special issue: 30 years of ict and learning in education – major changes and challenges issn: 1504-4831 vol 16, no 2 (2020), e4043 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4043 ©2020 (geir haugsbakk). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. special issue: 30 years of ict and learning in education – major changes and challenges geir haugsbakk inland norway university of applied sciences email: geir.haugsbakk@inn.no the expectations of the possible impact of ict on teaching and learning have been huge, and over the past few decades ict has played an increasingly important part in education all over the world. educational technology has been high on the political agenda, significant achievements have been noted and a whole range of actors have benefited from public funding for a variety of projects trying to make use of educational technologies in education. less attention has been given to research in field, and critical reflections have been rare. a main aim of this special issue of seminar.net is to focus major changes and challenges after (more than) thirty years of ict and learning in education. research identifying dominating ideas within the field of educational technology has been highlighted, but also the leading providers of ideas and strategies and the extent to which these ideas have resulted in consistent and convincing arguments. this has involved efforts to identify the key actors and networks and what can be regarded as the main activities and milestones. moreover, this is about how successful the policies of ict in education have been and trying to provide a platform for future policies. this is a rather complex matter, and such analysis and reflections have usually not been given priority in the field of educational technology. similar aims formed the basis for an international research seminar in lillehammer in january 2018, and the initial initiative to opt for a special issue was put forward during this seminar. the plans were strongly supported by the 2018 network meeting of network 6 mailto:geir.haugsbakk@inn.no 30 years of ict and learning in education – major changes and challenges seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 (open learning: media, environments and cultures1) in the european educational research association. the lillehammer seminar included thirteen researchers from five different countries: australia, usa, germany, scotland, sweden and norway. all five contributions published as research articles in the present issue of seminar.net are based on presentations given at the seminar. the framework for the discussions was established by two keynote talks given by neil selwyn, monash university, and norm friesen, boise state university. norm friesen’s presentation has been developed into a research article included in this special issue. neil selwyns gave a thought-provoking keynote that so far still exists in a not published written draft. in this he briefly summarises some of his main viewpoints and arguments. selwyn acknowledges that there are several interesting and insightful studies of education and technology, but he adds that the overall quality of research in this area has been understandably criticised over the past thirty years. he reflects on the need for education researchers to take care to resist falling into the trap of reaching polarized portrayals of digital technology in terms of either being good/bad, beneficial/harmful or descending into confirmatory roles of providing bland accounts of “what works and why”. he argues that we need research for the 2020s that explores the complexities, contradictions and inherently political nature of education and technology. according to selwyn, we have to make sure that our work offers unbiased and disinterested alternatives to those who think that they already know the answers. this implies “to go beyond the digital”, and that the contemporary digital education might be better understood as entanglements of humanity, materiality and digitality. (this presentation is based on selwyns not published draft.) in his article in this special issue, norm friesen begins by examining book culture one which provides long-familiar demarcations of knowledge and ignorance, development and depravation that are starting to lose their force. appealing to the notion of the longue durée, he then turns to the history and contemporaneity of the book in educational discourse. he considers what the changing educational significance of the book can tell us about change in education itself, and what this ongoing change might mean for us today. friesen’s approach is based on seeing the book as an epochally and epistemologically foundational medium. the book’s physical nature, its typical contents, the habits and practices associated with its use, and the way that these are acquired, can thus be said to together constitute the paradigm for knowing. rachel shanks presents a reflective and reflexive account in relation to seven educational technology projects carried out, over the last ten years, in scotland. the analysis is based on her own framework developed to understand why some of these educational technology 1 https://eera-ecer.de/networks/6-open-learning-media-environments-and-cultures/ 30 years of ict and learning in education – major changes and challenges seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 projects were successful and why others were not. her ambition is that this work can help to link practice back to research as well as indicating a way for lessons to be learnt in future educational technology projects. shanks’ underlying assumption is that educational technology the last thirty years has not impacted the delivery of education that might have been predicted for it. part of the lack of impact may relate to the introduction of new technologies through one-off educational technology projects which lack permanence and effective evaluation. rensfeldt and player-koro examines major swedish school digitalization curriculum reforms going back to the late 1960s. they examine how digitalization reforms are constituted discursively and materially in struggles over curricular knowledge content, preferred citizenship roles, and infrastructural investments and especially by relating curricular reforms to governance transformations. one recurrent strategy of reform is what they call the back to the future argument, where curricula address an ideal citizenship of future societies, politically used to support change. this movement has taken place partly through central, state-led or new monopolized technology governance and infrastructures and partly through decentralized forms of governing. bjørgen and fritze aim to shed light on the media practices considered by students as important and how their experiences correspond with the teachers' academic use of media. high expectations form the basis of their analysis, as exemplified by statements of the norwegian educational quality reform two decades ago. this implies that studentactivating teaching methods by the use of digital technology might increase the scope of student-active learning. the authors have focused on a bachelor's course in media education, and based on data from interviews, a survey and activity logs in the students’ learning platform they conclude that students seem to prefer to study effectively, at the expense of activating teaching methods and of being active producers of learning. and although students are expected to be digitally competent, it should not be assumed that they master technology as expected in higher education. haugsbakk and nordkvelle address what they consider to be dominant arguments, discourses and issues related to the hegemonization of meaning formation in the field of educational technology. their line of reasoning is based primarily on a case study of the leading journal in the field in norway over the last fifteen years. placing the journal’s policy at the forefront, the focus of their analysis is on the editorials. the main findings, based on issues of the journal over the first ten years, are that the editorials are in keeping with what may be regarded as the political priorities and the prevailing political discourses in the field. they contain relatively few, if any, critical perspectives and scant reference is made to the research articles and research area the journal claims to serve. special issue: 30 years of ict and learning in education – major changes and challenges title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 making sense of facebook: a mixed methods approach to analysing online student groups janus aaen centre for teaching development and digital media aarhus university email: jhaaen@tdm.au.dk abstract the objective of this paper is to discuss a methodological design developed to analyse self-governed student facebook groups as a part of a larger study of the use of ict in danish secondary schools (mathiasen. aaen, dalsgaard, degn & thomsen, 2014). the paper will discuss how this methodological setup can help the researcher gain in-depth knowledge of the students’ use of facebook groups, looking past the traditional dichotomy between online and offline as well as the distinction between school-related and non-schoolrelated communication. the paper will address the potential shortcomings of the design as well as how the approach can be further developed, and suggests 1) broadening the scope of the study from the facebook group as a singular medium to include other media used by the students and 2) extending the study to include the voice of students by engaging them as coresearchers. keywords: online groups, informal learning, mixed methods, online learning the context of the study the methodological design discussed in this paper was developed as a part of a larger research project studying the use of ict in 16 projects in danish secondary schools (mathiasen et.al., 2014). the research project employed a mixed methods approach (tashakkori & teddlie 2010) and was centred around a comprehensive questionnaire concerning educational use of ict answered by 932 students and 111 teachers, as well as semi-structured qualitative interviews (kvale 1996) with both 4-6 students and 4-6 teachers in all 16 projects. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:jhaaen@tdm.au.dk in earlier iterations of this study carried out by the research group (mathiasen bech, dalsgaard, degn & gregersen, 2012, 2011), the empirical data had suggested that facebook groups initiated and governed by students themselves had a significant part to play in the students’ educational use of ict. on these grounds it was decided to conduct an in-depth qualitative study of studentgoverned facebook groups in the third iteration of the research project (mathiasen, bech, dalsgaard, degn, & gregersen, 2013; dalsgaard, 2014). the facebook study was further developed in the fourth iteration of the research project (mathiasen et al. 2014). this is the study presented as a case in this paper. the methodological design the research setup for the study of the facebook groups is based on a mixed methods approach (tashakkori & teddlie 2010) and thus consists of both qualitative and quantitative methods. this approach was employed in order to harness the strengths of both the qualitative and the quantitative paradigms in order to provide more informative and balanced research results (johnson & onwuegbuzie, 2007). the study was predominantly qualitative and the quantitative data mainly has served as inspiration and also lent perspective to the qualitative studies. the main qualitative method of the study was ethnographic observation, inspired by kozinets (2010) who has coined the term ‘netnography’ and emphasises the need for a certain sensitivity towards the online context, in which the observations unfold. realising, however, that no social medium is an island, the study has also drawn on the thoughts of beneito-montegut (2011) who argues that ethnographic research of online phenomena often has a tendency to overlook the significance of the offline activities of the subjects. thus, abandoning the notion of a purely virtual ethnography (hine, 2000), beneito-montagut urges researchers to strive for a more “...holistic analysis of the way in which social information and communication technologies operate within society in everyday life” (beneito-montagut, 2011, p. 716). this view is supported by markham who states that “...if lived experiences in online social environments such as second life, mmorpgs, or less dramatically, facebook, twitter, and email has [sic!] taught us anything, it is that terms like ‘real’ or ‘virtual’ are not significant separators of experience.” (markham, 2012, p. 349). in order to transcend the dichotomy between online and offline (or virtual and real), the netnographic observations of the facebook groups were supported by the qualitative interviews and observations conducted within the main research project, as well as exploratory follow-up interviews with the some of the teachers of the classes who created the facebook groups. to make sense of the netnographic observations, a content analysis (holsti, 1969) of 2247 posts and 12217 comments spread across the six student facebook groups was carried out. all posts of the facebook groups were coded and tagged with analytical distinctions in order to construct categories in a grounded theory method approach (bryant & charmaz, 2007). thus, the content analysis was partly deductive based on an analytical distinction and partly inductive and grounded (ibid.). the five categories used to code the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 posts were 1) status updates 2) social events outside of school 3) social events in school 4) academic content and subjects 5) practical matters concerning school. the two main distinctions drawn in the formulation of the categories between school related/non-school related and academic/social are drawn from the existing literature on the educational use of facebook which has focussed on these terms in discussions on the potentials and role of facebook in education (for instance madge et al, 2009; selwyn, 2009). another criterion used in the forming of the five categories was the discrepancy in the way students and teachers had described the students’ school related use of facebook in the qualitative interviews conducted in the main study. while the teachers considered the students’ use of facebook to be private, disturbing and irrelevant, the students had a different story to tell. to some extent, they agreed that facebook may have a disruptive effect and be irrelevant to their school work, but at the same time, they indicated that the facebook groups in particular — which the classes had created on their own — often played an important role for the students when they wanted to help each other, collaborate, plan activities and keep track of what was going on at school. the findings of the study is the subject of the project report (mathiasen et al., 2014), but the content analysis allowed us to create a visual representation of the distribution of the five categories (fig. 1), which clearly indicated that a substantial part of the communication directly addressed matters concerning school – both academically, socially and practically. fig. 1. the distribution of the five categories thus, the content analysis allowed us to quantify the qualitative data, thereby illustrating that the students – at least in these particular groups anyway – actually used the self-governed facebook groups for purposes that benefited their academic work at school. in other words, the facebook groups were not irrelevant as the teachers had suggested. the facebook groups were saved and collected as complete web pages, which allowed us to extract statistical data on the students’ activity levels – both on group level and on an individual level. in other words, it was possible for us to pinpoint which students were highly active and which were not (fig. 2). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 fig. 2. posts and comments by individual students these data were informed by the aforementioned explorative follow-up interviews with teachers familiar with the students. this allowed us to establish whether activity levels in the facebook groups in line with the teachers’ assessments of the individual students’ academic skills, social skills and participation level in the classroom (for the results of the study, see mathiasen, 2014). these interviews were also consonant with beneitomontegut’s (2011) demand for a more holistic approach, in which online and offline contexts were connected. discussion: distributed communities this mixed methods approach has resulted in a comprehensive body of data, which can be approached from many theoretical angels and can potentially inform a variety of different issues, e.g. the role of self-governed facebook groups in formal settings, issues on social inclusion and visibility between students, or the learning potentials of mediated group communication. however, the approach is not without its weaknesses and these have become increasingly apparent. baym (2007) has suggested that online communities are often distributed over a range of platforms, instead of just being situated in a singular medium. this prompts her to suggest a shift in perspective from the researcher: one might liken the problem to that of a “pub crawl” in which a group goes from bar to bar drinking. one can do a fine study of any one of those pubs, and likely find something resembling community at play. yet a slight shift of perspective from the space to the patrons reveals that for them, whatever community might be happening at that pub cannot be understood without reference to other spaces in which those people also meet. (baym, 2007, p. 10) in line with beneito-montegut’s (2011) recommendation, this “pub crawl” of course also encompasses physical spaces of face-to-face communication. an example of this problem presents itself when investigating the selfgoverned academic use of the facebook-groups. as can be seen in figure 1, the classes in question do not use the facebook groups for this purpose to the same extent. if the researcher maintained his/her view on the singular medium, this could lead to a conclusion that some classes were better at seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 helping each other than others. however, the study does not take into consideration that that the student community might be using other media to meet these needs. for example, there were several students mentioned in the qualitative interviews from the main study whose extensive academic conversations with peers took place in facebook chat or google docs. for the purposes of this study we did not have access to either or these two platforms and nor did we attempt to gain such access. while any study to some degree can be considered as reductionist through its specific slant on a particular field of interest (slingerland, 2008), the focus on the facebook group as an isolated medium representing the full range of the community in question (the class) is problematic. if the objective is to pinpoint the significance of the facebook groups for the students, it would be necessary to observe the full range of the community members’ means of communication, which in this day and age includes face-to-face communication over snapchat, tumbler, google docs, pinterest and instagram, to learning management systems, voice calls, video calls, and texts – to mention just a few. the in-depth study of the facebook groups has the potential to say something about the facebook group as a medium and perhaps its inherent educational potential. but if the researcher wants to say something about the students’ experiences as students, it is far too reductionist. discussion: the students’ voice another issue to be addressed regarding the methodological setup in question is that of the researchers’ sensitivity towards the everyday context of the students. when educational researchers study students’ media use, they risk doing so from the point of view of the educational system alone. the discourse of the educational system is likely to differ from that of students. and no matter what they do, the researchers are not a part of the student culture; they do not share the goals and motivations of the students, and therefore they will find it hard to understand what it is like to be a student. in other words, when observing a community from the outside and without being a ‘participant’, the researcher may lack sensitivity towards the situation (markham, 2013). a solution to this issue can be for the researcher to engage as a ‘complete participant’ (gold, 1958) in the field in question and to some extent be a part of the community. but since the study can be said to have a bias towards an observation-as-archiving method (markham, 2013), there is no participation whatsoever from the researcher. and since this particular community is dominated by young people, it is not feasible for a researcher in his or her thirties to adapt adequately to and participate in the field. the researcher’s station in life is too far-removed from that of the student one way to secure the student’s voice in the study may be to include the students as co-researchers. within the area of participatory research, scholars have developed research methods which “...are geared towards planning and conducting the research process with those people whose life-world and meaningful actions are under study” (bergold & thomas, 2012, unpaginated). central to this view is to not treat the research partners (the students, in this case) as objects of research, but rather as co-researchers and knowing subjects with the same rights as the professional researchers. this is of course a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 controversial shift in the way research is regarded, but it certainly allows the voice of students to be more present in educational academic literature. conclusion this short paper has presented a mixed methods approach, which was used to study students’ self-governed facebook groups in danish secondary education. and while the approach has certain qualities and led to significant insights through its combined qualitative and quantitative methods, some obvious shortcomings have also emerged, and these have been analysed and discussed. it is clear that future studies of facebook groups in educational contexts should make an effort to broaden the scope and look towards other media used by the community of students as well. it is also clear that the distance between the researcher and his/her subjects created by the observing-as-archiving method is problematic and this needs to be addressed. one particular solution may be the implementation of participatory research methods. references baym, n. k. (2007). the new shape of online community: the example of swedish independent music fandom. first monday, 12, 1–1. beneito-montagut, r. (2011). ethnography goes online: towards a user-centred methodology to research interpersonal communication on the internet. qualitative research, 11(6), 716 –735. bergold, j., & thomas, s. (2012). participatory research methods: a methodological approach in motion. forum qualitative sozialforschung / forum: qualitative social research, 13(1). bryant, a., & charmaz, k. (eds.) (2007). the sage handbook of grounded theory. london: sage. dalsgaard, c. (2014). students' use of facebook for peer-to-peer learning. in s. bayne, c. jones, m. de laat, t. ryberg & c. sinclair (eds.), proceedings of the 9th international conference on networked learning, ncl 2014, (p. 95-102). edinburgh, scotland gold, r. l. (1958). roles in sociological field observations. social forces, 36(3), 217–223. hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. london: sage. holsti, o. r. (1969). content analysis for the social sciences and humanities. reading, ma: addison-wesley. johnson, r. b., onwuegbuzie, a. j., & turner, l. a. (2007). toward a definition of mixed methods research. journal of mixed methods research, 1(2), 112–133. kvale, s. (1997). interview : en introduktion til det kvalitative forskningsinterview. kbh.: hans reitzel. madge, c., meek, j., wellens, j. & hooley, t. (2009). facebook, social integration and informal learning at university: ‘it is more for socialising and talking to friends about work than for actually doing work’. learning, media and technology, 34(2), 141-155. mathiasen, h., aaen, j., dalsgaard, c., degn, h-p. & thomsen, m.b. (2014). undervisningsorganisering, -former og -medier – på langs og tværs af fag og gymnasiale uddannelser: hovedrapport 2014. aarhus: aarhus university. mathiasen, h., bech, c.w., dalsgaard c. , degn, h-p., gregersen, c. & thomsen, m.b. (2013). undervisningsorganisering, -former og -medier – på langs og tværs af fag og gymnasiale uddannelser: hovedrapport 2013. aarhus: aarhus university. mathiasen, h., bech, c.w., dalsgaard, c., degn, h-p. & gregersen, c. (2012). undervisningsorganisering, -former og -medier – på langs og tværs af fag og gymnasiale uddannelser: hovedrapport 2012. aarhus: aarhus university. mathiasen, h. bech, c.w., dalsgaard, c., degn, h-p. & gregersen, c. (2011). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 undervisningsorganisering, -former og -medier – på langs og tværs af fag og gymnasiale uddannelser: hovedrapport 2011. aarhus: aarhus university. markham, a. (2013). fieldwork in social media: what would malinowski do? qualitative communication research, 2(4). selwyn, n. (2009). faceworking: exploring students’ education-related use of facebook. learning, media and technology, 34(2), 157-174. slingerhand, e. (2008). who's afraid of reductionism? the study of religion in the age of cognitive science, journal of the american academy of religion, 76 (2), 375-411. tashakkori, a., & teddlie, c. (eds.). (2010). sage handbook of mixed methods in social & behavioral research. london: sage. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 making sense of facebook: a mixed methods approach to analysing online student groups aarhus university abstract the context of the study the methodological design discussion: distributed communities discussion: the students’ voice conclusion references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 adopting digital skills in an international project in teacher education hugo nordseth senior lecturer faculty of agriculture and information technology nord-trøndelag university college e-mail: hugo.nordseth@hint.no abstract the aim of the cotech project was to develop a concept of using ict tools for international cooperation in teacher education, and the output result was to develop and test a pilot project for an online course. our pilot shows that it is possible to implement an integrated curriculum using a variety of ict tools for the development and deployment of video-based learning resources, as well as collaboration between international groups of students in teacher education without these students meeting physically or using coeducation. at each location, it is important to provide training in the appropriate ict tools to be used. keywords: teacher education, digital tools, international collaboration, pedagogical videos, blog, peer assessment introduction the university college programme for teacher training for primary schools (glu 1-7) in norway has national learning objectives for student competence on internationalization and digital skills. the challenge is that those learning objectives are overall goals, and they are not linked to any specific subject. a requirement in internationalization is that "the candidate can contribute to strengthening the international and multicultural dimensions of the school's work" (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2010). furthermore, "the teacher education institutions should facilitate an international semester and international perspectives in primary education" (ibid). the objectives in europe 2020 (european commission, youth on the move, 2012) have a focus on student mobility and internationalization. within the seven flagships of the eu2020 is the goal of "youth on the way", with a goal that 20% of the youth cohort will have participated in an exchange with another country in europe. digital competence in norwegian schools has been a focus for the last 30 years. in the new curriculum for glu 1-7 are learning demands that "the candidate has knowledge of working with the pupils' basic skills in using digital tools in and across disciplines" (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2010). to have relevant digital skills, knowledge and attitude are defined as one of the five basic skills, with the other four being reading, speaking, writing and mathematics. the cotech project mailto:hugo.nordseth@hint.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 87 the aim of the cotech project was to develop a concept of using ict tools for international cooperation in teacher education (cotech, 2011). the output result of the project was to develop and test a pilot project for an online course with the following learning outcomes:  students will use collaborative technologies to develop digital learning resources within a specific theme and use english as their working language.  students should become familiar with the pedagogical aspects of elearning as a pedagogical method.  students will reflect on their own experiences with the use of collaboration technology for virtual collaboration.  students should be able to use technology to extend their cultural and communicative competence in an international relationship. cotech is an acronym for collaboration technologies in education. the project was funded through nordplus and implemented in the period from june 2010 to september 2011. the three partners in the project were haapsalu kolledz in estonia, uc nord-trøndelag in norway and uc southern denmark. the project involved 12 teachers and one class of students from each institution. haapsalu kolledz had the role as project manager. the participating students had three main requirements for their work in the cotech project: 1. the students presented themselves and their own expectations for the learning outcomes in a blog. 2. internal groups of students developed a video-based learning resource that was published on the project's publication channel on youtube. 3. the establishment of international groups with participants from at least two institutions. each international group should peer assess three videobased learning resources based on specific criteria and write a joint evaluation. the groups used skype and e-mail to coordinate evaluations, and tools such as etherpad and google docs for designing the report. the reports were published on the blog from the students involved in the peer assessment. in norway, the project activities were primarily linked to the subject of english, and this also provided feedback to students on the linguistic performance of the project work. expected ict skills for international school projects öztok and özden (2007) have investigated how different types of ict skills are used in comenius, word links and e-twinning projects, and give advice of what is expected of ict skills for those who will participate in similar projects. they found that the participants in the projects have used word processing tools, spreadsheets, presentation tools, messaging systems, e-mail, cd technology, digital cameras, scanners, web-publishing tools and imaging applications. most of these ict tools were also relevant for the cotech project. in addition, we introduced web conference systems and collaborative word processing tools such as google docs for the implementation of digital collaboration. the survey of digital status in higher education in norway (ørnes et al., 2011, page 94) found that students are concerned with digital collaboration in educational settings, and that use of this form of study activities gives a deeper learning and quality to the study programme. relevant tools for digital collaboration and communication are e-mail, social networks, forum, wiki and blog. the survey (ibid) concludes that 85% of the students use e-mail each week or more often, 60% use the student’s social network each month for the purpose of study and 43% share study-related content on social networks. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 88 survey also reports that just 10% of the students use tools such as blog and wiki for study purposes each month. in nord-trøndelag county, all students from age 16-19 get their own pc for study purposes. those students are now in a university college study programme with a lot of experience of using computers and expectations for using computers in the study programme for teacher education. for some categories of software, they are skilled users categorized as being equal to or above a level three in competence, according to dreyfus’ (1998) five levels of user competence. they have done a lot of schoolwork with writing, presentations and collaborative activities with each other (egeberg et al., 2012, page 108), while for other categories of software, they have a more limited competence, being categorized as beginners. research question how can an international student collaborative digital project give relevant digital competence to students in teacher education? the research process the cotech project was a case study with the duration of a one academic year pilot study, which was completed in the academic year 2010/2011. case studies are characterized by "a research programme aimed at obtaining much information from a few units or cases" (askheim & grenness, 2008). furthermore, askheim and grenness (2008) support yin (1994) in these five key components in the implementation of case studies: 1. “case studies are proper when it comes to providing answers to how and why questions." our research question in the article is formulated as a “how-to” question. 2. "theoretical assumptions are similar to hypotheses in quantitative research design, but are looser in form and not necessarily derived from the theory." examples of such theoretical assumptions in our project are: a. can international cooperation between students be carried out only by means of collaborative technologies, and without an introductory physical meeting? b. do the level of organization and the facilitation of cooperation have any effects on participation and activity in the international groups? 3. "analysis units can be both individual and social settings." our case study had a student group in each country, and they followed different academic programmes. additionally, the project group of staff members had different backgrounds and roles in the project. 4. "the importance of the logical connection between the data we collect and our theoretical assumptions." 5. "the findings interpretations must be based on the four components mentioned above and from what is available in existing theory in the field. from an empirical perspective, this provides only the experience from the first project implementation. the results from this project give no reason for generalization, but can bring relevant experience to similar projects and research in this field. the students involved in the project consisted of 20 norwegian first-year students from glu 1-7 and 17 estonian final-year students in estonian teacher education. the danish students were fall semester students from a postgraduate course in ict and learning. due to an illness for the instructor, there were seven different danish students and teachers involved in the project in the spring of 2011. the data for the project are the students' blogs, video presentations, reflections and a final evaluation upon completion of the academic year 2010/2011. the project also involved 12 teachers from different subjects and disciplines at the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 89 three participating institutions. teachers had three seminars during the project. the first seminar was at uc nord-trøndelag in september 2010, with the primary focus for the first seminar being to schedule and make relevant tasks for the student activity in the project. the second seminar was at uc south denmark in january 2011. evaluation and review of the schedule and student tasks was the main agenda for the second seminar. in the final seminar, which took place in estonia in june 2011, the project was evaluated and we prepared the final report. there were also monthly follow-up meetings using skype (voice/video/chat) and etherpad (agenda and online notes and report from the meetings). we conducted a survey of the various project activities after the completion of the course, which was answered by a total of 22 students, 16 from norway and 6 from estonia. no danish students completed the questionnaire. theory our approach focuses on the adoption of new technology for students and teachers based on hooper and rieber (1995), who explained that the familiarization phase is concerned with the student’s initial exposure to and experience with a technology. for our project, the student met some of the ict tools for the first time, which was their first experience in using them. the utilization phase occurs when the teacher uses the technology or innovation in the classroom (hooper and rieber, 1995). teachers who progress only to this phase will probably discard the technology at the first sign of trouble because they have made no commitment to it, and there would be no negative consequences if the technology were taken away. for our project, this was the first time they actually used some of the technologies for teaching purposes. with regard to communication purposes, some of the students were probably more advanced and frequent users of the technologies that were introduced. figure 1: a model of adoption of both idea and product technologies in education (hooper and rieber, 1995) the integration phase represents the “breakthrough” phase. hooper and rieber (1995) explain that this occurs when a teacher consciously decides to designate certain tasks and responsibilities to the technology, and a teacher who reached this phase would find it extremely difficult to teach without it. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 90 further on, the reorientation phase requires that educators to reconsider and reconceptualize the purpose and function of the classroom. as opposed to the teacher’s instruction, the most important characteristic is that the focus of the classroom is now centred on students’ learning. for our project, it was important to involve the students in making use of technology to help produce a common international report from the project. results from our case study to investigate the change of ict-competence among the students, we conducted a survey at the end of the course. the questions were mainly related to the individual tasks in the project, as well as various digital tools. most of the questions were formulated based on the student's perceived learning effect: "to what degree did you learn new knowledge and practices in the implementation of the specific task?" the response options were distributed on a six-point scale from "1: not at all" to "6: to a large extent”. blog task and competence the first task was to make a self-presentation in english on the project blog. the students had to set up their own blog environment, and they received a few keywords for their presentation. in the survey, we asked them: to what degree did you learn new knowledge and practices during the blog task (creating a self-presentation)? nearly 80% answered category 3 or 4, with just 5% answering “not at all”, which indicates that very few of the students had a relevant competence in creating and using blog tools before this task. this is also similar to findings by ørnes et al. (2011), in which it was found that only 10% of the students used blogs for study purposes in 2011. from the perspectives of hooper and rieber (1995), the blog task was in the familiarization phase for most of the students. figure 2: learning effect of a blog task in teacher education (%) video task and competence the next task was a group project in which the task was to make a pedagogical video for use in a topic for students aged 10-14. first, they had to create their own manuscript and design the video, and then make the video and publish it on youtube. the project had established its own youtube channel for the students (http://www.youtube.com/cotech2011). in the survey, we asked them: to what degree did the video task (creating an educational video) and activities expose you to new knowledge and practices? for this question, we received answers in all categories. only 18% of 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 1: not at all 2 3 4 5 6: to a large extent blog task http://www.youtube.com/cotech2011 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 91 the students gave a score in categories 1 and 2 for their own competence development on this task, while 25% gave a score in categories 5 and 6 for this task. this indicates that most of the students were not familiar with how to make and publish a video, which nevertheless should be a reasonable task in teacher education. related to hooper and rieber (1995), most of the students were in the familiarization phase of adopting the technology for the video task. figure 3: learning effect of a video making task in teacher education (%) using communication technology and making a common peer assessment we set up international groups with five participants in each group, with all three locations represented. the purpose of the international group was to create a common report for the peer assessment of three videos made by other students in the project. we published a limited evaluation framework for peer assessment work, and the students had to use communication technology to plan the work and share the common report process. for the digital group process, we had to use communication technology such as e-mail, skype and instant messaging, and we also introduced easy editing tools, e.g. type-withme and etherpad, for the writing process. to help plan the first meeting, we also introduced doodle as a tool for scheduling a time to meet. for some groups, the tutor set up the first meeting of the student group using e-mail, and facilitated the meeting by using skype. our experience was that those groups had an easier start with the process than those groups which had to make this initial group establishment process on their own. at the very least, we should give a specific student the task of establishing the group communication process. in the survey we asked the students, “to what degree did the collaboration task (working in an international group) and activities expose you to new knowledge and practices?” the student response revealed that they are familiar with digital communication tools, as 55% of the students put this in category 1 or 2, with 32% responding in category 3. ørnes et al. (2011) also found that the students are familiar with tools for digital collaboration and communication. from the adoption aspects of hooper and rieber (1995), many students are already in the integration phase for their own use of those tools, and will easily adopt this for educational purposes. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 1: not at all 2 3 4 5 6: to a large extent video task seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 92 figure 4: learning effect of introducing communication technology in teacher education (%) common report the last task was to make a common report by using peer assessment for the evaluation of videos made in the earlier task in the project. for this task, we presented some common criteria for the peer assessment based on three dimensions: educational, technical and english as a second language (cotech, 2011b). moreover, we also gave an e-learning introduction for some adequate tools for common writing. for this task we asked them, “to what degree did the report task (creating a joint report using collaborative tools like google docs, typewith.me) and activities expose you to new knowledge and practices? the answers demonstrated that this was new to many students. sixty percent chose category 4 or 5 on this activity, while just 20% chose category 1 or 2, thus indicating a low level of new knowledge and practice. related to the adoption model of hooper and rieber (1995), the task of using digital tools for a common report is in the familiarization phase. figure 5: learning effect of making an international peer assessment report (%) competence improvement we also asked the students to range their digital competence, both before and after this project, using a six-level scale from beginner to expert. the categories of user competence were inspired by dreyfus (1998), who used a five-point scale, with novice as a starting point. the other levels are advanced beginner, competence, proficiency and expertise, which is the highest level. 0 10 20 30 40 1: not at all 2 3 4 5 6: to a large extent communication 0 10 20 30 40 50 1: not at all 2 3 4 5 6: to a large extent report seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 93 before the project, the students categorized their digital competence as mostly advanced beginners (42%) and 51% as competent users at level 3 and 4. figure 6: digital competence of students in teacher education (%) after the project, the students reported a higher digital competence, with 55% categorizing themselves at level 4 (high competence/proficiency) and 36% at level 3 (high competence). an optimistic view is that this project gave enough digital competence to the students to enable them to implement their own international e-twinning project with groups of pupils from schools abroad, which can be categorized as the utilization phase (hooper and rieber, 1995). figure 7: digital competence of students in teacher education after the project (%) conclusion the cotech project shows that it is possible to implement an integrated curriculum using a variety of ict tools for the development and deployment of video-based learning resources and collaboration between international classes of students in teacher education without such classes meeting physically or co-educationally. at each location, adequate training should be provided for the appropriate ict tools to be used. the project participants can publish presentations, videos and peer assessments via a common web-based service, in which access can be adjusted as needed. blogs, wikis and youtube were used in the pilot implementation. most of the students report a positive learning outcome for tasks using blogs, video making and writing a common report within an international student 0 10 20 30 40 50 1: beginner 2 3 4 5 6: expert competence before the project 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 1: beginner 2 3 4 5 6: expert competence after the project seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 94 group. through this project, they reported a better competence in using ict tools, and were motivated to make their own e-twinning project in their individual school practice sessions. in order to achieve better dialogues in their collaboration and evaluation work, it is also important to ensure that such groups of students in a cooperation relationship are at a similar academic level in their ict skills, englishlanguage competence and educational experience. references askheim, o. g. a. & grenness, t. (2008). kvalitative metoder for markedsføring og organisasjonsfag. oslo: universitetsforlaget. cotech (2011). collaboration technologies in education (cotech). retrieved july 31, 2012 from http://cotech.pbworks.com/w/page/29494656/collaboration%20technologies%2 0in%20education%20%28cotech%29. cotech (2011b). task_3_common_report. retrieved july 31, 2012 from http://cotech.pbworks.com/w/file/38214815/task_3_common_report.doc . cotech youtube channel (2011). retrieved july 31, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/cotech2011. dreyfus, h .l. (1998). intelligence without representation. retrieved april 12, 2012 from http://www.class.uh.edu/cogsci/dreyfus.html. european commission (2012). youth on the move, a europe 2020 initiative. retrieved april 19, 2012 from http://ec.europa.eu/youthonthemove/index_en.htm. egeberg, g. et al. (2012). monitor 2011 skolens digitale tilstand. senter for ikt i utdanningen. retrieved april 19, 2012 from http://iktsenteret.no/sites/iktsenteret.no/files/attachments/monitor2011.pdf. hooper, s. and rieber, l. p. (1995). teaching with technology, in a. c. ornstein (ed.), teaching: theory into practice, pp. 154-170. needham heights, ma: allyn and bacon. retrieved april 12, 2012 from http://www.nowhereroad.com/twt/. kunnskapsdepartementet (2010). forskrift om rammeplan for grunnskolelærerutdannningene for 1. – 7. trinn og 5. – 10. trinn. retrieved april 12, 2012 from http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kd/dok/lover_regler/forskrifter/2010/forskrif t-om-rammeplan-for-grunnskolelarerutdanningene-for-17-trinn-og-510-trinn.html?id=594357. yin, r. k. (1994). case study research. thousand oaks: sage. ørnes, h. et al. (2011). digital tilstand i høyere utdanning 2011. norgesuniversitetets skriftserie nr 1/2011. retrieved april 12, 2012 from http://norgesuniversitetet.no/files/rapport_digital_tilstand_2011.pdf. öztok, m. and özdener, n. (2007). information and communication technologies in collaboration projects via the internet. international journal of human and social science 2(3) 166 – 171. http://cotech.pbworks.com/w/page/29494656/collaboration%20technologies%20in%20education%20%28cotech%29 http://cotech.pbworks.com/w/page/29494656/collaboration%20technologies%20in%20education%20%28cotech%29 http://cotech.pbworks.com/w/file/38214815/task_3_common_report.doc http://www.youtube.com/cotech2011 http://www.class.uh.edu/cogsci/dreyfus.html http://ec.europa.eu/youthonthemove/index_en.htm http://iktsenteret.no/sites/iktsenteret.no/files/attachments/monitor2011.pdf http://www.nowhereroad.com/twt/ http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kd/dok/lover_regler/forskrifter/2010/forskrift-om-rammeplan-for-grunnskolelarerutdanningene-for-17-trinn-og-510-trinn-.html?id=594357 http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kd/dok/lover_regler/forskrifter/2010/forskrift-om-rammeplan-for-grunnskolelarerutdanningene-for-17-trinn-og-510-trinn-.html?id=594357 http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kd/dok/lover_regler/forskrifter/2010/forskrift-om-rammeplan-for-grunnskolelarerutdanningene-for-17-trinn-og-510-trinn-.html?id=594357 http://norgesuniversitetet.no/files/rapport_digital_tilstand_2011.pdf enhancing future teachers’ competencies for technology integration in education: turning theory into practice ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. enhancing future teachers’ competencies for technology integration in education: turning theory into practice jo tondeur interfaculty department of teacher education vrije universiteit brussel email: jo.tondeur@vub.be abstract the main aim of this conceptual paper is to provide an overview of effective strategies to support pre-service teachers to adequately integrate ict in teaching and learning activities. specifically, the focus is on the strategies included in the sqd (synthesis of qualitative evidence) model: 1) using teacher educators as role models, 2) reflecting on the role of technology in education, 3) learning how to use technology by design, 4) collaboration with peers, 5) scaffolding authentic technology experiences, and 6) providing continuous feedback. to turn this model into practice, the approach of teacher design teams is adopted. a teacher design team can be described as a group of two or more (pre-service) teachers who design (ict-rich) curriculum materials. based on the sqd model – theory and the implementation of the key themes emerging from this model via teacher design teams – practice -, this conceptual paper provides recommendations to improve the potential of pre-service training to enhance future teachers use of ict in their educational practice. keywords: ict, teacher education, tpack, teacher design teams, sqd model, pre-service teachers introduction it has been seen increasingly important that starting teachers are able to adequately use technology in schools (robinson & aronica, 2015; spector, 2010). consequently, teacher training institutions are expected to prepare new teachers to integrate technology in their educational practice. several studies suggest that to develop pre-service teachers’ effective technology integration knowledge, teacher training institutions need to help them connect their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (including skills and attitudes) (mouza, nandakumar, yilmaz ozden & karchmer-klein, 2017; sun, strobel & newby, 2017). in their technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) framework, koehler and mishra (2009) argue that for technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 217 integration to occur, (pre-service) teachers must be competent in these three types of knowledge, and more importantly, they must be able to integrate all three forms of knowledge in their practice (see fig. 1). the tpack model was developed by mishra and koehler (2006) to guide technology integration in teacher education, brings different competences together. the core of the tpack model consists of the integrated components “knowledge of technology” (tk), “pedagogical knowledge” (pk) and “content knowledge” (ck). ict integration in teacher education is facilitated when preservice teachers understand how these three knowledge domains are interrelated and how they interact. but research literature reveals that transition from tk to tpack is not that simple (e.g., niess, 2008). individual courses in which teachers and teacher educators acquire ict skills have shown to be insufficient (kay, 2006). fig. 1: the tpack framework (koehler & mishra, 2009) this requires the adoption of various strategies by training institutions to develop teachers’ tpack (polly, mims, shepherd & inan, 2010). these strategies were identified and reviewed by tondeur, van braak, sang, voogt, fisser and ottenbreit-leftwich (2012), and an overarching synthesis of qualitative evidence (sqd) model was developed to present how they relate to each other (see fig. 2). other reviews identified similar strategies as tondeur et al. (2012), including kay (2006) and røkenes and krumsvik (2014). the main aim of the current paper is to 1) present these effective sqd strategies and 2) illustrate how these strategies can be implemented in teacher training institutions (tti) by student teacher design team. strategies to enhance future teachers’ tpack there are different strategies to prepare pre-service teachers for educational ict use (see e.g., mouza et al., 2014). as stated above, tondeur, van braak, sang, voogt, fisser and ottenbreit-leftwich (2012) reviewed the literature seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 218 aiming to synthesize strategies on how to best prepare pre-service teachers to integrate technology into pedagogy, and content areas (tpack). according to the findings of this review, different key strategies need to be integrated in the teacher training institutions (see fig. 2). the two outward circles in the sqd model include the strategies necessary at the institutional level such as technology planning and leadership, training staff, access to resources, or cooperation within and between the institutions. the inner circle includes six micro level strategies such as using teacher educators as role models, or scaffolding authentic technology experiences. these six strategies of the inner circle are focus of the current conceptual paper and will be linked to the introduction of teacher design teams. fig. 2: the sqd model to prepare pre-service teachers for ict use (tondeur et al., 2012) the first strategy at the inner circle of the sqd-model (role models) stresses the need of teacher educators acting as role models in view of ict integration in education. providing practical examples and inspiring pre-service teachers has proven to be a crucial motivator for the development of pre-service teachers’ ict competencies. but having pre-service teachers watch practical examples of adequate educational ict-use is helpful but not sufficient (see e.g., kaufman, 2015; tondeur, scherer, siddiq & baran, 2017). the second sqd-strategy (reflection) involves discussing and reflecting about the opportunities and the risks of ict uses in education (ching, yang, baek & baldwin, 2016). this can help them see the values and /or risks of using a ict in relation to a teaching and learning approaches (see mouza et al., 2017). empirical evidence also suggests that providing the opportunity to learn about technology integration by designing ict-rich curriculum materials can be a promising strategy (tondeur, van braak, siddiq & scherer, 2016), as illustrated in the next section of this paper (strategy 3: instructional design). koehler and mishra (2009) recommend that learning to design ict enhanced materials is a key strategy for pre-service teachers' development of their tpack (see voogt, fisser, pareja roblin, tondeur & van braak (2013) for an overview). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 219 research also demonstrated that collaboration can mitigate feelings of insecurity when pre-service teachers need to design ict related curriculum (strategy 4: collaboration) materials (cf. koh & chai, 2016). an online environment seemed to be useful in giving (future) teachers a forum to discuss and exchange points of view with others and to explain their opinions and thoughts. as a fifth strategy (authentic experiences), pre-service teachers should experience the value to use ict in education in authentic settings (cf. valtonen et al., 2015). in this respect tearle and golder (2008) stressed that “watching” technology being used could not substitute for “doing”. finally, the sixth sqd strategy (feedback) at the micro level involves on-going feedback, which has been proven to be beneficial for pre-service teachers’ abilities to realize ict competencies to utilize ict in their education practice (e.g., tondeur, scherer, siddiq & baran, 2017). one of the recommendations in the tondeur et al. (2012) review study was to use an ict portfolio to integrate evaluation and feedback throughout the training process. from the review of the six sqd strategies mentioned above, it was clear that effective preparation of pre-service teachers for educational ict use required attention to not only the separate strategies in the model depicted in figure 2, but the relationship between each of the key strategies. these key strategies are linked together in a way that made it difficult to address them separately. it is important to note that learning to teach with technology is a constructive and iterative process. clearly, competencies needed for technology integration are not only related to technology but also to pedagogical attitudes and content planning (sang, valcke, van braak & tondeur, 2010; tondeur, scherer, siddiq & baran, 2017). in order to implement the strategies, technology integration needs to be infused as a systemic and systematic process, as demonstrated in the sqd model (see fig. 2). this brings us to the next section of the paper. linking sqd strategies and teacher design teams in the current paper, we focus on (pre-service) teacher design teams (tdt) as a specific intervention to integrate the six sqd strategies mentioned above. a tdt can be described as a group of two or more teachers who (re) design curriculum materials together (handelzalts, 2009; voogt, pieters & handelzalts, 2016), in this case ict rich curriculum materials. an important characteristic of tdt is the emphasis of the design task (main, 2012). it is an increasingly used strategy to familiarize teachers, pre-service teachers and teacher educators with the various components of the tpack model to let them design their own courses in (teacher design) teams (e.g., angeli & valanides, 2005; boschman, mckenney & voogt, 2015; polly, 2011). koehler and mishra (2006) call this pedagogical approach “learning technology by design”. it means that pre-service teachers reflect together on how ict can support the content and pedagogical aspects of their practice in order to attain tpack (stoll, bolam, mcmahon, wallace & thomas, 2006). next, they design or re-design ict-rich curriculum materials, experiment with them and, finally, reflect on the results. all these strategies are also identified in the inner circle of the sqd model to prepare pre-service teachers for technology use (tondeur et al., 2012): 1) role models, 2) reflection, 3) instructional design, 4) collaboration, 5) authentic experiences, and 6) feedback. to illustrate, the kafyulilo (2015) study adopted tpack as a framework for describing the knowledge and skills that pre-service teachers need to develop in order to effectively integrate technology in science and mathematics teaching. pre-service teachers participated in hands-on training, collaborative lesson design in design teams, microteaching and reflection with peers. the findings showed significant changes in technology related components of tpack. kafyulilo (2015) concluded that opportunities for pre-service teachers to participate in teacher design teams that involve lesson design, teaching, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 220 evaluation and re-design, can be effective for the development of pre-service teachers’ knowledge and skills of integrating technology in education (cf. agyei & voogt, 2016). the work process with teacher design teams seems very similar to that of design-based research (see mckenney & reeves, 2013). an important difference however is the focus of design-based research on theoretical implications (e.g., new design principles). the focus of working in design teams is on the improvement of educational practice, in this case on the development of ict-rich curriculum materials. implementation of teacher design teams supporting a design team is not an easy task. it requires competent teacher educators who are able to respond to the needs of the pre-service teachers in a flexible way (see becuwe et al., 2017). based on the findings of a delphi study becuwe et al. (2017) conclude that creating an atmosphere of trust is an important condition for the effective implementation of tdt. results of their dephi study also revealed consensus about the importance of participants who are open-minded about innovation, who trust each other and who have confidence in each other’s expertise. another condition emphasized as critical is the feeling of ownership over the (design) process. all pre-service teachers need to feel responsible for the design task. previous research also indicates the importance of a shared feeling of responsibility (e.g., stoll et al., 2006). if team members do not feel responsible themselves for the outcomes to a rather great extent, they may need additional support (handelzalts, 2009). such support can be provided by a coach, such as the teacher educator. in this respect, flexibility seems to be the most important characteristic of a coach as also indicated by previous research (e.g., petrone & orquist-ahrens, 2004; huizinga et al., 2014; polly, 2011). for pre-service teachers to be able to work together there needs to be a simultaneous balance between using team processes (e.g., setting regular meetings, assigning specific roles, etc.), to complete the design tasks (e.g., knowing how to plan, complete a special project) and maintaining the relationships (main, 2012, 2017). clearly, for the successful implementation of tdt, several conditions need to be taken into account (voogt, westbroek, handelzalts, walraven, mckenney, pieters & de vries, 2011). the discussion about how to implement and sustain programs to prepare preservice teachers to integrate technology in classroom practice should be seen as part of the vision of the entire teacher education program (polly, mims, shepherd & inan, 2010). this leads to a focus on the institution as a unit of change and pays additional attention to the conditions at the institutional level. the institutional level factors, as expressed in the sqd model, included “technology planning and leadership”, “training staff”, “access to resources” and “co-operation within and between institutions”. these key strategies emphasized that the effective integration of technology in teacher education was possible if future goals were set and implemented in a planned manner (seels, 2003). the two overarching sqd strategies “aligning theory and practice” and “systematic and systemic change efforts” were clustered together as overarching themes, identified as important at both micro and institutional levels (see fig. 2). to implement the key strategies of the sqd model via tdt, access to resources needs to be guided by the administrative, financial, and teaching needs. therefore, an “ict plan” is needed that integrates the vision and strategic direction of the entire teacher education programme (see e.g., lavonen et al., 2006). technology planning can be challenging because teacher educators do not have similar technology knowledge, attitudes or skills (goktas et al., 2008; tondeur et al., 2017). as a result, teacher educators should be provided with seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 221 training to become role models for their pre-service teachers (barton & haydn, 2006) and a facilitator in the tdt. an interesting option is to organize tdt including both pre-service teachers and teacher educators in order to increase the learning experience of both the preservice teachers and teacher educators. moreover, it could be useful to collaborate with other teacher training institutions (cf. sqd model). in addition, collaboration with the practice field and inservice/mentor teachers where the pre-service teachers do their school practicum could be a useful contribution to the field (cf. kay, 2006; røkenes & krumsvik, 2016). through these collaborations, pre-service teachers could observe and take part in authentic ict-rich teaching with experienced digital role models. finally, using an online platform can enable the pre-service teachers in the study to collaborate across time and place, and the process of providing feedback and suggestions for improvement on lesson plans and delivery was considered by the teachers beneficial for linking theory to practice and exchanging information. lin, lin and huang (2008) explored virtual teacher teams who were collaborating on developing ict lesson plans (see also prestridge & tondeur, 2015). this attention on the institution as a unit of change must recognize the importance that learning to teach with technology via tdt is a systematic process (lim & hang, 2003; seels et al., 2003) that requires the engagement of pre-service teachers in investigating role models, designing lesson plans, practicing in authentic settings, and providing feedback. as stated earlier, effective preparation of the teams requires attention to the separate key strategies, but also demands similar attention toward the relationships between these strategies (cf. kay, 2006). furthermore, teacher design teams need to be infused as a systemic aspect throughout the entire program rather than presented in separate intervention (cf. polly et al., 2010). otherwise, the knowledge and the skills pre-service teachers gained from the design teams are likely to remain isolated and unused (tondeur et al., 2017). conclusion collaborative design in tdt has been shown to contribute to the development of pre-service teachers’ competencies necessary to integrate technology in education (e.g., agyei & voogt, 2016; alayyar, fisser & voogt, 2012). the integration of the sqd strategies via tdt can only be effective for preparing (future) teachers when taking a number of conditions both on team and institutional levels into account. the combination of the theoretical sqd model together with the practical translation into tdt can hopefully be used by policy makers, practitioners, and program planners to better prepare pre-service teachers to use technology in their teaching practices. references agyei, d., & voogt, j. 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(2011). teacher learning in collaborative curriculum design. teaching and teacher education, 27(8), 1235–1244. enhancing future teachers’ competencies for technology integration in education: jo tondeur abstract introduction strategies to enhance future teachers’ tpack references teachers as users of ict from the student perspective in higher education flipped classroom classes | journal article skip to abstract teachers as users of ict from the student perspective in higher education flipped classroom classes erkko t. sointu school of educational sciences and psychology, university of eastern finland, joensuu, finland email: erkko.sointu@uef.fi (corresponding author) teemu valtonen school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland, joensuu, finland laura hirsto school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland, joensuu, finland jenni kankaanpää school of educational sciences and psychology, university of eastern finland, joensuu, finland markku saarelainen department of applied physics, university of eastern finland, kuopio, finland kati mäkitalo faculty of education, university of oulu, oulu, finland anneke smits education innovation and ict research group, windesheim university, zwolle, the netherlands jyri manninen school of educational sciences and psychology, university of eastern finland, joensuu, finland ©2019 (author name/s), cc-by-4.0 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by-4.0), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. abstract the use of information and communication technology (ict) is important in today’s higher education. ict has a central role in the skill set students are expected to master during their studies. the fast development of technology poses both possibilities and challenges for teachers. this paper is part of a larger project aimed at implementing the flipped classroom (fc) model and supporting ict integration in higher education. in this project, teachers receive systematic support for implementing the fc model. the aim of this paper is to investigate how students assess their teachers’ knowledge of pedagogy, content and technology before and after a course using the fc model. in total, 317 students responded to the pre-post-test surveys. the data were analyzed as a single group and separately for students in different year groups. results indicate that there are statistically significant differences between the results of the preand post-tests. students assess their teachers content-specific pedagogical skills and technological pedagogical skills in teaching their subject higher after the fc courses. students also perceived their teachers as having more positive attitudes to using technology in teaching. it was found that the difference was more apparent in second-year and higher students. students perceived fc positively in general. keywords: information and communication technology (ict) tpack pedagogy student perception flipped classroom teachers as users of ict from the student perspective in higher education flipped classroom classes the role of information and communication technology (ict) is highly emphasized in today’s higher education. ict skills are seen as a central element in the 21st century skill set that students are expected to master (voog & roblin, 2012). the development of different technologies is fast. annual horizon reports (horizon reports, 2017) (see table 1) show several emerging technologies with different pedagogical approaches (e.g. adams becker et al., 2017). current trends focus on areas such as bring your own device (byod), flipped classroom (fc), robotics and artificial intelligence. the rapid development of technologies offers new possibilities and challenges for teaching and learning in institutions of higher education. one of these challenges is teachers’ competence in using developing technologies. the aim of this paper is to investigate how university students perceive their teachers as users of technology and how they perceive a technologically supported learning environment such as the flipped classroom. table 1. different technologies in horizon reports 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2013 mooc games and gamification 3d printing tablet computing learning analytics wearable technology 2014 flipped classroom 3d printing quantified self learning analytics games and gamification virtual assistants 2015 byod makerspaces the internet of things flipped classroom wearable technology adaptive learning technologies 2016 byod augmented and virtual reality affective computing learning analytics and adaptive learning makerspaces robotics 2017 adaptive learning technologies the internet of things artificial intelligence mobile learning next-generation lms natural user interfaces previous studies have identified several factors that affect the integration of ict in teaching and learning. brinkerhoff (2006) outlines factors such as administrative and institutional support, the availability of resources, training and experience and attitudes to change. ertmer (1999; 2005) defines so-called firstand second-order barriers that affect ict integration. first-order barriers are factors such as support, time resources, training and technical skills. second-order barriers are more personal factors such as pedagogical beliefs, i.e. how teachers perceive the nature of learning. harris (2005) notes a demand for a shared vision for ict integration in teaching. according to the widely adopted technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) model developed by mishra and koehler (2006), the skilled use of ict in education requires that teachers integrate their pedagogical knowledge (pk), content knowledge (ck) and technological knowledge (tk) in a way that these three areas support each other. according to koehler et al., (2013, p. 16) tpack is: “an understanding that emerges from interactions among content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge […] knowledge underlying truly meaningful and deeply skilled teaching with technology.” based on the theory of planned behavior by ajzen (1991), behavioral intentions, in this case the intention to use ict in education, are affected by attitudes to the behavior, subjective norms (i.e. expectations of important others) and perceived behavioral control (i.e. factors such as the availability of necessary resources and skills). teo and tan (2012) have found that attitudes are the most important factor affecting the use of ict in education. these studies indicate that there are many factors affecting the use of ict in education, factors that depend on the university and factors that depend on teachers. one important aspect is the extent of the change, i.e. how large change is pursued to integrate ict to teaching. according to zhao, pugh, sheldon and bryers (2002), instead of taking a revolutionary approach (very large) in change with ict, teachers should take evolutionary approach (small) in change with ict. more precisely, teachers are more likely to experience less frustration and more success with progressive steps that are smaller (zhao et al., 2002) one possible way to foster change is to implement the flipped classroom (fc) teaching method. this study focuses on the results of a large-scale project in higher education, focusing on changing pedagogical practices and integrating ict through implementing fc. fc has emerged as an innovative solution for emphasizing student-centered learning (baepler et al., 2014; chen et al., 2017; chen et al., 2014; lage et al., 2000). compared to lecture-based teaching, emphasizing frontal lectures with students taking notes and studying post-class materials alone, fc inverts this design. lectures are replaced with materials, typically online videos, that are distributed and studied before class meetings through digital platforms. the face-to-face time in the class meeting is used to practice the content together and to concentrate on complex issues through student-centered learning approaches (chen et al., 2014; lage et al., 2000). the fc model is well justified considering factors that affect ict integration and change in general. when considering traditional lectures from the perspective of the tpack framework, a strong emphasis is on content knowledge. the teacher disseminates his or her expertise to the students, and only a limited amount of interaction takes place. in the fc model, lectures are replaced with videos that the students watch prior to class. this replacement of the lecture challenges the pedagogical knowledge of the teacher. there is no reason to lecture anymore, and the teacher needs to rethink how to scaffold the lesson and support students working with challenging topics. from the perspective of ict in education, we value this emphasis on pedagogy. this is in line with watson’s (2001) “pedagogy before technology”, which suggests the importance of starting with the design of pedagogical practices that can then be supported with technology. similarly, ertmer (2005) refers to the importance of pedagogical beliefs in ict integration. in accordance with watson (2001) and ertmer (2005), we assume that the greatest added value that technology can provide to teaching and learning is in practices that emphasize student collaboration and taking an active role. for this reason, we consider fc to be a way to develop teaching and learning practices toward more student-centered ones and a suitable way to support ict integration. when considering the extent of the change (zhao et al., 2002) we find the fc model optimal. the fc model incorporates the role of the teacher as a content expert, i.e. the teacher defines and creates the pre-materials, in this case video clips for students to be used before class meetings. from this perspective, the change is small, however, the direction is toward a more student-centered teaching approach as to the other factors listed above, concerning the success of ict integration and change in general, this project is based on a shared vision (see harris, 2005) among the teachers and trainers of the model. more precisely, fc model was agreed upon as a way to develop teaching and learning and to support ict integration. moreover, in line with factors suggested by brinkerhoff (2006), the process has strong administrative support within our institution. the participating teachers were provided with resources and time for developing their courses as well as training and collaborative support. since fall 2016, over 100 teachers have participated voluntarily in re-designing their courses. this high number is indicative of a generally positive attitude to the development. this group of teachers was supported by researchers and experts in ict and pedagogy, who provide the teachers with help and support when needed. the technological support aspects of the fc training are presented in figure 1+(sointu &valtonen, 2015). first, videos are recorded with the screen capture option on teachers’ own devices. screen capturing allows teachers to use a variety of programs and software. second, the videos are transferred to a media server that allowed for simple video editing. third, the media server allows easy uploading, embedding and sharing of the videos for the students as part of the digital learning environments or web pages. making the video by using own devices 1 uploading the video to thelearning environment and embedding it to the web 3 uploading to mediaserver and editing the video 2 media server figure 1. technological support for creating flipped classroom video materials (adapted from sointu & valtonen, 2015). the teachers participated in a one-year program to adapt their teaching and to flip one of their courses. teachers were supported in the use of ict as suggested by (sointu & valtonen, 2015). the support was in the form of tutorial videos on how to use ict in pedagogically meaningful ways, which allowed teachers to learn in their own time. practical hands-on support for the use of ict was provided as needed. however, the technical perspective was not the only support for teachers. we recognized the importance to integrate pedagogy, content and technology as suggested in the tpack framework. therefore, four other kinds of support were put in place. first, practical hands-on support for flipping the course was provided individually and in large groups. one expert met with all teachers to start the process of change. second, workshops were arranged, and the teachers had the opportunity to learn about the pedagogical aspects of fc and discuss and share ideas collaboratively. thus, support was also provided for planning pedagogical practices for face-to-face periods. third, self-study materials were provided for the teachers. finally, teachers were allowed to take time to flip their course, and this development was supported institutionally. according to shih and chuang (2013), it is important to understand student perceptions of their teachers’ tpack when developing teaching and learning practices. in line with this, the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the fc integration from two perspectives. (1) how the fc courses affected the ways the students assessed teachers’ content knowledge (ck), combined content and pedagogical knowledge (pck), combined content, pedagogical and technological knowledge (tpack) (koehler, mishra & cain, 2013), attitudes to use ict in teaching (teo see tan, 2012) and (2) how students perceived fc and the type of future preferences they had regarding fc. methods participants and procedures the sample included 317 higher education students (n female >= 227, 71.6%; n male = 90, 28.6%) from 16 different courses from university of eastern finland (uef) during the academic year 2016-2017. students participated in courses taught by teachers who had participated in the uef flipped classroom (fc) development work. the courses took place during one period of the academic year (i.e. they lasted for around eight weeks maximum). from the student convenience sample, 43.8% (n = 139) were first-year students. participation in the study was voluntary for both teachers and students. informed consent was obtained from each individual student. the response rate in the different courses varied from 25 % to 75 % of the enrolled students. the research design was a quasi-experimental pre-post-test design without a control group (sadish, cook, campbell 2002). students responded to an electronic survey at the start of the course (pre-test, t1) and at the end of the course (post-test, t2). measures two surveys were used: (1) technological pedagogical content knowledge for 21st century skills (tpack-21; valtonen et al, 2015a, 2017) and (2) theory of planned behavior for information and communication technology for education (tpb-ict; sointu et al., 2017; valtonen et al., 2015b). both measures originally measure teachers’ perceptions of their tpack-21 and tpb-ict in education and have demonstrated adequate psychometric properties. however, the measures were adapted to reflect student perceptions of their teachers’ skills and attitudes. to this end we used only parts of the above-mentioned instruments. from the tpack-21, we used the content knowledge (ck) scale, the pedagogical content knowledge (pck) scale and the technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) scale. ck reflects student perceptions of teachers’ content expertise. pck reflects student perceptions of teachers’ skills in teaching their content area. tpack reflects student perceptions of teachers’ skills in integrating technology, pedagogy and content in teaching. from the tpb-ict measure, attitudes for using technology in teaching (att) scale was used. att reflects student perceptions of teachers’ attitudes to using technology in teaching. students responded with six-point likert-type scale (1 = totally disagree – 6 = totally agree) to statements such as my teachers are experts in their field (ck), my teacher uses versatile teaching methods in order make study content easily comprehensible (pck), my teachers are able to use teaching methods and technology for dealing with the content area (tpack) and, my teachers demonstrate interest in using technology in their teaching (att). we also investigated student perceptions of the flipped classroom using three direct statements. students responded with four categories (1 = very well, 2 = well, 3 = not so well, 4 = not at all) to the statement the method with pre-materials and contact meetings suited me. students responded with four response categories (1 = definitely yes, 2 = yes, quite surely, 3 = not so surely, 4 = no way) to the second statement in the future, i would like to study in similarly arranged courses. students responded with “yes” or “no” to the third statement i would prefer to study in traditional lectures rather than in a course using this type of approach (flipped classroom). data analysis the items of tpack-21 and tpb-ict measures were combined into composite scores. each composite score’s internal consistency was assessed with cronbach’s alpha (α) for both pre-test (t1) and post-test (t2) measurement points. we considered an alpha level of 0.7 or higher to indicate the adequate reliability of a composite scale (nunnally 1978). descriptive statistics (mean [m] and standard deviation [sd]) were calculated for each of the composite scores. additionally, percentages of the perceptions of flipped classroom teaching were calculated for the three individual items. paired sample t-tests were used to compare the differences between the two measurement points to investigate the differences of the studied area between t1-t2 measurement points. we also calculated pearson correlations between the t1-t2 measurement points for composite scores. in addition, we investigated the differences between two groups: (1) first-year students and (2) second-year students and beyond. cohen’s d was calculated estimating the effect size between the two measurement points (morris & deshon, 2008). based on hattie’s (2009) interpretation of cohen’s d in educational settings, d < 0.1 indicates developmental effects, d = 0.2–0.3 indicates teacher effects and d > 0.4 indicates a zone of desired effects (see also lenhard & lenhard, 2016). results table 1 presents means (m), standard deviations (sd), internal consistency (α), pearson correlations (r), paired t-test results (t) and cohen’s-d (d) for student perceptions of teachers’ content knowledge (ck), pedagogical content knowledge (pck), technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack), and attitudes to using technology in teaching (att). all composite scores met the criteria for adequate internal consistency. table 2. student perceptions of teachers ck, pck, tpack and att pre-test (t1) post-test (t2) t1-t2 m (sd) α m (sd) α r t p d ck 4.89 (0.71) 0.81 4.93 (0.71) 0.84 0.54 n.s. n.s. n.s. pck 4.02 (0.91) 0.85 4.20 (0.96) 0.85 0.45 3.28 0.00 0.21 tpack 4.05 (0.89) 0.86 4.20 (0.98) 0.90 0.49 2.77 0.01 0.18 att 4.28 (0.88) 0.90 4.43 (0.95) 0.91 0.55 3.01 0.00 0.18 note. ck content knowledge, pck pedagogical content knowledge, tpack technological pedagogical content knowledge, att attitudes for using technology in teaching, m mean, sd standard deviation, α cronbach alpha, r pearson’s correlation, t t-value, p significance, d cohen’s d and n.s. non-significant. significant differences between pre-test (t1) and post-test (t2) measurement points were found in the paired sample t-tests for pck: t(316) = 3.28, p = .00, tpack: t(316) = 2.77, p = .01, and att: t(316) = 3.01, p = .00. students assessed their teachers pck, tpack and att higher at the end of the course than at the beginning of the course. the effect size between the two measurements points (i.e. taking the correlation into account) was developmental in tpack and att (d = 0.18), and in the teacher’s effect zone in pck (d = 0.21) according to hattie’s (2007) cohen’s d criteria. there were non-significant differences in the ck scale. however, the ck scale scores were higher (m t1 = 4.89 [sd t1 = 0.71]; m t2 = 4.93 [sd t2 = 0.84])than the other areas (pck, tpack, att), which indicates that students perceive their teachers as content specialists. table 2 presents the same indicators as table 1, however separately for first-year students and second-year and higher students. the first-year student perceptions of their teachers’ ck, pck, tpack or att indicate that they did not perceive differences in their teachers’ knowledge in the measured areas. however, second-year and higher students showed statistically significant higher scores in all measures at t2 compared to t1. the paired sample t-tests showed significant differences between t1 and t2 measurement points in ck: t(176) = 3.01 p = .01, pck: t(176) = 4.15, p = .00, tpack: t(316) = 3.23, p = .01, and att: t(176) = 4.70, p = .00. according to hattie’s (2007) cohen’s d criteria, the effect sizes between two measurements points were in the teachers’ effect zone for ck, pck, tpack and att. table 3. pre-test (t1) post-test (t2) t1-t2 first year students m (sd) m (sd) r t p d ck 4.99 (0.66) 4.89 (0.79) 0.51 n.s. n.s. n.s. pck 4.21 (0.89) 4.26 (0.97) 0.36 n.s. n.s. n.s. tpack 4.23 (0.86) 4.30 (1.00) 0.37 n.s. n.s. n.s. att 4.54 (0.85) 4.54 (0.98) 0.42 n.s. n.s. n.s. second-year and higher students m (sd) m (sd) r t p d ck 4.81 (0.74) 4.95 (0.64) 0.59 3.01 0.01 0.20 pck 3.87 (0.90) 4.15 (0.95) 0.52 4.15 0.00 0.32 tpack 3.91 (0.89) 4.12 (0.97) 0.58 3.23 0.01 0.25 att 4.08 (0.88) 4.34 (0.91) 0.65 4.70 0.00 0.31 figure 2 presents how the students perceived the fc method. 88.1% of the students considered the fc method with pre-materials and contact meetings as well-suited to them. 78.5% of the students indicated that they would like to participate in similarly arranged courses in the future. almost two-thirds of the students (70.1%) stated that they would prefer to study using the fc method rather than in more traditional lectures. figure 2. percentages of student perceptions of the fc method discussion the purpose of this study was to investigate how students in higher education flipped classroom (fc) courses assess teacher content knowledge (ck), pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) and attitudes to ict in teaching (att), before and after the course. this comparison was done for the whole data set and for two groups: (1) first-year students and (2) second-year and higher students. we also investigated how students perceived fc method and what preferences for the future they had regarding the fc method. a comparison of the data as one group showed that the students assessed their teachers’ pck, tpack and att higher after the fc course. no difference was found in ck. after splitting the data into two groups, the results for the first-year students did not show statistically significant differences for ck, pck, tpack or att at t1 and t2. however, second-year and higher students assessed their teachers’ skill higher in t2 for all measured areas. the majority of the students perceived fc in a positive way and were willing to take fc-type courses in the future. the effect sizes were at a moderate level in general, however, they should be compared in the context in which the courses lasted for approximately one period of academic year. results can be considered reasonable from this perspective. these results indicate that the fc approach can change student perceptions of teachers’ tpack and teachers’ attitudes to using technology. the three steps for ict integration to teaching in the project and the individual support that was offered seem to improve the teachers’ tpack-related skills. we assume that the fc model provided opportunities for the meaningful use of ict to support learning. as suggested by watson (2001) and ertmer (2005), pedagogy and pedagogical beliefs are important factors for the successful integration of ict in teaching. the fc model emphasizes the teacher as a content expert, as an expert in pedagogy and as an expert in the use of ict in education. results of this study suggest that, from a student perspective, teacher skills in integrating content, pedagogy and technology, are increasing. in order to make changes successful, the change must be reasonable (see. zhao et al., 2002). one of the reasons the results of this study indicate such successful integration of pedagogy and technology is the nature of the fc model, which is optimal for initiating change. in other words, fc is an easy-to-grasp model that allows teachers to consider pedagogy and ict in their teaching more thoroughly. we assume that emphasizing collaborative and student-centered methods in teaching makes the expertise in pedagogy and in use of ict more visible for students, thereby approaching the definition of skilled teaching with technology by koehler and colleagues (2013). the role of the content specialist remains in pre-materials and contact meetings. through more student-centered approaches, teachers can use time more effectively. results show that students recognize the benefits of the fc model and the change in teaching skills, which indicates that the teachers developed professionally during the process. the results indicate that the second-year and higher students perceived significant change in all ck, pck, tpack and att areas, whereas the first-year students did not. higher year students may have a better understanding of teaching practices, technology use, teacher skill levels and teacher attitudes to the use of ict in education. first-year students may not have this experience. this result can be considered logical and, thus, increases the reliability of this study. these findings align well with the aspects presented in earlier studies for the successful integration of ict (brikerhoff, 2006; ertmer 1999; 2005) and with the vision of how teacher training should be organized. sufficient support for pedagogy, the use of ict, a peer-support culture and self-study materials combined with time for developing teaching practices are important in developing the use of ict in teaching. there must be a shared vision for ict integration (harris, 2005), and fc creates a framework for teachers participating the training and a framework for support personnel who train teachers. fc seems to influence teacher attitudes to using ict in teaching, which is according to teo and tan (2012) one of the most important factor influencing the use of ict in education. the fc project with support and training allows teachers to develop their skills systematically. thus, it seems that support for teachers with the flipped classroom framework is effective for professional development and to improve their content related pedagogical-technological skills in higher education from the student perspective. limitations and future research the present study has limitations. first, a convenience sample was used. future researchers should consider stronger sampling methods in order to verify the results of the study. second, only two aspects of ict integration were addressed, namely the tpack model and the theory of planned behavior model for ict in education. future research should consider using other theoretical frameworks and measurement instruments based on these theories. third, study did not include an in-depth investigation of the psychometric properties of the adapted instruments. future research should be extended to a more in-depth investigation of reliability and validity. fourth, typical analysis methods were used, but future research would benefit from using more sophisticated methods, such as structural equation modeling. finally, the pedagogical investigations were based on the whole fc model. future research should more specifically consider pedagogical approaches within fc. acknowledgements all teachers and students who participated this study are gratefully acknowledged. this study was supported by the grant from finnish ministry of education and culture and finnish [okm/199/523/2016], and suomen 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(2002). conditions for classroom technology innovations. teachers college record, 104(3), 482–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9620.00170 title seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 educational expectations and media cultures petra missomeliusi leopold-franzens-univerität institut für psychosoziale intervention und kommunikationsforschung university of innsbruck, austria e-mail: petra.missomelius@uibk.ac.at abstract this article investigates the media-supported educational resources that are currently under discussion, such as oers and moocs. considering the discursive connection between these formats, which is couched in terms of educational freedom and openness, the article’s thesis is that these are expectations which are placed on the media technologies themselves, and then transferred to learning scenarios. to this end, the article will pursue such questions as: what are the learners, learning materials and learning scenarios allegedly free from or free for? what obstructive configurations should be omitted? to what extent are these characteristics which are of a nature to guarantee learning processes in the context of lifelong learning or can these characteristics better be attributed to the media technologies themselves and the ways in which they are used? what advantages or new accentuations are promised by proponents of the education supplied by media technology? which discourses provide sustenance for such implied “post-typographic educational ideals” (giesecke 2001 and lemke 1998)? the importance to learners, teachers and decision-makers at educational institutions of being well informed as far as media is concerned is becoming increasingly apparent. keywords: media technology, expectations, learning, freedom, education, knowledge, participation, mooc, industry, oer, media studies. introductory remarks in times marked by general complaint about deficiencies in the educational system and lamentations over insufficient qualifications, while at the same time public education is being decried as uneconomical it only makes sense to look for satisfactory forms of learning. this is not merely a question of human capital, but of nothing less than up-to-date education in today's media culture. as would seem only natural, discourses also affect alternatives through the use of media technologies in educational scenarios. in what follows, i will argue that there is a tendency here to resort all too quickly to monocausal conclusions and to assume that the latest technologies also bring about desirable processes of social change. in the present article i will also question the development processes of media technology and the changing educational scenarios in terms of their implicit mailto:petra.missomelius@uibk.ac.at seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 34 expectations. i argue that these expectations are also reflected in the assessment of online learning groups: they have a pronounced influence on the way these groups are evaluated. it is important to be aware of these implicit expectations, since they are essential conditions which determine the success or failure of these educational scenarios. media technologies and expectations the proposition that expectations are a case of recurring patterns in the further development of media technologies is supported by the following three authors: hartmut winkler, in his outline of the history of digitization “docuverse: zur medientheorie der computer” (“docuverse: on the media theory of computers”) (winkler 1997), describes the altered social needs which cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled by traditional media and which seem to be more promisingly served by new media. one could say that the deficits in the “old” media created a vacant space for the new media. winkler suspects that the change of media was expedited almost automatically owing solely to a recurring dissatisfaction with what has already been achieved or developed. according to winkler, a change of media always arises in connection with the wishes and desires of the recipients. and technical innovations, he claims, are attempts to fulfil these. in his 2010 study “technik als erwartung” (“technology as expectation”), andreas kaminski presented an approach to the philosophy of technology in which he understands technical development projects and interactions with technologies as forms of expectation. along with kaminski’s category of expectation and winkler’s structures of needs, klaus krippendorff, in “the semantic turn” (2006), addresses the question of the meaning which users associate with design artefacts, whether these be objects, services or technologies. according to krippendorff, the fate of artefacts is decided in the narrative discourses which accompany their emergence and use. studying the respective narratives and myths serves to promote these attributive meanings. myths on the origin of the internet it hardly came as a surprise to media theorists that the internet triggered a sweeping revolution, for basic changes in media culture which accompany the establishment of new media technologies are also part of both the enthusiasm and the fear that accompany the introduction of new technologies to society. they are the concomitant effects of every change in media, eliciting both euphoric and sceptical reactions. in the context under consideration here – that of educational scenarios related to media culture – the expectations of internet enthusiasts are especially interesting. to this end, i would therefore like to go back to the earliest days of computers. in 1945, vannevar bush announced the basic idea of the memex system in his essay “as we may think”. the novelty of this idea was to link the contents of several documents by association. users of this system, bush maintained, could insert their own ideas into existing texts. searching for relevant texts in this system was connected to writing and understood as an active process. bush's basic idea of the memex system was taken up twenty years later by ted nelson in the xanadu project. xanadu is the idea of a “legendary place”, here signifying the vision of joining documents through hypertext, a kind of text database, that is, the universal network he called the docuverse (which proseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 35 vided the name for hartmut winkler's publication). xanadu also resorted to metaphors when taking its orientation from the functioning of the human brain and being based on the model of the “fluidity of thought” (nelson 1992, p. 13). at the same time, xanadu was supposed to be available to a large number of users, all of whom could move freely in various directions. for instance, users could readily access texts they were looking for, edit existing texts at any time and retrieve all texts previously edited by other users in the docuverse. this is how nelson describes hypertext, highlighting user involvement and already thinking of the computer. common to both development projects is their claim to have found solutions to a problem which had already emerged at that time. they are attempts to manage the flood of information technically, to deal with its complexity and uncertainty, for the body of knowledge and scientific specializations proved to be too great a burden to human capacities. these expectations, which are inherent in the myths of the origin of the internet, account for the suggestion that digital media technologies are suited to educational scenarios. moreover, they continue to have an effect on the discourse concerning these scenarios. the book, for example, still represents the epitome of education, and forms the basis of the oer logo, in which multiple hands reach out from it in all directions. the book as the epitome of education fig. 1: global oer logo cc-by jonathas mello fig. 2: central expectations concerning educational media (based on theory analysis) the myth of freedom of media-supported educational scenarios within the scope of the currently discussed forms of online learning, such as moocs (massive open online courses), oe (open education) and oer (open educational resources), a continuation of the narrative presenting technologies as paths to freedom can be detected, and this was already being imputed to the internet at the time of its inception. as early as 1995, the sociologists richard barbrook and andy cameron were discussing the naïveté of the “californian expectations of digital media technologies as educational media externalization of the human brain (imagery and metaphors) revolution (basic change in the world and in culture, potential democratization, promise of salvation) access to and availability of world knowledge (universal library) knowledge on demand seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 36 ideology”, a conflation of west coast bohemia and high-tech business emanating from silicon valley. the normative openness of these learning scenarios under discussion today, at first presented with positive connotations, concerns the legal aspects of their use and their technical characteristics (cf. foote 2005). this primarily refers on the one hand to the compatibility of various resources and systems; in this instance, the use of proprietary software or formats has an essentially restrictive effect which is basically opposed to the idea of sharing, and this is why the use of floss (free/libre/open-source software) tends to be preferred. on the other hand, the openness of the licensing framework for educational resources, as in the guise of the “creative commons”, is also intended. as far as the learners are concerned, they are on the one hand interested in freedom from (“negative freedom” in the philosophical sense), that is, freedom from the coercion and bureaucracies of (educational) institutions. furthermore, many of the offerings are free of charge, so that we can also speak of the financial independence of oer actors beyond any ideally institutional and objective-ideological freedoms. in his 1945 essay, bush was already giving a positive twist to his perspective on the inadequacy of the human memory by calling it the “privilege of forgetting”. hence he expresses the freedom of being permitted to forget (the freedom from being constrained to remember) as a positive (and freedom-related) aspect of the human condition. this aspect – which will not be pursued here – concerns human deficits and inadequacies which are not seen as reasons for attempts at technological compensation, but rather, in line with bush’s reasoning, are simply to be left alone. although this phase does not involve external coercion, a knowledge of the necessity that learners have the freedom to do something is still evident. this “positive freedom” refers to designing one's own paths throughout life – akin perhaps to personal fulfilment through self-empowerment and independence in learning. a closer look reveals not only freedom of choice, but also the obligation to choose. in this instance, recourse to an emphatic concept of individuality in the discourses on self-management, which these learning scenarios not only offer, but also demand, is noteworthy. “freedom technology” is supposed to enable forms of living and self-determined lifestyles in which individuals trust to their own abilities, talents and aptitudes, allow themselves to be advised, taught and assessed, and accept as a matter of course normative educational requirements, such as lifelong learning, while regularly updating an individual e-portfolio. characteristic of the post-industrial west, according to klaus krippendorff, is the narrative “of free access to information, of unlimited contact ... of the ability to make over the world, including one's own identity”ii (krippendorff 2013, p. 259). this also includes the contemporary narrative of choice (although all possible choices cannot be exhausted, their mere existence is positive). these mythological narratives channel people’s participation in a technologized culture. klaus krippendorff calls these mythologies the actual sources of impetus. education as part of a diy culture the publicist anya kamenetz refers to “edupunks” and “edupreneurs” in connection with do-it-yourself learning cultures in the area of higher education, as she calls the learner-centred educational configurations. prominently displayed on the back cover of her 2010 book: “diy u: edupunks, edupreneurs, and the coming transformation of higher education” is the slogan “a revolution in higher learning: affordable, accessible, and learner-centered.” seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 37 edupunks evade the formal education system by using free educational media, while as edupreneurs they construct educational media for themselves and others in entrepreneurial terms, thereby creating an institutional framework for these media. as suggested by the use of the term “punk”, these changes are to take place on an individual level by establishing alternative “distribution channels” for education. the implementation of these changes is intended to compensate for the deficits of the traditional public education system through individual initiative and, by means of technologically supported, selfdetermined learning management, lead to innovative thinking in the long run. the expectation here is to replace a deficient system through individual activities and the availability of technology in order to bring about transformation within education and to achieve educational goals. these new possibilities are supposed to guarantee an educational programme tailored to the needs of the individual. the characteristics expected of successful learners include (self-) motivation, the ability to focus, self-discipline and determination. however, there are no offers of support (for instance, of a psychological or didactic nature) accompanying the learning scenarios to enable learners to familiarize themselves with this kind of learning and overcome obstructive constellations in order to meet such expectations. these are the real tasks of teachers. hence the actual processes of learning and motivation are primarily characterized by expectations, while apparently failing to go beyond the formulation of ideals. an instantly successful “just do it” attitude is taken for granted. rather than a transformation of the educational system, the impression is that of the learners being transformed in a subjective learning process (cf. j1995). these learners are now expected to do their duty in the name of self-empowerment, sovereignty and autonomy and assume sole responsibility for their own educational biography. however, as mackness, mak and williams state in their study, many learners, while using such scenarios, in actual fact do not want this freedom (and the concomitant self-responsibility). on the contrary, the freedom resulting from something so open is a source of irritation. moreover, they expect a course structure: “the research found that autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness/interactivity are characteristics of a mooc, but that they present paradoxes which are difficult to resolve in an online course. the more autonomous, diverse and open the course, and the more connected the learners, the more the potential for their learning to be limited by the lack of structure, support and moderation normally associated with an online course, and the more they seek to engage in traditional groups as opposed to an open network. these responses constrain the possibility of having the positive experiences of autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness/interactivity normally expected of an online network.” (mackness, mak & williams 2010, p. 266). in the reality illustrated in the afore-mentioned study, autonomy is felt to be a lack of necessary support. the notion of openness is inconsistent, as well, for it can also mean avoiding networking and sharing. the fact that each learner has different skills influences online behaviour and therefore leads at best to education in self-contained groups. the authors of the study recommend teachers as moderators in order to limit disorientation and to detect undesirable behaviour that might be an obstacle to learning. they recommend (as do cillier, 2005, and snowden & boone, 2007) not stipulating what should happen, but what should not happen. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 38 fig. 3: central expectations concerning learners (based on theory analysis) the requirements inherent in learning theoretical knowledge are relinquished entirely to the learners in the free educational media, while for learners, the attraction resides primarily in the emphasis on personal interest and freedom. the usually idealized networking aspect is perceived as a positive component of what is offered. variety, connectivity and the possibilities of sharing knowledge are considered to be the advantages of educational networks. as part of the assessments of learning theory concerning the collaborative development of fields of knowledge, these forms of networking are guaranteed to have a high level of innovation when knowledge is freely shared: “the users are freely revealing their knowledge and, thus, work cooperatively.” (larsen & vincent-lancrin 2005, p. 16) online learning communities as cultures of sharing the theory of these learning scenarios is already treating such temporary communities as an end in themselves: in the network culture, interconnected networking is a good in and of itself. users of these learning communities belong to a variety of social, cultural and ethnic groups, have diverse educational backgrounds, cultivate a variety of habits and pursue different educational goals. they correspond to the post-traditional communities diagnosed by the sociologist ronald hitzler (hitzler 1998). their most salient feature is their limitation to a temporary group of people who comprise a voluntary community united by a common interest. this is characterized by their arising “not qua tradition, but through individual participation for a time”iii (hepp 2008, p. 135). these learning communities are an expression of a technical interconnectedness of users whose aim is personal benefit. in such cases, self-interest as the most compulsive form of usefulness remains as far from consideration in the theoretical perspectivation of idealized cultures of sharing as do competition and rivalry among the learners, which also characterize learning scenarios, ideally as an incentive. this is not insignificant, especially since some educational offers are linked directly to potential employers' labour recruitment by way of the evaluation of the big data they generate (learning analytics). another important aspect which requires close examination is the phenomenon of social loafing, in which the willingness of some people to perform in a group is lower than when they learn in isolation – a problem which frequently plagues teamwork in general. these objections and misgivings are not intended to rule out the possibility that similarities can, in fact, be discovered and nurtured, thereby also making collaborative learning possible. in terms of learning theory, a peer-to-peer configuration is recommended, since this may result in educational results that are more sustainable than those achieved through individual efforts at learning. certainly, participating in a group and expectations placed on successful self-directed learners in moocs freedom from / to self-monitoring good awareness of one's own learning behaviour setting individual goals self-motivation and determination ability and willingness to take an active part in a community of sharing seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 39 linking can create the possibility for a narrative 'we' to emerge, in the sense of “we-learning” (bersin 2009). however, this cannot be assured through networking alone. unfortunately, the size of the learning community also entails an increase in noise and interference (cf. mackness/mak/williams 2010). the lack of clarity concerning the manner and objectives of a mooc, for instance, and the lack of moderation in its discussion forums, merely serve to intensify this effect. trust is not only a fundamental prerequisite for knowledge processes (gendolla & schäfer 2004), but also for sharing (hemetsberger 2012, p. 225). however, building trust takes time and demands a certain familiarity with one's fellow students. endeavouring to establish trust is yet another challenge in dealing with oer, while at the same time limiting independence in terms of time. this is particularly evident when participants withdraw from moocs, that is, the more accessible such courses are in their conception, the more obstacles to sharing are created. when in the context of these scenarios a multiplication of public spheres in the sense of a radical democratic principle is postulated and public space, as a space of publicity, is said to be extended to as many sectors and institutions of society as possible, then these represent mere expectations and wishes. klaus krippendorff also speculates on the motivation to take part in the creation of something worthwhile (in this case education, whereas krippendorff considers it to be the vision of a design activity in society as a whole). this, he claims, is self-motivating (!) and satisfying, and, in the process, one can attribute to these things a meaning of one's own and incorporate them into one's own life. thus one constructs these things and oneself, both as an individual and as part of a social community (krippendorff 2013, p. 106). economization tendencies the pedagogically unambitious xmoocs, which are not at all open in the way noted above, present lecture videos of star scientists – preferably from u.s. elite universities – as well as multiple-choice tests, and have now generated an education industry which is trying out business models, such as charging graduates for their degree certificates or selling the big data thereby collected to potential employers. in terms of education policy, the chance to save money by outsourcing teaching jobs appears attractive to those institutions which formerly offered institutionalized education. hence the many programmes promoting a trial of these models in german-speaking regions. the invitation to bid for ten mooc production fellowships extended in 2013 by the stifterverband der deutschen wissenschaft (association of foundations for german scholarship and science) together with iversity, a commercial provider of education is a case in point. the discovery of the education sector as an area of society not yet entirely given over to capitalist exploitation could also put free and critical intelligence up for grabs. a view informed by media studies demonstrates that the development of economic models incorporating new media technologies in various walks of life is nothing new, either. by the same token, there are already a large number of more or less unsuccessful efforts at using media to teach educational content, such as educational television or radio (on this point, cf. also lehmann 2013). seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 40 economic expectations from media-supported education scenarios savings in education (rationalization, only a few elite brick-and-mortar institutions) creation of an education industry (cf. for instance xmoocs providers in the usa, such as udacity, coursera and edx) development of business models, such as revenues from certification charges and/or evaluation of big data attractive and hence successful offerings thanks to internationally renowned representatives of reputable educational institutions fig. 4: central expectations concerning media in educational contexts (based on theory analysis) the education industry as a promise of salvation? summary and prospects although xmoocs are the only version of massive open online courses currently under discussion owing to their economic reach, the so -called cmoocs, which have been developed and tested in canada by george si emens and stephen downes, are lagging behind. they refer back to ivan illich (e.g. see siemen’s blog http://www.connectivism.ca/ and downe’s blog http://learnonline.wordpress.com/) and are characterized by a connectivist approach which, while it may not yet have achieved the status of a new theory of learning, nonetheless offers potential for a discussion of new forms of learning and didactic approaches, including those outside institutionalized education. the interplay between societies affected by network media and changes in educational practice produces dynamic areas of tension which, moreover, do not react to one another simultaneously. furthermore, media technologies are not only involved in processes of creating accessibility, but are also necessary for the production and teaching of bodies of knowledge. thus a basic description of today's learning cultures is needed. as shown by the study carried out by mackness, mak and williams, what appears to be important to a study of online learning communities is the fact that they cannot be evaluated in the same way as social network sites. although understanding can be approximately coordinated, it can by no means be shared. at best, learning materials can be shared, but not learning and processes of understanding, nor knowledge itself. furthermore, particular pedagogical attention must be paid to such phenomena as social loafing. the visions of learning associated with new media-supported scenarios sound most inspiring and hark back to traditional ideals of education, such as “education for all” and historic traditions of sharing – a subject explored in depth by theo hug in his article (in this issue). however, merely building on the latest media technologies is not sufficient. there is still a long way to go before new forms of learning can seriously be realized – especially since there is no one best way, given the plethora of occasions for learning. from the perspective of media studies, it is indispensable to look more closely at the history of media if we are to evaluate omnipresent acceleration processes, define our relationship to such processes, and critically to question and reflect upon the basic conditions of changing education and educational institutions. it is highly desirable that educational research is study in more detail how exactly to seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 41 promote and support these positive effects in online communities. attention should be given to how they can actually result in successful learning in the current era of network media. for several years, this goal has been pursued by such initiatives as “keine bildung ohne medien” (“no education without media”) in germany and “medienbildung jetzt! ” (“media education now! ”) in austria, which champion basic education in media studies for all involved in teaching. to continue along the lines of klaus krippendorff’s design-related ideas, successful scenarios require a “second-order understanding”, an understanding of the learning processes of others which embeds them recursively in one's own understanding. if learners in digital scenarios are presented with a wide range of educational offers with teachers and learners in one person, they will accordingly need either ways to learn the 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(2012): ‘let the source be with you!’ – practices of sharing in free and open-source communities. in: w. sützl; f. stalder, r.maier & t.hug (eds.): media, knowledge and education: cultures and ethics of sharing / medien – wissen – bildung: kulturen und ethiken des teilens (pp. 117-128). innsbruck: innsbruck university press, hepp, a. (2008): medienkommunikation und deterritoriale vergemeinschaftung. medienwandel und die posttraditionalisierung von translokalen vergemeinschaftungen. in: r. hitzler, a.honer & m. pfadenhauer (eds.): posttraditionale gemeinschaften. theoretische und ethnografische erkundungen (pp. 132-150). wiesbaden: vs verlag,. holzkamp, k. (1995): lernen: subjektwissenschaftliche grundlegung. frankfurt am main; new york: campus verlag. kamenetz, a. 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(2013): es liegt was in der luft. educational broadcasting. in: r. schulmeister (ed.): moocs – massive open online courses. offene bildung oder geschäftsmodell? (pp. 257-271). münster/new york/münchen/berlin: waxmann verlag,. lemke, j. (1998): metamedia literacy: transforming meanings and media. in: d. reinking, m.c.mckenna, l.d.labbo & r.d.kieffer (eds.): handbook of literacy and technology: transformations in a post-typographic world (pp. 312-332). mahwah, nj: erlbaum,. mackness, j., mak, s. & williams, r. (2010): the ideals and reality of participating in a mooc. proceedings of the 7th international conference on networked learning 2010 (pp. 266-275). university of lancaster, lancaster. nelson, t. h. (1992): literary machines. sausalito: mindful press. snowden, d. j. & boone, m. e. (2007): a leader's framework for decision making. harvard business review, 85 (11), 68-76. winkler, h. (1997): “docuverse: zur medientheorie der computer”. grafrath: boer verlag. i petra missomelius petra missomelius is dr. phil., is a senior researcher at the institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies at the university of innsbruck, austria. she is working on media education, media literacy and e-education. phd in media studies on digital cultures at marburg university, germany. publications about media and perception; media aesthetics; media art; film cultures; body and technoscience; privacy activism; mashup and remix culture. recent work includes the interferences between medialization, knowledge dynamics and learning processes. ii my own translation of “des freien zugangs zu information, des unbegrenzten kontaktes [...] der machbarkeit der welt, einschließlich der eigenen identität”. iii personal translation of: “nicht qua tradition, sondern durch individuelle partizipation auf zeit” http://advancingknowledge.com/drafts/larsen-the%20impact%20of%20ict%20on%20tertiary%20education%20akke.doc http://advancingknowledge.com/drafts/larsen-the%20impact%20of%20ict%20on%20tertiary%20education%20akke.doc rethinking communication in virtual learning environments through the concept of bildung ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. rethinking communication in virtual learning environments through the concept of bildung charlotta hilli faculty of education and welfare studies åbo akademi university email: chilli@abo.fi abstract the aim of this paper is to discuss the transformative relationship between the self and culture, or bildung, while considering new technology such as virtual learning environments. it adopts a technocultural educational perspective; the digital world is an extension of the physical world, and as such an extension of humanity. it is the basis for developing identities that are constantly being readdressed through new encounters with the world. communication is a central theme in theories of bildung. from a technocultural standpoint, communication is the space, or interface, where bildung takes place. in virtual learning environments, there are different ways to communicate, both synchronously and asynchronously. these environments offer communicative spaces where the self is transformed through several actions because of communicating with the software or with other people. the paper suggests rethinking what communication means in education when it is mediated through digital technology. virtual learning environments make new teaching practices possible that include digital sources and collaborative assignments through intelligent interactions in simulations or social media. supporting students is crucial for them to learn how to use, understand and navigate these spaces. keywords: technocultural education, bildung, synchronous communication, asynchronous communication, virtual learning environments introduction this paper strives to offer what david m. berry (2011, p. 9) calls a humanistic understanding of technology, or rather a pedagogic understanding of bildung in virtual learning environments. the paper adopts the philosophical approach found in the essay technocultural education by lars løvlie (2006) that focus on the idea of education in a digital society. the main assumption is that the world is changing with digital technology and education with it. it adopts a technocultural educational perspective where the digital world is considered an extension of the physical world, and as such an extension of humanity. it is the basis for developing identities that are constantly being re-addressed through new encounters with the world. there are different perspectives on digital technology in education, ranging from highly optimistic to grossly pessimistic (grosswiler, 2013). according to løvlie (p. 3), technocultural fear is common when new technology is introduced, and usually passes once the technology is embedded into the everyday lives of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 110 people. furthermore, there are tensions and controversies in the research field of digital technology and education related to conceptual, theoretical, and methodological disagreements (harasim, 2012; livingstone, 2012; selwyn, 2011, 2016/2017). according to neil selwyn (2016/2017), 40 years of research cannot confirm that education gets better through digital technology. keeping in mind that ‘better’ is rarely defined clearly. although digital technology may improve certain aspects of education research proving this is yet to be validated. sonia livingstone (2012) accounts for certain cognitive processes that are being measured, without comparing surrounding factors, or critically examining what is being tested. however, what should be equally interesting to assess, according to livingstone, are skills such as creativity, playfulness, and empathy. the freedom and power of the user are generally mentioned as positive effects of digitalization (van dijk, 2012; grosswiler, 2013). however, selwyn (2016/2017, p. 34) notes that the hype of digital media in education is usually based on views of the private sector. the discourse in these narratives is that formal educators cannot be trusted, and that someone else, whoever that might be, should shoulder the responsibility of education and revolutionize it. the views of the private sector are not necessarily compatible with democratic, relational, and social aspects of education. they rarely address questions of inequality, or socio-economic factors among students, which make it more difficult for certain students to learn through digital technology. educationalists, throughout history, have maintained the importance of a public educational system for many reasons; reducing inequalities among students is one of those reasons (hug, 2017; kroksmark, 2003/2011; siljander, 2016). original theories of communication generally position the sender, the message, and the receiver as key factors when transmitting information (van dijk, 2012, p. 9). interaction and control are central to the communication revolution; through digital technology the traditional power balance between sender and receiver is questioned the user can control the digital message, unlike information provided through electronic media such as television or radio (van dijk, 2012; grosswiler, 2013). this relates to challenging hierarchies in education through digital technology that livingstone (2012) and løvlie (2006) discuss. livingstone highlights how ict, to some people, mean tools that should be used to uphold traditional teaching practices. she writes (2012, p. 11), “it is vital that society decides how radical to be in aiming merely to improve or wholly to redesign the power relation between teachers and pupils, classroom and home.” livingstone suggests more research is needed on how digital technology can break down hierarchies in classrooms; teaching methods including student collaboration through digital media is offered as one example of this. livingstone proposes including a perspective of how digital technology might transform educational practice. that correlates with the aim of this paper which is to discuss the transformative relationship between the self and culture, or bildung, while considering new technology such as virtual learning environments. bildung changes with historical contexts (gustavsson, 2003; løvlie, 2006). løvlie states that when new technology is introduced in education, or the context of education changes the concept of bildung will have to change as well. this paper introduces bildung in virtual learning environments as a dimension to consider in education. from a technocultural standpoint, communication is the space, or interface, where bildung takes place. in virtual learning environments, there are different ways to communicate, both synchronously and asynchronously. these environments offer communicative spaces where the self is transformed through many actions because of communicating with the software or with other people. therefore, the paper suggests rethinking what communication means in education when it is mediated through digital technology. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 111 the complicated concept of bildung according to siljander and sutinen (2012, p. 3), the concept of bildung has a long history dating back to hellenic writer cicero, where the soul needs refining through philosophy. another strand of thought is the judeo-christian idea that humans were created in the image of god; bildung should be realized through a creative process that leads to an undefined goal. gustavsson (2012, p. 311) also places the concept within a european realm, but adds that similar concepts are found in african, chinese, and persian cultures. burman and sundgren (2012, p. 8) confirm that bildung is hard to define, however, it is a personal process, it is something that happens and is directed from within an individual, it is not something that can be clearly directed by someone else, or defined in terms of skills or competencies. at the same time, it is not something that someone can do alone, some form of communication with other people is needed; this is where formal education usually comes in as a means for this. siljander and sutinen (2012) identify two aspects of bildung. first, it is a creative process where the individual develops through several different actions, and where the individual can also shape the surrounding cultural environment. second, it is a process where the individual seeks to better herself or himself, perhaps by setting an example or acting like a role-model. the authors add that this is not something that an individual can do without an education, thus they confirm the role of formal education discussed above. burman and sundgren (2012, p. 9) suggest three traditions of bildung. a german one, based on johann herder and wilhelm von humboldt, and the idea that the individual processes of bildung are connected to scientific development. an anglo saxon tradition, or liberal education, represented by martha nussbaum, which entails critical self-reflection, empathy, and an ability to understand and take part in global issues. the third tradition mentioned, is rooted in the concept of popular or liberal adult education typical for the nordic countries, but it is not relevant in this paper. some researchers connect the european and american traditions (gustavsson, 2012; siljander & sutinen, 2012). active citizenship is important for nussbaum modern bildung can be understood as more than simply a reflective and individual process. it is something that happens through actions with a more specific purpose than perhaps previous theorists such as von humboldt would allow (konrad, 2012). bildung can also mean a study of the past according to the hermeneutic tradition of hans-georg gadamer, the individual sets out into the unknown and returns home with past and present horizons merged as a result she or he has a deeper understanding of the world (gustavsson, 2012). the critique against bildung include problems to define the concept (siljander & sutinen, 2012), as well as the matter of who is supposed to be cultivated, and what this process of bildung entails (løvlie, 2006). kaveh (2012) raises several critical questions regarding bildung. around 1900, it was directed at conforming certain groups in society to certain ideals that were not being critically examined. these groups of people were generally excluded from political power, and their view on bildung was rarely included; middle or upper class ideals of reading classic literature, to become a cultivated citizen, were not necessarily of interest to the working class that regarded changing political and economic power balances important. according to kaveh, the ideal for this cultivated person was found among the middle class, that lead to a less than open and inclusive process. kaveh (2012) points out that bildung needs to be contextualised; it should be understood from a cultural perspective, and from a political and economic point of view, therefore, the ancient greek version of bildung is not the same as the one rooted in the rationality and independence proclaimed by the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 112 enlightenment. kaveh suggests that bildung can be understood as a dialogue between different classes in society to understand each other. it raises attention to the communicative and democratic processes entailed in the concept, which is of importance from a technocultural standpoint discussed below. bildung in a technocultural light løvlie (2006) suggests that one problem has always been the antithesis of man and machine humanity is considered opposite to machine; from a technocultural approach, the digital world is an extension of the old world, and digital features can be considered extensions of humanity. he states that john dewey takes a different route than the european traditions of bildung discussed above. dewey introduces the concepts of intelligent people, tools, and animals; intelligence is defined as interactions of different kinds. “for dewey the ”i” is not a spectator of the world but a participant in a relational and interactive world.” (løvlie, 2006, p. 4). løvlie explains that the subject, or the human, is the relationship, which he relates to theories of friedrich hegel. that is why the technocultural version of bildung breaks paths with previous theories; it is not looking for a way back to a fixed and fuller identity, bildung means being in a state of constant change, always open, turning towards the world, not inwards towards the human subject. where “i” as a physical being end and the machine begins is not relevant from a technocultural perspective. human and machine intelligences are deeply connected and interact in many ways. the distinction between human and machine make even less sense now when humans communicate and interact with intelligent machines sometimes daily. machines are getting more intelligent by the minute; the algorithms are getting more complex, and computers can perform complex interactions on their own, thus they no longer need humans to interact (berry, 2011; malone & bernstein, 2015). digital information online can take the concept of intelligence even further. a logical step forward is to consider collective intelligence, which malone and bernstein (2015, p. 1) define as “interconnected groups of people and computers that are collectively doing intelligent things”. according to berry (2011, p. 7), “computer code enable new communicative processes” that make collective thinking possible. are we, as berry proposes, seeing the beginning of a collective intellect through wikis and other collectively shared sites? berry (p. 8) writes about digital assemblages: “technology enables access to the databanks of human knowledge from anywhere, disregarding and bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge in the state, the universities and the market.” this is in line with the communication revolution that disrupts the position of the sender and the receiver; the receiver can impact digital information, transform it, and of course use it to disrupt the society, or challenge traditional ways of being through collective efforts (van dijk, 2012; grosswiler, 2013). berry (2011) implies that shared digital culture can lead to digital bildung. knowledge is no longer possessed by the few, but by the many digitally. however, much of present digital technology is made for individuals and used by individuals; this is not the same as the truly collaborative processes that berry imagines, where groups of people are thinking critically together through computers. the nascent research field of collective intelligence offers mostly questions at this point (malone & bernstein, 2015). the ideas of collective intelligence and intellect make interesting contributions to the pedagogical field of bildung. løvlie (2006) and berry (2011) place emphasis on the process of bildung. cultivating several selves would probably be something quite different, if at all possible, than cultivating only oneself. the transformations between the self or selves in this case, and culture is what constitutes bildung in a technocultural sense (løvlie, 2006). from a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 113 technocultural perspective technology merely returns humans to the natural state of being which is in a constant relationship with the world that also includes the machines. developing together with other humans, with and through technology, could mean new ideas and new social practices at a faster pace than ever before (berry, 2011; malone & bernstein, 2015). løvlie (2006, p. 12) attributes the concept of the cyborg to donna haraway, who uses it as a metaphor for the interconnected human and machine. collective intelligence would probably be an equally unstable presence in the world, as the cyborg, but a presence nonetheless. continuing the discussion initiated by løvlie, this presence strives to openness to that which is different; it would be a paradox for collective intelligence to agree on simply one truth or one identity, humanity is not fixed in subjects with one identity, rather it is constantly being negotiated collectively in digital spaces such as virtual learning environments. bildung in virtual learning environments virtual learning environments are interactive, communicative, collaborative, and digital; thus, they offer users a range of actions; they include text-based and immersive, visual digital environments. this make new teaching and learning practices possible that include other dimensions of learning than cognitive skills (annetta, folta & klesath, 2011; hilli, 2016). virtual simulations have been used in military or nurse training where participants can analyse visual information, and practice how to handle different scenarios typical for the field (carroll et al., 2015). in 3-d virtual simulations, participants can affect the outcome of the processes at hand which is important for their understanding of complex phenomena (trindade, 2005). through interactions with virtual learning environments, and through discussions with the teacher, misconceptions among students can be identified and rectified (karlsson, 2012). social media are another example of virtual learning environments; they make different forms of communication possible, both synchronous and asynchronous, and students can enhance communicative abilities and critical thinking skills through collaboration on social media (beldarrain, 2006; clark et al., 2015; kreijns et al., 2003). virtual learning environments have been studied through educational theories focused on the learning process of the individual, such as behaviourism and constructivism. it has also been studied through social theories on learning focusing on collaborative processes, and the role of interactions with other individuals for learning (annetta, folta & klesath, 2011; harasim, 2012; jones, 2007/2013). according to petrina, feng and juyung (2008), a shift could be seen in the late 1990-2000s from cognitive research on learning and technology to regarding learning as situated in social and cultural practices. although theories related to these approaches, for example communities of practice (lave & wenger, 1991), or activity theories (engeström, 1987/2015), generally identify the importance of mediating artefacts, such as language and tools for learning activities; they do not, as the technocultural approach does, identify “the symbiotic relationship between man and machine” or the cyborg (løvlie, 2006, p. 4). the transformation is in focus online where humans continue to find new ways of expressing themselves, and redefining themselves. that means fluid and constantly developing identities (løvlie, 2006), in an equally fluid and everchanging virtual learning environment (hilli, 2016). the student needs to make many decisions in a digital space to navigate forward, often through hyperlinks, and the learning process is not linear in the same sense as in a book; the student needs to find her or his own path online, which can be considered a form of explorative learning, and a curiosity to learn more engages the student (depietro, 2013). the student is not only receiving information; she or he is an active participant in virtual learning environments, but this can cause confusion among students if they do not grasp the codes and communication online. according to hannafin and hannafin (2010), reading seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 114 digital texts is a cognitive challenge for many students. students sometimes misunderstand the digital content, or they do not learn much about the course content since they are focusing on searching for digital information. similar criticism has been raised against virtual simulations; students might misunderstand a complex process if they do not possess relevant previous knowledge, or if they lack feedback from teachers (karlsson, 2012). digital technology offers new spaces for interactions and transformations among students. this is one way to interpret the symbiotic relationship that løvlie discuss in the light of virtual learning environments. the software in virtual learning environments requires students to navigate the space, and take part in interactions independently, as a result they gain practical knowledge about software (hilli, 2016). in the words of løvlie (2006, p. 8), the student or cyborg, might become “a technocultural migrant, who can interpret signs, understand symbols of power, see through rhetorical games, engage in argumentation, and through all this is formed into a politically educated individual.” løvlie describes an understanding of communication online, which can be translated into democratic abilities in a digital world. discussion researchers note that digital technology can be a disruptive force in the learning process (harasim, 2012; løvlie, 2006; selwyn, 2016/2017). however, there are several reasons for considering what it means to embrace digital technology, as part of processes of bildung, in the light of intelligent interactions. if online interactions are to be understood as intelligence as discussed above, it leads to prospects for virtual learning environments as communicative spaces that support processes of bildung. løvlie (2006, p. 4–5) calls the space ‘the interface’ and explains it as follows: what’s the interface? the screen is an interface, whether we’re talking about the tv, the pc or the display on a mobile phone. the interface is the dividing line between person and machine but at the same time marks the spot where the person stands face to face with the machine. that is why interface is such a graphic term. … the young owners do not necessarily identify with the mobile as a fetish, although it may offer an aura of freedom and power. rather, their identity is linked to the mobile as distributed intelligence in a network in which they realise themselves in ongoing dialogues with others. their identity is between rather than in the participants, identity is in the interaction. … interface is a boundary but not in the sense of a barrier or obstacle. a boundary faces two ways, it both unites and separates, it is face-to-face and janus-face. without interface, there would be no difference between humans and machines no space for intelligent actions. the relational aspect to consider extends the intelligence of the human; the interface makes it possible for humans to do and say things in new spaces in relation to others. simulations and social media are examples of interfaces where these intelligent interactions can happen. the essence of bildung is found in the transformative processes that take place online, between humans in communication, in the interface. in virtual learning environments, communication is made possible through the software. the distinction between man and machine becomes irrelevant. there is no communication without the software, nor is there any communication without man. from a pedagogical perspective, online communication can enhance transformative processes among students. synchronous communication is beneficial when brainstorming about a topic as a group or when teachers are providing feedback. through asynchronous communication students have time for reflection and they can choose a convenient time to read material, take different perspectives into consideration or comment on a topic seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 115 (annetta, folta & klesath, 2010; falloon, 2011; hrastinski, 2008). different forms of communication might enhance the process of bildung; they offer students different interfaces to communicate what they know, or want to know more about. the spaces for communication matter; if only verbal communication is used, shy students often remain silent. in written form, more students can participate and at their preferred pace and form of communication (depietro, 2013). simply including online communicative spaces is not enough to foster communication or collaboration among students. according to kreijns et al. (2003), teachers need to plan for and support collaborative and communicative activities to make students take part in them and learn through them. furthermore, a combination of synchronous and asynchronous communication, such as asynchronous digital videos and synchronous online meetings, seem to support interactions between students, and between students and teachers; this in turn enhances the learning process among the students. however, in their study on teaching and social presence among 16 teacher students in an online course, they found that some students did not feel comfortable uploading video posts, and some participants only posted textbased comments in an online discussion. rethinking communication in virtual learning environments means supporting students to learn how to take part in different interactions and learn collaboratively; to do that, teachers need technical knowledge about the digital software and pedagogical knowledge about the learning processes online (harasim, 2012). teachers need to plan for how to support students learning when introducing new media that emphasizes independent activities by students (karlsson, 2012). however, teachers are also technocultural migrants who need content knowledge, as well as, technological and practical knowledge about virtual learning learning environments. harasim (2012, p. 86–87) mentions teacher training and professional development to support teachers, but there are “many mixed and mixed up messages and unclear demands” that make it difficult for teachers to include these spaces while teaching. ideas of independent and active learners are embedded in the personal digital devices developed, when these ideas meet the collective efforts of education, conflicts of interest arise (selwyn, 2016/2017). the role of the teacher is as important as ever, although the learning process of the student is mediated through different multimedia (harasim, 2012; karlsson, 2012). harasim identifies a lack of learning theories suitable for online environments as part of the challenges for teachers. hannafin, hannafin and gabbitas (2009, p. 769) address other challenges for teachers, “designers are unable to account for individual cognitive demands in advance since the context of learning is often spontaneous and the availability and use of resources evolving continuously.” when the individual meets the digital world, it advances independent travels in sometimes uncharted territory, a digital territory that is constantly changing (depietro, 2013; hilli, 2016). bildung, in virtual learning environments, implies knowledge to read and understand the digital space, an ability to navigate successfully in it. synchronous and asynchronous forms of communication might make the reflective process diverse and inclusive within a group of students. diverse because students are subjected to different interfaces where they face the world. inclusive because they can take part on their own terms and often in their own time. it is in these spaces and in these relationships that the process of bildung is expected to evolve. furthermore, accepting this fluid and inconstant nature of the digital world is most likely essential for a technocultural migrant for a cyborg. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 116 conclusions this paper has discussed the transformative relationship between the self and culture, or bildung, while considering new technology such as virtual learning environments. the paper has adopted a technocultural approach to education; bildung is a personal, fluid and dynamic process that can be enhanced through online communication. it relates to the interactive and communicative aspects of virtual learning environments, that make it possible for students to be active while learning, as they are interacting with people, digital software, and digital information. virtual learning environments do not absolve the role of the teacher, rather they add new dimensions to consider when teaching in them; they make new teaching and learning practices possible, including studying digital sources, and collaborating through intelligent interactions in simulations or social media. however, students need support in virtual learning environments; they need to learn how to use, understand and navigate the spaces. teachers might do well to include communicative online spaces where students can discuss explorations they make, and questions or problems that arise. a combination of synchronous and asynchronous communication seems to support the learning process; students can share and reflect upon what they have learned with others to avoid misunderstandings or feelings of frustration. and finally, collaboration and communication do not happen unless they are planned for; teachers need to include collaborative assignments for transformative processes of bildung to take place. the paper has suggested rethinking what communication means in education when it is mediated through digital technology. the paper has argued that when humans meets computers transformations take place, not only through interactions with other people, but also through the machine and software; this was understood as interfaces where humans face culture. as the digital world is an extension of humanity there is no question if digital technology should be part of education, the paper assumes it would be unnatural not to include it. from a technocultural perspective, technology merely returns humans to the natural state of being in a constant relationship with the world digital technology extends this notion to a global level. references annetta, l. a., folta, e. & klesath, m. (2010). v-learning. distance education in the 21st century through 3d virtual learning environments. new york: springer. beldarrain, y. (2006). distance education trends: integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration. distance education, 139–153. berry, d. m. (2011). the computational turn: thinking about the digital humanities. culture machine, 12. burman, a. & sundgren, p. (2012). inledning. in a. burman & p. sundgren (eds.), svenska bildningstraditioner (pp. 7–25). göteborg: daidalos förlag. carroll, m., johnston, m. & hale, k. s. (2015). visual perceptual skills training in virtual environments. in k. s. hale & k. m. stanney (eds.), handbook of virtual environments. design, implementation, and application (pp. 1029–1042). boca raton: taylor & francis group, llc. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 117 clark, c., strudler, n. b., grove, k. j. 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(2015). introduction. in t. w. malone & m. s. bernstein (eds.), handbook of collective intelligence (pp. 1–14). cambridge, ma: mit press. nussbaum, m. (2010). not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities. new jersey: princeton university press. petrina, s., feng, f. & juyun, k. (2008). researching cognition and technology: how we learn across the lifespan. international journal of technology and design education, 18(4), 375–396. selwyn, n. (2016/2017). skolan och digitaliseringen. blir utbildningen bättre med digital teknik? göteborg: daidalos förlag. selwyn, n. (2011). making sense of young people, education and digital technology: the role of sociological theory. oxford review of education, 38(1), 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577949 siljander, p. (2016). systemaattinen johdatus kasvatustieteeseen. peruskäsitteet ja pääsuuntaukset. tampere: vastapaino. siljander, p. & sutinen, a. (2012). introduction. in p. siljander, a. kivelä, & a. sutinen (eds.), theories of bildung and growth. connections and controversies between continental educational thinking and american pragmatism (pp. 1– 18). rotterdam: sense publishers. trindade, j. f. (2005). improving physics learning with virtual environments: an example on the phases of water. interactive educational multimedia (11), 212– 226. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577949 rethinking communication in virtual learning environments through the concept of bildung charlotta hilli abstract introduction the complicated concept of bildung bildung in a technocultural light references microsoft word fredskild og frederiksen korr yn+kf.docx ©2020 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. educational textbooks in digital surroundings trine ungermann fredskild læringsog forskningshuset sygehus sønderjylland email: tuf@rsyd.dk kirsten frederiksen department of public health aarhus university email: kf@ph.au.dk> abstract the danish education system as well as danish society as a whole are influenced by technology in many ways. technology also has a significant impact on the decisions made by students in choosing their educational learning material. these issues are not limited to the danish educational system but can be applied to a number of contexts. the following study considers the findings in a danish study on the use of educational textbooks among students in denmark. it also examines how and to what extent traditional educational text-books are used, student preferences regarding textbooks vs online books and whether these preferences differ according to education and gender. the study also investigates the way students handle textbooks – such as sharing, photocopying, or buying second-hand copies, selling and buying etc. the study compares themes identified across educational contexts and looks beyond the danish educational context. empirically, the study builds on a survey conducted among students enrolled in the bachelor programme in the vocational education and training programme (vet) (health care) and in upper secondary schools. the study includes responses from 1146 students. the article discusses the findings from the perspective of work methods, communication and interaction, and concludes, inter alia, that even though the students still prefer traditional textbooks, ebooks supplement this traditional use in a beneficial educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 manner. the article argues that in order to satisfy different styles of learning, the textbook and the ebook should not be seen as competitors but rather as complementary. keywords: education, textbooks, e-books, online learning, learning processes, communication introduction recent studies among 506 and 669 students enrolled, respectively in further education programmes in denmark showed that in 2014, 79% of the students almost always preferred printed textbooks whereas 43% of the students attending further education prefer to read articles in digital format. results from 2016 showed that 64 % of the students preferred printed textbooks (fremtidens biblioteker, 2014; fremtidens biblioteker, 2016). further, 26% of students would typically choose digital study material such as articles and educational textbooks if these were available (fremtidens biblioteker, 2014). among the male students, 18 % preferred digital educational textbooks compared to 6% of the femalestudents (fremtidens biblioteker, 2014). in 2016, the numbers comprised 22% and 15% for males and females, respectively (fremtidens biblioteker, 2016). international studies have shown that the uptake of electronic textbooks has been slower than anticipated (stone & baker-eveleth 2013), but studies also suggest that student satisfaction with e-books has improved over time (gueval et al., 2015). hence, it is no surprise that despite the recent trend towards digitalization in the educational environment in a number of countries, including denmark, 79% (2014) respectively 64% (2016) of students still prefer the printed textbook. the printed educational textbook is a quite special form of literature, which is used to ensure that the syllabus is fulfilled. studies show that there is a marked difference between students’ preferences depending on whether they attend vocational education and training programmes or university college level programmes. moreover, gender differences in preferences are evident: male students show a remarkably higher preference for digital textbooks than female students (fremtidens biblioteker, 2014; fremtidens biblioteker, 2016). educational textbooks have for centuries been the cornerstone for teachers in planning, carrying out and evaluating their teaching (hansen, 2006). the textbook may be considered an educational teaching aid, which, together with topics and targets, defines the knowledge and the skills specified in the syllabus. thus, use of the textbook by students and teachers facilitates the fulfilment of the tasks in the syllabus. educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 the educational textbook provides a firm structure and clear guidance in the teaching process in the form of texts, exercises and relevant tasks. educational textbooks provide a clearly defined and limited knowledge in relation to the specific subjects (hansen, 2006; hacker, 1980). this has not yet been found to be the case in digital study materials except when the materials are an exact digital copy of the printed textbook. the development of digital study materials provides fresh educational perspectives and new pedagogical possibilities. hence, new ways of arranging and facilitating knowledge, teaching and learning have become possible. digital learning materials present a challenge to the use of the ordinary printed textbooks. previously, standard textbook reading was tantamount to studying whereas today, the involvement of digital textbooks and other digital study materials prompt us to question whether the digital text-books and study materials can provide the same learning outcome as traditional textbooks. the increase in sales and the popularity of ebooks together with the decline in printed books, raises various points of concern amongst publishers, librarians, teachers and others having an interest in education. will ebooks replace printed books? have people abandoned print for ebooks? who is likely to opt for ebooks and why? they wonder whether ebooks will come to replace printed books, the extent to how far people have already abandoned print for ebooks and who, exactly, is likely to opt for the ebook. publishers are experiencing a recent decline in the sale of educational textbooks. it is not known whether this is due to students’ giving preference to digital textbooks or if related to photocopying, selling and sharing. although there is a tendency at some education programmes to consider sharing, copying and selling as legitimate this has not yet been systematically investigated (brunet et al., 2011; cuinas et al., 2017; zhang et al., 2013). in general, publishers aim to complement the market of educational textbooks with digital solutions. initiatives take different paths and students’ preferences should be investigated. the aim of this study was to examine preferences for ebooks and printed books across educational contexts, which include the purpose of reading, the situation in which the reading takes place, and individual contextual factors such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, education level, price, content, readability and structure. this study aimed to identify factors that contribute to the uptake of ebooks. by enhancing our understanding of readers’ choices and preferences for e-books and printed textbooks across contexts, publishers, librarians and teachers, who are to make important decisions regarding the choice of literature for the educational courses, may stand gain. educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 research questions: to what extent do students prefer printed educational textbooks? how does this preference manifest itself? and is there a difference in the use and wishes related to the educational context? literature review reading online and the use of ebooks have been possible for decades. but it is only recently that researchers have begun to study behavioural patterns, quality and possibilities in the different ways of studying and reading (cuinas et al., 2017). a case study from 2015, seeking to determine the differences in costs between printed and ebook titles for an academic library showed that, on average, for academic libraries printed books are cheaper than e-books (bailey et al., 2015). however, a study from 2017 comparing the use of printed textbooks and e-books with the same subject profile showed that ebooks were used more, while printed textbooks were read in greater depth and with increased weighting. (horner, 2017). thus, this study found that of approval books matching the same profile, ebooks are used more, but print books received more substantial use. a study from 2017 on ebooks vs printed textbooks compared new trends of digital reading and traditional ones. it showed that despite the increasing offer of digital books on the market the printed textbook continues to survive (cuinas et al., 2017). the study also revealed that low levels of expenditure on digital books had been observed, which makes it possible that the market, currently at least prefers a dual track approach, depending on the content and the reason for reading (cuinas et al., 2017). the same study stated that some of the most relevant findings are that 89% of the respondents say that they have read a book in the last year, and 63% claims to have read between 1 and 5 books in printed format while only 37% did so in digital format. these findings indicate that the traditional reading format continues to resist despite the new ways of reading and the preference for the dual format. moreover, an average of 75% of the respondents did not buy books in digital format; and birthdays were typically the most common occasion for giving books. smartphones, tablets and note ebooks are the most widely used devices for reading ebooks. finally, the study stated that 58% in the younger segment prefer to read the newspaper online (cuinas et al., 2017). a study from 2013 examining the preference for ebooks and printed books in the context of reading purpose, reading situation and different contextual variables found that ebooks have gained a secure place in people’s lives, but are not yet positioned to replace printed books entirely. both printed books and ebooks have unique attributes and play a vitally educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 important function in meeting people’s reading needs. these may vary according to individual demographic, contextual, and situational factors (zhang et al., 2013). research outcomes on student preferences for ebooks compared to traditional textbooks vary. some researchers have noted that students prefer ebooks (brunet et al., 2011; jao et al., 2005), while others have found that students prefer printed books (shepperd at al., 2008; woody et al., 2010). another study from 2015 analysing the current relevant academic research in adolescent preferences for books found that, at present, the contention that adolescents prefer electronic books was not supported by evidence (merga, 2015). the study concluded that until a number of studies that meet criteria such as including quantitative components or being entirely quantitative in nature, drawing responses from a large and representative sample size, and distinguishing between reading for pleasure and reading for information, educators should not assume that adolescents preferred ebooks, since such an assumption may have implications for student access to the type of books they prefer (merga, 2015). thus, future studies should be multicontextual, and preferably present findings from different countries or at least different educational contexts (merga, 2015). method this study is a quantitative study. the study draws on a sample of approximately 1146 students from three different educational contexts. the study furthermore distinguishes between reading for pleasure and reading for information, as the survey was limited to educational questions on specific topics. using survey exact, a total of 29 questions were constructed. the survey comprised demographic questions regarding age, gender, education, and the region where the education took place. in total, a total of five demographic questions were asked. two further questions were produced regarding preferences concerning printed vs digital text-books, and whether the students bought, borrowed, shared or photocopied the printed books. questions were also drawn up regarding the importance to the students of the use of the textbook vs the digital book and whether the teacher’s recommendation and the price of the book were important factors. finally, two questions concerning a range of options were asked. the students were allowed to make several choices. these choices comprised 13 (printed books) and 23 (ebooks), and were based on criteria such as price, language, illustrations, figures and tables, and coverage of the curriculum. the students were encouraged to write comments as free text after the questions. educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 a pilot study among bachelor programme students attending health care education programmes was conducted. the results from the pilot were used to adjust the survey questions. only minor adjustments were made and only the results from the part of the pilot study where no adjustments were made have been included. distribution of the second survey took place about six months later and included the bachelor programmes from one of the university colleges in jutland, the vocational educational and training programmes (vet – health care) from two schools in jutland and on funen, and two upper secondary schools from respectively jutland and copenhagen in denmark. thus, the population was from all parts of denmark representing student perspectives from different ages and contexts. the educational institutions received an e-mail inviting them to participate in the survey. most responses were positive as many teaching staff found the limited use students made of educational textbooks to be problematic. an e-mail text including a link to the survey (one for each educational area) was written and sent to the person responsible for distributing the e-mail and the respective links to all the students. it is therefore impossible to specify the total number of students that received the e-mail with the attached questionnaire. approximately 20 % have responded (1146 students), although not all answered all the questions in the questionnaire. the respondents comprised: bachelor programmes 716 students (91 male students). vocational educational programmes regarding health care education 130 students (13 male students) general upper secondary schools 300 (61 male students) the percentage of male (165) vs female (981) was 17%. this is probably because the study was conducted at educational institutions attended by a majority of female students. data were analysed in surveyxact (https://www.surveyxact.no/) since they had been formulated on a basis that the programme could analyse. the questions where the students were asked to state their preferences and opinions were read thoroughly by both researchers and grouped to extract tendencies across answers. first, data for each educational institution were analysed separately and themes or groups of answers were identified, and data were compared between educational institution to reveal inter-educational differences. educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 results below results will be presented according to the findings in each educational institution. the bachelor programme – (n=716 students, 91 male). most of the students (58%) were between 18 and 25 years old; 86 % were female. they were studying in professions such as teaching, nursing, administration, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, medical laboratory technology, social education, radiography and social work. a total of 74 % preferred printed textbooks (figure 1), stating that they found it easier to read a textbook, because it is possible to annotate, and thereby gaining a better overview over the texts. one student said: “because it’s easier to sit down with an ordinary textbook than with an online book. also, it’s easier to take notes and annotate in an ordinary printed book than in an online book.” figure 1 preferred medium many students claimed it was hard to read an educational textbook online. they found it difficult to read on a screen and doing so often gave them a headache. one student said: “i don’t like reading on the screen. i can’t find the points or highlights as fast as when i am reading an ordinary textbook where you can handle everything better and you’ve got better control.” 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 the bachelor programme general upper secondary schools vocational educational programme pilot (the bachelor programme) what do you prefer? the printed book the ebook both educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 another student said: “i get a headache from reading on a screen and i learn best when i’m sitting with an ordinary textbook so i much prefer the printed textbook” almost all students said that a book with a good index and a table of content is crucial. the book should be easy to access and to consult on specific topics. furthermore, it is essential that the book covers the curriculum, includes the most up-to-date knowledge and that there are enough illustrations to explain and support the written content. finally, price is also very important. several students marked the following range of options: ” good index/ good overview/easy to access and to consult on specific topics/covers most of the curriculum/highly readable text and print (writing) / logical structure/ well illustrated/ the most recent knowledge/ reasonably priced and with a hardcover” a total of 35% of the students said that the price is essential; 32% said that the price has some impact on whether they would buy the book and 33% said that the price has no impact on their choice of buying an educational textbook. thus, the price of a book was important to 67% of the students. in comparison, only 64 % of the students bought between 75 and 100% of their study books; out of those who reported not buying their books themselves, 42 % answered that they bought second-hand books and 18 % photocopied books. as to whether the teacher gave advice to the students in relation to specific choices, 76 % answered that they were advised to use both printed and online books. vocational education and training programmes (health care) (n=130 students, 13 male) a total of 34% of the students were between 18 and 25 years old; 11% were under 18 years and 50 % of the students were between 26 and 55 years; 89% were female. the respondents were pursuing an educational course in the healthcare sector. these educational courses are largely oriented towards typical women’s occupations, which accounts for a large number of female students. many of the students attending these educational courses have reading issues and a low level of literacy. among these students, 51 % preferred printed textbooks. the students stated that their preferred choices hinged on it being easier to read in a textbook, because it was easier to annotate and gain a better overview over the texts. these statements were made by the literate students. 38% preferred both the printed textbooks and the e-books. the reason why 38% use a combination of printed and digital books is the need, due to reading difficulties, to use the “read out loud” function in the digital books (figure 1). educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 one student said: ” because you can underline the information you have to use… it’s easier to find it again when you’re going to use it for assignments instead of reading from scratch.” another student said: ” because it’s easier to have the printed book beside you and to consult it on specific points”. almost all students said that a book with a good index and a table of content is crucial. the book should be easy to access and to consult on specific topics. furthermore, it is essential that the book covers the curriculum, includes the most up-to-date knowledge and that there are enough illustrations to explain and support the written content. finally, price is also very important. figure 2 considerations about e-books educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 figure 3 considerations about printed books several students noted the following ranges of choices/range of options: “good index/easy to overview/easy to assess and to consult for specific subject/covers most of the curriculum/ highly readable text and print (writing) / coherent structure/good figures and pictures/ up-to-date knowledge/ reasonably priced and with a hardcover” . the students from the vet education area noted that illustrations should supplement the subjects to make it easily comprehensible since a high number of these students found reading problematic. a total of 24% of the students said that the price is essential; 37% said that the price has some impact on whether they would buy the book and 38% said that the price has no impact on their choice of buying an educational textbook. thus, the price of a book was important to 61% of the students. in comparison, 78% of the students bought between 75 and 100% of their course books, and for those who reported not buying their books themselves, 20% answered that they bought second-hand books and 5% photocopied or shared books. as to whether the teachers gave advice to the students in relation to choices, 70 % answered that they were advised to use both printed and online books. upper secondary schools (n=300, 61 male) a total of 37% of the students were between 18 and 25 years old; 63% were under 18 years; 77% were female. they were attending an upper secondary school preparing them for further education. 60% of the student responses came from an upper secondary school in copenhagen. the rest of the responses came from an upper secondary school in jutland educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 it was reported that 91% of students used the customary printed textbook; 98% stated that the school bought the textbooks for them. they stated that their preferences were based on ease of reading a textbook because it was easier to annotate and gain better overview over the texts. some of them stated that they used the usual textbook because they were accustomed to doing so in the municipal primary and lower secondary school. they also stated that they felt they would retain the information better if they read it in a standard printed textbook. one student said: “somehow i feel that it’s easier to learn if i have a normal textbook in my hand. i just don’t feel that online books have the same impact on my ability to learn or my professional level. i think i retain the information better if i use printed textbooks or articles”. another student said: ”it’s nice to sit down with a normal textbook and it is easier to remember the content when you can turn the pages”. almost all students said that a book with a good index and a good table of content was essential. the book should be easy to access and to consult on specific subjects. further, it is essential that the book covers the curriculum, includes the most recent knowledge and that there are sufficient illustrations explaining the content. several students noted the following range of options: ” good index/ good overview/easy to access and to consult on specific topics/covers most of the curriculum/highly readable text and print (writing) / logical structure/ well illustrated/ the most recent knowledge/ reasonably priced and with a hardcover” mention was made also of the format on several occasions, specifically with reference to the carrying of the books, “..the size should be a5, [because the a5 size books fits better into the school bag] and easy to have an overall view of”. a total of 82 % of the students stated that the price was not essential, since the school bought the books for them. as to whether the teacher gave advice to the students in relation to choices, 70 % answered that they were advised to use both printed and online books. discussion the local nature of this survey and the low overall response rate (1146) limits generalizability of the results, but it is still possible to compare themes identified in this study across educational contexts previously described (brunet et al., 2011; cuinas et al., 2017; horner, 2017; zhang et al., 2013). these earlier studies report similar results, even though they have been conducted outside denmark and in other educational contexts. educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 one of the most revealing findings in this study is that the use of the ordinary printed textbook is a habit inherited from the municipal primary and lower secondary school which is then carried over into the upper secondary school, and possibly (as the findings show) also into further educational contexts. the educational textbook has been the teacher’s cornerstone for planning, carrying out and evaluating their teaching for decades. it is still the preferred didactic teaching aid and defines the knowledge to be gleaned by students. students find that the printed textbook helps them to see what the curriculum is. furthermore, the educational textbook often provides a firm structure, guiding the student though the material in the teaching as is evident in the texts, the exercises and the accompanying tasks. thus, the educational textbooks provide a defined and delimited knowledge in relation to the subjects (hansen, 2006). a similar association has not yet been noted in digital study material except when the study material replicates digitally the printed textbook (rasmussen, 2004). rasmussen stated that the use of the internet and ebooks (digital media) often causes what he calls a potential information overload. students lose the established structures and they sense that order and sequence are less accessible. as a precondition for and an essential aspect of learning order and sequence must therefore be handled by the students themselves (rasmussen, 2004; hansen, 2006). however, rockinson-szapkiw, courduff, carter & bennett (robinson-szapkiw et al., 2013) found that most students (four out of five) preferred print textbooks, even though no differences in cognitive learning or final grading were found in a study of 538 university students. by contrasts a norwegian study (mangen et al. 2013) found that students who read texts in print scored significantly higher in a reading comprehension text than students who read the texts digitally and they also found that students with reading difficulties in printed text had increased difficulties in reading on a screen. further, in-depth studies (mangen et al. 2008; mangen et al. 2013; mangen & kristiansen 2013; mangen et al. 2016) on the differences between digital reading and traditional reading suggest these might stem from the vital role of our bodies in reading involving fingers and hands; relevant here also are the differences in tactile cues such as the material of the paper and the haptic feedback of a touch screen as a possible explanation of the challenges in reading on a screen. the students in this study refer to similar issues when they explain why they prefer the textbook to the e-book. if ebooks were better structured and had better indices, they might enjoy greater popularity among students. however, the development of digital study material leads to opportunities and new pedagogical possibilities and new ways of arranging and facilitating knowledge, teaching and learning will be possible. these opportunities would benefit from being guided by more research into these areas as also suggested by mangen et al. (mangen et al., 2016) moreover, it would be beneficial to conduct a similar survey to ours among the teachers at educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 all education levels as they are the ones preparing the student for their studies. references miller, l. (2015). print books are cheaper than e-books for academic libraries. evidence based library and information practice, 10(3), 91-92. brunet, d.p., bates, m. & strother, e. (2011). incoming dental students' expectations and acceptance of an electronic textbook program. journal of dental education, 75(5), 646-652. cuinas, a. & moreno, m. (2017). printed books in buenos aires: the traditional book continues to resist. journal of library and information technology, 37(3), 199204. fremtidens biblioteker. (2014). studerendes tekstpræferencer 2014. retrieved from http://www.fremtidensbiblioteker.dk/tekstprf fremtidens biblioteker. (2016). studerendes tekstpræferencer 2016. retrieved from http://www.fremtidensbiblioteker.dk/tekstprf1 wadson, k. (2018). nurses need training and policies to address barriers to use of mobile devices and apps for direct patient care in hospital setting. evidence based library and information practice, 13(1), 39-42. gueval, j., tarnow, k. & kumm, s. (2015). implementing e-books: faculty and student experiences. teaching and learning in nursing, 10(4), 181-185. hacker, h. (1980). didaktische funktionen des mediums schulbuch. in i h. hacker, das schulbuch. funnktion und verwendiung im unterricht (pp.7-30). bad heilbrunn: verlag julius klinkhardt, hansen, j. (2006). mellem design og didaktik. om digitale læremidler i skolen. phd thesis. odense: syddansk universitet. horner, j. (2017). e-preferred approval books at the university of manitoba: a comparison of print and ebook usage. evidence based library and information practice 12(2), 90-105. jao, c., brint, s. & hier, d. (2005). making the neurology clerkship more effective: can etextbook facilitate learning? neurological research. a journal of progress in neurosurgery, neurology and neurosciences, 27(7), 762-767. mangen, a. (2008). hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion. journal of research in reading, 31(4), 404-419. educational textbooks in digital surroundings seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 mangen, a. & kristiansen, m. (2013). tekstlesing på skjerm: noen implikasjoner av et digital grensesnitt for lesing og forståelse. norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift. 97(1), 52-61. mangen, a., walgermo, b. & brønnick, k. (2013). reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: effects on reading comprehension. international journal of educational research, 58(2013), 61-68. mangen, a., & weel, a. (2016). the evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: an integrative framework for reading research. literacy, 50(3), p. 116-124. merga, m. (2015). do adolescents prefer electronic books to paper books? publications, 3(4), 237-247. rasmussen, t. (2004). om læringens usannsynlighet og digitale mediers lærevillighet. systemteoretiske og formlogiske betraktninger. norsk medietidsskrift, 11(3), 237256. robinson-szapkiw, a., courduff. j., kimberly, c., & bennett, d. (2013). electronic versus traditional print textbooks: a comparison study on the influence of university students' learning. computers and education, 63, 259-266. schuh, k., van horne, s & russell, j. (2018). e-textbook as object and mediator: interactions between instructor and student activity systems. journal of computing in higher education, 30(2), 298-325. shepperd, j.; grace, j & koch, e. (2008). evaluating the electronic textbook: is it time to dispense with the paper text? teaching of psychology, 35(1), 2-5. siemon, j. scholkmann, a & paulsen, t. (2018). beschreibung von formen lehrerseitigen unterstütszungsverhaltens im offen unterricht. zeitschrift fü bildungsforschung, 8(1), 19-41. woody, w.; daniel, b & baker, c. (2010). e-books or textbooks: student prefer textbooks. computers and education, 55(3), 945-948. zhang, y. & kudva, s. (2014). e-books versus print books: readers' choices and preferences across contexts. journal of the association for information sciences and technology, 65(8) 1695-1706. title seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 my own private public library julia ronei department of social and political sciences, european university institute. florence, italy email: julia.rone@eui.eu abstract the present paper analyzes the emergence of bulgarian digital libraries with pirated literature as a form of compensation for the failure of both the state and the market to provide easy access to electronic books in bulgarian. these grass-roots digital libraries can be understood best through an analysis of the dichotomies between formal and informal economy, law and ethics, commercial and non-commercial interest, bricolage and engineering. sharing of books online in bulgaria has its historical precedent in the sharing of cultural objects during socialism and is part of the larger logic of informal economy as a form of independence from/resistance to the state. while many of the books in these electronic libraries are uploaded in infringement of copyright, the creators and users of the sites defend them on the basis of what is ethically right and claim that they contribute to the spread of knowledge. the paper emphasizes the rhetorical force of the word ‘library’ which is being appropriated by both commercial and non-commercial actors. without underestimating the value provided by many of the grass-roots digital libraries discussed, the analysis leads to the question whether the bottom-up collaborative strategy for digitizing books is the optimal one in terms of the variety of titles offered and the overall coherence of digital archives. in short, should sharing replace more traditional state policies in the field of culture? buildings falling down and web sites springing up in the summer of 2012 i was walking around sofia, the capital of bulgaria, with a friend of mine when we saw an old building almost falling apart. its windows were dirty and the paint was peeling off the walls. “this was once a branch of the city library”, my friend explained, “i used to come here to read in the 90s. and i stole so many books – it’s funny how easy it was to do it in those days”. this fleeting recollection about book-stealing in combination with the dilapidated appearance of the building is in many ways indicative of the general condition of libraries in bulgaria after 1989. during the post-socialist 90s the state withdrew active support for culture, the municipal library system collapsed, and in 12 years 2400 out of 9347 libraries were closed down (union of librarians and information service officers, 2004). in addition, many libraries saw their collections progressively diminish due to negligence, theft, or poor preservation conditions. the dynamics of public opinion in the early years of the transition period were such that talking about a coordinated state strategy for libraries was considered suspicious. the mantra was a combination of deregulation, decentralization and privatization. in the current paper i claim that the rise of grass-roots electronic libraries in bulgaria in the first decade of the 21st century could be seen as an attempt to compensate for the julia.rone@eui.eu seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 2 withdrawal of the state and should be situated in the context of wider economic and political changes. grass-roots electronic ‘libraries’ on the bulgarian web strive for legitimacy by using the web 2.0 rhetoric of sharing. they claim to be made by users for users in the name of the public interest. i would like to explore this rhetoric and tease out the inherent contradictions in it. digital ‘libraries’ can be understood best through an analysis of the dichotomies between formal and informal economy, law and ethics, commercial and non-commercial interest, bricolage and engineering. can a platform for sharing of pirated books be accepted as a public library? what kind of rhetorical strategies underpin the notion of a ‘library’? and finally what kinds of actors fill the spectrum of the book sharing economy? in order to answer these questions i performed mapping of the bulgarian web and identified popular web sites offering digitized books. i distinguished between: 1) collections of books existing online with free access, 2) online bookstores, 3) collections of public institutions, providing free or paid access. while public institutions offer only legal content, private-initiative online libraries and bookstores offer both legal content and copyrightinfringing content. often there are interesting synergies between these different kinds of platforms. in addition, i did content analysis of several threads on the legal forum lex.bg (lex, 2010) discussing whether the grass-roots web site ‘my library’ (chitanka.info) can be considered a public library or not. i will present my analysis and observations in what follows. on books and jars: sharing of culture and the informal economy according to the popular account, the collapse of state socialism led to the expansion of the ‘informal sector’ in eastern european countries. the negative consequences of reform encouraged individuals and groups “to work in and through informal social ‘networks’ and personal ‘contacts’ to help each other (often to achieve their legal rights), to derive economic or political benefit (often in the absence of effective institutional development) and to consolidate interpersonal and group obligations” (pickles, 2008, p.12). such observations often refer to the so-called economies of reciprocity, remittance based economies and household economies (ibid). the paradigmatic example of informal economies is the case of families living in the city who often work on a piece of land in the country side to secure additional food. the preparation of vegetables and fruits for the winter amidst soviet style city dwellings has been captured in a beautiful haiku by the bulgarian poet georgi gospodinov: “behind the concrete building my mother boils summer in a jar”. the simple linear connection between economic crisis and informal economy is however rejected by such authors as adrian smith, who claims that informal practices were already widespread during socialism and should therefore be understood within the context of locally embedded historical and cultural continuities. moreover, it could be argued that it was precisely through informal practices that socialism was ‘domesticated’, transformed from within (creed, 1997). smith invokes the concept of ‘economy of jars’ to describe the way in which various products enter into systems of reciprocal gift giving: “the ‘economy of jars’ is a deep-seated set of cultural/economic practices, which blurs the boundaries between the categories of the ‘economic’ and the ‘cultural’” (smith, 2004). in a society in which everything was controlled and formalized by the state, people withdrew into the private sphere of consumption and exchange as a form of retreat and silent opposition. the greatest ideological battle was fought in the private sphere of consumption (mineva, 2010). it has become commonplace to explain the collapse of socialism with shortages of goods and the censorship of western cultural products. there are legendary stories of people exchanging cassette recordings with rare and supposedly seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 3 ‘immoral’ western music, access to which was always a source of prestige and cultural capital. books that had been forbidden also found their ways in through informal channels. thus, it becomes clear that the contemporary practice of sharing books online has a historical precedent, thereby reflecting, more generally, the importance of informality in bulgarian culture and economy. a similar argument drawing historical connections between file sharing and the sharing of cultural objects during the socialist period is made in the report prepared by polish authors on the circulation of culture and the social distribution of content (filiciak, hofmokl & tarkowski, 2012). grass-roots digital libraries can be understood as an expression of the opposition between formal state politics and policies, on the one hand, and informal, under the counter, reciprocal relations between private persons, on the other hand. it is important to emphasize that as a social phenomenon this type of informal exchange is not simply a reaction to crisis. illegal downloading and uploading of materials in the contemporary context occurs both in poor countries and in the wealthiest ones. jonas andersson, for example, relates the phenomenon of file sharing to material abundance and the so called postmaterial values in an attempt to explain the origins and impact of swedish filesharing (andersson, 2011).while older materialist values reflected existential insecurity and expressed public concern for issues such as economic endurance, rising food prices, or crime rates, a post-materialist society is no longer concerned with economic issues, but rather with political participation, freedom of speech, environmental protection and sharing of culture. in this sense, it could be argued that the sharing of cultural objects is a complex phenomenon of acquiring independence from/resisting the state whose explanation goes beyond economic factors. finally, a note of caution is necessary. it is risky to equate the informal economy under socialism with the sharing economy glorified nowadays. a good example of the discourse surrounding the economy of sharing is the lament by the journalist neel gorenflo that: “as collaborative consumption goes mainstream, it risks losing the very thing that attracted people in the first place, the unique and even transformative social experiences made possible when you interact with helpful strangers”. he goes on to explain the competitive advantage: “when i met sarah to pick up her car, daffodillpickle, we struck up a conversation about aquaponics, she gave me an impromptu tour of her aquaponics setup on her balcony, and then sent me on my way with fresh strawberries she picked for me on the spot. that made my day. that’s never going to happen at hertz because this kind of intimacy can never be scaled” (gorenflo, 2013). the author does not realize that the intimacy that he deems so significant is already a mediated intimacy an intimacy achieved through a technical platform. in this respect it differs greatly from the kinship or neighbourhood based intimacy of informal relations in socialist bulgaria, for example. and that is why one cannot draw direct parallels between the economy of reciprocity and gift-giving under socialism and the volunteer work and gift-culture on online sharing platforms. the mediation of internet changes radically the scope and nature of informality while preserving its potential to delineate a zone of freedom from state control. on laws and ethics: if it looks like a library… apart from the distinction between formal and informal economy, another dichotomy that can help us understand better grass-roots digital libraries is that between law and ethics. in what follows i shall take one particular case – the electronic library chitanka.info, known also as ‘my library’ (‘моята библиотека’) and the issue of its legal status. ‘my library’ was created in 2005, when borislav manolov, a bulgarian living in germany, decided to upload his own personal library on the internet. since then the library has grown in seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 4 popularity with tens of volunteers digitizing and uploading books in bulgarian. there are no banners or ads on the website, all contributions are voluntary, and while there are indeed pirated books, there is also a significant percent of books which are already in the public domain. however, in 2010 the bulgarian cyber crime unit closed down the site and confiscated all servers associated with it due to alleged infringement of copyright. a fierce public debate followed the police action against chitanka and led to the restoration of the web site. i would like to draw attention to the discussion whether chitanka.info is a library or not. the legal intricacies of the question are discussed in minute detail on the legal forum lex.bg. the owner of the server claims that the web site is a library and therefore is exempted from the accusations of copyright infringement. the arguments for this are: that the entity is completely noncommercial (there are no financial gains whatsoever), that it allows free access to e-books by everyone and that it favours the promotion of learning. the counter arguments are that regardless of whether the website is noncommercial, publishing houses lose money as a result of of free access to their books, and more importantly, the website does not meet the legal requirements that specify which institutions can qualify as libraries and which not (lex, 2010). nevertheless, borislav manolov, the creator of the site, claims that while legally chitanka.info might not be a library, ethically it is one. a marked contradiction between law and ethics is introduced in examples such as the ‘black list’ on chitanka.info which includes all publishing houses that have requested that their books be removed from the web site. such publishing houses cannot request their books to be re-uploaded later. the black list also includes media that have published uninformed and unfavourable articles on chitanka.info. it is obvious that the web site tries to establish an alternative framework of justification, an ‘ethical’ set of rules which it opposes to the rule of the law. the site justifies itself in this way but at the same makes a political statement that challenges current copyright law. if they look like a library and if they behave like a library, why can’t they be a library? the very word ‘library’ is so important because it is used in opposition to media descriptions of the web site as a ‘bookstore’. according to the law the web site is not a library. but it does choose to present itself that way. the ‘present-yourself-as-a-library’ strategy is followed by many other players in the e-books field. thus one can find a somewhat dubious web site called “national library” (<http://narodnabiblioteka.info/index.php>), or sites such as e-bookbg.com which calls itself an ‘online library’, or koronal.com, presented as a ‘virtual library’. there is of course also the ‘bulgarian virtual library’ slovo.bg. even though all these web sites describe themselves as libraries, their positions on the spectrum of formal-informal economy, public and private, commercial and non-commercial activity vary greatly. chitanka.info hosts both pirated books and books in the public domain, and is maintained by a team of volunteers. in order to keep its non-profit status untarnished it doesn’t even accept donations. slovo.bg does not host any pirated books, but it does host all bulgarian classics which are in the public domain. it is maintained by a formally registered ngo that accepts donations and has its own online bookstore. e-bookbg.com provides pirated books, hosts ads and also provides a link to its electronic bookstore. koronal.com is a library for free essays and university papers directly linked to a web site which provides these types of materials for money. to sum up, different actors position themselves differently along the lines of the commercial/non-commercial, legal/ethical. the fact that they all use the word ‘library’ is a testimony to the legitimizing power of the word with all its hidden connotations. in the sphere of e-books in bulgaria the function performed by the word ‘library’ is similar to the one performed by the word ‘platseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 5 form’ in the context of social media (gillespie, 2010). in his provocative article ‘the politics of platforms’ gillespie argues that the term ‘platform’ is used by youtube “to make a broadly progressive sales pitch while also eliding tensions inherent in their service: between user-generated and commercially produced content, between cultivating community and serving up advertising, between intervening in the delivery of content and remaining neutral” (gillespie, 2010, p.3). in a similar way the word ‘library’ is used in the bulgarian context to elide tensions and obfuscate rifts. it conveys a concept of catering for public welfare that can be traced back to socialist state politics, but it differs radically from it in its opposition to the state and the emphasis on sharing as a practice of individual freedom and circumvention of censorship. it is precisely the role of the state that i wish to discuss in the final section of this paper. baby food, chic lit and nationalism the current fascination with the informal economy is evident in the proliferation of books such as “stealth of nations: the global rise of the informal economy” by robert neuwirth, which glorifies “the globe-trotting nigerians who sell chinese cell phones and laid-off san franciscans who use twitter to market street food” and shows that “the people who work in informal economies are entrepreneurs who provide essential services and crucial employment” (neuwirth, 2012). the new emphasis on informality can be found also in the field of icts for development. authors such as richard heeks insist on the importance of new models of technological innovation. heeks discusses the potential of “grassroots” (per-poor, i.e. by the poor for the poor) innovation in the developing world and introduces the indian concept of jugaad: “the impoverished quick-fix to get or keep technology working within an environment of relative poverty and resource constraints” (heeks, 2009, p.15). this focus on the informal economy and ad-hoc solutions in icts for development is the result of often justified criticism leveled against failed large scale projects of structural changes in state industry and economy. the hype surrounding the sharing economy is a part of this more general move in the direction of informality. it seems to me that the concept of sharing economy can be interpreted as a radicalization of the neo-liberal paradigm with its distrust for the state and its regulations. but what are the large-scale implications of such an informal approach to the digitization of e-books? it should be noted at the outset that in bulgaria there is currently no comprehensive state strategy for digitization in place, and existing efforts to create such a strategy are sporadic and insufficient. while there are several projects for digitization financed by the eu (bojadjiev, lunin & grigorov, 2013), they focus almost exclusively on the country’s historical heritage, church-slavonic manuscripts from the 13th century being a case in point. the unique access of bulgarian public libraries to such rare documents makes them important actors in the preservation of cultural heritage. at the same time, since these works are already in the public domain, the question of copyright is not relevant. the tricky issues arise when it comes to more contemporary texts. journals and magazines, archival documents and classics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been partially digitized by libraries. but what if someone wants to read contemporary bulgarian fiction online? one possible solution is to visit one of the many web sites that publish debut texts of authors. but what about access to books by more established authors? or scientific books? in these cases, the answer is more difficult. a possible solution could have been provided by the market but, in reality, there is still no market for e-books in bulgaria. moreover, books in bulgarian are still not allowed on amazon. the total amount of bulgarian e-books being sold legally in may 2013 was approximately 1000 and these were all newly published books (bogdanov, 2013). digital access to orphaned books or books in the public domain (which seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 6 are not church-slavonic manuscripts) takes place neither through state libraries nor the market, but only through the practice of sharing online. but because sharing is informal, illegally ethical and spontaneous, it has resulted in less than systematic results. thus, although the collection of chitanka.info aims to be extensive, it inevitably favours chic lit and science fiction: the most popular genres among volunteers engaged with digitization. another popular online collection contains recipes for baby food (biberon, 2013). several pro-nationalist sites have extensive web archives of historically significant documents. and photos from the distant past have been collected in ‘museums 2.0’ as a result of private initiative, thereby constructing a new bottom-up vision of heritage (kazalarska, 2012). the very fact that such informal, de-institutionalized collections have appeared shows that there is considerable interest in the topics they deal with. at the same time, there are no universal standards for digitization and no prospects of achieving any systematicity in the enterprise (bojadjiev, lunin & grigorov, 2013). there is no dialogue between the collections, no hyper linking, no underlying unity. what is observed is not a universal library, a repository of human knowledge (kelly, 2006), but rather a patchwork, the work of bricoleurs – people who make do with whatever is available in the absence of an overall plan or strategy. i invoke here the concept of bricolage proposed by levi strauss in relation to mythological thought. strauss distinguished between the engineers' creative thinking which creates plans, and proceeds from goals to means, on the one hand, and mythical thought which re-uses available materials in an ad-hoc manner, on the other hand. levi-strauss’s distinction can be used as a metaphor to underline the inherent ‘bricolage’ nature of sharing. while such an approach is not inherently good or bad, it is questionable whether it is the best approach to digitization of books in bulgarian language. obviously this is not an easy question to answer but it is an important one and is often overlooked in discussions about sharing. in addition, the fact that chitanka.info lacks funding and relies on goodwill provides it with an ethical justification but makes the process of web digitization slower and more laborious. there is a considerable shortage of people and time. is this the most efficient approach to digitization? furthermore, many web sites call themselves ‘libraries’ following the example of chitanka.info and parasitize on its good reputation, while at the same time benefiting from private financial gain. sharing: who cares? in conclusion, i would like to question the pervasive rhetoric of sharing that has captured contemporary political and social thought. sharing is good. sharing is caring. but is it enough? i was provoked to ask this question by a blog post called: ‘what the boston bombing taught us about internet arrogance?’ the author compares collaborative action online with the government’s actions and finds the latter to be significantly more effective: “my point isn’t to paint the government as perfect, far from it. i get as frustrated by government incompetence and i hate paying taxes as much as anyone. but i’m not so self important to think that i, the internet, social media, reddit, the tech industry, and even anonymous, can solve all of our problems if the government just gets out of our way” (dao, 2013). relating this position to the question of digitization of books in bulgaria, i have to admit that i started my paper with the clear intention of praising chitanka.info for the way they fill gaps left both by the government and the market. my admiration for this web site has not diminished in the slightest while writing this paper. on the contrary, i was pleasantly surprised to find that the team stick to their views even in the smallest details and provide high quality seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 7 books through voluntary work. but what i would like to ask is: is that enough? and should we abandon our faith in the state as a provider of public goods? obviously, the main debate about chitanka.info is a debate about copyright and whether users are allowed to digitize and upload books without the permission of publishers. but setting this aside, the big question is: who do we want to digitize our books? in a more global context, do we want this to be done by a private corporation such as google or by public entities? as geert lovink provocatively puts it: “google suffers from data obesity and is indifferent to calls for careful preservation or naïve demands for cultural awareness…google is not after the ownership of emile zola. its intention is to lure the proust fan away from the archive. perhaps there is an interest in a cool stendhal mug, the xxl flaubert t-shirt, or a sartre purchase at amazon. for google, balzac’s collected work is abstract data junk, a raw resource whose sole purpose is to make profit, whereas for the french it is the epiphany of their language and culture” (lovink, 2012, p.153). in the local bulgarian context, what happens to national language and culture when digitization is dispersed among numerous actors with different positionality on the scale of formality, legality and commercial interest? what vision do these actors have of digitization? the battles over copyright should not distract us from the matter of who should digitize books and how public access to those books should be provided? these are not either-or questions. new synergies can emerge. my only contention is that the current emphasis on sharing makes us dismiss too readily the state as an actor. is sharing by definition a practice outside the domain of the state? can it be reconceptualised in the context of public institutions? can there be a fruitful symbiosis between an overall public strategy and private initiative? the question remains open for anyone who cares enough to discuss. references andersson, j. (2011): the origins and impacts of swedish file sharing: a case study. journal of peer production, issue #0, mass peer activism. <http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-0/peer-reviewed-papers/the-originsand-impacts-of-swedish-filesharing/> [24.04.2013]. biberon (2013): български бебе център <http://biblioteka.biberonbg.com/klasika/> [24.04.2013]. bogdanov, i. (2013): наръчник на писателя: продажба на електронни книги. <http://forum.chitanka.info/topic3379.html> [24.04.2013]. bojadjiev, a., lunin, a. & grigorov, d. (2013): дигитализацията в българия – трудности и предизвикателства. <http://sudigital.org/publikatsii/statii/digitalizatsiyata-v-balgariya-2013trudnosti-i-predizvikatelstva> [24.04.2013]. creed, g. (1997): domesticating revolution: from socialist reform to ambivalent transition in a bulgarian village. pennsylvania state university press. dao, f. 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(2012): the circulations of culture. on social distribution of content. <http://obiegikultury.centrumcyfrowe.pl/en/> [18.02.2014]. forum chitanka (2012): сваляне на новоиздадени текстове. <http://forum.chitanka.info/topic2291.html#p13842 >[24.04.2013]. http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-0/peer-reviewed-papers/the-origins-and-impacts-of-swedish-filesharing/ http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-0/peer-reviewed-papers/the-origins-and-impacts-of-swedish-filesharing/ http://biblioteka.biberonbg.com/klasika/ http://forum.chitanka.info/topic3379.html http://sudigital.org/publikatsii/statii/digitalizatsiyata-v-balgariya-2013-trudnosti-i-predizvikatelstva http://sudigital.org/publikatsii/statii/digitalizatsiyata-v-balgariya-2013-trudnosti-i-predizvikatelstva http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/23/what-the-boston-bombing-taught-us-about-internet-arrogance/ http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/23/what-the-boston-bombing-taught-us-about-internet-arrogance/ http://obiegikultury.centrumcyfrowe.pl/en/ http://forum.chitanka.info/topic2291.html%23p13842 seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 8 fuster morell. m. (2011): the unethics of sharing: wikiwashing. international review of information ethics. <http://acawiki.org/the_unethics_of_sharing:_wikiwashing> [13.02.2013]. gillespie, t. (2010): the politics of ‘platforms’. new media and society, 12(3), 347364. gorenflo, n. (2013): collaborative consumption is dead, long live the sharing economy! <http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/19/collaborative-consumption-is-deadlong-live-the-real-sharing-economy/> [26.04.2013]. heeks, r. (2009). the ict4d 2.0 manifesto: where next for icts and international development? kaneff, d. (2000): property, work and local identity. max plank institute for social anthropology working papers. [23.04.2013]. kazalarska, s. (2012): музей 2.0? нова културна геометрия: уебмрежовици, културбракониери, киберагитатори. софия: изток-запад. kelly, k. (2006): scan this book! the new york times. <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?pagewan ted=all&_r=0> [23.04.2013]. kennedy, j. (2013): rhetorics of sharing: data, imagination and desire. unlike us reader. amsterdam: institute of network cultures. lessig, lawrence (2004). free culture. new york: penguin books. lévi-strauss, c. (1966): the savage mind. chicago: . lex (2010): forum.lex.bg: гдбоп затвори библиотеката chitanka.info. <http://lex.bg/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=42382&sid=56159b4d2304ba19b f397c5dc3219481> [23.04.2013]. lovink, g. (2012): networks without a cause. a critique of social media. cambridge: polity press. magagna, v. (1989): consumers of privilege: a political analysis of class, consumption & socialism. polity, 21(4), 711-729 . mineva, m. (2010): consumption – this political object of desire. critique and humanism journal (сп. критика и хуманизъм), 33, 225-235, nadin, s. and c. williams (2012): blurring the formal/informal economy divide: beyond a dual economies approach. journal of economy and its applications, 2(2), 1-19. neuwirth, r. (2012): the global rise of informal economy. new york: anchor books. pickles, j. (2008): the spirit of post-socialism: ‘what is to be understood by it?’ state and society in post-socialist economies. london: palgrave macmillan. pickles, j. (2005): new cartographies and the decolonization of european geographies. area, 37(4), 355-364. smith, a. (2004): informal work and the diverse economies of ‘post-socialist’ europe <http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/socialexclusion/pdf/informaleconomies.pdf> [24.04.2013]. stalder, f. (2010): relax! producing culture in a weak intellectual property environment. eurozine. <http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-07-01-stalderen.html> [24.04.2013]. strahern, m. (1998): divisions of interest and languages of ownership.in: c. hann, (ed.) property relations, (pp.214-232). cambridge: cambridge university press. http://acawiki.org/the_unethics_of_sharing:_wikiwashing http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/19/collaborative-consumption-is-dead-long-live-the-real-sharing-economy/ http://pandodaily.com/2013/03/19/collaborative-consumption-is-dead-long-live-the-real-sharing-economy/ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://lex.bg/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=42382&sid=56159b4d2304ba19bf397c5dc321948 http://lex.bg/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=42382&sid=56159b4d2304ba19bf397c5dc321948 http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/socialexclusion/pdf/informaleconomies.pdf http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-07-01-stalder-en.html http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-07-01-stalder-en.html seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 9 svab, a. (2010): consuming western image of well-being – shopping tourism in socialist slovenia. cultural studies, 16(1), 63-79. union of librarians and information service officers (2004): съюз на библиотечните и информационните работници: за необходимостта от неотложни мерки за решаване на основните проблеми на библиотеките в българия. <http://www.lib.bg/za_neob.htm> [24.04.2013]. van le, c. (2010): opening the doors to digital libraries: a proposal to exempt digital libraries from the copyright act. case western reserve journal of law, technology & the internet, 1(2), 121-147. i short biographical details julia rone is currently doing her phd at the department of social and political sciences at the european university institute. her research focuses on social mobilizations in defence of internet freedom with an emphasis on framing and transmission and diffusion of emotions online. julia has a keen interest in visual analysis and has monitored online video sites on the bulgarian internet as a participant in the bulgarian media monitoring lab. she has also coordinated the project ‘new youth, new cultures, new causes: interdisciplinary approaches in cultural studies’ at the department of theory and history of culture, sofia university, exploring how young bulgarians interact with new media. julia graduated from the oxford internet institute with a thesis on anonymous bulgaria. her publications include: ‘the seducer's net: internet, politics and seduction’ in digital cultures and the politics of emotion (athina karatzogianni and adi kuntsman, eds), palgrave macmillan; and ‘culture wide closed: pirate monopolies, forum dictatorship and nationalism in the practice of file sharing’ in cultures and ethics of sharing, (wolfgang sutzl, felix stalder, ronald mayer, theo hug, eds.), innsbruck university press. research interests: copyright, data privacy, social movements, network organization, internet politics http://www.lib.bg/za_neob.htm title seminar.net 2015. (authors name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 a pedagogical model for simulation-based learning in healthcare tuulikki keskitalo & heli ruokamo university of lapland, faculty of education centre for media pedagogy (cmp) rovaniemi, finland email: firstname.lastname@ulapland.fi abstract the aim of this study was to design a pedagogical model for a simulationbased learning environment (sble) in healthcare. currently, simulation and virtual reality are a major focus in healthcare education. however, when and how these learning environments should be applied is not well-known. the present study tries to fill that gap. we pose the following research question: what kind of pedagogical model supports and facilitates students’ meaningful learning in sbles? the study used design-based research (dbr) and case study approaches. we report the results from our second case study and how the pedagogical model was developed based on the lessons learned. the study involved nine facilitators and 25 students. data were collected and analysed using mixed methods. the main result of this study is the refined pedagogical model. the model is based on the socio-cultural theory of learning and characteristics of meaningful learning as well as previous pedagogical models. the model will provide a more holistic and meaningful approach to teaching and learning in sbles. however, the model requires evidence and further development. keywords: simulation-based learning environment, socio-cultural theory, meaningful learning, design-based research, case study, facilitators, students introduction—designing the pedagogical model simulation-based learning has been proven to be effective, experiential and fun (brewer, 2011; cook et al., 2011; konia & yao, 2013). simulation technologies enhance learning and affect clinical practice (cook et al., 2011; eaves & flagg, 2001; hayden, smiley, alexander, kardong-edgren, & jeffries, 2014; konia & yao, 2013; paige, arora, fernandez, & seymour, 2015). however, when and how these learning environments should be applied is not wellhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 75 known. as ker (2012, p. 346) observed: “there is a need to ask more how and why questions as opposed to ‘does this work?’ or ‘which is better?’” the purpose of this study was to understand teaching and learning in simulation-based learning environments (sbles) in healthcare in order to find answers to the how question. these advanced, complex and expensive environments will enhance learning only if they are used appropriately. the specific aim of this study was to design a theoretically and empirically justified pedagogical model for a sble in healthcare (keskitalo, 2015). the purpose of the pedagogical model was to emphasise the learning theories that will eventually enhance students’ meaningful learning in these unique contexts. we created multiple research tasks in order to answer the following research question: what kind of pedagogical model supports and facilitates students’ meaningful learning in sbles? the study used the design-based research (dbr) (brown, 1992; collins, joseph, & bielaczyc, 2004; design-based research collective, 2003) and case study approaches (gray, 2004; yin, 2013). the first cycle, designing the pedagogical model (keskitalo, ruokamo, & väisänen, 2010), was conducted at the simulation centre of arcada university of applied sciences (helsinki, finland) from april to may 2009. during the case study, various methods were used to collect data from paramedic students and facilitators. the first cycle resulted in a redesigned pedagogical model, which was evaluated during the second cycle of the design-based research. in this paper, we present the second cycle of the design-based research (see also keskitalo, ruokamo, & gaba, 2014). the case study was organised at stanford university (palo alto, ca, usa) in 2009–2010 and involved nine facilitators and 25 students. during the case study, we collected and analysed data using quantitative and qualitative methods. what follows is the introduction of the initial pedagogical model. then we briefly summarise and explain the methods used during our second case study. next, we introduce the redesigned pedagogical model, which is the result of these two design-based research cycles and various background studies (keskitalo, 2011; keskitalo, 2012; keskitalo, ruokamo, väisänen, & gaba, 2013). finally, we draw conclusions and provide suggestions for future research. design framework—the facilitating, training and learning model the purpose of this study was to understand teaching and learning in sbles in order to develop a pedagogical model. the initial pedagogical model is named the facilitating, training and learning (ftl) model. the principles of the ftl model are derived from teaching, studying and learning (tsl) processes (kansanen, tirri, meri, krokfors, husu, & jyrhämä, 2000; uljens, 1997) as well as the characteristics of meaningful learning (ausubel, 1968; jonassen, 1995; löfström & nevgi, 2007; ruokamo & pohjolainen, 2000) and previous pedagogical models (joyce et al., 2002; dieckmann, 2009). generally, the model and research were based on socio-constructivist and socio-cultural perspectives on learning (lave & wenger, 1991; vygotsky, 1978; wells & claxton, 2002). figure 1 presents the ftl model for a virtual reality (vr) and simulation-based learning environment for healthcare after the first cycle of our design-based research (keskitalo et al., 2010): seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 76 figure 1. facilitating, training and learning (ftl) model for vr and simulationbased learning (keskitalo et al., 2010) as the ftl process implies, students’ activity is necessary for learning to occur. in this context, we refer to teaching as facilitating (cf. kansanen et al., 2000; uljens, 1997), since teaching in a simulation-based learning environment is more an act of facilitating student learning. during the instructional process, facilitators are responsible for planning, guiding and evaluating the students’ learning process as well as reflecting on their own performance as facilitators (cf. tissari et al., 2005). in the ftl model, studying is referred to as training (cf. kansanen et al., 2000; uljens, 1997), because in this context the students’ activity also involves training to master the specific skills needed in healthcare. in this model, training is described with 14 characteristics of meaningful learning (hakkarainen, 2007; jonassen, 1995; löfström & nevgi, 2007; ruokamo & pohjolainen, 2000; tissari et al., 2005): experiential, experimental, emotional, socio-constructive, collaborative, active, responsible, reflective, critical, competence-based, contextual, goal-oriented, self-directed and individual (for a more detailed description, see keskitalo et al., 2010; keskitalo et al., 2014). we assert that facilitators should emphasise these characteristics in order to promote students’ meaningful learning in these learning environments. however, as previous studies have shown, these characteristics are partially intertwined and overlap (jonassen, 1995). simulation-based courses are typically structured into four phases (introduction, simulator briefing, scenarios and debriefing), as suggested by joyce et al.’s (2002) learning through simulation model (see also dieckmann, 2009; laurillard, 2012). therefore, we embedded these phases in the ftl model in order to structure the learning event. during the first phase, the facilitator presents the course topic and the most important concepts and explains the simulation to the students. this phase should include explanations of how the course is organised as well as what type of pedagogical models and methods are used. during the simulator briefing, participants familiarise themselves with the simulation and have hands-on-time with the environment and the equipment. during this phase, the facilitator broadly introduces the scenarios. after the simulator briefing phase, students need to know and understand what is expected of them. in the scenarios phase, the students participate in the simulation, whereas the facilitator guides and monitors the students’ performance. in the final phase, the debriefing, the facilitator encourages the stuseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 77 dents to analyse the learning process and possibly set new learning goals (fanning & gaba, 2007). in the ftl model, the introduction and simulator briefings are led by the facilitator, whereas the training is student-centred. the debriefing phase is situated under the learning phase, since it is presupposed that learning will occur mostly during the debriefing as the students reflect on their own learning. methods—evaluating the design we set multiple research tasks in order to answer the following research question: what type of pedagogical model supports facilitation and students’ meaningful learning in sbles? the study used the design-based research (dbr) (brown, 1992; collins et al., 2004; design-based research collective, 2003) and case study approaches (gray, 2004; yin, 2013). during this study, data were collected through case studies, and the development of the pedagogical model was an iterative process, as suggested by the dbr approach. in this study, we analyse the data collected during our second case study at stanford university in 2009–2010. since the original article (keskitalo et al., 2014) focused more on the evaluation, from the perspectives of facilitators and students, the meaningfulness of simulation-based learning, this article focuses on the elaboration and evolution of the model across studies based on the results. in this article, we use some of the same data but also synthesise the knowledge gained from our previous studies (e.g. keskitalo, 2011, 2012; keskitalo et al., 2013). set-up and participants in the second case study, the students (n = 25) were mainly second-year anaesthesia residents and thirdand fourth-year medical students. the students were studying anaesthesia crisis resource management and emergency medicine and participating in an anaesthesia internship; the facilitators’ (n = 9) specialties were anaesthesia, surgery and nursing. the youngest student respondent was 26 years old and the oldest 38 years old. most of the students had no prior experience (20%) or had had exposure to no more than two simulation-based courses (64%). altogether, the data were collected from five different courses, which lasted from three to nine hours. during the courses, all activities were done in a group format created by the facilitators. during the scenarios, usually one student had a leading role (the “hot seat” person) and called on others to help. the students who did not participate in the scenario watched it in a separate room via television. before the study, research permission was applied for, and the study was approved by the institutional review board. then, consent was obtained from the participants. simulation-based learning environments data were collected at two stanford university simulation centres between february and march of 2010: the patient simulation center of innovation and the goodman surgical simulation center (see cisl.stanford.edu/about/centers.html). the patient simulation center of innovation is situated in the veterans affairs (va) palo alto health care system. the centre has two large simulation rooms: one set up as an operating room and one as an intensive care unit, emergency department or ward. the centre also has five computer-directed patient simulators: three permanently set up and one adult simulator for in-situ training exercises in actual clinical environments. the centre also provides an infant simulator for paediatric anaesthesia training. the simulation centre has concentrated training in anaesthesiology, intensive care and rapid response teams, emergency medicine and respiratory therapy. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 78 data were also collected at the goodman surgical simulation center, which is situated in the middle of stanford hospital. the centre allows for convenient drop-in practice and pre-surgical planning. the skills area is open 24/7 (via card access) to all surgical residents. in addition to the centre’s accessibility, two surgical education fellows are available at the centre every day. the centre has vascular trainers, virtual reality laparoscopic trainers, box trainers, colonoscopy trainers and two patient simulators. it is used by surgical residents, medical students, residents in other disciplines, nursing professionals, respiratory therapists and others. surgical residents, for example, have a weekly exercise time. during this period, they practice skills and decision making relevant to their surgical rotation in the simulation centre. in this study, one room was used and equipped for students to rehearse. the room contained a patient simulator, and the vital signs were displayed on a monitor. next to this room was an area in which the facilitator and the simulation operator controlled the simulator and guided the students’ learning process via audio devices. one room was dedicated to debriefing, where appropriate technology, such as video and audio-recording devices, was available. during this study, video and audio recordings were used during the debriefing sessions to complement the students’ reflection process. data collection and analysis empirical data were collected from facilitators and students using group interviews (one individual interview), observations, video recordings and preand post-questionnaires. for this study, we analysed 1) group interviews and one individual interview, 2) field notes and 3) post-questionnaires (see table 1). the data analysis focused on the meaningfulness of the simulation-based courses as well as the evolution of the pedagogical model based on the lessons learned. table 1. data collection and analysis methods as well as data sources (applied from keskitalo et al., 2014) data collection method data source data analysis method group interviews, one individual interview facilitators (n = 9) students (n = 16) 2 anaesthesia crisis resource management ii courses, 2 emergency medicine courses, 1 anaesthesia internship atlas.ti qualitative coding and analysis software qualitative content analysis field notes facilitators (n = 9) students (n = 25) 2 anaesthesia crisis resource management ii courses, 2 emergency medicine courses, 1 anaesthesia internship qualitative content analysis postquestionnaires students (n = 25) 2 anaesthesia crisis resource management ii courses, 2 emergency medicine courses, 1 anaesthesia internship descriptive statistics the data analysis involved transcription of the collected data by an englishlanguage transcription service. we analysed the interviews and field notes from the viewpoint of meaningful learning and the development of the pedagogical model, using the qualitative data analysis software atlas.ti and a qualitative content analysis method. content analysis is often understood as a systematic and objective analysis of the visible and obvious components of the text (e.g. graneheim & lundman, 2004; gray, 2004). however, for some auseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 79 thors (graneheim & lundman, 2004) qualitative content analysis also interprets the underlying meaning of the text. the data analysis was an iterative process in which we organised and compressed the data into codes and categories and finally into themes. the unit of analysis was the utterance of the facilitator or student or the note made by the researcher reflecting the characteristics of meaningful learning or the pedagogical model. more profound data analysis process descriptions can be found in keskitalo et al. (2014). the questionnaires consisted of likert-type questions related to expectations and experiences of the ftl process in an sble. each of the 52 statements was scored on a continuum (1 = does not describe my expectations at all, 5 = describes my expectations very well). in addition, 29 likert-type questions (0 = not at all, 5 = to a great extent) focused on the emotions students experienced during the course. the students were asked to evaluate the degree to which they felt a given emotion (e.g. enjoyment of studying, boredom, sense of community etc.) before and after the course. five questions were also aimed at collecting students’ background information, and one open question gave the students space to write any other comments they had. for further analysis, we selected statements that reflected the characteristics of meaningful learning from the post-questionnaires (see also hakkarainen, 2007; nevgi & löfström, 2005). the data were analysed using means, medians and standard deviations. results—reflections on the design the results suggest that simulation-based learning is fundamentally meaningful since it inherently supports many characteristics of meaningful learning (see table 2). table 2. mean and median (standard deviation) ratings of meaningful learning characteristics after the course characteristics and statements on the questionnaires postquestionnaire mean (sd) median experiential and experimental i utilised my prior experiences during the lessons. during the lessons, i was able to familiarise myself and practise with the technology needed for future work. 3.50 (1.14) 4.17 (0.92) 4.00 4.00 emotional i felt safe during the lessons. the course’s climate motivated me to learn. enjoyment of the studying 4.58 (0.78) 4.58 (0.50) 4.21 (0.66) 4.00 4.00 4.00 socio-constructive and collaborative i was able to utilise my prior knowledge related to the course’s content. my collaboration and communication skills will develop/developed during this course. sense of community 4.54 (0.51) 4.45 (0.69) 4.23 (0.80) 4.00 4.00 3.00 active and responsible the student’s role was to actively find, evaluate and apply information during the lessons. facilitators will support/supported the students’ own activities. 4.58 (0.58) 4.38 (0.63) 4.00 4.00 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 80 reflective and critical i was able to critically evaluate my own learning during the training. my critical thinking skills developed during the course. 4.42 (0.72) 4.58 (0.56) 4.00 4.00 competence-based and contextual the training in the simulation settings developed my competence. the lessons were applicable to my future work. 4.57 (0.56) 4.72 (0.52) 4.00 4.00 goal-oriented and self-directed i set my own personal goals for the training. the course objectives were clear to me. 4.04 (1.04) 4.51 (0.63) 4.00 4.00 individual the course took the students’ individuality into account. the study skills that i have adopted worked for me in this course. 3.85 (1.02) 3.89 (1.05) 3.00 4.00 the analysis of the post-questionnaires suggested simulation-based learning was very meaningful (m = 3.50–4.72; sd = 0.52–1.14) for the students. the median values were also high (md = 3–4). in two of the statements (sense of community and the course took the students’ individuality into account) median values were 3.00, but in other statements they were 4.00. the lowestrated variable was i utilised my prior experiences during the lessons (m = 3.50; sd = 1.14), which indicated that students utilised their prior experiences to some level. since the standard deviation was high, the results suggest that some students felt that they utilised their previous experience during the course, while the others felt the opposite. however, this may also indicate that things were so new that the students needed to learn a lot and the relation to previous experiences was ambiguous. the highest-rated variable was the lessons were applicable to my future work (m = 4.72; sd = 0.52), which indicates that courses were valued as highly useful by future physicians. however, we observed that some characteristics need more focus (keskitalo et al., 2010; keskitalo et al., 2014). particularly the qualitative data revealed that the goal-oriented, self-directed and individual characteristics may limit the meaningful learning experience for some students. in the evaluated courses, formal articulation of the learning goals was poor, which in turn prevented students from setting their own learning goals, as a student observed: but we didn’t know what today was going to be, so we couldn’t have specific objectives for today. (group interview 2, students) as noted, the poor articulation of the learning objectives and course description prevented some students from setting their own learning goals. this, in turn, had an adverse effect on the self-directed characteristics to be realised. to aid self-directed learning, facilitators should help students follow and evaluate their own learning in relation to the course’s objectives, their own goals and their own competency level (cf. brockett & hiemstra, 1991; jonassen, 1995). the analysis of the post-questionnaires also revealed that the individual characteristic was realised, but not more obviously than other characteristics (m = 3.85–3.89; sd 1.02–1.05; see table 2). in this case, the median was also 3.00. qualitative data support these results, since some students expected more individual guidance than was provided. the standard deviation was also high, which suggests that some students might have been satisfied, but others expected more support in the future, as the following excerpts clarify: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 81 i think they just treated us all the same, basically. (group interview 2, students) yeah. and i also think what’s interesting about this place is that the quality of resident they get here is not varied amongst—compared to other schools. and so, i don't think they have to worry as much about training toward—or putting simulators to individuals and individualising them to make them more improved based on their weaknesses and working on the simulator to improve the weaknesses of an individual, because i think that from the standpoint of the residency itself and the people in the residency, we’re all strong. (group interview 1, students) the instructional processes of the courses followed the learning through simulation model (cf. joyce et al., 2001) quite obviously. it became clear that simulation-based learning includes at least the introduction, simulator and scenario briefing, scenarios and debriefing phases. facilitators observed: so that the morning time is going to be team building, gathering around the table having breakfast, signing forms, then to more of a traditional didactic or multimedia type of learning session. then the rest of the day, simulations followed by debriefs. so, in the introduction period while they’re signing forms, there is a briefing as to what the expectations are. i didn't do it today, but i often will—prior to the first debriefing... so you’ve had a 25-35-minute scenario, we’re going to spend a similar amount of time talking about it. (group interview 2, facilitators) as the excerpts show and as we observed, short lectures can occur between the familiarisation and actual scenarios. in this particular course (anaesthesia crisis resource management), the lectures dealt with principles of crisis recourse management and communication issues within healthcare. the other theoretical viewpoints that facilitators mentioned were adult learning and experiential learning principles (cf. kolb, 1984). kolb’s experiential learning cycles are viewed as a useful framework within simulation-based learning in healthcare. in simulation-based education, simulations are viewed as concrete experiences that are debriefed afterward (e.g. zigmont, kappus, & sudikoff, 2011). this also enhanced the experiential and reflective characteristics of meaningful learning to be realised in terms of gaining new experiences within the simulation and discussing them afterward. in terms of adult education, mature learners benefit from the student-centred approach (because of age, maturity, life experiences, multiple responsibilities etc.; see knowles, holton, & swanson, 1998), thus placing pressure on individualised guidance as well. conclusion—redesigning the pedagogical model the aim of the pedagogical model was to shed light on the important learning theories that are essential when organising teaching and learning in simulation-based learning environments. the aim was to also conceptualise meaningful simulation-based learning and define characteristics that can be useful in simulation-based learning environments in healthcare. in terms of the lesson learner, we took the deficiencies of the previous model into account and redesigned our initial ftl model. the redesigned model is presented in figure 2. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 82 figure 2. the pedagogical model for simulation-based learning in healthcare (keskitalo, 2015) first, the ftl model was not tested thoroughly; therefore, we decided that naming the pedagogical model in this phase was not appropriate. after several design-based research cycles, it will be more appropriate to name the model. the research and the first design were based on socio-constructivist and sociocultural theories of learning (lave & wenger, 1991; palincsar, 1998; vygotsky, 1978; wells & claxton, 2002). these theories place learning in a wider sociocultural context and view knowledge as the result of a shared and contextually bound process of knowledge construction rather than solely an individual experience. however, this did not become clear enough in our previous model (see figure 1). therefore, in the redesigned model (see figure 2) we emphasised that learning is a contextually bound and tool-dependent process by surrounding the pedagogical model with a socio-cultural context. the sociocultural perspective helps us understand the complexity of learning and the development of expertise and how the tools, practices and institutions also constantly changed within this interplay (palincsar, 1998). the characteristics of meaningful learning were chosen as a general framework within the pedagogical model, because they can help bring to the forefront issues known to enhance learning (e.g. jonassen, 1995). based on this study and our previous studies (keskitalo et al., 2010; keskitalo et al., 2014), sbles seem to be ideal environments for meaningful learning. however, the goal-oriented, self-directed and individual characteristics need more attention. therefore, in order to realise the goal-oriented characteristic, in future simulation-based courses the goals should be stated clearly, and they should be reflected on during the debriefing process. furthermore, participants could benefit from setting their own learning goals in relation to the course’s objective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 83 and their own level of expertise. however, this was what we found during our first case study, and based on the results, the ftl model was refined (keskitalo et al., 2010). learning is also very much an individual process (de corte, 1995), and some students might expect more individualised feedback about their performance as well as guidance on how to develop their skills and knowledge further (cf. keskitalo et al., 2010; keskitalo et al., 2011). in other words, we have clarified in the redesigned pedagogical model things that facilitators can do to help realise the goal-oriented, self-directed and individual characteristics of meaningful learning. at this point, we also realised that the characteristics of meaningful learning not only describe and are restricted to the planning and implementation of students’ training (the phase when they are most active) but also can be taken into account from the beginning of the course to the end. therefore, we placed the characteristics at the centre of the pedagogical model (see figure 2). as a consequence, we also discarded the ftl process from our redesigned model (cf. ftl model, figure 1), since it did not provide any additional value to the model. the original teaching, studying and learning process is more related to classroom-based teaching (kansanen et al., 2000), with the aim of the division to accentuate students’ own activity. however, simulation-based learning environments in healthcare are based on students’ activity and, therefore, are a natural part. in contrast to the ftl model’s four phases (see figure 1), the redesigned pedagogical model (see figure 2) consists of six distinct phases: pre-activities, introduction, simulator and scenario briefing, scenarios, debriefing and postactivities. for the redesigned model, we added facilitators’ and students’ preactivities and post-activities. these phases are highly relevant for students’ learning and development in simulation-based education; therefore, we wanted to shed light on those activities as well. during the pre-activities phase, the facilitators are responsible for planning the learning process—for example, choosing the resources and learning material and organising the environment. however, students are responsible for having adequate knowledge and skills when they participate in simulation-based education. facilitators should critically evaluate the entire instructional process as post-activities (cf. keskitalo et al., 2010) in order to develop their teaching style (boese et al., 2013); whereas students prefer to test their learned knowledge and skills in a new scenario or in real life as post-activities (see kolb, 1984; merrill, 2002). the study’s results should be read with caution, since this case study had both strengths and weaknesses. a clear strength of the study was that it produced various types of data and provided many angles from which to look at the phenomenon. however, large amounts of data can be overwhelming, especially in design-based research (barab & squire, 2004; collins et al., 2004). therefore, in this study we focused on interviews, field notes and post-questionnaires. however, this study also had weaknesses. one major weakness was that despite our expectations, we could not organise an appropriate teaching experiment and test the model adequately. therefore, we discuss the use of the design-based research approach instead of applying a pure method. thus, the data collection is best described as a case study, and to develop the pedagogical model, we used the iterative nature of the design-based research method. in addition, the quantitative analysis of post-questionnaires is simply descriptive; therefore, the results of this study should be interpreted and adapted carefully. the main result of this study was the redesigned pedagogical model. with the help of this model, healthcare education practitioners can make informed choices about simulation-based education. the model can also be used to identify gaps that must be reconsidered and developed in simulation-based education. in other words, the pedagogical model ensures that a more holistic and meaningful approach to teaching and learning is adopted. however, the model requires evidence and further development. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11—issue 2—2015 84 references ausubel, d. p. 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(2011). theoretical foundations of learning through simulation. seminars in perinatology, 35(2), 47–51. a pedagogical model for simulation-based learning in healthcare tuulikki keskitalo & heli ruokamo abstract references title seminar.net 2015. © author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ict-enabled innovation in technology rich schools? catarina player-koro school of education, university of borås e-mail: catarina.player-koro@hb.se dennis beach school of education and special education, university of gothenburg e-mail: dennis.beach@hb.se abstract this article takes its point of departure from the main findings from research into four upper secondary schools that have implemented digital technology through one-to-one laptop initiatives. various data sources have been used in order to identify and understand how teaching and learning are organised and the reasons why and how digital technologies are used in educational settings. this is a response to a demand for more knowledge regarding the ways in which desirable changes of education can be realised and the potential role of educational technology this process. the conclusion drawn is that fundamental transformations in education are less concerned with technology and have more to do with changing structures and discourses regarding teaching, learning and education. introduction in sweden as in many other countries, an increasing number of education districts are investing in 1:1 laptop initiatives as a means of pushing the integration of information and communication technology (ict) in schools. this integration has been accompanied by a national debate in which information and communication technology (ict) is often singled out as a key enabler for bringing about the necessary fundamental innovation and modernisation of education and training which is required for nations to remain competitive in the globalised economy (bocconi, kampylis, & punie, 2013; nivala, 2009; player-koro, 2012d). this debate also involves ideas about the development of educational processes with measurable outcomes both for stakeholder satisfaction and educational performance assessment; both these aspects are stressed and ict is described as playing a crucial role for these developments and of new ways of using and creating information and knowledge (bocconi et al., 2013; oecd, 2013). whereas these innovative practices are seen as necessary for the development of society, traditional practices are considered to be obsolete and resulting in societies being left behind in the global competition (oecd, 2013). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ ict discourse the prevalent strong belief in technology as a means of fostering and driving innovation in education, industry and beyond is a compelling discourse that brings together several other underlying discourses in current society. one of these emanates from a techno positivist assumption that has its roots in the industrial revolution. this discourse follows a logical argument in which it is assumed that the introduction of technology is bound to have an impact and that the potential exists to transform social settings (fisher, 2006). in this socalled technology-optimist perspective, the focus on technology and transformation is central and the diffusion of innovations is held to be the main factor determining changes in organisations or practices (ende & dolfsma, 2005; jagodic, courvisanos, & yearwood, 2009). it is assumed that the spread of innovation in a social system can be viewed as a development process based on the quotidian activities of the those who participate in that system, which will also be enhanced by the introduction of new technologies (ende & dolfsma, 2005; jagodic et al., 2009). literature in which technology or ict is assumed to be an enabler for innovation of teaching learning and education shares these premises as exemplified recently by kampylis et al’s (2012) proposed framework for mapping ict-enabled innovation for learning. this framework maps ict initiatives across five categories that are presumed to be following an evolutionary trajectory towards an innovated learning environment. the model was used to analyse 1:1 initiatives in europe. the conclusion, in line with three decades of research in the area of educational use of technology,(balanskat, bannister, hertz, sigillò, & vuorikari, 2013; dunleavy, dexter, & heinecke, 2007; goodwin, 2011; larkin, 2011; tallvid, 2010) was that: • ict was not enough to bring about transformative changes to education • 1:1 teaching and learning could not yet be viewed as a high impact innovation (bocconi et al., 2013; kampylis, bocconi, & punie, 2012) • instructional use of ict per se will not transform teaching and learning or improve students academic achievements (livingstone, 2011; skolverket, 2013; yuan-hsuan, waxman, jiun-yu, michko, & lin, 2013) the present investigation in the present investigation our point of departure is previous research, such as described above in order to contribute with an analysis of the different and often competing demands and traditions that restricts teachers’ structuration of their pedagogical practices with ict. we have used several different data sources for this analysis, including survey results, interview transcripts and observational field-notes as well as protocol from participant observation research. the roles played by these data differ slightly. the former have provided a more general picture of the teachers’ structuration of their pedagogical work in classrooms and their use of ict that we then attempted to illustrate in greater detail and deepening through conversation and reflection from a theoretical position where activities in classrooms are viewed as structured by many different and often competing discourses (bernstein, 2000). this framework allows for an analysis of how pedagogic discourse is structured in conjunction with the infusion of intentionally transformative innovations such as 1:1 initiatives and what discourses have the greatest impact on classroom activities. the aim is to contribute to a discussion about how education can be transformed so as to allow students to acquire the necessary knowledge to meet today and tomorrow's society. the following questions were given special attention: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 • what teaching and learning patterns can be found in technology rich educational practices? • what discourses appear to structure educational practices in conjunction with the infusion of 1 to-1 initiative? theoretical framework this research belongs to a theoretical tradition in which schools and classrooms are not reduced to transmission systems or mere sites of ‘learning transfer’. instead, what happens in teaching situations is considered to be the outcome of struggles between different agents and discourses engaged in processes of social inclusion and control — both inside and outside the immediate educational setting in a world made up of a complex and shifting meld of values, ideas and interpretations, in which discourses of legitimate knowledge and skills, together with rules for their transmission and acquisition are constructed (ball, 2006; dennis beach, 2005; bernstein, 2000). for this study this means that finding out how and why ict is being used in education and how this use (or non-use) is valued is about understanding how digital tools are negotiated and shaped by different agents with different interests who are also present both inside and outside the educational institutions. bernstein’s concept of the pedagogic device serves as a conceptual framework for describing this process. the idea of the pedagogic device is to describe how the content and practice of education and teaching — the pedagogic discourse — is formed through struggles and power relations between different agents. the components of the pedagogic discourse are twofold, namely the instructional discourse, which creates skills of different kind that are embedded within the regulative discourse that creates order, relations and identity (bernstein, 2000). viewed through the theoretical lens of the pedagogic discourse classrooms are contextual (situated) sites for teaching and learning where competing translations and interpretations of ideal practices and how and what to teach in different subjects shape the classification and framing of everyday school work (dennis beach, 2005). thus the pedagogic discourse is realised and made visible through activities in the classroom and has its roots in the modality of the social relations of actual classroom practices, such as in the selection of subject content and establishing rules for the transmission and acquisition of knowledge and skills (bernstein, 2000; player-koro, 2012a). the process of recontextualisation is a further significant concept for this study (bernstein 2000). it refers to the process that constitutes specific pedagogic discourses and it takes place in two different arenas or fields — the official recontextualising field (orf) and the pedagogical recontextualising field (prf). the state and its selected agents and ministries dominate the orf through political discussions amongst politicians and bureaucrats together with discourses derived from the public and media debate and selected agents (politically chosen representatives). significantly in this case, discourses about ‘ict-enabled innovative learning’ are included in this process (bernstein, 2000). the prf consists agents from the educational field, of pedagogues in schools and universities, departments of education, and writers of textbooks, specialist journals and research foundations etc. methodology empirical material has been produced for the present article through two years of participant observation studies within the school context in four upper secondary schools in a municipality that has invested in new technologies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 through a 1:1 initiative. it includes multiple data collection formats. these have comprised two online surveys (distributed in 2012 and 2013) addressed to directed to all teachers working in the schools in question, semi-structured group interviews with school principals at each school, semi-structured focus groups meetings with two groups of teachers in each school (8 groups consisting of 3-5 participants), direct observational field-work (two to three days each month during one year), and video observations from everyday work in classrooms where digital technology is used for teaching and learning (6 lessons of approximately 1 hour each). the different data have contributed to the investigation and hence the article in a number of ways. the general influence of the digitization of school on teachers' pedagogical work has been studied through the online survey and the outcomes were then analysed by using statistical methods, supported by spss, while focus group meetings were used to generate deeper ‘in-depth’ discussions on a specific topic defined by the researcher, often on the basis of a survey finding or ideas derived from observational protocol. the researcher acted as moderator of the discussion (breen 2006). we found this method particularly helpful because it allowed for reflection on the social realities through direct access to the language and concepts which structures experiences from the perspectives of the participants (mclafferty, 2004). the conversation was grounded in a perspective where the implementation of digital technology was viewed as part of a complex reality navigated by teachers. the conversation was documented using a digital sound recorder and by taking field-notes. participant and direct observational fieldwork were for us the most central method. derived from ethnographic research and anthropology, in its original sense participant observation is a means of experience and learning based on attentional and intentional observational action. it is conducted in order to document and learn from the experience of sharing in life with others and observing the on-going work in these activities, in this case in the schools in question and in the educational practices in their classrooms. observations inside the classrooms concerned primarily the effects of digital technology on the teaching process in particular, the interaction between students and teachers in the classroom. the fieldwork was documented using a video recorder (in some cases) and by taking field-notes. interviews and observations have been transcribed and analysed. these multiple data collection formats were used in order to provide both a broad and more general picture as well to allow for a more profound and deep understanding of how the teachers' pedagogical work is influenced by the digitization of school. it has therefore been possible to drive an analysis through analytical juxtaposition, in which the survey results have been reflected on in relation to both the analysis of interviews and observations and in relation to theory. the various data sources have provided a rich picture of both the daily teaching and learning as well as of the context surrounding teaching at the local schools under study. during the project period the time spent in the municipality varied in frequency and could also be described as having different aims and objectives. these different ways of using time have been described by jeffrey and troman (2004) as compressed and selective time modes. compressed time modes involve shorter recurrent periods of two to three days of more intense research periods. this was done mainly during the first year of the project. selective time modes operate with particular foci in order to examine and interpret specific events (jeffrey & troman, 2004). one example where this sampling was used is analysed in this paper. this was a selection of classrooms made by the principals of each school based on the criteria that the teachers /in these classrooms were regarded as particularly innovative in their use of digital seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 technology in education (see below). these classrooms were selected and studied using video-recordings and field-notes with a focus on the effects of digital technology on the teaching process and the interaction between students and teachers. results this section starts with a brief discussion of survey results from the investigation and a presentation of the general picture emerges from the compilation and analyses of this survey. these results will also be illustrated with citations from the interpretation and analysis of focus group meetings with groups and interviews with teachers and from the classroomsobservations, in order to give meaning to, and improve the understanding of, what is expressed and reflected through the responses in the survey. the results are discussed in relation to the first research question about what learning patterns can be found in technology rich educational practices. the second research question concerning the discourses that appear to structure educational practices in conjunction with the introduction of 1:1 initiative is discussed in relation to a theoretical analysis of interviews and classroom observations. what teaching and learning patterns can be where extensive use of technology is made? the survey was sent twice (in 2012 and 2013) to all teachers working in the four secondary schools in the municipality. the aim was to provide a picture of how the pedagogical work of teachers was influenced by the digitalisation of the school. the results did not differ significantly between the two years. in this paper we refer to the 2013 survey. in 2013 the on-line questionnaire was sent to 352 teachers, 276 of who returned their completed version (147 woman and 129 men). a relatively large number of issues were covered through 40 questions in 9 sections. we asked standard questions about teachers' professional development, school improvement, assistance and support, and more specific questions about the teacher’s use of digital tools in teaching, their attitudes towards the use of digital tools in teaching, the skill necessary to support students in their use of digital technologies and changes in the teacher’s work due to the introduction of digital technology. the 2013 questionnaire was mostly constructed with fixed interval items where the respondents were asked to express agreement or disagreement with a series of statements. they also had the opportunity to add their own comments in their own words in a number of open-ended questions. when designing the questions we made sure we adhered basic psychometric standards in order to avoid the risk of answers to individual questions being prone to standard errors, such as the ability to interpret a question differently. the results showed that 201 out of 239 (84%) responding teachers used ict more than once a week in their teaching and 40% used ict on a daily basis, whilst 4% never used ict. it was obvious from all our data (surveys, focus groups interviews etc.) that teachers had acquired a new tool for communication. that ict was integrated as a tool in the teachers’ everyday work was also evident in dialogue between teachers during focus group interviews. … yes ... now it is natural to use the computer ... i have everything on it ... … all you have to do is bring it (focus group interview 2012-06-19) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 … everything has changed drastically ... the computer is second-nature natural now ... whereas it wasn’t before... you had to book a computer lab and all that……( focus group interview 2012-06-12) the most common way of using ict in classrooms was for looking up and retrieving information. according to 82% of the teachers computers were used for information seeking and 70% said that computers were used for retrieval of information in their teaching more than once a week. the citation below illustrates this. ... the world has become closer ... it's very easy for students to listen to things and find interesting texts ... (focus group interview 2012-06-14) the second most common way of using ict was for text production. 68% stated that the computers were used for this purpose in their classroom at least once a week. a similar pattern was found for all categories of teachers, with the exception of physical education teachers. the survey data also provided evidence that teachers used digital spaces as an arena to collect, share and disseminate information between teachers and students through the learning management system (lms). the view of ict as part of the infrastructure for organizing teaching and training was also evident in focus group interviews and observations. in this respect the lms system was especially important. i don’t think that education has changed pedagogically ... but it is a tremendous gain in communication ... students can retrieve articles from the internet or go to any twitter account and tweet directly with politicians for example... it's a big change ... but not pedagogically... but the ict certainly provides more tools for communication (focus group interview 2012-06-14). … i no longer [have to] make photocopies for students ... i just put everything on the learning platform (focus group interview 2012-06-19) the survey also contained questions with aim of which was to establish, exactly, how teaching methods and the organisation of work in the classroom were affected when the school was digitized. in order to find this out, questions were posed about the teaching methods teachers used both when ict was part of their teaching and when they were not used. in both cases, the results showed that teaching from the front of the classroom was the most common way of organising the lessons. 23 % responded that teaching from the front was used in more than 50 % of their teaching time and 61 % responded that this way of organising classroom work occurred in at least 30 % of their teaching time. a similar patter emerged when teachers were asked about how they organised the work in classrooms while using ict. the observation protocol reflects similar patterns. teaching from the front of the classroom was the most common way of organizing lessons both in the absence of ict and where ict was intentionally intensive (player-koro, 2012). this way of regionalising classroom spaces and interactions has been found to figure regularly alongside expressions from teachers that clearly related their practices and professional value statements to a traditionally teacher centered pedagogy (beach, 1995, 2000, 2008). the second most common way of organising classroom work was as individual task based activities. 46 % responded that this kind of classroom work occurred during at least 30 % of their time spent in classrooms, and a similar pattern emerged when teachers used ict as part of their teaching. this pattern has also been noted by us in earlier ethnographic work (dennis beach, 1995; player-koro, 2012a). focus group discussions with teachers confirm these results. however, what teachers do within these forms of front-on work has seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 been changed through the use of ict. citations from focus group interviews serve to illustrate this: teaching is no different ... i stand at the board… before i had an overhead projector whereas now i use powerpoint. the difference is in communication: whereas before the students left their exams in my box, now they submit them through the computer ... it's the same thing ... the advantage is that the students and i can find the latest information on the web ... i use the computer all the time ... i wouldn’t be without it…(focus group interview 2012-06-14) ... yes a change is that i can stream the movie ... i do not have to order it as i used to have to do (focus group interview 2012-06-12) ... i don’t think the computer has replaced anything ... it is a supplement ... i do not have much use for it in mathematics (focus group interview 2012-06-12) taken together and in relation to the research question concerning the teaching and learning patterns that are evident in technology rich educational practices the results show that: • the 1:1 initiative has resulted in a high frequency of use of ict in classrooms • ict is an integrated tool for teaching • ict is a component of a digital infrastructure that is used for the organisation of the education. • the learning platform is a key component of this. • in teaching ict is primarily used for text production, communication, and information retrieval. • ict has affected the working methods and work in the classroom, but teaching is organized primarily according to traditional patterns • the power centric relations of space in the classroom have not been reconfigured • the modality of education does not seem to have been affected significantly in terms of classification, framing rules or pedagogic discourse in summary, one can say that the results from the different data sources run contrary to the repeated prediction about an innovative transformation of education through the use of technology. the results reinforce instead previous studies and evaluations whose main interest was to evaluate or find out how technology is actually perceived and used (balanskat et al., 2013). overall the studies have repeatedly shown a considerable lack of evidence regarding transformation or enhancements of educational standards. sometimes the explanation for the failure or absence of it impact is to point to the teacher as the major hindrance to the successful implementation of technology in schools (drent & meelissen, 2008). however, this cannot be said to apply in the present case, as in this research most of the teachers had a positive attitude toward technology and found it useful for managing their professional work, even if their view of teaching was somewhat traditional organised. thus an important point for us in this respect is to stress that these findings should not be regarded as failures. instead, the use of technology should be analysed and understood in the context where it appears and in relation to the complex web of policy demands and the different expectations and requirements which teachers are obliged to take into consideration; teachers are compelled to work within such constraints and this limits/affects what they can do (ball, 1993). we will look more closely at this in what follows. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 what discourses appear to structure educational practices in conjunction with the adoption of 1 to-1 initiative? in the focus group meetings teachers discussed how they planned and organized their teaching and what shaped and steered their work. in this discussion, it was mainly the new curriculum for upper secondary school (skolverket, 2011) together with the increasing demands made by national tests that teachers mentioned. the citation below illustrates this: ... the new upper secondary school reform has affected us a lot ... before we were able to work in an interdisciplinary way and we were divided into multidisciplinary teams working with the same students… it was easier to use computers ... whereas now we are back in the subject divided teams and [so] we mostly use computers to share material on the learning platform ... the above citation illustrates how the new curriculum seems to be conducive to a more for a more traditional way of working in schools. the next two citations illustrate how performative demands from national testing tends to structure the formation of the pedagogic discourse: [of course] i have to prepare my students for national tests… [that’s true]. i work ... straight or completely with that in mathematics. these tests very much affect the way i teach maths… my teaching is guided by the national tests ...(focus group interview 2012-06-14) ... they're not allowed to /use computers in national tests … they have to write by hand in the test... so we were unable to use computers and work with texts on the computer. we have to write with pens in the lesson as well (focus group interview 2012-06-12) the first citation indicates the way teaching is focused on preparing students for the national tests. the last citation exemplifies how it is national testing rather than the use of technology that steers teachers. taken together the two citations provide an example of issues that were brought forward by the teachers concerning how educational policy is related to the formation of the pedagogic discourse. an interesting consideration in this respect is that it seemed as if the recontextualising of policy documents from the orf, the field for policy production, prevented teachers from both innovative transformations of their teaching and to the implementation of ict in their pedagogical practice (singh, thomas, & harris, 2013). this result was confirmed in classroom observations. the classrooms to be observed were selected by principals of each school based on the criteria that their teachers were particularly innovative in their use of ict. however, this was not immediately evident in observational protocol. on the contrary, these classrooms shared the same traditionally teacher centered pedagogy discussed above while teaching and learning were discussed as being structured by the same kinds of performative demands in relation to forthcoming examinations. the citation below is taken from observations from a civic education class where students were working individually on a report. the tool used for seeking information and writing the report was the computer. teacher:... you have to include the country's economic and political development in the report if you want to pass the exam... you can look for information online ... don’t forget to submit the report for assessment by week 48 (from observation of civics classroom 2012-11-12) the examination was quite clear in the instructional part (the selected subject content) of the pedagogic discourse in the observed classrooms, as indicated in the following citation: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 8 teacher: ... today you have do solve the exercises that you will find/ on the learning platform ... i’ll show examples on the smartboard…then you go on to the task and you can ask me if you have any questions… (from economics classroom 2012-09-11) the teacher claimed that the exercises was to provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills for answering the questions and performing the forthcoming tests. another common feature was that although ict was used on a regular basis in the classroom[s], the regulative part of the pedagogical discourse, that shaped the form and structure of what was actually going on, consisted of a discourse where classroom talk and use of space resembled the most common way of organising teaching and learning in schools (hoadley, 2006; player-koro, 2012a). this could be described as: (a) each lesson started with an introduction. the introduction was aimed at introducing the topic of the day and was an activity that took place at the front of the classroom. the introduction was mediated either by the teacher or through digital technology (fig. 1). figure 1 introduction (b) in the next phase the teachers introduced the tasks that students were supposed to work with during the lesson. when students were occupied with the tasks, the teacher circulated tutoring individual students one at a time or in groups (figure 2). some students worked with the tasks as they had been instructed whilst others were engaged in with their friends or surfing on their computers (figure 2). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 9 figure 2 working on /with tasks (c) at the end of the lessons teaching was once again an activity that took place at the front of the classroom (figure 1). during this activity the aim was to answer the students' questions and show how the tasks in the book were to be solved. many of the questions concerned the content of the exam and the skills and requirements needed to pass. summary the main findings from the two years of study in 1:1 schools evidenced a frequent use of technology in classrooms supporting teaching and learning that could be considered as mainly traditional. here teachers had a positive attitude towards the use of technology and found it a useful tool for managing their professional work. during the two years of study there was no sign that the use of technologies played a significant part in education innovation whatsoever (bocconi et al., 2013). this does not mean that teaching has not changed however. it has. the point is that the introduction of ict in educational settings seems to lack the potential that is often referred to, namely that of transforming teaching and learning in a specific way in keeping with the discourses of flexible performances that serve society’s economic goals. two points should be noted here: it is examinations rather than the presence of technology that contribute to the structuration of a pedagogic discourse. the evaluative criteria specified by the examination rather than the virtual worlds of the technology have a regulative effect on the instructional part of the pedagogic discourse. this can be seen in the selection of subject content and in the interactional patterns during lessons (figure 1, 2). thus, even when ict was integrated in the teaching and learning activities observed, the teacher was very much in control of the selection of content, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 10 sequencing and pacing as well as being steered by his/her understanding of examination requirements that were not necessarily always under her/his immediate control. in the durkheimian sense of education in the interests of social integration and control, there is nothing whatsoever that is new about this (bernstein, 2000). according to bernstein this structuring of the pedagogical practice constitutes the main characteristic for what is defined as traditional forms of teaching and learning in schools (bernstein, 2000). the examinations were the main structuring force behind what was really going on during these lessons. this was also the case in the present ict-intensive classroom interactions as it was in our earlier studies either (a) prior to the extensive availability of ict or (b) in classrooms where, although /even if available for use, ict innovations were little used or not extensively used (see e.g. beach, 1995, 1999, 2003) or (c) other high-stake contexts where ict was made use of (player-koro, 2012a). it seems therefore, at least according to our analyses, to have had no general context independent impact on pedagogy. we hope we have been able to provide some illustration and explanation of this in the present paper. discussion this study made use of a bottom-up perspective with a theoretically informed analysis that allowed us to see the way the pedagogic discourse was structured from performative demands and national policy documents together with traditional forms of evaluative criteria that students should respond to. the pedagogic discourse was, in other words, constituted by traditional discourses stemming from the pedagogic recontextualising field (prf) and reinforced by the ever-increasing emphasis on assessment that have been the result of recontextualising of political discourses from the official recontextualising field (orf) of marketization and performativity (d beach & dovemark, 2007). this finding is important not least in relation to the increased emphasis on national testing and assessment that is part of a powerful discourse of performativity that exerts a strong influence on educational policy both on a national as well as on international levels (ball, 2003). these tests have a significant impact on teaching and learning in schools, both in relation to what and how to learn. a problematisation of this is more urgent than the reiteration of predictions made in research regarding the transformation and improvements of education through the use of technology — predictions where the lack of evidence for transformation or enhancements of educational standards commonly points to the teacher as the major hindrance in implementing technology in schools (drent & meelissen, 2008). the results presented here may however also contribute to the current discussion (selwyn, 2012) on the need for researchers in educational technology to distance themselves from the dominant discourse discussed above — a discourse that essentially consists of optimistic stories of the use of digital technology in education. selwyn (2012) argues that the field of educational technology tends to be an inward-looking and self-referential field of study characterised by a lack of rigorous studies about what really takes place when technology is used. our findings were also in keeping with those of a meta-analyse of a sample of 600 articles in the area of ict use for educational purposes (player-koro, 2012d), which concluded that, unlike other fields of academic studies, it seems as if the field of educational technology is particularly resistant to viewpoints that contradicts the view of technology as a potential force of positive change in education. this may indicate that there is a distinct authorial bias in this field of research (player-koro, 2012d; randolph & bednarik, 2008; selwyn, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 11 2011). it is not to be excluded that the discursive construction of the impact of technology on education as described above, meets the criteria for the definition of a dominant discourse (ball, 1990). as is often the case in dominant discourses, authorial bias (selwyn, 2011) focuses narrowly on possibilities to diagnosed problems, with the increased risk of missing ‘the bigger picture’, which in this case involves both the understanding and description of what actually happens with education and the educational system due to policy changes and what takes place in an educational context when teachers and students have unlimited/ubiquitous access to technology. concluding remarks this submission is based on research which uses a multi-sited design that targets and compares learning, interaction and outcomes the aim of which is to discuss the challenges of conducting research based evaluation of digitally innovative online learning. in this paper we have tried to problematize this in relation to the results from a two-year study of schools that have been digitized by providing students and teachers with their own laptop. the main objective was to focus on teaching and learning patterns and organisational practice in schools where extensive use of technology is made. in summary, this study evidenced that: • ict was frequently used by teachers and students in a way that sustained and replicated traditional practices • there was no sign in the data that the daily use of ict resulted in a development process towards innovative teaching and learning practices. • the performative discourse was the main structuring force for the educational setting and this appeared to reproduce traditional ways of organizing teaching and learning in schools. the conclusions to be drawn from the investigation are very much in line with those of other extensive and critical studies. they are that 1:1 learning initiatives in sweden and elsewhere seem to evidence only a weak link between technology use and the transformation of educational practices (goodwin, 2011; livingstone, 2011; skolverket, 2013; tallvid, 2010; yuan-hsuan et al., 2013). a possible difference between our conclusions and those of others, however, is that in other research the suggestion tends to be that the full potential of the use of ict has not yet been reached, but that it can be (bocconi et al., 2013). this line of reasoning springs from the conviction that ict plays a prime role as a key enabler for innovation in education (kampylis et al., 2012). we argue that educational change is not about technology and if it is our ambition to transform educational there are compelling reasons to take another point of departure. technology alone will not transform education. references balanskat, a., bannister, d., hertz, b., sigillò, e., & vuorikari, r. (2013). overview and analyses of 1:1 learning initiatives in europe scientific and policy report by the research centre of the european commission. luxembourg: institute for prospective technological studies. ball, s. j. (1990). discipline and chaos the new right and discourses of derision. in s. j. ball (ed.), education policy and social class (pp. 26-42). abingdon: routledge. ball, s. j. (1993). what is policy? texts, trajectories and toolboxes. in s. j. ball (ed.), education policy and social class. the selected works of stephen j. ball (pp. 43-53). london: routledge taylor & frabcis group. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 12 ball, s. j. (2003). the teacher's soul and the terrors of perfomativity. in s. j. ball (ed.), education policy and social class the selected work of stephen j. ball (pp. 143-156). abingdon: routledge taylor & francis group. ball, s. j. 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(2008). which factors obstruct or stimulate teacher educators to use ict innovatively? computers & education, 51(1), 187-199. dunleavy, m., dexter, s., & heinecke, w. f. (2007). what added value does a 1:1 student to laptop ratio bring to technology-supported teaching and learning? journal of computer assisted learning, 23(5), 440-452. doi: 10.1111/j.13652729.2007.00227.x ende, j., & dolfsma, w. (2005). technology-push, demand-pull and the shaping of technological paradigms patterns in the development of computing technology. journal of evolutionary economics, 15(1), 83-99. doi: 10.1007/s00191-004-0220-1 fisher, t. (2006). educational transformation: is it, like ‘beauty’, in the eye of the beholder, or will we know it when we see it? education and information technologies, 11(3), 293-303. goodwin, b. (2011). one-to-one laptop programs are no silver bullet. educational leader, 68(5), 78-79. hoadley, u. 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(2004). focus group interviews as a data collecting strategy. journal of advanced nursing, 48(2), 187-194. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2648.2004.03186.x seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 13 nivala, m. (2009). simple answers for complex problems: education and ict in finnish information society strategies. media culture society, 31(3), 433-448. doi: 10.1177/0163443709102715 oecd. (2013). innovative learning environments educational research and innovation: oecd. player-koro, c. (2012a). hype, hope and ict in teacher education: a bernsteinian perspective. learning, media and technology, 1-15. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.637503 player-koro, c. (2012d). reproducing traditional discourses of teaching and learning mathematics [elektronisk resurs] : studies of mathematics and ict in teaching and teacher education. göteborg: department of applied it, university of gothenburg ; chalmers university of technology. randolph, j. j., & bednarik, r. (2008). publication bias in the computer science education research literature. journal of computer science, 14(4), 575-589. selwyn, n. (2011). technology, media and education: telling the whole story. learning, media and technology, 36(3), 211-213. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.572977 selwyn, n. (2012). bursting out of the 'ed-tech' bubble. learning, media and technology, 37(4), 331-334. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2012.680212 singh, p., thomas, s., & harris, j. (2013). recontextualising policy discourses: a bernsteinian perspective on policy interpretation, translation, enactment. journal of education policy, 28(4), 465-480. doi: 10.1080/02680939.2013.770554 skolverket. (2011). läroplan, examensmål och gymnasiegemensamma ämnen för gymnasieskola 2011. stockholm: skolverket :. skolverket. (2013). it-användning och it-kompetens i skolan. stockholm. tallvid, m. (2010). en-till-en : falkenbergs väg till framtiden? utvärdering av projektet en-till-en i två grundskolor i falkenbergs kommun. delrapport 3. falkenberg :: barnoch utbildningsförvaltningen, falkenbergs kommun ;. yuan-hsuan, l., waxman, h., jiun-yu, w., michko, g., & lin, g. (2013). revisit the effect of teaching and learning with technology. journal of educational technology & society, 16(1), 133-n/a. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 14 ict-enabled innovation in technology rich schools? catarina player-koro dennis beach abstract introduction ict discourse the present investigation theoretical framework methodology results what teaching and learning patterns can be where extensive use of technology is made? what discourses appear to structure educational practices in conjunction with the adoption of 1 to-1 initiative? summary discussion concluding remarks references title seminar.net 2015. (authors) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 the digital competences and agency of older people living in rural villages in finnish lapland päivi rasi faculty of education, centre for media pedagogy university of lapland email: paivi.rasi@ulapland.fi arja kilpeläinen faculty of social sciences university of lapland email: arja.kilpelainen@ulapland.f abstract older people’s digital competencies are a means to minimise their possible risks for being excluded from society. therefore, the research in this field needs to be strengthened. this paper examines the digital competences and agency of older people who live in remote rural villages in finnish lapland. we argue that older people’s agency is the key factor that keeps them included in contemporary society. hence, our theoretical viewpoint rests on the theory of the modalities of agency. our data consist of three focus group interviews that were conducted in small, remote villages during the spring of 2015. we analysed our data deductively, and the results showed that elderly villagers interpret their digital competencies through their personal needs and desires. history, the present and the future are intertwined in the villagers’ conceptions. our respondents’ digital competencies are diverse; older people living in villages are not a homogenous group. based on our results, we argue that digital competence is very much a distributed competence of elderly dyads, families with three generations and informal networks of villagers and that it should not, therefore, be assessed solely as an individual characteristic. keywords: older people’s digital competence, agency, media agency, media literacy introduction this paper presents a study that focuses on the digital competences and agency of older finnish people who live in remote rural villages in finnish http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:paivi.rasi@ulapland.fi mailto:arja.kilpelainen@ulapland.f seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 150 lapland. in finland, people in the 64–89 age group use the internet substantially less than those in younger age groups. furthermore, 25% of people in the 64–75 age group report having never used the internet. the individual’s use or non-use of the internet is also related to the area in which he or she lives, and older people who live in rural areas use the internet less than city dwellers (official statistics of finland, 2015). older people’s non-use or low use of the internet has raised concerns about their possible risks for being excluded from services related to education, wellbeing, health, social security, welfare, communication and participation in the digitalised society. accordingly, national european strategies have prioritised the need to promote older people’s access to the internet and the need to better understand their specific needs in terms of, for example, digital competence-related training and support services (sourbati, 2009). in recent years, public authorities and international organisations have launched a significant number of media literacy initiatives aimed at older people (abad, 2014). the concept of digital competence (ferrari, 2013) that is applied in this research overlaps with the concept of media literacy. therefore, in this paper, we present a discussion and previous research that deals with both concepts. digital competence, broadly defined, refers to “the confident, critical and creative use of ict to achieve goals related to work, employability, learning, leisure, inclusion, and/or or participation in society” (punie, 2013, p. 2), whereas according to, for example, ofcom (2006, p. 10), media literacy is “the ability to access, understand and create communications in a variety of contexts” (cf. aufderheide, 1997). the concept of digital competence has been assessed as being narrower and more instrumental in its focus compared to the concept of media literacy, which is understood as being more critical (see, e.g., gutiérrez & tyner, 2012). the concepts of digital competence and media literacy underscore the crucial meaning of ictand media-related competences in present-day society. the european commission (2010) has acknowledged digital competence as one of the eight key competences for lifelong learning and participation in increasingly digitalised societies. the academic literature on media education and media literacy identifies the following three key purposes to which media literacy contributes: (a) democracy, participation and active citizenship; (b) the knowledge economy, competitiveness and choice and (c) lifelong learning, cultural expression and personal fulfilment (livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005, p. 7). the use of icts in general has been considered an opportunity to improve older people’s living conditions, to strengthen their social community and to facilitate their everyday lives in rural areas (kilpeläinen & seppänen, 2014; kilpeläinen, 2014). digital competences of older people the concept of digital competence refers to a complex set of knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to participate in digital societies (ferrari, 2013, p. 11). in this paper, we use the definition of digital competence provided by the european commission’s joint research centre’s institute for prospective technological studies, which summarises the areas of digital competence as follows (ferrari, 2013): information: identify, locate, retrieve, store, organise and analyse digital information, judging its relevance and purpose. communication: communicate in digital environments, share resources through online tools, link with others and collaborate seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 151 through digital tools; interact with and participate in communities and networks; cross-cultural awareness. content-creation: create and edit new content from word processing to images and video; integrate and re-elaborate previous knowledge and content; produce creative expressions, media outputs and programming; deal with and apply intellectual property rights and licences. safety: personal protection, data protection, digital identity protection, security measures, safe and sustainable use. problem-solving: identify digital needs and resources, make informed decisions on the most appropriate digital tools according to the purpose and need, solve conceptual problems through digital means, creatively use technologies, solve technical problems, update own and others’ competence. substantially less research has been conducted on the media literacy and media education of adults and older adults compared to children and youth (dennis, 2004; hakkarainen, hyvönen, luksua, & leinonen, 2009; livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005; ofcom, 2006; tisdell, stuckey, & thompson, 2007). however, the existing research suggests that adults may lack the necessary skills to critically evaluate the point of view from which information is presented (livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005). of the three aspects of media literacy (i.e. access, understanding and creation), creation has been the most under-researched (livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005). in the united kingdom (uk), ofcom’s (2006) report on media literacy amongst people aged 65 or older indicated that the breadth of their internet use was around one-tenth of the maximum potential. the report illustrated much lower levels of media literacy for older people compared to uk adults as a whole. this was especially the case with regard to older people’s volume of internet usage and their competence in digital tasks (e.g. blocking computer viruses or e-mail spam and listening to the radio over the internet). compared to adults, older people have reported less interest in learning more about internet technologies and use. their preferred method of learning about digital technologies, the internet included, is through friends and family, compared to other methods, such as reading the manual/instructions, trial and error on their own, finding out from the supplier/store, or going to a class/learning in a group. conversely, previous research has identified the following key enablers of adult media literacy (see livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005): self-efficacy (skills and confidence in using new media technologies), social support networks and family composition—especially having children in the household. modalities of agency as a theoretical approach in this study, we take a holistic approach to older people’s digital competences and explore these from the viewpoint of the theory of modalities of agency. this theory, which was formulated in finland by jyrki jyrkämä, draws on the theories of agency, especially in sociology and aging research, as well as on the theoretical ideas of the french semiotician julien greimas and his followers (jyrkämä, 2008). jyrkämä argues that the behaviour of humans is the result of the dynamic interaction of the modalities of agency: knowing how to, being able to, having to, having the opportunity to, wanting to and feeling. knowing how to refers to the enduring knowledge and skills that a person has acquired during his or her life course or will acquire in the future. being able to primarily entails an individual’s physical and mental abilities, which vary from situation to situation and change throughout the course of aging. having to entails physical, social normative and moral barriers, necessities and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 152 constraints. conversely, having to encompasses the opportunities that various situations provide. wanting to is related to motivation and to being motivated, as well as to volition, aims and goals. feeling deals with the human tendency to evaluate and make value judgements, as well as to experience and associate emotions with things and situations. according to jyrkämä (2008), “agency is something that originates from, takes shape, and is renewed within the intertwined and dynamic process of these modalities” (p. 195, author’s translation). bandura (2001) stresses a person’s own experience of capability as the basics of agency. an example of the modalities of agency in the lives of older people is the automated teller machine (atm) (jyrkämä, 2008, pp. 195–96). the user of an atm is required to know how to and be able to operate the machine. various kinds of wanting to may be related to its use: whereas one person wants to learn how to use the atm, another does not, and still another person asks a more skilful and able grandchild to accompany him or her to the atm. a person may also give his or her bank card to his or her home help. differences also exist in terms of the modality of having to, as there may be localities without atms. in terms of feeling, older people are known to appreciate more traditional, face-to-face forms of customer service at the bank. when looking at various everyday situations (e.g. using the atm), different types of intertwined modality constellations can be discerned. a person may, for example, represent the following type: “i know how to, i want to, i am able to and i even like to use the atm”, and another person may represent the following type: “i know how to, i am able to, but i don’t want to”. with regard to older people, the theory of modalities of agency is best seen as a heuristic viewpoint or framework that makes it possible for researchers to understand and analyse older people in their everyday life situations, including their interactions and positions with respect to services related to, for example, education, well-being, health, social security and welfare (jyrkämä, 2008). jyrkämä stated that for the researcher who is conducting research from the viewpoint of the modalities of agency, it is crucial for him or her to take into consideration the contextuality of agency, as well as its object orientation and its connectedness in terms of time, place and situation. in addition, the dynamic and interactional nature of agency is central to the framework. lipponen (2007) reflected on the concept of media literacy through the frameworks of sociocultural learning theory and agency. he argues that instead of understanding media literacy as the generic knowledge and skills of individual people, we should think of it more in terms of situated and distributed literacy. following this line of thought, understanding people’s media literacy requires understanding the situations and contexts within which they act. it is central to understand that a person learns to master, in particular, the tools of thinking and the action of the communities to which he or she belongs. earlier researchers have verified that individual, cultural and societal conditions define the relationship between older people and the use of icts (hakkarainen, 2012; kilpeläinen & seppänen, 2013; rasi & o’neil, 2014; suopajärvi, 2014). in the case of older people’s internet (non)use, digital competences (ferrari, 2013) can be thought of as only one or two modalities of agency (i.e. knowing how to and wanting to) that explain whether and how older people use the internet. however, for a more holistic understanding, we need to find out how all the modalities interact with each other. in previous research, older people’s non-use or low use of the internet has been explained by factors and barriers that can also be examined from the viewpoint of modalities of agency. these include physical limitations (being able to); lack of perceived needs and benefits of use (wanting to); lack of relevance to everyday living and lifestyle (wanting to); lack of sufficient skills, information and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 153 support (knowing how to) and negative emotions (feeling) toward the internet (abad, 2014; hakkarainen, 2012; hakkarainen & hyvönen, 2010; harwood, 2007; livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005; quinn, 2014). however, research into how the factors interact with each other is still scarce (livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005; wagner, hassanein, & head, 2010). research questions, data and analysis this paper reports the first phase of our research process. during this phase, we used the modalities of agency of knowing how to and having to (jyrkämä, 2008), and we formulated the following research questions: how do the respondents assess their digital competences and the need to enhance them? do the respondents report feeling social or societal pressure to use the internet? if so, how does this pressure manifest itself? to answer the research questions, we analysed the research data gathered through three focus group interviews with older people living in three small rural villages in finnish lapland. the use of a focus group interview makes it possible for participants to express their ideas in situ (barbour, 2007). all the interviews (see table 1) were conducted during the spring of 2015, and both authors of this paper were the interviewers. all the interviews were audio recorded with the respondents’ informed consent. the shortest interview lasted one hour, and the longest lasted for one hour and 39 minutes. the participants were both female and male. the preconditions to take part in the interview were the following: retired, living in a remote village, and either an internet user or non-user. table 1 description of focus group interviews focus group interviews number of participants (female/male) age (years) internet user/ nonuser duration number of transcribed text pages int. one 3/3 62–86 4/2 1h 31 min 78 int. two 3/2 64–85 3/2 1h 2 min 84 int. three 5/0 67–84 4/1 1h 39 min 113 our aim was to generate discussion rather than to conduct interviews. in doing so, we wanted to produce interactive, shared and reciprocal knowledge (kilpeläinen, 2012). the topics and parts of the questions used in the focus group interviews were specified in advance as follows: the respondents’ living history in the village, the benefits and disadvantages of living in the village, communality in the village, locality, internet use or non-use in everyday life and digital competence. the audio data were first transcribed verbatim by a trainee in the second author’s faculty. the analytical approach can best be characterised as deductive. we read the transcripts individually to identify and mark interview passages in which the respondents talked about their internet use, digital competences (ferrari, 2013) and everyday lives in the village in terms of the selected modalities of agency—that is, knowing how to and having to (jyrkämä, 2008). we then analysed and coded the data by writing notes on the printed transcripts, the unit of analysis being, at times, a word, a phrase, a sentence or a longer text passage. after completing our individual analyses, we compared and discussed our thoughts and codings in one data session. in the following sections, we will present and discuss our findings. all the extracts reported in this paper have been translated into english by the authors. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 154 results digital competences from a time perspective digital competence has been acknowledged as one of the key competences for lifelong learning and participation in increasingly digitalised societies (european commission, 2010). however, the data provide somewhat contradictory evidence regarding the important meaning of digital competence for the respondents’ present and future lives in remote rural villages. giddens (1984, p. 35) identified three forms of time: short day-to-day time, lifelong time and institutional time. the first form is constantly changing, the middle one is relatively stable and the last one, which is related to the culture of action, changes the slowest. applying giddens’ categories, villagers described three types of time: personal time, village time and societal time. their personal time has changed since retirement and during the time spent living in the villages. village time can be interpreted as a timeline for actions at the village level—for example, annual or other periodically recurring common events. the last one—societal time—represents societal needs and changes, and it has impacts on village time and personal time. first, the villagers situated their everyday lives through their personal lives. the respondents enthusiastically told numerous stories about their past, as well as their present, in which digital technologies and, accordingly, digital competence had no role. within their life course, digital technologies were viewed as newcomers, and their significance is partly constructed in relation to the individual’s past. interestingly, the villagers’ stories implied that competencies other than digital competence were more significant and personally meaningful in their lives. for instance, we were told stories about how the villagers managed in the past to collectively gather money to buy a tv and a piano for the village school, how they used to organise trips to the theatre in the nearest city or how they wrote and staged a play about the history of the village. in regard to these collaborative efforts, the various modalities of agency (jyrkämä, 2008)—that is, knowing how to, being able to, having to, having the opportunity to, wanting to and feeling—seem to come together. the skills and competences that these stories demonstrate do not include digital competences. in our analysis, we noticed that to understand the meaning of internet and digital competence from the respondent’s viewpoint, one has to acknowledge the life course of the respondent; in other words, this must be done to view digital competence from the time perspective (see also emirbayer & mische, 1998). this became evident as several respondents talked extensively about their previous lives without digital technologies (see also suopajärvi, 2014). second, the villagers were keen to situate their personal lives into their home villages. their life histories are included in their everyday lives. the historical and cultural habits of the villages are embedded into the newcomers step by step, and it takes time to accept and to be accepted in a village: [...] getting used to everything new, it takes its time. (female, 78 years, interview 1) [...] by doing something together, children living in the village learn. (female, 78 years, interview 1) in village time, the rhythm of the year provides frames and structures. there are some regularly repeated events in the village, and countless villagers organise and attend these social ceremonies/events. nature and the four distinct seasons play a crucial role in village time, in which the past, the present and the future are present at the same time. for example, summertime is associated with activities and competences (e.g. not getting lost in the woods) other than digital competence, as evidenced by this excerpt from our first interview: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 155 r1: [...] in the summer, you get to be out in nature a lot more, fishing and picking berries. (male, 64 years) r2: yes, that’s right. (female, 78 years) r1: it can be that summer always takes you to the woods. (male, 64 years) r2: yeah, that’s what it does. you know my husband [name omitted], even if he is 86 [years of age]—and he was already 86 last summer—he picked blueberries and lingonberries for us, just like that! [...] and our daughters were a bit worried about dad getting lost. but our son [name omitted] said that dad knows the area so well that when he goes to his own part of the woods, he will not get lost. (female, 78 years) third, the issue of societal time came up, especially in the discussions concerning communication habits, which have changed extensively in recent decades. information technology has brought about new methods of keeping in touch. as one respondent in the first interview stated, “paper letters are water under the bridge” (male, 62 years). however, the local history, culture and habits play an important role in everyday life. even if information technology is subverting some traditional structures, it is formulating new ones at the same time. one respondent in the second interview talked about the changes: r1: earlier, there were no phones. [—] if you had something to take care of, you had to visit. (male, 64 years) r1: i have acquaintances in southern and central finland. i usually check online [to see] what are they doing [and] what is happening there. (male, 64 years) even if communication inside the village has been decreasing, the respondents stated that they communicate via the internet with their family members who live far away. diverse individual and distributed digital competences definitional issues surrounding the concepts of media literacy, digital literacy and digital competence have been and will continue to be debated. according to livingstone, van couvering and thumim (2005), one ongoing debate is “whether media literacy is most usefully thought of as a societal capacity (‘a media literate society’) or an individual competence or skill” (p. 5). lipponen (2007) proposed the concept of situated and distributed media literacy, which cannot be described using generic, context-free knowledge and skill specifications. in the situated and distributed media literacy framework, participation in media communities and the viewpoint of media agency are central. however, lipponen argued that the more generic and situated viewpoints of media literacy are best seen as complementary to each other. our data confirm that solely belonging to a certain chronological age group does not define a person’s digital competences or media preferences (see harrington, bielby, & bardo, 2014; ofcom, 2006). harrington, bielby and bardo (2014) argued that assuming too much homogeneity regarding older media users and audiences has, to date, been a tendency of media/cultural studies. sixteen respondents aged 62 to 86 years took part in our study, and they constituted a diverse group in terms of their self-reported internet use and digital competences. the group included non-users, moderate users and active users. for example, one of the more active internet users (age 67) told us that she considered the internet “a necessity” for her. in her internet use, the modalities of agency (jyrkämä, 2008) seemed to come together as she told seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 156 us that she knew how to use her laptop for banking, making doctor’s appointments, signing up for courses, purchasing tickets, searching for information and updating her blog, among other activities. she reported good digital competences in all areas: information, communication, content creation, safety and problem-solving (ferrari, 2013). however, as lipponen (2007, p. 57) concluded, media agency can also be seen as resisting, contesting and deviating from customary ways of thinking and acting. in the abovementioned case, the respondent reported that she used “almost everything” on the internet but did not want to use facebook (cf. quinn, 2014). conversely, five participants in our research did not use the internet at all. their decision not to use the internet was related to the interaction of various modalities of agency (see also hakkarainen, 2012). in the case of one 78-yearold non-user, the dynamic interaction of modalities of agency could be seen as she talked about how starting a computer class and experiencing difficulties there because of poor hearing (being able to) had changed her willingness (wanting to) to learn new computer skills. this excerpt also demonstrates how the meaningful subject of digital competence in this case is actually a dyad— that is, a husband and a wife, instead of an individual person: my husband [name omitted] and i, we went to that computer class together, and i thought that, for sure, i will learn these things. [...] but that didn’t work out, because my husband [name omitted], who, at that time, already had pretty poor hearing, and the instructor teaching the course, he was talking behind our backs, and for a man, he had such a quiet voice that even i couldn’t hear. so, i didn’t want to bother. i dropped out of the course. (female, 78 years, interview 1) looking at the data from the present research, we argue that digital competence and, therefore, to some extent, media literacy are very much distributed competences of elderly dyads (couples living together), families with three generations and informal networks of villagers. in all the focus group interviews, the issue of children, grandchildren or villagers doing internet tasks (e.g. searching for recipes and paying bills) for the respondents and helping and supporting them in their internet use was evident (see also livingstone, van couvering, & thumim, 2005), as the following excerpts show: i give my bills to my daughter [name omitted], [and] she pays them. i don’t even have the machine. yes, they [her children] would have bought a computer for me, but i said i won’t take it. i don’t want to learn how to use it. (female, 86 years, interview 1) i don’t use the computer at all. [...] not in any way, i don’t even open it. i have such a great secretary [refers to her husband] that i don’t need to. (female, 69 years, interview 2) i manage very well [without the internet] because my daughter uses it. [...] she does everything for me. (female, 78 years, interview 3) therefore, seeing digital competence only as an individual characteristic provides a limited view. agency can be seen in the way in which individuals know from whom to ask for help and how to do so if and when needed (lipponen, 2007). conversely, respondents’ understanding regarding the opportunities afforded by the internet technologies developed through their interactions with their children and grandchildren. as lipponen (2007, p. 57) argued, “agency is essentially connected with an understanding about what resources are available, how to find them, and how to use them”. for example, one respondent told us how her grandson found information about a car accident seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 157 from the internet, and another stated that her grandson helped her with a computer problem: yesterday my grandson [name omitted] came, opened his laptop and started to look for where the car accident had happened. he was saying “oh, it was right there”. (female, 85 years, interview 2) and then our grandson [name omitted], the youngest one, who is eight years now … i was trying to send a photo the other day, and it’s kind of funny that this first grader asked me what was the problem i had with it. (female, 68 years, interview 3) social or societal pressure to use the internet during this first stage of our research process, we also wanted to examine our data from the modality of agency of having to, which refers to the physical, social normative and moral barriers, necessities and constraints (jyrkämä, 2008) related to our respondents’ internet use and digital competence. the results of our analysis coincide with those of our previous research (hakkarainen, 2012), indicating that older people experience pressure from society to use the internet. some of the pressure reported by our respondents was clearly partly social and partly self-inflicted in nature, as in the case of one respondent who worked as the village representative in the regional council and who described the interplay of the modalities of having to and wanting to in the following way (interview 1): respondent: because i ended up in this position [representative in the regional council], i want to take care of my responsibilities as well as possible. well, of course school children have contacted me a lot [...]. (male, 62 years) interviewer: how have they contacted you? respondent: through e-mail. older people’s social networks are highly important in terms of internet use and digital competence, as livingstone, van couvering and thumim (2005, p. 56) argued, “the more people one knows who use, say, email, the more incentive one has to use it oneself; the more one’s community is ‘wired’, the greater the benefits of participating online”. several respondents talked about the necessity of using the internet in present-day society and developing one’s digital competences. the having to modality was talked about both in positive and negative ways, as the following excerpts indicate: [...] because we live in a computer age like this, it is clear, because it is an electric age, where we have to use and learn how to use [the internet]. [...] i always use it [internet] to check my e-mails and pay my bills. and if i have something to take care of, i know how to go there [on the internet]. (male, 64 years, interview 1) r1: [...] and i just wonder how someone not using the internet, how is he able to manage anymore? (female, 69 years, interview 3) r2: yeah, and you need to have a printer, too, if the forms will be there [on the internet]. (female, 84 years, interview 3) the respondents also had several examples about not complying with the social pressures to use the internet, thereby showing media agency that entails resisting and deviating from customary ways of thinking and acting (lipponen, 2007, p. 57): interviewer: have you ever felt that you would like to learn [how to use the internet]? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 158 r1: well, no. they [family members] told me that they will bring it [ipad] to me, but i said don’t bring it to me; i will manage without. (female, 85 years, interview 2) r2: it’s not my thing. i don’t want to stare at the screen. (female, 69 years, interview 2) r3: and then we have that villager [name omitted], for instance, she stills travels to the city to pay her bills at the bank. (female, 78 years, interview 1) discussion in this study, we used the theory of modalities of agency (jyrkämä, 2008) to explore the self-reported digital competences (ferrari, 2013; see also lipponen, 2007) of 16 older finnish people, aged 62 to 86 years, who live in three remote rural villages in finnish lapland. we selected two modalities of agency—that is, knowing how to and having to—through which we examined our data. we sought answers to the following questions: how do the respondents assess their digital competences and the need to enhance them? do the respondents report feeling social or societal pressure to use the internet? if so, how does this pressure manifest itself? the analysis of the data indicated, first of all, that the participants in our study were a very diverse group and that there are differences in terms of their selfreported internet use and digital competences. villagers assess the need to use ict-based solutions from their own personal viewpoints. their everyday lives were founded on different kinds of habits and life history. hence, the roles of digital competences were mainly small in their everyday lives, even if they knew in theory the advantages of using ict. however, if villagers had a personal need to use ict, they were keen and willing to develop their competences. this points out to the need to provide specifically designed needbased training and support for elderly people (see also gonzález, fanjul, & cabezuelo, 2015). according to the data, it is clear that we need to view digital competences from a time perspective by considering the life course of the respondent (see also emirbayer & mische, 1998) and an aspect of time that we termed “village time”—that is, a timeline for actions at the level of the village, such as annual or other periodically recurring social events. based on our results, we also argue that digital competences are very much the distributed competences of elderly dyads (couples living together), families with three generations and informal networks of villagers and should not, therefore, be assessed only as an individual characteristic. the meanings of digital competences in the respondents’ everyday lives in the village did not always encounter the present-day understanding regarding the crucial role of digital competences in contemporary society (e.g. european commission, 2010). the meanings assigned to internet use and digital competences were often subordinate to other, more meaningful previous, present or future activities and competences (see also hakkarainen, 2012; hakkarainen & hyvönen, 2010; kilpeläinen 2014; talsi, 2014). in other words, the villagers were assessing and mapping these meanings through their own everyday life events, as well as the needs and communities to which they belonged (see also lipponen, 2007). looking from the perspective of modalities of agency, the data indicate that digital competences are related to the dynamic interplay of the modalities of agency (jyrkämä, 2008); of these, we looked closely at the modalities of knowing how to and having to. to gain a deeper understanding of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 159 interaction between the various modalities, our next step in this research is to analyse the present research data through all the modalities of agency. references abad, l. 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(2007). teaching critical media literacy in adult and higher education: an action research study. aerc conference proceedings. retrieved from http://www.adulterc.org/applications/classifiedlistingsmanager/inc_c lassifiedlistingsmanager.asp?itemid=1160&categoryid=147 wagner, n., hassanein, k., & head, m. (2010). computer use by older adults: a multi-disciplinary review. computers in human behavior, 26(5), 870–882. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/older.pdf http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/media-literacy/older.pdf http://www.stat.fi/til/sutivi/2014/sutivi_2014_2014-11-06_tau_008_fi.html http://www.stat.fi/til/sutivi/2014/sutivi_2014_2014-11-06_tau_008_fi.html http://www.adulterc.org/applications/classifiedlistingsmanager/inc_classifiedlistingsmanager.asp?itemid=1160&categoryid=147 päivi rasi arja kilpeläinen abstract introduction digital competences of older people modalities of agency as a theoretical approach research questions, data and analysis results digital competences from a time perspective diverse individual and distributed digital competences social or societal pressure to use the internet discussion references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 challenges with social software for collaboration: two case studies from teacher training teemu valtonen teemu.valtonen@uef.fi (corresponding author) sari havu-nuutinen sari.havu-nuutinen@uef.fi patrick dillon patrick.dillon@uef.fi sini kontkanen sini.kontkanen@uef.fi mikko vesisenaho mikko.vesisenaho@uef.fi susanna pöntinen susanna.pontinen@uef.fi university of eastern finland faculty of philosophy www.uef.fi/toty abstract this paper provides an insight into challenges with collaborative learning using social software. it reports two case studies conducted in a teacher training department in a finnish university. although the case studies were concerned with providing teacher students with inspiring and motivating experiences of using ict in pedagogically meaningful ways, the research design was set up so that challenges could be identified and investigated. results reveal several factors that are related to challenges of learning collaboratively with social software. the main challenge concerns students’ understanding of what it means to learn collaboratively. it would seem that the added value of interaction and collaboration is poorly recognised. furthermore, implications for teacher training are discussed. keywords: collaborative learning, social software, teacher training, teacher students, pre-service teachers 1. introduction the role of the information and communication technologies (ict) is now central to the finnish educational system. ict has a presence in national educational policies and strategies and in curricula from kindergarten to higher education (finnish national board of education, 2003; ministry of education and culture, 2010). ict is also topical because of different views about whether or not it is meaningful to call today’s students ‘digital natives’ and the ‘net generation’ on account of the skills they are assumed to possess (prensky, 2001; tapscott, 2008). on the one hand it is argued that net generation students are ready and willing to adopt discovery-based and collaborative learning methods with ict (tapscott, 2008; philip, 2007). on the other hand it is argued that such claims are based on everyday observations mailto:teemu.valtonen@uef.fi mailto:sari.havu-nuutinen@uef.fi mailto:patrick.dillon@uef.fi mailto:sini.kontkanen@uef.fi mailto:mikko.vesisenaho@uef.fi mailto:susanna.pontinen@uef.fi http://www.uef.fi/toty seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 19 instead of rigorous research (bennet et al., 2008) and that the types of software that students actively use are rather limited (valtonen et al., 2010). dabbagh and kitsantas (2012) claim that ict is used for the purposes of entertainment rather than for learning. these matters are especially interesting in the context of the initial training of teachers (hereinafter ‘teacher students’ or ‘students’). today’s teacher students can be seen as digital natives by their age i.e. most of them were born after 1980 (c.f. lei 2009). according to sadaf et al. (2012), these teacher students are skilled users of ict and interested in it, especially web 2.0, but mainly for meeting their personal needs. the challenge is to integrate these technologies into their future work as teachers. lei (2009) suggests that teacher students might be considered as digital-native students, but they are not yet digital native teacher students, as they lack skills in using ict for different pedagogical purposes. the challenge of teacher students using ict in pedagogically meaningful ways is addressed in this paper. the assumptions concerning digital native students’ preferred ways of learning can be related to studies focusing on students conceptions of learning. marton et al. (1993) described six different conceptions of learning varying from those that defined learning as increasing information where the student’s role is passive, mainly memorising, to those that see learning as student-centred, where the student’s role is active and aimed at a better understanding of the world. tynjälä (1997) found a similar range of conceptions of the learning process held by students: at one extreme learning was seen as a process directed from the outside while at the other an interactive and creative process regulated from within. the assumptions about net generation students preferred ways of learning coalesce with the student-centred, active and creative conceptions. the use of ict for teaching and learning is typically equated with collaborative learning practices. koschmann’s (1996) review of paradigms of ict in education culminates with computer-supported collaborative learning (cscl). according to koschmann (1996) the intellectual foundation of the cscl paradigm is based on the perspectives of social constructivism, sociocultural theories and theories of situated cognition. dillenbourg (1999) suggests that collaborative learning is a ‘situation in which particular forms of interaction among people are expected to occur, which would trigger learning mechanisms’. roschelle and teasley (1995) refer to collaborative learning as a process in which students negotiate and share meanings relevant to a problemsolving task. kreijns et al. (2003) outlines characteristics of collaborative learning that stress the active learning of students working in small groups, reflecting their own assumptions and thoughts while sharing their expertise, with the teacher supporting learning as a facilitator rather than a ‘sage on the stage’. collaborative learning emphasises the importance of students’ awareness of their prior learning and the way they and others structure knowledge if they are to use the collective knowledge as a resource for further discussion and learning. in this way students are confronted with conflicting ideas and meanings and have to come up with ways to resolve the conflicts. ict in education has moved on since the widespread adoption of the cscl paradigm. a recent development has been the use of social software for teaching and learning. there are hundreds of different social software available and according to boyd (2007) similar types are actively used around the world. bower et al. (2010) contends that we are still struggling to design learning experiences that make good use of social software although different models have been suggested (see vartainen et al., 2012.). according to ferdig (2006) the features of social software provide many possibilities for supporting students’ collaborative learning. a common feature of social software is their emphasis on the active role of users and this has to be translated into the working practices of students and teachers. instead of content prepared in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 20 advance, social software provides environments and tools to produce, edit, comment on and publish content in different formats, and the means to support the interactive processes involved in all these activities. (alexander, 2006; sinclair, 2007) even though both the processes of collaborative learning and the various ways it can be supported through ict have been well researched, implementing the mechanisms remains challenging. according to vuopala and järvelä (2012) passive students, the reluctance of teachers to take account of different educational backgrounds, setting the wrong type of tasks, and lack of time and motivation are among the factors that make collaboration difficult. dewiyanti et al. (2007) suggest that the size of the group is also a factor affecting the success of collaboration. also, they refer to a study by kagan (1994) who suggests that students’ negative ideas about learning collaboratively and their earlier experiences may inhibit participation. this paper sheds light on some of the challenges of collaborative learning with social software based on two case studies conducted within a teacher training department in a finnish university. the case studies are part of an on-going project aimed at developing student teachers’ skills in using ict for teaching and learning. part of this project is to provide them with inspiring and motivating experiences of how to use ict in pedagogically meaningful ways during their teacher education at the university and these elements of the case studies have been reported earlier (c.f. valtonen et al., 2011a; valtonen et al., 2011b). however, although the case studies were concerned with positive aspects of the use of ict, the research design was set up in such a way that that challenges could be identified in students’ use of social software for collaborative learning. in this paper we re-visit the two case studies and reflect on the hitherto unreported challenges. the research questions are: (i) what factors had negative effects on collaboration with ict; and (ii) what factors caused students to have negative experiences of learning with shared lecture notes. the first case study focused on an investigation where students were provided with the possibility of writing lecture notes collaboratively using a shared micro-blog space. the second case study involved the development of collaborative learning spaces using blogs and facebook during an ict course. compared to the characterisations of collaborative learning provided by kreijns et al. (2003) these cases do not present traditional collaborative learning situations with students’ working in small groups on specified problem solving exercises (sarmiento & stahl, 2008). the aim in both studies was rather to give them the chance to interact and collaborate in learning situations, literally to ‘see what happened’ when they were given the technological resources for collaboration. in the accounts of the case studies that follow, theoretical framing and contextual details are given for the initial aims of the studies, that is, for the free-format use of ict for collaboration in different situations. 2. case 1: building shared lecture notes with micro-blog 2.1. theoretical background in the traditional lecturing model, where students’ make their own notes, there is limited scope for collaborative learning. traditionally, teaching by lecturing is seen as a one-way, teacher-centred process of instruction where the student’s role is to receive information (phillips, 2005). murphy and sharma (2010) have outlined several ways to develop student participation in lecture teaching including small group conversations, clinical cases, debates etc. these seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 21 approaches foreground student’s ideas and opinions which may then be used as a source for further learning and discussion (murphy & sharma, 2010). in our case study we set up a situation where students were provided with the chance to write lecture notes collaboratively using a shared micro-blog space. for lecture notes, piolat et al. (2005) use the metaphor of ‘external memory’ built on students’ selection of information, thinking and comprehending. this metaphor provides insight into the ways students have interpreted the lectures, although the unique memories typically remain primarily the property of the individual student. kiewra (1989) described two functions for note taking: first, the storing function where the lecturers’ presentation is ‘stored’ in a way that can be used at a later date to facilitate recovery of lecture content; second, ‘encoding’ where students build connections between content from the lecture and their own ideas and experiences. peper and mayer (1986) call the second function the ‘generative’ mechanism of the note taking, a process that activates students’ cognitive processes, building connections between lecture content and their earlier experiences and knowledge structures. students’ notes containing unique ideas, i.e. encoded and generative interpretations, provide potential resources for further collaborative learning. these notes contain ideas that provide materials for other students as well as insights for lecturers about how students understand and interpret the content of the lecture. this investigation was designed to exploit these notes in order to bring elements of collaborative learning to the lectures. 2.2. research context and analysis the first case study was part of a teacher education course in which there was traditional lecture teaching and it was conducted with a group of 34 teacher students who could be categorised as net generation by their age. there was a total of 12 hours of lectures. the content focused on science education in the early years. students were provided with mini laptop computers and a microblog called qaiku (www.qaiku.com) to support their collaboration during lectures. qaiku allows writing messages with a maximum of 140 characters or to comment on messages without any length restriction. qaiku allows ‘channels’ to be built, i.e. shared areas for messages concerning some specific topic. currently qaiku is no longer available online, but other micro-blogs offer similar facilities. for example, twitter (www.twitter.com) could be used to conduct similar investigations. each student had a mini laptop computer with access to the wireless network. qaiku micro-blog contained a ‘channel’ for students’ lecture notes. at the beginning of lectures there was a short introductory session focusing on the use of the qaiku micro-blog and the aims of the investigation. students were encouraged to write their notes online and to read and comment on each other’s notes. they were also allowed to write notes using pen and paper. in parallel with the formal face-to-face lecture, students wrote their notes to the shared ‘channel’ and commented on each other’s notes, thus having access to other students’ ‘encoded’ (c.f. kiewra, 1989) and ‘generative’ (c.f. peper & mayer, 1986) ideas. data consisted of: (i) the lecture notes produced by students in the qaiku micro-blog; (ii) interviews with students about their experiences of the investigation as a whole. notes were analysed qualitatively using content analysis (roth, 2005) with atlas.ti software. notes were coded based on the way they related to lecture content and the extent to which they showed collaboration between students. thematic interviews were conducted with nine students (seven women and two men). the themes related to students’ overall experiences, how they used notes, how they felt about the ict, and how the http://www.qaiku.com/ http://www.twitter.com/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 22 notes affected collaboration during the lecture. the students were selected for the interview based on their note-writing activity: three from the most active group, three from a ‘middle’ activity group and three from the least active group. interviews were transcribed and analysed with atlas.ti software. the transcripts were analysed using open coding (gibbs, 2007). 2.3. results 2.3.1. contents of the notes altogether 526 notes were produced and 367 notes were analysed, i.e. over one hundred notes were removed because the content was almost identical to other notes. the results show that participation for writing the notes was uneven. students could be divided into three groups according to their level of participation, i.e. how actively they wrote notes online. students in the first group (n=15) did not use the option for writing notes online or used it very little, the number of notes varied between 0 and 10 per student. students in the second group (n=14) wrote more notes, the number varied between 11 and 35 per student. students in the third group (n=4) wrote most of the notes, the number varied between 45 and 73 per students. this unevenness in participation is indicative of challenges concerning motivation and understanding. three categories could be drawn from an analysis of the lecture notes: 'notes picked up directly from lecturers’ presentation', 'lecturers presentation represented in students’ own words' and ‘developments from the lecturers’ presentation’ (table 1). the examples given are verbatim, i.e. without the english corrected. category examples n notes picked up directly from lecturers’ presentation notes made using same words examples provided by lecturer concept definitions 61 lecturers presentation represented in students’ own words notes made using their own words notes containing summaries of lecture content 161 developments from the lecturers’ presentation notes containing students own ideas and opinions notes containing topics other than lecture content notes containing students own conclusions 49 table 1: categorisation of students’ different kind of lecture notes notes picked up directly from lecturers’ presentation this category contained notes with direct citations, examples provided by lecturer and definitions of concepts in descriptions similar to those of the lecturer. evidence of students’ own creative thinking and ideas within these notes was minimal. examples: the definitive characteristic = how a crow differs from a raven. it’s important to use relevant scientific concepts. lecturers’ presentation reproduced in students’ own words seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 23 this category contained ideas presented by the lecturer but using students’ own words. in these notes students connected and shortened parts of the lecturers’ presentation. the notes were typically declaratory, partly direct copies from the presentation and with minimal evidence of students’ own thinking and ideas. examples: learning books guide too much of the teacher’s action. the learning books are not checked in advance and thus teachers’ need to use books based on their pedagogical competence. the teacher is responsible for matching learning contents with children’s developmental skills. developments from the lecturers’ presentation notes in this category show students’ thinking beyond the realms of the presentation but they were few in number. students made connections between ideas and the lecture content, drew conclusions, and applied lecture content to different contexts. a glance at these notes serves to show that students had some concrete ideas about how to apply new knowledge. these notes also contained questions and problematic issues. examples: the holistic approach in science education will be achieved by integration. based on their previous experiences, the pupils have very varied concepts e.g. about the earth -> take account in teaching! the following are examples of the collaborative development of the ideas: note: how the children react to science education? [comment: the children see science learning interesting especially when they learn about animals or when they go on excursions]. note: the children’s nature experiences form often out of school and with grandparents [comment: i agree!] 2.3.2. students’ experiences as can be seen in table 1 the use of shared notes did not give rise to a high level of collaborative learning. this section outlines factors related to the results presented in table 1 based on student interviews, how students experienced the learning with shared lecture notes. the first challenge was the deficiencies of the qaiku micro-blog. the students said that the qaiku environment was not suitable for their ways of writing notes. some students suggested that they usually make notes in more creative ways, using diagrams, flow-charts, concept maps, etc; whereas the qaiku environment only allowed notes in text form. another problem with qaiku was that the list of notes did not update automatically. students had to update the page manually or the page updated when they posted new notes. it was agreed that this impeded greater collaborative interaction online. i use pen and paper to make notes and my notes resemble more like a treasure map or a mind map, so that there can be in my own ideas, lines and arrows… a sort of code language that only i can understand. students wrote down same things because you didn’t see what other students had written … if the software would have provided a real time seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 24 discussion, it would probably have launched more communication, so that one student wrote one note and others continue with it. interview responses suggest that some students did not participate in writing the notes to the shared environment, rather they used it for their individual learning needs; this inhibited collaboration. these students used the shared notes as a way of revising their own notes and to complete their notes in case they missed some lectures. for these students the purpose of note taking remained as it was in traditional courses, the difference was that the notes were written online instead of in a notebook. some students had shared their own experiences or opinions instead of just the lecturers’ speech … and of course these had to be written down to my notebook so that i can find them later. in case that i missed something, i could check it online and write it down for myself. but eventually i felt that when i wrote notes online i made the notes so that they were meant for me, for myself…even though it was a shared environment, i think that people used it for themselves, that everyone made the notes for themselves without thinking about the collaborative aspect. the comments of the students interviewed generally point to a view of learning as a process of transmitting information rather than collaboration and shared creative thinking. this led to a situation where there were several similar notes based on the original lecture content. i felt it was difficult, the qaiku was slow every now and then, so how could i write as fast as needed, because i write quite conscientiously, almost from word to word what the lecturer says. basically it was like as in a basic lecture situation, so that you try to take as much you can from the lecturers speech as it was. it was so that i copied directly: what the lecturer said i wrote and that was it. 3. case 2: supporting collaboration with blogs and facebook 3.1. theoretical background the second investigation was aimed at developing and testing a collaborative learning space using blogs (blogger), rss-feed and facebook to explore the extent to which students familiarised themselves with the ideas and interpretations of their peers (dillenbourg, 1999). these situations may set up cognitive conflicts, when an individual’s interpretation and understanding of the content in question differs from that of his or her peers. the individual concerned then has to find ways of resolving this conflict. social software provides several possibilities for supporting interaction between students, for example facebook provides ways to build environments for collaboration through discussion and social chats. according to valtonen et al. (2010) most net generation students use facebook on a daily basis. moreover, kabilan et al. (2010) claims that students have positive opinions about using facebook for learning. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 25 3.2. research context and analysis the second investigation was part of teacher education courses focusing on the use of ict for teaching and learning. altogether 147 first-year students participated in the course and out of these 50 volunteered to participate in the investigation. the learning environment used in the experiment consisted of students’ personal blogs. each student had their own blog where they made their assignments and reflected on their learning in a ‘learning diary’. the blogs were linked together using rss-feeds. in addition, a facebook profile was made, which all the participants ‘recognised’ as their ‘friend’. in order to support collaboration, all the blogs where linked to the facebook profile using the rss craffiti application. every time a student wrote a new entry to his or her blog it was simultaneously submitted to the blogs of peers and their personal facebook profiles. at the beginning of the investigation the students were informed about its aims and were encouraged to take advantage of the possibility to read the blogs of their peers. a total of 118 feeds were submitted to facebook. each new entry to facebook consisted of the first 50 to 70 words of the blog entry, which is equal to 5 to 7 lines of text, and a link to the actual blog. research data from this investigation consisted of students’ reflections on the investigation. students were asked to write about: (i) whether the use of facebook changed their ways of learning, and if so, how; (ii) whether the use of facebook affected the extent to which they read each other’s ideas; (iii) the extent to which they found other students’ texts useful for learning; and (iv) how they felt about using facebook for learning. the length of responses varied from half to one page of text. the qualitative data was analysed using an open coding approach (gibbs, 2007) to describe factors affecting students’ negative experiences. data was first read through several times in order to gain an overall view of the content. then the data was coded according to similarities of responses. codes were combined into three larger categories described in the results section below. supplementary data was collected through an online questionnaire containing statements concerning students’ attitudes towards using facebook for learning and the effects that experience had on their interaction, e.g. reading each other’s blog entries (see table 2). a five point scale was used with ‘1’ indicating strong disagreement and ‘5’ strong agreement. separate statements were consolidated using principal component analysis with varimax rotation i.e. condensing original variables into a few subscales. (afifi & clark, 1996; metsämuuronen, 2006). as a result, two subscales ‘attitude’ and ‘effect’ scaled from 1 to 5 were drawn up (table 2). coefficients of reliability for both subscales were satisfactory; cronbach’s alpha values were over .70 in each new variable (metsämuuronen, 2006). in order to highlight differences between students’ attitudes and experiences concerning the ‘effect’ of the investigation, the students were divided into three groups based on the percentiles (an average group of 50% and upper and lower percentiles of 25%). 3.3. results the mean values of subscales ‘attitude’ and ‘effect’ were close to 3 on the 1-5 scales (table 2). only one statement ‘course contents on my facebook page did not bother me’ had a higher mean value of 3.8 indicating that students took to the content quite well related to university studies in their personal facebook profile. taken as a whole, these results indicate that students’ reactions to the investigation were neutral. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 26 table 2. attitudes and effects (1= strong disagreement and 5= strong agreement) when we look more closely at mean values based on percentiles, we note differences between students’ attitudes and experiences concerning the effects of the investigation (table 3). half of the respondents had neutral experiences of the investigation: the mean values from both sub-scales were close to 3 on the 1-5 scale. the third percentile had positive experiences, both mean values were 4.0. from the viewpoint of the focus of this paper, which is on challenges, the interesting percentile is the first one which has the most negative experiences. the mean value of the ‘attitude’ sub-scale was 2.3 indicating rather negative attitudes toward the investigation. also, the mean value of the sub-scale ‘effect’ was only 1.7 indicating that for these students the use of facebook did not have any effect on how much they familiarised themselves with other students’ postings. neither did they experience any strong motivational effects. percentiles attitude: mean 3.2 effect: mean 2.9 25-negative 2.3 1.7 50-neutral 3.0 3.3 75-positive 4.0 4.0 table 3. differences between students the data on students’ reflections provides an insight into the factors related to the negative attitudes and effects of the investigation. negative experiences drew attention to matters concerning students’ lack of knowledge about the mechanisms of collaborative learning. these students suggested that they did not understand the reason why they should read each other’s blog entries and thus they preferred to do their work and tasks without the collaboration or influence of their peers. use of facebook would probably have helped me to read other students blogs, but i did not do that. i did not find it important or even meaningful because i just wanted to get my own assignments done. i did the assignments without reading what other students had done, that was enough for me. i did not read any feeds related to the course in the facebook. to be honest, i did not understand the reason why i should have read them, especially i did not understand what good would it would be for me, what is the additional value… other students blog entries would have provided hints and ideas for my own studying but i decided that it is better if i write to my blog only my own opinions and experiences. if i rely too much on the work of my peers attitude: mean 3.2 (alpha value .84) effect: mean 2.9 (alpha value .82) having my course content on my facebook page did not bother me (mean: 3.8) use of facebook increased my awareness of the work done by my peers (mean:3.1) i will use facebook as part of my studies also in future (mean: 2.9) facebook helped me familiarise myself with other students’ work (mean:2.8) facebook is well suited for higher education learning (mean:2.8) having access to other students’ work on my facebook page increased my motive for the studies (mean: 2.8) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 27 i don’t have to think of the topics from my own perspective and the work will remain distant. responses also suggest that some students deliberately tried to avoid reading each other’s postings, thereby suggesting that the posting of their peers may have had a negative effect on their own thinking and learning. i specifically tried to avoid reading other students blog entries when i was studying because i did not want to use others’ ideas instead i wanted to think on my own. actually i read other students texts only few times because i didn’t want any influences for my own assignments. the third reason for negative experiences was that some students did not want to use facebook as an environment for learning, seeing it rather as an environment for leisure and fun. some students said that several messages in their facebook profile became intrusive i.e. the first messages were interesting but after a while these postings become annoying. i think that facebook is for leisure, so using facebook for learning is not my thing. studying and leisure time need to be kept separated for my own well-being. at the beginning i every now and then read the texts of the feeds but after a while the feeds become annoying. they were frustrating when they filled the whole first page of facebook so i turned the rss of. 4. conclusion and implications of both cases this paper raises challenges related to the use of social software for collaborative learning. when designing the investigations reported in the paper, the assumption was that today’s students i.e. net generation or digital natives (c.f. tapscott, 2008; prensky, 2011) would understand the value of using ict for learning and especially take advantage of it for collaboration. the software used was already familiar to them, or could be readily learnt, suggesting that level of ict skills ought not have been an impediment. despite this, the results suggest there were challenges especially with initiating the processes of collaborative learning. the first investigation studied a way of building shared lecture notes using the qaiku online-environment. it was intended that students were to use the opportunity to familiarise themselves with some of their peers’ ideas, to comment on them and further develop them. however, the notes mainly reproduced parts of the lecturer’s presentation and participation within the note writing process was uneven in the group itself. most students wrote notes to collect the lecturer’s ideas and build their own synthesis of them. there were few instances where students mentioned their own ideas or questioned the topics dealt with during the lecture. there was minimal comment and development of other students’ notes and ideas. this pattern of use is in keeping with the ‘information storage’ function described by kiewra (1989) in which there is little evidence of the ‘encoding’ function. the results also suggest that for some students learning collaboratively using blogs and facebook was not meaningful. these students did not find these methods useful and they did not exploit the possibility to read each other’s postings. on the whole, it appears that they did not see any added value in interaction and collaboration in learning, rather they wanted to do their seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 28 assignment alone without being disturbed. these findings conflict with those of kabilan et al. (2010), who argued that students have positive opinions about using facebook for learning. for some students facebook has the status of an environment for leisure and fun which they do not want to ‘spoil’ with learning assignments. the findings reported in this paper are in some respects similar to earlier studies concerning factors that support or hinder collaborative learning. according to vuopala and järvelä (2012), challenging factors are the passive role of the students and factors related to the ict used. both factors are evident in the first case study. some students did not participate at all in writing the notes, thus reducing the potential pool of resources for collaboration. moreover, the content was similar in several notes thereby suggesting that the software used was not ideal for the purpose i.e. students did not see other comments automatically as would have been the case in, for example in chat software. with chat-like software this problem could probably be avoided, providing students with direct access to the notes of their peers. vuopala and järvelä (2012) suggest that students’ motivation is an important factor affecting the success of collaboration, and motivation may be connected with students’ ideas about and earlier experiences of learning collaboratively (see dewiyanti et al., 2007). the results of the first case study suggest that some of the students saw learning as information transmission. instead of launching collaborative practices these students saw the lecture as a one-way process based on teachercentred and instructive learning activities, as noted by phillips (2005). when comparing these results with earlier studies describing students’ conceptions of learning (marton et al., 1993) and their conceptions of the learning process (tynjälä, 1997), we can see some similarities with learning as the transmission of information and learning as a process directed from the outside. also, the experiences from the second investigation indicate that for some students the learning process is not something done with peers, rather it is a process to be conducted alone. respondents suggested that they did not see any reason for reading each other’s blog entries, or developing the ideas of their peers. it seems that they were not familiar with arguments about the benefits of learning collaboratively. this suggests that for these students collaborative practices with ict and social software do not offer added value for their learning. learning to use different ict and software for supporting collaboration may appear only as meaningless extra work for these students. the main reason for the challenges with collaboration brought up in this study seems to be the lack of knowledge about mechanisms and benefits of collaborative learning. at the beginning of both investigations the reasons for emphasising collaboration were discussed and students were encouraged to participate, to share their ideas and comment on and further develop the ideas of their peers. still, it seems that the mechanisms of collaborative learning suggested by dillenbourg (1999) need to be outlined more clearly and given greater weight. collaboration is important in teacher training if students are to make use of it in support of learning when they become practicing teachers. providing social software is not enough, rather it is necessary to provide teachers in training with inspiring and motivating authentic experiences of collaborative learning with social software which they can adapt and apply professionally. this suggests including introductory activities illustrating the benefits of interaction and collaboration such as coordinated production of talk and action, developing a common understanding, adding structure to content (sarmiento & stahl, 2008) and of exploring the possibilities of improvisation. such activities might allow students to develop from digitalnative students to digital native teacher students and later to digital native teachers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 29 references afifi, a., & clark, v. 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(2011b). linking school’s learning environment to students’ personal online environments: students’ experiences. in h. ruokamo (eds.), proceedings of the 4th international network-based education 2011 conference, the social media in the middle of nowhere (pp. 146-153). university of lapland publications in education 25. vartiainen, h., liljeström, a., & enkenberg, j. (2012). design-oriented pedagogy for technology-enhanced learning to cross over the borders between formal and http://www.minedu.fi/opm/koulutus/liitteet/tietoyhteiskuntakehittaminen.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 31 informal environments. journal of universal computer science, 18 (15), 20972119. vuopala, e., & järvelä, s. (2012). yhteisöllistä oppimista edistävät ja vaikeuttavat tekijät – opiskelijoiden kokemuksia verkkokurssilta [factors supporting and hindering collaborative learning – students’ experiences from an online course. kasvatus, 4, 406-422. the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories. issn: 1504-4831 vol 17 no 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar3761 ©2021 (tor jørgen schjelde and ingrid nilsen lie). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories. tor jørgen schjelde school of business and economics in harstad uit the arctic university of norway email: tor.j.schjelde@uit.no ingrid nilsen lie department of child welfare and social work uit the arctic university of norway email: ingrid.n.lie@uit.no abstract researchers of digital storytelling emphasize emotions as an important aspect of learning in the production and presentation of digital stories. the aim of this study is to explore the positive and negative emotions involved in the process of making digital stories and presenting them. as well as students’ perceptions of how this affects their motivation and learning. one hundred and thirty-two students responded to an adapted version of the achievement emotions questionnaire, which collects data on the emotions present in a learning context. in addition, we interviewed ten students to gather in depth data about their feelings, motivation and learning. we found that both positive and negative emotions were involved when the students created and presented their digital stories. the students felt that their emotions influenced their motivation and learning. drawing on theories of learning and motivation, we argue that negative activating emotions can aid learning, and positive deactive emotions can have a negative impact on learning. emotions can aid the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 learning in higher education and digital storytelling is an important contribution in this regard. keywords: digital storytelling, learning, emotion, motivation why considering students feelings? the emotions of child welfare students in encounters with children, adolescents and families during practice are important for their learning and professional development. we wish to examine how these emotions are experienced and applied when students produce digital stories from their practice, and what emotions they experience following their learning process. does the sports commentator’s question: “how do you feel now?” have any relevance to student learning? this will be explored in the present article, but let us first introduce the context of the study, child welfare education and training. child welfare programmes in norway include one or more practice periods. following their practice, students have various learning activities based on their practice. child welfare students on the harstad campus of uit the arctic university of norway are required to produce digital stories and present them on film following their two practice periods. the purpose of our study is to gain insight into the importance of students’ emotions in the learning process of producing digital stories and presenting them on film. students experience practice differently, and will also experience different emotional reactions. this emotional aspect of practice is difficult to capture in an academic text, but we assume that it can be expressed more clearly in a digital story. the background to our study is our desire to promote research-based teaching in the field of digital storytelling. emotions are an important aspect of digital storytelling and our research is a contribution to the field. we will therefore explore the following research questions: 1. what positive and negative emotions are involved in the process of producing and presenting digital stories? 2. how do students find that these emotions influence their motivation and learning? background to the study digital stories are short, personal stories of 3-5 minutes in length that convey experienced events. the purpose is to provide the storyteller and listener with new insights (lambert, 2010, 2013). digital stories very often use still pictures more than video. the storyteller’s voice, sounds and music accompany the pictures. this is done to emphasize the message of the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 the story. there are many possible themes, such as families, identity, relationships, oppression and injustice (haug, jamissen, & ohlmann, 2012; lambert, 2010, 2013). digital storytelling is used as a learning tool in higher education to encourage students to reflect on different topics (sandars & murray, 2011; stacey & hardy, 2011). anderson (2017) and hardy (2017) emphasize that reflection is an important part of learning through digital storytelling. nilsen lie and schjelde (2019) show that students learn through academic reflection on their own and others’ practices when they create and share their stories. in addition to reflection, emotions have been highlighted as a key aspect of digital storytelling, because students feel that they are emotionally engaged in the learning process. through sharing their own stories, gaining insight into different topics, and being emotionally able to relate to other students’ stories (price, strodtman, brough, lonn, & luo, 2015; stacey & hardy, 2011). digital stories differentiate from other types of expressions because the stories allows a connection with one`s feelings, makes students internalize narratives and engages them in learning (kocaman-karoglu, 2016). students also expressed that digital stories supports practice learning, and enhances motivation because the work is personal, and making the stories inspires creativity (kocamankaroglu, 2016). ribeiro, moreira, and da silva (2016) argues on how studentes reflection and display of emotion makes the learning process richer and deepens thinking. there is also evidence showing that the group work in digital stories has fostered more positive emotional experiences, and the researchers explain this because students support each other, and this causes less anxiety (liu, huang, & xu, 2018). digital storytelling at our university following their practice, students spend 3-4 days in a workshop, producing and presenting their stories. all students are asked to try to link theory and ethics to their story, and first year students create a story out of an event that has affected them during their practice. in the second year, students create a story that deals with their professional role as a child welfare officer. the difference between the firstand second-year stories is based on the content and progression of the curriculum. creation of the digital stories takes place in groups. this group work is called a “story circle” and represents a learning process in which students work to discover and develop their stories (lambert, 2010). the goal of the story circle is to encourage joint reflection to provide individual students with insight into their stories and help in developing them. this is done through feedback provided by the other students in the group (haug & jamissen, 2015). our story circle methodology is based on the seven steps by joe lambert the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 (2013). in our story circle it has involved students freely sharing their ideas and receiving feedback from the other students. they then write down their story and return to the story circle for another round of feedback. their teacher is present to provide advice and guidance. students find pictures and music that fit the story and record the story in a digital medium. the order of pictures, music and the story itself is planned by using a storyboard or storyline. a storyline involves creating a timeline where the sequence of images, sound and other effects is planned. students work independently on the storyline. finally, all the elements are combined into a digital story, using the movie maker or imovie filmmaking tools. the stories are then shown to the other members of the group, who provide mutual feedback. theoretical framework: emotions as indicators of learning relationships between emotions and learning performance have received little attention (govaerts & grégoire, 2008; pekrun , goetz , titz , & perry 2002; trigwell, ellis, & han, 2012). in recent years, research has foucused on how emotions play a role in students’ learning and development (schjelde, 2015). the new concept of “academic emotions” has been developed to describe emotions related to learning and performance situations pekrun et al. (2002) distinguish between four groups of emotions that are important for learning performance. these are: 1. positive activating emotions, such as enjoyment of learning, hope of success and pride. 2. positive deactivating emotions, such as relief or pleasant relaxation following success. 3. negative activating emotions, such as anger, anxiety and shame. 4. negative deactivating emotions, such as boredom and hopelessness. pekrun et al. (2002) find a correlation between positive activating emotions and motivation, effort, learning strategies that emphasize elaboration, and self-regulation. they assume that emotions and achievement mutually influence each other (pekrun, goetz, & perry 2014). if students initially show positive activating emotions, this will have a positive effect on their performance. the learning environment in the form of enthusiastic teachers, work requirements that students can meet on their own (autonomy), a goal structure that provides predictability, feedback and giving students a sense of belonging and a feeling of being supported can promote positive activating emotions. here, there is also theoretical support in deci and ryan’s theory of self-determination (ryan & deci, 2012; ryan, deci, fowler, seligman, & csikszentmihalyi, 2000), which shows that people need to feel belonging, autonomy, and competence. also, relevant here is bandura’s the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 theory of self-efficacy belief, which deals with faith in one’s ability to organize or implement the necessary actions to learn at a particular level (bandura, 1997). schunk, meece and pintrich (2014) state that self-efficacy belief is important for students to experience control and self-determination. further, self-efficacy belief has been shown to predict learning performance. our self-efficacy belief is influenced by our experience of similar tasks in the past. if students have high self-efficacy belief, they will be more likely to make extra efforts when facing challenges, and less likely to give up, provided that they have the necessary skills (bandura, 1997). self-efficacy belief is linked to feelings of expectation about the outcome of a learning activity. according to bandura (1986), students with high self-efficacy belief will usually also have high expectations of succeeding in a task. this leads to positive emotions such as hope of success and joy of learning, and the student will then feel highly motivated. negative deactivating emotions, such as boredom and hopelessness, are inversely related to intrinsic motivation, learning effort, self-regulation and concentration (reinhard pekrun, goetz, daniels, stupnisky, & perry, 2010), and therefore have a potential negative effect on student learning the other two categories are more complex. a positive deactivating emotion may lead to reduced learning effort in the following task. students may become over-confident and think that they do not have to make any effort this time. by contrast, negative activating emotions can motivate students to put in extra effort in the following classes, because they want to avoid a repeat of their negative feelings. negative activating emotions such as anxiety are a natural and normal response to uncertainty (nordhelle & sakhi, 2014). in unclear performance situations, where students get judged by others, it can lead to anxiety and insecurity. however, this process is necessary for learning to take place (moxnes, 1989). method in this section we present the methods we used to conduct and analyze our research. gerring (2007) points out that case studies provide a detailed exploration of a phenomenon and are used where case and context are difficult to distinguish. case studies are also suitable for mixed data collection methods, and where a particular example is being studied. drawing on gerring (2007), we have chosen to present a case because we have studied child welfare students in their learning context and have used different methods to explore our research questions in depth. child welfare students can also be considered an example. we chose to use a questionnaire for our data collection because quantitative method was suitable to explore the positive and negative emotions present among a larger section of the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 informants, during the process of producing digital stories and presenting them on film. in the first instance, a questionnaire would provide relevant data on a relatively large number of respondents to capture “the big picture” of the phenomenon. we also conducted interviews to elicit greater detail, and to elaborate on how the students felt that their emotions influenced their motivation and learning. this study was conducted among 132 firstand second-year students. two first-year cohorts (n=55) and three second-year cohorts (n=77) completed the questionnaire. in addition, ten students were interviewed, five from each year. students invited to interview were randomly selected by pulling students name randomly from student lists and asking them to participate in the interviews the questionnaire in order to collect data on emotions present in the learning context that may affect students’ learning performance, we translated parts of the achievement emotions questionnaire (r pekrun, goetz, & perry, 2005), which measures students’ academic emotions. we translated statements that cover positive activating emotions ( =0.69), negative deactivating emotions ( =0.55) and negative activating emotions ( =0.64). we did not translate statements related to positive deactivating emotions because these emotions are a product of learning activities, and affect future action. we had no data on the students’ future actions and therefore chose to exclude this area. in retrospect, we see that these emotions are relevant and should have been included. none of the areas in the questionnaire can be used as a common area, since internal reliability has a cronbach’s alpha ( ) below 0.7. we therefore chose to present frequency tables in the results section. the responses in the questionnaire were measured on a five-point likert scale, where 1 = completely disagree and 5 = completely agree with the statement. interviews a semi-structured interview guide was prepared as the starting point for the interviews. the questions were based on the various parts of the storytelling component of the programme, such as the story circle and the creation and presentation of the story. each student was asked about emotions, experiences, motivation and learning in relation to story circle, creation of and presentation of the digital story. the interview questions was not based on the questionnaire, but was designed to capture the students point of view in regards to the different parts of the process. we used open coding to analyze the interview data, creating codes to express key themes in the data. these themes were: preparation, expectations, motivation, experience with the tool, the group process, emotions in relation to production and presentation, learning and feedback. we then classified statements on the same topic into categories and examined the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 common features of the statements within each category (brinkmann & kvale, 2015). each category reflects a key theme of the project. brinkmann and kvale (2015) state that theories can add new insights to the analysis, as long as the researcher is sensitive to different findings and angles in the interview data. our final categories were as follows: expectations and self-efficacy, learning and the group process, and emotions. limitations of the study and ethical considerations the questionnaire was handed out after the students had presented their digital story. they were informed about the purpose of the study and told that participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw at any time. the interviews were conducted after the students had completed the entire storytelling component of their programme. one of the authors for this article helped to implement the storytelling component. this researcher developed the component and implemented it with the students. this may have influenced students’ responses both in the questionnaire and in the interviews. the other researcher was not involved in teaching and interaction with the students. against this background, both were involved in the distribution of questionnaires and the design of the interview guide to ensure open questions. the fact that a teacher researched and implemented a new educational intervention could be seen as a strength of the study (anderson & shattuck 2012). at the same time, the dichotomy between active participation and maintaining a distance may be challenging (reeves, 2011). a partnership between a teacher and a researcher has been argued to be important in ensuring validity (anderson & shattuck 2012). therefore, to minimize the impact on the results, both were actively involved in the analysis of the data and discussion of the findings. a further limitation of the study is that we chose to omit positive deactivating emotions because our experience suggested that these emotions were not central to digital storytelling. in retrospect, we see that this dimension should have been included, since students mentioned this emotion in the interviews. results we are now going to present the result of our research starting with the questionnaire responses. this section of the result gives us a general picture of the different emotion they experience when they produce and present their digital story. questionnaire responses when we asked the students how satisfied they were with the teaching, 88% expressed satisfaction. in the following presentation of the results, we have merged the responses “partly agree” and “completely agree” as “agree”, and “partly disagree” and “completely disagree” as “disagree”. the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 most students (65%) reported positive activating emotions in creating and presenting their stories, 25% was uncertain and 10% disagree on statment about positive activating emotions. most (75%) believed that they would succeed, were optimistic during the storytelling component (68%) and were proud of their contribution (65%). this is illustrated here: table 1: positive activating emotions in regard to negative deactivating emotions, the results show that few students (15%) reported negative deactivating emotions such as boredom during the classes. of those who experienced such emotions, most reported not being motivated for these classes. table 2: negative deactivating emotions the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 when it comes to negative activating emotions we get a more differentiated picture. 16 % of the student experienced irritation or anger in the teaching setting. few students (8%) experienced negative activating emotions about speaking up in the groups. a majority of students (60%) reported nervousness before and during the films, and a large proportion (47%) were afraid of not succeeding. table 3: negative activating emotions the students’ point of view from the interviews this section will present results from the interviews with the students in the categories: expectations and self-efficacy, learning and the group process, and emotions. the main categories are based on the theories of emotions, learning and motivation presented earlier in this article, and on the words of the students interviewed. in the first category of “expectations and self-efficacy”, the students reported having expected the classes to be fun, but had also been afraid of hearing their own voice. some also reported being anxious because they had no experience of digital storytelling. the vast majority of students mastered the digital tool, but a few had challenges with the music or the editing of images and sound. although a few experienced problems, they reported succeeding through trial and error. in the second category: “emotions”, most students described being embarrassed when the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 recording and hearing their own voice. most felt nervous before they showed their digital story, but they all thought it was a success. a few students were annoyed and frustrated while working on their story. they reported being annoyed at receiving too little feedback from other students or because they were struggling with the tool they needed to use for storytelling. all students felt pleased at having managed to create a story and they felt good about watching the others’ stories. in the third category: “learning and group process” category, the students pointed out that they had gained knowledge of creating digital stories, showing them to others and using movie maker/imovie. when students compared the learning outcomes of digital storytelling with practice assignments or group work based on problem-based learning, several of them felt that digital storytelling did not involve the same requirements for theory. they found it to be more experience-based. several students also mentioned having to reflect on the event they wanted to make a story about, which was a learning experience. the students also found that there was much to learn and reflect on from watching each other’s stories. only one student thought that digital storytelling had no learning value, perhaps apart from learning to use the tool. several of the students found that the group process was important for learning digital storytelling. however, there were examples of frustration when not all group members were equally motivated and involved in sharing and giving feedback on each other’s stories. the frustration was based on poor feedback from the unmotivated students in the group. the students mentioned that it was important that peer feedback was constructive and pointed out both the good points of the stories and those aspects that could be improved. analysis and discussion in the following we are going to present the analysis of the data and discuss our finds. starting with positive emotions. positive emotions and the learning process the students expressed positive activating emotions in the questionnaires, such as pride of their story, belief in success and optimism when working on digital stories. such emotions can have a positive influence on student learning. pekrun et al. (2002) state that positive activating emotions, such as the joy of learning, belief in success and pride, have been shown to have a positive effect on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, effort and learning performance. this may be what was expressed by the students’ experience in the interviews of mastering digital tools and learning through reflection when creating their own story and watching each other’s stories. one student explained: “i've learned a lot about myself and how it’s ok to challenge myself. you reflect more on what happened when you sit down and make a story like that. you don’t have to hold anything back, you actually learn from that as well. i’ve also learned how to use the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 digital tools.” the students’ statements and experiences of their own learning reveal their positive emotions when they worked on their own and others’ digital stories, and their feelings of having been motivated in preparing and presenting their stories. the following is one example of how they experienced emotions during the learning process in the interview material: “i couldn’t help smiling when i worked on my story. when the turning point came, i felt my feelings coming back linked to the experiences i’d had. the fact that he wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. and that he didn’t even want me to touch him. i felt all this when i was writing down all the feelings i’d had. i was completely at a loss in that situation. after the turning point, i felt the good feelings and i was happy. i thought, ‘wow, that’s great, i managed to build a relationship!’” the quote by this student is important to reflect on, based on the description of working on the narrative evokes emotions and memories in the student. this emotional aspect of practice is difficult to capture in an academic text, and as this quote shows the emotional side of practice is also powerful and important. students’ emotions related to practice will motivate them and inspire them to reflect, thus initiating and sustaining student learning. in line with kocaman-karoglu (2016) we also find that writing down the story allows a connection with one`s feelings and can be motivational because it is personal. the feelings in the memory and the process of writing down the personal reflection we think supports practice reflection. reflecting means linking actions, theories, experiences and ethical considerations (lauvås & handal, 2014). we might also suggest that reflecting should also include reflecting on the emotional side of the experience and actions and in line with ribeiro et al. (2016) that argues that the display of emotion makes the learning process richer, and deepens thinking. the students also reported in the questionnaires that they were optimistic and believed in their own success in digital storytelling. having faith in one’s own ability is referred to by bandura (1997) as self-efficacy belief. this means trusting one can do what is necessary to get a job done. self-efficacy belief is influenced by the experiences we have had with similar tasks in the past (bandura, 1997). if students have had positive experiences with the use of informating technology in learning, this can have a positive impact on their self-efficacy belief. in the interviews, the students stated that they had positive expectations and were looking forward to creating digital stories, and although some experienced challenges in how to add music to their movie or editing the movie in movie maker, they still mastered the tool by trial and error. if students have high self-efficacy belief, they are more likely to increase their efforts when facing challenges, and to persevere if they have the necessary skills (bandura, 1997). the students’ optimism may also indicate that they expected a positive outcome of their work on digital storytelling. optimism is associated with positive emotions and enhances student motivation (bandura, 1986). the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 in spite of the students’ positive expectations and mastery experiences, positive emotions can also be deactivating, such as relief, relaxation and pleasure. these emotions can lead to reduced learning, because the person believes that he/she does not have to put in as much effort. a feeling of pleasure can make the work seem less demanding, which will affect the learning effort. one student explained: “you learn a number of other things when you write a practice assignment. you have to go much deeper into theory than you do in digital storytelling. i think a digital story is supposed to be more general, and a practice assignment should be more academic.” this statement suggests that digital storytelling may be too easy for students. it takes place in a comfort zone without major challenges. learning is change in behaviour. to translate experience from practice into a digital story can be seen as a résumé rather than an important learning task. we have seen that most students expected to succeed in creating a digital story. further, they felt that digital storytelling did not require theory, unlike a practice assignment, resulting in high self-confidence, a relaxed attitude and little effort put into digital storytelling. this again may mean fewer reflections in the story circle. we must be critical as to whether we achieve reflection at the desired level. furthermore, we must realize that when students find lower requirements for theory in digital storytelling as in other types of student work, deactivating emotions may have arisen in the learning process. we also see that students found that some group members did not participate actively in the story circle. pettersen (2017) writes that we have a general tendency to invest less effort when working in groups, and group members may experience loss of motivation because it is difficult to define the individual’s efforts. this may be related to positive deactivating emotions where working in a group can make a person feel more relaxed about his/her own work. in the words of one of the students who found that not everyone in the group was equally motivated: “it was difficult in the story circle that not everyone had a clear idea of what to write about and it was hard to get anything out of them. not everyone was equally involved in the process or cared about it just as much. not everyone was equally motivated and they never gave any feedback.” peer feedback and students’ learning experiences from digital stories will then affect students’ emotions in the learning situation. lack of feedback and learning efforts from other group members can make keen students bored, finding little meaning in the work. in the next section, we will present negative emotions and their importance for student learning. negative emotions and learning performance negative deactivating emotions such as boredom and hopelessness have a negative impact the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 on student learning and can reduce intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (pekrun et al., 2014). some of the students reported being bored in the questionaire and unmotivated in the storytelling classes. this could be becase an important factor affecting student learning performance and motivation is autonomy. creating digital stories is part of a mandatory work requirement in the programme. students may therefore feel that participating in the group work and creating the story is an activity controlled by teachers, which they must do to avoid punishment, i.e. not meeting the work requirement. by contrast, an offer of choices can increase people’s motivation (deci, vallerand, pelletier, & ryan, 1991; ryan & deci, 2012). for example, students choosing their own stories can provide a sense of autonomy, which may be strengthened by the feeling that the stories are based on their own experience and point of view. as one of the students experienced making a digital story in the interviews: “it lived up to my expectations. it was fun because i had the freedom to structure it the way i wanted.” we must also be aware that making demands on students does not necessarily mean that they experience weakened autonomy. what is important is the degree to which they accept these demands, how well they can meet the demands and whether they feel that they can influence the learning process.we think that the students feelt like they could meet our demands, because most students (88%) reported that they were satisfied with the teaching. with regard to negative activating emotions, 60% of the students felt nervous before and during the screening and some students felt ashamed or embarrassed when presenting their story. we know that negative emotions can have a negative effect on learning performance. 47 % of students were afraid of failing in their attempt at digital storytelling. low self-efficacy belief can lead to feelings such as hopelessness and sadness, which in turn can affect students’ motivation for learning (bandura, 1986). on the other hand, negative emotions in a learning situation do not necessarily mean less learning. although the students reported nervousness before and during the presentation, this does not necessarily mean inferior learning. negative activating emotions such as anger, anxiety or shame can motivate students to extra effort if the consequences of failure are great or to avoid the associated discomfort (pekrun et al., 2002). several of the students were nervous but were still satisfied and proud of their product reported in the questionnaire, which made their nervousness unimportant. another factor is that our students work in groups during story circle. group work can cause less anxiety and fostered more positive emotional experiences, because students support each other (liu et al., 2018). negative activating emotions such as anxiety are a natural response to uncertainty (nordhelle & sakhi, 2014). being nervous in performance situations is completely natural and can be seen as “warm anxiety” that provides energy and a signal that the performance is important. however, in some students, nervousness will lead to “cold anxiety”, which will inhibit them in their performance (moxnes, 1989, 2009). since the students were presenting a digital story they had created in advance, the nervousness will not affect the presentation itself, but will affect the students’ experience during the presentation. this is the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 shown by the fact that the students reported being nervous before presenting their stories on film. one student explained this as follows: “i don’t normally like presenting things, and it was even worse when i had to hear my voice out loud. it was almost better to listen to my voice than to physically stand up and read out loud. it wasn’t that scary. if you’ve experienced the feeling of giving a presentation in front of some people, well, that’s worse than having prepared it in advance, so everything’s ready. then you just press play.” negative activating emotions and warm anxiety should therefore not be pathologized. they can be important drivers of learning, indicating to the student the importance of making an effort. summary reflection and further research our study has examined the emotions involved in the learning context of producing and presenting digital stories. teachers should be aware of the emotions present in a learning setting and how these can affect student learning and motivation. we have explored this by interviews and questionnaire. the students experienced positive activating emotions and expectations and motivation in relation to digital storytelling. the presence of positive emotions may not only enhance student learning, but make students realize that they have learned by reflecting on their own and others’ experiences in practice. we believe that digital storytelling is an important contribution to post-practice reflection. because we are creating what pekrun et al. (2014) calls a good learning environment. student reports high self-efficacy belief, they report feelings of success and pride in creating a digital story. the presence of positive emotions and motivation in the learning context will enhance student reflection, leading to greater learning outcomes. we also see that students do not only experience positive emotions in the learning process. most of them were nervous before and during the screening and some were afraid of failure. a few students were bored and unmotivated for digital storytelling, which might have adversely affected their learning. it seems it`s the dialectics or combination of paradoxical emotions that might lead to learning. as our research shows that even negative emotions can lead to learning. one factor to consider in relation to student learning in digital storytelling is that teachers have an important part to play in creating a safe learning environment. this also implies that the teacher has an important role to play in the story circle by being active and supporting students in the feedback process. these points are similar to those emphasized by pekrun et al. (2002 ) as important for promoting positive activating emotions, which we know enhance student learning outcomes. all these factors will thus help to promote student learning. we must focus on the idea that students need to perceive themselves as competent in order to be motivated in their work. this is related to bandura’s concept of self-efficacy belief, which means having faith in one’s the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 ability to organize or implement the actions that are necessary to learn at a certain level (bandura, 1997). further work on digital storytelling should explore how feedback can influence emotions and increase student learning in the use of digital stories. another interesting angle would be to study how students’ emotions affect their learning performance in terms of assessing the content of the digital stories. we believe that digital stories as a teaching and learning method allow students to work with subject matter in a way that can foster positive emotions, and with the right support also can make negative emotions become positive in the sense of learning. the research is a part of developing higher education towards the digital storytelling university (jamissen & haug, 2014) where also emotions plays a central role. so the sports commentator`s question: “how do you feel now?”, have important relevance also in academic learning. references anderson, k. m. 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(2015). digital storytelling: an innovative technological approach to nursing education. nurse educator, 40(2), 66-70. https://doi.org/10.1097/nne.0000000000000094 reeves, t. (2011). can educational research be both rigorous and relevant. educational designer, 1(4), 1-24. ribeiro, s. p. m., moreira, a. a. f. g., & da silva, c. m. f. p. (2016). digital storytelling: emotions in higher education. in j. m. spector, d. ifenthaler, d. g. sampson, & p. isaias (eds.), competencies in teaching, learning and educational leadership in the digital age : papers from celda 2014: springer international. ryan, r. m., & deci, e. l. (2012). motivation, personality, and development within embedded social contexts: an overview of self-determination theory (1 ed.): oxford university press. ryan, r. m., deci, e. l., fowler, r. d., seligman, m. e. p., & csikszentmihalyi, m. (2000). self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. american psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.55.1.68 sandars, j., & murray, c. (2011). digital storytelling to facilitate reflective learning in medical students. medical education, 45(6), 649. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.13652923.2011.03991.x schjelde, t. j. (2015). hvordan føles det?; om forholdet mellom følelser og læring. bedre skole (1), 57-59. stacey, g., & hardy, p. (2011). challenging the shock of reality through digital storytelling. nurse education in practice, 11(2), 159-164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2010.08.003 trigwell, k., ellis, r. a., & han, f. (2012). relations between students' approaches to learning, experienced emotions and outcomes of learning. studies in higher education (7), 811-824. doi:10.1080/03075079.2010.549220 https://doi.org/10.1097/nne.0000000000000094 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2011.03991.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2011.03991.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2010.08.003 abstract why considering students feelings? background to the study digital storytelling at our university theoretical framework: emotions as indicators of learning method the questionnaire interviews limitations of the study and ethical considerations results questionnaire responses the students’ point of view from the interviews analysis and discussion positive emotions and the learning process negative emotions and learning performance summary reflection and further research references title differences between the genders in ict skills for finnish upper comprehensive school students: does gender matter? kaarakainen meri-tuulia e-mail: merluo@utu.fi   kivinen antero e-mail: antkiv@utu.fi   kaarakainen suvi-sadetta e-mail: susaka@utu.fi   research unit for sociology of education ruse, university of turku fin-20014 university of turku abstract this study examined the ict skills of finnish upper comprehensive school students. the data has been collected from 65 municipalities around finland for 5455 ninth graders (mean age 15.24). ict skills were measured using a digital, performance-based ict skill test. the test was based on the revised finnish national core curriculum for basic education. based on the results, there was a small, but statistically, significant difference between the genders in the total scores on the ict skill test. more consequential differences between the genders were found in the item level analysis. as explicit item level analysis indicated, boys tended to get better scores from more technical-oriented items, while girls got better scores from school work-oriented and social interaction-related items. the results emphasize that gender differences in ict skills are more item specific than general. more importantly, the variation between individuals in ict skill items was extensive and in all likelihood more influential than the gender difference as such. keywords: ict skills, genders differences, upper comprehensive school students 1 introduction ongoing digitalisation is changing every aspect of society. the growing amount of (digital) data, digital infrastructures, online artefacts and transaction systems, among numerous other things, are changing the way that people study, work, communicate, and live their everyday lives. todays western societies are described as digital societies, where new information and communication technologies shape the landscape of everyday living. this digital citizenship demands new kinds of literacies and digital competencies for one to be able to operate and participate in society (gallardo-echenique et al., 2015).   there is continuing debate around what the essential skills in digital societies are. the digcomp framework project uses the concept of digital competence and categorises these crucial competences for information, communication, content-creation, safety and problem-solving (ferrari, 2013). in turn binkley et al. (2012) use the 21st century skills concept to describe the ways of thinking, working, and living in a digitalised world. fraillon et al. (2013) apply the construct of computer and information literacy that relates to an individuals ability to use technologies to investigate, create, and communicate and participate effectively at home or school and in the workplace or society.   the purpose of this study is to examine the differences in information and communication technology (ict) skills between the genders in the context of the finnish national core curriculum for basic education. the intent of the core curriculum is to provide a common ground for the local curricula and promote equality and equity in education. it contains the guidelines for providing education as well as the objectives and key content of instruction. in the core curriculum, ict skills are one of the seven transversal competences which are integrated into all subjects. ict skills are considered to be an essential aspect of civic competencies and are seen both as a goal and a tool for learning. in practice, the goal is to offer every student the following skills: understanding of the basic operations and concepts of ict, knowledge to use ict in a responsible, safe, and ergonomic manner; the skills to use ict as a tool for information management and creative work; and the abilities to use ict in interaction and networking. overall, the aim is to offer the experiences in using different applications to understand their meanings for everyday life, communication and public influence. (fnbe, 2016.) in this study, we are particularly interested in the learning goals for actual ict skills, instead of studying ict as a tool for learning.   the research questions are: 1) are there differences between the genders in ict skills between upper comprehensive school students? 2) what kinds of differences exist between the genders? 2 ict skills 2.1 concepts various concepts are used to define the skills required for ict use. concurrently with digitalisation, terms like it, ict, and computer literacy have become dominant. (van laar et al., 2017; bawden, 2008.) in most cases, these concepts consist of a domain part (computer, ict, internet, etc.) and a knowledge perspective (competence, literacy, skill, etc.) (hatlevik et al., 2015). in their systematic literature review on the different perceptions of 21st century skills, van laar et al. (2017) made a distinction between 21st century skills and digital skills. based on their results, 21st century skills are broader than digital skills and are not necessarily underpinned by ict, while digital skills involve that connection. based on the 75 reviewed articles, the authors created a framework of seven core skills and five contextual skills. the seven core skills are: technical usage, information management, communication, collaboration, creativity, critical-thinking, and problem-solving. the five contextual skills are: ethical awareness, cultural awareness, flexibility, self-direction, and lifelong learning.   in the definition offered by van laar et al. (2017), technical usage is seen as the skill to use devices and applications. information management skills are used to search and use information, including knowing what sources of information to use. communication skills are used to transmit information to others. collaboration skills are used to create social networks and be able to work as a team using ict. creativity skills are used to create new ideas or redefine old ones. critical thinking skills are used to evaluate gathered information and communicate with others. problem-solving skills are used both for finding information to solve problems and using ict to solve those problems.   in spite of the diversity in the concepts, ict skills or competences are considered essential skills for social interaction, civic participation, information retrieval and processing, academic performance, and professional success (see e.g. hoffman & schechter, 2016; pagani et al., 2016; zhong, 2011). consequently, ict skills should be considered necessary educational outcomes for every student in digitalised societies, and thus, a valid assessment of ict skills is crucial (aesaert & van braak, 2015). in this study, the term ict skills refers to the digital skills or competencies in line with the definition of the seven core skills offered by van laar et al. (2017) and the learning goals for ict skills found in the finnish national core curriculum (fnbe, 2016). 2.2 measuring ict skills in her review, litt (2013) classified the ict skill assessment methods as: 1) survey and self-reported measures; 2) performance/observation measures; and 3) combined and unique assessments. surveys and self-reports seem to be the dominant methods for ict skill assessment. in these assessments, participants respond to a question or a set of questions about their own competence level or evaluate their ability to perform specific tasks on the internet (e.g. heerwegh et al., 2016; livingstone & helsper, 2010). qualitative studies prefer observation-based measures or interviews, which incorporate ethnographic practices. these types of studies focus on, for example, observing a persons actions during information search tasks (see e.g. hargittai, 2002). interviews in their turn typically utilise open-ended questions like what are you strong in? (litt, 2013). some performance-based studies have conducted task-based assessments and virtual environments to mirror the actual environment where the ict skills are being used (e.g. claro et al., 2012; van deursen & van dijk, 2009).   in their review of assessment instruments siddiq et al. (2016) concluded that the majority of the utilised assessment instruments are based on self-reporting. most were online tests with multiple-choice questions. some also included questions in a dynamic format that required participants to interact with the tasks. a few had a dynamic task design that required interaction with the test environment. most of the tests were evaluated using quantitative methodology. siddiq et al. (2016) summarises by saying that the majority of these tests assess information search, retrieval, or evaluation, and technical skills; however, aspects like problem-solving with ict, digital communication, and online collaboration are not covered to satisfaction.   it is well known that measurements based on participants own evaluations face validity problems, as people tend to overrate or underrate their own levels of competence (e.g. van deursen et al., 2016; aesaert & van braak, 2015; litt, 2013). there is, as litt (2013) and van deursen et al. (2016) emphasise, an urgent need for more accurate, nuanced, and reliable assessment instruments for greater generalisable and diverse samples that can capture the phenomenon in its entirety. 2.3 gender and ict skills in their longitudinal cross-sectional study of representative samples from the dutch population on internet skills, van deursen and van dijk (2015) noticed men scoring higher than women on all skill domains: operational skills (e.g., saving files, downloading programs, using the refresh button); formal skills (e.g., being familiar with web site structure); information skills (e.g., finding information, using search booleans); and strategic skills (e.g., gaining financial benefits, and making decisions based on retrieved information). to the contrary, among students, previous research results on gender differences in ict skills have been quite diverse.   in their study, aesaert and von braak (2015) noticed that among primary schoolers, girls perform better in tasks that relate to communication-oriented activities and deliver digital information with understandable content to the receiver. in the study by ritzhaupt et al. (2013), middle school girls were found to be outperforming boys in all technology literacy domains. the five examined domains were: technology operations and concepts (e.g., creating new files, locating and opening files, selecting the best device to complete a given task); constructing and demonstrating knowledge (e.g., selecting the correct printer, setting page margins within a word processing document, editing images); communication and collaboration (e.g., practical keyboard skills, using e-mail, and creating new slides within presentation software); independent learning (e.g., using print preview, deleting data in a spreadsheet, creating concept maps as a learning strategy); and digital citizenship (e.g., maintaining password security, identifying security risks, displaying an awareness of potentially inappropriate media use). lau and yuen (2014) found that female students in junior secondary school perceived their internet literacy (e.g., searching information, using instant messaging, downloading files) and computer literacy (e.g., setting headers in word processing software, plotting a graph with a spreadsheet, editing a photo with image processing software) to be higher than that for male students.   in an earlier study, using the previous version of the ict skill test used in this study, among finnish upper comprehensive and secondary school level students, kaarakainen et al. (2017) found that male students outperformed female students on tasks that required advanced information technology skills (e.g., tasks related to software installation and initialisation, information networks, server environments, programming, and database operations), while on tasks related to basic digital skills (e.g., basic operations, information seeking, word or image processing, social networking) gender differences were not significant. in the case of technology self-efficacy, males/boys often reported higher ratings than females/girls (see e.g., huffman et al., 2013). for example, in their study on german secondary schoolers, christoph et al. (2015) found boys self-ratings (e.g., i am able to install new programs...) and theoretical computer skills (e.g., terminological knowledge of basic computer-concepts, such as java, ip-address or ftp) to be higher than those for girls, while no gender differences could be found in basic computer skills (e.g., tasks related to digital contexts within web-browsers, text processing, and e-mailing).   it can thus be summarised that the question of gender difference in ict skills is complex and still largely unclear. a notable problem is the variation in the used concepts and the diverse concept operationalisations. as ritzhaupt et al. (2013) speculated, even though girls are successful in their studies, boys may still be more proficient in other ict-related tasks not covered in their tests. thus, more research is needed to identify the actual dimensions of the potential gender differences within ict skills. this current study particularly aims to clarify this issue. 3 methods 3.1 participants the data was collected in finland at the beginning of year 2017 (januarymarch) as a project financed by the finnish prime ministers office (funding for governments analysis, assessment and research activities). the participants were from 149 upper comprehensive level schools (grade 9/9) in 65 municipalities around the country, chosen based on a geographically representative sample of finnish municipalities, as formed by the finnish education evaluation centre. altogether, 5455 9th-graders ages 15 to 17 years were tested, and of that group 47% were boys and 53% were girls. the mean age for the participants was 15.24. 3.2 measurement ict skills were measured using the online test developed in the research unit for the sociology of education (ruse) at the university of turku (finland). the original ict skill test was developed in 2013, and it was completely revised during year 2016 when the finnish national core curriculum for basic education was renewed (2014) and implemented in schools in august 2016 (kaarakainen et al., 2017; fnbe, 2016). the test is bilingual because both finnish and swedish are official languages in finland. the software used for testing is a web application, written in php and javascript and using the tinymvcand bootstrap-frameworks. the application is supported by postgresql database software for all data storage needs, and the test content (tasks and the specific questionnaires in each study) is included in the system as easily changeable xml-files.   the test consists of 18 items divided into 6 modules based on item topics (appendix 1). the goal was to form coherent modules for a comfortable user experience. test items were implemented in such a way that the user interface and graphics were intended to simulate common ict applications and hence mirror real-life settings. the tested competency areas (18 items) were chosen based on the renewed finnish national core curriculum (fnbe, 2016). the last module (requirements for the ict study programs) was broadly based on the curricula for the ict field of finnish vocational institutions and the universities of applied sciences. the participants could achieve 2 points for each item, which could result in a maximum total score of 36.   in the ict skill test, each item consists of multiple subtasks (16) and/or chains of actions, in which every action (selection or operation) is linked to the previous one; together they form a coherent item. in the items, a combination of close-ended questions (conventional multiple-choice, true-false multiple-choice, multiple true-false multiple-choice, and matching) (see haladyna, 2011) and open-ended questions or questions requiring participants to interact with the test environment (input the right values or select and click the right function icons) were applied (see siddiq et al., 2017). the majority of items can be seen as context-dependent item sets (see haladyna, 2011), as they consist of a problem scenario that participants have to solve by choosing right actions from given options beside the progressive storyline. some items can be seen as constructed-response questions that require the test-takers to construct or develop their own answers (miller, 2015). in the ict skill test, items are assessed automatically based on specified options and actions or simple text mining algorithms. 3.3 analysis the reliability (internal consistency) of the ict skill test was estimated using cronbachs alpha. reliability refers to the extent to which a test is a consistent measure of a specific concept. it is known that scales with only two or three items tend to exhibit smaller alphas than do those with more items (peterson, 1994). as the items of the ict skill test can consist of only one multi-phase interactive task or just two or three subtasks, other item measures are utilised instead of alpha values for item level analysis.   the corrected item-total correlation is widely used to examine if any item fails to correlate with a total score. the cut-off value of .3 means that items that have item-total correlation below the threshold value are likely to be extremely easy or difficult or ambiguous, or otherwise that this item is not measuring the same construct being measured by the other items. (nunnally & bernstein, 1994.)   to analyse item difficulty, an item difficulty index was used instead of the proportion of right answers (traditional item difficulty), as that choice was better suited for complicated items (tiruneh et al. 2017). here the interest is not simply on how many test-takers get the item (completely) right. the formula used to compute the item difficulty index (p) was:   difficulty index, p =   where ~fx is the total number of scores earned by all test-takers on an item, n is the number of test-takers, xmin is the smallest item score possible, and xmax is the highest item score possible.   item discrimination is another basic measure of the validity of an item. it is defined as the ability of an item to discriminate (or differentiate) between high and low achievers. the formula used to compute the discrimination index (d) is:   discrimination index, d =   whereandare the difficulty indexes for the highest performing (u) and lowest performing (l) groups. the widely used threshold of 27% was used to divide these upper and lower groups. (adams & wiemanc, 2011.)   in order to respond to the research questions (are there differences between the genders? and what kind of differences are these?), a two-tailed independent samples t-test was used to analyse the statistical differences between the genders. the t-test was used to compare the sample means from two independent groups for an at least interval-scale data when the distribution was approximately normal (see e.g., warner, 2013). analysis of the data was first executed using total scores of the ict skill test, and then on each item separately in order to examine the gender differences in overall performance and also for each item one by one. 4 results the cronbachs alpha for the ict skill test (all 18 items) was .86, which clearly exceeded the threshold of .7 (nunnally & bernstein, 1994). results of item-level analysis are presented in appendix 1. as that appendix indicates, the item difficulty indexes varied from .01 to .61. lowitem difficulty indexes for the last four items indicated that all programmingrelated items were extremely difficult for the majority of 9th-graders. even elementary programming, which actually does not require any programming skills, but only the ability to follow and give orders was based on the given instructions. the p-values for all other items lay within the range of ~.2 and ~.6, indicating that none of these items was either too difficult (<.2) or too easy (>.8) for the participants to complete.   the item-total correlation varied between .22 and .65. the items related to programming, which were among the most difficult items, also had the lowest item-total correlation values. the item discrimination indexes ranged between .34 and .92, and thus were all acceptable (>.3). these values indicated that all items on the ict skill test were able to distinguish between participants who mastered the skills required for a particular item and those who did not yet have those skills.       table 1. the ict skill test scores by items and gender differences for the students.     altogether girls boys the independent samples t-test item m sd m sd m sd t-value p-value information seeking 1.21 .45 1.29 .41 1.11 .47 15.086 .000*** word processing 1.02 .82 1.18 .80 .84 .81 15.568 .000*** software installation and updating .93 .69 .90 .67 .95 .72 -2.427 .015* digital communication .86 .62 .92 .60 .79 .63 7.961 .000*** video and audio processing .84 .68 .88 .67 .81 .70 3.770 .000*** information security .81 .58 .83 .57 .80 .59 2.182 .029* cloud services and publishing .81 .69 .85 .68 .77 .69 4.142 .000*** social networking .77 .51 .80 .48 .74 .53 4.698 .000*** image processing .65 .57 .65 .43 .64 .49 .503 .612 presentations .56 .67 .63 .68 .48 .65 8.642 .000*** spreadsheets .51 .63 .57 .63 .45 .62 6.956 .000*** software purchasing .38 .43 .40 .42 .37 .43 1.920 .055 basic operations .36 .52 .23 .37 .52 .61 -21.579 .000*** information networks .34 .41 .23 .30 .46 .47 -21.104 .000*** web programming .15 .32 .11 .27 .20 .36 -9.556 .000*** elementary programming .12 .37 .09 .30 .17 .44 -7.862 .000*** database operations .10 .30 .07 .26 .13 .35 -7.486 .000*** programming .01 .13 .01 .09 .02 .16 -3.484 .000***   *** p < .001, highly significant * p < .05, marginally significant   table 1 presents the ict skills test scores by items. the table is presented in descending order by the achieved average item scores of the students. the mean score for all test items for all participants was 10.45 (standard deviation 5.32), for girls 10.64 (sd 4.74) and for boys 10.24 (sd 5.92). the difference between the genders was small, but statistically significant (t-value 2.712, p-value .007). the five top scoring items for the students were information seeking (m 1.21), word processing (m 1.02), software installation and updates (m .93), digital communication (m .86), and video and audio processing (m .84). conversely, the five lowest scoring items for the students were information networks (m .34), web programming (m .15), elementary programming (m .12), database operations (m .10) and programming (m .01).   there were only two items where the differences between the genders were not statistically significant, namely, image processing and software purchasing. in the case of software installation and updates, and information security, the difference between girls and boys was only marginally significant (p < .05). in the case of all the other items, the differences between the genders were highly significant (p < .001).   the girls significantly outperformed the boys in information seeking, word processing, digital communication, video and audio processing, information security, cloud services and publishing, social networking, presentations, and spreadsheets. the boys in their turn outperformed the girls in software installation and updating, basic operations, information networks, web programming, elementary programming, database operations, and programming. the widest gender differences in item mean scores were found in word processing (for the girls, with a difference of .34 points), basic operations (for the boys, with a difference of .29 points), information networks (for the boys, with a difference of .23 points), and information seeking (for the girls, with a difference of .18 points). 5 discussion in this study, the ict skill test was introduced, and the results of the reliability and item analysis were presented to assess the quality of the test items and the test as a whole. the results indicated that the ict skill test was a reliable instrument, and its items were mainly adequate in their difficulty level and had appropriate discrimination power. both item difficulty indexes and item-total correlation for elementary programming, database operations, web-programming and programming items indicated the need to consider renovation of these items. it is clear that these four programming-related items are challenging for a comprehensive school final graders. however, since august 2016, programming has been integrated into the finnish national core curriculum. in the upper grades (79/9) programming has been integrated as part of the objectives set for mathematics, while in the lower grades, the fundamentals of programming can be taught in all subjects (fnbe, 2016). because of this these programming-related items should remain a part of the ict skills test, as they provide the ability to track whether the desired programming skills will increase in the future or will not.   based on our results, upper comprehensive level students performed best in schoolwork-oriented items, such as information seeking and word processing. conversely, the lowest scoring items for all participants were technical-oriented items, such as basic operations, information networks, different kinds of programming, and database operations. the discovery that students performed relatively well on items related to word processing, computer security, social networking and communication is encouraging in light of the desire to achieve the learning goals of transversal competences in the finnish national core curriculum (fnbe, 2016). on the contrary, the noticed lack of basic operational skills and knowledge deficits in information networks, spreadsheets, and software purchasing indicated the need for formal education on the very elementary use and knowledge of computers and mobile devices. it should also be noted that relatively low scores on the basic operations items, which relate to the technical usage of computers, can be explained to some degree by the fact that these items stress the use of computers and keyboards when finnish youth today are more experienced with smartphones or other mobile devices (see e.g., taipale, 2014). for example, the use of shortcut keys (a subtask in the basic operations item) requires computer specific knowledge.   the current study answered the question on whether there were differences between the genders in ict skills. based on the analysis in this study, there was only a small, but still significant, difference between the genders in the total scores of the ict skill test. particularly, this paper sought to identify the actual dimensions of potential gender differences within ict skills. when examining item level differences, the results are in line with previous studies (e.g., aesaert & von braak, 2015; lau and yuen, 2014), as girls were found to outperform boys, particularly on items that related to using learning-related software and tools like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, image processing, and items related to communication, social networking, and security issues. in contrast, in this study, boys were found to perform significantly better compared to girls on items that required more technical knowledge, like basic operations, information networks, programming, and database operations. this result is also in line with previous studies (kaarakainen et al., 2017; christoph et al., 2015). above all, these discoveries emphasise that gender differences in ict skills are particularly item specific.   students success was found to be weakest on the last module (requirements of ict study programs) of the ict skills test. this is also the module where the boys outperformed the girls by the largest margin. this module contained items related to database operations, web programming, and computer programming, which are common areas of computer science studies in secondary and tertiary level education. it is well known that in the field of computing, a lack of diversity has existed for several decades, and female participation in computing studies has remained low (mcgill et al., 2016). however, after more profound consideration, this is the module that distinctly revealed that differences between individuals outweigh the difference between genders, as even among the boys, there was a huge variation in individual performance. it is worth noticing that the standard deviations for the scores on the items in the last module were at least twice as big as the mean. in fact, there were only 19 boys and 3 girls among all the participants, who got at least half of the available points in that module. therefore there was only a very small group of students who mastered the most technical items in our ict skills test, and this success related more to individuals than gender as such.   individual technology usage habits and experiences played a notable role in the above-mentioned phenomenon. as aesaert and von braak (2015) assumed, the reason behind females success in communication-oriented activities and information delivering can be found in their ict use and experiences. similarly, lau and yuen (2014) presumed that because female students tend to engage in more learningand social networking-related activities at home, they achieve skills like information searching, instant messaging, word processing, image editing, etc., which were classified in their study as internet and computer literacy. when it comes to more technical skills, huffman et al. (2013) found that gender roles in particular (not just biological sex) play a large role in technology self-efficacy; in particular masculinity is a strong predictor of technology self-efficacy.   as van laar et al. (2017) suggest, ict skills are essential for performing tasks that are necessary in a broad range of occupations in a digital society. typically ict skills delivered in an educational context will have relevance also in 21st century digital skills for work. however, as van laar et al., (2017) summarised, the changing labour market and job demands in a knowledge society pose serious challenges to educational systems, when they are asked to prepare students for jobs that may not yet even exist. in the finnish core curriculum for basic education these ict skills are decentralised under traditional school subjects (fnbe, 2016). this creates a situation where the responsibility for teaching ict skills is fragmented between several teachers, at worst without adequately expressed and internalised common goals. this scenario increases the risk that not all students are getting sufficient digital preparedness for the future in their basic level education. all things considered, however, the notable role of individuals (leisure time) experiences and usage habits in ict skills and digital preparedness, when combined with decentralised teaching of those skills, may compromise the ideal of equality between the genders and principally between individual students. this raises important questions to study in future research.   6 references adams, w. k. & wiemanc, c. e. 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(2011). from access to usage: the divide of self-reported digital skills among adolescents. computers & education, 56, 736746. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.10.016   appendix 1. the modules and items and results of item analysis of the ict skill test. module/item description item difficulty index, p item dis-crimination index, d corrected item-total correlation, r basic use       basic operations participants have to pair a keyboard shortcut with a correct action and choose a correct type of computer memory for present education situation. .18 .63 .40 information seeking participants have four cases where they have to choose a correct source/channel, out of three, on where to further seek information on a given topic. after this, they are presented with list of search engine results and are asked to choose relevant items related to given scenario. .61 .55 .38 information networks participants are given four network usage scenarios and have to pair them with correct data transmission technologies and then match correct descriptions of computer network-related concepts. .17 .57 .33 productivity software       word processing participants are asked to edit (bold, italicise, underline and highlight) a given sample text. .51 .72 .49 spreadsheets participants are asked to fill a spreadsheet table with given information, bold a header row, and sort the table in ascending order. .26 .79 .50 presentations participants are given a general user interface view of presentation software, with essential sections marked. the task is to pair a correct name with the right section of this view. .28 .83 .50 social networking and communication       social networking participants have to pair correct social networking services with four service descriptions, define the meaning of social networking service, and choose four items out of nine that relate to the security of social networking services. .39 .75 .59 communication participants have to fill in the receiver fields, carbon copy, and blind carbon copy) of an email and add an attachment according to instructions, and identify the types of information that can be used to identify internet users. .43 .85 .65 information security participants have to choose correct statements for secure network communications and choose from alternatives those that are related to the information security of computers in an internet cafe abroad. .41 .80 .65 content creation and publishing       image processing participants have to select correct image processing tools for cropping an image and make the person appearing in the image unrecognisable. afterwards, participants have to choose correct image processing using related statements from given options and choosing the correct file formats for vector graphics. .33 .67 .61 video and audio processing first, participants have to choose those methods that can be used to edit video footage from a single camera and then choose a right answer to the question: which one of these alternatives is related to lossy audio compression?. .42 .95 .64 cloud services and publishing in the first step, participants have to choose which of the given statements about cloud services are true. in the second step one must choose the correct youtube-video sharing option that enables limited sharing even to those who do not have an account on youtube. the third step is a continuation question: can we now be certain the video does not circulate to the rest of the internet for outsiders to see [...]? .41 .93 .56 applications       software purchasing participants have to choose which matters need to be considered when evaluating the information security of mobile applications and also choose the correct definition of personal data protection from four alternatives. .19 .58 .45 installation and updates in the first step, participants choose whether a statement is about an installation or an upgrade and in the second step, they choose whether a statement is related to an update or an upgrade. .47 .92 .56 elementary programming participants have to write, per instructions, a maze traversing script that leads from the starting point to the end. then they have to write the value of a variable after the given pseudo-code has completed. .06 .57 .40 requirements for the ict study programs       database operations participants have to form an sql-query, based on given instructions and a simple database diagram, then choose the right definition for the concept nosql database. .05 .51 .20 web programming participants are given three files (html, css and javascript) to use to create a website and the view generated by these files. participants then answer four multiple choice questions to edit the simple web page view and the dependencies between these given files. .08 .34 .23 programming the programming task requires the participants to place lines of java code in the correct places based on given comment sections. .01 .44 .22     title seminar.net 2015. © author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. nursing students’ attitudes towards ict in education and clinic in denmark. raymond kolbæk center for nursing research-viborg regional hospital central jutland & faculty of health via university college e-mail: raymond.kolbaek@midt.rm.dk abstract: it is well known that in an era of emerging use of ict in nursing education and health care it is important to have knowledge of the attitudes towards ict within the profession. however, nursing students and nurses have been notoriously reluctant to embrace/implement ict in their work and studies. this paper focuses on the construction of ict-habitus amongst bachelor nursing students displayed by four positions of attitudes that describe the ict-habitus of the group of nursing students included [under consideration] in the study. quotes from the students are used to support and illustrate the findings. the methodical approach was based on pierre bourdieu’s multifaceted data collection approach and steiner kvale’s technical guidelines for interviewing were used for conducting focus group interviews. in order to carry out the construction a mapping of ict implementation in the danish primary and secondary education and nursing education from 1970 – 2001 was undertaken. a questionnaire concerning attitudes towards ict in healthcare was conducted amongst first year students and focus group interviews were completed. a bibliography and other sources has been included. these datasets made it possible to construct the field of ict in nursing education and +to construct nursing students' ict habitus and ict capital, which was were categorized in four descriptive positions, called "the endorser", "the sceptic", "the adversary" and "the critical". these positions can be used for developing strategies for implementing ict and development of e-learning in educational and clinical settings for nursing students, thereby contributing with new knowledge and understanding of the ict-based learning context and the processes within. keywords: bachelor, student nurse, attitude, ict, education, resistance, habitus, field. introduction it has been reported, that nursing students and clinical nurses in denmark throughout times have been reluctant to embrace ict1 for the purposes of work and study. it is a part of doxa 2 in the field of nursing (dansk sygeplejeråd, 1981), (bottrup & nielsen, 1986), (kolbæk et al., 1998), (krüger, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:raymond.kolbaek@midt.rm.dk 2003), (teknologisk institut, 2012) further, personal experiences3 when lecturing on healthand nursing informatics to nursing students and nurses supports this towards use of ict in their studies and clinical work. while it is important to consider the conditions for leaning with technology, it is also important to focus on the learners who use ict in their studies in order to obtain a more complete picture of the learning field. very few studies have focused on how nursing students’ attitudes towards ict in educational and clinical practice, either in denmark nor internationally. 4 it is commonly believed that students’ initial attitudes towards the use of ict in education frames the way technology is used to enhance learning. it also affects how learners accept the media based education through which learning is delivered. moreover, it has a bearing upon the way learners thinks about and use, or do not use, technology in their learning efforts and afterwards in their professions. this paper focuses on the construction of ict-habitus amongst bachelor nursing students as displayed by four positions of attitude that describe the ict-habitus of the group of nursing students included in the study. quotes from the students will be provided to support and illustrate findings. method the research was divided into five independent parts, each of which contributed to the construction of the four positions of ict-habitus. the theoretical and methodical setup was inspired by the methodical approach to the multi-faceted data collection approach established by pierre bourdieu (bourdieu, 1999), (callewaert, 1998). the method of setting up an interview has been based on steiner kvale’s guidelines, which provided a practical guide for carrying out focus group interviews. (kvale, 1997), (glasdam, 2007). this theoretical lens allowed to construct the field of "ict in nursing education” and to construct the positions of the students expressed during the interviews by means of four habitual ict positions. the first part comprised an investigation and description of ict implementation in the danish educational system, with a focus on ict in primary and secondary upper schools followed by an investigation and description of the implementation of ict in the nursing education field during the period 1970 – 2001. these parts will not be discussed further in this paper. the third part comprised the bibliographical research. the search were focused on published papers on health care student’s attitudes towards ict from 1992 to 2012. the results were poor. only four reports had been published in danish (kolbæk et al., 1998, uggerhøj, nyvang & kjeldskov, 1999, krüger, 2003, teknologisk institut 2012) and the international literature likewise yielded few studies on students’ attitudes (mcveigh, 2009, samarkandi, 2011). the empirical part of the project was carried out at three danish nursing schools. a small, a mediumsized and large nursing school, two of which were located in jutland. the third one was located in zeeland. in all schools, the type 5 and physical placement of ict were mapped and registered in line with the concept of bourdieu’s description of the kabylian house in the book “masculine domination” (bourdieu (1996). this mapping showed two interesting patterns. all three schools in which ict equipment was accessible for students to use were situated far away where the students were taught and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 the ict was to be found in libraries, rather than classrooms. the second patterns showed that all new ict equipment had first been bought for use in the school s administration and when this equipment became outdated for administrative use it was then available for use by teachers and students in offices and in rooms for group work. it was concluded, that ict was not implemented in nursing schools for pedagogical and learning purposes but primarily for administrative purposes, although learning and teaching are the core activities. all 205 first year students who had enrolled in spring 2002 at the three schools were included and invited to participate. from this group 23 students volunteered to take part for a focus group interview. those students gave the researcher permission to read their admission applications prior to the focus group interviews. the data from this reading was used to help mapping their socio-economic background as a group and their reasons opting for nursing. one distinctive pattern to emerge was that all 23 students, both males and females, stated that they wanted to become nurses to work with and help people. shortly before the focus group interviews began, the informants were asked to fill in a questionnaire regarding their attitude towards ict6. the results were processed immediately before the interview and were presented to the students at the warm-up stage of the interview. during this initial stage, the students were asked whether the results were a source of surprise. this issue gave rise to a lively discussion in all five groups for the next two hours. the interviews were recorded on digital media. after completion of the interviews, the informants were handed a stamped envelope with a questionnaire about their socio-cultural background.7 the remainder of the students were handed the two question-naires in class and told to hand in the questionnaires to a member of the teaching staff within a timeframe of fourteen days. after the last interview had been carried out, each interviews was transcribed using express scribe free8 and subsequently converted into microsoft word. after these tasks were completed, the construction of the ict educational field from the primaryand secondary upper school sector and in nursing education began. this was based on a comprehensive numbers of contemporary current sources as policy papers, ministerial orders, reports and minutes from meetings from the period of 1970 to 2001. this phase of the construction consisted of identifying and combining patterns in those sources. the next step was to analyse the data from the questionnaires. this was carried out by performing simple statistical operations as percent calculations with microsoft excel and the use of tendency analysis in excel. the tendencies were then expressed as written statements, which also were analyzed for concordant expressions. a thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews was performed by using nvivo.9 the results of the analysis formed one part of the empirical basis for the construction of the students ict-habitus.10 bourdieu finds that interviews can be seen as an interaction between two or more agents in possession of various types of capital and symbolic goods to varying degrees, not least linguistically. however, it is not only the linguistic capital that determines the success of an interview. further aspects to be considered are the agents' total social capital, which include gender, age, economic and social status. also relevant to these interviews, is ict-capital status, which plays a crucial role in the ways participants express their hopes, beliefs, dislikes and ict competencies in the discussions. it is simply not possible for individuals to figure out their own practices. thus, what is at play here goes beyond what each individual might comprehend, or reflect upon, alone. the individual is able to comprehend or reflect himself. bourdieu does seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 not discuss the validation of the informants' stories; he limits his comment to understanding what is being said from the informant's standpoint with all the possible inherent ambiguity. it is the researcher’s task to consider this asymmetry. the researcher must also consider the purpose or aim of the methodological construction work -which is to minimize the possible symbolic violence included but it goes without saying that it cannot be eliminated. moreover, it is of paramount importance that the researcher constructs the content of the informant's statements based on a systematic knowledge of the objective conditions for reflection and actions common to all the participants in the category. these elements led to the construction of four types of icthabitus. findings the field of ict in nursing schools in denmark showed diverse patterns, yet some of these were nevertheless relatively clear-cut and differed little. one of these patterns as mentioned above was that the implementation of ict started in the administrative environment at the nursing schools, and from there slowly spread into the educational environment, classrooms and offices of the teaching staff. no one in the funding bodies understood that nurses should be able to master ict in their clinical work therefore; there was no reason to implement ict in the educational settings. another finding was that the students entered nursing schools with fewer ict-competencies that those of their fellow students. it should be remembered that the majority of the students enrolled had a linguisticor hf-based11 secondary school background. the field analyses demonstrated that ict competency requirements for students with the linguistic secondary and hf grades were not as extensive as it was the case for the mathematical-, businessand technical secondary lines subjects. moreover, the research showed that the requirements for those ict skills that the students had been taught in secondary linguistic/hf were not as demanding in the subjects they had been taught, whereas in the case of other secondary directions in the same subjects these requirements were more exacting. this helped to explain the ict habitus of the students. an updated count from kot12 shows that the educational backgrounds for nursing students from 1996-2008, had been stable over the years up until 2008, as the table below shows. qualifying entrance exam background for nursing schools 1996-2008 1996-2000 2001-2005 2006-2008 n % n % n % secondary linguistic/hf 6414 51 6370 49 3602 47 other secondary directions* 4233 34 4401 34 2585 34 other background 1910 15 2288 18 1521 20 12557 100 13059 100 7708 100 table 1: number of students with different routes another finding was the unwillingness to provide financial support from politicians and civil servants. they were prepared only to give very limited or were unwilling to provide financial backing to the implementation of ict in nursing education. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 the regional authorities that were responsible for the administration of nursing schools also governed the secondary school sector, and were ordered by ministerial decree to financially support the implementation of ict in secondary upper schools. at stake, here was a specific economic view of the nursing profession a viewpoint that was underpinned by a gendered logic given that given that nursing is a predominantly female area of domain. the analysis showed that the field was characterised by conflicting views on the impact of ict implementation. there was a clear contrast between the perception of the nurses "warm hands" and the "cold technology." the data analysis also showed that all informants expressed both in their application forms and during the interviews that they deliberately had opted for nursing in order to be with people and to help others not to work with technology. as one informant put it: "the choice felt on the idea of studying nursing pretty quickly because i really wanted to work with people" (informant) with the passing of time, the tendency changed from considering ict as a threat to nursing; in 2002, the field painted a vision of ict as a medium that supported the day-to-day nursing work as a useful tool, but otherwise ict did not affect the question of joining the nursing profession and ict not was an attraction for students. "well i think it is a useful tool when you start to work as a nurse." (informant) in 2002, it became clear to the informants that the boundaries of physical contact between nurse and patient was about to change; furthermore, the risk of impersonal interaction was seen to increase with the concomitant risk of conflict between a caring ethos and technological logic. "err no; you shouldn’t avoid personal touch and contact. if that were the case then much of nursing would disappear, i think. you cannot look after patients just by appearances. (informant) however, the informants also found that ict had potential as a communicative tool that could enhance and improve information channels with older patients and citizens. " .... you ought be aware of the patient and remember that the care of the patient is what it is all about. this is not about ict. ok, ict can be there too, because it takes less time to put some notes into the computer than it does to sit and write notes by hand in the nursing record." (informant) remarkably few informants considered themselves either computer-literate or literate ict users. indeed, they saw themselves as 'ignorant ' when confronted with questions about matters of computer technology, handling programs and how the internet works. "then he asked me about my window operation system i could see on the screen. i had no idea what kind of system i had. it was something my brother had set up for me and that was it ... and as for things like creating files and folders and moving around? i have no idea." (informant) as is evident from the data and analysis from the two questionnaires, the nightingale data and the data from the field of ict in nursing education, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 there were some consistent patterns. it was therefore possible to construct the itc-habitus of the participating students shown as four positions. the four constructions or positions/types of students were "the endorser", "the sceptic", "the adversary" and "the critical". distinct characteristics were evident in all four positions. the endorser and the adversary were in particular a measure for the opposing views and the sceptic and the critical stances shares some of these views. the endorser position shows an optimistic belief that ict-based strategies create greater equality, makes learning fun and serve as patient support technologies. the ethos was one of “the more the better”. ict is only a tool. this was the position held by the most experienced ict-users whose awareness was extensive. they possessed ict +and made frequent use of it "it is almost indispensable". "ict is an aid.”, "it is a typewriter”, "it is all sorts of fun". "it's smart, you can download assignments and there’s no need to carry around all those papers, because they come directly from the teachers into the websites." both advantages and disadvantages of the new technologies were evident in the sceptic position. while they were not against ict implementation in education and clinics, this position expressed a balanced view according to which ict should serve a purpose beyond its technical advantages. for the advocates of this position, ict represented more than a neutral tool since it affects work conditions and when implemented raises a cluster of questions. further, advocates of this position were aware of the lack of ict competences, while being fairly experienced and aware users and owners of ict. "we are not yet familiar enough with it and we don’t use it properly or to its full potential. and neither do i do have enough knowledge to permit me to teach myself something new about computers, if you know what i mean? i couldn’t even dream of learning to make folders on the computer and things like that. but it could be good if you learned how to use it, then you could just go in and watch internet videos and things like that. and that would be really motivating. (informant) the critical position shares a similar view to that of the sceptic position, but expresses a more offensive approach to ict. now that the technology was in place, it has to be used properly and exploited to the full. it was underutilized in both clinical nursing and in education. advocates of this position were also fairly experienced and aware users and owners of ict. "the school should give access to computers in exam situations and it's a shame that the teachers do nothing to promote and encourage us because it could really be a great help. but it means that teachers have to know how to use it.” the adversary position was the most authentic. it found ict to be a timeconsuming and an inappropriate form of communication that lead to robotic and inhumane future scenarios. as an adversary puts it: "if so much ict is going to be used in hospitals, it will be about robots and sitting in front of computer screens the whole time and there won’t be any room for talking to patients about how they feel, so i think people seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 will get depressed and have other disorders, because there will be no space for people to talk together or be there for each other." (informant) advocates of this position avoided the use of ict in their private life and did own neither ict nor mobile phones themselves. if they needed to use ict, they borrowed it from family or school. as the research took place over a ten-year period, some vertical patterns of development and implementation stages of ict in the schools of nursing in denmark were revealed. these findings should be regarded as patterns that reflect the ict field in nursing and the tension between the attitudes of the two positions towards ict; itc represents both a threat to care in clinical nursing and a productive tool for developing modern nursing and modern education. moreover, it is the tension between a caring ethos and a technological logic homologue to a gendered male and female logic that is reflected here. the digitization of society (frønes, 2002) and the education system is emerging as a key driver behind students' increased ict usage. this should not be misconstrued as a precondition that students today have acquired specific increases in their ict skills. access to, and information about, ict is only regarded a prerequisite for learning to use ict as a study tool and a professional tool in nursing not as a life skill. it is possible to conclude that some external factors have changed and that these have affected the ict habitus and ict capital of the four positions: "the endorser", "the sceptic", "the adversary" and "the critical". some of these factors are illustrated in the chart below: differences and similarities 2002 and 2012 200213 201214 hardware laptop few in possession of laptop many possessed one pc many had one few possessed one tablet pc did not exist more possessed one 15 smartpho ne did not exist many possessed one mobile phone many possessed one few possessed one 16 software social media did not exist ”everyone” uses them17 programs installed at the machine used from the cloud 18 gendered behaviour female students have men to take care of technical and software issues female students have men to take care of technical and software issues ict-user rate love use rate higher use rate (especially social media) educational background mainly linguistic/hfbackground mainly linguistic/hf background up to 2006 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 the four positions reveal conditions, situations and backgrounds that are empirically recognizable today. the empirical findings are both relevant and they represent a high degree of explanatory power and usefulness in the nursing education field. it should nevertheless not be forgotten that there are elements in society that are more rigid and resistant to changes in ict habitus and ict capital, the gender issue being a case in point, since the maintenance of technical parts is still largely the task of men. a recent study of danish high school pupils (mathiasen, 2011) showed that there was a correlation between gender and self-awareness in one’s ict skills. more than half of the boys felt that their own skills exceeded average skill level, while this was true of only one-sixth of the girls. by contrast, four-fifths (80%) of the girls were found to be about the average level. what is your gender? sum male female how hard is for you to use ict compared with your classmates? it is harder for me to use ict than most of my classmates answers 4 9 13 % of gender 2,2% 3,8% 3,1% i use ict at the same level as my classmates answer 83 191 274 % of gender 46,6% 79,6% 65,6% it is easier for me to use ict than most of my classmates answer 91 40 131 % of gender 51,1% 16,7% 31,3% total answers 178 240 418 % of gender 100% 100% 100% table 2. correlation between gender and experience of own ict skills (mathiasen, 2011 p. 84) 19 the study reveals a picture in which the pupils seem to manage the tools and it the boys who feel more prepared than the girls do. it is also worth pausing to consider that the pupils' own experience of being competent users of ict tools contrasted to a significant extent with the teachers' experience of having to fight to get them to acquire them as "digital natives" in their use of ct tools. future considerations the forgoing gives rise to one question in particular: “can anything be predicted about any impact on current and future nursing students’ ict habitus and ict capital from the recent secondary school reform of 2006?” the way in which ict skills among nursing student have evolved since the school reform in 2006 has yet to be explored. the wide range of optional subjects, which require vastly differing ict skill levels, will play a significant role. student nurses will bring ict skills with them into their nursing studies, when students who are applying to nursing schools can only choose between c and b-level subjects.20 in the governing documents regarding directives on secondary school21 ict skills are not explicitly mentioned. ict requirements are, however written into the individual curriculum 22 of each subject and the associated guidelines for teachers.18 uni-c 23 has made many of the teaching guidelines available online as a source of inspiration for ict integration.24, 25 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 8 these requirements vary dramatically from subject to subject. for example, in the science and mathematics curricula it is stated that ict forms an integral part of the subject, including communication, data acquisition, data processing, modelling, visualization, simulation and information retrieval. in the curriculum subjects in the danish language, considerable thoughts should be given to the inclusion of within the context of teaching on writing. it would also be advisable to consider its implementation in work where oral presentation is supported by technology, in information retrievals well as work with texts that are unavailable in printed format. this includes specific digital tools and virtual collaboration. 26 in language courses, such as greek, it is forcefully stated that students must familiarise themselves with classical resources. they must also learn to use web-based tools. furthermore, those pupils who have greek at a high level possess a high level of expertise in greek just acquire competence in using virtual tools.27 the social science syllabus (cto a-level) includes simulation of economic relationships, the ict-based data collection of empirical data and integration of electronic conferencing software in its learning. it also includes the use of online macroeconomic calculation models, web-based collection of empirical data, the development of spreadsheets charts and publishing on the web. with such a diversity in the ict competencies of future students and their ict-habitus it is possible to hypothesise that the background in ict skills of future nursing students will far more variegated than is presently the case. whether it leads to a change in ict-habitus and ict-capital, such as increased ict skills among the students as a group has yet to be seen. without further research, it is possible only to speculate on changes in ict etc. it is legitimate to consider whether the findings and the four positions of icthabitus and capital are still relevant in 2015. the answer to this question is in the affirmative. even though these positions have not been investigated scientifically, their enduring relevance is nevertheless evident in classroom observations, online behaviour and dialogues with colleagues and nursing students, all of which have occurred since 2002. the dialogues were held with first year nursing students during the completion of several modules. 28 the dialogs were also conducted with first year students enrolled in the ict introduction course (module 1), second year students on the health informatics course (module 5) and third year students who were following a course on research into nursing, its theories and methods. (module 9) the ict-habitus and ict-capitals of the four positions, "the endorser", "the sceptic", "the adversary" and "the critical" is still recognizable for this author, and also for current students, as they can identify, to some extent, with aspects portrayed in the four descriptions as recognize traits from themselves in the four descriptions. the students respond by giggling embarrassment and "good" explanations as to why they let males carry out the more substantial work with their computers, printers, smart phones and internet access. however, what has changed is that today’s students make more extensive use of ict than was previously the case. whether nursing students of today can be considered as digital natives is open to question. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 9 clearly, there is scope for further research into the use of ict in educational settings and clinical nursing. the following conditions serve to illustrate this: 1. digital natives have integrated digital technology into all aspects of their lives 2. as a result of their upbringing and experience with digital technology digital natives have considerable competence in skills in ict 3. digital natives are the new content creators and heavy users of web2.0 technologies. 29 marc prensky introduced the term “digital native” in 2001. 30 (prensky, 2001) he described a generation of young people who were born in the mid-1980s into a world where digital technology was the norm. since they had never known a world without digital technology he thought they might have a deep intuitive understanding and knowledge of how digital technology was used. it was believed that their ict habitus and ict capital was advanced in relation to the digital ‘immigrants’ who were born earlier than mid-1980’s. recent studies suggest that the vast majority of young people in western societies cannot be said to belong to the "digital natives", when measured by the number of different technologies they use, the extent of use or whether they are not just consumers, but also creating digital content. (ryberg, 2009, 2012), (eduardsen, 2011) from a contemporary professional perspective the findings from a recently completed research project, titled technucation, is interesting.31 the project focused on developing a concept for understanding technology in the nursing and teaching professions. tools were also developed for implementing this concept into the education of teachers and nurses.32 the project comprised a study of the attitudes of student nurses and teachers towards new technology as well as their assumptions on the subject. the findings of this project were subsequently published. (teknologisk institut, 2012) this study included very similar questions to those asked in 2002; it was therefore highly suitable as a longitudinal update from 2002 to 2012. they found that the majority of nursing students felt confident using new technology in their studies but generally, they felt insecure and less confident when using technologies in a clinical setting. four percent of the respondents declined to use available technologies for their own study and in clinical practice. this group exhibit features from the adversary position. 68% and 81% agreed or strongly agreed that the use of new technology helped to develop the nursing profession, improve dissemination of knowledge, and enhance themselves as professionals. it was found that 57% felt that ict was a prerequisite for improving patient care. these respondents exhibit features of the embracive category. 17-21% considered new technology a barrier to the successful delivery of nursing. they thought that ict shifted the focus from the core professional skills. 35% were of the opinion that new technology meant there was less time for carrying out nursing, and thus the use of ict was considered unduly time-consuming. these respondents share traits with the sceptic and critic categories. it is possible to draw the tentative conclusion that there has been a positive development in nursing students' attitudes towards, and use of, ict in some aspects of their lives. moreover, greater use is made of ict and more nursing students now possess it, but they are not to be considered as digital natives. thus, the construction of the four positions is likely to last but these are not mutually exclusive seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 10 positions. rather than being immutable/fixed categories, they should be regarded as analytical positions, which enable us to understand the icthabitus and ictcapital of students. over time there will be shifts and even convergences in these positions and the boundaries of the positions are likely to become blurred, but given that four percent of the respondents in the 2012 technucation survey still prefered to avoid the use of technology in learning and clinical practice, there is no reason to believe that this position is on the wane. it is probable that change in the positions, and indeed in society, will come about slowly. such changes cannot be attributed to the dissemination of ict, but rather to a modification in mindset that will be receptive to ideas such as the best way to perform nursing as well as the conditions under which nursing should be understood and practised. knowledge of the four positions can be used to identify nursing students with traits from the sceptic and opponent positions and support these students in mastering and using ict in their study and clinical work. it can also help to identify students possessing traits from the endorsers’ position. in order to foster these students’ skills of critical awareness of ict implementation in education and healthcare. if nursing students wish to work with people and for people, in the future they have to get to grips with ict, because increasingly it is being integrated into everything to help us make the best choices in our daily lives and in our excessively demanding professional work. references bottrup, p., & nielsen, j. 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(roads and ways in a changing field. a comparative analysis of two groups of student teachers in denmark and the united states.) institut for uddannelse, læring og filosofi, aalborg universitet. teknologisk institut (2012). teknologiforståelse blandt lærerog sygeplejerskestuderende survey af anvendelser, holdninger og forudsætninger. taastrup: teknologisk institut. http://technucation.dk/fileadmin/www.technucation.dk/baseline-survey.pdf uggerhøj, j., nyvang, t., & kjeldskov, j. (1999). indførelse af edb og informationsteknologi en kvalitiativ praksisanalyse med fokus på viborg seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 12 http://m.epn.dk/teknologi2/computer/article4806468.ece sygeplejeskole. unpublished semesteropgave. sociologisk samfundsanalyse aalborg universitet. about the author: ph.d., (msn), rn raymond kolbæk is a research lecturer. he has worked with the impact of ict in nursing and in education for almost 30 years. his area of expertise concerns the impact of digitalization of nursing in hospital settings at the regional hospital in central jutland. another area of interest is the transformation of the nursing curriculum from a traditional paper-based one to a blended online setup of via, health nursing education. 1 ict is the acronym for information and communication technologies. this also includes new digital technologies. 2 doxa is the concept for a position or rationale which involves a certain perception of reality prevailing in a field at any given time. 3 by the author of this paper. 4 kolbæk, r. (2013). holdninger til brugen af it i teoretisk uddannelse og klinisk sygepleje hos nystartede sygeplejestuderende. (first year nurse students’ attitudes towards the use of ict in theoretical education and clinical nursing.) university of copenhagen, copenhagen. http://forskning.ku.dk/find-en-forsker/?pure=da/publications/uuid%28b819c6d2b88a-4ba9-a7b8-d7e5b1555151%29.html 5 type of equipment, age, programs installed, access to internet, access to printer. 6 this questionnaire was developed and validated in the eu project nightingale (nursing informatics: generic high-level training in informatics for nurses, general applications for learning and education.) the project website is avaiable at http://web.archive.org/web/20001202043600/http://nightingale.dn.uoa.gr/ 7 the questionnaire was developed and validated by the bourdieu program in viborg led by prof. staf callewaert, to be used in other comparative projects about other semiprofessional conditions such as teachers, pedagogues and nurses (olesen, 2005), (steensen, 2007), (halskov, 2013). 8 express scribe free is a audio player software for pc or mac designed to assist the transcription of audio recordings. http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/ 9 nvivo is a computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (caqdas) tool. http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx 10 to do a preliminary construction of a field will in this context means those players from the field, their relations and interactions become known, so they are visible to the researcher and the reader. 11 hf (higher preparatory exam) hf-exam belongs to upper secondary education, which (like stx, hhx and htx) provides access to the higher education. unlike other aspects of modules in secondary education, hf candidates are required to complete hf by the 10th grade. hf can be organized as full-time training over 2 years or as single units. (http://ufm.dk/publikationer/2011/the-danish-education-system) 12 the central coordinating registration agency. 13 no data exists from 2002. 14 in 2011, there were computers in 90 %, smartphones in 33% and tablet-pc’s in 9% of the danish households, as 90% had access to the internet, by which 84% of whom had broadband access from their home. (danmarks statistik, 2012) 15 more than 25 million tablet computers were sold worldwide in the second quarter of 2012, an increase of 66% relative to same period in 2011. meanwhile, sales of laptops stagnated and sales of desktop pcs has decreased 2% back since the first six months of the previous year. (jyllands-posten online august 13, 2012) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 13 http://forskning.ku.dk/find-en-forsker/?pure=da/publications/uuid%28b819c6d2-b88a-4ba9-a7b8-d7e5b1555151%29.html http://forskning.ku.dk/find-en-forsker/?pure=da/publications/uuid%28b819c6d2-b88a-4ba9-a7b8-d7e5b1555151%29.html http://web.archive.org/web/20001202043600/http:/nightingale.dn.uoa.gr/ http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/ http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspx http://ufm.dk/publikationer/2011/the-danish-education-system http://m.epn.dk/teknologi2/computer/article4806468.ece http://m.epn.dk/teknologi2/computer/article4806468.ece). every fifth family had a tablet or minicomputer; four out of five had a laptop. the proportion of families who had a desktop computer fell from 2010 to 2011 from 30 to 24%. during the same period, the proportion of very small computers, handheld computers, such as pdas increased significantly from 6% to 10%. (statistics denmark 2012) these figures show a similar trend to that seen among danish nursing students in 2012. 16 98 % of the population between the ages of 16 and 44 possess and operate a mobile phone. (a distinction is made between ordinary mobiles and smartphones with internet access) (statistics denmark, 2012) 17 65 % of the danish internet users were linked to a social networking service. (statistics denmark, 2012) 18 the cloud is the name for web2 technologies where data processing is done online in real time on the web. 19 translated into english by author of this paper. 20 the danish online educational guideare these guidelines?: http://www.ug.dk/uddannelser/gymnasialeuddannelser.aspx 21 https://www.retsinformation.dk/forms/r0710.aspx?id=132647#b8 22 http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasialeuddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen stx/laereplaner-paa-stx 23 uni-c is the danish national center for computers in education. ok? 24 http://www.emu.dk/gym/projektarbejde/medit/ 25 http://www.emu.dk/gym/fag/if/dl/inspiration/index.html and http://www.emu.dk/gym/fag/if/index.html?gymr=stx 26 http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasialeuddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen stx/~/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/1 00622_vejl_dansk_stx.ashx 27 http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasialeuddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamenstx/~/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/1 00629_vejl_graesk_a_stx.ashx p. 16-18 28 in denmark, nursing education currently comprises 14 modules, each of which is 10 weeks in duration. 29 jonas eduardsen: http://www.slideshare.net/nextgenmarketing/er-de-digitaleindfdte-myte-eller-virkelighed 30 an american writer and ambiguous designer of digital games. 31 technucation: technological literacy and new employee driven innovation through education 32 the project combines ethnographic field studies in schools and hospitals with experimental living labs. it is a collaboration between several universities, university colleges and international educational researchers (www.technucation.dk) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 14 http://m.epn.dk/teknologi2/computer/article4806468.ece http://m.epn.dk/teknologi2/computer/article4806468.ece http://www.ug.dk/uddannelser/gymnasialeuddannelser.aspx http://www.ug.dk/uddannelser/gymnasialeuddannelser.aspx https://www.retsinformation.dk/forms/r0710.aspx?id=132647%23b8 https://www.retsinformation.dk/forms/r0710.aspx?id=132647%23b8 http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen-stx/laereplaner-paa-stx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen-stx/laereplaner-paa-stx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen-stx/laereplaner-paa-stx http://www.emu.dk/gym/projektarbejde/medit/ http://www.emu.dk/gym/fag/if/dl/inspiration/index.html http://www.emu.dk/gym/fag/if/index.html?gymr=stx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen-%20%20%20%20%20%20stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100622_vejl_dansk_stx.ashx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen-%20%20%20%20%20%20stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100622_vejl_dansk_stx.ashx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen-%20%20%20%20%20%20stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100622_vejl_dansk_stx.ashx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen-%20%20%20%20%20%20stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100622_vejl_dansk_stx.ashx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen%20%20%20%20-stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100629_vejl_graesk_a_stx.ashx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen%20%20%20%20-stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100629_vejl_graesk_a_stx.ashx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen%20%20%20%20-stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100629_vejl_graesk_a_stx.ashx http://www.uvm.dk/uddannelser-og-dagtilbud/gymnasiale-uddannelser/studieretninger-og-fag/studentereksamen%20%20%20%20-stx/%7e/media/uvm/filer/udd/gym/pdf10/vejledninger%20til%20laereplaner/stx/100629_vejl_graesk_a_stx.ashx http://www.slideshare.net/nextgenmarketing/er-de-digitale-indfdte-myte-eller-virkelighed http://www.slideshare.net/nextgenmarketing/er-de-digitale-indfdte-myte-eller-virkelighed http://www.slideshare.net/nextgenmarketing/er-de-digitale-indfdte-myte-eller-virkelighed http://www.technucation.dk/ nursing students’ attitudes towards ict in education and clinic in denmark. raymond kolbæk abstract: introduction method findings future considerations references title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 students’ expectations and experiences of meaningful simulation-based medical education tuulikki keskitalo & heli ruokamo university of lapland, faculty of education centre for media pedagogy (cmp) rovaniemi, finland email: firstname.lastname@ulapland.fi abstract this study aims to investigate students’ expectations and experiences of meaningful learning in simulation-based learning environments. we set the following research question: how do students’ experiences of meaningful simulation-based learning correspond to their expectations? the students’ (n = 87; male 51, female 36) preand post-questionnaires were analyzed using statistical methods. the results indicated that students’ expectations and experiences of meaningful learning were positive, and for most statements, there were statistically significant differences between the mean prequestionnaire rating and the mean post-questionnaire rating, thereby indicating that students’ actual experiences of simulation-based learning were more positive than their expectations. thus, students’ experiences exceeded their expectations. keywords: simulation-based medical education, meaningful learning, students, expectations, experiences, quantitative study introduction simulation and virtual realities have gained significant attention within the health-care and medical education industries around the world over the past few years (helle & säljö, 2012). interest in the pedagogical use of these environments—that is, when, how and what to use these technologies for in education to support effective learning—has also increased. according to rall and dieckmann (2005), “simulation, in short, means to do something in the ‘as if’, to resemble ‘reality’ (always not perfectly, because then it would be reality again), e.g., to train or learn something without the risks or costs of doing it in reality” (p. 2). however, in this study, we use the concept of a simulationbased learning environment (sble) because we want to emphasize the learning purpose of these technologically rich yet safe learning environments. according to keskitalo (2015), these should also be considered complex cultural, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 111 social, physical, and pedagogical environments. importantly, simulations can involve technology, but not all of them do. the overall aim of this study was to develop a pedagogical model for healthcare simulation educators (see keskitalo, 2015; keskitalo & ruokamo, 2015; keskitalo, ruokamo, & gaba, 2014). the pedagogical model—a theory-based model—can be used to design curriculums, plan instruction, and create instructional materials (joyce & weil, 1980). generally, pedagogical models provide ideas for teaching and learning, and they can appear in various types of pedagogical solutions. the principles of this pedagogical model were derived from the sociocultural theory of learning (lave & wenger, 1991; vygotsky, 1978), meaningful learning (e.g., ausubel, 1968; jonassen, 1995; ruokamo & pohjolainen, 2000), and previous pedagogical models of simulationbased health-care education (dieckmann 2009; joyce, calhoun, & hopkins, 2002). within the pedagogical model, sociocultural theory helps us to understand the complexity of learning and the development of expertise from a wider perspective. as the theory suggests, there is constant interplay between individual and social factors (palincsar, 1998; säljö, 2009). the characteristics of meaningful learning were chosen as a general framework and can be considered ideal goals when creating an effective learning environment. moreover, meaningful learning characteristics can help the facilitators to shed light on the things that are known to enhance learning (keskitalo, 2015). the main contribution of previous pedagogical models has been in helping to structure the simulation-based learning process. this particular study aimed to investigate students’ expectations and experiences of meaningful learning in an sble in order to gain a deep understanding of the conditions and processes that lead to effective learning in that environment and to further develop both the pedagogical model and educational practice. moreover, there are only a limited number of studies related to the expectations of teaching and learning in sbles (e.g., keskitalo, 2012). for this study, we set the following research question: how do students’ experiences of meaningful simulation-based learning correspond to their expectations? this article first focuses on the characteristics of meaningful learning and the previous research related to the topic. then, the research question and methods are introduced. finally, the research results are summarized, followed by a discussion. theoretical background meaningful learning is a concept invented by ausubel (1968). it resembles the constructivist idea of learning, whereby new information is assimilated into what the learner already knows (ausubel, novak, & hanesian, 1978). according to this view, both the learning materials and the task must be meaningful, and the learners must engage with the learning process (ausubel et al., 1978). later, jonassen (1995) developed ausubel’s ideas in a more social constructivist direction and described seven characteristics of meaningful learning (see also nevgi & löfström, 2005). in previous studies (e.g., keskitalo, 2015; keskitalo et al., 2014), we developed those characteristics in a more practiceoriented direction and thus included experiential, experimental, emotional, socio-constructive, collaborative, active, responsible, reflective, critical, competence-based, contextual, goal-oriented, self-directed, and individual characteristics. we argue that these selected characteristics describe optimal student training in this context and can foster students’ effective and meaningful learning. as keskitalo (2015) points out, with these characteristics in mind, facilitators may consider teaching and learning processes from a wider perspective and develop pedagogical practices that are effective, innovative, and meaningful. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 112 regarding the characteristics of meaningful learning, the terms “experiential and experimental learning” indicate that students can use their own experiences as a starting point for learning (kolb, 1984) and gain valuable experience before entering health-care practice (cleave-hogg & morgan, 2002; gaba, 2004). the emotional characteristics of learning reflect the fact that emotions are always intertwined with learning (damasio, 2001; demaria et al., 2010; immordino-yang & faeth, 2010). a simulation setting is expected to arouse strong feelings and motivation to learn, but it can also lead to disbelief because of its artificial nature (dieckmann, gaba, & rall, 2007). simulation-based education is usually based on students’ collaboration and interaction with other students, the environment, the simulators, and other technical devices. thus, learning can be viewed as socio-constructive and collaborative in nature (lave & wenger, 1991; vygotsky, 1978). the active and responsible aspects of learning refer to the fact that when training, students are active and are expected to be responsible for their own learning (fanning & gaba, 2007; jonassen, 1995). in the simulation setting, debriefing has an important role because it allows students an opportunity to reflect on their learning (issenberg, mcgaghie, petrusa, gordon, & scalese, 2005). additionally, students should critically evaluate their own learning, their acquired information, and their learning environment. learning is also contextual (vygostky, 1978)—that is, knowledge is best learned when it is taught and practiced in a context that resembles real life (bransford, brown, & cocking, 1999). therefore, in order to promote learning transfer, facilitators should structure the training with specific learning objectives in mind based on the competencies that students will need to handle real-life situations (fanning & gaba, 2007). students are also encouraged to set their own goals for learning in relation to the course goals and their own levels of expertise. during the learning process, it is also important to reevaluate these goals (brockett & hiemstra, 1991). learning also differs among individuals (de corte, 1995); therefore, facilitators should provide individual guidance and feedback to each student. although many students enjoy simulation-based education, there are those who do not. previous studies on expectations and experiences of simulation-based healthcare education in this study, the term “student expectations” refers to students’ expectations about the learning process in sble (cf. keskitalo, 2012). previous studies in the service delivery sector have divided expectations into expected, or predictive, normative, and experience-based (higgh, polonsky, & hollick, 2005; shewchuk et al., 2007). expected, or predictive, expectations refer to the expectations that students have about learning in these environments. normative expectations are, in students’ opinions, what should happen in these learning environments. experience-based expectations are based on students’ previous knowledge and experience (edberg & andersson, 2015). despite the increased interest in this research area, there are only a limited number of studies related to the expectations of teaching and learning in sbles (e.g., keskitalo, 2012). prior research has concentrated on discovering students’ expectations about studying medicine or nursing. for example, miles and leinster (2007) compared first-year medical students’ expectations and experiences. the results revealed that students’ expectations were more positive than their actual experiences regarding learning and teachers, their academic self-perceptions, and their social self-perceptions. the study also revealed that facilitators were poor at providing feedback and constructive criticism, the learning goals were poorly articulated, and the timetable for courses was not very well planned. also, the support system was poorer than expected for stressed students. in a recent study, edberg and andersson (2015) discovered that students’ expectations about the curriculum had changed from a biomedical orientation to a nursing orientation, which meant that formerly, students had expected that biomedicine would constitute the main content of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 113 the curriculum. edberg and andersson (2015) concluded that this could be a sign of a paradigm shift from a medical orientation toward nursing science. however, keskitalo (2012) discovered that students had high expectations of activities involving simulations within health-care education. adult students, in particular, seemed to expect a great deal. students expected a great deal of simulation facilitators in that they expected the facilitators to be competent and well prepared for teaching (keskitalo, 2012). to sum up, from a pedagogical viewpoint, the use of simulations in education is primarily expected to provide students with active and experiential learning opportunities in order for them to better integrate theory into practice (cleave-hogg & morgan, 2002; gaba, 2004; keskitalo, 2012; rall & dieckmann, 2005). in contrast, from a health-care practice viewpoint, the use of simulations is expected to eventually improve patient care and safety by providing professionals with opportunities to practice on rare cases and to use teamwork, among other goals. therefore, expectations for simulations in health-care education tend to be high. there is also notable evidence that students enjoy simulation-based education (e.g., brewer, 2011; keskitalo et al., 2014; konia & yao, 2013). many describe it as fun, experiential, and safe, but in an sble, students also have the opportunity to learn at their own pace (brewer, 2011). in addition to being experiential and enjoyable, the use of simulations enhances learning, such as via its moderate effects on clinical practice (chakravarthy, haar, mccoy, denmark, & loftipour, 2011; cook et al., 2011; eaves & flagg, 2001; hayden, smiley, alexander, kardong-edgren & jeffries, 2014; konia & yao, 2013; paige, arora, fernandez, & seymour, 2015). in an sble, students have the opportunity to learn clinical skills and basic science concepts that are otherwise difficult to understand (beauchesne & douglas, 2011; chakravarthy et al., 2011; hope, garside & prescott, 2011). sbles help in combining the various forms of knowledge into a bigger picture (bland, topping, & wood, 2011). the use of simulations also seems to enhance students’ self-confidence (figueroa, sepanski, & goldberg, 2013; gough, hellaby, jones, & mackinnon, 2012; hope et al., 2011; morgan & cleave-hogg, 2002; paskins & peile, 2010). for example, hope et al. (2011) discovered many benefits of using simulations in nursing education. the students felt that they were more ready for practice and that the simulation-based education enhanced their humanistic abilities and their technical and problem-solving skills, which improved their confidence. similar results have been found within the medical education environment (e.g., konia & yao, 2013). research question and methods with this as a background, this study aimed to answer the following research question: how do students’ experiences of meaningful simulation-based learning correspond to their expectations? data collection and analysis empirical data were collected in two simulation centers at stanford university in the years 2010–2014. the data were collected from facilitators and students using group interviews, observations, video recordings, and preand postquestionnaires. for this article, we analyzed students’ (n = 87; male 51, female 36) preand post-questionnaires, which were distributed at the beginning and at the end of the course, respectively. the students were mainly anesthesia residents and medical students. they were studying anesthesia crisis resource management, emergency medicine, and anesthesia clerkship. the mean age of the respondents was 30 years old; the youngest respondent was 25 years old, and the oldest was 40 years old. ten percent of the students had no prior expeseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 114 rience in simulation-based education, but most of the students had undergone simulation-based education before (one session, 14%; two sessions, 7%; three sessions, 9%; three or more, 48%). altogether, the data were collected from 19 courses, which lasted from three to nine hours. all the students who took part in the courses participated voluntarily in the research as well. the chosen courses were those that were running during the research period at stanford and to which the researchers had access. during the courses, all the activities were completed in a group format created by the facilitators. during the scenarios, there was usually one student who had a leading role (the “hot seat” person) and would call on the others to help. in some of the courses—for example, the anesthesia crisis resource management course—all the students could be leaders one by one; however, there were also courses in which all the students did not have the chance to experience being a leader. those students not taking part in the scenario watched from a separate room via a television. before the study, research permission was applied for and approved by the institutional review board, and thereafter, consent was obtained from the participants. the pre-questionnaire consisted of likert-type questions related to the students’ expectations of the teaching and learning processes in an sble. each of the 52 statements was scored on a continuum (1 = does not describe my expectations at all; 5 = describes my expectations very well). in addition, 29 likerttype questions (0 = not at all, 5 = to a great extent) focused on the emotions that students experienced during the course. the students were asked to evaluate the degree to which they felt a given emotion (e.g., enjoyment of studying, boredom, sense of community, etc.) before and after the course. five questions were also aimed at collecting students’ background information, and one open question gave the students space to write any other comments they had. the post-questionnaire questions were similar to those in the pre-questionnaire but dealt with students’ experiences. the detailed description of the development and usage of these questionnaires can be found in a previous article (keskitalo, 2012). for further analysis, we selected statements that reflected the characteristics of meaningful learning (27 items) (see also nevgi & löfström, 2005; ruokamo, hakkarainen, & eriksson, 2012). the data were analyzed using the frequencies, means, and standard deviations of the individual statements. the sum variables of the items measuring meaningful learning were computed using factor analysis (principal component analysis, see appendices 1 and 2) and cronbach’s alpha. the paired-samples t-test was used to compare the differences between the students’ expectations and their experiences (see miles & leinster, 2007). findings the students estimated their expectations and experiences regarding the meaningfulness of simulation-based learning based on the 27 items from the preand post-questionnaires. table 1 displays the reliabilities for each of the subscales that are used to measure meaningful learning in this study. in addition, the subscales were renamed based on the statistical analysis (factor analysis, principal component analysis) and theoretical reasoning (ruokamo et al., 2012; poikela, ruokamo, & teräs, 2015). characteristics of meaningful learning prequestionnaire (α, n) postquestionnaire (α, n) concrete (experiential and experimental) 0.69 (n = 87) 0.85 (n =83) emotional 0.82 (n = 86) 0.83 (n = 84) socio-constructive (socio-constructive and collaborative) 0.84 (n =86) 0.83 (n = 84) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 115 intentional (active, responsible, goaloriented, and self-directed) 0.76 (n = 84) 0.73 (n = 83) metacognitive (reflective and critical) 0.75 (n = 86) 0.81 (n = 84) competence-based (competence-based and contextual) 0.82 (n = 87) 0.85 (n = 84) individual 0.80 (n = 86) 0.82 (n = 84) table 1: cronbach’s α values for the subscales the reliabilities of the various subscales are acceptable. only in the first subscale (concrete) is the alpha value below 0.7, which is considered to be the threshold for acceptable internal consistency in most social sciences research (nunnally, 1978). table 2 reveals the results of the questionnaires, which indicate that students’ expectations and experiences were positive, and for most statements, there were statistically significant differences between the mean pre-questionnaire ratings and the mean post-questionnaire ratings. this indicates that students’ experiences were rated more highly than their expectations. characteristics and statements in the questionnaires prequestionnaire postquestionnaire dissonance concrete i will be able to utilize/utilized my prior experiences during the lessons during the lessons, i will be/was able to familiarize myself and practice with the technology needed for future work 3.98 (0.67) 4.23 (0.87) 4.05 (0.81) 4.11 (0.81) 4.38 (0.79) 4.09 (0.98) 0.13 0.15 0.04 emotional i will feel/felt safe during the lessons the course climate will motivate/motivated me to learn 4.09 (0.68) 4.34 (0.77) 4.21 (0.79) 4.48 (0.55) 4.53 (0.66) 4.53 (0.64) 0.39*** 0.19 0.32** socio-constructive i will be/was able to utilize my prior knowledge related to the course content my collaboration and communication skills will develop/developed during this course 4.23 (0.71) 4.36 (0.73) 4.16 (0.88) 4.48 (0.59) 4.54 (0.59) 4.53 (0.68) 0.25* 0.18 0.47*** intentional the student’s role will be/was to actively find, evaluate and apply information during the lessons the course objectives will be/were clear to me 3.92 (0.62) 4.30 (0.74) 4.15 (0.89) 4.20 (0.60) 4.54 (0.62) 4.41 (0.84) 0.28** 0.24 0.36* metacognitive i will be able to critically evaluate my own learning during the training. my critical thinking skills will develop during the course. 4.20 (0.71) 4,28 (0.77) 4.14 (0.90) 4.47 (0.65) 4.48 (0.70) 4.51 (0.66) 0.27* 0.20 0.37*** seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 116 competence-based training in simulation settings will develop/developed my competence the lessons will be/were applicable to my future work 4.08 (0.62) 4.26 (0.82) 4.34 (0.83) 4.36 (0.58) 4.56 (0.63) 4.63 (0.58) 0.28** 0.30** 0.29** individual the course will take/took the student’s individuality into account the study skills that i have adopted will also work/worked for me in this course 3.74 (0,77) 3.72 (1.01) 3.58 (0.98) 4.04 (0.77) 4.13 (0.99) 4.09 (0.87) 0.30* 0.41*** 0.51*** * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001 dissonance = mean for pre-questionnaire score minus mean for post-questionnaire score table 2: mean (standard deviation) ratings of the sum variable (bold), examples of the individual statements before and after the course as well as dissonances of means the results revealed that the students had the highest expectations of the socio-constructive (m = 4.23; sd = 0.71) characteristics of meaningful learning. when exploring the individual statements of the pre-questionnaire, students particularly expected to feel safe during the lessons (m = 4.34, sd = 0.77) and that the lessons will be applicable to the future work (m = 4.34; sd = 0.83). the lowest expectations that students had were related to the individual (m = 3.74; sd = 0.77) characteristics of meaningful learning. students did not greatly expect that the course will take the students’ individuality into account (m = 3.72; sd = 1.01) or that the study skills that they have adopted will also work for them in this course (m = 3.58; sd = 0.98). the analysis of the post-questionnaires revealed that students experienced the courses favourably in terms of the socio-constructive (m = 4.48; sd = 0.59) and emotional (m = 4.48; sd =0.55) characteristics of meaningful learning. however, when studying individual items, students valued the courses’ competence-based characteristics as well because the individual statements training in simulation settings developed my competence (m = 4.56; sd = 0.63) and the lessons were applicable to my future work (m = 4.63; sd = 0.58) received the highest ratings in the post-questionnaire. when analyzing the difference between expectations and experiences, students ranked their experiences significantly more highly than their expectations in the statements that measured the emotional (0.39***, p = 0.001) characteristics of meaningful learning. regarding the emotional characteristics of meaningful learning, the results indicated that students felt safer and more motivated than they had expected. individuality was not rated very highly in the prequestionnaire (m = 3.74; sd = 0.77), although the experiences were significantly better than the students’ expectations in this regard (m = 4.04, sd = 0.77; 0.30*, p = o.o5). the individual characteristics of learning also received the lowest ratings in the post-questionnaire. discussion and concluding remarks even though the study’s results are somewhat descriptive, this research provided us with useful information about the expectations and experiences of student learning in an sble. this study complements the existing literature on students’ experiences with information about their expectations because seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 117 these can be important determinants of the learning event (dieckmann & yliniemi, 2012). the results suggest that although students have quite high expectations of the training in sbles (cf. keskitalo, 2012), their experiences were even higher. in this study, students rated their experiences more highly than their expectations, which stood in contrast with the results of previous research in the medical domain (miles & leinster, 2007). as the results suggest, students’ experiences have exceeded their expectations. notably, most of the students had some prior experience with simulation-based training, which certainly affected their expectations. therefore, students could have expressed their experiencebased expectations in these questionnaires (parasuraman, zeithaml, & berry, 1988). by examining students’ expectations and experiences, we are able to develop the areas of education in which meaningful learning characteristics should be more emphasized. in this study, students experienced the emotional characteristics of learning significantly more highly than they expected to, which could be explained by the fact that during simulation-based education, special emphasis is usually placed on the emotional aspect of learning (e.g., demaria et al., 2010). although the individual characteristic of meaningful learning was the least highly rated, their ratings were still positive. however, based on previous studies, this characteristic of meaningful learning is the one that requires most of the work in these collaborative settings because there may be students who expect more individualized guidance and feedback (keskitalo et al., 2014). therefore, future research should concentrate on how we can realize the individual characteristics of learning in these collaborative settings, for example, through individualized counselling sessions or clinical hours in sbles. in summary, this study shed light on the students’ expectations, which are often under-recognized but still affect their learning experience in many ways. furthermore, by comparing students’ expectations and experiences, we were also able to identify and address the areas with which students are least satisfied. in addition, we must continue this research to ensure that this questionnaire can be considered a valid measure of students’ expectations and experiences. in this study, cronbach’s alpha values were calculated for each of the subscales; these values indicate that this questionnaire can be considered a valid measurement (nunnally, 1978), except for the value that measured the expectations for the concreteness of learning in the pre-questionnaire (α=0.69). according to tavakol and dennick (2011), a low alpha value can depend on a number of things, including a number of questions, poor interrelatedness between items, and heterogeneous constructs. in future, we should conduct the study with a wider population and in other contexts in order to gain more reliable results and to develop a reliable and valid test for measuring the meaningful learning of students within a simulation-based learning environment. the principal component analysis also works better with a wider population. for example, the metacognitive variable includes only two items, and more research is needed to evaluate which items form a logical aggregate that can be used to describe and measure the metacognitive characteristics of meaningful learning. for now, these results should be interpreted with careful consideration. in addition, the research period was quite long, which is why the conditions for learning might have changed, and there were also different facilitators for some of the courses, which affected the condition for learning as well. however, the purpose of this paper was not to study the longitudinal effects of teaching and learning conditions, but rather to inquire into students’ expectations and experiences of meaningful simulation-based learning. this is, however, an interesting topic to cover in future research but with more participants. however, the results of this study will enable us to continue designing a more user-friendly pedagogical model and ensure its improved integration into simseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 118 ulation-based education practices. this research offers useful insights regarding teaching and learning—especially for health-care teachers, teacher educators, instructor trainers, designers, and researchers—regarding how to plan more meaningful and effective simulation-based education. references ausubel, d. p. 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(1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge: harvard university press. acknowledgements tekes (the finnish funding agency for innovations) and erdf (european regional development fund), as well as a number of public and private financiers, have provided the financing for this research as part of the medi peda iii, medipro, and crics projects. the authors would like to thank the cisl (center for immersive and simulation-based learning) group for their helpful comments and guidance, as well as the teachers and students of stanford university for their participation in this research. this study was also part of the research activities of the cicero learning network, finland (www.cicero.fi). http://www.cicero.fi/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 121 appendix 1. results of principal component analysis (pca) for prequestionnaire c on cr et e e m ot io n al so ci oco n st ru ct iv e in te n ti on al m et ac og n it iv e c om p et en ce -b as ed in d iv id u al i will be able to utilize my prior experiences during the lessons. ,749 during the lessons, i will be able to familiarize myself and practice with the technology needed for future work. ,617 i will be able to repeatedly practice my skills during the lessons. ,491 i believe that the use of equipment will be easier after the course. ,871 i will feel safe during the lessons. ,518 the course’s climate will motivate me to learn. ,713 the climate will be relaxed during the debriefing. ,778 i will feel comfortable during the lessons. ,846 i will be able to utilize my prior knowledge related to the course’s content. ,769 my collaboration and communication skills will develop during this course. ,669 my problem-solving skills will develop during the course. ,648 the student’s role will be to actively find, evaluate, and apply information during the lessons. ,786 facilitators will support the students’ own activities. ,727 i will set my own personal goals for the training. ,525 the course objectives will be clear to me. ,591 the learning goals that i have set are easy to achieve. ,545 i will be able to critically evaluate my own learning during the training. ,576 my critical thinking skills will develop during the course. ,69 4 training in the simulation settings will develop my competence. ,743 i will be able to utilize the lessons in my future work. ,765 the lessons will be applicable to my future work. ,700 i will be well prepared for practicing medicine after the course. ,794 i can manage different kinds of exercises. ,586 the course will take the students’ individual starting points into account. ,733 the study skills that i have adopted will also work for me in this course. ,762 the course will take the students’ individuality into account. ,759 i will be able to train independently with the facilitators’ guidance during the lessons. ,666 cronbach’s alpha ,690 ,823 ,836 ,758 ,746 ,822 ,804 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 122 appendix 2. results of principal component analysis (pca) for postquestionnaire post-questionnaire c on cr et e e m ot io n al so ci oco n st ru ct iv e in te n ti on al m et ac og n it iv e c om p et en ce ba se d in d iv id u al i will be able to utilize my prior experiences during the lessons. ,649 during the lessons, i will be able to familiarize myself and practice with the technology needed for future work. ,596 i will be able to repeatedly practice my skills during the lessons. ,793 i believe that the use of equipment will be easier after the course. ,597 i will feel safe during the lessons. ,660 the course’s climate will motivate me to learn. ,619 the climate will be relaxed during the debriefing. ,633 i will feel comfortable during the lessons. ,790 i will be able to utilize my prior knowledge related to the course’s content. ,785 my collaboration and communication skills will develop during this course. ,503 my problem-solving skills will develop during the course. ,758 the student’s role will be to actively find, evaluate, and apply information during the lessons. ,644 facilitators will support the students’ own activities. ,805 i will set my own personal goals for the training. ,716 the course objectives will be clear to me. ,822 the learning goals that i have set are easy to achieve. ,622 i will be able to critically evaluate my own learning during the training. ,660 my critical thinking skills will develop during the course. ,779 training in the simulation settings will develop my competence. ,778 i will be able to utilize the lessons in my future work. ,753 the lessons will be applicable to my future work. ,773 i will be well prepared for practicing medicine after the course. ,680 i can manage different kinds of exercises. ,695 the course will take the students’ individual starting points into account. ,569 the study skills that i have adopted ,683 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 123 will also work for me in this course. the course will take the students’ individuality into account. ,587 i will be able to train independently with the facilitators’ guidance during the lessons. ,623 cronbach’s alpha ,845 ,827 ,831 ,731 ,812 ,849 ,819 students’ expectations and experiences of meaningful simulation-based medical education tuulikki keskitalo & heli ruokamo abstract theoretical background previous studies on expectations and experiences of simulation-based healthcare education research question and methods findings discussion and concluding remarks references title openness in education: claims, concepts, and perspectives for higher education   theo hug university of innsbruck e-mail: theo.hug@uibk.ac.at abstract characteristics of openness can be found in many respects throughout the history of education. from comenius’ call for pedagogical reform to postmodern educational theory, requirements of access, social justice, creativity, knowledge sharing, innovation, and capacity building have been emphasized in various ways. the chapter provides an outline of different understandings and notions of openness in educational contexts as well a discussion of their relevance for openness towards academic knowledge cultures and different forms of knowledge. finally, the contribution highlights organizational, methodological, and critical perspectives as three aspects which appear to be undervalued in current debates about openness in higher education. keywords: education for all; open education (oe); open educational resources (oer); massive open online courses (moocs); knowledge cul­tures; educational commons; open learning; future of higher education; introduction since about 15 years, we find a variety of initiatives dealing with open education (oe), open educational resources (oer), and creative commons (cc) licenses. almost 10 years ago, in 2008 stephen downes and george siemens led a course called connectivism and connective knowledge at the university of manitoba (canada) which inspired dave cormier to coin the term ‘mooc’ as an acronym for a massive open online course. apart from a small number of students learning in class, over 2200 online students from the general public and various backgrounds took part in this course. today, we find a wide range of oe and oer initiatives as well as diverse kinds of moocs all over the world. consistently, the activities are aiming at opening up education in one way or another by the use of digital media technologies. however, these initiatives as well as related discourses and practices, are predominantly linked to general policy statements, claims of educational policies aiming at basic, vocational or higher education, and institutional strategies on global, international or regional levels. so far, these themes and developments have been taken up rather reluctantly in mainstream educational theory and philosophy. comparatively few theoretically ambitious contributions have been published in the area (cf. for example, bergamin et al. 2009; deimann 2014; cebrián-de-la-serna & desenne 2015; deimann & peters 2016).   notions of open education are often linked to notions of open access, open society and free culture, open source and free/libre open source software (f/loss), open science and knowledge commons, open government and open innovation, as well as further related notions. most commonly, recent debates about education for all, enabling universal education, or free educational infrastructures can be characterized by a kind of historical amnesia – calls for education for all are anything but new, they can be traced back at least to the work of johann amos comenius (1592-1670) and social and religious learning with the pauline epistles. characteristics of openness and motives of opening up education can be found in many respects throughout the history of education. from plato’s elitist concept of education for a ruling class of philosophers to the strategic efforts of the unesco and other institutions to improve the quality of education, the relation of private and public issues and its relevance for educational processes have been highlighted repeatedly.   as to higher education, respective discourses are oscillating between political calls for employability and economization, industrial hopes for funding for digitization strategies and implementation of new learning technologies, management objectives of marketization and efforts to profit financially.  the commercialization of academic institutions generally follows socio-political commitments to enable access to higher education more widely. on one hand, educational policies aim at opening new latitudes and flexibilities for students and teachers. on the other, educators make significant pedagogical efforts toward expanding scopes of action learners and educational institutions involve themselves co-create institutional conditions for all involved. public aspirations tend to lean toward free culture, educational commons, and democratization through openness and media. at the crossroads of openness and education characteristics and motives of openness can be found in many respects in the context of education. throughout history of education, we can find implicit dimensions of openness. for example, there are many reasons to assume that children educated themselves largely through varying degrees of free play, exploration, sharing and exchange for thousands of years. even though historic conditions, cultural constraints and media constellations are to be considered when reflecting such forms of openness avant la lettre, they remind us of always changing modes and scopes of learning and knowledge acquisition. although children’s play for its own sake might seem a prototypical example for openness in education at first sight, dynamic interrelationships of dimensions of opening and closure are essential for a differentiated understanding of the various aspects of free play, open education, and its conditions and constraints. moreover, dynamics and interdependencies of opening and closure are generally underestimated in discourses about openness in education, culture, and society.   as far as notions of openness are related to the achievements of the enlightenment, education for openness remains an ambiguous endeavor that extends to openness to criticism, intellectuality, freedom of expression, reasonable and sober-minded acting, bureaucratization of society as well as eurocentric thinking and european colonialism.   from a systematic perspective, openness in education refers to all levels of education as well as formal, informal and non-formal contexts. this counts for both, opening up educational processes and institutions as well as opening up minds, bodies, hearts, or communicative dynamics through education.   as to oer and higher education, the “definition of ‘open’ is constantly evolving and varies according to context e.g. sharing software source code, re-(using) content and open access to publications” (yuan et al. 2008, p. 2). generally speaking, in the context of oe and oer the term ‘open’ may refer to meanings such as ·         free availability and accessibility of content ·         open-mindedness and listening to critique ·         policies of reducing restrictions of all sorts as far as possible ·         avoidance of (significant) monetary costs for users ·         guidelines for building communities of use ·         modes of licensing ·         standards of interoperability.   according to lane (2009, p.4), basic meanings of ‘open’ in oer refer to open access, open licensed, open format, open software. albeit such listings highlight important dimensions of openness in education and oer initiatives, we have to be aware that they can be supplemented easily and that they tend to blanket other aspects and dimensions. in order to avoid or overcome possible pitfalls we can contrast contemporary claims with historic strands of discourse on open education, for example, with reference to nyquist (1972) and nyberg (2010 [1975]), or in terms of current basic research, for example, with reference to peters (2010) or deimann and peters (2016). another possibility for opening up debates and encouraging an open approach to openness in education might start by asking for synonyms of “open” and “education” or closely related terms. table 1 shows a series of basic meanings and synonyms in the form of a matrix. of course, other terms than those offered in table 1 could be used, too, such as “uncovered,” “unprotected,” “free from concealment,” or “not restricted to members of a particular group” for “open,” and “schooling,” “instructional principles,” “learning to learn,” “distribution of content,” “transmission of knowledge,” “pedagogical interaction,” “touching events,” or “biographical upheavals” for “education.” thus, understandings and conceptions of “open education” can be conceptualized in the fields of such a matrix. then again, existing notions of “open education” or “openness in education” can be positioned tentatively in one or more of the fields.     table 1. example for an oe-matrix – at the crossroads of interpretations of interpretations of ... (cf. hug 2016, p. 3)                         open education without barriers allowing for passage broad-minded free permeable tbc training easy to access eligibility certificates free choice of material no or low monetary costs coming and going   learning in formal contexts no eligibility assessments authorization transformative learning self-organized learning revising and reusing oer   self-learning self-empowerment crediting open learning, self-improvement critical literacy educational commons, edupunk sharing, redistributing content   teaching teaching as learning professional growth democratic orientation fair use, (re-)use of oer team-teaching   lesson, class low-threshold access skipping classes global education lessons at no (obvious) charge flipped classroom   formation (bildung, dannelse) free choice of educational material, rhizomatic education social mobility enabling self-deter­mined processes personal enrichment, education for its own sake choices for individuals in the course of education   upbringing (erziehung) anarchic education adequate bonding personal maturation liberal education intercultural education   tbc               obviously, further enhancements of (re-)thinking openness in education can be considered beyond complementing further meanings in an oe-matrix as exemplified in table 1. one way of moving beyond the addition of other basic meanings can be realized by introducing a third dimension in order to reflect on (a) temporal or spatial dynamics, (b) informational, socio-cultural, relational or emotional ecologies, or (c) on definitional and metaphorical uses of key concepts including related goals and politics of concepts (begriffspolitik). in addition, contexts of use, language games, alternative approaches, and discursive relationships can be opened up for debate according to problem descriptions being in negotiation.   although, often there are various limitations to negotiate meta-reflexive considerations in academic or pedagogical contexts, it is not least the meta-reflexive leeway which indicates the quality of dynamics and interdependencies of opening and closure. correspondingly, modes self-reflection on the level of individuals, groups, institutions and organizations can act as important indicators for the analysis of different forms and limitations of openness in education. this regards earlier forms of open learning, self-organized study-groups, open plan classrooms, or open schooling, just like more recent developments associated with open universities, open courseware, and open education. in all of these contexts, claims for open education are always dealing with tensions between programmatic, conceptual and performative dimensions as well as with differences between self-determined (selbstbestimmt) and self-directed (selbstgesteuert) forms of learning. in other words, open education always aims at opening up new horizons and encountering new limitations from now on.   generally speaking, openness in education can be regarded as an operative fiction and also as an “educationalization formula” (pädagogisierungsformel) (cf. veith 2003, pp. 183-201) that has been and can be interpreted in many ways. veith (2003) provides a useful historical overview of reproduction problems and educationalization formulas. although it has been developed for issues of education in the german-speaking area, it can be helpful to focus on guiding differences and formulas of relevance for education both in history and today in a wider sense, too. he analyses tensions between normative aspects of legitimation and educational discourses regarding conceptual clarifications of the core areas and responsibilities of the discipline, and the increasingly multi-faceted societal demands of providing various kinds of education.   however, his approach can be further differentiated in a number of ways, for example, with regard to educational formulas in different countries and world regions, transnational and global contexts of education, and not least recent oe developments and contemporary claims for open education, opening up education, and openness in education. although ‘openness’ suggests a static understanding of the concepts, in large parts of respective discourses processes and dynamics are being emphasized rather than results.   today, we are facing contrasting and competing relevance formulas for education rather than one formula, among them all kinds of competencies and literacies up to the “literacification of everything” (hug 2012, p. 118), dealing with complexities, inclusion, and openness as a sufficiently shimmering concept that is applicable in multiple ways in pedagogical, academic, political, medial, and economic discourses. openness in education includes patterns of thinking and speaking of education as upbringing, learning to learn, training, output, or relation. needless to say that these and similar thinking patterns imply various options for conceptualizations. if we take education, for example, as relation and not as output[1] we can describe various qualities of educational relations and also a number of basic understandings of ‘relation’ or ‘relational’. from a meta-theoretical perspective, the term ‘relational’ can be used in everyday language in the sense of both ‘connected’ or ‘bonded’ or associated domains of reference like kinship. it can be used in more specific or theoretically informed ways by referring, for example, to ·         conventional venn-diagrams, ·         relational realism in relational sociology (sensu charles tilly and pierpaolo donati), ·         ecological systems theory or human ecology theory (sensu urie bronfenbrenner) complementing the meta-model with respect to exoand chrono-levels, ·         actors who are relationally positioned within a field (sensu pierre bourdieu) and the modes in which respective positions are determining his or her situated viewpoint of activities in and towards certain fields, ·         the notational distinction between monadic versus relational predicates (sensu charles s. peirce), ·         relational logics of development (richter 2014) as a methodological basis for clarifications of the concept of transformatory education (transformatorischer bildungsbegriff) ·         theory of radical relationism as outlined by peter krieg (2005, p. 137-163).   these and other notions of ‘relational’ offer points of references for relation-oriented conceptualizations of education and for corresponding understandings of openness in education. accordingly, openness as educationalization formula can take many forms ranging from ideological claims to moral imperatives, and context-related norms. all of them are to be distinguished from more or less differentiated descriptions and analyses of oe practices, initiatives and conceptualizations of openness. oer and the case of moocs: reflections and critical considerations openness can also be characterized as a meta-principle that has been relevant in many ways for educational and academic practices throughout history. in their book on the virtues of openness, peters and roberts (2012) address “the social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding educational and scientific value, evidenced in the growth of open source, open access, open education, and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities” (peters and roberts 2012, p. 4). on the one hand, many hold up values of openness as an overriding value or a meta-principle especially in academic cultures. on the other hand, we are facing new tectonics in academic landscapes in view of progressing commercialization, intensified managerialism, disruptive technological developments and institutional diseases like “evaluitis”, as well as processes of globalization, digitization and medialization.   claims of openness have become increasingly important in academic discourses and especially in economic and political debates about organizational structures, governance and scientific development, and to lesser extent about understanding information, communication, and knowledge dynamics in transversal media systems. the spectrum ranges from philosophical works (cf. peters and roberts 2012) to initiatives on a policy-strategic level including initial unesco activities (cf. unesco 2002) or, for example, initiatives of the european commision like the “openeducationeuropa”[2]. hylén et al. (2012) provide an overview about oer activities in the scope of the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd).   as to moocs we can find a variety of different types today, among them bmoocs (blended moocs), cmoocs (connectivist moocs), mmoocs (meta, mobile or mini moocs), qmoocs (qualifications moocs), tmoocs (transfer moocs), vmoocs (vocational or vishnu moocs) and xmoocs (extended moocs). hypes and more quiet practices of “going amooc” can take many forms ranging from rather non-massive open online courses (“oocs”) with less than 30 participants to extraordinarily numbers which can go beyond 150,000 students registering for a single mooc. in detail, further distinctions can be drawn along business models, licensing models, forms of dealing with content, tasks and networking, relations of individuals and groups, roles of students, teachers and tutors, understandings of learning and pedagogy, gender differences, and other distinguishing characteristics. in their review of literature on moocs published from 2008-2012, liyanagunawardena et al. (2013) come to the conclusion that “[m]any articles published to date have discussed empirical evidence from case studies, the influence on higher education structure, or educational theory relating to moocs” and that there are “further interesting research avenues such as cultural tensions within courses and the ethical aspects of using data generated by mooc participants still to be explored” (ibd.). in another systematic review the authors state in a sobered manner:   “a rich, original idea that started strongly, with high expectations based on the innovative potential of openness, has, over the years, gradually becoming a mechanical formula with little genuine creativity but more focused on reaching global audiences rather than delivery through traditional academic institutions.” (chiappe-laverde et al. 2015, p. 14)   on the whole, skeptical assessments clearly predominate in analytic, reflective or evaluative literature. there are also critical voices from within. for example, in an interview with chris parr (2013), stephen downes argues:   “moocs as they were originally conceived…were the locus of learning activities and interaction, but as deployed by commercial providers they resemble television shows or digital textbooks with – at best – an online quiz component.” (downes in parr, 2013)   there are also voices claiming “that open education provides a road to deeply modernize education to the challenges of tomorrow, to support complex skills and to adapt education better to the demands of a knowledge society” (meiszner & squires 2013, p. 17). however, addressing moocs and uses of oer in terms of empowerment of students and faculty, better learning outcomes, or making use of course material anytime, at one’s own pace and anywhere generally remains problematic. this can easily be illustrated with reference to critical issues and paradoxical aspects.   a critical scrutiny of the literature suggests that terms like «openness» and «freedom» are under-theorized (cf. knox, 2013), and pay little respect to well established philosophical and historical evidence of its vagueness and implicit political agendas (cf. hug 2014), as well as its hidden assumptions about self-motivation and expectations on media technologies (cf. missomelius, 2014). facing these moocs one also can detect a number of paradoxes and ambivalences regarding claims of freedom and exclusive demands for stable and advanced technologies, providing opportunities that attract the well informed and already privileged users while weakening the financial foundation for public education. a different kind of paradoxes relate to how ideology states “sharing practices” and still promotes “branding” and marketing of prestigious institutions with rigorous copyright policies. technologies are, similarly, most often proprietary and its proponents avoid free/libre open source software, and – last the discrepancy between the huge exposure to learning analytics and big data analysis, while, in theory, advocating data privacy and autonomy.   ignoring such paradoxes and ambivalences will not lead to improvements of the quality of education. as far as moocs and oer can be characterized as modes of opening up educational opportunities and disengaging them from institutional ties, the public-private nexus has to be (re-)considered explicitly in view of developments of new institutional features and widespread forms of the incorporation of profit-oriented structures especially in higher education. perspectives for higher education – all open? at times, it is stated that openness and knowledge sharing have always been at the heart of higher education and academic knowledge cultures. then again, there are initiatives like the “science shop” (wetenschapswinkel, wissenschaftsladen) at least since the 1970s and more recently initiatives like the berlin declaration on open access to knowledge in the sciences and humanities (2003) which remind us of the unequal distribution of scientific knowledge as well as its benefits and risks, social accountability (sozialpflichtigkeit) of academic knowledge, and fair access to resources and results of academic knowledge production generally. today, open access initiatives are widespread and important but often fall short in terms of conceptual, social, and organizational aspects – at the same time ignoring former lessons learned in the context of opening up systems of scientific knowledge production (cf. for example, leydesdorff & besselaar, 1987).   indeed, even connections to traditional distinctions like doxa, epistêmê, technê, phronêsis, gnosis, or sophia (cf. glasersfeld 1997, p. 198) remain implicit or even forgotten all too often. although in the field of theory of knowledge, there are research activities going on regarding implicit dimensions[3] their relevance remains widely undervalued in contexts of higher education.   these understandings and other distinctions regarding the assumed location of knowledge, for example, in minds or heads, bodies, objects to be treated, societies, social structures or networks, in the “cloud” or vanishing into things (allen 2015), are of significant importance for concrete meanings of openness in higher education and strategies of opening up academic knowledge. distinguishing degrees of openness along the lines of access and availability, accreditation and forms of licensing, dimensions of information technology or computational thinking, and corresponding pedagogical framings and scopes for action are too narrowly considered. beyond that, concepts and practices of opening up are always relevant in terms of knowledge cultures and knowledge politics as well as medial constellations and understandings of education, too. besides, there is the ongoing struggle for clarification of various forms of knowledge – like experience-oriented everyday knowledge, common sense forms of knowing as well as knowing in arts and academic contexts, scientific knowledge or mythical knowledge –, not to forget about efforts to point out respective conceptual distinctions, transitions, and similarities.   in view of these complexities in flux, taking ‘openness’ as an absolute value or a value in itself appears to be problematic. unintended side-effects are rather likely if claims for openness are too simply conceived and if corresponding educational practices build upon such claims. opening up academic knowledge cultures without considering some strands of the complex interplay of understandings, organizational dynamics and practices at least in part could resemble a blind flight in foggy sky or end up in openness towards everything.[4] moreover, we should always be aware of socio-cultural and media dynamics of opening and closure (cf. rußmann et al., 2012, dobusch, 2017) as well as dynamics of co-evolution of media and culture, knowledge and space, and “knowledge scapes” (matthiessen, 2007) as related to knowledge milieus. with this in mind, i want to highlight three aspects which appear to be undervalued in current debates about openness in higher education.   (1) from an organizational perspective there are issues of openness towards structural changes. universitas est semper reformanda – throughout history, we find an ongoing transformation of academic cultures and scientific systems including outsourcing of technical universities in the 19th century, non-university research, and the invention of universities of applied sciences. today, media are often described as means of empowerment, participation and digital inclusion while being used as instruments of “wikiwashing” (fuster morell 2011), non-transparent data collection, surveillance, governance and control. whitchurch (2008) – following homi bhaba’s cultural concept of an “intermediary space” – uses the term ‘third space’ with reference to new roles between administration (in a narrow sense) and academic research and teaching. corresponding activities are related to fields like quality management, controlling of educational “outputs”, innovation management, e-learning “implementation” units, public relations offices, research management, library services, staff development, etc.   these fields have been established and continuously expanded in many universities all over the world, whereas many research departments and academic units have been struggling with substantial cutbacks. while zellweger moser and bachmann (2010) are describing this development in uncritical ways, baecker (2010) pleads in favor of balancing dynamics of research, teaching and administration. however assignment of responsibilities and competencies is being done, for example, in the context of innovation management within universities, mostly the respective activities show characteristics of re-acting or re-structuring and hardly characteristics of re-designing, re-framing, or-generating according to possible modes of coping with change (cf. peschl & fundneider 2008). it must remain an open question at this point, how and to what extent the ongoing activities in academic “third spaces” are complicating, obstructing, supporting or opening up perspectives for which areas of academic research and higher education.   (2) as far as methodological perspectives are concerned, wide parts of academic research are dealing with standardized methodologies. especially in empirical research, communicative stabilization of research topics, objects and methods is crucial in order to enable traceability, validity, reliability, replicability, transparency, reflection of limitations and well reasoned arguments concerning appropriate relations of selected subjects or objects, questions, and methods. but also in theoretical or philosophical research, quality criteria like understandability, coherent approach, value-added contribution, convincing argumentation, confirmability, critical engagement with sources or methodological reflection play an important role. however, without unbiased and open-result discussions, open-mindedness of participants, deep listening to critique, risky considerations, seriously getting involved with uncertainty, selective rule violations and courageous forms of re-framing hardly any new thoughts, theories and methods would enter academia.   openness towards innovative solutions and research-based learning and education in a globalized world require not only multi-perspective views, well-reasoned applications of methods and thoughtful thinking but also abilities to become sensitive towards styles, languages and cultures of knowledge and science (cf. thiel & rost 2001, hess 2012) and to call into question basic assumptions. in contrast to prevalent versions of monological research, and in contrast to much less common versions of dialogical research, options for polylogical research have been widely ignored so far. polylogical research as outlined by wimmer (2001) allows for extensive reciprocal influences of various positions and promotes situations in which all basic concepts, assumptions, starting points and methods are debatable (cf. wimmer, 2001).   (3) as to critical perspectives openness towards critical thinking is widely recognized as an indispensable prerequisite to foster good scientific practice. even though today often other forms of thinking – such as design thinking, computational thinking, complexity thinking, or emotional thinking – are being emphasized, critical thinking remains a general requirement in the sense of both a teaching and researching principle and a remedy against opportunistic or dogmatic thinking. on closer examination, it quickly becomes clear that there are varying preferences for this cross sectional subject among them logical reasoning as well as skeptical, multi-perspective, science-oriented, independent, systematic, methodical, critical of society, networked, systemic, self-reflective, and meta-cognitive thinking. by and large, on a paradigmatic level we can distinguish between four approaches: ·         neo-marxist philosophy, critical theory, criticism of ideologies ·         phenomenological critique ·         praxis-oriented and activist movements ·         postmodern, post-structuralist and post-colonial thinking.   if we take conceptual, discursive and performative aspects of critical activities into consideration we frequently are facing paradogmatic tendencies or paradoxical aspects, too. for example, it is sometimes the case that those who like to express themselves as particularly “critical”, “transparent” and “demo­crati­cally oriented” are concerned with the covert enforcement of anti­democratic interests. dynamics of opening and closure play an important role in the context of critical thinking, too, not least in the sense of problematic turning-points or tilt-effects when, for example, ·         criticism of ideology is turning into an ideological endeavor ·         critique of culture industry comes as part of arts and entertainment industry ·         re-governementalization takes place in the name of de-govern­mentalization ·         postmodern easiness is tipping in a cynical smile, laugh, or laughter ·         post-colonial activities are changing to a colonialist undertaking.   while critical thinking may end up in the prohibition of criticism of the other, a deeper understanding of open mindedness and openness in higher education aims at overcoming and avoiding pitfalls of arbitrary positings (setzungen) and epistemological foundationalism based on, for example, empiricism, rationalism or transcendentalism. from a meta-theoretical perspective it is important to be aware of epistemological and methodological research contexts as well as researcher-generated contexts, too. a non-foundationalist approach as outlined by heyting (2001) and goor et al. (2004) appears to be useful here. such an undogmatic approach takes account of the undecidable character of many questions, and it helps countering premature, oversimplified “solutions” or arbitrary strategies by means of a threefold contextualization of specific problems and topics: reflection on the meaning context, personal context and discourse context (cf. goor et al. 2004, p. 176, 182 ff).   against this background, openness in education means being in search of ways between scylla of epistemological foundationalism and charybdis of arbitrary positings (setzungen).thus, openness as related to critique and critical thinking means opening up towards reflective forms of meta-critique (latour 2004; hoy 2004). this claim for meta-critical, polylogical and context-sensitive perspectives should not be mixed up with a claim for ‘anything goes’:   “openness to possibilities is not the same as saying ‘anything goes’ because possibilities are always limited and situated. furthermore, openness is the opposite of saying ‘nothing matters’ because possibilities are considered open only insofar as they are found to be worth pursuing.” (hoy 2004, p. 232) conclusions this essay has discussed different understandings of openness in educational contexts and their relevance for openness towards academic knowledge cultures and different forms of knowledge. it was shown that superficial understandings of ‘openness’ and ‘education’ in widespread discourses and practices related to oe, oer and moocs are problematic, in particular if more effort is put into marketing of learning opportunities, doubtful learning analytics, and politics of simplistic concepts than into clarification of concepts and methodologies, solid normative reasoning, and context-sensitive argumentation. perspectives for openness in higher education turn out to be dead ends if they are based on confusions of learning, training and education, and everyday theories of pedagogical concepts, instable platforms, and priorities of fast-paced economization. fruitful and future-oriented perspectives for openness in higher education are necessarily linked to an understanding of higher education through participation in academic research as well as theoretical and methodological deliberation.   furthermore, this study has found that generally organizational, methodo­logical, and critical aspects are underestimated in oe and oer contexts. as to organizational perspectives, structural changes in the sense of excessive strengthening of activities in academic “third spaces” prove to be ambivalent. far more importantly, dynamics of openness and closure are related to the ongoing reorganization of academic tribes, territories and disciplines beyond epistemological essentialism (cf. trowler et al., 2012; müller ,2014), too. this is about nothing less than considering both the structure of scientific revolutions (kuhn, 1962) and the revolution of scientific structures (müller, 2016), and re-thinking critical thinking with an emphasis on meta-critical, polylogical and context-sensitive perspectives.   in other words: if we take seriously that all knowledge is contextually bound, then context-sensitive concepts and practices open to the future are vital. if we frame oe and oer in contexts of medialization and digitization, inter­dependencies between human agency and the ongoing work of algorithms are to be considered explicitly. if we consider higher education as both a public and a private good for many and not just for elites, polylogical approaches are needed in order to enable critical mediation between individual and cultural memories as well as bet­ween contemporary societal challenges and “pure” research meant to be purpose-free.   references allen, b. 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(2014). bildungserwartungen und medienkulturen. in p. missomelius, w. sützl, t. hug, p. grell & r. kammerl, (eds.), medien – wissen – bildung: freie bildungsmedien und digitale archive (engl. media, knowledge & education: open educational resources and digital archives) (pp. 73–86). innsbruck: iup. missomelius, p. & hug, t. (2016). opening up education: opportunities, obstacles and future perspectives. in m. deimann & m. a. peters (eds.), the philosophy and theory of open learning: peer learning and the intellectual commons (pp. 31-50). new york: peter lang. müller, a. (2014). die “stämme” der akademie. österreichische zeitschrift für geschichtswissenschaften. 25(3), 5-15. retrieved may 9, 2017 from https://www.univie.ac.at/oezg/oezg143.htm müller, k. h. (2016). second-order science. the revolution of scientific structures. wien: edition echoraum. neuweg, g. h. (2001). könnerschaft und implizites wissen. zur lehr-lerntheoretischen bedeutung der erkenntnisund wissenstheorie michael polanyis. 2nd ed., münster, new york: waxmann. nyberg, d. a. (ed.) (2010). the philosophy of open education (international library of the philosophy of education). london; boston: routledge & k. paul (first published 1975). nyquist, e. b. & hawes, g. r. (eds.) (1972). open education: a sourcebook for parents and teachers. new york: bantam. parr, c. (2013): mooc creators criticise courses’ lack of creativity. original vision lost in scramble for profit and repackaging of old ideas, say pair. interviews by chris parr with stephen downes, george siemens, dave cormier and bryan alexander, october 17, 2013. retrieved july 12, 2016 from https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/mooc-creators-criticise-courses-lack-of-creativity/2008180.article peschl, m. f. & fundneider, t. (2008). emergent innovation and sustainable knowledge co-creation. a socio-epistemological approach to “innovation from within,” in m. d. lytras, j. m. caroll, e. damiani et al. (eds.), the open knowledge society: a computer science and information systems manifesto (pp. 101–108). new york, berlin, heidelberg: springer. peters, m. a. (2010). the idea of openness. in m. peters, t. besley, a. gibbons, b. žarnić & p. ghiraldelli (eds.), the encyclopaedia of educational philosophy and theory. singapore: springer. retrieved september 24, 2013 from http://www.ffst.hr/encyclopaedia/doku.php?id=the_idea_of_openness peters, m. a. &  roberts, p. (2012). the virtues of openness: education, science and scholarship in the digital age. boulder and london: paradigm. polányi, m. (1966). the tacit dimension. garden city, n.y.: doubleday. richter, b. (2014). bildung relational denken. eine strukturtheoretische präzisierung des transformatorischen bildungsbegriffs anhand von robert kegans entwicklungstheorie. doctoral thesis at the humboldt-university of berlin. rußmann, u., beinsteiner, a., ortner, h. & hug, t. (eds.) (2012). grenzenlose enthüllungen? medien zwischen öffnung und schließung. innsbruck: iup. ryle, g. (1946). knowing how and knowing that. proceedings of the aristotelian society. 46(1), 1-16. retrieved february 19, 2017 from http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/ryle/ryle_knowhow.pdf thiel, f. & rost, f. (2001).wissenschaftssprache und wissenschaftsstil. in t. hug (ed.), wie kommt wissenschaft zu wissen? vol. 4: einführung in die wissenschaftstheorie und wissenschaftsforschung (pp. 117-134). baltmannsweiler: schneider verlag. trowler, p., saunders, m. & bamber, v. (eds) (2012). tribes and territories in higher education: practices in the 21st century. london: routledge. unesco (2002). forum on the impact of open courseware for higher education in developing countries: final report. paris, france. retrieved february 19, 2017 from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001285/128515e.pdf van goor, r., heyting, f. g. & vreeke, g. j. (2004). beyond foundations: signs of a new normativity in philosophy of education. educational theory, 54(2), 173–192. von glasersfeld, e. (1997). wege des wissens. konstruktivistische erkundungen durch unser denken. heidelberg: carl auer systeme. whitchurch, c. (2008). shifting identities and blurring boundaries: the emergence of third space professionals in uk higher education. higher education quarterly, 62(4), 377–396. wimmer, f. m. (2001). polylogische forschung. in: t. hug (ed.), wie kommt wissenschaft zu wissen? vol. 3: einführung in die methodologie der sozialund kulturwissenschaften (pp. 382-393). baltmannsweiler: schneider verlag hohengehren. yuan, l., macneill, s. & kraan, w. (2008). open educational resources—opportunities and challenges for higher education. bolton, uk: centre for educational technology & interoperability standards (jisc–cetis). retrieved may 9, 2017 from https://oerknowledgecloud.org/sites/oerknowledgecloud.org/files/ oer_briefing_paper.pdf zellweger moser, f. & bachmann, g. (2010). editorial: zwischen administration und akademie neue rollen in der hochschullehre. zeitschrift für hochschulentwicklung, 5(4), 1-8. retrieved february 19, 2017 from https://doi.org/10.3217/zfhe-5-04/01 short cv theo hug is professor of educational sciences at the university of innsbruck (austria) and coordinator of the innsbruck media studies research forum. his areas of interest include media education and philosophy of education, mobile learning and microlearning, research methodology and theory of knowledge, medialization and philosophy of science. he is the author and/or editor of several books on various aspects of media, communication, and education, and together with josef mitterer he is literary executor of the ernst von glasersfeld archive (see http://evg-archive.net). since 2015 he is member of the european academy of sciences and arts (easa). weblink: http://hug-web.at. address university of innsbruck   department of media, society and communication  univ.-prof. dr. theo hug    media education and communications culture maximilianstrasse 2, building a, third floor, 6020 innsbruck, austria phone   +43 512 507 73602 mobile  +43 676 8725 50107 e-mail   theo.hug@uibk.ac.at [1] cf. the conference theme “education is relation not output? scenes of knowledge and knowledge aquisition” at linnaeus university in växjö, sweden, may 17th-19th 2016, https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/events/2016/education-is-relation-not-output/. [2] cf. https://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/.   [3] since earlier notions of “knowing how” (ryle 1946) on “tacit knowledge” (polányi 1966), a variety of different dimensions has been considered, among them inaccessible memories, being unaware, not-knowing or unknowingly, unconscious dynamics, “untaught knowledge” (neuweg 2001), impossible-to-articulate knowledge, discreetness, reticence, and various relations to explicit dimensions.   [4] this calls to mind a slogan of the sponti-scene of the late 60ies – “who is open to everything belongs to a closed facility”. in german: “wer für alles offen ist, kann nicht ganz dicht sein!” translation by aloisia moser.   title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 wiki storyline in second language teaching hege emma rimmereide faculty of education bergen university college, email: her@hib.no barbara blair faculty of education bergen university college, email: bjb@hib.no jon hoem center for new media bergen university college, email: jon.hoem@hib.no abstract wiki storyline is a web-based storyline project. the interdisciplinary approach to second language teaching provided by combining the storyline method and ict is dynamic, and ideal for practicing receptive and productive skills in english. being a learner-centered approach, the storyline creates motivation for written and oral communication and this is facilitated by digital tools. the wiki storyline project has been carried out with two inservice courses and this study presents a comparative analysis of the various technical solutions, as well as of the pedagogical potential explored in the two courses. in addition to the wiki, etherpad and a blog were the key digital media tools included in the project. in the wiki a virtual world was created, while etherpad served as a tool for real time collaborative text editing, and the blog as an arena for reflection for the participants, outside the virtual world. keywords: basic skills in english, blog, co-writing, motivation, multi modal texts, sharing, storyline, wiki introduction the project discussed in this paper was interdisciplinary, involving english lecturers from the faculty of education and staff from the center for new media at bergen university college, as well as the 2009-10 and 2010-11 participants in the english 2 in-service course. bringing together the storyline method and a variety of technological solutions, the project had as its aim to mailto:her@hib.no mailto:bjb@hib.no mailto:jon.hoem@hib.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 95 develop participants‟ competence as second-language (sl) users and secondlanguage teachers, as well as their digital competence. the digital storyline is particularly appropriate for this purpose because this in-service course is partly seminar-based and partly web-based. in the first semester the participants met three times and each session extended over three days. the storyline has been integrated fully into the course programme for this semester, including the assessment; the storyline tasks must be completed satisfactorily before participants can sit the midterm exam. the insights reported here are based on two years‟ experience using the storyline method and wikis. in this project, participants practiced receptive and productive skills in english, both in the discussions and presentations in class sessions and on the wiki websites and blogs. rather than simply being told about various online resources and their potential for teaching, they actually gained experience using these. at the same time, they gained first-hand experience of a motivating teaching method for sl teaching. thus, the project was built on three pillars: the storyline method, sl competence and digital resources. the question is: will the wiki storyline project have an impact on the course participants‟ own language development and/or on their teaching practices? the storyline method the storyline method is based on the theory that knowledge is complex and many layered, that learning is guided by one‟s prior knowledge and experience, and that learners construct their own meaning through action and experience. the storyline creates a context for learning with the active involvement of the child. (harkness and bell as cited in cresswell, 1979:3) in the late 1960s, the storyline approach was developed by a group of educators in glasgow, scotland in response to changes in the education system and focus. it was designed to meet the new demands for increased emphasis on the child‟s personal development and active participation, and for subject integration. maintaining these basic principles, storyline has since been widely adapted for use in a variety of subjects and levels. according to one of the storyline developers, sallie harkness, storyline‟s “flexibility has permitted teachers and curriculum developers to adapt it to their own purposes. it has travelled well and proved its worth in various cultures and educational systems” (as cited in cresswell, 1979:xvi). harkness goes on to enumerate the many benefits of the method in terms of pupil motivation, classroom relations, discovery learning, parental involvement, community links, cooperative teaching, pupil output, and skills practiced, as well as enjoyment. according to the storyline scotland website, “the main feature that differentiates this approach from others is that it recognizes the value of the existing knowledge of the learner” (“storyline scotland,” n.d.). thus, storyline is a learner-centered approach that draws upon learners‟ existing schemata, their previous knowledge and their experiences outside the classroom. on this foundation, in accordance with constructivist principles, “the students construct and build their new knowledge structures around the themes that the teacher introduces” (purtic, 2006:1). by implication, the learners‟ role is active, while the teacher‟s role is that of facilitator, scaffolding the process by providing the learning framework in the form of a storyline. this scaffolding involves setting the learning goals, and designing a sequence of incidents and trigger activities that will activate not only the learners‟ prior knowledge about a topic, but also their problem-solving skills. storyline also stresses active learning and discovery processes, relying upon vygotsky‟s insights into how children learn through activity. focusing on this seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 96 dimension, it is possible to identify four factors: interaction, artifacts, context and creativity. in storyline, the interaction dimension is central since learners are not alone; they work in groups and engage in a variety of activities that develop their social and collaborative competence. artifacts are also important since learning involves the use of both head and hands; tools are used in working with the story, in remembering and in communicating. perhaps the most distinctive dimension is the story context; learners are transported out of the classroom into an imaginary situation in which the various areas of knowledge are integrated and skills can be practiced in a meaningful way. finally, as in all storytelling, storyline is a creative process; the learners are no longer themselves but story characters, who guide the plot and create the artifacts. all of these dimensions contribute to the learning process, both in terms of knowledge and of thinking, questioning and problem-solving skills. in this respect, storyline may also be considered a skills-and-concepts approach. it is not a topic, project or theme, although it may share some of the same features and aims. working on a story implies a focus on creativity, experience and a variety of skills, and not simply on knowledge. it also implies a large degree of learner control over the direction and outcome. this means that learners develop a sense of ownership and level of engagement that is infrequent in more conventional theme-based approaches. according to jeff cresswell, “the major difference between the storyline method and thematic teaching (is that) storyline begins by having the child create his or her own conceptual model first” (1997:7). using their imagination, children fill in the gaps in their knowledge. they then compare their ideas with reality, asking questions related to the key issues they have identified. we would suggest that the principle of communication lies at the heart of this method. in the course of the storyline process, pupils are constantly interacting with group members: discussing, negotiating and collaborating to produce a wide variety of artifacts in different genre and materials. these artifacts serve to communicate the pupils‟ developing knowledge and skills. since one of the central aims in most second-language (sl) curricula is communication, storyline provides an ideal context in which to develop learner competence. this is particularly important since “communicative competence is determined and achieved by diverse and interwoven processes when individuals interact with each other” (ehlers et al., 2006:8). storyline allows sl teachers to develop situations in which authentic communication can take place and provides a meaningful framework in which to practice communication skills. according to steve bell, “storyline, as a strategy, helps to create a context which provides an audience and a purpose for the use of language in all its various forms” (as cited in ehlers, 2006:56). the relevance of the storyline approach in the sl classroom goes beyond the emphasis on interaction and communication. this approach also integrates subjects in a meaningful way, as in the journey storyline in which pupils use their knowledge of mathematics to draw up a budget. from the learners‟ perspective, it allows for individual interests and strengths, and caters for various intelligences and learning styles. this facilitates learners‟ engagement in their own learning, as well as serving as a motivational factor. on the basis of curricular goals and themes, teachers plan their storyline; they then engage the class in the story in a number of episodes, structured like the chapters in a story. the elements of a storyline are also the same as those of a story: setting, characters, theme and plot. as part of the story frame, a specific time and place is established – this is the imaginary context and is further elaborated by the learners. it is this context that sets the premises for the story; for example, the language that will be needed, the problems that may occur and the categories of characters that will be appropriate. then the characters are developed by the learners themselves, who take on a persona seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 97 and present him/her using a variety of images and texts. while a general theme is set in relation to the context, often involving the investigation of some phenomenon that is familiar – for example, farms, markets or journeys the details are filled in by the learners. the plot develops in a series of incidents in which the characters have to decide what to do in the face of a „real-life‟ problem; for example, an accident, an important visitor or a new neighbor. also like a story, a storyline opens with an introduction of the theme and presentation of the context and the characters. the typical structure of a storyline has been summed up in the following diagram: figure 1: the typical structure of a storyline. (ehlers et al., 2006:19) for each storyline episode, key questions, activities and objectives are specified; this is the „thread‟ to be followed. the function of the questions is to stimulate the learners‟ existing knowledge and draw out their experiences; for example, what they know about a particular context/setting or what they might do in a given situation. the activities are varied and may include artwork, writing, oral presentations, calculations, ict and problem solving. the choice of both questions and activities is guided by the objectives, which are in turn derived from the learning goals in the curriculum. the products of the activities provide a means for measuring the achievement of the objectives and a basis for self, peer and teacher feedback and evaluation. methods the data reported in this study consisted of texts produced by 28 course participants, divided into two groups of 14. documentation was collected throughout the project, since the focus was on the process as well as the end product. the multi-modal texts that were collected in the wiki serve to document the students' competences. there were two main sources of data related to students‟ evaluations: reflection texts and unstructured group interviews. the texts written by the students in their blog entries focused on their experiences related to the project elements and the process. they commented upon both the individual tasks and the group work. these texts were analyzed to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the various elements, as well as general interest in the storyline method. in addition, they provided evaluations of the various ict solutions. the unstructured group interviews were used to supplement the data obtained from the reflection texts. they provided an opportunity to ask questions that would fill in the gaps in the information provided; they also provided a forum in which to confirm the findings related to these texts. the storyline project: in-service course for english teachers the storyline described in this paper was not the first digital storyline to be developed. it was inspired by hilde brox‟s presentation of the wiki site she had developed with her students at the university of tromsø (presented at a seminar for members of the national network for english and second introduction (letter,song,game…) characters (family,friends,jobs..) place (circus, shops, hotel, school, at home…) incidents (birthday, wedding, accident, burglary..) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 98 languages in halden, 29-30 january, 2009). at the initial planning meeting for the english 2 (30 ects) in-service course, there were several reasons why we decided to develop a digital storyline specifically for teachers. first, this is a method that few teachers are familiar with and those who have used it have not done so in english. second, in keeping with the storyline tradition, a theoretical introduction to the method would be inappropriate; being activitybased, the approach should be experienced rather than simply talked about. third, it is important in an in-service course with only 3 gatherings per semester to develop a learning context in which participants are using english actively. being an activity-based approach, storyline allows us to integrate online and in-class oral and written tasks for inclusion in the course assessment. finally, we chose to make this a digital storyline because the role of ict in teaching has grown and digital competence is now included in the english curriculum beginning in fourth grade. this means that english teachers not only need the skills and knowledge necessary to develop their pupils‟ digital competence, but also those required to utilize the potential of this channel for teaching. since digital skills development was a course aim, we decided that this could best be achieved by utilizing online services suitable for schools in the storyline activities. our decision to use digital media in this project was supported by research. according to the report “writing, learning and leading in the digital age” by the national writing project in the usa, “the use of web 2.0 tools such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and comics-creating software can heighten students‟ engagement and enhance their writing and thinking skills in all grade levels and across all subjects” (prabhu, 2010). this is confirmed in the norwegian context by hoem, who states “that education should be focusing on the possibilities of utilising the qualities of the digital media in new ways by introducing learners to working methods that emphasise the co-operative and collective production forms facilitated by new digital technology” (hoem, 2009:220). the basic skills in the knowledge promotion (lk06) – reading, writing, oral, ict and arithmetic – overlap with the basic skills in language teaching in english. thus, “english is one of the subjects in which the five basic skills can be readily and strategically integrated, since three of the basic skills (reading, writing and oral) are in the field of language and the remaining two involve language as a tool for investigation and expression” (blair and rimmereide, 2009:162). all of these competencies were included in the wiki storyline design, reflecting the integrated nature of this method. in developing the storyline, we started with the standard storyline chart and planned our storyline around this, as shown in table 1. prior to the first meeting, the wiki site was created by the college staff, who were then the administrators. at the first session, the participants were introduced to the basic idea of storyline and given technical instructions regarding how to use the wiki. once the participants had created their accounts, they were invited in. since they are invited in by the administrator, the administrator has complete control over who does what in the wiki. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 99 episodes key questions activities resource s goals & objectives 1. place 1. where is the town located? 2. what information can we provide about the town(s)? 3. what workplaces are in the town? discussion (group + class) > decision regarding location brain storming (class) > decision regarding information to provide about the town wiki site collaborative writing (group)– description of specific features of town brain storming (class) > options selection of workplace (group) presentation of workplace (group) collaborative writing (group) description of a fictional workplace upload texts + pictures (group) etherpad etherpad wiki oral skills + negotiation writing descriptions of place + digital competence oral skills + negotiation writing + digital competence digital skills + ethics 2. characters what information can we provide about the people in the town? brain storming (class) > discussion of characters (group) write and post a biography of „their‟ character (individual) find and post pictures of „their‟ character (individual) introduction of the characters to the class (individual) wiki internet oral skills + description writing descriptions of people digital skills presentation skills 3. incident 1.what do you feel about the proposal? 2. what can you do in response? discussion of the proposal (groups + class) write a list of issues (group) how the oil refinery will affect their workplace how the community should respond write a letter stating how this will affect them personally (individual) give an interview about how they will be affected (individual) wiki recording devices oral skills – expressing opinions problem solving structuring arguments writing formal letters oral skills – pronunciation + intonation table 1: the wiki storyline. session 1 for practical and technical reasons the name of the town had to be decided prior to meeting the students; the year-one town was named golgwera and the year-two town was named kwikstoni. at the opening session, the participants were divided into groups of 3-4 and the first storyline question was posed: where is the town located? they discussed the question first in their groups seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 100 and then the decision was made following a class discussion. interestingly, the chosen location was the northern tip of the northern island in new zealand both years. the third question was then posed, and following a brief discussion of what sort of activities go on in a town, the groups decided what their role would be in terms of their workplace. all of these activities provided a context for the authentic use of oral english. in addition, episode 2 was begun and the participants decided upon their characters and developed their roles in the story. since storyline is a role play, an imaginary world, it encourages creativity, which thrilled the participants. during the first class session, episodes 1 and 2 tasks were assigned. in connection with episode 1, the participants were assigned two group tasks. the first was to write about the town, as a follow-up to question 2; all the participants were responsible for adding information about the town. the second group task was to write about their group‟s workplace, in response to question 3. in connection with episode 2, the participants were to complete the online tasks and come prepared to introduce their character at the next session. the group activities meant that the participants had to cooperate online. they were introduced to etherpadii as a tool for writing about kwikston and their workplace and subsequently post their final document. since they were told to post background information when “everyone is satisfied with the text,” the group task forces the participants to collaborate, co-writing, and to take responsibility for content and language. in contrast, the individual task was each person‟s responsibility and was to be posted directly onto the wiki. the publication of group and individual texts in this manner increased the amount of effort put into the texts in two ways. first, the fact that participants were forced to think and write creatively provided an opportunity to improve their writing. second, the open forum where everybody in the group could read the others‟ writing motivated them to carefully check their work. an additional factor was the fact that the tasks were elements in the continuous evaluation. the participants produced and posted their texts on the wiki. since some were finished earlier than others, this may have inspired those who were not entirely certain of how and what to write. this meant that participants could function as writing models for one another. the students were also asked to post their personal experiences in a blog which was created for the purpose. the blog was by invitation only, and restricted to the course participants. the purpose of using the blog was to provide a forum in which participants could express their thoughts on the process as the instructions indicate (fig. 1). in addition to its intended purpose – to provide a forum in which to give feedback on the digital media and storyline process – the blog also served as a channel for venting frustrations and asking for, and receiving, help with technical problems. tables, illustrations and figures: figure 2: instructions for the use of the blog. the concerns expressed by the year-two project participants tended to relate to the storyline activities: what to write, and when to stop writing and post their the “kwikston reflected” link is to a blog in which you can record your experiences after each storyline session. this is a forum in which you, as course participants (not characters), can discuss the process etc. this will enable you to take up any problems as they arise, it will help staff to follow the storyline process, and it will make it easier for you to write the final reflection text. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 101 texts. as one participant put it, “i wasn´t sure what to do, and how to do it. i was also afraid to post bad work.” the only guideline they were given was to create a person and work place, and it was not specified how much they should write. this revealed a shortcoming in the task formulation that will be rectified. the year-one project encountered layout problems with wikispaces, which were a central concern. there were fewer technical problems in the year-two, thanks to the decision to switch platforms. the google version seems to be more seamless and user friendly than the wikispaces solution. it was evident that the activities opened for creativity, as is seen in some of the fantastical names of the character: for example, “victoria helpless” and “arrow forrest” allude to the role these „characters‟ would play in the wiki, while “serendipity” and “bonnie clyde” appealed to cultural humour. the layout and photos of the biographies reflected some participants‟ willingness to explore the potential in the wiki and others‟ more cautious approach. the general opinion of the students is summed up in the statement: “i think it is fun to play a role in a fantasy world.” session 2 at the second session, the groups presented their workplaces and all the participants introduced their characters. the participants had a thorough knowledge of their characters‟ biographies, and eagerly presented them to the rest of the group. this was another activity that developed the oral language element of the storyline. having developed the setting and characters, the action of the storyline could begin in episode 3. the key incident was the disruption of the town by an announcement in the local news (fig. 2): an oil refinery was to be built on the coast. questions 1 and 2 in table 1 were then raised, and as in the previous episodes, there were both group and individual tasks. the groups were asked to write a description of how this development would affect their workplace, and make suggestions regarding possible action. this collaborative task was designed to help the participants complete the two individual tasks: to write a letter to the mayor explaining how this would affect their daily life and to present their views in a one-minute, recorded interview at the next session. the incident was designed to activate and encourage participant‟s problemsolving skills and ability to express opinions and develop arguments. in the year-one project, the participants were given time in class to discuss the implications of the oil refinery. feedback revealed that this discussion had generated excitement in the role play. due to lack of time, the year-two participants did not have the opportunity for in-class discussion. the impact this has had on the level of engagement may be revealed when the feedback on this episode has been collected. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 102 figure 3: incident 1: announcement in the local newspaper. session 3 at the final/concluding session in the first semester, the final activity of the storyline was carried out. the students were interviewed by the mayor about how the oil refinery would affect their work place as well as them personally. the interview was carried out and recorded by the phonetics teacher. participants were subsequently given feedback on their oral english. this format may have been a source of stress for the participants since it resembles an oral exam. instead of a face-to-face interview, the participants could have done the recording themselves and simply sent in an mp3 file. the results might have been better since they would be more relaxed and they could have re-recorded the text if they were not satisfied. nevertheless, the participants seemed to enjoy the task, and appreciated the concrete feedback on their pronunciation and intonation, which are important elements of being a good english teacher. this task was also included in the project assessment. reflections on the project only a few of the participants were familiar with the storyline method at the beginning of the project, and none had experience setting up a wiki on their own, or even using a wiki. the reflection texts and unstructured group interview at the end of the 20092010 wiki storyline revealed that nine out of 14 participants considered implementing a similar project with their own groups of pupils. the 20102011 texts and interviews revealed virtually the same breakdown. the students reported their reflections in a blog that was set up for the purpose. in general, the students were positive about implementing a storyline in the form of a wiki. only one from each course claimed that they would not use it with their own students, because it was too time consuming. four or five stated that they were not sure whether they would implement a wiki because of the technical competence required. two participants in the second group had actually begun projects with their own classes before completing the project. in addition, one participant reported that she had initiated a similar project later. whatever their position, they all recognized the advantages of using a wiki storyline in language learning, based on their personal experience in the project. new zealand forges ahead – in kwikston! after 10 years of discussion and several surveys and reports, a site for the new oil refinery has been selected: kwikston. this small town is located on the northeastern tip of the north island. kwikston is ideally suited for this development for a number of reasons: a good natural harbor. a location on international navigation routes available land suitable for development a river that can provide hydro-electric power an existing road network that can be expanded it is expected that the refinery will bring new life, growth and prosperity to this isolated community. there will be new residents, new workplaces and new economic opportunities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 103 the technical solutions somewhat different solutions were chosen in the first and second years of this project for a variety of reasons. the wiki is at the core of the entire project. wikis are publishing solutions, which make any user able to instantly update the online information. changes are logged and can be reviewed and compared to previous versions by other users. this has proved to be a very fast and reliable way of creating and maintaining online information resources. wikis are made for easy sharing and updating of information, which make them powerful tools for collaboration. they are often accessible to a large public on the open internet, but can also be used in smaller, closed work groups, like a class. wiki-technology represents a considerable learning-potential for developing a common content resource within communities of various sizes. wikispaces wikispaces (www.wikispaces.com) is a service that uses wiki technology which has gained some popularity in the field of education. it can be used as a free serviceiii, but this is financed by advertisements and cannot be closed, so the content can be read by anyone. wikispaces have, however, opened for use of the cheapest paid versions, without charge, in primary and secondary education. in this version it is possible to create a "private room", into which the owner invites others, choosing who will be able to write and read the texts. as a teacher, one can create a wiki dedicated to a specific class or group. another advantage is that the users do not need any special knowledge about how to use a wiki as a publication tool. being a true wiki, wikispaces is based on the idea that a number of people can work with the same text and develop it over a period of time. thus, the written products differ from those with which most teachers in norway are familiar, due to their collaborative nature. in 2009 the staff designed the golgwera wiki (fig.3) following the standard procedures for this version of wikispaces. the participants were responsible for developing the fictional universe, using text and pictures. to make navigation within the wiki as easy as possible, the menu to the left was edited and displayed on all pages. figure 4: the main page of golgwera, made with wikispaces. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 104 when editing a page, there is a visual editor that resembles a simplified word processor. the user can format the text, insert images and files, add widgets, and link to other pages or external resources. it is also possible to include media from external services, like a video from youtube, presentations from slideshare, documents published by issuu, and numerous other sources. this also makes it possible to embed media that others have produced. figure 5: the alphabetic list of pages in the golgwera wiki. in addition, an alphabetic list of all pages made in this wiki is available (fig. 4), showing when the latest edit was done and which user was responsible for the editing. wikispaces also has a feature common to most wikis: a page displaying “recent changes”, which makes it easy to monitor activity on the wiki. google sites while wikispaces was generally satisfactory, both the teachers and the participants considered the interface rather unappealing. in addition, the editor had limited options for customizing the layout of individual pages. a different service was therefore chosen for kwikston in the year-two project (fig. 5): google sites. this is available from google as part of the google apps productivity suite, and is closely integrated with services like google documents, google mail etc. an example of the integrated nature of this site is the map of kwikston provided on the wikis main page, which was produced in google maps. google sites can also be used as an independent service. this solution has many of the characteristics of wikis, which reflects its origin as social softwareiv targeted at smalland medium-scale businesses. in spite of the fact that google sites is owned by a company that makes its money from advertising, the pages have no advertisements unless the site owner decides to allow such displays. a number of users can work together on a site, editing pages and adding file attachments and information from other google applications (like google documents, google calendar, youtube and picasa webalbums). as in wikispaces, the site owner can control access, whether it is just the user and a group or the rest of the world. google sites offers a range of useful features. for example, it is possible to create full copies of sites, which can be very useful in an educational setting. it is also possible to subscribe to changes in individual pages or an entire site, using email or rss-feeds. this makes it easy to monitor activity, even in situations where a large number of people are contributing to a site. an added advantage for teachers is the fact that the administration interface in google seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 105 sites can be shown in different languages, including norwegian. in addition, the pages can be sorted by the site owner, simply by dragging and dropping the pages to their desired position in the hierarchy. the functionality is quite similar to wikispaces, but the teachers considered google sites to be somewhat easier to administer. figure 6: the main page of kwikston, made with google site. when editing individual pages in google sites, the toolbar at the top of the pages has similar functions to those provided in wikispaces. however, in google sites the user has the possibility to change the layout of the text area (fig. 7), a process that is more difficult in wikispaces. note the link to typewithme that is provided, a solution based on etherpad, discussed below. figure 7: layout possibilities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 106 simultaneous co-writing both wikispaces and google sites allow the users to collaborate, and the individual contributions can be shown in the page history. nevertheless, realtime collaboration is rather awkward using the wikis. problems occur if several users try to edit the same page simultaneously, and information can easily be lost. when the participants were to create the pages containing the biographies of their individual characters, this was an individual task which went smoothly. however, the participants were also asked to collaborate on texts describing their community and workplaces. this was to be done within a short timeframe, and neither the wikis nor collaborative tools like google documents could facilitate this kind of simultaneous writing. the solution we chose was etherpadv (fig. 7), in which it is possible to see the different contributors‟ texts in real time. there are many tools based on the source code from etherpad and all of the solutions have similar functionality. figure 8: contributions by different writers in etherpad. in this extract, each contributor typed their character‟s name and chose a color to identify their contributions. several users were writing simultaneously, and every user was constantly aware of what the others were doing. a useful feature of this service is the “playback” button, which shows how the text has evolved over time. each individual‟s contribution to the text becomes visible, even the passages that are not included in the final text. when the participants were satisfied with the text they had composed in etherpad, they copied the end product and pasted it into the wiki. a variety of illustrations and typefaces could then be added to the text, as in figure 6. the text information can, of course, still be edited within the wiki, but this becomes a slower process compared to working in etherpad. blogger.com blogger, a free blogging service provided by google, was used in the project both years. the service is easy to use, and users can choose whether they want a blog to be personal or whether they want multiple users to contribute to a single blog. the latter option was chosen for the project, in order to encourage authentic written communication, so the blog became a writing space shared by all the participants. one of the teachers created the blog and invited all the other participants to join the discussion. the blog had a specific function in this project, supplementing the wiki. since all the texts in the wiki related to the fictional universe, the blog was where the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 107 staff and the participants were able to express their non-fictional thoughts; they could reflect upon the learning processes, ask questions, express opinions, etc. each post in the blog is signed with the writer‟s name, so the blog becomes a collection of individual texts, which the users can comment upon. by using the wiki and the blog for different purposes, the learning environment reflected the different stages of learning. in the wiki, the focus was solely on the collaborative task of building the fictional universe. that was where the participants carried out the tasks related to the storyline. in the blog, on the other hand, both teachers and participants were free to communicate in ways that could have destroyed some of the story qualities evident in the texts in the wiki. reflections regarding the various technical solutions several theories of hypertext make a point of the blurred boundary between readers and writers, emphasizing the “readers” contribution to the text through the choices that construct individual readings of a given text (landow). roland barthes claims that “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. “our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader” (barthes, 1974:4). barthes did not have hypertext in mind, and one can argue that the first hypertexts hardly fulfilled his “goal of a literary work”. users of traditional hypertexts were limited to predefined choices, and it was not until the introduction of wikis that the distinction between consumers and producers really seemed to disappear. then a user is considered a reader, and a writer is no longer dependent on qualities of the medium itself but rather on whether the user chooses to edit a page or not. in a wiki, the same opportunities are available to most of the users, with the exception of the administrator's exclusive rights, including the right to exclude destructive users. our experiences were gathered in two semesters working with these services and are not extensive enough to allow us to draw specific conclusions. nevertheless, some tendencies are evident with regard to the administration, text production and evaluation capacity of the services used. with regard to administration, google sites seems to be a more up-to-date solution than wikispaces. tools that facilitate the integration of external media also seem to be somewhat better implemented in google sites. however, ultimately these differences are a matter of individual preference. where the two solutions really differ is in their capacity to produce more complex site designs, both in matters of site appearance and in the layout of individual pages. of the two, the participants who worked with google sites seemed to appreciate this potential more than those who worked with wikispaces. from the teachers‟ point of view, the fact that users are able to use the same login to google sites and blogger and google documents makes administration easier. however, this would not be a strong argument if one chose another blog-service, such as wordpress, or had no blog at all. with regard to the production of written texts, we did not experience any significant differences between wikispaces and google sites. the main difference was between the wikis and etherpad. one can argue that the various versions of etherpad also have wiki functionality, as long as any user is able to revise the text. etherpad differs from the other services in its capacity for instant text editing, a function it fulfills admirably. nevertheless, etherpad could not have served as the only tool in this course since the various solutions meet different needs. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 108 when using wikis, a central principle is that a given text is not considered to be the final mediation of the learner‟s knowledge. the content and meaning of individual texts are meant to change over time, reflecting a development in which the content produced by one person may be revised by several others. this introduces some problems in the matter of assessing individual learning: how can one assess each individual‟s contribution to a collective text? both wikispaces and google sites have similar solutions in that they store the different versions of individual pages. nevertheless, it can be quite tedious to follow the different revisions, especially if they are done by a number of contributors. in order to monitor individual contributions to a collaborative text, one of the etherpad clones would be a better solution. it is also possible to use the external blog for this purpose, giving the participants tasks in which they are required to reflect upon their own writing processes, with links to specific versions of the collaborative text. concluding remarks both the texts and the general comments of participants on the wiki storyline project indicated a very positive response. the fact that several of the participants have already used wiki storyline in their own classes indicates that they found the project engaging and motivating and that it had affected their teaching practices. while they all felt more confident and willing to use technology in their teaching, not all felt completely competent to establish a site themselves. there were also those who did not feel that they had enough time to carry out such a project properly. nevertheless, the overall response to the project was very positive. with regard to their own language development, they indicated that they took the tasks more seriously when they were to be published. it would be interesting to investigate a number of features of the project more closely; for example, the possibility of more formal peer feedback during the process and the interaction between oral and written activities. in addition, there are a variety of other technological options that the participants might like to add to their site. one of the group suggested that voice mail could be added, thereby linking another facet of language use to ict competence. the wiki storyline provided an opportunity to include all the basic language skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking in english language learning through using ict. the motivating factors of storyline and the innovative use of digital media tools caught the imagination of the participants and created enthusiasm. with regard to the technical solutions, the staff were satisfied with the way in which these functioned. both wikispaces and google sites are free for schools and both provide wiki-functionality that most participants find easy to use. the choice of service did not influence the didactical parameters for implementing the storyline. the main negative factor was the fact that the free version of wikispaces includes advertisements when used in higher education. with regard to text production, educators should consider using some form of simultaneous writing as a supplement to the standard wiki. this tool makes it possible to collaborate on documents in real-time, which is not possible in all wikis. finally, we would also recommend using a blog for meta-level communication among teachers and participants outside the fictional world of the wiki. depending on the tasks, blogs can serve as a forum for individual reflection or for group/class discussion. we have chosen blogger.com, but there are several other free services. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 109 to sum up, we concluded that the wiki storyline provided an opportunity for both language skills practice and for increasing familiarity with ict solutions that could be introduced into the classroom. it allows for a combination of method and technology that utilizes the full potential of both. most importantly, it is very versatile and can be used at virtually all levels and in a wide variety of subject areas. references barthes, roland (1974) s/z. paris: éditions du seuil, 1970. s/z. translated by richard miller. new york: hill and wang. blair, barbara & rimmereide, hege emma. (2009) “the web of competencies” in traavik, h., hallås, o. & ørvig, a (eds.) grunnleggende ferdigheter i alle fag. oslo: universitetsforlaget. creswell, j. (1997). creating worlds, constructing meaning: the scottish storyline method. portland, ore.: heinemann. cunningham, ward & venners, bill (2003) "exploring with wiki." http://www.artima.com/intv/wiki.html [viewed 11 october 2010]. ehlers, g., kankowski, m., holtz, a., schmidt, s., järvinen, h., bradford, v. & materniak, m. (2006). storyline approach in the foreign language classroom – trainer‟s handbook. creative dialogues 112381-cp-1-203-1-de-comenius-c21. hoem, jon (2009): personal publishing environments, phd-thesis, ntnu. http://infodesign.no/2009/08/personal-publishing-environments-all.htm [viewed 12 october 2010]. hoem, jon. (2009): shared information as basis for individual knowledge. in personal publishing environments. phd thesis, ntnu. http://infodesign.no/bok1/personal_publishing_environments_chapter7.pdf [viewed 25 october 2010]. knowledge promotion. (2006.) læreplanverket for kunnskapsløftet. http://www.udir.no/artikler/_lareplaner/_english/common-core-subjects-inprimary-and-secondary-education/ [viewed 27 october 2010]. knowledge promotion. 2006. læreplanverket for kunnskapsløftet. <http://www.udir.no/artikler/_lareplaner/_english/common-core-subjectsin-primary-and-secondary-education/> landow, george: "reading and writing in a hypertext environment." http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/jhup/htreading.html [viewed 25 october 2010]. ncsa (2006): "in the beginning there was ncsa mosaic...." the national center for supercomputing applications. ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/web/mosaic/windows/archive/mosaichistory.html [viewed 15 october 2010]. prabhu, maya t. “technology a key tool in writing instruction.” http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/07/18/technology-a-key-tool-in-writinginstruction/ [viewed 26 october 2010]. purtic, n. (2006), “young learners and the storyline approach.” british council elt newsletter, june 2006. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oiq9tmpzxjkj:www .britishcouncil.org/serbia-elt-newsletter-june-2006-academic_corneryoung_learners_and_the_storyline_approach.doc+young+learners+and+the+ storyline+approach&cd=1&hl=no&ct=clnk&gl=no [viewed 1 october 2010]. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 110 storyline scotland. (n.d.). http://www.storyline-scotland.com/whatisstoryline.html [viewed 1 october 2010]. i all references in this paper are to kwikston, but also apply to golgwera. ii etherpad is a web-based word processor real time collaborative text editing. iiihttp://www.wikispaces.com/site/pricing ivgoogle acquired the company jotspot in 2006, and relaunched the service as google sites two years later. vhttp://etherpad.org/ title seminar.net 2015. © author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. coming back to basic concepts of the context karen borgnakke department of media, cognition and communication university of copenhagen e-mail: karen@comart.dk & karenb@hum.ku.dk abstract the use of ethnographic approaches to explore innovative learning contexts places the concept of context at the centre of discussion on basic categories. further, ethnography in online-learning within a virtual context as well as shifts between onlineand off-line contexts presents a challenge for ethnographic methodology and analysis. in this article i set out to address the challenge and reflect on the categories and models for empirical analysis. going back to the basic concept of context and ‘text-in-context’ my aim is to discuss the ethnographic significance of the learning context thereby shedding light on the strong context markers. examples will be adduced in relation to previous fieldwork in it-upper secondary schools as well as in relation to current fieldwork in scholastic-, profession-oriented and academic learning contexts. background in previous fieldwork detailed analyses of innovative strategies in upper secondary schools and university education were performed, thereby showing the socio-cultural meaning of academia for the scholastic and academic learning context (borgnakke, 1996, 2005, 2012a). the current fieldwork was carried out in the sector of nursing education following development work and inter-professional projects in the health care sector (røn noer, 2014, borgnakke & lyngsøe, 2014, borgnakke & sand nielsen, 2015). in what follows the impact and the socio-cultural meaning of professions and of ‘becoming a professional’ will be shown by means of the empirical analysis of profession-oriented learning alongside the shift between the scholastic and clinical practice context. in these research projects the main platform for ethnographic studies, which are focused on educational innovation and organizational development, are shared. these differ in focus – whether groups of professionals, teachers, supervisors or students. we propose a relatively straightforward definition of field (such as the field of nursing education) room and space (such as the classroom). related to the ethnographic principle of “following the field of practice,” we also share the need to renew the concepts of field and space in a digital environment, while remaining based on the classic ethnographic approach (marcus, 1995; borgnakke, 2010). in accordance with the interpretation of ethnography in online-communities (leander & mckim, 2002, hammersley, 2006, borgnakke, 2013a, 2013b) the need to re-think, and move beyond, place-based ethnography should be emphasised, but we still need the fieldwork to be grounded and situated. thus in research terms, ‘following the field,’ is defined as following courses across onlineand offline spaces; tracing the flow of objects, texts and the embedded multiple contexts. against http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://www.eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/search-programmes/conference/6/searchforcontributionbyperson/?no_cache=1&personuid=46136&chash=8383e8d46e5b29e4a701ba27d68716f2 mailto:karen@comart.dk mailto:karenb@hum.ku.dk this background our objective is to clarify the ethnographic significance of the flow of objects, texts and multiple contexts. in terms of overarching theories this clarification draws upon concepts and categories of ‘the field’ (pierre bourdieu) ‘discourse’ (michel foucault) ‘paradigm’ (thomas kuhn) and ‘communicative interactions’ (jürgen habermas). as for classic models, i draw on sender – text/message – receiver, such as it is originally used by roman jacobsen and karl buhler and the basic maxim for mass communication: “who says what to whom in which channel and to what effect?” such as it originates in lasswell’s maxim (1948). in educational field research and process analytic methodology (borgnakke, 1996) i transformed the basic concepts and models to a process analytical framework for empirical analyses of the educational field of practice, the discursive and communicative practice and the ‘text-in-context’ circuit (1996: vol. 2: 25-51). the framework is based on empirical investigations of the process of educational changes followed through milestones and mapped from the political and the institutional level to the practical level for teaching and learning. against this background fieldwork and the data and text-collections refer to the whole process of implementation. the odyssey from alternative ideas and strategies to educational practice is hereby covered as well as the flow of conflicts between ideas and intensions and the institutional embodiment of it. this process analytic framework has first and foremost produced an overview to the living dynamic processes in the educational field and has produced detailed knowledge about the academic context and learning strategies. having shown the empirical benefit it is possible to emphasise the process analytic framework as a fruitful background for the current fieldwork. but if ethnography in online-learning, ‘tracing the flow of object through different contexts’ calls for a process analytical approach, the present challenge is that it also demands a renewed context-analytical framework starting with the clarification of the context in it-self. in the fieldwork starting at the danish reform university in aalborg i where the process analytic framework was developed the academic context was visible. the reform university, the alternative project pedagogical paradigm and the project room were places and spaces to be in and places for acting and observation. the process was to be followed and analytical reconstructed. but the process was not visible in itself. in current fieldwork in online-learning it seems to be the other way around. the process — or at least the course — as well as the milestones are almost visible, but the context needs to be followed and analytical reconstructed. now it is the context being ‘not visible in itself’. against this background the context requires clarification as ‘a place’ to be in, to observe and regard as an analytical object. with a view to clarification this paper begins by focusing on the context in terms of a learning context. in accordance with previous empirical findings and models, (borgnakke, 2010, 2013a) the paper further provides examples of the ethnographic challenges related to what constitutes strong context markers and dominant paradigms and trends in the discourse. moreover, the interactive and communicative patterns in different learning contexts will be highlighted. strong context markers in relation to fieldwork on it-based learning in upper secondary education the first important statement concerns the context as a school-context. the second statement concerns the fact that the school context refers to political seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 discourses at a macro-level and the ongoing innovative strategies at a mesolevel; this statement goes on to refer to different organizational levels and micro-levels. the third statement concerns the new important text, namely the homepage and the menu. the homepage is information and storytelling ‘about us’ and provides the essential information on the school, the image, history etc. carrying out fieldwork in a field surrounded by ‘ict & learning’, the classic ethnographic concept of the context is challenged not only by new it tools, but also by the different organisational levels for professionalization and development of school culture. consequently, the challenge consists of providing a multi-level organisational and pedagogical description. next, the innovative strategies must be regarded as a process of acquiring digital literacy or what i have called technacy (borgnakke, 2012a). at an organisational level interview with teams of leaders and teachers and observations of meetings showed how school culture is re-constructed as organizational techno culture. officially the learning management system (for example lectio and fronter) is in the center, but on a daily basis all kinds of devices and social media are in use. on the next level classroom observations showed how blended learning and flipped classroom became a renewed part of the teaching strategies and the constructed learning models. further, mingling with students showed how the students create their own strategies for self-directed common space for interaction and communication. in the analysis this is regarded as a learning space characterized by informal learning, oriented towards peers and youth culture and hence related to use of social media (borgnakke, 2012a:165). the above-mentioned empirical findings confirm the important statements. the school-context is (per se) the context while a series of school texts from the homepage, the lms-content curriculum and text-books to the student assignments comprise ‘the text’. through an analysis of the series of ‘text-inschool-context’ the discourse, the organizational levels and the innovative strategies can be viewed as strong context markers. these markers make visible what the innovation involves. but it also makes evident what it means for it-upper secondary school and for it-based learning to be firmly anchored in culture of academic school subjects and to be placed close to the centre of a former elite education. today the former centre forms part of the late modern course and discourse: kindergarten, university and the elite institution of the grammar school gymnasium will be challenged by a new role enhancing the bridge-building between compulsory school (folkeskolen) and university. meeting such challenges the cases from upper secondary education provide a picture of how it-based learning creates build-bridging in terms of concrete meeting places and spaces in the light of the sphere of education, but also in the light of youth culture. in this context social media are not only ‘media’ but a significant part of facebook, twitter and youth culture. the impact of youth culture and the contradiction between school culture and youth culture are important in a conceptual analysis. as a context marker ‘culture’ is eloquent since it indicates formal activities, such as an educational programme, relating to academic culture or an informal and student-based activity as being ‘more like youth culture’. at the same time the cultural dimension is the context-bordering factor, which in turn points at a sphere unrelated to the school context and the educational sphere. context-bordering factors the current fieldwork on profession-oriented learning confirms the context markers, thereby increasing their strength in relation to the sphere. onlineseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 nursing education stresses, for example, the need for a learning context going across the sphere and bridging the gap between the sphere of education and the sphere of professional work and culture. further, the professional perspective is reformulated in the light of lifelong learning, which is traditionally understood as context bordering. against this backdrop it is possible to state that context-border settings seem to be typical for lifelong learning and for online-education. of especial interest, however, is the fact that the learning activities are still to be regarded as context-sensitive. since the online-learning activity is related to a specific context it is in turn related to either the culture of scholastic, academic or professional work and repertoire of practices. the practical logic can be summarised as follows: when onlineeducation refers to the scholastic context functions carried out by ‘a class’ with ‘student/teacher-relations’ are expected. when the reference-point is the clinical practice functions done by a ‘team of health care professionals’ with a ‘supervisor-apprenticeship-relations’ or newcomer/old-timer-relations are expected. thus context, functions and relationship between actors are accentuated by the context. the ethnographic mapping and empirical analysis confirm the relations outlined (borgnakke 2013b, borgnakke & lyngsø, 2014). inspired by basil bernstein it could be claimed that a concept of re-contextualizing is confirmed (bernstein, 2000) and that the theoretical informed procedure is outlined for an overview of the ‘text-in-context’ and close-up analysis of the strong context marker. at present ethnographic studies in veterinary education make clear the necessity of re-contextualizing (nielsen, forthcoming). by sharpening the analysis a picture of the conflict between the scholastic setting (a university course in a class with a student/teachers-relationship) and the professional practice-oriented setting (a farm, in a pig-pen with professional veterinary/farmer-relationship) emerges. at the same time the genuine recontextualizing became clearer. observations of the professional learning situation in the pig-pen show that as far as communications, interactions and relations are concerned ‘the classroom’ and the scholastic learning context with its typical student/teacher-relationship are re-contextualized. the typical teacher/students’ relationship and their actions recur. strong context markers are, for example, the discursive practice. the actors talks and interact as they would in a classroom thereby illustrating what recontextualizing is about. the ethnographical point is related to contextbordering, the pig-pen and profession-oriented learning. but since the pig-pen is not a classroom it must be described in relation to the work sphere. a synthesis of the statements about context-bordering factors in which the conditions for the profession-oriented learning are recalled necessitates highlighting the contradiction between the educational sphere and the professional sphere of work. against this backdrop the consequences for the ethnographical field analysis is stressed as being challenged by the fact that coping with the learning context is tantamount to coping across spheres. coping with the learning context is to cope across the spheres the analytical framework puts relations between the educational field, political discourses, practical innovation and learning strategies into focus. maintaining the focus means coping with the flow of objects and consequences going across the sphere. in the case of analyses of it-based strategies it confirms that the empiric data represent a course of implementation involving a flow of objects going across the organizational levels. for analyses of the practical process it confirms that the result of fieldwork and the empiric data collection represent a case going across the institutionalized spheres. but as illustrated below it also shows that going across spheres is challenged by a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 ‘new’ set of basic categories, closely related to the sphere as a kind of spherebased education, socialization and qualification. figure 1. coping across the spheres in coping with a case across spheres and being confronted with lifelong learning in the centre it is possible to argue that research in the learning contexts should not stray from classic fieldwork. classic participatory observation, interview, conversation and material collection constitutes a suitable framework for both place-based covering and coping across the spheres. the basic principle ‘following the field, following the case, following the actors’ (marcus, 1995) is indeed strongest if you stick to the fieldwork tradition and follows the group of learners through the different contexts. in former research on adult education was the principle of following the actor highlighted as ‘going across the spheres’ also a strong argument for the ethnographic turn in educational research (borgnakke, 1999). currently, phd projects are eloquent examples of the strength in fieldwork where the observations also are being carried out in the workplaces concerned or in the informant’s homes. to enter the sphere of family or participate in the sphere of work is both a challenging and a necessary going across the spheres, as exemplified in projects on nursing education (røn noer, 2014, borgnakke & lyngsø, 2014, borgnakke & nielsen, 2015). further, net-based ethnography and research carried out within onlinecommunities per definition is going across the spheres. in terms of methodology the conclusion seems to be that ethnography, albeit challenged, is well suited both to place-based fieldwork and net-based fieldwork provided that the relation between place and life-sphere is clarified. the need to move beyond place-based ethnography has been underlined by leander & mackim (2002) and the present author; the indication is that in ethnographic research on online-learning is the place losing relevance. however, it is also my contention that ‘going beyond the place’ is at the same time a coming back to the sphere of education, work, family or leisure in which conditions for learning, qualification, socialization etc are conceptualised. it should not be forgotten that fieldwork still needs to be grounded in the lived life; ‘the case in study’ also needs to be related to political discourse and tendencies. combined with the sociological tradition for identifying tendencies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 and practical consequences on levels described as the societal macro-level, the institutional mezo-level and the practical micro-level also allow us to refer to empirical analytical strategies. further such strategies can be strengthened by inspiration from critical communication and discourse theory put forward by jürgen habermas (1968, 1978, 1981), michelle foucault (1966) and norman fairclough (1995, 2005). in this sense the challenge is related to the development of a combination of a critical discourse and practice analysis that makes reference to the political level, as well as institutional and practical levels. since the ethnographic work i refer to belong to this research tradition the challenge has been an empirical one. it has also been an analytical challenge to cover the shifting system and the organizational perspectives; likewise, the shift between life-spheres and the voices between teachers and learners has been an almost exemplary challenge (borgnakke, 1996, 2005). in literal terms, the research projects are faced with living versions of the conflict between the educational system and the life-world of young and adult learners in line with conceptions set down by thomas ziehe (2004). to refer to the above-mentioned concepts in research which explore the most recent learning issues means casting them in theoretical terms. concepts of life-sphere and conflicts between system and life-world are in a theoretical analytic sense basic categories and these provide a strong platform for renewing the empirical analytic framework. in what follows it remains to be stressed that in order to enhance the empirical analytical framework, the relationship between sphere, field, place and space requires consideration. furthermore, the presence of a specified context is a prerequisite for the analytical approach. as illustrated below, ‘the context’ must be defined and the underlying principle of contextualization made evident. contextualizing focusing on ‘the learning context’ in the centre allows firstly the contextualization as the ethnographic answer to the question of basic concepts to be stressed. secondly it can be stressed as a metaphor as follows: contextualizing is a journey with stages and milestones for coming closer/maintaining a distance to the context. thirdly, the characteristic repeated movement between context and shifting context can be stressed. but in all events it is of importance that going across context and participating in a shifting context still refer to a context in a practical sense. the same can be said of place and space. the learning context is the learner’s context. but this context also refers to the fact that the journey of contextualizing traverses the schoolor work place as a place to be in to be in as shown in the following diagram: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 figure 2. contextualizing in the following sections i set out to state the repercussions by current discourse and paradoxes related to innovative scholastic learning, which is focused on ‘the project and the participators’. discourses and paradoxes among innovative projects and participators doing fieldwork in innovative school development by observing scholastic learning represents a contextualised version of the current discourse ‘enhancing it & learning.’ the it-upper secondary school’s programme and the online-nursing programme are a recent case in point. this provides a learning context with a high it-score, numerous it tools as well as having several interests for the latest system or single tool. as a previous case analysis has shown (borgnakke, 2011, 2012a, borgnakke & lyngsø, 2014) we can refer to newly constructed schools which are crammed with technology from cellar to ceiling, as well as full-scale online-education. it is also possible to refer to observed enthusiastic discussions among leaders and teachers concerning the lms system, including lectio, fronter or moodle, discussing the it didactic consequences and use in school subjects as well as the use of podcast, iphones and ipads. for the participators at all levels the main theme for discussion was also formulated as the questions: how much, how early and how often should the it-tools be used and how can the learning outcomes be expressed and measured? these questions proved to be open-ended; compared with the enthusiasm for it as expressed in political discourse research into the learning outcomes can be bristling with unexpected remarks, such as ‘no effect, no significant enhancing’. statements such as ‘ittools are unused’ can be underlined in national reports (drotner, 2009, laugesen, 2009, brink, 2010) as well as ‘no measurable effect’ can be a headline in international reports on one-to-one laptop programmes (see greaves & hayes, 2008; 2010). the open-ended question contains a paradox: while reports claim “surprisingly little use” just a view on kids every day behaviour will point at the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 ipad-generation, the i-generation, thereby highlighting technology and media in use “24/7”. the i-generation is the closest we get to the impact of the concept of ‘digital natives’ (prensky; 2001). but the notion of digital natives enables us also to rediscover the adult generation as it-illiterate or ‘itimmigrants’. the layer in this paradox requires further reflection while the position of participators and learners should be singled out for consideration. examples are taken from my case studies at us-campus’ in 2009 2013 (berkeley, stanford, university of michigan, university of san francisco). the ethnographic framework was defined as: reading about the campus (the homepage, the website) participating in guided campus tours for next years students and their parents, collecting materials, visiting the centre for university teacher training, it & learning, and research groups followed by interviews with leaders and participators. this rich yet focussed empirical collection is aimed at the analyses of the (us-) campus as a case exemplifying the academic learning context with innovative projects and upfront participators as its main focus. the case of ‘innovation and upfront participators’ is the main result of the us-campus studies. but the chief impression should not be forgotten and this is related not to ‘the upfront’ but to ordinary conditions and everyday life. just being there, mingling with different campus-citizens and groups, taking part in events or just ‘going bush’ gave the impression of a multi-ethnic campus with quite relatively young citizens (age 20-25). this made new ordinary conditions visible as a fact. the fact remains, that every streets, cafes and classrooms, i.e. the entire campus, was to be seen as sitting, talking, walking groups and bodies holding a laptop under the arm having a mobile-phone ready in the pocket. the end result was that throughout ‘anno 2013’ every community of practice, groups of students or activity includes computers and social media. thus, it-tools and social media are in use 24/7 and integrated in the young student’s life on campus. the second example refers to online-learning situations where everything by definition is digitalised. integration of the latest technology is the raison d’être. this is confirmed by field studies in onlineeducation in health care (borgnakke & lyngsø 2014). but field studies also show how, as part of an innovative project, online-teachers at the same time depend on “sticking to the conventional procedure” requiring routines and “business as usual”. further, this logic was stressed by teachers involved in the development of onlinecourses in dentistry at university of michigan. while working with the curriculum, the teacher teams asked the institution: “not to renew during the process”. the teachers stressed: “we depend on stability”, and one of the teachers went on to state: “actually, we are very sad when something “new” happens on the um platform” (borgnakke, 2012b, field notes campus study um). following the teacher’s voice there is a version of the innovative it-based scholastic context where questions about ‘new, newer and newest’ makes professional participators sad and where “business as usual” makes this group happy. a glance at such examples (see further borgnakke, 2015) sheds light on the new life conditions and the inherent paradoxes. in state of the art terms there are no evidence-based answers to the question concerning learning outcomes; the series of open-ended questions and different voices marks the diversity of the participators and the innovative projects. if the next step is to allow a pattern in diversity to emerge a context-dependent generational pattern among the participators becomes apparent. the youngest generations are born as digital natives (among the generation of students and peers) with the vast range of it-tools, while older generations are invited to enroll in it-classes, as it-immigrants (among the generation of teachers and parents). the generational gap can be regarded both in the light of formal education and in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 8 the light of family, leisure, peers and informal learning. the political discourse about ‘enhancing it & learning’ appeals to professional participators in the school context. the appeal, or rather the political demand, is that professionals need to deal with the generational gap and the above-mentioned paradoxes about it and social media, which have ‘too little and already too much impact’. since the paradox is authentic it will not disappear. moreover, it seems to have an impact on the learning situation by challenging the prevalent professional pedagogical reflection and action. excessive it-use requires greater rigorous educational justification, but the same can be said of the absence of it use. further, it demands a professional handling of new combinations of blended learning and flipped classroom as well as the rediscovery of the scholastic resources related to the textbook, the lecture and face-to-face conversation. crucially, this means that such context-dependent patterns force professionals to cope with the paradox of re-contextualizing everyday conditions. currently it means coping with the online/offline shift, blended learning and the flipped classroom in a mix with conventional classroom teaching depending on the context and conditions. the ongoing ethnographic research that maps the field explores how organisational and pedagogical development in practice cope with paradoxes and dilemmas in it-based and innovative educational projects. but as the following example demonstrates it also means that we rediscover the paradox in the learning context itself. the example shows how the latest trend in online-learning and possibly the new ideal type of academic and professionoriented learning is contextualized. going beyond the net-based place we see how the picture of academia anno 2013 reaches back to the classic academic institutions of the 13th and 14th centuries. currently mooc as massive open online course and the e-learning platform coursera makes classic academia the strong context marker. the new ideal type and the classic context marker: coursera since the start in 2012 coursera is developed as an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide to offer courses online free of charge. the ideas behind as well as the pedagogy are in a case study (stenbæk, 2013) characterised as a new form of availability and education methods. but at the same time the socalled coursera pedagogy partakes of conventional learning theories, bloom and behaviourism and the teaching methods correspond to conventional classroom teaching. in this sense the first analyses of coursera teaching demonstrates a new trend but also how the trend re-contextualises the conventional classroom, as bernstein puts it (bernstein 2000). the first dilemma we can add to the process of contextualizing and to ‘the list of paradoxes’ is that the coursera pedagogy is touted as a new online and university pedagogy yet to a large extent it remains based on conventional classroom teaching. the second dilemma concerns the educational democratic profile and the new brand: education to the world. the philanthropic precept regarding the provision of education to the world is undermined by the facts that most of the coursera participants already have higher education (stenbæk, 2013). thus one of the paradoxes is that ideas about ‘education to the world’ would seem in practice to be a matter of enhancing life-long learning in order to enable people who have already benefitted from h.e. to improve their competencies. fieldwork in net-based education produces new knowledge both about epedagogical practice and this sheds lights upon the way the digital educational seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 9 world refers to the life-world by shifting the reference to life spheres and learning places. shifting the references allows the e-learning platform to represents the new learning context. but at the same time coursera underlines the strong context marker that is so reminiscent of the classic academic learning context thereby reconstructing the communicative patterns between university lectures and students. entering coursera on the internet, means entering the front door and the introductory page with its constantly shifting references to the university partners ii. the visible part in terms of videos, pictures, logos and images is basically the picture of the august university building. the course introduction is often delivered by the professor surrounded by academic images, various classical volumes, their leather spines prominently displayed. even though it is expected that the academic context is present on the website, there is a surprisingly high degree of reference to the classic conservative elite university. the reference is enhanced by the discourse ‘the world’s leading university’ established almost as a brand. when entering the course description the narrative composition is recognized as 1. the course, the case, the theme (as for example ‘health care as a global challenge’) 2. background intro to the university presented by the professor 3. what is to be learned gained by following the course this composition would appear to be as simple as any other flyer and course description from any other course description drafted by the university. but the net-based version reconstructs the communicative patterns related to both one-way mass communication and the institutionalised supervision and communication between teacher and student. in similar fashion to television and commercials and with a high degree of personalization one-way mass communication holds sway. this is imbued with a strong context marker, namely classic academia. the professor addresses his/her audience directly and in a highly personalised manner and invites members of the audience ‘you’ to the course. this appealing dramatic intonation is a part of the double reference to the mediated academic context. while this is one-way mass communication it is also like having a face-to-face meeting with the professor or joining a seminar as a privileged student. it goes without saying that the reference to factuality is that in online-learning there will be thousands of students ‘out there’ or in the coursera courses and networks. the mediated and trustworthy aspect is that the online-situation and communication are managed under the aegis of the classic world-leadinguniversity and the faculty. in the case of ethnographic studies that follow the field of practice starting with the front door and its important gatekeepers this coursera welcome is a somewhat surprising welcome back to academia. addressed to professionals in the us campus case study carried out 2013 in san francisco i had occasion to speak to the dean about ucsf’s participation in coursera. the subjects i wished to raise were i) the new phenomena, moocs and coursera, ii) organizational challenges, iii) pedagogical challenges. as summarised below in my fieldnote the dean elaborated on these themes. “the dean stressed that ucsf participating in coursera had been a deliberate choice and commitment, though the institutions so fare had seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 10 had to spent extra money. they have new recruits in the library and new teaching assistants (tas). but generally, the dean was keen to stress that it had been a success. in response to the question about the perceived benefit for institutions the dean mentioned the two most important factors as: 1) message across the world, a reference to the course about caries and health care 2) ucsf branding, possibly it is unnecessary but it is always good, as the dean makes clear. further the dean stresses the innovative factors, such as the chat room and the fact that the participants intermingle as fellow professionals. the participants on his course work predominantly in health care but with many different branches of the health care sector. “ (fieldnotes, us-campus study, ucsf, borgnakke 2013c) in the conversation the dean confirms there was a tendency for students and teachers already involved in health care studies to participate as courserastudents. the potentials as further education are hereby stressed. in response to the question about the pedagogical challenges the dean stressed first and foremost that the format presented is a challenge. as he went on to explain: “as an individual teacher i have learned to break the lecture down into sequences of ten minutes in length. a teaching video, for example, will have 10 minutes of assignment-oriented teaching. i have found this highly instructive. i have even started to break down my conventional class and teaching into 10-minutes sequences.” (quote from leader conversation, usf, nov. 2013c) as indicated by the dean and coursera-teacher the impact is not only related to the online-course and the online-students but also to the conventional classes. and when i asked for a comment about the academic and professional level the answer was: “the level is indisputably as high as at the ordinary university courses, due to the targeting. after all, the course is addressed to professionals”. (quote from leader conversation, ucsf, nov. 2013c) the development work related to coursera is in a highly innovative and experimental phase. but the tendencies on which to reflect can nevertheless be identified and listed as follows: • coursera students already possess degrees and professional experiences within the academic learning context • the coursera pedagogy strengthens the conventional strategy for academic teaching and learning • there is interaction between the onlineand the conventional teaching practice • there seems to be mutual reinforcement between the late modern and the classic ideal type if, against the above-adumbrated backdrop we regard coursera in an ethnographic sense, the coursera platform is the place and classic academic learning is the context. further, the coursera innovation and strategies can may be regarded as a contribution to life-long academic learning addressed to professionals. summary in campus studies the university both place and context are of foremost importance and the online-university programmes are literally speaking a reseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 11 contextualizing. but as far as space and references to sphere are concerned, new tendencies can be recognised. the coursera and the online-university as a phenomenon refer to all the four spheres. in crossing spheres analyses show the extent to which coursera echoes the discourse of classic academia. in a context of analysing, this means that ‘going beyond the place-based ethnography’ replaces the online-learning context on the internet and in the whole digital circuit of ‘text-on-text’ and ‘text-in-context’. it also means that in the case of coursera the entire digital circuit can be divided into phases and interactive and communicative processes related to the academic learning context. what is more, it means shifting between online and offline activities. in an analytic sense a return to the basic concept implies a coming back to models of the communicative process. ‘sender text/message – receiver’ still represents the basic model and the conflict between the intention and the action is to be regarded as the key conflict. intention/action can be expressed in terms of a conflict between system/life-world, official agenda/hidden agenda, and can be seen in terms of ideas and goals/practice or as the process from vision-mission to practice. it is worth noting that different levels and symbolic constellations the development of the analytical framework remains rooted in the tradition of habermas’ critical communication strategy (borgnakke, 1996, habermas, 1978, 1981). being receptive to critical discourse analyses (fairclough, 1995) and bernstein’s concepts of re-contextualizing (bernstein, 2000) further development of the strategy may provide a basis for empirical reconstruction of the online-learning context and the digital circuit. likewise, it may serve as a basis for exemplary analysis of milestones in the interactive and communicative course. but in order to maintain a ‘solid’ basis it is crucial that the learner’s context is put in perspective. in the learner’s perspective by sharpening the focus on ‘the learner’ online students serve to place ethnographic principle: ‘following the field’ in perspective. tracing the learner means crossing contexts and seeing the process from the learner’s vantage point. as underlined in the ethnographies concerned, there will always be eloquent examples of both the learner’s standpoint and shift in perspective. but currently the challenging examples are represented in the professionoriented learning context. in this context focusing on the learner implies focusing on a fundamental contrast between the scholastic and the clinical context as well as the contrast between ‘theory and practice’. the context markers link ‘theory’ to ‘the school’ and ‘the classroom’ and ‘practice’ to workplaces, such as ‘the clinic’. in the discourse there are strong markers and forceful references to what is to be learned ‘at school and in theory’ and what is to be learned ‘at the clinic in practice’. but the strongest marker is the contrast meaning ‘both-and’ learning situations and meaning ‘the scholastic context versus the clinical practice context’. as illustrated below, this means that to identify the learner’s context is to recognise the contrast. the line of reasoning becomes clear if it is underlined that ethnographic exploration of the learner’s context is already defined as a practical contrast. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 12 figure 3. exploring the context fieldwork focusing on nursing-students’ study life and study balance is methodologically challenged by the contrast (røn noer, 2014) as well as the fact that the two contexts are experienced as two separate forms of scholastic and professional learning. fieldwork carried out in the net-based nursing programme is challenged in additional ways (borgnakke & lyngsø, 2014). firstly it is challenged by the e-pedagogical settings and online/offline learning situations, which shift between teacher-centered and studentcentered communication. secondly it is challenged by the shifting reference to formal learning strategies (learning through school-subject, textbooks, etivity) to informal learning (self-directed learning strategies, at home, the peer-oriented use of social media) and to practise learning (learning at the clinic oriented towards the professional action repertoire). the process of following the learner through the different phases of profession-oriented education with a view to collecting empirical data from the course is in itself a strong marker, which refers to both the ongoing process, the contrast and the flow in learning object. in this sense the basic ethnographic principle ‘following the field’ means not only a return to the context, but also a return to the ongoing learning process. as made clear in the following summary this could be regarded as the starting point for the empirical analysis. a starting point for the empirical analysis tracing the flow of object in the most basic sense “following the field” reaches back to research strategies for multi-sited ethnography (marcus, 1995, borgnakke, 1996). further, the principles regarding ecological validity (hammersley & atkinson, 1983) and the study of online cultures (hammersley 2006) recalls the basic reflection in the empirical analytical framework. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 13 as previously stated (borgnakke, 2013b, 2015) the empirical analysis refers to the fact that most of the new settings are not exclusively online; rather they comprise a blended mix of onlineand offline situations and a flow of texts and multi-modalities. this flow of objects is to be analysed within the context but in the light of a medialized learning culture. in this broader perspective the ethnographic place, space and the life spheres witness the impact from the medialized culture (hjarvard, 2008). summarizing the principle of ecological validity, the starting point for the empirical analysis can be regarded as the medialized mix but also as an “authentic mix” mirroring it-based strategies positioned at the different organizational levels and used by different parties. referring to empirical collections, which derive from the political and institutional macro-, meso and micro levels “the authentic mix” will possess ecological validity referring to policy documents, laws, programmes and strategies followed by material of curriculum and plans for the process of teaching. in the case of net-based analysis the salient fact is that the materials in question are included in the websites of the various organisations/institutions, the intranet and the lms system as well as in a whole range of devices currently in 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 jakobson, r., (1979). elementer, funktioner og strukturer i sproget, københavn: nyt nordisk forlag, arnold busck. kolbæk, r. (2013). holdninger til brugen af it i teoretisk uddannelse og klinisk sygepleje hos nystartede sygeplejestuderende. ph.d.afhandling, det humanistiske fakultet. københavn: københavns universitet. kuhn, t. (1969). videnskabens revolutioner, københavn: fremad. laugesen, j.(2009). på studietur med it i bagagen en undersøgelse af gymnasieelevers læringsstrategier på en studietur til vancouver. københavns universitet. leander, k. m., k. mckim. (2002). tracing the everyday “sitings” of adolescents on the internet: a strategic adaptation of ethnography across online and offline spaces. education, communication & information, 3(2), 211-240. marcus, g. e. (1995). ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multisited ethnography. annual review of anthropology, 24, 95-117. nielsen, c.k. (forthcoming). ethnography in the danish veterinary learning environment, seminar.net, 11(1). prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants. on the horizon, 9(5) noer, v. r. (2014). zooming in zooming out using ipad video diaries in ethnographic educational research”. in p.landri, a.maccarini & r.de rosa (eds.) networked together: designing participatory research in online ethnography (p.85-96) cnr-irpps e-publishing http://www.irpps.cnr.it/epub/ojs/index.php/mono/article/view/978-88-98822-02-7. stenbæk, l. (2013). fænomenet coursera en uddannelsesrevolution? (coursera the phenomenon – a revolution of education?) kandidatspeciale, institut for medier, erkendelse og formidling, københavns universitet. ziehe, t. (2004). schulische lernkultur und ziettypische mentalitätsrisiken, in b. hafeneger (ed.) subjektdiagnosen. subjekt, modernisierung und bildung. swalbach: wochenschau-verlag i the ethnographic fieldwork was carried out as classic long term fieldwork at the danish reform universities. the project-organized education at aalborg university centre (auc) was in focus in the first fieldwork (1981 – 83) and the open university of jutland (jåu) was in focus in the second fieldwork (1983 1985). the mentioned fieldwork in it-upper secondary schools was carried out in 2001-2003 and in 2006-2009. ii the description of coursera on the internet refer to the homepage 2012 – 2013. currently the described tendencies though in ongoing development are confirmed by visiting coursera presentations april 2015 at https://www.coursera.org seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 16 http://www.irpps.cnr.it/e-pub/ojs/index.php/mono/article/view/978-88-98822-02-7 http://www.irpps.cnr.it/e-pub/ojs/index.php/mono/article/view/978-88-98822-02-7 https://www.coursera.org/ coming back to basic concepts of the context karen borgnakke abstract background strong context markers context-bordering factors coping with the learning context is to cope across the spheres figure 1. coping across the spheres contextualizing discourses and paradoxes among innovative projects and participators the new ideal type and the classic context marker: coursera addressed to professionals summary in the learner’s perspective a starting point for the empirical analysis tracing the flow of object references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 scaffolded filmmaking in playoff: a playground for worldwide film experiments heidi philipsen associate professor center for media studies university of southern denmark email: heidij@litcul.sdu.dk abstract how is it possible to make an entire short film in only 48 hours? this task was carried out in the global online film contest, called playoff, held by odense international film festival (off) in august 2010 and -11. contestants came from all over the world — from countries as different as palestine, china and romania. i believe this kind of contest to be a fruitful area for research, giving better understanding of how motivation, flow and creative ways of thinking can be initiated through filmmaking. creative competences, environments, educations, classes etc. are in constant demand. nevertheless, only a few scholars have actually studied conditions behind these elements, and even fewer have researched them in relation to filmmaking. i will seek to expand knowledge in this field which has hitherto been assigned insufficient priority in media research. how to analyse and experience films is very well described, but when it comes to the process of creating films we find almost no scientifically based research or qualifying designs for stimulating creativity. while other media researchers focus on successful films, i find it crucial to study the idea-making, team work and other conditions behind the productions. this article is based on an empirical study of film processes in playoff 2010 and -11, and i will point out how these findings could be used in developing creativity. based on my empirical studies i will suggest a learning design for scaffolded filmmaking and propose some ideas of how to transfer this knowledge to an educational context. keywords: creativity, innovation, filmmaking processes, scaffolding, learning processes, film festivals research design and questions my research design used for the empirical study of playoff has been a methodical ‘quartet’ consisting of a combination of a qualitative and quantitative study supplemented with observations and film analysis. the quantitative part consisted of a questionnaire (which was) distributed to the filmmakers involved in playoff 2010 and -11. during the filmmaking process we also followed some of the individual contestants as they developed their ideas in 2010, whereas in 2011 only a questionnaire survey and analysis of the films were carried out. i in 2010, furthermore, we performed quantitative interviews with a selected group of contestants. i regard the quantitative study seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 72 as the foundation for the qualitative considerations in which i try to expand on the comments of the respondents. in addition, i saw and evaluated all the finished films from the perspective of the three parameters which, according to creative researcher, mihaly csikzentmihalyi (1996), ought to be applicable in a creative product: individual qualities, acknowledgement from experts and something new added to the domain (for instance the domain of stop motion films etc.). i cannot emphasize enough how important i find it to focus on both the processes and the results in analysing creativity. often media researchers chose to evaluate the films only, whereas the pedagogical field tends to be mainly interested in the processes. in this article i have chosen to combine these equally important perspectives. in doing so i focus chiefly on the 2010 winners, louise wulff andersen and astrid plesner, the runner-up, igor rado, and on the two unplaced participants, jacob lykke hansen and jannik dahl pedersen. in this way, both the solo and team process, both winners and ‘losers’, are considered. the findings of this empirical data naturally cannot be regarded as being representative for filmmakers or learning processes through filmmaking in general but are limited to the present findings from the process of filmmaking during a specific scaffolded contest. at the same time, however, the results are sufficiently fruitful for me to suggest a generic model for creative filmmaking. the findings from my research will help me address questions like: how did the participants in playoff use and apply so-called divergent and convergent thinking in their filmmaking? what type of conditioning best supports filmmaking processes concerning both internal (intrinsic motivation etc.) and external components (work environment)? which phases make up a film process based on specific rules? in what ways are the rules met by the participants? how does evaluation from a competent jury influence the motivation for filmmaking? and how can any of my findings (from this research) be transferred into everyday use in classrooms? in my analysis i use the didactic term ‘scaffolding’ as suggested by wood, bruner and ross (1976) and elaborated from vygotsky (1935). i have previously applied the term in relation to learning processes in filmmaking and presented this position in an article for seminar.net (philipsen 2009). ii for that reason, this is not the central issue of this present article. instead it can be regarded as a follow up and elaboration on former results. i have previously divided or categorized scaffolding into three types: 1) individual scaffolding (the support that the filmmaker/student/pupil gives himself), 2) team scaffolding (the support of a group), and 3) institutional scaffolding (rules set by an authority, e.g. off or a school, institution) (philipsen 2009, 2010). the three types of scaffolding are reflected in this present study. furthermore, i apply the term ‘flow’ as defined by creativity researcher czikzentmihalyi (1996) and borrow aspects of his approach to creativity, supplemented by other theoretical views on the subject from amabile & mueller (2008). czikzentmihalyi, amabile & mueller and i agree that creativity is not just a nature-given phenomenon. in order to be creative “the person must learn the rules and the content of the domain, as well as the criteria of selection, the preferences of the field” (csikzentmihalyi, 1996, p. 47). this approach to creativity dominates my reflections on the results in the present article.iii eight different nationalities played with film in 2011 how is it possible to make an entire short film in just 48 hours? this task was carried out in the global online film contest playoff held by off in august 2010 and -11, where contestants from all parts of the world—amateurs as well as professionals—competed on creativity. in 2010 this included countries as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 73 different as australia, finland, india, usa and denmark, whereas playoff in 2011 had entrants from eight different nations: palestine, germany, finland, italy, romania, syria, china, and of course denmark. playoff is the official name of the competition and is a new concept released in 2010, developed by off in collaboration with the university of southern denmark. iv the name, playoff, establishes the aim: to allow filmmakers from as many nationalities and ages as possible to play in creative ways within the short film medium. the new concept enabled contestants to use a variety of equipment, from mobile phones to video cameras, and to enter the competition from all over the world, since the films have to be uploaded on youtube. certain conditions—what i call scaffolding—set the framework for playoff, and every year these conditions are announced on the off website (www.filmfestival.dk). in 2010 the compulsory theme was ‘silver’, and, furthermore, ‘a button’ had in one way or the other to be incorporated as a prop. this year in august the announced theme was ‘used’, and ‘ice’ had to be implemented as a prop. both in 2010 and -11 the short films could only last three minutes and had to be uploaded online on youtube within 48 hours to comply with the rules and be eligible to collect the honour and prizes. the participants were aware that they would be judged by a domain-competent jury looking for a creative idea and the ability to realize it in film. as well as being of various nationalities the participants proved very different in terms of age, experience, and educational history. in 2010 the average age (ages ranging from 17-48) was 25. in 2011 (ranging from 20-43) it was 28. 2010 2011 age 25 28 films 19 22 winners louise andersen & astrid plesner mads outzen winning film the lake reused figure 1: participants’ age, number of films and winners the winners of playoff 10, astrid and louise, both seventeen, were the youngest in 2010. the respondents combined experience in filmmaking ranging from 0–10 years in 2010, and 0–15 years in 2011. astrid and louise were the least experienced. mads outzen—who won this year with reused—is 31 years old and an experienced filmmaker. the fact that this competition can be won by two inexperienced 17-year-olds as well as an experienced filmmaker of 31, illustrates that creativity can stem from quite different angles and sources. later, i will elaborate on whether the winning films can actually be regarded as creative. 48 hours offer a refreshing alternative when i researched what the contestants felt to be the best part of the playoff experience, their answers were like this: “the limitation regarding time and theme“, “it has been exciting to be given a defined task and to work under the pressure of a deadline”, “to test your ability and skills”, “that everyone is invited to compete”. a danish contestant from 2011, casper joel, elaborated on the positive aspect of the scaffolding by answering: [..] i do like a short and effective process, which is a refreshing alternative to normally much longer and more complicated productions. [..] one doesn’t indulge in something with a lot of doubt along the way. good fun, a relief, and a good exercise. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 74 casper highlights the time limit and concludes that it made him focus on the fun part instead of doubts and complications. he is thereby pointing out a fruitful aspect of the off constraints. all in all, the participants both in 2010 and -11 regarded the conditions, e.g. the institutional scaffolding, to be the best part of the experience. when the participants from 2010 were asked to mention the problematic aspects of playoff, the fact that not every film received an evaluation from the jury was considered to be negative. in 2010 only the participants who finished first, second and third were evaluated by the jury, and critique must therefore be acknowledged as an important motivating factor. this, again, can be seen as a form of scaffolding. ‘marking critical features’ is a type of scaffolding (type 4, according to wood, bruner & ross, 1976, p. 98).v in 2011 this concept was changed, which i will elaborate on later. finally, a participant in 2010 stated that her own self-criticism and selfapplied pressure were negative factors.vi it is well known that performance anxiety often accompanies filmmaking. from the results of the quantitative study, it seems reasonable to conclude that this was also true of the playoff participants. but, as the qualitative study will illustrate, they handled this in different ways. scaffolding in itself is a way to create focus and reduce negative stress, as in the rules of the competition, but the participants themselves actually added more types of individualand team scaffolding. the above-mentioned respondent who saw performance anxiety and selfcriticism as a problem worked alone during the full 48 hours of filmmaking, and she chose in the end not to hand in a film. it is remarkable that the majority of the participants who actually submitted a finished product were part of a group. it is reasonable to conclude, as validated by my observations and interviews, that participants in groups are able to support and appreciate each other in a number of ways: 3) direction maintenance, and 5) frustration control (representing type 3 and 5 of the 6 types of scaffolding). however, as the following qualitative part of my study illustrates, these types of support may be given by other group members as well as the creative individual him/herself (i.e. individual scaffolding). learning more important than winning i also asked the participants to quantitatively evaluate how satisfied they were with the process of their work, the rules from off (i.e. the institutional scaffolding), and their own results (i.e. the films). it turned out like this: 2010 2011 process 4.5 5.0 rules 5.0 5.2 results 3.8 4.3 figure 2: evaluation of process, rules and results on a scale of 1 to 6 they gave the process 4.5 on average in 2010, compared to 5 in 2011. both in 2010 and -11 these rankings were accompanied by comments expressing general satisfaction with, especially, the rules from off. the process and constraints in both years were ranked higher than the films. it is striking, however, that one respondent, considering the work of his group, wrote: “we already had ideas which we tried to fit in to the concept provided by off. in retrospect, we might have been too stuck on those ideas.” this is the comment from jannik in the questionnaire, and his perspective will be explored in the following part of the article, as i incorporate interviews. the ability to discard old ideas and embrace new ones turned out to be crucial in stimulating creative thinking. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 75 a further investigation into the satisfaction of participants regarding the specific rules of the competition as described by off showed that respondents awarded the rules 5 out of 6 (on average) in 2010, and 5.2 in 2011. altogether, a fairly positive evaluation. in the comments, the pressure of a deadline and the specific theme and prop were considered to be inspirational. a key motivational factor and a flow finally, i asked the participants to evaluate their own results. here, the evaluation was not quite as generous as seen in the evaluation of process and rules. the results scored 3.8 in 2010 and a little higher, 4.3, in 2011. this means that even respondents who did not finish their films before the deadline saw scaffolding as helpful. the process in itself seems to be more successful or valuable than the result. this shows, i think, that contestants primarily participate in order to partake in a process of learning. the majority are quite critical towards their short films, which illustrates their ability to reflect upon what to improve in the next film project. many participants are repeaters in playoff 11 and still consider it part of an ongoing learning process. as a summing up of the quantitative part of this study, one can conclude that participants found it stimulating to work with different forms of scaffolding, and that evaluation and appreciation (from other group members and/or jury) turned out to be a key motivational factor in the creative process. in fact, more important than the product itself, this is why the contestants seemed to be more oriented towards learning via the process and eager for feedback. this means, i will argue, that some of the participants experienced so-called ‘flow’ during their filmmaking process: an experience that made them very positive about the process as such. similarly, csikszentmihalyi found and then described flow in the empirical studies (of artists, athletes etc.) he carried out: this optimal experience is what i have called flow, because many of the respondents described the feeling when things were going well as an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness (csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 110). csikszentmihalyi argues that nine parameters increase the flow situation. i do not agree that all of these nine parameters actually describe what it feels like to be in flow. in my view nos. 1–6 define what kinds of scaffolding are needed to create flow, whereas the last three describe the actual flow feeling (selfconsciousness disappears, the sense of time grows distorted, and the activity becomes autotelic). in my interview, based on the scaffolding from some of the first six parameters, the respondents, louise and astrid (more below) describe the feeling of being in flow (nos. 7, 8 and 9), stressing that at times during the filmmaking process they forgot about time and the basic needs of eating, drinking and sleeping, and instead worked gladly. as illustrated above, all of the respondents evaluate the process as being more positive than the results, and this underlines that being in the process seemed more important than the actual result, which also is a criterion for the flow feeling as defined by csikszentmihalyi. the majority of the participants in 2011 were—as mentioned—repeaters from 2010. this may serve to underline the point that most of the participants regard these competitions as ongoing learning processes. many of them also write that they collaborate in many film processes similar to playoff. one of the contestants, tobias juhl nielsen, stresses that receiving feedback from a competent jury makes a huge difference: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 76 [..] then i’m able to find out why i [..] didn’t win, and by that way, make a better result next year. this means that you are not just left with an empty feeling, when you thought yourself that it was a good film. most participants share this conception of playoff as an exclusive opportunity for improvement, and it seems to be even more exclusive and motivating after it was decided to include jury evaluation of all entries to the competition in 2011. daniele caon from italy actually writes in the questionnaire that this was his main reason for joining playoff 11: “we participated especially for the feedback”. and also nathalie neuffer from germany points out that: “the comment from the jury is very important ”. she underlines the word “very” and her sentence with a smiley to be sure her message gets across, and caon and neuffer are not alone in pointing out the importance of feedback from the jury. my conclusion is that most contestants regard playoff as a valuable learning process. it may well be that some participants competed both in 2010 and -11 as one long learning process. important to the motivation and process is the need for feedback from a domain-competent jury capable of noting critical features. a playground to re-use a 2011 participant from romania, matei filimon, is the director of the short film good ice. vii filimon is 32 years old and an experienced filmmaker with an education in (the field of) media. he describes playoff as: a very exciting opportunity for everyone in the world, professional or amateur filmmaker, to show creativity, to play with creative ideas, in 48 hours, to express themselves freely, outside of the traditional film norms. a chance to taste cinematic freedom, to see and to be seen. play off is a prestigious film festival, a ‘playground’ in the city of hans christian andersen, open for worldwide film experiments. in this filimon highlights that he considers the competition as an opportunity for playing with creative ideas and expressions. in his own short film it is obvious that he likes to experiment with the conventions for film language (discontinuity in editing etc.). in the perspective of this article, it is quite interesting that he uses the terms “to express themselves freely”, and “taste cinematic freedom”. one might have expected some of the participants to criticize the playoff rules for being too restrictive and representing the trammels of authority instead of something liberating, but none of them mentions this as a negative limitation. when respondents were consulted on negative elements in playoff 11, one of the few comments given is the fact that the competition starts at 12 o’clock, which means that any participants with an 8–16 job are deprived the possibility of working at the film process for the entire 48 hours. furthermore, according to another participant, it can be regarded as negative that in 2011 greenpeace was both the sponsor and a member of the jury. the winner of 2011 is given the opportunity of making a campaign film for this organization, an association which can cause ‘noise’ in the process for some of the participants, as highlighted by one of them in the questionnaire. he wonders—understandably—whether to realize the idea he finds creative and is dedicated to himself, or to make a ‘green’ film that will suit the organization. this underlines the need for a film-competent jury (with no sponsors on it). amabile and mueller point out that: [..] although creativity is difficult for people to define and very difficult to measure objectively in most domains, people who are familiar with a domain can recognize creativity when they see it, and their independent judgements seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 77 generally agree as to a level of creativity in a given set of productions (amabile & mueller, 2008, p. 38). from this standpoint one could argue that an organization like greenpeace belongs to a quite different domain than short film, even though both domains are interested in creative ideas. both the stated criticism of the jury–sponsor relationship in playoff 11, and the fact that no respondents in 2010 or -11 mention the theme and prop restrictions as negative, are instructive results which could influence the use of filmmaking in the educational system: deadlines, other constraints, and competent evaluation seem crucial. marking critical features as clarified above, some participants in 2010 called for evaluation of all the short films instead of only those in the top three, and this can be regarded a search for ‘marking critical features’, or scaffolding type 4 according to wood, bruner and ross (1976: 98). with this request in mind i asked off to expand the jury’s evaluation to all participants in 2011, a suggestion which they welcomed and implemented. all 22 participants who finished a film were given assessment by email. this year’s jury consisted of the director and programme chief of off, kaspar munk, in collaboration with the executive manager from greenpeace, mads christensen. in 2010 the jury had a different composition. as in 2010, munk and christensen were seeking to reward the creative idea, and, as munk articulated it during the evaluation process, the capability to realize their creative idea in a film language and narrative. this year the winner was—as mentioned—danish mads outzen with the short film reused, whereas nos. 2 and 3 were actually the same contestants as the year before: joonas makkonen from finland came second this time, with a film called the chair, and igor rado from denmark once again came third, his contribution this year being the short film rotation. the fact that a completely new jury placed the same no. 2 and 3 as the year before shows that these contributors manage to maintain their production of creative films. louise wulff andersen and astrid plesner also delivered an interesting stop motion film this year, but failed to reach the top 3 this time. screenshot from the film rotation by igor rado according to csikzentmihalyi (1996) a creative product/idea must show individual qualities, get acknowledgement from experts and add something new to the domain. this article would be extremely long if i published analysis of all the finished films from playoff 10 and 11. moreover i think you, the reader, would do best to watch the films on youtube and judge for yourself. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 78 briefly, however, one could argue that the only films which actually fulfil the parameters from csikzentmihalyi are those made by igor rado: s (2010) and rotation (2011). they obviously express a quite unique style, and if you watch these two very short films you will immediately recognise the rado style, which can be regarded as a renewal of the short film domain—a domain which rado obviously knows very well himself from his more than 10 years of short film experience. it is difficult to decide whether experts other than the playoff juries will acknowledge his films as creative, but the fact is that his films ‘only’ came third twice in this contest. this highlights just how important a domainrelevant jury can be to creativity (amabile & mueller, 2008, p. 38). editing themselves into flow in the questionnaire from 2011 i studied the flow aspect (singled out by the findings from 2010) by asking the participants: “did you experience moments in the filmmaking process where you completely forgot about time and place?” viii a danish participant, siri frederiksen, answered: “in the process of editing time just flew. suddenly 7–8 hours had disappeared, and that was really weird”. her answer is typical for the participants. what she refers to as a “weird” feeling of time flying in the editing phase doesn’t seem weird at all to me. possibly, siri and her team experienced flow in this situation. without a tight deadline flow might have disappeared, because the filmmakers would have had the chance, or should we call it ‘risk’, to leave the editing room and perhaps find it hard to get back into the process. in the case of playoff the deadline serves as a support that maintains participants’ focus and concentration. a reflection from the famous danish screen writer, mogens rukov, supplements this result, as he points out: “the more time you have [in the process of film production], the more desperate is your need for success, and it pulls you down in the process” (aggersbjerg 2010: 118, my translation). he gives us the example that for thomas vinterberg’s film the celebration (1998) the process was extremely short and joyful, whereas for his next film, it’s all about love (2003), the production time was too long and the feeling of making it frustrating. in both cases rukov was consultant on the screenwriting. the majority of my respondents agree with playoff participant siri: in the editing process they forgot about time, and some of them—but only a few—also about the place they were in. one fear was that problems with the editing programmes could have disturbed the flow feeling, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. explanations for this could be various, but one is that the closer you get to a deadline in a filmmaking process, the more concentrated you get. another could be that normally you do not leave the room when editing compared to when you are recording. it might be significant, in further research, to study whether a limitation in numbers of locations (as yet another kind of ‘location scaffolding’) would influence the flow feeling, maintain focus from the filmmakers, and perhaps make them think in different (and divergent) ways. this study calls for a qualitative approach as a method and could serve as a new type of rule in future playoff contests. how to initiate divergent thinking according to my research into the field of filmmaking processes, scaffolding— as used in playoff both years—initiates flow situations, especially in the editing process. but to elaborate on this i turned to the observations and qualitative interviews done in 2010. with these data as a basis, i seek to further clarify the relationship between flow situations and divergent ways of thinking. in this regard a questionnaire obviously does not provide enough data. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 79 before i continue to reflect on the process of the participants, i therefore briefly need to introduce the differences between convergent and divergent thinking. convergent thinking is dominated by a structured and analytical approach when working towards a desired goal. cooking for example would mostly be dominated by convergent thing, if you follow a recipe (hilling, 2003, p. 44). this mode of thinking, which dominates human cognitive behaviour, converges with correct or conventional ideas (runco, 1991). divergent thinking does exactly the opposite: it is the non-conventional way of thinking. cooking could apply to this mode of thinking if the chef felt like adding a new, and in this context unknown, ingredient. so, divergent thinking opens up for new possibilities (hilling, 2003, p. 44). in the creation of films, both modes of thinking are obviously required. a person who only masters divergent thinking will probably not be able to cope. a convergent thinker could possibly do quite well, but might find it hard to contribute creatively. everybody uses both ways of thinking to some degree, but one could argue that without divergent thinking no invention or creativity occurs (hilling, 2003; runco, 1991; buhl, 2010). in addition, pedagogic researcher, feiwel kupferberg, stresses that, based on research from the swedish educational system, it is problematic that teachers are reinforcing what he labels ‘the right answers pedagogic’, as they are looking for and rewarding what—in their eyes or according to curriculum— is the correct answer, instead of sometimes rewarding a novel idea or a creative solution (kupferberg, 2009, p. 29). in this sense, the educational system in sweden—and we recognize the same tendency in denmark—is acknowledging convergent thinking and downsizing what, in relation to creativity, are important divergent cognitive patterns. when they enter the education system, most children are often naturally little divergent ‘goldmines’, because we are all born with the cognitive capability to think in divergent ways. part of the reason is that children—to start with—think spontaneously and do not often question their own ideas. adults have learned to replace spontaneous thinking with reflection and criticism: why and how, is it too expensive or too unrealistic? in this way we often question our ideas. children do things quite differently: they play and test things/ideas, and when doing this they focus on process rather than result and will easily enter a state of flow. research has illustrated that 98% of 3to 5-year-olds master divergent thinking (land & jarman, 1992; buhl 2010). among adults (over 18) only 2% could make use of this otherwise natural ability. this research could be wrong, since testing divergent thinking is a difficult field. but if we take the results into consideration, during 9–10 years of education we successfully reduce creative potential significantly, despite our visions for the promotion of creativity (buhl, 2010). the grading system and various curricula primarily honour and test convergent thinking—and thereby ‘the right answers pedagogic’—supported by documentation and argumentation. not often do exams honour the students’ ability to generate original ideas. testing children for their specific ability in divergent thinking has for many years been used to measure the potential for creativity. however, there are many unanswered questions concerning divergent thinking, and the methods used to test the potential have been subject to criticism through the years (runco, 1991). since convergent thinking is aimed at solving specific types of problems and divergent thinking is more directed towards an opening of a range of possibilities, tests often honour respondents’ abilities to come up with as many possible solutions as they can. more solutions equal more divergent thinking. this way of testing can in some cases be criticized as being too quantitative and not evaluating the quality of the divergent thinking. the question is what conditions make some people—in our case, filmmakers/learners—capable of thinking more divergently than others? runco’s book divergent thinking (1991) shows a variety of studies investigating the influence of heredity and environment. ix all in all it seems seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 80 reasonable to conclude that the possibilities for divergent thinking are influenced by both genetics and culture. moreover, this kind of thinking only represents a part of the creative process. even though you are able to think in a divergent way, you might not be able to master all aspects of the process. you might not, for example, be able to translate your divergent ideas into a finished creative product. emphasis on the pre-phase on the basis of the data from playoff 10—the study i have qualitative data from—i find it necessary and valuable to distinguish between different phases in the creative process. the playoff contestants apparently went through three such phases. we could name them: the pre-phase, the main phase, and the result. my research shows that the pre-phase, the phase before the actual process of filmmaking, is highly important when it comes to either stimulating or inhibiting divergent thinking. if the participants are set on too many elements originating from before the main phase, it is hard for them to cast aside those ideas and start thinking in new ways. my data shows that the prephase tends to have a decisive influence on the main phase and the result. this is not unexpected: from an early age we have been taught that preparation is important. but if we want to encourage divergent thinking—for instance in the educational system—it seems preparation does exactly the opposite. the participants jannik and jacob in 2010 answered when asked about their preparations in the pre-phase: jannik: we talked about it a lot, before and during the summer vacation. jacob: yes, regarding the basic ideas. that is also why we had so many already on the day the conditions were made public. so we talked a lot about what we would like to do. so, jannik and jacob discussed, in their pre-phase, specific stories for the competition—notably without knowing the conditions. if you want to look at this kind of approach from the perspective of the cooking imagery used earlier on, they had already chosen the dishes they wanted to make, without knowing all the ingredients they would be required to use. the winners of the 2010 competition, astrid and louise used a very different method in their prephase. they had already decided to make a stop-motion film, and also had the following reflections: louise: first we had this idea that we would do something like in dogville. or to draw something as it went along. astrid: yes, this was something we talked... louise: ...about early on. it was an experiment we wanted to do anyway, so we thought it could be a possibility. then we would be able to paint some boards or pieces of wood. in this sense we prepared. but other than that, we just thought... astrid: ...let us try it out. in their pre-phase the girls used inspiration from lars von triers film dogville (2003). this way of generating ideas is what creativityand practitioner researcher, donald schön, defines as ‘seeing as’ and/or ‘doing-as’ in a creative process (schön, 2001, p. 162). in this case the participants use the dogville reference to shape an idea for the visual style of their film. they use it moreover to communicate to each other what kind of, let’s call it, production design they are aiming for in the stop-motion film. and in the result, the lake, this idea and design are recognized (http://filmfestival.dk/en/s%c3%b8en/). like jannik and jacob they prepared something specific that they wanted to incorporate. the difference is that the girls only chose a visual element or design, not a finished storyline. the visual inspiration seems to have http://filmfestival.dk/en/s%c3%b8en/� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 81 influenced the creative process and the end result in a positive way for the girls, whereas the boys got themselves stuck, trying to follow the finished storyline. but, as highlighted previously, this participation in a filmmaking contest, is most of all regarded as a learning process. x searching for confidence in preparations the respondents jannik and jacob had a recipe, astrid and louise had just a visual component, while igor seemed to be preparing mentally. igor knew himself well in this phase of the creative process (from 10 years of experience in filmmaking) and knew what made him feel confident. according to my findings from these empirical data, this is a method one can use in a creative process to handle performance anxiety. but, presumably, this method is very individual and requires you to know yourself well and to have a certain degree of filmmaking experience; all these qualities characterize igor. jannik and jacob's approach was more confined. in order to establish their comfort zone in relation to their performance, they had already created a storyline before the beginning of the competition, and thereby to some extent ‘disenfranchised’ the context of the competition. in contrast, louise and astrid remained open in relation to creating a storyline: louise: we did make some preparations in advance..., the thing with the board. it was like..., we could go home, and then it was really only a matter of making up the story and crafting some things for it. in relation to performance, it seems there is a significantly light-hearted and unpretentious attitude in their approach. the wording: ”[…] and then it was really all a matter of making up the story” illustrates that the respondents in this case managed to limit the pressure of performing by not expecting too much of themselves and their product. the quotation above, along with answers from other respondents, provide further evidence that participants regarded both process and product as a joint effort with shared responsibility. during the interview the pronoun “we” is used more often than “i”. i will argue that the way the respondents handled the pre-phase in a demanding creative process corresponds to team scaffolding, where responsibilities in the assignment are shared in relation to conflicts, consequences and joys. relieving performance anxiety by sharing consequences in order to summon the courage to experiment is a proven method. as opposed to igor, the girls in 2010 had very little experience in filmmaking as prior to that time they had only made one stop-motion film. this may also help to explain their easygoing approach to the process. jannik and jacob have a few years of experience in filmmaking and they seem to be more focused on result and less on the process. this, presumably, hindered divergent thinking significantly as far as i can judge from my empirical data. when trying to reach their goal, they sought confidence in their prefabricated stories. such influential pseudo-preparations exhibit the filmmakers’ need to feel well prepared when they know they need to perform and enter into a creative process. design for a scaffolded filmmaking process the three case studies, one could conclude, all show different ways of preparing and the use of various methods in the process of filmmaking which help create comfort zones via scaffolding. the conclusion is that pre-phase, judging by what one can learn from this study, has a significant influence on the main process and the result. so far, theories of creativity have chiefly focused on the main process, while media science has primarily focused on the result—without showing any interest in the prior processes at all.xi i would like to promote a way of thinking, based on research, which combines these seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 82 approaches. drawing on my research and influenced by the model of creativity scholar, teresa amabile, (1996/2008), i suggest the following design for a scaffolded filmmaking process with focus on shaping new ways of thinking which may lead to creative results: scaffolding → flow → divergent balanced with convergent thinking (→ creative outcomes) figure 3: didactic design for creative filmmaking this figure of course needs to be tested and improved through further research in different educational contexts. according to my study, and as implemented in figure 3, divergent thinking is not a resource maintained by the selected few but a way of thinking which can be nursed, improved, and triggered by different kinds of scaffolding (themes, deadlines, constructive feedback etc.) and balanced with convergent thinking, since both cognitive abilities are significant to creative processes and results. i will also clarify that types of scaffolding are not only necessary as a starter in a process in order to reduce the anxiety in the pre-phase. my research also demonstrates the need for participants in filmmaking to use team and individual scaffolding along the way, and moreover the importance of constructive feedback on the results in order to be acknowledged and brought to the next level of learning. scaffolding is therefore both valuable as a starter and necessary as follow-up and for maintaining motivation. in addition, my results illustrate that filmmaking processes are of course influenced by the individuals within them and their intrinsic motivation and levels of experience within media, or what amabile would call “domainrelevant skills” (amabile & mueller, 2008, p. 36). my respondents from the qualitative study, louise, astrid, igor, jannik and jacob, all represent different needs for scaffolding and they react differently to the various phases of the processes. too much time in the pre-phase seems like an obstacle to some of them, whereas others are better at handling this. as amabile has stated, a creative process and outcome are both influenced by individual intrinsic motivation, by the ability to handle creative processes, by domain-relevant skills, and by what she refers to as “the work environment” (amabile & mueller 2008: 36), which in this article i have considered as conditions for creativity. both internal components (motivation, skills etc.) and external (work environment etc.) influence the creative process/outcome. in this article i have mostly outlined the external components by focusing on the institutional scaffolding from off as a starter (theme, prop, length and deadline) and a finisher (feedback from a competent jury) and offered examples of how these components are met differently by individuals, but all in one evaluated as helpful to triggering their motivation, inspiration, and ability to create a short film. filmmaking in the educational system concepts like playoff show merit in estimating how to create helpful work environments capable of developing creative competences (e.g. idea generation, team play, developing an idea into something useful etc.) and sometimes creative outcomes. from these experiences it is fruitful to try to implement/introduce/transfer elements from this into the educational system, which unfortunately sometimes seems concerned to constrain creativity and the development of creative competences. such competences require both divergent and convergent ways of thinking, and often the first is downsized. children are good at performing divergent thinking by themselves. however, as soon as we recognize the behavioural cognitive capabilities of children, the parental and educational system seem to ‘rob’ the children of those very seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 83 qualities. how do we address the dilemma or paradox that we remove a cognitive property, which at the same time we need in the creative process, and in a larger perspective: in the educational system? part of the answer could be: by using scaffolded filmmaking processes. based on the findings from my study i have suggested a learning design which could be applied to the educational system in order to initiate creativity. give greater priority to film production a report from the danish film institute illustrates that, compared to music, television, computer games, surfing and chatting on the internet, and reading books and magazines, film is actually the preferred medium among children and youngsters, i.e. 5-18 years old (dfi, 2009, p. 4). this could underline the need for a closer integration of film in school curricula. in a new book about didactics in teaching through filmmaking, læring med levende billeder (rose & christiansen, 2010), it is pointed out that in the danish educational system, filmmaking processes are unfortunately downplayed because emphasis is put on film analysis and experiences. these elements are already quite well integrated parts of the curriculum, whereas filmmaking is ‘forgotten’. some of the main reasons seem to be that it has not yet been fully documented which competences filmmaking can initiate, there is not yet a developed language in which to teach and communicate these processes, and, finally, the majority of the teachers do not believe that they possess the required skills and for that reason they feel uncomfortable to be teaching filmmaking. rose and christiansen (2010) suggest part of a language and a didactic, and it is argued that filmmaking processes both serve to develop children’s social competences and offer them analytical and critical tools (storytelling etc.). in addition, i would argue, such processes also preserve children’s motivation and their ability to think in divergent directions and suggest fruitful activities sometimes leading to creative results. but in order to carry out more filmmaking processes we have to look for ways to offer both children and teachers different kinds of scaffolding. they have to feel safe, supported and able to communicate about the processes. and finally, teachers will need to be able to consider themselves the institutional scaffolding (giving pupils/students directions, defining groups, setting deadlines, arranging juries to give feedback etc.), and depend on their capability to use team and individual scaffolding, especially concerning those parts of the processes which are difficult for the teachers to fully master (technical skills are difficult to maintain in a dynamic development of media technology). scaffolded filmmaking could be integrated in both primary schools and other parts of the educational system through concepts that have some similarities with playoff. naturally, aspects of the contest are impossible to reconcile with ordinary school timetables which do not allow 48 hours to be dedicated to film production. teachers also have to work across school subjects, but this is already everyday practice in most schools. nothing prevents teachers from asking their pupils or students to make a film on the theme of for instance ‘war’ as part of the history and social studies curriculum. as we have already discovered from my research, a theme constraint, combined with time constraints etc., can be very useful and motivating. and nothing prevents teachers from keeping the tasks at very low-tech levels (using mobile phones etc.). xii what can be productive to take into account when thinking of using filmmaking as a tool for learning is to remember how motivating and inspirational constraints and evaluation from competent people can be in combination with recording and editing. in addition, how filmmaking can help seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 84 students to reach for higher levels of reflection and learning methods, and to be competent team players and (sometimes creative) idea makers. if it is possible in an easy way to turn playoff into a playground in the city of h.c. andersen open for worldwide film experiments, as described by romanian participant filimon, it must certainly be possible to learn from this concept and transfer some of this knowledge into school curricula. in denmark we already have several concepts of media production/digital storytelling, besides playoff, that fulfil the need for both (scaffolding, constructive feedback) and can be integrated in the formal educational system (some of them already are): www.skolefilmfestival.dk, www.lommefilm.dk, and www.edit24.dk. these concepts moreover offer both students/pupils and teachers fruitful instructions on how to use the editing programmes. references aggersbjerg, m. (2010). rukov – et portræt. københavn: people’s press. amabile, t. & mueller, j. s. (2008). studying creativity, its processes, and its antecedents. in j. zhou & c. shalley (eds.) handbook of organizational creativity. new york: lawrence erlbaum associates. buhl, c. (2010). talent – spørgsmålet er ikke om du har det, men hvordan. viborg: gyldendal business. csikszentmihalyi, m. (1996). flow – and the psychology of discovery and invention. new york: harper perennial. dfi (2009). børn og unges medievaner i forhold til danske og udenlandske spillefilm. det danske filminstitut og kulturministeriet. www.dfi.dk hilling, s. (2003). kognitiv stil. aarhus: munkholm. kupferberg, f. (2009). farvel til de rigtige svars pædagogik. in l. tanggaard & s. brinkmann (eds.) kreativitetsfremmende læringsmiljøer i skolen. fredrikshavn: dafolo. philipsen, h. (2009). constraints in filmmaking processes offer an exercise to the imagination. seminar.net, 5 (1). http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol5issue1/philipsen_-_constraints_in_film_making_processes.pdf philipsen, h. (2010). designing (with) creativity. in l. agerbæk, h. philipsen & b. k. walther (eds.) designing new media. aarhus: academia. philipsen, h. (2011). en stimuleringsindsprøjtning for det creative. magasinet skolen, 17 (5). rose, g. & christiansen, h. c. (2010). læring med levende billeder. frederiksberg: samfundslitteratur. runco, m. (1999). divergent thinking. new lersey: ablex publishing corporation. schön, d. (2004). den reflekterende praktiker. århus: klim pædagogiske linjer. wood, d., bruner, j. & ross, g. (1976). tutoring in problem solving. journal of child psychology & psychiatry & allied disciplines, 17 (2). links www.filmfestival.dk www.skolefilmfestival.dk www.lommefilm.dk www.edit24.dk http://www.dfi.dk/� http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol5-issue1/philipsen_-_constraints_in_film_making_processes.pdf� http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol5-issue1/philipsen_-_constraints_in_film_making_processes.pdf� http://www.filmfestival.dk/� http://www.skolefilmfestival.dk/� http://www.lommefilm.dk/� http://www.edit24.dk/� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 85 i part of the data was collected with help from instructor trine lai, to whom i am most thankful. iihttp://seminar.net/images/stories/vol5-issue1/philipsen__constraints_in_film_making_processes.pdf) iii i could have elaborated more on the theoretical approaches to creativity as well. stokes (2006), kupferberg (2006), schön (1983) or others would have been fruitful to think with. but this is integrated already in my previous research (for instance philipsen 2010), and is not the aim in this present article. iv in earlier years (2006 and 2007) off headed a competition named video clip cup, where contestants had to be physically present. the theme was announced on the opening day of the festival, and the material had to be recorded on dv-tape. the film then had to be edited in-house using avid, a rather complicated program for editing films. v wood, bruner & ross mention six types of scaffolding: 1) recruitment, 2) reduction in degrees of freedom, 3), direction maintenance, 4) marking critical features, 5) frustration control, 6) demonstration (wood, bruner and ross 1976: 98). vi as the only respondent i am keeping her anonymous since she chose not to finish playoff10 and hand in a film. vii it is possible to watch all of the films from playoff 11 at: http://www.youtube.com/user/playoffmoviecontest?feature=mhee viii i am aware that such a question might guide the participant in a certain direction, and would have preferred to have had the time to make observations during playoff 11 as i did in 2010. this would probably have given my findings more validity and nuances concerning the difficult flow aspect. ix studies have shown that being a big sister or younger brother reflects directly on a person’s ability to think in a divergent and creative way (eisenmann 1964, staffieri 1970) part of the argumentation is that the oldest sibling will be more structured and analytical than the younger brothers and sisters because he/she will have a bigger responsibility than the younger siblings. x jannik (as a director) competed in another film festival (called the golden egg) in april 2011 and received an award from the audience; he was not however, awarded one from the jury. jannik and jacob also participated with another film at this festival and won one of the categories selected by the jury. they therefore seem to keep on going through learning processes and improving. xi it is fair to mention a few exceptions like redvall (2010), macdonald (2008), and caldwell (2008). xii i have written an article called ”en stimuleringsindsprøjtning for det kreative” in magasinet skolen aug/sep. 2011, no. 5, volume 17, in which i elaborate on specific ideas for teachers use of filmmaking. scaffolded filmmaking in playoff: a playground for worldwide film experiments heidi philipsen abstract research design and questions eight different nationalities played with film in 2011 48 hours offer a refreshing alternative learning more important than winning a key motivational factor and a flow a playground to re-use marking critical features editing themselves into flow how to initiate divergent thinking emphasis on the pre-phase searching for confidence in preparations design for a scaffolded filmmaking process filmmaking in the educational system give greater priority to film production references education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book issn: 1504-4831 vol 16, no 2 (2020), e4046 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4046 ©2020 (norm friesen). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book norm friesen boise state university email: normfriesen@boisestate.edu abstract the physical form of the book known as the codex has been described as nothing less than “the most powerful object of our time,” as the “concrete form” of “the western episteme.” the book, in other words, is an epochally and epistemologically foundational medium. the book’s physical nature, its typical contents, the habits and practices associated with its use, and the way that these are acquired, can thus be said to together constitute the paradigm for knowing. this article begins with an examination of book culture—one which provides long-familiar demarcations of knowledge and ignorance, development and depravation that are starting to lose their force. appealing to the notion of the longue durée, this paper then turns to the history and contemporaneity of the book in educational discourse. in concluding, it considers what the changing educational significance of the book can tell us about change in education itself, and what this ongoing change might mean for us today. keywords: educational media, history of education, philosophy of education, book culture, reading instruction introduction i went to university about 30 years ago, at the dawn of the microcomputer. these computers were expensive, immobile boxes that only responded to coded commands; but today i hold a smartphone in my hand that is over 10,000 times more powerful and infinitely more flexible. this incredible technological revolution, however, is all but invisible when i now go back to schools as a professor in educational technology. https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4046 education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 yes: there are teachers using interactive whiteboards, and students sneaking peeks at their phones or using a tablet or chromebook. but i still see teachers covering material via lectures and students using textbooks—just as they do in my own university. the question is inevitable: “why has education changed so little when media and technology have changed so much?” i was not satisfied by the standard explanations: that we’re at the cusp of an educational revolution (we always are) or that educators are “laggards” (they work very hard). instead, i decided to look at how questions of change and stability are understood by people with less of a stake in the game, by historians who focus more on a well-documented past than on an uncertain future. by looking back hundreds, even thousands of years, it is possible to show how education is not at all opposed to technology or change. instead, teaching children and young people is deeply connected to the most basic technologies of thought and communication, and to the changes that they have only very gradually undergone. these basic technologies are those of text and writing—not just evolving tablets and pens, but also writing systems themselves. technologies of these kinds generally do not change over years or decades, but rather, over centuries or millennia. even roman letter forms in the print version of this article are found in nearly identical form on ancient roman ruins from over 2000 years ago. this type of change and stability is not the kind explained by today’s managerial or technological change models—ones that would label some individuals as “innovators” and others the “late majority” or “laggards” (e.g., rogers 2003). instead, it is the change of what one 20th century historian ferdinand braudel (1982) referred to as the longue durée. the longue durée, braudel explains, means firmly rejecting the “short time span,” of “daily life, [of] our illusion, [of] our hasty awareness” (p. 33). instead of focusing on individual school days or technological product release cycles it “means becoming used to a slower tempo, which sometimes almost borders on the motionless” (p. 33). what does educational change look like from this perspective? change certainly exists, but it sometimes does indeed seem to “border on the motionless.” in other work, i have illustrated this by describing both continuities and changes in the forms of the textbook and the lecture.1 both of these educational forms can readily be traced back as far as the beginning of the modern era, back to the invention of the middle ages. i have shown that these two forms display remarkable continuity over time. the lecture still involves speaker who is “authorized” in some way speak to an audience of students, while the textbook still represents a compendium of content that can be said to be “educational” in the way it is distilled, presented and interconnected. of course, both lecture and textbook have also changed in many ways since their modern emergence some 500 years ago, but what has changed the most, i argued, are our understandings of ourselves as the speaker or audience for the lecture or the reader of the textbook: we no longer see ourselves as 1 see: friesen, n. (2017). the textbook and the lecture: education in a new media age. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press. education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 working to capture the “spirit” of the lecturer or of the textbook author as was the case in the romantic era more than 200 years ago. nor do we understand ourselves as almost worshipfully memorizing the content of canonical books (i.e. ones earlier regarded as textbooks) that were read aloud in the lecture, as was the case both before and after the invention of the printing press. however, in this article i look briefly at a rather different form or medium. this is one that is not particular to the university or the school classroom, but that can be said to join these sometimes isolated locations with the broader world of media production, consumption and circulation. it is a medium whose past and contemporary status has indeed received some academic attention as of late (e.g., piper 2012; houston 2016), but whose significance in education has only been discussed anecdotally (e.g. doyle 2014).2 this is form or medium of the book.3 the physical form of the book, known as the codex—pages bound together on one end, protected by a cover—has been described as nothing less than “the most powerful object of our time” (houston 2016, n.p.), as the “concrete form” of “the western episteme”4 (kittler 2015, p. 38). the book, in other words, is an epochally and epistemologically foundational medium. the book’s physical nature, its typical contents, the habits and practices associated with its use, and the way that these are acquired, can thus be said to together constitute the paradigm for knowing, knowledge and for learning itself. it is in these physical terms that the book is defined here. as i will argue in this paper, the physical self-containment and structure of the book are reinforced by its printed contents, which are generally arranged in a linear and hierarchical manner that is itself similarly self-referential and self-contained: hans blumenberg had ascribed to the book the same power that he attributes to “myth”—namely, a “power, that the [book] summons in itself, in that it achieves the production of totality.” “the power to bring the disparate, widely differentiated, countervailing, foreign and familiar together,” blumenberg says, “is in the end essential to the book, regardless of the subject-matter on which this is executed” (1981, p. 17-18).5 even academic books, which may make copious use of footnotes that frequently direct readers to outside texts and sources, keep them within the realm of textuality, if not also within the collections of the academic library. however, as a medium—something designed to disappear behind that which it mediates—i show that the book is always much more than the sum of its parts. the linear, selfcontained content that it mediates requires certain types of engagement from its users, or rather, readers. these three factors, form, content and engagement, are central elements of 2 one exceptional source that considers specifically the educational dimensions of this issue is kittler’s (1992) discourse networks, 1800/1900; other exceptions, to my knowledge, are in german or french and are untranslated; e.g. chartier, a.-m. (2007). l’école et la lecture obligatoire: histoire et paradoxes des pratiques d’enseignement de la lecture. paris: retz; böhme, j. (2006). schule am ende der buchkultur: medientheoretische begründungen schulischer bildungsarchitekturen; and sting. s. (1998). schrift, bildung und selbst: eine pädagogische geschichte der schriftlichkeit. weinheim: beltz. 3 note that for the purposes of this paper, the terms “medium” and “form” are used interchangeably. 4 for foucault, episteme refers to “the conditions of possibility of all knowledge… [existing] in any given culture and at any given moment… whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (2005, p. 183). 5 all quotes taken from foreign-language sources have been translated by the author. education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 what can be called “book culture”—a loosely-defined set of practices, values and beliefs arising from the book’s use, form, contents, production, circulation, etc. in this article, i begin by considering this culture, seeing in the book’s form content and typical uses—longfamiliar demarcations of knowledge and ignorance, development and depravation that are starting to lose their force. appealing to the notion of the longue durée, i then turn to the history and contemporaneity of the book specifically as it is evident in educational discourse. i conclude by considering what the educational significance of the book—both past and present—can tell us about educational change, and what it might mean for us today. the decline of the book the book’s decline, alluded to above, is readily evident in terms of its physical form, its content, and the type of engagement it implies. it is also palpable in the broader “culture of the book.” each of these is addressed, in turn, below. the book as physical artefact to “read” a book, to engage with its physical form, no longer necessarily means to turn the pages of a codex. in the case of ebooks, it can be a matter of swiping and scrolling on a smart phone or tablet; for audio books, it is a question of putting on a headset and pressing “play.” powerful data and knowledge, meanwhile, are typically not shown as shown as residing behind the doors of the library, but as coursing through networks, becoming tangible and visible only in the soft blue glow of a computer or laptop screen. if it is the physical form of the book that helped make it “the most powerful object of our time”—a veritable embodiment of a way of knowing—then today, it seems that there are other objects, with their own forms of organization and their own epistemic power, that can readily take its place. today’s new and competing epistemic, even epochal objects, it is clear, are digital—with portable networked touchscreen devices (i.e. smartphones or tablets) now almost inescapably functioning as a kind of antithesis to the book. the typical content of the book—the organization and self-containment through which it achieves its “production of totality”—is similarly endangered. whereas the book provides a rigidly-organized, selfcontained whole, held together by a kind of totalizing, almost “centripetal” power that draws the reader inward (e.g., figure 2), the screen presents us with the opposite: it is something that constantly points and tempts us to things outside of any simple sense of self-containment: to the fragmented communications of social media, the latest text, tweet or email, to the events of the day, to today’s traffic or tomorrow’s weather. in the place of the book’s isolating inward pull, the screen can be said to pull one outward, and away from the book’s potential for both abstraction and rarefaction: it tends to draw us to things much more concrete, things generally characterized by their topicality, their indexical education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 relation to our present time and (sometimes) place. finally, whereas we have been witnessing a multi-decade boom in the penetration of networked digital devices of all kinds, the book (with the notable exception of children’s books) has been experiencing something rather different. specifically, since the peak year of 2007, as one report puts it, “sales of books, in both print and digital formats, are struggling around the world” (graham, 2016, n.p.; see also persanti, 2016). the book as engagement the type of engagement demanded by books is also on the decline. as this paper goes on to show, the precise nature of this engagement can vary widely; however, given the nature of the book and the codex themselves, it is one that requires a commitment from the reader over multiple days if not weeks or months. as an often isolated and isolating activity, reading a book under contemporary conditions is perhaps uniquely exclusive among contemporary media forms: whereas one can read an instant message or listen to an audiobook on the street or while multitasking, books do not so easily accommodate this competition for attention. indeed, a good book seems to call us instead to sit down in a comfortable place and shut out the rest of the world. the centripetal self-containment that marks both the form and content of the book, in other words, seems to be readily reproduced in the type of engagement it demands of its “users” as well: it pulls them inwards and away from a world of the concerns and distractions of the moment.6 the culture of the book but the most important and perhaps most elusive evidence of decline of the book comes from the culture of the book. by “book culture,” i do not refer to an isolated subculture of bespectacled persons haunting libraries and bookstores. i refer instead to habits and norms of thought and action that are indeed conditioned by the book, but that are also part of everyday life. many of the most important elements of this culture derive from the type of engagement required by the book itself: the restraint required by the mutual exclusivity of book reading with many other activities, the sustained and uninterrupted focus it demands, and even the book’s own totalizing, self-enclosed organization. to draw a contemporary comparison, these characteristics require a type of thought and action that is rather different than what currently dominates the public sphere as i write this paper: the public behavior of “out of control” celebrities and politicians—e.g., kanye west, boris johnson,—and, of course, the man who has been called the first “postliterate” president, donald trump (e.g., see: wiesenthal, 2016; heer, 2017). nothing, it seems, could be more distant from the single-minded focus and constraint demanded by a book, and the linear and hierarchical order it imposes on the mind. in his disappearance of childhood (1993), neil postman points out how these qualities reflect what he calls “the biases of print,” 6 this is what is implied throughout this paper when the term “reading” is used. reading and literacy are now generally viewed as competencies independent of culture, context or medium (e.g., printed page or screen). however, in this paper, “reading” refers to the type of engagement just described; it also designates participation in a culture like the one described immediately below. education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 noting that they include “the capacity to think logically and sequentially, the capacity to distance oneself from symbols, the capacity to manipulate high orders of abstraction, the capacity to defer gratification. and, of course, the capacity for extraordinary feats of selfcontrol” (p. 42). if the book indeed exemplifies the western episteme and is “the most powerful object of our time,” then it is one that entails considerable control and containment. at the same time, however, this means that its decline in our culture can be seen as similarly epistemically foundational and epochal. figure 1 book culture under conditions of american west in the mid-19th century. this image illustrates a poem published by bret harte in 1904, titled “dickens in camp.” it imagines one possible moment in the sensational american reception of dicken’s old curiosity shop (e.g., see: garber 2013). in this case, it shows laborers camped in the american west, listening to the story of little nell with rapt attention. it is difficult to imagine reading and the book playing such a role among similar strata of american (or western) society today. licensed from alamy.com. reading and literacy over the longue durée however, in order to put the admittedly “short time span” of these contemporary developments into perspective, this paper now turns to the vastly slower tempo of the longue durée —and specifically, to the domain of education. the story of the book and its changing social significance ultimately goes back 2000 years to ancient rome, when its compact physical arrangement provided fugitive christians with a form much more portable than conventional scrolls for their gospels and epistles (norman, 2018, n.p.). the longue durée covered here, however, is rather shorter. it begins well after the invention of the printing press, but still at a time when books were relatively rare: to the stuart restoration, specifically to philosopher john locke’s essay concerning human understanding (1680). this was a time when the book was transitioning from being the objectified embodiment of religious authority—a bible or a confessional that was worshipfully read and memorized world-for-word—to become an object of entertainment education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 and passionate involvement. this new experience of reading, as kittler puts it, seems to have been “as hallucinatory” as watching “films” (1985 n.p.), and the health effects— particularly on the young—were seen as still more extreme. for example, it was not unusual for members of the upper echelons of british society—from queen mary on down—to see themselves as being permanently weakened or damaged by childhood bookreading (see: johns 1998, pp. 380-387; 408-413). adults were also deeply affected by the words and ideas they read: “seventeenth-century men and women” as mack (1992) concludes, simply “felt certain kinds of knowledge” through their thinking and reading (p. 23; emphasis in original). such experiences may well have played a role in locke’s comments on the book and education: all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment… they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided. if this were done… many of the books extant might be spared …several of those great volumes, swollen with ambiguous words… would shrink into a very narrow compass. (1680, p. 106) “artificial and figurative… words,” locke is saying, result in mistaken ideas, inflamed passions and clouded judgement. as a result, “many of the books extant” should be avoided in education, and, if not, their content greatly reduced. but books can do much more harm than this, locke goes on to say, particularly when they are used by children in school: many children, imputing the pain they endured at school to their books they were corrected for, so join those ideas together, that a book becomes their aversion, and they are never reconciled to the study and use of them all their lives after; and thus reading becomes a torment to them, which otherwise possibly they might have made the great pleasure of their lives. (p. 369) this complaint about the pressures that book-reading place on the young certainly echoes across the longue durée of educational history. indeed, it seems difficult to find figures in educational reform who do not raise the issue. for example, almost a century after locke, jean jacques rousseau’s famously decried children’s early exposure to books in his emile; or on education (1762): i hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about… when i get rid of children’s lessons, i get rid of the chief cause of their sorrows, namely their books. reading is the curse of childhood, yet it is almost the only occupation you can find for children. emile at twelve years old, will hardly know what a book is. (1979, p. 117) unlike locke, whose empiricism predisposed him to view with suspicion anything not taken directly from experience, rousseau’s opposition to the book is much broader. he education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 “hates” books and calls reading a “curse” because he is against the excesses of culture and artificiality themselves. but this by no means implies that he wishes emile, the young hero of his educational novel, to grow up illiterate. instead, rousseau paradoxically declares that “i am almost certain that emile will know how to read and write perfectly before the age of ten, precisely because it makes very little difference to me that he knows how before he is fifteen” (p. 117). despite his express contempt for the book and the culture of reading and writing, it is apparent that in the final analysis, rousseau is ambivalent. this ambivalence can be traced in his other books (whose publication is perhaps ironic in itself), and down to the reading habits of his own time. these appeared to be little different from those of locke’s era. in his own confessions, for example, rousseau himself writes of his own childhood fascination with books, and his youthful indoctrination in the “bizarre and romantic notions,” they provided—ideas, he says, “which experience and reflection never cured me of” (as quoted in darnton, p. 227).7 in addition—and again ironically— rousseau’s famous romantic novel, la nouvelle héloïse, effectively unleashed a flood of similarly bizarre and romantic experiences and symptoms among his readers. many were so emotionally affected that they complained of “seizures,” being convulsed by “sharp pains,” and of near “madness” (as quoted in darnton, pp. 242-243). the perspective of the longue durée allows us to see that similar reading symptoms were still were still a matter of great concern some 250 years later. one 1915 article from the british medical journal describes a widespread “reading mania” as a kind of addiction “which may be compared to the effects of the drug habit on the nervous system.... [it] makes a man [live] in world of dreams and illusions… [and] forget his duties to his family and to society” (unknown, n.p.; e.g., see: figure 2). at this point, reading seemed not so much to threaten one’s health or soundness of mind in childhood, but rather to represent a distinctly medicalized and adult “mania” of distraction and addiction—perhaps like gambling or alcoholism today. this addiction should also be seen as somewhat different from the emotional injury and victimization of earlier reading experiences of rousseau’s and locke’s time in that it was no longer limited to a relatively small reading elite. it had instead become a mass phenomenon, involving not only exponentially larger numbers of people, but also vastly greater quantities of readily-available books and other reading material. 7 speaking of the young rousseau’s absorption in books, darton adds: “he became the heroes that he read about, and he played out the dramas of antiquity in his genevan apartment as if he had lived them in athens and rome. in retrospect it seemed to him that this experience had marked him for life… he never learned to distinguish between literature and reality. (p. 227; emphasis added) education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 figure 2 book culture under the conditions of the mid to late 19th century in europe. a young “reading-impassioned” (leselustige) nanny (kindsmädchen) rushes ahead with her reading, leaving her tiny charge crying in the street behind her. the subtitle reads: “an image of a particular type rendered according to the customs of the times.” (from the deutsche nationalbibliothek, leipzig. photo by author, 2012). an increase in reading material at this time is certainly noted by john dewey—a figure whose views on education and the book simultaneously reaffirm and extend those of rousseau and locke before him. take for example his book schools of to-morrow, written with his wife evelyn, and published in the same year the “reading mania” article appeared in british medical journal. here they specifically highlight “the immense cheapening of printed material and the immense increase in the facilities for its distribution” (dewey & dewey, 1915, p. 242). the two deweys go on to argue that these developments are a key factor in simultaneous changes occurring in the school: consequently the schools do not any longer bear the peculiar relation to books and book knowledge which they once did[. out of school conditions have… gained immensely in the provision they make for reading matter and for stimulating interest in reading. it is no longer necessary or desirable that the schools should devote themselves so exclusively to this phase of instruction… merely learning the use of language symbols and of acquiring habits of reading is less important than it used to be… (pp. 242-243) the deweys’ denigration of the role of the book in education, it should be noted, is different from the “bibliophobia” of rousseau or locke before him: yes, dewey, like locke and rousseau, is in favor of providing students with more direct, experiential contact with life outside of reading and study. but as dewey himself was well aware, he was living under rather “general social and intellectual conditions” (dewey & dewey, p. 229) that were quite different from earlier ages. these are ones, as dewey himself put it, in which “the immanent intellectual life of society [had] quickened and multiplied” (1989, p. 317). unlike education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 locke and rousseau, dewey was writing in an era in which information sources other than books and printing had exploded on the scene. and these new sources and modes of information dissemination are mentioned with remarkable insistence and consistency by dewey, especially “radio… telephone [and] telegraph”—which he typically highlights alongside innovations in printing and transport (dewey 1929, p. 2).8 the total result of these varied technological changes, as dewey explains somewhat figuratively, is that the “capital handed down from past generations, and upon whose transmission the integrity of civilization depends, is no longer amassed in those banks termed books, but is in active and general circulation” (1898, p. 316). reading and books were clearly no longer the only way to get information: one could hear it on the radio, learn of it over the telephone, and even listen to it being transmitted at the speed of light via telegraphic dashes and dots. and all of these epochal changes, forever destroying the epistemic monopoly of the print and book, took place largely within a 50-year period. one important result of this early multiple-media “deluge” of information, dewey and dewey explain, is that for children in the progressive classroom, reading is not … an isolated exercise; it is a means of acquiring a much-desired object. like climbing the pantry shelves, its difficulties and dangers are lost sight of in the absorbing desire to satisfy the mental appetite ...hence, the actual learning to read is hardly a problem; children teach themselves. (dewey & dewey 1915, p. 22) reading, in other words, is no longer the single, isolated channel for enjoying a story or satisfying one’s curiosity; it is instead something that could be supported or figuratively “scaffolded” by the early explosion of media and information that dewey saw as occurring all around him. at the same time, when viewed from the perspective of the longue durée, dewey appears to share something with the equally eminent critics of books and reading who came before him. specifically, he appears to be echoing the ambivalence expressed by rousseau as a novelist and a critic of letters, or even locke as a writer of philosophical tomes, tracts and treatises. it is precisely because children are protected from reading—because (for example) “emile at twelve years old will hardly know what a book is”—that they flourish and that reading itself will be “hardly a problem.” in the specific case of dewey, it is at a time of reading addiction that reading appears as something learned almost automatically. and this is not because of any ingrained familiarity with books and reading, but precisely due to their diminished importance in society and in childhood itself. 8 as further examples, in schools of to-morrow, john and evelyn dewey list “railways and steamboats… cars, telegraphs, and telephones…” as making science education important in schools (p. 246). in his famous democracy and education (1916), dewey references “railways, steamboats, electric motors, telephone and telegraph, automobiles, aeroplanes and dirigibles” (p. 224) in a similar context. finally, earlier in his school and society (1907), dewey narrates how “learning has been put into circulation” by multiple inventions, including “the locomotive and telegraph, [and] frequent, rapid, and cheap intercommunication by mails and electricity” (pp. 39-40). education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 a final example of simultaneous antipathy to the book and affirmation of reading can be found almost exactly a century after dewey’s pronouncement, near the close of the 20th century. it is presented in the work of seymour papert, a tireless advocate for personal computers in the classroom, from their earliest appearance in the 1980s through to the world wide web. in his 1993 the children’s machine, however, papert focused on a transitional moment between these two developments. this is the emergence of the multimedia computer—using cd-roms to combine interaction with text, images, sound and video—which papert called the “knowledge machine.” he predicted that this new technology would open up a new realm of specifically informal “media-based knowledge acquisition” (1993, p. 12, 17; emphasis added). given the technological developments in his own day, papert was able to be even bolder than dewey in his dismissal of the age-old monopoly of reading and the book: in the literature on education there has long been a pervasive tendency to assume that reading is the principal access route to knowledge for students. the educational development of children is… seen as rigidly dependent on learning to read in a timely way. the prospect of the knowledge machine suggests that this basic assumption may not necessarily be true for all time, and indeed may start to unravel within a decade or two. (1993, p. 9) papert, like dewey before him, saw new technologies and technical configurations as offering children entirely new channels of information and thus as changing the meaning and importance of reading itself. indeed, we could say that we have been witnessing the “unravelling” of the order of reading and print that papert presciently foresaw. the book, for example, has not only been demoted from being the sole avenue to knowledge (as dewey observed), it is also no longer its primary source (as papert is asserting). now, in our own age of audiobooks and instant news updates, the book can be seen as one that is entirely optional if not superfluous. finally, uncannily echoing rousseau and dewey, papert predicted that despite the apparent threat the “knowledge machine” posed to the book and to reading, children would easily learn to read precisely because there is no necessity “to know what a book is,” as rousseau put it. such machines, papert assured his readers, would enable students to learn both reading and mathematics in what he referred to as a “non-formalized way:” giving children the opportunity to learn and use mathematics in a nonformalized way of knowing encourages rather than inhibits the eventual adoption of a formalized way as well, just as the knowledge machine, rather than discouraging reading, would eventually stimulate children to read. (p. 17) much like dewey’s young students learning to read like “climbing the pantry shelves”—or rousseau’s emile knowing “how to read and write perfectly” precisely because he has never seen a book—papert is asserting that his knowledge machine would lead the child to literacy precisely because it is never prioritized or taught in a “formalized way.” but again, education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 technological and “mediatic” conditions were different in papert’s time just as they were in dewey’s, and further back, in rousseau’s era: not only had a great deal of knowledge entered into “in active and general circulation” as dewey observed—thanks to television, computers, and perhaps most significantly, the internet—but reading itself was taking on a rather different form and status. there simply was no reading mania the 1980s or 1990s, no widespread disorder that doctors were comparing “to the effects of the drug habit on the nervous system,” or that adults later complained had ruined their childhoods. instead, when it came—and today still comes—to literacy, it is not an excess or surplus of reading that is of principal concern, but rather a deficit or dearth. it is not the disease of reading mania that now concerns parents and doctors, but disorders and other conditions that prevent reading. today, we calculate the national and international costs of non-reading, dyslexia and illiteracy into the billions; one out of every ten students is diagnosed with a reading disability, and this is seen as placing as many as “700 million children and adults worldwide at risk of life-long illiteracy and social exclusion” (dyslexia international 2014, p. 2). over the last few decades, the percentage of high school graduates in the us below “basic reading level” has increased 5%, and the mean sat verbal score among graduates headed to college has dropped by 8% (mla).9 moreover, instead of comparing reading addiction to the effects of a “drug habit on the nervous system,” reading advocates unapologetically seek to cultivate addictions that they compare to drug dependency in their young readers. fiction and comic books in particular have been described by the likes of art spiegeman as indispensable as “gateway drugs” to reading (as cited in gavigan, k. & albright, 2015, p. 46). we are also told that “any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him” (e.g., as quoted in: peace corps, 2012, p. 45; emphasis added). also, now that we are confronted by a wide range of variations on papert’s multimedia “knowledge machines”—from smartphones and tablets to xboxes—we know that these technologies tend not to “stimulate children” to learn to read as papert predicted. what is now visible is something that does not seem to have been apparent in 1762, 1898 or even in 1993: namely that reading and interest in books are not accomplished precisely by their being ignored or neglected. nor are these abilities and interests something to which use of newer media forms inevitably lead. instead, as is now widely acknowledged, such achievements are hard won. it happens, we are told, when children are exposed to books early and often, starting at an age that comes well before they might start to read themselves. reading books to even very young children at bedtime, letting them play with books of cloth and laminated “board books,” are all seen as helping to cultivate a “love of reading” in children. as they get older, picture books and first readers—e.g. dr. seuss, the little engine that could—helps cultivate an awareness of 9 sat refers to the scholastic assessment test, which seeks to assess high school students’ readiness for university and college. education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 what reading experts identify as the all-important “alphabetic principle.” this is the idea that words and letters correspond to sounds familiar from spoken language (e.g., byrne & fielding-barnsley, 1989). subsequent genres of children’s books—from “chapter books” to young adult novels—take the young reader still further until they merge with adult readers in their engagement with texts like catcher in the rye or the harry potter or twilight series. in this sense, as postman incisively observes, childhood itself—as well as its progression through various reading materials—can be understood as “a description of a level of symbolic achievement. infancy end[s] at the point at which command of speech was achieved. childhood [begins] with the task of learning how to read….” (1993, pp. 46; emphases in original). technology and change: school as a mediaresistant polis when seen from both a popular and an educational perspective, both reading and the book have clearly changed over the longue durée. book-reading has very gradually shifted from being an act of worshipful memorization to then become one of apparently hallucinatory emotional excess among cultured elites, and a danger, especially to the young. next, it appeared as a mass phenomenon somewhat akin to a drug-induced addiction. and in the contemporary era, it appears to have been transformed to become similarly medicalized. however, instead of something to be reduced and controlled, it something to be jealously protected and cultivated—again, above all for the young. this last claim is not supported simply by the dangers of dyslexia and falling reading performance, however: it is also buttressed by recent statistics from the book market. as previously mentioned, sales of children’s book represent a major exception to the overall decline of the codex as both a form and a commodity. recent reports specifically on sales of children’s books use words like “soaring” or “record-breaking;” they speak of a “children’s book boom” that is “buck[ing] the trend” in the book market overall (e.g., gilmore 2015; kirch 2019). children’s book sales, however, are not merely an aberration in publishing; they increasingly appear to constitute whatever change or positive news there is be had in this industry. “children’s share of print markets” as one report noted, “is averaging 34% across the board internationally. in australia and new zealand, it’s almost 50%” (gilmore, 2015). in 2016 in the us, fully half of the top ten titles sold by amazon.com were children’s books: harry potter and the cursed child came in first; the early reader first 100 words was third, followed by oh, the places you’ll go!, diary of a wimpy kid, and the early childhood board book, giraffes can’t dance (coming in at 5th, 6th and 8th, respectively). one could go so far as to say that books for children are increasingly what “the book,” under contemporary conditions, is becoming. parents seem eager to expose their children to reading as a precondition to the acquisition, as postman puts it, of “the sort of intellect we expect of a good reader: a vigorous sense of individuality, the education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 capacity to think logically and sequentially” (1993, p. 46). many parents are aware that their children require exposure to books—even if these same parents may themselves comfortably pursue life largely without them. the book, one could say, appears to be gradually becoming not so much the “concrete form” of “the western episteme,” or “the most powerful object of our time” (houston 2016, n.p.; kittler 2015, p. 38). instead, it is becoming an object that—like toys, colored pencils or braces—belongs above all to childhood and youth. this implies, as dewey has already noted, that the school itself is also changing—but now it appears this is happening not so much in synchrony with new technological developments, but rather in a kind of counterpoint to it. the new, “centrifugal” dynamic of the networked screen is not simply being inevitably and openly adopted in schools and by educators. as just one example, in recent years, from new york to norway, from france to australia, legislation has come into force banning mobile phones from schools and classrooms.10 although such an artificializing and even alienating move would in principle be anathema to progressive educators like dewey and rousseau, and to many of today’s constructivists and practitioners of authentic education, it is not foreign to educational discourse more broadly. conservative critics of the school—such as hannah arendt or michael oakeshott— have long seen the school as deliberately unworldly, even inauthentic. arendt, for example, regards these institutions as positioned “in a certain sense against the world,” providing “special protection and care” for the child or young person (1954, p. 186; emphasis added). and oakeshott argues eloquently for “the school and university” to be seen as “places apart”— “sheltered places where excellences may be heard because the din of local partialities is no more than a distant rumble.” (1989, p. 24). these and more recent school critics (e.g., pinar 2004; von hentig 2002) can ultimately be seen as making the case the school both can and should represent a kind of “counter-culture,” a counter-public sphere (gegenöffentlichkeit; böhme, 2006, p. 31). decrying the general corruption of public discourse as a whole, william pinar, for example, has argued that the public sphere has to be recreated, in effect in miniature, within the school and classroom: “our professional obligation” as teachers, he writes, “is the reconstruction of the public sphere in education” (2004, p. 4; emphasis added). as böhme (2006, p. 40) has perceptively observed, such critics effectively argue for “a protective and compensatory conception of the school,” one “established in opposition to a modern world of new media.” school, against “the din of local partialities,” should present itself as a watchful “counter-society,” a “mediaecological” version of the ancient greek polis or city-state. it is to become, as böhme puts it, a “media-resistant polis” (medienresistente polis: böhme, 2006, p. 41): just as the ancient athenians built fortifications to ward off invading forces, today’s schools must protect their own discursive space from the influence of so much new media distraction and “fake news.” of course, the vision of the “media-resistant polis” does not mean that the 10 new york city imposed a strict ban in 2015, which has subsequently been modified (blau & eisinger 2019); see also: the local, 2019, regarding norway; busby, 2018, regarding france; hurworth, 2019, on australia. education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 school abandon all media, but rather that their use of media be both conservative and selective. classrooms are still to retain their whiteor black-boards, papers and books, and (above all for some critics) certain modes of open oral exchange and dialogue. in the context of the school as a “media-resistant polis,” the book as an episteme, as the most powerful object of our time, is still further reconfigured. not only does the book become ever more emphatically an object proper to the world of the child, it also becomes one that the growing child gradually leaves behind. for the codex form no longer prepares the young for an adult world that is also full of books or that is even necessarily marked by the deferred gratification of disciplined reading. instead, the function of the book now appears strangely truncated. like the training wheels of a child’s first bike, it serves largely as a preliminary and preparatory device—one that is later abandoned for more freewheeling, authentic activity of text exchanges and twitter feeds. correlatively, the school and its forms can also be said to be changing—but only in very gradual and subtle ways. at least this is what is visible when this institution, as well as reading and the book, is viewed in terms of the changes and permutations proper to the longue durée. for such changes to become visible, it indeed appears necessary to become accustomed to a “slower tempo,” an almost motionless pace of change. it requires sensitivity, for example, to gradual changes in the history of reading and of informational circulation, and a careful awareness of changes in educators’ views of the book and reading in relation to these other media. for such changes in access to and modes of reading reach back not only as far as the invention of the telegraph and typewriter, but as this paper has suggested, as all the way to the invention of the printing press itself. and what this longue durée shows is not so much the triumph of literacy, led by education and by inevitable technological change, but rather centuries of disordered reading and reading disorders— ones with which education and educators have had at best a complex and conflicted relationship. references arendt, h. 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(1992). visionary women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century england. berkeley: university of california press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520915589 norman, j. (2018). 2. transitional phases in the form and function of the book before gutenberg. historyofinformation.com. accessed from: http://www.historyofinformation.com/narrative/roll-to-codex.php oakeshott, m. (1990). the voice of liberal learning. new haven: yale university press. pinar, w.f. 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(2012). book was there: reading in electronic times. chicago: university of chicago press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226922898.001.0001 postman, n. (1993). the disappearance of childhood. new york: vintage. rogers, e.m. (2003). diffusion of innovations (5th ed.). new york: free press of glencoe. the local. (nov. 28, 2019). norwegian city to introduce mobile phone ban in schools. the local https://www.thelocal.no/20191128/norwegian-city-to-apply-tight-limits-onkids-use-of-devices-at-school unknown. (may 22, 1915). the reading mania. the british medical journal. 1(2838), 902. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.1.2838.898 von hentig, h. (2002). der technischen zivilisation gewachsen bleiben. nachdenken über die neuen medien. basel & weinheim: beltz. wiesenthal, j. (november 29, 2016). donald trump, the first president of our postliterate age. bloomberg view. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-1129/donald-trump-the-first-president-of-our-post-literate-age https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226922898.001.0001 https://www.thelocal.no/20191128/norwegian-city-to-apply-tight-limits-on-kids-use-of-devices-at-school https://www.thelocal.no/20191128/norwegian-city-to-apply-tight-limits-on-kids-use-of-devices-at-school https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.1.2838.898 https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-29/donald-trump-the-first-president-of-our-post-literate-age https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-29/donald-trump-the-first-president-of-our-post-literate-age education, change and the longue durée: the fate of the book abstract introduction the decline of the book the book as physical artefact the book as engagement the culture of the book reading and literacy over the longue durée technology and change: school as a media-resistant polis references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 reflections on academic video thommy eriksson phd student chalmers university of technology thommy@ituniv.se inge ejbye sørensen phd student copenhagen university inges@hum.ku.dk abstract as academics we study, research and teach audiovisual media, yet rarely disseminate and mediate through it. today, developments in production technologies have enabled academic researchers to create videos and mediate audiovisually. in academia it is taken for granted that everyone can write a text. is it now time to assume that everyone can make a video essay? using the online journal of academic videos audiovisual thinking and the videos published in it as a case study, this article seeks to reflect on the emergence and legacy of academic audiovisual dissemination. anchoring academic video and audiovisual dissemination of knowledge in two critical traditions, documentary theory and semiotics, we will argue that academic video is in fact already present in a variety of academic disciplines, and that academic audiovisual essays are bringing trends and developments that have long been part of academic discourse to their logical conclusion. keywords: audiovisual essays, online journal of academic video, convergence. introduction audiovisual thinking (www.audiovisualthinking.org) is an online journal about audiovisuality, communication and media. it is the first journal in the world where all dissemination of research results and academic work – including papers, articles and editorials – occurs through audiovisual means, or as academic video. international in scope and multidisciplinary in approach, the journal works across national borders, institutions and disciplines. the journal’s rationale is quite simple: academic researchers and teachers study and teach audiovisual media, yet rarely conceptualise or disseminate their research and work through it. previously, creating audiovisual material was the realm only of media professionals, practitioners and the most media and technology-savvy individuals. today, the development of cheap, efficient and easy to use production tools has enabled academic researchers to create audiovisual media and mediate audiovisually. mailto:thommy@ituniv.se� mailto:inges@hum.ku.dk� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 2 in academia it is taken for granted that everyone can write a text. is it now time to assume that one should be able to make a video essay? using audiovisual thinking and the videos published therein as a case study, this article will explore the development, editorial background, launch and reception of this groundbreaking online journal and reflect on the legacy and challenges of creating and curating academic videos. the concept of audiovisual thinking is radical, and the idea of academic video has proved controversial and has polarised the research community. whilst comments and feedback from the research community on the activities of audiovisual thinking have been overwhelmingly supportive, enthusiastic and positive, others have dismissed academic video as, at best, ineffectual, impractical and fanciful. this article is an attempt to make the case for academic video and audiovisual essays. it will argue that audiovisual dissemination is already present in many academic disciplines, where it is an acknowledged part of established research methodologies and seen as an effective way of documenting and disseminating research and knowledge. anchoring academic video in critical theory which deals with disseminating knowledge through audiovisual means, documentary theory and semiotics, we will make the case that academic video takes contemporary thinking about media literacy to its conclusion (hartley, 2009; jenkins, 2008b, 2011a; wesch, 2007), and is a valid way of disseminating and publishing research results and academic work. moreover, as academic video is an evolving method of dissemination, it is a discourse and form that academics can help shape and establish today. the case: the academic journal audiovisual thinking audiovisual thinking was launched at the meccsa conference in london in january 2010 and published the first of its biannual issues in july 2010. the title of audiovisual thinking should be taken literally (or, rather, visually): it is not concerned with writing about audiovisual culture and media, but with using audiovisual means to mediate, articulate and “write” critically in the same audiovisual expression or mode that is being studied. the aim of the journal is twofold. firstly, and as described in greater detail later on, the journal attempts to create a framework to encourage experiments with the form of academic video essays, so that this form can develop as a respected, accredited and acknowledged academic discourse and method of delivering and disseminating research results. the journal therefore aims to be a forum where academics can articulate, conceptualise and disseminate their research into audiovisuality and audiovisual culture through the medium of video in a variety of ways, and in this way facilitate discussions, dialogue and collaborations about academic video.i the research methodology secondly, audiovisual thinking is a site that curates and provides an exhibition space for academic videos, reviewed and edited by academics and peers. to ensure standards and quality, submissions go through blind peer review (as of october 2011). the editors of the journal are also advised by a board of leading academics and thinkers in the fields of audiovisuality, communication and media: professor ib bondebjerg (copenhagen university), professor william uricchio (mit), professor john t caldwell (ucla), professor lily diaz (taik, finland) and senior lecturer paul kerr (london metropolitan university). the journal was started by, amongst others, the authors of this article and the reflections on the context and challenges of creating and curating academic videos are based on the case study of launching, editing and publishing the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 3 videos of the journal’s first three issues. we refer to our research methodology as practice-based research, using an auto-ethnographic approach. ethnography is the study of social interactions, practices and events. the study is carried out as fieldwork and the ethnographer observes and participates in the everyday practices of the group of people being studied. the observed social expressions – what people do and say – are described and to some extent interpreted and assigned meanings (hughes, 1994, geertz, 2000, hammersley & atkins, 1989). in ethnography, we turn ourselves as research instruments towards other groups of people, that are in some ways external, foreign, alien. as researchers we need to break into the practices of the group we study. conversely, in self-ethnography, we turn our focus and ourselves towards a group of people to which we already belong. then we need to break out of this group of people and break out of their practices. thus in autoethnography, one turns oneself towards oneself, and observe oneself in a particular role. one of the key differences between ethnography and self/autoethnography is the metaphorical direction of movements – as alvesson has pointed out (1999), ethnography can be seen as breaking into a group, while self/auto-ethnography can be seen as breaking out of a group. conceptually, auto-ethnography partly overlaps with the adjacent term practice-based research: the study of (one’s own) work practice. the latter is often associated with artistic research, a discipline whose status as scientific research has been debated. both selfand auto-ethnography have been described and in use for several decades. the term auto-ethnography was coined by hayano, 1979, and when it comes to “studies of personal nature” (wall, 2006) it is an established concept (ellis, 2004; ellis & bochner, 2000). according to reed-danahay (2001) selfand auto-ethnography is the result of a general shift towards a focus on the personal narrative, influenced by trends towards social practice in social theory (cohen, 1994; giddens, 1991), towards social and cultural poetics (fernandez & herzfeld, 1998; lavie et al., 1993), and towards a more reflexive ethnographic writing (cole, 1992). the context: convergence in theory and practise set up to curate and exhibit academic video essays, the online journal audiovisual thinking is an example of several types of convergence and their effects on theory and practice. digital convergence has had a profound impact on how and where audiovisual content can be viewed, produced, distributed and accessed, as established by numerous critics and thinkers (benkler, 2006; bruns, 2007, 2008; burgess & green, 2009; jenkins, 2006; 2007; 2008a, 2011b; rheingold, 2000). it has also had an impact on academic disciplines and their modus operandi. convergence takes place on many levels. henry jenkins points to five types of convergence: technological, economic, social, cultural and global (2001) and arild fetveit adds aesthetic convergence as a sixth dimension (2007). klaus bruhn jensen distinguishes between technological and social aspects of convergence. he lists eight types, and attributes four of them – the convergence of technology, multimedia, networks of distribution and platforms – to digital technology. the other four – industrial practices, consumption of multimedia, aesthetic and cultural convergence – are enabled by digital convergence and are resulting in new social, divergent practices and patterns of consumption (jensen, 2008). one of the most exciting aspects of the social and the technological modes of convergence is that they afford new synergies between theory and practice, between genres, production and distribution methods and viewing (plat)forms. these enable and inspire new forms of expression and discourse while creating new opportunities for collaboration across borders, disciplines and methodologies. audiovisual thinking is at the focal point of an emerging convergence between two well-established, but until recently only loosely seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 4 connected practices: that of conducting research and that of producing audiovisual narrative. as the areas of academia and audiovisual production increasingly converge, can moving images disseminate research results and make conceptually complex academic arguments? recent developments in academic publishing and mediation as well as critical theory suggest that they can. bringing the practices of academic and audiovisual production together is not altogether new. one of the founders of modern science, leonardo da vinci, moved effortlessly between the two practices. the visual model – be it of atomic nuclei or social hierarchies – is used throughout the sciences. historically, the natural sciences have been more accustomed to using images than social sciences have, and scientific visualizations of processes, experiments and data have long been prevalent in the natural sciences. however, in these disciplines the visual material is often illustrational and acts as supporting material. academic audiovisual mediation and dissemination of research is increasingly accepted and employed in the humanities and social sciences as well. this can be seen in the popularity of recorded lectures on public broadcast service tv channels and their online counterparts, for example, the danish national broadcaster, dr’s lecture series danskernes akademi (the danes’ academy) as well as on websites like ted.org. video is also part of most universities’ homepages and numerous universities, such as berkeley, have started their own channels to stream lectures through youtube. similarly, recorded interviews with, for example, prominent academic thinkers and practitioners, and audiovisual abstracts of articles are gaining ground. this can be seen on the science series universitets-tv (university tv) in sweden and, increasingly, academic journals, such as seminar.net, uses videos and recorded abstracts to support written articles. in these examples, however, the word, rather than the visual, remains the primary carrier of meaning. recently, examples of academic videos that use the visual as their primary carrier of meaning have appeared online. these are, at least according to audiovisual thinking’s conceptual framework, academic videos. the most famous examples are perhaps michael wesche’s web 2.0 … the machine is us/ing us, a video that reflects on the potential and possibilities of digital text (2007); the british documentary-maker adam curtis’ satirical minidocumentary the rise of ‘oh dear’-ism in television news (2009); and the videos on henry jenkins’ confessions of a aca-fan that reflect on issues facing current academic thinking, for example the new media literacies: an introduction (2008b).ii academic video essays and documentary theory what these academic videos have in common is that in intention, form and expression they resemble documentary film, a type of non-fiction film that has been disseminating knowledge since the very creation of film as a medium. documentary film theory offers interesting insights into the ways in which academic video disseminates and conceptualises knowledge and research findings. since grierson’s description of documentary as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, critics have described and explained what constitutes documentary films and the privileged position reality occupies in these films in a variety of ways, but most agree that documentary films are characterised by their intention successful or not and (ideologically) biased or not to inform or increase knowledge about topics, issues and phenomena in the real world (bondebjerg, 2008; bruzzi, 2006; corner, 1996; nichols, 1991, 1994, 2009; plantinga, 1997, 2005). this is also the case for academic videos. intentionality is especially important for carl plantinga’s theories about what constitutes documentary film. drawing on speech act theory, he attributes seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 5 documentary and its adherence to reality to the intent of the film-maker and a contractual understanding of this between him/her and the film’s recipient or audience (plantinga, 1997, 2005). on the basis of this and inspired by bill nichols’ documentary genre typography (op.cit), plantinga describes three documentary types. ib bondebjerg, building on both plantinga’s and nichols’ documentary genres and adding to this a cognitive dimension, operates with four documentary genres: the authoritative documentary, the observational documentary, the poetic-reflexive documentary and the dramatized documentary. expanding on theories about documentary genre, bondebjerg attributes specific characteristics to each documentary genre. in addition to its structure; its style and aesthetics; its use of evidence and source material; its narration and intent (plantinga’s “voice”); and its effect on its audience, each documentary has a specific type of theme world as well as a different reference to reality (op.cit pp. 110-120). the authoritative documentary and academic video the authoritative documentary has a particularly long-established tradition of disseminating knowledge to its audience. according to bondebjerg, the authoritative documentary with its reliance on evidence and documentation (interviews, statistics, and recorded documentation) and typical journalistic authoritative narration speaks with “epistemic authority” and seeks to explain and/or analyse problems or issues of common interest to the community within which it exists (ibid. pp110-112). this documentary genre is often associated with the television documentary about history, science, current affairs and economics, culture etc. we can relate video essays submitted to the journal audiovisual thinking with this genre. philip schlesinger and charlotte waelde’s video essay performers on the edge (2011) is about the findings of a two-year research project on the precarious work situation of dancers and musicians in the uk, presenting the current economic reality of the creative industries very effectively. focusing on dance and music, this academic video explores whether the present copyright regime adequately addresses the production of experiential works in which performance plays a major role. on the same subject, but from a different perspective and drawing on the sociology of subcultures, simon lindgren’s video essay geek revenue (2011) explores the relationship between the cultural industries and the increasingly active and tech-savvy audiences of the 21st century and asks, “is there always a clear-cut division between capitalist media institutions on the one side and a pirating audience on the other? what space is there for remix culture and other potentially copyright infringing activities in the discourse of digital content monetization?” the observational documentary and academic video the observational documentary’s relationship to reality is epistemologically open, in that its purpose is to observe and document social realities and ethnographical constellations in order to uncover how these work and play out. academic disciplines like anthropology and ethnology have therefore traditionally used observational documentary as part of their scientific projects and this tradition carries on today, as evidenced in the discipline visual anthropology. but other academic videos using the observational form very often differ from the traditional observational documentary, which has the lived reality of people, communities, organisations and institutions as its subjects and subject matter. the observational academic videos of audiovisual thinking have media practices and processes as their subject. in this way, however, they are in line with aspects of the traditional observational documentary, such as french cinema verité, which stated that the observed reality had to be dealt with in a reflexive way, including the way the film was made and how the participants reacted to the film. these academic essays are also in line with the more subjective observational documentary which became seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 6 dominant in the 1990s (bondebjerg, 2002; dovey, 2000; jerslev, 2004; renov, 2009). in max schleser’s video essay max with kaitai (2009) the filmmaker documents his own efforts to make a documentary about a japanese metropolis using early 3g mobile phone video technology and contemporary video aesthetics. martha-cecilia dietrich’s video take me to a place outside (2010) presents the findings of her fieldwork interviewing the inmates of a female prison. using anthropological theories of storytelling, perception and reception, as well as methods inspired by visual anthropology and applied theatre, dietrich invited women to express themselves creatively through sound, photography and video. the result was eight intensely personal and moving recollections or dreams about the relationship between the “real” and the “unreal”, the physical and the imagined, and the inside and outside. through these very subjective accounts, dietrich argues against an often objectified and homogenised experience of imprisonment forged by public as well as academic discourses. the poetic-reflexive documentary and academic video according to bondebjerg, the poetic-reflexive documentary’s epistemology is aesthetic. the aesthetic’s framing of the real is often used to reflect on a metalevel and through this offer a critique of society and media. albert figurt’s video essay notre cam de paris (2010) depicts digital representation and meta-mediation to explore how multiple screens and digital recordings and media impact on our lives and minds today. another example is tal udi’s loop (2010) which deals with the infinite narratives made possible by digitization and the possibilities to retell and reinvent sequences, narratives and lives. in the poetic and evocative dreamscape – a video sketchbook (2011), trevor hearing takes his inspiration from two quotations: federico fellini’s “film is a dream for the waking mind” and mikhail bakhtin’s “the psyche does not always speak in complete sentences”. starting from his own performative practice as an academic film-maker and using “creative academic research tools”, hearing seeks to explore and document connections between our sleeping and our waking minds and consider how these illuminate the different discourses of consciousness in his own life as an academic and a program-maker, in order to explore whether this can contribute to an understanding of the process of creativity in the production of the moving image. even the dramatized documentary is represented in academic videos. in bergen university library’s a plagiarism adventure (2008), a contemporary and creative remake of charles dicken’s a christmas carol, stian hafstad and jade haerem aksnes raise the ghost of christmas past to warn students against getting so involved in the christmas festivities that they have to resort to plagiarism in order to meet deadlines. documentary theory and its reflections on the privileged relationship to reality in non-fiction films can thus be used to explain the relationship between dissemination and conceptualisation of academic research and knowledge in an audiovisual form. theoretical perspectives on text and visuals and their capabilities in relation to academic dissemination from a different theoretical perspective, addressing the tension between the requirements and traditions of the audiovisual and the academic is central to academic video and, on a different level, semiotics develops these points further. considering that audio, visuals and texts are modalities with different conditions, how successfully can academic videos disseminate research, in practice and theory? can we manage without text? and is it possible to be academic without words? in many ways, these were the questions that inspired the journal. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 7 but a counter-question is, of course, why should you not be able to disseminate and discuss academic issues audiovisually? the semiotician umberto eco claims that while verbal language might be our most powerful language, there are other languages at our disposal, and it may even be that these other languages are capable of expressing ideas which verbal language cannot express (eco, 1976, p. 176). generally, we are accustomed to using the spoken and written word to discuss academic issues. when we think of academic videos, we tend to think either of recorded interviews or lectures (which are not primarily audiovisual, they are primarily reliant on the spoken word), as opposed to fictional movies dealing with emotional issues such as love, hate, revenge. anglo-saxon “hollywood” movie-making excels in its own catchphrase “show, don’t tell”. apparently simple concepts such as jealousy, envy, fear and so on are easily signified without words. but, is that all that the audiovisual is good for? what is it in academic issues that would not lend itself to the wordlessness of audiovisuality? after all, many academic issues can be expressed in another non-verbal language: the language of mathematics. there are actually many utterances – statements – in, for example, physics or economics that can only be expressed mathematically. is it the high level of abstraction? is it the complexity? is it that it is theoretical, as opposed to practical? let’s consider the following text: “annie has a relationship with john, who is quite snobbish and doesn’t really care much about annie. annie is working together with jim, who is much more easygoing and kind towards annie. john knows that annie is attracted to jim, and therefore he refuses to help him while pretending to be polite.” this could easily be expressed solely by audiovisual means, allowing editing, camera angles, blocking and mise-enscène to tell the story by conveying diegetic body language, character traits and character interaction. but isn’t this content quite abstract, quite complex and concerned with theoretical concepts and relations? could it be that the audiovisual can deal with complex and theoretical subjects, but maybe just on an emotional level? it is possible to construct examples contradicting this claim as well, let’s say a purely audiovisual description of a bank robbery; also quite a complex situation, but not necessarily focused on emotions, but rather focused on, for example, temporal and spatial relationships (who is where, when and doing what to whom and why?). could the potential to be specific be a characteristic of verbal language? is the audiovisual then deemed to be mostly implicit? our experience of reviewing numerous submissions to the journal supports this. a substantial proportion of the submissions leaned towards a more artistic approach and typically for these was that we, as editors, were able to have a strong emotional feeling that i understand exactly what the submitter intended to convey. at the same time self-reflection warned us that we could not rationally be certain that other viewers would arrive at the same interpretation. we often felt it necessary to check how our fellow editors interpreted it? this combination of preferred reading with a broad range of possible interpretations, and the combination of emotional certainty and rational ambiguity are typical of artistic forms of expression such as visual art, music and poetry. traditionally, explicitness is favoured and sub-texts and implicitness frowned upon in academia. however, we claim that the situation is more complex than it might seem. first, audiovisuality can be highly explicit. it depends heavily on the content. conveying, for example, the body language of an interviewee or the architectural description of the façade of a building can be highly explicit in visuals, while being hopelessly vague in a written text. second, even some academic written text can be open to multiple interpretations, most notably philosophical texts by continental thinkers such as baudrillard, gadamer and merleau-ponty. and finally, sub-texts and openness in interpretation is not disregarded in all academic endeavors in, for example, selfand autoethnography it is common practice to use evocative writing (crapanzano, 1984; duncan, 2004; ellis, 1997; wall, 2006). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 8 according to semiotic theory, all signs have a double set-up of relationship (eco, op.cit. p126). there is the syntagmatic relationship to other signs, for example, the code governing how words can be combined with each other to form sentences. there are combinatory rules in visual language as well, such as the convention that grainy imagery combined with shaky viewpoint means that the image is supposed to be captured by a handheld video camera. then there is the paradigmatic relationship to other signs, governing which signs can replace each other. in verbal language this is basically referred to as synonyms. in visual language, an example might be that the graininess signifying [video footage] might be replaced – or supplemented – with the presence of horizontal scan lines across the image. considering these examples makes it clear that the code for verbal language is much more specific than it is for visual language. in verbal language it is quite clear that the combination “red rose” has a correct syntagmatic relationship, while the combination “petal rose” doesn’t make sense. in visual language the relationships between the visual signs [grain], [scan lines] and [shaky] is quite fluid and indistinct. eco’s conclusion is that “the effability power of verbal language is undoubtedly due to its great articulatory and combinational flexibility” (op.cit. p172). but, does this make verbal language always more powerful in academic texts? furthermore, eco also claims that words “can be codified and listed, whereas the thousand different ways of drawing a horse are not foreseeable” (op.cit p214). in verbal language there are just a few ways to say, for example, dog (the words “dog” and “pooch”), while in visual language there are a multitude of ways to picture a dog. you could say that the number of ways to picture a dog is infinite, since every drawing and every photograph is unique. but, on the other hand, you could say that there is a quite formalized and limited repertoire of visual signs as well. if you are about to picture a dog, the picture needs to resemble a dog in order to be interpreted as a sign for a dog. if we once again look at the example of imagery signifying a video recording, we actually have quite a limited repertoire of visual signs: [grainy], [scan lines], [shaky], [desaturated], [rec icon] and a few more. one pertinent example from the journal’s collection of video essays is do you live forever today? (søndergaard et al, 2011) in which cyberspace is signified by standardized signs such as [abstract objects] [floating] in a [grey void] and [green tinted] colors. at the same time the film-makers add another visual sign to the vocabulary of the video essay: the [cut-out silhouette] representing the human in digital form. this is not an invention of a new sign, but a re-purposing of an existing visual sign. in combination with the other signs it forms a comprehensible text. within the dichotomy between the audiovisual versus the spoken/written word, there is the deeply established prejudice that images and sound are something you experience, while text is something you read. thus, the argument goes that you do not interpret or critically reflect on the audiovisual, while you interpret and critically reflect on spoken/written text. however, semioticians and media theorists such as eco (eco, 1976) and barthes (barthes, 1977, 1981) have demonstrated that images and video are also texts that you “read”. all reading processes are acts of interpretation and can be done reflectively and critically, and since you read audiovisuality, it can be subjected to critical interpretation. however, other media theorists (gunning, 2007; wuss, 2004) support the contention that audiovisuality holds a special distinction from other means of representation because it creates an actual experience. written words such as “camera shake” or “fast editing” work on a completely representational level; there is nothing in the words themselves that evoke the signified experience. but when camera shake and fast editing are utilized in a movie, the viewer actually experiences the image shaking and the editing as fast-paced. this means that even if semiotics describes how a movie can be viewed as a text composed of signs, a movie is also to some extent an actual experience. from seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 9 the viewpoint of academic dissemination this is an important distinction. the content in a written academic text is always an indirectly mediated experience – the researcher might describe that she had good rapport with an interviewee or that a sign changes when the context changes. but a recorded interview might allow the viewer to partially experience the meeting that took place, and a video essay might for example let the viewer experience firsthand the changes in context around a sign. the latter was demonstrated in our own editorial column video essay signs, texts and contexts (eriksson, 2010b). so, audiovisual and verbal languages share traits, are both powerful and have the capacity to express ideas that the other cannot. if the audiovisual means of expression is effective and comparable to verbal and written language in conveying academics’ arguments and research, does that mean that both are suitable for academic discourse? is it the case that what you need to say in academic texts falls into the blind spot where verbal and written languages excel, but audiovisual mediation fails? we suggest that some academic endeavors are better suited to investigation through verbal language and the written word, but others certainly lend themselves more to audiovisual mediation. for example, both thommy eriksson’s reflection on the dichotomy between picture and sound, content and context, endless semiosis (2010a), and albert figurt’s reflections on digital recording and the mediatization of culture in notre cam de paris (2010), succinctly convey points in pictures that would be hard to express in words. the previous argument has highlighted the dichotomy between written text and audiovisuality. in practice, the written word and audiovisuality support each other. one example of how the two modalities can support each other in a sustained, thoughtful and abstract text is scott mccloud’s understanding comics which is a self-reflective comic book about comics (1994), and many of the video essays accepted for the journal show examples of texts where written text and audiovisuality intertwine and support each other. for example, alan maclaughlin’s the object (2010) explores how context changes the meaning of visual images. it uses voice-over to guide the viewer to a series of images that the narration can name but never quite describe the full nature and essence of. similarly, do you live forever today? by mette søndergaard, astrid sofie jelstrup, niklas frost iversen and tobias roed jensen (2011) uses a voice-over narration to tell the story of how social media shapes the life of a fictitious girl, mette, and the digital footprints that she leaves online and in cyberspace. mette’s life (and afterlife) is represented as greenscreen silhouette footage of mette’s activities and endeavours on a changing background of stock footage, graphic representation and animated sections, intertwined with facebook wallposts, social media threads and tweets illustrating mette’s moods and social life. equating and visually mixing the silhouette of mette and the social media with which she surrounds herself creates an image of mette, her self-mediation and the digital world she inhabits as inseparable entities, which becomes especially poignant as mette’s social media profile survives her own death. creating framework and experimental space – practices and manifesto as stated earlier, the aim of audiovisual thinking is to be a pioneering forum for experiments with the form of academic video. therefore it is important to create a flexible framework within which academic video can evolve and establish itself as an academic discourse. in order to facilitate this, the journal provides guidelines as well as an intellectual framework within which to think about and create academic videos. audiovisual thinking is based on a manifesto loosely inspired by the dogma 95 manifesto (christensen, 2000). dogma 95 is a set of rules devised to challenge conventional film-making and encourage experiments with film-making forms. the rules put strict seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 10 regulations on the films that adhered to the manifesto, such as requiring only on-location shooting with hand-held camera and rejecting sound effects, nondiegetic music, optical effects and additional lighting.iii dogme 95 rejuvenated the danish movie industry, brought it international acclaim and became the trademark of successful art house films. lars von trier devised the rules of dogma 95 because he wanted to put film-makers in a situation where the rules forced a change in how films were made. dogma 95 was thus a laboratory. by changing the rules of the game, something new was expected to come out of the experiment. we, too, want to create such an “experimental space”. we would like to invite scholars into this space and in adhering to the rules, they will have to invent new audiovisual ways to disseminate the results of their research.iv our manifesto is supported by two seemingly opposing rules that open up our creative experimental space. the first rule requires the video essays to be primarily audiovisual. the other ensures that the videos are academic. this reflects the attempt to merge the two diverging theoretical and methodological traditions of academic publishing and audiovisual production. ensuring audiovisuality the first rule – used to ensure audiovisuality of submissions – requires simply that “submissions should be audiovisual”.v this forces the author to use primarily visual and/or audio means to convey the content, instead of relying on the written or spoken word. written or spoken language or text are not ruled out, but must be secondary, so that it, in effect, is possible to understand the general content of the video essay without understanding a single word. that content should be primarily audiovisual is fundamental. of course it is also the most problematic and contentious requirement, and as a consequence, it is an issue that is much debated among both the editors and the submitters. it should also be noted that much documentary visual storytelling doesn’t meet this requirement. a typical news report is primarily spoken text illustrated with images and, as described earlier, the authoritative documentary is often defined partly by its narration (bondebjerg, 2002, 2008; nichols, 1991, 1994). ensuring academic standards in the same way as the previous rule about audiovisuality force the submissions to use audiovisual texts, these four points ensure the academic merits of the submissions. in order to ensure academic standards an academic video should: • disseminate new observations, knowledge, insights or theories, thereby adding to the existing body of knowledge. • acknowledge previous knowledge, insights or theories, and build upon the existing body of knowledge. • credit all sources and references, be they visual, written or oral. • be self-critical and self-reflective. what is it that makes our research academic? in writing these four requirements we had to define what we – or rather what society – mean by “research” and “academic”. looking at the practice of academic research, the process of building on what others have already done is central to what researchers do, and so we included the first three requirements to cover this practice. this was derived both from an intent to comply with existing research practices, and our own belief that there is a clear connection between good research quality and acknowledging previous knowledge. in addition, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 11 although academic video is a relatively new phenomenon, the practice and methodology needs to write itself into an academic tradition. therefore, the content of a video should be of an academic nature and place itself within academic disciplines and critical traditions. furthermore, the context of the video might be a determining factor, much in the same way as museums curate and thereby dictate what art is, papers given at conferences and articles published in academic journals are by definition academic. in establishing audiovisual thinking we hoped to set up an audiovisual counterpart to the written tradition of academic journals. also, the process of self-criticism is essential. self-reflection and criticism are the common denominators in virtually every scientific methodology and field, the natural science as well as the humanities. academic video – making references, adhering to copyright issues one problem that has been emphasized by some submissions and particularly when the editors have worked on our own videos for example for the editorial column has been making citations within the video essay. there have been frequent citations to both text references and other audiovisual media. the only reasonable solution seems to be to include a title card – often at the end of the video essay, but sometimes within the narrative – with text-based references. this mimics the referencing done in written texts and is the only method which seems explicit enough. an alternative is to find methods to make audiovisual references. intertextuality and homage are established practices in conventional visual storytelling, such as feature film and commercials. it is usually done by imitating creative features (camera movements, production design, dialogue, colour grading and so on, and endless combinations of these features) so closely that the reference to another movie becomes obvious. one example is how the satirical cartoon south park (matt stone, trey parker 1997) brings in characters and events from other movies, or how the horror franchise scream (wes craven 1996-) re-enacts and plays with events from other horror movies. intertextual references were incorporated in one of the editorial column video essays rex : ren (issue 2010:2). it is obvious that this kind of citation requires the viewer to recognise the intertextuality, which makes it more or less impossible to reference something that the viewers haven’t seen. other experiments with citing within an audiovisual text can be seen in the video as infovis to portrait analysis on a tv advertisement, eva casado de amezua fernández-luanco’s on-screen analysis of tv adverts (2010). development in video distribution softwares and codexes will hopefully make it easier to annotate credit and create references to audiovisual material in the near future. similarly, current legislation on copyright does not lend itself to academic videos about intertextuality, remix culture or close readings of specific works and texts. in some countries – such as sweden – it is permissable within copyright law to include excerpts from the media artefact you are analyzing, which makes it possible to include footage or imagery in a video essay as long as you have a deeper academic discussion relevant to the excerpt. but this is not the case in all countries, and prejudices and misunderstanding are common, leading to abetter-safe-than-sorry approach among media scholars. although creative commons licences go some towards solving this, copyright legislation and disinformation from large media distributors (such as the copyright notice included on most commercial dvd’s claiming that all usage of the material is forbidden) continues to make academic freedom within the field of academic video problematic. http://www.ellaing.com/� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 12 conclusion in a world where audiovisual media abounds and is becoming increasingly prevalent – online, on mobile phones and tablets and on digital billboards in the urban landscape – teaching and communicating through moving images is increasingly important for educators and academics in all areas. in the same way as recorded lectures and instructional videos are being used more and more frequently in higher education, this paper argues that researchers should play their part and work towards integrating, incorporating and disseminating through video and moving images in academia. as this paper shows, academic video and the academic audiovisual essay are already present within academic disciplines and have the potential to be equally valid discourses in conceptualising and disseminating research alongside the written word. it is possible to convey certain kind of research results audiovisually as well as or even better than in written texts. looking into the ways in which documentary film and television has been used for both scientific and popular dissemination of knowledge would be of great value to science in a modern media society. investigating what kind of content lends itself to audiovisuality, and methodological consideration of how academic video as dissemination and conceptualisation should and could work, are fields of inquiry that are just opening up. in time, developing practice and theory will provide answers. audiovisual thinking hopes to help shape these developments and this process and would like to invite the readers of this paper to take part. bibliography barthes, r. 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(2004). analyzing the reality effects in dogma films. the journal of moving image studies, 1(2). i accordingly, and in order to build a video sharing academic community, the first issue and call for videos was on the theme: ‘what is academic video?’ ii it can also be argued that contemporary art video is moving towards subject matters and topics that are the realm of academia, in that some work is incorporating critique and reflections on video as a medium and the physical and temporal aspects of moving images as part of their subject matter, for example douglas gordon’s installation 24 hour psycho (1993), or the various twelve frames film experiments online, inspired by one of the obstructions in lars von trier and jørgen leth’s the five obstructions (2003). iii the dogme 95 rules are: • filming must be done on location. props and sets must not be brought in. if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found. • the sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. music must not be used unless it occurs within the scene being filmed, i.e., diegetic. • the camera must be a hand-held camera. any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. the film must not take place where the camera is standing; filming must take place where the action takes place. • the film must be in colour. special lighting is not acceptable (if there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera). • optical work and filters are forbidden. • the film must not contain superficial action (murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.) • temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (that is to say that the film takes place here and now). • genre movies are not acceptable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmp4nk0eoe� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 15 • the film format must be academy 35 mm. • the director must not be credited. iv one note about our manifesto rules is that they are quite soft and general compared to the highly specific dogma 95 rules. it might be that we failed to design rules that were specific and rigid enough, but we might also argue that the rules we devised were the rules we needed. even though we have been inspired by the dogma 95’s idea of creating an experimental space, our intent has been quite different. it is a manifesto in the making – on one hand we hope to make it more specific and, on the other, to keep it open so that it can evolve. v there is also an additional rule concerning the more technical aspects of the media that states that submissions must ‘form a coherent piece of media, which can be stored as one digital file that can be easily shared. this ensures that a work is one unified piece, as opposed to being a serial, game or interactive website. however, this rule is not relevant to the argument made here. reflections on academic video thommy eriksson inge ejbye sørensen abstract introduction the case: the academic journal audiovisual thinking the research methodology the context: convergence in theory and practise academic video essays and documentary theory the authoritative documentary and academic video the observational documentary and academic video the poetic-reflexive documentary and academic video theoretical perspectives on text and visuals and their capabilities in relation to academic dissemination creating framework and experimental space – practices and manifesto ensuring audiovisuality ensuring academic standards academic video – making references, adhering to copyright issues conclusion title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 online dating and education yvonne fritze and yngve troye nordkvelle department of education and social studies lillehammer university college email: yvonne.fritze@hil.no, yngve.nordkvelle@hil.no abstract taking its inspiration from luhmann’s communication theory, this article looks at online dating from the perspective of teaching and education. while eros obviously plays an important role in regenerating the desire to communicate, this ardour is often absent from the domain of net-based teaching. the article explores those features of online dating characteristic of distance dialogue, and discusses the extent to which these can be transferred to communication in the teaching context. we further argue that participation in online dating increases communicators’ competence and selfreflection. keywords: communication theory, net dating, erotic conversations, distance education introduction for some years now, there has been a discussion as to what measures are conducive to the success of e-learning systems, including what factors stimulate a high level of communicative activity. the qualities of the teaching materials, the quality of the response and the content and character of the dialogue have all been suggested as critical success factors. other factors such as students’ ict skills, their level of education and how this relates to everyday experience and the social climate have also been suggested as being significant. questions of a more ethical and moral nature have also been raised in the context of whether the establishment of a code of practice or “netiquette” may be pertinent to this type of communication.i learning is unpredictable and difficult to plan. teaching is therefore the form of communication more conducive to changes in learning. net-based teaching is generally accepted in research theory as an effective and popular method of organizing instruction. however, in reality it is often a different matter, and many teachers concede that it is difficult to arouse students’ interest in participating. in learning management systems (lms), communication seldom functions as planned or anticipated. one likely reason may be an inflated marketing rhetoric, which has exaggerated the promise of interstudent communication (grepperud & haugsbakk, 2004). furthermore, most teaching programmes via lms in norway fail to make full use of the system’s communicative possibilities (rønning & grepperud, 2006). the findings from a danish doctoral thesis confirm that few students participate productively mailto:yvonne.fritze@hil.no mailto:yngve.nordkvelle@hil.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 106 (rattleff, 2001). jonassen, carr and yueh (1998:30) claim that this low level of competence relates to students’ general lack of conversational skills, including an inability to assess their audience and give appropriate responses because during their years at school they “[...] have been too busy memorizing what the teachers tell them. so, it may be necessary to support students’ attempts to converse”. the empirical study comprising the background for this article originally came about because we were interested in learning more about how to avoid interruptions to pedagogical communication in distance learning. a key problem for luhmann and the present study is how to maintain communication in these systems. since the aim of many people taking part in online dating is to find the one and only, this is clearly a strongly motivating factor in this particular form of communication. this motive may therefore also provide clues as to why it is apparently so simple to sustain communication in an online dating arena, as opposed to what happens in netbased teaching. there is a great difference between participating in an academic discourse restricted in its subject content and being party to personal communication of a more romantic nature. this study has accordingly also sought to determine whether it is at all possible to separate romantic communication from its original context, with a view to transposing some of its elements to pedagogical communication. the article is based on results from an empirical study of communication on different online dating sites in norway and denmark. the core of the study comprises eight qualitative interviews with persons who have some experience with online dating. all the interviews were recorded on an ipod and subsequently transcribed. we have additionally collected quantitative data via a questionnaire survey with 56 responses. taking this as our point of departure, we set out to investigate how romantic communication can be described and if love and eros can have any bearing on teaching, learning and education. has romantic communication a special capacity for maintenance? in seeking insight into romantic love as a phenomenon and communicative form, we have turned to luhmann and his interpretation of the concept. we have also re-visited the ancient greeks and investigated love in relation to the eros myth. in the context of these descriptions of love, we ask if the concept contains any particular possibilities for communicative reproduction and system maintenance. love according to the eros myth in greek mythology, eros was the child of two gods: poros, the wealthy and resourceful god, and penia, the hungry and impoverished god. penia visited the drunken, half-asleep poros and conceived eros. love was therefore the offspring of both plenty and hunger, united in eros as the desire to satisfy unfulfilled needs. eros was neither benign nor intelligent, though his sole purpose was to identify a need that craved satisfaction. being imbued with the impelling power of love and seeking the consummation of its needs means possessing an energy that the greeks believed should be cultivated and nurtured. in plato’s interpretation, eros should ideally be directed towards the search for wisdom and the good. eros is the instrument that seeks and identifies needs and generates the energy to fulfil them. identified in these needs is what one yearns for as being worthy of one’s desire, understood to mean that the object of desire possesses a special beauty in the eyes of the desirer. in this search, creative power is released: “it is the paradoxical power seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 107 of genesis that mediates between being and not being”, as jim garrison puts it (1997:9). through this process of creation, man makes himself immortal by producing offspring – or re-creating himself in a cultural sense. teaching is a way of recreating oneself through imparting to children or others the cultural meaning of life. the procreation of children means the continuation of the human race. the communication of cultural learning makes one immortal in a wider sense: “the two go together naturally” (ibid:10). according to greek mythology, love is a self-generating force. the creative drive associated with eros means that in romantic communication there is the inherent means of reproducing this communication. in our argument, it is therefore important to ascertain how the erotic drive is activated – not solely in the search for love in a physical sense but also with regard to a love of learning, education, wisdom and culture. online dating sites can teach us more about dating as a formative strategy, while also providing stimuli for how to realize e-learning’s erotic potential. for example, the reproductive possibilities from the physical meeting can be preserved and refined through written communication. love in a luhmannian perspective in system theory, an important aspect of communication is that it always takes place via media. media are seen here as an answer to the three improbabilities of communication: the improbability of the communicators understanding each other, of the communicators establishing contact with each other and of the communication being successful in the sense of the communicators acting, thinking or processing information in accordance with what has been understood (luhmann, 2000:201). included in the latter category are the symbolically generalized communication media, understood as the code or optic that may be selected for a communication, e.g. a financial, ethical or educational message (luhmann, 2000:202). as luhmann sees it, love can be understood as a symbolically generalized medium, one that simplifies communication by using a specific communicative code. this medium is undifferentiated, with the aim of making communication probable and creating understanding through overcoming a threshold problem. the romantic medium is not in itself a feeling but on the contrary a communication code, according to whose rules we can express, form, simulate, ascribe or deny feelings to others and with all this accept the consequences this will have when a corresponding communication is realized. (luhmann 1995:60) in the romantic code, communication is of a highly personal nature: by highly personal communication we understand communication whereby the speaker seeks to distinguish himself from other individuals. this can be done through the speaker making himself the subject, i.e. talking about himself; but also in the context of factual discussions by making his attitude to the topic the pivot of the communication (luhmann 1995:61). romantic communication can thus be described as a special form of communication that seeks to overcome the threshold problem by adopting a highly personal form of communication. the interlocutors also attempt to distinguish themselves from others by making themselves, their feelings and their attitude to factual topics into the subject and pivot of the communication. moreover, it appears that this particular form of communication taking place within the romantic code may have its own inbuilt motor: love may, paradoxically speaking, intensify communication by largely foregoing communication […]. the classical code therefore also includes “the language of glances”, together with an affirmation of the fact that two lovers seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 108 can talk to each other indefinitely without really having anything to say to each other (luhmann 1995:66). romantic communication can apparently be sustained indefinitely without any particular direction or need for meaningful information. it is perhaps this point that distinguishes pedagogical from romantic communication and what may present a problem in any attempt to transfer communicative features from the romantic to the pedagogical code. flirting – the prelude to love without physical proximity between the interlocutors, romantic communication will be perceived as lingering in a preliminary phase generally described as “flirting”. on one of the major danish online dating sites, flirting is explained thusly: flirting can be the introduction to much more, but may also go no further than innocent dallying. flirting is the preliminary manoeuvre we employ to make contact with a new partner. if you’re game for a flirt, don’t hold yourself back on our pages (scor.dk). as well as being the prelude to romantic communication, the flirt itself is described as a light-hearted erotic courtship or casual romanceii according to a major norwegian encyclopaedia (store norske leksikon), i.e. a much less committed and risky form of romantic communication. online dating can therefore be regarded as a forum for the prelude to romantic dialogue, the flirt. the flirt as communicative drive as well as being the preamble to the romantic dialogue, the flirt can also be described as the driving force behind the desire for further communication. in other words, it is a function that may be included in a description of the romantic dialogue’s autopoiesis (the system’s self-production). for example, the english version of wikipediaiii says this about flirting: people who flirt may speak and act in a way that suggests greater intimacy than is generally considered appropriate to the relationship (or to the amount of time the two people have known each other), without actually saying or doing anything that breaches any serious social norms. one way they accomplish this is to communicate a sense of playfulness or irony. double entendres, with one meaning more formally appropriate and another more suggestive, may be used. the flirt can therefore be described as a form of communication that signals a sexual or romantic interest in another person, often hinting at a closer degree of intimacy in the verbal interchange than the relationship actually warrants and often constructed as an ambiguity or double meaning. the danish online dating site scor.dk distinguishes between flirting and a web flirt. during a web flirt, the interlocutors normally cannot read each other’s facial expressions or body language. little hints and “reading between the lines” therefore play an important role (scor.dk). approximately 80% of the informants in the questionnaire survey state that they flirt on the internet. when we ask them to be more specific about what web flirting actually entails, the answers fall into three categories: compliments, humour and double meanings. in our view, these categories are not the sole preserve of online dating, but apply to flirting in general. in relation to the use of compliments, the informants state: i make it clear that i like the person and pay him lots of compliments. tell him seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 109 i think he is nice and interesting and that i enjoy getting letters from him. compliment him on things he’s good at, or on his looks if they’re good. as we can see from the statements quoted above, compliments often function to excess and signal a greater degree of intimacy than the relationship (here a physically separated one) actually justifies. the informants make the following statements about flirting with humour: difficult to answer but i suppose it’s possible to flirt a little by being ironic. if contact is good, there’s a lot of nonsense talk and cuddly nicknames and so on. humour therefore appears to be a function that can be used to overcome barriers and encourage communication to move in a more intimate direction. humour and compliments are frequently mentioned as twin techniques when online daters are flirting and trying to get closer to their opposite number. according to luhmann (1999), trust capital can be accumulated through the use of humour. in turn, this can increase confidence in one’s own selfpresentation and encourage the speaker to move towards more personal forms of communication. intimacy arises when increasingly more of a person’s personal experience and physicalbehaviour become accessible and relevant to another person and when this relationship is mutually developed. this is only possible if double contingency is operationalized through personal accountability (luhmann, 2000:269). as the third explanation for how flirting develops over the internet, the use of double meanings is mentioned, including smilies as a means of expression: we always try to present ourselves in the most interesting way, of course. send lots of emoticons on msn, like winking smilies and so on. we like a bit of role-play. use “between the lines” talk and “snappy answers”, with double meanings where possible, if that feels the right thing to do. when we employ double meanings in communication, it means in reality that we are “speaking with two tongues”. luhmann sees communication as a chain of three selections: information, message and understanding. in the context of romantic code, the choice of the first two will often be a conscious desire to confuse understanding (the third selection). this can be done by the communicator choosing a piece of information, which in association with the form of the message, creates an ambiguity. for example: “are you going into town this evening? ;=)”. this can be understood as a simple request for information, but with a smiley attached it can also mean that the sender would like to meet the person in town. the other person may reply for example: oh no, it’s bed for me this evening ;=)”. this remark can be understood as an assertion that he/she can’t be bothered going out and possibly needs to sleep. but an accompanying smiley can create interest in further communication, for it perhaps means that this person would like to meet the other in bed instead of in town. whether or not one is interested in either of these possibilities, the double meaning can create interest in continuing the dialogue. the use of such ambiguities in romantic dialogues can have two functions. it can help to arouse interest in the receiver, and because of uncertainty about the sender’s intentions, the receiver will join in the communication to obtain certainty. for the sender of the double meaning, it can function as a safety net, in case the receiver “misunderstands”. if the receiver does not accept the sexual and underlying side of the message, the sender can always refer to the information aspect. double meanings can thereby serve to maintain the system by double-guaranteeing communicative reproduction. if she won’t go the one way, we’ll take the other. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 110 the use of negation [of the sexual element] may appear in the medium’s linguistic realisation as an “ambiguity”, but as an element in the semantic structure it has a very precise meaning in association with the undifferentiation and potentialization of specific communication forms and communication outcomes (luhmann 1995:72). the flirt as dialogical seducer on the other hand, flirting can be seen as an “entrapping” element in (the) autopoiesi: one party lures the other into reproducing the communication by means of compliments and humour. a particular strategy, though, is to give oneself an air of mystery or personified ambiguity. example no. 1: a seductive dialogue as strategy researcher: how did you meet him? hedda: he had also written and managed to draw me out. i wasn’t really all that interested in him either, not because he wasn’t attractive but he had a dangerous look to him. and what he wrote was very cryptic and a bit weird, but all the same he managed to make me open up because he intrigued me. he was very insistent too and persuasive, so i agreed to meet him. and it was very interesting.iv in this example, the female dater sees herself as being seduced by the male partner’s persuasive form of communication and equivocal self-presentation. first, she is enticed into writing about herself, then into meeting face-to-face. in the context of pedagogical communication, the process of coaxing a dialogue into being is not an unknown phenomenon. the tutorial is a dialogical form of teaching in which the tutor is not expected to impart instruction and or to tell the student in direct terms what is right and wrong. in order to exercise criticism in response to, e.g. a student paper or dissertation, the tutor must encourage students to take the first step towards a critical appraisal of their own work. this requires students to reflect over their work in relation to the topic of study and thus demonstrate their understanding of the subject. only after the student has had a chance to speak can the tutor engage in the dialogue and confirm or refute the argument. the method that tutors and lecturers use to coax their students into a dialogue is to ask questions. during lectures, the lecturer will often construct problems and related questions with which the students can identify. only after the lecturer has succeeded in establishing a dialogue is there a basis for further academic discussion (fritze, 2005). research on reading looks into how the reader seeks to find confirmation of his knowledge, while simultaneously being challenged and provoked in relation to his established views (salvatori, 1983). seduction occurs when comfort in assimilation is greater than the effort involved in reorganizing established schemes in the accommodation. to lose oneself in the text is to allow oneself to be seduced and is therefore a condition for allowing meaning horizons to merge. seduction is a constructivistic activity involving both being seduced and allowing oneself to be seduced (ricoeur, 1991; nielsen, 1995). only after this seduction and a maturing of thought will quiet reflection occur and an assessment be made of the love process. for example, we allow ourselves to be more readily seduced by teachers who use a register of seduction techniques, including humour, self-disclosure and authenticity (impulsive, topical and enthusiastic) (martin, mottet, & myers, 1999). students who express themselves in similar ways also attract interest. dysthe (2002) describes a session from an online discussion on a course in business ethics: one particularly simple example of good ethics equalsgood business in the longer term may be the use of condoms by prostitutes. in the short term there may be a lack of business. however, in the longer term, the more enlightened client is more likely to return when he knows that the product is safe. [iris 2] (dysthe, 2002 : 347 ). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 111 it is not difficult to see that if the average online student produces texts with equally lively associations, more fellow students will be keen to join in the discussion. iris is the key figure in this group. students who make communication work and elicit responses from fellow students obviously create interest and a certain amount of popularity. this type of student tends to produce more advanced ideas and hence stimulate reflection in the other students. iris produces inviting texts and includes topics that are open to interpretation, e.g. she plays on double meanings and can be understood in a sense as flirting. can we learn anything from the development of trust in the romantic code? the concept of trust has been introduced as an element in this study because we believe that trust is an important component in helping to maintain communication systems and encourage the personal dialogue in an online dating forum to continue. it is also our experience from our work on distance learning that trust-creating measures often play an even more significant role in communication when the communicators seldom or never have direct contact with teachers and others in the educational institution. what is trust? strictly speaking, luhmann (1999:20) provides no definition of trust, but says that in a modern society the possibilities open to the individual have radically increased as society has grown, and is increasingly growing, in complexity. confidence and trust are ways of reducing complexity, but in a social order characterized by complexity society loses its naturalness and confidence, so that the need for trust becomes even greater (luhmann, 2000). in his analysis of trust, luhmann distinguishes between personal trust and systemic trust as ways of relating to the growing risks in a modern, highly-complex society. all communication is seen as risky, requiring a minimum of trust if we are to be perceived as we wish ourselves to be (luhmann, 2000:9). luhmann sees personal trust as a reciprocal process between two parties, which starts by one person giving trust as a “risky opening offer” (luhmann, 1999:20). the other person responds to this proffered trust and confirms it. when we are shown trust we find ourselves, with no real obligation, in a special normative sphere that renders any breach of trust less acceptable (op.cit.:21). in conventional teaching, the teacher develops personal trust in his meeting with the students, whereas in net-based teaching, the teacher must rely to a greater extent on institutional trust: a trust which can be generated by invoking academic weight and understanding. the online dater also creates a kind of institutional trust in him/herself by using the formal structure of the online dating site. here, the website has assured its users that this is a safe country for self-disclosure. through the person’s user profile and possibly a photograph, a platform for trust is established. in the same way as the teacher creates a positive name for himself by choosing formulations likely to instil trust, either through prudence or self-disclosure, the online dater portions out information about him/herself with the same purpose in mind. trust provides a basis for new forms of behaviour such as humour and irony, which in turn foster growth in one’s trust capital (luhmann, 1999:22). in online tutorials, we see that the establishment of a threshold trust value can create “the rhetoric of criticism”, one in which openness and vulnerability are notably interchangeable qualities in each case (fritze, 2005). (true) love by internet it is our experience that romantic dialogue conducted online readily reproduces itself and appeals to the communicators to show personal trust. at seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 112 the same time, online dating presents obvious opportunities for dishonesty and breaches of trust. we have operationalized one way of showing personal trust as making oneself known as a person – being honest in relation to who one is. for example, communicators can reveal who they are, where they live, what their interests are and other personal details. they can also choose to publish a photo of themselves and thus disclose their identity completely. on a website, this information is naturally open to more people than it would be if you were meeting one person in a bar. your boss, your husband, your friends or neighbour can all find out about you. we have asked people if they are honest in relation to what they publish on the internet about themselves: example 2a: are you honest about what you say in your profile? researcher: you could simply set up a different profile, couldn’t you? hedda: yes, you could, but you wouldn’t gain anything by it. i don’t think you’d make contact if you didn’t have a photo. so i began by publishing an anonymous profile, not giving much away, and nothing happened. […] then i finally thought, after having tried to be anonymous and having written to the men… that the people out there want the same as me, after all. so, if my colleagues or friends or relations see me, they must be there for the same purpose. i thought: “what the heck – i’ll add both photos and write a long, positive story about myself.” and i almost died of fright and thought it was really stretching things. example 2b: are you honest about what you say in your profile? researcher: you can waste a lot of time on someone if you haven’t told them about your bad points too, can’t you? elise: but don’t you think you’ll do that anyway when you meet them faceto-face? i do, at any rate. don’t try to gloss over anything, for sooner or later the truth will come out. it therefore seems that a number of our informants are willing to stake their identity in trying to establish dialogue with a potential partner. many of them also tell stories about how they have opened up and confided strictly personal things to total strangers. the physical meeting as a risky objective internet daters envisage communicating primarily through textual presentation. it is also possible to use a webcam, which can compensate to some extent for the lack of physical presence, but the communicators will still be separated by distance and technology. in general, personal trust is thought to be closely associated with physical proximity between the parties, and is something to be developed over time. someone who is within physical reach cannot escape from interaction. there is a kind of symbolic exposure in physical presence, since it is actually possible to harm each other (qvortrup, 1998:182). there is no such possibility in online dating, with communication in this context possibly being considered relatively free of risk. the communicators may feel less constrained and breaches of trust are simpler to commit. the production of trust over the internet is therefore not directly hazardous. it is only when the communicators are about to meet for the first time face-toface that the physical consequences of their communication can take on a dangerous turn. a basis[…]in sexuality means that the parties attach importance to “being together’’, to immediacy and proximity, that they prefer those places where they can count on seeing each other (luhmann, 1995:70). one of our informants had this experience in connection with her first meeting with a man: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 113 example no. 3: showing trust on the first live date hedda: but this man here, no. 2, i knew clearly was a little weird, so i had decided that our first live date would be in the daytime and in some semi-public place […] i drove right down to the beach, where we had arranged to meet at the ice cream stall. researcher: were there many people there? hedda: no, there weren’t in fact, because the roads weren’t so good. so perhaps it wasn’t actually the best place to meet. and so i stood there on the beach wondering if i would be able to see him, which direction he would come from. and if he came from the side i could pull my stomach in. oh, i was just so nervous that i didn’t know where to put myself. and it struck me at the same time that i had the wrong dress on and everything was just wrong. then i thought i’ll sit up here among the dunes. then i can see him coming. it was time and he hadn’t arrived, so i thought:”f..., now i’ve been stood up”. two seconds later i was assaulted by a roaring man who came charging down from the dunes and knocked me over. the story ended well, and with this practical joke, he challenged the prejudices many women have about meeting a totally strange man for the first time in a relatively deserted spot. these two had a short meeting on the first occasion, but met again two days later. our informant relates the following about her experience of the second meeting (once more on the beach): example no. 4: trust in spite of things hedda: as i was driving home the following day, i thought to myself: if he had decided to slit my throat it would have been a whole week before anyone found me, because the roads were just so bad that there was no one around on the beach. it was rather chilling, but it was quite an adventure, one i’d never have imagined having through an online contact. researcher: but why did you do it, then? hedda: because he was fascinating, a bit of a mystery, weird and way-out. the true nature of trust can be seen here, demonstrating that mutual trust can be developed in an interaction not in spite of, but because of the fact that both parties are free to act differently than the other might wish or expect. consequently, we must decide to trust, with a full awareness that things can go wrong. in other words, trust only has […] “functional social value if it affords the possibility of mistrust. as a strategy for the reduction of complexity, trust has a wider scope than mistrust. the person offering trust expands his potential for action substantially” […] “mistrust is a more constraining strategy” (luhmann, 2000:169-171). although romantic communication employs a code involving highly personal communication, thereby fostering personal trust within this code, we must not disregard the fact that at the heart of this process lies a form of institutional trust, in the first instance, the trust the parties have in the website, that it is a reliable arena in which their disclosures will not be misused. however, it is also our impression that the parties tend to arrange to meet quite soon after the initial contact if their aim is to find a partner. they do not want to waste time, and are willing to risk their personal identity in their quest for the true “one”. within the romantic code, online daters enter into an exploratory mode in relation to questions such as: how much should i tell?, how honest should i be?, what can i put a gloss on?, what will self-disclosure result in? or where will trust lead to? these are considerations around the conversational elements that help to drive a conversation and which therefore carry a dialogical energy, like that which eros is imbued with. is it possible that this energy can have a transposable value? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 114 eros as the basis of education our reluctance to bring eros into the pedagogical discourse is of a modern nature. we tend nowadays to shudder at the thought of all the occurrences among priests, teachers and others that suggest paedophilia and illicit advances. however, it has not always been like that. to the contrary, the inviting dialogue and flirting have been fundamental to teaching. in ancient greek educational history, a romantic attachment between the adult teacher and the child was an accepted starting point. the french educational historian marrou (1956) describes “the loving teacher” as important in the development of the modern concept of teaching. the greeks saw teaching primarily as the exercise of love and not as, e.g. the design of teaching programmes and the application of teaching methods for an increasingly complex society. the most important aim was to build relations between the older, experienced warrior and the younger apprentice soldier, entailing the teaching of survival techniques, attitudes and knowledge as a kind of caringly professional socialization for life as a warrior. over the course of time, the content changed from the bellicose arts to more general topics such as spiritual enlightenment, philosophy and gymnastics. the warrior aristocrats took their traditions with them into civilian life and lent support to publicly-sponsored education in which the individual relationship between teacher and pupil could no longer be sustained. this is what plato bemoaned and criticized in his dialogues. relationships took on a more general tone, which according to marrou nevertheless did not change teaching as an essentially passionate relationship: for the greeks, education paideia essentially meant a profound and intimate relationship, a personal union between a young man and an elder who was at once his model and his initiator – a relationship on to which the fire of passion threw warm and turbid reflections. [...] throughout greek history the relationship between master and pupil was to remain that between a lover and his beloved (marrou, 1956:31-32). as noted in the description of the eros myth, the teacher’s desire to make himself immortal through his pupil can be seen as cultural reproduction (cf. garrison, 1997). socrates saw that the greek urban community was also apprehensive about the teacher’s seductive role. in the 1970s, certain dialogues from socrates were idealized, thus promoting the “majeutic principle” to canon status (dale, 1972; løvlie, 1984). however, critical studies show that plato did not discount additional dialogical concepts. gadamer points out that plato adopted at least 10 different dialogical strategies and did not discount either the tirade, seduction or edification as elements in the rhetorical register (gadamer, 1980). the notion of the “true dialogue” is hence a reflection of the athenians’ golden age myth about the time past when learning could be passed on from teacher to pupil in spartan warrior society. this was also a form of teaching with deeply erotic roots. jim garrison claims that eros offers an arsenal of concepts and practices that enrich our perception of learning and education. “we become that which we love” asserts garrison, and the cultivation of desire towards noble ends is therefore an essential condition for education: an education leading to wisdom and the good, and to a filtration of the random towards the reflected. rather than fearing to open the doors to sexuality, we should accept that it is through the sexual that love realizes its full pedagogical potential (cho, 2005:81). “love” implies the notion of the final fusion of two, but since that is not possible it is retained as the driving force in the notion. to put it in another way: love is something created in the absence of the optimal and becomes the method by which one person identifies with the other. for this reason, the practice of love is the creation of the method for seeking knowledge and experience in the world, both jointly and simultaneously. the erotic operationalization of education – or learning to learn there are many current proposals for a general description of the education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 115 concept, but common to most of the different approaches is the notion that education cannot merely be limited to a few social graces such as bowing, thanking, dancing and eating nicely. there is a mention of adaptability, implying that we must not only possess certain skills and qualifications, but must also know what we should know if we wish to be educated, how to acquire this knowledge and how to use it. it is therefore very much a question of being better at acquiring strategies for how to learn in the most appropriate way. in this light, modern education implies a capacity for learning to learn and to be seen as a reflexive concept. for example, qvortrup (2004) says that it concerns a conscious ability to reflect over the difference between what i am and what i could be, or between what i am and what others are. in this form of education, he proposes a principle of reflexive evaluation. here, evaluation means that society still has values, but that we must choose some as our own. as an educational concept in general, digital education can be seen in relation to the reflexive element. if ict is used in a way that allows the learner to observe himself and induce reflection on this basis, it can then support a reflexive (digital) education (nordkvelle et al., 2004). under certain conditions, the dating process may be described as being at its heart a mutual educational process in which each party re-creates him/herself and the other in the idealized picture as belonging together. each invites, flirts and initiates dialogues that are mutually explorative and self-presentational. in the context of remote communication through the medium of technology, the transition from one arena (or medium) to another requires a re-thinking of communication because the new communicative situation offers a scope and communicative form different from those previously used. the online dater therefore finds himself in a situation in which he is called on to reflect not only on the use of the technology and its written form, but also on himself and how he relates to romantic communication as communication. in traditional face-to-face romantic communication, lovers often speak in incomplete sentences and give verbal expression only to that which is not selfevident. by contrast, in written communication the communicator is obliged to express himself in more precise terms in order to create understanding despite physical separation. anyone writing for other readers must use adaptive techniques by putting himself in the reader’s place. the content must be objectified […] writing creates a structural divide which provides the experience of greater knowledge, more precise concepts and language for particular purposes. systems thus acquire an altogether different competence in considering themselves. alphabetization and reflection therefore go hand in hand (rasmussen, 2003:77). in other words, this means that the communicator in an online dating context has to be more explicit if the other party is to understand his/her contribution to the dialogue, which is especially true during the initial dating phase. in turn, this has consequences for the communicator’s reflection because the written communication form requires an observation of his/her own situation, thereby leading to a greater awareness of his/her communicative choices and often to a greater precision of formulation (hoel, 2003). the written communicative form also makes it possible to sustain a more protracted argumentation. we asked our informants if they had learned anything about themselves through online dating, if they had learned anything about dating through online dating or if they had perhaps learned anything about the use of new technology by using modern technology in online dating. we also looked for any sign of reflexive evaluation in the data. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 116 have you learned anything about yourself through online dating? example no. 5: online dating as an arena for learning about the world. stanley: but it didn’t come to anything, so i decided to forget about the norwegian websites altogether. i found out that the international sites were much more interesting. not mainly to find a date. that wasn’t really what i was after – i just wanted to make contact and learn something about the world. learn how people think and about other cultures. it really helped me broaden my entire outlook on life. the world seemed bigger, somehow. looking at this example, it could be true to say that stanley is not only learning about the world from others. he is also telling us something profound about his own understanding of the world and how he is expanding his horizons in meaningful ways. this online dater has a wider purpose for his dating. he presents himself as someone who is keen to know more about the world, about other cultures and how other people live, and he uses eros as the prime mover in his quest. in this approach to education, the internet dater uses technology to develop an understanding of the society around him and the relationships of which it consists, relationships clearly no longer constrained by geography, but negotiated through reading other people’s texts and publishing his own in an enduring form. this publication builds bridges between emotion and cognition and leads to self-exceeding processes, in which one is both the producer and consumer of texts. according to the norwegian sociologist jon hoem, this is a key phenomenon in modern digital education (2003). in this way, the online dater partly functions as a personal publisher (as a blogger) and as a letter writer (e-mail, messenger) in interchangeable modes. when the dater presents him/herself and is open in his/her search, the rhetoric is general and agapic. he reveals his human sympathies and values, and moves towards the erotic. have you learned anything through online dating about dating in general? our respondents say that the romantic game improves their competence in written flirting and inviting communication: example no. 6: learning the code kalle: yes, you learn a bit of everything. you pick up hints about what you should and shouldn’t say. you gradually learn the codes. i didn’t know if my strategy was good or bad, of course, but it seemed to pay off. some of the interviewees stated that the experience they had gained from flirting, as well as the use of titillating double meanings, let them down when it came to face-to-face flirting. some people felt that the online form of flirting was much better, in part because it helped to avoid the conventional meeting places one was usually referred to. others felt that flirting techniques could be transferred to the physical meeting with a partner: example no. 7: learning some useful tips researcher: you said you were better at talking to girls after your experience of online dating. can you tell us anything about the tips you’ve picked up? håvard: you realize what most of them want after you’ve paid lots of girls compliments on the internet. but of course it’s a lot easier to do that online than when you meet people in the normal way and say the same things. i’m shy like that. you pick up a fewtricks,sure, but daring to use them is another matter. our respondents talk about becoming more aware of their own thoughts and behaviour in such situations, and have developed strategies for tackling new challenges. they say that they would like to adapt, thus demonstrating the readiness to change that lies at the heart of education. several informants also seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 117 tell us about a search for skills that would be useful for this learning process, in which they can acquire this knowledge and how they would like to use it. it is therefore very much a question of becoming better at learning strategies for how to learn in the most relevant way. have you learned anything about new technology through using it for online dating? our respondents report that the technologically-conditioned arena for selfpresentation, disclosure, trust-building and the nurturing of emotional ties can provide a positive basis for an exciting and developmental process, a process we regard as a timely and appropriate extension of education. while web etiquette prescribes conservative rules for what one should and should not do, this exploration of personal horizons involves the need to make one’s mark in different ways and process one’s identity in light of personal goals. along the way, participants develop more general communicative skills, both for mastering computer technology and for expressing oneself in more precise terms – or in more ambiguous ones, if that serves the purpose. the american feminist bell hooks believes that teaching is also a form of selfeducating activity, one in which teachers must seek to find in themselves those passions likely to make teaching and learning more meaningful. bell hooks postulates that, “to restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire” (1994, p. 199). some of our informants tell us that they both explore their communication strategy, including that they expand their experience and reflection over their textual meetings with others, and that they gradually master the technology with the aim of satisfying their social and cognitive objectives in relation to online dating activities. conclusion according to greek mythology, love/romance has its own self-creating/selfreproducing force through the drive to satisfy our desires. luhmann also describes romantic communication as a communicative form with its own sustaining capacity. an example of this is when communicators are so strongly motivated to pursue the dialogue that the content becomes subordinate, which is a situation that would be unthinkable in teaching. people who take part in online dating with the aim of seeking romantic involvement do so with motivation and commitment. in this activity, they describe themselves, read other people’s presentations of themselves and establish contacts. they start a communication process that explores possible common interests, attitudes and topics of conversation, and in which means of furthering intimacy and reciprocity are applied. this requires communicators to think through the strategies and forms of expression they use to achieve contact. in doing so, they develop the ability to pursue the contact towards the goal of physical meetings and a more lasting relationship. all this takes place in a digital environment, in which cognitive and emotional presentations are processed and perfected with a view to romance. the communicators entice, flirt and seduce as best they can to reach the objective and get responses to these activities; in turn, they review their strategies and try again. our respondents also see this as a process during which they learn about themselves and how they relate to others. moreover, it can be seen as a selfeducation process in which the communicator continually takes risks, builds trust, chooses interpretations and re-formulations of him/herself in a chain of reflexive evaluation. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 118 transposed to a teaching context, this could mean that from an erotic standpoint, work on students’ motivation for learning requires new insights and experience. firstly, we must recognize that the student’s desire and yearning stem from love, not just motherly, fatherly or brotherly love, but also erotic and sexual love. in one sense, teaching matter, the teacher and the skills the student masters are all objects of this desire or attractivity. in ancient greek education, there were few obstacles to the realization of physical acts of love, though in the modern age, this is neither advisable nor permitted. both in e-learning and on-campus education, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. passionate and seductive pedagogy has a potential that is often unrealized or poorly applied. boredom and apathy figure prominently because we are afraid of failing to cultivate critical thought. we do not believe, however, that it is really possible to distance oneself from something that one has not taken seriously. references bjerrum nielsen, h. (1995). seductive texts with serious intentions. educational researcher; 24 (1), 4-12. cho, d. (2005). lessons of love: psychoanalysis and teacher-student love. educational theory 55(1), 79-95. comenius, j. a. (1989). didactica magna. daidalos gøteborg (with an introduction by tomas kroksmark). dale, e. l. (1972). pedagogikk og samfunnsforandring [education and social change] oslo: gyldendal. dysthe, o. (2002). the learning potential of a web-mediated discussion in a university course, studies in higher education, 27(3) 339-352. fritze, y. (2005). mediet gør en forskel. en komparativ undersøgelse af kommunikation i nærundervisning og fjernundervisning. [the medium makes a difference. a comparative investigation into communication in campus education and on-line teaching.] ph.d.-afhandling ved institut for filosofi, pædagogik og religionsstudier. syddansk universitet. [phd dissertation, university of southern denmark]. gadamer, h.-g. (1980). dialogue and dialectic: eight hermeneutical studies on plato new haven: yale university press. garrison, j. (1997). dewey and eros: wisdom and desire in the art of teaching new york: teachers college press. grepperud, g. & haugsbakk, g. (2004). ikke helt som planlagt? nettbaserte aktiviteter i teori og praksis, [not entirely as planned. netbased activities in theory and practice]. forskningsrapport no. 118/2004, høgskolen i lillehammer. hoel, t. l. (2003). dialogen i "fleksibel" rettleiing. [the diaogue in "flexible tutorials"] i: y. fritze, g. haugsbakk, og y. t. nordkvelle (eds.) dialog og nærhet. ikt og undervisning. [dialogue and immediacy. ict and education] kristiansand høyskoleforlaget. (56-75). hoem, j. (2003). digital dannelse [digital bildung] ntnu/institutt for kunstog medievitenskap (fra http://infodesign.no/artikler/digital_dannelse_090104.pdf 31.1.07). hooks, b. (1994). teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom new york: routledge. jagodzinski, j. (2006). is there an ethics of diabolical evil? sex scandals, family romance & academy. studies in philosophy and education 25(5), 335-362. jonassen, d. h., carr, c. & yueh, h.-p. (1998). computers as mindtools for engaging learners in critical thinking techtrends, 43(2), 24-32. luhmann, n. (1995). kærlighed som symbolsk generaliseret kommunikationsmedium. [love as symbolically generalised medium of communication], in j. c.jacobsen, (red.), autopoiesis ii. udvalgte tekster af niklas luhmann. [autopoiesis ii. selected texts by niklas luhmann]. københavn: politisk revy. luhmann, n. (1999). tillid: en mekanisme til reduktion af social kompleksitet. [trust: a mechanism for reduction of social complexity]. københavn: hans reitzels forlag. luhmann, n. (2000). sociale systemer – grundrids til en almen teori. [social systems – sketches for a general theory]. københavn: hans reitzels forlag. http://infodesign.no/artikler/digital_dannelse_090104.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 119 løvlie, l (1984). det pedagogiske argument: moral, autoritet og selvprøving i oppdragelsen. [the educational argument: moral, authority and exploring of the self in upbringing]. oslo: cappelen. marrou, h. i. (1956). a history of education in antiquity london: sheed and ward. martin, m. m., mottet, t. p., & myers, s. a. (1999). the relationships between students’ motives for communicating with their instructors and affective and cognitive learning. research report. eric: ed 437 692. nordkvelle, y., fritze, y., & haugsbakk, g. (2004). tema: mediepedagogikk. leder. [editorial: media education]. norsk medietidsskrift 3 (11). p. 206-214. qvortrup, l. (1998). det hyperkomplekse samfunn. – 14 fortællinger om informationssamfundet. københavn: gyldendal. rasmussen, t. (2003). luhmann: kommunikasjon, medier, samfunn. bergen: fagbokforlaget. rattleff,p.(2001). studiegruppers faglige diskussioner i computerkonferencer i et fjernstudium. [subject-related discussions in online discussion fora]. afhandling til ph.d.graden. [phd dissertation]. københavn: danmarks pædagogiske universitet. ricoeur, p. (1991). construing and constructing: a review of “the aims of interpretation” by e. d. hirsh. i: m. j., valdes (ed.), a ricoeur reader: reflections and imaginations. new york, harvester/wheatsheaf. rønning, w. & grepperud, g. (2006). the everyday use of ict in norwegian flexible education. seminar.net 2(1). http://seminar.net/index.php/volume-2-issue1-2006-previousissuesmeny-112/58-the-everyday-use-of-ict-in-norwegianflexible-education (downloaded 25.10.12) salvatori, m. (1983). reading and writing a text: correlation between reading and writing patterns. college english 45(7), 657-666. www.scor.dk (downloaded 080906) www.storenorskeleksikon.no (downloaded 080906) www.wikepedia.uk (downloaded 080906) i a danish version of this text was first published in paulsen, m. og qvortrup, l. (red.) luhmann og dannelse. unge pædagoger, københavn. this version has been revised and significantly altered for an international audience. ii www.storenorskeleksikon.no iii www.wikipedia.uk iv our underlining. http://seminar.net/index.php/volume-2-issue-1-2006-previousissuesmeny-112/58-the-everyday-use-of-ict-in-norwegian-flexible-education http://seminar.net/index.php/volume-2-issue-1-2006-previousissuesmeny-112/58-the-everyday-use-of-ict-in-norwegian-flexible-education http://seminar.net/index.php/volume-2-issue-1-2006-previousissuesmeny-112/58-the-everyday-use-of-ict-in-norwegian-flexible-education http://www.scor.dk/ http://www.storenorskeleksikon.no/ http://www.wikepedia.uk/ http://www.storenorskeleksikon.no/ http://www.wikipedia.uk/ title old literacies and the “new” literacy studies: revisiting reading and writing norm friesen ph.d. visiting professor, media & technology studies university of british columbia faculty of education curriculum & pedagogy 2125 main mall vancouver, bc canada v6t 1z4 e-mail: norman.friesen@ubc.ca abstract as media coverage of standardized test results shows, student reading, writing and math scores are a matter of keen national and international concern. it is therefore astonishing that dominant theories of “literacies” do not systematically differentiate between these “tested” abilities and much more vernacular forms. this paper addresses this gulf between theory and practice beginning with a brief précis of the now-dominant “new” or “multimodal” literacy studies, and of the development of these approaches from work in comparative cultural anthropology. it then highlights findings from recent archeological research that suggests quite different conclusions about the development and reproduction of sophisticated inscriptive and interpretive practices in human societies. the paper concludes by considering the broad implications of these findings, and of the concomitant normative investment of education to established textual forms and standards. keywords: literacy, multiliteracies, writing, ethnography 1. new and multi-literacies twenty years ago, in 1994, a group of ten literacy researchers and theorists from australia, the us and uk met in new london, new hampshire. they were motivated by the shared conviction that “what students needed to learn was changing… [and] that there was not a singular, canonical english that could or should be taught anymore” (new london group, 1996, p. 63). in the resulting “statement of general principle,” these participants outlined an ambitious program to develop pedagogies of situated and transformed literacy practice and to fashion a common “metalanguage of multiliteracies” (1996, p. 73). this metalanguage would be used for “talking about language, images, texts, and meaning-making interactions,” whatever the modality and medium (1996, p. 77). although the intervening two decades have resulted in divergent work, the participants have stood by the group’s founding principles and on this basis have undertaken (and also inspired) a vast array of studies. in an introduction to the “new literacy studies” (2007), one of the most prolific participants of the new london group, james paul gee, leaves little doubt as to the situated and relative nature of linguistic and literary practices: “there really is no such thing as ‘language’ in general, no such thing even as ‘english’ in general. rather, people adopt different ways with oral… and printed …words seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 mailto:norman.friesen@ubc.ca mailto:norman.friesen@ubc.ca within different and specific sociocultural practices” (2002, p. 31). in the place of overburdened terms like “language” or “english,” gee advocates the use of capital-d “discourse:” a discourse integrates ways of talking, listening, writing, reading, acting, interacting, believing, valuing, and feeling (and using various objects, symbols, images, tools and technologies) in the service of enacting meaningful socially situated identities and activities. being-doing a certain sort of physicist, gang members [sic], feminist, first-grade child in ms. smith's room… a regular at the local bar, are all discourses. (2003, p. 35) discourse, according to gee, is present in any and every human situation; and one instance is effectively the same quality as another. new london member gunther kress reaches a similar conclusion while using a more abstract, semiotic vocabulary: “generalizing, i wish to say that signs are always motivated… by the producer’s ‘interest’… and [are thus] never arbitrary” (1992, pp. 173, 180). the meaning of a sign, word or sentence, kress is saying, is not so much determined by arbitrary convention as it is simply by what its author intends it to be. kress goes on to explain that this puts “us” as readers at a significant disadvantage: “our possibilities of attending to potential discrepancies in interest are severely curtailed, by the multitudinous pressures which surround every act of communication and which curtail attempts at a critical reading” (1992, p. 178). readers are left to guess at the producer’s or author’s actual interest or motivation, and are consequently not positioned to judge one “motivated” expression superior or inferior to another. it follows that a gang member’s graffiti is as important to the new literacy studies as a physicist’s grammaticality; student’s work with prime numbers as vital as with pokémon powers. all are discourses, manifestations of literacy, socially contingent forms of “meaning making.” these uncompromisingly relativist positions contrast sharply with what remains an everyday reality in school literacy curricula and instruction. in these contexts, meaning is not seen as primarily relative and subjective, and the existence and value of correct english is not in dispute. taking this gulf between theory and practice as its principle concern, this paper first presents a critical analysis of the empirical and methodological grounding of the new literacy studies, and then offers its own comparative empirical case that points to rather different conclusions. it ends with a consideration of the farreaching implications of the normative commitment of formal education to established textual literacies, and the practical pedagogical differences that separate these literacies from more vernacular forms. the emphasis of the new literary studies on the culturally relative nature of expression, on expressive practice in any and all of its forms, owes much to anthropology, “the study of human diversity,” to which the relativity of all cultures and practices is axiomatic (cole, gay, glick & sharp 1971, p. 4; boas, 1940). anthropology became influential in educational discourse (discourse without a capital “d”) starting in the 1990s, when terms like “participation,” “apprenticeship,” and “communities of practice” started to appear and reappear in educational writing. anthropological studies undertaken outside places typically associated with “knowledge work” (like a lab or office) generally formed the basis for this influence. these studies included influential reports and interpretations of sewing and literacy practices in liberia (scribner & cole, 1981), midwifery in the yucatan peninsula (lave & wenger, 1991), and recipe-book math in the us (rogoff, 1991). a key publication in this anthropological or ethnographic turn is the 1989 “situated cognition and the culture of learning” by seely-brown, collins and duguid. it begins by pointing out that recent “ethnographic studies of learning and everyday activity …reveal how different schooling is from the activities and culture that give meaning and purpose to what students learn elsewhere” (p. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 74 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 35). with only a few exceptions (e.g., wenger 1998, also mentioned below) these studies develop broad conclusions about contemporary education using examples from outside of the modern professional settings of the laboratory, office, meeting room and certainly the lecture hall, study group or seminar. what these studies emphasize is that mathematics, reading and writing, and many other more obviously practical skills (e.g. sewing, meat cutting, cooking) acquire their meaning only within a very specific situation (at the sewing machine, the butcher’s block or the kitchen stove) –and that “learning and cognition” more generally “are fundamentally situated.” in these situated, immersive contexts, a type of spoken language dominates that seely-brown, collins and duguid characterize as “indexical:” indexical terms are those that “index” or more plainly point to a part of the situation in which communication is being conducted. they are not merely context-sensitive; they are completely context-dependent. words like i or now for instance, can only be interpreted in the context of their use [and are indexical]. surprisingly, all words can be seen as at least partially indexical. (pp. 32-33) indexical language is localized in activity, in engagement with the environment as it is immediately present. this language is embedded situationally in the literal sense of indexical physicality. this indexing or contextual referencing of the world, the three authors claim, is no less than the basis for learning and knowledge in general: “knowledge, we suggest, indexes the situation in which it arises and is used” (p. 36). as a result, learning becomes a process of enculturation, which has also been called “legitimate peripheral participation.” tasks take the form of practical or “cognitive apprenticeships,” arrangements through which someone less experienced is “shown the ropes,” almost literally, through talking, pointing and other situated action. a learner is gradually inducted, through indexical language, demonstration and participation, into a particular practice and the community of practice constituting it.i 2. experimental anthropology: a study of “restricted literacies” one anthropological study in particular that is “widely cited in support of new literacy studies” (stephens, 2000, p. 13), and that serves as “a major reference” in literacy research more generally (botha, 2004, p. 38), is scribner and cole’s the psychology of literacy (1981a). because of the breadth and depth of its impact, this text is discussed here at some length. scribner and cole investigate the relationship between multiple literacies and cognitive abilities among the vai tribe of liberia. their case was at once unique and representative: the literacies of tribal members were in english, arabic and vai, and literacy in each language was highly differentiated in both its origins and functions –although all three literacies were confined almost entirely to a small male minority (1981b, p. 62). first, reflecting british colonial history, a small fragment of these males were taught to both read and write in english for administrative work, “in western-type government and mission schools” (scribner & cole 1981b, p. 69; see also: scribner 1984). second, a larger number (including a few females) learned as children not to write, but to read and recite arabic from the koran. vai script, finally, was learned in informal circumstances, and was used largely for personal and financial record keeping and communication. scribner and cole characterize their research study as an “experimental” “comparative anthropology,” as research which identifies the cognitive effects of literacy. it compared the specific conditions of the acquisition and use of each of these literacies, paying particular attention to teaching and learning of vai script, a literacy that they regarded as “indigeneous,” and as as originating seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 75 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 independently among the vai. through their comparative analysis, cole and scribner discovered that literacies different in origin and function bring with them different cognitive characteristics: all our information points towards the specificity of literacy [and associated skills]… literacy is not simply knowing how to read and write a particular script, but applying this knowledge for specific purposes in specific contexts of use. (1981a, p. 236) literacy, in other words, is neither absolute nor monolithic; it is culturally constructed and contextually situated –embedded like cognition itself in particularized activity. the specific skills and applications involved, moreover, are not generalizable across contexts and cultures, but are particularized within these. although these simple but powerful conclusions are widely referenced and reiterated, scribner and cole’s revealing descriptions of the very restricted use of these literacies are only infrequently noted. all three forms of literacy, english, arabic and vai, are marked by a fundamental superfluity, to use scribner and cole’s own term. the “basic productive activities and the workings of the social order,” the authors observe, “do not seem to depend in any critical way on writing” of any kind. in addition, no one literacy is associated with “learning of new knowledge nor involve[s] individuals in new methods of inquiry” (scribner & cole 1981b, p. 66). characterizing vai script in particular as a case of “restricted literacy” (1981a, p. 239), the authors note the absence of any publically-available texts or religious canon in the vai language, and of any standardized orthography for the characters of the vai syllabary.ii they also observe that vai is nowhere used to record “persuasive arguments,” “personal experiences” or “poetic” expression (1981b, 65). finally, scribner and cole were unable to identify any “educational activity that [was] mediated by standardized written materials in vai” (1981a, p. 238). figure 1: fragment of a representative “rascal man” narrative in vai: “one man live to take a walk to go to some place. he go and catch one big town. all the people join for play.” (courtesy of dennis j. stallings; used with permission.) 3. literacy without schooling? why is a study focusing on a set of literacies so restricted and foreign to modern contexts so influential? one answer is that despite its “restricted” and “superfluous” nature, vai literacy presents cole and scribner with what they see as a remarkable exception –a type of “literacy without schooling” (as they put it in the title of a 1978 article). rather than the literacy of colonialist history (i.e., english) or of an “imported” monotheism (i.e., arabic; see: scribner, 1984), vai is an indigenous, vernacular script –although it likely did not arise sui generis, as scribner and cole claim (e.g., see: tuchscherer, 2002). facility in reading and writing in vai is also acquired in ways that themselves appear indigenous and colloquial. “becoming literate in vai script,” in contrast to schooled literacy, “is not child’s play,” the authors warn; “it is generally reserved for young men in their late teens and twenties” (1981a, p. 65). it occurs seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 76 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 through informal and non-hierarchical arrangements, in a manner that reminiscent of a kind of apprenticeship: transmission of the vai script occurred in such a way as not to transform the social relationships among individuals into a formal teacher-learner relationship. a definite accent lies on the teacher and pupil living and working together. one informant reported, for example, that he began to learn when he went to work at a sawmill… where a fellow sawyer was able to read and write vai script. (1981a, p. 65-66) iii via is taught and learned, it appears, in a manner embedded in everyday life, situated in an authentic, inherently meaningful context, rather than in the artificiality of the classroom, its rules and instructions. scribner and cole do not go so far as to recommend, as does gee, that english textual literacy could or should also be taught through such popular and informal “cultural processes” (2004, p. 108). however, they do ask why “institutionalized learning programs have thus far failed to tap the wide range of ‘indigenous’ interests and practices which confer significance on writing.” they then emphasize that “ethnographic studies of writing in different communities and social contexts –in religious, political and fraternal groups might help broaden existing perspectives” (1981a, p. 69). this conclusion or recommendation can be read as effectively anticipating and framing decades of new and multiliteracy studies that followed. the one difference from scribner and cole’s recommendation and what has followed in new literacy studies is that “writing” and “religious, political and fraternal groups” is interpreted in the most figurative and generalized terms imaginable. vernacular or quasi-“indigenous” examples for investigation now include contexts and communities associated with computer games, mobile apps, online fan fiction, and these studies invoke a panoply of “literacies” well beyond simply reading and writing. finally, cole and scribner underscore the degree to which the indigeneous “interests and practices” they studied differ from those of schooled literacy: our research highlights the fact that the kind of writing that goes on in school has a very special status. it generates products that meet teacher demands and academic requirements but may not fulfill any other immediate instrumental ends. is this an unavoidable feature of writing instruction? (1981a, p. 135) despite the anthropological principle of cultural relativity, there is a decidedly negative caste to phrases such as “formal… teacher demands,” abstract “academic requirements,” schooling as “child’s play,” and its removal from “any… immediate instrumental ends:” are these and other limitations of traditional textual literacy simply just “unavoidable feature[s] of writing instruction?” 4. “non-restricted literacy:” a comparative alternative matters of relativity and negativity aside, this paper now presents its own attempt to answer scribner and cole’s provocative question, which can be rephrased as: “are the characteristics of formal writing instruction indeed inseparable from textual literacy?” to answer this question, this paper considers a body of evidence that translation and digitization efforts have only very recently made available for consideration. this evidence is found in the form of a literate culture that died out well before currently hegemonic western archetypes for education and schooling emerged (starting in classical greece). this culture or example is also quite alien from hegemonic and colonialist models seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 77 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 in terms of the technology and materiality of the literary artifacts and processes involved. “literacy and schooling,” to use cole and scribner’s terms, are not confounded in this culture because it predates by millennia the appearance of these concepts as modern social constructs. the literacies reproduced in this culture, moreover, are not as highly “restricted” as those of the vai. they were indispensable, rather than superfluous, to full cultural, social and economic participation. in further contradistinction from vai, the literacy instruction in this culture was clearly connected with a body of public texts –including texts serving expressive, poetic, and analytic purposes. christine proust, one of the few educational researchers to study instruction in this culture, notes that it is precisely because of the simultaneous cultural importance and alien materiality of this ancient writing that we now have such a richly detailed record of it. speaking perhaps anachronistically of “curricula” and “education,” she remarks that “no other educational system of the past is as well documented” (2011, p. 162). proust continues, it is mainly the production of students that has been preserved [in the form of] clay tablets written …during the first stage of their education (or ‘elementary level’). …these tablets were discovered in many archaeological sites, over a large geographical area, including present-day iraq, iran, and syria. on these tablets, young scribes wrote out exercises for learning cuneiform writing, sumerian vocabulary and grammar, numbers, measures, and calculations. (2011, p. 162) this material evidence comes from ancient sumer or mesopotamia, particularly at the south-eastern tip of the fertile crescent, from about 2000 bce.iv these tablets were inscribed with a blunt reed, calame or stylus, creating triangular or cuni (latin for triangle) forms in the hardening clay. the writing system constructed from these forms consisted of about 500 symbols in total. like the writing system of the vai, most (but not all) of these symbols stood for syllables (rather than for atomistic phonemes, as is the case for phonetic alphabets). it is among the earliest (if not the first) functionally differentiated writing system in human history. this form of inscription was used largely for accounting, trade, and legal and administrative purposes, which represented specializations central to sumerian society. it also was associated with a substantial written cultural heritage. the code of hammurabi, an extensive set of laws, was written and disseminated in cuneiform, as was the epic of gilgamesh, one of the earliest recorded poetic sagas. it is from this documentation that it is possible to understand aspects of “cuneiform culture” that flourished millennia ago. the account presented here thus differs from that of scribner and cole in that it does not utilize observations and descriptions of practices brought from the field, but those reported, digitized and deduced on the basis of documented material evidence. as the name suggests, the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent were based on agriculture. cultivation, irrigation and animal husbandry were central, accompanied by a wide range of other activities, from weaving through copper-smithing to masonry. as in many other eras and societies, learning these practices or trades did not require any explicit schooling or formal education; ancient sumer, like 20th century liberia, had no polytechnics or trade schools.v as the studies of lave & wenger (1991) and others (e.g., rogoff & lave 1984) also confirm, what we today call “trades” were learned in ancient sumer through apprenticeship or “on the job training;” through observation and participation, with such “workplace” learning starting at a relatively young age. however, to learn writing, some children (mostly boys) were sequestered for years from the realm of productive labor–at considerable cost to sumerian society.vi they were sent by their parents to a special place: a location where seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 78 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 they were joined by others also learning to become scribes, and where they were overseen by one or more scribal masters. moreover, these were places in which writing material (clay), implements for inscription and examples (collections of texts and lists) were all available in quantity. in some cases, the walls of these rooms were covered with cuneiform tablets, which were also used as building materials. in fact, these places were often known in sumerian as edubba or “tablet houses,” and students were at times called their “sons.” here is an early description of such a tablet house, made by one of their first discoverers, archaeologist hermann hilprecht in 1903: the character of the northeast wing as a combined library and school was determined immediately after an examination of the contents of the unearthed tablets and fragments. there is [such] a large number of rudely fashioned specimens inscribed in such a naive and clumsy manner with old-babylonian characters, that it seems impossible to regard them as anything else but the first awkward attempts at writing by unskilled hands,--so-called school exercises. those who attended a class … [received] instruction not only in inscribing and reading cuneiform tablets, but also in shaping them properly, for not a few of the round and rectangular tablets were uninscribed. (1903, pp. 524–25) like proust, hilprecht’s use of terms like “school” or education system are clearly anachronistic, indicating a presentist projection of contemporary commonplaces onto otherwise alien historical data. despite this fact, the physicality of “the first awkward attempts at writing by unskilled hands” combined with the sheer number of surviving tablets recording these practices has led many researchers to confirm hilprecht’s initial deductions concerning instruction, reading and inscription: he had uncovered evidence of work that is part of a formalized sequence of instruction, and that is in this sense not unlike the first printing exercises of school children. figure 2: teacher’s model with the beginning of a traditional list of signs and sign combinations, to be copied to the right by a pupil… large signs enable the pupil to exercise minutely every detail of the sign. (8 x 9 cm; veldhuis 1997; used with permission) seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 79 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 more extensive sequences of instruction –what we today would refer to as a “curriculum”– are also quite well documented. speaking of what is known among archaeologists as the “nippur curriculum,” eleanor robson explains: in the first phase students concentrated on learning how to write the basic wedges that comprise cuneiform script... a vertical, horizontal, and diagonal wedge... repeated; the sign a repeated; the list of akkadian symbols now called syllabary a... a similar text known as syllabary b ... [and finally,] a list of deities. (2011, p. 563) instructional work, as this account suggests, began with methods of refining motor skills needed for accurate, legible inscription. these physical exercises, as robson explains, were followed by composing and copying individual and rhyming groups of syllables and words and names. in some cases, the “teacher” would render the letter forms on the tablet for the young student to copy, as illustrated in figure 2 (veldhuis, 1997, 41-42). among the next steps in the program of writing instruction, one which was standardized across a number of sumerian centers (tinney, 1998), were the inscription of words of greater complexity, including short or long extracts from …exercises …written out on large, square, multicolumn tablets, often combined with brief passages from ad hoc and “non-canonical” lists –for instance metrology [weights and measures], personal names, place names, professional designations, lexical lists – and/or literary works, proverbs, and administrative formulae… in the second phase long, single-column tablets were preferred... students continued to copy syllabaries... plus short excerpts from incantations, hymns, literary works, and more complex lexical lists, with up to four different compositions on a single tablet. (robson, 2011, p. 563) one technique used to facilitate these more advanced writing exercises appears to have been recitation or dictation. the practice of pronouncing words aloud, to then have learners reproduce them in written form, has been commonplace in western and other instructional traditions for centuries (hoetker & ahlbrand 1969; hirschler, 2013). evidence of this in ancient sumer takes the form of tablets that are otherwise identical except for varying spellings of homophones (tinney, 1998, p. 49). this further implies a kind of “frontal instruction,” a familiar instructional scenario in which a leader will face those facing and lead them in a common activity. another artifact of elementary instructional practice from ancient mesopotamia is provided in figure 3. it is a multiplication list or table about half the size the previous example, using the sumerian base-60 numerical system containing an obvious error in calculation. viewed as a scribal exercise, it illustrates a clear shift in instructional emphasis from rudimentary motor skills to much finer work, and more abstract cognitive abilities. correspondingly, the task here is one of mathematical reasoning and a (partially mnemonic) knowledge of mathematical relations.vii the calculations run the equivalent of 40 x 1 to 40 x 19, with the one error translatable as 40 x 14 = 550 (israel museum 2012, n.p.). seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 80 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 figure 3: multiplication clay multiplication table inscribed with cuneiform. babylonia (iraq), 2nd millennium bce. photo by author. although the historical contexts for these practices could not be more different, it is impossible to ignore the remarkable similarities linking the material artifacts and practices of sumerian instruction with modern, western schooling in handwriting and elementary mathematics. instruction in writing or printing in modern english-language schools (or what is called “manuscript”) begins with the drawing of signs and elements, lines, circles and curved marks (one contemporary commercial product for teaching handwriting is called “loops and other groups”). teachers may begin “first of all [with uppercase] letters using straight lines (e.g., l, t, h), then letters using curved lines (e.g., c, o, u), and finally those using oblique lines (e.g., k, n, m)” (asher, 2006, p. 466). lower case letters soon follow, with careful attention to the types of shapes combined in these characters. like their sumerian forebears some 40 centuries earlier, children learning writing today are introduced to variations on individual characters, using special wide-ruled paper to develop finer motor skills. in this context, “lists of signs” and “names” have also long been important, as one classic manual on handwriting instruction in elementary schools explains: early [student] writing may be centered about instances as the following[:] 1. their names 2. telephone numbers, dates 3. labels and captions for charts and pictures 4. calendars 5. records, such as temperature charts or records. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 81 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 as the children develop in handwriting skill, the teacher enlarges his role to facilitate further growth in helping pupils write their own announcements, notices to be sent home, or simple stories. (burns, 1968, p. 21) the one clear difference in modern day writing instruction, however, is the introduction of the student’s own purposes and compositions as soon and as frequently possible in writing exercises. while proust notes “the emergence of an ideology that legitimates the schools and the stratum of erudite scribes in the sumerian context” (p. 161) in the culture of today’s schools, students are cast neither as scribes nor copyists, but as authors of independent creations. however, from the standpoint of the pragmatics of technique and materials of instruction, the parallels between today’s writing instruction and those in ancient sumer seem more striking than the differences. 5. implications: non-restricted literacies and arbitrary meanings the circumstances of sumerian scribal instruction together provide a rather different example of an “indigenous” literacy than that described by scribner and cole. in the sumerian example, with a relatively “non-restricted literacy” and writing systems and practices indisputably sui generis (vis a vis western models) literacy instruction began early in life, and continued through many successive steps. in this context, what can be called “school” –an isolated and artificial environment for structured activity also isolated from immediate application– does not appear as a confounding variable. instead, it seems to constitute a necessary precondition –one that has arisen independently in civilizations across millennia (e.g.; mayan ca,. 300 bce; chinese, ca 1500 bce)– enabling a socially indispensable, multi-functional and multidimensional set of abilities to be reproduced over generations. it is worth considering still further implications. already the initial motor exercises (figure 2) forcefully bring to mind cole and scribner’s undesirable “products that meet teacher demands and academic requirements but [that] may not fulfill any other immediate instrumental ends.” what justifies exercises in inscribing lines, circles, triangular forms and other letter parts is not any immediate and practical payoff, but the fact that these isolated skills are a prerequisite to more complex tasks. the acquisition of knowledge and ability in these early stages is legitimated in terms of the nature of later stages, such as the much smaller and more intricate multiplication table (figure 3). this last illustration further suggests that this “indigeneous” literacy effort imposes the highest standards for orthography and for mastery of other conventions and rules, including those of measurement and mathematics. finally, this example of literacy is explicitly and multiply normative, from orthography (following teachers’ examples) through conformity to a teacher’s dictation, to accurate rendition of classical texts (an important skill when textual reproduction occurred only manually). further instructional characteristics become apparent, finally, by simply considering the implications of the abstract work recorded in the multiplication table (figure 3). the two sides of the tablet together represent a kind of twodimensional field in which the shape of the symbol in each position is determined not only through linear sequence, but also in relationship to those below and above. one could go so far as to say that the symbols inscribed in the table form an intricately structured symbolic or semiotic network. knowledge, or the values and interrelationships of each symbol, in these examples are not situated indexically, in relation to a context in the “outside world,” but in relation to other symbols and values arranged on the same tablet, whose significance is rather arbitrary. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 82 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 curriculum, dictation, alphabets, exercises, multiplication tables, instructor or teacher examples, frontal instruction, and specialized writing equipment: the material and practical analogues connecting elementary writing instruction today with the practices of ancient sumer form quite a long list. and the ways that these relatively non-restricted “multiliteracies” (i.e., reading, writing and mathematics) were learned and taught 4000 years ago lead to a rather different set of conclusions about literacies and their acquisition foundational to new and multimodal literacy scholarship. what does such an uncanny correspondence of independent instances across millennia say about human learning, literacy and related instructional techniques? it first, it suggests that there is an efficacy, and systematicity and mutualreinforcing interdependency of at least some of the techniques and practices associated with institutional instruction and practice. learning how to write in the context of a relatively “non-restricted” literacy seems to require a long list of steps that have meaning only in the light of later steps. any one set of these steps, beginning with the individual strokes of a pencil or stylus, can be readily extended and linked with further stages and skills to form a relatively long sequence or curriculum. these steps would extend from the rendition of words and phrases through multiplication tables to other highly structured forms and compositions, for example, epic poetry or astronomical data. this further suggests that writing instruction and ability is not just a matter of situated practice, of legitimate peripheral participation or of apprenticeship in ongoing and routine scribal work. the presence of what have been called curricula, of sequences of practices, with any one practice justified in terms of the next – rather than in terms of immediate student gratification– further implies the existence of didactics or instruction as a specialized knowledge, particular to a single social role or function. the parallels between ancient sumer and modern schooling thus suggest that there may be “philosophical anthropological” reasons for many arrangements of what we call school, reasons that arise simply as a result of “the shared circumstances of being-human” (de lara & taylor, 1998, p. 110). ranging from the hierarchy of teacher and student to the linearity of curriculum, these parallels also heighten the surmise that such arrangements are necessitated by the nature of writing itself. one particularly important characteristic of writing – whose implications are generally ignored or obfuscated in studies of new and multimodal literacies– is the arbitrary and self-referential nature of the writing systems and signs themselves. the opacity (to most readers) of both the cuneiform and vai scripts in the figures provided above, for example, is the result of at least two manifest layers of arbitrary complexity: the first is the relation between the characters and the sounds they encode (since both are syllabaries). the second is the relation between combined sounds and their practical meaning (e.g., what is the sound combination for “twenty” in sumerian or “rascal” in vai?). further layers include rules and conventions of counting and multiplication, as well as of social action and narrative. of course, for those with a knowledge of ancient sumerian or vai languages and cultures, much or all of this opacity disappears. it goes without saying that this is reciprocal; our own writing would also appear opaque to similarly untrained eyes. ferdinand de saussure, the father of semiotics and modern linguistics, used the term “unmotivated” to describe this characteristic of textual symbol systems. this is the exact opposite of gunther kress’ characterizations of the production of semiotic resources offered above. it is consequently with a related analysis of kress’ position that the concluding section of this paper begins. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 83 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 6. conclusion: meaning, arbitrariness and educational normativity kress convincingly maintains that the words “arbitrary” and “unmotivated” do not characterize the way that meaning is experienced for a young child (e.g., kress, 1998), whether the child is watching video, interacting with a tablet or smartphone, or involved in an imaginary game. this point is supported by the fact that what happens in these cases is not primarily symbolic in nature (although there might be symbols present). things seen and touched in these instances either physically resemble what they stand for (e.g. an animated cartoon bear or a stuffed toy version), or they gain their meaning through a kind of correlation (the pictorial “angry birds” icon accesses the game). this is how these media and associated visual and interactive literacies operate (whether the user is a literate adult or a young child). other meanings experienced by the young child, for example in imitative and imaginative play, are similarly motivated or “non-arbitrary.” the convincing assertion that these kinds of self-expressions “are, literally, full of meaning,” is a key part of kress’ understanding of semiosis among the very young: with that disposition… [young children then] come to writing, which has, to the learner, all the aspects of a system of arbitrarily constructed signs. this is at odds with their own sense of what signs are and how they work…. writing initially presents itself as (and indeed is at one level) a system of signs of arbitrary construction. given that children come to this stage as makers of motivated signs, this is incomprehensible. (1998, p. 225) in saying that writing presents itself to the child as a system of arbitrary construction, kress makes a key point. to learn reading and writing is to follow a veritable labyrinth through multiple layers of such arbitrary artifice. kress continues: “the engagement with (or imposition of) literacy is not neutral or innocent… it is not, nor could it be, a domain of free experimentation for the child:” the fact that the accretions of conventions in the system of writing over three millennia or more make it impossible to be “successful” by treating it as a system of motivated signs until the user of this semiotic system is fully within it. (kress, 1998, p. 246) kress appears to be saying that in grappling with textual literacy, children are taking on nothing less than the accumulation of arbitrary conventions that constitute the vast legacy of a textual culture –from the sound of a given letter and its position in the alphabet to its shades of meaning it can produce different words or sentences. these conventions are accumulated in written documentation, dictionaries, grammars, advertising, literary texts, as well as in tools for writing and analysis –from the alphabet and qwerty keyboard through multiplication and periodic tables to more ambiguous and multidimensional logical configurations and representations. the task, moreover, of inducting students into the accumulated layers of symbolic convention, of helping them become immersed in this semiotic system, is in one sense the task of schooling. as shown above, it involves work that by its very nature is abstract, academic and removed from immediate instrumentality or gratification. only when such an immersion occurs with some degree of success do these compounded symbolic conventions, as kress seems to suggest, become more manifestly meaningful and useful. however this is not where kress’s reasoning (and that of others in new literacy studies) ends up. instead, as indicated earlier, kress insists that the meaning of written symbols ultimately rests with their producer or author. for kress, and as quoted above, “signs are always motivated,” by the producer’s seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 84 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 ‘interest,’” meaning that they are “never arbitrary.” on this basis, and in the ellipses in the passages quoted just above, kress is actually defending the argument that “linguists, educators, and parents” all cling to a broadly saussurean belief that the arbitrariness of signs is a reality for both readers and writers (1998, p. 246). the widespread failure to recognize this, kress implies, unnecessarily makes the entire enterprise of literacy more difficult and imposing for the naturally expressive child than it needs to be. how is it that someone like kress can seem to so effectively explain the arduous instruction and learning involved in textual literacy, yet improbably insist that it is those guiding it –linguists, educators and parents– who make it so difficult? how is it, moreover, that kress and others in the new london group (e.g., cope & kalantzis, 2012) can generally acknowledge the arbitrary complexity of symbols, yet ignore the instructional implications that reasonably follow? an answer to these questions can perhaps be found in the ways that the methods of both semiotics and anthropology are applied by kress, gee and others. kress’ semiotics, in which producers’ “interests” or “intentions” predominate over those of the reader, seems to derive its principles from the productions of the youngest authors and producers. (a touchstone example repeated in his work is a drawing produced and identified as a car by his 3.5 year-old son.) looking later in a child’s development would doubtlessly configure the interests of authors and readers differently. for it is a reader’s or rather, a teacher’s interests that are obviously in evidence in the rule-bound formulation of a multiplication table or a grammatical exercise. a similar problem seems to arise from the ethnographic, anthropological research that underpins new literacy studies. often going back to field observation of remote cultures, these methods tend to have as their unit of analysis not the significance of inscribed documents or artifacts, but the overt and observable practices and forms of participation in which such documents might be embedded or buried. from this anthropological perspective, phenomena of textual communication or “immersion in semiotic systems” is obscured if not rendered invisible. at most, textual productions appear in this research as inflexible but mysteriously important artifacts (e.g., latour and woolgar, 1979), or as “reifications” or lapidary codifications of otherwise living, breathing cultural enactments (e.g., wegner, 1989, pp. 57–62). clifford geertz famously explains that in ethnographic thick description, artifacts like texts acquire “their meaning” only “from the role they play …in an ongoing pattern of life, [and] not from any intrinsic relationships they bear to one another” (1973, p. 43). for many established forms of writing, however, the intrinsic relationships that textual artifacts have to one another are indispensable. whether they take the form of page sequences, intratextual references, or forms of derivation, influence or intertextuality, such relationships are constitutive of meaning and interpretation rather than incidental or superfluous to them. symbolic representations, reading and writing, particularly at more advanced points in the curriculum, find their function and justification in an elevation of thinking above immediate, indexical situations. this is one meaning of the key educational phrase “knowledge transfer,” and it is concretely reflected in curricula and readings standardized and generalized across space and time, whether in the global west or in ancient sumer. not only can a system of symbols form a semantically or logically charged set of references in itself, as illustrated in a multiplication table, but in a society dependent on literacy, action or effects across space and time (rather than those indexically situated) are the raison d’etre of writing and documentation. indeed, when described this way, such communication sounds rather like the “metalanguage” that the new london group hoped to develop but never delivered –one that would transform and transcend the specificity of a given situated practice. its failure to emerge may simply be due to the fact that it was always already there –in the writing of group members and their many acolytes. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 85 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 my point in making these arguments of course is not to deny the multiplicity of modes –visual, symbolic or otherwise– that belong to all forms of semiosis, nor is it to assert the de facto legitimacy of national or international regimes of standardized testing. i also do not deny the importance of motivated expression in learning. the value of textual literacies highlighted here is also obviously not an absolute or monolithic one; it is relative to pragmatics of teaching, learning and everyday work. as stephens notes in an earlier examination of new literacy studies, the point instead is as follows: that the written form of a standard language has a special role in education; that schooling has a special role in the induction of children into this written dialect; and also that children bring to school language capacities which must be recognised and built upon, if the induction into the standard written form of the language which is a passport to educational and economic success, and international communication, is to be successfully accomplished. (2000, p. 21; see also maccabe, 1998) educational goals and purposes are profoundly different from the relativist, descriptive and participatory orientations of semiotics, anthropology and ethnography, and thus from the many new literacy studies relying on these methods. describing and decoding a child’s expressive creations is likely less politically and pragmatically challenging than inducting that child into a prescriptive textuality, for example, of international english. kress is absolutely correct in pointing out that this or any related type of inculcation is neither an innocent nor neutral act. but there comes a point where a student’s “indigeneous,” vernacular practices, so helpfully illuminated and celebrated in studies in the new literacies need to be seen outside of anthropological relativism and neutrality. a curriculum –whether in nippur or new york-is not a description of development, it is a prescription for it; and this is the difference that separates a relativist study of inscriptive and expressive practices from the practical realities of education. the one will be of limited value to the other until this separation is recognized and bridged. references asher, a. (2006). “handwriting instruction in elementary schools.” the american journal of occupational therapy, 60(4), 461–471. boas, f. (1940). race, language, and culture. chicago: university of chicago press. botha, p. (2004). cognition, orality-literacy, and approaches to first-century writings. in j.a.draper (ed.) orality, literacy, and colonialism in antiquity,(pp.3763). atlanta: society of biblical literature. burns, c. (1968). improving handwriting in elementary schools 2nd ed. minneapolis: burgess publishing. cole, m., gay, j., glick, j. & sharp, d. (1971). the cultural context of learning and thinking: an exploration in experimental anthropology. new york: basic books. cuban, l. (2011). “the durability of teacher lecturing and questioning: historical inertia or creative adaptation?” blog posting retrieved from: http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-durability-of-teacherlecturing-and-questioning-historical-inertia-or-creative-adaptation/ de lara, p. & taylor, c. (1998). from philosophical anthropology to the politics of recognition: an interview with charles taylor. thesis eleven, 52(1), 103–112. kalantzis, m. & cope, b. (2012). literacies. cambridge: cambridge up. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 86 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-durability-of-teacher-lecturing-and-questioning-historical-inertia-or-creative-adaptation/ http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-durability-of-teacher-lecturing-and-questioning-historical-inertia-or-creative-adaptation/ gee, j. p. (2002). a sociocultural perspective on early literacy development. in s.b.neuman & d.k. dickinson (eds.) .handbook of early literacy research, volume 1. (pp.30-42). new york: guilford press. gee, j.p. (2004). situated language and learning: a critique of traditional schooling. london: routledge. geertz, c. (1973). “thick description: toward an interpretative theory of culture. in c geertz: the interpretation of cultures, (pp.3-31). new york: basic books. goody, j. & watt, i. (1963). “the consequences of literacy.” comparative studies in society and history, 5(3), 304–345. hilprecht, h. (1903). the excavations in assyria and babylonia. philadelphia: department of archaeology of the university of pennsylvania. hirschler, k. (2013). the written word in the medieval arabic lands: a social and cultural history of reading practices. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. hoetker j. & ahlbrand, w. (1969). “the persistence of the recitation.” american educational research journal, 6(2), 145–167 israel museum. jerusalem. visited may, 2012. kress, g. (1992). “against arbitrariness: the social production of the sign as a foundational issue in critical discourse analysis.” discourse and society, 4 (2), 169– 191. kress, g. (1998). “writing and learning to write.” in d.olson & n.torrance (eds.): the handbook of education and human development, (pp.225-256). oxford: blackwell. latour, b. & woolgar, s. (1979). laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. princeton: princeton up. lave, j. & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press maccabe, c. (1998). a response to brian street. english in education, 32(1), 26–28. proust, c. (2012). “master’s writings and student’s writings: school material in mesopotamia. in g. gueudet, b.pepin & l. trouche (eds.) from text to 'lived' resources: mathematics curriculum materials and teacher, (pp. 161-179). new york: springer. robson, e. (2011). the production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge. in k. radner & e.robson (eds.) the oxford handbook of cuneiform culture (pp. 557576). new york: oxford university press. rogoff, b. & lave, j. (1984). everyday cognition: its development in social context. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. scribner, s. (1984). “literacy in three metaphors.” american journal of education, 93(1): 6–21. scribner, s. & cole, m. (1978). “literacy without schooling: testing for intellectual effects.” harvard educational review, 48(4), 448–461. scribner, s. & cole, m. (1981a). the psychology of literacy. cambridge ma: harvard university press. scribner, s. & cole, m. (1981b). “unpackaging literacy.” in n.f. whiteman (ed.) writing. the nature, development and teaching of written communication, (pp.788). hillsdale, nj: lawrence erlbaum. seely brown, j.s., collins, a. & duguid, p. (1989). “situated cognition and the culture of learning.” educational researcher, 18 (1), 33–42. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 87 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 stephens, k. (2000). a critical discussion of the “new literacy studies.” british journal of educational studies, 48(1), 10–23 the new london group. (1996). “a pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures.” harvard educational review, 66 (1): 60–92. tinney, s. (1998). “texts, tablets, and teaching scribal education in nippur and ur.” expedition, 40 (2), 40–50 tuchscherer, k. &hair, p.e.h.(2002). “cherokee and west africa: examining the origins of the vai script.” history in africa, 29, 427–486. veldhuis, n.c. (1997). elementary education at nippur. the lists of trees and wooden objects. doctoral thesis. rijksuniversiteit groningen. available at: http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts/1997/n.c.veldhuis/ wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. endnotes i in new london group statement of general principles, “situated practice” is identified as one of four components of a recommended pedagogy. it is described as “draw[ing] on the experience of meaning-making in lifeworlds, the public realm, and workplaces” (p. 65, 1996). ii since 2008, the orthography of the vai syllabary has been “standardized” as a part of the iso unicode standard. iii of course, the nature of a writing system will significantly influence the way in which competency in its use is achieved. the korean hangul alphabet, for example, can be learned informally in less than a day, whereas competence in chinese writing requires years of formal education. iv other, less well documented examples of schooling practices could be studied in china circa 1000 bce, in islam circa 800 ce, and in israel and babylonia in the final centuries bce. v liberia’s only polytechnic, “stella maris” in monrovia, graduated its first class in 1999. vi proust (2012) explains: “we don’t know how old the students were at the beginning of their scribal education. they were old enough to be able to manipulate clay and “calame” (the cane the scribes used to impress signs on wet clay), but still in the charge of their parents. moreover, the age of the students could have changed according to the place and the period” (p. 162). vii for a more detailed consideration of sumerian mathematical, geometric and related “problem texts,” see: friberg, j. (2007). a remarkable collection of babylonian mathematical texts manuscripts in the schøyen collection cuneiform texts i. new york: springer. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 88 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts/1997/n.c.veldhuis/ http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/faculties/arts/1997/n.c.veldhuis/ old literacies and the “new” literacy studies: revisiting reading and writing norm friesen ph.d. abstract 1. new and multi-literacies 2. experimental anthropology: a study of “restricted literacies” 3. literacy without schooling? 4. “non-restricted literacy:” a comparative alternative 5. implications: non-restricted literacies and arbitrary meanings 6. conclusion: meaning, arbitrariness and educational normativity references title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. gamification of learning and teaching in schools – a critical stance marc fabian buck faculty of education and arts, nord university, universitetsalléen 11, 8026 bodø, norway email: marc.f.buck@nord.no abstract the ongoing transformation of learning and teaching is one facet of the progressing digitalization of all aspects of life. gamification’s aim is to change learning for the better by making use of the motivating effects of (digital) games and elements typical of games, like experience points, levelling, quests, rankings etc. especially in the light of the success of pokémon go, multiple actors call for gamification of learning and teaching in schools as means for motivating students. from the perspective i introduce in this paper, gamification shows itself as reversion from serious pedagogical and didactical endeavours. this threatens to lead to the replacement of teaching by gamification and the (self) degradation of teachers to support personnel. in this paper, i argue that gamified learning and teaching suspends the fundamental, subversive, and critical moments only schools can offer. furthermore, it can lead to subjugation and isolation of students due to its inherent closed and enclosing structure. i further show how the line of argumentation of gamification advocates iterates that of progressive education. keywords: digitalization, gamification, games, pokémon go, teaching, critical theory, horkheimer, arendt, biesta, langeveld. “[the game] leads us away from an actual situation, from the captivity of a besetting and oppressive situation, offers an imaginative satisfaction in passing through possibilities which remain without the anguish of true choice.” 1 – eugen fink: “oasis of happiness” (1957, p. 38) schools and teaching appear to be inundated with technology and moving toward digitalization. the latest call for alteration of schools and their practices is that of gamification. by making use of the motivating effects of (almost exclusively digital) games, its ambitious promise is nothing short of a liberation of learning and teaching. (cf. richter, raban & rafaeli 2014) if we look at gamification with the help of theory and philosophy of education, this unbridled enthusiasm does not hold. it becomes evident that this development puts the foundations of both schools as institutions and teaching as profession at risk. at the same time, there is an argumentative kinship mailto:marc.f.buck@nord.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 36 between this approach and progressive education advocates. what began as a hopeful game changer for the strenuous practices of learning and teaching emerges as partly contra-pedagogical by actively contributing to the systematic reduction of teaching as tactful practice and schools as places that are more than places to learn – that is, places of social interaction and possibly bildung. in the following, i will explicate my critical theses in three steps. firstly, i will (1) explain how game logic and consequently gamification can be grasped from a dedicated pedagogical perspective. secondly, i will contrastingly (2) delineate this from school logic and key specifics of teaching within schools. finally (3) i will demonstrate the recurrence of progressive educational patterns of argumentation in the form of gamification. 2 game logic and gamification the suffix -fication indicates that something is in the state of undergoing transformation to whatever precedes the suffix. thus, gamification is the reshaping of something, in this case teaching, into a logic of play. according to friedrich fröbel (and followers of the gamification approach), play is a serious practice for both children and adults; the famous quote “play is not child’s play” 3, attributed to him, underlines this (it seems noteworthy that both game and play are spiel in german) (cf. berger 2000). in contrast to work, playing should motivate and cause fun; accordingly, everything has to become play–this is the tenor of those supporting a gamification of teaching (cf. kapp 2012, p. 9; sheldon 2012, p. xvi; fitzek 2014, p. 275). however, this is not a new thought. in his 22nd letter on the aesthetic education of man, friedrich schiller argued in a similar way: “the most serious matters have to be approached in such a way that we retain the ability to instantaneously confuse them with the easiest game”4 (schiller 1795, p. 95). in addition, the basic pattern of gamification itself is not a new phenomenon (cf. fuchs 2014), it has already experienced tremendous acknowledgement in schools in the light of the digitalization of society and its institutions. this is further facilitated by reform efforts promoted by public debate that primarily associates education with the concept of learning and reduces it to this very function, ignoring metaand para-learning activities and related, but different modes of interaction with the world. as malte brinkmann puts it concisely: “playful practice and playful learning are fashionable terms of the recent learning discourse” 5 (brinkmann 2012, p. 20). different domains, aspects of life, or basic practices of human existence and coexistence (cf. fink 1995) should thereby be reshaped following a logic that originates from play. according to mathias fuchs, “gamification [is] the permeation of our society with metaphors, methods, values and attributes seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 37 stemming from the world of games” 6 (fuchs 2013, now 2014, p. 120). in immediate relation to that, motivational psychology aims at influencing human behaviour and action through gamification with the goal of voluntary and permanent acceptance of heteronomous rules of games. from a critical perspective, this can be seen as an act of subordination under a set of rules that can only be controlled indirectly by teachers, who—traditionally—are responsible for pedagogical actions such as learning and thus are the last instances controlling the school framework in which learning, bildung and social interaction takes place. embracing gamification means introducing an intermediary that separates pupils from teachers’ ability to ensure a reflected education, guarded by personal experience, expertise and curricula. moreover, a problematic act of manipulation becomes apparent when games are used to merely influence students instead of as encouragement to critical reflection. this replacement of evident pedagogical interaction with nondescript influence is currently discussed as the concept of nudging. (cf. sunstein/thaler 2008; sunstein 2014, 2015) 7 play, according to eugen fink, is, next to work, love, death, battle/rule and education, a basic phenomenon of human coexistence, which distinguishes itself from all other phenomena because its final aim is not the ultimate objective of humankind or death, but rather lies within itself. (cf. fink 1957, p. 23) in addition, johan huizinga describes play as a steady cultural phenomenon found in various areas of society. he even regards play as the source of many cultural practices. in “homo ludens” (1938), huizinga describes five defining attributes of play, which in the interplay distinguish play from all other modes of living: “[p]lay is a voluntary activity or occupation, executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself, and is accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’.” (huizinga 1949, p. 28)8 in this sense, the logic of play is fundamentally non-pedagogical—as it is fundamentally non-political and non-sexual, even when used in these contexts. pedagogical acts, institutions, and organisations do not primarily rely on excitement, joy and voluntariness, nor do they carry their goal within themselves. pedagogical acts are rather “impositions” (reichenbach 2000) on the youth, and in the context of lifelong learning, of course, on adults as well. 9 whether or not pedagogical acts should be more joyful than they currently are is a different question and can only be answered considering the individual situation and context. it is not the primary aim of pedagogical actions to facilitate fun, but to educate. education however is according to fink a basic phenomenon of human coexistence that cannot fully disperse itself from other practices yet is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 38 neither completely in line with them. within play, there may be structural attributes such as spatial and temporal borders and the orchestration of world 10 that resemble pedagogical practices. this resemblance or mimicry is probably the reason, why the introduction of game logic into classrooms works seamlessly. with regard to both aim and mode of orchestration, there is a fundamental difference between games and education, as i will show in the following. fink describes the world of play as one in whose conceptualisation “the player [conceals] himself as the creator of this ‘world’, loses oneself in this creation, plays a part and has game-worldly objects and gameworldly fellow men within this game-world.” 11 (fink 1957, p. 36) orchestration within the teaching setting, on the other hand, does not aim at diversion or savor within a given spatial order and temporal articulation. it rather relies on didactical orchestration and approaches as a means of achieving education, learning and bildung 12 (cf. brinkmann 2009; 2015, p. 52). gamification in general and serious games in particular are not clichéd processes, but rather general procedures aiming at transferring the logic and elements of play into pedagogical practices. this transposition typically follows some principles and rules, mainly: 13 virtual point systems and a linear accumulation of different (experience) points, currencies or tokens, 14 the visualisation of progress in the form of levels, hierarchically structured rankings of players, immediate or at least shortterm feedbacks about the game’s progression and one’s own performance, special rewards for completing tasks and levels in the form of badges and achievements (cf. marczewski 2015). so far the application of gamification has mostly taken place in corporate world for the purposes of motivating employees in (private) companies. in an interview with forbes magazine, adam penenberg states that more or less all of fortune’s 500 listed companies apply gamification in the form of internally used games, virtual cash systems, point and rank systems, and he suspects this trend to increase immensely in the future (cf. schwabel 2013). also german software house sap uses gamification in their company’s internal social network scn (cf. cetin 2013). furthermore, the public sphere is being gamified, e.g. by encouraging people to take the stairs instead of the escalator 15. transformations are taking place in which citizens and employees are transformed into players. gamification also seeps into pedagogical settings: it first took the leap to pedagogical settings in the form of language learning and apps such as duolingo or memrise. the idea of not merely learning isolated chunks of information on a specific subject (such as in the study of vocabulary, binomial formulae, irregular verbs or chemical elements and their qualities) but whole teaching units, and subsuming entire school subjects under the logic of play, has only been formulated distinctly a few years ago. lee sheldon’s 2011 book the multiplayer classroom and karl kapp’s the gamification of learning and instruction (2012) mark the beginning of a conversion of teaching. jane mcgonigal’s book reality is broken: why games make us better and how they can change the world, also published in 2011, plays another important role in this context, as it became the groundwork for manifold publications on the topic. the title is symptomatic of the self-assured and promised potential that is supposed to be released by gamification efforts. the claimed potential seems impressive considering the long-lasting experience and knowledge of how limited pedagogical efforts and teaching practices are in terms of probability/feasibility, not to speak of success. karl kapp states: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 39 “gamified learning can, and is, difficult, challenging, and stressful. welldesigned games help learners acquire skills, knowledge, and abilities in short, concentrated periods of time with high retention rates and effective recall. do not think of games for learning in the same way as you think of games for children. gamification is а serious approach to accelerating the experience curve of the learning, teaching complex subjects, and systems thinking.” (kapp 2012, p. 13) it seems there is nothing that could not be solved with gamification, at least concerning learning. at the same time, a market for designers and computer scientists emerges. it is now software engineers that are competent and responsible for offering tools or even organizing lesson units for teachers. nowadays a plenitude of easy to use software and apps is available, carrying names like classcraft, goalbook and class-dojo. these apps allow teachers to transfer any teaching material and content to online role playing and other types of games. in this way a proximity to the lifeworld of students is established, something which is not very common (or easily attainable) in traditional pedagogical settings. school logic and teaching the last mentioned argument shall serve for pointing out the contrast between play logic and school logic. a traditional attribute of school is that it deliberately does not mirror students’ lifeworld, but rather offers a semi-public sphere which lies between the known, the life-worldly, the parental, and the real society, and thereby marks an expansion of experience (cf. benner 2002) of its own kind. this goes back to at least plato’s academia. martinus langeveld skilfully illustrates this from a phenomenological perspective in his 1960 book school as path of the child. the consequences of a professional attitude that includes teaching about the world while simultaneously being apart from it means that the organisation of teaching is anything but trivial. such a vocational ethos does not only demand expertise and didactical skill but also experience and sensitivity or instinct, which can be summarized as “pedagogical tact” (herbart 1976; muth 1967; van manen 1991). for a long time school has been a place where adults—professional pedagogues—have tried to tactfully familiarize children with the world by making use of isolation from the rest of the world (σχολή; scholé). 16 here, hannah arendt’s understanding of legitimate authority comes into play. she defines authority as the act of taking responsibility for the fact that there already exists a world that is only new to those who have not experienced it enough yet due to their newness (cf. arendt 2006, p. 270). in her essay the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 40 crisis of education, arendt explicitly positions herself against progressive educational delusions of three kinds. the first one is that the world (not lifeworld!) of children is categorically different from that of adults. the second one is that it is only children that are able to detach themselves from the old world and replace it with a better world, thus improving humanity in general through school education. the third and last point of her critique is directed against the assumption that the skill of lecturing and teaching is substantially more important than the knowledge of the teaching matter (ibid. p. 262 ff.), pointing to the myth of a born teacher/pedagogue. the development a practice of a stance towards the world in the sense of arendt is therefore not one that argues from the perspective of the child, but one that dismisses such an affirmation and approximation as neglecting adults’ collective and individual responsibility and authority. another fundamental difference between school and games is the time structure. traditionally school has not been subject to an expectation of immediateness between action and reaction within learning environments, but rather aimed at an undefined point of realization of an educational or formational process. max horkheimer already criticised the loss of this quality in the 1950s: “the pattern of education has transformed into one of processing. processing—and this is where the difference is rooted—does not give the matter time; time is being reduced. time, however, equals love; the matter which i give time is the matter i give love; violence on the other hand is rapid.”17 (1952: 411) in the course of the above speech, addressing the university freshmen of 1952 in frankfurt, max horkheimer refuses to define education, but it becomes evident that he sees the dimensions of social criticism and scepticism of (rushed) technological advancement are the underpinnings of education and self-formation. the goal of education is supposed to be the slow but cautious and intensive “devotion to the matter” (ibid. p. 415). thereby, following and reconstructing ideas and concepts as process of bildung is crucial. this all happens without knowing the outcome or whether there is a right handling of an idea at all. education in this sense realizes itself in a radically anti-technical and anti-hegemonic way (cf. heydorn 1995, p. 137). such thinking repudiates a functionalistic approach (in the cycle of evaluation and management) within neo-liberal reform discussions on the grounds of the interrupted and fragmented character of education and self-formation, and the fact that those arrangements are only plannable to a certain degree (cf. pongratz 2009). this contingence in combination with the non-visibility of processes of learning and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 41 self-formation are, in fact, constitutive for school and teaching practices within schools. by assuming that education can be mapped in the form of experience points and levels one also assumes that education and bildung are either radically materialistic or blended into the same process. gert biesta calls this development learnification of schools (cf. biesta 2006), understood as mere accumulation of knowledge, disregarding every other dimension of bildung or social interaction. by making use of critical theory, this example shows that school is not merely to be seen in its function as the place of learning, but as a space for the risky evocation of educational moments, that might only be fully actualized outside of school’s temporal and spatial bounds. the loose couple between school and society as well as schools’ structure and habituated practices, such as teaching, are the foremost requirements for such possible evocations. summing this perspective up, there are five characteristics of school logic that stand in radical opposition to play logic and therefore do not allow a transformation from teaching to play in regard to authority (arendt) and bildung (horkheimer). (1) the indirect conjunction to lifeworld that allows school to introduce the unknown. (2) the purpose of schools, consisting of an approximation to the status quo of the world. (3) the temporal structure that can be described as principally open to the future (and thus anti-deterministic) and (4) a resulting (vague and paradoxical) definition of the goal of education, be it maturity, critical thinking or autonomy. (5) the final difference is the prerequisite of scholé and its facilitation of the orchestration of teaching as means of refraining from and rejecting the unabated affirmation of lifeworld. in the light of such a contrastive analysis, gamification does not seem to be a pedagogical instrument for conducting educational and teaching practices but quite contrarily a means of withdrawing from that. the dependency on “instant feedbacks” (schwabel 2013) as well as the advancing process of learnification (cf. biesta 2006; vlieghe 2016) in simulated sovereignty (cf. fink 1957, p. 38) form a diametric contrast to an interrupting, deferring and in its result contingent devotion to the subject matter in the mode of scholé and with the help of professional teachers and judgments. gamification as recurrence of progressive educational argumentation gamification as previously delineated can thus be understood as depedagogization of formerly pedagogical practices. it works along the lines of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 42 progressive educational argumentation structures, not only with regard to its function, but also with regard to the pattern of argumentation. i will unfold this thesis historically and exemplarily based on three aspects. gamification, like progressive education, (1) predominantly facilitates and demands activity instead of cognitive effort, (2) leads to the destruction of teaching as profession and (3) neglects the difficulties and diligent work of education in favour of romanticism. activity is a favoured topos and guiding principle of progressive educational rhetoric (cf. böhm 2012, p. 12; oelkers 2005). concerning teaching actions, it implies that form (or reform)18 is categorically preferred to content (cf. liessmann 2006) and thereby releases a pathetic potential among its participators: “the little word ‘reform’ signalises awakening and demonstrates a readiness to act. it puts those into discursive offside, who hesitate. progressive educational rhetoric invokes a crisis which can only be solved by pedagogy, yet conveys to educators and teachers that they are being part of a meaningful project which demands their fullest dedication.” 19 (grabau 2014: 525) such a furore does not leave space for the careful discussion, examination and evaluation of well-known pedagogical content, methods, structures and institutions in the light of recent challenges and urgent needs. it dictates an immediate and radical change from the old and outdated. in the founding period of progressive education at the turn between the 19th and the 20th century, this meant renunciation from cognitive endeavours towards what is regarded a natural, lively and especially active learning. instead of cognitive efforts, activity and a proximity to the lifeworld are called for. by using this rhetoric, the old and stagnated state and drill school is marked as outdated. the same arguments were used in the foundation documents of german rural boarding schools (landerziehungsheime), which provide an astounding proximity to recent arguments in connection with school reform: “through the exposure to persons and things, through the opportunity for living a live-worthy life, it is supposed to educate to joyful performance of duty in diligent consideration of world lying within pupil [zögling] as well as in their surrounding nature. […] the teacher does not deliver or say anything that the pupil can find himself. any dead knowledge of names and figures is excluded.” (lietz 2001, p. 62 f., emphases added by mfb) 20 this extract from lietz’ programmatic paper concerning educational and organizational principles of landerziehungsheime represents these progressive educational lines of argumentation. the exposure to persons and things points to the idea of a holistic education, which always remains in the sphere of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 43 abstract (since no one is able to know the whole, not even those who are directly affected and present). pestalozzi’s phrase with head, heart and hand is often used as an illustration of this idea that serves as a form of delimitation from reductionist, logo-centric approaches to the world. the “life-worthy life” points to the objective of progressive education, which is an approximation to a pre-existent order of the world while simultaneously joyfully fulfilling a duty–but to what remains unclear. at the same time, the “world within the pupil” points to the idea of the pure and innocent child, which should form the moral basis of every pedagogical act and perhaps even to a cosmological thinking which presupposes a connection between individual and cosmological development (cf. andresen/tröhler 2001). the nature surrounding the pupil is also to be recognized within this form of education. it remains unclear however, how lietz and his anonymous co-authors understand such an appropriation. this approach however can be considered as form of determined anti-cultural or anti-modern stance (cf. böhm 2012, p. 19 ff.). the denominated “living knowledge” is, if not the most successful, an export of progressive education into the public school system of today. in this programmatic paper from 1906, a gesture or even ethos shows of what can be called an anti-intellectual tenor of progressive educationalists. this is nothing less than the ignorance of the collected and long-lasting knowledge of school as institutions and their inhering practices, of cognitively demanding efforts and the cautious and continuous development of didactics, for the sake of an ambitious reorientation towards nature and activity that promises vitality and joy. in a staggeringly similar way, proponents of gamification hold this very attitude against the public school system (which itself is subject to continuous change), while at the same time incessantly referring to the nature of mankind and humans’ urge to play (cf. sheldon 2012, p. 62; kapp 2012, p. 36 f., 56, 69). the necessary consequence of the idea of the innocent child corrupted by educational efforts is that one should search for its true teachers in nature (or play for that matter). this leads inevitably to the dissolution of teaching as profession. another programmatic paper by gustav wyneken and paul geheeb from 1906, on the establishment of free school community wickersdorf poignantly shows this: “[the former subject matter distinguishes itself] by introducing to a past cultural epoch in a one-sided [=cognitive; mfb] manner instead of getting to know the present and its life sources und that it mediates outdated and refuted ideas for dogmatic considerations […]. we present as the goal of our teaching to empower pupils’ ability to teach themselves.” (wyneken/geheeb 2001, p. 99 f., emphases added by mfb) 21 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 44 the legitimization for the reform is limited to critique of the existing state, embodied by subject matter. the goal of teaching is described as autodidactical, overriding or denying every difference between teaching and learning. at this point of the text a tremendous ambivalence comes apparent. teachers demanded a certain comprehensive jurisdiction in total institutions, like boarding schools (cf. kabaum 2014, p. 236) and at the same time stressed their respect for the natural autonomy of pupil. the students were supposed to experience this autonomy as the absolute highlight of their educational experience in the spirit of the school and through the teacher. this way of thinking has a comeback in today’s reform efforts. christian grabau describes this ambivalence in the context of brain research as a reactualization of progressive education with reference to winfried böhm: “in this, the function of brain-discourse is similar to the ‘master narrative of the godlike, unblemished and innocent child’ (böhm 2012, p. 82), which is marked by a strange oscillation between omnipotence and impotence. one no longer participates in the ‘divinity’ and ‘naturalness’ of the child, yet one tunes his ears for the imperatives of its nature.” 22 (grabau 2014, p. 528) a professional ethos formulated as such is problematic in multiple respects: firstly, the difference of power between adults and children or adolescents, between teachers and students, is systematically denied or re-interpreted. secondly, a negation of authority in the sense of arendt takes place: it negates the teacher’s duty of taking responsibility for a tactful introduction into the existing world through teaching and education—full of irritating moments, new perspectives, paradoxes and actual contradictions. instead, teachers metamorphose into friends, learning guides, coaches, and tutors. lastly, teachers are categorically depicted as representatives of the outdated mugginess of the old (read: outdated) school. an approximation to the lifeworld of students is touted as a feasible and welcome alternative, thus exercising the wilful ignorance of the constitutive and beneficial factor of school, namely its useful difference from the lifeworld of students. regarding gamified teaching, this means a metamorphosis of teachers to operator guides of learning machines, which will gradually replace them. instead of factual expertise, pedagogical tact and didactical skill, the new qualification profile becomes technical knowledge and troubleshooting competency. at the same time, students are reduced to players. the title of sheldon’s 2011 book the multiplayer classroom indicates this reduction illustratively. from the stance of educational theory, it can thus be argued that gamified teaching deprives itself of pedagogical possibilities. validated from a theory of pointing (prange 2005) this means: pedagogical feedback in the sense of reactive (and tactful) pointing does not seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 45 take place within a gamified teaching because a program or game is not able to apply pedagogical-reflective judgment (cf. brinkmann 2012, p. 384 ff.), but can only fall back on a reservoir of prefabricated feedback options in a mode of imitation. to be precise, a game cannot at all point in the pedagogical sense, because it does not operate with freedom and moralistic causality in depiction, representation and prompting (cf. prange 2005, p. 54). the consequence is that with gamified teaching schools as institutions are much closer to their dissolution. if school’s goal is the learning fulfilment of quests within set games and their corresponding frameworks of rules, its social dimension as the practising of reasoning and justifying one’s opinions in the presence of others (i.e. the exercise of reason in a kantian sense) is abandoned and it can be entirely replaced by virtual learning environments. this is not solely an attribute of the demand for gamification, but gamification fuels the potential social isolation of students due to its basic structure. students are subjects to an illusion of community and sociality, in the “mirror of their machines” (meyer-drawe 2007), which is, in the end, a virtual sociality relieved from the assessment in front of others. as a third and last point of destructive arguments in the tradition of progressive education, i want to come back to the benefit of teaching in a dedicated educational setting we call school. one of the merits of such a setting is the spatial and temporal solitude, allowing for and ideally fostering of critical thinking. by fundamentally restructuring schools and teaching around a technical possibility for a production of teaching results (outcome in postpisa terms), successes, milestones and so forth, we endanger this invaluable asset due to the consequent negligence of the fact that learning and bildung are painful processes (cf. meyer-drawe 2005, p. 28), which cannot be transferred into a harmoniously-romantic (the child as rough diamond and epitome of what is good) or linearly developing idea of world and mankind. what is more: such a perspective alters and possibly even blocks the subversive political potential of an education, which exposes the problems of and criticises the system we are currently living in. ways of thinking that oppose the existing societal and political circumstances may not be an integral part of today’s schools—this is already hindered by the fact that schools are state bearing institutions. yet by abiding to a presumption of a harmonious integration into a holistic and closed system, a critical stance towards such naturalizing and ontologizing assumptions is blocked in the first place. 23 this hindrance of an education which is understood as potentially resistant (exemplary: thompson/weiß 2008) is once again reinforced by the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 46 gamification of teaching. in other words: players cannot transcend the pre-set rules of the game. they are subject to a conditional framework that excludes codetermination, contradictions or even participation and a modification of the regulating force. a game only permits actions that have been anticipated by its authors/programmers and implemented as options. thus, implementing gamified teaching settings renders schools (even more) un-democratic. a progressive educationalist’s romantic worldview marked as natural is replaced by faith in the accuracy of the assessment done by a particular game. for the players, though, it remains unclear which principles decide over this judgment. the teacher in turn, who metamorphoses into a tablet and app coordinator, puts himself in a position, which cannot be more fittingly described than by kant’s well-known concept of self-inflicted immaturity (selbstverschuldete unmündigkeit). keeping this dissolution or even destruction of school and the teaching profession in mind, the replacement of expertise and didactics by natural learning, the rejection of authority and responsibility, of indirect and contingent education for the sake of motivation, directness and an affirmation of the students’ lifeworld, significant parallels between the naturalizing and romanticising argumentation structures of progressive educationalists and gamified efforts become apparent. conclusion and outlook the previous argumentation indicates that gamification is not the mere iteration of reform efforts, which reoccurs time and again within the learning discourse, but has shown that gamification proves an imminent danger to the obtained and established strongholds of school and the teaching profession as institutions (cf. reichenbach 2013; masschelein/simons 2013; türcke 2016). this endangerment is likely to progress in the future. this hypothesis can be made plausible from a technical as well as an institutional perspective regarding educational policy. the ongoing development of portable devices like smartphones and tablets will likely play a gradually more important role in digitalized classrooms. it is imaginable that teaching settings will fall more and more under the spell of gamification, aided by virtual and eventually augmented reality. maybe students will no longer collect pokémon, but rather chemical elements, authors of the german idealism and other things with their smartphones and tablets. thereby, teaching subjects become toys. following the mantra of byod (bring your own device) and the progressing virtualization of school is a qualitative seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 47 improvement of virtual environments with all its comprising dangers of social isolation. this can—in a third step—lead to education policy which does no longer tries to treat the teaching profession cohesively but allows, enables or even dictates a differentiation and hierarchization of the teaching personnel. unrealistic demands mingle together with changing popular phrases (individualisation of teaching) and foreign domains, such as political inquiries (sustainability, inclusion). ironically, the so-called hard science subjects could be endangered first by comprehensive gamification since their contents are regarded to be easily transferable into a technical way of teaching. in a next step, this could lead to a reduction, virtualization and de facto dissolution of teaching personnel. in this context, a sufficient critique of the paradigm of design-based learning from a pedagogical point of view still seems to be lacking. a process like gamification, one could argue, enforces the subjectification of learners as users of a seemingly interactive, but actually mono-directional influence that works in loops of self-enforcement and pursues institutionalization and intensification of itself. borrowing ian bogost’s words, one of the few critics of gamification in the anglophone sphere to discuss the fundamentals of gamification as opposed to its efficiency, “gamification is the pursuit of more gamification” (bogost 2014, p. 70). from the perspective i introduced in this paper, arguing with critical theory of education and with a sceptical stance towards progressive education, gamification is not understood as a mere transformation of teaching, but rather as a reversion from serious pedagogical and didactical endeavours. it will thereby lead to gamification instead of teaching. gamification suspends possible subversive and critical moments of teaching due to its inherent features and closed structure. at the same time, an endangerment of basic prerequisites of school takes place: a distance to the students’ lifeworld, a safe moratorium that simultaneously demands cognitive efforts, fosters selfformation and enables critical thinking. all of these pedagogical aims, albeit vague and at times of paradoxical nature, are at risk for the sake of steady motivation, and satisfaction of progressing changes of the conditions of teaching and school in the context of enforced postmodernist uncertainties and a growing heterogeneity. i have shown that proponents of gamification make use of the same topoi as supporters of progressive education: activity, proximity to lifeworld, and nature. as pedagogues, our responsibilities do not lie in opportunistic stances towards new trends, but rather in active critique and evaluation of new methods and approaches. gamification in its current state threatens to lure us into accepting a simple solution for the utter complex and traditionally passed on seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 48 problem of teaching as application of authority and enabling-space of bildung. of course, a significant distinction has to be made between pedagogically useful applications of digital and virtual learning environments and the blind following of promising means for simplification. (cf. clark et al. 2010) that requires, however, a lot of time, research, discussion and a much more critical discourse. such a critique of gamification should not be understood as cultural pessimism or a preserving pedagogy (cf. hübner 2012, p. 4). we have to facilitate the debate before gamification is implemented widely, even though this causes a certain discomfort for the proponents. as fink puts it, “to talk about the game in a serious manner, even with the sombre gravity of quibblers, is in the end a bare contradiction and a severe corruption of the game.”24 (fink 1957, p. 7; emphasis in original) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 49 references arendt, hannah (2006 [1958]). the crisis of education. in between and future. 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http://www.enterprise-gamification.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=160:the-sap-community-network-how-to-use-gamification-to-increase-engagement&catid=15&itemid=22&lang=en http://www.enterprise-gamification.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=160:the-sap-community-network-how-to-use-gamification-to-increase-engagement&catid=15&itemid=22&lang=en http://www.medienistik.de/lab-heft_gamification.pdf http://www.medienistik.de/lab-heft_gamification.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 52 marczewski, andrzej (2015). 48 gamification elements, mechanics and ideas. retrieved from: http://www.gamified.uk/2015/02/04/47-gamification-elementsmechanics-and-ideas/ (6 october 2016). masschelein, jan, simons, maarten (2013 [2012]). in defence of the school. a public issue. retrieved from: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/400685/1/jan+masschelein+ +maarten+simons+-+in+defence+of+the+school.pdf (6 october 2016) schwabel, dan (2013). how gamifications going to chance the workplace. retrieved from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/10/07/adam-penenberg-howgamification-is-going-to-change-the-workplace/#28642aae39e5 (6 october 2016) http://www.gamified.uk/2015/02/04/47-gamification-elements-mechanics-and-ideas/ http://www.gamified.uk/2015/02/04/47-gamification-elements-mechanics-and-ideas/ https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/400685/1/jan+masschelein++maarten+simons+-+in+defence+of+the+school.pdf https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/400685/1/jan+masschelein++maarten+simons+-+in+defence+of+the+school.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 53 1 transl. from german: „[das spiel] entführt uns aus einer faktischen lage, aus der gefangenschaft in einer bedrängenden und bedrückenden situation, gewährt ein phantasieglück im durchflug durch möglichkeiten, die ohne die qual wirklicher wahl bleiben.“ 2 for manifold productive advice and helpful comments, i want to thank the participants of “forum erziehungsphilosophie 2016”. special thanks go to chistian grabau and norm friesen for constructive criticism as well as fanny isensee, sophia zedlitz, and andreas lødemel for transferring the manuscript into something readable. in addition, thanks are due to yngve nordkvelle for publishing this (philosophical) essay in a journal that focuses on empirical perspectives and to the two anonymous peer reviewers for considerably contributing to the improvement of this paper. 3 transl. from german: „das spiel ist nicht spielerei“. 4 transl. from german: „der ernsteste stoff muß so behandelt werden, daß wir die fähigkeit behalten, ihn unmittelbar mit dem leichtesten spiele zu vertauschen.“ 5 transl. from german: „spielerisches üben und spielerisches lernen sind z. zt. modeworte des lerndiskurses.“ 6 transl. from german: „gamification […] die durchdringung unserer gesellschaft mit metaphern, methoden, werten und attributen aus der welt der spiele.“ 7 due to the lack of space, no further discussion of questions of structures of power in gamification can take place here. as a side commentary, the systematic application of gamification can plausibly be used as an instrument used for social engineering within education (buck 2015), and gamification may well be understood as a device of power, which even colonizes human communication, as byung-chul han (2016, p. 70) illustrates vividly. 8 one could argue that there are many similarities between game logic and school logic, e.g. a dedicated time and space. albeit this might be true for single characteristics, neither fink’s nor huizinga’s argumentation (emphasizing the emergent effect) is affected by this. in the same way, there may be parallels between e.g. political and sexual practices but that does not make them the same mode of being and existence. 9 when it comes to lifelong learning, the overall degree of voluntariness is probably much higher than in teaching in schools. the latter happens within a framework of compulsory school attendance, education laws, curricula, and syllabus, while lifelong learning is either completely voluntary (if it is for leisure or recreation purposes), or, if connected to further education, facilitates employability, human capital and so forth and thus is driven by the lack of alternatives the respective learner can choose from. in any way, there are many more degrees of involuntary participation in and between pedagogical institutions which cannot be laid out en détail here. 10 the orchestration of schools means the intentional temporal ignorance of knowledge for the sake of (aristotelian) questioning and reconstruction of this knowledge in a social setting. the simplest instance is a teacher asking a question about a certain topic in class, although he or she clearly knows the answer. nowadays the orchestration shows itself in the terms and concepts of “discovery learning” and the like. it is obvious that schools and classrooms are not the place where research takes place. yet, it seems to have a motivating effect on pupils in addition to the learning process. 11 transl. from german: „[...] sich der spielende selbst als den schöpfer dieser ‚welt’ [verdeckt], er verliert sich in seinem gebilde, spielt eine rolle und hat innerhalb der spielwelt spielweltliche umgebungsdinge und spielweltliche mitmenschen.“ 12 in this paper, bildung and self-formation are used in an interchangeable manner. 13 in the case of gamification, these are mostly elements from recent computer games and, so far, show mixed results in regard with their effectiveness. empirical studies focus mostly on motivation and learning outcome in terms of grades or academic achievement. for a remarkably differentiated, yet affirmative metastudy cf. young et al. 2012. this paper, however, does not focus on effectiveness or efficiency but aims to deconstruct the underpinnings of gamification and the consequences for learning and teaching in schools. 14 a thorough examination of the term ‘experience points’, as it is used in games, against a phenomenologically understood concept of ‘experience’ is still pending. 15 cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lxh2n0apyw 16 the past tense used in this paragraph is indicating that with the change of school governance from an input-oriented to an output-oriented logic, the fundaments described here are crumbling. it is an ongoing debate that is not to be laid out here en détail. exemplary see biesta’s essay ‘why what works won’t work’ (2007). for a historical perspective, see bellmann/waldow 2012. 17 transl. from german: „der prozeß der bildung ist in den der verarbeitung umgeschlagen. die verarbeitung – und darin liegt das wesen des unterschieds – läßt dem gegenstand keine zeit, die zeit wird reduziert. zeit aber steht für liebe; der sache, der ich zeit schenke, schenke ich liebe; die gewalt ist rasch.“ 18 in german, danish, norwegian, spanish and some other languages progressive education is called „reform pedagogy“, in contrast to french and italian (whose terms translate to new education). besides english, some other languages like polish use “progressive” as a qualifier. 19 transl. from german: „das wörtchen ‚reform‘ signalisiert aufbruch und demonstriert handlungsbereitschaft. es stellt diejenigen ins diskursive abseits, die zögern. reformpädagogische rhetorik beschwört eine krise, die nur die pädagogik lösen kann und vermittelt gleichzeitig den erziehern und lehrern, an einem gewichtigen projekt teilzuhaben, dem sie sich mit haut und haar verschreiben müssen.“ 20 transl. from german: „durch einwirkung von personen und dingen, dadurch daß gelegenheit gegeben wird, ein lebenswertes leben zu verbringen, soll zu freudiger pflichterfüllung unter sorgfältiger berücksichtigung der welt im zögling sowie der ihn umgebenden natur erzogen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lxh2n0apyw seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 54 werden. […] der lehrer bringt und sagt nichts, was der schüler selbst finden kann. alles tote namenund zahlenwissen ist ausgeschlossen.“ 21 transl. from german: „[der alte unterrichtsstoff zeichnet sich dadurch aus,] dass er einseitig in das leben einer vergangenen kulturepoche einführ[t], anstatt in die gegenwart und ihre lebensquellen kennen zu lehren und daß er aus dogmatischen bedenken veraltete und sicher widerlegte anschauung vermittel[t] […]. wir stellen es als ziel des unterrichts hin, den schüler zu befähigen, sich selbst zu unterrichten. ” 22 transl. from german: „darin ähnelt die funktion des hirn-diskurses der ‚meistererzählung von dem göttlichen und makellos unschuldigen kind‘ (böhm 2012, s. 82), der ein seltsames pendeln zwischen allmacht und ohnmacht eingeschrieben ist. man partizipiert zwar nicht mehr an der ‚göttlichkeit‘ und ‚ursprünglichkeit‘ des kindes, aber man lauscht seiner natur weiterhin ihre imperative ab.“ 23 in a recent interview, alain badiou describes “pokémon go” as “trap of the image” that hinders youth from reflection and rebellion or, in his terms, corrupts the corruption of youth, essentially abiding to the current state of things and the world. cf. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2842for-alain-badiou-pokemon-go-is-the-corruption-of-corruption (6 october 2016). 24 transl. from german: „denn über das spiel ernst zu reden und gar mit dem finsteren ernst der wortklauber und begriffsspalter gilt am ende als barer widerspruch und arge spielverderbnis.“ http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2842-for-alain-badiou-pokemon-go-is-the-corruption-of-corruption http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2842-for-alain-badiou-pokemon-go-is-the-corruption-of-corruption gamification of learning and teaching in schools – a critical stance marc fabian buck abstract game logic and gamification school logic and teaching gamification as recurrence of progressive educational argumentation conclusion and outlook references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 university students’ use of information and communication technologies (ict) in russia: a focus on learning and everyday life* alexander porshnev * national research university, higher school of economics, russia e-mail: aporshnev@gmail.com hartmut giest potsdam university, germany e-mail: giest@uni-potsdam.de abstract students' internet usage attracts the attention of many researchers in different countries. differences in internet penetration in diverse countries lead us to ask about the interaction of medium and culture in this process. in this paper we present an analysis based on a sample of 825 students from 18 russian universities and discuss findings on particularities of students' ict usage. on the background of the findings of the study, based on data collected in 2008-2009 year during a project "a сross-cultural study of the new learning culture formation in germany and russia", we discuss the problem of plagiarism in russia, the availability of ict features in russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ict usage and gender specifics in the use of ict. keywords: students, ict usage, internet usage, learning, plagiarism, gender differences introduction the internet audience and ict usage in everyday life has drawn the attention of researchers in different countries. for example, the us population is studied in «the pew internet & american life project» (http://www.pewinternet.org). there are also studies that have focused more on ict usage in higher education, including «survey of ict use in norwegian higher education» (wilhelmsen et al., 2009), “classroom technology in business schools” (parker & burnie, 2009), “students of the network age: a complex portrait of english university first year students” (jones, 2010), “the ecar study of * the work of a.porshnev is supported by the higher school of economics academic fund program 2010-2012 project, “a cross-cultural study of students’ internet usage in learning: behavioral and motivational aspects” (#10-01-0021). mailto:giest@uni-potsdam.de� http://www.pewinternet.org/� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 28 undergraduate students and information technology” (smith & caruso, 2010). contemporary research has shown that the picture drawn by prensky is far from reality (e.g. hargittai, 2010; jones & czerniewicz, 2010). the interaction between culture and technology is much more complicated than a simple generation gap. in her research, hargittai found differences in internet skills among members of one generation tightly connected with their social environment (hargittai, 2010), while czerniewicz and brown provide further empirical evidence, even within a south african context, of an “elite” group with native digital characteristics (2010). this leads us to the questions: how do national cultures and new technologies interact?, and is the influence of new technologies universal in different countries? we cannot answer these questions now, but hope to at least make a step forward in discussing these issues. in our research for, “a cross cultural study of the new learning culture formation in germany and russia,”** students and new technologies in russia we studied students’ behavioral and motivational patterns in learning and want to dedicate this paper to the following aspects of our study: a review of russian students’ ict usage and the problem of plagiarism, the availability of ict features in russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ict usage and gender specifics in the use of ict. in russia, the first psychological studies of internet users were conducted by arestova, babanin and voiskounky (арестова, бабанин, войскунский, 2000). from 1992 until 1998, they organized a series of research studies in which more than 3,000 internet users took part, who studied socio-psychological, demographic and motivational dynamics of the internet audience in russia. after 1999, several organizations started monitoring the russian internet audience. for example, the public opinion foundation (pof, http://www.fom.ru/projects/23.html) provided actual information about internet penetration rates for russian regions, social groups and demographic specifics of internet usage. apart from the general monitoring, the pof also organizes specials projects, e.g. “kids in the information society” – («дети в информационном обществе», http://bd.fom.ru/pdf/int.b1.pdf). in this project, usage of the internet by school and university students was investigated in 2008-2009. respondents were asked to answer questions about reading news, searching on the internet, downloading audio and video content, online games, shopping and other possibilities for internet usage, and for several of the questions we could compare data from our research with the data from the same year for the pof (for example with the question, “did you happen to use the internet yesterday?”). there are also other organizations that monitor the russia internet audience such as t ns (http://www.tns-global.ru/) or romir, although these companies primarily focus on market research. furthermore, there are various studies of students’ ict usage in particular russian universities (мордасова, 2004, поршнев 2007). in 2009, voiskounsky organized research devoted to the problem of plagiarism in which he used methods proposed by underwood and szabo (voiskounsky, 2009), so since voiskounsky’s research was organized at about the same time as ours, we will compare results. the project was supported by the higher school of economics academic fund program 2007-2008 (# 07-01-160) and an alexander von humboldt foundation grant 3.1-rus/1130038 buka. http://www.fom.ru/projects/23.html� http://bd.fom.ru/pdf/int.b1.pdf� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 29 the main idea of our paper is to provide information about russian students’ usage of ict in learning and in everyday life, including information about ict options that exist at russian universities and students’ attitudes toward plagiarism. additionally, we also want to go beyond the frequency of usage of different ict tools to find answers to two questions. the first question is: could we rely on data received about the ict usage? in many studies, it has been shown that the method of data collection can influence the results, so we could therefore expect some influence from the social desirability factor. for games, fun or communication, we also could expect that students who used these online activities would experience flow (see csikszentmihalyi, 1975; see also higgins, 2006) and be less critical about the real frequency of ict usage for these purposes. would we observe that students in russia overestimate the frequency of ict usage by their peers, or will we receive a more complex picture that the frequencies for some categories (attractive) will be overestimated, while others will be underestimated? in analyzing the answers, we considered that answers to a question about a concrete event would be more exact than answers about the frequency of an event. when answering a question about frequency, the respondents understood this to mean an overall picture as it usually does, and that this estimation could be more influenced by a person’s self-perception. thus, comparing answers will allow us to investigate students’ perceptions about different categories of ict usage. the second question is about gender differences. hargittai showed that males are more likely to be familiar with internet know-how (2010). smith and caruso found that about half of the male respondents saw themselves as innovators or early adopters of new technologies versus just a quarter of females who chose these categories (smith & caruso, 2010). can we expect the same picture in our research in russia? method in our online form, we include questions from our research project “new learning culture: conditions of efficient internet usage by students” («новая образовательная культура: условия эффективного использования интернет студентами», grant № 07-01-160 of scientific foundation of state university higher school of economics), which were adapted and translated from the pew internet & american life project (2009) and from classroom technology in business schools (parker & burnie 2009), as w ell as n ew questions to gather information about students’ preferences in learning and ict usage ( including most of the categories for everyday usage of ict, in addition to the usage of new technologies for learning purposes). for the analysis of the ict use category of “attractiveness”, we used three sets of questions v11.1-v11.16, v13.1-v13.16 and v14.1-v.14.16. in v11, students were asked, “what did you happen to use the computer for yesterday?”, while in v13, “what do you think about how often other students are using the following features of the computer and the internet?” and v14, “how often do you use the following features of the computer and the internet?” for question v11, students were asked to mark the category if they used a computer for such a purpose yesterday. for questions v13 and v14, the respondents were asked to estimate the frequency of use on a scale for every one of the 16 categories (see appendix 1): “several times in day,” “once a day,” “3-5 days in a w eek,” “1-2 days in a week,” “every few weeks,” “less often” and “never” (see appendix 1 for the entire list of questions). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 30 procedures for data collection, we used an online questionnaire (the online service survey monkey), which makes it possible to reach a large number of russian students distributed in different russian regions, while ensuring the same research conditions for our respondents. to start our research, we sent invitations to the leading russian universities included in a list from the reitor agency (рейтор, http://www.reitor.ru), and placed an invitation in the university’s forums. as a result, a n umber of universities reported that they were ready to cooperate and organize a survey of their students (e.g. vyatka state university, ural state university and others). in some universities, students learned about our study from the news portal and took part in it that way (e.g. state university higher school of economics moscow). there were also several universities not included among the top list of leading universities, although professors from these universities gained information about our study from colleagues and helped organize the student participation. the administration’s help was needed to receive a representative sample in the internet survey, as not all of the students had internet access at home. participants in total, our study involved 1,119 respondents, but after the exclusion of incomplete responses and filtering by the date of entry to the respective university, we obtained a sample of 865 students (247 men, 618 women) from 18 universities in the european part of russia (see figure 1). figure 1: the geography of the research; location of universities where the students took part in our research the gender proportion of the received sample was significantly different from the gender proportions of the russian population between the ages of 20 to 24 (chi-square criteria, p>0.05). according to the official statistics, it was 52% (women) and 48% (men) (http://www.gks.ru/doc_2010/demo.pdf), so for the analysis of ict usage we used a balanced sample. a balanced sample was created by randomly excluding 56% of the female respondents, while the rest of the female sample (270 female respondents) was tested for significant differences from the entire russian female sample (in relation to questions about specialization, birth year, university level, computer ownership and frequency of e-mail usage). all the differences were non-significant (chi-square criteria, p>0.05). as a result, a sample with 270 http://www.reitor.ru/� http://www.gks.ru/doc_2010/demo.pdf� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 31 females and 247 males has a close proportion of men (47.8%) and women (52.2%) among young russians, which is almost identical to that of the aforementioned official statistics. in our research, students participated from 14 leading universities (from a list of the 50 best universities in russia) and four high-level universities (universities not included on the list of the 50 best universities in russia). the primary amount of data,95.7%, was collected during september-october of 2009. in appendix 2, a description of the parameters of the original (865 students) and balanced samples (517 students) is presented. computer and internet usage responding to the question, “did you happen to use the internet yesterday?”, 90.9% of the respondents answered “yes,” 8.9% “no” and 0.2 % “don’t know or refused” (in this section, the analysis was based on a balanced sample). according to the research data provided by the pof, the percentage of russian students who use the internet every day is 57% as o pposed to 79% for the students using the internet every week. comparing these results, we should mention that the sample of pof respondents contained 258 students from the whole of russia, and was not limited to only the best or the good universities. hence, we think that the results are comparable and that students from the best and good universities from the european region of russia use the internet and computer more often than students on average. the following question: “what did you happen to use the computer for yesterday?” has only been presented to those respondents who answered “yes” to the question, “did you happen to use the internet yesterday?” from studying histogram 1, students apparently most often use social networks for reading/learning materials, skype, e-mail and news. it is rare for russian students to search for information about politicians and political campaigns, and to shop on the internet. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 32 histogram 1: students’ answers to the question, “what did you happen to use the computer for yesterday?” unfortunately, we cannot precisely compare our data with the data received in the pof research since in the report, “kids in the information society,” the question about internet usage was asked about the normal activities of the students over the past month. however, we can compare tendencies: according to the pof, the most popular usage is for e-mail and then social networks, though we did notice that social networks are more popular among the students from our sample (high-level universities from the european part of russia). according to our research, the percentage of students who used their social networks yesterday was 74.7%, whereas the pof data revealed that only 53% of the students used their social networks at least once over the past month, thereby showing that russian students from high-level universities are much more engaged in communication through social networks. answering question v15 about information overload, 85.7% of the students answered that they liked having access to the information, 8.7% felt that they were overloaded by the information and 5.6% said they “don’t know or refused” (see histogram 2). in the research for the annual gadgets survey 2007 (pew internet and american life project) organized in the us, 24% of 33,8% 74,7% 55,1% 17,8% 17,4% 38,7% 27,7% 24,6% 68,3% 41,0% 15,5% 54,2% 37,7% 7,9% 11,6% 41,6% 66,2% 25,3% 44,9% 82,2% 82,6% 61,3% 72,3% 75,4% 31,7% 59,0% 84,5% 45,8% 62,3% 92,1% 88,4% 58,4% 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % 80 % 100 % fun & games communicate with skype, email … search and download images, … do computing edit texts and presentations, … edit images and photos read blogs read handbooks or other … read scientific articles, books etc. look for information about … read news rest and relax look online for news or … shopping looking for information about … 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 yes no categories of internet and computer usage seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 33 the respondents agreed that they felt that they were overloaded with information, 64% said that having access to information was pleasant and 7% said they “don’t know or refused.” it is necessary to note that there are two factors which influence comparability of the data: 1) the difference in the data gathering method used, and 2) a difference in the samples. we conducted online research, while in the pew internet project, which specializes in telephone surveys, only 12% were between the ages of 18 to 24 years, whereas 98.7% of the participants in our research belonged to this age group. we suggest that our sample had more influence on the difference, thus we can conclude that the majority of the russian students like to have access to information, although with the growth in the penetration of technologies we would expect to see a growing group of information-overloaded students. histogram 2 students’ answers to the question, “do you feel overloaded with information from different sources (tv, magazines, newspapers and the internet), or do you like having so much information available?” for the next set of questions about the technologies in universities, v10.1v10.16, we used a set of question categories suggested by parker and burnie (2009). in histogram 3, we have presented the average data for a group of universities, as this allows us to demonstrate the distinctions present for the availability of equipment and technologies. we arranged the universities into three groups: research universities (included in the list of research universities at http://mon.gov.ru/pro/niu/6077/), best universities (included in the list of the top 50 universities in russia (except for research universities) and good universities (other u niversities not included in the list of best universities, from which students took part in our research) (a distribution of the data from the sample between different groups of the universities is presented in appendix 2, histogram 5). the answers to this question showed that universities provide internet access to students in computer classes, but only in research universities can the majority of students connect their own laptop to the university’s network (histogram 3). in all the universities, the majority of students noticed that their university learning materials were available in an electronic form. there were no significant differences in the availability of electronic materials for students between universities, but we observed significant differences between specializations, as it faculties provide their students with significantly more information in electronic form (chi-square criteria used, p<0.05). the difference between economics-related faculties, technical and naturalscientific faculties and humanity faculties was found to be non-significant (chi-square criteria used, p>0.1). 8,7% 85,7% 5,6% 0 % 30 % 60 % 90 % yes, i feel overloaded no, i like to have information available don't know, refuse seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 34 in histogram 3, we can see that researchand best universities were better equipped with projectors. in comparison with the other groups, t he students in research universities reported that they had free of charge access to scientific databases and could solve organizational questions using the internet. the group of good universities only provides better support for their students in the category of, interactive learning programs. in this category, 43.1% of the students answered that they have such a possibility, while in the best universities the percentage is 21.6%, and surprisingly, only 16.1% in research universities. we can therefore assume that interactive learning programs would be less popular in researchand best universities, as t hey are less effective and less flexible as a good teacher, though they could be used for reducing the overload for the teaching staff. *categories with significant differences (chi-square criteria, p<0.05) histogram 3: percentage of students’ “yes, available” answers for categories of equipment or technologies. question: “what kind of teaching technology and equipment do you have in your university?” answers about solving organizational problems via the internet displayed differences among the various faculties at the different universities. surprisingly, students from it faculties had fewer possibilities to solve organizational questions through the internet, as only 27.4% of students answered that they had such a possibility. leadership in this category belongs to economic related faculties, at 46.3%, while differences between economicrelated faculties and it-related faculties were significant at the p<0.05 level (chi-square test). at technicaland natural/scientific-related faculties, as well as –and at humanity faculties, 32.2% and 31.1% of students, respectively, agreed that they have such a possibility. this demonstrated that learning management systems were not widely applied in russian universities in 2009, as one of the effects of these systems is the possibility to manage different organizational issues online throughout the entire university. 92,6% 66,4% 80,5% 77,2% 59,7% 20,8% 16,1% 50,3% 86,8% 28,4% 82,3% 72,3% 17,4% 6,8% 21,6% 30,0% 81,0% 25,9% 72,4% 48,3% 24,1% 19,0% 43,1% 15,5% 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % 80 % 100 % *v10.1. internet access *v10.2. possibility to connect laptop to university network v10.3. course materials available in electronic form *v10.4. digital projectors *v10.5. free of charge access to scientific electronic databases (example jstor etc.) *v10.6. video records of lectures v10.7. interactive learning programs *v10.8. possibilities to sign up for courses, a schedules and to solve other organizational issues via internet research best good seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 35 plagiarism in russia to analyze the attitudes of russian students toward plagiarism, we used question mb28, “do you copy and paste texts from books or the internet without citing them?” an analysis revealed that there are no significant differences in attitudes toward plagiarism between women and men (chisquare test, p>.05), so for the analysis in this section we used the original sample (865 participants). in histogram 4, we could see that 26.4% of the russian students asserted that they copy texts from books and the internet without referring to their sources, thereby making plagiarism is a common practice for many russian students. at the same time, voiskounky (2009) organized more detailed research about academic dishonesty in moscow universities. one of the questions voiskounky asked in his research was, “under which of the following conditions would you hand in information readily available on the internet as your own work?” according to voiskounsky, 27% of college seniors responded, “at any time”, which is comparable to the results of our research at 26.4% as stated above. histogram 4: students’ answers to the question, “do you copy and paste texts from books or the internet without citing them?” next, we decided to look deeper into the categories of universities – research, best and good. although the plagiarism problem is serious in all three types of universities, the picture in research universities is much better (see histogram 5). in research universities, 66.2% of the students said that they do not copy from the internet, while at the best universities the percentage of such students is 43.2 %, and in the g ood only 30.8%. the percentage of students agreeing (for both categories of answers: “strongly agree” and “agree”) with the question, “do you copy and paste texts from books or the internet without citing them?” was 16.3% in research universities, 29.3% in best universities and 35.5% in the good universities. in our analysis of the plagiarism problem, we agree with the findings of voiskounsky that this situation is taking place because of the teaching staff at the universities. in his article, voiskounky writes that, “right now, nevertheless, it is unlikely that the tutors are either filtering plagiarism out or making attempts to stop it” (voiskounky, 2009, p.582). in his study, more than two-thirds of the students are not sure if their tutor’s expertise is high enough to recognize plagiarism, while one-fourth of the students think that it 18,6% 29,6% 25,4% 22,0% 4,4% 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % strongly disagree disagree uncertain or unsure agree strongly agree seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 36 is worth plagiarizing even if their tutors would definitely recognize it. students’ attitude towards plagiarizing even if the tutor would know emerges because tutors do not want to spend their time finding pieces from the internet and blaming dishonest students (voiskounky, 2009). comparing data from our research with the research of voiskounky, we can see that tutors in research universities pay more attention to preventing dishonest behavior. to the best of the authors’ knowledge , tutors in research universities used anti-plagiarism systems (for example, http://www.antiplagiat.ru/), and professors tried to give students nonstandard, creative tasks. histogram 5: students’ answers to the question, “do you copy and paste texts from books or the internet without citing them?” by groups of universities: research, best, good in analyzing the answers of the respondents while studying the different specialties, we can say with assuredness that among students learning an itrelated specialty, significantly more students agreed that they copy and paste texts without citing them (p <0.05, chi-square test). these results could be interpreted in such a way that students from it faculties are more successful in their use of new technologies, in that they have enough expertise not to be caught by tutors. hence they plagiarize. another possible interpretation provided by voiskounky, which is not an alternative to the above one, is based specifically on higher russian education (2009). his interpretation is that students have a limited choice in subjects in addition to their specialization, so for students studying in it-related faculties non-professional subjects would be humanities, and vice versa for students from the humanities in that it would be mathematics, physics, etc. in russia, it is more likely that a humanities tutor would ask students to write an essay, whereas a mathematics tutor would ask them to solve a set of exercises. the themes of the essays described in the state educational standard (государственный образовательный стандарт) are usually used by many teachers, therefore essays on these topics are widely present on the internet. taking into account that writing essays is a different skill from programming, with a short duration for non-professional subjects, it is obvious that it students will try to avoid doing this task. we should go ahead and admit that plagiarism is common among students at russian universities and agree with voiskunsky’s opinion that the dominant 33,1% 33,1% 17,6% 13,9% 2,4% 13,6% 29,6% 27,5% 23,8% 5,5% 9,3% 21,5% 33,6% 31,8% 3,7% 0 % 20 % 40 % strongly disagree disagree uncertain or unsure agree strongly agree research best good seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 37 role here is not only technological experience, but also the learning environment and learning culture at the university. categories of ict usage attractiveness to analyze how precise the participants were in answering questions about frequency, we started by looking at category 1, usage ict for games and entertainments. we found out that 126 respondents (from an original sample of 865 students) answered that for this purpose they used the computer more often than once a day (v14.1), but when looking at the answers from these same respondents for question v10.1, we found out that 33.3% (42) of them did not used a computer for this purpose yesterday. also, there were three respondents who answered that they never play games (question v14.1), but according to their answers on question v10.1 they did it yesterday. an analysis of category 9 revealed that students were more precise, as only 21 (12.8%) out of 164 answered that they read handbooks or other materials more often than every day, and for the purposes of this category, did not use a c omputer yesterday. a further analysis showed that the more precisely that the category was formulated, the more students answered that they use it every day, thereby yielding more precise information about their frequency of usage have. comparing estimations of the respondents in terms of how often other students use ict and how often they use a computer themselves, we find that the categories with the greatest divergence are: 1 “fun & games,” 4 “search and download images, ring tones and games for your phone,” 8 “read blogs” and 15 “shopping.”. within these categories, students note that other students carry out actions from these categories more often than themselves. for example, in category 1, “fun & games” (see histogram 6), only 14.6 % of students said that they play at least once a day, but when answering about other students, 35.5 % of the respondents noticed that other students play at least once a d ay. an overestimation in the frequency of the realization of actions by other students testifies to the attractiveness of this category of ict use for students, and it is necessary to note that we observe a similar situation in 13 of the 16 categories of use. it is interesting to note that category 5 “do computing” is an attractive category for students. but we do not think that this is unusual. we know a lot of examples of students who do computing and find this activity very creative and interesting. it also proved by other authors, for example babaeva and voiskounky (бабаева, войскунский, 2003). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 38 ***histogram 6: comparison students’ answers to a questions «what do you think about, how often other students use the following features of computer and internet? » and «how often you use the following features of computer and internet?» for category 1 “fun & games”. in only on three categories: #9, #10 and #11, respondents reported that they do actions from the given categories more often, than other students. for example, at category 9 19% of students answered that they do it several times a day and 16% of students answered that other students do it “several times a day” (see histogram 7). thereby, these categories could be marked as “valuable”, noticing that students know that it important to do, even if it is not pleasant. however the attractiveness of category does not predict level influence on level of accuracy in frequency measurement. 14,6% 14,6% 13,8% 14,5% 9,8% 18,3% 14,6% 35,5% 22,8% 19,4% 11,1% 4,5% 4,5% 2,2% 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % several times a day about once a day 3-5 days a week 1-2 days a week every few weeks less often never how often you… what do you think, how often other students … seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 39 histogram 7: comparison of students’ answers to a questions «what do you think about, how often other students use the following features of computer and internet? » and «how often do you use the following features of computer and internet?» for category 9 “read of handbooks or other materials (articles from wiki, presentations, essays etc.)” trying to compare v10 and v14 not only at the personal level we decided to approximate quantity of answered "yes" on a v10 question, taking into account the data about frequency of students’ ict use (v14). if the student answered that he or she uses ict – “several times every day” or “once a day” for “fun & games” it is logical to assume that yesterday he or she used it too. if the student answered that he uses computer for “fun & games” 3-5 days in a week it is possible to assume that in average four days from seven days he uses it, so the probability of that the computer has been used for this category yesterday is 4/7. using a similarly argument, we estimate that the probability of use yesterday for the answers “1-2 days in a week” approximately 1/7. thus, the percent of students who used computer and internet yesterday for category 1 can be approximately estimated under the formula: = + + + , where iis the number of the category, estimate percentage of students who used ict yesterday for category 1, – percentage of students answered that they uses ict for category 1 “several times a day”, – percentage of students answered that they use ict for category 1 “about once a day”, percentage of students answered that they use ict for category 1 “35 days a week”, percentage of students answered that they uses ict for category 1 “1-2 days a week.” (1) 19,0% 21,4% 32,5% 18,3% 6,9% 1,5% 0,5% 16,9% 22,5% 31,8% 20,5% 6,7% 1,4% 0,2% 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % several times a day about once a day 3-5 days a week 1-2 days a week every few weeks less often never how often you use… what do you think, how often other students use… i yp i stp i oadp 3 5 4 7 ip − 1 2 1 7 ip− i yp i stp i oadp 3 5 ip − 1 2 ip− seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 40 histogram 8: comparison of percentage of students answered that they used computer and internet yesterday and estimated percentage py calculated with formula (1) by categories of ict usage. we expected that russian students overestimate their frequency of ict usage and in the result we received a picture, which confirmed our expectations (see the histogram 8). thereby, we could conclude that russian students overestimate frequency for most attractive categories of ict usage. frequency self-evaluation influenced by personal perceptions and could not be regarded as absolutely reliable source of information. we could expect that in different countries students could vary in frequency estimation and for cross-cultural comparison would be essential to have several measurements. gender differences analyzing answers to the question v8 about computer ownership we can see gender differences. for example, more male than female students have their own computer for six or more years. still 4,2 % of female students and only 0,4% of male students do not have their own computer. it is worth noting that 26,2% 72,7% 51,4% 16,5% 13,9% 35,7% 25,3% 20,0% 67,3% 39,2% 14,0% 49,5% 31,8% 5,7% 9,0% 39,1% 81,4% 69,8% 20,7% 23,0% 32,5% 25,9% 29,8% 61,5% 39,0% 17,9% 59,5% 61,9% 8,9% 6,3% 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % 80 % 100 % fun & games communicate with skype, email and etc. search and download images, ring tones and games for your phone do computing edit texts and presentations, including creation of charts and … edit images and photos read blogs read handbooks or other materials (articles from wiki, presentations, … read scientific articles, books etc. look for information about health or healthy life online read news rest and relax look online for news or information about politics or political campaigns shopping 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 yes, i used yesterday… estimation of percentage of students py categories of internet and computer usage communicate in social networks or forums about general topics ... seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 41 the majority of respondents get their own computer with internet access while studying in senior classes of school, or right after entering the university (see the histogram 9). histogram 9: students’ answers to a question «since when have you got your own computer with internet access?». analyzing the question v11a shows that there is a significant difference in the percentage of males and females who used the internet yesterday (chi-square criteria, p<0.05). a l arger percent of men answered that they had used the internet yesterday 94.7 %, for women the percentage is 86.6 % . answer “don’t know or refuse” choose 0.4 % of young men and 0,3 % of young women. the percentage of students who answered “no”: is 13.1 % for female students and only 4.9 % for male (see the histogram 9). gender analysis of answers to the question v15 about an information overload shows no significant differences. 84.6 % of young men and 81.6 % of young women have answered that they like to have access to the information. histogram 10: answers for a question: “did you happen to use the internet yesterday?” 0,4% 1,2% 6,1% 16,6% 13,4% 12,1% 49,0% 1,2% 4,2% 3,4% 10,5% 22,3% 11,3% 14,2% 30,3% 3,7% 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % no computer with access in internet six months or less a year ago two or three years ago four years ago five years ago six or more years ago don't know/refused woman man 86,6% 13,1% 0,3% 94,7% 4,9% 0,4% 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % 80 % 100 % yes no don't know or refused woman man seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 42 analyzing gender differences in answers to the questions v11.1-v11.16 we can say that for all 16 categories male students more than female used the internet and computer yesterday. for 12 categories of use of the internet and computer, we observe significant differences by chi-square criteria with p <0.05 (the histogram 6). although fewer female students used the computer yesterday and the internet for reading scientific articles and books, we could not conclude that they were less interested in learning or in researching. our experience in working with russian students let us assume that this is connected with the attitude to visiting library and using hard copies of scientific papers or books. significant differences weren't present only on the following categories of use: 2 – “communicate in social networks or forums on general topics (facebook, students forums etc.)”, 4 – “search and download images, ring tones and games for your phone”, 9 – “read of handbooks or other materials (articles from wiki, presentations, essays etc.)”, 11 – “look for information about health or healthy life online” (the histogram 11). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 43 histogram 11: students’ answers to a question “what for did you happen to use the computer yesterday?” (for categories with * differences are significant p<0.05). as we observe the significant differences in ict usage we could conclude that male students are more interested in usage computer for playing games, rest and relax, read news, communicate with skype and etc.. this tendency has also been noted in the dynamics of internet auditorium in russia, since 2003 monitoring of pof shows that the percentage of internet user among men is bigger than the percentage of internet users among women. for example, in 2009 percentage of internet users among of men was 37%, among women 30% (pof 2009, http://bd.fom.ru/pdf/int0309.pdf). conclusion after analysis of research data about students’ ict use in learning and in everyday life, we can note the following: 18,4% 72,3% 46,9% 16,0% 9,5% 33,0% 23,3% 14,7% 66,3% 36,2% 12,8% 43,7% 24,8% 2,9% 6,1% 31,6% 45,7% 73,7% 62,8% 17,8% 24,7% 42,5% 30,4% 33,2% 69,6% 46,6% 17,0% 64,0% 49,4% 12,6% 16,2% 50,2% 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % 80 % 100 % fun & games communicate with skype, email and etc. search and download images, ring tones and games for your phone do computing edit texts and presentations, including creation of charts and diagrams edit images and photos read blogs read handbooks or other materials (articles from wiki, presentations, … read scientific articles, books etc. look for information about health or healthy life online read news rest and relax look online for news or information about politics or political campaigns shopping looking for information about smth else, didn't mention above 1* 2 3* 4 5* 6* 7* 8* 9 10 * 11 12 * 13 * 14 * 15 * 16 * woman man categories of internet and computer usage communicate in social networks or forums about general topics... http://bd.fom.ru/pdf/int0309.pdf� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 44 1. the most popular among russian students use of technologies are: social networks and general information resources (wikipedia and others). 2. young males more often, than females use ict while learning and in everyday life. 3. there are differences between groups of universities in russia (research, best, good) in equipment and ict possibilities provided by university to students: such as p rojectors, laptop connection to a university network or free of charge access to scientific databases. 4. possibilities of ict usage in educational process differ within university between faculties. at universities of russia new technologies just start to find their place in educational process, at many universities the system of online interactions with students isn't constructed yet. the process of learning management system application has just started at the time of our research in 2009. 5. although students use ict to read handbooks or learning materials, read scientific articles and books and look for information about health and healthy life they find this activities as less attractive in comparison with games and entertainments, dialogue in social networks, and, surprisingly, “do computing” . 6. the plagiarism problem in student's work is common in russia. in research universities the situation with plagiarism is better, but still demands the attention of tutors and administration. 7. we should also note that russian students positively refer to ict use: the majority of respondents like to have access to information and do not feel overloaded by different sources (tv, internet and etc.). answering the questions raised at the beginning of the paper, we could notice that application of technologies do not start from blank page and culture plays a big role. for example, wide usage of plagiarism by students determines not only by easy of copy and paste, but also by attitudes and behavior from teachers. regarding to universality in technology application, we could mention, that in russia data support the main tendency that males are more active in usage of ict than females. this could be explained by universality of gender roles and universality of gender values, as it showed by schwartz and rubel in data integrated across 127 samples man more than women, endorsed power and achievement, and woman more than men, tended to endorse the values of benevolence and universalism (2005). comparing with data received in a german sample (with a similar technique and equivalent double-blind translated questions) we could admit that german and russian students have a l ot of similarities like attitude towards reading (handbooks, scientific articles, news, blogs), they treat internet as source of relaxation and rest, and also they wish to choose more practical courses. although there are some differences: for example german students more often use skype and email, editing presentation, texts and graphs, shopping. russian more often use social networks and download music and pictures for mobile phones. also plagiarism problem is more serious in russia. more information about our results received from the german and russian sample can be found in porshnev & giest (2010). also we plan to provide more detailed comparison of russian and german students’ ict use in following publications. unfortunately, distinctions in data collection techniques allows us only to make approximate comparison with results received by jones (2010); shao, jones and richardson (2010); nordkvelle (2010). approximate comparison shows: firstly, students’ use of ict in russia has cultural specific, secondly it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 45 occurs within the limits of a universal trend – connected with increase influence of ict on society. analyzing a universal trend, we can expect that with further penetration of ict in russia, more and more universities will offer students possibilities of interaction through ict and research in this area will need to continue. in our further research we plan to organize a more detailed study of the information environment in universities, with use of various methods, such as focus of group and day experience method. also we plan to continue cross-cultural comparison of ict use. acknowledgments preparation of this paper was supported by funds the higher school of economics academic fund program 2010-20012 (#10-01-0021), and alexander von humboldt foundation grant 3.1-rus/1130038 buka to alexander porshnev. we thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and suggestions on this paper and prof. avraam levin, valery porshnev and prof. elena porshneva for comments and advices during the planning, organizing and conducting the study. prof. marina bagramyants, dr. regina ershova, gennadii gludin, dr. renat kamalov, dr.elena mamonova, prof. ludmila obukhova, prof. sogia gaponova, prof. alexander voiskounsky, prof. ludmila zakharova, dr. elena ivanova, prof. alexander chastikov, prof. natalia dorshakova, prof. alexander sytnik for help in organizing data collection at the universities of russia. references csikszentmihalyi, m. (1975). beyond boredom and anxiety. san francisco: josseybass. czerniewicz l. & brown c. (2010). born into the digital age in the south of africa: the reconfiguration of the ‘digital citizen’. in l. dirckinck-holmfeld, v. hodgson, c. jones, d. mcconnell & t. ryberg (eds.) proceedings of the 7th international conference on networked learning, aalborg 3–4th may 2010, 859–865 hargittai, e. (2010). digital na(t)ives? variation in internet skills and uses among members of the ‘‘net generation’’. sociological inquiry, 80(1), 92-113. higgins, e. t. (2006). value from hedonic experience and engagement. psychological review, 113(3), 439–460 jones c. (2010). students of the network ages: a complex portrait of english university first year students. paper presented at european conference on education research – ecer 2010 jones, c. & czerniewicz, l. (2010). describing or debunking? the net generation and digital natives. (editorial to special section). journal of computer assisted learning, 26(5), 317-320. nordkvelle y.t. (2010). students’ use of technologies in norway. paper presented at european conference on education research – ecer 2010 parker, b., & b urnie, d. (2009). classroom technology in business schools: a survey of installations and attitudes toward teaching and learning. aace journal, 17(1), 45-60. porshnev a. & giest h. (2010). entwicklung einer neuen lernkultur in deutschland und russland: eine kulturvergleichende studie (berichtsentwurf in tabellen seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 46 und diagrammen) , retrieved from http://www.lkultur.com/report_de_11072010.pdf schwartz, s. h., & rubel, t. (2005). sex differences in value priorities: cross-cultural and multimethod studies. journal of personality and social psychology, 89(6), 1010–1028. shao b., jones c. & richardson j. (2010). university students’ use of technologies in china presentation at ecer 2010, helsinki smith, s.d., & caruso, j.b. (2010). the ecar study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2010 (research study, vol. 6). boulder, co: educause center for applied research, 2010. retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ecar . voiskounsky a.e. (2009) web plagiarism: empirical study. psychology in russia: state of the art, 2009, 564-583 wilhelmsen, j., ørnes, h., kristiansen, t., & breivik j. (2009) digitale utfordringer i høyere utdanning. norgesuniversitetets ikt monitor. norgesuniversitetets skriftserie 1/2009 tromsø: norgesuniversitetet, 44 арестова о.н., бабанин л.н., войскунский а.е. (2000) мотивация пользователей интернет // гуманитарные исследования в интернет / под ред.а.е.войскунского, «можайск-терра»., 55-77 бабаева ю.д, войскунский а.е. (2003) одаренный ребенок за компьютером, «смысл», 336 мордасова н. а. (2004) провинциальный студент как пользователь сети интернет: на примере исследования студенчества тамбовской области retrieved from http://www.nbuv.gov.ua/articles/crimea/2004/doc/265.pdf поршнев а.в. (2008) психологические аспекты эффективного использования интернета в образовательных целях // культурно-историческая психология. 3, 43-50 поршнев а.в., гист х. (2010) кросс-культурное исследование новой образовательной культуры студентов германии и россии (отчет №1: графики и таблицы), 12, retrieved from http://www.lkultur.com/report_ru_01072010.pdf http://www.lkultur.com/report_de_11072010.pdf� http://www.educause.edu/ecar� http://www.nbuv.gov.ua/articles/crimea/2004/doc/265.pdf� http://www.lkultur.com/report_ru_01072010.pdf� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 47 appendix 1 questions from a project “a cross cultural study of the new learning culture formation in germany and russia” (english version) v1. sex male/female v2. please enter your birth date ______ v3. at that faculty you are studying ___________ (example, psychology) v4. please enter name of your university v5. what is your specialization ________________________ (for example social psychology) v6. since when you have you own computer with internet access • no computer with access in internet • six months or less • a year ago • two or three years ago • four years ago • five years ago • six or more years ago • don't know/refused v7. when do you enter the university _____ v8. since when you have you own computer with internet access • no computer with access in internet • six months or less • a year ago • two or three years ago • four years ago • five years ago • six or more years ago • don't know/refused v9. how often do you use the internet or email • several times a day • about once a day • 3-5 days a week • 1-2 days a week • every few weeks • less often • never • don't know/ refused what kind of teaching technology and equipment have you in your university v10.1. internet access v10.2. possibility to connect laptop to university network v10.3. course materials available in electronic form v10.4. digital projectors v10.5. free of charge access to scientific electronic databases (example jstor etc.) v10.6. video records of lectures v10.7. interactive learning programs v10.8. possibilities to sign up for courses, a schedules and to solve other organizational issues via internet v15. do you feel overloaded (by tv, magazines, newspapers, and the internet), or you like having so much information available? (mar 25, 2009, pew internet & american life project) • feel overloaded seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 48 • like having so much information available • don’t know/refused v11a. did you happen to use the internet yesterday? (mar 25, 2009, pew internet & american life project) • yes • not • don’t refused what for did you happen to use the computer yesterday? v11.1. fun & games v11.2. communicate in social networks or forums on general topics (facebook, students forums etc.) v11.3. communicate through skype, e-mail. mail, etc. v11.4. search and download images, ring tones and games for your phone v11.5. do computing v11.6. edit of texts and presentations, including creation of charts and diagrams v11.7. edit images and photos v11.8. read blogs v11.9. read of handbooks or other materials (articles from wiki, presentations, essays etc.) v11.10. read scientific articles, books etc. v11.11. look for health or medical information online v11.12. read news v11.13. rest and relax v11.14. look online for news or information about politics or the campaign v11.15. shopping v11.16. look for online information about something not mentioned above questions about plagiarism was included in motivational block (items mb6 and mb28) respondents were asked to choose answer from following scale: strongly disagree disagree uncertain or unsure agree strongly agree mb1. i prefer course material that really challenges me so i can learn new things mb2 there are courses i am so interested in, that i continue studying even if i have to work more than necessary (for example, participate in research groups) mb3 some of task provide me such a pleasure from using my creativity, that i want to spent more time doing them than it is necessary for the exam. mb4 getting a good grade is the most satisfying thing for me right now mb5 i make the tasks, because otherwise i will have troubles. mb6 my group mates copying a few paragraphs from a book/internet to their work uncited. mb7 i do not have time to review all recommended literature. mb8 when i take a test i think about how poorly i am doing compared with other students mb9 when studying for this course, i often try to explain the material to a classmate or a friend. mb10 i share my works in internet (in the blog, site or forum), because i want to receive feedback. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 49 mb11 even if i have trouble learning the material in this class, i try to do the work on my own, without help from anyone. mb12 if i have the trouble in learning i use to use internet communities mb13 if i know that i could not achieve a good mark at this course, i try not to choose it. mb14 if i can, i want to get better grades than most of the other students mb15 if i know that i could find solution to the tasks in internet or my group mates could give it to me, i will not do it by myself. mb16 if i have a choice between creative exercise and formal one i prefer the creative, even if it could be more complicated mb17 the main target for me is to pass exams mb18 when i take tests i think of the consequences of failing. mb19 i have an uneasy, upset feeling when i take an exam. mb20 i try to work with other students from this class to complete the course assignments. mb21 i share my works in internet (in the blog, site or forum), because i like to help others mb22 i ask the instructor to clarify concepts i don't understand well. mb23 i ask questions on internet forums to clarify concepts i don’t understand well. mb24 when i have the opportunity in this class, i choose assignments that i can learn new things, even if they don’t guarantee a good grade. mb25 during my studying in university i became so interested in one or several subjects that it influences my choice of the future professional activities. mb26 i want to do well because it is important to my family, friends, employer, or others. mb27 if i have possibility to avoid doing the tasks, i will use it. mb28 i copy and paste to my work a few paragraphs from a book/internet uncited. mb29 i feel my heart beating fast when i take an exam. mb30 when i take a test i think about items on other parts of the test i can't answer. mb31 when studying for this course, i often set aside time to discuss the course material with a group of students from the class. mb32 during the course i used to discuss the materials on-line mb33 when i can't understand the material in this course, i ask another student in this class for help. mb34 i have several favorite internet communities to found and discuss information about my profession in future what do you think about, how often other students use the following features of computer and internet? respondents were asked to choose answer from following scale: several times a day about once a day 3-5 days a week 1-2 days a week every few weeks less often never don't know/ refused v13.1. fun & games v13.2. communicate in social networks or forums on general topics (facebook, students forums etc.) v13.3. communicate through skype, e-mail. mail, etc. v13.4. search and download images, ring tones and games for your phone v13.5. do computing seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 50 v13.6. edit of texts and presentations, including creation of charts and diagrams v13.7. edit images and photos v13.8. read blogs v13.9. read of handbooks or other materials (articles from wiki, presentations, essays etc.) v13.10. read scientific articles, books etc. v13.11. look for health or medical information online v13.12. read news v13.13. rest and relax v13.14. look online for news or information about politics or the campaign v13.15. shopping v13.16. look for online information about something not mentioned above how often you use the following features of computer and internet? respondents were asked to choose answer from following scale: several times a day about once a day 3-5 days a week 1-2 days a week every few weeks less often never don't know/ refused v14.1. fun & games v14.2. communicate in social networks or forums on general topics (facebook, students forums etc.) v14.3. communicate through skype, e-mail. mail, etc. v14.4. search and download images, ring tones and games for your phone v14.5. do computing v14.6. edit of texts and presentations, including creation of charts and diagrams v14.7. edit images and photos v14.8. read blogs v14.9. read of handbooks or other materials (articles from wiki, presentations, essays etc.) v14.10. read scientific articles, books etc. v14.11. look for health or medical information online v14.12. read news v14.13. rest and relax v14.14. look online for news or information about politics or the campaign v14.15. shopping v14.16. look for online information about something not mentioned above seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 51 appendix 2 samples description histogram 1. distribution of collected data by year of entry to the university. histogram 2. distribution of collected data by age. 10,8% 32,7% 56,5% 13,3% 36,6% 50,1% 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 2005 2006 2007 original sample balanced sample 9,5% 37,3% 33,0% 13,6% 3,4% 3,2% 1,4% 35,2% 39,1% 17,4% 3,7% 3,4% 0 % 5 % 10 % 15 % 20 % 25 % 30 % 35 % 40 % 45 % 18 and less 19 20 21 22 23 and more original sample balanced sample seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 52 histogram 3. distribution of collected data by specialization. histogram 4. distribution of collected data by time of computer ownership. 20,3% 25,0% 46,4% 8,3% 26,1% 23,8% 41,4% 8,7% 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % information technologies (eg, … economics (eg, management, … humanities (eg, psychology, … technical and natural science … original sample balanced sample 3,0% 3,1% 2,8% 9,2% 20,7% 25,5% 35,6% 2,3% 1,9% 1,9% 8,7% 19,1% 25,0% 41,0% 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % do not know or do not wish to … no computer with access in … six months or less a year ago two or three years ago four or five years ago six or more years original sample balanced sample seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 53 † histogram 5. distribution of collected data by level of university. † 28,8% 60,0% 11,2% 28,3% 59,3% 12,4% 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % research best good original sample balanced sample alexander porshnev hartmut giest introduction students and new technologies in russia title teachers practices to support student work in digital storytelling: a study on finnish and chinese school teachers experiences   marianna vivitsou, faculty of educational sciences university of helsinki   hannele niemi, faculty of educational sciences university of helsinki   ge wei, college of elementary education capital normal university veera kallunki, faculty of educational sciences university of helsinki   rong miao graduate school of education peking university e-mail: marianna.vivitsou@gmail.com (corresponding author) abstract this study aims to discuss and analyze finnish and chinese primary school teachers practices when digital storytelling is the teaching method, aiming for student-generated stories in video format. to meet this end, teachers introduce digital storytelling in their practices and guide and support students into building and sharing digital stories in video format with peers in the classroom and online. in addition, they introduce the use of web-based environments and digital technologies, adapt their teaching plan accordingly, and enrich existing instructional material. as a result, teachers practices of organizing and facilitating student work and development change. in order to investigate how teaching practices change, this study draws from chinese and finnish teachers interviews and observation data and uses inductive analysis and constant comparison for more abstract themes and categories. the findings show that the teachers use formal and informal, natural and technological environments to organize student work and aim for freer learning in digital storytelling activities. also, different aspects of collaborative work are used to facilitate and, mainly, structure student work and development. keywords: digital storytelling, teachers practices, organizing student work & development, facilitating student work & development introduction technological advancement not only has accelerated the way in which we live and learn; it has also enabled the advent of digital technologies in our daily lives and into the school everydayness as well. this is putting pressure on teachers to introduce an array of technological hardware and software into the classroom and, thus, rethink the ways they practice teaching using web-based environments, and mobile devices and applications along with traditional pen and paper. as knowledge creation takes place during social interaction at the intersection of dialogical encounters among people, substances and artifacts (e.g., vygotsky, 1978), it is essential nowadays to investigate the ways the use of digital technology influences teachers professional practices.   one pedagogical method, in which modern information technology, knowledge creation and narrative are mixed, is digital storytelling (duveskog, tedre, sedano, & sutinen, 2012; lambert, 2013; mcgee, 2015; niemi et al., 2014; niemi & multisilta, 2015; page & thomas, 2011; robi, 2008; rossiter & garcia, 2010). the use of digital storytelling is combined with learner-centered approaches that aim to enable participatory learning through the use of connective technologies, digital mobile devices and language, while the goal is the production of meaningful stories (mcgee, 2015). a salient feature of digital storytelling is that it increases engagement in the topic, is collaborative, and encourages active participation as well as shared learning and creativity (lambert, 2013; mcgee, 2015; niemi et al., 2014; sadik, 2008; shelby-caffey, bda & jenkins, 2014; sukovic, 2014; woodhouse, 2008). it also blurs the roles of student and instructor by positioning them both as learners.   traditionally, a story needs a beginning, a middle and an end. nowadays, however, more avant-garde views question the triple feature and allow for less fixed definitions. a story, then, can also be any recount of events that presents a minimal emplotment. stories therefore can recount a single event or an array of events. given this, and taking into consideration that telling a story is not attached to one mode of expression (e.g., oral or written speech only), we can say that the use of the term is rather metaphorical. although storytelling used to be associated with oral expression, it now refers to a variety of modes of fixation and inscription (e.g., writing, acting out a role, filming etc.). following this, digital storytelling is a 21st century metaphor that signifies the use of multiple modes of expression and literacies in order to bring forward the viewpoints of storytellers by recounting series of events with digital and connective technologies (vivitsou et al., 2016).   this study is part of a wider research project on digital storytelling. earlier phases have given out findings concerning the contribution of the method to increase student engagement in learning (niemi & multisilta, 2016, niemi et al., 2014), as support to inquiry-based learning (penttil et al., 2016) and as a way to tell different types of stories for different purposes (vivitsou et al., 2016)1.   overall, findings resulting from previous studies (niemi & multisilta, 2016, niemi et al., 2014, penttil et al., 2016, vivitsou et al., 2016) indicate that digital storytelling is a method that engages students in dynamic and spiral learning experiences where commitment and hard work is needed for student-driven video stories with mobile technologies and web-based platforms. student-generated stories are produced in onand off-school settings and are subject-based and interdisciplinary, while topic selections can be student-initiated. as digital storytelling allows for the development of multiliteracies and multimodalities, it requires holistic and integrative approaches to teaching and learning.   considering these, this study introduces a joint research project in two schools in beijing and two in helsinki. during project implementation, chinese and finnish teachers introduce digital storytelling as a technology-enhanced method into their practices aiming to guide and support their students into building and sharing digital stories with peers in the classroom and online. in the finnish case the teachers choose to work on environmental themes, while in the chinese teachers focus on themes from natural sciences and comprehensive study, and everyday life and traditions in china. the study seeks responses to the following research questions:    1.        in what ways do teachers organize their practices in digital storytelling in finland and china?  2.       what scaffolding practices do teachers use in digital storytelling? 3.       what opportunities and challenges arise for the future from the use of tools and teaching practices in digital storytelling? theoretical background global sharing pedagogy and digital storytelling nowadays, teachers need to organize their professional practices in such ways that support student work and mediate development in terms of social interaction in the classroom and interaction through the use of digital technologies. in this study we examine how teachers organize and scaffold student work in digital storytelling activities. the theoretical framework of the study builds on the global sharing pedagogy (gsp) model (niemi and multisilta, 2016, niemi et al., 2014) that draws from the socio-cultural approach (e.g., vygotsky, 1978).   in the gsp, the focus is placed on learners and the main aim is to understand what factors interact for student engagement in learning with digital strorytelling. according to sociocultural theories, learning is the result of dialogical interactions between people, substances, and artifacts (e.g., slj, 2012; hakkarainen, paavola, kangas, & seitamaa-hakkarainen, 2013). the primary objective, therefore, is to strengthen student engagement in learning by opening up opportunities for active participation and student-generated knowledge creation. in this way, young people will be able to deal with the changes they are facing already, and will be facing in their lives. within this framework, engagement, rather than only an end, is also means for further learning. in order to offer a dynamic representation of the current situation in formal schooling, the gsp brings together the elements that shape the teaching and learning needs of the digital era. it does so on the basis of vygotskys (1978 p. 67) idea that tools, and symbolic and social mediators enable the learner to select, change, amplify, and interpret objects and, thus, activate the learning process. as figure 1 below shows, the model includes four interrelated goals: 1) learner-driven knowledge and skills creation; 2) collaboration; 3) networking; and 4) digital media competencies and literacies.   fig. 1. the global sharing pedagogy framework (niemi & multisilta, 2015)       on the one hand, the aims are interconnected and can act as both means and ends (niemi & multisilta, 2016). digital technologies, for example, both enrich the learning experience and contribute to the continuum of learning (multisilta and perttula, 2013). on the other hand, symbolic and social mediators are involved (niemi & multisilta, 2016). knowledge and skills creation, for instance, provide learners with the symbolic tools necessary to develop an active approach to learning as well as metacognitive skills. this is a dynamic process where learners build critical thinking, creativity, argumentation, and learning to learn skills, ethics and values. learners construct knowledge by working together, through interaction and collaboration. collaboration is a social mediator that allows for the development of competences that go beyond the purely cognitive and enable learners to deal with the requirements of the global world in a holistic way. social skills, cultural literacy and understanding, help-seeking, and help-giving strategies are such competences. as learning happens in interaction, knowledge building benefits from the synergy and expertise of people in diverse environments. networking is the social mediator catering for intercultural exchanges and sharing ideas and experiences in face-to-face and online encounters. networking, therefore, brings people from a variety of contexts together to learn from one another. as exchanges take place through digital and mobile technologies and web-based platforms nowadays, learners need to develop digital media competences and literacies. developing literacies does not concern technology only; it also requires social and symbolic mediators. in this way, learners can develop as content producers and consumers, able to navigate digital environments with a critical eye, by assessing and validating the knowledge they find and create.   within this framework, technology is a tool that can promote motivation and allow for student-generated scenarios and artifacts to occur within formal and informal settings. museums, libraries, natural surroundings or the home are examples of informal settings of learning. by organizing activities in off-school settings, or informal environments, the school becomes a learning hub within the community, while classroom boundaries extend toward knowledge building that serves authentic needs, and aims to solve problems and make peoples lives better (leadbeater 2000, pp. 111-112). according to findings of studies in science education, there is consensus that learning benefits from out-of-school settings (anderson, lucas, & ginns, 2003; bell, lewenstein, shouse, & feder, 2009; braund, m., & reiss, m. 2006; martin, 2004). in this way, students transcend boundaries within enriched learning spaces that involve the students wider cultural and linguistic background. as ntelioglou et al. (2014, p. 4) argue, building practices upon the students cultural and linguistic capital, or funds of knowledge, helps the young people develop a positive sense of who they are and how they relate to their teachers, their peers and the world.   in this study, we view digital storytelling as a technology-enhanced teaching method aiming for student engagement and development as a holistic process by building knowledge and artifacts in both in-school and informal settings. this combination brings a real-life element into schooling and learning and, therefore, pedagogical purposes become authentic purposes. this type of digital storytelling sets off to seek ways to achieve student purposefulness by drawing from content toward narratives the students develop collaboratively in groups. having defined the purpose and the overall topic, digital storytelling involves filming with cameras, smartphones or tablets and putting the scenes together in groups, aiming for a coherent and consistent whole. following from this, the digital stories are video-based and products of edits and remixes in collaboration and, as such, support the participatory culture through multiple (digital) media convergence.   in addition to other media and devices, students use web-based technologies to share digital stories. web-based environments and platforms, therefore, are 21st century informal settings of learning. findings from earlier studies indicate that students both work hard and enjoy the digital storytelling activities. engagement, therefore, increases (niemi & multisilta, 2016) through the use of digital and online technologies (niemi et al., 2014). therefore, digital storytelling can open up the space for holistic learning experiences.   considering these, it is important to understand what teaching practices underlie digital storytelling activities and how these relate to global sharing pedagogy. toward this end, in this study we will examine the practices teachers use in order to guide and support the students efforts for knowledge building and development through digital storytelling in two schools in china and two in finland.   teachers supporting practices in digital storytelling young peoples development has been theorized by lev vygotsky (1978) as a process occurring in collaboration between the child (or student) and an adult (or teacher) within the zone of proximal development (zpd). as far as school learning is concerned, the zpd does not only apply to a subject-specific area but is an aggregate of factors intersecting at a point of difficulty (zaretskii, 2009). the zpd, then, is a complex area that involves cognitive, emotional and other forms of challenges. for a meaningful development, teachers need to come up with practices that support or scaffold the process. scaffolding therefore is a complex phenomenon and needs to be further discussed so that we gain a deeper insight into the role it plays in teaching practices.   the construct of scaffolding (bruner, 1975; wood, bruner and ross, 1976) extends the vygotskian concept while it allows zpd to remain relevant. in order to be meaningful for a specific learning situation, scaffolding needs to take place within a particular zpd and, as such, is mediational practice. the term draws from the analogy of a building under construction. similarly to this situation, the teacher removes the scaffold when the movement in the zpd has been achieved. however, as wass et al. (2011) argue, scaffolding is a complex concept. in their 3-year-long study examining ways supporting the development of critical thinking abilities in university students, wass et al. (2011) argue that scaffolding can be conventional (e.g. textbooks or other material) or informal. in this sense, peer evaluation can be a way to scaffold learning. also, it can have a material (e.g. a book) form, or not (e.g. it can take place through speech). this view of scaffolding is relevant to digital storytelling, as students use multiple ways (e.g., devices, software, pens, paper, books, group discussions etc.) to build up their stories. scaffolding, therefore, can be socio-material and symbolic.   in accordance with this view, tharp and gallimore (1988) propose that assisted performance is a form of scaffolding. also, moll and whitmore (1993) suggest that zpd should be seen as a space for reciprocal meaning-making interaction between the student, the teacher and the peers. these views extend the notion of scaffolding as introduced by bruner (1975). thompson (2013) and meira and lerman (2001) argue that bruners view of scaffolding promotes teacher control at the expense of student autonomy and, thus, is closer to behaviorism than to socioculturalism. on the other hand, these approaches are in agreement with the vygotskian idea of the developmental process where other capable peers can provide assistance (e.g., macy 2016, zaretskii 2009).   although vygotsky did not elaborate on who can be a capable peer, wells (1994, 2000) suggests that this person should be part of a given learning environment (e.g., in class, a group, a community) and assist the learners to achieve what they are yet unable to do alone. similarly, in their studies on building pedagogies through drama and process writing, macy (2016) and thompson (2013) view all involved teachers and young students as knowledgeable individuals who interact for knowledge construction within settings of participation and engagement. in his study, thompson (2013) found that peer collaboration assisted his young students to internalize cultural and psychological tools. therefore, peer interaction can be scaffolding practice when it assists performance and leads to development (wass & golding, 2014). scaffolding then should aim to lead to task performance independently from assistance and scaffolds.   this positioning in favor of a peer interaction-oriented scaffolding draws from vygotskys own research. according to ageyev (2003), vygotskys view of the developmental phase is actually a recursive loop that involves the use of signs, mediated memories and play. practically, this means that a capable other can be any person who assists in the developmental transition. instead of being removed, then, scaffolding should be adapted according to the needs of a particular zpd system. moreover, scaffolding is situated practice and, thus, is recursive and constructivist, rather than exclusively materialistic in nature. within this framework, knowledge building happens as part of collaborative interaction of others with a mix of skills, backgrounds and perspectives shared in a community of learners engaged in common practices (macy, 2016). this dynamic view of scaffolding implies that any meaningful activity that advances student interaction with peers or artifacts for pedagogical purposes can be a scaffolding device. again, this view is relevant to digital storytelling where student work is based on collaboration and can take place in formal and informal settings. within this context, background knowledge, skills and expertise of teachers, students and other individuals (e.g., museum curators, researchers, parents etc.) blend, aiming to assist young peoples development.   as teachers need to be constantly searching for tools that allow them to rid of the outdated concept of knowledge transmission, digital storytelling can be a dynamic tool to assist toward this direction. digital storytelling itself is a method that entails multiple activities, as the use of technologies should not only lead to the creation of videos; it should serve pedagogical purposes as well. as digital storytelling allows for interaction in both group work (e.g., in a role play activity) and on individual basis (e.g., when learning how to edit with a software), the opportunity opens up for teachers to use different types of scaffolding for different purposes.   it is important therefore to examine how teachers organize their practices and how they support student work when digital storytelling is the pedagogical method. in this way, we will be able to identify the types of scaffolding that finnish and chinese teachers use when they integrate digital technologies into their classrooms. the context of the study this study draws on the experiences of four finnish and ten chinese teachers in two primary schools in helsinki and two in beijing during the implementation of a digital storytelling project. the data of the study result from field notes, observations and interviews.   for project implementation, the finnish researchers met the chinese teachers in november 2015 and agreed to implement digital storytelling activities for about a one month-long teaching period. to this end, they designed activities aiming for more student-centered teaching to take place through the use of smart phones, digital cameras, tablets and a web-based digital environment. storytelling activities took place late november 2015-february 2016, following two workshops, presentations and discussions with teachers and principals in beijing in november. as that was the first time chinese schools became acquainted with digital storytelling, the situation was to a certain extent different from the finnish context where the method, following its introduction in schools in 2012, there had seen the implementation of projects, training workshops and studies where teachers had already participated.   the current project used that research experience (e.g., niemi et al., 2014, niemi & multisilta, 2016) as a basis and emerged as part of the large-scale sino-finnish collaboration. overall, this time one goal was to create bridges for joint research in the field of educational technology between beijing university and helsinki university.   the study participants the finnish teachers in the project the study participants are three female and one male, experienced teachers who teach in two comprehensive schools in helsinki and choose to introduce digital technologies for pedagogical purposes into their everyday practices. two female teachers teach 5th graders, the third is a 7th grade subject teacher and the male teacher teaches 4th grade students.   the three female teachers are newbies in the learning with technologies field, while the male teacher had previously worked with digital storytelling projects. his current participation is based on reflections on the previous project experience and driven by the desire to allocate more classroom time to project activities. in this way, he believes that the students would have an opportunity to work together and tell science-related stories with technologies. in addition, as he mentioned during the pre-project phase, making digital stories would instigate the students interest for science learning.   for digital storytelling, the finnish teachers chose informal settings for students to film the stories in groups, and introduced digital devices and a web-based platform to upload and share with peers.   the chinese teachers in the project in the chinese context, there were two teams of 45 chinese teachers who worked with digital storytelling, each coordinated by a male (school 1) and a female (school 2) teacher. the teachers in both schools teach 4th, 5th and 6th grade students in beijing. the selection of the chinese schools was made by colleagues in beijing university and was based on the schools expressed interest in educational technology, the international profile of school 1 and an orientation to science learning of school 2.   interviewing in china took place in public, in the sense that discussions were attended by the school principal and the colleague from beijing university responsible for the project, while they were facilitated by an english teacher or masters students who acted as language translators. the basic idea here was to share experiences and views and, as such, constituted a learning opportunity at the collective level. given the situation, as they were the main contributors during discussions with the finnish researchers, we consider that the project coordinators perspectives played a pivotal role in the study with the rest of the teachers contributions supporting and further illustrating the situation.   for digital storytelling, the chinese teachers introduced the topic in class and assigned tasks to groups of students. the students organized and filmed their digital stories at home or other off-school settings. later, they presented their work to their peers and the teacher in class. methods collecting data in order to get an insight into the four finnish teachers experiences we conducted three interviews following the completion of project activities in may 2016. there were two interview sessions in english lasting between 45-50 minutes each. one interview involved one male teacher answering questions about his experiences during digital storytelling. the second interview involved two female teachers and two english-speaking researchers. these teachers worked in the same school at the time, collaborated during the project and chose to be interviewed together. the third interview was conducted by a finnish-speaking researcher.   the finnish research teams first effort to touch base with the chinese context included two visits in beijing. one aimed to introduce the technology-enhanced teaching method (november 2015) and the second to gather data (april 2016) following the implementation in both schools.   in the interim phase of the visits there were internet-based exchanges between researchers in both universities and web-conferences with the chinese teachers to coordinate the project. in addition, one chinese scholar, member of the team of authors lived in helsinki at the time, while on a doctoral exchange program. as there was a multiplicity of actors involved, ranging from primary schools to research units, to faculties, and universities, the project had an international profile in many respects.   the interview questions aimed for responses concerning teaching practices, the benefits and the difficulties that arose during the digital storytelling project. following are the questions used to guide the finnish teachers interviews:            overall, have you enjoyed the digital storytelling experience? why/why not?          what kind of changes took place during the implementation of the digital storytelling project?          so far, which part of the digital storytelling project has been the most memorable? why?          what problems have come up during digital storytelling classroom integration?          in what ways have you solved these problems?          have there been any dilemmas (i.e., situations involving difficult choices) that needed to be dealt with? if yes, what kind of dilemmas these have been?          in what ways have you resolved these situations? why?    we used these questions also in china as a guiding framework that we adapted according to the needs arising in each situation. for instance, some teachers said that networking and using english were problems they were met with during digital storytelling implementation. to resolve this, we focused our questions on problems arising from making and improving the stories, and the benefits and aspects of collaborative work instead. also, as mentioned previously, we used the questions as a map to make our way around, as the goal was to understand the ways teachers used and integrated technology and how this influenced their professional practices. developing, therefore, the interview questions according to the needs arising in each context was part of the research process.   analyzing data for the interviews, we used inductive thematic analysis and moved by constantly comparing the data to more abstract categories (glaser and strauss, 1995). we used observations and field notes as complementary information source to understand contextual conditions and factors influencing the teachers professional practices. also, we used the guiding questions discussed above as a map to make our way around. during interviews, we adapted the guiding questions so that we can reach a better understanding of themes that emerged during the interviews. the overall goal of our research was to look into manifestations of the same phenomenon by examining the views of finnish and chinese teachers and how they handled the situation, rather than create replicable settings or apply a comparative design in the strict sense of the term.   although there was a set of questions used in both the chinese and the finnish context, we used more targeted questions to form a clearer picture of emergent themes. when, for instance, the male finnish teacher brought up the issue of free-learning program as example of a different approach to teaching during the project, we asked further questions. we did so in order to understand how students handled the situation, if any amendments were needed, what these were, and so on. for the analysis, the researchers listened to the recordings, made notes separately and compared them in order to ensure mutual understanding of the data and match with emergent thematic areas. the interviews were transcribed for thematic analysis.   for the analysis, we moved iteratively from the more general to the more specific, by examining utterances in teacher talk,coding and assigning them to key and recurrent themes (table 1):   table 1. key and recurrent themes in the teachers interviews subject utterance subtheme key theme recurrent theme mt1 to make more time i have to take it away from some other subjects and say now we are going to do only this topic. making time by conflating the curriculum organizing teaching and student work informal learning environments (natural & technological)   its very interesting to look where the beach is and what the pothole is (like)... i have to find where the right places are... choosing and finding the right place         as table 1 above shows, the male teachers (mt1) utterance about the natural spot to study the ice age is both about the importance of getting students in touch with the place and the difficulties of getting there. the whole thing mounts to the subtheme of making time, as the teacher further explains what actions he took to achieve the goal (i.e., by minimizing the distance and conflating the curriculum). this first cycle of analysis (saldana 2009) reveals that convergence in teachers talk leads to recurrent themes but, then, the underlying notions can be quite divergent. for instance, the female teachers (ft2) utterance about getting students prepared to start shooting the digital stories points to the same recurrent theme (i.e., informal learning setting).   on the other hand, recurrent themes were not clear cut or distinct. informal learning environments, for example, can be one type of resource. therefore, the two recurrent themes, informal learning environments and available resources are overlapping. moreover, expanding available resources can entail subthemes, such as digital and other multimodal material that precede or follow the digital story making. the analysis therefore was a complex process with focused and axial coding. (saldana 2009, 151). findings the findings indicate that setting up digital storytelling activities involves different approaches to teaching and learning that frame the whole endeavor and the teachers practices. digital storytelling activities take place in informal settings, in natural surroundings and online, and aim to expand human and material resources of learning. teaching practices employ teacher-student and peer-to-peer collaborative work as scaffolding devices to mediate the process of student development. as table 2 shows, thematic analysis resulted in the following main categories and subthemes:   table 2. main categories and subthemes. setting up digital storytelling informal learning environments (natural) informal learning environments (technological) expanding resources collaborative work for development a free way to learning making connections with reality (a constructivist approach) need for a concrete plan, a grasp of the scientific method & asking questions digital storytelling in natural settings requires making time : at the periphery of the curriculum (integrated, after-hours sports clubs) : within the core curriculum using digital and mobile devices teaching how to edit digital stories working with a web-based platform sharing on a web-based platform with international peers developing multimodal material before, during & after shooting the stories reusing digital stories sharing digital stories with local & international peers sharing expertise with researchers teacher works with individual student with groups of students with researchers with peers students work individually with peers     setting up digital storytelling overall, the chinese and the finnish teachers in this study use three main approaches to set up the digital storytelling activities. according to these, students should be given the opportunity to learn in a freer way and to make connections with reality, while activities should be based on a concrete plan. more particularly:   a free way to learning as the male finnish teacher (hm) explains, he organizes activities in natural settings, while students choose who to work with, what aspect of the topic is important and how to build knowledge on it. in this way, as hm says, they learn not because they have to, but because they are free to learn. as the teacher argues, this way respects the students own pace of growth. when studying the ice age, the teacher intervenes when needed and mainly offers guidance concerning aspects of the topic. digital storytelling is a good reason to go to places, and is making students happier, he argues. it also allows students to get an understanding of how the pothole has developed through time. to this end, students take photos or short videos of the area in order to compare with the textbook or other material, and discuss in groups and reflect on how ice has influenced the formation of the landscape. in this way, science becomes a contextualized learning experience.   making connections with reality (a constructivist approach) in addition, p, one of the finnish female teachers in school 2, uses a myth as tool to facilitate student understanding of climatic change. when the interview starts, p explains how the story of the giant helped address the cognitive load her 5th grade students face when engaged with difficult concepts. the notion of millions of years is one example. as p argues, the myth assisted students to draw connections with reality and kick off activities in a creative way. making connections with reality is a principle consistent with ps theoretical background in constructivism where the teacher strongly positions herself. then, the students visit natural settings or the school yard and take photos or videos to edit the scenes into stories when they return to the classroom. for story improvement, the teacher interacts with individual students and asks questions to lead the students thinking deeper into the content.   need for a concrete plan, a grasp of the scientific method & asking questions as the male chinese coordinator in school 1 argues, digital storytelling expands the formal teaching content, while the method should fit in the design-implement-discuss framework that this school applies. in agreement with their colleagues in school 1, the teachers in school 2 state that a concrete plan is needed, along with a good grasp of the scientific method, ideas, collaboration, argumentation, and asking questions. to this end, the students work in groups and perform tasks to respond to topic-related questions posed by group members or the teacher.   in this way, digital storytelling helps students think deeper into the content, the teachers in school 2 argue. in relation to what normally happens in the classroom, in storytelling activities the students are deeply engaged and have more freedom, as, for instance, they can choose their work partners or what theme to focus on. like with school 1, teachers here teach the phenomenon under study in class and set storytelling activities in informal settings, as homework. the chinese teachers acknowledge the need for practices that blend knowledge from different areas and are willing to experiment with inquiry-focused, project-based and learner-centered methods. for them, digital storytelling is one such method.   as the female coordinator in school 2 argues, digital storytelling is a creative experience that opens up the possibility for students to do work beyond the core curriculum. it is a new adventure, and a complex process that requires effort and commitment. in this way, digital storytelling adds a new dimension to technology. again, the students work with digital storytelling activities assigned as homework to consolidate content taught in class, while they make digital stories about new years festivities during the holidays.   digital storytelling in informal settings as digital storytelling is not part of the school timetable to date, the teachers need to make time in order to accommodate storytelling activities organized in natural settings by, for example, conflating the curriculum (e.g., in the male finnish teachers case by using the time allocated to arts, biology and physical education). however, in both china and finland project activities also take place as part of the integrated program and after school hours (i.e., at the periphery of the core curriculum).   at the periphery of the curriculum as we mentioned above, in china, student digital storytelling activities mainly take place at home where small groups of students meet and build up stories together. in school 1, teachers design digital storytelling based on the needs of the project-based integrated curriculum. to this end, the activities are interdisciplinary, in the sense that, while the topics draw from the natural sciences, the students also need to consider aspects such as making measurements to construct a specific artifact. in this way, they also develop skills in math.   one example of the interdisciplinary dimension is the building a bridge project in school 2. in order to build a miniature bridge, the students in each group need to reflect on the length of the artifact, its weight and balance, and so on. to meet this end, the female chinese teacher presents the topic and assigns digital storytelling work in small groups of 3-4 students. once the digital story is filmed, the students present their work to peers and the teacher. filming and editing the stories takes place at home for this project, while peer and teacher feedback is given in class. during feedback, the teacher observes that the students sense of achievement has developed with digital storytelling. despite the fact that the process requires multiple sets of problem solving (e.g., scenes need to be shot again, storymaking from different angles and camera position adjusted, background music to be added etc.), the teacher argues that managing with difficulties is rewarding. her students have learned from each other, feel proud for building strong bridges, and their friendships get strengthened.   in addition to the central environmental theme, other topics are presented in the chinese students digital stories. these involve traditions and painting, home life, student self-introductions and so on. in all cases, 4th to 6th graders are motivated, get engaged with the multidimensional digital storytelling tasks, and collaborate with peers and parents for and during the production. student-teacher interaction about digital storytelling takes place mainly at the post-production stage, when students share the digital stories with peers and the teacher. during interviews with 4th, 5th and 6th graders in both schools, the young people also expressed the view that digital storytelling was a constructive experience in terms of building knowledge and relations. in both schools in china, the parents play a role and assist their childrens effort. in one case, the parents play the characters in a digital story. according to this student-storytellers teacher, digital storytelling activities opened up the opportunity for him to communicate with a wider audience than usual. this is a 12-year old introvert male student, and the digital story is one way for him to share in a creative way how important it is to care for and help other people.   within the core curriculum in the finnish context, digital storytelling activities mainly take place as part of school everydayness. however, s, one of the female teachers in school 2 in helsinki, argues that homework would make more time for storytelling activities. upgrading digital devices would help toward that direction. as s states, i couldnt give them (i.e., the schools ipads) to the students for the evening... and then, when i thought that they could also use their cell phones they told me my cell phone doesnt work and i dont have this or that in my phone.   technologies and web-based settings for digital storytelling using digital and mobile devices the technological part covers two main phases in finland and china. one phase concerns how to use mobile devices and applications toward production. teaching students how to use mobile devices and software to add music and sound effects, and how to insert photos and record the videos is easy, as hm argues. in addition, the finnish male teacher finds a correlation between digital storytelling and the students needs in the digital era. as hm argues, (t)hey are very interested because they have their own phones where they could do that (i.e. telling and editing stories etc.). overall, the participating teachers agree that using digital and mobile technologies is already part of the students daily lives.   teaching how to edit digital stories in addition, integrating technologies in teaching practices for digital storytelling involves the use of a web-based platform where the students upload video stories, share with peers and edit at the post-production phase.   working with a web-based platform to manage work on the online environment for digital storytelling, teachers set up accounts and groups for students to share stories. for improvement of the digital stories, teachers need to support student work toward, for example, further editing the scenes to achieve a tighter narrative. also, the story metadata need to be taken care of. to this end, the students need to add a description and tags to sustain searchability and visibility of their stories.   sharing on a web-based platform with international peers finally, when it comes to exchanges with international peers, teachers need to think of the common language to be used for asynchronous communication with comments or instant messaging. overall, the teachers acknowledge the dynamic character and significance of using web-based technologies for exchange and communication. as p argues, i want to not to limit (the story) but to make it as (communicable as possible), (by adding, for instance) speech.   expanding resources developing multimodal material before, during & after shooting the stories when the students return to the classroom, having completed the recording and the initial editing of the videos, they are invited to go back to pens and paper and commit to assignments, such as painting pictures or essay writing in the finnish schools. in this way, student understanding of the topic can be enhanced through multiple modes of expression, the finnish teachers argue.   the storytelling activities, therefore, involve a variety of physical artefacts ranging from devices (e.g., computers, mobile phones) and software (e.g., for editing and sharing online), to pens and paper, and result to different modes of topic-related, student-driven knowledge representations, such as paintings, assignments and digital stories. this influences the material circumstances of the school in several ways (e.g., it requires equipment and connectivity) and enriches the learning environment. as the male finnish teacher argues, it is all about growth. the more student work and material circumstances of learning expand, the more students developmental zone grows. similarly, multimodal ways of expression are supported in the chinese schools.   reusing digital stories in addition to multimodal student-generated artifacts, the finnish teacher 2 teaches her students to use the internet in order to retrieve authentic texts and further elaborate on topic-related concepts. using topic-related sources will enable the students to edit the stories and therefore expand their knowledge of the topic even further. in this way, the students can re-use the digital story for different purposes. according to a chinese teacher, the students can edit and use the stories again for different purposes. in this way, digital stories become a sort of dynamic textbook that the students develop by, for instance, accessing and adapting authentic material that they work upon and adapt; by changing the order of scenes; or by blending own stories with stories shared with international peers.   the use of authentic material does not come without a price though. both the finnish teacher and her students realize that, reading, for instance, wikipedia requires a more advanced level of text understanding. to resolve this, they make dictionary lists with explanations and paraphrases of lexical items. however, this seems to be an effective solution, since the teacher can trace some changes in the students understanding of the topic and topic-related vocabulary. using the internet in this learning environment seems to lead to digging deeper into the topic. understanding what this resource is about is an essential part of this teachers practices. this whole process benefits the students, as it increases their motivation to get involved more actively in the school learning process. as s argues,   one of my students who normally doesnt do anything in the classroom was the master with edvisto (i.e., the web-based platform). he was making the videos work better, helping everyone and that was good also i have many boys that are not interested in studying at school at all. when we were making those videos they were so motivated and they were helping each other.   expanding resources, however, does not concern the material circumstances of the school only. it is also about working with researchers to familiarize with the use of technologies to set up and organize digital storytelling as well as sharing expertise with regard to classroom experience and insights into the teaching and learning process.   collaborative work for development overall, collaboration during the digital storytelling project happens at two levels:          when teachers work with individual students and with groups of students, with researchers and peers, and          when students work individually and with peers.   more particularly, in both chinese and finnish schools, group work gives space to students to develop by, for instance, asking questions, taking initiatives, and putting hypotheses to the test while shooting the stories, editing the scenes and giving feedback to one another. however, implementation poses considerations. one example is when the finnish male teacher realizes that more time is required for guidance on the basis of what the needs of different groups are. in a similar way, s and j (finnish teacher 3and 4) find that teacher presence was more required than they had initially thought. this realization challenges ss and js beliefs that they wouldnt have to be involved that much.   nevertheless, the collaborative mode was one of the main ways to scaffold student individual and group work. collaborative work was performed during classroom time in the male (hm) and female finnish teachers (s) class, as after school activity (j) or, as p explains, at the edge of school learning, when finishing other tasks made room for digital storytelling activities. in ps classroom, digital storytelling was a peaceful activity aiming to help students make connections with the real world. in addition, p argues that, as the students were filming the stories on their own, they had to be more responsible for their work. the chinese teachers seem to align with the finnish peers about the contribution of collaborative work to student growth and development and, similarly, express the view that younger students need support and guidance in the process of conceptualizing what real life needs are. discussion organizing digital storytelling practices in all the four schools in beijing and helsinki, the teachers set up digital storytelling activities in informal settings. as discussed above, these include topic-related places such as a museum, the local open market, the school yard, an island to study a natural phenomenon, as well as the home. in terms of knowledge creation and skill development, therefore, student background knowledge is a significant aspect of organizing digital storytelling work. in addition to informal settings, the teachers introduce a range of social (e.g., group work), symbolic (e.g., a myth) and material (e.g., mobile devices, software) tools. such practices reflect the view of proximal development as dynamic space of reciprocal meaning-making interaction (macy, 2016, moll and whitmore, 1993, thomson, 2013, zaretskii, 2009) where development is achieved recursively as assisted performance aiming for artifact construction. as mariotti (2009) argues, constructing artifacts enables students to both build shared meanings and relate with personal understandings. in this way, development is reciprocal and takes place at the interand the intra-personal level.   organizing digital storytelling activities in informal (natural and technological) environments allows students to investigate the phenomenon in situ, to do research with internet-based sources, to decide what aspects of the topic to study, what pictures to take, how to put them together and so on. in this learning environment, students have choice, as they work with tasks that open up opportunities for making decisions and solving problems in interaction with peers. according to wass and golding (2014), these are complex tasks that allow students to problematize learning during the multiple stages of the process. as they evaluate own and peers digital stories in groups, the students develop oral, written and digital literacies while they exchange with peers, solve problems together, give and get feeback about their strategies and adapt them when needed. in this way, students engage actively with learning within a broad zpd for deeper learning.   as development happens even at the outer limits of student capacity in the zpd, students need support to manage hard learning with tasks that both structure and problematize the process. the former aim to reduce complexity by, for instance, distributing the work to groups, asking students leading questions, teaching how to edit a video and so on. in terms of developing digital literacies and skills, digital storytelling allows teachers to combine a wide range of tasks and activities. for instance, material devices (i.e., hardware and applications) are used for digital story creation, while both a bring your own and a use the schools approach (clark, 2013) are applied. overall, in both china and finland teachers handle technical requirements and perform a seamless introduction of digital tools into the classroom with a balanced use of older and newer technologies.   scaffolding digital storytelling work the use of devices and applications is characteristic of a stage-one digital storytelling classroom integration and activities assign students to shoot photos and videos, and edit them with mobile cameras, cell phones and tablets. the main underlying purpose here is to provide structure toward storytelling. while keeping the learning going, however, the focus of these tasks is rather to provide assistance than cater for development, as they allow a narrow zpd space (wass and golding, 2014). more tasks aiming to problematize the process are needed.   in addition, the teachers introduce the use of a web-based platform to connect students across classrooms. this indicates an orientation to practices that favor opportunities for blended learning through interaction and participation in online communities, which we consider a second stage of digital storytelling. as this is a dynamic, newly-introduced experience in schools, it does not require proper connectivity and infrastructure only. it also takes a comprehensive approach to learning with digital technologies and entails time and effort on different types of management.   for instance, web-based environment management requires setting up accounts and considering terms of use. in addition, the digital story needs to be further edited. also, for student communication with peers online, a common language is needed as well as awareness of netiquette principles. when it comes to digital storytelling per se, it is not only the story that matters. it is also the about the story or meta-story that should be taken into account. attributing meta-features contextualizes the story and extends the digital narrative. in addition, requirements of the digital era, such as searchability and visibility, should be taken into consideration for connected learning.   using web-based platforms for learning, therefore, opens up a whole array for activities that require collaborative work with activities that aim to both structure and problematize digital storytelling. collaborative work can be used to reduce task complexity and get the activity going, as well as for development through peer interaction for evaluation, negotiation of the content of the story, its structure and so on. it is therefore a mediator that can both assist and scaffold. considering these, it would benefit the whole process to further scaffold collaboration in group work. this can happen, by, for instance, introducing interactive diaries for students to share and evaluate the learning experience individually and in groups. in this way, teachers will be able to keep track with student development as well as offer further advice. during the project, teachers mainly touch base with student progress in feedback sessions (in the chinese case) or activity implementation (in the finnish case). constructing professional knowledge in-action is evidence that digital storytelling is a learning experience for teachers as well, and allows for emergent and, thus, recursive (kvale & brinkmann, 2009), rather than pre-defined, practices. recursive practices match the current needs for flexible and adaptive teaching and the complexities of the digital era. however, keeping a record of the digital storytelling process would bring to the surface aspects that were not made visible and would contribute to both teachers and students work and development. networking would also help toward this direction. while expanding resources was a major area of development during the project, it concerned mainly the material circumstances of learning. however, teacher collaboration on a systematic basis and exchanges with international peers would enrich and strengthen teaching and learning within a global sharing pedagogy context. conclusions through this digital storytelling project experience, it becomes evident that it is not enough to use an application to edit a video. it is also important to understand how editing changes the narrative in the video and how this influences the pedagogical purposes. such insights could contribute and augment the producer culture in schools, as it would open up opportunities for students to, for instance, generate new digital storytelling genres for science and language learning. to this end, the overall knowledge construction process needs to be strengthened so that students can become producers of digital culture than simply remain consumers of tools and applications.   overall, the application of digital storytelling in chinese and finnish classrooms echoes the current needs for enriched zones of development supported by dynamic, adaptive teaching practices. as breaking boundaries with digital technologies makes education more and more global, practices will get more and more diversified in order to cater for these needs. therefore, it will become even more evident that traditional ways of teaching are obsolete and that there is no one solution to fit each and every classroom situation. there can, however, be common principles underlying teaching practices for knowledge building in a manner that takes the students needs into consideration. toward this goal, a global sharing pedagogy setting is required.   wrapping up, teachers practices in this project cover all the four areas of the gsp and aim to both structure and problematize the learning process in order to allow students learn in a freer way, draw connections with reality and use a concrete plan as a basis. in this way, the students get actively engaged in informal (natural and technological) environments for knowledge creation and skill development. in this context, group work aims to both reduce task complexity and open up the space for students to think deeper through collaboration and working together. collaborative tasks in digital storytelling increase student engagement. however, when it comes to digital skills and literacies, activities aim for structure rather than development. therefore, more scaffolding is needed so that students gradually become independent learners. structural changes would help toward this direction and curricula that allocate more time for interdisciplinary learning with digital connective technologies. then teachers will have flexibility to deal with multidimensional 21st century methods, such as digital storytelling. also, teacher education and 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(2009) the zone of proximal development, journal of russian & east european psychology, 47:6, pp. 70-93.     1 the first project, digital storytelling in the boundless classroom (2012-2014), aimed to seek new ways to connect formal and informal learning environments and encourage students active learning and knowledge creation with video stories. one of the goals was to promote tools for knowledge sharing and to advance 21st century skills, especially problem solving and creativity. this phase involved diverse school environments in primary and secondary education in finland, greece and california. findings of the research studies showed that the web-based environment (movie) where students uploaded and remixed their stories was a strong predictor of engagement (niemi et al. 2014). the second, video inquiry project: stem learning and teaching with mobile video inquiries and communities, (2013-2015) (http://www.innovationsforlearning.net/savi-44.html#) was part of a joint finnish-american project. the aim was to create innovative tools and provide research findings supporting new pedagogical models that foster learners and teachers interests in science and math. project activities took place in primary schools in finland and california, where students created and shared video stories with peers online. in this project phase, research findings showed that storytelling based on structured inquiry can support novice learners development in science (penttil et al. 2016). the third occasion is the sino-finnish collaboration project (2015-2017) aiming to build bridges of collaboration between finnish and chinese researchers and teachers.   title seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 dinosaurs and fossils living without dangerous tools: social representations of computers and the internet by elderly finnish and american non-users päivi rasi (previously hakkarainen) faculty of education, centre for media pedagogy university of lapland, finland e-mail: paivi.rasi@ulapland.fi christine o’neil finlandia university, suomi college of arts & sciences hancock, michigan, usa e-mail: christine.oneil@finlandia.edu abstract this study compares the computerand internet-related conceptions of finnish and american elderly people who deliberately refuse to use the internet. it seeks to answer the following questions based on various social representations: are there similarities and differences in the way the finnish and american respondents classify the computer and the internet? are there similarities and differences in the images the finnish and american respondents use to depict the computer and the internet? how do the social representations of the computer and the internet express the respondents’ distinct identities, history and culture? an analysis of written accounts provided by elderly finnish and american people showed that both groups expressed an understanding of the computer and the internet as a ‘tool and thing’ and ‘danger’. however, differences existed between their understanding of the computer as a ‘depriver of freedom’ and ‘marker of differences’. the study concludes that their distinct identities, interests, history and culture may be some of the factors that limit their motivation and capacity to welcome and use the computer. to promote digital inclusion, the elderly should be provided with internet-related information, training and support. at the same time, however, digital inclusion policies should also encompass a choice for internet non-use. keywords: elderly internet non-users, elderly computer non-users, social representations, internet refusal, computer refusal, technology metaphors introduction in the 2000s, the use of computers and the internet by older people grew rapidly in europe (euractive, 2005) and the united states (zickuhr & madden, 2012). despite the digital divide narrowing, it still exists predominantly in terms of age, education levels and income (euractive, 2005; zickuhr & smith 2012). in finland, 95 per cent of people in the 45–54 age group are reported to have used the internet in the last three months of spring 2011, whereas the paivi.rasi@ulapland.fi christine.oneil@finlandia.edu seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 56 percentages for age groups 55–64 and 65–74 are 81 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively. official statistics released in 2011 show that the percentage for the age group 65–74 increased by up to 10 per cent from the previous year (official statistics of finland, 2011a). despite the increase in elderly internet users, as well as national and eu policies promoting active lifestyles, a large number of aging people are still either avoiding or have stopped accessing the internet. the us also has a high prevalence of internet usage, and 91 per cent of people in the age group 30–49 are reported to have used the internet in april 2012, whereas the percentages for age groups 50–64 and 65+ are 77 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively (zickuhr & madden, 2012). the percentage for the age group 65+ increased significantly between 2010 and 2012—only 40 per cent of people in this age group reported using the internet in 2010. however, internet usage declines significantly for the age group 75+ (34%), and it still shows a 24 per cent difference from the next closest age group (zickuhr & madden, 2012). in developed countries, the internet is seen as capable of providing a means to deliver services related to education, health, social security and welfare (selwyn, gorard & furlong, 2005; sourbati, 2009), as well as to promote democracy (oikeusministeriö, 2010). richardson, weaver and zorn (2005) argue that existing literature on older people’s use of computers presents a very optimistic picture that shows it is highly desirable to all and that it produces only positive outcomes. selwyn (2003, p.106) argues that most academic research has focused on the non-use of ict as a problem to be solved: ‘…to not use ict is to choose not to be part of the information society an irrational and ultimately disadvantageous position to adapt’. when considered an abnormality, the non-use of ict has mainly been discussed within the discourses of economic and cognitive deficiency, technophobia, ideological refusal and diffusion (selwyn, 2003, p. 106), or from the viewpoint of resistance to new technology (bauer, 1997). research on those elderly people who do not use the internet was mostly conducted using a barrier-analysis approach that focused on individuals. it was reported that non-users perceived no benefits or motivation, were intimidated by computer jargon, had security and safety concerns, lacked sufficient information and support, thought it was expensive, had physical limitations, had stereotypical thinking, had little or no experience, had unsuitable user interfaces or did not have a network connection (cresci, yarandi & morrell, 2010; harwood, 2007; richardson, weaver & zorn, 2005; wagner, hassanein & head, 2010). the present study compares the computerand internet-related conceptions of finnish and american elderly people who deliberately refuse to use the internet. instead of looking only at individual circumstances or deficiencies, this study explores their refusal to use the internet from the perspective of social representations, and in particular, their iconic quality (moscovici, 1976, 2000, 2008). the social representations approach is particularly useful for the study of new or much debated, emotionally charged issues (contarello & sarrica, 2007), and it was therefore considered suitable for the present study. the aim is to compare how the elderly finnish and american people that participated in our study understand the internet and what it represents to them. the current study is an outgrowth of the first author’s previous study on elderly finnish people who refused to use the internet, which indicated that the computer evoked many negative emotions (hakkarainen & hyvönen, 2010). furthermore, the elderly finnish respondents’ social representations indicated an understanding of computers as risky ‘tools and things’ that threaten one’s seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 57 freedom, lifestyle, health and security, as well as create differences between users and non-users (hakkarainen, 2012). the perspective of social representations the social representations theory was originally formulated by serge moscovici, who defines a social representation as ‘a particular modality of knowledge’ whose ‘function is to shape inter-individual behaviours and communication’ (moscovici, 2008, p. xxx). social representations are ‘social’ or collective in two respects. first, individuals and groups create a social representation during the course of communication and cooperation. second, and more importantly, they are ‘social’ because they ‘function as a framework for the interpretation of psychical, physical or collective phenomena’ (moscovici, 2008, p. 32). moscovici (2000, p. 37) argues that the purpose of all representations is to make the unfamiliar familiar. he uses the concept of ‘taming’ (moscovici, 2008, p. 105) to refer to this process. the construction of social representations is ‘a mental process that can make something that exists some distance away from us, or that is in some sense absent from us, familiar, situate it and make it present in our inner world’ (moscovici, 2008, p. 19). moscovici (2008, p. 13) compares individuals to ‘amateur scientists’ who are trying to ‘be in the know’ in order to fit the latest ideas and notions ‘into a coherent picture of the real or to slip them into a language that allows them to talk about what everyone else is talking about’. the construction of social representations proceeds through two mechanisms: anchoring and objectifying. anchoring means classifying an unfamiliar phenomenon, placing it in a given category and labelling it with a familiar name (moscovici, 2000). for example, aids was first publicly understood in terms of venereal diseases and as god’s punishment (wagner et al., 1999), whereas psychoanalysis was likened to the more familiar practices of conversation and religious confession (moscovici, 2008). objectifying means discovering the iconic quality of an imprecise idea or reproducing a concept in an image, and during this process using an icon, metaphor or trope to represent the new phenomenon or idea (moscovici, 2000). for example, images of ‘decay’, ‘curdling like milk’ and ‘going off like milk’ have been observed in laypersons’ understanding of mental illness (wagner et al., 1999, p. 99). two ideas are central to the construction of social representations: their cultural variation and their creative power. central to the present study is the idea that social groups are distinct in terms of their social representations (moscovici, 2000; wagner et al., 1999; bauer & gaskell, 1999). moscovici (2008, p. 22) defines social representations as a body of propositions, metaphors, value judgments or figurative beliefs that are ‘organized in very different ways by different classes, cultures or groups’. an example of this is the fact that in france, psychoanalysis was compared to religious confession in its early days because of the deep roots that the practice of religious confession had in france (moscovici, 2008, p. 109). wagner and others (1999, p. 100) stated that the trope and image groups used for representing a phenomenon are not arbitrary; rather, they are determined by the group’s experiential world. the differences can be socio-structural, historical, cultural/subcultural or intergenerational, or they could depend on the education level. when making sense of their society and their world, individuals are, according to moscovici (2008, p. 14), not ‘passive machines’ but instead have ‘the freshness of the imagination’. in a similar vein, voelklein and howarth (2005) argued that a social representation is not simply a repetition of an idea communicated by a dominant social group, but instead, individuals and groups always seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 58 have the possibility of transformation and change. for moscovici (2000, p. 24), social representations are ‘re-thought, re-cited and re-presented’ by individuals and groups. thus, the act of representation can manifest creative power (moscovici, 2008). research on social representations of computers and the internet is scarce, with one of the exceptions being the work by flick (kilpiö, 2008). flick and others (flick, 1994, p. 190) studied how people ‘cope psychologically with technological change in everyday life’ in france and in east and west germany. with respect to computers, the social representations varied according to the cultural context. for instance, people in east germany considered the computer as more ‘symbolically loaded’ and understood it as a means for ‘staying on the train’ of technological progress (flick, 1994, p. 194). kilpiö (2008) studied social representations among finnish schoolteachers and looked into ways of conceptualising new technology, including the internet. teachers frequently used comparisons and metaphors when trying to familiarise themselves with the benefits and possibilities afforded by the internet. common metaphors used for the internet included ‘an environment’, ‘a tool’ and ‘a world’ (kilpiö, 2008, pp. 179–180). teachers compared the use of information technology and the internet to other, more traditional, instructional strategies or tools (e.g., pens, books), thereby anchoring technology to everyday practices (kilpiö, 2008). contarello and sarrica (2007) investigated different components of social representations used by italian undergraduate students, namely information, attitude and representational field. the respondents’ attitudes toward the internet were, in general, moderately positive. students’ attitudes indicated an artificial-natural dichotomy, where naturalness is connected with easiness and harmlessness, and artificialness linked to difficulty and harmfulness. a judgment of artificialness also included elements of danger. in terms of metaphors, contarello and sarrica (2007, p. 1031) conclude that ‘it seems that the most powerful metaphors for the device are provided by the participants who declare less familiarity and lower rates of use of this new technology’. method the aim of this study is to compare how elderly internet non-users taking part in this study in finland and in the us construct their shared understanding of the internet and the nature of this representation. the aim is to look for similarities and differences between the finnish and american research data. the study seeks answers to the following questions: rq1: are there similarities and differences in the way the finnish and american respondents classify the computer and the internet? rq2: are there similarities and differences in the images the finnish and american respondents use to depict the computer and the internet? rq3: how do the social representations of the computer and the internet express the respondents’ distinct identities, interests, history and culture? data collection the finnish research data was collected in february and march 2009 by advertising for written accounts published in the regions of lapland, northern ostrobothnia and kainuu. this research has been reported in greater detail seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 59 elsewhere (hakkarainen, 2012). the american research data was collected in october, november and december 2011 by advertising for equivalent written accounts in newspapers and free sheets published in the upper peninsula of michigan. the advertisement was written in finnish and then translated to english. these two countries were selected because of the availability of research locations and because the first author had worked as an exchange scholar in the us in 2011. in both the finnish and american advertisements, the respondents were asked to write an account of their lives based on the following questions: why don’t you use a computer? would you like to use a computer? how do you feel about living without a computer? how do other people react to the fact that you don’t have a computer? what are your daily activities without a computer? what kind of practical advantages or disadvantages does not using a computer provide? the respondents were asked to either respond anonymously or include their names. we limited the minimum age of the respondents to 60 because the percentage of internet users in finland (official statistics of finland, 2011a) and the us (zickuhr & madden, 2012) is lowest among those above this age. the finnish research data consists of 126 accounts in which life without a computer is described as the respondents’ deliberate choice (hakkarainen, 2012). the length of these accounts varies from 29 to 1,454 words, with the mean length being 238 words. similarly, the american research data consists of 32 accounts in which life without a computer is described as the respondents’ deliberate choice. the length of these accounts varies from 73 to 777 words, with the mean length being 326 words. although this study does not seek statistical significance, we need to comment on the differences in the number of finnish (n = 126) and american (n = 32) accounts. although there is a numerical difference, the number of stories received is comparable when considering the proportion of the population in both areas (we received responses from .019% and .011% of the population in finland and the us, respectively). the total number of inhabitants in the regions of lapland, northern ostrobothnia and kainuu is 662,896 (official statistics of finland, 2012). the total number of inhabitants in the upper peninsula of michigan is 299,184, and the number of people in the age group 65+ is approximately 54,350 (us census bureau, 2012). the largest regional newspapers used in the finnish data collection had 176,000 readers in the age group 50+ (levikintarkastus oy, 2012). the newspapers used in the american data collection had 58,655 readers (age not specified). these numbers show clearly that there is a significant population difference between the areas studied in finland and those studied in the us. this population difference helps explain the difference between the numbers of accounts in the two data sets. respondents the present research data comprises 158 accounts. table 1 summarises the respondents’ gender distribution and mean age. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 60 country total accounts gender distribution mean age (years) m f finland* 126 33 92 69 usa** 32 8 24 76 * no mention of gender = 1, no mention of age = 1 ** no mention of age = 2 table 1. respondents’ gender distribution and mean age most of the finnish (81%) and american respondents (75%) reported that they were retired from working life (no mention: finnish respondents, 15%; us respondents, 22%). the finnish respondents’ most common lines of business were welfare and health (18%), business/finance (17%), training/education (9%), natural resources (8%), food and cleaning (8%) and technique (7%). the american respondents’ most common lines of business were business/finance (36%), training/education (25%) and homemaking (20%). the educational level of the respondents was relatively low, with 30 per cent of the finnish respondents and 40 per cent of the american respondents having completed only basic education or less. furthermore, among the finnish respondents, 36 per cent had upper secondary level vocational qualifications, and 9 per cent had tertiary level qualifications, which is lower than the corresponding percentage (27%) of the entire finnish population aged 15 or over (official statistics of finland, 2009); in addition, a quarter of the respondents did not provide information about their education level. among the american respondents, most had a low level of education, with only 28 per cent holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. this is slightly lower than the averages for michigan and the us as a whole (34% and 28%, respectively). however, 96 per cent of the american respondents held at least a high school degree; seven respondents did not provide information about their education level (us census bureau, 2012). the finnish respondents mostly lived in non-urban environments, with the largest number living in the regional councils of northern ostrobothnia (39%) and lapland (37%); here, 8 per cent of respondents did not provide information about their location. northern ostrobothnia and lapland are the two northernmost areas of finland, and they are sparsely populated. however, the principal cities and their surrounding areas are more densely populated (regional council of lapland, 2010). finland is one of the most ‘rural’ countries within the oecd, with its northern and eastern regions having a greater dispersion and a higher proportion of the population living in rural municipalities than the southern and western areas (oecd, 2008). like their finnish counterparts, the american respondents lived primarily in non-urban environments in the upper midwestern usa. the upper peninsula of michigan is a remote area of the state, accounting for 29 per cent of the state’s landmass but only 3 per cent of its population (us census bureau, 2012). however, 55 per cent of the respondents from this rural area lived in one of the more densely populated cities. the finnish accounts indicated that nature played a big part in many of the respondents’ activities, with several of them opting for outdoor recreation and exercise such as skiing, walking, trekking, nordic walking (n = 53), yard work and gardening (n = 32), nature activities such as photographing and observing nature (n = 19), mushroom and berry picking (n = 16), hunting and fishing (n seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 61 = 14), spending time at a summer cottage (n = 12) and forestry work (n = 7) (hakkarainen, 2012). while outdoor recreation was also highlighted in some of the american accounts (n = 9), most of the respondents opted for indoor activities such as reading (n = 12), crafts/decorating (n = 8), baking/cooking (n = 6), puzzles/games (n = 4) and writing letters (n = 2); they also opted for social activities such as church and volunteering (n = 6), spending time with family (n = 3) and socialising (n = 3). data analysis the starting point for the present analysis was the first author’s previous study results on elderly finnish citizens who deliberately refuse to use computers and the internet (hakkarainen, 2012). the results indicated that their social representations articulated four computerand internet-related dichotomies: useful/useless, free/dependent, risky/non-risky and similar/different. these dichotomies expressed four computerand internet-related conceptions that were designated as tool and thing, depriver of freedom, danger and marker of differences. the finnish respondents’ social representations could be summarised as follows: the computer and the internet are useless and risky ‘tools and things’ that threaten one’s freedom, lifestyle, health and security, as well as create differences between users and non-users. in the present study, we applied the same coding scheme used for the finnish data in the previous study (hakkarainen, 2012). table 2 in the results section presents the coding scheme and the analysis results of both the american and finnish data. we started analysing the american data by transcribing it wordfor-word and saving it as an ms word document. then we read the data several times and coded it independently according to the computerand internetrelated concepts and justifications. for the coding, we used ms word’s commenting tool. the unit of analysis was sometimes a word, a phrase, a sentence or a longer text passage. after completing our individual analyses, we compared and discussed the codings in four data sessions. after arriving at an agreement about the coding, we transferred the data and the codings into the qualitative data analysis software nvivo. finally, we coded the images and metaphors in the respondents’ accounts. results table 2 summarises the data analysis and results. in the following subchapters, we describe the similarities and differences in the finnish and american data according to the four clustered categories originally developed for the finnish data, that is, the computer and the internet as a tool and thing, danger, depriver of freedom and marker of differences (hakkarainen, 2012). seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 62 original categories of computerand internet-related concepts and justifications (hakkarainen, 2012) (n; %) dichotomy featured in the orig. categories clustered category images and metaphors related to the computer and the internet useless tool (56; 44%) (23; 72%) useful tool (43; 34%) (19; 59%) personal work experiences (25; 20%) (4; 13%) negative personal work experiences (19; 15%) (1; 3%) not missing out on anything (8; 6%) (7; 22%) junk and cords (5; 4%) (1; 3%) useful/ useless tool and thing ‘calculator’, ‘lazy teachers’ favourite tool’, ‘glorified pencil’, ‘not much of a snow shovel’, ‘odd gizmo’, ‘strange contraption’, ‘gadget’, ‘humming, flashing cord’, ‘stupid mouse’, ‘contraption’, ‘technical contrivance’, ‘widget’, ‘newfangled invention’, ‘showy piece of junk’, ‘aide’, ‘junk’, ‘just another screen to look at’, ‘little black box’, ‘machine’, ‘search engine’, ‘thinking machine’, ‘unfriendly vacuum cleaner’ independence, freedom (26; 21%) (2; 6%) addictive computer (22; 17%) (4; 13%) pressure from society (4; 3%) (6; 19%) freedom/ dependence depriver of freedom ‘slavery’, ‘imprisonment’, ‘hook’, ‘shackles’, ‘bondage’ , ‘addiction’ , ‘being stuck’, ‘being hooked’, ‘being bonded’, ‘tries to get you hooked’, ‘the devil asking for your little finger’, ‘good slave, poor master’, ‘being plugged in/wired/wrapped up/stuck’, ‘compulsion’, ‘slave’ risk to: time resources (43; 34%) (10; 31%), security (26; 21%) (9; 28%), health (24; 19%) (5; 16%), trad. skills (15; 12%) (7; 22%), faceto-face human contact (12; 10%) (7; 22%), simple living (11; 9%) (3; 9%), energy resources (5; 4%) (0), silence (3; 2%) (3; 9%), undone household chores (3; 2%) (1; 3%), society (0) (8; 25%), other activities and things (30; 24%) (14; 44%) easily obsolete, prone to technical problems (15; 12%) (9; 28%) harmful content (11; 9%) (3; 9%) nuisance (6; 5%) (3; 9%) too much information (5; 16%) (4; 13%) irrelevant content (0) (8; 25%) risky/ non-risky danger ‘radiation’, ‘immobility’, ‘overgrown pathways between neighbours’, ‘replacement of humans’, ‘a robot caretaker’, ‘world of robots’, ‘flu’, ‘mentally ill’, ‘disabled’, ‘worms’, ‘viruses’, ‘flu viruses’, ‘computer worms’, ‘criminal gangs’, ‘thieves’, ‘information overload’, ‘information flood’, ‘spiritual pollution’, ‘time thief’, ‘waste of time’, ‘waste of time’, ‘babbling inanity’, ‘cold computer’, ‘cyber attack’, ‘god’s replacement for flood’, ‘hassle’, ‘identity theft’, ‘idiots and thieves’, ‘infected sites’, ‘one more chore to do’, ‘personality quirk’, ‘roby’ (pl. robies), ‘royal pain’, ‘spy ware’, ‘trouble shooter’, ‘virus’, ‘worm mutating’ ‘us non-users’ (22; 17%) (18; 56%) pressure from acquaintances (21; 17%) (5;16% ) singular life (15; 12%) (0) ‘computer enthusiasts’ (14; 11%) (2; 6%) inequality (14; 11%) (3; 9%) keeping up with modern times (11; 9%) (0) no pressure from acquaintances (3; 2%) (9; 28%) similar/ different marker of differences ‘fallen off the boat’, ‘man who signs his name with an x’, ‘fuddy-duddy’, ‘fossil’, ‘left behind’, ‘past expiration date’, ‘second-class citizen’, ‘myopic robot designers’, ‘not going with the flow’, ‘slow lane’, ‘hick’, ‘cutting my own path’, ‘backward grandmother’, ‘dinosaur’, ‘geeks and goons’, ‘left out of the loop’, ‘old-timer’, ‘wacky’, ‘way of the future’ table 2. summary of the data analysis and results for the finnish (n = 126) and us data (n = 32) seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 63 we first present the social representations of the computer and the internet as a tool and thing and danger, which were, for the most part, similar in the american and finnish respondents’ accounts. then we present the social representations of the computer and the internet as a depriver of freedom and marker of differences, which were different in the american and finnish respondents’ accounts. tool and thing most finnish and american respondents understood computers as tools, describing them in the dichotomy of ‘useful/useless’. within this understanding of the computer, there were no major differences between the finnish and us respondents’ accounts. respondents from both countries considered the computer to be a useful tool mainly for finding information and communicating. this understanding of the internet as a tool that can be used for specific purposes is in line with previous research on elderly people accessing the internet (buse, 2009; kilpiö, 2008). the respondents understand that the computer could be a tool they could use for a number of specific and familiar tasks, such as paying bills, taking part in quizzes, hunting down addresses during christmas, finding information related to hobbies (e.g., crossword puzzles, travelling, cooking, knitting, genealogy), keeping in touch with friends and relatives, writing letters and other documents, book-keeping, making appointments or ‘finding the best deal on an airline ticket’. however, they do not want to use it (sourbati, 2009), and viewed it as something irrelevant to their lives. as one us respondent comments, ‘we [sic] are senior citizens who live (very nicely) without computers’ (r1). both the finnish and american respondents expressed an understanding of the computer as simply ‘a thing’ (slack & wise, 2010, p. 145), a material object for which they provided numerous labels (moscovici, 2000): ‘gadget’, ‘humming, flashing cord’, ‘stupid mouse’, ‘widget’, ‘thinking machine’, ‘little black box’ and ‘just another screen to look at’. the following two computer comparisons that the respondents provided are particularly interesting: a computer? why don’t i use one? well, it’s not much when it comes to shovelling snow and it’s just in the way when carrying firewood. (finnish respondent r91) compare this to the user-unfriendly vacuum cleaners we put up with, have you ever tried to change a bag on one of these, or switch nozzles for a different task. they are like my computer – functionally imperfect. (us respondent r18) as moscovici (2000, p. 37) argues, the construction of social representations is a process of dynamic familiarisation in which ‘objects, individuals and events are perceived and understood in relation to previous encounters or paradigms’. the above comparisons of the computer with a snow shovel or a vacuum cleaner exemplify the process of constructing social representations, as defined by moscovici (2008, p. 19): ‘…in order to enter the world of an individual or group, an object enters into a series of relations and articulations with other objects that are already there, borrows their properties and adds its own properties’. even if these comparisons may imply differences in the living conditions of the finnish and american respondents, they both symbolically communicate the role assigned to computers: a tool to perform specific, mundane household chores. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 64 furthermore, what the first author concluded about the finnish data (hakkarainen, 2012) also applies to the american data. the image shared by younger generations of the internet as a virtual place, environment or world to visit (baym, 2011; boellstorff, 2008) where you can meet or hang out with friends and consume, share and produce content (ito et al., 2010) is missing from the data. danger the social representation of the computer as a danger was found in both the finnish and american data. the computer is depicted as a risk to time, security, health, traditional skills (e.g., hand writing), face-to-face human contact, ‘simple living’, silence, undone household chores and various other things (harwood, 2007; richardson, weaver & zorn, 2005; wagner, hassanein & head, 2010). in terms of the computer being a security risk, the respondents resorted to the medical images of ‘worms’, ‘worm mutating’, ‘viruses’ and ‘infected sites’ that plague the computer and the internet. furthermore, the computer user was seen as being faced by ‘criminal gangs’ and ‘thieves’ who perform ‘cyber attacks’ and ‘identity thefts’. both the finnish and american respondents’ accounts express an understanding of the internet as a threat to ‘simple living’. some finnish respondents claimed that the computer was a threat to a lifestyle portrayed as ‘easy and simple’, ‘peaceful’ and ‘modest’, and ‘not too hectic’, ‘complicated’ or ‘hurried’ (hakkarainen, 2012). in a similar vein, the american respondents described their lifestyle as ‘uncomplicated’, ‘uninterrupted by computer-generated busyness’ and with only ‘few buying needs’. even if this lifestyle of cutting down on one’s activities, possessions and technologies bears a resemblance to the contemporary concept of downshifting, as represented in popular media (e.g., wikipedia), the social representation may be best understood when considering the respondents’ distinct history and culture (wagner et al., 1999). as one of the american respondents wrote: back in the thirties, we lived seven miles out of town. no electricity, no phone. and although my father was gone, with seven of us (out of nine) still at home, life was just as enjoyable as it is today, maybe more so. we had to feed ourselves, but what made life so enjoyable, was the simplicity of it. we did a lot of things together. if you had a baseball glove, you were on top of the world. we played cards in the evening. (r23) a nostalgic attitude is evident in both finnish and american respondents’ accounts in the way the computer is understood as a risk to traditional skills such as cursive writing, letter writing, spelling and even thinking. baym (2011, p. 26) argues that parallels between today’s anti-discourse about the internet and earlier rhetoric about technologies such as the telephone are striking, and that ‘the concern that communication technologies make us dumber is as old as writing’. some of the respondents clearly voice this old concern again: today, kids are all wrapped up in computer games. i believe they let the computers do their thinking for them. i’m still ahead of my grandkids in math. i do my math with my brain. (us r23) in my day you used your head for something besides a hat rack. (us r28) the american respondents’ accounts expressed yet another threat that was not coded in the finnish respondents’ accounts, namely the computer as a threat to society. these stories voiced a highly negative view of contemporary society, and saw computers from the viewpoint of technological determinism; that is, seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 65 as an external agent that changes society (baym, 2011), as these examples illustrate: it [internet] creates a whole civilization of people who are filled with selfimportance and self-absorbtion [sic]. i don’t want it. i don’t need it. the world would be better of [sic] without it. (r9) i feel there may be trouble headed for rome because of the ‘new’ communication. (r19) in both the finnish and american respondents’ accounts, the computer is described as posing a threat to face-to-face social encounters by superseding them. this understanding goes against research results from studies on internet use that show that internet users are generally more social than non-users (baym, 2011). however, this understanding again voices the concern that has been expressed throughout the history of electronic communication, namely that the internet is removing people from their local relationships with families and communities (baym, 2011). furthermore, some respondents expressed the understanding of computers as replacing humans. for instance, one american respondent describes children as only partly human: ‘kids seem more likely to be called “robies” – robotic thinking’ (r32). while the computer was understood as being easily obsolete and prone to technical problems, as being a nuisance, as having too much information and as being harmful owing to its content by both the finnish and american respondents, only the latter wrote about it in a way that we coded as ‘irrelevant content’. this implies that the internet is ‘nonsense’, ‘junk’, ‘spam’, ‘crappy video games’, ‘merchandise one doesn’t need – information one can’t use’, ‘jokes’, ‘babbling inanities’ or ‘unnecessary trivia’. again, one american respondent refers to his past when justifying his understanding: i grew up in an age when the telephone was for 1) emergency 2) legitimate business and 3) contact with family and friends and limited socialising; (limited, because that phone time was precious – you didn’t waste time and money with unnecessary trivia) – how can anyone spend so much time on a computer?! why does anyone feel that they need to talk all the time? there must be something extremely gratifying about spreading our babbling inanities around the block and sphere. (r13) depriver of freedom a dichotomy evident in a number of finnish respondents’ accounts was freedom/dependence (hakkarainen, 2012). within this social representation, the computer was understood as a depriver of freedom. interestingly, nye (2004, cited in baym 2011, p. 28) argues that nineteenth-century americans responded to new technologies of the time both with utopian and dystopian visions, and that the dystopian reactions emphasised fears of losing control, becoming dependent and being unable to stop change. however, this dichotomy was less evident in the american respondents’ accounts, in which we found only two instances that fitted the coding category ‘independence, freedom’. one way to explain this difference is to refer to the american notion of individuals as agentically in charge and in control of their actions. markus and plaut (2001, p. 188) argue that this notion has been one of the reasons why the idea of social representations has been slow to spread in the us: ‘…the core of the american’s social representations about themselves is that they are free from social constraint and that they live outside social representations’. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 66 in the finnish data, the idea of losing one’s freedom is manifested through numerous images associated with work, judicial systems or drugs. therefore, we have, for example, the metaphors ‘slave’, ‘prisoner’, ‘hooks’, ‘shackles’ and ‘bondage’ associated with internet use (hakkarainen, 2012). in the few instances where the dichotomy of freedom/dependence was visible in the american data, the images were similar to the ones found in the finnish data. most of the finnish respondents were pensioners/ retired people and had a relatively basic education, which makes their concern about losing their freedom more understandable; they were probably used to set working hours during which they were supervised closely by their immediate managers (hakkarainen, 2012). the specific social conditions of a certain group favour specific types of images and metaphors in social representations (wagner et al., 1999). one finnish respondent even says that being free of computer is like not having to clock in and out of work as she was used to doing: ‘i now have time for hobbies, time to live – without a computer and a clock to punch!’ (r60). technology is not a neutral force (bauer, 1997; nelkin, 1997). as bauer argues (1997, p. 1), ‘it creates opportunities and simultaneously constrains human activity. we experience the latter as being paced by “machines” rather than controlling them’. in the finnish data, the idea of being controlled by the computer was more evident, which seems to go against scientific understanding, according to which the relationship between culture and technology is reciprocal and that neither side is enslaved to the other (slack & wise, 2010; baym, 2011). interestingly, the depriver of freedom representation contrasts with the popular and scientific image of modern mobile internet technologies as simultaneously increasing and decreasing users’ psychological, social and physical freedom (jarvenpaa et al., 2003). the finnish respondents’ overtly negative representation of the computer as a freedom-endangering tool may reflect a self-defensive standpoint towards computerised society and the pressure to become a computer user (buckingham, 1994; wagner et al., 1999). the highly emotional quality of the finnish respondents’ accounts (hakkarainen & hyvönen, 2010) can also be interpreted to indicate that the pressure experienced by the finnish respondents to use the computer might be higher than the pressure experienced by their american counterparts. marker of differences the dichotomy ‘similar/different’ was evident in the finnish respondents’ accounts. in their social representation, the use of the computer and internet was employed as a marker of differences between the respondents and others (hakkarainen, 2012). a number of finnish respondents presented their decision to refuse the internet as being motivated by a desire to live a singular life and not ‘go with the flow’, as this excerpt from a finnish respondent shows: i don’t hate computers but i don’t enjoy working with them either. i’ve never even entertained the idea of getting one; i’ve never been the kind of person who has to go with the flow. i don’t even have a mobile phone with a camera, although everyone else seems to have one. i’ve never followed fashion in the way i dress; i’ve always just worn clothes that i like. (r103) however, in the american data, we could not find any instances that pointed to the category of ‘singular life’. some finnish respondents described their decision in the context/framework of keeping up with modern times (richardson et al., 2005). for some, the decision means being left behind or outside seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 67 modern times, whereas for others it means not being left behind (hakkarainen, 2012). the american data, on the other hand, did not indicate this line of thinking. both the finnish and american respondents’ accounts suggested a type of positive ‘us non-users’ identity. the respondents used numerous images to describe themselves as computer non-users, which were articulated in a humorous, self-deprecating manner. the finnish respondents used images like ‘having fallen off the boat’, ‘past expiration date’, ‘fossil’, ‘second-class citizen’, ‘left behind’ and ‘man who signs his name with an x’(hakkarainen, 2012), whereas the american respondents used images like ‘dinosaur’, ‘left out of the loop’, ‘old-timer’ and ‘wacky’. while a roughly equivalent proportion of the finnish and american respondents reported having experienced pressure from acquaintances to use the computer, the proportion of respondents writing about not experiencing pressure from acquaintances was larger among the american respondents. some of both the finnish and american respondents’ accounts clearly refer to social inequality between users and non-users, and to the discursive, commercial imperative of modern society to buy and use the computer (richardson, weaver & zorn, 2005). for example: it only bothers me that the many raffles, games and chances to present one’s opinion in the papers tell you to reply to something dot fi. likewise they are always trying to get you to pay for things electronically. this is one sign that the myopic robot designers are seriously trying to create an orwellian world where humanity is forgotten. there are a lot of us older people who don’t know how to use and don’t want a computer or other technology. (finnish respondent r88) i fell [sic] limited in what i can do in this computerised society. everyone is telling me to go to .com and i can’t do it. i can’t get recipes [sic] or enter a contest etc. you cannot force a 60–80 year old to change. you must provide means by which they can exist. (us respondent r15) discussion and conclusion this study compares the computerand internet-related conceptions of elderly finnish and american people who deliberately refuse to use the internet, and explores their refusal to use computers from the perspective of various social representations (moscovici, 2000, 2008). the social representations of the computer and the internet as a tool and thing and danger were, for the most part, similar in both the american and finnish respondents’ accounts. most understandings of the finnish and american respondents as a useful tool centred around information gathering and communication. despite any acknowledgement of usefulness, most respondents believed the computer to be a tool that served no purpose for them, as socialising, communication and information gathering takes place in other avenues. thus, both the finnish and american respondents exhibited the mechanism of anchoring by fitting the computer (as a tool) into a familiar category. rather than being seen as a useful tool, the computer is given a label likening it to an object more familiar to the respondent, such as a vacuum cleaner or a snow shovel. similarities also existed between the finnish and american respondents in terms of danger. both viewed the computer as a risk—to ‘security’, ‘simple living’, ‘face-to-face interaction’ and so on. many viewed the computer as a security danger, and used similar metaphors related to infection and disease (i.e., ‘flu’, ‘worms’, ‘infected sites’). the computer as a threat to ‘simple living’ seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 68 or traditional skills reflects a nostalgic desire for an earlier, simpler time, as noted in many respondents’ stories. as randall (1997, p. 58) argues: change is a necessary feature of life. ‘change’ may ring well from the lips of aspirant politicians. but much fundamental change is painful and that which destroys old ways of life more painful still. we should approach our analysis of those who resisted change with more humility and with more sympathy. why do these similarities exist between the two data sources? despite their different locales, both sets of respondents have at least somewhat similar backgrounds in terms of computer experience. for both the finnish and american respondents, the computer would have been introduced later in their life. the respondents’ social representations of the computer and internet reflect their age and fairly traditional lifestyles in highly developed countries in nonurban settings where internet and computer use is lower than in urban settings (official statistics of finland, 2011b). part of this lower usage can be explained by the limited internet infrastructure (larose et al., 2007; boase, 2010), whereas for the respondents of this study, the decision to not use the internet is a deliberate one. social representations about the computer vary between different groups (moscovici, 2000; wagner et al., 1999; bauer & gaskell, 1999), and this study has shed light on this variation. the social representations of the computer and the internet as a depriver of freedom and marker of differences point to differences between the american and finnish respondents’ understanding. the finnish data shows a strong emphasis on these two representations. in the american data, however, there was very little discussion regarding ‘losing control’, which may be partly explained by the pervasiveness of ‘freedom’ in american culture (markus & plaut 2001, p. 188). furthermore, in terms of a marker of difference, the finnish data reflected the desire to live a singular life, something that was absent in the american data. despite these differences, there was one major similarity between the two data sets—an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality, which was often laden with value judgments (moscovici, 2008, p. 22) to represent differences between users and non-users. the present study has limitations. to achieve a better understanding of the respondents’ refusal to use the internet, it would be beneficial to employ complimentary data collection methods that focus on the construction processes of social representations (moscovici, 1976, 2008). the present research data does not allow for arguing whether there was variation depending upon individual circumstances, for example, respondents’ knowledge (moscovici, 2008) about what the internet offers, previous experiences and occupations or their rural/suburban locations. furthermore, it would be important to analyse how different information sources, especially mass-mediated messages, may contribute to what elderly people think about computers, the internet and their relationship with them. although the respondents had a relatively broad understanding of what the internet can be used for (e.g. paying bills, finding information, keeping in touch with friends and relatives, shopping etc.), their conception was somewhat deterministic and stereotypical. they saw computers as a security threat and as an external agent that changes society, enslaves people (cf. slack & wise, 2010; baym, 2011), and removes them from their local relationships with families and communities (baym, 2011). this calls for awareness-raising activities (e.g. media literacy campaigns, guidance materials, training, support) from industry, governments, educators and non-government organisations. the activities should aim at providing more balanced internet-related information and altering elderly non-users’ overtly negative perceptions of the internet as tool and thing, depriver of freedom, danger and marker of difseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 69 ferences. in addition, a safety by design approach is called for to address elderly non-users’ security and safety concerns. it is essential to incorporate risk and safety concerns into the design stage of internet technologies (livingstone, 2009). on the other hand, some of the respondents’ accounts clearly refer to social inequality between internet users and non-users. furthermore, the study indicates that the respondents’ distinct identities, interests, history and culture may be some of the factors that limit their motivation and capacity to welcome and use the computer (see also ling, 2008). therefore, to promote both digital inclusion and cultural inclusion, digital inclusion policies should also encompass a choice for internet non-use. funding this research was partially funded by a fulbright scholar-in-residence program grant that was awarded to the first author of this article for the academic year 2011–2012 by the j. william fulbright foreign scholarship board. this program is administered by the us department of state’s bureau of educational and cultural affairs and the council for international exchange of scholars. references bauer, m. 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(2012). digital differences. pew internet and american life project. available at: http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/digitaldifferences.aspx (accessed february 2014). http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/digital-differences.aspx http://pewinternet.org/reports/2012/digital-differences.aspx title seminar.net 2015. (author names) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 behind the concepts of multiliteracies and media literacy in the renewed finnish core curriculum: a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed research lauri palsa department for media education and audiovisual media national audiovisual institute kavi email: lauri.palsa@kavi.fi heli ruokamo faculty of education, centre for media pedagogy university of lapland email: heli.ruokamo@ulapland.fi abstract finnish basic education faces a significant change with the 2016 commissioning of the renewed core curriculum, which introduces a new transversal competence, termed multiliteracies—a concept closely related to media literacy. this systematic literature review examines the research literature on media literacy and multiliteracies, analysing and comparing the nature of knowledge constructed and the varying definitions of the two concepts. previous review articles (marten 2010; potter 2010) found little consensus among scholars regarding the definition of media literacy. this review examines the research literature published in international peerreviewed academic journals between 2010 and 2014 to investigate whether a mutual understanding of the concept has since been established. the article argues that significant differences exist between the concepts of media literacy and multiliteracies and, further, that finnish core curriculum defines multiliteracies differently than the research literature defines the term. in line with previous research, this article finds no consensus on the definition of media literacy in the research literature. based on the multifaceted nature of the concept, this article rejects attempts to establish a universal definition of media literacy and presents a theoretical framework for conceptualising media literacies based on their abstraction levels. the article aims to facilitate understanding of the concept and its operationalisation in research and practice and discusses future opportunities for research on media literacy and multiliteracies. keywords: media education, media literacy, multiliteracy, multiliteracies, systematic literature review, finnish core curriculum http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 102 introduction finnish basic education will face many changes with the introduction of the new national core curriculum in 2016. the renewed core curriculum for basic education was completed and published at the end of the 2014 by the finnish national board of education (fnboe). the new transversal competences addressed in several subject areas are likely to have a significant impact on media education. one of these competences is termed multiliteracies, defined as “the skills to interpret, to produce and to evaluate different kind of texts. these skills help students to understand diverse cultural forms of communication and to build their identity” (fnboe, 2014, p. 22). the curriculum defines texts as information presented through various symbol systems (linguistic, visual, auditive, numeric, kinesthetic or a combination of these). the definition of multiliteracies is closely related to the concept of media literacy, which is traditionally defined as an ability to access, analyse, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms (aufderheide 1993). media education can promote both multiliteracies (fnboe, 2014, p. 86) and media literacy (kupiainen & sintonen, 2009). definitions of these concepts clearly overlap. it is important to distinguish between multiliteracies and media literacy, because unclear definitions create challenges in operationalising the terms in practice and in research. this raises research questions: how are the concepts of multiliteracies and media literacy related? how are these concepts defined in the recent research literature, and what kind of knowledge is constructed in the research literature? clarifying concepts on a national level to define the line between media literacy and multiliteracies is important for scholars of media education, education planners and education practitioners. the national core curricula are critical for basic education in finland due to their role in research, policy and practice. curricula lead and guide the planning and implementation of educational practice. the concept of media literacy has been under discussion for several decades, but a consensus regarding its definition has yet to be reached. the concept is multifaceted, and scholars tend to add and subtract others' ideas in seeking to define it (potter, 2013). this study aims to produce new information and construct new knowledge by analysing the various definitions presented in the research on media literacy and multiliteracies. the article further contributes to the work of education scholars, planners, practitioners and policy makers by presenting a theoretical framework for defining media literacy. by examining the research and exploring definitions of the concepts, the article contributes to the media literacy discussion both nationally and internationally. the following section will contextualise the research within the discussion of national finnish education and will provide an overview of discussion of media literacy definitions. next, the methodology of the systematic literature review will be presented and discussed. the findings section will address the research literature itself, focusing first on the nature of the knowledge constructed and next on the various definitions of media literacy and multiliteracies. in the final sections, the findings, implications and limitations of the study are discussed and conclusions are drawn. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 103 background of the study media education and media literacy in the finnish core curriculum finland's core curriculum is renewed approximately once a decade. the current curriculum is from 2004; the new curriculum will be introduced in the fall of 2016. kauppinen (2010) studied the concepts of literature and reading literacies in finnish basic education curricula. according to her research, the concept of media literacy has appeared in a variety of core curricula since the 1970s. the definitions, roles and perceptions of media literacy, however, have followed the development of wider discussions concerning media culture, meaning that varying aspects of media literacy have been included and thus promoted in core curricula. in the 1970s, for example, the focus was on mass communication, whereas curricula in the 1980s and 1990s used a concept of communication education (kauppinen, 2010, pp. 230–232.) in the 2004 core curricula, media literacy relates to the cross-curricular theme communication and media skills (fnboe, 2004). this development stems from a wider discussion on media education and media literacy in finland (kupiainen, sintonen, & suoranta, 2008). media literacy is a multi-dimensional concept discussed by scholars, professional educators, activists, parents and others worldwide. it is, however, a relatively new concept; most of the discussions began just a few decades ago (potter, 2010). there is as of yet no consensus about the definition of media literacy (martens, 2010; potter, 2010; hobbs, 2011a; potter, 2013). at the national level, media education and media literacy have long roots in the context of finnish education (ruokamo, 2005; kupiainen, sintonen, & suoranta, 2008). the new core curricula states that students need multiliteracies to interpret the world around them and perceive its cultural diversity. according to the curriculum (fnboe, 2014), multiliteracies refers to the skills to acquire, mix, edit, produce, express and evaluate information in various forms, environments and situations, with the help of a variety of tools. the acquisition of multiliteracies supports the development of critical thinking and learning skills. ethical and aesthetic questions are also related to multiliteracies, as are information technology and communication technology skills. cultural multiliteracies can be promoted through media education and by taking into account students’ and families’ media culture (fnboe, 2014, p. 88). these notions make it interesting to scrutinise the relationship between the concepts of media literacy and multiliteracies. however, core curricula are abstract in the sense that they are contextualised later at the local level. as conceptual clarity is presumed in the field of research, where concepts must be defined with a high degree of precision, this article focuses on the research literature and the ways these concepts are defined in research articles. debate about the concept of media literacy one of the most cited definitions of media literacy was presented in 1992 at the national leadership conference on media literacy, where media literacy was defined as “the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of forms” (aufderheide 1993). however, this definition has been criticised for its ignorance of the themes central to media literacy (potter, 2013), and many definitions have been presented since the conference (martens, 2010; potter, 2010; potter, 2013). one important motivation behind the conceptual discussion is the demand for a mutual understanding of the concept's content. the development of science seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 104 is based on the cumulative nature of knowledge construction; scholars and others in the field need to know what is meant by the field's core concepts. attempts to define media literacy have used various methods. a number of researchers have analysed the concept in relation to other closely related concepts. for example, koltay (2011) and fantin (2010) analysed media literacy in relation to information literacy and digital literacy. another method analyses how other scholars have defined and used the term. this article combines these two methods to offer a comparative view of media literacy and multiliteracies based on a systematic literature review. james potter (2010) presented a synthesis of various media literacy definitions and noted that the term can have multiple meanings. potter argued that there is no consensus about the concept and that authors “continue to add and subtract ideas from other definitions when constructing their own, and continue to struggle with the questions ‘what is media literacy?’” (potter, 2010, p. 679; see also potter, 2013, p. 420). according to potter (2010), four common themes are generally agreed upon in the field of media literacy: (1) mass media has potentially negative effects, (2) media literacy has a protectionist purpose against those potentially negative effects, (3) media literacy needs to be developed and (4) media literacy has many dimensions. renee hobbs (2011a, 2011b) critiqued this vision, stating that potter's ideas are too narrow in scope and that valuable perspectives are left out of the definition. “most importantly, in conceptualizing media literacy primarily as a response to counteract the negative effects of mass media and popular culture, potter’s vision of media literacy mischaracterizes the depth and complexity of the field” (hobbs, 2011a, p. 420). according to hobbs, it is important to understand media literacy as more than just an antidote for mass media exposure, because media literacy education has a much wider range of objectives. potter (2013) deepened his analysis in a later review article, noting that mass media has a wide range of potential effects on individuals and that the purpose of media literacy is not just protectionist but also empowering in the sense that people can use media to achieve their goals. potter also introduced three new themes upon which the field of media literacy seems to agree: (1) mass media also has an influence upon larger social structures, (2) people are more susceptible to media influence when they are passive and (3) media literacy involves skills besides knowledge (potter, 2013). according to hans martens (2010), the scholarly literature defines media literacy mainly in relation to the knowledge and skills needed for analysing, evaluating and producing media messages. according to buckingham (2007, p. 48), four broad conceptual aspects are generally understood to be essential components of media literacy: representation, language, production and audience. one aim of the paper is to point out the multifaceted nature of the concept of media literacy and clarify its meaning. this aim is in line with potter’s recommendation to identify the most useful parts of the existing definitions and combine them into a concept that is “broad enough to apply to all media and all cultures but also detailed enough to be useful to researchers and instructors” (potter, 2013, pp. 429–30). potter (2013, p. 430) has emphasised a need for more carefully designed applied studies and for research built on a stronger conceptualisation of media literacy. conceptual clarity is important in practice as well as theory. mihailidis and diggs (2010) noted that the interdisciplinary nature and broad definition of media literacy have influenced utilisation of the concept in practice. a concept must be broad enough to include a variety of aspects, but it cannot be too wide or it loses its definitive power. if a concept is defined too narrowly, however, it may not be versatile enough. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 105 the finnish core curriculum defines the concept of multiliteracies very broadly and includes a variety of literacies within the concept (fnboe, 2014). the risk is that this umbrella concept becomes too broad to be utilised effectively in practice or in research. the broadness of the concept raises questions: what has been left out? which literacies are not included? regarding media literacy, teurlings (2010) noted that it would be hard to find another concept that connects such a variety of approaches and perspectives (p. 360). although the broadness of a concept might explain its popularity, the risk in conceptual stretching—adding multiple ideas and things under a single concept (sartori, 1970)—is that it can represent a deliberate attempt to lessen the conceptual value. to illustrate this idea, sartori (1970) refers to the “hegelian night in which all the cows look black (and eventually the milkman is taken for a cow)” (p. 1040). this also applies conversely. the higher the discriminating power of a concept, the better the information (sartori, 1970, p. 1039). methodology this study applied the methodology of systematic literature review (slr). a common methodology in various disciplines, slr is suitable for the search and analysis of large datasets and a wide range of literature. the methodology of slr is employed in disciplinary fields such as medicine, psychology and education and also in interdisciplinary fields such as engineering education and female entrepreneurship (borrego, foster, & floyd, 2014; strech & sofaer, 2011). slr is by nature a secondary research method; it uses primary studies as the data for analysis (finfgeld-connett, 2014). slr can be used to promote evidence-based activity (horvath & pewsner, 2004), to improve policy making and decision making, to enable more objective critiques of past literature, to answer empirical questions and to evaluate methodological approaches (borrego, foster & froyd, 2014; finfgeld-connett, 2014; strech & sofaer, 2011). slr can also be used to construct an overview of a specific field to find trends or gaps in the research (henry, foss & ahl, 2015). in this study, the review method was applied to gather research articles on media literacy and multiliteracies to analyse the definitions of the concepts and to scrutinise how these concepts have been utilised in the research. one important reason for conducting slr is to glean ideas from researchers studying the same topic (fraenkel & wallen, 2006, p. 67). this review gleaned ideas about defining the concepts of media literacy and multiliteracies. according to onwuegbuzie et al. (2010), the benefits of slr include identifying relationships between concepts and practice and identifying research methodologies and designs. this study focused especially on the relationship between the concepts of media literacy and multiliteracies and on the methodologies of the research using and researching the concepts. the review seeks to analyse the multifaceted nature of these concepts, clarify their meanings and evaluate the relationship between them. slr is used in multiple disciplines and thus may have various applications, but some basic principles are generally shared. slr consists of two interconnected phases: the search of the relevant literature and the analysis of the data. to ensure the transparency of the process and to enable others to evaluate the adequacy of the method and to reproduce the process, it is important to explain both of these methodological phases thoroughly. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 106 search of the studies relevant peer-reviewed articles published from 2010 through 2014 were searched using the scientific databases eric (proquest),i academic search elite (ebsco),ii sciencedirect (elsevier),iii springerlink, iv sage journals v and emerald journals.vi these databases were chosen because of their multidisciplinary scope and their relevance to media literacy and multiliteracies research. the search terms used were media literacy, media literacies, multiliteracy and multiliteracies. the search terms focused on the articles’ author-supplied keywords, presuming that if a concept were one of the keywords, the study would define it. both of the concepts—media literacy and multiliteracies—were searched differentially to compare the search results. relevant research articles were included in the review based on the following inclusion criteria. inclusion criteria and sample size to be included in the review the article had to be • peer-viewed • a theoretical or empirical research article • published between 2010 and 2014 • written in english • focused on the topics of media literacy or multiliteracies (keywords) while contributions on media literacy and multiliteracies can be found in a wide variety of journals and other documents, for this review we focused only on research articles, based in part on the presumption that the relevant concepts would be defined in the research with a high degree of precision; the cumulative nature of science requires that concepts utilised in research be precisely defined. in addition, empirical and theoretical research articles are valuable sources for conceptual analysis because of their highly contextual nature and pursuit of conceptual clarity. thus, other documents were excluded, including book reviews, online books, editorials, book chapters, opinion articles and lesson plans. this study focused particularly on the multiliteracies and media literacy research written in english, because of the historical and the widest language group bases in this research field. authors are aware that literature published in languages other than english could give wider perspective to examine these concepts. to ensure that the articles were relevant for the discussion of media literacy and multiliteracies, only articles which listed either or both of these concepts as keywords were included. this study focuses particularly on the recent research literature, including only articles published between 2010 and 2014 in the review. this decision was made based on previous discussion and review articles in the field of media literacy (martens, 2010; potter, 2010; potter, 2013). analysis of the data content analysis was used as a methodological framework for the data analysis. research articles are valuable data for analysis in the sense that they are highly contextual texts. they must be analysed with a high level of precision to maintain their original meaning. this is especially important when focusing on the definitions used in the articles. undoubtedly, the complexity of qualitative content analysis increases in relation to the amount of data. scientific precision demands that close attention be paid to sample size. according to finfgeld-connett (2014), the risks of a too-large sample size include the possible loss of important nuances and overwhelming redundancy (p. 349). hannes and macaitis (2012) noted that the median number of research reports analysed in systematic reviews of health care literature was 14. according to finfgeld-connett (2014), this sample size can be analysed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 107 using content analysis. for these reasons, the sample size for this review is 14 articles for each dataset. the phase focusing on the analysis of the studies consisted of two separate steps, data extraction and content analysis. data extraction in line with the research questions, the analysis focused specifically on definitions used in the literature and how the research was performed. the data relevant to answering these questions were extracted from the articles into a separate document. extracted information included articles’ reference details (authors, publishing year, the name of the article), methodological information (methodological approach, the nature of the data, the data analysis method) and concept information (the definitions of media literacy/media literacies, multiliteracy/multiliteracies, reference details if external definitions). content analysis a variety of qualitative analysis methods for literature reviews are available (onwuegbuzie et al., 2012). to systematically analyse the relevant extracted data, this study used the content analysis method. content analysis is a widely used method in various disciplines. it is not, however, a single analysis technique but rather a methodological framework that includes different approaches (hsieh & shannon, 2005). although content analysis has been used in primary studies, there is also a growing trend toward its use in systematic literature reviews. finfgeld-connett (2014) noted that the key differences between using the method for primary studies and systematic literature reviews stem from the notion that the data used in slr are highly systematised and contextualised. “due to this difference, qualitative systematic reviewers should avoid overmanipulating and processing the data (e.g. deconstructing and abstracting) for purposes of analysis” (finfgeld-connett, 2014, p. 350). findings the first section will present basic information and provide an overview of the dataset. it describes the number of articles and divides them by year. the findings from media literacy research and multiliteracies research are presented separately. the second section focuses on the nature of the knowledge constructed in the research literature and the analysis of the definitions of the concepts. the final section presents a theoretical framework for media literacy. data description searches of the databases yielded 711 references. of these, 619 were references from searches on media literacy/literacies, and 92 were from searches on multiliteracy/multiliteracies. duplicates, document types other than research articles and articles without the defined keywords were excluded from the research based on evaluation of the studies’ abstracts. after the exclusions, 237 articles were included in the study. of these, 188 addressed media literacy, and 49 addressed multiliteracies. year of publication media literacy multiliteracies total 2010 20 9 29 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 108 2011 30 10 40 2012 38 9 47 2013 46 12 58 2014 54 9 63 total 188 49 237 table 1. division of publications by year the statistical software spss was used to collect a random sample from each dataset. based on the reliability reasoning described in the methodology section, 14 media literacy articles and 14 multiliteracies articles were included in the final qualitative analysis. nature of the knowledge produced one objective of this review was to analyse the nature of the knowledge constructed in these studies. this was done by focusing on the data used in the research and the analysis methods of the research. methods media literacy research multiliteracies research qualitative 3 7 quantitative 4 1 mixed-method 2 1 theoretical 5 5 table 2. methods used in the analysed research based on the data used in the research, three of the analysed media literacy articles used a qualitative approach (chu & lee, 2014; vega & barranquilla, 2013; teurlings, 2010). four of the analysed media literacy articles used a quantitative approach (chang, miao, lee, chen, chiu, & lee, 2014; ashley, maksl, & craft, 2013; espinoza, penelo, & raich, 2013; mizuno, narimatsu, kishi, kodama, murashige, yuji, & kami, 2010). two of the analysed articles used a mixed-method approach (del-moral & villalustre, 2013; sidekli, 2013). five of the analysed media literacy articles were theoretical in nature and thus not so easily classified on a qualitative and quantitative scale (andrist, chepp, dean, & miller, 2014; holladay & coombs, 2014; lin, li, deng, & lee, 2013; radigales, 2013; tejedor & pulido, 2012). seven of the analysed multiliteracies articles used qualitative research methodologies (ntelioglou, fannin, montanera, & cummins, 2014; tan & guo, 2014; adsanatham, 2012; marshall, hayashi, & yeung, 2012; ajayi, 2011; wedin, 2010; keegan, 2010). one used quantitative methodology (coleman, mctigue, & smolkin, 2010). one used both qualitative and quantitative methods and was thus classified as mixed-method research (huang, 2013). five of the analysed multiliteracies articles were theoretical in nature (emert, 2013; rebmann, 2013; bradley, 2012; ruiz & valverde, 2012; westby, 2010). definitions of the concepts media literacy as an educational outcome seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 109 the rigor of media literacy definitions in the articles varied. in some cases, media literacy was defined thoroughly and with great precision, whereas in other cases media literacy was referred to without a proper definition; instead, the meaning of the concept was implied. this variance can originate partly from the research topic and how closely media literacy is related to it. articles closely related to media literacy focused on the development of the concept (holladay & coombs, 2013; lin et al., 2013; chu & lee, 2014; teurlings, 2010) or on measuring levels of media literacy (ashley et al., 2013; espinoza et al., 2013; del-moral & villalustre, 2013; sidekli, 2013; chang et al., 2014). in all of these articles, the term media literacy was conceptualised thoroughly and with precision. for instance, topics covered include how media literacy is understood and what the aims of the concept are, what the origins of the concept are and what kind of discussion is related to it—for example, different approaches and point of views. lin et al. (2013), for example, defined media literacy in detail, because their conceptual article presented a theoretical framework for the concept “new media literacy”. the concept of media literacy was, in a sense, at the core of the article. lin et al. (2013) also described different approaches in the discussion of media literacy and the arguments for promoting it. in other articles, although media literacy was included in the keywords, the concept played a less significant role. andrist et al. (2014) analysed the use of videos in the classroom, and the authors saw media literacy as a possible learning goal for some of the video genres; vega and barranquilla (2013) described an educational media project related to television viewing in which the aims were related to media literacy; mizumo et al. (2010) described a study that analysed news reporting practices; tejedor and pulido (2012) analysed literature from the perspective of internet risks and radigales (2013) described the development of opera in relation to the change in media culture. radigales (2013) discussed the genre from the perspective of media literacy: “theories on media literacy promote the idea that communications media inform, entertain and teach. when an artistic genre becomes an agent or subject of media literacy, it adopts the prototypical drive that is characteristic of a communications medium” (p. 163). these articles all referred to media literacy to some extent but did not explicitly define the concept. when a concept is not explicitly defined, its contents cannot be analysed. andrist et al. (2014) used the notion of media literacy as a learning goal for video use in the social studies classroom and clearly related it to critical thinking: “films can also be used to build media literacy and sharpen critical analysis skills” (p. 197). in introducing the concept of media literacy, andrist et al. made reference to other media literacy sources. they used the definition provided in these references but did not define the concept explicitly in their article. the authors implied its meaning by giving examples of how media literacy can be built through the analysis of videos from various genres. according to andrist et al., pop fiction films can be used to identify messages, assumptions and meanings; propaganda films can be analysed from the perspective of persuasion and détournement videos can be useful for analysing the meanings of videos and changing them. these notions imply that media literacy is the ability to analyse and understand the messages, assumptions and meanings of media texts and the ways persuasion is used in the texts. the problem here is that a clear and explicit definition was not given; rather, it is assumed that there is consensus about the meaning of media literacy and that this meaning is obvious to the reader. for example, the boundaries of media literacy are not clearly defined. this raises the question: do the authors think that these ideas cover all media literacy, or are these just examples of singular aspects of it? for example, these ideas do not include the production or creation aspects, which are relatively common in discussions on media literacy. mizuno et al. (2010) included media literacy as one of their article’s keywords, but the concept was not defined or even mentioned in the actual research text. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 110 by using the keyword, the authors connected the article to the discussion of media literacy, but they did not make any explicit effort to explain the relationship between the contents of their research and media literacy. this connection was left for the reader to make. multiliteracies as a pedagogical approach in most of the analysed articles, the origins of the multiliteracies concept were consistently traced back to 1994, when a group of scholars met in new london, new hampshire, and 1996, when their article, “a pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures”, was published. the concept’s theoretical basis appears to be relatively homogenous, since the origins of the concept can be traced back so clearly. for media literacy, the case is different. some of the analysed articles traced the first media literacy discussions back even to the 1930s (lin et al., 2013). although some references were cited more often than others, a single theoretical basis for media literacy definitions could not be found in the analysed articles. based on this observation, it can be assumed that the theoretical basis of media literacy is broader than that of multiliteracies. in line with the conceptualisations presented in the curriculum in finland, in some articles, multiliteracies or multiliteracy was seen as a set of communication abilities. however, in most of the articles, multiliteracies was also conceptualised and analysed as a pedagogical approach. this differentiates the concept of multiliteracies in research from the concept of multiliteracies in the finnish core curriculum. compared with the media literacy articles, clear definitions of multiliteracies as an educational outcome or ability were hard to find in the multiliteracies articles, but teaching practices and pedagogical questions and content were addressed more thoroughly. in this way, the differences between the concepts of media literacy and multiliteracies became clarified. for example, tan and guo (2014) explicated and analysed the use of multiliteracies pedagogy in the context of secondary education. “we implemented the new london group’s (cope & kalantzis, 2000) pedagogy of multiliteracies in 2 year two (14-yearold) english language classrooms, in collaboration with their language arts teacher (tan & guo, 2009; tan et al., 2010). the new london group’s (cope & kalantzis, 2000) pedagogy of multiliteracies was suitable for the school as it offered a framework for the collaborating teacher to include a range of semiotic modes of meaning-making in a wide array of multimodal texts that the students were likely to encounter in their everyday lives” (tan & guo, 2014, p. 31). the concept of multiliteracies was not used to describe just the educational outcomes, but it was also used to describe a pedagogical approach in education. besides a pedagogical approach, multiliteracies was also defined as an educational outcome. according to westby (2010), “students not only need to be able to communicate effectively in oral and written language, but they also need to communicate effectively in multimodal ways—they need to become skilled in multiliteracies” (p. 64). multiliteracies is seen as a set of communication skills or abilities which students develop. in line with this is the definition offered by ajayi (2011): “in this study, multiliteracies is used to refer to the ability to interpret and construct different possibilities of meanings made available by differing text types associated with digital technologies and multimodal texts such as the internet, video games, digital video, visual images, graphics and layouts” (p. 398). this definition differs in focus from the original writings of the new london group (nlg). if multiliteracies are presented as a set of skills or communication abilities, the role of a specific seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 111 pedagogical approach loses its value. in this sense, the outcome is important, not the way it is achieved. in analysing the articles, it became clear that most of the multiliteracies articles shared a common theoretical basis. the citation patterns reveal a number of references to the writings of the nlg. in 10 of the analysed articles, references were made either to nlg’s original multiliteracies article from 1996, in which the authors present the concept for the first time in article form, or to their later writings (cope & kalantzis, 2000; cope & kalatzis, 2009). in the original multiliteracies articles (nlg, 1996; cope & kalantzis, 2009), the concept’s founders did not intend for it to represent a strictly defined set of skills; rather, they intended it to represent a pedagogical approach for english literacy teaching. this approach takes into account the different modes of meaning, which are “dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes” (nlg, 1996). this thinking continued in the later writings of the nlg (cope & kalantzis, 2009). their multiliteracies approach is based on two separate but interconnected societal developments: globalisation and technological development. according to the nlg, the notion of multiliteracies supplements traditional literacy pedagogy with these developments, which also creates the basis for the “multi” in multiliteracies. the first “multi” is multilingualism. through globalisation, the role of the diversity of languages is increased in world. with regard to different languages, multiliteracies pedagogy also takes into account professions, ethnicity, subcultures and interest and affinity groups. differences in the use of the same language—in this case, english—in different countries is also taken into account in the pedagogical approach of multiliteracies. literacy is not, however, merely the formal literacy traditionally promoted in schools; it also covers various forms of literacies outside the school context. literacies are not limited to a single language but are rather related to a number of different languages. the broadened understanding of literacy also covers ideas about formal and informal literacies. in their article, marshall, hayashi and yeung (2012) analysed how people use different literacies in digital contexts. in their informal literacy practices, in a digital context, they can combine not only different forms of communication but also different languages. “unlike julia’s sample of academic writing [...], amy’s communication via facebook has many language forms associated with informal, digital literacies as well as a range of complex multilingual communication strategies” (marshall et al., 2012). another “multi” in multiliteracies is multimodality, which involves different modes of meanings, such as linguistic, visual, audio, gestural and spatial. as ajayi (2011) notes: “literacy has hitherto been defined as the ability to read and write print-based materials. however, this is increasingly becoming inadequate in the face of digital, multimodal and hybrid textual forms made possible by new media technologies” (p. 398). an important aspect of multiliteracies pedagogy is the idea of metalanguage, which helps learners and teachers discuss and describe forms of meaning such as language, image, texts and meaning-making interactions (nlg, 1996, p. 77). the purpose of metalanguage should be to describe the differences between texts and connect those to the relevant social and cultural contexts. according to the nlg (1996), metalanguage should be flexible and open-ended in the sense that it can be used as a tool kit for “working on semiotic activities, not a formalism to be applied to them”. at the core of metalanguage is the idea of design. “the metalanguage of multiliteracies describes the elements of design, not as rules, but as an heuristic that accounts for the infinite variability of different forms of meaning-making in relation to the cultures, the subcultures, or the layers of an individual’s identity that these forms serve” (nlg, 1996, p. 88). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 112 nlg authors see teachers as designers of learning processes and environments rather than dictators of doing and thinking. in this way, the pedagogy of multiliteracies emphasises transformability. according to the nlg (1996), meaning-making is an active and dynamic process that is not governed by static rules. the nlg understands any semiotic activity as a matter of design, which includes three elements: available designs, designing and the redesigned (nlg, 1996, pp. 74–76). the multiliteracies pedagogy includes four interconnected components: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing and transformed practice. although multiliteracies is not defined in the original nlg articles as a teaching and learning outcome as such, but rather as a pedagogical approach for english literacy, skills are presented which are related to the broadened view of literacy. for example, changes in working life have brought a need to develop skills for access to new forms of work. according to the nlg (1996), teachers need to help students develop skills to “speak up, to negotiate, and to be able to engage critically with the conditions of their working lives” (p. 67). in a globalised world and society, students must also be prepared to negotiate “regional, ethnic, or class-based dialectics; variations in register that occur according to social context; hybrid cross-cultural discourses; the code switching often to be found within a text among different languages, dialects, or registers; different visual and iconic meanings; and variations in the gestural relationships among people, language, and material objects” (nlg, 1996, p. 69). the authors also noted that learners can substantively gain metacognitive and meta-linguistic abilities when they juxtapose different languages, discourses, styles and approaches (nlg, 1996, p. 69). theoretical framework for media literacies despite the active research tradition and substantial discussion of media literacy, consensus about its definition has not been reached. based on the multifaceted nature of media literacy, this article rejects attempts to establish a universal definition and instead highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of the concept, presenting a theoretical framework for conceptualising media literacy. this framework is based on abstraction levels and aims to clarify the concept and facilitate its operationalisation in practice. as we have seen, the theoretical basis of media literacy is wide and multifaceted. teurlings (2010) described the media literacy discussion as “a movement in which radically opposed paradigms and methodologies meet: exponents of rhetorical criticism find themselves in bed with political economists, media psychologists, cultural studies scholars and mainstream communication researchers; textually oriented scholars work together with audience scholars; and both quantitative and qualitative methods are used” (pp. 359–360). ashley et al. (2013) noted that inconsistent operationalisation of the concept of media literacy can increase reliance and the possibility of invalid inferences. these ideas call for a better understanding of the concept in relation to its levels of abstraction. in his classic article, sartori (1970) presented the idea of a ladder of abstraction divided into three levels: high, medium and low. a concept can be moved along the ladder in relation to its intension and extension—in other words, by widening and narrowing the scope of the concept by reducing or increasing its attributes, or the properties, which determine what belongs under the concept. the challenge is to make extensional gains without losing precision or empirical testability. if a concept stretches too wide in its scope, it loses the ability to be clearly defined; instead of meaning something, the concept means everything (sartori, 1970). potter (2013) noted that definitions of media literacy vary in their levels of detail. this was also noted in the analysis of the articles. some authors may define media literacy with high precision, and others may define it more generally—in other words, with seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 113 different levels of abstraction. next, a theoretical framework for conceptualisations of media literacies based on these abstraction levels is presented. high level of abstraction media literacies medium level of abstraction different subsets of media literacy low level of abstraction contextualised media literacy definitions table 3. theoretical framework of media literacies the analysed articles revealed that media literacy is defined and understood in various ways. taking this into account, we present a notion of various media literacies, and a theoretical framework for illustrating their differences is presented. the framework divides media literacy definitions into (1) media literacies with a high level of abstraction, (2) different subsets of media literacy with a medium level of abstraction and (3) contextualised media literacy definitions with a low level of abstraction. media literacies the notion of media literacies is in the “high level of abstraction” category. this is the broad umbrella concept, which encompasses the different conceptualisations of media literacy—the subsets of media literacies. different approaches affect how the media literacies’ goals are viewed. for example, teurlings (2010) used a political criterion to demonstrate that media literacy can have conservative, feminist, liberal and radical approaches. each of these approaches has its own ideas about which aspects of media literacy to highlight and how the concept should be defined. in the liberal approach, media literacy is seen primarily as an individual ability; in this sense, media literacy is a matter of one’s own personal transformation. the radical approach focuses on the transformation of the media system. clearly, the chosen perspective and theoretical approach will influence how the concepts are understood. this notion highlights the importance of clear conceptualisations. this study’s aim in conceptualising the media literacies concept is not to provide a definition for use in empirical studies, but rather to create a space for theoretical discussion and gather the different theoretical perspectives together. the risk here is that if the definition used in the research is too broad, it can result in confusion and a lack of precision. this relates to the ability to discern what is not included under the label of the concept—to define what media literacies are not. when a concept in the “high level of abstraction” category is defined by its negation, the concept can move closer to the concrete level. in this case, the level of abstraction decreases. this is the case in more precisely defined media literacies. media literacy is a normative concept in the sense that it is a desired state—an outcome of education (teurlings, 2010), especially media education (chu & lee, 2014). within the field of media literacy, different goals regarding its promotion have been suggested—for example, the protectionist and empowerment rationales noted earlier (potter, 2010; hobbs, 2011; potter, 2013). based on the analysis, both of these approaches are still evident in the field. chang et al. (2014) examined the association of media exposure and media literacy with alcohol and tobacco use, and espinoza et al. (2013) focused on media literacy’s association with body image and eating disorders. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 114 according to a traditional definition, a media literate person can “decode, evaluate, analyze and produce both print and electronic media.” (aufderheide, 1993). this definition forms the basis for media literacy definitions. teurlings (2010) referred to firestone (1993), who stated in the forewords of the report of the national leadership conference on media literacy that media literacy is “the ability of a citizen to access, analyse, and produce information for specific outcomes”. firestone’s definition differs somewhat from the previous definition: “access” is added and “evaluate” and “decode” are omitted. although these may present a basic framework for definitions, different emphases are placed upon different aspects of media literacy. in a similar way, as potter (2013) has noted, certain characteristics are added, changed or left out of the definitions. sidekli (2013) illustrated this, noting that media literacy is a life skill for citizens and it focuses on access to, analysis of and evaluation of written and unwritten messages. chu and lee (2014) stated that in hong kong, “media literacy is defined as a life skill that enables young people to critically understand, analyse, use, and influence the media” (p. 130). access, evaluation and produce are not mentioned in this definition, but rather critical understanding and the use and influence of media are emphasised. the subsets of media literacy the different subsets of media literacies form the “medium level of abstraction” in this framework. the idea is to emphasise the differences in the definitions and perspectives. this view rejects attempts to establish one universal “fit-for-all” definition, but rather highlights the importance of future discussion on the relationships between the different definitions and subsets. compared with media literacies, concepts at the medium level of abstraction are defined with greater precision and higher intension. media literacy can be understood in very abstract or more concrete ways. based on the articles analysed in this study, the subsets of media literacies include news media literacy (ashley et al., 2013), public relations literacy (holladay & coombs, 2013) and alcohol and tobacco literacy (chang et al., 2014). these literacies are explicitly defined in relation to media literacy. contextualised media literacy definitions research always takes place in a specific context, and concepts must be defined precisely. media literacies should be defined in a way that not only relates to the relevant theoretical discussion but also takes into account the context in which the research takes place and its social and cultural characteristics. contextualising the definition can also help other researchers and practitioners better understand the concept’s meaning. this allows planners and practitioners to utilise media literacy in practice, and researchers can construct knowledge and build on other studies more coherently. contextualized media literacy definitions relate to the “low level of abstraction”, where media literacy needs to be defined in relation to the concrete context in which the actual study takes place. media literacy is so multifaceted and multidimensional that in empirical research it must be well contextualised by definition. this makes the contents of the concept more understandable and avoids potential confusion from using the same concept with different meanings. based on a critical theory of literacy, chu and lee (2014) argued that the meaning of media literacy cannot be separated from the social context. this view underscores the importance of definitions for concepts that fall into the “low level abstraction” category. the question is this: what is meant by “media literacy” in the specific research context? chang et al. (2014) illustrated the importance of contextualised definitions of media literacy by noting that caution should be exercised when comparing media literacy across studies and countries, noting how alcohol and tobacco seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 115 advertising policies vary from country to country. this suggests that media literacy studies should be placed within social and cultural contexts by defining the concepts with high precision and intension. in discussions and interpretations, studies must also take into account the differing contexts in which the research is conducted. discussion and conclusion to conclude, we raise possibilities for further research, noting important aspects which should be considered more closely and discussed among researchers in the fields of multiliteracies and media literacy. we also point out limitations of this research, which should be taken into account when interpreting the findings. this study emphasised the differences in media literacy definitions and rejected attempts to establish a universal definition that can be applied in all cases, suggesting instead that media literacy should be understood as multiple media literacies. the study designed a theoretical framework—based on the abstraction levels of the concepts—to facilitate media literacy conceptualisations. the analysis of the english definitions showed that media literacy is defined in various ways and with different levels of precision. if these differences are recognised and acknowledged, the definitions could more easily be put under critical evaluation. contextualised media literacy definitions would help to operationalise media literacy in research and practice and facilitate theoretical discussion and cumulative knowledge construction. in this article, we presented a framework for understanding media literacy. the framework was based on the idea of different abstraction levels. the framework presented in this article is not intended as a tool for establishing a conclusive definition of the concept. its purpose is not to end the discussion— quite the opposite: its purpose is to emphasise the importance of conceptual clarity and raise discussion. the challenge is to find balance between the scope and precision of the concept. in this research, several limitations are worth considering. the inclusion criteria omitted a significant amount of relevant media literacy literature; the roots of media literacy research reach back many decades. the decision to limit the study to articles published between 2010 and 2014 was based on the cumulative nature of research. other reviews have taken into account the earlier research (martens, 2010; potter, 2010), and this study supported the findings of these reviews in that there is still variance in the ways media literacy has been defined. the inclusion criteria also omitted literature outside the research realm and research published in languages other than english. for example, much media literacy research is conducted and published in finland (pekkala, pääjärvi, palsa, korva, & löfgren, 2013) and in other european countries (livingstone, papaioannou, grandío pérez, & wijnen, 2012), not to mention the other language areas in the world. however, the role of english in international scientific communication is important to take into account, and thus the inclusion criteria used in this study is arguable. this study argued for a stronger focus on the relationship between the concepts of multiliteracies and media literacy. the contents of these concepts clearly overlap; for example, both recognise multimodality. this raises the question: do the theoretical discussions share a common frame of reference and, if so, to what extent? are any shared sources relevant to both discussion traditions? for reasons of synergy, it would be useful to find ways to explicate these mutual ideas for bridge building between these thus-far differing fields. creating common references—for example, through bibliographical analyses— is one possible starting point. interviews with influential researchers in both seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 116 fields could provide insight into the relationships between the two concepts. more theoretical and practical research is needed to discover the mutual connections between the research traditions. this could open up possibilities for cooperation between the scholars of multiliteracies and media literacy. this study demonstrated that media literacy and multiliteracies research have used a number of methodological approaches. this theoretical variance suggests that more discussion on theoretical questions is needed. what possible challenges do the differing theoretical bases pose? what kinds of theoretical—epistemological and ontological—presumptions are related to the research traditions? what does the variance in theoretical presumptions mean for the nature of constructed knowledge and the foundation of cumulative knowledge? further discussion is needed on the pedagogical approach to multiliteracies in finnish education, since multiliteracies is defined as an outcome in the core curricula. due to the overlapping contents of the concepts, research and conceptualisations of media literacy can offer useful support for education planners and educators in implementing outcome-driven multiliteracies in the finnish school system. the theoretical framework presented in the article facilitates a better understanding of the various conceptualisations of media literacy. the framework also highlights the importance of contextualisation, which can lessen confusion about the concepts’ meanings. in media literacy research, contextualised definitions are also essential for the construction of cumulative knowledge. references adsanatham, c. 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(2014). multiliteracies in an outcome-driven curriculum: where is its fit? the asia-pacific education researcher, 23(1), 29–36. tejedor, s., & pulido, c. (2012). challenges and risks of internet use by children: how to empower minors? comunicar, 39, 65–72. teurlings, j. (2010). media literacy and the challenges of contemporary media culture: on savvy viewers and critical apathy. european journal of cultural studies, 13(3), 359–373. vega, j., & barranquilla, a. (2013). a children´s observatory of television: “observar tv”, a space for dialogue between children. comunicar, 40, 145–153. wedin, å. (2010). narration in swedish preand primary school: a resource for language development and multilingualism. language, culture & curriculum, 23(3), 219–233. westby, c. (2010). multiliteracies. topics in language disorders, 30(1), 64–71. i http://www.proquest.com/products-services/eric.html ii https://www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-elite iii http://www.sciencedirect.com iv http://link.springer.com v http://online.sagepub.com vi http://www.emeraldinsight.com http://www.proquest.com/products-services/eric.html https://www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-elite http://www.sciencedirect.com/ http://link.springer.com/ http://online.sagepub.com/ http://www.emeraldinsight.com/ behind the concepts of multiliteracies and media literacy in the renewed finnish core curriculum: a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed research lauri palsa heli ruokamo abstract introduction background of the study media education and media literacy in the finnish core curriculum debate about the concept of media literacy methodology search of the studies analysis of the data findings data description nature of the knowledge produced definitions of the concepts media literacy as an educational outcome multiliteracies as a pedagogical approach theoretical framework for media literacies discussion and conclusion references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 digital network as a learning tool for health sciences students ragnhild nilsen professor faculty of health sciences/department of health and care sciences university of tromsø email: ragnhild.nilsen@uit.no abstract an online learning module for health sciences students with various educational backgrounds was implemented at the university of tromsø (uit). the purpose of this article is to examine how participation in a joint, web-based course can be a didactic tool that promotes motivation and contributes to interactions among health sciences students. the study is based upon findings from focus group interviews with students who participated in a joint online course, as well as on recordings of activity in online discussions. keywords: qualitative method, web-based course, motivation, interaction, health care education introduction the division of professions and labor cause cooperation problems in the health sector, and to help improve these problems, health care workers must interact and learn from each other’s knowledge and skills (chang et al., 2001; sidhom & poulsen, 2006; zwarenstein & reeves, 2002). interdisciplinary professional education and learning increase the possibility for health care workers to collaborate more effectively with professionals from other professions in the future, which is a strategy for better health services (barr et al., 2005; who, 2010). computer-supported collaborative learning (cscl) is a form of learning that emphasizes cooperative learning and how technology can provide support for teaching (dillenbourg & fisher, 2007). the technology helps to expand physical space as an arena for learning and provides new opportunities for learning. cscl is based on learning theories elaborated on by vygotsky (1986), who believes that learning takes place within the framework of human interaction and through social practices. group collaboration involves individual learning (stahl, koschmann, & suthers, 2006). motivation is an important factor in learning. students who show motivation, initiative and personal responsibility often achieve a particularly favorable result (zimmerman, 1990), with many educational institutions using different forms of web-based instructions to motivate students to interact with each other and work towards common goals. westbrook (2012) describes how the implementation of three online collaborative initiatives for a course in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 96 radiography enabled the students to work together and learn from each other, further noting that there is an urgent need for further research in similar collaborative activities. bechina and hustad (2010) describe how the faculty staff at two norwegian universities involved in their investigation regards the platform of the learning management system fronter as being beneficial for structuring the learning environment in terms of having all the needed information in one place, and how fronter enables a flexible speed of learning. a framework consisting of the socio-technical factors facilitating or hampering the usage of fronter is delineated. social features such as discussion forums are seen as a good way to increase the collaboration and communication between stakeholders (bechina & hustad, 2010). health care educationalists should consider collaborative activities for their students (santy & smith, 2007), and the purpose of this article is to examine how participation in a joint, web-based course can be a didactic tool that promotes motivation and contributes to interactions among health sciences students. the study is based upon findings from focus group interviews with students who participated in a joint online course, as well as on recordings of activity in online discussions. an online learning module for health sciences students with different educational backgrounds was implemented at the university of tromsø (uit) with the purpose of enhancing the interaction across professional boundaries. the course was carried out using fronter, and the learning path was used as a tool. with learning paths, students follow a curriculum in which new tasks are presented each day. presentation pages contain films of authentic health science cases, specific questions to the cases, online lectures, discussion forums, texts, links and photos. study design joint course contents six ects credits were given for joint courses for first-year medical laboratory scientists, dental hygienist, occupational therapist, physiotherapist, and radiography students. a total of 118 students were divided into 18 groups of six-seven students each, all with different educational backgrounds. 16 groups attended the ordinary joint course, and two groups were randomly selected to participate in an online variant of the joint course. the groups were supervised, and the supervisor for the two groups was responsible for developing this program. the course was completed in three weeks. the topics that were taught are described in a part of the educational programs’ curricula, and are related to ethics, communication, state and municipality knowledge and health and social policy, as well as science and research methods. students who attended the online course shared the same curriculum as the students who attended the regular joint course; however, all teaching was online-based. figure 1 shows an example of a presentation page of the learning path. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 97 figure 1: presentation page of the learning path the first students’ group meeting was in person the students met once in person at the start of the course, at which time they also met the supervisor, who was also present for the online discussions. this meeting was intended for them to become acquainted, which was considered important for the success of the students’ online work. filmed case studies with relevance to health students were instructed to discuss five actual health-related cases during the course, taken from the book, samhandling i helsefaglig arbeid (coordination of health care activities) (nilsen, 2010). this book is a collection of essays written by second-year health sciences students from the university of tromsø; in this book, students describe and reflect on a situation that involved interactions from their own practice. five cases were selected for dramatization and filming, and for this article a picture describing the case of the role of the health care worker is shown (figure 2). the screenplay was developed on the basis of the selected cases, around which improvisations were developed. taken into consideration when choosing the cases was that students should have a starting point for discussing the various aspects of health-related communication (cases 1 and 2), health-related ethical dilemmas (cases 3 and 4) and cooperation in health care work (case 5). drama students from the university of tromsø were the actors who participated in the film project. they received counselling on health-related words and phrases, and instructions in health care methods as needed, with each movie lasting two to three minutes. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 98 figure 2: from the case of the role of the health care worker filmed lectures each case study was accompanied by one or two lectures, with each lasting 10 to 15 minutes. after watching the lectures and reading the literature related to each topic, students should have a sufficient amount of information to take part in online discussions. online discussions with core time five online discussions were arranged in the forum room, with one for each case. the core time for online discussions was one hour, though the room was open for a longer period of time. specific questions were provided for each case, and students were instructed to make at least two contributions to each online discussion: a primary posting and a response to a fellow student. in addition, participation and activity in the online discussion was a requirement for entering the exam. examination the course was concluded with an oral group exam, with joint and individual questions. the examination was related to course topics and objectives as outlined in the framework plans and covered by the syllabus, and assessed in accordance with the criteria of “passed/not passed.” method focus group interview focus group interviews were used as a method to elucidate the problem (vaughn, schumm, & sinagub, 1996). unlike individual interviews, focus groups provide information from a dynamic group interaction process seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 99 (morgan, 1997; krueger, 1994), with focus group interviews centered on specific questions about how the online joint course had been developed. the students in the two groups comprised the two focus groups. the committee consisted of 12 students, with six in each group. these groups constituted the study’s informants, and consisted of three radiography students, an occupational therapy student, six physiotherapy students and two dental hygienist students. it was purely coincidental that no medical laboratory scientist student was included in the committee, although this was not considered a weak point in the method since the objective was to observe learning collaboration, and not the similarities/differences between different professions. each interview lasted one hour, and a combination of open and closed questions was used, with the answers followed up and expanded on. the informants were also given the opportunity to develop their own themes and ideas. the presentation was anonymous, but all the quotes are genuine. the interviews were audio-taped and transcribed verbatim (malterud, 1996). the words in the transcribed interviews are identical to the original conversations, and represent my data for analysis. in addition, the number of posts in online discussions, which were counted by the author, was registered by the students in a separate form, which was meant to show the students’ activity in relation to work requirements, according to which, the student should contribute at least two entries for each online discussion. data analysis the analysis method used is the phenomenological hermeneutical method (ricoeur, 1976), which consists of three phases: 1) naive reading, an initial interpretation is developed that provides a picture of what the text is about; 2) structural analysis, the text is divided into various topics and categories; 3) general interpretation, one uses an author’s pre-understanding phase, interpretation of results and theories so as to better understand the findings (lindseth & norberg, 2004). the transcriptions from focus group interviews were systematically reviewed and analyzed several times. at first, i formed an impression of what the text was about, as i read through the entire text several times and underlined the words educational, learn, learned. my focus was on students’ learning experience, and what in their opinion contributed to learning after completing the online course. spontaneous interpretations and reflections in the material were noted, and i also interpreted what words and phrases were expressed. it was important to be aware of my own pre-understanding in this research, because as a researcher, i am involved in the project. i must therefore describe my position and my point of view. i have been the technical leader of the joint course at the university of tromsø for several years, and am responsible for the idea, development and implementation of the online learning module. i guided the students who participated, evaluated them during the examination and conducted focus group interviews with them. empirical analysis participation in online discussions two groups of six students from different health science programs were chosen to follow a web-based variation of the course. the activity in online discussions of the two groups is shown in table 1, and each group completing five online discussions, one for each case. the first column in the table seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 100 indicates the group number (1 and 2), while the second column indicates the number of the online discussion. the third column lists the number of posts per online meeting. in order to fulfill the requirements, students must have at least two contributions in each discussion a primary post and a response to a fellow student. the fourth column shows that the students, with the exception of two cases in group 2, had more posts than had been required. furthermore, group 1 was more active than group 2 in online discussions. group 1 online meeting number of post number of posts over requirements 1 25 13 2 27 15 3 18 6 4 17 5 5 22 10 group 2 online meeting number of posts number of posts over requirements 1 11 2 16 4 3 15 3 4 12 5 17 5 table 1: participation in online discussions focus group interview results transcripts of statements from focus group interviews about learning have been analyzed. the students were asked how they experienced the online joint course, with eight statements being selected for analysis that are presented in table 2. the focus here is on the conversation in the interviews and the students’ learning experience in the online joint course. 1: i think the joint course was very educational and very effective because we worked online, it’s true. (...) i felt that i had a lot to learn. 2: i also think it was great that you no longer had to show up at scheduled times, and go to school every day. (...) you don’t have to be so firmly bound to a schedule in a way, and at the same time we learned equally as much as the others. (...) 3: i also think it was very educational; i could sit down and write down all the lectures, and you could also rewind the recording. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 101 4: (...) i believe it worked quite well studying online and in discussion forums; we learned a lot. it was also nice that you could go back and look at what we had discussed. 5: i agree with what is being said that the joint course was very educational (...) 6: yes, it was very educational. i did not think it would be like that at all. but everyone made a good effort. and i learned a lot of it, anyway. very precise things were said, and one could discuss it with the others who had seen the exact same video. 7: it was great that it was very different, people had emphasized different things. (…) so you got several comparisons, you learned a lot better and had a broader view of what it was all about. table 2: statements about learning the excerpts illustrate findings on learning related to various aspects regarding the flexibility of the web-based course. efficiency (1) and flexibility (2) as related to time and place represent an important category for the learning experience. the students pointed out that they could control time, and that they did not have to go to school every day. students were able to rewind the lectures to review the necessary details whenever they studied for the exam, which contributed to learning (3). it was also instructive to go back to the online discussion to review what had been previously said (4, 5). students also say that the online discussions were instructive, and that all of the group participants were involved in these discussions (6). lastly, students said they learned a lot from discussing with each other after watching the same cases, and that the discussions provided a broader perspective and greater learning results (7). all of the statements were linked to the flexibility regarding the network as a tool that promotes motivation and contributes to interactions among the students. discussion this article discussed how participation in a digital network can be a didactic tool for health sciences students. the study was based upon findings from focus group interviews with students who participated in the online joint course, as well as upon the recording of activity in online discussions. table 1 shows students’ engagement in the online discussion, revealing that students involved in the study were enthusiastic and likely to come up with more than what was required. by supporting the involvement, one supports the formation of a practice community, and thus the activities, community formation, social energy and expertise of the individual (wenger, 1998). learning is a matter of commitment and the ability to contribute actively in the community (wenger, 1998). students in the online course were first-year health sciences students who initially participated in a course common to their professional education, but eventually created an interprofessional involvement in an online community practice. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 102 a well-organized course of study helps to keep the focus on the activity that one deems necessary to achieve their goals (halland, 2004). various aspects of the online joint course regarding the flexibility contributed to learning, and as shown in table 2, efficiency [1] and flexibility [2] as related to time and place represent an important category for this. the students could watch the lectures repeatedly [3], and participate in online discussions with students with various educational backgrounds; they were very motivated to write down the lectures and engaged in the study [4, 5, 6]. students interacted by means of digital print and in a distance education setting and yet with a contemporary immediacy. the online discussions lasted several hours, which illustrates the particular status and special characteristics of time. regardless of time, space and place, the flexibility of the online environment made it easier for students to be active in the online discussion. they could add their posts whenever they felt like doing so, and realized they had the time and opportunity for reflection. students were involved in a transparent system that used computer technology; core time and a clear framework for discussion provided optimal conditions for engagement and knowledge development, and the students felt they gained a broader perspective when discussing with other students [7]. the curriculum stimulated the students’ commitment and knowledge development across disciplines, though by nature, a mutual commitment is partial since the participants in a group can have different or overlapping roles (wenger, 1998). at the same time, this partiality in community practice could be a resource and not a limitation. wenger shows that common practice does not necessarily entail uniformity, agreement or cooperation, but instead involves a form of difference in which perspectives and identity impact on one another. learning is the ability to preserve experiences and use them in future contexts (sæljø, 2001), and our understanding of the world is a process in which our previous understanding is adjusted or amended in light of new experiences. it is the dynamics of learning, according to sæljø. new requirements are established through our experiences, while they are also subject to reflection and revision in the face of new experiences, thereby providing students with access to new understanding horizons. one can influence the quality of learning activity and contribute to the desire to learn by facilitating optimal learning. this facilitation may include taking the form of creating motivation, which in turn inspires and contributes to the energy, drive and desire to work (halland, 2004). halland further shows how motivation is a key issue for learning, as it is about the forces that have their origins in interest, commitment and past experience. “motivation is enhanced when students perceive they are making progress in learning” (shunk, 1991). i must account for the limitations of this study. a small number of students (12) participated in the study, as a larger number of students would have provided a more nuanced picture. moreover, the lms platform fronter has some technical limitations concerning updating the entries in the online discussions, and students pointed out that it was difficult to discuss because many new posts were generated just as they were writing the first post. one must consider tools other than a "forum" for such online discussions, or else extend the core time. references barr, h., koppel, i., reeves, s., hammick, m. and freeth, d. 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(1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, cambridge: cambridge university press. westbrook, c. (2012). online collaborative learning in health care education. the european journal of open, distance and e-learning – http://www.eurodl.org/index.php?p=current&article=475. who (2010). framework for action on interprofessional education and collaborative practice. 4. may 2011 http://www.who.int/hrh/resources/framework_action/en/index.html. zimmerman, b.j. (1990). self-regulated learning and academic achievement. an overview. educational psychologist, 25, 3 -17. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 104 zwarenstein, m. and reeves, s. (2002). working together but apart: barriers and routes to nurse-physician collaboration. the joint commission journal on quality improvement, 28, 242–247. the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.3582 ©2021 (marcia håkansson lindqvist). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective marcia håkansson lindqvist department of education mid sweden university email: marcia.hakanssonlindqvist@miun.se abstract the use of digital technologies is now a natural part of schoolwork in many schools. the use of digital technologies and the conditions for technology-enhanced learning and school development were studied in two schools, an upper-secondary school and a compulsory school, over a period of 3 years, exploring the student, teacher, school leader, and school perspectives. in this small study, two surveys (n = 26; n = 17) were used to provide further insights into the compulsory school, by exploring the parent perspective of a 1:1 laptop initiative. laptop use in the classroom was seen as a potential pedagogical tool for structure and support in learning activities, student responsibility for schoolwork, and issues of digital equity. challenges included increased laptop use, difficulties regarding insight into and monitoring of schoolwork and homework, students’ focus on schoolwork in the classroom environment, and physical aspects. the results show that the parent perspective provides important insights for teachers, school leaders, and school organizers that may help support students’ learning through the use of digital technologies in the classroom. keywords: digital technologies, laptops, parents introduction the use of digital technologies is now a natural part of daily schoolwork in many schools. policy makers continue to emphasize the need for students to acquire 21st-century skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and digital competence in the digital classroom the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 (european commission [ec], 2018; eurydice, 2012; organisation for economic cooperation and development [oecd], 2018). recent policy efforts continue to seek the more efficient use of digital technologies for teaching and learning and the development of digital competence (ec, 2018). in the swedish context, the government continues to refine the goals for the use of digital technologies in schools in the national digitalization strategy for schools (swedish government, 2017). despite these efforts, the impact of the use of digital technologies on teaching and learning continues to be somewhat uncertain (national agency for education, 2016). the national agency for education evaluates the implementation and use of digital technologies and digital competencies in swedish schools every 3 years. the most recent report shows that although investments and access to digital technologies have increased, pedagogical development and digital competencies have not expanded to the same extent (national agency for education, 2016; swedish schools inspectorate, 2012). proposals to strengthen digitalization in schools were introduced in the swedish national it strategy (the committee for digitalization, 2014) and the national digitalization strategy for schools (swedish government, 2017) in terms of adequate digital competency, which have been adopted (eurydice, 2018). moreover, the national agency for education pointed out the necessity for professional development (pd) in the area of digitalization for all levels (i.e., teachers, school leaders, and school organizers) of swedish schools (national agency for education, 2016). however, adequate digital competency appears to be somewhat boundless, involving interpretation in relation to both overall and local contexts regarding digitalization in k-12 schools (fransson, lindberg & olofsson, 2018). despite the strong intentions and expectations of policymakers, academic gains in the use of digital technologies appear to be somewhat vague (cuban, 2013; livingstone, 2012). in many schools, the implementation of digital technologies has included laptops or tablets in what are referred to as one-to-one (1:1) initiatives (richardson et al., 2013; valiente, 2010). these initiatives involve the introduction of laptops or tablets into lessons in a digital classroom, where teachers and students each have access to their own laptop or tablet. here, researchers note a gap between policy intentions and expectations and the actual use of these devices in practice (mcgarr, 2009; olofsson, lindberg, fransson & hauge, 2015, säljö, 2010). overall, efforts to support the development of 21st-century skills through the promotion of basic and more advanced information and communication technology (ict) skills for the major stakeholders in these initiatives (i.e., students, teachers, and school leaders) is reported in the international literature (cuban, 2013; vrasidas, 2014; warschauer et al., 2014; williams, 2008; zheng, warschauer, lin & chang, 2016) as a way for the use of digital technologies to provide opportunities for technology-enhanced learning and school change (fullan, 2001; olofsson et al. 2015). studies in the swedish context (håkansson lindqvist, 2015a; bergström & mårell-olsson, 2018; fleischer, 2013; grönlund, 2014; mårell-olsson & bergström, 2018; pettersson, 2018; tallvid, 2015) mirror international results. however, although the student, teacher, the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 and school leader perspectives are in focus in the literature, one important stakeholder, parents, seems to be lacking. thus, the challenges and opportunities parents see regarding the use of digital technologies in the classroom appear to represent a relatively unexplored area. literature review in regard to the use of digital technologies in the classroom, as noted above, many researchers have focused on the 1:1 classroom context (cuban, 2013; lei & zhao, 2008; harper & milman, 2016; penuel, 2006; richardson et al., 2013). an overview by zheng, warschauer, lin, and chang (2016) reported positive findings related to 1:1, noting an expected continued expansion of 1:1 in k-12 schools, but they also called for more systematic research in the area. studies often involve students, teachers, school leaders, and the schools as organizations. these stakeholders are seen as the main partners in the implementation process of digital technologies, and parents are only occasionally included in this group (mooij & smeets, 2001). keane and keane (2017) described parents as silent stakeholders, pointing to the need to elevate parents to equal stakeholders in 1:1 laptop initiatives. others argue that ict integration efforts should potentially be coordinated with students’ home computer use (vekiri, 2010). pullen (2015) reported benefits of linking students’ home use to school use (e.g., in digital use and confidence). this would also help provide a learning environment with digital technologies, which would ideally support a seamless transition between the home and school. however, this requires the combined support of both schools and parents (kong & li, 2013). as policy measures continue to push a focus on access, integration, and developing frameworks for use and curricula, students’ perceptions and digital competence continue to develop outside the classroom, rather than within the classroom (aesert & van braak, 2014). further, aesert and van braak (2014) argued that teachers’ attitudes and experiences do not contribute to an improvement in students’ ict skills, but the home environment, including parents’ ict attitudes and experiences, does. these findings are in line with zhong (2011), who reported that the out-of-school context in which children use ict could be a more powerful predictor for ict efficacy than the school context. according to parents, attitudes concerning ict competence and a child’s success appear to be related, although there were socioeconomic differences in how parents conceived of the relationship between computers and success (scholfield clark, demont-heinrich, & webber, 2005). a school’s potential to implement measures as well as the parent’s level of education and occupation also had effects on differences in access to ict and use (pereira, 2016). parents’ expectations regarding use in school are of importance as well (brigas et al., 2016). laptop use was seen as important for keep up with the pace of life in modern society as well as for academic achievement and the strong social imperative of the information society (pereira, 2016). the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 pereira (2016) noted the importance of access, focusing on the family and the way children access and used ict. a study of small children entering nursery school suggested that access is not equivalent to the ability to use digital technologies, based solely on the parents’ intervention or modelling (o’hara, 2011). parents have an impact by providing children with the opportunity to use ict, thorough supervision, by playing with children with ict resources, and by drawing children’s attention to ict in the home and the world around them (o’hara, 2011). it appears that parental ict attitudes are related to primary school pupils’ ict competences, and that classroom use is also related to pupils’ competences (aesaert, van nijlen, vanderlinde, tondeur, devlieger, & van braak, 2015). this could mean that parents’ ict attitudes affect how they support and regulate children’s use (vekiri, 2010). for example, in a study of students who bring their own devices to school, parents were concerned with issues of equity, ethical use, safety, and device security (kiger & herro, 2015). these concerns were also in focus in a study by kong and li (2013) in which parents expressed what could be described as a shift in concern over use to a concern over how to build and cultivate proper attitudes and use. in a study of tablet use with parents and students, parents expressed more concerns regarding use by older children than younger children (rončević-zubković et al., 2016). the use of digital technologies may offer support for students with special needs (peterson-karlan, 2011; sik-lányi, hoogerwerf, miesenberger, & cudd, 2015; starcic, 2010; nordström, nilson, gustafsson, & svensson, 2018). however, parents expressed concerns regarding the use of ict technologies as entertainment rather than as educational media (scholfied clark et al., 2005). use involving non-schoolwork activities was reported to be a concern, which parents reported as a distraction (keane & keane, 2017). other concerns reported by parents were the lack of focus on traditional school skills, such as handwriting. furthermore, parents reported general challenges related to students’ prolonged use and ergonomic concerns, such as issues relating to posture and eye strain (keane & keane, 2017; woo, white, & lai, 2016). however, concerns regarding use can present an opportunity because understanding and addressing parents’ concerns may also serve to increase resources and support the teaching of digital citizenship (kiger & herro, 2015). schools can capitalize on parental interaction to increase the quality of parental involvement in school and out of school. schools that see the opportunity to utilize family resources may increase parental awareness of the potential benefits and risks of ict technologies (vekiri, 2010). digital technologies, such as laptops, can be seen as tools to support and assist teachers’ work and students’ learning but also as tools for crossing boundaries and creating a culture of sharing between schools, parents, and other actors in the community (niemi, kynäslahti, & vahtivuori-hänninen, 2013). it appears that ict alignment between parents and principals regarding preferences and expectations in the use of digital technologies improves parent satisfaction with the school, whereas misalignment appears to have the opposite effect (heath, maghrabi, & carr, 2015). schools may provide information through the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 increased modes of communication as a way to increase access and communication between families and communities. however, this does not guarantee the quality of the information (hohlfeld, ritzhaupt, & barron, 2010). collaboration between schools and parents to foster information literacy was also an issue. the high expectations school leaders have for parental support reflect the need for schools to initiate cooperation with parents to extend technology-enhanced learning to the home setting (kong & li, 2013). further, kong and li (2013) discussed the need to support home–school collaboration to provide opportunities and to mobilize parents to support learning at home. context the umeå research project in umeå, conducted between 2011–2014 in sweden followed a 1:1 laptop initiative in two k-12 schools in the municipality of umeå to study the use of digital technologies and the conditions for technology-enhanced learning as well as the educational change observed. employing a research design with a case study approach (yin, 2009), the data collection in the overall research project consisted of surveys, interviews, and classroom observations. two schools were involved in the research project: a large upper secondary school and a middle-sized compulsory school. the teachers and school leaders in the research project were either teachers, mentors, or school leaders for the four classes involved in the research project. previous research has explored the student perspective (håkansson lindqvist, 2013), the teacher perspective (håkansson lindqvist, 2015a; 2015b; 2019a), and the school leader perspective (håkansson lindqvist 2015c; 2019b). by providing insight into yet another important stakeholder perspective, the parent perspective, this paper aims to explore the challenges and opportunities of ict technologies as perceived by the parents of the compulsory school students in the two classes studied in the research project. theoretical framework the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010) builds upon the idea of learning as an interaction between the individual and the sociocultural environment (engeström, 1987; säljö, 2000; vygotsky, 1978). in the model, the learner is placed in the center. the model is illustrated in figure 1. the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 figure 1 the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010) including resource elements and their filters. with the learner in the central position of the learning activity, demands can be set on the surrounding learning environment, context, and design (luckin, 2010). surrounding the learner are three resource elements: environment, knowledge and skills, tools and people. these resources are available to the learner and can be accessed either through direct or indirect interaction. an important theoretical concept in the ecology of resources model is filters. according to luckin (2010), the resources surrounding the learner may be restrained and impeded or expanded and enabled. thus, the process of exploring and identifying filters can be used both to strengthen design and to ameliorate negative effects in technology-rich learning environments (luckin, 2010). identifying and making filters visible can be seen as an important part of identifying the challenges and opportunities related to the use of digital technologies, as in the case of a 1:1 laptop initiative. in this paper, the parents (learners) are placed in the center of the model to explore the aggregated parent perspective and provide parents’ perceptions of the use of digital technologies in the classroom. aim and research questions the aim of this paper is to explore, identify, and analyze the challenges and opportunities related to the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative from the parent perspective. the following research questions are hereby put forward: (a) what challenges and opportunities are expressed by parents with regard to the use of digital technologies in the 1:1 classroom? (b) using the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010) and the theoretical concept of filters, how can these challenges and opportunities be understood? i aspire to contribute to new insights regarding the challenges and opportunities in a 1:1 laptop initiative from the parent perspective. the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 methods the participants in this study are the parents of the two classes involved in the 1:1 laptop initiative. surveys were used to capture the perceptions of the parents and were sent to the parents of the students in the two classes involved in the 1:1 laptop initiative. the survey was comprised of 10 questions to capture how parents viewed the use of the laptop in relation to schoolwork, homework, and collaboration. the survey also included openended questions and the option to write comments. regarding procedure, the survey was sent to the students’ parents according to a class list that specified the parents’ names and addresses. one copy of the survey was sent to oneparent households and two copies were sent to two-parent households. a return envelope was enclosed. the first set of data was collected during late fall 2012, approximately 18 months after the start of the 1:1 laptop initiative at the compulsory school. one year later, the same procedure was repeated. the same survey was again sent out to the students’ parents according to the class list. the data in this study consisted of the two sets of data collected (survey 1, survey 2). for the first mailing, the survey was sent to 57 households (94 parents of 52 students), and 26 were completed and returned. one blank survey was discarded, leaving 25 surveys remaining. for the second mailing, one year later, the same survey was sent to 50 households (80 parents of 50 students), and 17 were completed and returned. the first survey was answered by 25 parents (14 women and 11 men). the second survey was answered by 17 parents (12 women and five men). following data collection, the surveys were compiled, and the data were analyzed. the answers to the open-ended questions, i. e., the free text comments provided in the surveys, were analyzed using content analysis (schreier, 2014). the 26 surveys in the first data set are identified as parents 1a-1y. the 17 surveys collected during the second data set are identified as parents 2a-2q. following this analysis, the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010) was used to identify and understand the challenges and opportunities expressed by parents with regard to the use of digital technologies in the 1:1 classroom. results in this section, the survey results are presented. first, the overall survey results from the two surveys are presented. these results include the parents’ perceptions of the 1:1 laptop initiative. the results from the two surveys are then combined and compared, then changes between the two surveys are presented. thereafter, the parents’ comments provided in the free text comments in the surveys are presented challenges and opportunities. lastly, the results are summarized and presented using the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010). the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 overall survey results: survey 1 in total, 24 parents viewed the 1:1 laptop initiative as very positive or positive, with only one parent reporting a negative view of the initiative. when asked if their view had changed since the start of the initiative, the majority of the parents noted no change or a change for the better. six parents reported a change for the worse, two parents were indifferent, and one parent did not answer. the majority of the parents found the rules for the use of the laptops at school to be reasonable. one parent thought that the rules were too strict, and six parents reported that the rules were too lenient. three parents were not aware of what the rules were, and the remaining two parents did not answer. a total of 22 parents reported that their children took their laptops home every day for schoolwork. two parents reported that their children brought their laptops home a few times a week, and the same number reported that they took their laptops home a few times a month. one parent reported that their child never took the laptop home. when asked if their children used their laptops too often at home, 12 parents answered yes, eight parents answered sometimes, and three answered no. one parent did not answer. overall survey results: survey 2 all parents viewed the 1:1 laptop initiative as very positive or positive. when asked if their view had changed since the start of the initiative, the majority of the parents noted no change or a change for the better. three of the parents reported a change for the worse. in survey 2, the majority of the parents found the rules for the use of the laptops at school to be reasonable. three parents thought that the rules were too strict, and two parents did not answer. nine parents reported that their children took their laptops home every day for schoolwork. one parent reported that their child brought their laptop home a few times a week, and three parents reported that their children took their laptops home a few times a month. three parents reported that their children never took the laptops home, and one parent did not answer. when asked if their children used their laptops too often at home, nine parents answered yes, seven parents answered sometimes, and one parent answered no. changes from survey 1 and survey 2 the parents’ perceptions of how the 1:1 laptop initiative had impacted learning for their children from survey 1 to survey 2 showed the largest changes in fully agree or agree to some extent, with a decrease of 19%. the number of parents who did not agree that the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 learning improved increased by 17%. parents’ perceptions of improved learning for their children regarding the 1:1 laptop initiative are illustrated in table 1 table 1 parents’ perceptions of improved learning for children improved learning survey 1 survey 2 change fully agree or agree to some extent 15 (60%) 7 (41%) -19% no change 5 (20%) 4 (24%) +4% do not agree 3 (12%) 5 (29%) +17% no answer 2 (8%) 1 (6%) -2% total 25 (100%) 17 (100%) parents’ perceptions of how the 1:1 laptop initiative offered opportunities for their children to have increased collaboration with schoolmates from survey 1 to survey 2 showed the largest change in those who reported no change, at 20%. parents’ perceptions of increased collaboration with schoolmates increased by 20% among those who fully agree or agree to some extent. parents’ perceptions of increased collaboration between their children and classmates regarding the 1:1 laptop initiative are illustrated in table 2. table 2 parents’ perceptions of increased collaboration with schoolmates increased collaboration with schoolmates survey 1 survey 2 change fully agree or agree to some extent 10 (40%) 3 (18%) -12% no change 8 (32%) 9 (52%) +20% do not agree 3 (12%) 3 (18%) +0% no answer 4 (16%) 2 (12%) -2% total 25 (100%) 17 (100%) when parents were asked if they thought that the 1:1 laptop initiative had made schoolwork easier, the largest change was seen in those who fully agree or agree to some the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 extent, with a decrease of 20%. a change of 13% was seen in parents who do not agree. parents’ perceptions that schoolwork was made easier is illustrated in table 3. table 3 parents’ perceptions that schoolwork was made easier schoolwork made easier survey 1 survey 2 change fully agree or agree to some extent 14 (56%) 6 (36%) -20% no change 5 (20%) 5 (29%) + 9% do not agree 4 (16%) 5 (29%) +13% no answer 2 (8%) 1 (6%) +2% total 25 (100%) 17 (100%) parents were also asked about their perceptions regarding whether the 1:1 laptop initiative made schoolwork more fun for their children. a decrease of 31% was reported in parents who fully agree or agree to some extent. an increase of 31% was seen in parents who reported no perceived change in whether schoolwork was fun for their children. parents’ perceptions of whether schoolwork was more fun are illustrated in table 4. table 4 parents’ perceptions of schoolwork being more fun schoolwork more fun survey 1 survey 2 change fully agree or agree to some extent 18 (72%) 7 (41%) -31% no change 1 (4%) 6 (35%) +31% do not agree 3 (12%) 3 (18%) -6% no answer 3 (12%) 1 (6%) -6% total 25 (100%) 17 (100%) parents’ perceptions of whether the 1:1 laptop initiative made their children take more responsibility for their schoolwork showed a decrease of 18% in those who fully agree or agree to some extent. an increase of 26% was seen in parents who reported no change in the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 whether their children take responsibility for their schoolwork. parents’ perceptions of whether children take more responsibility for their schoolwork is illustrated in table 5. table 5 parents’ perceptions that children take more responsibility for schoolwork more responsibility for schoolwork survey 1 survey 2 change fully agree or agree to some extent 10 (40%) 2 (12%) -18% no change 7 (28%) 9 (54%) +26% do not agree 6 (24%) 6 (35%) +11% no answer 2 (8%) 2 (8%) -8% total 25 (100%) 17 (100%) parents’ perceptions of whether the 1:1 laptop initiative led to children needing less help with homework decreased among those who reported no change at 25%. at the same time, parents who responded that they do not agree that their children needed less help with homework increased by 31%. parents’ perceptions that children needed less help with homework are illustrated in table 6. table 6 parents’ perceptions that children needed less help with homework needed less help with homework survey 1 survey 2 change fully agree or agree to some extent 7 (28%) 5 (30%) +2% no change 12 (48%) 4 (23%) -25% do not agree 4 (16%) 8 (47%) +31% no answer 2 (8%) 0 (0%) -2% total 25 (100%) 17 (100%) in summary, the majority of parents who answered this study (survey 1, survey 2) saw the 1:1 laptop initiative as something that offered opportunities for improved learning (60%, 41%), making schoolwork easier (56%, 36%), and making schoolwork more fun (72%, 41%). although some parents noted increased collaboration with classmates (40%, 18%) and increased responsibility (40%, 12%), many parents reported no change in these areas; the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 that is, no change in collaboration with classmates (32%, 52%) and no change in responsibility (28%, 54%). in reports of whether children needed less help with their homework, many parents (48%, 23%) reported this to be unchanged. the largest changes between the two surveys were seen in an increase in the number of parents who reported that they did not agree that children needed less help with homework (+31%), a decrease in the number of parents who agreed that schoolwork was more fun (-31%), and an increase in the number of parents who saw no change in whether schoolwork was fun (+31%). challenges when noting what parents regarded as challenges related to the 1:1 laptop initiative, the answers could be placed into the following categories: technical issues, use, knowledge, the laptop as a distraction, physical aspects, and responsibility. technical issues access to the laptops was also seen to be a challenge. parents noted that the laptops were always accessible, which implied challenges: “too large a focus on the laptop. [children] can’t work when there is something wrong with the laptop” (parent 1w). parents reported technical problems related to the laptops themselves: “lots of technical problems with the laptops” (parent 2l) as well as with the network, “old laptops . . . hard to work when the internet is not working” (parent 2h). another issue was access to technical support if a laptop broke down: “[my child] did not get any help with technical support until i, as a parent, called” (parent 2l). use parents reported concerns regarding the use of the laptops for non-schoolwork use: “the computer is used for things other activities than schoolwork” (parent 2b). another parent echoed the same sentiment: “the laptop is used for things other than schoolwork” (parent 2q). laptop use involved the element of distraction as well. this was noted as difficulties concentrating on work in the classroom: “he has said that he is distracted in the classroom, since he sits in the back and sees all of the laptop screens in front of him, often with games” (parent 1j). another parent commented that “sometimes the computers are used for other things, such as chatting, email, and games instead of ‘teaching’” (parent 2a). distractions related to group work in the classroom environment were also reported: “it is difficult to concentrate on the right thing when email alerts are on and chatting is often going on. you can turn it off, but it is difficult” (parent 1k). parents also described nonschool activities, such as access to games, as a distraction: “too much computer gaming” the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 (parent 2k), both in the classroom and on breaks, and “more individual gaming, and group pressure to play games during lunch, since access is free” (parent 1i). another parent commented: access can be abused. the laptop is used only for a small fraction for schoolwork, and the rest is up to the student’s own discretion. and in the teens, it is not searching for information on the web that is prioritized, but things that are fun, such as games, facebook, youtube, etc. (parent 1c) in summary, parents saw challenges in the students’ use of laptops for schoolwork, with many opportunities to do other things during lessons. knowledge the challenges parents reported regarding knowledge were related to the fact that children would potentially no longer read books and would not be able to write by hand. one parent noted an effect on lessons, as they often started late because the laptops were not turned off. another parent hoped the laptops would be used more extensively: “few good tasks, not often good homework assignments for using the laptop as a proper tool. too bad that it is mostly reading and writing” (parent 1b). another parent reflected on the kind of knowledge that is lost: as always, when you implement something new, you lose something else. in this case, it is the opportunities for breathing space and reflection, when word fixes the spelling and the structure, and the disposition and becomes something that you can fix afterwards. the texts are not thought through before they are written—by the good students—first at the end of the process. many [children] can’t cope at all. (parent 1q) one parent expressed concerns over traditional school skills that were being lost, for example, handwriting: unfortunately, there are so many children who have handwriting that is not readable! when the laptops take over, children who need to develop their handwriting are not given the opportunity… the children should learn to use pencils, erasers, and paper before laptops and keyboards. (parent 2q). another parent saw the laptop as a challenge for children with special needs: “a child who needs extra help should not have a laptop—everything is too unclear, they cannot set guidelines for how to learn things” (parent 1p). another parent brought up the need for knowledge about social media and the internet, seeing “too little dialogue about social media on the internet, for example facebook” (parent 1x). another parent summed this up: the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 i usually ask my son if he needs to bring his laptop with him to school, but the answer is often no! my experience is that the laptop is not used very often in the teaching. it seems that it is more something that students themselves use after lessons. (parent 1c) in summary, these parents reported concerns about the lack of focus on traditional school skills to the extent that they risk being lost, while they also expressed a need for guidelines and discussions on the use of social media. some parents reported concerns regarding students searching for information in the classroom and a shift in learning activities: “it is more important to be able to find the right information than to learn things” (parent 2a). another parent expressed this as follows: “schoolwork changes from learning things properly to ‘just’ finding information” (parent 2b). physical aspects parents also saw challenges in the physical, or ergonomic, aspects of working with laptops. these were related to more sitting still in front of the laptop, laptop work being tiring, and the increased use of the laptop in school and at home: “the level of laptop use is too high” (parent 1h). parents also noted concerns about children carrying the laptop back and forth to school: “the need to carry the computer back and forth is very strenuous” (parent 1w) and “too heavy for growing backs to carry laptops, books, and gym clothes” (parent 1m). one year later, the parents also expressed concerns about the ergonomic challenges related to the laptop: “the computer is too heavy to carry back and forth” (parent 2g) and “heavy and difficult to carry the laptop between school and home” (parent 2f). another parent also reported concerns related to carrying the laptop back and forth: “heavy computers and heavy books equals injured back. the backpack weighs at least 10 kilos, often more, and it is carried back and forth to school every day” (parent 2j). other sources of stress were technical problems, such as problems arising because the laptops had previously been used by another group of students, as well as problems with hard drives: “my son had a hard drive crash and the school’s backup wasn’t working, which led to a big problem and a stressed student” (parent 1y). responsibility other challenges that parents noted related to the responsibilities of the children, parents, and teachers. one parent noted that the responsibility of taking care of an expensive laptop was too great for the children, considering the risk of theft and other damage. another parent noted that taking on responsibility for all of the students’ laptops was difficult for teachers: “the fact that the teachers do not have the ability to follow up on how the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 the laptops are used” (parent 2q). excessive use of the laptop for activities other than schoolwork could also give children the wrong idea about how to use the laptop for schoolwork: “poor role models for work [with the laptop] in the future” (parent 2j). another parent noted that the work with the laptop places too much responsibility on the student for schoolwork, and others reported too little insight: “i have no idea/poor insight into what needs to be done. [i] don’t know if homework has been done or not. too much responsibility is put on the student. not on the teacher or mentor” (parent 1y). parents also noted that they did not really know what students used their laptop for during lessons: “it is difficult to say how he uses the laptop during lessons, but if he does other things than schoolwork, that is not good” (parent 2c). this lack of insight was difficult for parents who hope to help their children with schoolwork in that the lack of overview meant that they were “left out and cannot help in the same way” (parent 2j). one parent saw this lack of overview and insight as exclusion: “it feels like the school is on the wrong path with too much laptop use in teaching. as a parent, i feel quite excluded from everything that is taking place” (parent 2g). another parent summarized this as follows: “the computer is used too much. you don’t even know what your child has for homework, don’t know if it has been done, the password for the computer makes this a problem” (parent 2j). another concern expressed by parents during the second survey was directed toward the lack of structure in documents and information published by teachers: “the teachers do not have structure when they publish documents . . . documents should be put in files and dated” (parent 2j). this parent also reported that the laptop meant that schoolwork for children “demanded both laptops and books, that is, the teachers have not kept up with the development” (parent 2j). the challenges and opportunities that parents reported were similar from the first year to the second year. in the first survey, parents noted opportunities in communication. in the second year, they saw opportunities in the use of the laptop to support efficient learning. the challenges the parents reported were also similar, for example, use, physical aspects, and responsibility. in the second year, parents expressed a need for teachers to structure information. opportunities when noting the opportunities the parents reported with regard to the 1:1 laptop initiative, the answers could be placed into the following categories: access to laptops, the laptop as a pedagogical tool, learning with the laptop, and communication. access to laptops access was one of the opportunities reported in relation to the laptop initiative. parents reported that all of the children had the same opportunities to use a laptop as a tool in the the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 classroom: all children have access to laptops, even though some children’s parents do not have the money or do not have access to laptops due to other reasons. all of the children have the same prerequisites in the 1:1 project. good! (parent 1c) in this classroom, one parent expressed that “hopefully the laptop will always be available in the lessons as support and a supplement” (parent 2q). access to laptops provided all of the children with the opportunity to search for information: “every student has access to the internet and can search for information whenever they like when doing school work” (parent 2d). in both sets of surveys, parents also noted opportunities for access at home as a result of not having to share the laptop with siblings. the laptop as a pedagogical tool many of the parents’ comments were related to the laptop as a pedagogical tool. several parents noted the educational value of the laptop: “the children have a good pedagogical tool” (parent 1r). here, parents saw opportunities in the use of the laptop as a pedagogical tool: “they reflect and use the laptop as a tool for help” (parent 1d). other potential opportunities were that it was easier to search for and find information and allowed students to become laptop savvy, write more easily, and be better structured in their work. one parent summarized this as follows: “students learn both to use the laptop and access the information available on the internet” (parent 1s). this was due to the fact that, with the laptop, “all information is more accessible” (parent 2a), and it is easier to find “up-to-date information” (parent 2j). parents also noted the need for their children to develop skills in laptop use as a result of future demands: “they get used to a work method and tools that are used in society” (parent 1q). here, parents made general comments, such as “computer skills” (parent 2k) and “the opportunity for young people to learn technology at an early age” (parent 2l). more specific uses were also reported, such as “learning to use the laptop’s fantastic search engine” (parent 2q) and “learning computer technology and ict” (parent 2f) as well as “knowledge” (parent 2n) and “innovative thinking” (parent 2n). another parent reports that laptops could lead to “positive young people” (parent 2h). learning with the laptop opportunities were also seen in the laptop programs, such as the spell check program and a speechto text program. the laptop was also seen as a tool for structuring work because “all the assignments, notes, etc. are located in one place” (parent 1f), all the information is close by, and “school materials are always accessible, i.e., there is no risk that he will forget the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 his books” (parent 1k). “good for homework, they test each other on skype and homework programs” (parent 2h), and laptops facilitate “homework, mainly in languages” (parent 2j). one parent reported that learning with the computer “works well at home” (parent 2c). opportunities were seen for study skills in general as well as for producing texts with a nice layout. one parent noted the wide number of programs available on the laptops: “there are many tools for help on the laptop, which is positive” (parent 1h). parents of children with special needs commented: “for my child, who has a slighter form of reading and writing disability, the laptop is a fantastic tool for help” (parent 1t); and “the laptop is a great tool for my child who has reading and writing difficulties” (parent 2p). another parent noted, “he has had a laptop since 7th grade, and we don’t know how he would have managed if he hadn’t had a laptop” (parent 2d). this category also included comments regarding parents’ thoughts about responsibilities and learning: “the student takes a greater responsibility and shows more interest in their own learning” (parent 1t), including increased knowledge by learning to be responsible for the laptop. the theme of responsibility was also seen in the second survey in which parents noted that working with the laptop provided opportunities for students to “take responsibility” (parent 2f). “they learn to take responsibility” (parent 2l) and become “more self-sufficient” (parent 2j). one parent summed this up as, “my child takes on a lot of responsibility and plans for his own learning” (parent 2p). in the second survey, parents noted what could be described as efficient learning. here, a parent noted that “schoolwork could probably be done in shorter time; they don’t need to write a lot but just revise the same document . . . [to] make increased learning possible” (parent 2a). as reported by another parent, the laptop was considered a tool that “facilitated schoolwork” (parent 2b). communication the last category of comments was related to communication. parents noted that communication between teachers and students improved. another parent noted opportunities for children to communicate with each other: “everyone in the class can speak to each other on the internet, easier than calling” (parent 1b). communication between home and school was also seen as important: “all information, provided that the teachers put out information, is more accessible” (parent 1t). another parent noted that their child had recently started at the school and that information about the 1:1 laptop initiative had not been communicated (parent 1a). in summary, the results reported as challenges and opportunities are illustrated in table 7. the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 18 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 table 7 parents’ perceptions of challenges and opportunities from survey 1 to survey 2 parents’ perceptions survey 1 survey 2 challenges use use technical issues technical issues knowledge knowledge physical aspects physical aspects responsibility responsibility teachers’ structure opportunities access to information access to information knowledge knowledge laptop as a pedagogical tool laptop as a pedagogical tool communication efficient learning in returning to the research questions, the aim of this study was to explore, identify, and analyze the challenges and opportunities related to the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative from the parent perspective. the first research question explored and identified challenges and opportunities as expressed by parents regarding the use of digital technologies in the 1:1 classroom. here, parents saw opportunities in children having their own computer for schoolwork, access to information, and pedagogical tools provided on the laptop. parents saw challenges in non-school activities in the classroom, technical issues, and their lack of insight into and overview of children’s schoolwork and homework. to answer the second research question—how can the challenges and opportunities regarding the use of digital technologies in the classroom be understood using the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010) and the theoretical concept of filters?—i analyzed the results regarding the use of digital technologies in the 1:1 classroom from the parent perspective according to the resource elements: environment, knowledge and skills, and tools and people. in summary, based on parents responses to a survey regarding the use of digital technologies in the 1:1 classroom, parents support the change to a digital learning the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 environment (resource element: environment), the development of ict skills (resource element: knowledge and skills), and the pedagogical use of digital technologies (resource element: tools and people). using the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010), this can be illustrated as shown in figure 2. figure 2 challenges and opportunities from the parent perspective using the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010). discussion in the following section, the results of the study will be discussed in relation to the resource elements and filters in the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010). environment in the resource element environment, parents reported positive views regarding the 1:1 laptop initiative and could see many opportunities for supporting children’s learning with laptops in the classroom. this positive view appeared to continue over time. in this sense, the laptops are considered to be a resource for learning (niemi et al., 2013; vekiri, 2010). the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 20 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 one filter identified here is the classroom environment itself and how teachers work to support the digital classroom. if non-school activities and distractions such as email and text message alerts disturb the classroom work environment, as parents in this study expressed, students will likely find it difficult to focus on schoolwork as intended. here, teachers’ work to support digital work methods in the classroom will be key. discussing individual and classroom laptop rules and guidelines may be of importance in this work. although many of the parents in this study saw the classroom rules for laptop use as reasonable, they did have concerns regarding the balance of laptop use for school and nonschool activities in the classroom (kiger & herro, 2015). further, parents saw a need for increased dialogue to promote awareness of social media and internet use. another filter manifested in this resource element was the physical environment, or the physical aspects of the digital classroom, such as parents’ reports of excessive laptop use and the need to carry heavy books and laptops (keane & keane, 2017; woo et al., 2016). these factors may affect the learning environment for students as well. in this study, parents reported that excessive laptop use makes the students tired. they also had general concerns about the amount of time spent in front of the laptop. alleviating this filter will likely be an important step for teachers to take, for example, by ensuring that laptop use is spread out across lessons throughout the day to better support the physical learning environment. the teacher’s ability to provide well-designed and well thought-out lessons, thereby targeting the opportunities that the laptops offer as pedagogical tools, is important; this may involve closing the laptop during certain tasks to create time for reflection and nondigital learning activities. all of these physical aspects relate to concerns for students’ long-term health, as the parents in this study noted. for teachers, this work will most likely demand time for planning with other teachers as well as for professional development (vrasidas, 2015). if time and professional development are not provided, teachers will find collaboration to be difficult; therefore, time for planning and professional development could be a filter in this resource element. as the parents in this study acknowledged, an increase in laptop use for schoolwork and homework may create opportunities for bridging the gap between the home and school learning environments (aesert & von braak, 2014; zhong, 2011). increased opportunities for collaboration (vekiri, 2010) and the alignment of information will be necessary (heath et al., 2015). and more time will likely need to be allocated for teachers to provide the necessary schoolwork-related information and structure that the parents requested. if teachers provide this information, parents will most likely gain insight into and an overview of children’s schoolwork. however, it will also be important for this information to be of good quality (hohlfeld et al., 2010). knowledge and skills in the resource element knowledge and skills, parents see opportunities in the use of the laptops for gaining both subject knowledge and skills in laptop use. therefore, access to the the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 21 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 laptops for non-schoolwork activities could manifest as a filter in this resource element. according to the parents in this study, students’ free access to the internet may present difficulties and will most likely have an impact on the laptops’ pedagogical use. if the laptop is not used as a pedagogical tool in the classroom, this may, in turn, weaken the opportunities for students to attain increased knowledge and ict skills (kiger & herro, 2015; schofield clark, demont-heinrich, & webber, 2005). the parents in this study also expressed concerns over the lack of traditional school skills, such as handwriting, which are perhaps also important for students to acquire in the classroom. further, the use of the laptops for non-school activities, as manifested as a filter, could take over the opportunities for knowledge and skills that pedagogical use of the laptop achieves. pedagogical use of the laptops is a prerequisite for attaining the goals set in policies for digital competence (european commission, 2013; organisation for economic co-operation and development, 2018). these skills appear to be related to parents’ ideas regarding the skills their children need in modern society and for success in school and society (pereira, 2016; schofield clark et al., 2005). thus, a pedagogical challenge for teachers will be planning and designing classroom work that makes optimum use of student laptops, which may require professional development for the teachers (vrasidas, 2015). new work methods will also place demands on teachers to develop teaching methods that overcome the concerns expressed by parents, i.e., using the laptop only for reading, writing, and searching for information. teachers’ skills and knowledge must also enable them to use laptops to post information in a structured manner and make it accessible for parents, which will be important for keeping parents updated on information that is important for students, such as providing insight into schoolwork and homework assignments. teachers’ lack of time to post and structure information can manifest as a filter from the parent perspective, as it impedes the parents’ ability to communicate with teachers and leads to poor insight, as the parents in this study reported. this lack of transparency may also interfere with parents’ ability to take on the responsibility of helping their children with schoolwork and homework and limit the opportunities to take full advantage of students’ and parents’ knowledge and skills (keane & keane, 2017; kong & li, 2013). tools and people in the resource environment tools and people, filters manifested in technological issues with the laptops. for the work with the laptops to be successful in the classroom, the laptops must be in good condition. technical support must be available for students when needed. another filter is the nonuse of all of the programs that may facilitate learning, such as spellcheck and text-to-speech programs and the underuse of other resources that are provided on the laptop that can be accessed on the internet. it is likely that teachers occasionally need to remind students that these tools are available on the laptops. here, parents can be a resource in the effort to better utilize laptop features. moreover, to further the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 22 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 promote the use of these tools in the classroom, teachers may need additional professional development opportunities (vrasidas, 2015), while parents need to learn these new skills as well so the tools can be used in the home environment. therefore, the teachers’ use can manifest as a filter in this resource element. digital technologies, such as laptops, may be used to support the learning of students in general and students with special needs in particular (nordström et al., 2018; peterson-karlan, 2011; sik-lányi et al., 2015; starcic, 2010). the present study contains contrasting views regarding students with special needs. laptops provide the students with tools, but it is important that they receive the help and support they need from both teachers and parents so that they are able to use the laptops optimally and access these tools. the parents in this study recognized the importance of these tools (brigas et al., 2016; keane & keane, 2017; kiger & herro, 2015; schofield clark et al., 2005). however, although parents may be able to support this use in the home to a certain extent, it will be up to the teachers to support this use in the classroom to facilitate the students’ learning. thus, supportive and competent teachers will be important. finally, regarding use, the laptop’s lack of use can also manifest as a filter. parents voiced concerns regarding disruptions in the classroom. here, parents’ attitudes toward (aesert, van braak, rončević-zubković, 2016; o’hara, 2011; van nijlen & vanderlinde, 2015) and involvement in supporting awareness of digital competence and citizenship in school and out of school may also be of importance (kiger & herro, 2015; vekiri, 2010). involving parents could provide support for teachers’ work in the classroom. conclusions and practical implications the aim of this paper was to explore and identify the challenges and opportunities presented by the use of digital technologies in the classroom in a 1:1 laptop initiative from the parents’ perspective. the use of the ecology of resources model (luckin, 2010) and the theoretical concept of filters appear to have been fruitful for understanding the challenges and opportunities as expressed by parents. one of the opportunities presented by this 1:1 laptop initiative that parents reported was digital equity. parents noted that the laptops provided the children, all of the children, with the opportunity to gain knowledge and twenty-first century skills as well as to find individualized support in planning and structuring their schoolwork. many parents also felt that their children think that learning with the laptop is more fun. however, this depends on how they use the laptop in the classroom. if they use the laptop to complete well thought-out assignments designed by teachers with a focus on gaining knowledge and ict skills and using the resources the laptops provide, then digital equity and digital competence will most likely be achieved. if this is not the case, it is possible that students who need extra support to use their laptop as an educational tool may fall behind in the digital classroom. as the parents of students with special needs expressed in this study, the the use of digital technologies in a 1:1 laptop initiative: the parent perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 23 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 laptop offers fantastic opportunities at the same time it presents challenges, with teacher support being key. the main challenges that parents report are issues related to responsibility. these issues comprise different roles and responsibilities. one issue is what responsibilities the teachers have to teach with the laptops and to inform parents of assignments and homework. another issue is what responsibilities parents have for ensuring that their children have their laptops with them at school, that the laptops are charged, and that children use them as pedagogical tools for schoolwork both in the classroom and at home. teachers must provide the necessary information for parents and students alike so that all stakeholders have an insight into and an overview of schoolwork and homework. further, what responsibilities and how much responsibility can be placed on the students—in many cases, young children—is an important issue. for some children who lack the support of parents with a high level of ict skills, this responsibility may be difficult. finally, another question lies in the overall responsibility for increased laptop use and the potential physical aspects related to, for example, long days of work with the laptop, carrying heavy books and laptops, and stress, and what this may imply for the health of these young students over the long term. determining how these challenges will be addressed will require collaboration between school organizers, school leaders, teachers, and parents as all stakeholders work together to provide children with the best possible pedagogical conditions for learning with laptops. finally, the use of digital technologies in the classroom appears to provide opportunities for parents to gain insight into schoolwork and homework. however, if the gap between the school environment and home environment is to be bridged, teachers will need to provide the necessary information in a structured manner to increase parental involvement and provide parents with the opportunity to take on this responsibility. at the same time, skills students acquire in the home environment should perhaps also be seen as an opportunity for learning in the classroom. here, parents with digital skills and knowledge may also provide a well-needed resource in establishing the digital classroom. references aesaert, k., & van braak, j. 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(2011). from access to usage: the divide of self-reported digital skills among adolescents. computers & education, 56(3), 736–746. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.10.016 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2015.03.014 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.09.029 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12149 https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2014.866871 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpc.13181 https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654316628645 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2010.10.016 abstract introduction literature review context theoretical framework aim and research questions methods results overall survey results: survey 1 overall survey results: survey 2 changes from survey 1 and survey 2 challenges technical issues use knowledge physical aspects responsibility opportunities access to laptops the laptop as a pedagogical tool learning with the laptop communication discussion environment knowledge and skills tools and people conclusions and practical implications references title philosophical speech act theory and challenges in interactive dialogue: experiences of narrow communication halvor nordby the university college of lillehammer po box 952 2604 lillehammer norway e-mail: halvor.nordby@hil.no and the university of oslo department of health and society po box 1089 blindern, 0317 oslo norway e-mail: halvor.nordby@medisin.uio.no abstract background. modern information conveying technology can facilitate interactive communication that transcends the possibilities of information exchange in ordinary face-to-face dialogue. however, interactive communication has its limits, related to lack of personal and physical closeness between communicators. when a communication channel is narrow – when written signs or verbal utterances are the only interpretive clues – misinterpretation and poor dialogue happens more easily than in face-to-face encounters. design. the article analyses the concept of interactive narrowness on the basis of philosophical speech act theory and a study on interaction between paramedics and health personnel working in acute medical communication centers. method. the article uses a combination of theoretical interpretation and experimental philosophy – philosophical analysis ‘from below’ – to develop a conceptual analysis of interactive narrowness that is grounded in actual experiences of this form of communication. analysis. the paramedics held that it was difficult to secure interactive communication in hectic and unpredictable situations involving emotional disagreement and conflicts about choices of actions. even when it was possible to discuss difficult situations on the phone, this could not replace face-to-face dialogue. discussion. the paramedics’ experiences support the conclusion that there is an irreducible interpretive element in face-toface dialogue that is not present in interactive communication. speech act theory can shed further light on this irreducibility and, more specifically, on the importance of personal closeness in communication. implications. faceto-face communication is crucial in contexts that have similarities to the sensitive situations described by the paramedics. the article indicates how this and related implications apply in various settings and uses interactive dialogue between teachers and students in distance learning courses as an example area to clarify the main implications. keywords: interactive communication, conceptual analysis, face-to-face dialogue, prehospital medical work seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 mailto:halvor.nordby@hil.no introduction interactive information exchange has become a dominant form of human communication, not only in our private lives, but also in pedagogical contexts such as dialogue between professional teachers and students (keegan 1996, caron 2007). interactive communication and information conveying technology are used on all study levels – from primary schools to universities and in many further education courses. in fact, in some courses, typically sessionbased teaching for adolescents in distance learning arrangements, interactive classrooms constitute the main communication arenas (katz et al 1999, anderson 2008). learning programs like fronter i and its learning ii are implemented and used as pedagogical tools over a large scale, often in combination with more common programs like skype and facebook (saba & shearer 1994, keegan 1996, saba 2000). these programs constitute structuring frameworks for interactive dialogue in the sense that they have many functions that are designed to secure successful exchange of thoughts and beliefs (nordby 2006, anderson 2008). nevertheless, senders and audiences in communicative processes face many challenges of understanding when they are engaged in interactive discourse. the most obvious challenge is that communicators do not have full awareness of the context ’in the other end’ – there is not the same kind of personal closeness and rich observational access as in ordinary face-to-face encounters (nordby 2006, bargiela-chiappini & haugh 2010). this absence of personal closeness is particularly striking in all the chatprograms that students use in further education settings, typically in group work. students often exchange written messages on-line without visually observing each other, and this can make the communication challenging. in telephone calls a person’s tone of voice can be of help (consider ’i can hear that he means to be ironic’), but it is limited how this can constitute a sound interpretive clue. in fact, even camera based programs such msn and kik cannot incorporate the quality of being present together. there is something that is simply not there. even visual face-time communication channels are narrower than the rich observational context of ordinary face-to-face dialogue (argyle 1988, kappas & kramer 2011). the first aim of this article is to use philosophical speech act theory to clarify how interactive narrowness influences the quality of human communication. the basic idea in speech act theory is that communicators use as little language as they think is needed in order to convey all the information they intend to communicate (sperber & wilson 1986a, cappelen & lepore 2006). according to this economical principle about communication, a large part of the message senders intend to transmit in communicative processes is underneath the surface of what they directly say. senders typically hope, and they usually have good reason to believe, that communicative meaning that is not literally expressed ends up in the intended way in the consciousness of their audiences (davidson 1987, grice 1989, bach 1994). this means that when communicators have limited interpretive clues, there is an increased probability that audiences form incorrect beliefs about the part of the message that is not directly expressed in language. the second and main aim of the article is to discuss the significance of this implication by using results from a study on interactive communication between paramedics and ambulance coordinators in acute medical communication centers. iii the aim of the study was to understand how the paramedics experienced this communication, and how they thought it could be improved. a striking finding was that emotional and conflict related communication was conceived to be very challenging on-line. poor interactive dialogue affected decision processes, cooperation and, in the final instance, the quality of the seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 99 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 patient work. within the framework of speech act theory and a modern empirical approach to conceptual analysis, the last part of the article uses these findings to elucidate the concept of interactive narrowness and to explain why it is so challenging to secure dialogue when communicators are not situated together in an ordinary face-to-face encounter. forms of communication it is extensively documented that non-verbal behavior plays an important part in human communication (bargiela-chiappini & haugh 2010). it is difficult to measure exactly how communicators rely on non-verbal interpretation – how they use body language, facial expressions and other contextual factors as significant interpretive clues when this is possible (argyle 1988). however, there is widespread theoretical and empirical agreement that personal closeness is vital in ordinary face-to-face communication (hinde 1972, baym et al 2004, kappas & kramer 2011). when communicators are physically close and able to see each other, a variety of observations are essential in audiences’ interpretations of senders’ communicative intentions. this kind of rich interpretational access is not available in interactive communication that is based on the use of modern information conveying technology like computers and mobile phones.iv in email correspondence all that is visible to audiences is written signs. the communication channel is narrow – the communicative process does not have all the dimensions of ordinary face-toface encounters (baym et al 2004, nordby 2006). interactive narrowness, in a fundamental sense, tightens the scope of human interpretation. there are, obviously, degrees of narrowness. misunderstandings in interactive communication are much more likely to occur when many communicative dimensions are missing. thus, in communication involving text messages with many abbreviations it is more challenging to secure communication than in internet based communication involving web cameras (kappas & kramer 2011). both forms of communication are interactive, but the latter is not as narrow as the former. it reminds more of ordinary face-to-face dialog in the sense that communicators can see each other. nevertheless, communication via web cameras is not as transparent as ordinary face-to-face dialogue: audiences can visually and audibly observe senders, but they are not situated together; they are not in the same three-dimensional interpretative room. all forms of interactive distance can make it challenging to achieve a full understanding of the context ‘in the other end’, and this can easily lead to uncertainty (and suspicion!) about senders’ communicative intentions. pedagogical experiences my own pedagogical experiences from a further education program for medical paramedics can serve as an initial illustration of the challenges in interactive communication. v in classroom discussions, our students often describe their interactive dialogue with ambulance coordinators in acute medical centers (amk) vi, via telephone or on-line written messages that are displayed on screens in ambulances and amk. this communication can be stressful and hectic. patients transported in ambulances are often critically ill or injured, it is difficult to secure proper assessment and treatment, and decisions must be made quickly. nevertheless, the paramedics and amk personnel sometimes disagree about choices of actions, and it is difficult to secure a shared, rational understanding of the situations the paramedics confront (tjora 1997, berlin & carlström 2009, 2011). seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 100 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 these contextual factors can easily lead to misunderstandings, and many paramedics have negative experiences from their communication with ambulance coordinators in amk. as one said: ‘i do not trust him [a particular coordinator]. we have had many conflicts. so now, when he says [my italics] nice things like ‘you did a good job’ i typically think he is smiling ironically to the others in the control room [in amk] when he is talking to me.’ another paramedic student analyzed the main challenge in an illuminating way: the problem is that we never see them [the amk personnel]. so we ask ourselves: what are they doing in the other end of the line? are they shaki ng their heads and rolling their eyes while they are talking to us? we get suspicious. we know what we do not have good reason to, but it is so difficult. the suspicion seems to come naturally. perhaps we are born like this. this is, in fact, a quite general attitude. in a comprehensive study on the relation between paramedics and telephone operators in amk, tjora (1997) found that places where the cooperation worked well were places in which paramedics often visited amk after having delivered patients at the hospital where amk was situated: the contact is maintained through regular visits [in amk]. the paramedics and the personnel in amk really get to know each other. there is a friendly, open atmosphere. in coffee breaks they talk to each other, tell jokes and laugh together (tjora 1997, p. 103). a key to successful interactive communication was that the paramedics and amk personnel learned to know each other as persons. but this happened in the face-to-face encounters. these encounters created bonds of trust and respect – both parties achieved a shared understanding that made them feel comfortable about discussing difficult issues in interactive contexts. this development of trust and interpretive competence could not be documented in places where paramedics and amk coordinators never met.vii this importance of face-to-face encounters, as described by tjora, is striking. nevertheless, the relation between paramedics and amk is just one example of how it is difficult to secure communication in interactive contexts. it has, more generally, been extensively documented that observational togetherness is crucial for securing dialogue in emotional, conflict related and other forms of challenging communication (argyle 1988, baym et al 2004, kappas & kramer 2011). the point is simply that interactive narrowness makes it challenging to talk about difficult issues. these challenges in interactive dialogue can be elucidated from many perspectives, and it seems, at least prima facie, unreasonable to assume that one perspective is more sound than the others. a better suggestion is that various theoretical, empirical and practical analyses jointly can shed light on crucial distinctions between face-to-face and interactive communication. my first explanatory focus here will be a cognitive perspective from modern philosophy of mind and language. i will argue that speech act theories – theories of how language acts are used to express complex communicative intentions – are plausible frameworks for explaining why there are so many pitfalls in interactive communication. speech act theory the basic idea in speech act theory is that written or spoken language acts is only the tip of the iceberg in human communication (sperber & wilson 1986a, bach 1994, recanti 2004). senders mean much more than what they strictly seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 101 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 speaking say, and successful dialogue depends on audiences being right about the part of the message that is beneath the surface (grice 1989, cappelen & lepore 2006). this is part of the ‘whole package’ – the overall message senders intend to convey. thus, part of the communicative message is only expressed indirectly, not literally in words that the sender uses. an imagined example can serve as an introductory explanation of how this can lead to poor communication: a student has a meeting with his supervisor. they are discussing the progress of the student’s work on his master thesis, and the supervisor sums up his comments by saying ‘i think this is beginning to look very good’. this kind of appraisal is usually remembered well, so also in this case. after the meeting the student thinks about the conversation and what the supervisor said. he is confident that the supervisor is very pleased with his work, that she will recommend that he should submit his master thesis quite soon and that he will probably get a good grade. in this example, we can imagine, the student’s interpretation of the supervisor’s views on submission is incorrect: the supervisor thinks that drafts of parts of the thesis are good, but that much more work is needed before the thesis should be submitted. if the student had asked the supervisor directly, she would have recommended that the student should submit next term. the communication between the teacher and the student involves an associative misunderstanding: the associations the student forms about the sentence ‘i think this is beginning to look very good’ differ from the teacher’s associations. their contextual interpretation of what the supervisor strictly speaking says (the tip of the iceberg) is not the same: the student ascribed to the supervisor beliefs (part of the message beneath the surface) that were much more specific and positive than the beliefs the teacher actually associated with the sentence. we can all recognize similar examples from our everyday communication. it is not uncommon that the language we use is not interpreted in the way we intend it to be understood. when we think we have good reason to believe that this might happen we typically try to clarify how we want to be understood. we put into words the full conceptual meaning of the message we intend to convey. so why does not the supervisor in the above example clarify what she means, in order to avoid unintended interpretations and associative misunderstandings? the reason, we can assume, is that the supervisor thought she was entitled to believe that the student would understand her as she wanted to be understood. she thought that her wider interpretation of her own speech was a natural interpretation, an interpretation she had prima facie reason to believe that the student would form as well. if we had asked the supervisor, she would probably have said that it was unreasonable to interpret her in the way the student did. in other words, if the supervisor thought that the student’s interpretation was reasonable (and thereby an interpretation she had good reason to believe that the student would form), then she would typically have clarified her own wider interpretation of what she said, to make is clear how she wanted to be understood, so that she could avoid the misunderstanding. the economical principle of communication the supervisor example is, obviously, just one example of an interpretive misunderstanding – a situation in which communicators interpret language acts in very different ways. this happens all the time – in our private and professional lives – and all these cases of poor communication can be explained in seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 102 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 the light of speech act theory and what sperber and wilson (1986b) call an ‘economical principle’ about communication. when communicating humans automatically aim at maximal relevance, i.e. maximal cognitive effect for minimal processing effort. this is the single general factor which determines the course of human information processing (sperber & wilson 1986b, p.160). there are other versions of this principle than the one sperber and wilson formulate (bach 1994, recanti 2004, cappelen & lepore 2006), but the basic idea is the same: language is used as actions to express complex intentions, and the main reason why we often misunderstand each other is that we only use as little language as we think we need – as few (economical) resources as we think is required – to convey all that we want to communicate (grice 1989, bach 1996, carston 2002). the economical principle has been widely recognized as a natural framework for understanding real-life communicative acts (peacocke 2007), and it is not difficult to understand why many theorists have thought that the principle is plausible. in ordinary communication it would take an enormous amount of time (resources) for senders to put into words all they intend to convey to their audiences. senders therefore attempt to formulate only what they think is needed in order to communicate all that they want to communicate. sperber and wilson (1986a) give striking examples of how what they call ‘loose talk’ – use of utterances that are not strictly speaking true – might be the best way of communicating complex intentions. they imagine situations of the following kind: marie lives just outside paris. at a cocktail party in england peter asks her where she lives. marie answers 'i live in paris'. sperber & wilson (s&w) claim that even though marie's sentence expresses a proposition that is literally false, it is correct of her to utter that sentence in the context in the following sense: from marie's answer peter will normally infer a substantial amount of true information, that marie spends most of her time in the paris area, that she lives an urban life, that peter might try to meet her the next time he is in paris, etc. but peter will not infer that marie lives in the city of paris rather than just outside. the reason is, s&w hold, that peter (and marie) knows that her answer can be used in the way marie used it, as the most economical way of getting someone to make the inferences peter makes and which are the inferences marie wants him to make. on the other hand, if marie answers ‘i live just outside of paris’, then s&w hold that peter is entitled to think that marie wants him to know that she lives a suburban life, that she has to travel by train every day to get to work, etc. but these are not inferences marie wants peter to make (we can even imagine that some of them are false). marie knows that peter would make such inferences and therefore she chooses the first answer. “in other words, it is not just that marie's first answer, ‘i live in paris’, is effective enough to convey just what she wants; it may be more effective than the literally true second answer” (s&w 1986a, p.164). i have presented this example in length because it gives an illuminating illustration of how the economical principle applies in real life. it is, more generally, not difficult to understand why the principle provides an overall explanatory framework for analyzing communication. it can explain successful communication (communicators do not form very different associations), but also poor communication (communicators form very different associations). the latter happened as in the imagined supervisor case above, but the point is genseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 103 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 eral. as davidson (1987, p. 449) observes, interpretation “rests on vast vague assumptions about what is and what is not shared.” poor communication typically happens when an audience mistakenly thinks that his wider interpretation of a senders speech acts correspond to the senders’ interpretation – that they share the same interpretative framework. as the supervisor example illustrated, this is not always the case. our understanding of others are shaped by many idiosyncratic factors – such as our personal values, socio-cultural roles and individual horizons – and these factors can influence interpretation in many ways (nordby 2008). experiences of interactive communication above i gave an initial description of how paramedic students struggle to secure communication with amk. in order to achieve a more fundamental understanding of why interactive communication can be so challenging, i will use results from a more systematic empirical study on interactive communication in ambulance services. in 2012, as part of a comprehensive research project on cooperation and colleague support in acute medicine, researchers from lillehammer university college did a qualitative study on paramedics’ experiences of prehospital communication. an important aim of the study was to understand how paramedics on assignment experience their interactive communication with telephone operators in amk. the main reason why we wanted to do research on this relation was that we had heard critical comments of the kind described above. in classroom discussions and written work, many of our paramedic students working in ambulance services had expressed frustration about their communicative relation to amk. many described the interactive communication as ‘far from optimal’. for the purpose of getting more systematic knowledge of how this communication was perceived, we decided to interview paramedics students in one of our study courses – national paramedic program – a further education program for ambulance workers.viii students in this program have (minimally) certificate of completion as ambulance workers – or an equivalent competence – and they usually have extensive experience from many years in prehospital services. conceptual analysis the interviews with the students were merely one element in a more comprehensive research project, and it would fall outside the limits of this article to present the project in detail. furthermore, the aim here is not to present representative results from the study in an argumentative way. if that had been the aim, it would be necessary to clarify concepts of reliability and detailed methodological assumptions the study was based on. the more modest aim here is to use elements from the research to shed further light on the concept of interactive narrowness. doing this falls under the idea of conceptual analysis – of clarifying abstract concepts by understanding what they mean in our common language. attempts to achieve this aim have traditionally been a priori – the analyses have attempted to define target concepts in terms of other concepts, independently of empirical investigations (harman 1999). it is not, obviously, this kind of conceptual analysis that is relevant when actual experiences are used to illuminate a concept. the strategy i will purse here falls under a more modern way of doing conceptual analysis that is often called ‘experimental philosophy’ (knobe & nichols 2008, alexander 2012). the basic idea in this approach is seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 104 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 that a concept cannot be fully understood simply by relating it to other concepts on the level of thought – as ‘armchair metaphysics’ (sosa 2007). the concept must also be linked to the beliefs and thoughts people actually have about the concept’s applications conditions. as knobe and nichols (2008, p.8) observe, “no experimental philosophers has ever offered an analysis of one concept in terms of another. instead, the aim is usually to provide an account of the factors that influence applications of a concept.” the last decades have witnessed a growing skepticism about a priori conceptual analysis (peacocke 2007, burge 2010, 2013, alexander 2012). many philosophers have held that concepts definitions have to be tested against our linguistic intuitions, that such test are inductive (and hence empirical) in nature, and that our empirical intuitions about the meaning of concepts are, in themselves, shaped by our experiences (harman 2009, swain et al 2007, systma 2010). experimental philosophy is a position that avoids these problems, and has thus become an influential approach to conceptual analysis in recent years. according to experimental philosophers, concepts should be saturated ‘from below’, on the basis of studies of how people normally understand them’. in this sense the aim is more modest than the aim of the traditional analyses. the intention is not to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the applications of concepts, but to elucidate – in a less rigid sense – central aspects of concepts in the light of actual experiences (ibid). as knobe and nichols (2008, p.5) observe, as long as “we can offer an account of the internal psychological processes that underlie our judgements, we do not need to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept in particular cases.” correspondingly, the aim of this article is not to develop a definition of what it means to communicate through narrow interactive information channels. the aim is to use the study of the paramedics’ experiences as a platform for giving us a richer understanding of interactive narrowness. for this purpose, some striking findings from the study have been selected. in the presentation of these findings it will not be argued that they are representative for the professional group of paramedics as a whole. the aim is not to justify empirical conclusions, but to clarify interactive narrowness, and for this purpose it is sufficient to select findings that can help us to understand relevant communicative challenges. method invitations to participate in the study where sent out via email to students and paramedics who had graduated from earlier classes. the response was overwhelming. more than 100 paramedics wanted to participate, and 30 respondents were randomly selected for one-to-one in depth interviews. this group consisted of personnel with different backgrounds and various levels of competence skills. some were working in rural areas, others in larger cities. all had in common that they were involved in interactive communication on a daily basis. the interviews also made it clear that the participants had many of the same views on interactive dialogue. no findings could be traced to differences related to personality or professional roles. the interviews were made on the basis of standard naturalistic method in qualitative research (bowling 1997, flick 2002, berg & lune 2012). the basic idea in the naturalistic approach is that literal interpretation is prima facie correct: researchers are normally entitled to assume that informers mean ẃhat they say, that there is a direct link between their verbal statements their communicative intentions. according to naturalism, deviating from the principle of literal interpretation can sometimes be justified, but this requires a special justification. literal interpretation is the norm and not the exception. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 105 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 for the purpose of understanding the paramedics’ experiences, the study used narrative interviews. the idea in this approach is that informants’ own stories and descriptions of events constitute a guiding norm for how interviews should be structured. a narrative approach is, as flick (2002, p.96) observes, suitable when the topic of discourse are sensitive issues that cannot be captured within an ordinary question-answer scheme: “the starting point is a basic skepticism about how far subjective experiences may be tapped in the question-answer scheme of traditional interviews, even if this is handled in a flexible way.” if interviews are designed as a list of questions it becomes difficult to capture informers’ genuine experiences of complex social relations. furthermore, informers can easily get an impression of being cross examined and forced into frameworks of interpretation that do not fit their idiosyncratic perspectives. a rigid interview guide will necessarily have a narrow interpretive focus. by using a wide narrative approach it is possible to focus holistically on informers’ overall horizons. as flick observes, “narratives allow the researcher to approach the interviewee’s experiental world in a comprehensive way”. open questions give informers the possibility of engaging in reflection, so that they can identify their own opinions and find a language they think is suitable for expressing their views. the interaction there and then between researchers and informants can be meaning stimulating encounters that help the informants to develop their perspectives contextually. bowling (1997, p.341) states the point in an illuminating way: with structured interviews, conducted within a framework of positivism, the interview-respondent interaction is of interest only in relation to interviewer bias and error, response bias and whether the interviewer has departed from the interview protocol. in contrast, unstructured interviews are regarded by qualitative researchers as a social encounter. within qualitative research, relational and contextual aims of understanding fall under a reflective life world approach (dahlberg et al. 2001): researchers aim to understanding what the world looks like from informers’ perspective. as neuman (2011, p.214) points out, the aim is to capture “an inside view and provide a detailed account of how the people we study understand events”. it is, obviously, impossible to get into other persons’ subjective perspective. nevertheless, the aim of understanding others’ perspectives from the inside (from the outside) can be a methodological ideal. in accordance with principles from theoretical hermeneutics, reflective life world research is a useful holistic strategy for uncovering informers’ subjective horizons, their overall perspectives on themselves and the world around them (bowling 1997, flick 2002). a personal horizon includes much more than thoughts and beliefs. it also includes mental states like emotions, attitudes and personal values. in order to facilitate comprehensive authentic communication, interviewers need to create an atmosphere that facilitates dialogue about all aspects of informers’ horizons. findings the participants included ambulance personnel with various backgrounds, identities and professional roles. one might therefore think that they would describe their dialogue with amk very differently. this hypothesis turned out to be false. a striking finding of the study was that the paramedics shared many views about their interactive relations to amk, and that they all described the interactive dialog as difficult and challenging. as one said: ‘misunderstandings happen very often. it seems impossible to avoid them. i have no idea what i should do.’ seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 106 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 furthermore, it was a widespread view that the communication was poor because it was interactive and because the amk personnel could not observe the patients directly. the following was a representative statement: ‘the reality is often very different from what we think. so we face a double challenge: we do not know what to expect when we arrive at the scene of an accident. we have to prepare for the worst. but then we also have to communicate this to them [amk], so they can make their decisions. the problem is that they do not see the patient and the situation, so this can be very difficult.’ conflicts when asked to explain why they thought the communication with amk was so challenging, it was no surprise that the paramedic students did not use theoretical concepts from speech act theory. however, they clearly had an implicit understanding of the general idea about communication as involving much more than what is directly said. that is, they recognized that the main communication problem was that they did not interpret spoken or written messages – the ‘visible’ part of the iceberg – in the same way as the telephone operators in amk. the paramedic students said that it was not uncommon that they disagreed with amk about choices of actions. such disagreement could typically involve disputes about delivery addresses, resource allocations, patient autonomy and interpretation of information. when it was difficult to achieve agreement about these issues, conflicts sometimes arose. as one said: sometimes disagreement is settled when one of us [the ambulance or amk] get new factual information, like an updated medical record. in such cases the communication problems are not so fundamental. the real problems arise when there is no new information that can help us to reach agreement. these disputes are not settled easily. it was evident that many of the conflicts had normative dimensions – they involved disagreement about answers to question concerning what the ambulance personnel or amk operators ought to do. as with normative questions in general, they did not have obvious empirical answers. it was interesting to note that all the paramedic students held that it was especially difficult to solve these interprofessional normative conflicts as long as the communication was interactive. a typical view was that ‘it is not so difficult with co-workers, like doctors, at the scene of an accident. it is so much harder on a busy telephone line.’ the paramedics gave two reasons for this. first, limited time and resources made it practically difficult to discuss challenging situations over the phone. this was described as ‘unfortunate’, since extensive communication in conflict situations was conceived to be of special importance in interactive communication. as one said, ‘we need time to reach agreement so that we can cooperate. in fact, we need more time when we cannot see each other. but this is hopeless in our job. it is sad to say, but sometimes we just hang up when we realize that we cannot understand each other.’ consequently, many conflicts were left unsolved and contributed to creating a negative tension between the paramedics and amk operators. the other reason why interactive communication made it difficult to solve normative conflicts was that the interactive context often created what one paramedic described as a ‘bad atmosphere’. intercom equipment was not thought to be a good channel for discussing conflicts. the technological distance made it difficult to focus rationally on arguments for and against alternative choices of action: ‘we easily focus on the person we talk to instead of the seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 107 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 issue we should discuss. this, i think, is because we do not really trust the person in the other end.’ many of the paramedics said that they believed that it would have been better if they had met and learned to know the telephone operators in amk. one paramedic student said about one of the ambulance coordinators: ‘we talk very often but i do not know him, i have never seen him, and then i tend to forget that he is probably a nice guy. i have absolutely no idea of what kind of person he is. he could, for all i know, be a machine.’ in fact, this student said that the associations he was disposed to form about the coordinator were probably not justified. when he thought about the coordinator from what he described as a more ‘sober perspective’, he ‘was not confident’ that some of the negative attitudes he ascribed to him corresponded to the attitudes the coordinator actually had. many paramedics talked about the phenomenon of ‘talking past each other’, and they said that this often happened in conflict situations. as a good example, one paramedic mentioned an episode in which he and his colleague had volunteered to assist at the scene of an accident. we had transported a cancer patient to a centralised hospital far away from our station. we were driving back to the station when we heard on the radio that there had been a big car accident on one of the large highways, not too far away from where we were now driving on a smaller road. this was outside our geographical area of responsibility, so we were not obliged to redirect our resources, and amk did not ask us to assist. however, there were no other assignments waiting for us, and the other ambulance in our station was free to go out, so we offered our assistance. after a short time amk got back to us and said that we were not needed. we were surprised and wondered why. at first we thought, somewhat typically, that the reason was that they did not trust our competence and wanted to get in the heavy armour instead of our services from a smaller district station. this interpretation got us really annoyed, as so many times before [when communicating with amk]. it was also typical, i must admit, that we later got new information that showed that our initial interpretation was false. it turned out that there were many more resources directed towards the accident than we knew, and that they were closer [in driving time] than we thought. so our irritation was not really justified. why do we never learn? i have quoted this story in length because it so clearly illustrates the point about the significance of knowledge of other persons underlying communicative intentions. if the paramedics had known more about the coordinator’s intentions in the first place, they would not have formed the beliefs they did. thus, it is evident how the theoretical framework from speech act theory can explain the misunderstanding. when the ambulance coordinator in amk used the speech act ‘your assistance is not needed’ (the visible part of the iceberg), he did not mean to convey doubt (as a part of the iceberg beneath the surface) about the paramedics’ competence. the coordinator, we might assume, did not believe that the paramedics’ competence was below required standards. when the paramedics mistakenly ascribed this belief to the coordinator, an associative misunderstanding happened (davidson 1987, nordby 2006). the associations the paramedics formed about the coordinator’s message did not correspond to the associations the coordinator had and meant to communicate. fortunately, in this situation the misunderstanding was uncovered. if this had not happened, there is a good chance that the poor communication would have contributed to developing – or maintaining – a negative relation between the paramedics and the coordinator. the paramedics saw this themselves: ‘we thought they were sitting there making fun of us because we are from a district seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 108 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 service and do not perform complicated procedures like intubation very often.’ when the ambulance coordinator in amk provided the further explanations, he did not only improve the communication there and then. he also prevented the misunderstanding from having negative consequences in the long run. emotional communication in addition to conflict related communication of thoughts and beliefs, the paramedic students emphasized that the communication with amk had an emotional element: ‘we are persons, not computers, and we react in various ways to situations involving critically ill and sometimes dying patients‘. many assignments were experienced as having a heavy personal impact. the problem was that interactive communication channels were not conceived to be appropriate for discussing what one student described as the ‘human factor in our relation’. this became especially salient when the paramedics experienced negative emotions like frustration, irritation or even anger. as one said, ‘how can we talk about personal reactions on the phone with people we have never met?’ the negative emotions the paramedics described were of three types, depending on their directions. personal coping. some emotions were purely subjective – perceived to be personal reactions after difficult transports. these subjective feelings were not experienced as attitudes like anger, frustration or irritation directed towards other persons. they were directed inwards, ‘into myself’ as one said. a typical statement was, ‘after difficult transports i often have a reaction. i take it personally.’ this could typically happen after big accidents, but also after ‘quiet difficult’ assignments like transports of dying cancer patients (nordby & nøhr 2011). such transports were very challenging, but the paramedics very seldom talked about them with the amk personnel. in fact, even when they talked to amk after emotional assignments like transports of dying patients, the tone was described as formal and business like. the paramedics and the ambulance coordinators in amk did not discuss personal difficulties or support each other, and this was attributed to the interactive context. as one paramedic said: ‘when the person listening is an unfamiliar voice in the other end of a phone, it is difficult to talk about this’. some paramedics mentioned body contact as crucial after emotional work: ‘sometimes we just need someone who can hold an arm around us. the phone is simply not the same.’ external relations. a second kind of emotions was directed towards coworkers from other professions, like personnel from the police and fire brigades. many paramedics mentioned as typical examples emotional states like frustration or irritation, arising from poor cooperation on the scene of big accidents. time pressure and acuteness of situations often resulted in emotional communication between the emergency personnel. in these situations it could be very difficult to find and maintain appropriate roles, respect leadership and getting updated information concerning cooperation and allocation of resources. many of the paramedics missed more support from amk. ‘i know that it is not easy for them, but i would like to have more back up. sometimes i think they could express a better understanding of the chaotic situations we are in, how difficult it is for us to get a good overview of the accident’. the paramedics said that they wished they could get more updated information from amk and that amk’s communication could be better adjusted to the stressful and emotional prehospital work. ix again, this was connected to interactive communication and the lack of face-to-face meetings. amk personnel could not see the difficult situations, and ‘all the chaos and tension in the air’ as one said. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 109 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 internal relations. the paramedic students held that emotional communication was especially challenging when they experienced frustration, irritation or even anger in relations to medical doctors and the telephone operators in amk. supervising physicians who were formally responsible for patients were sometimes conceived to be arrogant and not always interested in cooperation. one paramedic said: ‘we talk to them on the phone, but some of them think they always know best even though they have very little prehospital experience. they are not really interested in listening to us.’ once again, the paramedics blamed the interactive distance, and the fact that many of the doctors did not have a good observational understanding of the prehospital reality: ‘they know medicine, but we see the patient and have many years of clinical experience.’ many paramedics were also dissatisfied with the practical information sent out by amk. patient descriptions were described as incomplete and difficult to understand, and individuals in amk were conceived to be conflict shy and uncommunicative. one described an episode in which an irritated ambulance coordinator in amk eventually said ‘if you do your job, i will do mine’. this was not perceived as a positive comment, and it was regarded as particular unsuitable in an interactive setting. just as the paramedics saw that their critical beliefs could sometimes be unjustified, they recognized that their emotional frustration was not always rationally grounded in facts and knowledge of the perspectives amk operators have. as one observed, ‘they have their sense of reality, i have mine. deep inside i know that i have to understand before i can criticize. the problem is that it is so difficult when we live in separate worlds.’ another said that ‘they are sitting in their control room deep down in the bunker. they nevertheless have an interactive overview that we do not have. we, however, are in the frontline and observe the patients directly. that can be difficult to remember, both for us and them [amk].” not all the paramedics had a good understanding of this. when we asked them how they perceived the fact that the ambulances and amk were working from different perspectives, some paramedics showed little or no awareness of the different professional roles and the limits and possibilities of information exchange. the majority, however, held that this was something they should i have in mind before criticizing amk for making decisions that were objectively unsound. as one said: ‘criticism can only be justified if it is based on a good understanding in the first place’. this statement deserves a special comment: it displays an impressive understanding not only of the distinction between understanding and justification, but also the deep philosophical dualism between communication and epistemology. in philosophy of mind and language, it has been a widespread assumption that questions of how it is correct to understand other persons should be distinguished from questions of who is right about an issue of dispute (nordby 2005). real ‘authentic’ agreement – agreement that is based on dialogue in which communicators are not talking past each other – presupposes a shared sense of meaning and reality in the first place. this is of particular importance in interactive dialogue: the communicative narrowness makes it easy to jump to conclusions based on insufficient knowledge due to the narrowness of the channel. several paramedics emphasized that this was something it was important to acknowledge. they thought that being able to adjust their own communication to amk’s perspective should be part of their professional competence. again, the emphasis was on learning to know each other and perspectives from the other side. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 110 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 analysis according to the idea of experimental conceptual analysis – as outline above – actual experiences of a phenomenon can tell us something important about concepts that refer to that phenomenon, the idea is, as knobe and nichols (2008, p.4) observes, that ‘experimental philosophers proceed by conducting experimental investigations of the psychological processes underlying people’s intuitions about philosophical issues’ the target concept here is the concept of narrow interactive communication that does not involve an ordinary face-toface encounter. in this section i will show how the paramedics’ experiences can shed illuminating light on communicative challenges in interactive settings. it was striking how the paramedics’ experiences of communication with amk could be explained in the light of speech act theory. the paramedics held that the fundamental problem was that it was difficult to understand – and be understood – in ‘the right way’. both the paramedics and the amk operators normally grasped the meaning of what was directly expressed. it was the associations underlying the messages literally expressed – displayed on a screen or heard on the phone – that were different. all the paramedics held that the main problem was the communicative distance; that the narrowness of communication via telephone or on-line written messages constituted a fundamental obstacle to successful communication. misinterpretation happened no matter how the paramedics tried to secure dialogue: the lack of interpretive clues made it impossible to avoid poor communication. thus, the interviews with the paramedics support the idea that there is an irreducible element in face-to-face communication; that dialogue in which communicators are present together – in the same physical space – has a dimension that necessarily is absent in interactive communication. interpreted as a philosophical idea, this principle of irreducibility involves two claims about the essential nature of face-to-face communication. metaphysical anti-reductionism. the first claim is that in face-to-face encounters there is a link between communicators that does not exist in interactive discourse. the idea is that the two forms of communication do not have the same ontological nature, in the sense that the aspect of togetherness in face-to-face communication is non-existing in interactive discourse. metaphysical anti-reductionism implies that being together is an intrinsic property of face-to-face communication; the property exists independently of how we judge this kind of communication. this was accentuated in the study when the paramedics said that it was impossible to capture exactly what was missing in the interactive dialogue. it was something that just wasn’t there. correspondingly, communicative anti-reductionism implies that togetherness is an extrinsic property of interactive communication. that is, no matter how interactive communication is designed to constitute togetherness, there will always be something missing: we might think we have managed to create a personal context, but the direct link is never there ‘in itself’, as what philosophers call a genuine ‘primary’ property (stroud 2000).x epistemological anti-reductionism. the second claim of anti-reductionism concerns what we know, how our perspectives on the world relate to the world as it is, as opposed to how we think it is.xi epistemological anti-reductionism implies that we have cognitive access to something in a special irreducible way on one level of inquiry, and that this access is not available on other (lower) levels. applied to the distinction between seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 111 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 face-to-face and interactive communication, the idea would be that faceto-face communicators can achieve an understanding that they cannot reach in interactive contexts: while face-to-face knowledge of understanding is direct, understanding in interactive communication is mediated and indirect through information conveying technology. xii all the paramedics claimed that it was problematic to understand the communicative intentions that the amk operators expressed. the problem was partly that they represented a different professional culture, but the main challenge was the context of communication: the paramedics did not merely have (as they also have in face-to-face communication) indirect access to the operators’ thoughts and beliefs. they also had nothing more than indirect access to vital interpretive clues – like nonverbal behaviour – that they could not see. all the limiting factors of the interactive dialogue made it difficult to form reliable interpretations. actions and evaluative judgements the distinction between communicative anti-reductionism and reductionism has a striking parallel in theoretical ethics. many philosophers have argued that we should make a deep distinction between theories asserting that ethical insight can be reduced to knowledge of moral rules (if you know and follow the rules your actions are good), and theories asserting that ethical insight must be based on a subjective competence that cannot be reduced to knowledge of rules. as scott (2003, p.26) observes, the latter kind of ethical antireductionism has been become influential in the last few decades: “ [a] number of contributors to the health care ethics literature have, for a number of years now, tried to argue that a virtue theory approach is needed at least as a supplement to a dutyand principle-based approach.” according to critics of rule bases ethics, there is an awareness and subjective capacity of evaluative judgement that is irreducible; that cannot be described as empirical knowledge or learned like methodological tools or instructions in a manual (nordby 2007). the paramedics’ experiences of interactive narrowness support the idea that actual evaluative judgements are irreducible in this sense. rules or instructions could not solve disputes about solutions to ethical dilemmas; even when it was possible to talk extensively about choices of action, the discourse was conceived to be incomplete. the way the paramedics thought that an evaluative judgement was justified, could not be captured in words. thus, the reason why the paramedics found it so difficult to solve ethical conflicts was that they found it hard to understand and convey ethical justifications. if communicating a justification had been a matter of conveying statements, then this would not have been so problematic. closeness ethical irreducibility is a general view, and we should distinguish this view from more specific explanations of why ethical justification cannot be reduced to rules. one influential explanation is that justification is connected to direct experiences of wanting to help other persons. in health work, this emphasis on closeness has often been connected to the french philosopher levinas (1987) and his analysis of the appeal of the face: the face forces itself on me, without it being possible for me to remain deaf to its summons or to forget it, that is to say making it impossible for me to cease being responsible for its helplessness. consciousness no seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 112 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 longer has priority …to be i means from now on to be unable to escape responsibility. it was precisely this closeness that the informers pointed to when they explained why the interactive narrowness made it so difficult to avoid conflicts about choices of action in patient work. the ethical insight was grounded in in face-to-face encounters with suffering patients, and these experiences could not be detached from the encounters. the conflicts were difficult to solve as long as the amk operators did not have a direct understanding of what it was like to be there – looking into the eyes of patients who really need help. the paramedics thought that many conflicts could have been solved if the amk operators had more experience from patient work. ethics and communication ethical dilemmas cannot be sharply distinguished from communicative challenges, but there is, nevertheless, a crucial difference between communication and ethics. in communicative practices we aim to convey thoughts and beliefs to others, in ethical practices we try to understand what it right and wrong. however, the practices also have a fundamental evaluative similarity. communicating successfully is a matter of getting messages across in the intended ‘right’ way, just as ethical deliberation aims to understand what is morally ‘right’. furthermore, like analyses of communication, ethical inquiry focuses on actions. ethical inquiry is more explicitly concerned with ordinary bodily actions, but use of language – not only speech acts – can also be evaluated as moral actions. in general, the scope of value evaluations includes all behavior that expresses intentional content. this was clearly acknowledged in the study of the paramedics’ experiences. when the paramedics focused on evaluations, they were not merely concerned with bodily actions in patient work. they were also concerned with the verbal utterances in the interactive dialogue. they were critical to many of the statements made by amk, and they thought that they got undeserved criticism for saying what they did. a typical example was the abovementioned ‘i do my job example’. this was conceived to be a statement that contributed to causing a conflict about the assignment. but it was also a conflict about how the utterance should be interpreted. the paramedics ascribed a negative value to the coordinator’s speech act. the coordinator, on the other hand, thought that this was an appropriate remark (otherwise he would not have used it) in other words, the interactive conflict had two levels. one concerned the assignment they were talking about, the other the speech acts they used to refer to that assignment. both conflicts involved disagreement about values of actions, and both were difficult to address in the interactive setting. however, there was a crucial difference between them. the evaluations of the speech acts were evaluations about actions that could be directly observed. the discussions of actions in the patient work, on the other hand, were discussions of actions that amk could not observe directly. one might think that this would make a crucial difference, that the level of precision and possibility of agreement was better when the objects of discussion were transparent to both parties. this, however, was not the case. conflicts and emotional communication were typically grounded in negative interpretations of others’ speech acts, and the verbal conflicts were just as challenging as the conflicts about bodily actions. this finding really accentuates how fragile the interactive communication was: the problem was not merely that the paramedics and the amk personnel misinterpreted each other in the sense that they had different perspectives on the reality of the patient work. the seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 113 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 speech acts they used to talk about the patient work were also interpreted in entirely different ways. personal coping i have so far focused on tensions in the interactive relations between the paramedics and the amk personnel. as shown, the paramedics also said that the misunderstandings had a heavy personal impact. in order to get a richer picture of the communicative challenges in interactive dialogue, we should therefore say something about the psychological effects of the poor communication. fundamentally, all the paramedics agreed that the context created interpretive doubt. furthermore, when they were uncertain about the amk operators’ motives, they tended to focus on negative interpretations. they ascribed negative attitudes to operators, even when they recognized that this was not justified. a striking example was the abovementioned situation involving an amk operator who said ‘your assistance is not needed’. the paramedics suspected that the operator had doubts about their competence skills, but they also recognized, later on, that the statement could be, and probably should be, interpreted differently. the problem was that the context created a negative interpretive filter; the communicative distance made it difficult to form more positive interpretations. the negative interpretations created dissatisfaction and frustration on personal levels. this, in turn, led to a general tension, poor cooperation and a domino effect that influenced the quality of the patient work. what started as ‘small misunderstandings’ had large consequences. the paramedics recognized this, but they thought that their ascriptions of negative attitudes were a natural human reaction. and they blamed the interactive nature of the communication. the other main problem related to the psychological consequences of the poor communication, was that it was difficult for others to see how the paramedics coped with assignments that had a heavy personal impact. the paramedics talked about debriefing as an example. they sometimes needed collegial support arrangements after emotional work, but understanding when this was needed was, to a large extent, a matter of observing a person’s behavior. it was necessary to see the person. talking to someone on the phone could not always reveal the need for a debriefing talk, and certainly not replace a real conversation about difficult transports. a debriefing arrangement should be a close personal encounter where those involved could share emotions and thoughts. all the paramedics agreed that when they really needed to talk to someone, it was important to be situated together. pedagogical implications there are, obviously, many health related challenges in paramedic-amk communication that are idiosyncratic – not salient in interactive communication in other professional relations. however, the results of the paramedic study, and the way they can be analyzed on the basis of speech act theory, are clearly relevant in other contexts. the interpersonal challenges described by the paramedics can arise in a variety of communicative relations involving comprehensive use of information conveying technology. the nature of these challenges will vary, and it is difficult to develop substantial analyses on a general level. in order to clarify how the findings can shed light on interactive narrowness in other contexts, i will therefore focus on one area that is of special relevance in this journal, namely communication beseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 114 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 tween teachers and students in distance learning courses. obviously, students recruited from professional services are not always involved in as much workrelated interactive communication as paramedics working in ambulances. however, like the paramedics in the national study program, students in adolescent courses and distance education typically use interactive communication extensively in their studies (katz 1999). for the purpose of understanding the wider significance of the points made above, a natural area of generalization is therefore interactive communication related to studies for professional groups, in further education courses and other more or less formal pedagogical contexts. this is a wide area that involves a variety of communicative relations (keegan 1994). for simplicity i will focus on the conceptual relation between ‘teachers’ and ‘students’. it will be easy to understand how the implications i will outline apply to other learning relations, like interactive group work and other forms of communication between students. the main implication is straightforward: as the initial student supervisor example above illustrated, students and teachers can sometimes misinterpret speech acts, and the use of interactive communication increases the risk of this happening. when narrow communication channels like chat programs or emails are used, it is more difficult for students to make reliable interpretations of how teachers express communicative intentions. consequently, they can often form mistaken beliefs about the part of the communicative ‘iceberg’ that lies beneath the surface. obviously, when students and teachers do not meet very often, interactive classrooms are valuable arenas for dialog (saba & shearer 1994, saba 2000, nordby 2006). but there are many pitfalls when senders and audiences are not present together, and this is why the paramedic students’ experiences are so interesting. they not only illustrate how challenging it can be to secure successful communication in interactive contexts. more importantly, the study has practical and normative dimensions, in the sense that it indicates how interactive teacher-student communication can be improved. four implications should be accentuated: 1. the paramedic study suggests that conflicts and emotional issues should, as far as possible, be discussed face-to-face. if it is not realistically possible to do so in a conflict situation, it is normally a good idea to arrange a face-to-face meeting later, when this is realistically possible. the interviews with the paramedic students indicate that if this is not done, unresolved tensions can have a negative impact on the teacher-student relation. formal or informal ‘debriefing’ talks – in settings that all parties experience as comfortable – are important to clear the air. as the professional leader in the relation, this is something teachers need to pay special attention to. students have normally no choice but to defer to teachers’ way of organizing the communication. as the rule (and not the exception), creating a dialogue context that students are comfortable with, falls within teachers’ area of responsibility. 2. speech act theory has a normative implication for teachers in communicative processes: if they have reason to think that the beliefs they associate with a message are radically different from the beliefs students form, they should clarify their own associations, so that these associations end up in the consciousness of their audiences. thus, if a teacher thinks that a student is about to misinterpret his speech acts, he should bring his own interpretation to the surface. in the supervisor example above, it was a good question whether the student’s mistaken interpretation was a natural interpretation. it is, at any rate, clearly possible to interpret the rather vague sentence ‘i think this is beginning to look very good‘ in various ways. this means that the principle of economical communication should be weakened from the perspecseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 115 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 tive of the supervisor. in order to avoid possible misunderstanding (and resource consuming) unintended consequences, she should have invested more time in clarifying her overall intentions. using extra resources was especially important in the light of the fact that the misunderstanding could have substantial negative consequences.xiii 3. the principle about uncovering associations also applies in the other way in pedagogical relations, when students are senders and teachers audiences. speech acts expressed by students contain much more than what they directly say. they use what they regard as the most convenient way of conveying what they want to communicate, but their own interpretations of links between observable language and background intention is colored by their subjective perspectives – their social roles, values and cultural horizons of understanding. these horizons can be very different from their (‘old fashioned?’) teachers’ horizons, and when the communication channel is interactive, it can be even more difficult for teachers to get a good understanding of students’ communicative intentions. the implication for teachers is obvious: when there is good reason to interpret a student’s speech act in a nonstandard way, they should seek to uncover the student’s interpretation. straightforward questions like ‘do you mean that…?’ or ‘do i understand you correctly if you mean that…?’ are often sufficient. many unintended consequences of poor communication can be avoided if teachers have (interactive!) social antennas for noticing when such questions are appropriate. 4. communication related to conflicts and emotional communication should be based on a shared understanding. a fundamental misunderstanding happens if two communicators who disagree about a topic of discourse are talking past each other – if the disagreement is based on an insufficient understanding of the other person’s perspective. a typical example might be a case in which a student has received a lower grade on an essay than what he expected. normally the student only sees the grade, and he might easily be wrong about his teacher’s beliefs about the content of the essay. the student might, for instance, think that the teacher is not satisfied with his knowledge of the topic area. the teacher, however, might be satisfied with this but not so satisfied with the student’s discussion. he might think that the essay lacks a good, independent voice and sound arguments. obviously, in ‘authentic’ two-way communication, all parties have a responsibility for securing dialogue. this principle also applies in the relation between teachers and students. however, there are two reasons why teachers have the primary responsibility for paying attention to the four conditions i have outlined. first, the relation between teachers and students is a professional, formalized relation. it is therefore also part of teachers’ professional duty to secure communication. xiv second, students are, even informally, often the ‘weak’ part. the psychological dynamics of the relation can make it difficult for students to raise their voices and take the initiative to uncover possible misunderstandings and talk about what they regard as poor communication. conclusion in this article i have used speech act theory and actual experiences of interactive narrowness to clarify challenges in communication that does not involve an ordinary face-to-face encounter. obviously, much more could be said about these challenges, but that would fall outside the limits here. my aim has been to clarify the idea that there is an irreducible element in face-to-face commuseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 116 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 nication, and use this idea to explain why it is so challenging to secure communication in interactive settings. the main challenge, i have argued, is that it is difficult to find the right words in narrow interactive settings. furthermore, finding the right words and express all that is needed is, in the final instance, a matter of understanding what is right and wrong. in interactive communication it is especially important to choose one’s speech acts carefully and to be aware of how audiences reads more into expressed messages than what is strictly speaking said. in formal relations such as the relation between teachers and students, this responsibility involves more than avoiding associative misinterpretation: teachers need to be sensitive to idiosyncratic interpretations that students do not express directly in words, but they also have professional obligation to understand when interactive communication cannot substitute the closeness of a real faceto-face encounter. references alexander, j. 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(1997). caring machines: emerging practices of work and coordination in the use of medical emergency communication technology. d. phil dissertation. trondheim: ntnu. endnotes i http://com.fronter.info/ ii https://www.itslearning.com/welcome.aspx iii in norway these centers are called ‘amk’. this is where you get if you dial medical emergency number (113 in norway). iv the distinction between face-to-face and interactive communication is not sharp. for the purposes here, we do not have to rely on a definition of the distinction. it is sufficient to rely on an intuitive conception. for a detailed discussion of how the concept of interactive communication should be defined, see nordby (2011). v http://hil.no/nasjonal_paramedic_utdanning. vi nurses working in amk answer medical emergency calls and cooperate with ambulance coordinators who make practical arrangements related to the ambulance assignments. paramedics in the ambulances units communicate extensively with the coordinators and sometimes with the emergency nurses. vii the reason why some paramedics never met the amk personnel was that they worked in ambulance services that never delivered patients to the hospital where amk was situated. paramedics who knew the persons working in amk often transported patients to causalty centres situated close to the amk central, and there was an informal culture of visiting amk after patient delivery. viii the program is session based and uses principles from distance education in between the sessions. for a general introduction to distance education, see keegan (1996). ix amk normally gets updated information from the other emergency centrals – police and fire brigades – and it is usually possible for amk to forward this information to the ambulance units when they are on their way to the scene of an accident. the paramedics appreciate this, as they become better prepared for the reality that awaits them. x the direct link would then be a secondary property, in the same way colors and other relational properties have been thought of as partly subjective in nature (stroud 2000) xi realism is the view that many objects and properties in the world around us exist independently of us. realism goes hand in hand with fallibilism, the view that we can never know for sure that we think is true really is true. nowadays, most philosophers are realists of some form (boghossian 2007). xii this idea about face-to-face directness has a parallel in theories of self-knowledge – theories of how we have privileged access to our own conscious thoughts (burge 2013). obviously, we do not have direct first-person access to others’ thoughts in face-to-face communication, but the principled distinction between directness and indirectness is the same: epistemological anti-reductionism about communication claims that there is seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 119 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 http://com.fronter.info/ https://www.itslearning.com/welcome.aspx http://hil.no/nasjonal_paramedic_utdanning an asymmetry between direct face-to-face communication and indirect interactive communication. xiii this typically happens when the misunderstanding leads actions that are inconsistent with the senders intentions. in the above example we might imagine that the student, as a consequence of the misunderstanding, starts to apply for jobs because he thinks he will soon graduate. xiv it is also reasonable to assume that it is part of teachers’ responsibility to talk to students about their relational communication. clarifying this is often a key to avoiding conflicts. in fact, knowledge of communication principles can be helpful for teachers in two ways. the knowledge can guide them in their interaction with students, but they can also, somewhat more theoretically, pass the knowledge on to the students. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 120 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 philosophical speech act theory and challenges in interactive dialogue: experiences of narrow communication halvor nordby abstract introduction forms of communication pedagogical experiences speech act theory the economical principle of communication experiences of interactive communication conceptual analysis method findings conflicts emotional communication analysis actions and evaluative judgements closeness ethics and communication personal coping pedagogical implications conclusion references nonlinear storytelling method and tools for low-threshold game development | journal article skip to abstract nonlinear storytelling method and tools for low-threshold game development mika letonsaari, leena karjalainen and jukka selin south-eastern finland university of applied sciences email: mika.letonsaari@xamk.fi ©2019 (author name/s), cc-by-4.0 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by-4.0), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. abstract nonlinear storytelling is a method in digital storytelling where the storyline is not linear but has branches. this is typical for interactive stories such as computer game plots. in this study we present a review of nonlinear storytelling tools and educational computer game development software. special attention is paid to usability, software licensing models, and integration with modern game engines. we present a pilot study where nonlinear stories (n = 14) were collected during a game development project. participants were adults with low information technology skills and who were participating in an information technology training course intended for enhancing their employment opportunities. collected stories are analyzed to show an example of what kind of content can be expected when nonlinear storytelling is used. in particular some common errors and misconceptions in nonlinear storytelling are explored. usability of the collected stories in the context of game development is examined. these observations and findings can be used to develop storytelling process more meaningful to students and to harness the nonlinear storytelling method more effectively in education and educational game development. keywords: digital storytelling nonlinear storytelling educational game storytelling software introduction storytelling has become a very popular method of education. in storytelling, the learner creates or tells a story that is related to the subject matter. learner’s personal point of view connects the subject matter to a larger context. storytelling as a learning method has many positive cognitive, social, and emotional benefits including improvement in language skills, concentration, imagination, comprehension, and critical thinking (boltman 2001, pp. 17-18). due to the arrival of computers in school classrooms, digital storytelling has become a widely used and studied form of educational storytelling. digital storytelling, sometimes called multimedia storytelling, is storytelling using methods of digital multimedia such as images, sound, and video. often computers are used to compose the story. digital storytelling is a method to learn digital information processing and multimedia production using modern digital tools. it also provides engagement to the learning process and encourages students in multimedia literacy (viitanen et al. 2014, çıralı et al. 2015). most of the educational storytelling, including digital storytelling, is linear in structure. stories present only one predetermined sequence of events. the reader of the story has no control of the story. an example of such a story is presented in figure 1. figure 1. a story with a linear structure. gamified stories or interactive stories provide the user of the story, a reader or a player, a possibility to affect the storyline. such a storyline has branches and the structure is not linear but nonlinear. an example of a nonlinear gamified story is presented in figure 2. the story starts from the left. the player is given two options which provide the player with more options. this creates a complex structure for the story with several possible outcomes. figure 2. a gamified story with nonlinear structure. there is little research focused on the nonlinear nature of gamified stories in education. computer game development as a form of nonlinear storytelling is most often just a tool for teaching computer programming (for example leutenegger et al. 2007, topalli et al. 2018, kalelioğlu 2015). sometimes game development or interactivity of the story is used as a way to engage students but nonlinear nature of stories is not considered as a special feature (tran 2016). a notable exception is a study by liu et al. (2010) where linear and nonlinear storytelling interfaces were compared. they measured co-creative performance in four factors: derivation, remix, ownership, and positive interdependence. in all four factors, the nonlinear group performed superior to the linear group. researchers reported a positive outcome for the nonlinear storytelling. in our earlier work, we have shown that nonlinear stories have similarity to computational algorithms (reference removed for the review). based on this, we speculate that practicing nonlinear storytelling may have positive synergy with learning computational thinking skills. in this article, we review some available types of nonlinear storytelling tools and software. these include general software that is not intended for writing nonlinear stories, as well as specialized nonlinear storytelling software. we present their features regarding the requirements of an educational game development. we also present an analysis of stories collected in our earlier study to give an example of what kinds of results can be expected when nonlinear stories are collected from novice computer users. in the research project an educational computer game was developed by information technology students and professionals. we wanted also to enable the participation of another group of adults who had very low information technology skills. the aim was to engage them in a computer game development, to empower them regarding the use of information technology, and to provide their non-information technology related expertise to the game development process (reference removed for the review). in this article the collected stories are analyzed in detail. we are interested in common technical problems that novice users have. participant in this project had only a short introduction to nonlinear storytelling and limited help from their teacher as they continued their work after school hours. this method of study tries to uncover the critical learning challenges and possible misconceptions in nonlinear storytelling. nonlinear storytelling software game plots can be understood as nonlinear stories or hypertext documents. there are many tools to produce such documents with internal hyperlinking. there also exists many types of game development processes from simple experimentations to complex professional projects. therefore both the requirements of game development processes and the features available in tools must be considered when storytelling tools are chosen. in our example game development project we chose the following key features for consideration when choosing the solution: easy to use for people with no special information technology skills, possibility to export stories in a simple form, or an integration with advanced game engines, and open source licensing. the first requirement is given because the idea is to enable a low-threshold participation for everyone. the second requirement is important for us because the stories are used in another professional game engine. it is also generally good to prevent vendor-locking by using software with full export functionality. the third requirement was chosen because we develop an educational software in an academic research project and it is important to be able to share the results. we also wanted to use external open source licensed resources and therefore open source licensing was a natural choice to avoid licensing problems and enable wide adoption. in the following, some of the basic types of nonlinear storytelling software are introduced. different types of hyperlinking methods are explained and the software’s selected key features regarding game development are discussed. text editing the simplest way to write nonlinear stories is to add references to a text file for internal linking. for this purpose, any text editor can be used. notable examples of texts produced in this manner are encyclopedias with internal linking. there also exist gamified storybooks, for example, choose your own adventure book series (friedman, 1995) which have numbered chapters. at the end of each chapter, there are usually choices given to the reader. for example, the text might say “if you want to fight, jump to chapter number 13. if you want to run away, jump to chapter 85.” a more advanced option is to use bookmarking and cross-referencing features in word processing or presentation software such as microsoft word, microsoft powerpoint, openoffice writer, or openoffice impress. this can be a good method in nonlinear storytelling for people who are familiar with word processing and presentation software. in addition gamification can also be used as an engaging method to teach the advanced features of office software. hypertext and wiki software for hypertext documents, hypertext markup language (html) is the standard markup language, especially used in internet www pages (berners-lee, 2001). basic hyperlinking of documents with html language requires only a small subset of html language (w3c, 2017). hyperlinking is created with a href attributes and some additional attributes are required for forming valid html documents. the biggest drawback for utilizing html language with novice users is the need for understanding files and file systems. each passage in the nonlinear story must be stored in its own file. for example, in our project, students did not have the required skills in file handling, and this makes the task of using html difficult. wiki software is an improvement in this matter as documents are stored in a database and the users do not need to manually manage them. also, the markup language is simplified from html and users do not need to define document structure. there are several different wiki software and also many open source options exist. documents are computer readable and can be exported in simple formats. this makes wiki documents a very simple and efficient tool for writing nonlinear stories. using wiki for writing also teaches wiki markup to students so that they become familiar with how the online encyclopedia wikipedia and other online wiki resources work. game-oriented software there exist some game oriented software for nonlinear storytelling. these software have the advantage that they are designed for the purpose of writing game plots. they often have some means to control the story structure and maybe to visualize the story structure in a form of a flowchart. they often have features for a more complex game mechanics such as variables and scripting programming option. let us review some of the most popular game oriented nonlinear writing tools. twine is described on its website (twinery.org) as a tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. its user interface is a flowchart-based. nodes of the flowchart are known as passages. they contain the text presented to the player as well as hyperlinks and possible macros for controlling the plot. an example of twine flowchart is presented in figure 3. figure 3. twine flowchart with five passages and one branching. there are two methods for creating hyperlinks in twine. the basic syntax is double brackets around the link text. this creates a link to the passage with the same title as the link text. if no passage exists with the same name, a new passage with the name is created. the second method has separate link text and target passage title. there are three syntaxes for this in twine and its default harlowe story format: [[linktext|title]] [[linktext->title]] [[title<-linktext]] renpy (renpy.org) is a tool for creating visual novels. it has many options designed to integrate visual images into nonlinear storytelling. a story is written in a text file and story structure is created with menus, jumps, and labels. an example of a renpy code, where two options are provided to the player, is presented in figure 4. renpy is a popular and mature software. it is at its best when the story is strongly visual. s “sure, but what’s a \”visual novel?\”” menu: “it’s a videogame.”: jump game “it’s an interactive book.”: jump book label game: m “it’s a kind of videogame you can play on your computer or a console.” figure 4. story structure control mechanisms for renpy visual novel engine. menu item gives options to the player. the jump attribute moves to the given label in the storyline. this example is taken from renpy website renpy.org. inkle is a software for combining visual art with nonlinear stories. it uses a scripting language ink. ink website (github.com/inkle/ink) describes it as “scripting language for writing interactive narrative, both for text-centric games as well as more graphical games that contain highly branching stories.” an example of ink scripting is presented in figure 5. another scripting type of software is choicescript (github.com/dfabulich/choicescript). both inkle and choicescript are open source software. inkle also has unity 3d integration option by a plugin. as scripting languages, these are both textual in nature. this emphasizes the story logic and the story script is very concise. both of these languages have clear syntaxes and are good for text-based game design when no structure visualization is required. == paragraph_1 === you stand by the wall of analand, sword in hand. * [open the gate] -> paragraph_2 * [smash down the gate] -> paragraph_3 * [turn back and go home] -> paragraph_4 === paragraph_2 === you open the gate, and step out onto the path. figure 5. an example of branching in ink scripting language. fungus (fungusgames.com) is an open source software for writing stories inside unity 3d development environment. it is a flowchart-based tool and usability of the tool has been highly paid attention to. the usability is especially good in using variables and conditional branching but these advanced features were not used in our pilot project. the drawback of fungus is that it requires unity 3d installation. while unity 3d is free for personal use, it is a significantly more complex software. the native unity 3d integration can make the user interface difficult to use for people with low information technology experience. an example view of the user interface is presented in figure 6. figure 6. an example view of fungus user interface inside unity 3d environment. alice (alice.org) is a storytelling tool that is designed to be used in education. it is developed by carnegie mellon university and its aim is to provide an introduction to computer science concepts and computer programming in an engaging way of telling stories and creating games. alice is a rather comprehensive storytelling tool. a 3d scene view of alice is shown in figure 7. as an educational tool, it is designed to be easy to use even if it has many advanced features. as an independent storytelling tool alice is an engaging and compact tool. but it has many internal features in addition to the storytelling features and it cannot be easily integrated into external processes such as general game development processes. alice has extensive learning resources. for example there is material for designing nonlinear narrative (https://www.alice.org/resources/lessons/design-interactive-narrative/). figure 7. the scene view of alice storytelling tool. methods an educational computer game was developed by university information technology students and professionals. to acquire content for the game, nonlinear stories were collected from a group of novice computer users. the group of adults (age 30-64 years) participated in a basic information technology training course intended for enhancing their employment opportunities. during one learning session the serious game development project was introduced to the students and students tried the game. the game is an open world 3d game where the player’s avatar can walk around and complete educational tasks. during a second learning session, the basic usage of nonlinear storytelling tool twine was introduced to the students. twine was selected for the project because it is an open source software and because it’s good integration with unity 3d game engine. after the introduction, students were instructed to write a sample story on personal computers at the computer laboratory of the school. students were able to continue their stories at home after the session. submitting their story for the game development research project was voluntary and not everybody wanted to include their work in the game. results fourteen stories (n = 14) were submitted to the project. the default visualization of story list view by twine is presented in figure 8. in this visualization, each circle presents one passage in the story. size of the circles correlates with the amount of text in a passage. colors are only for visual purposes. the overall structure of the story is also visually presented by positions of circles. figure 8. visual presentation of the collected stories in twine. it can be seen from the visualization that there are three stories with only one passage (just a single sphere in the visualization). these stories have obviously some technical problems. other stories seem structurally good. so the default visualization of the story list view presented in figure 8 can be used as a simple inspector of story structure. a more detailed view of two of the stories, as presented by the story edit view of twine, is presented in figure 9 for comparison. as can be seen, the visualization in figure 8 gives an approximate structure of the story. but the story edit view also presents the story flow and transitions between passages. figure 9. a more detailed view of two stories in figure 8. two extra passages on the lower right corner are omitted from the latter story. it is possible to collect certain metrics from the stories to describe the story structure in analytical means. the number of passages and the number of links between passages in each story is presented in figure 10. here we can see again the three stories with only a single passage and no links. figure 10. the number of passages and the number of links between passages in collected stories. we analyzed the three stories with only one passage and found that they all had the same problem: students had not correctly understood the syntax for creating hyperlinks. an example of the contents of one story is presented in figure 11. it can be seen that the dialog has been written as a linear manuscript without any interaction with the player. in all of these three cases, students had put double brackets over the whole dialog. double brackets are used for creating hyperlinks, but they should include only the link text provided to the player or a link text and a link title. double bracket notation works only with single line text so no hyperlink is created in this case. [[bartender1 what would you like to have? customer 1/1 a large dark beer bartender2 would you like to have german or belgian, sir? customer1/2 german, please. bartender3 and you, sir? customer2/1 a scotch and a small beer. bartender4 okay. here you are!]] figure 11. an example of a story with only one passage. the student has not understood the idea of nonlinear and hyperlinks properly but has written the dialog in a traditional format. the text has been translated into english from the original finnish language used in the project. by default, twine generates new passages using the link text as a new title. this was a somewhat difficult concept to learn in the introduction phase. the problem is that given two similar link texts, same continuation passage is assumed. this is not always the case and simple hyperlink syntax cannot be used. in collected stories, only one story had this problem. a part of the story is presented in figure 12. in this story, there are several questions with yes and no answers. questions are very different, “do you need a bank?” and “do you need a map?”, so the story should not continue in the same passage. in the case of negative answer, the student has solved the problem by using “no” and “no.” which are interpreted as two different texts by twine. but in the positive case both answers lead to the same passage. the problematic passage has been selected in twine user interface so it is shown as light blue instead of regular white color in figure 12. this passage has even a further yes and no question which leads back to the passage itself in the positive answer case leading to a possible infinite loop in the story. figure 12. an example of a part of a story where the concepts of link text and link target were not fully understood and this has caused a problem with the story structure. there are several questions to the player with yes and no answers and automatically incorrectly generated hyperlinks cause an illogical structure. the text has been translated into english from the original finnish language used in the project. it is worth noting that most of the stories were not finished completely. out of the eleven stories that had more than one passage, only two had no unfinished passages. some of the unfinished passages were story branches that were not written, but some were missing just the closure or the ending for the story. three stories had extra passages that were not connected to the story. this is not an error or a problem but can tell something about the creative process of the story. unconnected passages can tell for example about the editing of the story or experimentation with the story structure. discussion and conclusions in this article, nonlinear storytelling was introduced as a low-threshold method for co-creative educational game development. some of the most important characteristic features of nonlinear stories were presented. nonlinear stories can be seen as hypertext documents, interactive stories or game plots. these are all used in education in different contexts but there does not exist much research literature on the specific topic of creation of stories with nonlinear structure. we presented several methods for writing nonlinear stories. stories can be written with very commonplace tools such as html editors, wikis, word processors or presentation software. there also exist several tools for specifically writing nonlinear interactive stories. these tools often have features that make writing nonlinear stories easier such as flowchart visualization and integration with more advanced game engines. they often also have an easy use of scripting, such as using variables and conditional branching, although these advanced features were not utilized in this pilot project and were not introduced in detail in this article. in our pilot study, 14 stories were collected from adult students with low information technology skills. students were given only a short introduction to nonlinear storytelling and twine software used for writing stories. the teacher was only limitedly available to supervise and help in technical problems because students continued their work unsupervised after school hours. this experimental setup was used to reveal common learning challenges and possible misconceptions in nonlinear storytelling. out of the 14 stories collected, three stories had some fundamental flaws so that stories contained no hyperlinks. creating a nonlinear story with hyperlinks was introduced to students beforehand but based on these observations, more emphasis should be put on explaining the user interaction and the concept of branching in nonlinear stories. the difference between the link text and the target passage title was emphasized during the introduction of the tool as it is maybe the most difficult concept in using hyperlinks. making efficient passage titles should be considered an important subject in storytelling as it can cause confusion. in this study, only one student had technical problems with the independent link text and the target passage title. submitted stories had many unfinished passages. the process of writing a nonlinear story differs from traditional linear story as nonlinear story can have several branches and all of them must be finished. there are several techniques for this. for example, there can be several different endings or branches can be pieced together in a single ending. this idea could be made clear by practicing with small gamified stories first. we did not include computer programming concepts such as variables and conditional branching in this study. still, hyperlinks and complexity of the story structure presented challenges for the students. this is something that we are interested in our future research: how do these challenges, recognizing them, learning to solve them and gaining fluency in dealing with them, develop their thinking skills generally. these skills are also very close to so-called computational thinking skills which are considered to be of great importance in computer science education. it would be therefore interesting to know if useful transferable skills are accumulated during the activity of nonlinear storytelling. most of the collected stories were of good quality and ready to be implemented in our game. the chosen software tool was found functional and students were able to use it very independently, although it would be better to give more support during the writing process especially in the early phases of learning. students’ views were not inquired formally but computer game development embedded in a regular information technology basic training was considered as a refreshing change for their study routines. this study was a small scale pilot study to better understand nonlinear storytelling process and to increase understanding of how to implement nonlinear storytelling in education. in our future work we will develop teaching methods and materials for nonlinear storytelling in education based on the findings of this study. more research is needed to identify the special features and possible applications of nonlinear storytelling in education. this study will provide some guidance for designing these studies. most of the storytelling tools reviewed were open source licensed software. this allows the modification of software. in our future work, we plan to further modify some of the software features to answer the requirements of educational use. these modifications will include features such as enabling better co-creative processes through sharing and remixing stories. acknowledgment this work was supported by european union regional development fund and the leverage from the eu 2014-2020 programme. references berners-lee, t., hendler, j., & lassila, o. 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(2006). computational thinking. commun. acm, 49(3), 33–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/1118178.1118215 title seminar.net 2015. (authors) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 envisioning diy learning in primary and secondary schools author juana maria sancho-gil university of barcelona. esbrina research group http://esbrina.eu/en/home/ e-mail: juanamsancho@ub.edu fernando hernández-hernández university of barcelona. esbrina research group http://esbrina.eu/en/home/ e-mail: fdohernandez@ub.edu rachel fendler university of barcelona. esbrina research group http://esbrina.eu/en/home/ e-mail: rachel.fendler@ub.edu abstract the diylab project (do it yourself in education: expanding digital competence to foster student agency and collaborative learning. european commission)i seeks to explore the changes (and its educational effects) occurring in the last decade regarding digital competencies, especially in relation to the emergence of a culture of collaboration, that connects youth learning, technology and diy (kafai & peppler, 2011). to achieve the project's objective, we are following a methodology based on the principles of collaborative action research (car). this paper focuses on the first step of the car process and shows the main challenges identified by teachers, students and parents in order to implement the project’s learning philosophy in the current curricula and schools organisation. we carried out a series of focus groups with teachers, students and parents from primary and secondary schools and the university to discuss what diy learning looks like in the participants’ educational contexts. based on these discussions we have begun to analyse how each context imagines diy learning and how it relates to the notion of virtual space. this paper focuses in the spanish primary and secondary school participating in the project. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://esbrina.eu/en/home/ mailto:juanamsancho@ub.edu http://esbrina.eu/en/home/ mailto:fdohernandez@ub.edu http://esbrina.eu/en/home/ mailto:rachel.fendler@ub.edu keywords: autonomous learning, participatory youth culture, digital competence, school innovation, focus groups diylab in january 2014, we began a 3-year project titled do-it-yourself in education: expanding digital competence to foster student agency and collaborative learning.1 this comenius grant stems from the acknowledgement that over the last decade young people’s relationship with digital competencies has evolved drastically. in the last years, our understanding of digital competences has significantly change. first, it considered young people’s critical understanding of new digital media as a key aspect of digital literacy (buckingham, 2003; gilster, 1997). and in a second phase young people were not only envisioned as consumers who browse the internet and share information on social networking sites, but also as producers of content, who contribute to blogs, design animations, graphics, and video productions (ito, baumer, bittanti, boyd, et al. 2009). this has generated alternative approaches to digital competence, such as the proposal of jenkins, purushotma, weigel, clinton, et al (2009, xiii) to “shift the focus … from questions of technological access to those of opportunities for participation and the development of cultural competencies and social skills needed for full involvement.” this project seeks to explore the changes (and their educational effects) which have taken place in the last decade regarding digital competencies, especially in relation to the emergence of a culture of collaboration, that connects young people’s learning, technology and diy philosophy (kafai & peppler, 2011). young people's efforts to create and disseminate digital media have been associated with the growing of the do-it-yourself (diy) movement (spencer, 2005). starting in the '90s (halfacree, 2004) with arts, crafts, and new technologies (eisenberg & buechley, 2008; lankshear & knobel, 2010), it is now prevalent in curriculum contents (guzzetti, elliott, & welsch, 2010), giving educators and students the opportunity to create, share and learn in collaboration. to achieve the project's objectives, the consortium members ii have followed a methodology based on the principles of collaborative action research (car): “a participatory, democratic process, concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview which we believe is emerging at this historical moment. it seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of the individual persons and their communities” (reason & bradbury, 2001, 1). building on this foundation, in the different phases of the project, we will use complementary methods to collect data (green, camill & elmore, 2006), with the purpose of fostering the process of reflection-action-reflection, while developing a culture of collaboration, discussion and purposeful inquiry. an interpretative ethnographic approach one of the more concrete outcomes of this project will be the production of open-source learning materials, developed by students and teachers in the participating institutions. these resources will serve as tools for other learners, linking the work carried out in the project to other schools, universities and broader diy communities. what form these materials will take, how they will circulate, and what type of audience they will generate are questions that we will address along in the project. currently we are in the initial stages of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 project and have yet to negotiate the specifics of the implementation phase in each school and university. at this time, we focused on thinking about how school parents, teachers and students conceptualize the notion of diy learning, garnering information that will be useful when designing the diylab in each context. included in the scope of this project is our interest in studying what happens when schools opt to actively supporting diy learning practices. within this framework of research, our ethnographic approach will not be exclusively concerned with researching “online communities and interactions”. instead, we will develop an interpretative ethnographic inquiry (denzin, 1997) around the observation and study of the interactions between the internet-based diy activities and the school environment (orgad, 2009). in this sense, to borrow from hine’s (2000) categorization, we consider online environments as culture (rather than cultural artefacts) and are attentive to the potential culture shock that may result from the implementation of this project. in order to promote the sustainability of the project within the participating institutions, and perhaps beyond, it is important to understand how diy may be successfully incorporated into the school culture and what tensions it may provoke. this means we cannot only research how students and teachers engage with diy but also, how those experiences affect local understandings of learning, student agency, the role of teachers, and the place for digital tools and online platforms within the school curriculum. focus groups with schoolteachers, students and parents on the topic of diy learning the first step in this research project was to set up a series of focus groups. each participating school (three primary, three secondary) organized three focus groups –two at higher education level, comprising of six teachers, students and parents, respectively (table 1). university researchers and the school coordinators led the discussions in an effort to gain an initial understanding of what diy practices were already taking place in the school environment and what resources the school has to support them. in addition to using this information to inform the design of the diylabs, it is also a rich source of data for considering the points of contact between formal learning and diy experiences, and also for beginning to map out how diy could have a disturbing effect on existing notions of schooling in each context. primary school 6 students who are, or are about to become 5thyear students 5 5th-year teachers 6 parents of 5th-year students secondary school 6 students who are, or are about to become 3rd-year school students 6 teachers of 3rd-year secondary school students 6 parents of 3rd-year secondary school students table 1. focus groups we shared a document with the participants explaining the basic principles of diy philosophy to encourage reflection and to explore their familiarity with the notion of diy. the first proposed questions to discuss were: students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 • up until now, when do you think the teachers at your school have introduced learning experiences related to diy? what did they propose you to do and what tools did you use in the process? • where else do you develop these types of learning practices? • how? with what tools? with whom? teachers • up until now when do you think you or other teachers at your school have introduced learning experiences related to diy? what did you/they do and what tools did you/they use? • where do you think the students develop this kind of learning practices the most? what do they do? with whom do they work? • do you think that the school could improve its offer of these types of learning experiences? how? families • up until now when do you think the school has introduced learning experiences related to diy to the students? what did they do and what tools did they use? • in what other types of situations do your children participate in diy learning experiences? what do they do? with whom do they collaborate? what tools do they use? the contents of the discussion groups were transcribed and analysed using a series of categories, in line with those used for the analysis of official curriculums and the school programmes: 1. knowledge and evaluation of the notion of diy. 2. autonomous and self-regulating learning. 3. interdisciplinary knowledge. 4. digital competence. 5. collaborative and problem-based learning. 6. how to frame the project considering the formal aspects of the curriculum. 7. emerging elements befitting each situation. in the following paragraphs, we first characterise the spanish primary and secondary school. then, based on the content of the discussions takin place in the focus groups, we share a preliminary analysis of the how the spanish school communities participating in the project envisage diy learning and what notions of the virtual are present in this imaginary. more specifically, we will refer to diy learning in and outside school and the notion of the virtual. school features escola virolai of barcelona is located in the district of hortaguinardó. it caters for primary and secondary students. in the 2010-2011 academic year, the school had over 900 students. escola virolai is a charter school, a semipublic institution that receives both public and private funding. the socioeconomic context of the school is of mainly average middle-class families, who are very committed to their children’s education. the core educational principles from the school’s mission statement are: 1. family/school collaboration. 2. the education and personal development of the students. 3. the relationships in the school community are based on affection, respect and trust. 4. striving to provide the best possible learning opportunities to enable every child to maximize their abilities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 5. helping students become good citizens with reasoning skills, creativity and critical capacity, who are able to commit to building a better society. escola virolai firmly believes that educational innovation is the only way to attend to the changing needs of students and the society, and has been on the cutting-edge of integrating ict in the classroom. the school is implementing the tac pla (learning and knowledge technology-lkt plan) based on different official initiatives such as educat 2.0 project (prior to educat 1x1). the main aim of this plan is to progressively defining a global and fundamental methodological change that incorporates methodologies that ensure the central role of students in the construction of their learning, the creation of collaborative learning environments and the role of the teacher as learning facilitator. the tac pla seeks to: • define the uses of different communication, management and teaching environments: web, clickedu, virtual classroom, virtual corner and other educational platforms to take advantage of all possible resources to enhance communication, collaboration and consistency among all levels of the educational community. • review the sequencing of digital competence, incorporating it transversely into course schedules, defining the assessment strategies used to ensure consistency in both course, class years, and whole school levels. • prioritize the use of lkt technology as a tool to improve individual attention to all students and increase their role in learning. the school has a good and updated computing infrastructure with internet connection in all school spaces. it is using a good range of digital tools. in addition, it has an in-service professional development plan especially focused on the improvement of teachers’ digital skills. diy learning in and outside school 1. the concept of diy is not widely known, but participatory activities are typical both in and outside school the teachers demonstrated a passing familiarity with the term “diy” but did not feel identify with the movement. in the case of the teachers, it was something they had heard of, or read about it, but it does not come from their practice and specific experiences. however, because of a well-defined school mission statement, the teachers had a clear idea about the importance of student autonomy and placed this characteristic at the centre of the school project. in fact, they mentioned activities linked to solidarity actions encouraged by the school. the diy philosophy connects with one of the fundamental aspects of the educational project that involves the pupils’ participation in the school. secondary school students had some experience with diy tutorials on the internet, claiming that diy allowed one to make things one would not have otherwise have been able to make, or claiming that diy was about doing things without help from others. they summarised it as “doing something yourself”. they related it to the possibility of doing things they like by themselves and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 finding tutorials for doing what they want. they have read about this question and have found out on internet and some have explained it to others. the primary school pupils know the term and recognise it from other activities they have done, and they understand it as “learning something on your own”, and in some cases refer to tutorials, internet, videos, youtube, mathematics or reading web pages. parents claimed to never have heard the term, but were able to describe in great detail activities their children engaged in that went beyond the traditional school curriculum, where their level of interest lead them to do more, both on their own and at school. secondary school families stated they did not know what diy was and have never heard about this movement or the philosophy associated with it. throughout the session, however, reference was made to a series of projects that are undertaken in the school and which could be linked to this movement. the primary school families introduced the question of the cultural difference; they thought that there are contexts more directed towards this philosophy than others are. this reflection recalls the need to not forget that ‘the school does not educate alone’ and that the cultural and social context has an important influence that is transmitted through the educational guidelines of the families, the media and the value they all give, not only to know what, but to know how, where, for what and why. for all them, putting the diy philosophy into practice involves a series of predispositions and challenges. the primary school teachers are clear about the importance of accompaniment, of mediation in the learning process. the secondary school ones raised doubts and were ambivalent about the degree of autonomy pupils should have to develop in the project. 2. diy activities in table 2 we have compile a list of activities that teachers, parents and students identified as containing elements of diy learning. in school outside school computer classes, where the students are creating apps. after completing 5 assignments, they can design their own app. “synthesis credit” project: “we have to work on a specific theme, but aside from that we can do what we want.” the “entrepreneurship project”: in the class educating citizens, the project allows students to design their own businesses. lego league: an extracurricular project that is “really fun!” according to a parent’s comments, “the participation is horizontal and the kids teach each other.” open school day. the event when the school is open to the perspective and current students’ families. students collaborate by organizing the activities and exhibitions. extracurricular activities offered tv: teaches “basic life skills.” school exchanges video tutorials. “youtube teaches you a lot”. “you can always find a tutorial there if you need it.” yahoo answers books. “you can learn as much from books as you do from clicking around on clickedu (a language platform).” music. “many kids in english classes aren’t interested and they don’t learn… but as soon as a song becomes popular they just listen to the lyrics and understand it! scripts: an online messaging game el rincón del vago (in english: the slacker’s corner): a website “where people upload their schoolwork, and it’s there, you share it.” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 during school hours, such as the “midday workshop” or “public speaking workshop”. students volunteer to participating and learn different skills or do community service activities. table 2. diy learning activities. 3. diy introduces tensions within traditional understandings of education from the content analysis of the various focus groups emerged a series of tensions that we synthesize as follows.  does diy replace the teacher? there was a growing anxiety among teachers regarding their hypothetical role in a “do-it-yourself” classroom environment. one of them asked: “when the kids design their own learning, autonomously, using new technology, what is the teacher’s role? what will it be like?” students and teachers described many instances where the young people were encouraged to act autonomously. therefore, it could appear that the phrase do-it-yourself limits the way teachers can imagine their contribution to the process.  to what extent do students want to assume more responsibility? secondary school students’ value having a say in what they study, but diy learning also poses a good deal of doubts and ambivalence for them. “internet is a space where you can get information about diy… but it also allows you to copy, slack off, and get distracted!” “when you have more freedom at school some people just say, “ok. i’m going home!” apparently the role of responsibility inherent in diy is an unsettling notion for the young people in question.  what happens to assessment? parents, students and teachers expressed doubts regarding the assessment of diy learning practices. there is already an acknowledgement that assessment is problematic and that removing any form of standardization in the learning process result into an even less transparent process. notions of the virtual when discussing the possibilities and potential setbacks of diy learning, the conversation began to introduce different understandings of how the virtual environment interacts with education today. 1. the idea that children are ‘digital natives’ is still a pervasive discourse parents remark on the facility with which young people use technology to create interactive content and compare that with what they did as young people. they considered this fact as both positive, in the sense that young people are seen as possessing the skills to succeed, but also as negative, as there is an acknowledgement that this comes at the expense of other skills, knowledge, attitudes, etc. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 “using new technology, they can do it all (websites, groups…). it’s as if they’ve forgotten their hands, or their imagination, at least the way we understood them.” the consensus appeared to be that today new skills, digital skills, are not necessarily seen as being worse, but they are understood as being essentially different from analogical skill sets. during the project questioning this perceived difference may be a productive exercise for thinking about creative learning or autonomous learning as not necessarily dependent on the use of digital technology. 2. the internet is an archive of open resources, available for personal use there is a tension that arises when discussing open-source materials, because they are seen as both a fund of knowledge and a potential shortcut, allowing you to get a result without doing the work. the idea of autonomous learning was familiar to all focus group participants and it appears that it is well managed and has become an integral part of the activities carried out at the primary and secondary school participating in the project. however, when discussing “diy learning” it emerged that it is not considered exactly the same thing. diy implies more freedom and choice, and less structure. we noted during the focus group discussions that there was little mention of the collaborative dimension. the “giving back to the community” type of ethos that is prominent in the diy movement received very little attention. differentiating between the idea of having total autonomy in one’s learning and the concept of becoming an active and equal citizen within a learning community may be a productive starting point when designing diylabs. 3. connectivity is a way of living and learning parents’ remark on the high level of connectivity they observe among their children, commenting that: “they have learned to be permanently connected to a virtual world, which we didn’t have when we were students. this gives them a great window for sharing their feelings, experiences, opinions… lots of things… they spend all day sharing.” primary school teachers describe how their students are accustomed to working in groups. illustrative of what is referred to as life-wide learning (banks, au, ball, bell, et al., 2007) they mention that their students learn from the teachers, their peers and their families. the parents went on to corroborate this sentiment. while the notion of community was notably absent when discussing the potentials and perils of bringing more diy practices into the schools, it did appear here, in discussions that refer to the way young people use technology to stay communicate and express themselves. parents paint a picture of young people constantly sharing and learning with others. 4. virtual space, in educational terms, provides a space of infinite differentiation relying more on the internet and student interests forces the school community to re-think the importance of core curriculum content. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 8 the focus groups discussed whether young people should be learning the same things, and if so, in the same way, and if not, how to assess learning. some students and parents discussed learning practices that appear to be increasingly widespread and have little to do with traditional teaching (collins & halverson, 2009; thomas & seely brown, 2011). in the parents’ words: “they have a different approach to create and are able to create interactive content on their own world. they do it by using new technology (websites, groups, etc.).” "you could say that technology dismantles time ... they have learned to live with them and achieve their goals." “they create your own learning and sharing communities. the whatsapp, for example, has been a brutal change. they solve many questions (educational and not educational) [...] i think it can contribute much, much, much to education." the focus groups talk about what it means to have a “solid knowledge foundation” representing two schools of thought. on one hand, it is the idea of a predetermined set of facts about the world and standards for resolving problems, organized on a scale of more simple to more complex (sawyer, 2008). on the other hand, an idea emerges that involves a set of knowledge and skills developed by not only focusing on the what, but also on how, why and for whom. conclusions in this early stage of the project, we are interested in learning about how a transversal project like diylab can be integrated into the primary and secondary schools and higher education. we want also explore how educational communities that value autonomous learning – such as the institutions that agreed to participate in this project – conceptualize and work with diy practices. on the one hand, there is a sense that diy is somehow already happening and that it is a part of young people’s lives. we have noted that young people are highly connected and literate in the their use of digital technology and that they value and seek out learning opportunities, both in and out of school, that provide engaging avenues for learning, playing and socializing. on the other hand, in the case of the participating spanish school, we discovered that although they offer a lot of support for autonomous learning and the transversal development of digital competences, the notion of diy implied something beyond what the school community was already doing. the concept of diy troubles basic understandings of schooling, such as the core curriculum, the role of teachers and students, and assessment frameworks. questions abound when deliberating how, or to what extent diy deserves a place in educational systems. in general, we found that practically all the participants in the focus groups had some idea about the notion and educational implications of the diy philosophy. however, the point of view of each group differs. our implicit observation and interpretation was that, all three-target groups contributed their own perspective to the discussions: teachers’ knowledge of the diy philosophy comes from documental sources, but the term did not typically appeared in participant’s specific experiences and practices. they rather mentioned extra-curriculum activities linked to solidarity actions and expressed confidence in students’ abilities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 9 primary and secondary school pupils summarised diy as “doing something yourself”. they related it to the possibility of doing things they like by themselves, such as finding tutorials online to learn to do what they want, and in some cases refer to tutorials, internet, videos, youtube, mathematics or reading web pages. secondary school students were a little sceptical when evaluating to what extent the school can promote genuine autonomous and self-regulated learning processes in accordance with the diy philosophy. in their own words: “it cannot be done in a normal school like this one... in other words, it cannot be done through an educational system if what you want is to impose contents on the course”. “it might be possible but not in a school setting in which the contents are set by a ministry and not by a spontaneous order”. they also pointed out the importance of the pupils’ predisposition to learn. for parents, while the term diy was unfamiliar to most, they were able to reference a series of projects that are undertaken in the schools which they associated with diy which they linked to this movement, as well as list different extracurricular activities their children engage in. parents also had a wider view of students’ lives, incorporating activities both in and outside school, and easily drew connections between the two, stressing how the development of digital competence went beyond school walls. from an analysis focus group content, it is clear that the virtual world is considered a vast resource. this presents both an opportunity—information is more accessible and learning opportunities multiply—and risk—the lack of regulation, standards and structure is unsettling. regarding our project, a productive way to move forward is to think about the collaborative ethos implicit within the diy movement. by moving away from a discourse that defines online materials as resources, towards thinking about how to participate in, and benefit from, collaborative learning environments, we hope to foster a more sustainable and far-reaching integration of the diylab project into schools. references banks, j. a., au, k. h., ball, a. f., bell, p., gordon, e. w., gutiérrez, k., heath, s.b., lee, c.d., lee, y., mahiri, j., nasir, n.s., valdes, g. i., & zhou, m. (2007). learning in and out of school in diverse environments. life-long, life-wide, lifedeep. the life center for multicultural education. http://www.ibparticipation.org/pdf/learningindiverseenvironments.pdf (24 /05/2008). buckingham, d. (2003). media education: literacy, learning and contemporary culture. cambridge, england: polity press. collins, a. & halverson, r. (2009). rethinking education in the age of technology. the digital revolution of schooling in america. new york: teachers college. denzin, n. (1997). interpretative ethnography. thousand oaks, ca: sage. eisenberg, m., & buechley, l. (2008). pervasive fabrication: making construction ubiquitous in education. journal of software, 3(4): 62–68. gilster, p. (1997). digital literacy. new york, ny: wiley. green, j.l, camill, g., & elmore, p.b. (2006). handbook of complementary methods in education research. routledge for aera. guzzetti, b., elliott, k., & welsch, d. (2010). diy media in the classroom. new york, ny: teachers college press. halfacree, k. (2004). ‘it could only do wrong’: academic research and diy culture. in d. fuller & r. kitchin (eds.), radical theory/critical praxis: making a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 10 http://www.ibparticipation.org/pdf/learningindiverseenvironments.pdf difference beyond the academy? (68–78). victoria, british columbia: praxis press. hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. london. sage. ito, m., baumer, s., bittanti, m., boyd, d., cody, r., herr-stephenson, b., horst, h.a., lange, p.g., mahendran, d., martínez, k.z., pascoe, c. j., perkel, d., robinson, l., sims, c., & tripp, l. (2010). hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media. cambridge, ma: mit press. jenkins, h., purushotma, r., weigel, m., clinton, k., & robison, a.j. (2009). confronting the challenges of participatory culture. media education for the 21st century. cambridge, ma: mit press. kafai, y.b., & peppler, k. a. (2011). youth, technology, and diy: developing participatory competences in creative media production. review of research in education, 35: 89-119. lankshear, m., & knobel, c. (eds.). (2010). diy media. creating, sharing and learning with new technologies. new york, ny: peter lang. orgad, s. (2009). how can researchers make sense of the issues involved in collecting and interpreting online and offline data? in, a. n. markham & n. k. baym (eds.), internet inquiry: conversations about method (33-53). thousand oaks ca: sage. reason, p., & bradbury, h. (2001). handbook of action research. participative inquiry and practice. london: sage. sawyer, r. k. (2008). optimising learning implications of learning sciences research. paris. oecd. spencer, a. (2005). diy: the rise of lo-fi culture. london, england: marion boyars. thomas, t., & seely brown, j. (2011). a new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. lexington, ky: create space. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 11 i education, audio-visual and culture executive agency. 543177-llp-1-20131-es-ka3mp. http://diylab.edu ii university of barcelona and escola virolai (barcelona) from spain, university of oulu and oulu university teacher training school, from finland, charles university and zš korunovační faculty school, from czech republic. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 12 http://diylab.edu/ http://www.korunka.gns.cz/ envisioning diy learning in primary and secondary schools author abstract diylab to achieve the project's objectives, the consortium members1f have followed a methodology based on the principles of collaborative action research (car): “a participatory, democratic process, concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit... an interpretative ethnographic approach one of the more concrete outcomes of this project will be the production of open-source learning materials, developed by students and teachers in the participating institutions. these resources will serve as tools for other learners, linking the work ... included in the scope of this project is our interest in studying what happens when schools opt to actively supporting diy learning practices. within this framework of research, our ethnographic approach will not be exclusively concerned with research... in order to promote the sustainability of the project within the participating institutions, and perhaps beyond, it is important to understand how diy may be successfully incorporated into the school culture and what tensions it may provoke. this mean... focus groups with schoolteachers, students and parents on the topic of diy learning the first step in this research project was to set up a series of focus groups. each participating school (three primary, three secondary) organized three focus groups –two at higher education level, comprising of six teachers, students and parents, r... table 1. focus groups we shared a document with the participants explaining the basic principles of diy philosophy to encourage reflection and to explore their familiarity with the notion of diy. the first proposed questions to discuss were: the contents of the discussion groups were transcribed and analysed using a series of categories, in line with those used for the analysis of official curriculums and the school programmes: 1. knowledge and evaluation of the notion of diy. 2. autonomous and self-regulating learning. 3. interdisciplinary knowledge. 4. digital competence. 5. collaborative and problem-based learning. 6. how to frame the project considering the formal aspects of the curriculum. 7. emerging elements befitting each situation. in the following paragraphs, we first characterise the spanish primary and secondary school. then, based on the content of the discussions takin place in the focus groups, we share a preliminary analysis of the how the spanish school communities parti... school features escola virolai firmly believes that educational innovation is the only way to attend to the changing needs of students and the society, and has been on the cutting-edge of integrating ict in the classroom. the school is implementing the tac pla (learn... diy learning in and outside school 1. the concept of diy is not widely known, but participatory activities are typical both in and outside school the teachers demonstrated a passing familiarity with the term “diy” but did not feel identify with the movement. in the case of the teachers, it was something they had heard of, or read about it, but it does not come from their practice and specific e... secondary school students had some experience with diy tutorials on the internet, claiming that diy allowed one to make things one would not have otherwise have been able to make, or claiming that diy was about doing things without help from others. t... parents claimed to never have heard the term, but were able to describe in great detail activities their children engaged in that went beyond the traditional school curriculum, where their level of interest lead them to do more, both on their own and ... for all them, putting the diy philosophy into practice involves a series of predispositions and challenges. the primary school teachers are clear about the importance of accompaniment, of mediation in the learning process. the secondary school ones ra... 2. diy activities in table 2 we have compile a list of activities that teachers, parents and students identified as containing elements of diy learning. table 2. diy learning activities. 3. diy introduces tensions within traditional understandings of education from the content analysis of the various focus groups emerged a series of tensions that we synthesize as follows.  does diy replace the teacher? there was a growing anxiety among teachers regarding their hypothetical role in a “do-it-yourself” classroom environment. one of them asked: “when the kids design their own learning, autonomously, using new technology, what is the teacher’s role? what...  to what extent do students want to assume more responsibility? secondary school students’ value having a say in what they study, but diy learning also poses a good deal of doubts and ambivalence for them. “internet is a space where you can get information about diy… but it also allows you to copy, slack off, and get distracted!”  what happens to assessment? parents, students and teachers expressed doubts regarding the assessment of diy learning practices. there is already an acknowledgement that assessment is problematic and that removing any form of standardization in the learning process result into an... notions of the virtual when discussing the possibilities and potential setbacks of diy learning, the conversation began to introduce different understandings of how the virtual environment interacts with education today. secondary school students were a little sceptical when evaluating to what extent the school can promote genuine autonomous and self-regulated learning processes in accordance with the diy philosophy. in their own words: “it cannot be done in a normal ... on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology a case study of editorials in a norwegian academic journal issn: 1504-4831 vol 16, no 2 (2020), e4044 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4044 ©2020 (geir haugsbakk/yngve nordkvelle). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology a case study of editorials in a norwegian academic journal geir haugsbakk inland norway university of applied sciences email: geir.haugsbakk@inn.no yngve troye nordkvelle inland norway university of applied sciences email: yngve.nordkvelle@inn.no abstract this article has emerged from a project aiming at gaining an overview of actors and key figures, their perspectives and results after more than 30 years of ambitious governmental efforts to introduce computer technology in school. the main focus of the article is on what we consider to be dominant arguments, discourses and issues related to the hegemonization of meaning formation. our line of reasoning is based primarily on a case study of the leading journal in the field of educational technology in norway over the last fifteen years, the nordic journal of digital literacy. this is a mainstream research journal, which publishes peer-reviewed articles. however, being subject to the norwegian ministry of education and research, it represents a rather interesting case for interrogating the issue of hegemony. placing the journal’s policy at the forefront, the focus of our analysis will be on the editorials. the main findings, based on issues of the journal over the first ten years are that the editorials are in keeping with what can be regarded as the political priorities and the prevailing political discourses in the field. they contain relatively few, if any, critical perspectives and scant reference is made to the research articles and research https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4044 on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 area it claims to serve. the method used is document analysis, inspired by discourseanalytic approaches. keywords: educational technology, historical perspectives, academic journals, editorials, hegemonic discourses, discourse analysis introduction the widespread introduction of computer technology in schools in many western countries during the 1980s was received enthusiastically. yet the evidence for the claims that the new technology yields results in learning is scant (livingstone, 2012). much attention has been paid to how teaching and learning can be made easier and more effective by the use of new technology and how its implementation can increase motivation and learning outcomes. problematization and critical reflection have been rare. this paper aims to identify the advocates of this trend and the way the figures are presented. analysis of the main journals in the field might offer an avenue for investigation. moreover, a series of studies has given rise to some interesting research approaches (bulfin, henderson & johnson, 2013; selwyn, 2012; bigum, bulfin & johnson, 2015). these provide a reliable starting point for our enquiry. we start by highlighting a norwegian case, the nordic journal of digital literacy, an open access scholarly journal initiated by “the norwegian centre for ict in education”. the main purpose of the research presented in this paper has been to identify the discourse of the editorials of the journal and then to consider the extent to which it relates to what might be regarded as the dominating political discourse in the field. from its inception, the aim of this journal has been to create “a platform for the critical analysis of digital literacy and competence, and the use of ict in an educational context”.1 what is of particular interest here is that the centre publishing the journal has been falling under the responsibility of the norwegian ministry of education and research.2 the centre explicitly consolidated its position at the outset by stating that its mission was “to implement government policy within our area of responsibility using the resources made available to us”.3 yet, the nordic journal of digital literacy has continued to be a standard research publication that carries peer-reviewed articles. it ranked briefly as one of the most prestigious journals in norway. it was for a period a level 2 journal. in the norwegian system scientific journals are divided into two tiers. tier 2 journals are ranked significantly above tier 1 journals, accounting for approximately 20% of the publications in any given 1 the main aim as presented in the journal: https://www.idunn.no/dk?languageid=2#/about 2 the centre was in 2018 relocated to the the norwegian directorate for education and training, which is the executive agency for the ministry of education and research. 3 http://www.scientix.eu/national-contact-point-norway https://www.idunn.no/dk?languageid=2#/about https://www.idunn.no/dk?languageid=2#/about http://www.scientix.eu/national-contact-point-norway http://www.scientix.eu/national-contact-point-norway on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 field. however, based on the centre’s position with respect to the authorities it was interesting to learn how and to what extent the journal reflects the prevalent political discourse as well as how these matters are presented and discussed. more generally, greater importance should be attributed to the way its position as a policy-directed journal produced to a high academic standard deals with the inherent conflict. the nordic journal of digital literacy was founded in 2006. during the first four years it was titled “digital kompetanse” (“digital competence”). our analyses are based on the journal’s first ten years – 2006-2015 – in which regular articles and editorials appear. a total of 24 editorials are taken into consideration excluding those written by guest editors. if we had focused our attention on the journal’s guest editors and the published articles the impression gained would have been different. however, the editorials analysed are not linked in any way to the articles. we start by presenting the method of analysis and go on to outline the theoretical framework and the research literature with a main focus on journals and editorials. the analysis of the editorials is based on: the visions and premises, the basic concepts, the journal as part of the evolution of society, the dominating actors and key references, how learning and technology is addressed and examples of challenges, contradictions and dichotomies. a discourse-analytic approach our method for the analysis is document analysis, which has been established as a discourse-analytic approach (haugsbakk, 2010). this concerns the way meaning is created through language; it endeavours to reveal patterns of meaning-making (wetherell et al., 2001). the project is inspired by norman fairclough’s ideas concerning the recontextualization of the dominating discourses in society, and how discourses from one domain in society influences another (fairclough, 1992; chouliaraki & fairclough, 1999). this is a matter of how education is influenced by external discourses about technology, as computer technology was not originally developed for pedagogical purposes (haugsbakk, 2011). the particular focus of our article is on the impact of the dominating political discourse on an academic journal. for fairclough a key question is if the recontextualization process entails a colonization by the external discourse into new areas or whether this takes place through an active process of adaptation and independent, critical reflection. this is an important aspect in analysing the editorials. we wanted to identify the differences and similarities between political and academic discourses. a part of this is how and to what extent the editorials relate to the main strategies of the political field compared to the variety of research findings in the on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 educational field. the result of a widespread colonization of discourses is hegemonic forms of meaning construction being developed. as ernesto laclau and chantal mouffe (2001) point out in their discourse theory this might involve creating unambiguity out of ambiguity. reinhart koselleck (2004) underlines the critical importance of the use of key concepts, which have proved highly relevant as part of our analysis. a basic premise for the project presented in this article is that the editorials of the journal might be valuable for reflection on the dominating discourses of the field. in this respect, we have to some extent been inspired by michel foucault who argued that analysis should not be limited to a particular type of material. for him, diaries were as important as canonical works. in his studies of psychiatry as a new discipline in the 19th century, foucault relates to a discursive formation that was expressed in various ways in the organization of society. it manifested itself in very different types of statements, ”in legal texts, in literature, in philosophy, in political decisions, and in the statements made and the opinions expressed in daily life” (foucault, 1972, p. 179). in our examination of scientific journals, we have also drawn on research which considers new journals to be equated with important events. new journals as important events the founding of a new journal in any academic field is always significant. mulkay (1979) suggests that a new journal indicates a magmatic movement in the field has taken place, and room is made for a contender in the new territory. once established, the selection of editor(s) and editorial board members reflects how the journal positions itself in relation to current trends and tendencies. vanderstraaten, vandermoere and hermans (2016) have investigated scholarly communication in aera journals from 1931 to 2014, focusing on how authority and authorship have evolved over this period, followed by how the national/international orientation has shifted. they have also examined how the aera journals are linked to journals in other domains in particular psychology and sociology. they describe how the editorials of the journals were used to to integrate and complicate the basic tenets and purpose of american educational research. they see scholarly communication in a journal as representing: “[…] scientific communities as precariously constructed and historically contingent networks of specialists. they depend on social contexts that support the development of particular interests [....].. these networks depend on regular communication among their members. publication venues, such as scholarly periodicals, channel this communication process” (vanderstraaten et. al, 2016, p.3). they contend that these journals “control and steer the communication process among on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 specialists”, and they therefore shed light on the “morphogenesis” of their specialization”. mulkay’s (1979) analysis is derived from the sociology of science and broadens the critical perspectives of r.k. merton and thomas kuhn concerning how journals portray conflicts and disruption in otherwise stable fields. how can conflicting or contentious topics be expressed in the “communication process” of a scientific community? it is worth asking exactly how hegemonic and critical perspectives are created and articulated. in this respect the nordic journal of digital literacy is worthy of attention since as well as providing a forum for researchers in the field its goal is to follow governmental policies and promote one particular line of thought. xie, wu and li (2019) claim that the editor occupies the highest position in the scientific power hierarchy. zdeněk and lososová (2018) and oleinik (2014) point out that the editors are supposed to have academic capability and therefore the scholarly power of making decisions about the acceptance, revision and rejection of articles (see also resnik & elmore, 2016; roth, 2002). the fairly new approach called editormetrics has been developed to produce quantitative evaluation which takes the editor/s of the journals as the empirical method for scientific analysis “[....], based on the idea that the prestige of a journal is closely linked to the journal’s editors” (xie, wu & li, 2019, p. 1334). some findings suggest for instance that a journal’s impact has a strong correlation with how productive the editorial staff is in terms of research output (walters, 2016). another finding presented by zdeněk and lososová (2018) is that if members of an editorial board publish in their “own” journal, this correlates with low impact figures for that journal, implying that the base of authors should extend very broadly. the constellation of a journal’s management structures is vital. teixeira da silva and al-khatib (2017) list the following as typical management structures: “[....] that are operated by professional societies in which editors are elected by members of the society, journals that are operated by scientists with a particular area of expertise who select editors and editorial board members based on professional relationships and expertise, journals that are operated by university departments or programs, and journals that are operated by private for-profit or non-profit companies” (p.1802). this suggests that the sociometric pattern that memberships of editorial boards offer, shape the pattern of knowledge management thus making the “invisible college” effect very visible. this may result in networks that act as “gatekeepers” and decide which discourses have significance and which do not. proprietors of journals will therefore seek to consolidate relationships with established scholars to enhance their status and improve the journal’s (teixeira & oliveira, 2018; zuccala, 2006). in this article we will consider editorials as expressions of a management structure with an editor as the director and “judge of the judges” (ray, 2002). the texts in the nordic journal of digital literacy were signed by the editor. whether this indicates that the on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 editorial board had been directly involved in producing the text or not is not easy to establish. the maintenance of ethical standards in editorial decisions is, as suggested by ray (2002), a comprehensive and complex duty, which in the case of medical research journals implies identifying the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, health policies, and paradigmatic rivalry. the editorials in this case will show signs of that particular morphogenesis of the journal in question. the sole sponsor of this particular journal is the royal norwegian ministry of education and the question is how the scientific aims of the journal are handled within this ethical context of politics, industry and the research community. previous research on morphologies expressed in norwegian journals vanderstraaten et. al’s research indicates that it is useful to see new journals as the expression of a network of specialists in an emerging field. harald jarning (2016) offers a critical analysis of the century-old ideology of the most prominent norwegian educational journal, norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, which first appeared in 1917. he traces various “knowledge regimes” ranging from the initial rural and anti-modern editor and founder, torstein høverstad, who in keeping with the zeitgeist was an exponent of the nationalist spirit, up to recent developments with a blurred understanding of “pedagogy”. this journal expressed the views of an engaged network of specialists situated partly in teacher education institutions and partly in teacher organizations before the academic field of “education” had become established. sæther (2011), who has written extensively about the evolution of norwegian educational sciences, suggests the following “regimes” are applicable to the norwegian discourse on education: the technocratic regime versus the critical humanist regime. it is evident that he is describing five different lines of thinking: 1) the liberal progressive tradition, 2) the socialist tradition, 3) the political instrumental tradition, 4) the christian conservative tradition and 5) the anti-authoritarian tradition (sæther, 2011, pp. 225-226). in historical overviews, the split in the institute of educational research at the university of oslo, between the “traditionalist” and the “revolutionary” in 1973/74 reflects the split between the technocratic and the anti-authoritarian regime. this split was significant for broader movements in the nordic scene of academic publishing. for several years the “traditionalists” were in charge of the scandinavian review of educational research (now published by taylor & francis). the oppositional group closed ranks on a nordic platform, forming in 1972 the nordic educational research association. this organisation adopted annual nordic conventions, and from 1983 had its journal nordisk pedagogik (nordic studies in education, published by universitetsforlaget/scandinavian university press). on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 researching journals of educational technology: morphongenic investigations in this paper we aim to describe and analyse the editorials. journals in this field have previously been analysed for content of journal articles using quantitative techniques. a survey conducted by bulfin, henderson, johnson and selwyn (2014) on 468 researchers claim that journal articles in the field of educational technology are primarily based on “relatively basic forms of descriptive research” (p. 409). olofson and lindberg (2014) offer similar criticism. summarising critical reviews from diane laurillard, neil selwyn, roger säljö and o. mcgarr, they point out a) the lack of theoretical coherent positions, b) that the studies presented are seldom connected to other research results and c) claims of generalisability are overstated. selwyn (2012) comments that as a relatively new discipline it suffers from lack of consistency and struggles for identity and status. there is therefore reason to expect that the editorials might express the striving for an identity and position in relation to the scientific community. why target nordic journal of digital literacy? bulfin et.al (2014) say that they ask simple questions in order to claim that they interrogate their research material in a straightforward fashion: “what do we do?” and: “how could we do things better?” (p. 343). the first question is crucial: what does the journal “do” and how can we analyse the dominant ideas, perspectives, outcomes and assessments, in light of the above factors? since it is a norwegian journal, the way it is influenced by the politics, social movements and modernisation of norwegian society is important. how does it relate to the division between technocratic or humanist values? can it be related to the liberal progressive tradition, a socialist tradition, the political instrumental tradition, the christian conservative tradition or an anti-authoritarian tradition (sæther, 2011) all of which are specific to the norwegian (and nordic) tradition? how is it possible to establish theoretical positions, purposes and intentions, or traits that suggest that the weaknesses described above namely, the lack of historical and political contextualisation, positivist claims and lack of constructive attempts foster theoretical coherence? visions and premises the visions presented in the editorials of the nordic journal of digital literacy enjoy a relatively independent status in relation to the articles. they appear initially as comments on current topics and to a limited extent provide introductions to the articles. this differs significantly from the editorials written by the guest editors. one of the main parts of the visions is, as we perceive it, to create the “school of the future” and to be part of an indispensable digital knowledge promotion to reach that goal. the very first issue states: “in the journal we will report on projects, activities and networks that contribute to the on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 digital knowledge promotion" (1-2006).4 creating the school of the future entails enhancing learning by the use of ict, and an important part of this is to draw on the competence acquired by young people outside school. this vision is for instance expressed through such statements as “give pupils a voice on their own terms”. part of the visions expressed through the editorials involves the creation of a network of researchers and developers representing unified approaches in the field of educational technology. a clear message is repeated: developing a policy for the implementation of ict in an educational setting requires holistic actions that need to be shared by its stakeholders. the editorials describe a successful line of development since the inception of the norwegian centre for ict in education, and they place the centre in the middle of a winning team of consecutive governmental action plans, white papers and national curricular reforms. the editorials also explain how the development of the centre goes hand in hand with international events. the politics of the eu and the oecd point in the same direction, and norwegian policies are well advised to follow. the rationale for this is twofold: ict is instrumental for keeping up with economic development in the oecd. moreover, the information and knowledge society requires constant change and adjustment to new technology. this is in keeping with such positive traits as creativity, community and a “digital culture for learning”. by referring to the european commissioner for education and culture the editorials claim that ict contributes to economic growth and that “digital literacy is becoming a prerequisite for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship” (1-2006). furthermore, it is suggested that an agreement on a common set of concepts is needed, and a key term for describing and approaching the field is essential. this term is digital competence. a common set of concepts digital competence as a password the editorial of the 10th anniversary edition of nordic journal of digital literacy states: “the term digital competence has been something akin to a password into new fields politically as well as pedagogically”. related to this, “passwords” are understood as generating ideas and contributing to new ways of thinking and providing access to discussions (ann.-2015). “competence” is regarded as a common agenda setter: “digital competence has set the agenda for innovation, education and pedagogy in europe” (3-2013). the concept is perceived as having a double function. on the one hand, it is “the principal policy concept in innovation policy and in educational reform”, while on the other, the concept has 4 the authors’ translation. on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 become “an objective in the development of schools and in practical pedagogy”. we go on to read that “educationalists are now working on anchoring digital competence in theories for learning and media development and further developing the concept”. a broad and open concept of competence is promoted. this includes skills and knowledge as well as various aspects of academic critical thinking, ethical considerations and bildung. this is in keeping with how the concept is perceived by the oecd and the eu, and is also closely related to their definitions. it is claimed that the oecds deseco-report (definition and selection of competencies) has become “the foundation for international collaboration on work related to the concept of competence” (3-2013). the deseco program was established in 1997 and focused on three basic competency categories: (1) using tools interactively, (2) interacting in heterogeneous groups and (3) acting independently. these competencies are required by most people on a daily basis in a variety of situations. likewise, references are made to the recommendation of the european parliament and of the council on key competences for lifelong learning (3-2013). it is argued that the definitions of digital competences in norway and in the eu are built on common ground and that the concept is closely related to new concepts such as “the 21st-century skills” (12008). reflecting the evolution of society it is assumed that “the school of the future” reflects developments in society (3-2013). to meet the complex demands inherent in a rapidly changing society, it is necessary to promote a digital culture for learning (4-2006). referring to the oecd it is stated that “the educational sector must follow the impact of technological development” (1-2-2013). education is crucially important for social development, and competence is society's most important resource. but the promotion of knowledge has to be combined with the use of new technology. this is essential for economic growth, as exemplified in the following statement made by the european commissioner for education and culture: “digital literacy is fast becoming a prerequisite for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship” (12006). an example which has been much discussed in an editorial in 2007, is “wikinomics”, based on don tapscott's book wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything. the author is supported in his contention that not only will wikinomics dramatically change the way we produce goods and services, but also the way research and education are conducted (4-2007). according to tapscott, wikinomics is based on four ideas: “openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally”. however, a prerequisite for the development of wikinomics as a global trend in innovation is the “net generation”. as early as 1997, this new digital generation was described by tapscott in the book growing up digital. the rise of the net generation, and the editor adds that this is book has had a on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 significant impact on the development of the norwegian centre for ict in education. as far as wikinomics is concerned, the conviction is that the presence of internet will usher in a new era in which individual businesses will be involved in extensive collaboration with the outside world, and this is regarded as the key to innovation in the future. tapscott uses the canadian mining company goldcorp inc. as an example. the company's fifty-year-old gold mine in red lake, ontario, failed to produce enough gold and risked bankruptcy. they were subsequently inspired by the development of linux and the collaboration between volunteer programmers worldwide. the editor presents this as a success, and the conclusion, according to tapscott, is: "the world is your r & d department". dominating actors key references based on the references made in the analysed editorials, the most prominent actor is oecd. oecd is mentioned 50 times in the 24 editorials. there are references to several reports: the definition and selection of key competencies (2002), schooling of tomorrow: think scenarios, rethink education (2006), new millennium learners (2007-2012), inspired by technology, driven by pedagogy: a systemic approach to technology-based school innovations (2010), 1-to-1 in education current practices, international comparative research evidence and policy implications (2010), connected minds (2012), innovative learning environments (2013), measuring innovation in education (2014). the references are used to confirm the editor’s arguments. they are presented and justified without any critical commentary. what appears to be important is the way oecd points things out, argues, what is emphasised and so on. likewise, reference is made to reports from the european commission/parliament, including: elearning: better elearning for europe (2003), key competences for lifelong learning: a european reference framework (2004), survey of schools: ict in education (2013), a digital agenda for europe (2010), europe 2020: a strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth (2010). the norwegian centre for ict in education is also mentioned quite often in a selfreferential way. this is true of reports like digital kompetanse: fra 4. basisferdighet til digital dannelse (2003), itu monitor 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2013, digital skole hver dag (2005), sites 2006. norsk rapport (2008), nye nettfenomener – staten og delekulturen (2008). one interesting example of experts who are awarded prominent positions is the new media consortium (nmc) presented as “an international community of experts in educational technology” (4-2013). considerable attention is given to their report technology outlook for norwegian schools 2013-2018 published together with the norwegian centre for ict in education which presents emerging technologies and forecasts their potential impact. interestingly, the nmc was founded in 1993 by a group of on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 hardware manufacturers, software developers and publishers. they recognised the potential of developing close relations with the foremost colleges and universities.5 in the nordic journal of digital literacy the experts are presented as a community embracing “practitioners who work with new technologies on campuses every day to the visionaries who shape the future of learning at think tanks, labs, and research centres, but also staff, boards of directors, advisory boards, and others helping the nmc conduct cutting edge research” (4-2013). the nmc’s ambition was to help educational institutions, museums and research centres worldwide to “stay at the leading edge of emerging technology” (nmc, 2015). they realised that “the ultimate success of their multimedia-capable products depended upon their widespread acceptance by the higher education community in a way that had never been achieved before” (ibid.). “strategic partners” have included adobe systems, apple, autodesk, hewlett-packard and intel. during the years in cooperation with experts in different countries, nmc has explored emerging technologies and forecasted their potential impact. reports have been produced for ireland, india, scandinavia, asia, latin america, australia, brazil, new zealand and singapore. the important contributions made by large private companies are clearly visible as in the case of “outlook” for singaporean education. through the acknowledgements at the start of the report we are clearly informed that the project and report “were made possible by the generous support of singtel” “asia's leading ict provider operating in 22 countries with 40 offices”, and that this company has played “active roles in shaping the education landscapes of singapore, hong kong and australia by deploying innovative ict solutions in schools”. and we are reminded that “singtel powers the future in education” (johnson et. al, 2012). the category of “gurus” and philosophers showcased in the editorials include nicholas negroponte, don tapscott, marshall mcluhan and jean baudrillard. learning and technology one of the main assumptions in the editorials is that the use of ict enhances learning. however, the relation between technology and learning is in general expressed in somewhat vague and well-known ways. a number of examples can be mentioned. it is widely believed that digitization promotes dialogue, cooperation and problem orientation (2-2006), that “digital tools can support and facilitate learning in new and better ways” (22010) and that this can lead to “better and deeper learning” (1/2-2013, ann.-2015). with references to the survey monitor (2013) published by the norwegian centre for ict in education it is concluded that eight out of ten upper secondary students believe that the use of computers or tablets helps them understand the subjects better and that it gives 5 based on their own presentation: https://web.archive.org/web/20150908060814/http://www.nmc.org/about/nmchistory/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150908060814/http:/www.nmc.org/about/nmc-history/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150908060814/http:/www.nmc.org/about/nmc-history/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150908060814/http:/www.nmc.org/about/nmc-history/ on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 “more desire to learn and makes it easier to learn school subjects“ (3-2013). these findings are confirmed by results from a local innovative school development project in sweden presented as “an engine for promoting learning quality” (1/2-2013) and “a lot of evidence” from international sources stating that ict-tools in combination with relevant pedagogical practices “have beneficial effects on outcomes” (2-2010). the changes from what is perceived as traditional teaching methods are considered to be profound. whereas the teacher so far has imparted knowledge supported by the linear message of the book, digital media are interactive and offer a variety of communication and collaboration. referring to tapscott, this is presented as a move towards interactive learning (4-2007). we are supposed to be in a new phase in the evolution of technologically enhanced learning that is characterised by “seamless learning spaces” (42006). the new environments are perceived as richer and more personal since the digital arenas are as much a place of differentiation and cultural diversity as a driving force for homogenization. however, to exploit them “the learning theories must be updated and be in line with the digital revolution” (2-2006).6 the editorials convey a positive attitude towards learning analytics that may be used to support decisions made in the educational system in the same way as analysts in business use consumer data to target potential customers and personalise advertising. in education learning analysts may “harness student data to build better pedagogies, target at-risk student populations, and assess whether programs designed to improve retention have been effective and should be sustained”. a main impression expressed is that “students are beginning to experience the benefits of learning analytics” as part of their online engagement that leaves data “to create responsive, personalised learning experiences” (42013). challenges, contradictions and dichotomies through several of the editorial’s challenges regarding increased use of new technology in education are given a lot of attention. these are mainly related to the lack of equipment, lack of competence and lack of coherent efforts within schools, but the focus is gradually shifting from equipment to competence acquisition and coherence. to a large extent, however, such considerations are based on a perceived contradiction between two somewhat antagonistic positions within education, one anchored in notions of the schools of the future, and the other in what might be regarded as traditional schools. in the first case, schools of the future are seen to reflect development in society and are characterised by the innovative use of new technology, the inclusion of the students’ leisure time use of technology as well as a new pedagogy embracing new possibilities. in these 6 the authors’ translation. on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 kinds of schools, students will “use digital media innovatively and with confidence to develop the skills they will need as individuals, professionals and interactive participants” (1/2-2013). the schools will have a wide range of technology-based systems offering the possibility to “transform schools into important agents of innovation”. this might in turn revitalise the school “as a powerful arena for learning”. unlike in the existing schools where motivation is gradually draining throughout primary education, the students’ natural motivation for personal development will be sustained. new media and new technology are expected to “serve as an impetus and hub for innovation” and thus making it possible to develop “a virtual school” offering “online and pupil-centric education” using “new forms of learning and collaboration”. then “24-hour teacher availability” might be possible (1-2011). the students’ leisure time use of technology is considered to be vital for developing a “productive and creative digital competence”. this competence should be used in school (12006), which to some extent is already the case (3-2008). young people are presented as role models referred to as “the net generation” (inspired by tapscott), “the next great generation” (wim ween) and “new millennium learners” (oecd) (4-2007). new trends that may be realised in norwegian schools “in the near future” are presented including “virtualization”, “cloud computing”, “service-oriented architectures” and “context-aware systems” that can adapt their behaviour according to the situation at hand (1-2011). in a school of the future scenario norwegian education is seen as “the best in the world regarding the development of digital competence”. the school is recreated as a learning organization in which active use is made of the ict competence developed by the students in their leisure time. technology is “tailored to the needs of the individual”, and digital tools are used “to promote personal learning and collaboration” (4-2006).7 “a new pedagogy” paves the way for new possibilities and gives scope for the innovative use of new technology. once again the descriptions are rather vague and the arguments on a quite general level. overall, this appears to be a stereotypical version of a desired type of school. so are the descriptions of the traditional school, and the result is a dichotomous presentation of school systems. traditional schools are described as neither reflecting society, nor reaping the benefits of new technology, while showing resistance to technology and partly seeing technology as a threat. it is maintained that they are based on a traditional pedagogy with a hidden curriculum of technophobia. scepticism towards technology is perceived as widespread and several pedagogical researchers are seen as “closet technophobes” (1-2011).8 this scepticism is described as a stance which informs the entire history of education. instances 7 the authors’ translation. 8 the authors’ translation. on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 mentioned are: the fear that plato’s writing would destroy memory (ann.-2015), jeanjacques rousseau’s warning against using globes and maps (1-2006) and the controversies regarding gutenberg’s printing press. one explanation provided is that technology is perceived as a threat before being subsumed into culture. culture is defined as “the sum of all the functions and values which oppose technology” (4-2014). both critical and traditional pedagogy are based on the ideals of enlightenment and linked to a humanistic orientation where education is viewed as a protection against technology. pedagogy has therefore developed technology knowledge only to a limited extent. there are concepts and tool metaphors to describe technology, but these terms have not been developed to embrace today’s media and technology. as the editor of the journal observes, this results in the establishment of technophobia as a hidden curriculum in pedagogy. this is presented as a paradoxical situation since information technology and learning are seen as converging in the current interdisciplinary trend including computer-supported collaborative learning: “digitalization promotes dialogue, cooperation and problem orientation” (1-2011).9 the editorials present the traditional school as part of a status quo scenario, or as a prolongation of the existing school system. the main reasons for the failure in reaching the goals of a digital knowledge promotion reform are to be found in the combined opposition from bureaucracy, teachers and various interest groups. it is observed that no attention is paid to digital competence developed by children and young people during their leisure time. moreover, norwegian schools do not recognise the ideas of the digital domain as part of the curriculum. then the importance of the school as a knowledge arena is weakened, and digital divides are developed (4-2006). the total absence of references to the research articles presented in the journal, indicates either that the editor and editorial staff take for granted that they contain a message that is wholly in line with the hegemonic ideas presented in the editorials, or that they are perceived as being uninteresting or irrelevant to the discursive level of the editorials. both positions raise serious ethical questions. the lack of a critical discourse inside the journal, between the editorials and the journal articles, needs further attention. concluding remarks and discussion one of the main insights from the analysis of the editorials is that they are consistent with what might be regarded as the dominant political priorities. the editorials are to a large extent based on governmental plans and reports, national curricula, oecd and eu documents. they contain few, if any, critical perspectives and few references to research in the field. they are also characterised by presenting dichotomies based on stereotypical 9 the authors’ translation. on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 descriptions of schools. in the editorials we can note a marked negative attitude towards the “traditional school”. in outlining the alternative, we have repeatedly seen an open school where extensive use is made of advanced home technology and regulated by social networks. a wide array of ideological terms like “millennium learners” and “the net generation” are used, and the future is mapped out by different sorts of learning systems of technology, benefiting from “learning analytics” and “cloud computing”. in addition, the hope is expressed that schools might be revitalised and transformed into “important agents of innovation” where the students’ natural motivation for personal development and learning is sustained. the dichotomic version of this is the traditional school where the students’ eagerness to learn gradually diminishes over the course of their primary education. criticism is directed to those who disapprove and “doomsters”. the negative attitude towards those teachers and educators who resist the digital wave is persistent. readers are repeatedly reminded of the technophobes through history. the current ideology dominating education is proclaimed as a humanist conception that is fundamentally critical towards “the technological” and which still spells out its hidden curriculum. it should be noted that consensus is being reached in the editorials on various perceptions, which are seen as ”true” and ”self-evident”, and presented without objection. laclau and mouffe’s descriptions of hegemonic meaning construction (laclau og mouffe, 2001) is here evident. it can be seen as an expression of hegemony when the most important arguments are taken from oecd and eu documents and transformed unquestioningly into the school planning documents. the importance of the use of commonly accepted key concepts as put forward by koselleck (2004) is clearly demonstrated. in many ways, following fairclough’s arguments, this might be regarded as a colonization of the education system (fairclough, 1992; chouliaraki and fairclough, 1999). the recontextualization that takes place when computers which have been developed for other purposes are introduced into the school, shows little sign of active adaptation to the needs of teaching and learning. thus, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that the editorials are aiming at creating a kind of clarity and simplicity out of ambiguity and complexity. another noteworthy finding was that the messages in the published research articles that may challenge or criticise hegemonic views, or give context and reflective ideas to the highly politicised editorials, seem to have had no impact on the editorial positions. the question this will raise for future research is if the selected and published articles do in fact align themselves with the expressed editorial positions, and how this might reveal more about the morphogenesis of a national knowledge structure of this field of research in norway. on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 references bigum, c., bulfin, s. & johnson, n. 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(eds.) discourse theory and practice. a reader, 1-8. london: sage. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2796.2001.00626.x xie, y., wu, q., & li, x. (2019). editorial team scholarly index (etsi): an alternative indicator for evaluating academic journal reputation. scientometrics, 120(3), 1333– 1349. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03177-x zdeněk, r. & lososová, j. (2018). an analysis of editorial board members’ publication output in agricultural economics and policy journals. scientometrics, 117, 563–578. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2881-9 zuccala, a. (2006). modeling the invisible college. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 57(2), 152–168. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20256 appendix the analysed editorials • 1-2006 formatering • 2-2006 det skjulte pensum • 3-2006 proteser • 4-2006 morgendagens skole • 1-2007 cool memories • 2-2007 digitalt kunnskapsløft? • 3-2007 digital stillstand i lærerutdanningen? • 4-2007 wikinomics • 1-2008 learning spaces • 3-2008 delingskultur, sosial web og læring • 4-2008 program for digital kompetanse (2004–2008) – posthumt • 2-2009 the digital state of affairs in norwegian schools 2009 • 3/4-2009 1-til-1 i utdanning • 2-2010 we are the champions • 1/2-2011 lower secondary school dot com • 1/2-2013 synergies for better learning – where are we now? • 3-2013 learning to be: developing and understanding digital competence • 4-2013 horizon: technology outlook for norwegian schools mapping and analyzing prospective technologies for learning • 2-2014 learning analytics • 3-2014 look to denmark • 4-2014 hidden curriculum in teacher education https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2796.2001.00626.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03177-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2881-9 https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20256 on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 • 2-2015 finnish education system • 3-2015 children testing tablets and apps • 10th anniversary edition-2015 digital competence a password to a new interdisciplinary field total 24 2006-2015 4+4+3+2+1+1+0+3+3+3 on the expression of hegemony in the field of educational technology a case study of editorials in a norwegian academic journal abstract introduction a discourse-analytic approach new journals as important events previous research on morphologies expressed in norwegian journals researching journals of educational technology: morphongenic investigations why target nordic journal of digital literacy? visions and premises a common set of concepts digital competence as a password reflecting the evolution of society dominating actors key references learning and technology challenges, contradictions and dichotomies concluding remarks and discussion references appendix the analysed editorials mapping and analyzing prospective technologies for learning title seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2014 how to gain knowledge when data are shared? open government data from a media pedagogical perspective i valentin danderii university of cologne, germany e-mail: valentin.dander@uni-koeln.de abstract numerical data are becoming one of the dominant codes for describing society. public services are sharing open government data (ogd) as public goods. academic interest so far has focused on political, technical and organizational implications. educational research has been widely neglecting ogd. i argue that contemporary media pedagogy needs to productively and critically consider this development in research and practice, engaging with the question of how these data can be turned into knowledge. what objections to ogd as a political project have emerged, and what skills are required by data users? apart from giving examples of how data use can be learned and supported, this paper illustrates and discusses potentials and risks for ogd use in terms of learning and subject transformation. various objectives for media pedagogy – such as media, digital and data literacy, numeracy and picturacy – will be discussed in order to draw conclusions on a conceptual level. this paper aims at a differentiated approach to ogd and data education, taking into account their growing importance as well as emerging paradox constellations. key words: open government data, ogd, open data, media pedagogy, education, digital and media literacy, data literacy shared datascapes technological developments in recent years and decades seem largely to follow gordon e. moore’s law (1965), in which he declared the biannual doubling of transistors on integrated circuits. this exponential increase similarly applies to digital storage capacities – and stored digital data (mayer-schönberger & cukier, 2013, p. 9). accompanied by a constant growth of these already ‘big data’ we’ve come to a point where wired magazine, in 2008, can title its special feature “the petabyte age: because more isn't just more — more is different.”iii until now, big data has remained in the hands of the state, academic users, and business, since using them meaningfully requires specific hardware, software and adequate skills (manovich, 2011, p. 1). data are not only shared and processed in terms of big data. digital sharing cultures are blossoming in general. volker grassmuck (2012) names this trend the “sharing turn”, in the same breath stating that sharing can be understood as an anthropological constant of human existence. not only are we talking mailto:valentin.dander@uni-koeln.de seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 44 about private users who are leaving digital footprints and exchanging thoughts, ideas and knowledge. more and more governments and administration departments are following the call by the open government data (ogd) movement to open their data storages.iv several democratic promises accompany this openness and are gratefully picked up by governments, such as the obama administration: “we will work together to […] establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. openness will strengthen our democracy.”v one might ask: who are ‘we’? and what kind of ‘work’ are ‘we’ to do? the ogd concept is implicitly thought of as a three-step procedure: at first, these digital data are gathered and shared online according to principles such as accessibility, free licensing, and machine-readability (sunlight foundation, 2010). in a second step, data are refined by professionals (finding, cleaning, linking, analyzing, visualizing, interpreting data or developing applications) and transformed into in-form-ation until non-expert users can start to work with them. there appears to be a divide, however, between this mediated access to information and any idea of immediate civil participation, as proclaimed by ogd enthusiasts like the open government working group: the internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. […] open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources (open government working group, 2007). we can conclude for now that data of different scale are becoming one of the dominant codes to describe society and therefore are acquiring an increasingly decisive role in “public space” – and even more within the public sphere. civil society is invited to participate actively in governance by analyzing and querying this shared data. we might remark sceptically that not only data are shared. all citizens – by part-time ‘working’ for their governments – equally receive their share of accountability. referring to the obama quote above (‘we will work together […]’), we might ironically call this phenomenon crowd sourcing governance: citizens are expected to participate in governing themselves and their fellow citizens. thus, we find a situation that, on the one hand, might be interpreted as a unique chance for democracies to foster the communication and interaction between citizens and administrations and for teachers and learners to use these free learning materials in meaningful ways. on the other hand, we have to acknowledge the double-bind of this invitation to participation. while scholars from various disciplines, such as informatics, economics, organizational studies or political science, have engaged with the field of ogd and data use in general, there hasn’t been any noticeable response from education, and media education in particular.vi therefore, the issue of citizens learning how to use (open government) data is not yet resolved. it is assumed that a response from media education scholars and practitioners is required to provide citizens with orientation within these datascapes – thereby transcending the mere technical or knowledge-based use of data. to avoid naive enthusiasm in educational conclusions, a cross-disciplinary, critical approach has been chosen to address certain problematic aspects emerging around open government data. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 45 objections to ogd numerous objections have been expressed towards ogd. media pedagogy necessarily needs to take them into account before it can respond to the current ‘open data condition’ by proposing learning with and for ogd use. starting with the motivation for promoting ogd in the first place, the leading proponents of ogd seem to be widely neglecting the possible side effects of this project. additionally, conflicts of interest might arise regarding their own professional background, since they are largely ict experts. while democratic intentions are positioned in the foreground of public debate, lobbyism for ogd can at the same time be understood as extending the significance and value of digital industries. hence, ogd is not only a political project. neelie kroes, european commissioner for the digital agenda, blogged about the enormous economic potential of ogd: [a]ll together, public sector information generates over 30 billion euros per year in economic activity, with services from geo-location services to weather forecasts. by opening up this resource fully, we could more than double the value of this activity – to around €70 billion. this opening up can generate tax revenues which far exceed revenue from any fees previously charged for the data (2011; emphasis in original). an optimistic view might regard these expectations as another argument for a winning game on all sides. the counter-perspective, however, has to ask: what power structures arise from this constellation? what data are to be published in what form? who will benefit (the most)? and what effects on governance will become visible? it certainly makes a difference to have to wait for governments to share certain data versus having the right to demand them. while in sweden, the united kingdom, the united states of america and many other countries freedom of information is regarded as a basic democratic principle, in austria it legally collides with an overruling, constitutional obligation of discretion (austrian constitution).vii either way, the basic principle of sharing these data can be queried, if we assume that “sharing is an act that takes place among equals – power relations cancel the spirit of sharing, which is based on free will and generosity”, as katherine sarikakis (2012, p. 37) puts it. obviously, this complex arrangement of motivations complicates the analysis and leads simple analytical approaches astray. longo (cf. 2011) adds another perspective, naming some indications that ogd functions as a “trojan horse” for new public management strategies by letting citizens participate as informers and assistants. working on specific quests like comparing educational institutions, mapping crime scenes or finding ‘questionable’ publicly funded cultural projects, their output can for instance result in the cutting down of subsidies. public services are monitored by the public and held accountable, while the government can easily retreat into a moderating position. additionally, conducting this monitoring is not considered to be ‘work’, but ‘participation’ or ‘honorary work’. sarikakis’ writing on economic structures in social network sites (2012, p. 38) matches these open government scenarios: the deprivation of privacy of individuals strengthens the public monetary position of the industry. again, this contradictory element of invisibility of private/public through the publicness of the user, is accompanied by the invisibility of labour/leisure […] that articulate[s] vast amounts of un-remunerated labour hours. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 46 users within the ogd apparatus find themselves in a twofold position: enhancing participatory democracy on the one hand and creating (public and/or private) value for undefined beneficiaries on the other. this challenge of the public/private distinction seems to go along with the abovementioned “invisibility of labour/leisure”. furthermore, the ogd condition of mutual and self-observation generates a normalizing effect on individuals and institutions, as johnson (2013, p. 9) argues, referring to the integrated postsecondary educational data system (ipeds) in the united states.viii while johnson introduces foucault’s concept of a disciplinary society to describe those effects, i propose to refer to ‘governmentality’ as an analytical category better to understand the phenomenon of ogd. this concept interrelates governance to (quantitative) information and knowledge: the theory of the art of government was […] connected to a set of analyses and forms of knowledge which began to develop in the late sixteenth century and grew in importance during the seventeenth, and which were essentially to do with knowledge of the state, in all its different elements, dimensions and factors of power, questions which were termed precisely ‘statistics’, meaning the science of the state (foucault, 1991, p.96). while in the early times of governmentality these governing techniques remained reserved to professionals (scientists, administrators), contemporary strategies blur the competences and responsibilities within political processes: [i]f the state is what it is today, this is so precisely thanks to this governmentality, which is at once internal and external to the state, since it is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private (foucault, 1991, p. 103). intensified by digital access, information on societal conditions is mirrored to the general public and necessarily provokes consequences in knowledge structures and behaviour. in his study a trial on normalism (versuch über den normalismus) (1997, p. 452ff), link elaborates on the subjectivizing forces of “datizing cultures” and their ensuing “curvescapes” on the three dimensions of signal, orientation and control. statistically processed representations of ‘facts’ predominantly operate with bell-shaped curves and, hence, bring forward a normalism tendency: deviant behaviour becomes less probable, since the majority is ‘pushing to the middle’. the equivalent on a state level can be found in the use of benchmarking as a controlling technique. finally and most importantly, we have to ask, “who is in a position to make ‘effective use’ of this newly available data?” (gurstein, 2010a). if ogd are only used by privileged citizens, they might just exacerbate the digital divide and extend it to a ‘participation divide’. hence, a realistic view on ogd shows that data per se are no legitimate cause for euphoria. to handle all these challenges well, we need to learn how to read and interpret them critically, to read between the lines, to notice what is absent or omitted, to understand the gravity and implications of different figures, and so on. we should not imagine that anyone can easily understand any dataset (gray, 2012). drawing educational consequences from the abovementioned objections, it seems highly relevant to consider the political as well as the socioeconomic context of collecting (production), archiving/publishing (distribution), understanding (reception) and using (transformation) data. at the same time, social seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 47 injustice (‘participation divide’) appears to be one of the main perils we are facing in the context of open data. so far, it has been argued that data education is necessary and under which circumstances it is taking place. now, we can concentrate on what data education might look like in practice and theory – by taking a look at ‘what’s already out there’ and, finally, by transferring these insights into educational terminology and a conceptual framework. meaningful ogd use different approaches to achieve meaningful use of ogd are already being tested. it is virtually impossible to draw a clear line between projects which are aiming at democratizing meaningful use by technology and others trying to support teaching and learning this meaningful use, since the latter are largely working with ‘learning by doing’ approaches. i will sketch three short examples and then draw conclusions for media pedagogy on a conceptual level. in june 2012 a w3c (world wide web consortium) workshop on using open data took place in brussels.ix a group of researchers and software developers from dresden, germany, presented a concept of open – the open data processing engine, an enhanced database management system (dbms) to enable non-expert users to identify, extract, integrate and analyze datasets. it is meant to serve as a single access point and tool for democratization of data use. users will be invited to contribute (braunschweig, eberius, thiele, & lehner, 2012). simplifying infrastructures, like with open, can indeed be helpful in educational settings. however, even operating this software is still demanding to non-expert users. also, the authors regrettably do not comment on how the dbms shall be licensed. a second example is the uk data service, “a comprehensive resource funded by the esrc [economic and social research council] to support researchers, teachers and policymakers who depend on high-quality social and economic data”. they provide advice, online as well as face-to-face training and courses, guidebooks for learning and teaching and a “wide range of secondary data” (university of essex & university of manchester, 2012). for full access to the available datasets, one is obliged to register. all accessible data are preprocessed. about 30 case studies indicate that the service is in use by university and college teachers at both undergraduate and postgraduate level – mainly within the field of social sciences. uk data service is using proprietary software (nesstar) for online publishing and analysis of statistical information.x in terms of ‘openness’ the most consistent service is the school of data by the open knowledge foundation. it proclaims to “empower civil society organizations, journalists and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively in their efforts to create fairer and more sustainable societies” (open knowledge foundation & peer 2 peer university, 2013; emphasis in original). various learning materials are offered online, such as a handbook or tutorials, and everyone is invited to join so-called explorer missions. the latter are set up as self-organized, informal moocs (massively open online courses) including narrative or game-like elements and aiming at specific results, such as analyzing nigeria’s oil revenuesxi. since no formal certification is offered, the school of data is experimenting with openbadges.xii all content displayed is licensed under a creative commons attribution-sharealike v3.0 license. in autumn 2013 the austrian branch of school of data (school of data austriaxiii) launched a pilot course on data analysis, which was conducted both online and offline. as in the online expeditions, learning by doing played an important role within the course concept. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 48 now, what can we learn from these examples? especially within an educational context it is crucial to have free or at least affordable software to hand in order to process dataxiv – and to find a compromise between required complexity and barrier-free simplicity. this can be achieved through adopting a holistic approach as proposed by the open team, uniting all required functions within one single application, which might reduce constraints at first sight. at the same time it might reduce the user’s opportunities of looking behind the scenes and understanding how the single jigsaw pieces fit together. this largely depends on how transparently the structure itself is built. the uk data service has chosen a predominantly academic audience and restricts freedom of action to particular steps of data refinement. secondary data might be adequate to learn about quantitative methods in social science within institutional settings by working on ‘real data’. however, strictly speaking the data are not ‘open’. registration and proprietary software pose additional deterrence to interested users. if using ogd in formal learning scenarios, the possibility of applying it to various subjects could be considered. apart from allowing users acquisition of instrumental competences in statistics, ogd can enrich political education in schools with relevant, contemporary data. the school of data (sod) is free of institutional restrictions and can focus its activities and learning objectives on open data. this informal, mutual ‘private’ learning space seems to be more publicly relevant than the uk data service, for instance. who is using this service remains open. even if everyone is invited, we might expect to find expert and semi-expert users on sod data expeditions. if aiming at non-experts on a broad community basis, we need to step back even further. gurstein (2010b) lists seven “elements that are required to be in place on the end-user side for the effective use of open data to take place.” i quote those elements in a shortened version: 1. internet access adequate to support making data available and barrier-free; 2. computers and software sufficiently powerful, sufficient time for users; 3. computer/software skills to use the software and hardware; 4. content and formatting – having the data available in a format such as to allow for effective use at a variety of levels of linguistic and computer literacy; 5. interpretation/sense making – sufficient knowledge and skill to see what data uses make sense (and which don’t) and to add local value; 6. advocacy – having supportive individual or community resources sufficient for translating data into activities for local benefit; 7. governance – the financing, legal, regulatory or policy regime, required to enable the use to which the data would be put; to complicate this plain list, further aspects can be added:  knowing about open data  motivation to engage with them seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 49  context information on open data sets and sources (who collected it how, when, where and for what purpose?)  online or offline communities to exchange ideas and skillsxv gurstein (2010b) asks “what are the language, computer literacy, data analytic literacy levels that are required for an effective use of the ‘open data’?” but before we try to answer this question regarding ‘levels’ – as the notion of “interpretation/sense making” remains rather abstract – we have to ask which specific skills are required for an effective and critical use of ogd. conceptual remarks if media pedagogy decides to engage with the open data issue, the objectives it wants to envisage must be discussed. the variety of definitions for literacies, competences and education models exceeds the scope of this paper. some of the most predominant lines of thought should be outlined briefly, largely following hug’s (2012) argumentation. the most established approach in anglophone literature and classrooms is certainly the media literacy concept, which hobbs (2011, p. 12ff) expands to “digital and media literacy”, defining it by five “elements”: to access (using, finding, comprehending), to analyze (critical thinking), to communicate (expression), to reflect (social responsibility) and to act (ethical democratic citizenship). this definition shows slight differences to the one the namle (national association for media literacy education; us)xvi offers. the namle sees media education on a predominantly knowledge-based level, while media literacy merely refers to practical abilities. the european charter for media literacyxvii raises additional concerns over harmful content. as namle is calling for a “wider set of literacy skills,” an obvious confusion of terms arises. what do literacy and skills mean in this context? kress (2004, p. 21ff) critically addresses misleading compounds including ‘literacy’ – and there have been several within recent years: visual literacy, information or computer literacy, critical or political literacy, statistical literacy and so on. data analytic literacy, as mentioned above by gurstein, and data literacy are just two examples out of many. two aspects appear problematic at this point. first of all, there has not been any widely accepted definition for data literacy (cf. mandinach & gummer, 2013, p. 30). in their article on data literacy for educators, mandinach and gummer (ibid.) “broadly” define data literacy as the ability to understand and use data effectively to inform decisions. it is composed of a specific skill set and knowledge base that enables educators to transform data into information and ultimately into actionable knowledge [...]. these skills include knowing how to identify, collect, organize, analyze, summarize, and prioritize data. they also include how to develop hypotheses, identify problems, interpret the data, and determine, plan, implement, and monitor courses of action. this example shows that there are certainly ideas about data literacy. still, these propositions remain restricted to their specific fieldsxviii – in this case focusing on educators, whereas no equivalent models have been developed within media education. in addition, as we have seen, the ogd phenomenon raises political implications of data use. this complicates answering the questions of why data literacy should be separated from media literacy and which particular components it contains, if it does not contain those named above in hobbs’ digital and media literacy. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 50 secondly, if we take kress’ critical remarks on literacies into account, we ought to think of more fundamental skills and abilities to describe what data use requires: literacy in its literal meaning, numeracy and signing. to stress the powerful democratic and sociopolitical character of mathematics, skovsmose (1998) elaborated his concept of mathemacy, which transcends the more basic mathematical operations that are being addressed in numeracy. ‘signing’ might be misleading, compared to alternatives like heffernan’s concept of picturacy (2002). in turn, picturacy focuses on comprehension of photography and paintings. visuacy (hug, 2012) can avoid such restrictions and includes the latter as well as matters of design, graphics and visualizations.xix yet, considering complex and interconnected datascapes, all these capabilities are needed to understand effectively all steps of accessing, understanding, processing, displaying, encoding and decoding. these multimodal conditions not only can be found in this context, but are fundamental for digital environments in general (kress, 2004). here, we have to question the value of categories like literacy, mathemacy or visuacy beyond the analytical. regarding the interdependency of these capabilities, introducing another cross-sectional subject to school would hardly lead to groundbreaking changes. in contrast, the german notion of bildung refers to an even more essential and abstract, subject-oriented category. medienbildung, in a structural sense, designates the process of transforming relations to oneself and one’s surrounding through mediatic experience, aiming at orientation in its widest sense, as well as critical reflectivity (jörissen & marotzki, 2009; koller, marotzki & sanders, 2007). hence, in this discussion, it might be helpful as an umbrella term, despite challenges in translation. shifting the question from one aspect to another, we might ask whether it can be constructive to introduce another cross-sectional subject to school. although the school of data is labelled a ‘school’, it in fact scrutinizes educational institutions by offering informal, project-based ‘data expeditions’ in disrespect of the classic learner/teacher distinction. as to institutionalized education, large parts of it can be taken as examples demonstrating how much literacy-based forms of the communicative stabilization of learning cultures can restrict the probing of creative, conceptual and critical-reflexive scopes (hug, 2012, p.123). these remarks invite us to consider whether the institutionalization of data education is desirable at all. foucault’s governmentality concept sharpens our perspective on power structures within governmental conditions. on the one hand, this calls for a response to, and reflection on, governmental practices and apparatuses which can similarly be situated in formalized educational contexts. on the other hand, the role of teachers within governmental power relations has to be dealt with carefully. an educational conception towards ‘governing students not to be governed (that much)’ within formal, obligatory education can too easily act out what it pretends to counteract. informal settings, however, run the risk of fortifying social injustice and privilege – if largely used by well-educated citizens and semi-experts, as assumed. a middle ground between public and privatized approaches might be opened by local community projects (gurstein, 2010a). the educational character of these community informatics possibly goes along with its concrete political perspective. conclusions online sharing practices result in immense quantities of data. various public services are continuously sharing their data storages as open government data. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 51 consequently, quantitative data is becoming increasingly significant as a representative code in digital environments. while ogd proponents stress the potentials of ogd as a means to expand transparency and participation, numerous objections have been expressed. ogd can be read as both a political and economic endeavour. a political economy perspective reveals un-remunerated labour under the guise of participation. this double-bind applies to its advocates and users as well as to those releasing data. hence, ogd can be understood to advance a renaissance of new public management in public services. thus, citizens can be established as controllers and quality managers, while undergoing a normalizing shift that emerges from ‘curvescapes’ and comparative rationalities. hence, participation may be understood as self-management and self-governance under the conditions of governmentality and governmediality. media educationalists need to consider these complex and ambiguous dynamics and find an adequate response in theoretical and practical terms. ‘literacy’ compounds are misleading, as they either remain attached to a linguistic perspective or blur the denotation of ‘literacy’. effective use of ogd requires more than linguistic symbols. numbers and visual forms are crucial codes in equal measure within multimodal digital and even more so in data environments. they therefore demand specific skills. literacy, mathemacy and visuacy can serve as core competences for handling data, while ‘medienbildung’ is proposed to embrace the other concepts towards a processand subject-oriented understanding of ‘learning’. while single skills might be taught in public institutions, their interdependence and the political implications of ogd challenge formal education. meanwhile, informal learning projects are experimenting with community-based, self-organized learning arrangements. here, empirical research is needed to understand better who is learning or 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(1998). linking mathematics education and democracy: citizenship, mathematical archaeology, mathemacy and deliberative interaction. zdm, 30(6), 195–203. sunlight foundation (2010, august 11). ten principles for opening up government information. sunlight foundation. retrieved from http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/ten-open-data-principles/. tufte, e. r. (2006). the visual display of quantitative information. cheshire, conn: graphics press. university of essex, & university of manchester (2012, 2013). uk data service. uk data service. retrieved april 24, 2013, from http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/. i i this paper was presented at the media in transition 8 conference 2013 at the mit in cambridge, massachusetts within the panel deconstructing the public / private distinction: on concepts and practices of sharing. the research process was funded by the university of innsbruck doctorate program. ii biographical note: valentin dander teaches at cologne university, germany, and is a phd candidate in educational science at innsbruck university, austria. his research interests include learning and teaching with digital media, data literacy, open data and media spaces. iii http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_intro# [accessed 2013-04-23]. iv by the end of 2013, 77 access points were counted by the open data census, conducted by the open knowledge foundation, as can be seen at http://census.okfn.org/ [accessed 2014-01-07]. the institutional recognition of ogd can be seen in official documents by the g8 or the european union: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-datacharter-and-technical-annex [accessed 2014-07-09]. 62 countries already joined the open government partnership (ogp) process, which includes ogd as a basic dimension. find details at http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries [accessed 201401-07]. v this quote can be read at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/ [accessed 2013-04-24], quoting barack obama. vi within media education there have been several works on privacy issues for internet users in terms of security, predominantly resulting in protective approaches. according to these existing ideas, learners should become aware of existing risks and be capable of recognizing and avoiding them, instead of dealing with data as a symbolic code. vii the constitution online in german language: http://www.bka.gv.at/docview.axd?cobid=30953 [accessed 2013-07-15]“ [outdated link]. austria has been criticized for this issue by the groupe d’états contre la corruphttp://www.opengovdata.org/home/8principles http://schoolofdata.org/ http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/ten-open-data-principles/ http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/ http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_intro http://census.okfn.org/ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-charter/g8-open-data-charter-and-technical-annex http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/ seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 54 tion (greco 2011). an ongoing civil initiative is trying to implement a strong transparency act: http://www.transparenzgesetz.at/ [all accessed 2013-04-23]. viii http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/ [accessed 2013-04-24]. ix find the report at http://www.w3.org/2012/06/pmod/report [accessed 2013-04-24]. x find detailed information at http://www.nesstar.com [accessed 2013-04-24]. xi see the blog post about this specific expedition: http://schoolofdata.org/2013/12/23/mapping-company-network-in-the-nigerianextractive-industry/ [accessed 2014-01-10]. xii mozilla’s openbadges are explained on their website: http://openbadges.org/ [accessed 2013-04-24]. xiii official homepage (in german only): http://www.schoolofdata.at/ [accessed 201401-10]. xiv see the open definition homepage by the open knowledge foundation: http://opendefinition.org/okd/ [accessed 2013-04-24]. xv some of those remarks are drawn from the 5 stars of open data engagement that have been worked out by various contributors at the ukgovcamp 2012 to address nontechnical ogd principles (davies, 2012). xvi details at http://namle.net/publications/media-literacy-definitions/ [accessed 2013-04-25]. xvii read more at http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/charter.php?id=3 [accessed 201304-25]. xviii within library studies, carlson et al. (cf. 2011; 2013) are elaborating on the concept of “data information literacy” (dil), which leads into a more specific direction of database and metadata management. xix the visual display of quantitative information (tufte, 2006) confronts us with the problem of representation in a different way from e.g. realist art or war photography. http://www.transparenzgesetz.at/ http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/ http://www.w3.org/2012/06/pmod/report http://www.nesstar.com/ http://schoolofdata.org/2013/12/23/mapping-company-network-in-the-nigerian-extractive-industry/ http://schoolofdata.org/2013/12/23/mapping-company-network-in-the-nigerian-extractive-industry/ http://openbadges.org/ http://www.schoolofdata.at/ http://opendefinition.org/okd/ http://namle.net/publications/media-literacy-definitions/ http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/charter.php?id=3 adequate digital competence – a close reading of the new national strategy for digitalization of the schools in sweden ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. adequate digital competence – a close reading of the new national strategy for digitalization of the schools in sweden. göran fransson faculty of education and business studies university of gävle, sweden email: goran.fransson@hig.se j. ola lindberg department of education umeå university, sweden email: ola.j.lindberg@umu.se anders d. olofsson department of applied educational science umeå university, sweden email: anders.d.olofsson@umu.se abstract in this paper, the notion of ‘adequate digital competence’, as it is used in the 2017 swedish strategy for digitalization of the school system, is in focus. based on a close reading of the strategy, three dimensions are formulated for discussion: time, context, and interpretation. these dimensions open a more general discussion about the content of policies regarding digital competence. the notion of striving for an ‘adequate digital competence’ for children, students, teachers, school leaders, and other school staff is loaded with a variety of possible meanings. the strategy provides guidance in some aspects, but leaves a lot to local enactment of the strategy. keywords: ict, implementation, policy, school, strategy introduction questions concerning how to implement and use technology in k-12 schools have been around for more than half a century. when the earliest forms of teaching machines were introduced, the expectancy was that the advanced machines, with their automated responses and user-driven feedback, would ultimately replace the teacher (ferster, 2014). today, such issues are still present, though associated with other, somewhat wider, concerns as well (serholt, 2017). given the prominence given to the current ongoing seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 218 digitalization of society (cöster & westelius, 2016), it is unlikely this attention will decrease. one area in which it is visible that education and technology are closely connected is in government policies of different kinds. high on the educational agendas of most western countries has been the adaption of a policy or strategy for introducing and supporting information and communication technology (ict) in education (moonen, 2008). even though western countries have similar economic preconditions, the content of the ict policies and their implementation display differences (austin & hunter, 2013; moonen, 2008; ottestad, 2010). kozma (2008) distinguishes between strategic policies on the one side and operational policies on the other. both seem to be connected with some specific rationales. examples of strategic policy rationales are to support economic growth, promote social development, advance education reform, and support education management. kozma (2008) states that operational rationales often display some of the following five components: infrastructure development, teacher training, technical support, pedagogical and curricular change, and content development. thus, different rationales can be said to underlie policies, and often there is an explicit and implicit over-optimism about ict in k-12 schools (convery, 2009; egea, 2014; jordan, 2011) and the use of ict as a tool for teaching and learning in education (hammond, 2014, haugsbakk & nordkvelle, 2007; selwyn, 2010). since the midand late 1960s, several initiatives have been taken to introduce computers and other digital devices into the swedish school system (karlsohn, 2009). during the 1970s, the initiatives were mostly small-scale trials and projects, but from the early 1980s and onwards they started to be more widespread and of more common concern for the k-12 school system. jedeskog (2005) describes these initiatives as campaigns or waves that have swept over the swedish educational landscape. the first wave in the mid-1980s was concerned with computer science education, the second from the late 1980s to the early 1990s focused on computers as pedagogical tools, and the third wave in the latter part of the 1990s centred on the large-scale investments made by the swedish knowledge and competence foundation in it in schools, primarily through 27 so-called ‘lighthouse projects. the fourth wave came in the early 2ooos with the broad it in schools (itis) program, which focused on both technological investments and in-service training of teachers (in which all 289 municipalities in sweden and about 60,000 teachers took part). in the years directly after jedeskog’s report, there was another state-financed initiative to provide further in-service training and competence to the swedish teachers. the web-based competence training modules called practical it and media skills (pim), an initiative that came out of government proposition 2004/05:175 through a directive to the, at that time active, swedish agency for school improvement. the pim modules were no longer supported as of 2013. swedish policy on ict in education – 1983-1994 over the years, there have been several swedish policies and decisions that have been concerned with the area of ict in education. going back to 1983, government bill 1983/84:100 (which regulated the state financial affairs for the years 1984/85) had in its appendix 10 new suggestions for the teaching of computer science in the lower secondary grades. the bill was built on arguments about the global influence on culture that could be foreseen; the consequences for humans, organizations, and society that also seemed present; and gender issues where knowledge about computers for girls was an issue. the areas that were primarily in focus in 1983 were time in curricula for computer science education, the provision of subsidies for schools to buy equipment, and preparation for more qualified professional development for one or two teachers at each school. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 219 in 1985, a report in the swedish government official reports series (sou 1985:50 broad computer education) suggested a broad computer education directed towards adults, based on the assumption that their competences in this area needed to be better for future work. the arguments in 1985 were about strengthening swedish industry, but also issues of equality and democracy. technology was seen as affecting all. the suggested education had a syllabus that concerned areas such as the use of computer systems and how activity, work organization, content, and professional knowledge related to computer systems, systems and programming, and the structure and function of the computer. general knowledge about computer technology and the importance of the ‘invisible’ software, positive and negative consequences of computerization, and knowledge of data policies were also of concern. further, it contained elements of some training in running different application programs and the importance of having knowledge of continued computer education. in 1994, another report in the swedish government official reports series sou 1994:118 wings to man’s ability was largely devoted to the use of information technology (it) for learning. the argument in 1994 was that technology drives globalisation of the economy, trade, science, and culture. it was seen as an issue for the whole country, and technology was thought to release creativity and develop learning and instruction. the areas of primary concern in 1994 were that all students should learn to use it and that it was to become an integrated tool in all school subjects. it was suggested that k-12 schools should have local it strategies and that on a national level there would be information networks. the teacher was seen as a role model, and teacher education was supposed to lead the way. it was also directed at providing equipment and services for teachers and the development of electronic learning materials. swedish policy on ict in education – 1994-2016 the report from 1994 was followed in 1997 by a decision for a large investment and professional development program for the schools (government communication 1997/98:176, learning tools). it was built on arguments about lifelong learning and how it drives societal changes, which will lead to new demands for education and competence. schools must relate to changes in society and adapt to the conditions of tomorrow, and it will be important that all students know the new tools for knowledge and learning. included areas in the 1997 initiative were professional development and computers for teachers, internet connections to all schools, and e-mail for all students. it was also to be a tool for working with students with disabilities. the swedish school net was going to be built, and rewards for teachers who made specifically good pedagogical use of it were to spread good examples. in 2002, the ministry memorandum ds 2002:19 next step suggested an it strategy for the schools. the argument in 2002 was that sweden faced international competition in a knowledge-based economy. areas included in the suggested strategy from 2002 were additional professional development for all teachers, preschool teachers, and school leaders; the development of learning resources; support to local municipalities in technical issues; support for international cooperation; integration of it in curricula and syllabi; and a follow-up on the goal attainment for teacher education (since it had been a goal for some years that new teachers would be well prepared to use it in their work). the strategy suggested school-based research and development, included the area of special education, and suggested a national function for implementing the strategy. in government bill 2004/05:179 from it policy for society to policy for it society, the government put forth arguments based on a view of it as a part of a global economy; it should be made use of with efficiency, and it should seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 220 enhance quality. in 2004, issues of sustainability were also raised. areas in focus were how to include it in curricula and syllabi, include more competence development for teachers and staff members, cooperate with industry, increase focus on monitoring and evaluation of it usage, continue work with the swedish school net, place focus on soft infrastructure for the schools, include it already in preschool, and provide teacher training. from the ambitions in the 2004 government bill, the pim web-based online tool was developed, which ran from 2005 until 2013. then, in 2014, the report sou 2014:13 a digital agenda in human service a bright future can be ours came. the arguments in the report were still based on a view of global competition; digitalization could increase innovation and quality and counter gender inequity. in the digital agenda, in 2014, the focus continued to be on revised curricula and syllabi with a digital perspective, how to promote and include digitally based national exams in primary and secondary school, greater acceptance for remote teaching in primary and secondary school, additional professional development in digital competence for teachers, and professional development in digital competence for school leaders. it was also suggested to clarify the digital element of teacher education and to promote innovation projects for future learning. swedish policy on ict in education – 2017 the latest government initiative was when the swedish national agency for education suggested a strategy for digitalization of the schools. in the strategy, the aim for 2020 is that students, teachers, school leaders, and other staff members working in the schools have to develop an adequate digital competence that is relative to each group and its specific conditions, that access and use are distributed according to needs and conditions, and that research is directed towards the possibilities of digitalization for schools. in 2017, the government decision i:1 (2017-10-19) came, with a supplement in which the framework for a strategy for digitalization of the schools was presented. in the strategy, digital competence is defined with a reference to the swedish digitalization commission that was appointed in 2012 in order to promote the digitalization of sweden and work to achieve sweden’s it policy objective to be the best country in the world at utilizing the opportunities of digitalization. in turn, the commission’s definition of digital competence falls back on the eu competences for lifelong learning, and the digital skills are said to be ‘determined by the extent to which people are familiar with digital tools and services and have the ability to keep up with digital developments and their influence on our lives’ (sou2015:28, p. 32). swedish research on the ict in education – three examples in sweden, there have been a few reports and dissertations that have given notice to the introduction of ict in swedish schools, analysing its introduction over several decades. hernwall (1998) analysed the debate about ict in schools (1957-1997) and describes two views: (a) ict is needed to follow the development or change of the society, and (b) ict is a means for bringing about development and change in the society. in a similar manner, johansson (1997) claims that although the technological developments over the years have been dramatic, many arguments used for and against computers have had the same basic content over time. johansson sums these into two contrasting ‘visions’, named ‘nothing changes’ and ‘everything changes’. both these examples of analysis point towards the ambiguities that surround the implementation or introduction of ict in education in sweden; the arguments change and stay the same at the same time. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 221 söderlund (2000) combined an analysis of how it has been argued for in different programs and initiatives from a government perspective with an indepth analysis of the activities that have taken place in one municipality. he claims that in the 1970s and 1980s there was a pressure from central levels on the schools, but with a widened interest during the 1990s in it from the schools as arenas of realization, there has been more of a meeting of local expectations and needs with central or national initiatives. with this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to present a close reading of the most recent national policy in the area of ict in k-12 schools in sweden. in particular, the paper focuses on how a specific notion – ‘adequate digital competence’ – can be understood in the policy in relation to aspects of who is in focus for an adequate digital competence, when a notion of adequate digital competence is supposed to be fixed, and what a notion of digital competence should include. the notion seems to play a central role, not only in making the policy appealing to all actors involved in the implementation of the policy, but also to make the policy conceptualized as ‘doable’. first, some notes on the concept of policy before the paper moves on into the notion of adequate digital competence. some notes on the concept of policy policy can be conceptualized as a ‘programme of action, or a set of guidelines that determine how one should proceed given a particular set of circumstances’ (bell & stevenson, 2006, p. 14). these guiding principles can be manifested in texts as legislations or guidelines, as well as in speeches or gambits by authoritarians. though policy has often been viewed as being part of a top-down process, where policy is formulated in one arena and then realized in another (lindensjö & lundgren, 2000). from this perspective, policymaking can be (mis)understood as a rational and straightforward process in which policy is implemented in practice as originally intended and formulated. policymaking can here be seen as a process that involves a complex interplay of actors (for example, politicians, school leaders, and teachers), ideas, concerns and social processes on multiple levels of a system in which ongoing processes of negotiations and transformations are taking place (datnow & park, 2009). however, policy formation processes (edwards, 2012) are often more complicated than that and can also be understood as an enactment (ball, maguire & braun, 2012). for instance, to acknowledge processes of policy formation is also to acknowledge processes of micro-political manoeuvring (keltchermans, 2007), power, and negotiation in practice, and to relate the policy enactment processes to the existing preconditions, structures, and activities of the educational contexts in which the policy is to be realized. the theoretical ideas of policy as text and policy as discourse can analytically focus some aspects of policy (ball, 1993, 2015). policy as text refers to the textual aspects of policy, as in legislations and guidelines and how these are construed, interpreted, translated, and enacted in practice (ball, 1993). policy as discourse is about the ways ‘in which policies are framed and the discourse that develop around policies, shape and constrain the scope for individual agency’ (bell & stevenson, 2006, p. 18). taking a discourse perspective means that, rather than understanding policies as a response to actual problems, challenges or needs, policy can be understood as a discourse on how tasks, challenges, solutions, and policies are construed, conceptualized, and presented. from this perspective, the notion of ‘adequate digital competence’ can be understood in relation to its discursive frame. this frame may be uncovered by analysing sense-giving entities (gioia & chittipeddi, 1991) contextualising the policy text. according to ball (1994), the policy discourse is about what can be said, thought, and done as well as what’s emphasized and what is downplayed. thus, a policy discourse is about how something ‘ought’ to be conceptualized and what to be recognized as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 222 ‘problematic’, ‘inappropriate’, ‘suitable’, ‘solutions’, etc. this way, policy discourses influence how actors conceptualize and frame issues, what they do, and how they understand and frame educational practice and themselves – all of these with implications for ‘what we are’ (ball, 2015, p. 306). for instance, in terms of an ict-skilled teacher acknowledging innovations or not. in a similar way, a policy discourse gives cues and directions for how the notion of ‘adequate digital competence’ in a policy text ought to be understood and enacted by different actors in a k-12 context. questions such as ‘who does a policy address?’, ‘when is certain activities expected?’ and ‘what is expected?’ has a central position in policy analysis. thus, in the following, a close reading of the newly presented strategy for digitalization of the schools in sweden will be presented within three themes answering to the questions, who, when, and what? ‘adequate digital competence’ – a close reading the supplement to the government decision on a digitalization strategy for the school system is not a long document. in fact, it is only fourteen pages, divided into five main headings (gd i:1, supplement, 2017-10-19)i. the content of the first is one page long and titled ‘the modernization of sweden begins at school’. the content under the second heading is slightly more than one page, and titled ‘the overall goals and focused areas of the strategy’. headings three to five are the main focus areas of the strategy, beginning under the third heading with focus area one: ‘digital competence for all in the school system’. the content under heading three is thereafter divided into three milestones, each under separate subheadings. in total, focus area one is just over three pages. under heading four is focus area two: ‘equal access and use’. this is, in turn, divided into four milestones under separate subheadings. the content in focus area two is just over three pages. under the fifth heading, focus area three is described: ‘research and follow-up on the possibilities of digitalization’. it is one page long and divided into two milestones under separate subheadings. adequate for whom? within the first focus area of the strategy, digital competence is said to be a question for all in the school system. but the conceptualization of, and need for, digital competence is expressed somewhat differently for different groups involved in the school system. (gd i:1, supplement, page 6). for children, students, and staff members, issues of access and use relate to access to digital tools departing from their needs and conditions (page 10). this implies that ‘adequate digital competence’ is about having the ability to use digital tools in relation to needs and conditions of each group. in that sense, it is dependent on the context of those involved. since technology is not only a matter of access in the physical sense, access and use in an effective manner is to be related to the needs and conditions of children, students, and staff members as well as to the assurance of appropriate infrastructure and technical and pedagogical support (page 10). to ascribe the notion ‘adequate digital competence’, relevant meaning, it is claimed, needs to be connected to the curricula and syllabi. the possibilities of digitalization are to be used to reach the objectives given in the curricula and syllabi; it is said to be a matter of equivalence and quality (page 7). in this part, the strategy connects the increased use of ict in the school system to gender issues and the interests among girls in ict. increased use is said to contribute to a decreased bias in the recruitment for higher education in ict. gender equality is therefore an issue for the continued work with digitalization in schools in order to provide all children and students with equal conditions and possibilities (page 7). gender issues in relation to technology have been present in swedish policies in the area since the early 1980s (see for instance government bill 1983/84:100 appendix 10). this seems to be one area in which nothing changes (compare johansson, 1997). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 223 on page 10, the strategy departs from the demands that are put on all staff members in the school system working with children and students to handle digital technology for teaching and learning; it is stated that it is important that staff members have good access to digital tools (page 10). for preschool, teaching and learning with digital tools does not imply that every child needs access to a digital tool of his or her own. on the contrary, it is stated that there is often an advantage when children use digital tools together or with a preschool teacher or other staff member (page 10). including arguments about the kinds of equipment to be used is also present in earlier policies, all since 1983 and up until now. students’ school-related work is referred to as not being constricted to the time students are at school, and this is said to be more apparent in higher grades. a large part of the teaching and learning in the school system is claimed to depart from access to digital resources, and more work is claimed to be conducted with digital tools. this implies access to teaching and learning outside of schools and a practice of extending school time, for instance, by homework. this, in turn, might imply digital tools that are transferable between contexts, school and home. but since it is also stated that teaching and learning should be accessible to everyone, tools that are adapted to different needs and conditions are needed. here, the example given is digital tools, for instance, from a disability perspective (page 11). including technology for special needs and disabilities is also present in earlier policies, for instance in the government communication from 1997 and in ministry memorandum from 2002. in the introductory part of the strategy, the swedish media council study (statens mediaråd 2015) is referred to, in which the access and use of digital tools is said to vary depending on gender, socioeconomic circumstances, and other demographical variables. this emphasizes the need for a national strategy providing opportunities for all children and students to develop their digital competence (page 3). on page 4, the main objectives and focus areas of the strategy is described. for the objectives to be reached, it is said to take cooperative and coordinated efforts not only from those working in the school system, but also from other stakeholders such as trade and industry, the civil society, and the academy (page 4). cooperation with industry was suggested in the 2004 government bill from an it policy for society to politics for the it society, as was coordination and local support. adequate related to when? in the first heading of the strategy, it is said to be part of a process of modernizing sweden, beginning in the schools. the swedish schools are thereby implied to be unmodern (p. 1). on page 6, digitalization is claimed to be an ongoing process. the abilities and knowledge that make up digital competence today, it is claimed, are not necessarily enough to make for digital competence a few years ahead. children and students also need to have the abilities they need to be able to update and continuously develop their digital competence. in this part, the strategy relates to the work of the swedish digitalization commission and its definition of digital competence as ‘the extent to which people are familiar with digital tools and services and have the ability to keep up with digital developments and their influence on our lives’ (sou2015:28, p. 32). being able to keep up with development is a concrete reference to digital competence as something bound in time. ‘adequate’ is said to capture the idea that digital competence changes over time and is aligned with the development and use of digital tools. therefore, on page 7 in the strategy, it is stated that the curricula in all parts of the school system must contain the knowledge and skills that are needed in future education, on the labour market, and for active participation in civil society. this echoes prior policy texts in the area from 1983 and onwards. the relation to the labour market and to global competition is, to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 224 different degrees, present in the discussion about the timeliness of the competences needed. competence is for now and for the future. even though the notion ‘adequate digital competence’ signals a competence that is relative over time, there are also meanings ascribed to the competence needed, as well as to the technologies associated with it, that are more explicitly stated in the strategy. one example of such is the need for all children and students to have an understanding of the way digitalization is affecting the world and their lives, and how programming is controlling not only the flow of information they meet, but also the tools they use (page 3). the school system is also given a specific responsibility to develop the ability to use and create with digital technology and to provide an understanding of how digitalization is affecting individuals and society (page 3). all students are supposed to develop their ability to use digital technology, since it will be important for future working life (page 3). even though this was present already in the sou 1985:50 broad computer education, whereas it was directed towards adults and their assumed needs in 1997, today, this is supposed to be directed towards children and youth in the entire school system. in the strategy, teaching and learning are also aimed at educating responsible internet users. it is said to be of importance that preschool teachers, teachers, and other school staff members have knowledge about copyright issues, as well as knowledge of issues of personal integrity (page 8). staff members are also to have an understanding of net abuse and tools to counteract this (page 9). these issues can be seen as timestamps in the policy, providing a temporal position for its formulation in relation to present problems and agendas. as such, it mirrors aspects of lifelong learning in the government communication 1997/98:176 learning tools of 1997, and issues of sustainability in the government bill from an it policy for society to politics for the it society of 2004. it can also be seen as examples of what hernwall (1998) describes as a view of technology in schools, where it needs to follow the development and change in society. other issues where the strategy departs from the way technology is conceived today are references on page 11 to appropriate infrastructure, hardware and broadband, and systems that have interoperability. coordination and cooperation are said to be of importance for providing technological infrastructure that ensures easy access to, and use of, digital learning resources. infrastructure is said to be of importance not only for the use of learning resources, but also for administrative solutions for schools. examples of appropriate infrastructures are given, such as access to wireless net, enough broadband capacity, and other relevant equipment and support (page 11). examples of technologies can be recognized as having importance today, similar to the importance that was given in the sou 1994:118 wings to man’s ability 1994 and the development electronic learning materials and in the government communication 1997/98:176 learning tools of 1997 when including e-mail addresses for all students and broadband for all schools. adequate related to what? the question of what kind of competence is meant by ‘adequate digital competence’ is described first and foremost in relation to the context of its use for different actors (page 1-2). for children and students, it is related to the conditions for them to develop digital competence to an ‘adequate’ degree in the schools. for school leaders and school authorities, ‘adequate digital competence’ is in the same logic related to their ability to lead digital development work. for all staff members, ‘adequate digital competence’ is related to their competence to choose and use appropriate digital tools in education. in this sense, ‘adequate digital competence’ is in need of interpretation from each position and in relation to each context. the digital seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 225 resources used for teaching and learning are to be appropriate and result in the effective use of the possibilities of technology (page 1). what appropriate and effective should translate into is not given any precise and operable meaning. for school leaders and school authorities, ‘adequate digital competence’ is about knowing how to provide appropriate support structures, technical and pedagogical, and appropriate infrastructure (page 11). as such, it needs to be interpreted from the context and position of the others involved in education. that digital resources used for teaching and learning are appropriate and related to the possibilities of technology to be used effectively implies that there is a position from which these possibilities can be established. since technology is not only a matter of access in the physical sense, access and use in an effective manner is to be related to the needs and conditions of children, students, and staff members as well as to the assurance of appropriate infrastructure and technical and pedagogical support. these, it is said, ought to lead to an easier working situation for staff members (page 12). this is more in line with later policies, for instance, the government bill from an it policy for society to politics for the it society from 2004 and sou 2014:13 a digital agenda in human service a bright future can be ours from 2014, which are more strategic than operational (kozma, 2008). in the government bill 1983/84:100 appendix 10 of 1983 competence in relation to technology was given more emphasis as computer science, and also in the sou 1985:50 broad computer education, of 1985 where a broad computer education for adults was suggested. when technology gradually has shifted from content to tool to integrated aspects of society, the competences needed seem to be more and more difficult to describe. within the context of teaching and learning, the strategy suggests that research about the effects of digitalization on teaching and learning should be initiated (page 14). schools are understood as places where students learn how to change the world (page 3), which implies a view of teaching and learning as transformative. at the same time, the curricula and syllabi are said to follow technical and digital development (page 7), which implies a reactive and reproductive view on schooling (again, the different views of hernwall (1998) are present in the strategy). education is also considered as a tool for other political ideas, such as gender equity (page 7). including research on the use of technology in education was suggested already in the ministry memorandum, ds 2002:19 next step from 2002. the focus has shifted slightly from schoolbased research and development towards the suggested follow-ups in the 2017 strategy where the effective use of digitalization is focused. discussion in the strategy, the notion ‘adequate digital competence’ implies that digital competence changes over time in line with the development of both technology and its use. it is also implied that an absolute level of digital competence is not possible to provide, since it needs to be developed in accordance with the local conditions of the schools and the students as well as societal demands. to provide a relevant meaning for ‘adequate digital competence’, it needs to depart from the curricula, which in turn need to reflect knowledge and skills related to education, working life, and society. therefore, the curricula need to be aligned with technical and digital development (gd i:1 supplement, p. 7). the meanings possible to ascribe to ‘adequate digital competence’ can therefore be said to depend on, at least, three dimensions: (1) a dimension of time, (2) a contextual dimension, and (3) an interpretative dimension. the use of ‘adequate digital competence’ allows different actors to interpret the meaning of what is to be regarded as ‘adequate’, dependent on context and circumstances related to all aspects of the educational system and to different aspects of time. through this close reading, it seems possible to describe the notion of ‘adequate digital competence’ as being both multi-layered and somewhat stretchable. it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 226 can be understood in relation to almost all aspects of education, and it offers a position that is not easy to contest. as such, ‘adequate’ places the enacting of a policy in the hands of different actors in the k-12 school system – the local school authorities, the school leaders, the teachers, and all other staff members who are involved in education. arguments provided in the national strategy for digitalization of the school system are not easy to contest. different actors are given voice in pronouncing the positions from which the notion of ‘adequate’ is to be decided. the swedish government, school authorities such as the national agency of education, the swedish media council, the swedish digitalisation commission, trade and industry, software developers, and hardware suppliers all have legitimate says in providing points of departure for the notion of ‘adequate’. the cues to decode the notion of adequate digital competence are there for the actors to first interpret and then enact, without clear views of what might be in their own local and specific contexts. this specifically does not regard the years to come. the reading also provides an understanding of how the notion of ‘adequate digital competence’ operates as ‘policy as text’ but are at the same time dependent on being interpreted in relation to overall discourses about digitalization in k-12 schools and in relation to educational contexts and local policy formation processes. by offering sense-giving entities (gioia & chittipeddi, 1991), the policy operates as ‘policy as discourse’ in relation to context(s) and the interpretation(s) of ‘adequate digital competence’. thus, the meanings possible to ascribe to ‘adequate digital competence’ are dependent on (at least) three dimensions – the interpretative and contextual dimensions and the dimension of time. with other dimensions to guide an analysis, it seems reasonable to expect other issues to emerge from a notion that has such loose boundaries. references austin, r. & hunter, b. 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(2017-10-19)’. adequate digital competence – a close reading of the new national strategy for digitalization of the schools in sweden. göran fransson j. ola lindberg anders d. olofsson abstract introduction swedish policy on ict in education – 1983-1994 swedish policy on ict in education – 1994-2016 swedish policy on ict in education – 2017 swedish research on the ict in education – three examples some notes on the concept of policy ‘adequate digital competence’ – a close reading adequate for whom? adequate related to when? adequate related to what? discussion references microsoft word nantongo og hetland.docx ©2020 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training proscovia suubi nantongo department of education university of oslo email: proscovn@student.uv.uio.no per hetland department of education university of oslo email: per.hetland@iped.uio.no abstract the status of inclusivity in current educational practices warrant an examination to ascertain the primary aim of inclusive education or education for all. drawing on the classroom observations of a single case study, we analysed the use of the teachermediated video material ‘teachers for all’ to explore the application of the aip model (i.e., access, interaction and participation) analysing the teaching and learning process. two teacher educators and 11 in-service teachers from one regional training centre (out of six regional training centres) participated in the study. we conclude that the aip model provide three advantages. first, carpentier’s aip model provide a theoretical framework for analysing and building bridges between special needs education, where access signifies presence, and interaction socio-communicative relationships, and inclusive education, where participation signifies co-deciding and power. second, the aip model provide a theoretical and methodological framework to analyse the dimensions of technology, content, people and organisations of a specific digitalised social learning environment. third, the aip model is useful understanding the ambiguities between teacher-centred versus learner-centred pedagogy. keywords: inclusive education, teacher-centred pedagogy, carpentier’s aip model, inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 digital technology, digital divide introduction in an inclusive education framework, the aim of education for all is to promote educational justice for all learners (unesco, 2014). in the context of sub-saharan africa, where a large percentage of the school-going population is perceived as vulnerable to exclusion, education for all may seem like the logical approach (kamenopoulou, 2018; munene, 2016). of significance is the ability of information and communication technology (ict) to promote effective pedagogical practices (alibali & nathan, 2007; beardsley, cogan-drew, & olivero, 2007; marsh & mitchell, 2014) – specifically, the potential to stimulate participation and elicit learners’ reflective feedback (helgevold & moen, 2015). however, research has also revealed a widening divide between ict and educational pedagogies especially in low-resourced nations. the impediment lies in misinterpretations of educational reforms at the macro level leading to weak implementation at the micro level (hargreaves & shirley, 2009; munene, 2016; nantongo, 2019). because digital use takes into account ‘the need to develop clear methods for situating video cases in the large contexts… and the development of instructional procedures that take advantage of the power of video cases’ (miller & zhou, 2007), limited or lack of both technical and pedagogical awareness among the populace often complicate ict adoption (nantongo, 2019). in the case of uganda, the ministry of education and sports spearheaded a nation-wide curriculum review process in primary teacher training programme, establishing ict facilities and emphasising inclusive pedagogy that ensures all learners’ educational needs (nantongo, 2019). hence, in this qualitative study, we observed and analysed the use of standardised video material as an ict approach aimed at facilitating inclusivity, in teacher training. this article proceeds as follows. the second section discusses the theory and conceptual framework drawn from carpentier (aip model, 2015) to highlight educational and digital divides. the third section presents the methodology in which data was qualitatively collected from a single casestudy on two stages (design stage and user study stage). the fourth section presents the study findings. the fifth section discusses the findings in light of the present literature. the final section concludes the article with the way forward. a sociocultural framework for understanding technology enhanced learning sociocultural theory contributes to the discussion about the design intentions inscribed in the technology that this study examined, the conceptions of the use and users that guided inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 its design and the actual use of video materials in teacher education (i.e. design intentions and actual use). vygotsky and other proponents of sociocultural theory (daniels, 2001, 2009; engeström, 2007; vygotsky, 2012; wertsch, 1979) have asserted that tools (e.g. those provided by technology) are culturally designed and adapted to perform culturally defined goals. tools mediate the learning process by framing the intended goal to facilitate the participants’ understanding and sense of the meaning of their culture (lave & wenger, 1991). the actual practices, attitudes and perceptions of the activity (teaching) process, thus, endow the participants with experiences (histories). the digitalisation of classrooms and the learning process has emerged in learning spaces as an impeccable solution to most problematic educational experiences, such as learner exclusion. knowledge may be inaccessible due to time and space constraints. extended studies on the use of videos in learning spaces have strongly commended their long-lasting impact on access, interaction and participation (inclusivity) in social engagement (blomberg, sherin, renkl, & glogger, 2014; goldman, pea, barron, & derry, 2007). the critical prerequisite for inclusive education is the focus on learner-centred pedagogy (lyakurwa, 2019; mino, 2004; mpho, 2018) designed to engage learners in the learning process through interaction and participation. similarly digitalised social learning environments are often set to promote learner-centred against predominantly teachercentred pedagogies (akyeampong, 2017; tabulawa, 2003). to structure our discussion on the use of teacher-mediated video material (cultural tool) in teacher education, we combine sociocultural theory with the access, interaction and participation (aip) model (carpentier, 2012, 2015) as seen in table 1 and 2. the concepts of access, interaction and participation have become important for describing how and in which spaces learners access knowledge, how they interact with each other socially and communicatively and how we think about participation (carpentier, 2012, 2015). carpentier (2012) claimed that ‘access becomes articulated as presence, in a variety of ways that are related to four areas: technology, content, people and organisations’ (p. 173), while interaction ‘has a long history in sociological theory, where it often refers to the establishment of socio-communicative relationships’ (p. 174). finally, carpentier (2012) stated that the ‘difference between participation on the one hand, and access and interaction on the other is located within the key role that is attributed to power, and to equal(ised) power relations in decision-making processes’ (p. 174). in the final discussion, we will use carpentier’s aip model (see table 1) to highlight the relationships between teacher-centred and learner-centred models (see table 2). inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 table 1. access, interaction and participation – the aip model access (presence) technology content people organisations production presence of (proto-) machines to produce and distribute content presence of previously produced content (e.g. archives) presence of people to cocreate presence of organisational structures and facilities to produce and distribute content reception presence of (proto-) machines to receive (relevant) content presence of (relevant) content presence (sites) of joint media consumption presence of organisational structures to provide feedback to interaction (socio-communicative relationships) technology content people organisations production using (proto-) machines to produce content producing content co-producing content as a group or community co-producing content in an organisational context reception using (proto-) machines to receive content selecting and interpreting content consuming media together as group or community discussing content in an organisational context (feedback) participation (co-deciding) technology content people organisations production (and reception) co-deciding on/with technology co-deciding on/with content co-deciding on/with people co-deciding on/with organisational policy inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 source: carpentier (2015, p. 22) in this study, the aim is to study the potentials of the aip model (access, interaction and participation) using a case study of teacher-mediated videos among in-service teachers learning inclusive education. design and methodology we conducted the qualitative case study in 2017 in one of the six regional centres designated to host an in-service teacher education programme targeting grade iii certificate holders in primary education. it is a three-year distance learning programme including two weeks of face-to-face sessions twice every year. it is run on a module basis. upon completion, students receive a diploma in special needs education (grade v). kyambogo university owns the programme, and the primary teachers’ colleges (ptcs) acting as the centres are highly involved in both administrative and teaching activities. the data are based on a single setting in which tutors used ‘teachers for all’ video material to facilitate learning among in-service teachers. in the early 1990s, brown (1992) and subsequently collins (1992) introduced design experiments as a new approach to studying learning phenomena in quasi-experimental settings to facilitate dialogue. however, like goldman (2007), the sociology of testing has identified a paradox: even when users are important, when it comes to performing tests, their contributions are often ignored or made invisible (hetland, 2011; pinch, 1993; woolgar, 1991). consequently, we will focus on the ambiguities between design and actual use. documenting the data followed two stages design stage: the university of oslo’s department of special needs education in norway, kyambogo university in uganda and kenya institute of special education in kenya produced dvd material called ‘teachers for all’ in 2008 (wormnæs, skaar, & refseth). we refer to this step as the design stage, and build on a study of the original designer group’s report from the design stage (see table 2). user study stage: the next step involved determining how the ‘teachers for all’ dvd was used in the classroom (see table 2). six regional centres implement a uniform curriculum but we purposively selected one regional centre because of the presence of a tutor there who had participated in the design stage of the dvd material. consequently, the case selected represents an extreme or deviant case. extreme cases often reveal more information ‘because they activate more actors and more basic mechanisms in the situation studied’ (flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 229). this was important since many studies of ict in an educational inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 context in uganda risk being studies of non-use of ict (nantongo, 2019). the first author video recorded live classroom teaching sessions employing this dvd material. the study participants included two tutors (tutors 1 and 2, both females) and 11 in-service teachers (with mixed backgrounds concerning gender, age and experience) trained in inclusive education. this study was approved by the norwegian social sciences data services. in the past, the first author facilitated this training programme in the different regional centres. certainly, this double role (researcher and teacher educator) strengthens the qualitative data by ‘creating a synergy of what [is] visible and relative’ (nantongo, 2019) in the practical field of teaching inclusive education to teachers. further the researchers sought permission to access the participants from the training centre managers. the individual tutors consented to participate unconditionally and willingly integrated the videos into their instructions. individual in-service teacher student had the opportunity to withdraw from the class or isolate himself or herself from the video recordings. we transcribed the documented video material (verbal data) verbatim. in addition, from the live observation of the lesson, we were able to describe the occurrences as they unfolded. we used nvivo to form categories using the aip model. findings we will systematically present the findings from the two stages concurrently, based on the aip model: the design stage is dedicated to perceptions of the ‘teacher for all’ video material as is visually presented, whereas for the user study stage, we look at how the above mentioned video material was used in the teaching sessions of in-service teachers (as recorded). the supplementary data are the researcher’s live observations in the classroom. the following table presents the summarised findings from the design stage and the user study stage. inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 table 2. from design to use access (presence) technology content people organisations production ds: design of dvdand netbased version; net-based version better supported by scaffolding material ds: design included 40–50 short video sequences of lessons in ugandan and kenyan primary schools ds: design team from university of oslo, kyambogo university and kenya institute of special education ds: design supported and funded by university of oslo, norad and nufu reception ds: originally cheap, small, rechargeable, battery-operated dvd players us: pc ds and us: dvd and net-based versions gave different options and limitations – universal design difficult ds: production team unsure about how narrative traditions differed in different countries ds: dummies were shown to a wide range of stakeholders interaction (socio-communicative relationships) technology content people organisations production ds: video sequences may capture the complexity of a classroom and have real-world relevance ds: present ‘scenarios’ (good practices and dilemmas to invite participants into a discussion) ds: all participants had a background in inclusive education and teacher education ds: final videos should be useful in teacher education for inclusion in countries in the southern and northern hemispheres reception ds: dvd players within classroom settings guided by teachers us: pc within classroom settings guided by two tutors ds: defining tasks, taking the opportunity to collaborate and to reflect us: learners preferred teachercentred approach ds: examples of specific methodological steps in teaching us: learners ‘coordinated’ their responses ds: promote discussion and reflection in pre and in-service teacher education us: teacher-induced dialogues inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 participation (co-deciding) technology content people organisations production (and reception) ds: the production and design expertise was found only among the norwegian participants us: would a broader cultural involvement change the design? ds: co-deciding on/with content (e.g. scenarios, good practices and dilemmas) us: limited evidence of recontextualisation of the learning material ds and us: codeciding on/with people (e.g. a tendency for the educators to focus more on what teachers and student teachers should know, less on reflection on how to learn the knowledge, skills and attitudes) ds: co-deciding on/with organisational policy (e.g. in teacher education there is a need for instructional material with examples of relevance for their students) us: need for indigenous pedagogies perhaps, and need for knowledge and skills in technology integration source: adapted from carpentier (2015, p. 22) note: ds represent the design stage, while us represent the user study stage. access the first step of data generation was at the design stage where observations of the ‘teachers for all’ dvd material was carried out. in total, ‘teachers for all’ includes 40–50 short video sequences of indoor and outdoor activities/lessons from ugandan and kenyan primary schools. there are also video sequences with statements by public officials, teacher educators, head teachers and class teachers, along with sequences where pupils with and without disabilities share some of their experiences of being in an inclusive school. each video sequence lasts, on average, 10 minutes. the educational intention of the designed video was to influence students’ perspectives by challenging them to reflect upon key perspectives of relevance for teaching learners with disabilities in inclusive schools. the choice of technology had user implications. first, several attempts to start the video were unsuccessful due to the use of a technically dated laptop. in a seemingly reluctant voice, the tutor recognised the need to upgrade the laptop. learners waited in anticipation; some gazed at each other, prompting one learner to voluntarily offer technical assistance. although the researcher suggested switching computers, participants expressed limited technical resources and time constraints. in view of the observed technical hiccups, and mindful of the dvd material’s production date, the researcher randomly asked whether the in-service teachers had access to these videos during their grade iii training or at the schools where they were currently practising. they could not recall using any form of video inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 for teaching. finally, the tutor was able to access two video sequences. one sequence featured a teacher conducting an english lesson. the teaching session was labelled methodology and lasted for 19 minutes. the second sequence featured a teacher conducting a social studies lesson; the teaching session was labelled inclusion and lasted for 29 minutes. both lessons were conducted among lower primary school classes. the tutor selected the two videos/sequences for participants to watch. the participants repositioned themselves around the laptop. in the interest of the users, audio-visual accessibility was limited due to size of the gadget vis a vis the class size. the tutor determined continued access to the content. the findings also revealed that the dvd material in use exited as a single copy personally owned by the tutor not the programme. overall, the data revealed that video use is never or seldom part of pedagogy in teacher education. it depends on the individual tutor’s interest and previous knowledge. lack of time coupled with large class sizes also hinder the use of technology in teaching. interaction from the design stage, ‘teachers for all’ should have real-world relevance; it requires students to define and examine the tasks and subtasks needed to complete the activity from different perspectives, providing the opportunity for students to collaborate and reflect. the ‘scenario’ idea is based on a narrative perspective, where the intention is to create an image of how one might use the planned material in the future. the purpose of using a scenario was to create a shared basis for associations and to invite participants to discuss what the learning tool should look like and how they may use it. there was a wish to present examples of specific methodological steps, considered universally relevant, for teaching beginners. video recordings from classroom activities have the legitimacy and rigour to promote discussion and reflection in preand in-service teacher education; they have a hallmark ability to capture the complexity of a classroom and facilitate closer examination. the tutors complemented several video sequences with text-based discussion/reflection. from the user study stage, the researcher noticed that tutor 1 appeared several times to observe the in-service teachers as they watched the video as if she was expecting them to display a particular shared behaviour in relation to the video content – the eye gaze shifting back and forth without verbal expressions. the in-service teachers exhibited a particular body posture conveying eagerness to learn from a relatively familiar scenario. however, when the tutor, with the aid of inscribed texts, posed questions, there was limited direct interaction, mainly in the forms of eye gaze, giggles and faint smiles. moreover, although this behaviour could have signalled moments of interaction, the tutor never interrogated it. tutor 1’s recaps of video sequences encouraged involved class demonstrations amidst restricted laughter from the in-service teachers. several times, inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 tutor 1 described the scenario and opined: ‘she is actually trying to teach him sounds. you may realise that this is a child with mental retardation. and you can see that she encourages the child to say the sound’. as was the case many times, the in-service teachers maintained their visual focus on the video without having any verbal reaction to the tutor’s submission. tutor 1 employed questions, cautions, supplements and/or technical adjustment of the video (rewind/forward) to elicit more access and interaction: ‘so, in each video, we have reflections and discussion. so, as you view this video, we should be able also to understand what the teacher is doing, so that we are going to reflect’. furthermore, tutor 1 read the inscribed prompts, citing a particular scene, to the class and described the event: ‘the activity was teaching children sounds before the actual reading. so, what do you think the children could have learnt from this activity?’ she then asked the class with the following: ‘to us, what do you think could be the purpose?’ then she hastily wrapped up, ‘these are our reflections that we need to work on’. in summary, tutor 1 recited verbatim and elaborated upon inscribed reflective tasks to the in-service teachers. the class offered minimal verbal interactions during the lesson. at this point, the role of tutor 2 was unclear. participation in designing ‘teachers for all’, there was a deliberate attempt to create a basis for discussing how learners are involved in class activities, such as whether everybody is able to contribute ideas and can expect meaningful and dignifying comments from the teacher (and peers). the dvd provided several themes and topics that served as a good starting point for identifying and initiating discussions to the benefit of both the teachers and student teachers on inclusive education. there were typical scenarios of how one interprets inclusive education in the classroom environment. for example, there was the case of anna, who was perceived to be at risk of being left out during the teaching and, therefore, the teacher paid special attention to her. during the user study stage, tutor 1 systematised the learning tool (video) by describing the aim, content and tasks to the viewers beforehand. she contextualised the video content with the in-service teachers’ assumed teaching experiences (past knowledge) of learners with special needs. this was intended to stimulate memory and elicit critical observations. for example, tutor 1 reflected upon one of the video sequences as follows: if i may ask a question: in our classrooms, when we have children with special needs – like anna (the girl with special needs) – the teacher said ‘sarah’, and sarah answered. then she goes to anna. ‘anna, anna, anna’. it looks like she wants the children to identify that anna has a problem. she continues to say ‘anna’. anna responds. then she says ‘very good. you see, even anna can read’. is it really good? to you as practising teachers, what do you inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 think? the researcher observed that the in-service teachers expressed no intention of discussing the narrative above. rather, they listened to the tutor’s remarks on the teacher’s strategy to encourage anna to read and the shortcomings of inclusive practices among her peers. the tutor extracted examples of inclusive education practices from the video and challenged the in-service teachers to cite more such elements. she verbally encouraged the class to take an active role in the lesson. for example, tutor 1 said, ‘someone can stand and make the movement’. the class swung in emotions when a participant volunteered to perform the movement. there were no verbal explanations as to why most participants laughed. rather, tutor 1 recommended teacher demonstrations for effective inclusive learning: ‘i do; you do; we do’. once, tutor 1 insisted that the class respond to her questions. suddenly, group laughter erupted, followed by a resounding collective response to the question. for example, tutor 1 distinguished the uniqueness of classroom arrangement. on rewinding the video and elaborating on the content, for example, tutor 1 said, ‘the teacher appreciated, but at the same time, that girl vanessa was not given time’. she then challenged the class: ‘do you think vanessa learnt anything? she was not given a chance’. at this point, tutor 2 interrupted with a supposition about what they could observe. tutor 1 agreed completely and supplemented her submission. the two tutors prolonged the dialogue by including elaborations, citing classroom examples, from both the video and the teaching field, of good practices for inclusive education. the researcher observed that the class seemed less tense as they listened to the dialogue but maintained the same posture (gazing at the screen) throughout, and no in-serve teacher attempted to join in the dialogue. however, to continue citing the inscribed text and save time, the dialogue ended unexpectedly. tutor 1 read and answered the tasks as provided in the video with the help of rhetorical questions, accessioned by the participants’ aided contributions. for example, tutor 1 said, ‘teachers for___ (pause)’ and the class replied, ‘all’. then tutor 1 asked, ‘able to what?’ and subsequently answered, ‘enjoy’. at the end of the first session, the students had to discuss strategies relating to their routines as classroom teachers. there was no presentation of the outcome of the discussion; rather, a subsequent video session began with tutor 1 positing that the inservice teachers (study participants) were primarily the potential implementers of inclusive education. the video materials demonstrated them as role models. in summary, selected excerpts represent the voluminous data recorded to illustrate how the user study addressed the general aim of video use in teacher education. our conclusions from the general observation are, first, that the tutors focused more on what the in-service teachers should know and less on how a multimedia-based tool could inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 facilitate reflection and motivation to acquire the intended knowledge, skills and attitudes. second, the tutor answered or simply recited several inscribed questions/tasks. the roles of tutor 2 and the in-service teachers remained unclear. tutor 1 also made no attempt to provide opportunities for individual contributions. the lesson was facts-driven with minimal reflection on diverse thoughts. in fact, the use of videos attracted minimal verbal responses from the in-service teachers. particular scenarios also left the students giggling without further explanation. the students commonly responded collectively (in unison) to complete the tutor’s normative narratives on inclusive education. discussion as stated earlier the aim of this paper is to explore the potentials of the aip model (access, interaction and participation) using a case study of teacher-mediated videos among inservice teachers learning inclusive education. the following discussion is informed by the findings from the design stage and the user study stage. first, as a design strategy, and also as the material was nearly 10 years old, a dvd version maintained user-friendly accessibility in light of potential slow and unstable internet connections. although the capacity of educational materials to promote inclusive education learning may be uncontested, hargreaves and shirley (2009) emphasised that such good practice may be rejected if there is a mismatch within the prevailing circumstances. our findings show that the educational curriculum did not advocate the video material’s authenticity, which adversely affected its accessibility and implementation. hence, at the end of the project (modus operandi), no local ownership was assumed to ensure sustainability. unesco (2014) has raised a concern about building institutions to ensure that global reforms are sustained in the local context. indeed, most experiences of educational reforms and innovations show that they require the backing of technical and political decisions to attract resource allocations (munene, 2016). the findings reveal no official recognition of ‘teachers for all’ video use at any level of teacher education. second, the dvd material design provided real scenarios and reflective tasks to promote a learner-centred approach to learning about inclusive education. this approach is closely linked to the sociocultural understanding of learning. the findings indicate that this insight is underrated when the power-related position is established. the tendency for one would-be facilitator (tutor) to monopolise the learning process by performing all possible tasks, identifying other parties’ mistakes and authoring good practices evidences this. conversely, those in a less powerful position due to knowledge uncertainties withdraw, becoming passive, as a strategy to avoid criticism. the user study revealed that in-service teachers are socialised within a teacher-centred schooling tradition with the frequent use of a question-and-answer approach. often, the in-service teachers gave both questions and answers collectively, but also occasionally, they ignored the questions. the teacher found inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 this somewhat frustrating, but mostly because the learning material was designed to include reflective questions for discussion and practice. we assert that the intention in the video was to disrupt the tutor’s traditional role and power by providing in-built tasks. in a struggle to restore this position, the tutor recited the texts and answered the tasks. however, the main problem was not the teaching material’s aim at breaking away from a teacher-centred teaching practice; quite the contrary, inclusive education provides an opportunity for society to critically examine its schooling system (mpho, 2018). consequently, in moving from the design stage to the user study stage, we experienced that the design stage had an inscribed user that was almost invisible in the user study stage (hetland, 2011). this user paradox is evident both in the selection of the video material and within the planned dialogical and participatory activities. therefore, if one wishes to introduce new audio-visual teaching material that represents a break with old teaching and learning methods, one must also change the framing of teaching and learning (nantongo, 2019). this is at the heart of (unesco, 2014) prioritisation of five areas for the sustainability of educational reforms, but specifically, transforming learning environments and training programmes. moreover, our findings show active participation between the two tutors (equal power position). although this verbal interaction could not attract more participants from the class and was short-lived, it redefined the teaching and learning approach to which the class was accustomed. the result was the expansion of content by contextualising the video from various perspectives in line with miller and zhou (2007) pedagogical approach to video use. as videos have the capacity to induce access, interaction and participation in inclusive learning through reflection, attention and discussion among participants (beardsley et al., 2007; helgevold & moen, 2015), this very analysis, therefore, points to the question of participants’ role in the use of videos. in the current study, there was no logical evidence suggesting how students contributed to the existing knowledge (video) even with the intention to design the video with familiar learning environments and daily routines in uganda. from a sociocultural perspective, the video stimulated minimal tutor– learner interaction beyond its content. continuous episodes of the tutor’s eye gaze alternating between the class and the video, as well as learners’ numerous giggles and facial expressions (paralinguistic features) while watching the video demonstrated interactions. in some ways, the tutor relied on paralinguistics, although the interpretation of the learners’ own gestural reactions remained unexplored during the learning process. this use of paralinguistic features with verbal expressions maintained a unified focal point (video) of learning and ensured that everyone interacted and participated in a digitalised environment (alibali & nathan, inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 2007). therefore, it would be naïve to conclude that there was no interaction; rather, the indicators were less exploited at the expense of verbal communication, leading to minimal achievement of the intended goal of inclusive learning. using video for reflective purposes (describing, evaluating and integrating) in teacher education, blomberg et al. (2014) remarked on the overall overwhelming tendency of experiencing learning by watching videos. therefore, we can assume that the limited verbal exchange (dialogue) between the tutors and learners was a response to the limited time to digest the video content and the approach to relate that content to knowledge that the inservice teachers had already acquired in the programme. for example, helgevold and moen (2015) study on the use of flipped classrooms in which variations in modalities were used (such as on-line lectures and discussions) ‘contributed to a better understanding of, and a greater involvement and participation in the teaching and learning processes’ (p.40). analyses have revealed that there is a crucial difference between the design stage and the user study stage, and to understand this difference, we must understand the present teaching and learning culture in uganda (and quite likely across large parts of sub-saharan africa). in a study on how blind university students access learning in inclusive classrooms, lyakurwa (2019) found that students with visual impairments often preferred teacher-centred methods over learner-centred methods; however, our main finding is that this preference is likely deeply entrenched in ugandan schooling traditions – a tendency restraining reflective pedagogical engagement (nantongo, 2019) even at the teacher training level. the critical justification borne of these findings is the facilitator’s (tutor) own pedagogical awareness of using videos (helgevold & moen, 2015) – the less the pedagogical awareness, the less likely the learners are to reflect in the user study. as stated earlier, at the design stage, there were considerations about the tool’s (video) accessibility in differently endowed (internet and no internet) learning spaces. however, the findings reveal that such solutions lack an in-depth sociocultural understanding of the environment. thus, dvds alone may not guarantee accessibility in the context of in-service teacher education in uganda. this explains why the material mostly has been neglected for the last 10 years – a warning that hargreaves and shirley (2009) already sounded in relation to importing practices without proper training. similarly, we argue that the narrow implementation of digital classrooms in much of subsaharan africa emanates from issues of technological affordability, as goldman et al. (2007) contended, rather than a cultural preference for teacher-centred methods. given this case study contextualising the use of video in teacher education, we ‘call for the need to adapt research approaches to make them qualitative and flexible but also systematic and reflective’ (kamenopoulou, 2018, p. 129) in semi-digitalised communities (e.g. subsaharan africa) to establish prevailing local alternatives. one important issue about ‘teachers for all’ is that it is based on a learner-centred approach to inclusive education inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 (mino, 2004). however, other studies have concluded that even if participants embrace the concept of inclusive education, teacher-centred methods dominate in countries such as botswana (mpho, 2018) and ghana (akyeampong, 2017). along similar lines have come claims that international aid programmes’ interest in a learner-centred pedagogy is part of the dominant economic and political ideology that international aid agencies promote (tabulawa, 2003). helgevold and moen (2015) warned of the adverse implications of global reforms because of their lack of understanding of local contexts. for the same reason, tabulawa (2003) advocated the need for the study of indigenous pedagogies. conclusions we have investigated the use of teacher-mediated videos within in-service teacher education, and our findings indicate that a) the aip model provide a theoretical and methodological framework for analysing and building bridges between special needs education and inclusive education, b) the aip model provide a well-integrated framework to study the four dimensions technology, content, people, and organisations of digitalised social learning environments, and c) the aip model is useful understanding the ambiguities between teacher-centred versus learner-centred pedagogy. the case study reveals a mismatch between the video material design’s intentions (‘teachers for all’) and its actual use, perhaps indicating restrictive in-depth inclusive learning. we suggest that carpentier’s aip model should guide further studies into pedagogical approaches in teacher education to better understand accessibility, interaction and participation. acknowledgement the authors of this article owe a deep intellectual debt to the original designers of ‘teachers for all’ and the participants for their commitment to being featured in the study. conflict of interest we declare that by undertaking this study, there is no known conflict of interest. references akyeampong, k. (2017). teacher educators' practice and vision of good teaching in teacher education reform context in ghana. educational researcher, 46(4), 194203. alibali, m. w., & nathan, m. j. (2007). teachers’ gestures as a means of scaffolding students’ understanding: evidence from an early algebra lesson. in r. p. goldman, r; barron, b; derry, j.s (ed.), video research in the learning sciences (pp. 349365). new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates, publishers. inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 beardsley, l., cogan-drew, d., & olivero, f. (2007). videopaper: bridging research and practice for preservice and experienced teachers. in r. goldman, r. pea, b. barron, & s. j. derry (eds.), video research in the learning sciences (pp. 479-493). london lawrence erlbaum associates, publishers. blomberg, g., sherin, m. g., renkl, a., & glogger, i. (2014). understanding video as a tool for teacher education: investigating instructional strategies to promote reflection. instructional science, 42(3), 443-463. doi:10.1007/s11251-013-9281-6 carpentier, n. (2012). the concept of participation. if they have access and interact, do they really participate? communication management quarterly, 14(2), 164-177. carpentier, n. (2015). differentiating between access, interaction and participation. conjunctions: transdisciplinary journal of cultural participation, 2(2), 7-28. daniels, h. (2001). vygotsky and pedagogy. new york: routledgefalmer. daniels, h. (2009). vygotsky and inclusion. in p. hick, r. kershner, & p. farrell (eds.), pyschology for inclusive education: new directions in theory and practice (pp. 2437). london: routledge taylor & francis. engeström, y. (2007). putting vygotsky to work: the change laboratory as an application of double stimulation. in h. daniels, m. cole, & j. v. wertsch (eds.), the cambridge companion to vygotsky (pp. 363-425). cambridge: cambridge university press. flyvbjerg, b. (2006). five misunderstandings about case-study research. qualitative inquiry, 12(2), 219-245. goldman, r., pea, r., barron, b., & derry, j. s. (eds.). (2007). video research in the learning sciences. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. hargreaves, a., & shirley, d. (2009). the fourth way: the inspiring future for educational change. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. helgevold, n., & moen, v. (2015). the use of flipped classrooms to stimulate students’ participation in an academic course in initial teacher education. nordic journal of digital literacy, 10(01), 29-42. hetland, p. (2011). the user paradox in technology testing. nordic journal of digital literacy, 6(1-2), 7-21. kamenopoulou, l. (ed.) (2018). inclusive education and disability in the global south. london: palgrave macmillan. lave, j., & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. lyakurwa, s. e. (2019). universal design for learning towards achieving inclusive higher education in tanzania. (phd), university of oslo, oslo. (297) marsh, b., & mitchell, n. (2014). the role of video in teacher professional development. teacher development, 18(3), 403-417. doi:10.1080/13664530.2014.938106 miller, k., & zhou, x. (2007). learning from classroom video: what makes it compelling and what makes it hard. in r. goldman, r. pea, b. barron, & s. j. derry (eds.), video research in the learning sciences (pp. 321-334). london: lawrence erlbaum associates, publishers. mino, j. j. (2004). planning for inclusion: using universal instrutional design to create a learner-centred community college classroom. equity & excellence in education, 37(2), 154-160. mpho, o.-m. (2018). teacher centered dominated approaches: their implications for today's inclusive classrooms. international journal of psychology and councelling, 10(2), 11-21. munene, i. i. (ed.) (2016). achieving education for all: dilemmas in system-wide reforms and learning outcomes in africa. lanham: lexington books. inclusive education and digital divides: the case of video materials in in-service teacher training seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 nantongo, p. s. (2019). framing heuristics in inclusive education: the case of uganda’s preservice teacher education programme. african journal of disability, 8, 10. pinch, t. (1993). "testing one, two, three... testing!": towards a sociology of testing. science, technology, & human values, 18(1), 25-41. tabulawa, r. (2003). international aid agencies, learner-centered pedagogy and political democratisation: a critique. comparative education, 39(1), 7-26. unesco. (2014). road map for implementing the global action programme on education for sustainable development. retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000230514. vygotsky, l. (2012). the science of psychology. journal of russian & east european psychology, 50(4), 85-106. wertsch, j. v. (1979). from social interaction to higher psychological processes. a clarification and application of vygotsky’s theory. human development, 22(1), 1 22. doi:10.1159/000272425 woolgar, s. (1991). configuring the user: the case of usability trials. in j. law (ed.), a sociology of monsters. essays on power, technology and domination (pp. 57-99). london: routledge. wormnæs, s., skaar, s., & refseth, y. dilemmas in designing a dvdand net-based materials intending to promote reflection among students in special teacher education. university of oslo. title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 interprofessional participation and reflection in a digital network ragnhild nilsen (corresponding author) professor university of tromsø, faculty of health sciences ragnhild.nilsen@uit.no line lundvoll nilsen, ph.d. norwegian centre for integrated care and telemedicine, university hospital of north norway line.lundvoll.nilsen@telemed.no abstract interdisciplinary professional education (ipe) contributes to the formation of effective collaboration in the field of practice. education needs to be organised so that health science students can learn with, from, and about each other. this article explores how web-based collaboration contributes to this, by describing how it promotes reflection and professional understanding among health science students. our data analysis is based on focus group interviews and online student discussions. the findings show that the flexibility of digital network, which represents both collaboration triggered by videos and online communication, is important for the students: they develop their argumentation together in reflective tranquillity. it is important to practise reflection since a choice of actions is an integral part of healthcare work, work which depends upon judgement exercised by the individual healthcare worker. the digital network allows students from different health science programmes to draw on each other’s knowledge and expertise. the findings are relevant for the development of reflection and professional understanding among health science students, as they show how students discuss and seek solutions to complex challenges in the practice. keywords: qualitative method, interprofessional education, web-based learning, reflection mailto:ragnhild.nilsen@uit.no mailto:line.lundvoll.nilsen@telemed.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 33 introduction increased professionalization and increased attention to patients with complex diseases have led to the requirement of different professions being able to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries (mulvale & bourgeault, 2007; svensson, 1996). collaboration is difficult because a profession, in principle, has a monopoly: only people with a certain education are entitled to exercise the profession in question, which, in practice, may be at the expense of general knowledge and sharing with other professionals. professional competence is based upon science, is acquired through education, and has a practical and clearly defined goal. this requires both theoretical and practical knowledge in the subject. interprofessional education (ipe) is defined as occasions when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care (barr, koppel, reeves, hammick, & freeth, 2005). by organising the training, ipe can provide effective cooperation with other professions in the practice (barr et al., 2005). students who learn to collaborate with other students can provide better service to patients, because they develop the skill to reflect on collaborative processes with other professions (wilhelmsson, pelling, ludvigsson, dahlgren, hammar, & faresjö, 2009). experiential learning requires reflection on the process, both individually and as a group. schön (1987) divides the development of knowledge in action into two themes: reflection-in-action and reflection-onaction. reflection-in-action means that practitioners think about their work while carrying it out and can adjust and improve it while the action is in progress. reflection-on-action means that one can, in peace and quiet in the aftermath of the situation, revise the events and one’s own actions. one reflects on what has been done to whether the knowledge influenced the result. schön is concerned with the fact that knowledge cannot be separated from social practice. ipe involves learning, while learning, in turn, requires reflection. students should learn to reflect on their own profession as opposed to other profession, and thereby discover the specific features of their own profession. reflection is often quoted as a key ingredient as being crucial to effective ipe and practice (barr et al, 2005; d'eon, 2005). a common expression of reflection includes “stepping or sitting back” from a situation to review it. the process is described as consisting of the turning over of a subject in one`s mind and giving it serious thought (dewey, 1933). rodgers (2002) suggests that reflection is the process of the “reconstruction and reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience”. just as situations must be interpreted in order to be handled in an appropriate manner, so too a written text has to be read and interpreted before the words can make sense. the national curriculum for professional education in health and social care in norway describes a course whose goal is to develop a common frame of reference as a basis for future interprofessional collaborations. the topics comprise ethics, communication, stateand municipal-knowledge, healthand social-politics, as well as scientific theory and research methods. this article examines how health science students, participating in an interprofessional web-based curriculum, collaborated. first-year students from northern norway who were enrolled in four educational programs (dental hygiene, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, and radiography) took part in the study. the study explores students’ online discussions relating to five filmed, authentic healthcare cases. the purpose is to show how participation in a digital network can promote professional understanding and reflection among health science students when collaborating using online communication. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 34 methods the study presents findings from a qualitative study of a web-based curriculum where students from four different health science programs participated (nilsen, 2012). study design two groups of six students from different health science programs were selected to follow a web-based variant of the course. the supervisor for the two groups was responsible for developing the programme. the students followed a succession of presentation pages on a learning path, and a new page was presented every day. the purpose of the programme was to challenge the students to reflect and encourage discussions by adding new tasks every day. the participants were given five authentic healthcare cases. these were filmed with drama students as actors in order to show how traditional collaboration between healthcare professionals could be. the students participated in five online discussions, one per case. for each situation, there were one or two lectures of 10–15 minutes in length. by following the lectures and reading the literature for each topic, the students should have had sufficient grounds to take part in the online discussions. data collection two methods of data collection were used: textual analysis of transcripts of the online discussions (nord, 1991) and focus group interviews (vaughn, schumm, & sinagub, 1996). the students were divided into two distinct groups, forming two focus groups of six people. group 1 consisted of a radiography student, an occupational therapy student, two physiotherapy students, and two dental hygiene students. group 2 consisted of two radiography students and four physiotherapy students. it was coincidental that no medical laboratory medicine students were in the sample. since interprofessional education was explored, rather than the similarities/differences between the professions, this was not deemed to be a weakness of the method. data analyses the online discussions were transcribed, systematically reviewed, and analysed (nord, 1991). in the analysis, excerpts that included specific examples of students from different programmes were selected in order to share their knowledge and experiences with each other. for this article, three excerpts from the online discussions relating to the two cases, the good encounter (figure 1) and the role of the healthcare worker (figure 2), were selected. excerpts from the online discussion from the case the good encounter are presented in excerpt 1, whereas those from the case the healthcare worker’s role are presented in excerpts 2 and 3. these particular extracts were chosen because they illustrate how web-based collaboration can be used for students to share knowledge and reflect on practice together. the content of the online discussions was analysed (silverman, 2006) and spontaneous expressions and their reflections on the material were noted and interpreted. the text was read several times to create a holistic understanding (geanellos, 2000). the empirical analysis focused on student participation in the digital network and opportunity for reflection when discussing online (schön, 1987). to complete the statement from the online discussions, the students were then interviewed. two focus group interviews, guided by the first author, were conducted, one per group. a combination of open and closed questions was used in the interviews; the answers were followed up and elaborated. the interviews were audio-taped and transcribed (vaughn et al., 1996). four seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 35 statements from the focus group interviews form the basis of the textual analysis (excerpt 4). these are considered to be key statements highlighting the students’ experience of participating in discussions in a digital community of practice. the online discussions and focus group interviews are presented in different formats. the online discussions show excerpts from situations with students from different healthcare programmes. the results from the focus group interviews are presented as statements. they are in response to the question of the students’ experience of discussing online. together, the use of textual analysis of transcripts of the online discussions and focus group interviews reflects how videos and written online communication fosters collaboration and reflection among health science students. results interaction in online discussions the good encounter (figure 1) is a film depicting a “radiography student” and a “radiologist”. figure 1. from the case the good encounter. excerpt 1 is the online discussion between a physiotherapy student, a radiography student, and a dental hygiene student regarding a similar situation. excerpt 1. sharing professional knowledge physiotherapy student: (...) because of the radiologist, the student became increasingly insecure during the conversation; she finds an equal partner, which allows for good teamwork in the communication. for example, the radiologist moves to the same height as the student when he sits down; hence, she avoids looking down at him, but makes sure they are equal, and the conversation continues satisfactorily. since it is the radiologist who has the formal power in the form of her position, it is her task to make this an equal relationship between her and the student, and i think she succeeds in this. radiography student: i think it is well pointed out that she sits down when the student does, so as not to look down on him. i also think that her ability to communicate well makes the student feel that he can safely turn to her later on. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 36 dental hygiene student: i think communication between the radiologist and radiography student was pretty straightforward. they listen to each other, and the student will, in the future, learn from his mistakes. there was also a great conversation at the end where they sat down together and talked in a friendly manner. *** the physiotherapy student exemplifies an attempt to level the inequality in the relationship between two healthcare workers by reducing the physical asymmetry. the excerpt illustrates how health science students from different programs draw upon each other’s knowledge and expertise. both the radiography student and the dental hygiene student agreed with the physiotherapy student’s description that a beneficial situation for communication between the healthcare professionals had been created. the healthcare worker’s role (figure 2) is a film depicting a “doctor” and a “nurse” discussing the organisation and division of duties in healthand socialservices. figure 2. from the case the healthcare worker’s role. excerpt 2 is a discussion between an occupational therapy student and a physiotherapy student, discussing various roles in healthcare. excerpt 2.professions and the different roles in the health services occupational therapy student: i was lucky enough to experience teamwork during my practice. it was a user who had cp, and an electric wheelchair had to be adapted. two physiotherapists, an occupational therapist, and a wheelchair technician, as well as the guardians were present so i had the opportunity to see how they worked together in a team, and role played by the occupational therapist in relation to the physiotherapists. to be honest, i was surprised how similarly these two occupational groups worked during the actual meeting. in fact, the occupational therapist was more active than the physiotherapists on the medical side in relation to correct posture. here, anatomical knowledge plays a part, and this comprises a major element in the profession of occupational therapy. of the cases i had access to, it was the occupational seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 37 therapist who was responsible for reporting and further treatment. in my opinion, it was an exciting observation. physiotherapy student: oh, how exciting! yes, in that case it was perhaps the occupational therapist that had the main task. the occupational therapist, for example, adapts equipment, and is probably better at it than physiotherapists. physiotherapists places greater weight on identifying, and improve or sustain the patient’s functioning. *** the occupational therapy student examines a situation she has experienced from her practice, in which she describes a team effort and the role of the occupational therapist in that team. she describes being surprised to see the similarity in the work of the occupational therapist and physiotherapists. she points out the importance of the occupational therapist’s knowledge of anatomy and claims that the occupational therapist was responsible for the reports and further treatment. the physiotherapy student says enthusiastically that it was an interesting observation, but believes that the occupational therapy student’s experience is a special case. the physiotherapy student outlines a general division of work between the occupational therapists and physiotherapists in practice. the excerpt illustrates health science students’ reflections on knowledge and skills in an interprofessional team, based upon the discussion of various tasks of the professions in the team. excerpt 3 illustrates the students’ discussion about their practical strengths and weaknesses based on the healthcare worker’s role. excerpt 3. reflection on practice physiotherapy student: i have also noticed one thing. i simply feel a bit stupid at times. (...) yet, there is an advantage in not being expected to know everything your mentor knows. hence, you will be given more understanding, and you get a lot of good advice that can help you further in your studies. dental hygiene student: i totally agree with what you say about feeling stupid sometimes. as a reasonably young student, it is not always easy to “swallow the big spoon of knowledge”. fortunately, there are many good mentors out there who understand how we feel, as they themselves were once in a similar position. radiography student: i totally agree. it is easy to be overlooked as a student (...). if we see one of the professional healthcare workers making an obvious mistake, you are likely to be disregarded because you are “merely” a student. the positive thing about being in practice is that you learn in different ways. (...) at least that is how it is for me; i learn better by doing things rather than sitting and listening to a lecture. of course, there are things you cannot do, and thus must be read! *** the physiotherapy student says that she sometimes feels stupid in practice, but usually the expectations for students in practice are lower. she also states that good guidance leads students on in their studies. the dental hygiene student and radiography student agree, and share ways of thinking, speaking, and acting (wenger, 1998). the radiography student says that it is easy to be overlooked as a student and that it is better to learn in practice than to listen to a lecture. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 38 interviews about online discussions in order to explore our analysis and interpretation of the excerpts, the students were asked how they perceived the online discussions. four statements were selected for analysis, presented in excerpt 4. the statements illustrate experiences with written online dialogue, thereby allowing beneficial opportunities for reflection. the focus is on the students’ experience in participating in discussions online. excerpt 4. statements about participation in online discussions 1: i thought it was alright, because i got to read through and sort out what people had written and post a comment instead. it is a bit easier to read and discuss online, because you can reflect on what to write. yes, i don’t know, i think it was much better to write online. 2: (...) being online i thought it worked quite well, and in the discussion forums we learned a lot. you can go back to look at what we discussed, unravelling some of the topics of the discussions. 3: there were so many differences, people had emphasised different things. (...) you could sort of compare, you learned a lot better and had a broader view. at the same time, you had it in front of you, so you could scroll back to see, “what did she mean? what was it he said?” in that sense, it really is a good way to keep up with the discussion and perhaps learn to join in. 4: yes, once again, i agree. the fact was that you got a great overview of what had been said before, and we could discuss by reviewing as well. *** a student says (1) that the technology helps to promote reflection, because it is easier to discuss in writing than verbally (vetlesen, 2003). she justifies it by saying that she has time to sort through and read what the others have written and think about what to write. the excerpt highlights what reflection-on-action means by re-evaluating the interactions in peace and quiet in the aftermath of the situation (schön, 1987). different ideas were emphasised in the discussion, and these gave a broader perspective and greater learning outcomes (3). the student says that being able to go backtrack and see what the others had said was very beneficial. another student agrees, pointing out the opportunity to go back to previous posted comments (4). discussion this article explores how the digital network promotes professional understanding and reflection among health science students triggered by videos and written online communication. in the course of three excerpts from online discussions, and additional excerpt of statements from the interviews with the students, the analysis explores how students from different health science professions reflect on practice and draw on each other’s knowledge and expertise. physiotherapy students, during their education, acquire tools for describing, analysing, and interpreting the body and its movements in different ways. excerpt 1 illustrates how a physiotherapy student shares professional knowledge with other students, thereby showing how students from different backgrounds and perspectives draw upon each other’s knowledge and expertise (parsell, spalding, & bligh, 1998). since our understanding of the world is a continuous process in which our previous understanding is adjusted seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 39 or modified in light of new experiences (säljö, 1998), new requirements are established through our experiences, while being subject to reflection and revision in the face of this new experience. this provides the students access to new knowledge and new frameworks of understanding (säljö, 1998). thus, excerpt 2 illustrates a dialogue in which the students express different views on the tasks of healthcare workers. in excerpt 3, the students’ reflections on practice are presented, illustrating that there are common ways in which students think, act, and speak (schön, 1987). in the focus group interviews (excerpt 4), the students say that discussion online made it easier to acquire an overview because they could review the discussion to see what had been written earlier. they were then able to reflect on what had been written and post new comments (holmes, & gardner, 2006)). writing is a good way to develop reflection (eisner, 1991). the online discussions lasted several hours, and the timescale ranged from virtually synchronous to varying degrees of lag-time. asynchronous tools promote reflection to a greater extent than do synchronous tools (benbunan-fich & hiltz, 1999). the excerpts illustrate how written online dialogue provides students with the opportunity to develop their argument in reflective tranquillity. for the students, reflection means that they have to think through the situation. reflection is an important part of collaborative learning for health science students; however, it requires a structure ensuring that students have the space and time to be able to reflect (clark, 2009). the goal is to develop collaborative learning environments that encourage reflection and professional understanding where students learn with, from, and about each other (barr et al., 2005). the analysis illustrates how students from different health science programmes share knowledge through different learning processes. it is important that students are able to understand the value, functions, and roles of other professions; furthermore they should possess interprofessional skills (wilhelmsson, 2009). the discussion regarding the authentic case studies gave them the opportunity to focus on personal and interactive skills in relational work, which is important for practice and also stimulates to remember their own experiences. the discussions around the cases encouraged the students’ reflection-on-action (schön, 1987). the different perspectives in the cases challenged the students and resulted in creative and stimulating thinking and increased insight. the students reflected on their own roles as health science students and the particular nature of other professions too. thus, they discovered their strengths and skills thereby allowing them to complement each other’s expertise. therefore, they had a common point of departure for practice. although there are differences between professions, training in reflection is important because healthcare often necessitates a choice of action and is dependent upon the individual healthcare worker’s judgment in practice. yet research on reflection in online discussions is divergent. miers, clarke, pollard, rickaby, thomas et al. (2007) found that although students shared their knowledge online, their discussions were superficial and limited, showing little reflection and analytical ability. atack, parker, rocchi, maher & dryden, (2009) describe how students from a range of programs such as nursing, medicine, paramedicine, police, media, and health administration discussed a simulated disaster situation in a web-based course, which increased the students’ awareness and appreciation of other team members. solomon, baptiste, hall, luke, orchard et al. (2010) describe how students from different institutions participated in an online discussion forum where the use of problem-based learning (pbl) was intended to encourage interaction. the results showed that students learned about each other’s roles, solved problems together, and had a positive attitude towards web-based ipe. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 40 this paper examines how participation in a digital network can promote reflection and understanding among students. unlike miers et al. (2007) who says that even if students share knowledge online the discussions is limited and show little reflection and analytical ability, the results from this study show that the web-based education helps the students feel that they are being given an opportunity for professional reflection and knowledge development. although the limited number of participants in this study, our findings shows that digital networks provide health science students with training in collaborative reflection and increased understanding of each other’s competence. this is relevant for the development of professional understanding among health science students, because it shows how students discuss and seek solutions to complex healthcare challenges. our findings differ somewhat solomon et al. (2010) who found that students learned about each other’s roles, solved problems together, and had a positive attitude towards web-based ipe, since they were using problem based learning as approach to learning. as compared to atack et al. (2009) who describe that participation in a web-based course increased the students’ appreciation of other members in the team; however, in that study, the teams had participation of students from police, media, and health administration programs as well. the primary focus of this study is reflection and professional understanding as a basis for ipe. virtual communities of practice (vcops) are a type of online learning community that has been shown to improve knowledge sharing and thus overcome professional and structural isolation (r´ıos, aguilera & guerrero, 2009; wenger, mcdermott & snyder, 2002). the value of vcops is to communicate people who want to share or learn about a specific topic by interacting on an ongoing basis (wenger, 2009). the main driver has been to create networks of people with common interests who are geographically dispersed. the technology helps to expand physical space as an arena for learning, while allowing the creation of a learning community, and providing new opportunities for interaction. this study shows professional understanding and reflection among health science students when they collaborate using online communication. many educational institutions use different forms of web-based learning to motivate students to interact and work towards common goals. according to wenger (2009) the question is is no longer whether this manner of teaching is “as good” as face-to-face learning. the searchlight is now trained on the factors affecting group dynamics and cooperative learning. concluding comments it is important to find beneficial digital forms of cooperation, while maintaining and developing the specific expertise of the healthcare student. discussing authentic cases stimulates students to remember their own experiences and is a potentially useful tool for ipe. web-based education is a strategic tool for ensuring good and equitable health services and should be included early in the educational curriculum. by taking advantage of having resource to the network’s functionality, health science students are given the opportunity to participate in online discussions with other students, regardless of whether they are on the campus or not. this can help enhance the quality of skills as well as the standardisation of health services, while allowing more time for the treatment of the patient. however, to develop good occupationally-oriented practice it is necessary to conduct research focusing on the value of interprofessional collaborative education. web-based education is one way of achieving this. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 41 references atack, l., parker, k., rocchi, m., maher, j., & dryden, t. (2009). the impact of an online interprofessional course in disaster management competency and attitude towards interprofessional learning. journal of interprofessional care, 23 (6), 586–598. barr, h., koppel, i., reeves, s., hammick, m., & freeth, d. (2005). effective interprofessional education. argument, assumption & evidence. london: blackwell. benbunan-fich, r., & hiltz, s. r. (1999). educational applications of cmcs: solving case studies through asynchronous learning networks. journal of computermediated communication, 4(3). retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcmc.1999.4.issue-3/issuetoc clark, p. g. (2009). reflecting on reflection in interprofessional education: implication for theory and practice. journal of interprofessional care, 23 (3), 577–589. d`eon, m. (2005). a blueprint for interprofessional learning. journal of interprofessional care; 19 (suppl. 1) 49–59. dewey, j. (1933). how we think (revised edition). d. c. heath, boston. geanellos, r. 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(1991). text analysis in translation: theory, methodology, and didactic application of a model for translation-oriented text analysis. amsterdam, netherlands/atlanta, ga: rodopi. parsell, g., spalding, r., & bligh, j. (1998). shared goals, shared learning: evaluation of a multiprofessional course for undergraduate students. medical education, 32, 304-311. r´ıos, s., aguilera, f., guerrero, l. (2009). virtual communities of practices purpose evolution analysis using a concept-based mining approach. in: knowledgebased and intelligent information and engineering systems, pp. 480–489. rodgers, c. (2002). defining reflection: another look at john dewey and reflective thinking. teachers college record; 104: 842–866 silverman, d. (2006). interpreting qualitative data. london: sage. schön, d. a. (1987). educating the reflective practitioner – toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. london, england: jossey-bass. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcmc.1999.4.issue-3/issuetoc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 42 solomon, s., baptiste, s., hall, p., luke, r., orchard, c., rukholm, e. & damianitaraba, g. (2010). students’ perceptions of interprofessional learning through facilitated online learning modules. medical teacher, 32, 384–391. svensson, r. (1996). the interplay between doctors and nurses – a negotiated order perspective. sociology of health and illness, 18(3), 379–398. säljö, r. (1998). thinking with and through artifacts: the role of psychological tools and physical artifacts in human learning and cognition. in faulkner, d., littleton, k., & vaughn, s., schumm, j. s., & sinagub, j. (1996). focus group interviews in education and psychology. california: sage. vetlesen, a. j. (2003). det forpliktende møtet. in fritze, y., haugsbakk, g., & nordkvelle, y. (eds.), dialog og nærhet. kristiansand: høyskoleforlaget. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. wenger, e., mcdermott, r.a., snyder, w. (2002). cultivating communities of practice. harvard business press, boston. wilhelmsson, m., pelling, s., ludvigsson, j., dahlgren, l.o., hammar, m., & faresjö, t. (2009). twenty years’ experience of interprofessional education in linköping – ground breaking and sustainable. journal of interprofessional care, 23 (2), 1– 13. title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 efa in pakistan: struggle for upgrading literacy dr. mumtaz ahmad assistant professor of education, govt. degree college 170 j.b jhang, higher education department (punjab) pakistan email: mawatto@gmail.com abstract literacy is an instrument of stability within and among countries and thus may prove an indispensable means of effective participation in the societies and (the) economies of today’s world. eradication of illiteracy from the world is an important agenda of unesco, and one of the six goals of dakar framework of action on education for all. illiteracy is also a major problem in pakistan. the picture of illiteracy in pakistan is grim, and although successive governments have announced various programmes to promote literacy the situation is still poor because of various political, social, economic and cultural obstacles. to sum up, it can be said that literacy is a skill necessary to acquire or transmit (information) to others. it is a means not an end in itself. keeping in view the gravity of the situation of literacy and basic education in the country, pakistan has completed/implemented a number of actions/activities for broad-based consultations with principal actors of efa. furthermore, the government of pakistan has accomplished the preparation of provincial and national plans of action and resource mobilization for efa planning. this paper therefore examines the efforts to decrease illiteracy in pakistan, a signatory of the worldwide efa movement. keywords: literacy, efa, development, community, policies, targets. introduction more than ever before education is seen as a basic need of any social, cultural and economic plan. it is a basic human right and a process through which societies plan their socio-economic development (mahbub-ul-haq, 1998). currently, it is considered "essential for civic order, citizenship, sustained economic growth and the reduction of poverty" (world bank, 1995, p.4). without education and literacy it is not possible to realize the goals of balanced and sustainable development. thus, literacy and basic education are considered a pre-requisite for socio-economic development worldwide. furthermore, literacy is the pre-requisite for the ability to consult and benefit from major sources of information and knowledge in today’s world (mark, 1988; unesco, 2002). moreover, knowledge seekers have more facilities seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 112 today to educate themselves and enlighten their lives (unesco, 2004). at the world conference on education for all (jomtien, thailand 1990) some 1,500 participants, comprising delegates from 155 governments, policy makers and specialists from around the world, met to discuss major aspects of efa. in this conference, governments of the world promised to make education for all a reality by the year 2000. when they met again in 2000 in dakar, senegal, it became evident that this objective had not been achieved. hence, they reaffirmed their commitment to ‘education for all’ and agreed on a new target year – 2015 (education international report, 2003). the main areas unanimously approved by the dakar forum of action are shown as below: figure:1: efa targets source: unesco, (2006). efa monitoring report, paris. (p.125) since then, governments, non-governmental organizations, civil societies, bilateral and multilateral donor agencies and the media have started literacy work to help children, youth and adults in becoming skilled or literate. however, developing countries are unable to allocate a sufficiently high budget for the implementation of literacy programmes. war, crisis (crises?)and other emergencies are also major hurdles in some countries. moreover, the traditional educational set up, policies and plans may not be able to cope with the revolutionary pace of the efa goals of dakar. the main purpose of this paper is to present a precise, brief and current/factual picture of the literacy situation in the country and struggle to change the scenario (of literacy) after the launching of efa in pakistan. education for all education is taken as a basic human right and in the same spirit it was affirmed as a worldwide approach by uno in 1948 (unesco, 2003). to accomplish this right, the concept of education for all (efa) was introduced in 1990. efa simply means basic education for all children (both boys and girls), young and old alike and both male and female as discussed by unesco (2005). efa main areas universal primary education learning needs of young and adults education quality gender equality adult literacy early childhood care and early education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 113 similarly, a global synthesis by unesco (2000, p.31) highlights the reality that “education for all is not only a moral obligation and a right; it is also an investment with very high potential rates of individual and social return.” therefore, an emerging readiness is desired to incorporate national policies and expenditures with national development plans and development strategies. one key issue within reduction and development is that of literacy; however, due to a number of factors, the goal of 100% literacy has not been met in all countries. in developing countries, the situation is very alarming. about 80% of the world’s illiterates live in 29 developing countries of asia and africa (unesco, 2006). to cope with the situation the international community began its efforts in 1990 with the holding of the first efa conference. in short, although efa is not a new concept, it is an initiative to push for the provision of education for the masses of a society and it also attempts to focus on key issues such as literacy. historical perspective of education for all the ancient scholar aristotle was only in favour of elites’ education and discouraged education of the masses. however, with the promotion of christianity and later on islam the concept of mass education was emphasized. when muslims came to the sub-continent of indo-pak, there was no idea of mass education. as a result muslim rulers attempted to introduce education for every person of their kingdom. in the same way, compulsory schooling was gradually introduced in most of the western european states during the first half of the 20th century (unesco, 2005). a parallel improvement could be monitored during the same period in north america and in the countries of eastern europe (unesco, 2000, p.iii). according to education international report (2003, p.15): when the process of decolonization began after the second world war, many people expected a similar development in the former colonies. until the end of the 1970s, such progress could be observed in most of these countries. the number of children and youth enrolled in schools gradually increased as the rate of illiteracy dropped. in modern times the first voice to support the education for all was raised by uno in 1948 (venkataiah, 1999). to meet the challenge of efa, the world conference 1990 established a global programme committed to reducing illiteracy all over the world by the year 2000 (unesco, 2004). from 1990 to 2000, according to malcolm (2000, p.44), “throughout the decade countries had introduced a wide array of educational reforms either directly within or related to the six target dimensions agreed at jomtien”. in the world conference held in dakar in april 2000 the developments linked to literacy were analysed in a chain of thematic studies, regional synthesis reports, national reports and other documents. it was noted in the dakar forum in 2000 that the objectives of the jomtien conference had not been achieved. hence, these were reshaped and a new target year was 2015 (unesco, 2000a). the other important and prominent steps towards education for all are known as efa flagship initiatives and efa fast track initiatives (unesco, 20002b). as far as the role of education for all movement is concerned, its effectiveness is being recognized all over the world. however, some signs are indicating that the education for all (efa) process is not on track. the progress of planning and implementation of efa in many countries has been slow and facts regarding literacy in pakistan are no different. role of unesco in efa in pakistan seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 114 unesco is the leading agency in promoting education for all. the main objective of this organization is: …to contribute to peace and security in the world by promoting collaboration among nations through education, science, culture and communication in order to foster universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights and fundamental freedoms that are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the charter of the united nations (unesco institute for statistics, 2005). to fulfil its mandate, unesco performs five principal functions. these principal functions are discussed in nesco (2005, p.2) as: prospective studies on education and culture; transfer, sharing and advancement of knowledge; standard-setting actions; expertise through technical co-operation to member states; and the exchange of particular information. unesco’s educational programme is traditionally focused on meeting the needs of developing countries. currently unesco and unicef are working with some 20 developing countries to design and introduce classroom assessment of learning achievement in grade 4 of their primary schools. pakistan is one of them (unesco, 2002). according to tally, ba & tsikalas, (2005, p.41), “unesco focuses on support for literacy and non-formal education at the international, regional, national and community levels.”. its main key task is to facilitate the development of efa partnerships. another task is to ensure that the activities of all efa partners are compatible with one another and consistent with the efa agenda. pakistan is a developing country and also a signatory of the education for all movement, so the role of unesco especially in the field of education is significant. through unesco financial and technical support has been provided to federal and provincial education departments for the formation and commencement of efa forums and development of a national efa plan of action. meetings of provincial efa forums and efa technical groups were held in four provinces, namely sindh, baluchistan, punjab, and nwfp, during march 2001. regarding efa in pakistan, the first draft of the national plan of action for efa was prepared and presented in the south asian ministerial review meeting held april 10-12, 2001 at kathmandu, nepal (unesco, 2001, p.26). unesco islamabad office extended technical and financial assistance to the ministry of education for the preparation of the draft plan and participation of the pakistan delegation in the sub-regional meeting. in the same way, unesco has supported the ministry of education, government of pakistan, to undertake an assessment of learning achievement of primary level students during 2001. it also developed a data bank on literacy statistics of pakistan. in pakistan unesco’s actions have come under three main headings. the first is providing basic education for all children and the second is fostering literacy and non-formal education among youth and adults. the third main action is known as renewal of education system (unesco, 2002). but all these still require unesco to do more to enhance the firmness and energy of efa. efa in pakistan pakistan is an islamic republic with an area of 796 096 square kilometres. it came into existence on august 14, 1947 as an ideological state after the partition of united india into two parts: pakistan and india. the population of pakistan in mid 2007 has been estimated at 159.1 million. it is one of the most populous countries in south asia. located along the arabian sea, it is surrounded by afghanistan to the west and northwest, iran to the southwest, india to the east, and china to the northeast. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 115 in pakistan, the education sector is being adopted as one of the basic tools for poverty reduction and the benefit of the masses. pakistan started with a very low education profile in 1947, but today the situation is not very poor. the literacy rate reckoned by the number of people who could read only was 16 % in 1951. a short overview of various programmes and practices to tackle illiteracy in pakistan is given below: i. village agricultural and industrial development (aid) programme (1953) ii. literacy programme under basic democracies (1964-69) iii. peoples works programme, 1973 (sipah-e-khidmat) iv. literacy programmes through local councils in punjab province (1974-81) v. pakistan television, s adult functional literacy project (aflp) 1973. vi. experimental pilot project integrating education and rural development (1977). vii. rural education and development (read) programme (198283). viii. the functional education project for rural areas (fepra). ix. 100% literate islamabad project (1983-84). x. the national literacy plan (1983-93). xi. television literacy centres (tlc) 1983-84. xii. president ten (10) points (ptp) 1984-85. xiii. iqra pilot project (ipp) 1987-88. xiv. nai roshni schools project (1987-89). xv. experimental literacy project (1989). xvi. training of unemployed educated youth project (1990-91). xvii. quranic literacy project (1991-95). xviii. islamabad literacy project (ilp) 1992-95. xix. eradication of illiteracy project (eip) 1992-93 xx. ten year national literacy plan (1993-2003) xxi. non-formal basic education community schools project (1995). xxii. crash literacy programme. xxiii. ict adult literacy project. xxiv. adult literacy centres (2001-06). in 2000 the npa was launched by the ministry of education in collaboration with unesco to fulfil the requirements of efa. npa has focused on elementary education, adult literacy and early childhood education. the estimated targets regarding adult literacy as mentioned in npa are as under; 1. phase-i 2001-02 to 2005-06 = 61% (male 71.5%: female 50.5%) 2. phase-ii 2006-07 to 2010-11 = 68% (male 77%: female 65%) 3. phase-iii 2010-11 to 2015-16 = 86% (male 86%: female 86%) definition of literacy in pakistan while pakistan aims at achieving the efa goals within the context of the dakar framework, the reference-definition of literacy is the one as adopted in the 1998 national census. according to this definition, a person of 10 plus age is literate if he/she “can read a newspaper and write a simple letter, in any language.” however, deliberations of different forums on literacy, in the recent past, have also identified the numeracy skills, along with life-skills, as an essential component of literacy. obviously, the formal adoption of some new definition of literacy is a time-taking process. now, when pakistan is striving hard and looking ahead in this direction, the emerging definition of literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 116 will have to be kept in view while planning for and implementing new interventions for achieving the efa goals by the year 2015. constitutional provisions for literacy and education in pakistan the universal declaration of human rights article 26, declared that everyone has the right to education. education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages (yves and kishore, 2001). this was also one of the main objectives set at the different international forums (unesco, 2002). in this perspective, all the constitutions announced in pakistan recognized education as one of the fundamental rights of the people (govt. of pakistan, 2008). article 37 (b) of the constitution of pakistan (1973) makes it obligatory for the state to eradicate illiteracy and provide compulsory and free education up to secondary level within the minimum feasible period. in line with the above-said constitutional provision, several enactments have been made to provide legal exposure to literacy efforts in the country. they include the following: 1. the west pakistan ordinance no. xxix, 1962. 2. the literacy (amendment) act, 1986. 3. the punjab compulsory primary education act, 1994. 4. the nwfp compulsory primary education act, 1996. 5. the sindh compulsory primary education ordinance, 2001. 6. the ict compulsory primary education ordinance, 2002. 7. 18th constitutional amendment, 2010 for compulsory primary education (govt. of pakistan, 2008a). the constitution of pakistan recognizes that education is a fundamental right of every citizen. it is the responsibility of the government of pakistan (gop) to provide education to its entire populace. in addition to its constitutional responsibilities, gop has recognized the fact that education is crucial for human as well as economic development. being aware of this fact, the government has put emphasis on increasing access and raising the quality of education in the post dakar period. to streamline these issues, the moe developed a ten-year perspective plan (200111) which provided a broader outline for the development of the education sector in the country. moreover, a comprehensive education sector reforms programme (esr) and national plan of action (npa) for efa were developed and implemented to realize efa goals by the year 2015. under these initiatives, reform programmes were commenced to provide compulsory and free primary education, provision of free textbooks, overhauling the examination system, revising and updating the curriculum, development of textbooks and learning material policy, enlarging teacher training programmes, capacity building of education managers, streamlining madrisah education and provision of missing facilities. technical and vocational education is also getting priority in the reform agenda to cater to the needs of a growing economy and the demands of globalization. efa in educational policies of pakistan. the government of pakistan since 1990 has included in all the educational policies the future aspirations and plan for the achievements of the efa goals. a brief review of these policies is given in the forecoming sections/the sections below. i. efa in national education policy (1992) as a follow-up to the jomtien conference a major attempt towards efa was the formulation of the national education policy (1992) in consultation with principal efa actors both at the national and local levels (saleem, 2000). the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 117 major goals and targets set in this policy towards covering different dimensions of education for all are summarized below: a. compulsory and free primary education. b. transformation of primary education into basic education. c. planning for the improvement of literacy rate to 70% by the year 2002. d. implementation of literacy programmes through the provincial governments, ngos and local organizations. e. utilization of electronic and print media for motivation and to support literacy efforts. f. change in curricula, teaching methods and evaluation techniques for quality education. g. provision of opportunity for semi-literate and school drop-outs for upgrading their skills. (govt. of pakistan, 1992). ii. efa in national education policy (1998-2010) the national education policy (1998-2010) was framed in the perspective of historical developments, modern trends in education and emerging requirements of the country. the main policy provisions for efa are about elementary education, adult literacy and early childhood education. the following targets were fixed in this policy: a. access to elementary education through effective utilization of existing facilities. b. elimination of gender disparities and diversification of financial resource. c. priority to the provision of elementary education to the out-of-school children. d. adoption of non-formal system as complementary to formal system. in the same way, the following measures are proposed to enhance adult literacy:  expansion of adult education, literacy and functional literacy programmes, as a basic requirement for economic development, modernization of social structure.  achievement of upe by complementing the formal primary school system with a strong non-formal basic education initiative.  launching non-formal basic education programme for outof-school children.  nationwide replication of the asian development bank sponsoring pilot project for 15-25 year old rural women (govt. of pakistan, 1998). iii. efa in national education policy (2009) the latest educational policy has determined the following policy actions towards efa targets: a. literacy rate shall be increased up to 86% by 2015 through nfe. b. sustainability of adult literacy and nfe programmes shall be ensured. c. government shall develop a national literacy curriculum. d. a system shall be developed to mainstream the students of non-formal programmes into the regular education system seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 118 e. provinces and district governments shall allocate a minimum of 4% of education budget for literacy and non-formal basic education (nfbe). f. linkages of non-formal education with industry and internship programmes shall be developed to enhance economic benefits of participation. g. special literacy skills programmes shall target older child labourers, boys and girls (aged between 14 and 17 years). h. steps shall be taken to ensure that teachers for adult learners and non-formal education are properly trained and have a well-defined career structure allowing them to move into mainstream education. however, the above-mentioned documents and constitutional steps have remained incomplete mainly due to resource constraints. pakistan spends 2.1 percent of its gdp on education as compared to india which spends 4.1 percent, bangladesh 2.4 percent and nepal spends 3.4 percent. the trend of investment on education in terms of gdp has been 2.50% and 2.47% in the years 2006-07 and 2007-08 respectively whereas it is estimated to be 2.10% during the 2008-09 which is being decreased; reflecting low political will. year (in billion rs.) expenditure on education current developme nt public sector expenditure on education as % of gdp % of total expendit ure 200607 159.9 56.6 216.5 2.50 12.0 200708 190.2 63.5 253.7 2.47 9.8 200809 200.4 75.1 275.5 2.10 11.52 table: 1 expenditure on education 2006-07 to 2008-09. source: economic survey of pakistan, 2008-09. in spite of the said efforts, the situation towards education for all is not very encouraging. progress in literacy rate no doubt exists but it is very slow. allocation of budget for the enhancement of education/literacy is still very low as unesco suggested minimum 4% of gnp (govt. of pakistan, 2004) for developing countries. theoretically all pakistani children have a right to education but in practice the majority of school-age children are still out of school and on the other side half of the enrolled children drop out before completing the cycle. in practice, the ‘right to education’ is not attaining its proper status/being fulfilled, sometimes as a result of disability or difference, sometimes through gender, social and economic class, urban or rural situation, regional location, or other factors. in the same way, efforts have been made through different packages but unfortunately the situation remains unsatisfactory due to non-availability of adequate facilities, lack of political commitment, infrastructure and services for adult literacy especially in remote rural areas. eshya and iqbal (2004) described some other factors contributing to the low levels of literacy. these include poverty, lack of educational facilities, especially teaching staff; and parental values which were affected by invisibility of benefits of education. required vision and steps for efa in pakistan seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 119 in the speedily changing era of today’s knowledge, with the progressive use of newer and modern technological means of communication, efa requirements continue to expand regularly. in order to survive in today’s globalized world, it has become essential for all masses to learn new concepts and expand their ability to locate, evaluate and effectively use information in multiple manners. the targets of efa will be effectively achieved only when these are planned and implemented in local contexts of language and culture ensuring gender equity and equality, fulfilling learning aspirations of local communities and groups of people. different programmes launched under efa must be related to a variety of dimensions of personal and social life, as well as to national development. therefore programmes of efa must be related to a comprehensive package of economic social and cultural polices. in order to achieve efa targets, the government must build an active partnership with a variety of stakeholders. it is therefore obligatory to activate the local communities, ngos, teachers, associations and workers’ unions, universities and research institutions, the private sector and other stakeholders to contribute and participate in all stages of efa literacy programmes. the attainment of efa targets requires adequate funding. the government of pakistan needs to mobilize sufficient resources in support of literacy promotion in the country. the following approaches may be adopted at the national level: i. incorporate the efa component across the budget for all levels of education, from basic to higher education; ii. attract extra funding through coordination and resources sharing with other ministries and departments where literacy is a component of programmes of advocacy, extension education and poverty reduction; iii. mobilize the civil society and private sector to support the education for all programme. similarly, at international level, successful resources mobilization will require: i. ongoing consultation among uno agencies in support on education for all. ii. involvement of bilateral agencies for their financial support and commitment; iii. mobilization of international civil society in support of the education for all programme. it can be concluded that the efa programme will have to expand its scope. references education international report. 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(1995). priorities and strategies for education, washington, d. c. yves, d., & kishore, s.(2001). education policies and strategies 2, the right to education: an analysis of unesco’s standard-setting instruments; united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization 7 place de fontenoy, 75352 paris 07 sp. http://www.jtla.org/� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 121 dr. mumtaz ahmad abstract introduction perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? issn: 1504-4831 vol 17 no 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar3828 ©2021 (brita bjørkelo, aslaug grov almås and ingrid helleve). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? brita bjørkelo norwegian police university college/university of bergen email: brita.bjorkelo@phs.no aslaug grov almås western norway university of applied sciences email: aslaug.almas@hvl.no ingrid helleve university of bergen email: ingrid.helleve@uib.no abstract teachers are role models when it comes to ethics both onand offline. teacher education aims to prepare preservice teachers for future onand offline situations and issues that may be of ethical concern. education in ethics is one way to work with awareness about ethics in social networking sites (sns) across different forms of social media. this study first investigates preservice teachers’ perceived adequacy of ethics education. second, it investigates how perceived usefulness of ethics education relates to how aware preservice teachers’ report to be regarding own and others’ negative sns experiences. the results show that preservice teachers perceive that education in ethics differs depending on how well it has prepared them for dealing with ethical issues in the teaching profession. preservice teachers who felt that ethics education had prepared them well for ethical challenges as professional teachers, reported more awareness (conscious competence, known area) of personal negative sns content than preservice teachers who reported mailto:brita.bjorkelo@phs.no mailto:aslaug.almas@hvl.no mailto:ingrid.helleve@uib.no perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 education in ethics to be less useful. ethics education that preservice teachers perceive to be useful is one way to connect to preservice teachers’ own negative sns experiences. connecting to how preservice teachers recognise and detect own negative sns experiences can prepare preservice teachers for future ethical situations and issues as professional teachers. keywords: teacher, education, social media, ethics, competence, awareness introduction professional teachers are role models for prospective students in the application of information and communication technologies (ict) as well as in use of social media (sns) in an ethical manner. according to shapiro & stefkovich, (2011) different surrounding arenas contribute to influence ethical consciousness and behaviour. teacher education may be one of these arenas. teacher education aims to prepare preservice teachers for future onand offline situations and issues that may be of ethical concern. as such, teacher education is a fruitful venue to bring personalized experiences in general, and address sns related ethical challenges and dilemmas specifically for prospective teachers. education in ethics is one way to work with ethical sns awareness. this study investigates (1) preservice teachers’ perceived adequacy of ethics education, and second (2) how perceived usefulness of ethics education relates to how aware preservice teachers’ report to be regarding own and others negative sns experiences. ethics and teacher education according to shapiro and stefkovich (2011), ethics education for preservice teachers is one way to secure the “best interest of the student”. in their model of “the ethics of the profession”, they argue that the major factors that converge to create the professional surroundings of teaching are (1) the personal codes of ethics, (2) the individual professional code, (3) the standards of the profession, (4) the professional code of ethics, and (5) the ethics of the community. shapiro and stefkovich argue that a professional code cannot be separated from a person’s personal code of ethics, and that ethical choice and reasoning is related to how it is understood in the surrounding community of an individual or profession. education in ethics may thus be of importance for preservice teachers’ ethical sns awareness (alakurt et al., 2012). in this study, the issue of concern is the personal codes of ethics. ethical codes are based on people’s life stories and critical incidents. the development of professional code, that is, what is perceived as good or bad, and right or wrong, and how and why professional teachers behave as they do, is closely linked to personal codes. the factors surrounding prospective teachers in relation to ethics are the impact of personal norms, the specific perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 norms for the profession, the norms of the system, the norms of the subject matter, ego protective norms, and ethical norms of the profession (ohnstad, 2010, p. 45, based on colnerud, 1995). thus, prospective teachers’ perception of ethics is influenced by characteristics of themselves, normative assumptions, as well as assumptions in the profession they are a part of. levinas (1979) is concerned with the ethical responsibility we have as human beings when we meet other people. teachers are role models through their way of acting (colnerud, 2006a, 2006b), and it is vital that teachers support their pupils in acting legally, ethically and responsible online (greenhow & robelia, 2009). according to fox and bird (2015), teachers need education as well as reassurance on the impacts of sns’s in their professional role. one way to prepare preservice teachers for future onand offline situations and issues that may be of ethical concern is through ethics education in teacher education. personal to professional ethics onand offline according to foulger and colleagues (2009, p. 13), the muddiness of sns’s “might represent an ethical vulnerability in the professional use of social networking tools and deserves more concentrated study”. previous studies that have addressed the issue of sns and teaching have on one hand argued that teachers should be cautious with their use of for instance facebook (fb) as an informal channel (selwyn, 2010). on the other hand, others have found that pupils are more motivated when teachers present information about themselves through sns’s such as fb (mazer et al., 2007). the development of a professional teacher identity related to sns behaviour includes ethical evaluations (morris, 2010, july; morris et al., 2012) and knowledge about the world their pupils live in (ziehe, 2001). the pupils who prospective teachers meet as professional teachers experience negative online experiences such as exposure to online sexual content, aggressive and/or inappropriate content or contacts; online harassment and bullying; hacking; sharing personal information. they also experience damage to reputation. viruses, spam, pop-ups and online advertisements (smahel et al., 2020). teacher educators may support preservice teachers in meeting future pupils by providing possibilities to become aware of how he or she is present in their students’ lives, online as well as in psychical meetings. this may be done through supporting preservice teachers to reflect upon their personal attitudes in sns’s. thus, making possibilities for preservice teachers’ reflection concerning ethics on sns’s is one way to teach them how to, in next turn, to teach their own pupils how to act legally, ethically, and responsibly online. the rationale behind approaching ethical sns awareness through personal experiences is the conscious competence theory (miller et al., 2011). the origin of the theory has been perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 linked to a variety of sources (see e.g., howell, 1982, cited in cannon et al., 2010; attri, cited in ngo, 2020) and assumes that if you are unaware of a problem you are unconscious incompetent (stage 1). the second stage (conscious incompetence) is characterised by a growing awareness and lack of knowledge, which provides an eagerness to learn more. step three, conscious competence, means that you have acquired a skill, but it is not yet integrated. the final stage is unconscious competence, which means that you have the knowledge and know how to handle the situation without even realizing that you are doing it. talking about teaching, and how to deal with ethical issues, may also, in hindsight, be perceived as an activity of being “unconsciously competent”, and helpful in “seeing and trying” and ultimately getting a different understanding or point of view (fredericksen, 2010, p. 17). gaining more access to what is hidden in yourself, is also a core issue of johari’s window (luft, 1969). johari’s window is illustrated as a quadrant with four areas of importance for the development of self-awareness and personal development. the first area is called open and portrays what is known by the person about him/herself and is also known by others. the blind spot (2nd area) illustrates what is unknown by the person about him/herself but others know. the third area (hidden) concerns what the person knows about him/herself that others do not. the last area (unknown) signifies what is unidentified by the person and others about him/herself. growing up with sns’s, preservice teachers may have developed their personal sns use without reflecting on how personal usage may differ from sns use in their future role as professional teachers (see e.g., helleve et al., 2020). entering teacher education, novice teachers tend to copy the teachers they have experienced as good teachers (loughran, 2006). according to loughran, it is necessary for preservice teachers to become conscious of previous experiences, in order to find their own way as teachers. concerning digital media and sns’s, preservice teachers may have personal experiences to draw on, but not necessarily teachers as role models from their own schooldays. previous studies suggest that reflection on cases (helleve, almås & bjørkelo, 2020; helleve, eide & ulvik, 2021), including ethical issues, is regarded as a useful way to gain a self-understanding as professional, digital competent teachers, and that teacher education should create possibilities for reflection based on personal experiences and cases including ethical issues connected to sns (helleve et al., 2020). in line with this, we argue that discussions concerning personal experiences of onand offline situations and issues that may be of ethical concern may be one way to prepare preservice teachers for the future through the possibility of illuminating more of areas of themselves. depending on the perceived adequacy of ethics education, preservice teachers may potentially get in touch with more of their personal experiences. connecting their professional development to their own personal experiences may make preservice teachers more prone to develop the perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 ability to “see” (i.e., consciously competent, known area) issues that may be of ethical concern (e.g., situations that arise on social media) than preservice teachers that do not connect their own life and experiences to their role as future professional teachers. awareness of personal negative sns experiences may thus be one way to increase ethical sns awareness. aim of study teacher education aims to prepare preservice teachers for future onand offline situations, and issues that may be of ethical concern. one way to work with ethical sns awareness is through education in ethics. perceived usefulness of education in ethics may again be related to more conscious competence, if preservice teachers are able to connect to their own experiences. based on the models of the relationship between teaching as a profession and ethics, we assume that one way to get access to preservice teachers’ ethical sns awareness is through adequate education in ethics during teacher education. in this study we therefore first investigate preservice teachers’ perceived adequacy of ethics education, and second, how perceived usefulness of ethics education relates to how aware preservice teachers’ report to be regarding own and others negative sns experiences. method procedure data from preservice teachers (n = 475) were collected from six norwegian teacher education institutions. the teacher education institutions were approached through gatekeepers (i.e., personnel whom the researchers already knew). questionnaires were personally distributed by one of the authors and filled out before, during breaks or following a plenary lecture, with an across site response rate of about 80 per cent. the norwegian social science data services approved the study. open, closed and numeric response categories were applied. sample the mean age in the preservice teacher sample was 30 (sd =8.2, n = 438) and 64 per cent of the sample were female. questionnaire the norwegian version of the questionnaire was developed in cooperation with australian colleagues and consisted of six parts (see e.g., helleve et al., 2013 for more details about how the norwegian version was developed; morris et al., 2012). parts a-e was identical to the “professional interactions and behaviours scale” (pibs, morris, 2012), which is piloted, tested, and validated (morris, 2016). part f aimed to investigate the participants’ personal experiences with sns in teaching. this part included questions about sns in teaching within the participants’ teacher education institution and questions about sns in perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 teaching within their practicum classes and schools. previous studies based on this larger study have investigated sns use among preservice teachers and upper secondary pupils and how the government’s recommendations correspond to the two groups’ understanding of their educational institutions’ sns guidelines (helleve et al., 2013), on and offline teacher professional boundaries (morris, 2016), as well as challenges and possibilities concerning professional digital competence (pdc) for teacher education (helleve et al., 2020). in this study, we present findings of relevance for the research questions, namely experiences with and perceived adequacy of education in ethics, as well as one’s own and others negative sns experiences. results and analyses statistical analyses were performed with the ibm spss statistics version 21. open response categories were analysed with microsoft excel. education in ethics and perceived adequacy most preservice teachers (85 %/n=462) reported to have some (1-5 hrs., 47 %), a moderate amount (6-10 hrs., 23 %) or a lot (11-20 hrs., 15 %) education in ethics included in their studies so far. most reported to have had adequate education to some (55 %, n=210) extent. descriptive results are portrayed in table 1. table 1 amount (%) of preservice teachers (n=384) who reported experiencing their current degree having prepared them adequately to deal with ethical issues in the teaching profession. frequency (n) per cent (%) not at all 18 4.7 somewhat adequate 210 54.7 moderately adequate 112 29.2 very adequate 44 11.5 total 384 100 negative sns experiences of the total sample (n=475), 439 (92 %) responded to the question that asked if they personally or any of their friends had experienced negative sns experiences of any kind. the question participants were asked was: “have you, or your friends had any negative experiences using social networking sites? (please explain)”. 33 per cent (n=144/439) described their own or any of their friends’ experiences in an open-ended response category. of these, 88 per cent (n=127) had completed education in ethics. the participants were then categorized into two groups. group 1 “low extent” (61 %, n=77), perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 consisted of participants who reported that their current degree not at all or to some degree had prepared them to deal with ethical issues in the teaching profession. participants who reported that their current degree moderately or very much had prepared them to deal with ethical issues in the teaching profession were categorized into group 2 “high extent” (39 %, n=50). open response categories were analysed with template analysis (see e.g., king, 1998). the core of this analysis is that “the researcher produces a list of codes (a ‘template’) representing themes identified in their textual data” (king, 1998, p. 118). in this study, the second and third author coded the data after the initial analysis was done by the first author to secure inter coder reliability. the data mainly consisted of short sentences. consequently, higher-level templates were not applied. the template analysis yielded three main templates or categories based on whether the person or persons who were experiencing negative experiences using sns’s where either “others”, “themselves” or “unspecified”. in table 2, some examples of the content of these three codes are illustrated. table 2 the content of the three categories (1) “others” experiences that concerned the participants own children, friends and fellow students. examples: “during praxis i experienced that a pupil was pestered by classmates on youtube.com” and “yes, a friend experienced that a stranger created a fake profile on facebook by copying a picture”. (2) “themselves” descriptions of the participants own negative sns experiences. examples: “i have been involved in rather nasty disputes with total strangers” and “yes, i have been contacted by older men who have impersonated younger males. i have been offered alcohol for pictures of myself when i was a minor” (3) “unspecified recipients” neither own nor directly others’ experiences. example: «gossip», «negative comments on facebook» and «arguments and quarrels can become perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 rather blurred». group 1, as previously mentioned, consisted of participants who to a low extent perceived that they had experienced adequate education in ethics in their studies until now. among these participants, the results showed that the categories with most responses predominantly was “unspecified recipients” (n=33, 41 %), followed by “others” (n=30, 38 %) and “themselves” (n=17, 21 %). group 2 consisted of participants that to a high extent perceived to have experienced adequate education in ethics. here, the most prevalent category was “others” (n=21, 38 %), followed by “themselves” (n=18, 33 %), and “unspecified recipients” (n=16, 29 %). as some of the described experiences could be categorised by several codes, the total number of coded experiences comprised of eighty (group 1), and fifty-five (group 2), respectively. an illustration of the results is portrayed in figure 1. figure 1 an illustration of the findings of content of codes across groups who have experienced their current degree as low (group 1) or high (group 2) in preparing them to deal with ethical issues in the teaching profession. as illustrated in figure 1, participants who had experienced a high extent of adequate education in ethics reported more awareness of personal negative sns experiences. awareness of more personal negative sns content may be interpreted as a form of conscious competence and known area. even though awareness of negative experience of “unspecified” and “themselves” differed in relation to perceived adequacy of education in ethics, negative content experiences concerning others (e.g., spouse, pupils, and colleagues) was equally common among both groups. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 unspecified others themselves low perceived adequacy (group 1, %, n=80) high perceived adequacy (group 2, %, n=55) perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 discussion this study has investigated preservice teachers’ perceived adequacy of ethics education, and how perceived usefulness of ethics education related to how aware preservice teachers reported to be, regarding own and others negative sns experiences. the results showed that most preservice teachers reported to have some, a moderate amount of or a high amount of education in ethics. preservice teachers differed in how well they perceived education in ethics to prepare them for dealing with ethical issues in the teaching profession. preservice teachers who felt that ethics education had prepared them well, reported more awareness of personal negative sns content (e.g., been offered alcohol for pictures), than preservice teachers who reported ethics education to be less useful. according to shapiro and stefkovich (2011), education in ethics is one arena to make sense of and deal with ethics in education. the development of professional code, that is, what is perceived as good or bad and right or wrong, and how and why professional teachers behave as they do, is closely linked to his/her personal codes (colnerud, 1995). in this study, most preservice teachers reported to have education in ethics. about half of the total sample perceived to have received education in ethics that prepared them well for future professional ethical issues. as more preservice teachers report to have had education in ethics than those who report to profit well from it, ethics education seems to hold unreleased potential concerning ethics. another finding was that preservice teachers who reported to have received education in ethics that was perceived as being low on perceived adequacy, also reported less personal negative sns experiences than other preservice teachers. according to loughran (2006), preservice teachers need to reflect on their previous experiences in order to decide what kind of teachers they want to be. so, when preservice teachers are asked to reflect on previous sns experiences in the role as future teachers, they may utilise pre-professional experiences. these experiences may provide a base for discussions of potential ethical issues in ethics education. the lack of perceived adequate education in ethics combined with lack of awareness of negative sns experiences may indicate an unreleased form of unconscious competence (miller, vandome & mcbrewster, 2011). the assumption being that discussions concerning personal experiences of onand offline situations and issues that may be of ethical concern may be one way to prepare preservice teachers for future professional development through the possibility of illuminating more of areas of oneself. thus, lack of awareness of negative personal sns experiences may be an obstacle towards facilitating that preservice teachers get in touch with more of their personal experiences, and further, connect their own experiences to their ongoing professional development. another interpretation of the finding that lack of perceived adequate education in ethics perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 combined with lack of awareness of negative sns experiences may indicate that some, more than other preservice teachers, to lesser extent wish to disclose their personal experience (hidden area, luft, 1969). thus, they have personal negative sns experiences, but do not wish to present them to others. self-presentation may be defined as “the process of presenting oneself in relationship to socially and culturally accepted modes” of behaving and acting (reber, 1995, p. 704). this process has been described as one of many ways to act online and in relation to sns’s (boyd, 2014). thus, lack of presented personal negative sns content, may also be a result of more or less willingness to break a barrier in selfdisclosure. strengths and limitations a strength of this study is that it provides an overall picture of the amount of education in ethics preservice teachers have had, as well as how well they perceive this education to prepare them for dealing with ethical issues as future professional teachers. preservice teachers were asked about amount and perceived adequacy of education in ethics in their current teacher education. it is however not known whether amount of education in ethics, taking place before teacher education, indirectly may have influenced our findings. further, in this study, templates were analysed into who were at the receiving end of negative sns experiences (self, other, unspecified). other ways of categorising negative sns experiences (i.e., technical, illegal, normative) may provide other insights into how adequate education in ethics is related to ethical sns awareness. we interpret more awareness of own negative sns experiences as an indication of more ethical sns awareness. it should be noted that some preservice teachers may in fact have experienced more negative sns content than others. thus, it may be that some preservice teachers not only are more aware, but also more vulnerable, as they also may be more exposed to personal negative sns experiences than others. conclusion this study has investigated preservice teachers’ perceived adequacy of ethics education, and how perceived usefulness of ethics education relates to how aware preservice teachers’ report to be regarding own and others negative sns experiences. most preservice teachers reported to have had some to a high amount of education in ethics. however, they differed in how well they perceived education in ethics had prepared them for dealing with ethical issues in the teaching profession. preservice teachers who felt that education in ethics had prepared them well reported more awareness of personal negative sns content (e.g., been offered alcohol for pictures), than preservice teachers who reported ethics education to be less useful. perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 we find that ethics education seems to hold unreleased potential when it comes to preparing preservice teachers for dealing with ethical issues in the teaching profession. adequate education in ethics provides a possibility to reflect and discuss personal and professional sns experiences that again may support the development of a professional stance in these matters. one way to do this may be to encourage preservice teachers to share, reflect and discuss personal and others’ sns experiences as this may increase personal and professional ethical sns awareness. increased awareness (conscious competence and increased known area) may promote preservice teachers’ ethical sns awareness. acknowledgements we wish to thank all the participants for making this paper possible. the study was initiated by brita bjørkelo and zoe morris (monash university, australia) and the first study (2010-2011) in the project was funded and is owned by the digital learning communities research group at the faculty of psychology, university of bergen (see also helleve et al., 2013). the second (2012) and third (2013) part of the study was funded and is owned by the norwegian police university college. support has also been given by the western norway university of applied sciences. we wish to thank the participants at the teacher education policy in europe conference for comments on a preliminary version of this paper (almås, bjørkelo, & helleve, 2013). references alakurt, t., bardakci, s., & keser, h. 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(2001). de personlige livsverdeners dominans. ændret ungdomsmentalitet og skolens anstrengelser. uddannelse, 34(10), 3-12. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520601009710 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203840795 https://doi.org/10.21953/lse.47fdeqj01ofo perceived adequate education in ethics: a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness? abstract introduction ethics and teacher education personal to professional ethics onand offline aim of study method procedure sample questionnaire results and analyses education in ethics and perceived adequacy negative sns experiences discussion strengths and limitations conclusion acknowledgements references seminar.net 2015. (author) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn ethnography in the danish veterinary learning environment camilla kirketerp nielsen department of large animal sciences copenhagen university email: cape@sund.ku.dk abstract the overall objective of this project is research-based development, implementation and evaluation of a game-based learning concept to be used in the veterinary education. herd visits and animal contact are essential for the development of veterinary competences and skills during education. yet veterinary students have little occasion to reach/attain a proper level of confidence in their own skills/abilities, as they have limited “trainingfacilities” (kneebone & baillie, 2008). one possible solution might be to provide a safe, virtual environment (game-based) where students could practise interdisciplinary clinical skills in an easily-accessible, interactive setting. a playable demo using classical swine fever in a pig herd as an example has been produced for this purpose. in order to tailor the game concept to the specific veterinary learning environment and to ensure compliance with both learning objectives and the actual learning processes/procedures of the veterinary students, the project contains both a developmental aspect (game development) and an exploration of the academic (scholastic) and profession (practice) oriented learning context. the initial phase of the project was a preliminary exploration of the actual learning context, providing an important starting point for the upcoming phase in which i will concentrate on research-based development, implementation and evaluation of a game-based virtual environment in this course context. in the academic (scholastic) and profession (practice) oriented learning context of a veterinary course in herd health management (pig module), ethnographic studies have been conducted by using multiple data collection methods; participant observation, spontaneous dialogues and interviews (borgnakke, 1996; hammersley & atkinson, 2007). all course related activities in the different learning spaces (commercial pig herds, auditoriums, post-mortem examinations, independent group work) were followed. this paper will describe the project and it will focus in particular on the initial exploration of the veterinary learning context in terms of theory, empirical data and the methods. keywords: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:cape@sund.ku.dk professional pig practice” development, evaluation and documentation of a game-based-learning concept; an interactive approach of practising veterinary clinical skills during virtual herd visits. background herd visits and real-life animal contact during education in veterinary medicine are extremely important for training of clinical skills. however, the high costs associated with clinical courses and the increase in student uptake means that actual contact-time is very limited. hence, veterinary students have little chance to practise and reach a proper level of confidence in their own skills/abilities. inexperience and anxiety combined with the challenge of interdisciplinary thinking in order to employ elements of previously acquired basic theoretical knowledge from a wide range of subjects can be overwhelming. it is therefore quite clear that appropriate, clinical “trainingfacilities” are urgently needed. efforts have been made to identify teaching methods that might assist and facilitate learning processes in veterinary clinical courses. current methods include the use of computer animated anatomical 3d programs, skill-laboratories, traditional e-learning and simulated patient case-based problem orientated exercises, but so far there has been a lack of training methods involving herd visits (de bie & lipman, 2012). one possible solution might be to provide a safe, virtual environment where students could practise their interdisciplinary clinical skills in an easilyaccessible, interactive game-based setting. the efficiency of game-based-learning (gbl) in terms of being engaging and motivating (mann et al. 2002) together with improving academic performance (blunt, 2008; kanthan et senger, 2011) has been advocated. advances in technology allow the programming of complex game-situations with a high degree of interaction. furthermore, the majority of today’s students are believed to be digital natives, thus they possess the necessary prerequisites to exploit gbl to the full (prensky, 2001). the inclusion of gbl as a part of the veterinary curriculum requires further research, especially regarding how, and under what conditions, games might most effectively be integrated into the learning process in order to maximize learning potential and achieve learning goals. also, the learning outcome of a specific learning game must be assessed and evaluated. therefore, the aim of this phd project is to develop, describe, implement and evaluate a gbl concept for use in clinical courses. a project group was set up as a collaboration between the departments of large animals sciences and veterinary disease biology (sund-uc), media, cognition and communication (hum-uc) and external software developers (fenris film & multimedia ltd). in the group, veterinary research and professional skills, pedagogical disciplines and computer science are combined. the main area of the phd study being development, evaluation and scientific documentation of a gbl concept. using pig herds as model, learning modules of important pig diseases will be developed, implemented and evaluated in pig-related courses. to demonstrate the product and also to document sufficient competences and collaboration seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 skills within the project group, a playable demo using classical swine fever as example has been produced. figure 1. instruction research aims the aim of the current research is the development, implementation and evaluation of game-based learning. the key research questions relate to game-based learning as a didactical unit as well as investigations in the existing learning context. further, important factors believed to influence the establishment of an effective learning environment using gbl will be considered; game-design, motivational factors, entertainment and professional level. by using ethnographic and qualitative evaluative approaches, the research project will involve close-up/in-depth studies of the learning processes affected when using gbl in veterinary clinical courses. against this background, exemplary analysis of game-based learning situations will be developed, the aim of which will be to prompt reflection on gbl as one possible way of establishing a link between theory and practice in clinical veterinary courses. further, the analysis will cast light both on teaching and learning strategies as well as significant aspects allowing complex clinical problems to be identified and solved and social interaction to be practised. throughout the project and the empirical phases, the veterinary master course practical herd health management and meat inspection will form the basis of the project. there will be intensive fieldwork with observations and interviews in the one-week course, called the “pig-week”, with clinical work and herd health-related projects on swine farms. the course is taught four times per year with groups comprising approximately 45 students per course. the course is described in terms of content, learning outcomes, teaching methods and assessment in the official course description (http://kurser.ku.dk/course/svek13006u/2013-2014) (in danish only). the gbl concept will be developed, implemented and evaluated within the framework of this “test course” with approximately 200 students per year and short game description students draw a herd at random (with a well-defined disease or problem). the visit (game) starts at the stable door where certain safety procedures should be applied to avoid transfer of pathogens (change clothes, wash hands etc.). there are several possible lines of dialogue with the farmer, some of which will provide/lead to important clues, while others will be of less relevance/no relevance. by selecting a pig pen (point and click) a video sequence will show typical clinical signs and behavioural patterns of affected pigs. certain animals can be selected for closer examination, and eventually necropsy, where close-ups will be provided and students have to notice and identify pathological changes. it will be possible to select material for laboratory examinations and receive the results i.e. of culturing during the visit. the visit is concluded by selecting the correct diagnosis and prescribing appropriate treatment and/or action. the game design resembles adventureand simulation games and students obtain points by correct actions. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 http://kurser.ku.dk/course/svek13006u/2013-2014 using the learning/teaching environment as a research field. in addition, focus groups comprising students who are not associated with the course are included in the study. piloting ethnographic studies in the danish veterinary learning environment empirical studies conducted in the danish veterinary educational environment are very sparse. an exception is the pioneering phd project dealing with emotions in the danish veterinary learning environment which was defended in 2011 (langebæk, 2011). internationally, veterinary institutions show a greater interest in educational research, and the number of studies has increased. to my knowledge, the danish veterinary learning environment has never been explored by using an ethnographic approach. in an endeavor to gain new insights and a more complete understanding of the actual “inner culture” of veterinary learning and teaching in the different learning contexts, it is essential to turn to empirical studies. borgnakke has emphasized the necessity of empirical studies within the fields of university pedagogical practice (borgnakke 1996, borgnakke 2011). traditional fieldwork and participant observation following students/teachers in the different learning contexts shows considerable benefits in terms of studying the dynamic processes of learning and teaching (borgnakke, 2013). however, it is advisable to follow the complex learning processes of the participants (students/teachers) through the different contexts in “real time/rhythm” of the actual course progression to fully exploit the strengths of the ethnographic methods (ibid). the first phase of this project (starting with ethnographic mapping of the veterinary clinical learning environment) concentrates on piloting (pioneering) ethnographic studies in the “pig-week”. entrance into the research field is driven by the fundamental basic educational ethnographic questions: how is usual teaching practice in the “pig-week”? methodological, the ethnographic studies are inspired by educational research and evaluation research using a variety of methods: participant observation, spontaneous dialogues, interviews, photos, videos and document collection (borgnakke, 1996, borgnakke, 2013, hammersley & atkinson, 2007). in what follows, a brief introduction of the structure of the danish veterinary education is given in order to place the “pig-week” in the context of the danish veterinary education. organization and structure of the veterinary education in copenhagen in denmark, the qualification and the title doctor of veterinary medicine (dvm) allowing graduates to apply for authorization as a practicing veterinarian can be obtained only at the university of copenhagen. the danish ministry of food, agriculture and fisheries grants authorization. the danish veterinary authorization is a “one-purpose authorization” (no specialization). the school of veterinary medicine and animal science (svma) (http://vetschool.ku.dk/om/) is responsible for the veterinary programme. the total number of students has increased in recent years and in 2013, 180 new veterinary students were admitted on the veterinary bachelor programme. of the 180 students accepted in 2013, 154 were woman. prerequisite for entering the veterinary programme is a secondary school grade point average of 10.7 (2013 danish ministry of higher education and science: http://www.ug.dk/flereomraader/maalgrupper/videregaaende_uddannelse/k ot-tal_for_alle_videregaaende_uddannelser.aspx). there are no entry requirements regarding previous experience with animals. the veterinary curriculum consists of a bachelor´s degree (3 years) and a (dvm) master´s degree (2.5 years) in concordance with objectives of the bologna declaration of 1999 and the danish law of universities (legal order seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 http://vetschool.ku.dk/om/ http://www.ug.dk/flereomraader/maalgrupper/videregaaende_uddannelse/kot-tal_for_alle_videregaaende_uddannelser.aspx http://www.ug.dk/flereomraader/maalgrupper/videregaaende_uddannelse/kot-tal_for_alle_videregaaende_uddannelser.aspx no. 367 of 25 march 2013 – in danish only). https://www.retsinformation.dk/forms/r0710.aspx?id=145366) the structure of the study for both bachelorand master programs divides the year into four blocks of nine weeks, each with an interim week in between. each block has a value of 15 ects, thus 180 ects for the bachelor degree and 150 ects for the master degree (jensen, 2006). exams are held at the end of each block (week 9). the following figures show the current course content of each block in the veterinary bachelor and candidate program. all courses, with the exception of the elective differentiation courses (light green), are compulsory if students are to obtain the dvm title. http://studier.ku.dk/bachelor/veterinaermedicin/undervisning-ogopbygning/ http://studier.ku.dk/kandidat/veterinaermedicin/undervisning-ogopbygning/ year block 1 block 2 block 3 block 4 1 veterinary ethics and philosophy of science cytology and basic histology veterinary genetics veterinary anatomy and physiology part 2 chemistry and biochemistry veterinary anatomy and physiology part 1 2 immunology, general pathology and pathofysiology infection microbiology basic pharmacology, toxicology and pharmacy microbiel food safety basic statistics and epidemiology applied pharmacology 3 special pathology and poultry diseases large animal basic clinical theory veterinary jurisprudence and laboratory animal science animal nutrition small animal basic clinical theory herd health and public health veterinary bsc project seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 https://www.retsinformation.dk/forms/r0710.aspx?id=145366 http://studier.ku.dk/bachelor/veterinaermedicin/undervisning-og-opbygning/ http://studier.ku.dk/bachelor/veterinaermedicin/undervisning-og-opbygning/ http://studier.ku.dk/kandidat/veterinaermedicin/undervisning-og-opbygning/ http://studier.ku.dk/kandidat/veterinaermedicin/undervisning-og-opbygning/ year block 1 block 2 block 3 block 4 1 medicine, surgery and reproduction – small animals practical herd health management and meat inspection (rotation i) “pig-week” general clinical practice – large animals (rotation ii) medicine, surgery and reproduction – large animals veterinary paraclinics (rotation i) 2 general clinical practice – small animals (rotation iii ) veterinary imaging (rotation iv) veterinary jurisprudence and animal welfare assessment (compulsory e-learning course for all students) differentiation course or veterinary msc thesis emergency, obstetrics, critical care and clinical anesthesiology (rotation iv) 3 veterinary jurisprudence and animal welfare assessment (compulsory e-learning course for all students) differentiation course or veterinary msc thesis the first 1½ years of the candidate programme comprise compulsory courses some of these being rotation courses with 45 students in each rotation. in the period of participating in the rotation courses, students choose (one) from four different options of differentiation courses: biomedicine (35 places), equine clinic track (25 places), advanced companion animal track (45 places) and herd health management (75 places). having completed the veterinary master (candidate) programme students will have received not only the required omnivalent basic training but also a higher starting competence level in the area of one of the specified differentiations (jensen, 2006). most bachelor courses consists mainly of lectures. furthermore, students participate in various exercises; reading, writing and statistical exercises, practical laboratory work, dissections, microscopy etc. contact with live animals is limited in the bachelor programme and is restricted to basic animal handling courses. however, these courses do not include handling of pigs. in the master (candidate) programme the orientation towards the veterinary clinical practical profession can be seen in the clinical practical courses, where students engage in clinical practical veterinary practice. during rotation ii, iii and iv periods of various length in the clinical practical context of the university hospitals (companion animals and large animals) are included. production animals especially pigs are not hospitalized in veterinary practice. for the proportion of students who do not choose the herd health management option/differentiation course, the “pig-week” represents the final practical professionally orientated part of the veterinary programme regarding pig diseases and herd health management in pig herds before graduation and authorization. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 “pig-week” the “pig-week”, a part of rotation i (light blue on figure) constitutes the empirical basis for this study. an estimate of between 15-20 % of all students entering “pig-week” have neither visited a commercial pig herd, nor encountered a live diseased pig. previous clinical courses involving live pigs are placed at the beginning of the master programme in block 1+2 before ”pigweek” (medicine, surgery and reproduction – small animals/large animals). these are practical courses in surgical technique (anesthetic procedures and minor surgical procedures) and technique of basic clinical examination (examination of healthy pigs and medical record keeping). animals in these courses are brought in for teaching purposes and hospitalized in the university hospital (with a status of experimental animals); hence, they are not presented to students in the herd context in which students will encounter pigs in future veterinary practice. the student level of clinical practical experience (other species) upon entrance into the “pig-week” varies according to whether the student begins with rotation i, ii, iii or iv. the official course catalogue overall purpose description regarding the “pig-week” is: “the purpose of the course is for the student to obtain the knowledge, skills and competencies required to fulfil the demands of the herd health advisory service and meat inspection as required by danish legislation” (translated by author). the pig week (5 days) is designed and planned to replicate what a pig veterinarian would do in practice from clinical examination of individual patients, necropsies and diagnostic testing to an ”advisory-visit” where the herd is evaluated as an epidemiological entity and all elements of legislation are considered. during the five-day course students alternate between academic/scholastic learning contexts at the university and practice-oriented learning contexts in commercial pig herds. at the university, students attend lectures, classroom seminars, post-mortem examinations, take part in group work, give presentations and participate in discussions. in commercial pig herds students undertake clinical practical work related to herd health management in pig herds. during the course, each student visits the same herd on two course days (day one and day four). a permanent teacher (associate professor of pig diseases) is responsible both for planning and teaching the course. in most courses, a phd student from the pig research area participates in teaching activities when visiting commercial herds. further, the advisory herd veterinarian associated with commercial visit-herds is present at the first visit. “pig-weeks” often begins with the following introduction to the course: this is an applied subject, where you are supposed to use what you have learned so far. it is a very practical oriented course. we are to do what veterinarians do. you have to use the knowledge you have gained from immunology, pathology, epidemiology etc. (field notes, permanent teacher, course introduction, nov 2013) ethnographic studies were conducted in three consecutive courses in which participants were followed in original time and rhythm through all different learning contexts of the “pig-week”. the piloting studies have included experimenting with different observational methods. an approach inspired by borgnakke focusing on original statements from the participants was adapted from the beginning (borgnakke, 1996). however, it emerged that observations in commercial pig herds were challenging. in the very noisy environment and in the tight narrow confined physical spaces found in pig herds, it was hard to hear what students were saying and it was equally hard to see what they were doing. to a certain extend those difficulties were overcome by using a small video recorder to capture action while leaving the observer to focus on spoken words. however, my seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 observational challenges show a striking similarity to the challenges facing veterinary students engaging in the clinical practical learning environment of the “pig-week”. as person number 25 in a line of students in a noisy pig herd, i was trying to make sense of the words of the teacher in the front end of the row. she was talking about important veterinary focus points in the different sections of the herd. i was unable to hear the words. my observation of students in the back of the row reminded me of children playing the game “chinese whispers”. in this game, a sentence has to keep wording, content and meaning when whispered from person to person throughout a full circle a people. some students were choosing to not “participate in the game” by simply not listening – but rather talking to each other instead. others were left to form their own interpretations of the incoherent sentences as these were passed on from the person in front. (personal memo based on field notes, first herd visit, november 2013). the pilot studies have resulted in a voluminous amount of empirical data, which can be approached from several analytical angles. some of the initial reflections arising from the first empirical material are outlined in what follows – these reflections provide background for continuous reflection and new upcoming focused studies in the field. characteristic learning strategies – dominated by the learning paradigm veterinary education comprises both theoreticaland practical/clinical aspects. however, the mandatory part of the educational programme is dominated by theoretical courses. this is especially the case, when considering the herd health-related disciplines, in which there are few practical/clinical profession orientated elements in the education. doing fieldwork – being in the field, close to the ongoing teaching practice of the “pig-week”, the challenges and complexity of the different contexts of the “pig-week”, were overwhelming. indeed “voices” from the different actors in the field have highlighted a gap between theory and practice. surprisingly, and of particular interest, the field points to the existence not only of a gap between theory and practice but also between “real veterinary practice” and “veterinary practice in clinical courses”. this could pose a challenge for the university-based profession-oriented veterinary education. initial observations and descriptions of the veterinary learning/educational context(s) have revealed a significant articulation of the theory of constructive alignment and deepand surface learning strategies (ramsden/biggs) from/in the field. official veterinary course descriptions, descriptions of educational structure/content and the choice of “constructive alignment – teaching for quality at the university” (biggs and tang, 2007) as the textbook in “educating” veterinary educators, reflect the interpretation of the “ramsden/biggs tradition” found within the field itself. intended learning outcomes (ilos), solo taxonomy (structure of the observed learning outcome), alignment of teaching/learning activities (tlas), alignment of assessment tasks (ats) and the concepts of deepand surface learning strategies are firmly established in both course descriptions and the mindsets of danish veterinary educators. borgnakke (2011) describes the ramsden/biggs tradition (“learningparadigm”) as a strong normative paradigm (kuhn´s theory of paradigms) focusing on individual learning and learning strategies (borgnakke, 2011). further, borgnakke questions a possible shift approaching “the learning question” moving from a pedagogical-psychological individual concept of learning towards a more sociological-anthropological approach – perhaps indicating a shift in paradigms. the strong presence of the concepts of the “learning-paradigm” in the veterinary learning environment and a possible seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 8 upcoming shift in paradigms inspire to a broadened outlook in conjunction with theories of “situated learning” and learning as social practice focusing on the principles of apprenticeship (lave & wenger, 1991, wenger, 1998, nielsen & kvale, 1999). in addition, dreyfus & dreyfus (1999) with their five-stage model of skills acquisition, provide a relevant theoretical framework in which acquisition of clinical skills and “movement” of theoretical knowledge towards practical application and clinical decision making/problem solving can be discussed. further, inspired by bo jacobsen (1981) and his educationalsociological analysis (kuhn/bernstein) of medicaland danish studies at the university of copenhagen, the danish veterinary education can be described as having a fixed-structure. this description finds possible usefulness in further analysis. following the process focusing on the development of demo following the process of development, implementation and evaluation of gbl and “professional pig practice”, the next phase in the project will concentrate on how to prepare the playable demo (classical swine fever) and present it to students. the plan is that the preparation of the existing demo will incorporate results from focus-group interviews (game design, game play, motivational aspects etc.). the prepared version of the game will be analyzed as a game (narrative patterns, content, intentions, didactical design and the embedded learning strategies) and followed when used as game based learning (gaming situations). up-coming questions in the next phase of the project will focus on experimenting with methods to determine how to follow students while they engage in gaming activities. references biggs, j. & tang, c. (2011). teaching for quality learning at university. 4th ed., the society for research into higher education & open university press/ mccraw hill, berkshire. blunt, r. (2008). does game-based-learning work? results from three recent studies. paper presented at the joint adl/co lab implementation fest, orlando, florida. borgnakke, k. (1996). procesanalytisk teori og metode. bind 1: pædagogisk feltforskning og procesanalytisk kortlægning – en forskningsberetning. københavn: danmarks universitetsforlag. borgnakke, k. (2011). et universitet er et sted, der forsker i alt – undtagen i sig selv og sin egen virksomhed. rapport om den forskningsfaglige baggrund for udvikling af universitetspædagogisk forskning. det humanistiske fakultet. københavns universitet. borgnakke, k. (2013) etnografiske metoder i uddannelsesforskningen mellem klassiske traditioner og senmoderne udfordringer. københavns universitet de bie, m.h. & lipman, l.j.a. (2012) the use of digital games and simulators in veterinary education: an overview with examples. journal of veterinary medical education, 39(1),13-20. dreyfus, h. & dreyfus, s. (1999) mesterlære og eksperters læring. in k.nielsen & s.kvale (eds.) mesterlære: læring som social praksis. københavn: hans reitzels forlag. hammersley, m. &atkinson, p. (2007). ethnography: principles in practice (3rd ed.). routlegde. jacobsen, b. (1981). de højere uddannelser mellem teknologi og humanism. københavn bibliotek rhodos. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 9 jensen, a.l. (2006). the new curriculum at the royal veterinary and agricultural university, denmark. journal of veterinary medical education 33(2), 209213. kanthan, r. & senger, j.l. (2011). the impact of specially designed digital games-based learning in undergraduate pathology and medical education. archives of pathology & laboratory medicine, 135(1), 135-42. prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants. on the horizon 9(5) pp.1–6. kneebone, r. & baillie s. (2008). contextualized simulation and procedural skills: a view from medical education. journal of veterinary medical education, 35(4), 595-598. langebæk, r. (2011). emotions in the veterinary surgical environment – with a special focus on anxiety and the effect of training in a surgical skills laboratory. phdthesis. dep. of small animal clinical sciences, facuelty of life sciences, university of copenhagen. lave, j. & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. reprinted ed. cambridge: cambridge university press. mann, b.d., eidelson, b.m., fukuchi, s.g., nissman, s.a., robertson, s. & jardines, l. (2002).the development of an interactive game-based tool for learning surgical management algorithms via computer. american journal of surgery, 183(3), 305-308. nielsen, k. & kvale, s. (1999). mesterlære – læring som social praksis. københavn: hans reitzels forlag. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice – learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 10 camilla kirketerp nielsen abstract professional pig practice” development, evaluation and documentation of a game-based-learning concept; an interactive approach of practising veterinary clinical skills during virtual herd visits. background research aims throughout the project and the empirical phases, the veterinary master course practical herd health management and meat inspection will form the basis of the project. there will be intensive fieldwork with observations and interviews in the one-week c... the gbl concept will be developed, implemented and evaluated within the framework of this “test course” with approximately 200 students per year and using the learning/teaching environment as a research field. in addition, focus groups comprising stud... title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. teachers’ awareness of guidelines for quality assurance when developing moocs ulf olsson department of computer and systems sciences stockholm university, sweden e-mail: ulf.olsson@su.se abstract this study focuses on teachers’ awareness of quality issues in relation to standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the european higher education area (esg). semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 teachers at six swedish heis while they developed open courses (moocs). the interviewees’ comments are divided into five categories, but the overall finding shows that the teachers were not part of any transparent quality assurance system. this was despite the fact that there were several examples of quality assurance work. the result relates to prevailing standards and guidelines for quality assurance esg (2015) and conole’s (2016) characteristics of good learning. the question of the adequacy of a quality system for innovative activities is raised. keywords: quality assurance system, esg, moocs, higher education introduction sharing and openness are expected to be cornerstones for both teaching quality and a global perspective with regards to access to education (weller, 2014). accordingly, knowledge, information, technological communication and open educational resources used in a way that enhances the quality of education is becoming an expectation of teachers in higher education (he) (kirkwood, 2013; janssen, nyström claesson, & lindqvist, 2016). however, the adoption of these new demands at many higher education institutions (heis) has been slow (nascimbeni & burgos, 2016; singh & hardaker, 2014). the teachers interviewed in this study were expected to develop massive open online courses (moocs) using these new demands by engaging in internal and externally funded projects. their initial attitudes were investigated in a prior study (olsson, 2014) and were found to be highly positive overall. however, their ambitions were often difficult to see in their day to day work. this study is a follow-up of this, but with a focus on quality, and questions were raised about the teachers’ awareness of quality assurance whilst in the middle of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 56 open courses’ innovation and development phases. the quality assurance awareness is related to the esg described below. the standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the european higher education area, esg, (enqa, esu, eua & eurashe, 2015) is a reference document for both internal and external quality assurance systems in he. at a generic level, it gives reasons for quality assurance in europe to be accepted and has been divided into three parts: quality assurance agencies, external quality assurance and internal quality assurance. the latter part is most interesting for this paper as the purpose of the current study is to investigate the awareness of any current quality assurance system among academics developing moocs. most notably, it will appear in the component for internal quality assurance. a solid quality system involves several stakeholders in the process of designing education, and academics directly involved in a course design process should be significant players in a quality assurance task. to be involved, the stakeholders need to be aware of the system as a starting point. the principles of esg give guidance for the quality assurance system in sweden, and other european countries. the swedish higher education authority’s (ukä) new quality assurance system for he has been based on esg and is due to be implemented in early 2017. in line with the development of the esg is broader access to he and a change towards student-centered learning and teaching. although moocs have not yet celebrated their 10th anniversary, quality issues surrounding them have been frequently discussed (kocdar & aydin, 2015; creelman, ehlers, & ossiannilsson, 2014; daniel, 2012; conole, 2016; hayes, 2015; hood & littlejohn, 2016). this is likely due in part to the discussion of moocs that, for a period, was carried out outside of the academic field. some argue that the new open and scalable courses are disruptive and have changed the preconditions for the whole sector, while others believe that it is just another hype around technology. admittedly, the moocs had many registered individuals, but could easily be criticized for lack of interaction among the participants and other pedagogical issues. these criticisms have also been compounded by the fact that a majority of participants do not complete all of the tests and even fewer obtain a certificate (jordan, 2015). moocs are not a solution to every educational need and lowenthal & hodges (2015) argues that it is an opportunity to rethink how to design and teach online courses rather than either a complete threat or gimmick. a common skepticism of online learning has contributed to a number of quality assurance programs for online courses (lowenthal & hodges 2015), and there are a number of quality agencies and european initiatives focusing on quality assurance in moocs (conole, 2016; creelman, ehlers, & ossiannilsson, 2014). some discussions have centered around whether moocs can use the same criterion for quality assurance as for other types of education that take place on campus (hood & littlejohn, 2016; yepes-baldó et al., 2016). these discussions are largely an extension of those focusing on the aspects of quality in distance education, in which categories of participants do not fit into the traditional model of a campus student. quality assurance as a tool for enhancement is emphasized, and several recommendations highlights seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 57 the value of using different criteria for the quality work. martin weller argues in a contribution to the efquel mooc quality project “one last plea – moocs are still a new kid on the block. let them make mistakes, let them be experimental, let people play and explore in this space without tying it down with the types of quality overhead we already have in formal education.” (creelman, ehlers, & ossiannilsson 2014, 83) the relationship between quality systems and innovation comes to the fore when new types of activities are taking off, such as the development of moocs. to measure the degree of excellence of something demands an existing scale, but even with some scale, you cannot discuss if innovation and quality assurance systems are incompatible entities. ng states, when discussing the school system, that ”quality assurance in an era of diversity and innovation is a delicate affair and there is an inherent tension.” (2007, 246) the aim of this study is not to discuss any aspect of quality of the moocs themselves. however, it is obvious that some issues regarding pedagogical methods, adequate guidance and feedback are quite different compared to ”traditional” courses. it can be discussed if conole’s (2016) characteristics of good learning are relevant in the mooc setting. those characteristics are: encourages reflection; enables dialogue; fosters collaboration; applies theory learnt to practice; creates a community of peers; enables creativity; motivates the learners. good learning is important as daniel (2012) argues that moocs of bad quality can obstruct the development of open education. moocs must be shown to meet some of the same quality standards that other online courses are expected to meet (lowenthal & hodges, 2015). in the same way that quality assurance systems are relevant for all institutions, the question of moocs have become a present issue of every strategic board in the higher institutions’ management. esg and current quality systems convey an ambition that quality assurance issues should be transparent and in all parts of the business, from individual teachers, administration, management, and external stakeholders and, preferably, in all phases of the educational pathway. the starting point is that quality assurance is everybody’s concern and should be embedded in all activities, which means engagement of stakeholders of every category involved in a project is important. in that sense teachers developing new courses should be an active part of the quality assurance process at an institution. due to this, the focus of this study is teachers that are highly engaged in developing open courses. the study poses the question: how aware are teachers of quality assurance systems when developing moocs? it is not an inventory of any quality assurance work at any level even though some teachers in this study pointed at quality assurance work conducted by other units and stakeholders at the university. it is nor any evaluation of the quality work of any existing or absent parts in conjunction with the mooc development projects respectively. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 58 method a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis by using interviews was adopted and a purposive sampling method (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2011) was used to access the ”knowledgeable people”. the knowledgeable people in this case were academics at six swedish universities. all 20 interviewees have been involved in the planning, production and delivering phases of moocs. the interview sample has representation from a range of disciplines and experience levels. the interviewee’s contribution to the moocs’ design and production varied from one minor ”part” of a larger course to a teacher/producer of all of the material in a course. the interviewees have combined experience from 10 moocs. the study is not conducted with the purpose of being able to generalise outside the sample and the result should be interpreted accordingly. thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted face-to-face and seven by using skype. fifteen were conducted in swedish and five in english. any translated citation below is indicated. the interviews varied from 40 minutes to 100 minutes, but included some issues about personal incentives and ”going public”, which are not reported here. all interviews were transcribed in full. interview data was analysed inductively by using maxqda11. the transcribed material was coded in an iterative process and the interviewees´ standpoints were compared and categorised (anfara, brown, & mangione, 2002). these were all possible to verify by data, as presented below. the presentations of the categories below are not any ranking of a project’s total quality of work as the quality assurance work was done at different levels. the focus is what the teachers involved expressed opinions about, and not any mapping of the quality assurance systems at the institutions. findings the overall finding shows that the teachers involved in developing the moocs were not part of any transparent quality assurance system, even though there were several examples of quality assurance work, both by the teachers in the project and by other parties (internal or external) involved in the development of the courses. different kinds of support were promised when the projects were initiated as the projects were financed by internal funds or externally funded by a granting body. the support and advice from an academic development unit, a project manager or an external production company were described as being very important. several decisions about quality issues were also taken by other staff or units, and this was described as a presumption for progress within the projects. it was clearly expressed in the interviews that the production made it necessary to collaborate with other teachers and parties. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 59 the interviewees’ comments about quality assurance work are divided into the categories below. the categories are the interviewees’ expressions about quality assurance systems and are more or less overlapping. the name in the brackets is an attempt to give each category of quality assurance process a short name. review by colleagues (in-office qap) an internal review by colleagues can be done more or less without being outspoken as a method for quality assurance. at one department, this was explained as a way to work with video recordings in the project. “we looked at each others and would help each other, and it is also the manager, project owner [x], who was in control and had the big picture and see if this is correct or not.” (p11) in this case, it goes hand in hand with “in-department production.” the teachers were using their computers and software for several components of the production. awareness, but not in use (avoidance qap) several teachers had knowledge about the routines for course evaluations and standardized quality assurance activities at their institutions, but they did not follow the required routines. problems with surveys adapted for campus courses and not for the actual open courses decreased the ambition to use them. “..we have problems with our evaluation because [the institution] wants you to ask a lot of standard questions and earlier we had a tailor-made evaluation that i worked with and had easy to produce. when it is not your questions, i don’t know, i lost interest in working with the course evaluation.” (p32, translated) another comment about the course evaluations was that they were very also sloppy handed when collected. as such, it was not a serious alternative to suddenly implement that kind of information retrieval. routines and infrastructure in use in the ordinary operation were not always considered usable for the new format. ”oh, to gore me bloody against the it department, one want to do things that are not standard, noo, it´s just a lot of work. and people who think that you should use this or that, no it is backward, i do not.” (p21, translated) this teacher found that there were possibilities outside the it department. quality assurance by company providing the it platform (external qap) quality assurance by checklists was used by the external platform providers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 60 ”the server belongs to canvas network, then we had a supervisor who was very kind and she asked us supervisors if we had any questions about any slide or what to do. she took part and went through all the pages, all modules, that everything is correct and nothing odd.” (p11) this kind of quality assurance is a review that the course would follow acceptable standards of the platform and that the navigation and design issues were correctly implemented. in some cases, the platform providers communicated deadlines for the production and publishing process. trying to keep up with the deadlines became a challenge as the work took a lot more time than had been estimated. don’t know (laissez-faire qap) some interviewees expressed that they did not know anything about any quality assurance system or simply ignore it. the quality issue was assumed to be handled by someone else in the project or organization. the project management or the institution needs to solve that issue. “no, no .. i do not know if we have any quality system. do you know?” (p52, translated) this question exemplifies the teachers’ vague idea about any quality assurance system, even if they know about some routines for new courses as in the next and last category. standards used (standard qap) several interviewees commented that the syllabusis was usually required to be approved by a committee. publishing material in the institutions learning management system (lms) also requires approval. one unit was developing a new quality assurance process, based on the european standards, and the teacher saw no problems with a system that covered all kinds of education. several teachers mentioned the help from the educational department and one teacher appreciated the possibility to attend a course about online teaching as professional development in parallel to his mooc development. the interviewees expressed that they learned a lot when designing and producing the courses. the need to be on schedule and to plan the course in detail was mentioned several times, and the material that should be put online must be of good quality. ”i feel pressure. is the material i am creating, is it up to the standard?” (p11) aside from the view that the production of video and other material was more time consuming than expected, it was a challenge to get ”the essentials” out of the research. one teacher was already looking forward to the possibility to improve the course when it runs for the second time. one teacher expressed the opinion that “one must be aware that if you work with an open education you let some quality go in both learning and in the specific interaction above all and in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 61 learning process. but if you can accept it one can get more students.” (p52, translated) however, this interviewee was the only one that expressed that the quality can be worse as a result of the new format. all other interviewees expressed that it was a lot of work and a new form that has its quality gatekeepers but not necessarily the traditional quality standards. it is not surprising that the teachers’ stories are focused on video recordings. the produced courses are among the first of its kind at the institutions and to convert presentations of short videos is a common way to start using media in teaching. discussions of more student-centered activities were rare. it was not evident that moocs were popular among students, but the form was seldom problematized. the effort generated material for courses, and the teachers were satisfied, perhaps both because of and in spite of the fact there was more work than expected. one exception, however, is a teacher who was not completely satisfied with what was achieved. ”we are still to record a script and has a little material at hand. it is not so much more. it has not happened so much more. that’s really the question of what can we do in 10 years.” (p62, translated) despite this, most teachers mentioned different motifs for them to be part of the development of moocs but did not stress quality assurance nor as a control function, nor as a support for development. discussion the esg part 1: standards and guidelines for internal quality assurance states with regards to the policy issue that a quality culture that involves all internal stakeholders at all levels should be supported (enqa et al. 2015, part 1:1, page 11). the above result shows examples of internal stakeholders as the education department, support unit, mooc project group and also external stakeholders as platform providers and video companies. the outspoken awareness of general quality reviews or quality assurance were quite vague. instead, examples of colleagues as reviewers and the above-mentioned platform provider as the reviewer were mentioned. a high level of ambition was built in all of the projects and the teachers were clearly focused to deliver a course that would be completely public and estimated to attract considerably more participants than existing courses. teachers in one mooc can ”meet” more students than they do in a whole career at the campus. the institutions and the external bodies also invested heavily in the projects. this is reflected in the stories of weekend work and that virtually all teachers express that it took more time than expected. esg part 1:1 also indicates that ”how the policy is implemented, monitored and revised is the institution’s decision.” (enqa et al. 2015, part 1:1, page 11) the interviewees’ thoughts about any quality assurance were outside the ordinary processes except for some teachers who mentioned the process of approving new or changed syllabus and publishing routines on the learning management system. esg gives advice about the processes of the design work, how seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 62 education should be delivered, evaluation and competence of teaching staff. esg also recommends that the institutions should undergo external quality assurance on a cyclical basis. the recommendations consist of various perspectives and are clearly adapted to ongoing programs even if the teachers’ competence should include “encourages innovation in teaching methods and the use of new technologies.” (part 1.5, page 13) the focus of this study was not to ask the teachers about the pedagogical values behind the design of moocs. however, almost no concerns about the possibility for the student to learn from moocs were raised except for discussion about separate parts of the course’s design. as previously stated, conole’s (2016) characteristics of good learning are: encourages reflection; enables dialogue; fosters collaboration; applies theory learnt to practice; creates a community of peers; enables creativity; motivates the learners. the interviewees have an engagement and ambition to deliver an open course of the highest possible quality, despite more work for them than originally expected. a structured quality review of all of conole’s seven characteristics seems, however, to be absent in this first run, and may not even be adequate in this initial phase and for the mooc format. esg can be interpreted as a framework for the ambitious, innovative and tentative ways of teaching and learning that may not fit in the first round of moocs. the diversity of participants’ inducements for participation is highlighted when moocs are criticized for high drop out rates. conole’s characteristics for good learning can hardly be relevant for all the participants as some registered participants use the mooc as a site to get a brief clue about something interesting to them, while others are curious about how (other) teachers present the field. some participants may also want to get some brief information on a subject. all these participants may not want to reflect, communicate, etc. as conole describes as being good learning, even if her characteristics are highly relevant for good learning as such. a quality assurance system that has the flexibility to embrace new activities can support the institution to be prepared for changes and new operating conditions, but that is eventually not possible by definition of innovative activity. the institution needs to choose a strategy on how to deal with open courses. clarke (2013) suggested four possible strategies which all need quality assurance work: • launching their own mooc • joining an existing mooc consortium • ensuring all courses are up to mooc standards in terms of content quality and technological sophistication • emphasizing the distinctive qualities of face to face, campus education the decisions taken by the majority of the institutions for the moocs projects in this study is to join an existing mooc consortium, which reached many students. the institutions that got external funding for developing open education were more geared to their existing communication platforms. the latter institutions’ ambition to reach new students and position their research worldwide were quite low compared to the first category. by viewing the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 63 different decisions, different conditions for the teachers’ quality of work existed. this study has shown the absence of teachers’ (those engaged in projects developing moocs) awareness of any structured quality assurance systems although different reviews and checks are mentioned. this does not indicate the absence of quality assurance as other parties in the projects can be assumed to have a holistic picture of the process. however, the result shows that the teachers interpreted the quality assurance process more as an internal control system than as a tool for strategic change. the result raises the question of the adequacy of a quality system for innovative activities. suppose that an activity requires full resources in order to develop. this makes björn stensaker’s question highly relevant as a closing remark: ”how can we create qa systems that stimulate creativity, personal engagement, local initiatives, and innovation?” (stensaker, 2009, 2). practical implications björn stensaker’s question above (stensaker, 2009) is in line with the concern by one of the teachers. “but if there is a project and we do not test different paths. what kind of academy are we then? then we roll’s just on one track, and then, we will, of course, do not get any answers to questions..” (p21 translated) how can a quality assurance system support development of he and thereby become embraced by innovative teachers developing new teaching and learning activities? references anfara, v. a., brown, k. m., & mangione, t. l. 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(2012). making sense of moocs: musings in a maze of myth, paradox and possibility. journal of interactive media in education, 2012(3), p.art. 18. doi: http://doi.org/10.5334/2012-18 http://lup.lub.lu.se/record/4648237 http://doi.org/10.5334/2012-18 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 64 enqa, esu, eua, & eurashe. (2015). standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the european higher education area (esg). brussels, belgium: enqa. retrieved from http://www.enqa.eu/index.php/home/esg/ hayes, s. (2015). moocs and quality: a review of the recent literature. gloucester, uk: the quality assurance for higher education 2015. janssen, m., nyström claesson, a., & lindqvist, m. 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(2015). quality assurance and accreditation of moocs: current issues and future trends. in proceedings of open education global 2015: innovation and entrepreneurship. banff, canada. 22-24 april, 2015. lowenthal, p., & hodges, c. (2015). in search of quality: using quality matters to analyze the quality of massive, open, online courses (moocs). the international review of research in open and distributed learning, 16(5), 1– 8. retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2348/3436 nascimbeni, f., & burgos, d. (2016). in search for the open educator: proposal of a definition and a framework to increase openness adoption among university educators. international review of research in open and distributed learning, 17(6), 1–10. retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2736/3974 olsson, u. (2014) a preliminary exploration of operating models of second cycle/research led open education involving industry collaboration. european journal of open, distance and e-learning. 17(1) http://www.eurodl.org/?p=archives&year=2014&halfyear=1&article=610 ng, p. t. (2007). quality assurance in the singapore education system in an era of diversity and innovation. educational research for policy and practice, 6(3), 235–247. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10671-007-9018-x singh, g., & hardaker, g. (2014). barriers and enablers to adoption and diffusion of elearning. education + training, 56(2/3), 105–121. http://doi.org/10.1108/et11-2012-0123 stensaker, b. (2009). innovation, learning and quality assurance mission impossible? in presentation at european quality assurance forum, copenhagen (p. 2). retrieved from http://www.eurashe.eu/library/qualityhe/plenary_i_bjorn_stensaker.pdf weller, m. (2014). the battle for open: how openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. london: ubiquity press. http://doi.org/10.5334/bam http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2013.773419 http://www.eurashe.eu/library/quality-he/plenary_i_bjorn_stensaker.pdf http://www.eurashe.eu/library/quality-he/plenary_i_bjorn_stensaker.pdf teachers’ awareness of guidelines for quality assurance when developing moocs ulf olsson abstract introduction method findings review by colleagues (in-office qap) awareness, but not in use (avoidance qap) quality assurance by company providing the it platform (external qap) standards used (standard qap) discussion practical implications references title seminar.net 2015. © author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. at home with students – observing online and offline contexts anita lyngsø department of media, cognition and communication university of copenhagen & health department via university college e-mail: anly@via.dk abstract this article reflects the methodological challenges presented in the research process, where the principle of 'following the field’ means that the researcher must also follow students engaged in online activities in their own homes. the ethnographic studies are a part of a phd project on “neteducation,” a full-scale development project in nursing education (lyngsø, 2014). with a focus on online professional education as the starting point, the process of research will follow the shifting learning process, through phases in the virtual classroom and in the students’ own homes. research in online contexts demands a rethinking of the traditional ethnographic approach (hammersley, 2006; hine, 2005), sharpening the focus on the online and offline contexts, and the shifting between them (webster, da silva, 2013). the methodological reflections in the first part of this article can relate to this division due to the “netstudents” activities in studying online at home. on the other hand, the dichotomy between online and offline contexts is found to be inadequate, during the observations conducted. in light of some preliminary findings, the challenges of observing online and offline activities almost simultaneously are considered, despite a dearth of literature existing on this subject. keywords: methodology, ethnography, reflexivity, online learning introduction this article reflects the methodological challenges in the research process, where the principle of 'following the field’ means that the researcher must also follow students engaged in online activities in their own homes. the ethnographic studies are a part of a phd project on “neteducation,” a fullscale approach to development in nursing education (lyngsø, 2014). the focus of this phd project is online professional learning, empirically following the movement of a class of “netstudents” and their teachers in educational time and place. this involves participant observations, interviews and the collection of relevant document materials in the clinical settings, in the classroom and in the digitalized classroom; achieved by going into the students’ own homes. only the latter dimension is to be considered in this article. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:anly@via.dk the ethnographic approach gives knowledge about the teachers and students’ activities and practices in the educational everyday life. the broad ethnographic approach (borgnakke 1996, hammersley, atkinson, 2007) opens up for mapping the educational field and for close up studies of the online settings and courses. herby the project gain qualitative, in-depth analyses, and produce knowledge on the new and not yet researched online learning in nursing education. research in online contexts leads to a rethinking of the traditional ethnographic approach due to, amongst other things, the involvement of technology in human interactions (hammersley, 2006; hine, 2005). with this rethinking, the focus falls upon the online and offline contexts and the shifting between them (webster, da silva, 2013). the methodological reflections in the first part of this article can relate to this division, due to the “netstudents” studying online at home, while also reading the syllabus and other materials offline. on the other hand, a dichotomy between online and offline contexts is found to be inadequate, in the observations conducted. in light of some preliminary findings, the challenges of observing online and offline activities almost simultaneously are considered, despite a dearth of literature on this subject. the case: online nursing education the case is an online education in nursing, given the title “neteducation” by the persons involved. neteducation is a development project ordered by the department of health, with via university college and two nursing schools implementing the program in collaboration. the project is scheduled to run between 2012-2017, and can be regarded in concrete terms as an e-pedagogical experiment, characteristic of political and professional tendencies for the ongoing development of the e-pedagogical strategies of teachers and students. the purpose of neteducation is, according to the planning team, to develop an ‘e-didactic approach to professional learning’ (nielsen et al, 2011). at the same time, they also stress that the development of the e-didactic approach should aim to prepare the nursing students for digital and high-tech healthcare: ‘(to)…develop an e-didactic concept that, through the form of planning, can prepare students to be included as employees in a digital and hightech form of healthcare’ (ibid.) the first evaluations and experiences of students and teachers show that the netstudents did not possess the anticipated level of it skills, exemplified by the fact that on her first day, one of the students commented that she had heard about google but had not tried it yet! their only interest in it, as such, was as a means to gaining a much higher degree of flexibility in their education, rather than any desire to gain greater competence in it. these divergent interests have been previously described and discussed by borgnakke and lyngsø (2014), with an emphasis on digital literacy or technacy (borgnakke, 2012) and the it habitus (kolbæk, 2013) of nursing students in general. the other providers of online nursing education in denmark perhaps more accurately described as distance learning in nursing have only made small changes in their pedagogical approach, in relation to their campus-based education (fredskild, 2008). neteducation, however, has made a conscious choice to clarify their special e-pedagogical approach, and are using gilly salmon's ‘five-stage model of teaching and learning online’ (salmon, 2011) to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 do so. the team responsible for the planning of the curriculum describes the model as both a ‘stage model’ and as a ‘scaffolding model’ and highlight the role of the e-moderator and the “e-tivities”: ‘the model has two basic elements: an e-moderator, who makes a summary of the discussions, and e-tivities, which are activities that students should perform online (with defined purposes, goals and deadlines). each stage also requires the participants (students and teachers) to master certain technical skills’ (document, the curriculum team, 2012). the inspiration from salmon is evident, but neteducation has also altered the e-pedagogical concept. as a nursing education with clinical training, it is not possible for neteducation to be an entirely online education. neither does the scholastic part take place entirely online. neteducation has chosen that a few days each semester should be spent face-to-face, on campus. these days are often used to start or close topics, or for practical training in the simulation lab. despite the fact that neteducation calls itself an online education, it seems that they have more of a blended learning approach (dirckinckholmfeld, 2002; borgnakke, 2012). this means that, compared to traditional campus-based nursing education, neteducation still has learning spaces in the clinical setting and in the classroom, but have added a further learning space the space for online learning. therefore, it seems that neteducation could be an alternative to traditional nursing education, with positive evaluations about the use of etivities particularly evident, where both netstudents and their teachers find them to be productive in the learning process. examination results are another positive element, where there is a tendency for netstudents to achieve slightly higher grades. therefore, even though the formal criteria are comparable with the traditional nursing education, the space for online learning still demands further research. with the focus in this paper on online observations, the rest of the paper will concentrate on the ethnographic studies conducted in the netstudents’ homes and upon the methodological questions raised in relation to this. online observations in students homes the methodological approach draws on the experiences of international research using an ethnography described as mixed-method (hammersley, atkinson, 2007; borgnakke, 2013), within scholastic and educational settings. this means that periods of participant-observation are interspersed with spontaneous conversations, interviews and the compilation of relevant documents. the learning process is a personal, internal process, which is not fully visible for others. the learning process is also happening within a context that, for the netstudents, is their own home as well as the practices involved in neteducation. the ethnographic approach seems to have the ability to embrace them both. the participant-observations in the netstudents’ homes give the researcher the possibility of following the netstudents in their individual activities, in their collaboration with other students, and of hearing their interactions as they actually take place. at the same time, interviews and spontaneous conversations will acknowledge that it is only the individual netstudent who knows exactly how they perceive what is going on (walford, 2008; hammersley, atkinson, 2007). relevant documents are defined, in this context, as the e-tivities assigned by the teachers who frame the activities being observed and the products being produced by the netstudents. in this way, the ethnographic approach provides the opportunity to produce more seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 comprehensive empirical material on online learning, than any of these methods could achieve individually. the inspiration to follow the students at home is derived mostly from marcus and his descriptions of multi-sited design (marcus, 1995). marcus emphasizes that the very heart of ethnography is to design strategies for following the participants’ connections and relations in the various sites within which they participate. as already mentioned, the individual netstudent is part of sites such as the classroom at campus, the clinical settings and the digitalized classroom. this digitalized classroom, where she sits at home, is where she spends the majority of her study time. following the netstudents at home, then, must become the key area when online learning is the research focus. by following the student at home, the methods are ‘blended to the same degree as the field of practice’ (borgnakke, 2013). participant observations involve participating in the social world, preferably in a role chosen by the researcher themselves, but just as often in the role it proves possible to obtain, or the role given to them. (hammersley, atkinson, 2007). the netstudents knew me as one of the teachers on the program, giving me easy access to contact them both on campus, and afterwards to secure their permission for observing them in their studies at home, via email. however, as a researcher, this relation could also represent a restriction in getting to know their everyday life as netstudents, due to the potential implications of the inherent power relationship. therefore, it was emphasized that i would no longer teach or examine them after i had started to observe them. the preferred role in ethnographic studies is between a stranger and a friend (ibid.). i was no stranger, and harbored no intention of being a friend. therefore, i presented myself for the netstudents as a ‘participant-observer,’ being neither expert nor critic, rather trying to establish the position of being ‘acceptably incompetent’ by pointing out the fact that they were the only ones who could introduce me to the field (ibid.). i also clarified that it was solely their decision, as to when i should come and go. coming into people’s homes can give the researcher the role of a guest (jordan, 2006) and in an attempt to avoid this i wrote to them that i would bring my own lunch. the first class of netstudents started with 17 women and 1 man, between the ages 21-53. now, 2½ years later, there are nine women left. during the last two years, nine students have been observed in their homes, each for a period of two days. going online with the netstudent in their homes usually involved observing their participation within their study group. the online observations therefore also include the connections and relations between the other group members observing online contexts demands a rethinking of the traditional ethnographic approach (hammersley, 2006). everyday life has become mediatized and consequently more complex. the observation of this mediatized everyday culture therefore inevitably becomes more complex, because the researcher has to follow the participants online (webster, da silva, 2013). this involves rethinking the traditional ethnographic approach not in the sense of producing a clear recipe for observations in online contexts, but more an increased awareness of some principles (hine, 2005). one of these principles is that even though the research site of interest is online, the research does not need to start online. traditional contexts still ‘play a vital role in everyday social experiences’ (ibid. s.112), and therefore also in the understanding of online activities. the offline context is not necessarily present in the research, but when the observed students shifts between online and offline activities and interactions, it makes sense methodology to follow them both in their online and offline environment (james, busher, 2013; borgnakke, 2013). this strengthen the choice of going home to the students. i could still note that this home-context includes shifting between online and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 offline situations. it led me to the assumption that these were two separate situations and that is was meaningful to see them as such. at the same time a common almost private atmosphere is characteristic for the home observations as confirmed in my first observation. in e-mails to the netstudents, i had been focusing on online learning and the first netstudent suggested that i should be at her home, half an hour before she and her study group had arranged to go online together. when i arrived, the netstudent served newly baked buns; she said she baked every second morning. this netstudent used her dining table when studying. after the buns were taken away, she found her laptop and several books and laid them on the table. i sat myself opposite; just as before, but now with my laptop ready, and i got the password for the internet connection. i could hear she was connecting with the study group, and after telling them that i was present, she also invited me to join them in their “lync”i meeting. i could now follow the netstudents on my screen, see what they wrote, hear what they discussed and i took field notes accordingly. during the next hours, i started to get the feeling that i was missing out on something. i observed that the netstudent opposite me was intermittently working on the laptop without any activity happening on my screen. at one point, i went over and looked. she had several documents open, and she was switching between them. none of these documents were visible for the study group or me she was working with them offline. after lunch, i sat myself diagonally behind her, so i could follow her activities both online and offline and quite another perspective arose. in this first observation, i chose, as an ethnographer to follow what turns out to be meaningful in the situation. sarah dyke (2013) uses this argument to verify that she follows her informants from offline into the online universe. unlike her, i began by observing online, but found that what was meaningful for my perspective on online learning also seems to happen offline. however, the greatest difference was that i was not as such leaving one context to observe in another context. what was meaningful was that i tried to observe both contexts simultaneously. to illustrate how meaningful this was, the next section reveals some of the findings and preliminary analysis from observing both online and offline, with these findings selected due to their ability to invite further methodological reflections. result: observations both online and offline at this point, two topics seem to be interesting in the attempt to reveal what would have been missed, if the observation had focused solely on online activity. these are ‘hiding behind the screen’ and ‘interruptions by daily life.’ hiding behind the screen lync’s capacity to show the participants via a video-stream was not used by any of the netstudents, because of the demands this placed on their internet connections. in this sense, they are all ‘hiding’ themselves from each other but there are also different manifestations of hiding behind the screen. multi-tasking is one of them. all the students have books lying by the computer, with most of them also using a tablet to read literature scanned electronically for them. they are consulting these, while at the same time seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 taking part in discussions and writing assignments online. as mentioned previously, the netstudents have several documents open simultaneously, to find relevant discussion points, but sometimes also to focus on the same document: ’the study group are discussing whether the structure of their assignment is at bit messy. student g: ‘maybe a bit of this part would be better in the part about the patient’s medicine?’ student a: ’i found that part. shall i write it down?’ the other two: ’yes’. nothing happened on my screen (field notes, jan. 2015) the netstudents can write in the same documents simultaneously, but often it make sense that one of them shares the document via lync, to be sure that they are talking about the same part. the student who shares and controls the document is in a more locked position than the others are, she cannot scroll up and down or look in another document without the entire study group being aware of it. the exception is the students who have two screens. they have the shared document on one screen and can do whatever they like on the other. some of the students who are using two screens, or are not actively sharing in lync, also multi-task with activities that are not relevant for the study-group. for example, during a webinar, where study groups take turns presenting their findings in the presence of a teacher, a netstudent starts checking and answering her private emails. furthermore, the mobile phone is always close by and text messages are read immediately: ’they (the study group) are discussing how to nurse a patient with breast cancer. student b gets a text message and, right away, she reads it and sends a short message back. student b looks up at the screen again and says: ‘you said symptoms?’ and by doing so, she gets one of the other students to repeat what was just said, and she continues in the discussion’ (field notes, april 2013) student b had lost a bit of the conversation but no more so, than she could ask a completely relevant question about it. this is a main characteristic: that the netstudent who takes these breaks can almost immediately switch back into the conversation, even without help from fellow students. it is seldom possible to hear a student being absent, even for the other students: ‘when i am not the one who writes down what the group decides to put into the assignment, i almost have a tendency to play a game or something like that. it is not that clever, i know. i do not think that anyone of the other students do things like that. they are always very active’ (interview, student e, dec. 2013) this “hiding behind the screen” is very evident here, as is the belief that it is in some way possible to recognize if another person is absent behind the screen. hiding behind the screen can also be a conscious decision. at webinars, some students distinguish between the study groups to which they will listen. their experience is that not all of the groups always present well-researched materials, and it can therefore be a waste of time listing to them. what makes it possible for them to do something else without anyone being aware, is the fact that the netstudents among themselves have decided that due to noise pollution, they should keep their microphones switched off. the others can therefore not hear any sound from chats etc.: ’a netstudent from another study group started presenting and student k is listening, when the chat function in her lync makes a sound. she activates the chat and reads it, and among other things, there is a link, which she enters. a loud video starts playing. she smiles, looks at me and shuts it down. she answers the chat message and takes their own document on the screen instead of the presentation. now there is only seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 the sound of it. a new chat message arrives which she reads. at the end of the presentation she removes both the document and the chat, but during the questions after the presentation, she sends and receives another chat’ (field notes, jan. 2015) this student and her study group were not present, but for the other students and the teacher it is impossible to see this. their names are displayed in lync alongside all the others, and there is no other way to track their activity. observations have shown that it is not possible to presuppose that netstudents who do not participate in discussions and the like are always absent. in many cases, they are listening, taking notes, skimming through their books for arguments etc. but without having anything to say to the whole group. hiding behind the screen with the microphone shut at webinars can also be quite simple in its manifestation: ‘student e is sitting with her arms crossed, looking out the window. the teacher now passes the conversation over to student e and her study group, but no one answers. student e makes no attempt whatsoever at opening her microphone. silence. no movement. another student says: ’i don’t think there is anyone there’’ (field notes, dec. 2013) if netstudents wish to hide, there is not that much that can be done. interruptions by daily life the majority of the netstudents have husbands or boyfriends that either study, work from home, or have flexible working hours. for some of the netstudents this can give rise to interruptions when they want to concentrate on their etivities or lync meetings. the netstudents, who no longer have children living at home, have their own office. however, a closed door is not always something that is respected: ‘student e is sitting at her desk working with a powerpoint. her husband passes by the closed door to her office. there are wooden floors that creak throughout the house, so it is clear that he has been walking around in the house, before now passing by the door. student e shouts with a pawky smile, without looking up from the screen: ‘you don’t dare to pop in today, eh [name of the husband]?’’ (field notes, dec. 2013) in an attempt to create her own space for learning, this student has arranged with her husband that they meet in the kitchen for coffee at 10.30 and again for lunch. in the meantime, she does not want to be disturbed. their meetings in the kitchen function well, but he still has a tendency to pop in, just to hear how things are going. at the same time, and as shown in the citation, the netstudents are often very attentive to what is going on around them, without necessarily expressing this. also, the younger netstudents that do not have an office are attentive without looking up, when they sit in their sitting rooms or kitchens and just in time – raise their hand for goodbyes, or point appropriately when the location of specific items is requested by others. the lack of an office means that the younger students must take the rest of the family’s needs and wishes into consideration: ’today student h is sitting at her dining table, but says: ‘i had been studying in our bedroom for the last couple of weeks, because my husband has had a written exam at university and has been occupying the sitting room. he has roughly 15 sessions at the university and otherwise he is at home studying. he finds it quite disturbing when i talk with my study group over lync, so i often sit at our daughter’s desk, in her room’. i tell her that the netstudents with small kids often do not have an office. she laughs and says: ‘student e asked one day if we could seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 study in the evening and said that if i was disturbed by my family, i could just use my office. i said that i might get the kitchen, but then that’s the lot!’’ (spontaneous conversation, dec. 2014) indeed, the younger netstudents are often not even able to choose between this many rooms. on the other hand, it does not seem to be that important where they study, but far more important that they do not get disturbed. a main reason for the younger netstudents with children to attend the neteducation program is the possibility of collecting their children no later than 15.30. it does not mean that they are not a disturbed, when they come home: ’the door of the flat opens and then straight away the door to the sitting room. a girl in outdoor clothes is looking in. student h looks up and smiles. when the girl has removed her outdoor clothes, she comes running in and shows her mom a woven christmas heart basket she has made in school. student e smiles again and then turns to the computer. the girl leaves the sitting room to meet her younger sister who now enters the door to the flat. she comes straight in and demands to hear who i am. the older sister is also back and wants to whisper something to her mother. student h: ‘i just need to finish here.’ the little sister tiptoes out of the sitting room. both girls meet their dad when he enters the door of the flat with shopping bags in both hands. student h says to her study group: ‘the girls are home now, so i have to stop’. the others agree.’ (field notes, dec. 2014) this is just one of the disturbances the netstudents have chosen themselves. challenges in both online and offline observations firstly, this discussion will focus on methodological challenges in observing both online and offline activities within the same situation, and secondly, the methodological challenges presented by observing in the homes of the netstudents. had i not been observing online and offline contexts simultaneously, i would not have attained the nuanced understandings presented previously. including the offline context within which the users are situated while they are online, is something that can be forgotten when ethnographers go online: ‘the context of use, though usually missed by online ethnographers, is something that can be explored by the in-situ observation of users’ (mackay, 2005). still, mackay divides the observations in online and offline observations, not as activities going on in the same situation; and reflects a similar approach used by other researchers (webster, da silva, 2013; james, busher, 2013; hammersley, 2006). as an experiment, i have also tried solely observing offline activity during a short period at home with a netstudent. i got the same feeling of missing out on something, because i could not follow all that the study group were talking about or always be sure why the student had reacted as she did; due to the lack of insight into their online context. observing both online and offline activities simultaneously could be regarded as multi-tasking, and research has shown that cognitive work suffers under this kind of divided attention: ‘multi-tasking is a mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one’ (hallowells, 2007). the observations rapidly switches between online at offline activities and are as such not simultaneously, but the switches can happen within seconds and always within the same situation. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 8 even despite the lack of complete attention on each context, the almost simultaneous observations give deeper understandings than separate observations. for example, the observations attained relating to the switched off microphones would merely have been that the microphones were switched off had the observations focused solely upon online activity. the offline observations revealed a variety of actions behind these switched off microphones, which again led to new questions, providing a deeper understanding. adding online observations such as the online comment, ‘i don’t think there is anyone there,’ broaden the understanding even more; most profoundly because of the fact that i was sitting beside one of the very students who ‘wasn’t there.’ being there when the children come home, and seeing them literally filling the room and the attention of their mother, gives a deeper understanding than just hearing her utter the words, ‘i have to stop.’ ‘being there’ has always been one of the characteristics in doing ethnographic inspired fieldwork (landri, 2013). landri finds that this is also the case in fieldwork in online environments, and suggests that online observations do not necessarily require a rethinking of the traditional ethnographic approach; but should instead be regarded as an extension that there is a ‘complex flow, and interpenetration among online and offline presence’ (ibid.). however, in other ways he seems to maintain the separation between observations online and offline, when discussing fieldwork in online environments. in the end, the students do not regard their situation as being separated into different contexts, they are fundamentally still just working with their study group. methodologically it is both interesting and necessary for the researcher to reflect upon their access to both dimensions, just as it can have important analytical implications. in-situ observation essentially involves these two dimensions becoming conjoined for the researcher. ‘being there’ validates the ethnographic knowledge when the ethnographer at the same time reflects on the product of that participation. the ethnographer should ‘maintain a self-conscious awareness of what is learned, how it has been learned, and the social transactions that inform the production of such knowledge’ (hammersley, atkinson, 2007). regarding these social transactions, i had as previously mentioned tried to attain a position of ‘acceptable incompetence,’ according to observing online learning, and presented myself more as an observer than a participant. even though one’s roles are clarified, they often are altered by the field (ibid.). for example, jordan (2006) experienced that the families she observed in their own homes, constructed different roles for her: the researcher as student, as guest, as person and as negative agent. inspired by jordan i will begin my reflections on the social transactions experienced with the netstudents by relating to these roles. the role of the researcher as student is described as a non-judgmental observer, who is interested in learning from the field. most of the description is very similar to the role of the ‘acceptably incompetent,’ figure who tries to go open-mindedly into the field (hammersley, atkinson, 2007). all the netstudents so far have accepted this position, and thereby given me this role. they accept me in their homes, presenting me to their husbands and boyfriends as, “anita who wants to see how i study.” they put no restrictions on me being in their homes, but most of them just show me their place of study. they seem to reason that the rest of the house would not be of interest to my research focus. jordan found that she was only given this role when she was still a student herself, and not afterwards due to her more knowledgeable appearance and her increasing age. i did not share this experience. currently, and as they also did 2 years ago, the students try to give me as realistic an impression as possible, so i can learn from it. this should not imply that they seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 9 construct the day for my benefit. instead, the e-tivities with predetermined deadlines and the expectations of other group members frame the activities of the day, rather than the fact that i am present. some of the netstudents saw me as a guest for part of the day. for instance, they emailed me back with an ‘invitation’ to come and observe them, and would give me lunch if i was prepared to eat what they ate, and in some ways they would try to acknowledge my presence by smiling and nodding in my direction during the day. being regarded as a guest in this manner was not quite as categorical, as the experiences described by jordan, where the families prepared special food for her and tried to entertain her, but this may also be due to the more informal social conventions in denmark. the netstudents, for instance, all referred to me by my first name and anything else would have been odd, whereas this is a major factor in the distinct role of “the researcher as person,” described by jordan. even some netstudents who had given me the role of guest at lunch, said at the end of the day that they had forgotten i was sitting behind them. this emphasizes and supports the claim that it was more the individual and the study group that structured the day, rather than any influence of my presence. a few of the netstudents also constructed a new role for me, not experienced by jordan, a role that was perhaps predictable, due to my former post. they saw me, for short periods of time, as a teacher. the study group would perhaps require supervision or assistance, but with no teacher available, the students turned to me and tried to implicate me as a participant in the group for a moment. sometimes i agreed to give a short answer because of the notion that: “we have given you something, now you can return the favor.” other times a smile and a shake of one’s head would negate the request. all of these episodes are described in the field notes, as a part of the observations. for jordan the family was the focus, where the focus for me is just one person from the household. the netstudents’ relations with and actions towards their families are interesting, as a part of their patterns in creating their own strategies and spaces for interaction, communication and learning as are their relations and actions towards the patients in the clinical settings but this does not make the family or the patients my focus. my focus is the netstudents. when the netstudent goes from studying to being with their family, as described in the final citation from the field notes, i observe this, but at the same time, it also marks the end of the legitimacy of my presence. concluding remarks in this case, the principle of ‘following the field’ essentially following the online students in their own homes presents methodological challenges in tackling the complexity of being in someone’s private home and observing situations consisting of both online and offline contexts. it is concluded that when a situation consists of online and offline contexts, the ethnographer must observe both, despite the methodological challenges this presents. the challenge is to observe the students’ activities in both these contexts – if not simultaneously, then by following their rapid switching between the two. it becomes evident that this approach gives more detailed and representative findings, and therefore provides the possibility of a deeper understanding of the situation. another challenge arises in trying to observe netstudents at home, where the division between the online nursing education and family life is blurred; this division is not as distinct and definite as in the traditional nursing education, taking place on campus. reflection on the roles the researcher can actively seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 10 construct, and the roles given by the students provides an awareness of how the knowledge obtained has been achieved. this awareness can provide clarity, by 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(2005). new connections, familiar settings: issues in the ethnographic study of new media use at home. in c. hine (ed.), virtual methods: issues in social research on the internet (pp. 129–140). oxford: berg. marcus, g. e. (199510). ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multisited ethnography. annual review of anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. nielsen, c., seyer-hansen, h., kolbæk, r., & bjerg, k. (2011). netbaseret sygeplejerskeuddannelsen i via. projektbeskrivelse. salmon, g. (2011). e-moderating: the key to online teaching and learning (3rd ed.). new york: routledge. walford, g. (2008). the nature of educational ethnography. in g. walford (ed.), how to do educational ethnography (pp. 1–15). london: tufnell press. webster, j. p., & da silva, s. m. (2013). doing educational ethnography in an online world: methodological challenges, choices and innovations. ethnography and education, 8(2), 123-130. i lync is an expanded kind of skype seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 12 at home with students – observing online and offline contexts anita lyngsø abstract introduction the case: online nursing education online observations in students homes result: observations both online and offline hiding behind the screen interruptions by daily life challenges in both online and offline observations concluding remarks references seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 toys as tools for skill-building and creativity in adult life katriina heljakka school of history, culture and arts studies (degree programme of) cultural production and landscape studies university of turku e-mail: katriina.heljakka@utu.fi abstract previous understandings of adult use of toys are connected with ideas of collecting and hobbying, not playing. this study aims to address toys as play objects employed in imaginative scenarios and as learning devices. this article situates toys (particularly, character toys such as blythe dolls) as socially shared tools for skill-building and learning in adult life. the interviews with finnish doll players and analyses of examples of their productive, toy-related play patterns showcased in both offline and digital playscapes reveal how toy play leads to skill-building and creativity at a mature age. the meanings attached to and developed around playthings expand purposely by means of digital and social media. (audio)visual contentsharing platforms, such as flickr, pinterest, instagram and youtube, invite mature audiences to join playful dialogues involving mass-produced toys enhanced through do-it-yourself practices. activities circulated in digital play spaces, such as blogs and photo management applications, demonstrate how adults, as non-professional ‘everyday players’, approach, manipulate and creatively cultivate contemporary playthings. mature players educate potential players by introducing how to use and develop skills by sharing play patterns associated with their playthings. producing and broadcasting tutorials on how to play creatively with toys encourage others to build their skills through play. keywords: skill-building, creativity, doll, narratives, photoplay, play, social media, toys introduction in the western world of the 21st century, toys are everywhere; playthings of all kinds have expanded from the nursery to sites of serious play, public interiors – offices, studios of artists and designers – not to mention the great variety of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 135 products of the entertainment culture, such as television series, films and games. at the same time, player-created content – activities showcased on social media – reveals the ‘real’ toy stories of adults who are coming more actively out of their toy closets. today, toys and adults go together although a majority of play research is still concerned with the ‘immaterial’ (or ‘free’) play of children. over the past years, and probably thanks to the rapidly emerging and expanding academic area of (digital) game studies, play has elevated its status as a topic of research. at the same time, adults are still not addressed as toy players in academic studies related to toys or play patterns associated with them, or rather, their interaction with playthings is discussed in terms of hobbying and collecting, not ‘toying’ with playthings. the research related to object play is still mostly restricted to children’s culture. interestingly, game playing seems to have overcome this one-sided take on ludic activity some time ago. in fact, the educational and developmental potential related to game playing seems to have gained a steady foothold in western play discourse. de jong (2015, p. 17) postulates that the ludification of culture (e.g., raessens, 2006) has implications for education. in my view, the practices of ‘toying’ with contemporary dolls contribute to skill-building and learning, even in adulthood. thus, adult doll play presents a case of possible toyification of learning, that is, toy use aiming at instrumentalised play and the development of different skills, instead of playing only for pleasure. moreover, i presume that in adult toy play, players are creative, productive and proactive rather than reactive in their actions. at the same time, adults actively use multiple media platforms in both playing and social sharing of their play. in other words, adults are coming out of their toy closets to show their toys and share what they have learned about (and with) them in play. reflecting on the current situation, with adults’ growing interest in toys that is made visible through the internet, adult toy play could be mistakenly considered a recent phenomenon. however, as the (popular) cultural history of toys shows, toys have always appealed to demographic groups other than children. the cultural (as well as industrial and commercial) history of toys shows that they were originally produced as artefacts for adult use (see e.g., daiken, 1963, p. 102; hillier, 1965, p. 14; newson & newson, 1979, p. 87). from time to time, this interest becomes more distinct and perceivable. as proposed by sutton-smith (1997) and combs (2000), in the ludic age that parallels ideas about the ludification of culture, adult toy play that extends to practices beyond collecting, for example, can be more easily perceived because of the possibilities offered by digital media’s means of communication. this article aims to identify and analyse creative patterns of playing in relation to adult doll players. the presumption is that these play patterns have become visible through social media applications. by inspecting the play patterns related to the blythe doll (see figure 1), specifically, its representations on fan sites, flickr and the data collected from qualitative interviews and participatory observations conducted at doll meetings with blythe players in finland, i demonstrate how toys are used as tools for skill-building and creativity in adult life. theoretical framework first, the theoretical framework comprises previous theories about ludic activities in relation to manipulation and learning through the use of objects. second, i discuss the relevance of social media as a ‘toyful’ playground that offers multifaceted possibilities to study adult toy play, particularly with seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 136 reference to creative object practices with toys, which may lead to skill-building and learning. previous theories in relation to ludic activities regardless of toy play as a phenomenon that does not restrict itself to children, studies on play have mainly concentrated on the forms of play that are carried out in childhood. as van leeuwen and westwood (2008, p. 153) justifiably point out, ludic engagement at an adult age has been almost exclusively studied in a therapeutic context. adult play may result from factors other than using surplus energy (mainly connected with childhood), specifically, the need for recreation (groos & baldwin, 2010, p. 226). adult play practices related to collecting or other forms of interaction with toys seem to happen most often during leisure time. however, the value and benefits of playthings and interacting with them have also been noted in the areas of design work and management (see e.g., hunter & waddell, 2008; schrage, 2000). research on sensory engagement with toys such as dolls (object play) is a rare field of study, even in contemporary toy research. furthermore, investigations of adult toy play addressing the perspective of skill-building and creativity in relation to these character toys seem non-existent in academic writings. due to the scarce research literature on adult interaction with contemporary playthings, scholars must try to find theoretical knowledge in other realms of academia. recent game studies seem to offer an interesting area of research that tackles questions similar to studies on adult toy play. one of these questions concerns the topics of learning and creativity that are accomplished alongside playing due to the intrinsic value of play, in other words, playing ‘just for fun’. according to sherry turkle, a psychologist and scholar in digital culture, ‘in video games, you soon realize that to learn to play you have to play to learn’ (1995, p. 70). learning through play seems to happen without trying, as in the case of many games. similarly, some toys include a potentiality that intrigues the player to manipulate the plaything in various ways and develop certain skills in the process. playing to learn and manipulating to master while playing, children learn emotionally, physically, socially and cognitively (see e.g., burghardt, 2005; izumi-taylor, samuelsson, & rogers, 2010; piaget, 1962). both children and adults experience an almost irresistible desire to closely examine any strange object to acquaint themselves with its properties. the cognitive benefits of play are widely recognised. play begins with exercises focusing on manipulation of material objects. as sotamaa affirms, with good playthings, a child does not only derive useful experiences from objects but also “learns to learn” (1979, p. 11). sensory engagement is a central idea in any material artefact designed for play. according to klabbers, “toys involve eye-hand and fine motor coordination, and require planning, imagination, thinking ahead, cooperation, negotiating, sharing, self-control, delay of reward, and last but not least, patience” (2009, p. 5). what then motivates the player to engage with a toy? a child delights in playing with things that can be put in motion. some evidence shows that adults enjoy playful artefacts that allow a similar movement of limbs or at least ‘poseability’ (heljakka, 2013a; heljakka, 2015). equally, the possibility to manipulate and thus alter the appearance of an artefact, as is the case with many construction toys, dolls and action figures, is an important feature, such as in the so-called ball-jointed dolls (see ball-jointed dolls, 2015). for instance, a fashion doll or an action figure that is less articulated and thus affords less poseability also offers less play value than one that provides this kind of manipulation. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 137 play leads to more challenging tasks, as the feeling of pleasure derived from succeeding constantly develops into a hunger for more demanding challenges (groos & baldwin, 2010, p. 5). in toy play, this manifests itself in experimenting with and testing the limits of the toy, both physically and creatively. as media scholar stephen kline (2005) argues, different forms of play permit varying degrees of creativity and experimentation. doll play seems to offer particularly rich possibilities for this kind of creativity and experimentation, mainly because of the tactile and (in most cases) threedimensional qualities of dolls. imagination and creativity play major roles in this interaction with toy objects that are not themselves enhanced with technological features. in other words, being playful in the company of toys seems unregulated, at least to the point that their player is freer to manipulate the toys than a game player would be. how this learning happens in connection with contemporary dolls is explored further by turning to the blythe doll, its adult fans and the digital playscapes that offer a ‘shop window’ to contemporary cultures of adult toy players. social media as ‘toyful’ playground people play with materials, both individually and with others; power (2000) differentiates between solitary and social object play. as the material means to toy with things are expanding through an ever-growing universe of playthings, so are the possibilities to connect with likeminded (toy) players in digital media. in this section, i further discuss the playful capacity of contemporary social media platforms. the internet is generally viewed as a focal point for groups of people with similar interests, such as fans of various kinds. fans have always been early adapters of new media technologies, and their fascination with fictional universes often inspires new forms of cultural production (jenkins, 2006, p. 135). as convergence culture enables new forms of participation and collaboration among fan groups (jenkins, 2006, p. 256), a playful attitude and engagement towards culture have become even more perceivable. brenda danet (2001, pp. 7—8) regards cyberspace as a site for play because it affords all kinds of activities related to pretending and make-believe, both familiar terms describing different forms of play. digital media scholars saarikoski, suominen, turtiainen, and östman support this view by arguing that play, or rather, playfulness, has been one of the most important factors tempting people to engage in online activities (2009, pp. 261–262). as the internet has become a ‘social laboratory’ that allows experimentation (turkle, 1995, p. 180), it has also become possible to perceive toys as material means to practise creativity and to share playful experiences with likeminded people, even in adulthood. these activities are further explored in the context of both analogue and digital aspects of doll play. contextualising photoplay on social media the story of blythe – the doll type studied here – began in the usa in the early 1970s. the doll was designed in 1972 by allison katzmani and marketed by the kenner toy company and later by hasbro. today, contemporary versions of blythe dolls, so-called neo blythes, are produced and marketed by the japanese toy company tomy takara under hasbro’s licence. the internet plays an important role in the contemporary phenomenon of blytheism. contemporary doll play does not restrict itself to the concrete and manipulable toy object. new media technologies allow players to play with their toys in novel ways, mainly by allowing social sharing of creative digital content. displaying and sharing digital images have become increasingly seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 138 popular as the tools have developed online. besides photo discovery and management services, such as pinterest and flickr, youtube’s role as another type of ‘search engine’ for today’s ‘screenagers’ is undeniable. aside from televised, animated or music-related content, materials related to toys and play are also sought on youtube.ii in addition to being used as search engines for playthings by transgenerational toy enthusiasts, social media applications also function as catalogues for both contemporary toys and their related play patterns. photography and video creation have thus gained a significant position among and as part of other pastimes, such as toy play. alongside photography, social media services may also be considered tools for creative production. in services such as flickr, players who photograph their playthings may obtain new audiences and appreciation for their ‘photoplay’ (heljakka, 2011). in other words, new media offers a perceivable and collective playground for adult players. from the perspective of adult toy play, this development means that people are taking a creative stand towards their playthings by engaging in circulation and re-interpretation of the meanings attached to them. players are endlessly ‘toying with’, that is, re-appropriating the uses, appearances and narratives of their playthings. these playful interactions are in some cases documented and shared on the internet through virtual environments that allow networking and social interaction. when examining pictorial representations of toys (toys used as depicted subjects), the questions of play and creativity become significant. methodology investigations of adult toy play addressing the perspective of skill-building and creativity seem non-existent in academic writings. this article thus aims to seek answers to the following questions: in which ways does adult toy play extend beyond acquiring and maintaining a toy collection? how can adult toy play contribute to learning and skill-building? using qualitative interviews conducted in 2014 with finnish doll players who showcase their play patterns in online spaces such as flickr, i have aimed to formulate new understandings of adult toy play. in my study, i have elaborated on the creative, productive and digitally shared aspects of toy play with the popular blythe doll. to investigate emerging play patterns with reference to contemporary dolls, i have turned to online playscapes employed by fans of blythe dolls, particularly websites and flickr pages dedicated to blythe and the doll players. these players include five finnish women, aged 30–40+ years,iii who have actively engaged with their dolls and other blythe players, both online and offline at doll meetings, for example. i contacted these interviewees after meeting them in person at doll meetings. altogether, i invited seven people to participate; five responded and joined the study. the thematic interviews have been conducted with doll players who are locally and internationally active in their play patterns with physical dolls and on social media. the main theme of the interviews has been to collect data on blytheism in finland by finding out about play patterns in relation to this doll type. the interview questions target the phenomenon of adult toy play from many perspectives and aim at a thorough understanding of the motivations leading to and maintaining the play with blythe dolls. the data collection method has been further enhanced with participatory observations during ‘adult play dates’ organised in finland and at the international blythecon event in amsterdam (2014).iv analysis seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 139 my goal is to identify and analyse creative patterns of playing, particularly in relation to the blythe doll. by exploring the adult players’ activities that have become visible through social media applications (e.g., flickr) and analysing the data collected through qualitative interviews, i have sought answers to how adult toy play emerges. i have further enhanced the data collection by participatory observations conducted at doll meetings and a doll convention. using content analysis, i have focused first on mapping the most popular play patterns with reference to blythe dolls. second, i have comparatively analysed the discourses on learning and skill-building, as illustrated in the comments by the players in the finnish interviews and the american blythe enthusiasts posting on the this is blythe (tib) website.v this approach brings forward the similarities between blythe play in finland and the us, particularly concerning player-generated discourses on skill-building, creativity and learning. figure 1. blythe is a contemporary fashion doll produced by toy company tomy takara (photoplayed by the author, 2015). results this study targets two questions: in which ways does adult toy play with blythe extend beyond acquiring and maintaining a toy collection? how can adult play with blythe dolls contribute to learning and skill-building? blythe’s story continues today in photographic representations, text-based narratives and audiovisual materials created and shared by different fan communities, especially in the playgrounds of social media. the first encounter with a purchased doll may be documented in an unboxing video. what follows in shared play scenarios is the documenting and sharing of play patterns related to processes of customisation or creating stories, for example, which in some cases lead to ‘tutoring’ on toy play through blogs or tutorials on youtube. as such, the play patterns in relation to blythe exemplify a lively dimension of adult interaction with playthings. the activities with blythe, as in the case of most ‘digital dolldoms’ evolving in fan communities online, involve play practices, such as collecting and creative play. furthermore, these toys may be appreciated purely for their aesthetic qualities. for some fans, the dolls are family members and thus represent parasocial relationships; for others, the dolls are artefacts that may be used to decorate interior spaces. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 140 mapping play patterns with blythe: discovery, exploration and skill-building the play patterns that are relevant to the scope of my study are the material, digital and social practices around blythe dolls. for example, a large fan audience customises and personalises dolls for re-selling purposes; some produce unique dresses and accessories for blythe and sell them to other doll enthusiasts. vi in many blythe players’ long-term relationships with their toys, the key is to discover the plaything as a potential source of inspiration, as illustrated by an american doll player’s comment on the tib website: vii she also encourages me to be creative and try new things. she never fails to make me happy!!! anything that can affect me in a positive way is fantastic!!! i also love blythe because she’s an artistic inspiration that allows me to use my imagination (jessica, 16, tib). customisation all play is creative (kudrowitz & wallace, 2010). blythe dolls function as triggers for exploration and creative processes, which unfold in both imaginative reflection and play activities associated with the dolls’ physical features. in this context, creative play refers to the activities inspired by the doll, in addition to traditionally recognised play in which the doll functions as a vehicle for imaginative play. a trend connecting with the do-it-yourself (diy) and maker cultures, the personalisation of dolls represents an important direction of creative play practices over the past years. the doll is given a new, individual and customised appearance as a result of the player’s handicraft. as observed, the customisation of blythe may be linked to its personalisation, all the way from the design and re-creation of its clothes (such as sewing and knitting) to the reinterpretation of its physical features through changing or fine-tuning its eye chips (see figure 2), face makeup or hair (re-rooting) (how to reroot blythe doll hair, 2015). in some extreme examples, blythe fans use their own hair in personalising the doll. based on my observations during doll meetings or adult play dates, blythe dolls are sometimes further enhanced with body parts coming from other, more articulated doll types (e.g., pure neemo). the manipulation of blythe’s hair, facial makeup or skin colour shows that adult play practices in interaction with dolls are not distant from children’s doll play, for example, regarding ‘hair play’ (a play pattern also recognised in industrial toy design). furthermore, fans advise one another through tutorials, podcasts and blogs. these tutorials may demonstrate different themes, from changing the eye chips of the doll to re-creating its hair, lips and makeup or sewing its clothes. doll play may also function as an extension of other activities partaken during leisure time. for some fans, the doll offers itself as a tool to extend the play activity to other hobbies, such as handicrafts or photography. sometimes, playing may lead to skill-building, as in the case of a blythe player featured in the fan spotlight section of the tib website: [my favourite thing about blythe is that] [s]he pushes me to learn new skills. i learned to knit because of blythe, and my sewing has improved no end. i love to reroot blythe dolls, a skill i never thought i'd be able to master. she's just a magical doll and the kenner 'pip' in particular is the one thing that can always cheer me up (jane, 24, tib). creating stories (from display to photoplay) displaying toys is an important play pattern in adult toy cultures (heljakka, 2013a). toys inhabit bookshelves, cabinets and dioramas built especially for this purpose in the intimacy of players’ living spaces (see figure 3). as illustrated by the following excerpt from an interview with a finnish blythe seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 141 player, dolls may be given their own ‘houses’ in which different play scenarios are built, sometimes with great care: the dolls that are less used in play inhabit a “glass palace” [glass cabinet], and the most lucky ones are in my arts and crafts room in a large-scale folder cabinet in which i have made several apartments with kitchens and bathrooms (pinkkisfun). viii one of the most prominent forms of creative play that follows the display of playthings is photography; many blythe fans confess taking pictures of their dolls. in adult play activities, the blythe dolls are styled with personalised looks and photographed in different environments. singular shots and series of photographs taken in natural or urban environments signify a cross between real and imagined worlds, as the scale of the toy becomes challenging to grasp. in these visual toy stories or photoplay, the player functions as a narrator, and the plaything plays the lead role. figure 2. blythe dolls being customised by changing their eye chips at a doll meeting in finland, 2014. additionally, adult activities with blythe also include toy tourism and mediarelated play patterns, which all often tie in with photoplay (heljakka, 2013a). photoplaying with the toys outside domestic environments gradually builds the player’s skills in manoeuvring the camera together with toys and the use of tourism sites, urban landscapes and nature. moreover, players may be inspired to use their acquired camera skills with other types of photography, as stated in this post: i enjoyed taking photos of blythe so much that i started taking pictures of other things and now i rarely leave the house without my camera. and through customizing blythe i've found the perfect hobby, relaxing and rewarding (sherri, 42, tib). the toy photographs are displayed and shared on social media platforms, such as flickr, and sometimes sold on etsy.com, the ‘online craft fair’ and community launched in 2005. as in other types of toy photography shared in similar environments, blythe photographs are evaluated and appreciated based on their aesthetic, humorous and inventive qualities. an online search of the available materials in may 2015 generated 1,206,344 hits for the index entry ‘blythe’ and 1,448 hits for ‘blythe tutorial’ on flickr. ix seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 142 in photoplay, the toy and camera (or another type of mobile device with a camera), together with the chosen environment, challenge a player’s creativity. the finnish blythe players ‘sandy’ and ‘liiolii’ interviewed for this study also think of displays and play in displays (such as dioramas) as potential settings used in the creative practices of narrativisation and photoplay with blythe: [the results of photoplay] are manifestations of creativity [and tell] how one may see possibilities for a picture or a story. displays used in photographic challenges titillate creativity (sandy). do you see your activities with blythe as creative? (author). yes. photographing and play and the telling of stories (both in one’s mind and in pictures) are always creative (liiolii). blythe seems to offer itself particularly well to creative play (as described above) and can thus be regarded as including a creative potential that is partly built in the toy through the aesthetics and mechanics of its design (e.g., through its moving eyes and poseable body), as well as in its possibility to be customised and photoplayed. an additional way to examine creative play with blythe – customisation and creation of stories through photoplay – is to interpret the re-creations and representations of the doll as a cultivation of what such an industrially designed and mass-produced doll originally offers to its player. imaginative play patterns, such as naming the doll and creating its personality in one’s mind, are usual practices in the doll play of both children and adults. in an increasingly technologised and socially networked society, the dimensions of storytelling in relation to objects are often taken further, even on the level of the physical artefact – a doll in this case. many players want to personalise their dolls through physical interventions, for example, changing the look of the dolls through practices related to ‘modding’. however, it is important to note that the cultivation of the dolls does not end here. instead, playing with contemporary dolls, such as blythe, continues through the appropriation of camera technologies and social media applications, which results in socially shared play involving skill-building and learning. this is exactly what most of the players are doing with the dolls – manipulating, re-creating and representing blythe in creative ways – as evident in the research materials collected from interviews and blythe-related websites. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 143 figure 3. creatively customised and displayed blythe dolls at blythecon in amsterdam, 2014. learning with blythe dolls “in play, and perhaps only in play, a child or an adult has the right to be creative”, says psychoanalyst donald winnicott (2005, p. 53). telling the stories of toy characters makes it possible to explore a person’s creativity in useful ways and for its own sake as well (autotelic) , as explained by an interviewee: with the dolls, one may find an outlet for creativity in both completely “useless” and useful ways. […] photography, sewing of clothes, making a doll house, problem solving in miniature size – all of these require creativity. but even people who are less creative or whose creativity is in some other area may enjoy dolls with the help of other players’ creativity (pinkkisfun). furthermore, playing with toys entitles people to more than just a way of occupying and entertaining themselves. this study suggests that toy play may also have outcomes that exceed the motivation of ‘playing just for fun’. besides entertaining themselves, contemporary players are also ‘playing for a purpose’ – to learn and develop skills. summary adult toy play is manifested as a productive type of play, where creativity motivates and drives the play practices. playing with blythe as a form of adult toy play reinterprets, remoulds and renews the meanings originally attached to the doll and at the same time, expands these meanings. in play, even adults are allowed to test, be creative and experiment with toys in unforeseeable ways. creativity employed in toy play becomes perceivable through the concrete outcomes of toy projects, such as play related to blythe, signifying a joyous activity, not only for the players themselves but also for others. for example, in photoplay, plots involving toys are developed. when presented in a serial mode and posted online on social media, the toy images may attract audiences and followers. through the photographed toy scenarios, one player’s creativity may thus also influence other players to participate in the ‘game’ of mimetic play. in this light, the contemporary concept of a toy can be perceived as having further developed from dan fleming’s suggestion in his book powerplay. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 144 toys as popular culture (1996). fleming draws a figure with the historical characteristics converging on the contemporary toy, including phenomena such as the element of spectacle, that of the narrative and the doll as an image of childhood, to name a few. time has passed since then, and a final suggestion in the framework of this article would be a re-development of fleming’s thinking, as shown in figure 4. based on the ideas proposed in this study, a new version of the graph may include new elements, such as social media, the doll as a constructional toy and furthermore, the toy as a form of 21st-century adult amusement that also caters to the need for goal-oriented, even game-like play patterns related to learning. figure 4. re-development of dan fleming’s (1996, p. 92) graph ‘historical characteristics converging on the contemporary toy’ (heljakka, 2011, 2013a). discussion this article concludes with a discussion on how blythe dolls may be viewed, not only as playthings that exclusively invite individuals to solitary play but also as transformative, social tools that potentially encourage players to develop their skills and creativity and learn further. this article has explored how to gain new understandings of adult play with contemporary toys such as dolls. its goal has been to identify and analyse creative play patterns related to adult doll players. it has been presumed that these play patterns have become visible through social media applications. by examining the play patterns related to the blythe doll (i.e., its representations on fan sites, flickr and the data collected through qualitative interviews and participatory observations conducted at doll meetings with blythe players in finland), i have demonstrated how toys are used as tools for skill-building and creativity in adult life. second, i have explored how the dimensions of adult play in digital environments relate to different forms of creativity, self-expression and skillbuilding that the blythe doll seems to inspire its fans to do. through an investigation of visual, material and digital play patterns emerging in social media contexts, i have illustrated how both physical manipulation and the creation and sharing of blythe dolls’ photographic representations result in skill-building and learning. as blythe dolls are collected, customised and commercially appropriated through selling of fan art (including imaginative, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 145 creative and productive outcomes of photoplay), it becomes possible to observe how visual, digital and shared practices of play significantly shape and enrich adult play cultures with contemporary toys. without photoplay (filmed or animated toy stories presented on flickr, facebook, instagram or youtube), it would probably be extremely difficult to capture, analyse and discuss the phenomena related to fashion dolls (such as blythe) employed in adult toy play or get hold of the players who engage creatively with these playthings. in the light of the given examples, social media platforms seem to offer themselves as playgrounds full of potential and possibilities – even for adult toy players – where both toys and forms of creative play are cultivated. blythe seems to inspire its fans to the extent that its individuality can be perceived, not only as a result of the original design work of the toy company but also as something that unfolds through the creative processes and practices learned and taught further by the players. psychologists van leeuwen and westwood, who have written about the importance of acknowledging the existence of play(ful) behaviour at a mature age, claim that “[…] it is important for psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians to also study adult play conceptually, ‘for its own sake’ as a relevant form of behaviour rather than limited to its role as a means to other ends” (2008, p. 160). thus, contemporary adult toy play may also manifest itself as a productive activity with creative outcomes although it would have taken place first ‘for its own sake’. furthermore, once communicated online, various toy projects invite new players to acquire their own toys, get involved in popular play practices and start building their skills around the toys. this means that toys are no longer just recreational objects used for pleasure in unproductive ways by solitary players (for parasocial motivations or as decorations) but also as socially shared and socially played objects. such objects are potential learning tools that enhance creativity, expanding the toy activity beyond collecting and into various crafts, for example, customising, displaying and photographing the toys. this study broadens the understandings of toy play in contemporary western society by pointing out adults (previously thought of as toy collectors or hobbyists) as active, productive and social players. their play behaviour (as presented on social media as a playful learning environment) results in skillbuilding, innovative forms of self-expression and tutoring and teaching others to play. to conclude, it is possible to draw a parallel between the skills developed in toy play and the concept of 21st-century skills, whose list includes “creativity, artistry, curiosity, imagination, innovation and personal expression, among other forms of knowledge, skills, work habits and character traits”.x based on these 21st-century skills, the current generation of students should be taught different skill sets than had been expected of their counterparts in the previous century. in a technology-driven society, it is still possible to recognise the importance of physical objects, especially those that invite learning in playful ways. in this light, it would be appropriate to consider toys, alongside playing with them and with games, as tools for lifelong learning, which could possibly be used in educational contexts as well. acknowledgements this study has been conducted as part of the ludification and emergence of playful culture project funded by the academy of finland (275421). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 146 references ball-jointed dolls. (2015). retrieved from http://ball-jointed-dolls.deviantart.com/ blythe (doll). (2015). in wikipedia. retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/blythe blythe fan spotlight. (2010). retrieved from http:www.thisisblythe.com/fan_spotlight.php?id=23 burghardt, g. (2005). the genesis of animal play. testing the limits. cambridge, mass.: mit press. combs, j. e. (2000). play world. the emergence of the new ludenic age. westport: praeger publishers. daiken, l. (1963). children’s toys throughout the ages. london: spring books. danet, b. (2001). cyberplay. communicating online. oxford; new york, ny: berg. de jong, m. m. (2015). the paradox of playfulness: redefining its ambiguity, s.i.: s.n, tilburg university. retrieved from https://pure.uvt.nl/portal/files/5445702/de_jong_paradox_04_03_2015.pdf fleming, d. (1996). powerplay. toys as popular culture. manchester: manchester university press. global world of pullip (2015). retrieved from http://www.pullip.net/ groos, k., & baldwin, e. 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(1965). pageant of toys. london: elek books. how to reroot blythe doll hair. (2015). retrieved from http://dolls.wonderhowto.com/how-to/reroot-blythe-doll-hair-271165/ hunter, jr. r., & waddell, m. e. (2008). toy box leadership. leadership lessons from the toys you loved as a child. nashville, tenn.: thomas nelson. institute of museum and library services. (2009). museums, libraries, and 21st century skills (imls-2009-nai-01). washington, dc. retrieved from http://www.imls.gov/pdf/21stcenturyskills.pdf izumi-taylor, s., samuelsson, i. p., & rogers, c. s. 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(2009). the magic circle: principles of gaming & simulation (3rd ed.). rotterdam: sense publishers. kline, s. (2005). digital play: the interaction of technology, culture and marketing. montreal, qc: mcgill-queen’s university press. kudrowitz, b. m., & wallace, d. r. (2010). the play pyramid: a play classification and ideation tool for toy design. international journal of arts and technology, 3 (1), 36–56. retrieved from http://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/ijart.2010.030492 newson, j., & newson, e. (1979). toys & playthings. new york: pantheon books. piaget, j. (1962). play, dreams and imitation in childhood. london: routledge & kegan paul ltd. power, t. g. (2000). play and exploration in children and animals. mahwah, n j: erlbaum. raessens, j. (2006). playful identities, or the ludification of culture. games and culture 1(1), 52–57. saarikoski, p., suominen, j., turtiainen, r., & östman, s. (2009). peliä ja leikkiä virtuaalisilla heikkalaatikoilla. [games and play in virtual playgrounds] in p. saarikoski, j. suominen, r. turtiainen, & s. östman (eds.), funetista facebookiin – internetin kulttuurihistoria [from funet to facebook – the cultural history of the internet] (pp. 234–264). helsinki: gaudeamus. schrage, m. (2000). serious play. how the world’s best companies simulate to innovate. boston: harvard business school press. sotamaa, y. (1979). introduction. some general aspects concerning the development of playthings. in k. otto, k. schmidt, y. sotamaa, & j. salovaara (eds.), playthings for play. ideas of criteria on children’s playthings (pp. 11–13). berlin: aif & ornamo. . sutton-smith, b. (1997). the ambiguity of play. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. turkle, s. (1995). life on the screen. identity in the age of the internet. new york: simon & schuster paperbacks. van leeuwen, l., & westwood, d. (2008). adult play, psychology and design. digital creativity, 19(3), 153–161. winnicott, d. (2005). playing and reality. london: routledge. i see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/blythe (doll) (2015). ii for a study related to character toy play as broadcasted on youtube, see also heljakka (2013b). iii this is a typical age range of organised blythe players in finland, whereas younger doll players tend to prefer other doll types, such as pullip dolls (see e.g. global world of pullip (2015). when i conducted the study, the five interviewees comprised the highest number of blythe players willing to join the study that i was able to reach in person. http://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/ijart.2010.030492 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/blythe seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 148 iv the observations were recorded as field notes, with photographs. see figure 2, for example. otherwise, no pre-structured format was used. v http:www.thisisblythe.com/fan_spotlight.php?id=23 (this website is no longer available.) vihttp:www.thisisblythe.com/fan_spotlight.php?id=23 (this website is no longer available.) vii http:www.thisisblythe.com/fan_spotlight.php?id=23 (this website is no longer available.) viii my interviewees chose the names with which they should be identified. the interviewees’ names (except sandy) are the pseudonyms they used in their play and shared online activities. ix for blythe (2015) and blythe tutorial (2015) on flickr, see https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=blythe https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=blythe%20tutorial x for 21st-century skills, see the institute of museum and library services (2009). https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=blythe https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=blythe%20tutorial toys as tools for skill-building and creativity in adult life katriina heljakka abstract results summary title teacher education as design: technology-rich learning environments and trajectories andreas lund andreas.lund@ils.uio.no jonas bakken jonas.bakken@ils.uio.no kirsti lyngvær engelien k.l.engelien@ils.uio.no proted—centre for professional learning in teacher education department of teacher education and school research, university of oslo abstract traditional school subjects are being challenged by the accelerating production and development of knowledge in all domains. this creates a need to educate student teachers not only to appropriate existing practices but to be prepared to take the initiative in designing and developing new ones. this paper examines the challenges that confront teacher education when both the amount of information and its complexity are increasing due to the growing use of technology. we argue first that we need a richer view of technology than is often found in decision documents and in some of the didactics literature. we then introduce the concept of design as both an analytical and a didactic concept that links technology-rich environments and learning trajectories to knowledge development. from an activitytheoretical perspective, we approach the notion of design as a key component in teacher education and consider how it materializes through the use of a wiki, and in a new type of exam. the aim is to contribute to enhancing the quality of teacher education by making visible some of the more underlying qualities of what professional ict competence can entail. keywords: teacher education, educational designs, view of technology, collaborative learning introduction teachers’ professional development in the knowledge society is inextricably linked to what is perceived as valid knowledge at any given time (kelly, luke, & green, 2008). school subjects have traditionally been associated with stable and often standardized expressions of knowledge, communicated by teachers and verified through various forms of tests and examinations. however, as has been shown, for instance, by edwards, gilroy and hartley (2002), traditional school subjects are being challenged by the accelerating production and development of knowledge in all domains. this creates a need to educate teachers who are not only socialized into existing practices but who are also themselves prepared to take the initiative in developing new ones. according to edwards et al. (2002), a key to revitalizing teacher education is to develop students’ relational expertise—in other words, the skills required to work across knowledge domains. hargreaves (2003) is also preoccupied with this, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 mailto:andreas.lund@ils.uio.no mailto:jonas.bakken@ils.uio.no mailto:k.l.engelien@ils.uio.no pointing out that existing models of teacher education hinder innovation and, in fact, contribute to the disintegration of innovative communities. this paper examines the challenges that confront teacher education when both the amount of information and its complexity are increasing due to the growing use of technology. we argue first that we need a richer view of technology than is often found in decision documents and in some of the didactics literature. we then introduce the concept of design as both an analytical and a didactic concept that links technology-rich environments and learning trajectories to knowledge development. in addition, we attempt to relate both this view of technology and this concept of design to development projects taking place at proted (the centre for professional learning in teacher education), a centre of excellence at the department of teacher education and school research at the university of oslo. to summarize, we argue that this approach constitutes a basis for a principled approach to professional digital competence for teachers. the need for a rich view of technology the use of ict in higher education in norway has often lacked a clear vision of technology. as haugsbakk (2011) shows, following a review of relevant planning and decision documents, the premises for investment in technology have lacked clarity while at the same time technology itself has gone through considerable changes. according to haugsbakk, teachers’ pedagogical judgments have also often been replaced by more instrumental perspectives on the development of technology and of society, and he claims that little or no attention has been paid to how the use of technology can result in greater complexity, doubt, and uncertainty (ibid., p. 249). as a consequence of an instrumental approach, digital technologies have often been described metaphorically as ‘instruments’ or ‘tools’. tools are something we develop to ease or automate processes, to save time (and money) and to achieve results more efficiently. teacher education has traditionally offered students courses on various types of digital tools for use in schools. as haugsbakk points out, the challenge of metaphors such as ‘tools’ is that they reduce or hide complexity. they also obscure the potential that digital technologies possess to go beyond and transform existing practices and to pave the way for new ones— not least in the field of learning and teaching (hauge, lund, & vestøl, 2007; lund & hauge, 2011b). for the same reason, this also becomes a particular concern for teacher education. there is a need to theorize the relationship between tool and agent in order to unpack this relationship’s inherent potential and what is at stake when it is integrated into learning and teaching activities. the relationship between agents and tools has attracted significant attention from various theoretical perspectives, especially from actor network theory (ant), distributed cognition (dc), phenomenology, and cultural historical activity theory (chat) (see for instance shaffer & clinton, 2006 for an extended discussion). in drawing here on chat, it is because, more than ant or dt, chat clearly distinguishes human agency from agency and inscriptions embedded in tools, and more than phenomenology, it connects cognition to institutional affordances. our position is that human agency and institutional affordances are fundamental concerns when developing teacher education. as, for example, roger säljö has shown (säljö, 1999, 2000), some tools assume the role of cultural implements or artifacts. as its prefix indicates, an artifact is an artificial product, constructed for specific purposes. these products are developed over time and are therefore the carriers of historically and collectively developed insights within one or more areas of knowledge. artifacts can function as both the gatekeepers and the glue of cultures, but seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 90 they also possess the potential to change our culture, to open it up to new practices. for example, the plough is the result of generations of experience of cultivating land and is a carrier of collectively developed knowledge of both agriculture and physics. the latter became clear when a plough was developed in england in the 18th century with a ‘twisting mouldboard’ that enabled the plough not only to slice the earth but to turn it over. in many ways the plough is both the gateway to and the glue of agricultural society. at the same time, the plough transformed this culture and pointed it towards industrialization. in this sense, an artifact is more than a tool applied to existing practices; it transforms not just the practice but also the agent engaged in the practice. it is from this kind of perspective that we approach digital technologies. as early as 1987, michael heim pointed out that as well as facilitating the work of writing, word processors also changed the actual writing process. from being restricted to horizontal lines and vertically organized pages, we could now fashion the language by moving and replacing chunks and paragraphs. according to the philosopher heim, this is an expression of how thought itself is formed through a technology that changes the way we express ourselves (heim, 1987). hardware, software, applications, and web-based resources are currently regarded as an expression of human insight in almost all knowledge domains. they function increasingly as the gateway to and glue of the network society (castells, 1996), and they have the potential to transform our culture in fairly dramatic ways, whether in respect of research and education or of interpersonal contact. for example, in norway we have statistics to show that, on an average day, 76% of children between the ages of 9 and 12, and 91% of adolescents between the ages of 13 and 19, use the internet (egeberg et al., 2012). in schools, we can see how digital technologies open up to multimodal genres, dynamic and interactive forms of representation (maps, simulations etc.), and communication where the limitations of time, place—and to some extent, culture—are transcended. but at the same time, there is evidence that newly qualified teachers in norway find a mismatch between digital practices in school and a lack of digital practices in their teacher education (gudmundsdottir, loftsgarden, & ottestad, 2014). another recent report shows that while ict competence is fostered in teacher education, this is still mostly because of engaged individuals, it is arbitrarily scattered among institutions, and there is seldom a principled approach anchored in the leadership of those institutions (tømte, kårstein, & olsen, 2013). as artifacts, digital and networked technologies have the potential to link the lifeworlds of pupils and schools to the development of students as professionals. in other words, we see the possibility of attaining a higher degree of authenticity and relevance in the tasks and activities engaged in by students. such technologies unite students who retrieve, share, and produce subject-relevant content, fashioning parts of the world they are being prepared for, and offering multiple forms of representation of the phenomena being studied. this in turn has an impact on task design, learning activities, teaching methods, and assessment. what student teachers do during their education must be aligned with the conditions they will encounter elsewhere in the educational system. but this is a system where the ‘finite’ or ‘controlled’ relations between textbooks, tasks, and teachers are increasingly challenged— and, indeed, replaced—by an infinity of relations to information and other agents, and where artifacts (spell checkers, translation programs, pocket calculators) may contribute to building a performative competence that outstrips our non-artifact-supported competence (säljö, 2010). we encounter a new communication ecology (friedland & kim, 2014) in which complexity increases and predictability decreases because of the many and shifting relations between agents, artifacts, institutions, groups, and media types. such learning environments also afford a role for pupils as producers of content and not just as consumers. we argue that these trends need to be adopted in, and adapted to, teacher education. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 91 against this backdrop, we introduce the concept of design as a key component of teacher education, as a means of preparing student teachers for the uncertainty, high complexity and multiple affordances of the networked society, and to make student teachers capable of developing new practices, in addition to mastering those that already exist. designs for learning and teaching in our discussion of perspectives on technology (above) we briefly explained why we have adopted a chat perspective in the present study. in linking chat here to the notion of design, this reflects chat’s emphasis on the object as the collective motive for activities such as, for instance, learning and teaching (kaptelinin & miettinen, 2005). additionally, chat makes it possible to see how the various stakeholders engaged in a community participate in order to transform the (learning) object into tangible results. we refer to this process as design, and it involves configuring and re-configuring relations between agents and artifacts regulated by institutional factors, as found in rules and conventions, the larger community of practice involved, and how work is negotiated and divided between stakeholders. design is a vague concept, partly because it is used in a variety of disciplines and knowledge domains—for example in architecture, art products, advertising, and technology. within a pedagogical perspective, the design concept was introduced by donald schön (1987) who, inspired by john dewey, linked it to professional practice and to reflection on practice. schön applies the concept of design to professions that transform existing situations and practices into desired and future-oriented practices. in the design perspective, there is therefore a wish to find the best possible alternatives when faced with a problem or a challenge—what schön calls ‘reflection-in-action’. for schön, design is always oriented towards meaning-making and identifying wholeness in situations, and connections between series of actions that are characterized by complexity, instability, value conflicts, and the unexpected. design is in part informed by experience and theory and in part comes into being as it is applied in the practice situation—much as jazz musicians use a theme and a series of chords to support their improvisations on the same theme and series. but for schön this also applies to teachers, and his concept of design therefore goes much farther than planning a lesson or an activity. an activity theory approach to design (hauge et al., 2007; lund & hauge, 2011a) places emphasis on linking learning activities, their direction and intentionality—for both teachers and pupils—to the learning object. in this perspective, the learning object is perceived in two ways, giving direction to activities at the same time as it manifests in different ways during the process (kaptelinin & nardi, 2006). pupils and teachers construct and reconstruct the object as the design gradually assumes an increasingly relevant direction and form in relation to the tasks to be resolved. hauge, lund and vestøl (2007) distinguish between two complementary aspects of design. design for teaching is basically the teacher’s responsibility and emerges through the teacher’s interpretation of curricula and competence aims, lending an institutional dimension to this aspect of design. design for learning is an expression of what happens in the actual learning situation—what is enacted or played out when pupils and teachers work together to realize the learning object. while design for teaching limits and anchors the activities, design for learning is more context-sensitive and will, for example, respond to pupil initiative and to unexpected opportunities resulting from access to cultural resources (e.g., the internet) and from negotiations and discussion. hauge et al. (2007) have shown examples of this in how pupils (and teachers) have tried to create an understanding of how acts of terrorism can arise and on what grounds—in this case, the hostage taking led by chechen rebels against a school in beslan in russia, in 2004. this event was beyond most people’s seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 92 comprehension; the teacher could not be expected to provide a satisfactory explanation, and the information on the internet was contradictory. the pupils therefore had to attempt to construct a presentation themselves, which was debated in plenary. in this way, the combination of the two design aspects has the potential to build a bridge between the various lifeworlds of the pupils and common institutional goals. as artifacts that mediate between diverse cultural contexts and partially different activity systems, we regard digital network technologies as a crucial cornerstone of this bridge-building. but the relationship between designs for teaching and designs for learning is nonetheless under-theorized. lund and hauge (2011a) have elaborated and theorized this relationship. the vygotskyan concept of obuchenie occupies a central position in this work. obuchenie, didactics, and design obuchenie is a russian term that is vital for understanding vygotsky’s theories of development. the term describes the activities of both teaching (instruction) and learning. this complexity makes the term difficult to translate as one simple word or expression (cole, 2009). the term is closely connected to vygotsky’s theory of the zone of proximal development, where knowledge development is a two-way process involving collaboration between teachers and pupils. however, what the term does not make explicit is another fundamental assumption within the sociocultural perspective and in our understanding of design: the important role that cultural tools or artifacts play in development. this becomes clear in later explanations, as for example by cole (p. 292): in general, the russian word, obuchenie, refers to a double-sided process, one side of which does indeed refer to learning (a change in the psychological processes and knowledge of the child), but the other of which refers to the organization of the environment by the adult, who, it is assumed in the article under discussion, is a teacher in a formal school with power over the organization of the children's experience. this quotation links obuchenie to a teaching design, and to available resources, by emphasizing “the organization of the environment”. although the relevance for digital technologies becomes clear here, the learning design is also pointed out—as well as the knowledge development of the individual who is learning. obuchenie thus emerges as a dialectic concept in which teaching and learning are mutually constitutive of (cognitive) development. thus, when introducing the notion of design into teacher education, we see how the concept bridges intentions and actions for teachers as well as for learners. it also captures the physical dimensions of the classroom and its extended virtual space, together with a non-dichotomous (learning and teaching) approach to education. in the same way as obuchenie has influenced our understanding of design for technology-rich activities, the concept also affects how we seek to develop the notion of didactics. in the european tradition, didactics is firmly based on democratic ideals—reflection on learning and teaching, and how these become part of education’s formational dimension (bildung) (gundem, 1998; klafki, 2001). however, the anglo-american tradition often links the concept of didactics to more instrumental and normative dimensions such as planning, choice of method, and predefined goals (hamilton, 1999). within this latter tradition, interaction and the use of semiotic and material resources are not always as important. this is what selander (2007) emphasizes when he formulates a notion of didactics that includes interactivity in physical, collective, and virtual space. in understanding didactics as a response to the questions of what to teach, how to teach it and why, online learning environments will also challenge us on questions about when and where to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 93 teach. digital technologies have the quality (among many others) of being able to transcend or suspend limitations of time and space, and so we see that when introducing the notion of design into teacher education, spatio-temporal issues also become crucial. nonetheless, we argue that a clearer focus is required, both on practices and on the learning object. we propose that activity theory offers us a system of concepts for developing didactics in a way that will capture the complexity of teaching and learning activities that take place both collectively and individually, and for which the availability of cultural resources and artifacts (both material and social) is growing. in our view, one way of developing teacher education in the next stage would be to add a clear design element. designs can be used as a way of constructing and orchestrating learning environments and learning activities over shorter or longer timescales. but a design approach can also be used to analyze reallife or videotaped situations from classrooms. in this paper, we have emphasized design as vital for the attainment of professional ict competence, as called for in the report on ict in teacher education from the nordic institute for studies in innovation, research and education (tømte, kårstein, & olsen, 2013). however, the ict element is no sine qua non; providing designs for both learning environments and learning trajectories in general must be assigned key importance if student teachers are to be prepared to lead learning in increasingly complex and future-oriented situations. in the following, we present and discuss examples of how this can be implemented. these empirical examples do not qualify as research studies, but are included here as empirical carriers of some of the more conceptual and theoretical aspects discussed so far. the student teacher as designer in 2012–2013, the department of teacher education and school research (ils) introduced a new integrated study design for their teacher education programs. the overall goal of the new model is to educate a new generation of “learning professionals” (boshuizen, bromme, & gruber, 2004) by enabling student teachers to become adaptive experts (darling-hammond, 2012). the program of study now has a design with common and integrated learning outcome descriptions for the subject areas of educational theory, subject didactics, and teaching practice. all the examination assignments are also integrated; one of these is a semester assignment that students work on in pairs throughout the first semester, including the practice period. the design of the examination assignment aims to create stronger bonds between students’ experience from their teaching practice and their learning work on campus in order to develop students’ relational expertise (cf. edwards et al., 2002). during their practice period, students hand in four part-assignments in which they document their practice experience and collect empirical material. this includes observing a class and documenting the implementation of a teaching plan and the supervisor’s feedback on this. on the basis of this work in their teaching practice, students write a semester assignment in which they discuss the relationship between the design for teaching design and pupils’ learning. by integrating learning work both in teaching practice and on campus, a design of this kind paves the way for greater authenticity and professional relevance in the examination work. at the same time, it prepares students for having to relate to a knowledge world and a work situation steadily increasing in complexity. when the design for examination was first put into practice, students from three of the didactics subjects in the program (norwegian, english, and history) participated in a pilot project under the auspices of development area 3 at the proted centre for professional learning and teaching education, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 94 digital learning environments. the objective of this area is to strengthen students’ learning progression by creating digital, flexible learning environments. this pilot project required students to do all the writing—both on the part-assignments and on the final semester assignment—in a wiki rather than submitting text documents in a learning platform, as was the case for the other students. one common wiki was used for all students and lecturers participating in the project, which meant that everyone had the opportunity to read each other’s texts at all stages of the writing process, lending a strong collective dimension to the design. however, access to the wiki was closed to those who were not involved in the project. on the basis of what we have earlier referred to as an instrumental approach to technology, such use of a wiki in examination work could be considered a tool or an implement—something that facilitates an existing practice. instead of writing on a word processor and then submitting the end product in a learning management system, students write the text directly into the wiki. they then need only one digital tool, and this saves the work of submitting the text. however, the purpose of this pilot project was to study whether the wiki could function transformatively by contributing to transcending existing practices and establishing new ones (hauge et al., 2007; lund & hauge, 2011b). the evaluation conducted among the students after the semester assignment was handed in to some extent confirms that such an effect. the majority of the students said that they read others’ texts during the process, and that this gave them inspiration for their own work on the semester assignment. for example, one of the students writes: “i think it was instructive to see how others formulated their assignments. it was also a support for me to see whether i’d misunderstood anything by comparing layout etc.” the students’ writing thus became part of a collective knowledge development. in addition, some students emphasized the value of taking part in others’ practice experience in addition to the actual work on the examination assignment. one student writes: “i got some tips on structure and approaches. […] it was also interesting to learn about other areas, bearing in mind the exam and working life.” lecturers reported that the wiki gave them good access to students’ experience while they were doing their teaching practice so that it was possible to include this experience in the teaching on campus. these experiences have been incorporated in a new exam design at the department of teacher education and school research (ils) at the university of oslo, where student teachers on the five year integrated master’s level program meet this design for the third time. the exam design includes a task requiring student teachers to draw on their expertise in a particular subject, in pedagogy, and in subject didactics—but also on relevant experience from their practice in schools. the task is available online from the very first day the students start the course, but how it will be approached by the student teachers is decided by a digital video case that students encounter on the day of the exam. the task is constructed so that the student teachers can choose to work from home or from campus, individually or in pairs or small groups. these elements constitute the campus teachers’ design. however, how the student teachers approach and choose to respond to the task cannot be predicted, nor can a uniform response be expected. at the time of writing this paper, exam papers are analyzed in order to see, for example, how student teachers succeed in making integration visible, whether they take a subject as a point of departure (pedagogy, the video case etc.), and to what extent their analysis of the video case draws on multiple sources of knowledge. this effectively amounts to an analysis of the students’ learning design. in sum, the design approach is operationalized in the educational activities that constitute the teacher education program(s), as well as being a way of developing study designs among the staff. the design approach, using the wiki for work on the semester assignment in the ppu program and at exams in the five-year integrated master’s program, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 95 seeks to address two big challenges in today’s teacher education. first, it contributes to building a bridge between theory and practice, and between experiences on campus and in the practice field. through the wiki, those who teach on teacher education programs can follow students’ activities during teaching practice, and students can bring their documented experience back to the campus. second, the design highlights how knowledge is not fixed but produced, in the interaction between people. in the wiki, everything that is written is immediately visible both to other students and to their university teachers, and students are then able to see how the experiences, thoughts, and texts of others develop over time. in addition, those involved can both learn from and contribute to the development of other students. in this development project, both collaborative technology and a principled pedagogical approach have afforded a design for learning trajectories and environments. conclusion throughout this paper, we have sought to show that increasingly complex learning environments require responses that go beyond what teacher education currently offers. our contribution is to establish an understanding of digital technology as an artifact with transformational potential, linking this to the chat approach—a theoretical perspective that allows for transformation by theorizing the relationship between agents and artifacts while taking institutional dimensions into consideration. together, these efforts bring us to the notion of design in teacher education. two cases were used as empirical carriers to visualize the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of the paper. the wiki case highlights artifact-mediated collaborative approaches to teacher education, while the digital exam shows how a campus teacher design is appropriated and transformed as the student teachers’ designs seek through their learning to accomplish the object of the exam: an integrated view of subject knowledge, pedagogy, didactics, and practice. the example of a radically new exam type shows that doing design is something that should not just be taught but also lived. while design is not restricted to technology-rich learning situations, we argue, on the basis of a conceptual and empirical analysis, that a design approach can contribute to enhancing the quality of teacher education by specifying more closely what professional ict competence can entail. references boshuizen, h. p. a., bromme, r., & gruber, h. (2004). professional learning: gaps and transitions on the way from novice to expert: springer. castells, m. (1996). the rise of the network society. cambridge, ma.: blackwell publishers. cole, m. (2009). the perils of translation: a first step in reconsidering vygotsky's theory of development in relation to formal education. mind, culture and activity, 16(4), 291–295. darling-hammond, l. (2012). powerful teacher education: lessons from exemplary programs: john wiley & sons. edwards, a., gilroy, p., & hartley, d. (2002). rethinking teacher education: collaborative responses to uncertainty. london: routledgefalmer. egeberg, g., gudmundsdottir, g. b., hatlevik, o. e., ottestad, g., skaug, j. h., & tømte, k. (2012). monitor 2011—the digital state of affairs in norwegian schools. nordic journal of digital literacy (1), 73–78. friedland, l. a., & kim, n. 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(2006). toolforthoughts: reexamining thinking in the digital age. mind, culture, and activity, 13(4), 283-300. säljö, r. (1999). learning as the use of tools. a sociocultural perspective on the humantechnology link. in k. littleton & p. light (eds.), learning with computers. analysing productive interaction. (pp. 144–161). new york: routledge. säljö, r. (2000). lärandet i praktiken. ett sociokulturellt perspektiv. [learning in practice: a sociocultural perspective]. stockholm: prisma. säljö, r. (2010). digital tools and challenges to institutional traditions of learning: technologies, social memory and the performative nature of learning. journal of computer assisted learning, 26(1), 53–64. tømte, c., kårstein, a., & olsen, d. s. (2013). ikt i lærerutdanningen. på vei mot profesjonsfaglig digital kompetanse? oslo: nifu. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 97 teacher education as design: technology-rich learning environments and trajectories andreas lund andreas.lund@ils.uio.no jonas bakken jonas.bakken@ils.uio.no kirsti lyngvær engelien k.l.engelien@ils.uio.no abstract introduction the need for a rich view of technology designs for learning and teaching obuchenie, didactics, and design the student teacher as designer conclusion references identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.3199 ©2021 (rob miles). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom rob miles higher colleges of technology, united arab emirates university email: rmiles@hct.ac.ae abstract this study takes place in the context of a federal laptop-mediated english language preuniversity course in the united arab emirates. despite predictions and claims from policy makers and practitioners that 1:1 classroom devices would revolutionise teaching and learning, student results remain static and student attrition remains high. through the lens of activity theory this paper identifies ten contradictions, and their discursive manifestations, potentially causing failure and attrition. this paper contributes to the fields of technology enhanced learning, 1:1 device initiatives, english language teaching, computer assisted and mobile assisted language learning and activity theory by highlighting several problematic experiences in teachers’ practices and mapping these within the activity system context. the paper also questions the positive impact of a 1:1 laptop initiative in this particular context, with implications for future research. keywords: laptops, english language, esl, activity theory, activity systems, uae, technology enhanced learning, call, mall introduction from policy makers to practitioners, there is a wider view in education taking a positive stance on classroom technology as a ‘desirable outcome’ leading to increased learning (scanlon & issroff, 2005, p. 431). however, is classroom technology actually increasing student success or is the ‘state-of-the-art’ distracting from the ‘state-of-the-actual’ (selwyn, 2011, p. 715)? through the lens of activity theory, this study focuses on one federal institution in the united arab emirates (uae) and attempts to identify the causes of attrition and failure in a laptop-mediated pre-university preparatory english language course. identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 governments increasingly see technology and classroom device implementation as the key to educational achievement nationally and globally. the uae is no different, and a ‘first rate education system’, feeding human capital into a knowledge based economy nonreliant on oil revenue, is crucial to its future and position in the world (uae, 2010). technology is a core component in this drive for educational excellence, ‘a key element in modernisation and reform of education’ (lightfoot, 2016, p. 1). laptops were introduced to uae universities in the early 2000s, while 2012 saw the ipad initiative, a project affecting 14000 students in preparatory english courses across three federal institutions. this initiative was expected to revolutionise teaching and learning through the adoption of a single, mobile device that would personalize education and make mobile learning a reality. initially research reported teachers firmly moving towards this goal. (cavanaugh, hargis, kamali, & soto, 2013b; cavanaugh, hargis, munns, & kamali, 2013a; hargis, cavanaugh, kamali, & soto, 2014). laptops replaced ipads in 2017, but classroom delivery remains via 1:1 devices. this positivity is echoed elsewhere. tubaishat and bataineh (2009) mokhtar, al bustami and elnimeiri (2009) and raddawi and bilikozen (2018) claim major improvements, particularly in english second language (esl) writing scores, following laptop implementation in uae classrooms. grimes and warschauer (2008) and park and warschauer (park & warschauer, 2016) also cite improvements in esl writing abilities in standardized tests in the usa. this research takes place in the context of a preparatory english course at one campus of a large federal tertiary institution in the uae. students wishing to enter degree programs must achieve the equivalent of an international english language testing systems (ielts) band 5.0 on a national english proficiency test, the emsat. those that fail to do so enroll in a one-year preparatory english language course, delivered face-to-face via laptops and a learning management system (lms). technology is central to the preparatory classroom. however, actual student results in the classroom do not support these positive claims. the successes reported in research are neither being replicated in practitioner’s experience nor institutional statistics. laptops are deployed 1:1, yet scores on standardized tests remain largely static. failure and attrition see many students leave before their academic careers have begun. pass rates of 72% in 2016 dropped to 63% by 2018. why are almost 40% of students failing? what contradictions in this technology enhanced environment are contributing to failure and attrition? this paper aims to identify these contradictions. following a brief discussion of the literature, i will outline the theoretical framework underpinning the research. the methodology and methods employed are discussed in some detail. the findings are then presented as ten distinct contradictions. the paper takes a critical perspective, underpinned by theory at all stages, and aims to represent the reality facing teachers and students, the state-of-the-actual as opposed to the state-of-the-art. identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 literature review the english preparatory course occupies a unique position between k12 and tertiary education. therefore, literature from both school and university contexts has been considered, and from the wider international context as well as that focusing on the uae. three main themes relate to the context of this research, namely computer-assisted language learning (call), the positive impact of classroom devices and research into negative impacts of one-to-one (1:1) devices in the classroom. computer-assisted language learning the combination of computers and language learning is not new. computer-assisted language learning (call), defined by beatty (2013) as ‘any process in which a learner uses a computer and, as a result, improves his or her language’ came into common usage as a term in the 1980s. call is both a ‘middle-aged multidisciplinary field’ (warschauer, 2013 in tafazoli, abril, & parra, 2019) yet ‘filled with areas that are unknown and in need of exploration’ (beatty, 2013). call acts as an umbrella term for a diverse field. as new technologies emerge new areas and acronyms emerge for investigation. a summary of the current terms can be seen in table 1. table 1: call and related acronyms call computer-assisted language learning focuses on the learner cai computer-aided instruction focuses on the instructor, teacher centred calt computer-assisted language teaching focus on the teacher cat computer-assisted teaching any subject, not limited to language teaching cbt computer-based teaching computers used to teach discrete language skill cmc computer-mediated instruction l2 learners communicate with l1 speakers via computer cmi computer-mediated instruction distance learners use computers for communication with tutors icall intelligent computer-assisted language learning computer software gives feedback on performance well web-enhanced language learning the internet is the medium for instruction identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 mall mobile-assisted language learning mobile devices are used by learners for language learning (tafazoli et al., 2019) research reflects this plurality. areas include telecollaboration and distance learning (lamy, thomas, reinders, & warschauer, 2013; o’dowd, 2013), ‘vodcasting’ (self-selected video casts) among distance learners (faramarzi, tabrizi, & chalak, 2019), virtual worlds (sadler, dooly, thomas, reinders, & warschauer, 2014) and digital feedback (ware & kessler, 2013). other areas include call and learner autonomy (bahari, 2019; blin, 2004; reinders & hubbard, 2013; schwienhorst, 2012), the use of automatic writing evaluation (awe) (li et al., 2019) and interactive courseware for writing (tsai, 2019). research has also taken place into autonomous learners and corrective spoken grammar feedback (penning de vries, cucchiarini, strik, & van hout, 2019), as well as the flipped classroom in different international contexts (webb & doman, 2019). however, while the research carried out in this paper concerns face-to-face classrooms, much recent call research focusses instead on autonomous and distance learning. there is a gap in terms of what students and teachers are actually doing in class with computers and classroom technology. the positive impacts of classroom devices research in the uae and beyond suggests 1:1 devices are having a positive effect, at least on esl writing abilities (grimes & warschauer, 2008; park & warschauer, 2016; raddawi & bilikozen, 2018; tubaishat & bataineh, 2009). research in saudi arabia cites the potential of 1:1 devices, particularly smartphones, to increase esl students exposure to english (alfarwan, 2019). for others, 1:1 devices allow teachers to replace the ‘plain talk and chalk’ of the conventional classroom with online student response systems such as kahoot! to promote ‘entertaining and fun’ learning environments (azman & yunus, 2019). the widespread use of laptops, smart phones and tablets means that traditional classroom based esl is giving way to ‘alternative, rapidly evolving’ styles of teaching (ghareb, sateaskew, & mohammed, 2017). whilst there is some recognition that increased availability of technology does not automatically mean better learning (andrei, 2017), research still leans towards the positive effects of 1:1 devices. criticality is perhaps lacking. the negative impacts of classroom devices research taking a negative stance often focuses on distractions caused by devices. in the uae, teachers described ipads as a distracting ‘smorgasbord of fun’ (miles, 2019), while awwad, ayesh & awwad (2013) found uae undergraduates almost exclusively using laptops in class for non-college related tasks such as chatting or browsing websites. this is described as ‘unsanctioned use’ by tallvid, lundin, svensson, & lindström (2015). for leander and frank (2006 in knobel & lankshear, 2007) unsanctioned use demonstrates identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 conflicting mindsets in the classroom. teachers expect 100% attention, while today’s students are actually perfectly capable of multi-tasking and can carry out ‘self-selected purposes’ such as browsing websites alongside classroom work. this clash of mindsets could be a cause of conflict in the modern 1:1 classroom. in the uae, research often focuses on teachers rather than students, particularly the barriers to training teachers to use technology (ali, 2013; saunders & quirke, 2002; schoepp, 2005) or a specific device such as the ipad (cavanaugh et al., 2013b; cavanaugh et al., 2013a; donaghue, 2015; hargis et al., 2014). what students are actually doing with their laptops in class has been secondary. a gap in the literature recent call research focusses on distance learning and learner autonomy, not device use in face-to-face classrooms. research into actual 1:1 devices in classrooms takes a largely positive stance. where there is criticism the focus is on specific, isolated problems such as classroom distraction or teacher training. the wider context and systems that teachers and students find themselves part of is not considered. this is a specific, but important, gap in the literature. at a crucial point between k12 and undergraduate level, classroom 1:1 device deployment is not leading to increased success. many students are failing and leaving college before their academic careers have begun. considering the activity system as a whole, what are the problems causing this failure and how are they being experienced? that is the gap this paper seeks to address. research questions the following research question has been identified. rq1: what contradictions are experienced by english language teachers in a laptopmediated federal pre-university english language program in the uae? findings are presented in a later section. theoretical framework this paper takes activity theory and activity systems analysis as the theoretical framework. rather than focusing on isolated elements activity theory allows consideration of the whole system. vygotsky (1986) uses the following example. imagine a student is trying to understand why water extinguishes fire. the individual elements, hydrogen and water, are flammable and fire-sustaining. the extinguishing qualities of water are lost when you break the system into components (virkkunen & newnham, 2013, p. 31). similarly, we cannot truly understand how technology is being used in education by considering isolated identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 elements. each element and complex interrelation needs to be considered in terms of the whole system. the complex and multi-faceted problem of student failure needs a complex theory that considers the multiple elements at play. activity theory has this utility. it provides the language and conceptual tools to describe and analyze the complexity of social situations like education (bligh & flood, 2017; hopwood & stocks, 2008; murphy & rodriguez-manzanares, 2013). in activity theory, the unit of analysis is the activity system. an activity system could be a team, a department, an institution, a social system or practice. regardless of size or scope, it is represented by the activity system. see figure 1. figure 1: the activity system (engeström, 1987) all activity is social, and has an object with intended outcomes. the interaction between the subject (the individual, group or organisation) and object (the aim of the activity) is mediated by tools, which can be physical objects, concepts and ideas or social others. the activity system also includes rules, community and division of labour. rules mediate between the subject and the community, while the division of labour mediates between community and object. classroom teaching in a school can be simplified as an activity system according to table 1. the different elements are interdependent and mediate between each other. table 1: elements of a school activity system subject teachers, teaching assistants etc. tools syllabus & curriculum, course books, assessment instruments, pedagogy etc. object successful learning, often measured via standardised tests. identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 rules class timings, behaviour, modes of addressing teachers etc. community students, school management, governors, family, other teachers etc. division of labour who does what – lesson preparation, homework, schedules, curriculum design etc. when the activity system is working in harmony, the object – successful learning – is achieved. however, a change in any element can cause a disruption, or contradiction, leading to unintended outcomes, such as increased student failure and attrition. a new tool such as a revised course book may not sufficiently cover the curriculum, or a new examination may replace the current object. these changes may cause contradictions, and the consequences are unintended outcomes. in the preparatory english course, the unintended outcomes of failure and attrition become reality for many. this means that systemic contradictions are occurring. activity systems analysis enables the identification of these systemic contradictions. systemic contradictions take four forms: • primary contradictions occuring within one element of the system. • secondary contradictions occurring between elements of the activity system. • tertiary contradictions occur between an existing system and attempts to apply a new model • quaternary contradictions between neighbouring activity systems. (engeström, 1987/2015 in bligh & flood, 2015) for engeström & sannino there is a ‘risk that contradiction becomes another fashionable catchword with little theoretical content and analytical power’ (2011, p. 368). they identify four ways in which subjects experience systemic contradictions as discursive manifestations. see table 2. table 2: discursive manifestations dilemmas an expression or exchange of incompatible evaluations in discourse, typically reproduced rather than resolved. conflicts these manifest as resistance, disagreement, argument and criticism. resolution involves compromise or submitting to authority. critical conflicts these cannot be resolved by subjects alone. feelings of guilt and inner doubt are emotionally and morally charged. identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 resolution may require emancipation and liberation. double binds alternatives are pressing and equally unacceptable. resolution requires practical transformation. (adapted from engeström & sannino, 2011) discursive manifestations are subjective experiences represented verbally by those experiencing the contradictions, and allow a more nuanced and personalised account of systemic contradictions within the activity system being studied. note that there is no mechanical on-to-one relationship between discursive manifestations and contradictions. several manifestations may, for example, point towards the same underlying contradiction. the phenomena of failure and attrition in a laptop-mediated preparatory english course is complex and concrete. activity systems analysis can make sense of ‘complex real-world data sets in a manageable and meaningul manner’ (yamagata-lynch, 2010, p. 5) and guides the design of the research, data collection and data analysis. methodology activity theory is a framework for qualitative research, consequently qualitative research methods were employed. by its collective nature, an activity system is always a community of multiple viewpoints. in the preparatory english course, potential stakeholders include teachers, students and management. ideally research would reflect this multi-voicedness, but practical limitations meant only teachers were included in this study. the research site is one of 16 campuses across the uae and was chosen for largely practical reasons. as a teacher on the preparatory course i am based at this campus, facilitating access to students and faculty. the campus is representative; it is single-sex (female), and the catchment area is both rural and urban. the teaching body is also representative, with 21 teachers at the time of the study representing 11 nationalities. while the majority are from the uk or usa and classified as native speakers, a number of teachers are from second language backgrounds, with 5 native arabic speakers. the research site is bound as a case study by its location in one emirate, its particular student cohort, the teaching body and their shared object of student learning. the employment of activity theory as the theoretical framework underpinning the research further binds the case study analytically. this activity system forms the unit of analysis for this study. being an insider to the research site presents several advantages. i am already ‘immersed in the organization and have built up knowledge of the organization from being an actor in the processes being studied’ (brannick & coghlan, 2007). i possess a level of preunderstanding that would take an external researcher a potentially prohibitive amount of identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 time to acquire (smyth & holian, 2008 in unluer, 2012). awareness of potential issues is needed. insider researchers need to avoid over-assumption during interviews and consequently failure to probe, and must consider the duality of roles balancing institutional duties with research. however, the benefits of greater understanding, established intimacy and insider knowledge should outweigh the disadvantages. this insider knowledge informed participant selection. students in the preparatory course are grouped into ‘sections’ of up to 25 students and taught by three teachers who see the group for 8 periods each for a total of 24 class periods. the teachers then divide the teaching of each week’s learning objectives between themselves. typically, this is based on language skills, for example one teaches writing and grammar, another reading and vocabulary, and one listening and speaking. two focus groups were chosen, consisting of three teachers teaching the same section. therefore, each teacher in the focus group was sharing the same phenomenon – each was teaching the same group of students on the same course, experiencing the same successes and failures. all teachers had at least 5 years teaching experience in the region, with at least one year in the preparatory course. the diverse teaching population in the uae was reflected in the focus groups, with the uk, australia, jordan, colombia and the usa represented. two further experienced teachers, both from the uk, were chosen for individual interviews. these individual interviews took place via email due to participant preference. each teacher has been granted a pseudonym for anonymity. see table 3. table 3: interviewees focus group 1 edward, peter, ben focus group 2 geraldine, heather, tania individual interviews johnson, anna methods institutional ethical approval was granted prior to commencing data collection. the interviews were artifact mediated in order to potentially provide new contextual information to explain and verify interview findings (yamagata-lynch, 2010). actual teaching materials were chosen as artifacts to initiate discussion among the participants, to add relevant authenticity to the process and complement the interview protocol. modules of teaching material were opened on the lms and displayed. the groups were prompted to discuss how they were using these materials. the main page (figure 2) is expanded to show all the material contained within (figure 3) and an example of an online identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 reading activity (figure 4). figure 2: example theme on lms figure 3: expanded theme figure 4: example online reading activity identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 these materials were discussed in terms of a 6-point interview protocol. the protocol aims to address all elements of the activity system and the mediation between them. an interview protocol based on marken’s (2006) adaptation of mwanza’s eight-step-model (2002) was adopted. see the original in table 4. table 4: marken’s interview protocol what tools do the subject use to achieve their objective and how? what rules affect the way the subjects achieve their objective and how? how does the division of labour influence the way the subjects satisfy their objective? how does the tools in use affect the way the community achieves the objective? what rules affect the way the community satisfies their objective and how? how does the division of labour affect the way the community achieves the objective? (marken, 2006) questions were rephrased and broken into sub questions to avoid issues with terminology. for example, the original question remains in bold with prompts for the interviewer to ask the focus groups. see table 5. table 5: actual interview protocol example with prompts question what tools do the subject use to achieve their objective and how? why are you teaching the students? what’s your purpose? is that all? nothing else? look at the materials – go through each item. how would you use….? talk me through how you would deliver this to students. is there anything you would adapt? is there anything you wouldn’t use / that wouldn’t work? why? is there anything missing or anything you would add? what? influence of the laptop. influence of lms. the interview protocol focusses on each element of the activity system and also the relationships and mediation between the elements. this enables the identification of systemic contradictions occurring within the activity system. discursive analysis then identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 allows for identification of experiential manifestations of the contradictions as dilemmas, conflicts etc. the animated nature of the group interviews meant they quickly became semi-structured and the protocol a guide rather than a rigid framework, although all elements were covered. the interviews were recorded and transcribed. two further individual interviews took place, taking the form of ‘interview to the double’ (ittd). teachers wrote a monologue as if instructing a double to take their place in the classroom (lloyd, 2014; nicolini, 2009). this is the actual question asked for the ittd: imagine you are going to train a ‘double’ to take your place tomorrow. it is very important that your colleagues, students and management do not detect the double as an imposter, so you must provide them with as much information as possible. the double looks – and sounds – exactly like you. now, i want you to imagine you are teaching this double all the things they will need to know to replace you at work tomorrow, specifically in the classroom, without arousing suspicion and being exposed as an imposter. what will you tell them? this method should allow for understanding and representation of actual practice that can be mapped onto the activity system in combination with the data from the focus groups. the ittd’s were originally intended to take place orally, but the participants preferred to write their answers in email to allow for more thought and reflection. combining focus groups with the ittds allows for contradictions to be identified wherever they occur in the activity system, directly as experienced by the teachers in their own words. findings findings overview the following section describes the findings. following a brief overview, the current activity system for the preparatory course is illustrated. each contradiction is then detailed and described in terms of its discursive manifestation as a dilemma, conflict, critical conflict and double bind. overall, contradictions are clearly occurring in the activity system. ten distinct contradictions are identified, manifested as two dilemmas, three conflicts, three critical conflicts and two double binds. these contradictions and discursive manifestations are identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 discussed in more detail following a description of the current activity system. the current activity system the individual and collective activity of the preparatory course teachers is the context for the research. this context forms the current activity system, as shown in figure 5 figure 5: the current activity system the intended outcome of this activity is that students pass the preparatory course and progress to degree programs. unfortunately the unintended outcomes of failure and attrition mean that contradictions are occurring. the discursive manifestations of these contradictions are now discussed. dilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts and double binds analysis identified two dilemmas, three conflicts, three critical conflicts and two double binds. as previously mentioned, there is not an automatic one-to-one relationship between manifestations and contradictions. while the ten manifestations are attributed here to ten contradictions, this represents merely the unfolding of the empirical analysis in this paper rather than a general principle. classroom materials the first issue relates to classroom materials. official teaching material is kept on a learning management system (lms). however, this is largely ignored by teachers who prefer to use bespoke resources or online alternatives. for example, ben: i don’t use any of the materials on blackboard, even though some of them are mine…because i like to tailor the materials exactly to what i want… materials are moved to lms sub-sites or other platforms such as edmodo , and various identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 online tools such as kahoot !, quizlet , flipquiz and readworks are employed. the general consensus is that bespoke, tailored materials are superior to anything on the lms. this is an example of a dilemma as the discourse between teachers signifies incompatible evaluation, a difference of opinion over what materials should be used, a phenomena that is typically reproduced rather than resolved. when mapped onto an activity system, this dilemma appears as a secondary contradiction between the subject and tools, illustrated as dilemma a in figure 6. pedagogy and vocabulary teaching the next phenomenon refers to the teaching of vocabulary. a major tool in the teacher’s armory is pedagogy, yet there is pedagogical disagreement over vocabulary teaching. vocabulary is presented out of context, and practiced via online tools. while such tools are recognized as fun and engaging their long-term efficacy is unproven. there is disagreement between the participants. peter: word’s meanings are words in context. words alone don’t have meanings… edward: yes they do…if i didn’t have words i wouldn’t be able to make a sentence in the first place… ben: but would you then learn how to put that in a sentence? again, there is incompatible evaluation between teachers that suggests a dilemma, but also healthy debate that is reproduced rather than resolved. when mapped to the activity system, this dilemma manifests as a primary contradiction in the tools, principally pedagogy, illustrated as dilemma b in figure 6. figure 6: dilemmas identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 student keyboard skills and online exams this item concerns the potentially negative impact of student keyboard skills on online exams. students take the national standard emsat test, an online exam that requires keyboard input. however, typing is not taught, and poor keyboard skills hinder the students. edward: if they are typing like this [mimes single finger typing] they are not going to get anywhere near 200 words… ben: that’s true. we can’t teach them to type in six weeks… peter: computer skills and typing should be a completely different subject. participants demonstrate resistance and criticism, classifying this particular contradiction as a conflict. this is a secondary contradiction between tools and object experienced by teachers as conflict a, illustrated in figure 7. laptops and classroom management this phenomenon sees teachers resorting to paper for efficiency and more importantly classroom management. using paper means students are on task more quickly, and prevents them watching videos, chatting online or browsing other websites. participants are clearly frustrated, and express the resistance, disagreement, argument and criticism typical of an experienced conflict. heather: i do use online, i do, but this past week i just happen to use hard copy because i’ve had enough of having to put a stop to ladies watching their turkish films, you know. tania: or it’s they’re talking to their pals heather: they’re on the wrong paper, they’re not following along. tania: yeah, yeah, yeah. heather: -you know, but this way, when they get a hard copy, i know they’re working on that. when mapped onto the activity system, this can be seen as a secondary contradiction between the rules of appropriate laptop use and the tools, illustrated in figure 7 as conflict b. the nature of the course this area concerns the course itself. for management the course is remedial, aimed solely at achieving the required english proficiency. for teachers, however, the course should be developmental. one teacher uses reading lessons about the taliban banning education for identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 females, to show students that: ben: …they are getting their education for free…they should take full advantage of that. another urges students to see beyond the test: geraldine: it’s not just about the emsat...they need to improve the way they do things. however, the course, driven by management, remains focused on exam results as ben: …otherwise they would let us teach proper foundations items like research and apa and all that. the discursive disagreement, resistance and criticism is typical of a conflict. when mapped to the activity system, this appears as a quaternary contradiction between the participants’ activity system and management, illustrated as conflict c in figure 7. figure 7: conflicts mobile phones in the classroom this concerns the major distraction posed by mobile phones in class. this is an example of a critical conflict as the participant’s language is emotionally charged and shows the inner doubt typical of a critical conflict. for example, johnson and anna mention the need to ‘ask students to put away phones’ and to check students are not ‘staring at their phones’ during tasks. there are also conflicting attitudes among teachers in terms of expectations. some teachers insist phones are out of sight and not used in class. others see them as a second device to be utilized in class. teachers are ‘trying to enforce behaving like adults’ (peter) although the same teacher cites an internet video where a teacher dropped phones in a bucket of water if they were used in class. geraldine even questions her own teaching, thinking ‘maybe i need to come over to their side of things…using phones’ and admitting that ‘maybe i need to do things differently’. teachers are struggling. identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 this secondary contradiction between rules and use of tools is mapped to the activity system as critical conflict a, illustrated in figure 8. teacher and student expectations this point concerns the differences of teacher and student expectations over classroom roles and learner independence. students see good teaching as ‘teach me – help me – learn for me’, while teachers expect more learner autonomy. language is emotionally charged indicating critical conflict: heather: they come from the background where all learning is tania: spoon-fed. heather: yeah…so then they come to college and all of a sudden they’ve got to plough the earth themselves lack of learner autonomy is exacerbated by students’ inability to follow instructions and lack of independence: tania:…you can’t just like sit back… and trust them to work independently… teachers want independent learners, but teacher-centred learning is required. this is a difficult juggling act. this maps to the activity system this as a secondary contradiction between the subject and the division of labour, illustrated as critical conflict b in figure 8. student motivation this point concerns the teachers’ belief that students do not have clear objectives or motivation. the language used is morally and emotionally charged denoting a critical conflict. heather: students have no enthusiasm, no interest…they don’t see the value of education… the class is a holding pen for students who are killing time until they can retake the exam. tania: every time i asked her to do an activity, she would just, excuse my english, she would just half-arse it the students are only interested in taking the test, not in working towards it. gillian: i struggle to get the students to understand that it’s not just about an emsat test, it’s about being successful once they’ve moved on to their programs. in the activity system this maps as a quaternary contradiction between the teachers’ and students’ objectives illustrated as critical conflict c in figure 8. identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 18 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 figure 8: critical conflicts it policy and classroom technology this phenomenon concerns institutional it policies and the practical use of classroom technology. material is displayed in class via a classroom desktop and a touch screen. it policy means that the desktops log out after two minutes for security reasons. this interrupts lessons, and teachers need to log in multiple times during classes. it is: edward:… is the single biggest problem…some stupid policy…it’s just insane… the language shows the depth of feeling and frustration, indicators of double binds. the strong language is echoed by other teachers: peter: it’s an insurmountable problem that is driving me nuts… coupled with this are smart lighting systems which turn off if rooms are unoccupied. this often occurs during class, plunging rooms into darkness mid-lesson. repeated requests to management have not led to resolution, and the physical environment remains a source of disruption. as a double bind, resolution would involve practical transformation. this can be mapped onto the activity system as a quaternary contradiction between management and teachers concerning tools illustrated as double bind a in figure 9. open access and student success the final phenomenon is not connected to technology. while many are successful – 72% in 2016/17 went on to degree programs – there is a significant minority that are not ‘bookworm ready’ (heather) who we are ‘not giving enough time’ leading to them being ‘sacrificed’ (peter). this strong language for strong feelings is typical of a double bind, where the alternatives are pressing and resolution requires practical transformation. students are accepted who will never pass. for some, the mountain is too high to climb. open access means the college accepts everyone, but this sets many up for failure. there is identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 a limit to what the preparatory english language can achieve. when mapped to the activity system, this is a secondary contradiction between the community (ministry of education) and the object experienced as double bind b, illustrated in figure 9. figure 9: double binds discussion this paper aims to answer the following research question: rq1: what contradictions are experienced by english language teachers in a laptopmediated federal pre-university english language program in the uae? it is clear that teachers are experiencing ten main contradictions that may be contributing to failure and attrition. these are listed in table 6 and illustrated in figure 10. table 6: summary of contradictions issue manifestation classroom materials dilemma a pedagogy and vocabulary teaching dilemma b students keyboard skills conflict a laptops and classroom management conflict b the nature of the course conflict c mobile phones critical conflict a teacher and student expectations critical conflict b student motivation critical conflict c it policy and classroom double bind a identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 20 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 technology open access policy double bind b figure 10: contradictions mapped to the activity system dilemmas the dilemmas could be connected. the desire for autonomy over materials, dilemma a, and disagreement over pedagogy, dilemma b, show that teachers are employing alternatives to earlier ‘talk and chalk’. classroom practice is evolving to engage students via classroom devices and online tools such as kahoot! and flipquiz etc. (alfarwan, 2019; azman & yunus, 2019; ghareb et al., 2017). the disagreement evident shows that teachers do not necessarily accept that more technology necessarily leads to more learning (andrei, 2017). conflicts three main conflicts were identified. firstly, concerns were expressed over student keyboarding skills, in direct contradiction to research claiming improvements to esl students’ writing following 1:1 device implementation (grimes & warschauer, 2008; mokhtar et al., 2009; park & warschauer, 2016; raddawi & bilikozen, 2018; tubaishat & bataineh, 2009). 1:1 devices are perhaps an impediment to success in this case. secondly, teachers are resorting to paper for efficiency and classroom management. perhaps this is further evidence that the state-of-the-art is not the state-of-the-actual (selwyn, 2011), and argument against the idea that more technology means more learning (scanlon & issroff, 2005). at times perhaps chalk and talk trumps technology. thirdly, and unrelated to technology, while teachers feel the course should be developmental, the leadership sees it as purely remedial. activity theory does not identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 21 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 concentrate solely on technology, so is able to identify this important contradiction. a disagreement between two important interrelated activity systems can only have a negative effect on the course and student success. critical conflicts classroom devices, in particular mobile phones, are a major distraction. teachers report students are off task and slow to actively participate, further evidence of the distracting nature of classroom devices such as ipads (miles, 2019), off task students (awwad et al., 2013) and the conflicting mindsets of teachers and their classes (knobel & lankshear, 2007). while researchers in ksa may report the potential benefits of devices such as mobile phones (alfarwan, 2019), this is not the experience of the participants in this research. the other critical conflicts are technology related. teachers and students have very different expectations over the division of labour in class, a fundamental disagreement deserving further research in this context. furthermore, students cannot see beyond the exam and are perceived as unwilling to work hard. is this another example of knobel and lankshear’s conflicting mindsets (2007), or something else? an interesting area for future research perhaps. double binds the first double bind reports a situation not reported here in the literature. ‘smart’ classrooms are not enhancing learning but are instead a major hindrance and source of frustration. state-of-the-art classrooms are causing a dysfunctional state-of-the-actual, a situation that is surely unintentional. this deserves further investigation in a wider context. finally, an open access policy is seen to condemn many students to failure. this is a controversial area that would need discussion and resolution at policy maker levels. to conclude, ten contradictions, manifested as dilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts and double binds, may be contributing to the unintended outcomes of failure and attrition among students on a laptop-mediated pre-university english language course. teachers do not lack prowess or training (ali, 2013; donaghue, 2015; saunders & quirke, 2002; schoepp, 2005), but clearly know not only how to use devices engagingly, and also when to employ ‘chalk and talk’. however, attrition and failure are occurring, and technology is at times a distraction and hindrance to learning. this is the state-of-the-actual. conclusion in conclusion, it is clear that the introduction of 1:1 devices to preparatory programs in the uae has not revolutionized teaching and learning, and brings into question the argument identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 22 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 that sees the introduction of technology as beneficial and desirable. if this were the case, students would be passing the preparatory english course in ever increasing numbers, yet failure and attrition remain considerable. the ten contradictions identified by this modest project suggest that there is clearly room for policy makers to work with practitioners in order for these issues to be addressed and successfully resolved. a state-of-the-art where technology is at least part of the solution is an ideal goal, but we need to recognize when technology does not enhance learning and may even contribute to failure. we need to consider all the elements of an activity system, from pedagogy to policy to student to teacher in an interrelated network when considering 1:1 device initiatives. further critical research in this area is imperative. this research has been approached from the perspective of the teachers, but future work should aim to be multi-voiced, including students, management and where possible the wider community, broadening the potential impact and benefits. by recognizing contradictions, we can seek solutions to real problems in real contexts. this is a worthy goal deserving our efforts, both locally and worldwide. acknowledgements this research was undertaken as part of the phd in eresearch and technology enhanced learning in the department of educational research at lancaster university. i am pleased to acknowledge the contribution of tutors and peers in supporting the development of this study and its report as an assignment paper references alfarwan, s. 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(2010). activity systems analysis methods: understanding complex learning environments: springer science & business media. https://www.vision2021.ae/en/our-vision abstract introduction literature review computer-assisted language learning the positive impacts of classroom devices the negative impacts of classroom devices a gap in the literature research questions theoretical framework methodology methods table 4: marken’s interview protocol findings overview the current activity system dilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts and double binds classroom materials pedagogy and vocabulary teaching student keyboard skills and online exams laptops and classroom management the nature of the course mobile phones in the classroom teacher and student expectations student motivation it policy and classroom technology open access and student success dilemmas conflicts critical conflicts double binds conclusion acknowledgements references title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 developing a tpack measurement instrument for 21st century pre-service teachersi teemu valtonen school of applied educational sciences and teacher education university of eastern finland, joensuu email: teemu.valtonen@uef.fi erkko t. sointu school of applied educational sciences and teacher education university of eastern finland, joensuu kati mäkitalo-siegl school of applied educational sciences and teacher education university of eastern finland, savonlinna jari kukkonen school of applied educational sciences and teacher education university of eastern finland, joensuu abstract future skills, so-called 21st century skills, emphasise collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and especially ict skills (voogt & roblin, 2012). teachers have to be able to use various pedagogical approaches and ict in order to support the development of their students’ 21st century skills (voogt & roblin, 2012). these skills, particularly ict skills, pose challenges for teachers and teacher education. this paper focuses on developing an instrument for measuring pre-service teachers’ knowledge related to ict in the context of 21st century skills. technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack; mishra & kohler, 2006) was used as a theoretical framework for designing the instrument. while the tpack framework is actively used, the instruments used to measure it have proven challenging. this paper outlines the results of the development process of the tpack-21 instrument. a new assessment instrument was compiled and tested on preservice teachers in study1 (n=94). based on these results, the instrument was further developed and tested in study2 (n=267). the data of both studies were analysed using multiple quantitative methods in order to evaluate the psychometric properties of the instruments. the results provide insight into the challenges of the development process itself and also suggest new solutions to overcome these difficulties. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:teemu.valtonen@uef.fi 88 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 keywords: tpack, 21st century skills, measurement instrument measuring pre-service teachers’ 21st century skills todays’ working life poses new challenges for educational systems around the world. schools and teachers have to provide their students with skills for working in multidisciplinary teams with ill-defined problems by making good use of ict environments. students have to learn how to find and analyse information in order to create novel products, new knowledge and better services (silva, 2009; griffin, care, & mcgaw, 2012). these skills expected in working life are often referred to as 21st century skills (griffin et al., 2012). there are various definitions of 21st century skills by several organisations (assessment and teaching of 21st century skills, partnership for 21st century skills, oecd’s definition and selection of competences, and european union’s key competences for lifelong learning). common to all the definitions is an emphasis on skills for collaboration, communication, ict literacy, social and/or cultural competencies and creativity as well as critical thinking and problem-solving (voogt & roblin, 2012; voogt, erstad, dede, & mishra, 2013). what is also common is the central role of ict; todays’ and future workers have to be able to take advantage of different ict tools and applications as a means of work (voogt & roblin, 2012; voogt, erstad et al., 2013). in order to provide their students with 21st century skills, teachers need to be able to use various pedagogical approaches with appropriate ict applications (voogt, erstad et al., 2013). these expectations affect teachers’ work, and, consequently, teacher education when, in addition to more traditional contents and skills such as mathematics and literature, 21st century skills as more generic skills need to be integrated into education as a means and goals of learning (c.f. rotherham & willingham, 2009; silva, 2009). despite of the hypothesis that the current pre-service teacher generation has grown up as a “net generation” (prensky, 2001), it seems that today’s pre-service teachers need support in developing their skills to use ict for teaching and learning (see lei, 2009). not surprisingly, it seems that growing up surrounded by electronic gadgets and being an active user of various ict applications do not by themselves prepare a “digital native” to be a successful 21st century teacher. pre-service teachers seem to have difficulties in both understanding the pedagogical potential of various everyday technologies (valtonen, pöntinen, kukkonen, dillon, väisänen, & hacklin, 2011; lei, 2009) and the connection between the use of ict and the development of 21st century skills. in this paper, we report the results of the design and evaluation process of creating a technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack; see mishra & koehler, 2006) questionnaire, which is psychometrically sound and pedagogically grounded on 21st century skills. this revised tpack questionnaire is designed particularly for pre-service teachers. theoretical background the tpack framework was developed for studying and describing knowledge related to teachers’ use of ict in education (mishra & koehler, 2006; koehler, mishra, & cain, 2013). tpack consists of three areas of knowledge: technology, pedagogy and content, and the combination of these is presented in table 1. 89 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn area of measurement acronym explanation content knowledge ck central theories and concepts of the field with knowledge including the nature of the knowledge and means of inquiry. pedagogical knowledge pk knowing the processes and mechanisms of learning and ways to support and guide students’ learning process. technology knowledge tk knowing the possibilities and constraints of different technologies and abilities to use technologies available. also, technology knowledge refers to the interest regarding the development of new technologies. pedagogical content knowledge pck how teacher can facilitate certain students learning of certain contents, what kind of learning environments, activities, collaboration etc. are needed. technological pedagogical knowledge tpk knowledge of how different pedagogical approaches can be supported with different technologies. tpk refer to a general knowledge concerning the possibilities of technology in education technological content knowledge tck knowledge of how technology is used within certain discipline like math or history table 1 tpack areas of measurement tpack is a combination of different elements defined as “an understanding that emerges from interactions among content, pedagogy, and technology knowledge [...] underlying truly meaningful and deeply skilled teaching with technology” (koehler et al., 2013, p. 66). we assume that teachers with highlevel tpack are more capable of choosing appropriate pedagogical approaches for supporting students’ learning of certain content and the related 21st century skills and, furthermore, actively take advantage of appropriate technologies to support these learning processes. features of previous tpack measurement instruments the tpack framework has been actively used since it was first introduced (see voogt, fisser, roblin, tondeur, & braakt, 2013), and several instruments have been designed for measuring it (see schmidt, baran, thompson, mishra, koehler, & shin, 2009; koh & sing., 2011; lee & tsai., 2010). however, two main challenges related to the available instruments remains—namely, psychometric features and the nature of pedagogical knowledge. firstly, some difficulties in the psychometric features of the instruments were caused by the assumption that tpack consists of seven different areas as separate factors. according to graham (2011), the separation of these seven areas into independent factors is difficult. these psychometric properties of the instruments have mainly been studied with explorative factor analysis (efa), including principal component analysis (pca), although confirmatory 90 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 factor analysis (cfa) and different approaches with structural equation models (sems) have also been used. one of the earliest and still actively used questionnaires for measuring tpack is the survey of preservice teachers’ knowledge of teaching and technology (sptktt) by schmidt et al. (2009). despite its active use, sptktt has attracted criticism based on the process of validation with principal component analysis (pca) conducted separately for each of the seven areas of tpack (see chai, koh, tsai, & tan, 2011). altogether, the psychometric challenges have particularly focused on how the constructs (factors) of tpack are formed. in other words, the combination of separate elements in the constructs has varied between studies. in a study reported by chai et al. (2011), only five out of seven elements of tpack were found, excluding the tck and pck. koh, chai and tsai, (2010) reported five factor model aligning with the tpack framework. in the study by archambault and barnett (2010), the only factor emerging as expected was tk, while all the rest of the six factors were combined as three factors. interestingly, pamuk, ergun, cakir, yilmaz and ayas (2013) reported a study where all seven elements of tpack separately aligned with the tpack framework. however, this study was challenging because the pedagogical aspects of the questionnaire and the methods used in this study were unclear. the second challenge with the available instruments concerns the nature of pedagogical knowledge. according to brantley-dias and ertmer (2013), the tpack framework can be described as a pedagogically free frame that can be used for different pedagogical approaches. this feature of tpack can be clearly seen within different questionnaires designed for measuring tpack. for example, the sptktt questionnaire by schmidt et al. (2009) focuses on pedagogical themes on a very general level, such as “i know how to assess student performance in a classroom”, “i can adapt my teaching based upon what students currently understand or do not understand” and “i know how to organize and maintain classroom management”. yet, there have been attempts to explicate pedagogical knowledge as in the questionnaire by koh and sing (2011). in their study, the statements in the questionnaire concerning pedagogical knowledge were built on the theory of meaningful learning by jonassen et al. (1999). this approach highlights students’ active role in their own learning and group activities, and it was implemented in terms of the following statements: “i am able to help my students to monitor their own learning”, “i am able to help my students to reflect on their learning strategies” and “i am able to plan group activities for my students”. the role of pedagogical knowledge has been indicated as a central factor affecting the success of using ict in education (c.f. ertmer, 2009; guerrero, 2005). in the case of 21st century skills, there is not necessarily anything new—rather newly important compilations of different skills (silva, 2009). yet, voogt, erstad et al. (2013) argue that teachers must know various pedagogical approaches and ways to take advantage of ict for supporting the development of students’ 21st century skills. from this perspective, we assume that it is important that questionnaires measuring tpack need to be pedagogically well-grounded for measuring teachers’ certain pedagogical approaches—in this case, pedagogical approaches aligning with 21st century skills. developing a new measurement instrument according to pedagogical approaches that support 21st century skills in the development process, we investigated the new instrument in two phases (study1 and study2). the main focus of this process was to design a psychometrically sound tpack measurement instrument whose pedagogical practices align with 21st century skills, especially in the teacher education context. for this purpose, three starting points were used. firstly, the questionnaire by koh and sing (2011) provided an example of how to better implement pedagogical knowledge in a certain well-studied theory of learning. 91 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn secondly, the pedagogical perspectives of 21st century skills were seen as a basis for defining the pedagogical goals that this questionnaire aimed to measure. while pedagogical goals were based on different definitions of 21st century skills (voogt, erstad et al., 2013; voogt & roblin, 2012; mishra & kereluik, 2011), they ended up stressing collaborative learning practices with an emphasis on skills for creative and critical thinking, skills for learning and self-regulation and skills for collaborative problem-solving. these themes are related to all categories of pedagogical knowledge (pk, pck, tpk and tpack). thirdly, in areas of pck and tpk, we included statements that are similar to the statements in the questionnaire by schmidt et al. (2009). the reason for including previously tested elements was that we wanted to have a reference between editions of subscales and an additional safety line if the editions were to demonstrate inadequate properties. we considered this important as in the early stages of the measurement instrument development, it was not clear how these statements would influence the structure of the instrument combined with the new statements focusing on 21st century skills. items related to content knowledge were divided into two parts. first, there are statements measuring content knowledge aligning with the questionnaire by schmidt et al. (2009). these statements measure how highly pre-service teachers assess their knowledge related to the more traditionally understood content knowledge of, for example, history, mathematics or literature. in this case, the selected content was science. in addition to these, there were statements for measuring how well pre-service teachers know the principles and mechanisms of 21st century skills, such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving etc. (voogt, erstad et al., 2013). we argue that in addition to knowledge related to traditional subject content such as mathematics and literature, todays’ students and especially teachers should be aware of the practices and mechanisms of the 21st century skills as a new area of content knowledge to be gained at school. tck strongly stresses the idea of how ict is used within different disciplines outside schools in working life—that is, how professionals of science or mathematics are taking advantage of the ict in their work. in the study by schmidt et al. (2009), this area contained only one statement for each content area: “i know about technology that i can use for understanding and doing [different content]”. this is taken into account when building a tck subscale for different content areas and with a stronger set of items. technological knowledge (tk) in this instrument contains two areas that focus on the general level of teachers’ interest and skills in using ict and current technology in education. because of the fast development of ict, the questionnaire contains general-level statements focusing on respondents’ interest in the development of ict and their ability to take advantage of various ict applications, as in the questionnaire by schmidt et al. (2009). in order to gain a more precise picture of the respondents’ interest in the development of ict, items measuring their knowledge of currently popular ict applications in education; social software, tablet computers, touch boards and the production of online materials were added. according to chai, koh and tsai (2010), pre-service teachers’ underdeveloped professional knowledge causes difficulties in acknowledging and distinguishing between the elements of tpack. similar to roblyer and doering (2010) and doering, veletsianos, scharber and miller (2009), we suggest that tpack should be considered a metacognitive tool for enhancing technology integration into teaching and learning to help understand how different knowledge areas work in tandem and to identify personal strengths and developmental areas. for this reason and in addition to mere research purposes, the questionnaire was designed as a tool for opening the tpack framework for teachers. the questionnaire consists of seven sections aligning with the elements of the tpack, and at the beginning of each section, scaffolding texts were provided to briefly outline the core of each area of 92 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 tpack. in this way, we assume, the respondents might become aware of tpack’s theoretical framework as well as the structure of the tpack framework, and this activity could trigger respondents’ thinking of different tpack elements and thus support their reflective thinking and professional development. the following is an example of a piece of scaffolding text for tpk, which was preceded by tk, pk and ck: ok, now you have assessed your content knowledge, technological knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. next, think about combining these areas; think about your knowledge concerning how well you know how to use different ict applications for supporting your pedagogical aims and pedagogical practices. in which areas do you find your knowledge strong and where do you think you need more knowledge? in addition to the pedagogical grounding, we focused on the psychometric properties of the new measurement instrument and specifically on reliability and validity. reliability refers to the reproducibility or consistency of measurement scores, and while different types of reliability exist, we focused on the internal consistency referring to the degree to which responses on a measurement are similar to one another (e.g. aera, apa, ncme, 2014). validity refers to “the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests[…] the process of validation involves accumulating evidence to provide a sound scientific basis for the proposed score interpretations” (aera, apa, ncme, 2014, p. 11). generally, validity is a complex and multidimensional aspect of measurement instrument development, and different aspects of validity exist. in this study, we investigated the initial construct validity of the new instrument. therefore, the purpose of this study was also to separately investigate the developed instrument with independent samples. we have named these studies study1, which was the pilot phase of the investigation, and study2, which was the phase used to investigate the structure more thoroughly. method participants two sub-studies were carried out in this paper: study1 and study2. both studies had target groups of first-year (novice) pre-services teachers (preservice teacher education is university education in finland). after graduation, these pre-service teachers will mainly work as classroom teachers, which in the finnish basic education system means grades 1 to 6 (pupils aged 7 to 12). study1 included 96 pre-service teachers from one finnish university (nfemale = 59; nmale = 34), of which 63% were female. in study2, the sample size was 267 pre-service teachers from three different universities in finland (nfemale = 203; nmale = 64), of which 76% were female. there was a slight gender difference between these two independent samples although both samples adequately followed the general gender distribution of finnish classroom pre-service teacher education, which is dominated by women. data collection in both phases (i.e. for study1 and study2), data collection was conducted as a part of the pre-service teachers’ courses. the aim of the study was explained to the target groups. pre-service teachers were not obliged to take part in the study. furthermore, permission for conducting the study was acquired from the head of the department of the teacher education units. study1’s data collection was conducted in the spring of 2013 and study2 data collection was conducted in late autumn of 2014 and early spring of 2015. the data collections were administered with online questionnaires. in both phases (i.e. study1 and study2), the questionnaire was designed to serve research 93 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn purposes as well as a reflective thinking tool for ict in teaching and learning for pre-service teachers, thus supporting the learning goals of the courses. data analysis spss v22 was used in the statistical analysis of both studies. we used descriptive statistics (m, sd, skewness, kurtosis), internal consistency (for study1 and study2) and exploratory factor analysis for the initial factor structure investigation of the developed tpack-21 instrument for study2. internal consistency was estimated with cronbach’s alpha (α) and its associated 95% confidence intervals. a well-structured scale and its items should have an alpha level of 0.7 or higher (e.g. nunnally, 1978), indicating a good combination of observed item responses and a reliable scale. furthermore, we estimated the 95% confidence intervals for the α coefficients in order to evaluate the precision of the point estimates—that is, the plausible range of α estimate with several replications of the analysis. we hypothesised that the α-level of study2 would fall into the range or should be higher compared to the study1 α and its confidence intervals, indicating the sufficient development of the tpack-21 instrument. to evaluate the validity of tpack-21, we used two independent data sets (study1 and study2) to test its initial structure. when the theoretical factor structure can be proven with independent empirical data, this can be considered as initial evidence for the validity of tpack-21. this was investigated with the exploratory factor analysis (efa) principal axis factoring (paf) method with oblique (direct oblimin) rotation on study2 data. oblique rotation was used because we expected the factors to be correlated. extraction was based on eigenvalues greater than 1. the following criteria were used to interpret the results of efa paf: kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo), bartlett’s test of sphericity, eigenvalues, scree-plot, amount of variance explained and rotated factor loading. we expect the kmo to reach a value of .9 to indicate distinct, reliable factors and adequate sample size. further, bartlett’s test should be significant, indicating that the correlations between variables are significantly different from zero and eigenvalues higher than one to indicate an individual factor accompanied, which can be confirmed by viewing scree plot. tpack-21 instrument (study1) the designing of the updated tpack measurement instrument began by reviewing the earlier questionnaires of tpack. based on the review, the first version of the instrument was built. five experts in the area of ict in teaching and learning were asked to read and comment on the developed instrument (face validity). the subscales of study1 were pk, ck (content/ subject area being science), tk, pck, tck, tpk and tpack. in addition, each of the subscales (except tck) were divided into two: tpack statements following the schmidt et al. (2009) questionnaire and newly added 21st century skills self-evaluating tpack statements. finally, a measurement instrument with 13 subscales and 86 items rated on a six-point likert-type scale (1 = i need a lot of additional information about the topic; 2 = i need some additional information about the topic; 3 = i need a little additional information about the topic; 4 = i have some information about the topic; 5 = i have good knowledge about the topic; 6 = i have strong knowledge about the topic) was designed. examples of these 21st century skills self-evaluating tpack statements are as follows: pk—guiding students’ discussions during group work (2–5 students), ck—principles of collaborative learning, tk—familiarity with new technologies and their features, pck—in teaching natural sciences, i know how to guide students’ content-related problem solving in groups (2–5 students), tpk—in teaching, i know how to make use of ict as a medium for sharing ideas and thinking together and tck—i know technologies which i can use to illustrate difficult contents in natural sciences. 94 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 results of study1 the aim of study1 was specifically to test the reliability and initial validity of the newly developed tpack-21 instrument. in table 2, we present the mean (m), standard deviation (sd), skewness, kurtosis and internal consistencies (cronbach α) of the tpack-21 instrument for both studies (study1 and study2) in order to facilitate the comparison of the instruments. the alphas for study1 were adequate at α = .83-.89 (α < .07 preferably < .8), indicating the initial reliability of the tpack-21 instrument (table 2). moreover, the ci’s of alpha were adequate, indicating that if these analyses were to be performed repeatedly, the alpha level would remain adequate. the mean value of study1 indicates that respondents had or needed only little information about the tpack-21 areas, except with tck (m = 2.61, sd = .91), in which respondents seemed to need more information (response options varied from 1 to 6). ______________________________________________________ table 2 mean (m), standard deviation (sd), skewness, kurstosis, and internal consistency [95% ci] (scale 1= i need a lot of additional information about the topic; 6 = i have strong knowledge about the topic) modifications of the tpack-21 instrument for study2 the results from study1 indicated adequate to good internal consistency of subscales measured by cronbach’s alpha. still, based on various analyses, there were challenges with the instrument that demanded further development for study2. first, the structure of the study1 measurement did not follow the tpack framework. based on these results, all statements were carefully re-evaluated in order to find possible difficult wordings, challenging concepts and double statements (two statements in one statement). when these difficult statements were removed, the structure became more observable. also, some statements were re-written in order to be tested in study2. second, some concepts used in the study1 questionnaire caused difficulties for respondents. statements focusing on critical thinking and creative thinking correlated strongly (pearson’s r over .70). we assume that the reason for this was that first-year pre-service teachers had difficulties in separating these areas in the learning context. again, some statements were redefined for the second study. also, it seemed that concepts such as reflection, collaborative problem-solving and creative and critical thinking were difficult for the firstyear pre-service teachers. for this reason, we added a short dictionary to the beginning of the instrument. in this dictionary, we defined the meanings of m (sd) skewness kurtosis cronbach α study1 study2 study1 study2 study1 study2 study1 study2 tpack pk 21st 3.78 (.65) 3.21 (1.03) -.45 -.27 .72 -.77 n = 94 n = 267 ck old 3.76 (.91) 2.98 (1.09) -.57 .13 .69 -.68 .84 [.79, .89] .93. [.92, .94] ck 21st 3.79 (.79) 3.59 (1.09) -.07 -.32 -.05 -.62 .88 [.84, .92] .88 [.86, .90] tk 3.74 (.96) 2.85 (1.23) .30 .12 -.14 -.99 .89 [.85, .92] .94 [.92, .95] pck 21st 3.69 (.74) 2.96 (1.04) -.42 -.07 1.19 -.42 .85 [.79, .89] .92 [.90, .94] tck 21st 2.61 (.91) 2.23 (1.05) .10 .68 -.63 -.28 .87 [.82, .91] .95 [.95, .96] tpk 21st 3.72 (.80) 2.94 (1.12) -.45 .03 .46 -.73 .83 [.76, .88] .95 [.94, .96] tpack 3.42 (.81) 2.65 (1.05) -.01 .11 -.67 -.82 .88 [.84, .91] .89 [.87, .91] 95 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn these concepts (see appendix 1). we assume that in addition to mere research purposes, this instrument needs to serve as a tool for supporting pre-service teachers’ professional development and reflective thinking. third, based on mean values and skewed distribution of results, it seems that some statements were too easy for the respondents. this was especially visible in the tk section where respondents evaluated their knowledge related to the use of separate ict application as very high. in order to avoid the ceiling effect, some statements were made more difficult. for example, the statement i can use social software for teaching was changed to i am an expert on using social software for teaching. these changes were made in order to better take into consideration the character of today’s pre-service teachers’ knowledge and also to support their reflective thinking and professional development. the new questionnaire included 54 items, some of which were modified, and a dictionary was tested in study2. the subscale structure was similar to the study1 version of the tpack-21 instrument. results of study2 the exploratory factor analysis (efa) with principal axis factoring (paf) method with oblique rotation was conducted at the first stage for all 54 items, including the tpack statements. however, 54 items did not produce an interpretable factor structure as the tpack statements loaded strongly to other subscale (pk, ck, tk, pck, tpk and tck) items. we therefore removed the tpack items from the second efa, which produced an adequate initial factor structure with 36 items. a kmo value of 0.93 verified sampling adequacy, and a significant (p <.001) bartlett’s test of sphericity indicated that the variable correlations were different from zero. seven factors were produced by the eigenvalue (< 1), and this was confirmed by reading the scree plot. table 3 presents the factor loading after rotation, eigenvalues and percentage of explained variance. the clustered items of efa indicate that separate factors represent designated factor structures as hypothesised. rotated factor structure item pk21st ck old ck 21st tk pck 21st tpk 21st tck 21st pk1 ,713 pk2 ,682 pk3 ,861 pk4 ,761 pk5 ,844 pk6 ,809 pk7 ,648 ck1 ,685 ck2 ,882 ck3 ,687 ck4 ,475 ck5 -,720 ck6 -,754 ck7 -,863 96 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 ck8 -,796 ck9 -,829 tk1 ,796 tk2 ,999 tk3 ,899 tk4 ,677 pck1 ,847 pck2 ,815 pck3 ,822 pck4 ,769 pck5 ,816 pck6 ,701 tpk1 -,506 tpk2 -,658 tpk3 -,938 tpk4 -,845 tpk5 -,798 tpk6 -,697 tck1 -,536 tck2 -,841 tck3 -,832 tck4 -,623 eigenvalues 16.3 2.22 1.03 4.42 1.17 1.40 1.90 % of variance 45.28 6.15 2.85 12.27 3.25 3.87 5.27 note. factor loading under .40 cleared from the table. pedagogical knowledge pk, content knowledge ck, techological knowledge tk, pedagogical content knowledge pck, tehcnological pedagogical knowledge pck, techological content knowledge tck. tpack did not load separately to the efa. table 3 exploratory factor analysis (principal axis factoring) with oblique rotation the alphas of study2 ranged from .88 to .95. the alpha levels also increased systematically as expected between sub-studies 1 and 2; however, this information should be interpreted with caution as differences in sample size may influence the increase. the means of study2 (m varied from 2.23 to 3.59) were systematically lower than expected due to the fact that we aimed to make the items more difficult for respondents to answer in order to form a more realistic picture of pre-service teachers’ tpack and to obtain more variance and have less skewed/kurtotic data (see table 2). the results of study2 indicate that first-year pre-service teachers require more information about the tpack areas. generally, the study1 data were closely normally distributed, and with the development modifications to the tpack-21 instrument, we were able to obtain normally distributed data from study2. discussion the aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a measurement instrument for the assessment of pre-service teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) that aligns with 21st century skills (i.e. tpack-21). we 97 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn focused particularly on initial reliability and validity. for this purpose, two sub-studies in two phases, study1 and study2, were conducted. focusing on descriptive statistics, internal consistency and the factor structure, we can conclude that the development and redesigning of the questionnaire has been adequate, and it has improved the quality of the tpack-21 instrument. the original tpack structure proposed by mishra and kohler (2006) was found, although the results from the efa indicate that the tpack model works only without the actual tpack subscale. this being the case, should tpack be considered as a theoretical construct as a sum of its parts, perhaps a higher-order factor structure? the reliability of the factors estimated with cronbach’s alpha (α) were similar/higher when compared to the results of the earlier studies (see pamuk et al., 2013; koh & sing., 2011; lee & tsai., 2010). the result of overlap in α cis for the tpack-21 subscales indicates that the reliability in the population may not differ largely between different data sets, as seen in the results of study1 and study2. the changes in mean values for the subscales between study1 and study2 indicate that the instrument can be seen as more accurate for separating the respondents with lower and higher tpack. this is especially important for follow-up studies of tpack development for first-year pre-service teachers— with limited knowledge and experience of teaching with ict—to teachers with more experience. particularly during the re-designing and testing of the tpack-21 instrument, it was discovered that first-year pre-service teachers’ scaffolding needs to be obvious. based on this result, we assume that the addition of separate introductory elements for each tpack subscale with scaffolding text was adequate and helped respondents to better acknowledge the elements of tpack (c.f. chai et al., 2010). certain concepts such as reflection, collaborative problem-solving and creative and critical thinking in the learning context were difficult for first-year pre-service teachers. for this reason, we added a short dictionary to the beginning of the instrument to help with these challenging concepts. based on the results, we were also able to notice that some statements were too easy for the respondents. this feature could be seen especially in the tk section, where respondents evaluated their knowledge related to the use of separate ict applications very high. these insights show that designing a tpack instrument for pre-service teachers is a challenging task. an important question is how this instrument would work with more experienced students—that is, will the instrument need modifications for a follow-up study as these pre-service teachers proceed in their studies? the results from the efa provided important insight into the nature of the tpack itself. discussion on how different tpack areas relate to each other, that is, how tpack should be understood, had already begun with the research on the predecessor of tpack—that is, pedagogical content knowledge, pck (see gess-new some, 1999). the burning question now is how the entity of seven areas (including tpack itself) should be understood; should tpack be considered one single entity or rather as a combination of separate elements (gess-new some, 1999; graham, 2011)? the results from the efa align with the view that tpack should be considered rather as a combination of separate elements—a synthesis where six elements form the latent tpack (i.e. sum of constructs that cannot be directly measured). these questions need further research, for example, by testing the model with confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) techniques. the aim of this research was not only to create a tpack instrument for research purposes, but at the same time to create an instrument to trigger reflective thinking and professional development. we assume that this instrument that includes scaffolding elements can be a valuable tool for supporting pre-service teachers’ professional development. based on previous studies, it seems that today’s pre-service teachers’ skills in using ict in a 98 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 pedagogically meaningful manner are limited (lei, 2009; valtonen et al., 2011). therefore, the tpack-21 instrument was designed to support preservice teachers’ reflective thinking and, on a larger scale, to emphasise their awareness of their strengths and development needs related to pedagogically meaningful use of ict in education. this is also an important topic for future studies. longitudinal research with this instrument will be particularly valuable in shedding light on pre-service teachers’ tpack development. in addition, the repeated measurements and self-reflection can help pre-service teachers to acknowledge their own development. for future research, preservice teachers’ experiences with this instrument as a reflective tool is central—that is, how scaffolding with the instrument can support pre-service teachers’ reflective thinking and professional development during teacher education. like all research, this study has its limitations. first, the sample included only classroom teachers, although this study can be easily replicated with a wider sample of pre-service teachers. also, pre-service teachers of different levels of experience (e.g. third-year pre-service teachers) should be included in the research to see whether the initial structure holds. the second limitation is related to the sample representativeness. although we had a large proportion of teacher education units in finland, researchers should include more preservice teacher education units in their future studies. third, this paper focused on the initial structure of tpack-21. future research should include a confirmatory factor analysis and analysis of measurement invariance. in addition, other aspects of validity and reliability should be included in future investigations. fourth, only the initial evidence of item-level and scale-level properties were investigated. future research could include more in-depth studies on these properties, such as with rasch modelling. fifth, no attempt was made to examine the study results in light of the ability to use or attitudes toward the use of ict in teaching and learning. future researchers should include this aspect in their studies as the tpack construct may be influenced by abilities and attitudes. sixth, this study did not even scratch the surface of pre-service teachers’ tpack development during teacher education or in the early years of in-service teaching. longitudinal research is needed to understand pre-service teachers’ tpack development more thoroughly. acknowledgements this research presented in this article is supported by the academy of finland (grant no. 273970). references archambaulta, l., & barnetta, j. (2010). revisiting technological pedagogical content knowledge: exploring the tpack framework. computers & education, 55(4), 1656–1662. brantley-dias, l., & ertmer, p. (2013). goldilocks and tpack: is the construct “just right?” jrte, 46(2), 103–128. chai, c., koh, j., & tsai, c.-c. (2010). facilitating preservice teachers’ development of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (tpack). educational technology & society, 13(4), 63–73. chai, c., koh, j., tsai, c., & tan, l. (2011). modeling primary school pre-service teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) for meaningful learning with information and communication technology (ict). computers & education, 57(1), 1184–1193. 99 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn doering, a., veletsianos, g., scharber, c., & miller, c. (2009). using the technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge framework to design online learning environments and professional development. journal of educational computing research, 41(3), 319–346. ertmer, p. (1999) addressing firstand second-order barriers to change: strategies for technology integration. educational technology research and development, 47(4), 47–61. gess-newsome, j. (1999). pedagogical content knowledge: an introduction and orientation. in j. gess-newsome & n. lederman (eds.), examining pedagogical content knowledge (pp. 3–20). dordrecht: kluwer. graham, c. (2011). theoretical considerations for understanding technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack). computers & education, 57(3), 1953– 1960. griffin, p., care, e., & mcgaw, b. (2012). the changing role of education and schools. in p. griffin, b. mcgaw, & e. care (eds.), assessment and teaching of 21st century skills (pp. 17–66). heidelberg: springer. guerrero, s. (2005). teacher knowledge and a new domain of expertise: pedagogical technology knowledge. journal of educational computing research, 33(3), 249– 267. jonassen, d., peck, k., & wilson, b. (1999). learning with technology: a constructivist perspective. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. koehler, m.j., mishra, p., & cain, w. (2013). what is technological pedagogical content (tpack)? journal of education, 193(3), 13–19. koh, j., chai, c. s., & tsai, c. c. (2010). examining the technological pedagogical content knowledge of singapore preservice teachers with a large-scale survey. journal of computer assisted learning, 26(6), 563–573. koh, j., & sing, c. (2011). modeling pre-service teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) perceptions: the influence of demographic factors and tpack constructs. proceedings ascilite 2011 hobart: full paper. lee, m., & tsai, c. (2010). exploring teachers’ perceived self-efficacy and technological pedagogical content knowledge with respect to educational use of the world wide web. instructional science, 38(1), 1–21. lei, j. (2009). digital natives as preservice teachers: what technology preparation is needed? journal of computing in teacher education, 25(3), 87–97. mishra, p., & kereluik, k. (2011). what 21st century learning? a review and a synthesis. in m. koehler & p. mishra (eds.), proceedings of society for information technology & teacher education international conference 2011 (pp. 3301–3312). chesapeake, va: association for the advancement of computing in education (aace). mishra, p., & koehler, m. j. (2006). technological pedagogical content knowledge: a framework for integrating technology in teacher knowledge. teachers college record, 108(6), 1017–1054. nunnally, j. (1978). psychometric theory (2nd ed.). new york, ny: mcgraw-hill. pamuk, s., ergun, m. cakir, r., yilmaz, h. b., & ayas, c. (2013). exploring relationships among tpack components and development of the tpack instrument. education and information technologies, 20(2), 241–263. prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants. on the horizon, 9(5), 1–6. 100 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 roblyer, m. d., & doering, a. h. (2010). theory and practice: foundations for effective technology integration. in m. roblyer & a. doering (eds.), integrating educational technology into teaching (5th ed.) (pp. 31–70). boston, ma: allyn & bacon. rotherham, a.j., & willingham, d. (2009). 21st century skills: the challenges head. educational leadership, 67(1), 16–21. schmidt, d., baran, e., thompson, a., mishra, p., koehler, m., & shin, t. (2009). technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack): the development and validation of an assessment instrument for preservice teachers. jrte, 42(2), 123–149. silva, e. (2009). measuring skills for 21st-century learning. phi delta kappan, 90(9), 630–634. valtonen, t., pöntinen, s., kukkonen, j., dillon, p., väisänen, p., & hacklin, s. (2011). confronting the technological pedagogical knowledge of finnish net generation student teachers. technology, pedagogy and education, 20(1), 1–16. voogt, j., erstad, o., dede, c., & mishra, p. (2013). challenges to learning and schooling in the digital networked world of the 21st century. journal of computer assisted learning, 29(5), 403–413. voogt, j., fisser, p., roblin, n., tondeur, j., & braakt, j. (2013). technological pedagogical content knowledge – a review of the literature. journal of computer assisted learning, 29(2), 109–121. voogt, j., & roblin, n. p. (2012). a comparative analysis of international frameworks for 21st century competences: implications for national curriculum policies. journal of curriculum studies, 44(3), 299–321. i correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to teemu valtonen, philosophical faculty, school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland, po box 111, 80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: teemu.valtonen@uef.fi. mailto:teemu.valtonen@uef.fi developing a tpack measurement instrument for 21st century pre-service teachers0f teemu valtonen erkko t. sointu kati mäkitalo-siegl jari kukkonen abstract measuring pre-service teachers’ 21st century skills references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 developing contextual knowledge arenas in the global classroom siv oltedal faculty of social science the university of nordland (siv.oltedal@uin.no) email: siv.oltedal@uin.no abstract the purpose of this article is to discuss challenges in the development of contextual knowledge arenas by focusing on: how the contextual perspective is brought into a master’s program in social work; how the development of different knowledge areas offer a variety of learning for a group of international students; how to design an efficient and ethically reliable program to be offered for both offand on-campus students. these topics are explored by analyzing reflections from students. keywords: context, knowledge arena, flexible studies contextual knowledge arena the development of distance education can be identified in three phases: 1) correspondence schools; 2) online virtual space; and 3) an e-learning environment that supports the sense of place and the transition from space to place (wahlstedt et al., 2008). this third step is related to flexible studies and blended learning. “generally, blended learning means any combination of learning delivery methods, including most often face-to-face instruction with asynchronous and/or synchronous computer technologies” (so and brush, 2008, p.321). when entering a geographical or virtual classroom some students experience this as merely a physical space, while for others it is a place to promote cultural and social understanding. hence, we can look at space and place as a continuum between focusing on location and people. in a space the location is emphasized, whereas a place without people is meaningless. however, a place that cannot be located or a space that is not interpreted by humans does not make sense. spaces such as, e.g. houses, need people to become a home. an arena is a location that resembles a field (bourdieu, 1979/1995), whose borders are more easily identified than when the term space is used. we can associate an arena with a ring or a circle, in which more activity occurs within the borders of the arena than by crossing borders. an arena can be defined as where actions take place, and can thus be defined as a fixed institutional frame (jensen, 2005, p. 55). “learning and accumulation of (new) knowledge in an organization always starts with the individual” (jensen, 2005, p.53). in freire’s (1970) critical mailto:siv.oltedal@uin.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 121 learning theory, he underscores that people must consciously develop their world view and a self-awareness rooted in their own social and historical background. a community is a group of people with some common interests, while the creation of knowledge is an interactive and dynamic process in which individuals and communities act within areas or systems of communication. the role of the context is important when focusing on learning processes and the problem of how spaces interact with learning theories (bligh and lorentz, 2010). what contributes to a re-orientation and information for a student is dependent on what is regarded as a difference that makes a difference to them (bateson, 1972, p.315). knowledge is information that is processed for a certain aim, hence “to create knowledge is to use information for a productive purpose in a certain context” (jensen, 2005, p.54). transforming learning into knowledge about experiences is a process in which concepts and language are important. learning starts with individuals who have developed knowledge in different situations and contexts, and have thus acquired something unique: “knowledge can be defined as the situation where insight is achieved in a context by pointing out information from data as the difference that makes a difference” (jensen, 2005, p.54). when using theories and concepts, we develop competencies in pointing out what matters in a context to help create coherent and meaningful interpretations of a situation. referring to action theory, which was developed in the soviet union by people such as vygotsky, jensen (2005, p.55) writes that: “the activity in itself is the context. the context is shaped by the activities involving individuals and artifacts.” this can be related to the social construction of reality (berger & luckman, 1966) in which we as human beings both construct a society and are constructed by it. the context is shaping the structure we learn and create knowledge within, and these activities can also be interpreted as processes that create this context. to sum up the central terms in this article, context, knowledge and arena each have a specific meaning. context is about coherence and connections and is shaped and changed all the time, depending on what i as an individual interpreter indicate and point out as something i observe and process. knowledge is related to how i have transferred experiences and information to be used in a specific situation or for a specific purpose. an arena can be identified as geographical and/or virtual, and is an institutional frame in which something can be mediated either within or through. an arena is therefore more stable than a context. in this article, i will use the following description: a contextual knowledge arena can be identified when individuals in specific settings are becoming aware of, taking into account and relating their situation to current or previous surroundings. method and material in this article,i i will draw on data collected in november and december 2010 of international students’ experiences with a flexible learning master’s program.ii all informants have been studying on-campus in bodø in the north of norway in either the second term of 2009 or the second term of 2010, though some of them were off-campus students at the time of the research.iii the material consists of three parts: the first are anonymous course evaluations collected as part of the evaluations system at the university. the second are answers on e-mailed questionnaires, whereas the third are answers on an issue in an exam paper. while writing this article i was confronted with methodological challenges such as the dilemma between how to profit from engagement and the importance of a more distanced critical research perspective (mcintosch, 2010; willumsen & studsrød, 2010). i have been part of the establishing process of this master’s program, and thus a colleague of the leader of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 122 program. i was abroad on sabbatical in 2009 when the master’s program was started in august of that year. in 2010, i was leader and internal assessor of a 10 ects-credit master’s course that was the focus of the norwegian open university (nuv) project, “border crossing in social work.” in addition, i was the leader of both this nuv project and a norwegian aid (nufu) project, and we combined these two projects and had a specific focus on the educational and ict collaboration between norway and malawi. the third part of this material is answers on exam papers from this 10 ects-credit master’s course, and the students received a request regarding participating in this evaluation after they had been informed about the grades on their exam. however, one can argue that students will try to answer politically correctly in an exam paper, thus the challenge when reading and analyzing this material is to look for descriptions of different experiences and less at the normative parts of these answers. the leader of the international master’s program was present in the room when 18 students (11 female and 7 male) anonymously completed the evaluation form. he reported that these students came from nepal (10), russia (2), canada (2), cameroon (1), palestine (1) and china (2). the material provided an evaluation with regard to five different courses offered during this second 2010 (autumn) term, and was systemized according to the different questions, and then summarized and presented in different parts of this article. the e-mailed questionnaires i sent out were answered by students from malawi (4), russia (4), nepal (5), norway (1), pakistan (1), turkmenistan (1) and china (1). seven out of 14 students gave permission to quote from their exam papers, which included students from malawi (2), russia (2), nepal (1), turkmenistan (1) and pakistan (1). nobody refused, though the other students did not answer on the one request that was sent out. when using quoted material, we identified the nationality of the student and gave them fake names. the answers from olga and tatjana from russia, tor from norway and kelly from china were collected from questionnaires, while the answers from christel from nepal, collen from malawi and mikael from turkmenistan are from their exam papers. the material from exam papers and questionnaires were coded and categorized into different themes and analyzed according to the research questions. a majority of the quotes in this article derive from answers to the following question: “you have yourself been crossing borders. discuss how your experiences, observations and communication across borders or cultures have developed your competence in contextual and comparative social work.” this question was part of the exam paper and included in the emailed questionnaire, while another question in the questionnaire focused on whether they preferred to stay in mixed groups or in their own language group when undertaking group work. critical views on studying within crossnational student groups are therefore asked for. the main material in this article is derived from questions that contain an evaluative perspective concerning the program. since these students had not completed all their courses at the master’s program when they answered the questionnaires, we could argue that their answers are biased or that critical students did not answer the e-mailed questionnaires. however, the picture one gets from the anonymous student evaluation is in accordance with the profile of the answers in which the respondent can be identified, and all students present in the class did answer the anonymous evaluation scheme. the focus of this article is not to evaluate the program, but to develop an understanding in terms of how students approach “contextual learning arenas” within a master’s program with an international student group. this article is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 123 explorative; hence, critical answers regarding videotaping an international class has led to the development of other forms of flexible courses, including one 30 ects-credit course to be implemented in 2013. why does context matter in social work? history and structure are contexts that are relevant in meaning making processes. thus, it is helpful to make a division between what is initiated within the situation and when we need to look at expectations prior to what is being played out in the present situation. “to help keep it simple, we will use two kinds of meanings: context and move. ‘context’ sets an expectation of possible meaning. (….) ‘move’ is an active association (often an action), called out by a specific situation” (harrison & tatar, 2008, p.110). collen from malawi tells that contexts matter as far as the application of theories, and he had to reconsider similarities and differences between countries. i also learned that the experiences of my friends from developing countries like nepal, cameroon, pakistan and malawi were similar. surprisingly, experiences from russia and china, which are much developed, seemed to be similar to the developing countries experience. collen from malawi reflects upon the various family structures in different contexts, as well as about the actual move within class discussions, when he was reflecting upon and comparing these different situations: much as one would observe that the social workers in the west and developed countries are better resourced than us from the developing countries, and one would think they have an easy profession, my observation proved otherwise. i observed that being resourced is also not everything. the social workers in the west are facing challenges in their work due to the disappearing of the family unit. the institutions are taking the family place. i observed that in the developing countries the family unit still remains intact, but is also overstretched and can also not cope, and it does not help much the social workers in developing countries with poorly resourced professions. this brought to me the realities and diversities of the social work profession practice. through explaining local practices of social work in the global classroom, students often reanalyze their own life worlds and enhance their understandings of their practices based on the feedback they get from each other. reciprocal and complementary participation by the students creates a fund of knowledge of people from other cultures; consequently, the collaborative learning process has the potential to transform an individual's perspective from parochial to global. this process increases critical reflection on local practices at home, which were often previously taken for granted. christel from nepal has acquired knowledge about how human rights principles and social work values can be used as a point of departure to challenge local cultures and customs: the sharing of experiences has provided me with an additional perspective to understand and analyze the widespread existing social problems in nepal such as gender-based violence, hiv and aids, caste-based discrimination and child labour among others. i have recognized that social problems have been upheld by social–cultural norms and expectations of the nepalese society. i can now argue how our culture and customs have become barriers in social work practice. i have gained values and knowledge that can enable me to address the above mentioned challenges. more importantly, i have been able to develop more openness towards reflecting critically on my social work practice. the fact that students from less social political developed countries were in majority was stressed as essential in creating a fruitful and encouraging class seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 124 ambience. tatjana from russia underscores this when focusing on nonwestern situations: in our case it was just perfect and wise, maybe at random, that the majority of students were from a developing country. it would be worse if the majority were from the "already developed countries"; in our case, we had "minor" majority and "major" minority. they discovered that context mattered regarding, e.g. economic development and social policy. tor from norway tells that: “i will remember the word ‘context’ for the rest of my life.” discussions led to a discovery of the diversity of social work in general depending on socio-cultural contexts, and that we need to be aware of how social work will be changed when taken from one context to the other. that you need to interpret social work theories in different contexts is stressed by collen from malawi, while some of the students emphasized that essential tenets within social work, such as social welfare and interventions, were culturally relative. discussions also facilitated a comparison on more specific topics such as the division of welfare tasks among the state, ngos and families in various socio-cultural contexts. they discovered that there are a lot of different ngos providing social services and supporting social spherea in asian and african countries, but on the other hand, students in some european countries (including norway) could see a strong position of government in social policy. as opposed to teachers and nurses, social work does not have a primary institutional base. it is exactly this “deeply contextual nature of social work that differentiates it from other professions” (healy, 2005, p.4). it is important to enhance social workers’ capacity to understand, analyse and respond to the different contexts they are working within, and to take seriously the impact of an institutional context shaping social workers’ practice approaches (ibid). to develop the dialogue pertaining to social work in different continents and between minority and majority countries will be very valuable for the general development of social work in an international context. it may provide us with more knowledge about what is general and what is specific to different contexts in social work. moreover, considerations regarding where people are situated and how to describe their local context are important. contextual social work is about how local circumstances affect social work practices, and this concept can be thought of as a tautology because all social work must be context-specific and rooted in historical and institutional traditions (lyngstad, 2012). why context matters in social work could be expressed rhetorically: social work without a context makes no sense. how varieties in knowledge arenas may enhance reflections among students social work is known as a professional field that works with clients of all different types and in many different settings, as the complexity of social work and practice is taught through multiple pedagogical tools and a multi-cultural ambience. this not only increased professional skills in relation to the global world, but also the students’ perspective on social work as a profession. when students participate in field visits, they can observe social work practices. collen from malawi appreciates being able to obtain first-hand information about social work in norway: “in this master’s program the element of observations to social work practice institutions in norway provided handson experience to us as students on some of the learnt theoretical aspects in social work.” what moves students make in a situation to pick out what is the important part of a context will differ according to their background experiences. when students are summing up experiences about how social work in a norwegian context appears, we anticipate that they will develop different contextual knowledge arenas to interpret the situation they encounter. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 125 studying in an international ambience, the concept of "culture" ceases to be an abstraction, as people from foreign cultures become personal connections to classmates. the multi-cultural ambience sometimes results in an increased empathy and understanding in encountering future clients, with tor from norway explaining how he achieved new insights: “cultural differences can be transferred to my own field easily. makes me think twice before i judge anything at all about another person’s challenges.” he developed reflections on complexities when learning from students coming from a very different context compared to his own. tor from norway stated: “i am more humble to social work and its challenges,” while kelly from china was very positive regarding all the new knowledge she has obtained in her master’s study: before i came to norway, i was a teacher, so i have not much experience about social work. however, after a period of study and discussion with classmates, i got much professional knowledge and new, interesting ideas. now, i have a full realization of my shortage and problems of chinese social work. from my point of view，chinese social work needs to accept much advanced experiences and change the work system. the experienced norwegian social worker and the chinese newcomer in the field of social work interpret the cross-cultural communication they have been part of differently; tor sees complexities and problems, while kelly sees opportunities and solutions. one way of interpreting what the chinese student said is that she is very enthusiastic about discovering something in a new context. what has exactly triggered this new knowledge is difficult for a native norwegian to understand because the different arenas she participates within are related to history and background. all learning is context-dependent and transformation processes occur because there must be some correspondence between the individual’s old knowledge and the information that should be transformed into new knowledge (jensen, 2005, p.56). the chinese student is involved in a multitude of (learning) arenas that can be shared with other people, while her different contextual learning arenas are unique. the collaboration of students in both the physicaland virtual room, as well as flexibility, is the key to the maintenance of effective interactions (aspden & helm, 2006, p.251). students need variation and differentiation in order to learn and to develop discernment (stacey & gerbic, 2007). the courses included different forms for group work, which was appreciated by the students, with some even suggesting the inclusion of more group work, such as project work, in future courses. being “critical friends” was something that many students enjoyed, which is a method where students work in pairs, and where one takes the time to develop an understanding of the issue and context of the other’s work. as a trusted person, the critical friend is supposed to offer a critique of the other student’s work, which was an unfamiliar pedagogical tool for a lot of the students. to be considered rewarding, it is important that the criticism is considered as being constructive. the students are asked to take a kind of supervisory role towards each other as critical friends. they are dealing with tense themes, discussing something she/he has produced, which is a challenge because many of the students are not skilled in supervision. a norwegian film entitled “restorative justice”iv was shown to the students, who were then asked to do a role play on a potential restorative justice situation in their local context, thereby creating a vital discussion with regard to the differences between different welfare systems. youtube was also easily used in the classroom of both lecturers and students, with short movie clips such as interviews working as an illustration of various aspects of social work practice or social issues as kick-off to a discussion. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 126 during the lectures, the students were often encouraged to come up with examples from their own socio-cultural backgrounds. this created a vital dialogue in the classroom, and several students stated that this increased their learning outcome of the program as a result of getting different stories and voices. in particular, the on-campus ambience creates space for informal discussions among the students, which was highly appreciated by several students such as, e.g. tatjana from russia: “discussions within and after each lecture were very important. it gave us opportunity to digest the topics and how we could apply them in local situations.” students discussed a lot during the breaks and gave their evaluation to issues raised during the class. this backstage knowledge arena can provide students with the confidence to be able to raise a question in class, or they can take the floor and ask for another students` time to listen to their individual context-specific reflections. cross-cultural communication and understanding also entail certain difficulties. in addition to language barriers, some students also admitted that they sometimes found it hard to understand foreign cultural contexts. olga from russia tells that as long as people in a multicultural group respect each other and listen carefully, they manage to communicate. sometimes they discussed sensitive issues, and then students had to develop skills in how to comment upon others’ opinions in a tolerant and careful way: during our lectures, we had so many discussions and we have heard so much about the things which are unacceptable in my society for example. sometimes, information was so “unbelievable” that many of us i am sure got the idea that it cannot happen nowadays. in the classroom, an intimacy and outspokenness developed, and students shared tense stories with each other. it was almost like opening up a taboo theme to be explored in this learning space. some students had the feeling that the opinions that were voiced seemed to be controversial, although some of the examples discussed from a local context were obviously alien to some of the other students. the exploration of tacit knowledge opened the possibilities for students to bring onstage contextual knowledge arenas that had formerly been kept silent or offstage. how recordings of interactive lectures create possibilities and problems in advance of offering studies there is the planning and documentation activity, in which it is relevant to discuss sharing, reuse, how technologies provide personalized learning and to evaluating education against costs. a learning design represents a variety of size and complexity from a course to an individual activity, whereas the scope of the design should be determined by the learning objectives to be met (falconer & littlejohn, 2007, p.43). lectures and seminars at this master’s program are streamed and sent by via the internet in real time. videotapes are then stored at the learning platform fronter, where access is restricted by username and password. students can therefore simultaneously follow the program on-campus, off-campus or both. when the university of nordland started to offer a flexibly delivered norwegian master’s program in social work in 2003, the off-campus students were actively participating (oltedal, 2006). they sent in comments and questions to the lecturers during the breaks, who were then able to respond to the students in the following lecture. this was made possible in part because a technician working in a half time position followed up with the off-campus students. every morning, he would log in and greet the students with a “good morning” and have a small chat. today, different technicians are streaming the lectures and it is not a part of their working contract to communicate with the distant students. those of us who have been lecturing for this program for many years are aware of this change, and we no longer ask for questions from seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 127 the off-campus students. moreover, there are much fewer distant online students today, and it is even rarer that they actively ask questions. we think this has also happened because it is no longer the responsibility of the technicians to develop contact with off-campus students as they did during the first years of this master’s program. to keep students in the virtual room as active knowledge producing participants in real time requires that their contributions are actively asked for by a study facilitator. the student group at this social work master’s program was diverse, not only in relation to their socio-cultural background, but also when it came to languageand academic skills. some of the students did not have backgrounds within social work, while among the ones who did, these backgrounds differed greatly. many students therefore needed more time to understand the content. for these students it was very convenient that all the lectures were taped and stored with the learning management system, which made the information available for later review and free from temporal constraints. as kelly from china expressed it: “anytime if i want i can watch the videos, and review again when it is more convenient.” the majority of the students had english as a second or third language, so when english is set as the standard language this imposes not only a linguistic, but also a cultural burden on those who do not have english as their mother tongue (morse, 2003). during the course, the students worked partly in separate language groups and partly in mixed language groups. in retrospect, they were asked what they preferred. the reported advantages with the separate language group were that these discussions were less time consuming, led to a better understanding of difficult topics and increased the reflection and interpretation on national aspects of the questions raised. some also emphasized that they felt more comfortable in these groups insofar as being able to talk their mother tongue with their national counterparts. advantages reported with the mixed language groups were that the international ambience enabled comparisons of certain situations in different cultural, economic and political contexts, analyses of ways of realization of concrete practices in different national contexts and the development of new skills and competencies. one knowledge arena activated within this actual program is a competence meeting (oltedal, 2009), in which a student is presented an issue and the group follows up with a discussion. this meeting will be evaluated as a reflective forum. arranging online competence meetings was usually set up by involving technical personal at different universities. the majority of the students were satisfied with the technological contribution, though some students emphasized the challenges during, for example, the skype conversations due to the bad quality of the internet connection between norway and malawi. although primarily regarded as positive, this demonstrates that the use of technology and virtual networks also poses some challenges to the participants. in addition to technology frustrations, these challenges often include coordination difficulties and timing/delay frustrations (morse, 2003). using computer-based communication forms implies a vulnerability to technology frustrations, as this reliability has the potential to disrupt the computer-mediated communications environment, thereby reducing the stability of the learning environment (morse, 2003). flexibility can be arranged along many dimensions, giving both students and universities a more beneficial situation. by creating a virtual learning community and integrating both an on-and off-campus program, the universities potentially attract more students. courses which can be attended by both firstand second-year master’s students are less expensive, thus gaining support when education is evaluated in terms of costs. although much of the quality of this program is linked to the possibility of gathering students in a geographical area, it has created the flexibility to stay off-campus in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 128 certain parts of the study program, thereby creating opportunities for more students to access. mikael from turkmenistan has been able to compare the situation as an on and off-campus student. he stayed on campus in bodø for the first year, then moved to another continent and completed his second year off-campus: “geographical barriers are eliminated” and “what made it possible for me to continue in such a quick pace is the possibility to choose when i could listen to the lectures.” he communicated online with his fellow students, and tells how he was: “able to communicate with a wide range of students from different countries participating in this program.” off-campus students who seldom appear on the campus tend to stay more in contact with teachers than fellow students (oltedal, 2009). taking into account the learning design of this blended program, it is doubtful as to whether this student would have developed a communication with fellow students of the strength and volume evident in this case without having met face-to-face and developed relationships as students at the same program during the previous year. tatjana from russia raises a critical awareness concerning the use of videotaping in the classroom: too much of taping. it’s ok when it is the teacher taped only, he/she tells the theory and doesn’t give a subjective, personal evaluation of the incidents. but students were inspired to tell from their context and be subjective. we all started to feel being under control, then as i consider, it is not the cultural differences which are the obstacle, but political contexts, and being critically reflective, students are able to discuss openly politics in their own countries, but “pass the mic” phrase became the main silencing tool, but it’s my opinion. maybe teachers also were less inspired to give subjective opinions under the control of the taping machine. i say this not because i’m from russia and we are used to be suspicious, we discussed it with my friends during the breaks. tatjana highlights what we can relate to as an ethical concern about our human moral existence. first, we have the meeting and then develop reflections. how is the ethical relationship between students in a videotaped discussion and the unknown future spectators? this is not a play with a predetermined manuscript, as their participation resembles “reality tv” and that maybe students should be made more aware of this image. although videos are shown within a restricted learning platform, you do not know who will have access to look at these videos. additionally, there are no restrictions for students to invite visitors to look at videos presented at the fronter platform. the university of nordland is aware of this problem with students being taped and the videos published within the fronter management system, as technicians are instructed to only use close pictures of the lecturers. prior to the study registration, the students are informed that the lectures will be streamed and published, though they do not individually sign an agreement. however, the dilemmas that students from russia and china in particular are highlighting need to be considered in relation to further developments of the blended learning design of this program. concluding remarks since the revolution of e-mail and the worldwideweb in 1994, universities have changed dramatically in their pedagogical structure, increasingly embracing computer-mediated communication-, learningand teaching opportunities (morse, 2003). since then, a growing and changing globalized scenario, with its different realities and demands – such as student seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 129 diversification, student mobility, internationalization and the cost-efficient availability of ict – have all led to the development of innovative pedagogical experiences and initiatives (larsen et al., 2008). these new opportunities that technology has brought are said to have the potential to democratize education, connecting people and organizations across cultures (snyder, 2005), as well as bring educational opportunities to all students regardless of their economic circumstances or geographic location (cifuentes & murphy, 2000). this article has explored student expressions on cross-cultural communication and how they learn and re-orientate when their local context is brought into the global classroom. they have studied in a flexible, blended learning context, although most of them relate heavily to on-campus experiences. students profit from having lectures taped and stored at the learning platform, thus oncampus students who are not very familiar with social work or english can revisit lectures when convenient. students located all over the globe where there is net access will be able to access the master’s program. problems with interactive lectures are related to both synchronic internet sending and to storing the lectures at the learning management platform. students, especially those coming from russia and china, are worried about who could possibly be in the virtual audience or obtaining access to the stored videos. from the formal perspective, students who apply for this master’s are informed that lectures are streamed, videotaped and sent by the internet and then stored in the learning management platform, fronter. however, it is possible to imagine the misuse of information or worries about unwanted monitoring and censorship. the challenge regarding ethical reliability leads in the direction of looking for other technical solutions for this international program. in this actual program, a process was started towards replacing the streaming of lectures where students are present with e-lectures, where only teachers are videotaped. when teaching is videotaped, it presents a challenge and makes some students become tacit in class. to share tense issues and critical incidences, students need to develop confidence towards teachers and fellow students, as discussions may flourish more when the microphone is turned off. at a general level, students usually profit from a variety of learning designs within a given educational program, in part because students are different and in part because one’s attention is usually sharper when something new or different is taking place. instead of leaning heavily towards a teacher monologue, a dialogue creates a more active learning situation for the students. when exploring local practices, social work students need to develop a safe surrounding for reflecting upon silenced history and taboo issues, which can also be supported by both preand after off-stage discussions during recess time. varieties in knowledge arenas in an ethical reliable situation enhance reflections among students. although differences were detected, the students also realized common principles such as human rights and social justice that were made relevant across the borders. they developed reflection pertaining to their own context by understanding, discussing and exploring other practices through stories told by fellow students, in addition to staying and living in a new context. a sensitivity to, as well as an understanding of, political, social and cultural diversity, does enhance cross-cultural communication. the majority of students did not come from welfare states; hence, the agenda was dominated by examples and discussions in relation to societies with a lack of material resources. this non-western mixture of students was experienced as empowering because other topics not dominant in international textbooks could emerge. furthermore, they experienced that cultural differences could also be transferred to their own field of practice. students say that from being seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 130 exposed to this variety of contextual backgrounds, they learned to think twice before judging or drawing conclusions about another person’s challenges. this creates an awareness and social presence when a feeling of intimacy is developed with regard to whether they identify with each other or they get to learn about alien situations. the international program thus promotes crosscultural communication. when individuals coming from different contexts meet and discuss, they create important knowledge arenas. references aspden, l. & helm, p. (2006): making the connection in a blended learning environment. educational media international. 41(3), 245-252. bateson, g. (1972): steps to an ecology of mind. new york: ballantine books berger, p.l. and t. luckman (1966): the social construction of reality. new york: penguin books, bligh, b. & lorenz, k. (2010): the rhetoric of multi-display learning spaces: exploratory experiences in visual art disciplines. seminar.netinternational journal of media, technology & lifelong learning 6(1) retrieved from http://seminar.net/index.php/volume-6-issue-1-2010/141-the-rhetoric-ofmulti-display-learning-spaces-exploratory-experiences-in-visual-artdisciplines2 bourdieu, p. (1979/1995): distinksjonen (la distinction). oslo: pax forlag, cifuentes, l. & murphy, k. 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(2012): contextual social work and internationalizing social work education: two sides of the same story? journal of social work. first published february 21, 2012 as doi: 10.1177/1468017311435202. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 131 mcintosch, p. (2010): action research and reflective practice, london: routledge, morse, k. (2003): ‘does one size fit all? exploring asynchronous learning in a multicultural environment’. jaln 7(1). oltedal, s. (2006): fleksibelt tilrettelagt masterstudium som gjer det irrelevant å skilje mellom nærog fjernstudent, i: frå erfaring til kunnskap. noen lærdommer fra utviklingsprosjekter 2005. norgesuniversitetets skriftserie 2/2006, tromsø. oltedal, s. (2009): using competence meetings as a practical reflective method, seminar.net media, technology and lifelong learning, 5(2). retrieved from http://seminar.net/index.php/volume-5-issue-2-2009/123-using-competencemeetings-as-a-practical-reflective-method so, h.-j., & brush, t.a.(2007) student perceptions of collaborative learning, social ..., computers & education, doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2007.05.009 stacey, e. and p. gerbic (2007): teaching for blended learning research perspectives from on-campus and distance students. education and information technologies 12(3), 165-174. doi 10.1007/s10639-007-9037-5 snyder, k. (2005): the digital culture and communication: more than just classroom learning. seminar.net – international journal of media, technologies and lifelong learning 1(2). retrieved from http://seminar.net/index.php/volume-1-issue-2-2005previousissuesmeny-109/44-the-digital-culture-and-communicationmore-than-just-classroom-learning willumsen, e. and i. studsrød (2010): høyere utdanning og praksisnær forskning i profesjonsutdanningene – et eksempel fra sosialt arbeid. uniped 33(1), 25-36. wahlstedt, a., p. samuli and m. niemelä (2008): from e-learning space to e-learning place. british journal of educational technology 39(6), 1020-1030. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 2 – 2012 132 i thanks to phd student marit ursin at the university of nordland and professor karen healy at the university of queensland for their discussions and cooperation in the initial phase of this paper. ii in 2009, the following projects and networks provided financial support to establish the 120 ects-credits: “master’s in social work with a comparative perspective,” funded by the university of nordland; “border crossing in social work” (2008-2010), funded by the norwegian open university (nuv); “child, gender and comparative social work” (2007-2012), funded by nufu (norad); “master’s program in comparative social work in the arctic (20072010 ), funded by siu and “the thematic network on social work university of the arctic,” funded by the norwegian ministry of education. iii the participants who studied off-campus throughout the course are not included in this research. iv resources from the norwegian open project “border crossing in social work” was used to produce this film. title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 website preferences of finnish and mexican university students: a cross-cultural study miguel santiago department educational sciences and teacher education, faculty of education, university of oulu email: miguel.santiagobustos@student.oulu.fi pirkko hyvönen department educational sciences and teacher education, faculty of education, university of oulu and university of lapland email: pirkko.hyvonen@oulu.fi or pirkko.hyvonen@ulapland.fi abstract this paper is focused on understanding internet use and comparing crosscultural differences according to the contents and preferences of the websites that are most visited by two groups of university students from finland (n = 30) and mexico (n = 30). the following research is an exploratory qualitative study with some basic statistics. a questionnaire was used in this study as a data collection instrument. the findings show that in both groups, university students prefer websites about social networking (facebook), sending email (msn), videos (youtube), multiplatform applications (google), educational sites (university of oulu), and wikis (wikipedia). this demonstrated that both groups have an interest in sharing ideas and meeting friends. the differences reveal that finnish students use their university’s website more regularly than the mexican student respondents and that they tend to implement their ideas more often. furthermore, this study explored how university students use the internet and what type of influence the internet has on them. the emotional effects suggest that almost quarter of students reported using the internet to escape negative feelings, such as depression or nervousness. the findings provide information for university teachers about students’ habits and prior knowledge regarding internet use for educational purposes. the information will be helpful when designing learning and teaching in multicultural student groups. keywords: internet, websites, finland, mexico, contents, cross-cultural differences http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:miguel.santiagobustos@student.oulu.fi mailto:pirkko.hyvonen@oulu.fi seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 236 introduction the internet is a mediator of person-to-person communication patterns because of the constant interrelations it creates, affecting the people’s lives both online and offline. people use the internet to carry out important developmental tasks, such as identity formation, social interaction, and the development of autonomy. in addition, the internet can provide a learning environment, and people can learn how to transfer their new skills from the internet to real-life interactions (amichai-hamburger & furnham, 2007). several previous studies have evaluated the positive and negative effects the internet has on everyday life. for instance, stepanikova et al. (2010) found a positive relationship between internet use and loneliness and a negative relationship between internet use and life satisfaction. in the same way, several classifications have been performed to categorize the amount of time that people spend on the internet (e.g., the addicts and the affiliated) and the positive and negative consequences this has for quality of life (amichaihamburger et al., 2007; meyen, pfaff-rüdiger, dudenhöffer & huss, 2010; weinstein & lejoyeu, 2010). also, huang and chang (2009) carried out a study using a database of 101 countries. they evaluated the similarity (e.g., language and religion) of websites among countries and found that internet users in countries sharing common social norms were likely to visit the same websites. in general, previous studies have been focused on evaluating a group of users in a specific country, evaluating the positive and negative consequences that the internet has regarding quality of life, and the time that users spend on the internet. however, few studies have assessed the type of information that is published on the internet, the contents that are consulted by users on websites, and whether users from different countries access the same websites. therefore, this study makes an effort to fill a gap by determining how students use the internet (websites) in formal and informal contexts and what factors influence this process. this research is focused on the comparison of crosscultural factors regarding internet use between groups of university students from finland and mexico, specifying the characteristics of and preferences regarding the websites that are most visited by both groups. literature review role of the internet the internet influences people’s lives in many ways. mckenna et al. (2002) mention that the internet not only provides an opportunity for people to talk among themselves, but it may also be the preferred place for self-expression because the internet environment may be perceived as sufficiently safe for expressing various aspects of people’s identities. meyen et al. (2010) have developed a typology with seven types of internet users (the virtuosi, the professionals, the addicts, the aficionados, the companions, the cautious, and the affiliated). this typology of internet users shows that access to the internet varies widely in terms of the ability to take full advantage of the internet. this ability and the relevance of internet use to daily life are influenced by the habits of users, for example, socialization, gender, and personal environment. likewise, the internet can create a safe environment, which has a particular significance for people with social inhibitions, such as introversion and neuroticism. the internet has a positive effect on these individuals because it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 237 enables them to acquire more information about social anxiety disorder and provides a medium through which socially inhibited people can acquire social skills and confidence (amichai-hamburger et al., 2007). additionally, adults tend to learn new ways of carrying out traditional tasks, e.g., a conference using skype rather than a traditional conference call. in the same sense, for younger generations, the internet is the “normal way” to perform all kinds of activities. these people are involved in a world guided by the internet. this is an intrinsic and innate part of their lives, and it is not possible for them complete many tasks without this tool. it includes all kinds of activities, such as social interactions, study, leisure, playing, etc. the current generation is clearly the generation of the internet (amichai-hamburger & barak, 2009). the magnitude and the abilities of the internet are part of every aspect of our lives, both social and professional, and this has only increased over the years (amichai-hamburger, 2002). moreover, anderson et al. (2004) have described how the web’s capacity building via hyperlinking may be compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental schema and to the subsequent development of mental structures. now, one of the major changes in communication practices and social interaction is social networking sites. by using the social networks, an individual can find others with similar interests for both romantic and social purposes (ross, orr, sisic, arseneault, simmering, & orr, 2009). the overwhelming success of social networks such as facebook poses a number of important questions regarding their impact (ryan & xenos, 2011). also, facebook is associated with all generations of internet users, being a notable communications tool among the student population and academic institutions. this means that social networks are frequently involved in the area of education by connecting current and potential students and delivering instructional content (paul, baker, & cochran, 2012). nadkarni et al. (2012) developed a model suggesting that facebook use is motivated by two primary needs. the first is the need to belong, and the second is the need for self-presentation. demographic and cultural factors may contribute to the need to belong. the use of new applications such as social networks creates new communication patterns in the digital age (movius, 2010). through the internet, others with similar interests can be found without difficulty while preserving anonymity. this process allows people to share aspects of themselves online with far fewer risks (amichaihamburger et al., 2007). some people see the internet as a venue in which they can express their emotions openly. also, there are risks associated with anonymity. for instance, some people obtain benefits by deceit, extortion, human trafficking, selling drugs, or stealing information from others. additionally, as defined by colley (2008), the impact of the internet on different social groups and genders are a significant area of research. their study provided an analysis of the impact of the internet on men’s and women’s lives. amichai-hamburger et al. (2011) have assessed the influence of internet use on social interactions in separate life domains (e.g., with family members, friends, or colleagues). their investigation has confirmed that internet use can enhance the social lives of its users. in addition, internet use may have psychological effects. for example, johnson et al. (1991) argues that the relationship between internet use and psychological well-being may be positive or negative, depending on how internet use influences social processes. robinson et al. (2000) found that the internet may reduce stress and provide social support. it may enable the creation of new supportive social ties that would not otherwise exist, improving the social integration and psychosocial health of individuals (stepanikova et al., 2010). regarding the risks of internet use, yu et al. (2013) argue in their study that problematic internet use can be described as an seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 238 excessive preoccupation that has resulted in academic difficulties and physical health problems for the people involved. cultural factors culture is defined as the shared cognition and patterns designed by a set of people for identifying, describing, explaining, and responding to the social factors around them (lederach, 1995). hofstede defines culture as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others” (hofstede, hofstede & minkov, 2010). this definition emphasizes that culture is always learned; it is not inherited. it is derived from one’s social environment, not from one’s genes. in addition, it explains that culture is a collective action that is perceived as a dynamic process rather than a passive one and supports individual and group identity formation (hofstede et al., 2010). culture is shared and is factor in an individual’s social interactions. therefore, people in human societies generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations. moreover, in contemporary culture, identity is connected much more loosely to group membership. people have a place within a multitude of cultures, and their identities are different in each one. however, in many cases, an identity is only partial or temporary (curtis & pettigrew, 2009). today, globally influential factors have effects on societies and their cultures because these norms determine a set of values and beliefs that are largely shared around the world (castells, 2009). cross-cultural differences manifest themselves in several forms: they provide the basic value orientations, beliefs, and worldviews that are prevalent in a given context. however, these differences can be understood by recognizing and describing cultures according to a series of dimensions (markus & hamedani, 2007). hofstede (2010) describes how every person belongs to a number of different groups and categories. consequently, individuals unavoidably contain several layers corresponding to the various levels of their cultures. cross-cultural differences relate to country (where there is a dominant culture regarding practices and values throughout a nation), region (some minorities are at the crossroads between the dominant culture of the nation and their own traditional group culture), religion (the result of previously existing cultural value patterns), gender (how cultural groups understand and relate to members of the opposite sex; in many cultures, there are different rules for men and women), generation (this separates grandparents from parents and parents from children; there are differences in practices and values between generations), and social classes (this is associated with educational opportunities and a person’s occupation, profession, and income). because cross-cultural differences are related to race, gender, physical and mental abilities, and religion, this has an impact on cultural orientations. it is hard to identify any person using a single cultural label. learning is considered a cultural activity. the human capacity to learn is universal, and learning has performed a historically important role in constructing communities within specific cultures (curtis et al., 2009). some people view learning as the transmission of knowledge from experts to novices. other people base their view of learning on a learning approach in which beginners learn by collaborating and interacting with people who are more experienced. although the effectiveness of collaborative learning particularly computer-supported collaborative learning is substantiated by scientific evidence, its success depends entirely on certain conditions in which students interact actively (dillenbourg, järvelä, & fisher, 2009). today, learning is seen as a social activity in which students set goals for their seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 239 learning, monitor them, and make changes that are needed to achieve their goals. during the process, students regulate their emotions, motivation, behaviour, and cognition (zimmerman, 1989). learning involves an awareness of how people think, understand, and learn about language, culture, knowledge, and how these are related. it also includes concepts such as identity, experiences, diversity, and individuals’ own cultural thoughts and feelings (scarino & liddicoat, 2009). the internet has a significant effect on cultures. the implementation of new technology makes us think that societies will become more and increasingly similar and connected. people use the internet to carry out important developmental tasks, such as identity formation, social interaction, and the development of autonomy. the impact of the internet on people is increasingly exponentially (mesch, 2009). in addition, internet use can, unfortunately, be associated with problems, such as a lack of technological skills, the consumption of time (internet addiction), and making poor use of time. cross-cultural differences have varying influences on people due to race and ethnicity, gender, physical and mental abilities, and religious and other beliefs; these influence cultural orientations. it is therefore important to identify the effects the internet has on different groups of people. method aim and research questions the aim of this study was to know, compare, and describe the contents (characteristics) and preferences of websites that are most frequently visited by groups of university students from finland and mexico (whose cultures are different). additionally, this paper is focused on determining the cross-cultural differences between participants in both countries regarding internet use. this research project attempts to answer four questions: 1. what do university students in mexico and finland use the internet for? 2. what are the most visited websites by respondents in both countries? 3. what characteristics do these websites have? 4. are there cross-cultural differences in internet use among mexican and finnish students? research context the research context is higher education in finland and mexico. finland is located in europe’s north-eastern region, and it shares a border with russia to the east, the gulf of finland and estonia to the south, the gulf of bothnia and sweden to the west, and norway to the north and northwest. the finnish education system is comprised of the following: 1) one year of voluntary preprimary education, 2) a nine-year basic education (comprehensive school), 3) upper secondary education, comprised of general education and vocational, and 4) higher education provided by universities and polytechnic colleges (bachelors, masters, and doctoral studies). the entire seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 240 educational system is provided free of charge by the state (ministry of education and culture of finland et al., 2014). mexico is located in north america, and it shares a border with the united states to the north, guatemala and belize to the south-east, the gulf of mexico and caribbean sea to the east, and the pacific ocean to the west. the mexican educational system is comprised of the following: 1) two years of pre-primary education, 2) six years of basic education (primary), and 3) three years of secondary education. pre-primary, primary and secondary are denominated as basic education, which is compulsory; this education is provided for free by the state. in addition, 4) upper secondary education is provided after secondary education (high school), and 5) higher education consists of four types of institutions: universities, technical institutes, colleges, and technical universities (bachelors, masters, and doctoral studies) (secretariat of public education, 2014). internet penetration the population of finland is about 5.4 million people; in finland, 92.4 individuals per 100 people can access the internet via some device type (computer or mobile) and connection, according to the statistics of the world bank in 2014. in the case of mexico, its population was about 123 million people in 2014. in mexico, 44.4 individuals have access to the internet per 100 people. in summary, there is a notable difference between both countries in terms of access to the internet; in finland, the number of people who can access the internet is quite high, while in mexico, less than half of population can access the internet (the world bank, 2014). participants volunteer university students (n = 60) took part in this study. the finnish student participants (n = 30) were from the faculty of education (university of oulu, finland). questionnaires were handed out to students at the university of oulu. in mexico, the surveys were conducted in the faculty of agriculture (department of biology) at the autonomous university of nayarit; student population (n = 30). in finland, 73.3% of participants were between 20 and 29 years old. only 26.7% of respondents were between 30 and 44 years old. in mexico, 96.7% of respondents were aged between 19 and 27 years old. only one respondent was between 28 and 31 years old. in this research, 73.3% of finnish students were female, and 26.7% were male. also, 56.7 % of mexican students were male, and 43.3 % were female. questionnaire questionnaires are a major tool of inquiry for teachers, sociologists, and other social scientists. they can provide information about people’s attributes, such as their age, gender, social characteristics, etc. (buckingham & saunders, 2004). in order to find answers to the research questions of this study, a questionnaire was developed that consisted of questions to enable the students to provide information. university student volunteers were requested to complete these questionnaires. there were a total of twelve questions, and the questionnaires were written in english. in addition, we added some comment boxes so that the respondents could provide personal responses to any specific question. the main idea of these questionnaires was to identify and describe internet use by students in finland and mexico. the individual questionnaires contained the following questions: (1) how often do you access the internet? (2) how many hours do you spend surfing the internet per day? (3) where do you use the internet most often? (4) how often do you use the internet to http://www.minedu.fi/opm/yhteystiedot_ja_asiointi?lang=en http://www.minedu.fi/opm/yhteystiedot_ja_asiointi?lang=en seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 241 escape feelings of depression, moodiness, or nervousness? (5) when you access the internet where do you prefer to be? (6) do you prefer having online friends to real friends? (7) what do you use the internet for? 8) what kind of internet sources do you use? (9) what browser do you use? (10) what search engine do you use? (11) what are the websites you most often visit? (12) what are the characteristics of these websites? (see appendix a for more information on the questionnaires). data analysis based on the questionnaires, as a next step, we have conducted this research project using descriptive methods, measuring and obtaining frequencies and percentages from the answers to the survey questions. these analyses were conducted with ibm spss statistics 22. this process enables us to examine and describe internet use in accordance with the most-visited websites and contents for finnish respondents and mexican students. the research findings from the analysis of the questionnaires are presented and interpreted in the following section. results table 1 presents the frequencies and percentages of the answers of respondents (finland and mexico) to questions (1), (2), and (3). table 1: descriptive methods (access to the internet, daily internet usage, and the location of internet access) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 242 as expected, there are some similarities and differences between the answers of the finnish respondents and mexican students. for instance, 33.3% of finnish respondents answered that they spent ‘more than 8 hours’ using the internet per day, while in mexico, the most-mentioned amount of time spent on the internet was between ‘2 and 5 hours’ per day (46.7%). the results indicate that finnish people use the internet more per day. additionally, 83.3% of finnish students indicated that they prefer to access the internet at home. the results in mexico were very similar (76.6 %). this shows that people in both countries prefer to access the internet at home. in addition, it was very clear that all respondents from both countries accessed the internet every day. table 2 shows the results regarding respondents’ feelings about using the internet to escape feelings of depression, moodiness, or nervousness (question 4). table 2 results regarding escaping feelings of depression, moodiness, or nervousness (frequencies and percentages) the finnish and mexican respondents indicated that they rarely used the internet to escape such feelings. it is notable that 23 percent of students in both countries reported escaping such feelings occasionally or often. there was some degree of similarity within the results for this category. table 3 illustrates the findings regarding preferences in accessing the internet and having online friends or real friends (questions 5 and 6). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 243 table 3 results regarding preferences in internet access and having online friends or real friends (frequencies and percentages) ninety percent of finnish respondents said that they prefer to be ‘sometimes alone, sometimes with friends’ when they visit the internet; no one answered ‘always with friends,’ and few people responded with ‘always alone.’ the mexican students mostly indicated they preferred to use the internet ‘sometimes alone, sometimes with friends’; the second most frequent response was ‘always alone,’ and no one answered ‘always with friends.’ according to the survey, the results are very similar to those of finnish students. the difference is that mexican students responded with ‘always alone’ more often. also, the majority of people in both groups ‘always prefer to have real friends over online friends.’ table 4 indicates the results for question (7). table 4 findings regarding internet use by participants in this study finnish students mentioned that they often preferred to use the internet to obtain information (literature, news, etc.), send or receive emails, study, and engage in social networking. the respondents indicated that they sometimes accessed the internet for online shopping; work/business; downloading or watching movies, music, etc.; and checking the weather. they never reported, as the main answer, using the internet for playing games. some people indicated that they visit the internet to do other things. the mexican respondents reported that they often access the internet to obtain information, study, and engage in social networking. these students commented that they sometimes use the internet for sending or receiving emails, playing games, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 244 and downloading and watching movies. they do not use the internet for work/business, online shopping, checking the weather, etc. according to the data, there are some similarities regarding internet use, such as obtaining information, sending or receiving emails, studying, and social networking. the differences were mainly in the areas of online shopping, work/business, checking the weather, playing games, and the ‘other’ category. table 5 shows student perceptions about internet use to access internet sources (question 8). table 5 findings for studying on the internet (internet sources) the following category relates to internet use for study. the finnish respondents mentioned that they ‘often’ use learning resources, such as wikis, blogs, etc., and ‘sometimes’ use online courses, online dictionaries, and databases. the mexican respondents reported that they ‘often’ use wikis, blogs, etc. and ‘sometimes’ use databases and online dictionaries for study purposes. the main response was ‘never’ regarding online courses. this indicates that there is a similarity regarding the use of wikis, blogs, online courses, and online dictionaries. the major difference was related to the category of online courses; the two groups of respondents provided opposite answers. table 6 presents the findings regarding the most-used web browsers and search engines for finnish and mexican students (questions 9 and 10). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 245 table 6 results for web browser and search engines we found some similarities and differences between the responses of the finnish and mexican students. it is important to establish respondent preferences for web browsers and search engines because these applications enable students to search for content on the internet. in response to the question about web browsers, finnish student respondents reported that 36.7% used firefox to search for information on the internet. google chrome was the second most preferred option, followed by safari and internet explorer (one student preferred opera). in the case of the mexican student respondents, the most popular browser was google chrome (60%), followed by firefox and internet explorer with the same number of mentions. no additional browsers were mentioned by mexican students. this indicates that the finnish student respondents tended to use more web browsers than the mexican student participants. in addition, in both countries, the popular web browsers are the same; only the orders of preference are slightly different. according to the questionnaire results regarding search engines, the majority of students from finland use google, and only three people mentioned bing as their preferred option. the mexican findings show that 93.3% of students said that google was the best option for them, and ask and metacrawler were mentioned only once. this shows that google was preferred as the best option for students in both countries; this result is clear and concise. table 7 indicates the websites that were most frequently accessed by respondents in both countries (question 11). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 246 table 7 frequency and percentages for the websites visited most frequently by respondents these websites are the most preferred websites according to the students; we mention the responses per country and their content. in finland, facebook was the most preferred (17.1%). the second was the university of oulu’s site (15.5%), followed by google (14.7%), msn (7%), and hs and youtube with 4.7%. according to the results from the mexican student participants, facebook was the most popular (26%). the second most popular was youtube (22.1%), followed by google (12.5%), msn (11.5%), and wikipedia (6.7%). this shows that the most preferred website is the same in both countries (facebook). this is a social networking website. the second most popular website in finland was that of the university of oulu, which is related to student studies. in the case of the mexican student participants, the second most popular site was youtube, which is the most popular website in the world and shows various types of videos. in finland and mexico, the next option was the same, google, which is a website with multiplatform applications, such as google drive. the fourth most popular website was msn in both countries. this website is used for sending and receiving emails and checking information such as news and gossip, among other things. the next most popular sites in finland were hs and youtube. the first is a newspaper, and the second was mentioned above. in the case of mexico, the next most popular site was wikipedia. it is a popular website which is used to search for all types of information. regarding the characteristics of these websites, as seen in the responses to question (12), websites about social networking (facebook) were the most popular, with percentages of 17.1% (finland) and 26% (mexico). sending and receiving emails, gossip and news (e.g., msn), videos (youtube), multiplatform applications (e.g., google), educational content and universities (e.g., university of oulu), and blogs and wikis (e.g., blogilista and wikipedia) were the most frequently accessed websites in terms of content characteristics. there are many similarities between both countries. in addition, most people seldom visit websites related to sports or playing games. additionally, almost no one visited websites related to religion. there were, however, notable differences, such as the fact that some people in finland visited websites reporting the weather (ilmatieteenlaitos). in mexico, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 247 no one mentioned a similar site. the finnish student participants said that they visit newspapers whereas this was not the case for mexican student participants. students from mexico visited websites related to japanese anime, while finnish student participants did not. similarly, mexican student participants visited online shopping sites (e.g., mercado libre), while in finland, this was not as common. the mexican student respondents accessed websites such as skype and websites for watching or downloading movies and tv series more frequently than those in finland. the final observation was that accessing the website of the respondent’s home university was common among finnish respondents, while in mexico, the university website was used, but not frequently. in addition, websites with blogs and wikis are very popular in finland, while in mexico, the respondents showed a preference for wikipedia. discussion this study has identified cultural similarities regarding websites accessed by students from finland and mexico; facebook is the most popular website visited by students in both countries. this means that they prefer, and have an interest in, sharing ideas, information, pictures, and social interactions (social networking). this is in accordance with ross et al. (2009), who indicates that by using social networks, individuals may find others with similar interests for both romantic and social purposes. in the typology developed by meyen et al. (2010), the respondents belong to “companions” category, because they have favourite websites such as facebook, where the students interact socially. in addition, these findings are related to the work of movius et al. (2010), in which he describes how social networks have a significant impact on communication patterns in contemporary society. websites containing videos, such as youtube, are very popular, as well as websites devoted to gossip, news, and sending emails, such as msn; websites containing blogs, such as blogilista; and websites of multiplatform applications, such as google. this demonstrates the global influence of internet use, which may even represent a form of cultural imperialism (castells et al., 2009). some of these applications have useful functions, such as google (a set of applications); share scientific or positive information within groups or blogs, such as on facebook or wikis; or contain tutorials or guides in videos, such as youtube. the cultural approach of the respondents with regard to religion was clear. these people do not visit these types of websites or those dedicated to sport. we also found that participants had a very positive attitude towards learning through internet use (study reasons) using all types of available resources. interestingly, almost one-quarter of the students reported escaping feelings such as depression or nervousness by using the internet. this suggests that these students find a safe environment by accessing the internet, which affects them positively. this is because the internet may provide a medium that allows freedom, reduces stress, increases social support and social integration, improves the mental and psychological well-being of individuals, and creates new ties and strong feelings that otherwise would not exist (amichaihamburger et al., 2007; stepanikova et al. (2010). common interests may develop due to social networks such as facebook. these social networks are notable communication tools within the student population and academic institutions, as described by paul et al. (2012). finland and mexico are countries with high internet penetration and similar social norms. therefore, as was cited by huang (2009), people in countries with similar social norms access similar websites. in addition, for example, the respondents in this study accessed the internet for all types of activities (e.g., studies, social interactions, etc.). today, internet use is particularly relevant to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 248 every aspect of their lives, both professionally and socially (amichaihamburger et al., 2009; amichai-hamburger et al. (2002). some cross-cultural differences were identified by comparing the characteristics of the most-visited websites and internet use by participants from finland and mexico. this study found that the respondents from finland tended to perform new processes or implement their ideas more often (innovation). for example, in the case of the use of web browsers, the students from finland use a variety of browsers, while participants from mexico use only a few. as another example, finnish students visit and use websites where they interact and develop creative applications more often (e.g., the university of helsinki and wikis). in the case of mexico, these processes are used infrequently and with some restrictions. other differences that we have identified include the use of media in the form of newspapers and weather channels. this was identified in the students from finland. the mexican respondents indicated that they did not check this sort of material frequently. conclusion this research project has examined in detail the effects that the internet has on various groups of people. as researchers, our intention is to ensure the implementation of improvement measures for internet use among students according to their needs. therefore, this study suggests that the internet should be used as a learning environment in the educational and learning processes and that emphasis should be placed on developing university websites that provide multifaceted interaction. in addition, it is important that we understand that the internet is a technological tool that should enable us to grow as people and societies. individuals must be able to identify and use its features properly. the tool facilitates the acquisition of considerable knowledge (e.g., science), access job opportunities, and information that is hidden or censored regarding political issues, among other things. we also recommend that future studies should consider how the internet impacts students of all ages (e.g., their feelings and emotions) and focus on sensitizing parents to monitoring the content that their children are exposed to on the internet. in addition, this study should be repeated in order to determine whether the trends it has found remain constant or change. we would like to mention some potential limitations that may have influenced the study results. first, the respondents in this research project were from different faculties; in mexico, the respondents were from the faculty of agriculture, while the participants from finland were from the faculty of education. this could have impacted the research findings, due to differences in the participants’ chosen interests given their respective backgrounds. however, our chief concern in this research project was to involve students from one university in mexico and from another in finland, without giving undue weight to (considering) whether these students were from different faculties. second, the rather small number of respondents in this research project may suggest results that cannot be generalized. this exploratory study only can provide some interesting preliminary cross-cultural differences. third, the possibility that some students felt that not all website content was culturally acceptable in their society cannot be ruled out, and this in turn may account for their decision to access only commercial and traditional websites rather than others. acknowledgments we would like to acknowledge the autonomous university of nayarit and dr. rocío vega-frutis for practical support in carrying out this research in mexico. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 249 references amichai-hamburger, y. 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(1989). a social cognitive view of self-regulated academic learning. journal of educational psychology, 81(3), 329-339. appendix a contents of websites (internet) questionnaire please complete the survey, mark your responses “x” (close questions) and write your responses into the box (open questions) 1) how often do you access the internet? once a week several times a week every day 2) how many hours do you spend surfing the internet per day? less than two hours 2 5 hours 5 8 hours more than 8 hours 3) where do you use the internet most often? home school library http://www.sep.gob.mx/work/models/sep1/resource/1447/1/images/sistemaedumex09_01.pdf http://www.sep.gob.mx/work/models/sep1/resource/1447/1/images/sistemaedumex09_01.pdf http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/it.net.user.p2 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 251 other (please specify) 4) how often do you use the internet to escape feelings of depression, moodiness or nervousness? never rarely occasionally often 5) when you access the internet where do you prefer to be? always alone sometimes alone, sometimes with friends always with friends 6) do you prefer having online friends to real friends? yes sometimes never 7) what do you use the internet for? often sometimes never get information (literature, news, science etc.) send or receive email online shopping work / business studies playing games downloading music, video, films etc. use a social networking, chatting check the weather other activities if you use the internet for “other activities” in the last question, please specify seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 252 8) what kind of internet sources do you use? often sometimes never databases online courses online encyclopedias, dictionaries etc. wikis, blogs others if you use other sources, please specify 9) what browser do you use? (e.g., mozilla firefox and internet explorer) 10) what search engine do you use (e.g., google, and yahoo) 11) what are the websites you most often visit? (please list your top five websites) 12) what are the characteristics of these websites? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 253 website preferences of finnish and mexican university students: a cross-cultural study abstract introduction literature review role of the internet cultural factors method aim and research questions research context participants questionnaire data analysis results table 5 findings for studying on the internet (internet sources) constraints in film making processes offer an exercise to the imagination towards considerations beyond dichotomies: the study of material culture faces challenges in online playgrounds michaela rizzollii phd student in educational science institute for history and european ethnology university of innsbruck e-mail: michaela.rizzolli@uibk.ac.at abstract this paper problematizes dichotomous thinking in academia, exemplified by the study of material culture in online playgrounds. the purpose of this paper is to deepen our understanding of how dichotomies can lead to misconceptions and misrepresentations of phenomena. this paper argues that there are three dichotomies which account for a number of difficulties in dealing with material culture in online playgrounds: first, the critical division between the material and non-material dimensions of material culture. second, the distinction between immaterial and material space. third, the dichotomy between real and virtual. instead of using a “dichotomous” way of thinking, the article advocates an “interdependent” way of thinking. keywords: ecer, material culture, digital material, mmorpgs, dichotomies introduction at the beginning of the 20th century studies of material culture were associated with museum anthropology. by the mid-20th century material culture had become a neglected research subject (heidrich, 2001). by the end of the century material culture had begun to receive growing attention from academic fields as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, literary studies, history, psychology, sociology, and education science (könig, 2005). the exponential growth of scientific publications on material culture, the emergence of a demand for increasing research in this area, and a multidisciplinary attraction for material culture mark a paradigm shift in the humanities: known as the “material turn”. according to hauser (2000), the “material turn” should be understood as an attempt to assure oneself of the physical environment in a world where new media have taken precedence. likewise, scharfe (2005) describes the increasing volume of research concerning materiality as a result of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 mailto:michaela.rizzolli@uibk.ac.at dominance of virtuality. the emergence of digitality and the paradigm shift towards materiality, material objects, and material artefacts within diverse academic cultures has resulted in various distinctions, dichotomies and juxtapositions in academia. dichotomies specifically, this paper invites you to think about the role of dichotomies in academia. according to kirschner (2006), dichotomies occur frequently in scientific discourse. in line with the definition given by wikipedia, he refers to dichotomy as the division of something into two halves. firstly, this division is “mutually exclusive”; nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts. each side has its own rules, values, slogans and norms. secondly, this division is “jointly exhaustive”; everything must belong to one part or the other. the key problem of dichotomies is that they force one to opt for one side or the other. the dangers of dichotomous thinking are exemplified in the present paper through the study of material culture in online playgrounds. the theoretical considerations are based on my research experience during my doctoral research project on material culture in massive multiplayer online roleplaying games. the project focuses on the relationship between gamers and various “digital objects”, such as buildings, weaponry, pets, and jewellery encountered by gamers in “massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (mmorpgs)”. these items might be embedded in modes of sociality, might be negotiated when players engage with the digital environment or might even become subjects. the aim of my dissertation is to foster our understanding of material culture in online playgrounds. material culture in online playgrounds the primary concern in studies of material culture is the “mutual relations between people and objects” (woodward, 2007, p. 14). this point is supported by miller (2008), who has illustrated in several studies on material culture that the analysis of objects tells us something about the ways people relate to each other, as well as about the ways they relate to themselves. moreover, material culture studies are based on the assumption that the analysis of relationships between persons and things is an important source for learning about how culture is transmitted, received and produced. in brief, scholars of material culture studies “engage with the minutiae of everyday life while retaining […] a commitment to understanding humanity as a whole” (miller, 2008, p. 6). in the wake of recent digitalisation and the transition from material to digital an increasing number of people engage with different digital technologies, digital platforms and digital worlds. in september 2012, the journal of material culture published a special issue dedicated to digital subjects and cultural objects. this issue emphasises that an increasing number of people are becoming ““digital subjects”social actors whose experiences, thoughts and relationships play out through and across an ever-expanding variety of digital platforms” (salmond, 2012, p. 213). in interacting with the digital environment “digital subjects” meet various “digital objects” such as the internet, software, application or code. the authors of the aforementioned publication are unanimous that since an increasing proportion of people are becoming “digital subjects” and are therefore engaged with “digital objects” “digital worlds” are of paramount importance for the study of material culture. according to rodney (2009), to date digital material culture has attracted scant scholarly attention. in his article excavating second life, rodney expounds on the concept of “cyber archaeology”, developed by jones in 1997. jones proposed a new way of understanding digital communities through the study of cultural artefacts. in contrast to jones (1997), who analysed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 60 technologies used by digital communities, rodney (2009) studied digital objects created by people within “cyber-space”. his study consists of a series of observations in “second life” regarding the digital material culture and, in particular, it focuses on digital places conserved as “heritage” within “second life”. jones and harrison draw the attention of classical archaeology to digital settlements and examine the possibilities and limitations of cyber-archaeology. recently, horst and miller (2012) published a book entitled digital anthropology, where they bring key anthropologists of digital culture together. through a range of case studies on google earth, facebook, and second life the book explores the question of how human and digital can be defined in relationship to each other and how humanity is constantly manifested differently across the cultures. this work embraces various aspects of digital culture without specifically focusing on digital material culture. in my view, the study of material culture faces challenges in online playgrounds. i argue that the difficulties in addressing material culture in online playgrounds are threefold: first, the critical division between material and non-material dimensions of material culture. second, the distinction between immaterial and material space. third, the dichotomy between real and virtual. this paper will examine each of these dichotomies in greater depth. in doing so, the article will shed light on some dichotomies in academia which give rise to problems, points of conflicts and misconceptions. this paper aims to move beyond binary oppositions by questioning dichotomous ways of thinking and thereby transcending binaries. material versus non-material culture the first dichotomy focuses on the term material culture a somewhat vague term that carries ambivalent meanings. on the one hand, material culture refers to objects that are material. this point of view places emphasis on the physical aspect of objects. objects are comprised of matter and form. they are light or heavy; their surfaces have very specific tangible properties. on the other hand, the term material culture considers various non-physical applications of which material culture is composed. these non-material dimensions include any mental or ideational aspect of material culture (hahn, 2005). people surround themselves with the most bizarre and mundane objects. they do so not only because material objects fulfil material needs, but also because material objects acquire significance and meanings in the course of people’s lives (hahn, 2005; kramer, 1995). to a large extent material and non-material dimensions are analysed in parallel rather than put into a networked relation. this is because these studies have failed to take into account the fact that culture consists of material and non-material dimensions. the binary opposition of the material and non-material dimensions of culture were reinforced by the emergence of digitality. according to hirschberger (2010), digitality generates altered and intangible things while transforming the material objects into an electrical, technological or virtual trace. since the emergence of new media, several authors express their concern about the disappearance of material dimensions of culture in the digital age. selle (1997) discusses the question of which things will endure the age of images and simulations. in his view material objects are sentenced to death. likewise, flusser (1999) brings to our attention the disappearance of things and the appearance of “non-things” (p. 85). he argues that our environment is no longer made up of physical objects. instead, it is composed of ‘non-things’, and of information. according to negroponte (1996), “the change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable” (p. 4). the world is moving towards an “information superhighway” (negroponte, 1996, p. 12). the new objects are no longer characterized by form and matter, but rather by immateriality, transparency and weightlessness. the world “is marked by a transformation of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 61 atoms into bits and of matter into mind” (van den boomen, lammes, lehmann, raessens, & schäfer, 2009). recently, there has been an increasing amount of literature on “digital objects” as virtual goods, engaging with key debates in contemporary consumption studies. for example, martin (2008) has investigated the use-value, exchangevalue and role of virtual goods in “second life”. her study shows that virtual goods “lack any use-value in terms of physical needs”. in fact, virtual goods in “second life” are used primarily for virtual representation and serve as symbols of status, individuality and belonging. by contrast, landay (2008) published an essay in the journal of virtual worlds research, where she criticizes commodification and consumerism in “second life” as something one does when one does not know what else to do. but a year later she admits that she had “underestimated some important aspects of virtual goods” (landay, 2008). in her second paper entitled rethinking virtual commodification or, the virtual kitchen sink she highlights the social aspect of owning something in a virtual world (landay, 2009). unlike landay (2009), lehdonvirta (2010) investigates the attribution of cultural meanings to virtual goods. “the results of this research show that people consume virtual goods for much the same reasons they consume material goods: to establish social status and live up to the expectations of their peer groups, to build and express identity, and to seek solutions to problems, real or imagined” (p. 886). diverse as these works were in character and style, they all focused on consumer culture and virtual goods. existing accounts fail to resolve the contradiction between material and non-material, regardless of the deep insights gained by preliminary studies into the nature of our current consumer culture in digital spaces. digital objects are addressed as non-material ones and the non-material dimensions such as values, meanings and social relations of material culture have precedence over the material ones. they have tended to overlook the material dimensions of material culture in online spaces, whereas material and non-material dimensions are simultaneously opposed and intertwined. as van den boomen et al. (2009) state in the volume digital material “material objects can take on many forms and formats. […] when it comes to digital material, the lines separating objects, actions, and actors are hard to draw, as they are hybridized in technological affordances, software configurations and user interfaces” (p. 10). meanings, political-ideological tendencies and values are treated as incorporated elements in materiality rather than as a metaphysical substance floating in digital space. this volume does not mention of material objects as material or non-material, but as “in-material” (van den boomen et al., 2009, p. 9). this term, introduced by schäfer (2008), defines digital material as “incorporated in materiality” (van den boomen et al., 2009, p. 9). in other words, “digital material has to be in another material” (lehmann, 2012, p. 168). the volume digital material is an attempt to move beyond the material versus non-material model and proposes a material understanding of different digital artefacts. i argue that in order to examine material culture online we have to take into account the material and nonmaterial dimensions of digital objects and of digital space. digital spaces are immaterial this leads us to another notion that is taken for granted: digital spaces are immaterial. in the 1990s popular discourse interpreted the emergence of technologies and new media as an unprecedented revolution of the material world. several authors (flusser, 1999; negroponte, 1996; selle, 1997) predicted a new world, a “new home of mind” (barlow, 2007): the “cyberspace” (gibson, 2003). scholars portrayed a world in which the physical past was razed to the ground or reduced to ashes. they waved goodbye to material objects. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 62 this particular zeitgeist is cogently expressed in barlow’s (1996) “declaration of the independence of cyberspace”. he states: “there is no matter here” and no rules or legal concepts based on matter, because cyberspace is a “global social space” situated outside the known borders. he argues in favour of the dissociation of cyberspace from the material and real world. real versus virtual the dichotomous conception of virtual in opposition to real is strongly related to the previous material versus immaterial model. the real versus virtual model is a leftover from the early thinking about the internet. networked mediated communication was conceptualized as activity and space distinct from the real world (lehdonvirta, 2010b). moreover, bray and konsynski (2007) claim that “internet has been about virtually disconnecting from one’s body” (p. 22). new media were considered as removed spaces, detached from reality and materiality. the world was portrayed as being new, quite different from the old one. also, massive multiplayer online games (mmos) were presented as separate worlds, located outside the old and real world within the dichotomous “real world” versus “virtual world” model. according to lehdonvirta (2010), the terms “in-game” and “out-of-game” are based on the assumption that “the game” and “the rest of the world” are independent of each other and are distinctive. this conception draws a clear dividing line between “inside” and “outside” (copier, 2007, p. 133). moreover, online playgrounds are regarded as being magic. the “magic circle” concept was introduced by salen and zimmerman (2003) and became an influential concept in the field of game studies. salen and zimmerman adopted the term “magic circle” from the dutch historian huizinga. zimmerman and salen used the term “magic circle” as a metaphor to illustrate that games are located outside of everyday life, within their own boundaries of space and time, and liberated from material interests and moral consequences. “in effect, a new reality is created, defined by the rules of the game and inhabited by its players” (salen & zimmerman, 2003, p. 96). the authors create an imaginary reality where distinct boundaries of space and time evolve by separating games from “real” or “ordinary” life. in recent years, several scholars have heavily criticized the concept of the “magic circle”. in contrast to salen and zimmerman (2003), who interpret “game space as an isolated magical wonderland” (copier, 2007, p. 133), copier suggests a cross-medial understanding of experiences of play in order to move beyond the real-virtual dichotomy. copier (2007; 2009) argues that huizinga referred to the “magic circle” merely as an example of a playground. also, frissen, de mul, and raessens (2013) point out that huizinga used the term “magic circle” only four times in his book homo ludens: twice to list different sorts of playgrounds, and twice in very general sense. in fact, huizinga’s (1995) study of the play-element in culture highlights the central role of play in human culture. however, the magic circle concept and cyberspace separatism are influential concepts, from which current researchers still draw their research design. lehdonvirta (2010b) argues that much influential scholarship on massive multiplayer online games (mmos) is rooted in the “magic circle” concept in game studies and the cyberspace separatism of early internet thinking. in his paper virtual worlds don’t exist he questions the real versus virtual dichotomy and discusses various dimensions of this dichotomous model. he argues that all dimensions of the real-virtual dichotomy, such as virtual worlds seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 63 versus real worlds, virtual economy versus real economy, virtual identity versus real identity, virtual population versus real population, and virtual law versus real law are seriously flawed. for example, players sell their in-game items on trading sites for real-world money. for this reason we need to accept that we now live in a hybrid environment made of intertwined and overlapping systems, constantly interlinked, both real and virtual, online and offline. as early as in 2006, taylor discusses the false assumption that arises from the real-virtual model: “to imagine we can segregate these things game and nongame, […] virtual and real not only misunderstands our relationship with technology, but our relationship with culture” (p. 153). copier (2009) has also argued that the concepts of cyber separatism and magic circle are problematic because they hide the ambiguity and complexity of actual games and play. to answer the question of where virtual space ends and where the real world begins is therefore an impossible undertaking. interdependence as seen in the previous chapter new media were constantly situated within a dichotomous order: material versus immaterial on the one hand and real versus virtual on the other hand. this binary order marks a clear dividing line between “here” and “out there”. “here” is characterized by materiality and reality, and “out there” is framed as immaterial and virtual. furthermore, studies on material culture address material and non-material dimensions of material culture as opposed categories. i would argue that in order to address the challenges of material culture studies in a digital age it is necessary to move beyond the dichotomous ways of thinking. guilds in “world of warcraft” meet in offline settings, and make their presence known in forums, chats and video sharing sites, so that a strict demarcation between real and virtual is no longer appropriate. furthermore, technological specificities as well as the socio-political relations and the effects on social realities are an inherent aspect of new media (lehdonvirta, 2010b). therefore, a clear distinction between material and immaterial is obsolete. instead of using a dichotomous way of thinking, i argue in line with kirschner (2006) for an “interdependent” way of thinking. according to the macmillan dictionary, “interdependent” is an adjective which describes ““things” related to one another in such a close way that each one needs the others in order to exist.” wikipedia describes “interdependence” as a relationship in which each member is mutually responsible to and dependent on others. according to kirschner (2006), in this definition it is fairly evident that interdependence consists of two elements: first, an independent aspect (i.e. individual responsibility) and second a dependent one (i.e. dependent upon others). kirschner proposes this term in the context of interdependent learning. he uses this term to conceptualize education as a system composed of interdependent elements. to speak of “digital” objects as “interdependent material” allows the material qualities and the symbolic meanings of ‘digital’ objects to be addressed as a tangled web of interdependent elements, which are at the same time dependent on and independent of each other. i use the term “interdependent” to define material and immaterial dimensions of material culture in digital spaces as simultaneously opposed and intertwined. conclusion in this paper i have proposed that the study of material culture in online environments is a bold venture (1) as long as the term material culture implies a division of material and non-material dimensions of material culture, (2) as long as digital spaces are perceived within a dichotomous material versus seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 64 immaterial model, and (3) as long as digital spaces are situated within a realvirtual dichotomy. even though a change in thinking about these dichotomies can be perceived, this paper has shown that there is a significant body of literature rooted in these seemingly self-evident notions. although recent studies have made an attempt to move beyond dichotomies, this paper has highlighted the fact that dichotomies are utterly compelling. these compelling analogies also influence the conceptual framework from which researchers draw their research design. on the one hand, dichotomies are “mutually exclusive”, while on the other, they are “jointly exhaustive”. for this reason i see a need to call into question the established dichotomies in academic discourse. i argue that in order to work towards a multilingual, multicodal and multicontextual understanding of key concepts and key issues in learning, education, media and culture considerations beyond dichotomies are necessary, because, as exemplified by the field of material culture studies in a digital era dichotomies become implicit, compelling, and give rise to false assumptions. references barlow, p. j. (2007). unabhängigkeitserklärung des cyberspace. in k. bruns & r. reichert (eds.), cultural studies: vol. 18. reader neue medien. texte zur digitalen kultur und kommunikation (pp.138–140). bielefeld: transcript-verl. (original work published 1996) bray, a. d., & konsynski, b. (2007). virtual worlds: multi-disciplinary research opportunities. the data base for advances in information systems, special issue on virtual worlds, 38(4), 17–25. copier, m. (2007). beyond the magic circle: a network perspective on role-play in online games. utrecht university. retrieved from http://psychology.vanguard.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2013/02/apastyleessentials.pdf copier, m. (2009). challenging the magic circle: how online role-playing games are negotiated by everyday life. in m. van den boomen, s. lammes, a.-s. lehmann, j. raessens, & t. m. schäfer (eds.), digital material. tracing new media in everyday life and technology (pp.159–172). amsterdam: amsterdam univ. press. flusser, v. (1999). the shape of things: a philosophy of design. london: reaktion. frissen, v., mul, j. de, & raessens j. (2013). homo ludens 2.0: play, media and identity. in j. thissen, r. zwijnenberg, & k. zijlmans (eds.), contemporary culture. new directions in art and humanities research. (pp. 75-92). amsterdam: amsterdam university press. gibson, w. (2003). burning chrome. new york: harpercollins publishers. hahn, h. p. (2005). materielle kultur: eine einführung. berlin: reimer. hauser, a. (2000). erb-sachen: historische sachkulturforschung als geschlechterforschung. in g. mentges (ed.), münsteraner schriften zur volkskunde/europäischen ethnologie: vol. 6. geschlecht und materielle kultur. frauen-sachen, männer-sachen, sach-kulturen (pp.21–48). münster: waxmann. heidrich, h. 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(inter)dependent learning: learning in interaction. retrieved from http://www.ou.nl/docs/expertise/nelll/publicaties/%28inter%29dependent %20learning%20-%20learning%20is%20interaction%20%20inaugural%20address%20utrecht%20university.pdf könig, g. m. (ed.). (2005). studien und materialien des ludwig-uhland-instituts der universität tübingen: vol. 27. alltagsdinge: erkundungen der materiellen kultur. tübingen: tübinger vereinigung für volkskunde e.v. kramer, s. k. (1995). dingbedeutsamkeit. zur geschichte des begriffes und seines inhaltes. nürnberg: anzeiger des germanischen nationalmuseums und berichte aus dem forschungsinstitut für realienkunde. landay, l. (2008). having but not holding: consumerism & commodification in second life. journal of virtual worlds research, 1(2). retrieved from https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/355/265 landay, l. 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(2008). the comfort of things. cambridge, malden, ma: polity. negroponte, n. (1996,). being digital. new york: vintage books. rodney, h. (2009). excavating second life. journal of material culture, 1(14), 75–107. doi: 10.1177/1359183508100009 salen, k., & zimmerman, e. (2003). rules of play: game design fundamentals. cambridge, mass: mit press. salmond, a. (2012). digital subjects, cultural objects: special issue introduction. journal of material culture, 17(3), 211–228. doi:10.1177/1359183512453531 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 66 schäfer, t. m. (2008). bastard culture: user participation and the extension of cultural industries. utrecht: all print utrecht. scharfe, m. (2005). signatur der dinge. anmerkungen zu körperwelt und objektiver kultur. in g. m. könig (ed.), studien und materialien des ludwig-uhlandinstituts der universität tübingen: vol. 27. alltagsdinge. erkundungen der materiellen kultur ; (pp.93–117). tübingen: tübinger vereinigung für volkskunde e.v. selle, g. (1997). siebensachen: ein buch über die dinge. frankfurt am main u.a: campus-verl. strauss, a. l. (1978). a social world perspective. in k. n. denzin (ed.), studies in symbolic interaction (vol.1). greenwich, ct: jai press. strauss, a. l. (1984). a social world perspective. in k. n. denzin (ed.), studies in symbolic interaction (vol. 5, pp. 123–139). greenwich, ct: jai press. taylor, t. l. (2009). play between worlds: exploring online game culture. cambridge, mass.; london: mit. van den boomen, m., lammes, s., lehmann, a.-s., raessens, j., & schäfer, t. m. (2009). introduction: from the virtual to matters of fact and concern. in m. van den boomen, s. lammes, a.-s. lehmann, j. raessens, & t. m. schäfer (eds.), digital material. tracing new media in everyday life and technology (pp. 7– 20). amsterdam: amsterdam univ. press. woodward, i. (2007). understanding material culture. los angeles: sage publications. http://www.macmillandictionary.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/ i phd student michaela rizzolli is a scholarship holder of the university of innsbruck, the austrian academy of science and the austrian agency for international cooperation in education and research. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 67 http://www.macmillandictionary.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/ towards considerations beyond dichotomies: the study of material culture faces challenges in online playgrounds michaela rizzolli0f abstract introduction dichotomies material culture in online playgrounds material versus non-material culture digital spaces are immaterial real versus virtual interdependence conclusion references title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 storytelling – edu: educational digital – unlimited? theo hug professor, institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies university of innsbruck coordinator of the interfaculty innsbruck media studies research forum, austria email: theo.hug@uibk.ac.at abstract it is undisputed that storytelling is one of the oldest practices of humankind and has been ever-present in social life. this traditional role of narrating has gained new and unexpected topicality in the last decades in various fields and in many respects. today, 'digital storytelling' is widely established as an umbrella term. related phenomena are being discussed in terms of mediation, mediatization, multimodal forms of narration and others. as to educational issues, the situation seems to be rather ambivalent. on the one hand, digital storytelling offers enhancements of learning experiences, chances for meaningful learning and democratization, and also for bridging formal and informal contexts. on the other hand, we can observe a persistent adherence of educational institutions to "writing" as the dominant medium in many countries, thus negating media ecologies and the multimedia environment. especially regular schools are widely conceptualized as "monomedial provinces" (j. böhme), thus being justified as "literal countercultures" in which it is imperative to defend literality as the foremost achievement in the process of civilization, whereas otherwise calls for "new literacies" cannot go unnoticed. the contribution reflects on various understandings of 'digital storytelling' and underestimated dimensions in this regard. it aims at pointing out conceptual problems, and it sounds out limitations of the utilization of digital storytelling in educational contexts. keywords: storytelling, digital stories, utilization of digital storytelling, conceptual analysis, education (bildung), literacies, subjectivation, governementalization. "the truth about stories is that that's all we are." (king 2003: 2) introduction it is undisputed that storytelling is one of the oldest practices of humankind and has been ever-present in social life. this traditional role of narrating has gained new and unexpected topicality in the last decades in various fields and in many respects. today, 'digital storytelling' is widely established as an umbrella term. there are many historical roots and developmental strands, some of them seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 17 concerned with formal and informal contexts of learning, formation, and education. in view of the rapid proliferation of concepts and practices of digital storytelling it seems acceptably to step back for a moment and look, how stories about digital storytelling are being told, especially as related to educational issues. at first, i want to approach the topic from a wider context by accentuating a few points of departure and basic considerations. first of all, at least from historic and anthropological viewpoints there is a lot of evidence that narration and storytelling seem to be inescapable. it has a lot to commend that a basic necessity, a kind of an anthropological need of stories and storytelling across cultures can be claimed. having said that, from epistemic and systematic viewpoints this can be questioned. even if we take abstract mathematical arguments as specially regulated forms of storytelling, there are examples for efforts and practices beyond narration and storytelling (for example, zen practices or concrete poetry). from both historic and systematic viewpoints, metatexts like the end of the great narratives (lyotard 1984) became very influential. according to lyotard's view, in the sphere of modernity knowledge was closely tied to an ‘ideological’ framework, for example the emancipation of humanity or prosperity of everybody through capitalism. these common ‘modern’ ideologies have lost their obligation and power of legitimation in the 20th century in remarkable ways. on the one hand, there are new "great narratives" (global digital opportunities, global digital divide, neoliberal ethics considering market-like structures in terms of metaethics prior to other existing ethical beliefs). on the other hand, we can witness an immense expansion of documented stories in various contexts and in relation to qualitative and quantitative dimensions. we can observe manifold processes of differentiation of modes, mediatization, and mediation of creating, telling, sharing, listening to stories today (cf. lundby 2008a). moreover, there's no end of the road in sight, and processes of digitization seem to be irreversible. with this in mind, i want to reflect on understandings of 'digital storytelling' and to sound out some options, forgotten or underestimated dimensions and also limitations of the utilization of digital storytelling in educational contexts. first of all, if we look at practices of combining properties of things and activities it seems that language characteristics play a role in the context of storytelling, too. in the english-speaking world, hardly anybody seems to have a problem with the expression 'digital storytelling'. the same counts for expressions like 'digital painting' (tonge 2008) or 'digital musician' (cf. hugill 2007). in the germanspeaking world, for example, one would talk of boring, exciting, emotionally moving, funny, sad, entertaining, fictitious, true or lying stories or forms of storytelling. expressions like "radiogeschichte" or "fernsehgeschichte" commonly refer to the history of radio or tv and rather seldom to stories being told by means of radio or tv, or to any kind of experiences one might have made with these media. although meanwhile, in the german language terms like 'digitales geschichtenerzählen' or 'digitale narration' do show up here and there, they are scarcely used.i on the other hand, many people started talking about digital stories in various ways, and even more started creating and telling digital stories. so, how about the meaning of this term and its use? – a widely used definition is offered by the center for digital storytelling (cds), a non-profit, community arts organization in berkeley, california. on their website, 'digital story' is defined as a "short, first person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds." the same counts for 'digitale geschichte' which rather refers to the historic developments of digital technologies and not to a 'digital story'. ii although the definition is focussing on voices of individuals the concept is rooted in community-based initiatives, and it's meant as a form of democratization, counting on people's agency, at the same time working as counteragent to official historical accounts. consequently, at the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 18 core of the work of cds there is "a commitment to narrative, an enduring respect for the power of individual voices and a deep set of values and principles that recognize how sharing and bearing witness to stories can lead to learning, action, and positive change" (ibd.). though, values and principles include statements like "everyone has many powerful stories to tell" and "sharing stories can lead to positive change."iii while the concept of the cds focuses on workshop related activities and community-based learning (cf. lambert 2006), academic papers mostly start from wider understandings. for example, nick couldry uses the term 'digital storytelling' for "the whole range of personal stories now being told in potentially public form using digital media resources" (couldry 2008: 42). and kirsten drotner places an emphasis on everyday life contexts. she uses the term 'digital storytelling' for a "multitude of ongoing, often ad-hoc and haphazard everyday narratives that people give shape to through their appropriation of portable devices and online services like blogs, wikis and social filesharing and networking sites like flickr, facebook and youtube" (drotner 2008: 63). then again, digital media not only facilitate individual, collaborative or everyday exercises. they facilitate digital narratives and digital storytelling as related to exceptional situations, too. after all, why should "winning the future", the state of the union address recently delivered by president obama at the u.s. capitol not count in terms of digital storytelling? iv since this paper is written in english, i want to take an open and tentative characterization of the key terms as a starting point for my considerations. so, by 'digital stories' – as an abbreviated manner of expression – i mean discursively embedded, narrative (co-)productions which are created, presented, received and passed on publicly in formal or informal contexts by means of digital media. according to this working definition 'digital storytelling' refers to concepts, structures and practices as related to processes of creation, mediation and transmission of digital stories. these understandings are open to both further development and critique, too, as i will argue in this paper. making use of digital storytelling in educational contexts in the past decade, digital storytelling has been promoted in many areas such as public broadcasting, community development, public health, social services, museums, and other informal educational contexts. above all, it has been advocated in formal educational contexts, too (cf. porter 2004; behmer et al. 2006; dogan & robin 2008; frazel 2010). there it has been recognized as a valuable tool that fosters collaboration, development of literacies and decisionmaking skills, bridging formal and informal contexts, and pupils and students involvement in learning processes. in his essay on "the educational uses of digital storytelling" bernard robin (2006) refers to the storytelling concept of the cds and argues that definitions of 'digital storytelling' generally "revolve around the idea of combining the art of telling stories with a variety of digital multimedia, such as images, audio, and video" (ibd.: 1). he summarizes his understanding as follows: just about all digital stories bring together some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video and music to present information on a specific topic. as is the case with traditional storytelling, digital stories revolve around a chosen theme and often contain a particular viewpoint. the stories are typically just a few minutes long and have a variety of uses, including the telling of personal tales, the recounting of historical events, or as a means to inform or instruct on a particular topic. (robin 2006: 1) based on this understanding, he explains the three different types. first of all, there are personal narratives that foster learning about diverse cultural and family backgrounds and that "can be used to facilitate discussions about current issues such as race, multiculturalism and the globalization that is taking place in today’s world" (robin 2006: 2). furthermore, "a student who creates such a story seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 19 can benefit from sharing that story with others and thereby use information as a way of eliminating some of the distance that foreign born students feel between themselves and their peers" (ibd.: 2). secondly, digital stories are considered as documentaries that examine historical events, focusing on supporting documents and factual aspects and possibly providing an opinion or a specific message, too. and thirdly, there are stories that inform or instruct – in other words: "stories that reflect instructional material in content areas such as math, science, health education and instructional technology" (ibd.: 3). robin does not interpret these types as domains which are to be distinguished strictly. he rather argues that, as a matter of fact, "stories can be created using combinations of these three methods" (ibd.: 3). apart from other practically motivated differentiations v − cognitive, emotional, body, or social learning, types of digital storytelling in educational contexts could be distinguished along with didactical settings, forms of narrative and multimodality (cf. kress 2010), concepts of framing, or understandings of education, formation, and learning. for example, even without going deeper into models and theories of learning, a few basic distinctions like the following demonstrate that different versions of digital storytelling can be created depending on the favored understanding of learning: − learning driven by motivation, technology, problem, market, or interest, − goal oriented, problem based, or situated learning, − instrumental/mechanistic or expansive vi − functional or self-reflective learning, learning, − living or alienated learning, − conscious or unconscious dimensions of learning, − self-organized and externally organized learning, − learning of individuals, organizations, generations, or societies. it is noticeable that digital storytelling is often described as "tool" for learning and instruction. this counts for over-all descriptions in terms of "an effective instructional tool for teachers" or "an effective learning tool for students" (cf. robin 2006: 3-4) as well as for descriptions in which special aspects are foregrounded, for example, the use of storytelling in educational digital games as a motivational tool (cf. bopp 2007). no matter how we conceptualize learning, the "tool-thinking" on its own appears to be a reduction of complexity yet. in addition, this thinking quite frequently is connected with misleading metaphors like "knowledge transfer" or "distributing education", although it is widely accepted today that coming to know through processes of active construction by the learner is better described in terms of structurally coupled processes of communicators and recipients, and consequently of teachers and learners, too. however learning is defined as process of transformation based on activities of meaning-making or behavior modification, as far as it refers to storytelling it's more than about technical or didactical tools. one might argue that this kind of talking of tools is a figure of speech and should not be taken too seriously. above all, there are arguments for advancements of educational efforts by means of storytelling on various levels and in manifold respects. for example, in their study on teachers' use of digital storytelling in their classrooms dogan and robin (2008) report that in spite of the all over positive responses during a workshop series less than half of the teachers continued to use digital storytelling during the implementation period who throughout describe "positive effects on student performance, an increase in 21st century skills, and increased motivation and engagement levels in their students" (ibd.: 1). maxine alterio (2002) argues that in contrast to former understandings of storytelling as "lightweight, soft, not a real learning tool" (ibd.: 1) more recently the reflective movement has shown that storytelling can be advanced in terms of creative learning capabilities and significant learning is possible "when it is used seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 20 in thoughtful, reflective and formalised" (ibd.: 2). she says: "when educators support students to share and process their practice experiences in these ways, storytelling can: − encourage co-operative activity; − encompass holistic perspectives; − value emotional realities; − link theory to practice; − stimulate students' critical thinking skills; − capture complexities of situations; − reveal multiple perspectives; − make sense of experience; − encourage self review; − construct new knowledge." (alterio 2002: 2) similar arguments are brought forward, also in view of teaching and learning in higher education where "storytelling" often is seen as something in contrast to serious academic reports or distracting from really important scientific course content. on the one hand, multimodal ways of knowing (raimist et al. 2010: 283f) and the power of multimodality (cf. hull & nelson 2005) are sounded out - on the other hand, the effectiveness of digital storytelling for student reflection is evaluated (cf. jenkins & lonsdale 2007) and aspects of meaningful technologyintegrated approaches for engaged student learning are discussed (cf. sadik 2008). moreover, in her chapter on "theorizing through digital stories" rina benmayor (2009) describes how critical theorizing can be fostered by means of digital storytelling and how co-existing theorizing strategies can show up in students’ digital stories and their corresponding theoretical essays. in view of these and other contributions, it stands to reason that there is hope for innovation in higher education and also for "transmedial school-cultures" (böhme 2006).vii critical considerations having said that, these arguments should not hide the fact that there are problematic aspects, underestimated dimensions and also limitations of the utilization of digital storytelling in educational contexts, too. as to challenges and critical issues of digital storytelling in educational contexts we can find a wide spectrum of considerations ranging from lack of technical support or continuing education programs to allegations of edutainment. robin (2006) argues that "bad storytelling using digital media will simply lead to bad digital storytelling" (ibd.: 5) and issues of copyright and intellectual property are not always easy to handle, not to forget about the fact that digital storytelling "can be very time consuming" (ibd.: 6). other considerations are dealing with critical aspects of digital spectacle and making proper use of digital props (cf. lambert 2006: 89-90) or demarcation lines between issues of education or learning and therapeutic contexts or health professions (ibd.: 155). in my view, there are some more basic critical issues which seem to be underestimated if not overlooked commonly in discourses about digital storytelling. as already mentioned above, describing digital storytelling as "tool" for learning and instruction corresponds with instrumentalistic connotations and reductionist views. stories about digital storytelling read different if we take metaphorical extensions into account, too. for example, if we consider notions of "tools" in the foucaultdian sense of methods and techniques through which human beings constitute themselves, issues of subjectivation and caring come into question which otherwise easily are blanked out. reflecting practices or "technologies of the self" (foucault 1988) in the context of digital storytelling goes beyond the optimization of media applications or didactical settings and encourages the analysis of power relations. furthermore, there are interesting details of the "big world of the small narratives" (faßler 2008: 33-34) like the deceleration of communication dynamics, the generation of presence, or the http://www.springerlink.com/content/?author=alaa+sadik� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 21 creation of connectivity which allow for a differentiated reflection of a narrative situation. among further critical issues as related to widespread notions of digital storytelling i want to emphasize a few aspects and dimensions. in my view, these are covering a wide range of crucial arguments. first of all, there is the anthropological argument. if we think of narrating as "the basic conscious operation of creating meaning in cognition as well as in communication" (cf. schmidt 2008: 17) then the constitutive relevance of narrative structures becomes clear. in view of the extensive inescapability of narration and storytelling 'digital storytelling' rather appears as an unavoidable program than a set of special applications for educational or other purposes. no matter how we conceptualize history and the relation of humans and technologies, it makes sense to take co-evolutionary dynamics of cultural, biological and technological transformations into account. in line with this, considering an interplay of micro-, mesoand macro-levels (cf. lundby 2008b: 10) seems crucial whereas focussing on one level only appears to be misleading. emotions are widely recognized as important in the context of storytelling, sometimes in the sense of emotionalizing strategies in order to tell powerful stories. there again, joe lambert emphasizes that "exploring emotional material is a personal decision" (lambert 2006: 53). in my view, power relations, institutional contexts, and aspects of group dynamics have to be considered, too. moreover, there are at least two more aspects relevant here: (1) it makes a big difference if we conceptualize emotional or affective dynamics as "add on" which sometimes plays a role and sometimes not, or if we start from the basic assumption of an ongoing interaction of cognitive and emotional dynamics. viii (2) in both cases there are limitations of the utilization of digital storytelling in the service of (unconscious) emotional dynamics to be considered as well as limitations of the utilization of emotions in the service of digital storytelling. as to ethics "it seems that our typical inclination is to morally engage in narratives in order to investigate how they might help us to then live" (raney 2011: 176). and in view of the manifold mediatized stories he comes to the conclusion that perhaps "we can no longer process all the stories we encounter" (ibd.). this is not just about orientation, moral judgement and enjoyment, about factual or desirable limitations of the instrumentalization of storytelling, or about blurrings of local or global public and private spheres -this is also about the basic question of storytelling as "truth-telling". without doubt, the manifold forms and efforts of "truth-telling" are challenging our emotional involvement and moral development. moreover, insofar as education towards truth is concerned here, we should remind ourselves that "education towards truth is always education towards the truth of the educator" (mitterer 2001: 67). concerning political dimensions digital storytelling is frequently associated with democratic practices in view of cultural diversity. according to lambert's view, one aspect is "to provide mechanisms for people who have felt excluded from the channels of economic and political access a vehicle for projecting their stories into the mainstream" (lambert 2006: 110). apart from other aspects like promoting empowerment strategies or encouraging political activism and solidarity, basic questions remain like in which extent the democratic efforts are part of the problem in view political usurpations and exploitations of critical endeavors, how to deal with the relation of politics of memory and memory of politics, or how to respond to the ways in which power is organised (cf. cox 2010). unsurprisingly, more detailed examinations of the power relations at work may demonstrate that the concept of de-gouvernementalization emerges as concept of regouvernementalization on other levels (cf. hug 2008: 251). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 22 furthermore, epistemological aspects are to be mentioned among the forgotten or underestimated dimensions. in his book science as an art paul feyerabend (1984) describes how during the 6th and 5th century (bce) new forms of explanation, depiction, and schematization "crept in" (ibd.: 52) and replaced former forms of storytelling by and by. these new types of telling abstract stories which "automatically" imply a certain end denote an important step in the history of scientific forms of storytelling. ix whereas today in natural sciences and parts of social sciences graphical depictions and simulations play an important role, written language is still widely taken for granted as basis for epistemic (self)ascertainment. ramifications of pictorial, cultural or mediatic turns are hardly taken into consideration. even arguments brought forward in the spirit of the lingustic turn like, for example, in is there a text in this class? (fish 1980) – seem to play a marginal role only. but there are at least two more crucial arguments: (1) some opportunities which storytelling by means of digital media offers could be backed up in detail by referring to "the picture theory of reason" (nyirí 2001) and related arguments. (2) fish's question can be reformulated today: is there a digital story in this class? also today, answers might refer to issues of micro-management and authorities of interpretative community. but there are other, no less fundamental options for answers which can be summarized in the assertion that there is no such thing as a digital story at all, and if there would be such a thing, it would be a conglomerate of bits and bytes, binary codes, algorithms and magnetic or electrical charges. 1x expressions like 'digital story' are rather part of general parlance or a shortened mode of speaking than clearly pointing out specifics of narration and storytelling in interactive spaces and media(ted) constellations. as previously mentioned, digital storytelling is commonly described as a valuable tool for educational purposes, too. among the often mentioned aspects we find advancement of collaboration and pupils and students’ involvement in learning processes as well as the development of (new) literacies and decision-making skills. even if we agree that a lot of valuable and worthwhile is going on in respective processes the impression remains that is more about skills, qualification and competence than about processes which are intrinsically valuable. and if we agree that one cannot be 'conditioned' into education and that education (bildung) is always self-education (selbstbildung), the focus on instructional dimensions in mainstream discourses is questionable. similarsounding words like self-determined (selbstbestimmt) in contrast to selfregulated (selbstreguliert) or self-organized (selbstorganisiert) should not be mixed up in this context. the same counts for independent study (selbststudium), self-education (selbstbildung), and self-reflection (selbstreflexion). the list could be continued and elaborated in detail, and there are many interconnections between these aspects and dimensions. especially between the priorities of politics of memory and memory of politics education as didactics of remembrance (schäfer 2009) and as critical mediation of individual and collective memory becomes important. and as far as the construction of personal and cultural identities is concerned the work of both narratology and ludology is significant. it's narrative truths and playful approaches turning out to be highly relevant (hierdeis 2010, raessens 2006). however, in my view these critical considerations show that there are limitations of the utilization of 'digital storytelling' and that considering both relative and more basic arguments are subjects for debate. conclusion in concluding it can be said that stories about 'digital storytelling' in educational contexts show an ambivalent situation. on the one hand, enhancements and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 23 enrichments of learning and education in formal contexts are reported predominantly in terms of practical viability. in addition, further creative potentials can be sounded out. on the other hand, there are limitations of the utilization of 'digital storytelling' and underestimated dimensions particularly with reference to epistemological issues, "truth-telling", and politics of remembering. in this situation, it stands to reason that coming to terms with various forms of discursively embedded, narrative co-productions which are created, presented, received and passed on publicly in formal or informal contexts by means of digital media is on the agenda further on. as to educational contexts, the task is to figure out viable solutions for educational purposes and education for its own sake, and distinguish them from those problematic stories which think of themselves as solutions of a problem. one of the frequently discussed solutions refers to claims for (new) literacies. among others, robin (2006) says that "digital storytelling by students provides a strong foundation in many different types of literacy, such as information literacy, visual literacy, technology literacy, and media literacy" (ibd.: 4). on the constantly expanding list of literacies we find digital, numerical, musical, family, environmental, emotional and sexual literacies, and also 'new literacies' like multitasking, transmedial navigation or networking. in my view, the widespread modalities of pragmatic connection of 'literacy' to various areas of phenomena, such as outlined here, all too easily hide the fact that letters, words, images, numerals, formulas, etc. are linked with various forms of meaning creation, significance attribution and knowledge building. it is this metaphorical enhancement of all sorts of 'literacies' and their reduction in the sense of functionalist understandings, at least as suggested in policy priorities (cf. drotner 2008: 74), which indicate a case of a problem claiming to be a solution. for solid solutions we have to rethink relations of literacy, numeracy and picturacy more basically. but this 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(2001): the picture theory of reason. in: b. brogaard & b. smith (eds.), rationality and irrationality (pp.242-266). wien: öbv-hpt, 2001, porter, b. (2004): digitales: the art of telling digital stories. sedalia, co: bjp consulting. raessens, j. (2006): playful identities, or the ludification of culture. games and culture. a journal of interactive media 1(1), 52-57. raimist, r.; doerr-stevens, c. & jacobs, w. (2010): the pedagogy of digital storytelling in the college classroom. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6(2)vol. 6, 280-285 (online available at: http://www.seminar.net/images/stories/vol6-issue2b/raimist_prcent_2cdoerrstevens_prcent_26jacobs-thepedagogyofdigitalstorytelling.pdf; consulted: 2011-0115). raney, a. a. (2011): media enjoyment as a function of affective dispositions toward and moral judgement of characters. in k. doveling, c. von scheve & e.a.konijn, (eds.), the routledge handbook of emotions and mass media (pp. 166-178). london & new york: routledge, robin, b. r. (2006): the educational uses of digital storytelling. in c. m. crawford, r. carlsen, k. mcferrin, j. price, r. weber & d. a. willis (eds.): proceedings of society for information technology & teacher education international conference 2006. chesapeake, va: aace, pp. 709-716 (online available at: http://digitalliteracyintheclassroom.pbworks.com/f/educ-uses-ds.pdf; consulted: 2011-11-15). sadik, aa. (2008): digital storytelling: a meaningful technology-integrated approach for engaged student learning. educational technology research and development 56(4), 487-506. schäfer, c. (2009): didaktik der erinnerung. bildung als kritische vermittlung zwischen individuellem und kollektivem gedächtnis. münster et al.: waxmann. schmidt, s. j. (2008): telling stories about storytelling. in y. gächter, h. ortner, c. schwarz, a. wiesinger, c. engel, t. hug, s. neuhaus & t. schröder (eds.): erzählen reflexionen im zeitalter der digitalisierung / storytelling reflections in the age of digitalization (pp. 17-28) innsbruck: innsbruck university press. tonge, g. (2008): bold visions: a digital painting bible. cincinnati, oh: f+w media (impact books). i it's different in the context of new speech or "new german" where anglicisms and americanisms play an important role. this counts for diploma or master theses, too (for example, cf. liebhart 2009; franz 2010). ii cf. http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html (accessed: january 25, 2011). iii cf. http://www.storycenter.org/principles.html (accessed: january 25, 2011). iv cf. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/26/state-union-address-winning-future (accessed: january 28, 2011). http://www.springerlink.com/content/?author=alaa+sadik� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 26 v cf., for example, http://old.lubbockisd.org/sfirenza/storytelling/ (accessed: january 28, 2011). here, 18 types of digital stories are distinguished, indeed from a practical viewpoint and not systematically. vi cf. holzkamp (1996), for example, who distinguishes between "defensive learning", initiated by a third party, and "expansive learning", initiated by the learning subject on the basis of his or her own intentions, plans and interests. in doing so, he emphasizes a constructivist argument in his critique of the "teaching-learning short circuit" (ibd.: 23), a well known pedagogical figure of thought which says that teaching in formal contexts automatically implies learning and that the learning subjects learn what is taught by an instructor. vii in many countries we can observe a persistent adherence of educational institutions to "writing" as the dominant medium, thus negating media ecologies and the multimedia environment. as böhme puts it, especially regular schools are widely conceptualized as "monomedial provinces" (ibd.), thus being justified as "literal countercultures" in which it is imperative to defend literality as the foremost achievement in the process of civilization, whereas otherwise calls for "new literacies", "transliteracies" or "multiliteracies" cannot go unnoticed. viii cf. the concept of affect-logic (ciompi 2007). ix if we take scientific forms of storytelling as especially regulated forms of storytelling which are communicatively and methodically stabilized in special institutions, then we have an analogy to glanville's (1999) argument that „(scientific) research is a subset of design, not the other way round“ (glanville 1999: 89). x this argument can be elaborated in analogy to claims of the invisibility of 'digital images' (cf. heßler 2006) and related arguments for rethinking visibility (cf. faßler 2009: 207-225; 2010). storytelling – edu: educational digital – unlimited? theo hug abstract title cooperative learning within educational networks: perspectives for good educational governance in modern reading education   gudrun marci-boehncke faculty of cultural studies / department of german language and literature technical university of dortmund (germany) email: gudrun.marci@tu-dortmund.de abstract german schools, universities, and libraries havent established a teaching and cooperation practice that uses the potential of a convergent and participatory culture (jenkins 2006, 2009). schools and libraries have to collaborate more closely using the digital networks and language of the students of today. although official references, such as the report of the eu high-level group of experts on literacy (2012), postulate joint efforts with the objective of promoting reading and media education by different educational and non-educational institutions, at least in germany this is currently still not a collaborative educational practice. one reason for this might be a missing link in local educational governance. furthermore, the professional self-image of teachers and librarians, as well as the image of the cooperation partner, may limit effective public cooperation. this contribution starts (1) with an outline of the demands in the field of digital literacy and participatory culture, followed by (2) a discussion about the chances and potentials of partnerships between schools and public libraries, their specific interests, and potential. finally, (3) problems and principles of good educational governance within those networks are identified and developed to excavate the potential, especially for academic teaching and students practice. the article is based on empirical data as well as participatory observation of the three-years teacher training and the seven years of on-the-job-training of librarians of public libraries (experten fr das lesen).   keywords: reading literacy, media literacy, reading and media education, teaching librarian, cooperation school-library, educational governance, public schools, and libraries digital reading: what does it mean and what is necessary to achieve? thinking as well as speaking are human abilities based on coding procedures. the human being is, as ernst cassirer (1944, 44) defined it, an animal symbolicum. to read texts no matter what kind of texts they have to link symbols (whether they are from a materialistic point of view pictures, images or signs) to ideas. thinking is symbolic (rath, 2001). philosophy made the symbolic turn wittgenstein (1922) was focusing on in his tractatus logico-philosophicus. the meaning of understanding and reflection goes even further: the texts and their denotative significance get an individual connotation and importance. reading education theory describes these procedures as on a low and on a high hierarchy level of understanding. decoding and recoding processes are necessary to build an understanding of written or otherwise constructed texts. reading literacy as an essential competence developed during the educational biography, therefore, means the ability of   understanding, using, and reflecting on written texts, to achieve ones goals, to develop ones knowledge and potential, and to participate in society. (oecd, 1999, 20)   since society and thereby the coding systems themselves undergo permanent changes with the media techniques especially becoming more sophisticated, it is necessary for the individual to keep up with that development. one of the significant developments during the last decade has been digitization. it not only changes industries but also individuals way of acting, producing and perception (krotz, 2007). it has had the effect of a disruptive culture (christensen, 1997) since it changes the way people organize the handling during the decoding and recoding procedure. as paul gilster puts it, digital literacy   is the ability to understand information and to integrate it in multiple formats that the computer can deliver. being able to evaluate and interpret information is critical []; you cant understand the information you find on the internet without evaluating its sources and placing it in context. (pool, 1997, 6)   so it needs more than just decoding and recoding competence to be a competent digital reader. what is subject to digital reading is not all written text, but video, audio, photos. and being digitally literate is multidimensional and interactive since the individual very often is embedded within complex perception and production processes. the erstwhile reader or user becomes author and producer himself producer (bruns, 2008). besides the decoding and recoding procedures, he has to use skimming and scanning to find a quick way through the provided information. the search interest conducts the whole reading process not a single text-resource. during the search interest, even further communicative actions are possible. besides a technical knowledge of how to use the internet, it is the capacity for critical thinking on the one hand and the ability to build local and global coherence on the other that are most important as new competencies for a digital understanding (halpern, 1989; shetzer & warschauer, 2000; warschauer, 1999). warschauer concludes that overcoming the digital divide is not only a matter of achieving online access but also of enhancing peoples abilities to integrate, evaluate and communicate information. so, to close the digital gap one of the recommendations in the report of the eu high level group of experts on literacy (european commission, 2012) the following seven partial competencies have to be developed during education:          analog reading literacy        technology literacy        information literacy        visual literacy        communication literacy        social literacy        critical thinking   digital literacy, therefore, is a crosscutting expertise that does not belong to a single faculty or school subject. it has to be trained and developed as always linked to the subjects, questions, and topics that are focused on as well as to those human as well as mechanical actants that are involved in the answering process. it covers critical engagement with mass media and personal, technological, and intellectual skills for living in a digital society.[1]   teachers education, as well as local governance, has to professionalize four aspects to implement digital literacy in school education. they are not only relevant to the topic of digitization but without having an eye on these issues, the implementation of digital literacy is not going to work. besides the seven partial competencies mentioned above and based on shulmans (1986) work (technological pedagogical content knowledge tpack), teachers have to reflect (1) on the content they want to convey. also important is (2) the target group that is the focus of the learning process, their particular needs, individual knowledge and recourses, and (3) thirdly the technological or medial aspects that are necessary to impart knowledge. the relevance of the target group determines the pedagogical means. so, reflection is the first and most critical competency for teachers, since it fosters high-order thinking (evens, elen, & depaepe, 2015). after all, it is (4) a didactic competence that combines these aspects of knowledge. reflecting these procedures is more than the sum of the three individual competencies. they have to be connected: it matters what the kids should learn; not each topic can be mediated in the same manner, and not every target group can be reached the same way. teachers have to adapt the methods and learning pathways to the circumstances of the learning environment and the learning individuals.   effective teaching of digital literacy, therefore, means to react flexibly within different settings, to keep an eye on the needs of the students, use digital technology according to these requirements on the one hand and well balanced to the teachers framework of resources on the other side. the objective a teacher wants to set, and the situation of the students determine methods and didactics. teachers education right now faces the changes of digitization, but especially in germany is not yet successfully integrating digital literacy into current curricula in universities (marci-boehncke, 2014; marci-boehncke, & wulf, 2016). it is not only relevant that future teacher can analyze modern digital presentations such as homepages, fanzines, chats, and videos, but also that they know about tools and ways to teach how students can use these formats for learning processes. it is relevant to find those resources, to pick out a particular draft, which means to give criteria for the selection. besides, it is essential to motivate communication among the students to stimulate the discussion about and analysis of the movies and to motivate and enable them to produce their ones. participatory culture (jenkins, 2009) even in classroom settings for reading education (jenkins, 2013) isnt well established in german schools, as recently shown in the iae 2013 study (frailon et al., 2014; see also german icils 2013 report in bos et al., 2014). german teachers do not regard digital media highly as tools relevant for motivational purposes, individual support, for participatory learning, or for sustainability in education (see figure 1). they estimate digital media rather for administrative than pedagogical purposes (schmidt, goertz, & behrens, 2017; thom et al., 2017).   compared to the iae 2013 average, the approval of german teachers for the potential of digital media is more than 20 percentage points below. that means teachers education alone will not change the situation very quickly or with lasting effects (monitor hochschulbildung, 2016). for reading education, in particular, this situation would have dire consequences. germanys results in the overall pisa evaluation in reading literacy are not very bad. students could improve during the last 16 years of measuring and teaching support. so the numbers of lowest competence level students decreased. but the german situation for reading analog texts is much better than that for digital texts. german students do not train digital reading in school. their digital knowledge is based on private resources, friends, and family. pisa 2009 and 2012 already have shown how far there is coherence between analog and digital reading competencies. of course, an excellent analog reading competency will affect the reading of digital texts. that correlation seems obvious. but one can also conclude, that the better the digital skills are, the better the analog will be.   figure 1: national percentage of teachers agreeing with statements about itc teaching and learning in schools (frailon et al., 2014, p. 200)     countries that show higher scores in digital reading are also among those who have higher scores of analog reading competencies. on the other hand, good analog competences do not immediately translate into higher scores in digital reading competence (see figure 2).   that makes it clear that there is more to do than just enhancing students ability of analog reading to prepare them for the requirements of digital reading. navigation competence in a way a synthesis of different skills like technology literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, and critical thinking seems to be a key factor in successful digital reading.   it is a truism that the more one practices, the better the results will be. so, of course, the digital learning environment, the situation in schools will influence students competencies. the context factors like a modern digital workplace with a good ratio of computers/ipads per student, access to networks/wifi is significant. but it seems to be the attitude and confidence of teachers that are most relevant to teaching digital literacy or at least enabling students to use digital resources in classrooms (blackwell, lauricella, & wartella, 2014).   figure 2: relation between digital reading performance and navigation behavior (oecd, 2015, p.4)   self-efficacy (bandura, 1977) is a question of practice; in so far as schools can only keep up with the current developments in digitization if teachers on the job get more chances to practice digital teaching, coached or supported by others who can increase the teachers digital awareness. that means: partnerships in local educational networks become highly relevant. possible partnerships with local educational networks and their institutions specific interests and potentials one of the most attractive partners for schools as regards teaching digital literacy are libraries public libraries as well as scientific libraries, affiliated to universities. although currently in germany there is no particular qualification or outline of a profession as a school librarian, as we find school librarians in the united states, canada, and australia, there is undoubtedly the need for librarians to cooperate with schools. to this end, it is necessary to qualify librarians, especially those of public libraries, for the particular needs of such cooperation. libraries, to be viable, have to analyze the needs of their potential users carefully. the social structure of their catchment area, the institutions that could be of interest as potential partners play an essential part in the strategic network planning of libraries themselves, which is part of local development (umlauf, 2015, p.172). kindergarten, all kinds of schools, as well as retirement homes define the target group of possible users. there is a chance to enlarge the numbers of users through well-organized cooperation and new, qualified pr-concepts (holderried, & lcke, 2012, p.14). of course, there are already local partnerships of libraries and other educational institutions. libraries provide access to lectures of famous authors; they deliver books and other media for particular topics, they organize the summer-reading club or offer guided tours through their research facilities, explaining catalogs and archives. there are even progressive curriculums (keller-loibl, 2016) that cover digital media. public libraries do offer a lot the question is whether and how schools and teachers use all this.   as rose (2012) found out about the alliance partners of three representative libraries in three different german counties (bundeslndern), northrhine-westphalia, saxony-anhalt and baden-wuerttemberg schools as well as kindergarten do not appreciate libraries as equal partners regarding reading education. instead, they are taken into consideration as an attractive place to learn, as institutions that can organize lectures and provide books. it seems that teachers understand mediation as part of the profession of librarians only as a transaction of material and not so much as a communicative and pedagogical process for learning how and what to read. so, besides the urgent need to include cooperation skills in librarians education and profession, there is the equivalent need to convince teachers that libraries and librarians can do a lot more than just provide and hand out books. for librarians that mean they have two target-groups in one: the teachers as their cooperation partner and the students, they want to reach by the reading promotion.   still, the most favorable offerings of public libraries are those that deal with reading promotion: lectures and literature talk (marci-boehncke, & rose, 2012). but, since 2010, the situation has changed at least in northrhine-westphalia: based on the findings of rose (2012) a certificate experten fr das lesen (experts on reading) for public librarians as well as for teachers was established, to converge the two institutions and their interrelation. one-third of all professionally directed, regional libraries have participated in that professional development (marci-boehncke, 2016; hft, & marci-boehncke, 2016), as have more than 250 students of the technical university of dortmund and 33 teachers of different schools participating in the national biss-project bildung durch sprache und schrift (education in language and literature) and 100 librarians. the primary goal of the training offering is to establish an attitude of cooperation on both sides and to inform about the possibilities and chances that occur by using the strength of the cooperation partner to enlarge the own educational offerings. the following synoptic comparison sums up results from different national surveys (bertelsmann, telekom-stiftung, ifs-allensbach) as well as results from content analysis of various schools and libraries which we could carry out in our educational projects such as biss, kidsmart (strehlow/rath, 2015) or others (lohmann, trapp, & marci-boehncke, 2017). for schools and libraries, on can sum up the situation as follows:   school public library lack of free wifi high rate of free wifi lack of digital working-places for students (bos et al., 2014) reliable number of digital working-places for public teachers lack of digital bibliographical research competence (bos et al, 2014) professionals with high digital bibliographical research competence school not attractive as working place more attractive working place out of school lack of full sets of actual lectures (novels) for all students supply of full sets of actual lectures (novels) for all students possible each school/class works on its own networking with other schools not regular practice (richter/pant 2016) possibility to establish cooperation with schools (national and international) by providing digital network structures (learning platforms) hardly any possibility for extra money acquisition (e.g. to invite and pay for an author) extra money acquisition belongs to regular library work teachers not yet sovereign in the use of digital media, partly skeptical about value of digital media. (schmidt et al. 2017, thom et al. 2017) ict professionals with a lot of digital competencies and mostly open minded for further possibilities of working and learning activities. hardly any capacities for maker-spaces or other play-oriented learning spaces. provides play-oriented learning spaces and room for creative experiences with digital resources. hardly any public attention for students learning-outcome; governmentally restricted pr-policy for schools that prohibits publishing of photos, texts, audio-materials from students. possibilities to provide space and attention for productive outcome: exhibition, events, cooperation with local newspapers/press. no appropriate valuation of and confidence in the potential of digital media as regards participatory culture, inclusion and sustainability of learning-outcome (bos et al., 2014). open-minded for participatory working settings, play-orientation without strong emphasis of a comparison of students performance. provide room for discovery and release of undetected potential of students by non-performance approach. library-visits belong to the curriculum of all educational institutions (including kindergarten) but are rarely actively and cooperatively planed with the library personnel. teacher is responsible for the classroom library personnel provides.th. in the library or a selection of books/media for classroom use. more and more activities to establish educational partnerships that lead to a continuing interest in library activities of the students even out of school. offering of a youth-oriented variety of media and events. searching or at least waiting for cooperation offerings. teacher seeks recognition and appreciation for his work. strong performance approach by grading-system inhibits social recognition of students and teachers. conversely, attractive learning settings enlarge respect for teachers and fun for students. library is still interested in getting more users. appreciation of library efficiency is measured by library lending volumes (or downloads). the better the cooperation, the higher the output of books. professionals in didactics and planning need for extra personnel. providing extra personnel need for more pedagogical and didactical competencies. table 1: synopsis of different strengths and weaknesses of school and public library   as demonstrated in the table above (see table 1), libraries and schools show different strengths and weaknesses. if they would work together, the one cooperation partner with its strength may compensate many of the weaknesses of the other cooperation partner.   working together with collaborative responsibility for a modern reading concept including digital work and resources may minimize a lack of individual confidence or a somewhat skeptical attitude towards digital media. combining the teaching competencies of professional teachers with the educational and technical resources of the library can be economically as well as pedagogically effective. one of the most important arguments for a cooperation of schools and libraries seems to be playful, rather informal learning space and learning atmosphere a library provides, which is necessary to appreciate the students different competencies and learning approaches. as institutions that are not as rigidly administered as schools are especially regarding public relations and digital access libraries can provide gratification and public attention for students work. the attitude that a lot is possible if one is flexible enough is probably one of the key competencies which both library personnel as well as teachers have to train in and experience in their professional education and practice. as international research shows for digital literacy in early education (kontovourki et al., 2017) which can be more or less generalized for school education as well confidence, attitude, and flexibility are the three core competencies and more important than economic or technical resources to establish digital reading and learning offerings. a teachers and librarians education, which does not strengthen those personality traits but focuses on fixed patterns of behavior produces a simple assembly of a presumed educational ideal that will not fit into the rapidly evolving social, digital and technical circumstances of present and future educational needs. standardized worksheets and imitation are not as encouraging as creative developments of own and differentiated learning scenarios. problems and principles of good educational governance to establish those kinds of well-accepted and efficiently working cooperation between schools and libraries, let us finally focus on the issues and principles of the necessary educational governance. mostly, governance implies leadership which is the first obstacle for cooperation, which means equity. on the other hand, if no one takes responsibility there will be no movement. if municipalities develop governance for such a cooperative network, those responsible have to take into account the institutions and individuals attitudes towards governance, leadership, work-life balance, and technology. they are part of the professional self-concept.   merkler (2015) sums up research about the three most critical social generations that are currently on the job: the baby boomers (born 1946-1965), generation x (born 1965-1980) and generation y (born 1981-2000). he describes key differences as regards attitudes and values that might become important in cooperative and structured working-contexts. whereas the generation of baby boomers seems to be somewhat skeptical about digital technology, the other two generations are more flexible and used to digital work. they belong to the early adopters. relevant for cooperative work is a critical attitude towards authority in all three generations. generation baby boomers show a more positive view towards work and feel responsible for the institution one operates in. the other two generations are more used to changing working places; they do not identify as strongly with their current job. on the contrary, it means their overall attitude is far more flexible. that applies to the setting of the working place itself, the colleagues, the users, or target groups they are working with. multiculturalism, heterogeneity, and inclusion seem to be more a matter of course for the younger generations. besides the generational differences, there are also differences as regards the social field, the job itself. teachers are different from librarians. and there are even more substantial differences amongst librarians themselves, due to the various apprenticeship programs (finger, 2015).   without going too much into detail, a governmental structure for local networks has to take into account even these various situations. a brief analysis of the main and maybe leading generations represented in the partner institutions may help to understand expectations and attitudes. of course, these are generalized remarks an individual questionnaire at the beginning of a cooperative process could specify the very situations to reflect the different expectations, images, and self-images.   for most faculties in school, it is true that they show a strong sense of collegiality and team spirit at least in the staff room. peers for them are the most influential group and teachers rely on their advice, and they exchange their materials and ideas (richter, & pant, 2016, p.8). still, germany has no widely established peer-to-peer monitoring as a means of internal school development. most teachers do not want their colleagues monitoring their lessons. team-teaching is a desirable, but not yet established culture. even teachers feel an intense pressure of evaluation and competition. they mostly do not work full-time in school but have to do a lot of work at home. this situation affects their work-life balance. partly self-determined, they often fluctuate between excessive demands, stress and a hectic lifestyle. time pressure or not enough time to realize the own quality standards for good educational practice are often-heard arguments of teachers. that leads to a routine, which does not allow space for experiments or anything new, not evaluated in the outcome. for teachers, flexibility seems to be less effective than routine, and new but not yet implemented competencies threaten their time management and required outcome. strict orientations on educational standards either national/regional or from the local school itself (school curriculum) permit little time for anything new.   that means that for teachers the implementation of digital media and digital reading are a disruptive technology (bowen, & christensen, 1995; christensen, 1997). if they have to implement new media and develop new teaching habits like participatory work , it changes old patterns of behavior. besides generational differences, a school faculty is compared to a library a rather homogeneous group, since all teachers went through the same kind of teachers education and examination. beyond the fact that they teach different subjects, they share a sort of similar culture, they gain and own comparable assets and principles. educational politics is a rather stable and slow-moving sector, so there is no pressure for high institutional flexibility in school. as long as there was no need for individual support even in classrooms, teachers didnt have a great need to retrain and adapt to entirely new conditions at relatively short intervals. that is even truer for higher education in a rather selective school system. (richter & pant, 2016, p.9). whereas german primary school (isced 2011, level 1, cf. uis, 2012), as well as gesamtschule (comprehensive school, isced 2011, level 1, 2, and 3), brings together all social milieus, sekundarschule (secondary school, isced 2011, level 2) and gymnasium (secondary school, isced 2011, level 2, and 3) is highly socially selective. the more selective a school is, the less is the flexibility the curriculum forces. grades as standardized values for a long time prohibited highly flexible, individual evaluation criteria in school. equality was a high value. since 2008 the year the un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (united nations, 2006) entered into force a change of paradigm is taking place in schools, which is not yet completed.   for libraries, the situation is somehow different: due to very heterogeneous training pathways for personnel working in libraries (fingerle, 2013) the staff itself is much more diverse than that of a school. not everybody has passed a diploma; the way to become a librarian is not single-tracked. furthermore, due to digital development, libraries feel a very high pressure for adjustment. the new technology undermines the very basis of their self-concept as institutions as well as individual librarians (fuhrmann, 2016, p. 9). digitalization means an enlargement of their traditional work; ict is an entirely new technology and needs fundamental changes of structure and action processes. library as a new place to learn, the librarian in the role of a mediator of competencies, not only provider of reading-material, e.g., books these changes affect extensional resources of buildings and intentional resources of employees. the new profile of embedded librarian changes the direction of the use of libraries: being a many-to-many supply, in the beginning, the library of today mutates into a one-to-one service, which provides highly differentiated supplies. open access publications and a new and less expensive administrative and accounting system like rda (resource description and access) mark some of the significant challenges for libraries since the new millennium. conclusion summarizing the different situations of teachers and librarians, one can conclude that librarians due to their public contract as a service provider for reading promotion felt a much higher pressure to change their job profile and their acting habits. teachers, on the contrary, act in a much more homogeneous college. their pressure for change during the last years was strongly related to the international students assessment like pirls and pisa, which forced teachers and schools to enhance german students results in the tested subjects including reading competence. especially, boys and students with more than one first language are still in focus. the demand for inclusion marks another primary challenge. due to the rather unfortunate situation as regards a technological ambiance compared to other eu or oecd countries the school didnt force the development of digital education in the same way. experts demand a more and more systematic reading promotion (rosebrock, & nix, 2007) as a solution for an increasing reading competence. training and theoretical background for the trainers, of course, is necessary but the circumstances for that training are a matter of discussion and different opinions. whereas traditional reading educators stick to analog texts and a linear reading process, digital reading promoters rather encourage hypertext reading and acting, using the convergent market to react flexibly to the changing interests and needs of their students. of course, theoretical background and knowledge about different methods are necessary. otherwise teaching stays as the philosopher and founder of pedagogy as a scientific discipline johann friedrich herbart in 1802 has called it inefficient (schlendrian, jog-trot, herbart 1982, p.125). university education nationwide has not yet implemented a modern digital didactic of reading education. charitable trusts and foundations such as the german telekom foundation encourage digital learning by project funding. large corporations such as ibm or the german energy group rwe promote initiatives at various locations. and institutions for teachers training, like medienberatung nrw or landesanstalt fr medien (lfm, state institute of media), try to encourage the willingness for teachers training as regards digital literacy. cooperation with other institutions, such as libraries, belongs to their concepts. a bundling of resources and an enlargement of competencies should be convincing arguments. the cooperation of the german federal ministry of education and research and the mercator foundation supported two projects of the experten fr das lesen (as part of the initiative biss bildung in sprache und schrift[2] (education in speaking and writing) that try to encourage a digital reading education in cooperation with libraries.[3]   after the three-year supporting program for teachers and a seven-year on-the-job training for public librarians both called experts on reading (hft, & marci-boehncke 2016, marci-boehncke, & vogel, 2017), we can conclude that it takes a long journey to convince an entire college to move towards digital reading promotion. and it takes continuous support on a peer-to-peer level. a vast majority of teacher colleagues has to accept profound organizational and contextual changes. they have to experience self-efficacy within their class and gratification in their students. teachers who respect their students and who could convince them to be engaged for their benefit gain respect and success in class (fisher, frey, & hattie, 2016). the motivation to change well-established patterns of teaching can only be sustainable if it is an intrinsic one. it means a change of teachers media-habitus (biermann, 2009). that cannot be a mere state decreed order, but of course, it would help if digital literacy were made mandatory in all classes and all subjects. cooperation with libraries would be an encouraging support since the two organizations could exchange their competencies. but as long as exchanges amongst teachers within the same school are not well established or between teachers of two schools cooperation with other institutions such as libraries has even a low probability to be realized (richter, & pant 2016: 16). as regards tpack, it is still necessary to provide german schools with modern digital media and free access to wifi (technic). and it is always required to convince them of a new way of reading (content and didactics) within the digitally mediatized world. this material is highly motivating for students (target group) and covers the needs of present society. cooperating as well as collaborating with competent library-personal will be an excellent chance to establish these new practices efficiently.   for the governance, nevertheless, it is necessary to obey the different interests of the two groups of personnel, to respect their fears and uncertainties. it would be helpful if teams with different competencies could work together so that there is peer-to-peer learning: the older could learn from the younger, the younger from the older, traditionalists benefit from the knowledge of entrepreneurs and digital natives, and vice-versa (merkler, 2015, p.120f.). a team built of similar colleges might be less efficient. but everything has to be the result of free choice, consensual, with no explicit hierarchy between the actors of the different institutions. the image of librarians in the eyes of their cooperation partners has to change. they are not mere external contracted providers but colleagues at eye-level (marci-boehncke, 2016). teachers have to understand the professionalism of librarians as regards reading education, especially digital reading education and ict. a corresponding mentoring structure that enables encouragement of an overall flexibility and individual responsibility for problem-solving seems to be a better advice for local educational partnerships than any concrete hierarchical governance structure. the idea of change management (fuhrmanns, 2016) is not too useful if this leads to the application of a set of fixed patterns of action. the concept for accompanying measures during the development of a local partnership must be to enhance flexibility, to force spontaneity, to focus on the main success factors rather than on impediments. the primary tool within a set of methodological devices is anything that encourages flexibility and a somehow adventuresome attitude based on theoretical and practical as well as methodological knowledge as one needs this to keep up with the digital developments themselves. this is part of the 2017 oecd report on paedagogical knowledge and the changing nature of the teaching profession. teachers are required to revisit and update their skills continuously, which includes   adapting to technical development and using information and communication technologies, [] collaborating with colleagues and other professionals and developing and maintaining an approach towards education based on reflection, inquiry, etc. (guerriero, & rvai 2017, p.254).   this is what we try to establish by the experts on reading: a deeper learning (pellegrino 2017, p.223) that allows self-reflection and meta-cognition and tries to change cognitive, intrapersonal as well as interpersonal aspects oft he professional self-image, strengthening self-efficacy and a positive attitude towards new challenges. and what is right for teachers might also be true for librarians and all those who support local partnerships: great teachers understand that different approaches work more effectively at different times and for some students better than for other students (fisher, frey, & hattie, 2016, p. 3). references bandura, a. 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(2017). monitor digitale bildung. digitales lernen an grundschulen. gtersloh: bertelsmann stiftung. uis (2012). international standard classification of education isced 2011. ed. by unesco institute for statistics. montreal, quebec: uis publications. http://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/documents/international-standard-classification-of-education-isced-2011-en.pdf. umlauf, k. (2015). trends bei bibliotheksfilialen. bibliothek forschung und praxis, 39(2), 163-174. united nations (2006). convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/rights/convtexte.htm. warschauer, m. (1999). electronic literacies: language, culture, and power in on-line education. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. wittgenstein, l. (1922). tractatus logico-philosophicus, london: kegan paul.         [1] cf. http://mediasmarts.ca [03.06.2017]. [2] cf. http://www.biss-sprachbildung.de [03.06.2017]. [3] cf. http://www.biss-sprachbildung.de/biss.html?seite=37&p_modul=p4&id=67 & http://www.biss-sprachbildung.de/biss.html?seite=37&s_modul=&id=99 [03.06.2017] title seminar.net 2015. © author(s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. learning by using digital media in and out of school raquel miño-puigcercós university of barcelona e-mail: rmino@ub.edu juana m. sancho-gil university of barcelona e-mail: jmsancho@ub.edu abstract. the gap between the compulsory secondary school, students’ daily experiences and interests and social demands seems to have significantly increased. nowadays disaffection and disengagement with school, lowattainment and early school leaving are found not only in disadvantaged students but also practically among all social groups across countries. the traditional conception of learning prevailing in most schools does not seem able to meet the educational needs both of young people and society. living and learning in a digital and globalized world implies considerable challenges for schooling, and these are reviewed in this paper. we build on the outcomes of an ethnographic case about young people learning inside and outside school using different media. first, we discuss the challenges posed by contemporary compulsory secondary education while also establishing the scope of our research. then we explore the transitions of students between inside and outside school and the characteristics of a learning process in which switching constantly between online and offline environments is a given. finally, we make suggestions, which can be taken into account by schools seeking to offer students more meaningful and authentic learning experiences. keywords. life-long learning, youth and media, digital literacy, secondary school, virtual ethnography, participatory research. 1. introduction in the first quarter of the 21st century, compulsory secondary education is facing formidable challenges. the educational agendas of secondary schools, teaching methods and curriculum content, need to meet the students’ daily life experiences, interests and social demands. in this context, the ongoing phenomenon of school disaffection, disengagement, low-attainment and early school leaving is not only evident in disadvantaged and non-mainstream students (bernstein, 1970) but practically all social groups across countries (oecd, 2003; harber, 2008; yan & jament, 2008; graham, van bergen & sweller, 2015). education, understood as the capability to know what, how, where, when, why and for what would appear to be fundamental for any human being. not only is education essential for finding or creating a job, but it is also a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ prerequisite for living as a democratic and glocal citizen (grubb, 1987; robertson, 1995). it also allows people to understand “the intersection between their lives and global issues and their sense of responsibility as local and global citizens” (nair, norman, tucker & burkert, 2012, p. 56). moreover, taking into account the complexity of contemporary societies (boltanski & chiapello, 2002; castells, 2006, 2012; bauman, 2006, 2007; sennet, 2006; 2012) today more than ever people need to have access to educational and learning processes that foster the best of oneself and life-long, life-wide and life-deep learning skills (banks, au, ball, bell, et. al, 2007; jackson, 2011). thus, the need for young people to learn both at an individual and social level has never been greater. however, a growing number of students seem to find school irrelevant (oecd, 2003) to the point of leaving school without any qualification1. this situation has increased the interest and need to understand and find ways of tackling this phenomenon (skinner & furrer, 2008; taylor & parsons, 2011; christinson, reschy & wylie, 2012; duncan, 2013). even more, it is encouraging, or should encourage, researchers and policy-makers to take more into account that, for as argued by phillips (2014, p. 10): learning is a phenomenon that involves real people who live in real, complex social contexts from which they cannot be abstracted in any meaningful way. difficult as it is for researchers to deal with (especially if they are suffering from physics envy), learners are contextualized. they do have a gender, a sexual orientation, a socioeconomic status, an ethnicity, a home culture; they have interests—and things that bore them; they have or have not consumed breakfast; and they live in neighborhoods with or without frequent gun violence or earthquakes, they are attracted by (or clash with) the personality of their teacher, and so on. so, the role of schools as privileged organisational metaphors and their role in fostering or preventing students’ learning should be revise: schooling worldwide is characterised by misery, boredom, bullying, deceit, anxiety, humiliation, brutalisation, ethnic – and many other types of – discrimination, religious – and many other forms of – indoctrination, sexual – and many other kinds of – exploitation, and testing to destruction. it should not be like that. it should be fun (douse, 2005, p. 1). as it should be reconsider the kind of knowledge and skills young people need to acquire and develop in order to take an active part in social life. as lankshear & knobel (2003) emphasise, being a literate individual means much more than using the linguistic systems. digital literacy not only means being able to read and write texts, but also to use and understand discourses underlying texts, videos, images and sounds. if all these aspects are to be taken into account, the traditional secondary school curriculum implemented in most secondary schools seems a rather poor response. as discussed in a previous work (sancho, 2010), today students are literally besieged by aural, visual and sensorial stimuli, which provide them with very distinct living and learning experiences, which are often neglected or rejected by schools. according to twenge (2006), these people belong to generation me, the first generation able to speak the language of self: "just be yourself." "believe in yourself." “express yourself.” etc. for these people the so-called web2.0 appears to be a perfect set of tools for expressing the “self” through digital social media that facilitate authorship, creativity, collaboration and sharing between users and effective information handling. the members of this generation have been called millennials (howe & strauss, 2000), instant-message generation (lenhart et al., 2001), homo seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 2 zappiens (veen, 2003), the net generation (oblinger and oblinger, 2005), the gamer generation (carstens and beck, 2005) and even the einstein generation (boschma & groe, 2006) by being considered smarter, faster, and more social. however, in recent years, authors such as nicholas carr have started to question whether google was making us stupid 2. he went on to argue that internet was making people increasingly superficial (carr, 2011). his writings fuelled an ongoing controversy about the negative impact of digital technologies in learning3. the ethnographic research we are presenting in this paper draws on empirically based knowledge concerning the constant connection students generate between formal and informal learning contexts, by using different media. the results show that every day, young people have access to an unprecedented amount of information, tools and environments that are shaping the way they learn and their life experiences in social and academic contexts (ito, baumer, bittanti, boyd, et al., 2010; boyd, 2014, inter alia). however, this does not mean either young people or adults have or can easily acquire the intellectual and emotional resources needed to interpret an ever growing amount of information and use the available devices (whether digital or not) to communicate, express themselves and learn. in this sense, one of the greatest challenges in current educational systems lies in the need to take into account the new modes of knowledge production, representation, communication and access to information that are frequently neglected, and seldom included in formal education (vivancos, 2008; gillen & barton, 2010). this constitutes a challenge inasmuch as it deeply questions the traditional ‘grammar’ of schooling (tyack & tobin, 1994), and especially the role of teachers. taking into account what we know about how people learn (sawyer, 2006; carey, 2014) and the opportunities provided by digital media (järvelä, 2006), as researchers and teachers we need to start thinking about moving from the idea of teaching the subject to teaching to subjects. this is to say, to promoting and guiding students’ learning. a shift is required from the idea of representing teachers as the ones who know and students as passive empty vessels, to the notion of learning while teaching in collaboration. for authors like marc prensky (2012, p. 69) “the single biggest problem facing education today is that our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”4 if this is the case, the second biggest challenge will be that of transforming teachers who are so focused on teaching that they often forget to keep on learning, into active learners who are willing to learn while they teach. in the light of this situation, we have developed the rtd project “living and learning with new literacies inside and outside school: contributions for reducing school drop-out, exclusion and disaffection among youth” 5. our main goal was to explore how young people learn by using digital media in and outside school. we focussed on the perceived lack of connection between what is considered as learning in the formal curriculum (mainly listening, doing exercises and performing in exams and how young people learn outside school through multiple literacies (cope & kalantzis, 2000; hull & schultz, 2001a, 2001b, 2002; alvermann, 2002; patel stevens, 2005). with a view to the exploration of this hypothesis and being in a position to offer suggestions and recommendations to secondary education educators, we produced empirical data on the subject of young people’s learning culture in formal, informal and non-formal contexts. and this was carried out with them rather than on them (hernández, 2011), in order to better understand the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 3 elements shaping the way young people learn and how they perceive and experience their own learning networks and environments. during the 2012-2013 school year, we carried out research with students from five secondary schools. these participants were taking part in the study with their teachers and our university team. five multi-sited ethnographies (marcus, 1995; faizon, 2009) moving through school and home (anderson, 1989; denzin, 1997; troman and waldorf, 2005) and virtual environments (hine, 2000, 2005; jhons, shin-ling & hall, 2004), were developed by five groups of 5 to 11 students (hernández, fendler, sancho, 2013). this paper reports on one of the ethnographic cases carried out in a public and semi-rural secondary school of catalonia. eleven students, aged between 16 and 18, took part. they were working in an extracurricular environment at the school. their own words will help to convey their learning experiences, specifically the ones about how they connect and constantly handle through online and offline contexts. finally, we challenge the current role of the school and invite teachers and policy-makers to consider the results of our investigation, the aim of which was to provide students with a more meaningful and authentic learning experiences. 2. methodological approach this paper draws on an ethnographic case that took place in the els alfacs secondary school. every tuesday from september 2012 to april 2013, the university researcher, eleven students aged between 16 and 18 and their art teacher researched together. the young people were very interested in participating in the project for two main reasons. firstly, because they had a very good relationship with their teacher, and felt always engaged with his innovative proposals, and secondly, because the school allowed them to present the results of their study as their final research project. according to the curriculum guidelines, this project consisted of “a set of discovery activities performed by students around a chosen topic, selected partly by themselves, under the guidance of teachers” (departament d’educació, 2010: 251). twenty-eight meetings, based on workshops and discussions, allowed us to explore their ideas of learning both inside and outside school. the participatory research process prompted us to work on eleven ethnographic stories based on their observations, experiences and field diaries. they expressed themselves in written texts; talking in front of the camera; conveying their experiences through images, drawings, pictures; and organizing their ideas through maps. even though the research took place in the school, in the arts classroom, in particular, we considered the research field to be in-between. we were able to recognise some typical pedagogical attitudes and practices during our meetings. however, interestingly, the young people were constantly questioning school rules. this allowed us to discuss what would had happen if the same research had been carried out within the regular school timetable or in a totally out-of-school context. once we had started fieldwork, it became clear that we would not be able to impose our rules as adults and professionals on the students. since we wanted the young participants to be the real authors of the ethnography, we provided them with some tools, global topics and frameworks. however, after some weeks, they raised new questions to develop their own narratives, thereby demonstrating a certain degree of autonomy and agency, but at the same time, turning to us for help and advice. we shared the decision-making process with them as well as the responsibility for carrying out a participative and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 4 ethnographic learning process (siry & zawatski, 2011, mccartan, schubotz & murphy, 2012). thus to some extent we were co-producers and co-researchers. they wrote their texts, brought in their images and reached their own conclusions, guided by us when they asked for support. after several workshops and discussions about what learning meant and how we learn inside and outside school, we realised that shifting from inside to outside the school premises was necessary, even if not easy. the participants showed us that they were learning every minute; that learning was “happening all around us, everywhere, and it is powerful” (thomas & brown, 2011, p. 17). on the other hand, they did not know how to explore and describe their outside-of-school experiences. it was much easier for them to talk about schooling, because their discourses were rather homogeneous and dichotomous –“do we like or not like school”. therefore, we considered the convenience and value of focusing on their informal learning environments, which ranged from ballet to computing, travelling, photography, cooking or drawing (image 1). image 1. young people’s pictures about their learning experiences outside school. we invited them to ask their own questions, to explore and find their own answers and to understand their learning cultures and perceptions without restricting the range of their descriptions. we would not have been able to develop this process without respecting their interests, literacies and modes of expression and communication. it soon became clear to us that the most frequently used forms of communication between students were not just written texts. they were used to communicating and interacting with friends – and sometimes familythrough images, videos, symbols, emoticons, music and web links. why should we try to explore learning only through text, when they were communicating and learning using such a variety of means to communicate, through extensive online and offline communities and formal and informal environments? this virtual and image-based ethnography allowed young participants to express themselves through images, videos, paintings, web pages, maps, etc. firstly, this requires the use of a virtual space to share all those evidences. the group was familiar with google drive, so we kept on with this environment. in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 5 any case, it was not a smooth and quick process but a rather slow and difficult one. the problems were not in the mastering of the digital platform, but in their lack of experience of working in groups, being critical, analysing their own work and taking decisions independently and responsibly. one of our first discoveries (for both students and us) was that the competences they needed to be ethnographers and storytellers had to be carefully developed. we implemented didactic and creative strategies to guide them in the process of narrating their experience visually and textually. a writing and virtual example was the group interview that took place through google drive. after reading the eleven individual texts about their learning experiences in google drive, they interviewed each other virtually, by asking questions in the document. another visual and oral example was the discussion that took place when they brought pictures to represent visually their out-of-school experiences. as can be appreciated in image 2, we discussed why they had brought in the images and how we could organise ‘everything’. the process of creating visual maps itself was even more interesting and engaging for the students than the collage itself (image 3). image 2. discussing with the group. image 3. collage of the group’s images. when they finished the research and presented it to the school, they decided to call the ethnographic narratives compilation “a slice of our life”, referring to the methodological allusion described by connelly & clandinin (2006, p. 479). “story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful”. as these authors claimed, storytelling allowed us to think about the learning process as individual, special and unique experiences. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 6 3. analysis and results we are currently involved in the analyses of the huge amount of data generated by both the young participants and us through field diaries, observations and interviews. this analytical process of the ethnographical results, based on the grounded theory (corbin & strauss, 2008), allowed us to offer a preliminary microanalysis by organizing the key codes the participants selected from their own narratives (table 1). story title, selected by young learning interests key codes an experience in the water swimming effort, achievement, pride between oar strokes the current carries me along rowing sacrifice, satisfaction, self-confidence drawing my life drawing pressure, website creation, understanding from the twirling to the gloves twirling and gymnastics pressure, evolution, learning with others the travelling balls travelling emotions, cultures, coexistence feelings with quavers and crotchets compose and perform music youtube, discover, fun, express one world, everything different learning languages friendship, motivation, values, communication manufacturing my life arts and crafts express, interpret, selflearning the moment machine photography relax, feelings, metaphors the videos, my life video editing and computing fun, videos, volunteer, internet table 1. learning interests and key codes from young people’s ethnographic narratives afterwards, axial coding (corbin & strauss, 2008) allowed in-depth analysis of the stories and identify five central codes: learning; engaging; media and literacy; diversity; and transitions between learning contexts. in what follows, we discuss three of the topics that emerged from the codification. the discussion is based on the young people’s voices, both from the stories they created and the report they presented to the school to be assessed as their research project. a) connecting learning inside and outside school. yassine was one of the participants who did not feel involved in the school. every time we talked about learning and developing the skills needed for today’s society, he refused to recognize that school was important for him. he was totally immersed in the topics and information sources he considered to be significant for his own life and interests. however, the subjects in question in no way corresponded to school subjects. when the teacher started talking, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 7 yassine stopped listening and navigated internet to learn how to produce and edit videos, create a webpage or modify an image with photoshop. as he explains in the following quote, every day he considered himself more professional in this field, but at the school, he was not seen as a successful student because of his low marks. i started making videos four years ago, and the truth is that i am good at it. little by little, i search for information about videos, how to make and edit videos, then a bit more professional, even more professional; to get more practice in this area (…) i also make pictures. i have done an online course to learn more (yassine’s story, videos, my life). paradoxically, when he showed us his pictures and channel in youtube, we realized that most of his videos were made in school (image 4), with other students and teachers. however, every time we asked him about this, he did not consider it to belong to school. that was because he created and shared these videos in extracurricular time and his knowledge was irrelevant to the school subjects. on the other hand, when two teachers suggested different informal activities to him, he valued the offer and collaborated willingly. i had the chance to have two teachers who helped me a lot. one of them is alfred and the other is carles. for example, with carles we put some music or videos together during the break-time and did activities for children [of the school] just for fun, like at the end of school year celebration… things like that (yassine’s story, videos, my life). image 4. picture from yassine’s story this idea of engaging with an activity inside and outside school was present in most ethnographic stories. we selected some of the key codes with the young people and they came up with definitions or examples for each concept, exploring the same notion inside and outside school. table 2 shows how they related the idea of striving inside school and having a good job and striving outside school and getting better at what they liked to do. effort in out we do not like the effort in the classroom very much, but we have to do it if we want to get a good job and good marks. the majority considered the effort required by school to an obligation. we also make an effort in our hobbies other activities. however, the difference is that when we are at school, it is a duty. when it is a hobby, we make an effort because we want to do something we like and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 8 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 9 would like to improve what we do. table 2. effort notion, inside and outside school. b) shifting from offline to online environments maria was considered an excellent student by the school. her marks were quite high, but at the same time, she was quite critical of the school ‘grammar’ (tyack & tobin, 1994). the experience that maria wanted to share with us was based on composing, recording and sharing music through the internet. the most remarkable aspect of her story was that despite her success at school, the subject she most disliked was music. the reason was that the means and strategies she put into practice to learn songs outside the school were different from those used at school. to improve on a song, i write it down in a notebook and listen to it many times on my mobile phone. i read the lyrics and little by little, i learn it. if it is in english, i check the words i don’t know, listening and practicing them carefully. usually i can learn the song in two days (maria’s story. feelings with quavers and crotchets). in this quotation, maria referred to the knowledge she put into practice to learn a song. in addition, it is impressive that she emphasised, “usually i can learn the song in two days”. this showed that in this case, the informal learning culture implies having a very systematic, personal and well-organised learning method. first, she writes the lyrics down; then she listens to the music and memorises the lyrics; and finally she practises the english pronunciation, if required. what we highlight here is that at the same time, she was learning how to search for the lyrics on the internet; download the song in her mobile phone; search for the translation into spanish; create a youtube channel and avatar and get visits from other users (image 5). she was taking for granted all the abilities she needed to carry this out. image 5. picture from maria’s storytelling as we can see in the following quotation, she also talked quite naturally about how she constantly shifted from one environment to another, learning instinctively and incorporating new skills, competences and even expressions into her language. nowadays, i have a youtube channel where i upload covers of songs. i have a few subscribers and not many viewers, but i am doing okay. after practising the songs with my notebook a few times, i record myself singing, edit the video a little bit and publish it. the channel also made me discover my passion for videos and now i usually record different videos to upload them on another channel. i just hope that someone likes them (maria’s story. feelings with quavers and crotchets). as shown in table 3, students came up with a definition of learning music inside and outside school. in their free time, they were able to choose what kind of music they want to listen to and which instruments they want to play. meanwhile, in the classroom they cannot choose because the teachers structured the whole curriculum without consulting them or taking into account their knowledge, skills and interest. the emerging idea in this table is the student’s agency in a learning context. music in out in school, we study music as history and as a way of hearing, but [teachers] always pick the songs they think will be more suitable for us. outside, you can learn different languages listening to songs in another language, such as english, japanese, french, etc. while you're listening to it, you mentally translate and understand the language better. you learn music more deeply in a particular field, if you go to extra classes. table 3. learning music, inside and outside school. c) relating to others in virtual and face-to-face sites judith was an excellent student who had little time at home to do what she really enjoyed: painting and drawing. an important element from her learning process out of school was the relationships with others who shared this passion allowing her to improve as an artist – not only face-to-face, but virtually. the main goal was to share her creations and learning with others; but again, she was not aware of her transition between online and offline environments. she mentioned her godfather as an important face-to-face mentor, because he started painting at home when he was young and ended up doing it professionally. at the same time, she discovered a webpage where people shared their drawings in forums and commented on other people’s creations. in this quote, she explains that it was not just a matter of entertainment, but also the possibility of finding virtual mentors who gave her advice to improve her own work (image 6). i meet new people in internet forums, where people from other places upload their drawings and comment on how they did them and where they found the inspiration… i read their opinions and apply them to my daily life as an artist, improving my drawing technique and style (judith’s story. drawing my life). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 10 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 11 image 6. image from judith’s storytelling table 4 shows how young people defined friendship inside and outside school. they could learn languages in both scenarios with friends who spoke french or english, but at school, they were only able to do it during the break, not in class. out of school, they shared moments and interests they had in common, “things [that] are not usually taught by teachers from the school”. friendship in out in the classroom, friendship can help us if we do not understand a concept or task, if the friend understands it. if you have a friend of another nationality, you can practice your language with them, such as english or french (the most common). sometimes you have colleagues with whom you share good times or interests you have in common. teachers do not usually teach these things, but you want to learn them because you enjoy. table 4. friendship notion, inside and outside school. 4. conclusions in this paper, we have analysed the ethnographic narratives created by young people participating in our research project to represent how they connect with the wide array of environments -both real and virtual, where they interact, communicate and learn. as hine (2000) suggested, virtual ethnography allowed us to explore young people’s relationships with technology. we have focused on their learning cultures through online environments and using digital media. the results showed how they are constantly shifting from one context to another, developing skills and abilities highly important for the 21st century without being aware of the learning process. below we highlight the most crucial results in relation to our research objectives. a) school disaffection yassine’s story illustrates the phenomena of school disaffection that is typical worldwide. his case challenges some of the assumptions about dropping-out and school failure, exemplifying how young people can show a huge capacity to engage and to carry out hard work to accomplish his goals. on the other hand, his knowledge was not considered as curricular, that is to say as legitimate school knowledge. if yassine did not drop out from school, it was not because of his marks or his concern about the traditional subjects. it was because some teachers suggested that he engage in extracurricular activities that made him reconsider the possibility of continuing studying. b) learning and agency the difference young people found between learning music inside and outside school cannot be generalised. we need to take into account the fact that these ethnographic results relate to their contexts. however, maria’s case shows that learning music in her leisure time is also based on systematic, personal and well-organised methods. what made a difference between her experiences in the class was that school does not take into account students’ agency, by integrating their knowledge, skills and interest into the curriculum. c) virtual and face-to-face mentors judith’s case continues the work started by ito et al. (2010) about young people’s participation in the new media ecology. they concluded that young people engage in friendship-driven and interest-driven relationships online to share their creations and receive feedback from others. through our results, we emphasise that this phenomenon is not only happening through online contexts, but that they are also learning with face-to-face mentors. we believe is of crucial importance to keep on researching into this subject, as it provides us with important keys to explore what young people define as “things [that] are not usually taught by teachers.” d) how does it help us rethink the inner world of classroom? we found tensions between school narratives and the ways young people moves from face-to-face to virtual learning environments, especially in social networks. it is clear from our research evidence that some secondary school students showed a high degree of autonomy and agency in their outside-ofschool learning processes. while they learn independently how to modify pictures, create a channel in youtube or share their pictures and drawings, they are often faced with very narrow patterns for learning in the classroom. one of the participants concluded as follows: after participating in many discussions, an interesting idea emerged: everything is much too regulated in secondary schools. previously i thought that adolescents did not have any initiative to learn and to discover by themselves (final report, written by the participants). their final considerations demanded changes in secondary school rules, structures, relationships with teachers and peers, and student agency. often there is little cooperation between teachers and students, because the teacher works alone and doesn’t want to solve the students’ queries, or because the student does not listen to the teacher and does not allow other students to be attentive in class. we reached the conclusion that teacher and student should work together to achieve the same goal: improving teaching and classroom experiences, helping students to overcome educational barriers and making the teacher’s job more pleasant (final report, written by the participants). to sum up, their words prompted us to consider young people’s learning cultures in order to rethink secondary education. if they believe that activities like producing videos, singing, composing music or programming a web page are an essential part of their out-of-school learning, we should take their seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 12 agency and knowledge into account when we review the school curriculum, making it more participatory and meaningful. 5. from conclusions to actions in this final part of the paper, we summarise a set of suggestions and recommendations for all those involved in compulsory education, from teachers to policy-makers, and including teacher educators and families. our research envisages formidable challenges for compulsory secondary education but also ways of dealing with them. both teachers and students recognised the time and effort needed to master learning. the key question here would be how to convert schools into real learning environments (oecd, 2013). however, to convert schools into genuine innovative learning environments we should guarantee that: • students and teachers engage in genuine and authentic learning processes (laur, 2013) which enable young people’s knowledge, skills and interest to be linked with the knowledge and skills relevant to 21st century citizenship. • it is recognised that schools cannot go on considering themselves as the only information and knowledge providers. schools still play a hugely responsible role in certifying students’ achievements, but they should certainly question the pervasive organisational metaphor that breaks down and compartmentalises time, space, knowledge, skill, resources and people. • the collaborative dimension of learning should be taken into account not only at the students’ level, but also at teachers’ and teachers-students’ level. • the complex dimensions of the digital society, with its threats and opportunities, should be acknowledged and teaching and learning processes should not look into the past but into the future. acknowledgment this paper has been written with the support of the faculty of education and the department of didactics and educational management. university of barcelona. 6. references alvermann, d. 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(2008). integrated but not included: exploring quiet disaffection in mainstream schools in china and india. the international journal on school disaffection, 6(1), 12 -18. about the authors raquel miño-puigcercós. phd student and associate professor of educational technologies. department of didactics and educational management. university of barcelona. member of the quality research group esbrina – contemporary subjectivities, visualities and educational environments (2014sgr 632): http://esbrina.eu and reuni+d -university network for educational research and innovation (edu2010-12194-e) http://reunid.eu. dr. juana m. sancho-gil. full professor of educational technologies. department of didactics and educational management university of barcelona. co-coordinator of the quality research group esbrina cotemporary subjectivities, visualities and educational environments (2014sgr 0632) http://esbrina.eu; she also coordinates reuni+d university network for educational research and innovation (edu201012194-e) http://reunid.eu. postal address p. vall d’hebron, 171 08035 barcelona spain 1 in 2013 the eu average rate of early leavers from education and training was 11.9%, surpassing 15% in 5 countries. source: eurostat (lfs). 2 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ 3http://www.igi-global.com/newsroom/archive/digital-technology-new-wavestupid/1464/ 4 the author’s emphasis. 5 spanish ministry of economy and competiveness. edu2011-24122. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 1 – 2015 17 http://esbrina/ http://reunid.eu/ http://esbrina/ http://reunid.eu/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ http://www.igi-global.com/newsroom/archive/digital-technology-new-wave-stupid/1464/ http://www.igi-global.com/newsroom/archive/digital-technology-new-wave-stupid/1464/ learning by using digital media in and out of school raquel miño-puigcercós juana m. sancho-gil abstract. 1. introduction 2. methodological approach 3. analysis and results a) connecting learning inside and outside school. b) shifting from offline to online environments c) relating to others in virtual and face-to-face sites 4. conclusions a) school disaffection b) learning and agency c) virtual and face-to-face mentors d) how does it help us rethink the inner world of classroom? 5. from conclusions to actions acknowledgment 6. references constraints in film making processes offer an exercise to the imagination theoretical analysis of three research apparatuses about media and information literacy in francei jacques kerneis, phd university institution for teacher education e-mail: jacques.kerneis@bretagne.iufm.fr abstract in this article, we compare three projects about mapping digital-, mediaand information literacy in france. for this study, we first used the concept of “apparatus” in foucauldian (1977) and agambenian sense (2009). after this analysis, we called on bachelard (1932) and his distinction between phénoménotechnique and phénoménographie. the first project began in 2006 around a professional association (fadben: http://www.fadben.asso.fr/), with the main goal being to distinguish 64 main concepts in information literacy. this work is now completed, and we can observe it quietly through publications. the second project emanates from a research group (grcdi: http://culturedel.info/grcdi/) that is still active. in 2011, grcdi produced a status report, including future perspectives, which introduced the idea of transliteracy (media and information culture).the third project (limin-r: http://www.iscc.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article1115) is an open group (media, information, computer science) with support from cnrs. we aim at mapping the web around these concepts, and in all three projects wiki tools have been used, which has been important for the success and limits of the collective action. this paper presents highlights and lessons learned, as well as ideas for further development. outline: • necessity of archaeology and architecture of knowledge • project 1: dictionary and integrators’ concepts in information literacy • project 2: grcdi : report on information culture • project 3: limin-r and evolutions: translit • perspectives necessity of archaeology and architecture of knowledge this article aims to present to an international public some research on media and information literacy using key concepts. we have chosen to look at them through the constructs of apparatus and phénoménologie. thus, we will be seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 mailto:jacques.kerneis@bretagne.iufm.fr http://www.fadben.asso.fr/ http://culturedel.info/grcdi/ able to see the heuristic contribution of this wittgensteinian analysis (looks like a duck or a rabbit). the phenomena of web 2.0 are phénoménotechniques (production of pnenomna) (bachelard, 1932), and understanding them needs an “archaeology of knowledge”, which is defined as an analytical method that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period (foucault, 1969). this is the reason why we will present our three research projects in different perspectives. the first one is to look at these projects as an apparatus through foucault, who said: what i’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. such are the elements of the apparatus. the apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. secondly, what i am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements.” (1977) we will attempt to show what kind of apparatus each project is. we can tell immediately that “dispositif” is a french concept, and if foucault was translated as “apparatus” in english, this choice is not so obvious, while “dispositif “is translated differently, even in the same book, as “device”, “machinery”, “apparatus”, “construction” and “deployment”. agamben’s praxeologic definition of the apparatus is the most insightful for us: i shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and--why not--language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses. (2009, 14) in other words, our question will be how each project is a “various institutional-, physicaland administrative mechanisms, as well as knowledge structures that enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body.” in a second step, we will see how these projects contribute to an architecture of knowledge in salaun’s perspective (2012), who cites richard saul wurman (1976): thought “architecture” was a better way of describing what i thought was the direction that more people should look into for information, and i thought the explosion of data needed an architecture, needed a series of systems, needed systemic design, a series of performance criteria to measure it. in this perspective, our point of view will be the phénoménotechnique described by bachelard. indeed, “one of the most interesting of his philosophy is the erosion of the boundary between the theoretical and the technical part of science” (chimisso, 2008, 386). in fact, for bachelard, scientific phenomena seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 82 are today caused by instruments, particularly instruments of inscriptions (latour and woolgar, 1979). however, bachelard does not impose only approach as stated by castelaolawless (1995, 58): “finally, because it accepts that both the study of each science and of each stage of development of science require different types of philosophical and historical analysis, it opens the way of pluralistic models of scientific explanation.” finally, bachelard distinguishes the production of phenomenon (phénoménotechnique) and the (high)lighting that he calls phénoménographie. project 1: dictionary and integrators concepts in information literacy after this section centred on theoretical tools, we presented the three projects in chronological order by relying on the concepts we have defined. the first began in 2006. two teachers (ballarini-santonocito and duplessis) with a group of “professeurs-documentalistes” (teacher-librarians), a specificity of the french education system, worked on an online search. they built a map with the concepts used in this activity. the production apparatus is like action research. the phénoménographique used a specific instrument of inscription: map minding, like in figure 1. figure 1: a map of the online search after that, this small team, including a third researcher (serres), built a dictionary consisting of a culture of information, especially for “professeursdocumentalistes”. they aimed to overlay the field and spot 133 concepts for a first base of knowledge to teach, which was adapted to the level of education. for this work, the inscriptions were brought forth using a private wiki. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 83 the difference between phénoménotechnique and phéoménographie is never easy, on account of goings and comings, but here for this last part of the project, we can identify a particular production: 64 main concepts, including seven core ones (information, document, source, indexation, information space, information search and information exploitation). this phénoménotechnique work was published by a professional association (fadben) in a professional journal called mediadoc (2007). here, we propose two inscriptions of the core concepts: the concept of source (figures 2 and 3). figure 2: a map of a main concept: source figure 3: a didactic approach of source seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 84 this huge work was necessary in the first place, as quite a few “professeursdocumentalistes” have used it, but not really the institution. it is the production of activists, and they take care to ensure direct links with teaching. we can remark that this work only mentions information culture, and says nothing at all about media culture. however “source” is not the same concept in these two cultures. another aspect of this first apparatus is the small place for archaeological aspects, and the culture of information is not really positioned relative to information literacy. this work was done by le deuff, who distinguished among three aspects of literacy (figure 4) and their main features. figure 4: three aspects of literacy olivier le deuff seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 85 figure 5: culture of information vs. information literacy an important aspect of these apparatuses is to feed the second and the third projects, as we shall proceed to demonstrate. project 2 grcdi: report on information culture the second project was produced by a research group created in 2007 (grcdi: groupe de recherche sur la culture et la didactique de l’information. http://culturedel.info/grcdi/) that is still active, and in 2011 we produced an outlook report (media, digital and information culture and education). here, the production apparatus is different, as the group consisted of researchers and other different types of actors (mostly librarians, but mainly “professeurs-documentalistes” in secondary schools and high schools). the group was not affiliated with a lab, but took part in erte, a national research programme during the period from 2006-2009. at the beginning, the primary aim of this group was to make an archaeology of information culture and didactic reflections. this is why we wrote an important report within a collaborative work, and extracted 12 recommendations (figure 6). here, the phénoménographique aspect is based on a blog, presenting more than 150 texts from all the members of grcdi and completed by a private wiki for writing the report. the phénoménotechnique aspect of this group is an annual seminar gathering researchers and teachers. figure 6: 12 recommendations published on the blog this complete apparatus aimed to open very quickly to other cultures (digital, computer, media…). therefore, we can show the overlap of some aspects of these different cultures. so, after alan liu in the us (santa barbara university) and sue thomas in great britain (de montfort university), we have introduced the idea of transliteracy in france. we used the definition of the latter author.“transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, tv, radio and film, to digital social networks. (thomas, 2007) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 86 this topic was on the menu of the 5th seminar of grcdi in september 2012, and this idea was further developed by another group, limin-r, which was created in 2010 to focus on this issue. project 3 limin-r and evolutions: translit we discussed the limin-r projectii (2010-11), “literacies: medias, information and digital studies”, in the previous section, which is explicitly connected with a previous project: the erte: technological research in education task force: “information literacy and curriculum in documentation” (2006‐2010), and finished with an international symposium: information literacy education (october 16‐18, 2008) at the university charles de gaulle lille 3. this apparatus was funded by cnrs (pir) for the period from 2010‐2011, and operated by various research laboratories or groups: crew, prefics grcdi, stef, geriico‐ iscc and ims. this objective was to operate a prior census of academic works on the concept of “information” related to media, information and computer literacies, and to produce an interdisciplinary research restructuration of the three separate fields (overlapping concepts, methodologies and finalities). the phénoménotechnique of this project is based on a platform (figure 7) and a glossary. as in the first project, the first word put to work was “source”, but here in various senses. figure 7: a private platform website: aladoc figure 8: turn and return seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 87 the main interest of this work is based on the turn and return shuttle process between these two inscription instruments (figure 8). here, we only propose two maps produced by the research team (figures 9 and 10). figure 9: keyword map of experts seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 88 figure 10: co-occurrences between “information” and other words on the web the insertion in academic circuits has consequences at the level of the involvement of people who are not researchers. it is also the reason why this group, which is directed by the main professors: divina frau-meigs (media), eric delamotte (information & knowledge literacy and eric bruillard (computer literacy), aims to create an association and review for the phénoménographie aspects. hence, we can already find a first publication on the ina site (institut national de l’audiovisuel) called “l’éducation aux cultures de l’informationiii” that lays the emphasis on “translittératie” (à la french), which is open to numeracy and visual cultures. currently, an anr (french national research agency) project takes over for four years (2013-2016), though only with researchers from four labs: crew, stef, geriico and ims, but with a convention that will allow all the other partners of limin_r to be involved. the project aims at continuing the various trends of investigation already described. perspectives three research questions are proposed by this reconstructed group: 1 what new sharing of competences between these three disciplinary fields do these uses of transliteracy generate? through an analysis of the old and new forms of engagement with information evinced by young people, the purpose is to check and qualify their viability and their finalities. 2 what are the new collective dynamics, on the scale of the school and of the territory, that may be set up with the development of the transliteracy in learning events with varied configurations? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 89 the purpose is to explore the new issues that may arise at the articulation between the individual and the collective, and in the digital space as much as in the geographical space. 3 what are the political and educational options that might appear to reach a fully-fledged transliteracy? the purpose is to identify and qualify the practices and the uses of transliteracy currently in development, as they could lead to new reconfigurations of the three scientific domains involved to unheard of processes of regulation, as well as to shifts in the borders between private and public uses. these three questions lead to four tasks: t1: mapping “information” in the three fields considered, via a dedicated search engine; t2: observing transliteracy situations in both semi-formal and non-formal settings; t3: processing the collected data to identify strategies for transliteracy in “information cultures”; t4: modelling conceptual relations linking transliteracy, knowledge building and e-learning. this attractive programme shows that the research apparatus became more structured and more related with empirical fields by dint of cooperative design. the balance between phénoménotechnique and phénoménographique seems to be a good way to ensure that. beyond this chronological presentation, it is clear that these three types of apparatus must continue together, and that it is primordial at best to articulate these two inseparable bachelardian dimensions of research. in conclusion, we can write that this particular manner of describing theses three projects allows a focus on important aspects, but at the same time prevents us from seeing other aspects of projects, such as, for example, their social value. bibliography agamben, g. (2009). what is an apparatus? and other essays (2009). stanford: stanford university press. bachelard, g. (1932). l'intuition de l'instant. étude sur la siloë de gaston roupnel. paris: stock. bogaards, j. (2004). richard saul wurman: the infodesign interview. infodesign. [en ligne]: http://www.informationdesign.org/special/wurman_interview.htm. castelao-lawless, t. (1995). phénoménotechnique in historical perspective: its origins and implications for philosophy of science. philosophy of science, 62, 44-59. chimisso, c. (2001). gaston bachelard. critic of science and the imagination. london: routledge. duplessis pascal (dir.) et al. (2006). inventaire des concepts info-documentaires mobilisés dans les activités de recherche d’informations en ligne, académie de nantes [en ligne]: http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00520098 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 90 http://www.informationdesign.org/special/wurman_interview.htm http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00520098 duplessis p., ballarini-santonocito i. (2007). petit dictionnaire des concepts infodocumentaires: approche didactique à l’usage des enseignants documentalistes. [en ligne]: http://savoirscdi.cndp.fr/culturepro/actualisation/duplessis/dicoduplessis.htm foucault, m. (1977). the confession of the flesh (1977) interview. in power/knowledge selected interviews and other writings, c. gordon (ed.), 1980: pp. 194-228. kerneis, j (2009). analyse didactique et communicationnelle de l’éducation aux medias : éléments d’une grammaire de l’incertitude. thèse de sciences de l'éducation, université rennes 2. cread (centre de recherche sur l'éducation, les apprentissages et la didactique). [en ligne]: http://classespresse.pbworks.com/f/these+2010+08+13.pdf. publiée aux éditions universitaires européennes en août 2010. isbn-13: 978-6131521904. kerneis, j. (2010). mediatics objects in education: a high-level of uncertainty. communication at the european conference on educational research (ecer) education and cultural change", helsinki, finland, 25-27 august. kerneis, j. (2011). translittératie: a new way for digital, knowledge and media education in france. in current and future perspectives on media competence, media-bildung, and "literacies" (2011). symposium at european conference on educational research (ecer) urban education. berlin, deutschland, 13-16 september. kerneis, j. & le deuff, o. (2012). critical analysis of different projects about key concepts mapping information and media literacy in france since 2006. in key concepts and key issues in learning, education, media and culture. symposium at european conference on educational research (ecer). cadix, spain, 18-21 september. kerneis, j., coutant, a., assogba, h., & stenger, t. (2o12). les natifs numériques profitent-ils de la convergence ? constats nuancés et pistes de réflexion pour les éducateurs. études de communication, 38, 53-68. latour, b. & woolgar, s. (1979). laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. sage: new-york, londres. resmini, a. & rosati, l. (2011). a brief history of information architecture. journal of information architecture 3, 2 33-45. [en ligne]: http://journalofia.org/volume3/issue2/03-resmini/jofia-0302-03-resmini.pdf rosenfeld, l. & morville, p. (1998). information architecture for the world wide web. [en ligne]: http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/infoarch/index.htm salaün, j. m. (2012). vu, lu, su: les architectes de l’information face à l’oligopole du web. paris: la découverte. serres, a. (2007). information, media, computer literacies: vers un espace commun de la culture informationnelle? séminaire grcdi (groupe de recherche sur la culture et la didactique de l’information). wittgenstein, l. (1953/2004). recherches philosophiques. paris: gallimard. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 91 http://savoirscdi.cndp.fr/culturepro/actualisation/duplessis/dicoduplessis.htm http://classespresse.pbworks.com/f/these+2010+08+13.pdf http://journalofia.org/volume3/issue2/03-resmini/jofia-0302-03-resmini.pdf http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/web2/infoarch/index.htm biography teacher at the iufm (university institution for teacher education) located in brittany email: jacques.kerneis@bretagne.iufm.fr webpage: http://cread.bretagne.iufm.fr/spip.php?article445 post-school qualifications: phd in didactics and communication (université rennes 2) (2009) capes (teacher certificate for secondary education) of documentation (1995). positions held: iufm de bretagne: teacher trainer (2007/2013) secondary lower schools in fouesnant and quimper teacher of documentation (1995/2007) primary schools in brest and quimper (1985/1995) i all my thanks to martine kervran, divina frau meigs and mauri sauslaff for their proofreading. ii http://www.iscc.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article1115 iiihttp://www.ina-sup.com/ressources/dossiers-de-laudiovisuel/les-e-dossiers-delaudiovisuel/e-dossier-leducation-aux-cultures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 92 mailto:jacques.kerneis@bretagne.iufm.fr http://cread.bretagne.iufm.fr/spip.php?article445 http://www.iscc.cnrs.fr/spip.php?article1115 theoretical analysis of three research apparatuses about media and information literacy in france0f jacques kerneis, phd abstract necessity of archaeology and architecture of knowledge project 1: dictionary and integrators concepts in information literacy project 2 grcdi: report on information culture project 3 limin-r and evolutions: translit perspectives bibliography biography title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 from classroom to digital arena in seeking higherlevel learning: student experience mark browni ph.d. department of communication, culture and languages bi norwegian business school mark.brown@bi.no abstract much of the impetus in introducing digital technologies has come from distance-learning courses rather than from traditional classroom-based activity. however, classroom-based teaching faces a resource squeeze for which digital technology offers a possible solution; in order to provide students with higher-level learning opportunities, teaching hours will probably have to be reallocated from lower levels of classroom-based learning activity. this article reports some results from a teaching project in which we moved a mid-level learning process out of the classroom and into a digital learning environment to free up teaching time for higher-level learning. the findings confirm previous work showing that students respond very positively to such reflective learning opportunities. more importantly, this article contributes to an understanding of how students, who are used to cooperating in a classroom, respond to being moved into a digital learning environment. the findings are based on results from a student questionnaire. the variation in responses to different aspects of the experience underlines the importance of offering choice in a digital learning environment. keywords: digital learning environment, higher-level learning, reflection, learning outcomes, community of enquiry, cooperative learning introduction this article makes a contribution to knowledge within teaching practice. it describes and reports some results from an attempt to use a digital learning platform to automate part of a learning process that has traditionally been classroom-based. the automation was intended to free up teacher contact time with students, so that more hours could be allocated to providing them with a higher-level learning opportunity (described later). this topic is relevant for teacher-practitioners who must grapple with the challenge posed by two opposing pressures. on the one hand, there is our professional ambition to provide students with higher-level learning opportunities. unfortunately, these processes tend to consume a relatively large amount of teaching time, a fact mailto:mark.brown@bi.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 2 that is at odds with the second pressure: a resourcing squeeze within education that wants to see fewer teaching hours per unit of learning. digital technology in learning processes one possible way of meeting this challenge is offered by digital technologies, whose promoters were quick to position them in this resource-squeeze discourse. one of their sales arguments claimed that administrative chores were simpler to carry out. keller and hrastinski’s (2009) survey of university teachers reported widespread acknowledgement that learning platforms are indeed useful in disseminating information to students and administering assignment submissions. (see also lonn & teasley, 2009; weaver, spratt, & nair, 2008; alexander & golja, 2008). a more recent survey by olsson (2011) corroborates their findings, reporting that the three most common usages of “ict [information and communication technology] are distribution of material, communication [and] administration” (p. 37). generally then, digital learning platforms would now seem to be widespread throughout scandinavia, but their usage is still concentrated on administrative functions and low-level learning processes. if one narrows the focus from general usage to practitioners’ reports of specific applications of digital technology in specific learning processes, there is already a considerable bank of knowledge. some articles in this journal report on the use of learning platforms in blended approaches to course design (johansen, harding, & ljosaa, 2012; hole, larsen, & hoem, 2010; bjørke, 2011). (see also akkoyunlu & soylu, 2008; condie & livingston, 2007). the courses on which these studies are based have one important feature in common; because of the geographic separation of participants, none of them could have been offered as a purely face-to-face, classroom experience. an important difference between such work and this study is that the course which is the subject of this article is classroom based; bachelor-level students turn up at the same time weekly to participate in a negotiations course conducted by their regular teacher. we wanted to see how they would compare their normal classroom experience (i.e., negotiating a business case face-toface with classmates) with the experience of negotiating remotely (i.e., within a digital environment with strangers). the case for making changes why change a learning process that already works well? although improved versions of learning management software continue to be released, when compared with a real teacher, our experience is that they are still only useful for making evaluations of learning at the lower levels. with reference to the six-stage, modified-bloom cognitive processes (anderson et. al., 2001) they can clearly test remembering and, arguably, understanding. but prior to this trial we had no experience of using a digital platform to support a learning process at the applying level. indeed, the applying learning activities that we had created for students were all face-to-face, classroom-based and very popular. one serious consequence of this popularity that we faced, a challenge which is probably typical for other teachers, is that in testing the usefulness of the technology in supporting higher-level learning activities, one risks moving students into digital environments that actually provide a poorer learning experience than the one they can get in their regular classroom. however, current shortcomings in functionality should not be used as an excuse for inactivity. those of us who teach within the relative luxury of a 36hour, classroom-based course may expect the two opposing pressures to intensify; we will become more ambitious regarding our students’ learning outcomes, and limitations in public financing for higher education will mean seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 3 less money per student. simultaneously, digital learning platforms will become better. it is not a question of if. it is rather a question of when they will be good enough to move into higher-level learning processes and how we can use them successfully to improve overall learning outcomes. we must build our understanding of how in preparation for when. technology and good learning the technology must, of course, be the servant of the learning processes (vogel & klassen, 2001). in the next major section, therefore, i conceptualise the course we teach within a simplified-bloom hierarchy of cognitive learning, to pedagogically position the role of the technology. for current purposes, it is sufficient to mention that i conceive most of the learning processes in our course to be heavily constructivist rather than, following bjørke (2011), “instructivist.” within our own teaching group, however, the debate prompted by the advance of e-learning technologies is revealing that there is this difference in conceptualisation among us. different members of our group conform fairly well with the three-level description provided by biggs (2003, pp. 20-25). for those teachers who conceive of learning as a largely objective mass of facts and ideas, the teaching process is about broadcasting material, while the students’ learning process is about receiving, storing and reproducing it. the first generations of digital learning platforms did not threaten such a viewpoint. they simply offered an electronic channel for transmitting the knowledge as a supplement to the teacher (see, for example, garrison & anderson, 2003, pp. 34-39 and billing, 2007). as already mentioned, the multiple-choice quizzes that we have placed on the learning platform are able to test remembering and arguably, understanding, but no more. the newer versions of platforms now claim functionality such as sharing, collaborative writing and cooperation (its learning, 2013; fronter 2013). underpinning this technology is a more constructivist assumption of what learning is; students work, often in groups, at applying ideas to construct new understandings. for the constructivists in the staffroom, these recent advances in technology are an exciting development, but for the instructivists they are an irrelevance. so the technology has initiated an important and long overdue internal discussion about exactly what we understand by the term good learning. that said, i am not a one-size-fits-all social-constructivist. one valuable contribution from olsson (2011) is in reminding us that different subjects have different learning processes. he reports, for example, that lecturers in chemistry and biology – two of the natural sciences – showed highest agreement with the claim that “learning is an individual process” (p. 38). a moment’s reflection on the knowledge base in these two subjects suffices to show why they hold this opinion. continuing the theme of good learning, oltedal reports student experience of a digitally supported reflective learning process. she describes her “competence meetings” as an “arena for reflection … on theory and practice” (2009, p. 2) and the task assigned to the students conforms closely to the one described in this article. her findings are also broadly positive and they provided some guidance in our project design at the bi norwegian business school. first, her on-campus students liked the reflective learning process. however, there is no indication that they were comparing their digital experience with an experience they had had in a previously organised reflective process in a classroom. the comment from one of the on-campus students is that she “underscores the new experiences and learning that result [from the competence meeting]” (p. 10), which suggests that the process itself was new. oltedal’s findings give good grounds to believe that reflective learning processes are appreciated by students, (see also harrison, short & roberts, 2003). however, they are not necessarily an endorsement for applying technology for on-campus students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 4 who can meet each other face-to-face relatively easily. the second finding relevant for this project was the feedback from several students that a high level of participation was important for the process. therefore, to motivate students to participate, the project allowed student groups that submitted their jointly written reflective assignment by the deadline to book a half-hour tutorial with their teacher to discuss their reflections. general research questions one seemingly, unavoidable consequence of providing students with such a high-level learning experience as the one described by oltedal is the heavy investment in teacher resources that is needed, not to teach, but to advise or evaluate. if teachers are to engage with their students’ thought processes, our experience shows that that they must spend considerable time with their material, whether it be a video of a meeting or a written assignment. recognising the resource squeeze referred to earlier, one assumption of our project was that this requirement would have to be met by resource savings made lower down the learning hierarchy. the first general research question, therefore, was formulated as follows: assuming that teaching resources which are freed up by an automation process at a lower level of learning, are allocated to a new higher-level learning process, will the students experience an increase in their learning outcomes as a consequence of the new process? this leads to exploring the automation possibilities in lower-level learning activities which digital technology is beginning to offer. but it is important during this process not to lose sight of the ultimate pedagogical goal: better overall learning. the general research question for this area of understanding can be formulated as follows: when a learning process at a lower level is automated, will the students work with less, the same, or greater diligence and will their learning outcome be less, the same, or greater than it was before the process was automated? all teachers will have to rework these research questions within the context of their courses; their understanding of how learning takes place, the processes they have designed to support student learning, and the automation and augmentation of processes that they propose to make. but crudely stated, if the answers to the research questions point to an aggregate increase in learning outcomes, then the pedagogic case for change has been made. it is in this area of digital automation that this project makes a contribution. as mentioned earlier, the digital platforms are now able to help with checking for student acquisition of facts and terminology and also, arguably, with checking for students’ understanding of the more basic theoretical concepts that we want them to learn. but there are limits to what one can do with multiplechoice questions. in the next level up the modified-bloom cognitive hierarchy – applying – students attempt to use the theory or model they have acquired in some task. we are fortunate that in our course on negotiating, students play roles in business cases. this is an applying learning activity that lends itself to a digital arena. in many other courses, the applying process must be a practical task that may not lend itself to automation by a learning platform. although the software we used could not fully automate the management of the process, we created a digital environment in which students prepared for a business negotiation, negotiated, and then reflected on their experience. afterwards, they responded to an electronic questionnaire in which they were asked to make an explicit comparison between a classroom-based negotiation seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 5 three to four weeks earlier and the digitally based negotiation just completed. the findings suggest that moving student activities out of their classroom setting and into a digital arena can be experienced positively. in the next section, i have conceptualised the course within a bloom-inspired model of cognitive learning. this enables me to refine the two general research questions and to position pedagogically technology’s role in students’ learning activities. the negotiations course conceptualised an overview the course which is the subject of this study offers learning of two negotiation theories and then practice in their application in five different cases. due to limitations in teaching resources, there is little teacher-managed work for students in reflecting on how well the negotiation theories worked in practice. students are left largely on their own at this high level of learning. their learning process is summarised in the three layers of the pyramid in figure one, which is a simplification of the six-stage, modified-bloom cognitive process dimensions (anderson et al., 2001, p. 28). our experience as practitioners is that these three layers provide a sufficiently well delineated conceptual framework with which to work. making more fine-grained subdivisions, such as in bloom’s taxonomy, leads, at this stage of our journey at least, more to confusion between teachers about what is what, rather than providing any productive pedagogical insight. figure 1: three-layer model of cognitive process (simplified from modifiedbloom) with negotiations course learning process (on left) and current allocation of teacher contact hours (on right). acquiring theory/models the syllabus includes the two major models for approaching a negotiation situation: (i) integrative and (ii) distributive, negotiation theory. they are provided in one book: getting to yes, (fisher, ury, & patton, 1997) and by a 30-page chapter from essentials of negotiation (lewicki, barry, & saunders, 2007). at this first level of their learning, students acquire the theoretical knowledge in cognitive processes which we equate with the remembering and understanding of the modified-bloom model. following anderson et. al.’s knowledge dimension (p. 28), we are inclined to consider the syllabus material to fall within their categories of factual and conceptual knowledge. the digital seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 6 learning platform has been furnished with some simple multiple-choice questions which give students an idea of how well they remember this material. some of the questions offer students alternative definitions of particular terms and ask them to select the right one. (opinion within the teaching group varies as to whether such questions prove that a student who picks the right answer has actually mastered the concept). currently, utilisation of the digital learning platform is limited to course administration and to support for these two processes and this is what we understand by the term lower-level learning. perhaps reflecting the reservations of some of the teachers referred to above, we also spend some classroom time helping with and testing students’ understanding of the two theories – an estimated 15% of teaching time. applying the models a course booklet contains five business cases that the students negotiate (brown & cleaverley, 2010). this learning activity is level two in our simplified model and has a one-to-one correlation with the simplified bloom level of applying; students try to apply the two theories in these five practical situations. the learning activity is heavily constructivist. student teams start by building up an agreed interpretation of the business situation in which they have been placed. they go on to discuss alternative approaches which are offered by the two theories to decide on the combination that – in their opinion – will give them the greatest chance of achieving their objectives in the negotiation. although students prepare outside the classroom for the negotiations, it is at this level of learning that teachers invest most of their student contact time; an estimated 70%. there is a final preparations stage in the classroom in which teams can hone their strategy and teachers can check that they are prepared. this is followed by the negotiation phase, during which teachers observe and, occasionally, offer advice during time outs. finally, there is a post-negotiation documentation phase, in which students make notes on the deal agreed and any additional thoughts on the process of trying to apply negotiation theory in practice. throughout, the focus is on student activity, so the teachers mostly play an administrative rather than teaching role. students like the negotiations. the goal of negotiating the best deal is invaluable in motivating them, particularly the non-academic “roberts” (biggs, 2003). however, for many students the task becomes an end in itself rather than a step on the learning pyramid. cognitively, once the deal has been negotiated, we want the task-oriented negotiating teams to morph into the sort of communities of inquiry envisaged by garrison and anderson (2003). it is time for them to reflect on their attempt to apply negotiation theory in practice. instead, the students want to compare the deal they negotiated with the ones negotiated by other teams. a second advantage in this mid-level learning process also becomes a problem when we try to move students up to the higher-level reflective learning activities. although the process, properly executed, requires note taking, students experience it as an oral activity and thus write very little, which means there is no detailed record of exactly what happened. students are expected to reflect on verbally mediated processes which only exist in their own memories and, perhaps, in a few hastily written notes. reflecting in its current teaching form, the course does not provide students with sufficient opportunities for reflecting, a term which we use interchangeably with higher-level learning. the 15% of time allocated to reflecting allows for no more than a teacher-focused summary of observations using the white seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 7 board. the situation is much as biggs (2003) portrayed it; the academic “susans” spend time after each negotiation discussing their experiences. they record specific instances in which the application of a theoretical idea had its expected outcome, and those in which the theory was not so successful in dealing with the negotiation practice. these latter examples are an opportunity for analysis; why did the theory work well in situation x but fall short in situation y? this form of cognitive learning is what we understand by the modified-bloom terms of analysing and evaluating. conceivably, an outstanding academic susan might even reach such a high level of insight into negotiation theory and practice that she would make new proposals for modifying theory. this level of cognitive learning is what we understand by the modified-bloom top level of creating, but this is a bachelor-level course and therefore such an ambition level is, mostly, unrealistic. our learning expectations and activities are not fine-grained enough to make a distinction between analysing, evaluating, and creating. as teacher practitioners, we roll them into one: reflecting. evaluation of learning outcomes while inadequately provided for in our teaching process, the grading guidelines for the oral exam are explicit in stating the course’s higher-level learning ambitions. students are initially asked questions at lower levels of learning outcome. however, in order to get an a grade, they must display clear evidence of reflecting on the process of applying theory: the internal examiner will be most interested in your reflections about how you were able (or not able) to apply the negotiation theory in the practice of this case ... the internal examiner will also be interested in your thoughts on the relevance or usefulness of the different negotiation theory articles. the examiners would like to emphasize that these articles should make an important contribution to your own reflections over negotiation theory [emphasis added] (brown, 2010). a misalignment the deliberate reference to higher-level learning outcomes in the grading guidelines makes explicit a misalignment, to modify the meaning of biggs’s (2003) term, between classroom learning activities and the evaluation of student learning outcomes in the exam (see figure two). the relatively small amount of time that teachers have available for this stage of the learning process unfortunately sends the wrong signal to students about its importance. figure 2: misalignment between teacher activity and exam expectations. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 8 research questions students have always rated negotiating the deal as the best part of the course and there is an understandable reluctance to make changes to a winning team, particularly so with respect to our non-academic roberts. but to align teacher resources with the course’s higher-level learning ambitions, we must take the students out of their teacher-managed, face-to-face, classroom negotiations and place them and their multi-stage negotiation process in a digital environment. the first research question was formulated as follows: (1) when the teacher’s presence is withdrawn from the negotiation process, will the students work with less, the same, or greater diligence in trying to apply theory to practice, and will their learning outcomes be less, the same, or greater? we did identify one clear advantage of the automation process; the digital capture of the negotiation would provide students with the raw material on which we could base a reflective assignment. it was to be written by each negotiating team following their online negotiation and would then be reviewed by a teacher and the team during a half-hour tutorial. this process formed the experimental foundation for the second research question which was formulated as follows: (2) when the negotiation process is augmented with a written assignment and subsequent teacher feedback, will the students experience an increase in their learning outcomes? the next section describes setting up a project that attempted to answer the two research questions. project description and implementation this work is an act of faith; eventually the technical functionality of these learning platforms will deliver what we need. but a healthy scepticism to the optimistic claims of the it promoters is also fine and in this case the sceptics were proved right; the learning platform functionality could not completely replace the teacher in administering the negotiation process. the limited saving of teacher input time at this level meant there would be very little time to reallocate to the reflecting level. the choice was straightforward; either (a) stop the project and wait until the learning platform technology could deliver exactly what we wanted, or (b) view the project as an opportunity to explore the pedagogic questions and find some money to support it. we are not adherents of a big-bang approach to change. incremental improvements are more easily managed by both teachers and students. just as important as the system developments is the need for we teachers to develop our digital literacy (buckingham, 2006; keller & hrastinski, 2009). fortunately, we received funding to pay four teachers for their extra time, so the project proceeded according to plan. four classes and their respective teachers were involved, one class each from the bi schools in bergen, stavanger, drammen, and oslo. a total of 106 students were organized into 26 negotiating teams. seven teams in bergen negotiated with seven in drammen, and six in stavanger negotiated with six in oslo. the project was divided into five stages as shown below and ran from late january 2011 to early march, an elapsed time of four to five weeks according to how quickly each team completed the process. the students negotiated case one using the traditional classroom approach before embarking on the project, during which they would negotiate case two: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 9 (1) stage one: preparing for the negotiation (2) stage two: negotiating with a student team in another bi location (3) stage three: writing the post-negotiation reflective assignment (4) stage four: participating in a tutorial with the class teacher (5) stage five: voluntary completion of questionnaire about learning experience. stages one and two supported learning at the second, applying-the-model level. the most important change in the learning environment was that the negotiating arena of stage two used etherpad (2012) and required teams to communicate in writing. etherpad is a web-based, real-time, collaborative document editor; its written log of the negotiation was essential for the reflective assignment in stages three and four. the aim of stages three and four was to raise student learning outcomes at the higher reflective level of learning. following their negotiation, the teams were given a 500-word assignment, the start of which is shown here: reflection on negotiation in getting to yes the authors suggest that by inventing options for mutual gain, negotiators may be able to create win-win opportunities for the two sides … this process and its results, they argue, will increase the chances of the two sides reaching a mutually beneficial negotiated agreement. (i) discuss whether you were able to follow this advice in your negotiation of case two. make reference to exchanges from your negotiation log to give examples of such attempts. (ii) reflect over the extent to which such a process helped to resolve negotiating difficulties between the two sides and give examples from your log to illustrate your thinking … maximum length of assignment: 500 words. deadline for submitting assignment to your teacher is thursday 24 february at 16:00 (brown, 2011, p. 61). as their reward for completing the assignment, the students then received a 30-minute tutorial with their class teacher in which they received feedback on the assignment and discussed their ideas. the most appropriate technique for measuring student learning outcomes would be to use an exam, but setting up a trial exam was deemed to be too costly to organize and administer. for this reason the measurement technique adopted was an electronic student questionnaire – stage five – in which students were asked to assess their perceived learning outcome from the project. project implementation the project’s first four stages were carried out according to plan in the spring semester of 2011. the biggest problem involved the voluntary completion of the student questionnaire, which only 51 of 106 students completed. it had 32 questions, mostly of a multiple-choice type and was divided into four main sections, which corresponded to the project’s four phases. there was also a short final section in which students expressed their overall satisfaction with the entire process. the questions invited students to compare their learning experience in the traditional, face-to-face negotiation process of case one, which they had completed in late january, with the new negotiation process of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 10 case two. most questions offered five alternatives which ranged from “much worse” and “worse” through “no difference” to “better” and “much better.” results research question two i begin with the response to research question two – experience from the reflective learning process – because the findings are just what we hoped for and not unexpected. in figure three, students’ feedback is presented graphically. the “/ +” column in the centre of the bar charts indicates the percentage of students who did not experience any appreciable difference between the traditional negotiation process of case one and the new form in case two. the “-” and “++” of the charts correspond to the extreme opinions of “much poorer” and “much better.” figure 3: comparison of perceived learning experiences from the reflective processes in stages three and four (vs case one). the learning experiences referred to in stages three and four were the reflective assignment and the teacher-led tutorial. the comparison students made is between these two activities and the experience of being left on their own after negotiating case one. for those students who participated in stages three and four, roughly 80% thought they had learnt more. the results indicate that it is possible to raise activities and learning goals to the reflective level and that among students who rise to the challenge, an overwhelming majority think they learn more. but it is also important to note that a very small number of students thought the process had negatively affected their learning. student assessment of the overall learning outcome however, excellent results at a reflective level do not guarantee an improvement in the overall learning experience. in the final question of their questionnaire, students were asked to complete the following statement: “in an overall comparison of the classroom-based negotiation of case one with all four stages in the net-based negotiation project, i would say that my learning experience was …” the results are presented graphically in figure four. on the one hand, it is gratifying to note that 53% of students had a better or much better learning experience in the net-based negotiation of case two than they did in the traditional classroom negotiation of case one. however, 20% of students had a worse or much worse experience – a fact to be borne in mind which is discussed later. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 11 figure 4: overall comparison of perceived learning experience from project vs case one. student participation in the project the answers to four questions are presented in figure five and reveal that, among the 51 students, participation in the project declined as the process progressed. the chart shows that 90% participated in the planning process of stage one whereas participation declined to 65% for the tutorial with the teacher (stage four) – a finding discussed in the next section. figure 5: level of student participation in the four stages of the project. research question one this question was formulated as follows: “when the teacher’s presence is withdrawn from the negotiation process, will the students work with less, the same, or greater diligence in trying to apply theory to practice and will their learning outcomes be less, the same, or greater?” first, i should repeat that our customisation of the learning platform software was not sophisticated enough to remove teachers from the process, which is most accurately understood as an electronic environment in which teachers intervened at specific points to check that things were proceeding to plan. anecdotal evidence from teachers was that students appeared to be just as enthusiastic about the negotiation seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 12 process as they had been a few weeks earlier in the first case. however, such evidence is no substitute for a truly teacherless digital environment and student responses, so we look forward to trying the process again with a more sophisticated version of the software. we did, however, learn some valuable lessons from student feedback on the three key changes that we had made to their negotiating experience. the first change was that student teams negotiated with a team of strangers – students from another bi location – rather than with another team from their own class. although about 15% of students felt less motivated (see figure six), this change was a positive contribution for motivating a clear majority of students (however, see discussion in next section). figure 6: students’ self-perceived motivation due to geographic separation in the net-based negotiation of case two compared with the classroom negotiation of case one. the second change was that instead of seeing the other team face-to-face and being able to read body language, student teams negotiated on a pc screen without visual feedback. we had expected that students would experience this lack of visual feedback as a significant weakness of our system. however, as figure seven shows, most students felt more motivated to work on the negotiation as a result of this change in the communication form. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 13 figure 7: students’ self-perceived motivation due to communication differences in the net-based negotiation of case two compared with the classroom negotiation of case one. the third change that was forced on students by the digital arena was that they had to negotiate in writing rather than orally. our classroom experience is that oral activities are always more popular with students than written ones, so we were prepared for negative feedback. however, the chart in figure eight shows a much more balanced picture. certainly, some students were less motivated, but a slightly higher number were more motivated and the largest number reported that having to write rather than speak made no appreciable difference to their motivation. figure 8: students’ self-perceived motivation due to having to write in the netbased negotiation of case two compared with speaking in the classroom negotiation of case one. discussion and further work research question two: experience of higher-level learning the findings for research question two confirm those of oltedal (2009). it is possible to create higher-level learning activities for students and some seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 14 respond by working on them and, by their own assessment, learning more. however, these findings should be tempered by what the questionnaire response rate implies – 51 out of 106 possible – and by students’ reported levels of participation. it is reasonable to assume that these 51 respondents were the more motivated out of the 106. if we then assume that their participation levels are not representative for the group of 106, then perhaps as few as 62% of 51 = 35 students followed the learning process all the way up to the tutorial. the very positive findings may be feedback from just 35 academic susans in a group with a total of 106 students. research question one: withdrawal of teacher presence from negotiation and overall learning outcomes 55 students did not fill in the questionnaire and therefore we know nothing of their experience. in addition, the findings from figure four show that about 20% of students who did complete the questionnaire, experienced a poorer learning experience when compared with the first negotiation case. for them, the digital arena was a clear step backwards from their face-to-face, classroom experience of case one. we need to find out more about their experience. it is not legitimate to make changes that will benefit one group of students when we have clear evidence that the same changes will be disadvantageous to another group. one clear lesson we can draw from the project is that the learning platform software is not yet sophisticated enough to automate the applying-the-models learning activities. despite the project’s failure on this point, our basic assumption about the technology is still in place; future releases of such software will enable teachers to reduce their input time at this level of learning. it is a question of when and not if. another important lesson for teachers working in classroom-based, as opposed to distance, learning is not to be afraid of testing new digital techniques that replace the immediate personal contact that we appreciate so much. the students are much more open to using technology as a replacement for face-to-face contact then we expected. they did not experience the oral-to-written change as negatively as we expected because they are much more used to the orally written communication style of facebook and texting. the positive feedback on negotiating with strangers in another bi location may not be something that can be extrapolated to other learning environments. most learning experiences of applying theory are probably characterised by a spirit of cooperation. although our negotiation role-plays also provide opportunities for teams to gain by cooperating with each other, there are also aspects in which a competitive approach to the other side is advantageous. many of our students latch onto this latter aspect which certainly functions as a good motivational factor; so, the positive response to negotiating with students in another bi location may simply reflect an extra kick from the chance to beat a team of strangers. critical reflection an important critical reflection to note is not to allow the theoretical model to dictate the conclusions drawn. although biggs’ robert-susan idea is helpful in reminding us that students come to our learning processes with differing cognitive ‘kitbags’ and motivations, we must not fall into the trap of thinking that we have just two types of student in the classroom. between the archetypes are many different students and this becomes clear in studying the findings for research question two; we have not and will not get clear answers from our classes. our students learn in different ways, and it is reasonably clear that digital learning environments that cater for this variety are more seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 15 likely to succeed. for example, there is no reason why the digital capture of the negotiation must be in written form. it had to be written in this project because etherpad was the only solution we could find that could reproduce a log of the process. but if skype eventually offers functionality to record and present both ends of its video conversation, this technology could be integrated into the learning environment alongside etherpad and student teams could be offered a choice of negotiating arenas. further work the potential to offer students choice in selecting their learning processes is a key attraction and a competitive advantage that digital technologies have over our limited attempts to cater for different needs in the classroom. the theory of cooperative freedom (paulsen, 2008) is a useful tool here for reflecting over the development of our system. for example, the etherpad-or-skype selection just mentioned would be classed as a medium facet of flexibility in his model. to offer student teams such a choice would be an attractive feature of the next version of the software. it is always necessary, as paulsen points out, “to find a reasonable balance between individual flexibility and participation in the learning community” (2009, p. 7), but what is our learning community? although we have several hundred students taking part in this course across the different bi locations, we have been used to thinking of them as 15 separate learning communities each of 30 students and one teacher. as the digital arena develops in sophistication, one can imagine that individual students will be able to establish their own negotiating teams in accordance with their personal “cooperative learner profiles” (paulsen, 2008, p. 13). when this happens the learning community will change as well and we may lose our role as teachers of a particular class of 30 students. such cultural shifts take time – another good reason for making incremental change. we look forward to developing and testing version two of the digital negotiation arena. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 1 – 2013 16 references akkoyunlu, b. & soylu, m. y. 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(2008). academic and student use of a learning management system: implications for quality. australian journal of educational technology, (vol. 24–1), 30–41. i biographical details mark brown is an associate professor at the bi norwegian business school in oslo, norway where he teaches bachelor-level communication courses. his research interests are in (i) sustainability communication and (ii) developing the learning environments of his students in ways that are pedagogically sound. this article describes such a process. title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. networked e-learning: the changing facilitator – learner relationship, a facilitators’ perspective; a phenomenological investigation chris o’ toole phd candidate technology enhanced learning, lancaster university email: c.otoole1@lancaster.ac.uk; chris.otoole@nuigalway.iet abstract this phenomenological case study investigates the lived experiences of a group of virtual learning environment (vle) postgraduate academic facilitators at irish universities where they have indicated that the nature of their relationship with learners is shifting. it aims for a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the changing facilitator – learner relationship in a networked e-learning environment (an asynchronous vle with discussion forums, virtual labs and collaborative assignments). the author’s role as a highly experienced facilitator provides particular and specific insight into the guiding facilitator’s experiences during a time of institutional transition to networked e-learning. a theoretical framework based on beaty and howard (2010) is used to explore the networked relationship, i.e. their core set of boundary characteristics, central to the way networked learning is conceptualised and experienced which are the characteristic of expertise, the boundaries of the facilitator-learner relationship, communication and content and the professional development of networked e-learning facilitators. conclusions are presented as four themes describing how participants perceived the impact of networked e-learning on the changing facilitator – learner relationship. these themes highlight the differences between the current interpretative phenomenological analysis and the initial framework of beaty and howard (2010): (1) expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality depending on activity, participant roles and technological context; (2) boundaries traditionally placed around facilitators and learners are shifting; (3) communication like content is considered highly important for both facilitators and learners; (4) professional development for facilitators must be re-conceptualised. recommendations include the requirement to initiate revised forms of professional development for networked e-learning facilitators. limitations included the relatively low number of participants. keywords: case study, facilitator, learner, networked e-learning, phenomenology, virtual learning environment (vle) 1. introduction mailto:c.otoole1@lancaster.ac.uk mailto:chris.otoole@nuigalway.ie seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 19 with the advent of web 2.0 and online communication technologies, universities are increasingly moving to networked e-learning which has the potential to change the perceptions and practice of those engaged in learning within networked environments (mcconnell, hodgson & dirckinck-holmfeld, 2012). few would argue that the nature of the facilitator – learner relationship is at the heart of networked e-learning, as their roles and responsibilities are transformed (goodyear 2005; hodgson & reynolds 2005). much guidance has arisen on academic practice for networked e-learning. the e-quality in elearning manifesto (2002) has outlined key goals for this relationship. recent studies however suggest these key goals can be furthered to reflect the shifting roles, responsibilities and relationship (beaty & howard, 2010). this is particularly true in online education delivered with virtual learning environments (vles). making an assumption that the facilitator – learner relationship in networked e-learning is the same as face-to-face learning because of similar personal connections may cause misleading practice. because of the researcher’s own status as a networked e-learning facilitator (who has experienced an enormous spectrum in terms of roles and responsibilities of facilitators), as well as his experience as an online and blended learning educator, the researcher questions how networked e-learning faculty relate to learners, their networked learning needs, and to the movement of facilitator/learner networked boundaries (guldberg, 2008). although faculty usually clearly outline the facilitator – learner relationship in their course expectations, the researcher was curious as to their unstated perceptions. thus the researcher asks the question, “how does the facilitator perceive the changing relationship between facilitators and learners within networked elearning?” the researcher considers four sets of relationship characteristics (four phenomena) through which to investigate the facilitator experience of networked e-learning as identified by beaty and howard (2010). these are the characteristic of expertise, the boundaries of the facilitator-learner relationship, communication and content, and the professional development of networked elearning facilitators. these same characteristics do not manifest themselves in the same forms in face to face learning where there is an absence of mediation using digital networked technology. in this research, the chosen characteristics provide an opportunity to consider the changing facilitator-learner relationship within vle networks, the nature of their activity and how this can be improved by networked facilitator professional development. few published articles, to any extent focus on these phenomena of the changing facilitator – learner relationship in a networked e-learning environment in relation to these characteristics, and none focus on the lived experience of facilitators themselves. therefore, this research explores the lived experiences of facilitators in a networked e-learning vle. 2. philosophical approach to understand the purpose and position of this research, it is necessary to outline the researcher’s own ontological and epistemological presuppositions underlying this study. the researcher sought a methodology that allowed exploration of the lived experience of vle networked e-learning facilitators and consequently chose a phenomenological case study. understanding how that experience unfolded for each facilitator was an important anticipated outcome, but what became apparent to the author was the need to understand how these experiences were socially and culturally constructed in specific networked elearning vle contexts. thus the researcher’s position is taken from a constructivist/interpretivist paradigm where the view of the world is that seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 20 knowledge is based on experiences that are socially constructed (creswell, 2009) and emphasises the importance of personal perspective and interpretation. the research purpose has personal significance to the researcher given his own direct connection and experience of being a networked e-learning facilitator within networked e-learning vles. 3. theoretical framework the study organisations, on which the research was conducted, were united with online learning. in this case online learning is understood as networked e-learning or “technology enhanced learning” which means the use of technology for supporting and enhancing learning practice (mayes & de freitas, 2004) and the use of “the internet to access learning materials, to interact with the content, instructor, and other learners and to obtain support during the learning process, in order to acquire knowledge, to construct personal meaning, and to grow from the learning experience” (anderson & elloumi, 2004, p37). the conceptual framework of the present research is based on the framework of beaty and howard (2010), i.e. their core set of boundary characteristics, central to the way networked learning is conceptualised and experienced. the researcher chose this framework as these core characteristics provide an opportunity to consider the changing facilitator-learner relationship within vle networks, the nature of their activity and how this can be improved by networked facilitator professional development. the principles of the framework that are important to this research are the characteristic of expertise, the boundaries of the facilitator-learner relationship, communication and content and the professional development of networked e-learning facilitators. this small-scale research employed the beaty and howard (2010) framework to explore the changing relationship of facilitators to learners within the networked vle. this is done by examining the relationship based on the above four key boundary characteristics, gaining participant views of each characteristic. this framework is specifically used in this paper in formulating the questions posed to the participants, as well as in informing the research questions with deeper understanding of networked facilitator-learner relations in this context. 4. literature review a review of the available literature provides a wealth of information of networked e-learning (steples & jones, 2002; jones, ferreday & hodgson, 2008; mcconnell, hodgson & dirckinck-holmfeld, 2012). for example jones et al., (2008) synthesise the research on the general effects of networked elearning. however more recently, authors have moved towards the concept of network participant roles and responsibilities (beaty & howard, 2010). these qualities are an integral part of the e-quality in e-learning manifesto (2002). the changing facilitator – learner relationship in a networked e-learning vle appears to be a complex set of phenomena to define. beaty and howard (2010) suggest that networked e-learning has initiated shifts in the role, responsibilities and experiences of both facilitators and learners. however, other authors, such as baran, correia, and thompson, (2011) highlight the unrecognisable nature of the shifts and emphasise the frustrating point that individuals recognise shifts when they experience it, but find the phenomena difficult to define. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 21 a review of the literature focused on professional practice within networked elearning vles helps to illuminate the current study. the areas of expertise, boundaries, communication and content, and professional development were chosen based on beaty and howard’s (2010) assertions. expertise the core change in the facilitator-learner relationship and the associated pedagogical design of networked e-learning vles appears to lie in the shifting quality of expertise. prior to the establishment of networked e-learning, vle facilitators were viewed as experts (beaty & howard, 2010). however networked e-learning has increasingly fore-grounded pedagogies based on shared responsibility (goodyear, 2005; hodgson & reynolds, 2005). it was thus theorised that vle facilitators should have an equal level of influence within vles (downes, 2010). both facilitators and learners would cocreate and collaborate using their joint expertise. furthermore, the focus on work-based learning and professional education means that learners are now frequently experts in their profession (bawne & spector, 2009). in addition learners frequently hold higher levels of expertise in the use of ict and web 2.0 networked technologies. the author’s experience supports this belief as having experienced networks between learners enabling unions of learners as experts rather than the lone facilitator. it is important to note that networked e-learning pedagogical design does not imply the elimination of expertise within networked e-learning, but rather a quality that moves between members of an e-learning network, both facilitators and learners, resting on shifting and transient boundaries (beaty & howard, 2010). thus expertise appears transactional rather than hierarchical. however as there is an absence in the literature of any indication as to what any shift in expertise depends on, the author seeks to investigate these dependencies. boundaries much literature asserts that there are no easily identified boundaries to facilitator-learner communities within networked e-learning. many have questioned the relevance of a learning community (castells, 2011). the author finds notable tension in these reviews. certain inferences about the facilitator-learner network boundary can be made from research that critiques the blanket use of the community concept. jones and esnault (2004) reported that a network doesn’t privilege the closeness of community rather it serves to encompass all kinds of links and relationships. such indicators suggest that networked technologies enable the development of hybrid networks outside of the facilitator initiated network, but which are still linked and through which learners navigate depending on their needs. in the author’s own experience, it is unclear whether for vle facilitators, the use of networked e-learning correlates with the diffusion of arbitrary boundaries and consequently the changing facilitator-learner relationship. the current study sets out to investigate the facilitator’s lived experience of a vle e-learning network to gain additional insights about the participants ‘tight-loose’ engagement (jones, asensio & goodyear, 2000), its hybrid networks and their influence on the boundaries of networked e-learning. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 22 communication and content dialogue has always been the key to facilitation. however, with networked elearning, it seems to become the basis for the learning rather than the way to impart knowledge. within the literature, guldberg (2008) reports that the communication itself becomes the essence of the ‘content’ used. these perceptions point towards content that is co-created and enabled by dialogue. the author agrees with this from his own experience, as he frequently uses previously recorded networked online discussions as actual content for subsequent ones. to explore this and the influence of communication in the facilitatorlearner relationship within networked e-learning vles, the author seeks to explore how facilitators communicate and in so doing generate content. professional development oastashewski (2010) maintains that the above changes in the facilitatorlearner relationship have consequences for their professional practice, while beaty and howard (2010) go further in breaking down the distinction between facilitators and learners, viewing both as practitioners. on reflection, the author’s own experience of networked e-learning facilitator professional development appeared to be based principally on advancement of networked technology specific skills. dirckinck-holmfeld’s (2006) work reiterates much prior literature and notes we should rethink the role of networked e-learning facilitators. however its main value lies in highlighting the need to consider the educational and professional diversity of facilitators of such networks. while it is interesting that beaty and howard (2010) argue that facilitators practice will be coloured by the realities of their prior experience, this reveals a double challenge for professional development in that it must thus utilise the pedagogies and technology of networked learning itself. this is also suggested by baran, correia, and thompson (2011) who indicate that facilitators will need to experience the changing facilitator-learner relationship outlined above in order to motivate their professional development and practice within tel for networked e-learning. the researcher believes, therefore, that a study which carefully looks at the lived experiences of facilitators within networked e-learning vles deserves serious exploration. focusing on the lived experience is powerful for understanding subjective facilitator perceptions of the changing facilitator-learner networked learning relationship, cutting through the clutter of taken-for-granted assumptions and conventional wisdom. 5. limitations this study represents an initial exploration of the perceptions of facilitators within a networked e-learning vle of the changing facilitator – learner relationship. as such it is foundation research in this area. given the time constraints with this short study, it was only possible to interview two participants for a short time and ascertain written reports from two other participants. in addition, all four facilitators (one being the researcher himself) were known to the researcher. they were ict academic vle facilitators within third level universities within ireland. future research could widen the context to include cross-sector studies with larger sample sizes in order to perform further analyses to confirm the changing facilitator-learner relationship within networked e-learning vles. the researcher acknowledges the possibility of researcher bias within this study given his involvement as both author in the original paper and a particiseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 23 pant, and the professional relationships that have been sustained over time with the other selected participants. where the source of bias could have appeared in particular was in conducting the interviews (cohen et al., 2011) and soliciting written reports. because of this, every effort was taken to ensure questions were phrased in an open manner, without pre-empting responses. opportunities were also offered for participants to elaborate on experiences that the researcher would have knowledge of. 6. methodology and methods 6.1 research design case study methodology enables researchers to closely study the data within a specific context using a small number of participants “to provide an in-depth understanding of the case” (creswell, 2007, p.74). in addition “phenomenology provides a deep understanding of a phenomenon as experienced by several individuals”, (creswell, 2007, p.62). as a result i employed the qualitative method of a phenomenological case study. in alignment with this approach, the researcher has focused on the experiences of individual facilitators and not on a comparative examination of their experiences in contrast to other facilitators. this design consists of an interpretive, exploratory, phenomenological singlecase study of the phenomena based on the views of three independent participants (emic) as well as the views of the researcher (etic), as the fourth participant (runeson & host, 2008). the researcher subsequently conducted an analysis of themes in order to explore “the deep meaning of individual subject’s experiences” (rossman & rallis, 1998, p.72). the study is interpretive in the sense that it aims to understand the phenomena through the experiences and interpretations of the participants (runeson & host, 2008). it is exploratory in that it looks for new insights of the phenomena and seeks to generate ideas for further research (robson, 2002; yin 2014). the objective of this investigation is to highlight the changing facilitator – learner relationship in a networked e-learning environment and to initiate further investigation of the phenomena, all of which makes phenomenological case study design a suitable for this small-scale study. 6.2 participant sampling purposive sampling was employed in this study. this was due to the limited time and scale of the research and also the need to gather rich data from indepth experiences and different perspectives of the phenomena (creswell, 2007; patton, 1990). participants were vle facilitators of differing experience, age groups, gender and educational backgrounds as variation in experience is essential (akerlind, 2004). selection criterion was having more than four years’ experience as an online academic facilitator within virtual learning environments of academic institutions. from an initial list prepared based on the above variables, four participants were recruited through email invitation containing a link to the research project participant consent form as well as a participant information sheet. it therefore aligns to smith, flowers and larkin (2009), who advocate that a small sample size is acceptable as phenomenology is “concerned with understanding particular phenomena in particular contexts” (p.49). seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 24 6.3 researcher’s and participants’ contexts the first participant (who was also the researcher) was 46 years old, male and of irish descent. the second participant was 27 years old, female and of irish descent. the third participant was 55 years old, male and of irish descent. the fourth participant was 34 years old, female and of irish descent. the researcher was well known to all of the participants. therefore, the researcher’s insider position, background and perspectives have influenced the rationale, operationalisation and interpretation of this research. however, insider mitigation techniques proposed by others (mercer, 2007) were employed. 6.4 ethical considerations ethical and consent issues were duly considered given the nature of the data to be collected (kanuka & anderson, 2007, p.5). ethical approval was granted from lancaster university, and written permission to invite the trainees was not required as they were not representing their employers. the researcher obtained verbal consent to record the interviews. they were informed that the data obtained would be anonymised. participants were informed that participation in the research was voluntary, and that they could choose not to answer specific questions. 6.5 data collection methods in case study research, emphasis is placed on having multiple sources of evidence. in single-case design a minimum of two sources of evidence is advised for validity purposes (yin, 2014). the primary set of data collected in this study was semi-structured interviews undertaken with two participants; this is common in case study research (cohen, manion & morison, 2011). of all interview types, semi-structured, face-toface were used in this study to allow the researcher to delve deep using followon questions and ask for clarifications when required. as opposed to structured and non-structured interviews, semi-structured with open ended questions cater for structured yet flexible interview design (cohen et al., 2011; barriball & while, 1994). here the researcher could pre-design questions catering for standardisation across both interviews, increasing data reliability but allowing participants to inform the research beyond the questions as the researcher was allowed to probe the participants and ask follow-on questions. the two semi-structured interviewees were limited to 30 minutes and took place in a place and time chosen by the participant ensuring it would not affect the audio-recording quality. the interviews were subsequently transcribed. secondary data was gathered in the form of written reports requested of the other two participants’ experience based on open-ended questions. the researcher obtained written consent to obtain the written reports. both participants completing written reports were advised that they should not spend more than forty minutes on the written report. they were given a total of five days to complete, with a reminder email sent after three days. questions for both the interviews and written reports were designed based on the underlying research question, the theoretical framework and issues that were highlighted in the literature review. these questions were piloted with experienced vle facilitators and revised based on feedback. both transcribed interviews and written reports were initially reviewed for completeness by the author. this gave a closer look at the data collected, and provided some familiarity with the data. this was viewed as a first step in the analysis and, once reviewed the data was re-read systematically to allow for patterns and themes to emerge. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 25 6.6 data analysis guided by the theoretical framework and the research question, the researcher took account of all relevant data while conducting the analysis. interpretive phenomenological analysis (ipa) was performed, including the following: (a) movement from what is unique to a participant to what is shared among the participants, (b) description of the experience which moves to an interpretation of the experience, (c) commitment to understanding the participant’s point of view, and (d) psychological focus on personal meaning-making within a particular context (smith et al., 2009). following the ipa process, the researcher conducted initial noting, which includes descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual comments (smith et al., 2009). after completing initial noting on each participant’s data, the researcher searched for emerging themes across all participants by examining discrete sections of the written reports and interview transcript and simultaneously recalling what had been learned during the analysis up to this point. the themes not only reflected the participants’ original words and thoughts but also the researcher’s interpretations. in the development of themes, the researcher supported each theme again by descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual comments made by each of the participants. the process produced a rich and varied description of the participants’ facilitation experience, their perception of the changing facilitator – learner relationship within networked e-learning and the shifts in the role, responsibilities and experiences of vle facilitators and learners. the results of the data analysis are organised by four themes: expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality depending on activity, participant roles and technological context boundaries traditionally placed around facilitators and learners are shifting communication like content is considered highly important for both facilitators and learners professional development for facilitators must be reconceptualised 7. findings the themes developed in this study illustrate to what extent and in what ways the facilitator experiences networked e-learning initiating shifts in the role, responsibilities and experiences of facilitators and learners within a vle. these themes highlight the differences between the current interpretative phenomenological analysis and the initial framework of beaty and howard (2010) the section below will describe each of these in more detail, and support these with extracts from the written reports and interview transcripts. written reports are identified as [w1] and [w2]. interview transcripts are identified as [i1] and [i2]. 1) expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality depending on activity, participant roles and technological context the author found that all of the participants in this study had moved away from the taken-for-granted relationship between facilitators and learners. one participant recalled, “since becoming a networked e-learning facilitator using our vle, i definitely feel i am no longer viewed as the expert. in one such inseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 26 stance, a learner with considerable commercial experience and knowledge in the subject area used his expertise in the technological context to provide supporting real world examples to scaffold the course content provided, which i could not.” [i1] another participant further identified the shifting quality of expertise when working on a group activity where many learners were clearly experts and the facilitator not. as this participant put it, “… when attempting a distributed computer programming activity, i suggested an approach to the design and development based on my most recent practice and the course content. however, this approach had since been replaced with a more efficient approach based on newer technology and practice. several learners who held roles as distributed computing programmers were able to point this out to the group and provide supporting examples for our activity. this clearly indicated that depending on the activity and participant role, the learner is frequently more of an expert than the facilitator.” [w2] 2) boundaries traditionally placed around facilitators and learners are shifting all four participants highlighted the shifting boundaries within networked elearning vles. the technologies enabling networked learning diffuse the boundaries we place around the facilitator and learners within the vle. “i feel that as a facilitator i am now a fellow learner. i see myself providing a particular form of expertise assisting the learners to maximise the potential of the vle network. i structure learner interactions but also actively involve learners in this.” [i1] one participant recalled an occasion where groups of learners were subdivided to perform group tasks based on subject specifics. here the facilitator perceived the existence and use of hybrid networks, where learners participated via multiple connections in accordance with the sub group needs and objectives. “on one occasion, i posted a discussion question to explain ‘test driven development’ within software engineering as defined within the course content. the learners moved outside the vle network to source material and supporting examples for their explanation. in essence they navigated hybrid networks to accomplish the task.” [w1] these participant perceptions seem to support the idea that network elearning doesn’t privilege the closeness of a vle community but rather it encompasses all possible links and relationships (jones & esnault, 2004). in this view of jones & esnault, the boundaries around networked e-learning facilitators and learners cover relationships that have ‘varying degrees of proximity’. it appears that hybrid networks of learners are emergent and their associated boundaries shaped by the specific networked activity. 3) communication like content is considered highly important for both facilitators and learners all participants in this study experienced great benefit from the communication afforded by the networked technology. one participant recalled the first virtual lab exercise where they had experienced networked communication and noted the increased activity, the higher standard of group communication, and overall the much improved student grades. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 27 “i could immediately see how the level of learner communication increased significantly. their collaboration when working on understanding the concepts and finding solutions to the tasks was increased greatly and their overall understanding and level of knowledge on the subject increased substantially.” [w2] “one of my learners commented to me that the ability to communicate in an online networked way to complete the weekly activities enabled them to grasp the concepts better and learn more effectively than had the weekly content been simply distributed to all learners without the ability to communicate and network online.” [i2] all participants expressed the view that with networked e-learning, the boundaries between communication and content are now less defined. “… previously i believed as a facilitator that providing course content was more important than providing communication with digital media for my learners. however, the increased level of learning and higher learner grades that i have experienced with networked e-learning has highlighted that the boundaries between the content and communication are less defined. i now see them as duel elements of one consortium, in which both facilitators and learners are engaged in the creation and communication of content as the basis of true networked learning.” [w1] this indicated that networked e-learning within vles by facilitators had consciously made a shift towards dialogue built on social-constructivist pedagogies where their approach to online facilitation focuses on dialogue within networked experiences. this is further evidenced by one participant (the author, a highly experienced facilitator) who explained that the training schedule for all vle facilitators in one of his organisations “…included a development plan for our facilitators to include significant dialogue within their facilitation so that both their learners and themselves engage in the creation and communication of content and not to fore-ground content over communication” [i2]. 4) professional development for facilitators of networked e-learning must be re-conceptualised in addition to the above changes to the expectations, practice and role of the facilitator and learner initiated by networked e-learning, all four participants perceived significant implications for their continuing professional development as networked e-learning vle facilitators. “i see significant challenge in educating new facilitators for their networked e-learning role. they will need the ability to manage expectations and practice of their fellow networked learners whilst also adjusting their own expectations as facilitators.” [i1] another participant further identified this need in the context of changing identities. as this participant put it, “…and not only will it involve the development of new skills and practical approaches but new ways of thinking aligned to the development of new identities for us as facilitators and also for our learners...” [w1] 8. discussion this study showed that networked e-learning vle facilitators believe that networked e-learning has initiated shifts in the role, responsibilities and exseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 28 periences of both facilitators and learners, and affirms the belief of beaty and howard (2010). in addition the study showed that facilitators also believe the nature of these shifts emphasises the need to investigate new forms of professional development for those who facilitate and support networked elearning. this agrees with fullan (2013), in that facilitators should be made aware of the benefits of pedagogies and technology of networked learning and how these can improve their professional practice. it also strengthens the view of zenios, goodyear and jones (2004) who believe that institutions need to adapt their approach to such professional development to include strategies that support the identification and development of core competencies and skills focused on the technological fundamentals of networked e-learning and the dialogic pedagogies it requires. the findings show that expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality depending on activity, participant roles and technological context. this moves away from the traditionally assumed relationship between facilitators and learners and is aligned to beaty and howard (2010) who no longer view learners as acolytes. in agreement with jones and esnault (2004) the findings question the boundaries that can be placed around those engaged in networked elearning via technology enhanced processes and practices, as these enable connectivity to networks that exist outside the learning process initiated by the facilitator. this is aligned with the view of brown (2010) who believes that learners and facilitators are increasingly members of multiple networks. in accordance with the opinion of hodgson, mcconnell and dirckinckholmfeld (2012), the findings assert that in today’s networked vles with enhanced connectivity, the demarcation between communication and content is now less defined. facilitators recognise the increasing importance of dialogue within their networked facilitation practice. this supports guldberg (2008) who believes that dialogue built on socio-constructivist pedagogies frequently defines the content of networked learning environments. this is also aligned with the view of hodgson et al., (2012) who believe learners as well as facilitators are engaged in the creation and communication of content. “i believe the level of connectivity in vles today afforded by networked technology highlights the notion that dialogue is now negotiated between the facilitator and learner as it becomes the foundation for the networked learning rather than the means to transfer knowledge. the communication now underpins the content.” [w1] consequently the expression of expertise will also rest on the facilitatorlearner dialogue and the learner to learner dialogue as asserted by guldberg (2008). the results are highly significant because as indicated, if expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality, and boundaries placed around them are also shifting, and communication for both is as important as creation of content, then the approach to professional development must be correspondingly re-conceptualised (zenios, goodyear & jones, 2004). the results further scaffold those found by beaty and howard (2010) and show that the networked elearning has a profound influence on the changing facilitator-learner relationship within vles. more specifically they highlight the differences between the initial framework of beaty and howard (2010) and the current research. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 29 networked e-learning beaty and howard (2010) framework current research findings core set of boundary characteristics, central to the way networked learning is conceptualised and experienced 1. the characteristic of expertise 1. expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality depending on activity, participant roles and technological context 2. the boundaries of the facilitator-learner relationship 2. boundaries traditionally placed around facilitators and learners are shifting 3. communication and content 3. communication like content is considered highly important for both facilitators and learners 4. the professional development of networked elearning facilitators 4. professional development for facilitators must be reconceptualised figure 1. comparison of beaty and howard (2010) framework and current research 9. conclusion and practical implications this qualitative study, as an attempt to explore the changing facilitator-learner relationship within networked e-learning vles, through the lens of facilitators, is an important complement to the existing literature in the area of networked e-learning, within the context of technology enhanced learning. although the study had its limitations, the findings are compelling. from a practical standpoint, the findings can inform other facilitators of networked elearning vles about the shifting facilitator-learner experiences they may encounter, and how they can address this as part of their professional practice and training requirements. therefore it may be possible for experienced facilitators to communicate to all, the appropriate skills and experience required for best practice networked e-learning facilitation. the key things to take from this study are to be aware of the shifting quality of expertise of facilitators and learners depending on activity, participant roles and technological context, the shifting boundaries placed around facilitators and learners, the consideration of communication like content as highly important for both facilitators and learners and the need re-conceptualised professional development for facilitators. these themes as evidenced in the research findings provide clear answers to the research question, identifying distinct changes between the relationship of facilitators and learners within networked e-learning. as regards the practice context, this alone may go a long way toward helping to improve the facilitator-learner relationship and ultimately the learning within networked e-learning vles. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 30 based on the findings of this study, it is vitally important to promote and allow for a fundamental understanding on the part of the facilitator and their institutions of the shifting nature of the facilitator-learner relationship (roles, responsibilities and experiences) within networked e-learning vles for maximising the networked learning experience. as schneckenberg (2010) advocates, networked e-learning within tel asks the facilitator to reflect on the power relationships and processes involved and to ensure change is supported by institutional structures and cultural values. future research could explore how learners themselves experience the changing facilitator-learner relationship with regard to the expectations, practice and role of the facilitator and learner initiated by networked e-learning and how they feel nature of the facilitator-learner relationship is shifting. 10. reflection despite its relative newness, using the beaty and howard (2010) core networked learning relationship characteristics as a theoretical framework enabled exploration of the pedagogical implications for being a networked elearning facilitator and how to create meaningful learning opportunities for networked vle e-learners. following this research study, there is a requirement to initiate revised forms of professional development for networked elearning facilitators. this is valuable knowledge gained and something that should be investigated further in time. references åkerlind, g.s. 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(2007) the challenges of insider research in educational institutions: wielding a double-edged sword and resolving delicate dilemmas retrieved 25 oct 2015, from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03054980601094651 moustakas, c. e. (1994). phenomenological research methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage. ostashewski, n. (2010). online technology teacher professional development courselets: design and development. in d. gibson & b. dodge (eds.), proceedings of the society for information technology & teacher education international conference 2010 (pp. 2329–2334). chesapeake, va: aace. patton, m. q. (1990). qualitative evaluation and research methods (2nd ed.). newbury park, ca: sage publications. robson, c. (2002). real world research. oxford, uk: blackwell publishers. rossman, g.b., & rallis, s.f. (1998). learning in the field: an introduction to qualitative research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. runeson, p. & host, m. (2008). guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. empirical software engineering, 14(2),131-164 schneckenberg, d. (2010). overcoming barriers for elearning in universities – portfolio models for ecompetence development of faculty. british journal of educational technology, 41(6), 979–991. smith, j. a., flowers, p., & larkin, m. (2009). interpretive phenomenological analysis: theory, method, and research. london: sage. steeples, c., & jones, c. (eds.). (2002). networked learning: perspectives and issues. london: springer-verlag. yin, r. k. (2014). case study research: design and methods (5th ed., p. 312). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. zenios, m., goodyear, p., & jones, c. (2004). researching the impact of the networked information environment on learning and teaching. computers and education 43(1-2), 205-213. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03054980601094651 http://www.sagepub.com/textbooks/book237921 http://www.sagepub.com/textbooks/book237921 seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 33 appendices appendix a definition of terms in this research context emic insider perspective (markee, 2012) etic outside perspective (markee, 2012) experience wise and skilful through doing facilitator helps the learner group navigate the vle network, structures and monitors activities improve make better learner receives teaching, guidance and support from facilitator lived experiences emphasizes the importance of individual experiences of people as conscious human beings (moustakas, 1994). networked e-learning learning in which information and communications technology (ict) is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources (steeples and jones, 2001; goodyear et al., 2004) tel technology enhanced learning vle virtual learning environment chris o’ toole ba, dip law, dip cci, msc cci, qfa, fiap, mba technology management, phd candidate technology enhanced learning, lancaster university chris o’ toole is a teaching professional with an established reputation in elearning and integration of technology into daily learning; he has a passion for research and evidence based practice to support the development of technology enhanced learning; with over 25 years commercial experience in ict, engineering and technology management roles within leading companies in ireland and the uk, chris is a technology enhanced learning specialist and adjunct e-lecturer in ict, engineering and management. chris, a phd candidate at lancaster university, has written a paper called: “networked e-learning: the changing facilitator – learner relationship, a facilitators’ perspective; a phenomenological investigation”. this phenomenological case study investigates the lived experiences of a group of virtual learning environment (vle) postgraduate academic facilitators at irish universities where they have indicated that the nature of their relationship with learners is shifting. it aims for a deeper understanding of the phenomena of the changing facilitator – learner relationship in a networked e-learning environment (an asynchronous vle with discussion forums, virtual labs and collaborative assignments). the author’s role as an experienced facilitator provides particular and specific insight into the guiding facilitator’s experiences during a time of institutional transition to networked e-learning.the researcher collected data from semi-structured interviews and selfwritten reports. the key things to take from this study are to be aware of the shifting quality of expertise of facilitators and learners depending on activity, participant roles and technological seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 34 context, the shifting boundaries placed around facilitators and learners, the consideration of communication like content as highly important for both facilitators and learners and the need re-conceptualised professional development for facilitators. this research was undertaken as part of the phd in e-research and technology enhanced learning in the department of educational research at lancaster university. i am pleased to acknowledge the contribution of dr. brett bligh, dr. murat oztok, mr. vlad chiriac and miss. joanna beaver in supporting the development of this study and its report. networked e-learning: the changing facilitator – learner relationship, a facilitators’ perspective; a phenomenological investigation chris o’ toole abstract expertise boundaries communication and content professional development 6.1 research design 6.2 participant sampling 6.3 researcher’s and participants’ contexts 6.5 data collection methods 7. findings 1) expertise of facilitators and learners is a shifting quality depending on activity, participant roles and technological context 8. discussion 9. conclusion and practical implications 10. reflection references title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. older active users of icts make sense of their engagement magdalena kania-lundholm and sandra torres department of sociology uppsala university e-mail: magdalena.kania@soc.uu.se (corresponding author) abstract research on older people’s ict usage tends to focus on either the ways in which they go about learning to use these technologies or the impact that icts have on their lives. this research seems, in other words, to take for granted that older people are ‘digital immigrants’ as the digital divide debate proposed. research that specifically looks at the ways in which older ict users make sense of their engagement with these technologies is still limited. this article explores therefore – through focus group interviews – how a group of older people who are active ict users make sense of their ‘digital nativeness’. the analysis shows that the interviewees are well aware that their ict proficiency differentiated them from their peers, which is why they make sense of their ict usage by making reference to the issues that make them ‘exceptional’ older people. these include the fact that they have used computers for many years and therefore made ict usage an everyday habit early on; the fact that most older people do not have the skills that they themselves have, which is why they feel the need to share them with others; and the fact that their lifelong experience means they can use these technologies in judicious ways. by bringing attention to how older active ict users make sense of their engagement, this article contributes to the notion of the digital spectrum and the debate on the inequalities that ict proficiency brings about. keywords: ict usage, older people, digital divide, digital immigrants, digital natives, digital spectrum, digital inequalities introduction one of the most persistent assumptions within media and communication research has been the idea that age and belonging to a specific generation are useful sources of information about ict usage. prensky (2001), for example, distinguished between ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ when describing what made people ict-savvy. he described the former as “native speakers of the digital language” and the latter as “those of us who were not born into the digital divide” (prensky, 2001:1). although this distinction has been criticized on numerous occasions (see e.g. van dijk, 2006), the criticism has focused mostly on nuancing the notion of ‘digital natives’ (e.g. bennet, maton & kervin, 2010; hargittai, 2010) since evidence that the digital divide mailto:magdalena.kania@soc.uu.se seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 2 exists is actually not contested (e.g. gilleard & higgs, 2008; niehaves & plattfaut, 2014). over the years, however, the debate has become more nuanced as scholars have recognized that there is a difference between the divide that access creates and the one driven by skills. studies on access, for example, have confirmed the existence of the divide (e.g. brandtzoeg, heim & karahasanovic, 2011; cruz-jesus & bacao 2012) but have distinguished between countries that can be described as ‘digital leaders’ and those that fall behind, namely ‘digital laggers’ 1. hargittai (2002) has also proposed that when we shift focus from access to skills we will inevitably draw attention to the ‘second-level digital divide’ – the term she uses to differentiate between knowing how to retrieve information from the web and doing it in an efficient manner. there are also some scholars that have introduced the idea that sociodemographics affect the divide (e.g. silver, 2013) and others who have shown that we should focus on age cohorts rather than age per se (e.g. gilleard & higgs, 2008). thus, although the notion of the digital divide continues to be highly contested, this is a notion that policy-makers have taken to heart and one that some scholars still argue should remain an important point of departure for inquiries into ict usage (e.g. sparks, 2013). it was against this backdrop and because studies on ict usage tend to focus on either those who are ‘digital natives’ or ‘digital immigrants’ (also known as ‘non-users’ or ‘have-nots,’ who are usually members of the older segments of the population), that we decided to focus on older active ict users. therefore, this article explores how a group of older people that can be regarded – by virtue of their age – as ‘digital immigrants, make sense of their use of digital technologies considering that they can, because of their active usage, also be regarded as ‘digital natives’. the reason we explore this is threefold. first, as will be shown in the next section, there is still relatively little research on how older users of icts make sense of their ict use (loos, haddon & mante-meijer, 2012). second, studies on older users have yet to focus on active users since most of the research on older users has focused on those whose usage is believed to be representative of the older segments of the population (i.e. either limited or moderate usage as far as scope and frequency are concerned; cf. selwyn, 2004b). third, because a recently completed study of older active users of icts has shown that this group of older people regard themselves as the exception to the rule (kanialundholm & torres, 2015), it seemed interesting to explore how they make sense of their use of these technologies. worth noting with regards to active usage is that we regard the informants in our study as active users of icts because they use digital platforms, such as smartphones, computers and tablets, on a daily basis. this must be noted since research shows that older users are generally more likely to use traditional rather than digital platforms on a daily basis (ofcom, 2015). with regards to the volume of activities performed online, it seems also worth noting that older users (55+) are most likely to stick to a limited number of performed activities (1-6) and “tried and tested websites” (ofcom, 2015: 168). to this end, it seems important to draw attention to selwyn (2004b), who argued that researchers should focus on older people’s actual use of icts and the circumstances that give rise to meaningful use/ engagement, instead of studying the possibilities of access or the motives for usage/non-usage. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 3 although he argued this over ten years ago, his suggestions seem to have gone unnoticed. this is why loos, haddon and mante-meijer (2012) have recently proposed that qualitative research that grasps the understanding and meaning of older people’s use of digital technologies is needed if we are to understand the perspective that old age provides for the digital divide debate. this article aims to contribute to this research gap by placing the question of older people’s active use of these technologies (i.e. computers and mobile telecommunications) at the center of the inquiry. in doing so we follow ofcom’s (2015) report’s definition of active ict usage in old age as usage that brings attention to frequency as opposed to number of activities engaged in 2. overview of research on older users of icts research on older people and ict usage tends to focus on the ways in which they go about learning to use these technologies (e.g. campbell, 2004; cody et al., 1999; russell, 2011; seals et al., 2008; turner et al., 2007); the reasons they use these technologies and what they use them for (e.g. mathews & hughes, 2009; morris et al., 2007; selwyn et al., 2003; sum et al., 2010); the ways in which ict usage can enhance their everyday lives (e.g. kanayama, 2003; khvorostianov et al., 2011) and the effects that usage has on many issues often studied when focusing on older people [such as well-being (blit-cohen & litwin, 2005); self-efficacy (erickson & johnson 2011; karavidas et al., 2005); intergenerational relationships (dickinson & hill, 2007); loneliness (sum et al., 2008); social capital (russell et al., 2008) and work/ leisure boundaries (buse, 2009)]. the vast majority of research on older people’s ict usage focuses, in other words, on either the ways in which they go about learning to use these technologies or the impact that their ict use has had on their lives. thus, although the debate on the digital divide nowadays takes for granted that we must understand older people’s ict usage as practices that are socially shaped and locally situated, research that specifically looks at the ways in which older ict users make sense of their use is still very limited. to the best of our knowledge, the few studies that have addressed this angle are the ones by white and weatherall (2000); selwyn (2004b); blit-cohen & litwin (2004) and kania-lundholm & torres (2015) who have mostly addressed this question on the basis of older people whose ict usage resembles that of ‘digital immigrants’. white and weatherall (2000), for example, used grounded theory to explore how six older individuals that used computers described their use of them, and showed that usage was connected to other interests (such as genealogy) which is why they deemed computers to be useful tools that, among other things, made keeping in touch with their families and friends easy. selwyn’s (2004b) qualitative study of 35 older individuals who had participated in a larger survey on ict usage and agreed to be interviewed about adoption, non-adoption and use of icts in later life is also one of the studies that focused on the ways in which older ict users make sense of their use of these technologies. it is worth noting that most of the older users interviewed by selwyn (2004b) were people that were not using icts on a regular basis. instead, these were people that were using computers for a specific project or use. selwyn’s interviews highlighted that older ict users regard their usage as a given, due to the fact that the ‘information society’ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 4 required that people were proficient in these technologies. as such, they used these technologies because they thought ict proficiency was necessary if one wanted to remain independent in old age. another study that explored how older ict users make sense of their ict use is the study by blit-cohen and litwin (2004) which compared how 10 older ict users and 10 non-users made sense of their participation (or lack of) in cyberspace as well as the implications this had for their social capital. in this study, the older users interviewed were found to uphold ideas about old age and aging that differed from those held by those that did not use icts. the ict users were also found to be more oriented toward the future than the nonusers and to have greater opportunities to increase their social capital as a result of their involvement with these technologies. finally, with regard to studies of older ict users, there is the study we conducted ourselves which explores how older active ict users try to differentiate themselves from younger users and older non-users (kania-lundholm & torres, 2015). when reviewing the research available on how older ict users make sense of their ict use we note a few points. first of all, with the exception of our own study, all of the studies focused on older users whose ict use was either limited or moderate. thus, the research that is available on older people’s ict usage which specifically focuses on their ict use is research that has focused on older people whose usage resembles that of ‘digital immigrants’. this is one of the reasons we designed the study upon which this article is based. we wanted to draw attention to older people whose ict usage resembles that of ‘digital natives’ and who are therefore not really characteristic of what the literature on the digital divide assumes about older ‘digital immigrants’. something else worth noting is that the few studies available on older ict users have not explored how they make sense of their ‘digital nativeness’. instead, the little research that is available tends to explore why they use these technologies and not necessarily how they make sense of their use of them. this is why this article explores how a group of older active ict users make sense of the fact that their active use of these technologies is not common among their peers. method the data for this article comes from a project that relies on focus group interviews (cf. vaughn et al., 1996) since the main interest is in how older active ict users share and compare their understandings and experiences of these technologies with each other (breen, 2006). a total of 30 people (14 men and 16 women) between the ages of 66 and 89 were interviewed through six focus groups. they were recruited through local organizations for seniors. sampling-wise, we looked for people that were 65 years of age and older, and who used digital technologies daily (although for different reasons). thus, the sample could be described as homogenous in some respects but also as an extreme or deviant sample (cf. cresswell, 1998) since the focus was on older people who could be considered an anomaly as far as the digital divide debate is concerned. in terms of the specific national and local context of our study it must be noted seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 5 that sweden is one of the world’s leading ict nations with very high (86%) household internet penetration via broadband (findahl, 2013). digital infrastructure is widespread since ict policies began pushing for basic access to internet in the mid-2000s. however, as it has been noted in numerous occasions, the question of ict usage is not only a question of access since class, gender, ethnicity, education and income are all relevant when it comes to who uses these technologies. in our study, for example, we noted that most of our informants are well-educated, white, middle class professionals living in one of sweden’s largest cities. they are, in other words, a privileged group (cf. kania-lundholm &torres, 2015). table 1 summarizes the sample characteristics with reference to demographics, as well as the type of digital technologies and frequency of use that each of the older people interviewed used. information communication entertainment services news medical info. e-mail facebook blogs games banking ecommerce name ag e edu . se x d s n d s n d s n d s n d s n d s n d s n d s n g ro u p 1 ulrika 68 u f • • • • • • • • ewa 77 u f • • • • • • • • kalle 77 u m • • • • • • • • anders 70 u m • • • • • • • • g ro u p 2 gunilla 70 u f • • • • • • • • lena 73 u f • • • • • • • • göran 70 u m • • • • • • • • bengt 74 e m • • • • • • • • g ro u p 3 gunhild 81 u f • • • • • • • • elisabet 69 u f • • • • • • • • gudrun 72 u f • • • • • • • • pelle 72 m • • • • • • • • arne 77 u m • • • • • • • • jan 78 u m • • • • • • • • g ro u p 4 anna 72 h f • • • • • • • • mia 77 h f • • • • • • • • marcus 68 u m • • • • • • • • nils 78 u m • • • • • • • per 72 u m • • • • • • • • g ro u p 5 cecilia 89 u f • • • • • • • • britta 68 u f • • • • • • • • maria 67 e f • • • • • • • • johan 67 e m • • • • • • • • åke 66 u m • • • • • • • • g ro u p 6 kerstin 73 u f • • • • • • • • anna lena 68 u f • • • • • • • • maja 83 e f • • • • • • • • marianne 76 u f • • • • • • • alvin 81 u m • • • • • • • • seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 6 rolf 73 u m • • • • • • • • abbreviations d: daily s: sometime n: never u: university h: high school e: elementary school the interviews focused on the reasons for their use of icts, what digitalization means to the older segments of the population and the stereotypes about older people that are promoted by the mainstream media. with regards to the latter it is noted that the widespread stereotypes reproduced by media often portray older people as “fearful”, “unknowledgeable” and “incapable” ict users because of their age (birkland, 2016). this is one of the reasons why scholars have recently called for a more nuanced understanding of internet use among elderly (van deursen & helsper, 2015) and why we wanted to bring attention to older active users’ take on the stereotypes about older ict users that are available through different types of media. the first author carried out the interviews, which lasted approximately one and half hour each and conducted the initial analysis of the data by organizing the material (through coding) with reference to qualitative conceptualizations (neuman, 2011). this means that in the first stage of analysis, we used the topics covered by the interview questions as well as the topics that emerged from the analytical insights gained in connection with both the data collection itself and through repeated listening to the audio-recorded material. during the second stage of the analysis, we identify the main themes that the data revealed (i.e. the themes that were generated are used in the results section as sub-titles). the third stage of the analysis entailed sorting through the coded themes in order to determine what the main trains of thought were in each of them. every step of the analysis was examined by the second author through peer-debriefing sessions (creswell, 1998), the aim of which was to ensure the trustworthiness of the analysis. she also conducted a search for disconfirming evidence, to ensure the quality of the analysis (cf. morse et al., 2002). findings when discussing why and how they used icts, the older active users interviewed talked about their use as: 1) a given and a future investment because of the way in which digitalization impacts most aspects of everyday life; 2) the continuation of a habit they had acquired earlier in life; 3) a form of social capital that they were privileged to have and must therefore share with others, and 4) an activity in which they could engage in a judicious manner because old age allows them to make better choices. these are therefore the sections we will use when reporting on our findings. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 7 ict use in later life: a given and a future investment one of the themes discussed during the focus groups was the idea that ict was something one used because society had become digitalized. some of the informants emphasized that their ict experience, competence and skills allow them to keep up with the rapid technological advancements that have taken place. when asked to comment upon the results of research showing that some older people think that ict use is an investment in their future, one of the informants explained why it had been important for her to “keep up with the society”: interviewer: there is research about older people/…/ and some of them say that they see it as sort of investment in their future. what do you think about this? britta: well i don’t know…it is actually more about keeping up with society, that it is actually important…one can actually get problems…yes, this is a good example…when they started with computers in the shops…you know when you have to go round and… åke: yeah, yeah, yeah…scan by yourself. britta: yes, scanning, exactly. it was many years ago when they started that in some shops and there were many that said, no, yikes, i don’t want to deal with this shit. but i thought, no, i should be able to shop when i retire so i think it would be good if i learn this/…/. one has to keep up…with such things, otherwise one can run into trouble when one has to pay bills or anything else one has to do. so in this way it is an investment in the future, so you are actually …more or less forced to keep up with society. (focus group #5) the ability to keep up with the ongoing digitalization of society was one of the factors that the informants alluded to when trying to explain why they used these technologies. as such, ict use was something that seemed to be regarded not only as a given but also as a future investment (which in this case is framed as skills one should acquire before one retires). some talked about having no choice but to keep up, since failing to do so placed them at risk of being incapable of dealing with basic aspects of everyday life, such as shopping or running other errands. thus, although the people interviewed were active users of icts whose use resembled – at least in terms of frequency – that of ‘digital natives’, there were some that seemed concerned that use of these technologies had become a prerequisite for keeping up with society. in other words, this group of older people regarded ict competence as comprising skills one needed in order to remain independent in old age. this is in line with selwyn’s (2004b) findings since the moderate to limited users of icts that he interviewed also thought that engaging with these technologies was a given because of the rapid digitalization that society was experiencing. however, our informants – who were active users of these technologies – described their use of digital technologies also as something they did because they were, in some ways, obliged to if they wanted to “keep up with society”. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 8 ict use in later life: the continuation of a habit acquired earlier in life we initially asked our informants about their first contact with digital technologies and the main reasons they used them. the majority claimed to have begun using these technologies two or three decades previously, which is when they were first introduced in most swedish workplaces. irrespective of how they had learned to engage with these technologies (i.e. whether they had attended courses in order to learn how to use a computer or had been the ones that introduced these technologies to their workplaces), it was clear that it was mostly work-related demands that had prompted them to begin using digital technologies. thus, when asked how and when they had started to use these technologies, it was not uncommon to allude to ict use as something that had started very early on and had therefore become a natural part of life. the following excerpt alludes to this: interviewer: do you remember when you started [using digital technologies for the first time]? åke: no, i don’t know when, but it was at work when they had just come out, so to speak . interviewer: but why, what was the reason…was it a must or was it curiosity? why did you start? åke: i don’t know, but it was obvious that one had to start using this. because…before that we had been dealing with faxes and things like that . britta: it was so much easier…when we switched from fax to e-mail. it was a big difference. åke: but it was a bit of a step-by-step transition, i think, some things were still there, such as fax and some had just come out like e-mail and such, so it went in stages, i think. johan: as we are speaking, i am thinking of the year /…/ and it was at the beginning of the 1990s, so it was actually 20 years ago/…/time flies…it was 20 years ago and it was at work when i first came into contact with…i don’t think that we, i had one at home then [he means a computer] which i bought rather quickly because i thought it was fun. interviewer: in what way was it fun? johan: well…one could search for so many things and i was curious and then it became practical because i could send home what i had done at work and could then keep on working from home and so on. åke: true johan: so it was very practical too. but above all because i was curious and thought that it was exciting. (focus group #5). in the quote above, åke, britta and johan describe their first contact with icts at their respective workplaces. when asked why they began using these technologies, åke mentioned that it had been an obvious step since he had previously been using fax machines. thus, for some older active ict users, using icts is a habit they developed while at work and one that continues to define how they live their lives after retirement. this resembles what white seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 9 and weatherall (2000) refer to as cyclic usage (i.e. that one uses icts because one has previous experience of them, which makes using them a given). something else worth noting is that the focus group discussions touched upon the fact that some informants talked about icts as advancements that they regarded not only as useful but also as exciting. as britta and johan both pointed out, the switch to digitalization at work was an opportunity to experience “the difference” that computers brought with them, and this was “exciting”. so, unlike the older ict users in selwyn’s (2004b) study who inherited their computers from younger members of their families, the active ict users interviewed in this study were people that acquired the icts they use on a daily basis on their own. something else we noted was that the informants talked about these technologies as advancements that seemed useful from the start. as some of them phrased it, icts “made the difference” because they saved time and resources: interviewer: but you know, i am also thinking about what you said ulrika, that you know, that you can decide more…do you also feel this about the internet…that you have more perhaps…that it makes things easier? ulrika: it becomes a freedom in a different way. interviewer: freedom, yes, okay, yes. can you say a bit more? ulrika: no, i don’t know. one does not need to plan ahead when you go to the movies (for example). if you have made the arrangements, you can just go and put your [credit] card and get the tickets out. interviewer: do you agree? what do you think about what ulrika just said about freedom? ulrika: i like freedom. anders: freedom is comfortable, it is. ulrika: one can also reserve [books] at the library quite easily… extend one’s loan and so on. (focus group #1) thus, when explaining why they used icts as often and as naturally as they did, the informants talked not only about the fact that these technologies make life easier and can be quite practical but also about the freedom that active use of them can bring. in doing so they alluded to the fact that they appreciated the time-saving benefits that these technologies offer partly because they knew what life without them was like. ict use in later life: social capital that must be shared something else that became clear was that the informants were aware that their ict knowledge surpassed that of the “average user” in their age group, and they talked about wanting to share that knowledge with others. the reasons they were knowledgeable varied but were partly related to their experience of working with digital technologies for many years and, for some, the fact that they had been asked to teach computer courses for seniors. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 10 following are some illustrations of the latter: interviewer: /…/ what do you think about such initiatives where older people teach…other [older people]. mia: yes, just the other day at the senior university. i had a lecture, a tuesday lecture about using computers and the web and such things. and people seemed very interested. there were a lot of questions at the end, but of a technical nature, so i had to finish it (laughs). anna: yes, exactly, there is seniornet, which deals with exactly this. i found them on the internet and spoke to them…and they have a motto that those of us that know a little bit more can teach those who know a little less. and i think this is quite good. (focus group #4) in the exchange above, mia and anna employ the pronoun “we” when describing older people who are helping their peers improve their computer literacy. this can be interpreted as a way of acknowledging that active older users have knowledge and skills that should be shared with those who “know less”. thus, the informants seemed very much aware of the fact that their active use of icts was a kind of social capital that was coveted by some. remaining on top of ict development seemed therefore to be something they regarded as a must. as one of the informants pointed out, it is important to make sure one remains updated on these developments even though one must remember that society should take responsibility for enabling people to become ict proficient: interviewer: yes, what do the rest of you think about this…social development? /…/ some say that we are living in such a digitalized society that more and more centers around these new technologies too. åke: no, it is as britta says, it is about keeping up. and that is enough, there is also societal responsibility that i think is missing to some extent too/…/society should take greater responsibility in this case. interviewer: what could it do, what do you think is needed? åke: yes, to make sure that we all keep ourselves updated. (focus group#5 ( in this exchange we see that åke thought that it was society’s responsibility to make sure that people stay updated on technological developments. computer courses and facilities that cater to older people’s needs were mentioned as ways that society can enable the older segments of its population to remain updated. but, as mentioned earlier, the informants unanimously regarded digitalization as a given, and believed that there are aspects of it that we should all learn to handle. therefore, our informants seemed to think it was their own responsibility to ensure they constantly stayed updated as far as icts are concerned, even though they also thought that society should assist older people who are unable to become ict proficient on their own. something else worth noting is that the informants were very eager to discuss their knowledge with each other. it was not unusual for the focus group discussions to detour into an exchange of how-to-tips, resources one could access (books or websites) to learn more about an aspect of technology that some did not know about, short how-to-lessons in which they discussed how to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 11 solve a tech problem they had experienced, or know-how concerning online security, which seemed to be a topic that preoccupied some of them. the impression we got from witnessing this repeatedly was that our informants were well aware of their slight advantage as compared to others in their age group. they knew that they ict proficiency was social capital that they were privileged to have, which may explain why they felt obliged to share their know-how with others. ict use in later life: a judicious activity thanks to one’s lifelong experience one of the aspects that several informants mentioned was that their age and experience made their ict use a prudent activity. the idea that common sense was something older people have was discussed at length during the interviews, particularly in relation to online security. when asked about the risks that come with ict usage and what one can do in order to protect oneself, the informants mentioned common sense as something that gave older users an advantage over younger ones: interviewer: how can one know what one should not do…because it is so easy to share information with others? /…/ åke: common sense. maria: yes, common sense. interviewer: what does it mean? maria: to think a little beforehand…where, where might this end up? åke: think beforehand. maria: but this also has to do with the experience that you have, right? we have more of this than the younger generation perhaps. (focus group # 5) in this excerpt, both maria and åke agree that common sense is something that implies thinking a few steps ahead. here – and in other excerpts like this one – the informants seem to want to convey that the capacity to think in this way comes with older age. their discussions went something along the lines of: the older you are, the wiser you are because longer experience leads to common sense. this is an interesting point because earlier in the course of the interviews the interviewer mentioned that older people are sometimes depicted as vulnerable when the digitalization of society is being discussed. although the quote above does not directly illustrate this, when asked about the portrayals of older people as prone to exclusion from ‘the information society’, the older active users interviewed distanced themselves from these stereotypical representations and pointed out that although they were old they did not fit that stereotype. instead, they argued that old age gave them an advantage over the younger generation since their life experience meant that they were not as gullible about icts (cf. kania-lundholm & torres, 2015). it is also worth noting that common sense is handy when addressing the threats that come with the digitalization of society. for instance, when talking about the people who permanently stay online, some of the informants seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 12 expressed skepticism: johan: and this thing with being connected all the time. but this is actually something else…this has nothing to do with technology. this is common sense in some way. interviewer: okay, yes…what do you mean? johan: no, but this thing that one, yes, socializing with others via computer…we have seen those who each sit in their own corners… cecilia: exactly, yes, yes. johan: and text-message and e-mail to one another. cecilia: and play [games] and… johan: yeah, games cecilia: so one can only imagine how the generation that is doing so today, how it is going to be for them in 40 years (laughs). (focus group #5) it could be argued that by being skeptical or even critical of those who constantly stay online, some of the informants presented themselves as “reasonable users” and, as people who had control not only over the technologies they use but also over their lives. being in control means therefore that one uses icts in a judicious manner, which also entails opting to disconnect when necessary, for instance while abroad. therefore, it can be suggested that being in control is an important aspect of the ict use that the older active users interviewed described. discussion this article started with allusions to the scholarly debate on the digital divide and the constant eagerness to differentiate older people from younger ones that has characterized it (cf. brandtzoeg et al., 2011; loos et al., 2012; prensky, 2001; van deursen & van dijk, 2010). this focus has left us with a research gap since little research has in fact focused on older active ict users’ actual engagement with these technologies. against this backdrop, this article drew attention to a group of older users that have not been studied before, i.e. active ict users whose usage resembles – in frequency at least – that of ‘digital natives’. in this respect, it seems necessary to reiterate that the few studies that have been conducted in order to draw attention to how older ict users make sense of their usage are studies that have focused on the most common groups of older users (i.e. older people whose ict usage can be described as either moderate or limited). by drawing attention to a group of older people who are actively involved with icts, this article has corroborated some of the findings that research on older ict users has highlighted. for example, just like the older moderate to limited users who selwyn (2004b) focused on, the older active users interviewed in this study regard digitalization as a given, and view ict proficiency as a skill that can enable people to remain independent in old age. the fact that our study also showed – just as white and weatherall’s (2000) study also has – that older users of icts make sense of their use of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 13 these technologies against the backdrop that their earlier life involvement with them offered is also something that must be mentioned. in these respects, this study has corroborated findings of previous research. however, by focusing on older active users of these technologies, this study has shed light on the fact that older people who are highly engaged with these technologies, seem not only to be aware of the second-level digital divide that media scholars talk about (cf. van deursen & van dijk, 2010) but also concerned with what this divide means in terms of older people’s exclusion from ‘the information society’. in other words, they make sense of their ict use by alluding to their exceptionality as older people and the responsibilities to their less fortunate peers that they feel they have. in a way, they seem to be reasoning as follows: the digitalization of society is happening at an incredible speed and those of us that are keeping up with these advancements (i.e. those who are ‘digital natives’ by birth or have been fortunate enough to becoming “naturalized” later in life) have a moral duty to make our expertise available to those who risk being left behind (i.e. those who are still digitally excluded). because of this, we would argue that their active use of these technologies needs to be considered against the backdrop of their awareness of the privileges that come with their social position (they are, after all, not only welleducated older people but also experienced users). in other words, their awareness resonates well with the argument that “increasingly, all familiar social and cultural differences in society are reflected in computer and internet use” (van dijk, 2013: 45). in this respect it seems important to note that the main concern of the digital divide debate nowadays is not access to the internet, but rather the differences that socio-demographics bring about in terms of skills and interest which lead to differences between the information “haves” and “have-nots”. these differences are creating new inequalities while simultaneously exacerbating the ones that already exist (ragnedda & muschert, 2013). in a recent study of non-users and ex-users in the uk and sweden, helsper and reisdorf (2016) argue that digital exclusion is increasingly concentrated to the most disadvantaged groups. their results show that old age along with social and economic disadvantage are strong predictors of digital exclusion of the new emerging digital underclass. they suggest that in a few generations, the group of non-users in sweden will be considerably smaller yet potentially severely excluded and that “(…) overall non-users in sweden and britain are increasingly older, less educated, more likely to be unemployed, disabled and socially isolated” (helsper & reisdorf, 2016: 15). these changing patterns of digital exclusion also mean that the demographics of digitally privileged groups could also change in the future. the present study provides insight into how older active ict users themselves navigate the landscape that is ‘the information society’. our informants seemed to be well aware that their ict proficiency differentiated them from their peers and they seemed to make sense of their use of these technologies by making reference to the issues that make them ‘exceptional’older people. these include the fact that they have used computers for many years and therefore made ict usage an everyday habit early on; the fact that most older people do not have the skills that they themselves have, which is why they feel the need to share them with others; and the fact that their lifelong experience means they can use these seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 13 – issue 1 – 2017 14 technologies in judicious ways. the latter differentiates them from younger active users (i.e. those that are often referred to as ‘digital natives’) and was one of the core themes regarding how they made sense of their ict use: we are older active ict users and are, as such, wiser ict users (see also kanialundholm & torres, 2015) it is also worth noting that this study’s findings draw attention to the idea of the digital spectrum (cf. loos et al., 2012), which is the latest development in the debate on the digital divide as far as older people are concerned. some scholars have suggested that instead of focusing on how the new media landscape is dividing different generations of users into categories such as ‘digital immigrants/ digital natives’ or ‘haves and have-nots’, research should focus on furthering our “insight into the everyday new media practices” of older adults. this study shows that the older active ict users interviewed spoke about their ict use against the backdrop that their peers’ lack of ict use entails. thus, the older active ict users who participated in our focus groups were not only concerned with differentiating themselves from the younger generation but also with differentiating themselves from other older people, i.e. the non-users. the focus group discussions drew attention not only to the differences between groups that the older active ict users interviewed were well aware of, but also to the differences within groups to which the recent debate has drawn attention. this finding points to the importance of differentiated usage (hargittai, 2002; hargittai & walejko, 2008) and emphasizes the diversity of the older user group that the debate on the digital divide has yet to acknowledge. in short, our findings provide insight not only into how older active ict users make sense of their use of these technologies, but also into the fact that they – because they regard themselves as ‘exceptional’ older people – are engaged in the creation of a “digital divide” of their own (the one between older active users and older non-users). in following loos, haddon and mante-meijer’s (2012) recommendations to focus on older people’s actual use of icts, and also by considering the ends rather than the means of ict use and its implications for inequalities as selwyn (2004a) has urged media scholars to do, we have shed light on how older active users of these technologies make sense of their ict use. we have done this by drawing attention to the fact that they seem aware that their active ict usage resembles that of ‘digital natives’ (even though they belong, generationally speaking, to the group known as ‘digital immigrants’). thus, although they actively tried to differentiate themselves from older people whose usage and use of icts resembles that of ‘digital immigrants’, the older active users interviewed in this study seemed to want to draw attention to the inequalities 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(1996). focus group interviews in education and psychology. ca, london & new delhi: sage. wagner, n., hassanein, k., & head, m. (2010). computer use by older adults: a multidisciplinary review. computers in human behavior, 26(5), 870-882. white, j., & weatherall, a. (2000). a grounded theory analysis of older adults and information technology. educational gerontology, 26(4), 371-386. 1 the data presented in this article comes from a country that is considered to be a digital leader. sweden is namely one of the forerunners of digitalization, both in europe and worldwide. this is despite the fact that recent statistics show that about 1 million people in sweden do not use the internet and the vast majority of these non-users are over 65 (about 80%) (findahl 2013). older adults are, in other words, still regarded in sweden as one of the most vulnerable groups as far as the digitalization of society is concerned. 2 according to a recent ofcom report (2015) users who are 55+ have generally lower weekly volume of use compared to other internet users. the average number of usage hours for people between 65-74 is 9,7 for this group. our informants engage with various digital platforms on a daily basis (some for up to eight hours per day) which means that their weekly use is higher than the average use volume for their age group. older active users of icts make sense of their engagement magdalena kania-lundholm and sandra torres abstract introduction overview of research on older users of icts method findings ict use in later life: a given and a future investment ict use in later life: the continuation of a habit acquired earlier in life ict use in later life: social capital that must be shared ict use in later life: a judicious activity thanks to one’s lifelong experience discussion references title seminar.net 2015. (author names) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 3.0 unported (cc by 3.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 body, identity and images of the self among adolescents. from research to action through peer&media educationi alessandra carenzio cremit, research centre on media, information and technology education, department of education catholic university of milan, senior lecturer email: alessandra.carenzio@unicatt.it simona ferrari cremit, research centre on media, information and technology education, department of education catholic university of milan, assistant professor email: simona.ferrari@unicatt.it lorenzo de cani cremit, research centre on media, information and technology education, department of education catholic university of milan, phd student email: lorenzo.decani@unicatt.it sara lo jacono cremit, research centre on media, information and technology education, department of education catholic university of milan, phd student email: sara.lojacono@unicatt.it pier cesare rivoltella cremit, research centre on media, information and technology education, department of education catholic university of milan, full professor email: piercesare.rivoltella@unicatt.it abstract in recent years, social media have become a mirror for many adolescents: young people experiment online, testing their own limits and possibilities, and they build their identity day by day (boyd, 2014). the consequences of this new behaviour are important and include sexting (temple, 2012, 2014), self-exposure, self-objectification and identity manipulation. many of these behaviours pass through the media themselves, as they work as a sort of megaphone or extensive sharing platform. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:alessandra.carenzio@unicatt.it mailto:piercesare.rivoltella@unicatt.it mailto:lorenzo.decani@unicatt.it mailto:sara.lojacono@unicatt.it mailto:piercesare.rivoltella@unicatt.it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 121 this paper aims to reach two goals. the first is to share a new perspective with educators and researchers named peer&media education (ottolini & rivoltella, 2014)—a model developed in recent years to reach young people and foster their “awareness” of media and their health (ottolini & rivoltella, 2014). the result is a new methodological framework fostering the responsible use of social media and digital tools and also helping young people to keep healthy habits. we will present the framework in sections 1 and 2. the second goal is to discuss the results of the research image.me, run by cremit, which studied the uses of social network sites, their impact on relationships and identity and the incidence of risky behaviours. in fact, the research is built according to the peer&media education perspective, preventing risky behaviours and supporting media awareness. we will discuss this in section 3. keywords: media education, peer education, peer&media education, digital media, sexting, identity, body, social network, prevention 1. media education and health promotion among adolescents media education (me) and peer education (pe) are both facing a new era after several decades from their establishment in the field of education. starting from these changes, and the definition of a new perspective (peer&media education), this paper tries to define a new idea of how to prevent/promote prevention/promotion of good habits, working with and on the media, in order to deal with the emerging needs expressed by adolescents and adults, as described in the research image.me run within this new theoretical framework. what follows is an attempt to discuss the methodology of peer&media education—after a short presentation of its origin and the reason why me and pe need to walk together—describing the research on the phenomenon of sexting (sex + “texting”), which means the exchange of explicit contents, texts, images and videos of a sexual nature through digital media. when, in 1973, the conseil international du cinéma et de la télévision defined media education (me) as “the study, teaching and learning of modern means of communication and expression considered as specific and autonomous discipline in the theory and pedagogical practice,” ii certainly no one could imagine the limitations of this short definition. to study the media is still important, especially to understand their evolution; however, it cannot consist only of media analyses, as we will see. in 1973, miniaturized, cheap cameras and editing programs did not exist, especially accessible to all (even to children aged 6!) and media certainly did not represent “partners” in our everyday life. the evolution of media education can be briefly defined as an effort to “extend the boundaries”—it does not occur only at school, as it usually happened in the past (rivoltella, 2001), and it is not just a specific theme for media educators. me seems to be part of education in a broader sense, as geneviève jaquinotdealunay stated some years ago: me is simply education (jaquinot-dealunay, 2008); it is a mix of “to do” and “to reflect”. it is an act of citizenship (rivoltella, bricchetto, & fiore, 2012). referring to the second theoretical perspective, peer education is now facing a time of growth, along with new challenge and new risks, similar to me. compared to traditional interventions, aimed to “warn against something”— seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 122 substances, risks or discomforts—working with pe does not mean providing contents or technical knowledge, but rather providing new intellectual tools for analysis and reflection, forgetting “indoctrination” for promoting critical thinking (croce & gnemmi, 2003). this idea has been developed over the last few years, at least in the italian debate, and the outcome has been recently presented to educators, teachers, medical staff and health workers in the public sector (ottolini & rivoltella, 2014). we cannot forget that, from its beginnings, me and pe media education and peer education (even separately) have always worked on actual problems, facing contemporary issues, helping people to live actively and supporting a critical reflection on current practices and emerging habits related to media, identity, body, relationships, friendships and self-expression. that is why peer&media education is a perfect framework for working with behaviours, for example dealing with sexting, as we will describe. such practices are spreading among tweens and teenagers. in italy, sexting was first detected in 2010, thanks to the national observatory for children and adolescents. in 2012, the commission focused on the "sexting" phenomenon, seeing an increasing number of children and young people posting their pictures on the internet in skimpy outfits and other such provocative behaviours. this concern is also explicit in the official journal of the european union (15 november 2012), in which sexting is mentioned among the risks linked to the internet, in particular for "the majority of young people who have received no prior training on the intelligent and responsible use of the intelligent and responsible social networks". despite these indications, there are no specific studies on this topic in italy. for a first indication, we have to look at the american research context, in particular the study "teens and sexting", by the pew research center's internet & american life, iii investigating cell phone use as a tool for sexting. in europe, we can quote the eu kids online iv research, conducted in 25 european countries, which documents the risks associated with sending and receiving sexual online messages or images. according to the data, 15% of youngsters involved in the research—aged between 11 and 16 years—received messages or pictures of a sexual nature from peers, and 3% reported to have sent or posted online messages of this type. among those who have received such messages, nearly a 25% stated having been annoyed. half of the latter also reported to having been fairly or very upset, and 38% of european children in this situation deleted the unwanted messages and/or blocked the person who sent those (36%). regarding parents, 41% of those whose children claim to have seen sexual images deny this possibility. parents therefore are not aware that their children look at pornographic images online, and very often they are totally unaware of the fact that their children have been victims of online offenses. the tendency is to label this phenomenon as a natural consequence of the massive use of digital media, a result of a plot between the media environment and social practices. this simplistic idea, not supported by research, seems to free adults from their responsibility and educational role, creating a highly dangerous attitude. 2. peer&media education there are two ways in which peer education and media education meet. we will discuss of these briefly in an attempt to depict a clear image of their theoretical framework. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 123 the first is about their aim, which is critical thinking. what pe has always done is to train youngsters so they can help other youngsters to become aware of the risks of sex and drugs, as stated in the previous paragraph. if you “think with your head”, you’re able to understand that if you don’t use condoms, it’s possible that you could get a disease, and it is the same thing with drugs and alcohol addiction (carenzio, gnemmi, ferrari, & rivoltella, 2015). critical thinking frees us from what people or friends mainly argue: when we consider the effects of our actions, we’re able to see them and choose what is best for us. and this is more effective if youngsters work in a reciprocal way, without adult intervention but rather through peer training: teaching them to become “peer educators” means enabling them to help their friends to become aware, too (this is the basic notion behind pe). in addition, media education traditionally aims at critical thinking. in the past this meant being aware of media messages in terms of identity development and models. media have always been considered as tools that are able to impact our behaviours and values. so it is quite different to receive messages passively versus in an active and critical way: in the first case, we will be probably influenced; in the second, we have the chance to “appropriate” tlambrate_2014 2015_selfie_ok_01.avihe messages, filtering them and evaluating what is good or not. in both cases, we have two methodologies and perspectives with the same pedagogical meaning: to make youngsters aware and thus enable them to think critically. the second way of convergence relates to becoming part of the same pedagogical framework and is represented by digital and social media development and facing a real change between old and new media. the old forms—first of all television—had an impact basically through their contents. the problem with radio and tv was that, being “mass” media, they were considered able to produce a unique way of thinking in their audiences (martin barbero, 2002; masterman, 1990). from a pedagogical point of view, the solution was to make people able to understand and deconstruct media messages. for many years, media education consisted of teaching youngsters how they could analyse the media; the idea was that deconstructing messages could provide a way to get beyond what was presented and reveal the “dark side” of the media (buckingham, 2003; rivoltella, 2001, 2005). nowadays, the problem with digital and social media is not only about contents, but rather mainly about media themselves. online gambling, online pornography and video gaming are some of the activities that lead to concern for the youngsters in our society. in these cases, the problem does not relate to contents (bad or good, true or false), but rather to behaviours that media can promote in youngsters. this is the case of “addiction without substances”, a common case of addiction in our society—thus, critical thinking doesn’t merely concern contents. this idea explains the connection between peer and media education (ottolini & rivoltella, 2014). pe considers media simply as tools for prevention: for example, if the aim is to encourage youngsters to use condoms, we can organise a group to produce a tv spot about this issue. youngsters use media as an opportunity to reflect on their sexuality or sexual expectations. in the case of peer education, media become tools, similar to the instrumental idea behind media education (masterman, 1990): this means educating with the media. in the case of gambling, sexting and other examples of digital behaviours, media are both tools and problems. we cannot use them only as tools for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 124 prevention, because they are simultaneously what we have to protect youngsters from. peer education isn’t enough. we need more media competencies, and these could be effectively provided by media education. finally what we get is a new educative perspective—peer&media education— whose profile can be defined in two ways. the first refers to the mutual articulation of the two terms “media” and “peer”. accordingly, peer&media education can mean the following: 1) educating peers with the media—this is the case of the use of video in peer&media education activities. we can think of video making or video analysis, activities aimed to help youngsters think about their practices and develop critical thinking. in italy, the first steps of pe took place around 1996, as described by emilio ghittoni, spreading from school to school as a sort of positive virus (ottolini & ghittoni, 2011) as discussing hiv with adolescents is an important theme dating back to that time. on the other hand, peer&video education started around 2008, developing a new idea of pe with videos to promote and develop positive habits among adolescents (ottolini & rivoltella, 2014). 2) educating about the media with peers—this is a case of group work. as we have already said, prevention is more effective if the educators are not adults: when youngsters work in groups, they have a chance to reflect together, feeling freer to express their ideas than with teachers or animators leading the setting (croce & gnemmi, 2003). 3) educating peers about the media—when planning an activity to prevent sexting, we must train peers both about sex behaviours and digital media features. peers will act in groups of youngsters whose aims will be: a) preventing sex addiction, an inappropriate relationship with one’s body and cyberbullying episodes and b) developing an appropriate way of using digital media (critical and responsible). the second way in which we can understand the relationship between the concepts of “peer” and “media” relates to three basic situations (ottolini & rivoltella, 2014), as follows: 1) brick peer&media. this is the case of peer education 1.0. trainers meet peers at school (face-to-face; this is where the term “brick” comes in), where through teacher mediation, peers use the media in their activities, but mainly as tools, without planning any online activities. 2) brick&click peer&media. in this situation, peers meet at school and work face-to-face, but they start to use digital environments to communicate and share ideas (a “click situation” is made of online activities). these environments are open, and they can allow youngsters to meet other people outside school, talking with them about prevention or similar issues. 3) click peer&media. this is the case of peer education 2.0. peers operate directly on social network sites. they enter youngsters’ communities, talk with them, try to be helpful in addressing different problems such as online sex, gambling, cyberbullying, sexting etc. this means that social networks are considered to be analogous with the streets or squares: this actually represents an important change for policy makers regarding prevention issues, as they are normally used to waiting for youngsters to go to hospitals or visit their offices. now, as we can easily understand, they are forced to meet them in their own social/meeting places on the internet. theoretically speaking, this shift started—at least in italy—in 2011, defining pe 2.0 as “a strategy of prevention close to the education of a real citizenship (as digital citizenship) as stated by media education, as a necessary answer to the social, technological and identity changes in peer groups”. v seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 125 3. the research on sexting 3.1 context, beneficiaries, aims image.me—bodies, consumption and transformation of youngsters in the social media mirror—is a biennial action research project (june 2013–june 2015) funded by “minor landmark grants” vi of fondazione cariplo.vii these special grants finance initiatives promoted by non-profit organisations, delivering actions with a significant philanthropic value and of an adequate size, to be highly impactful on life quality and on the cultural, economic and social development of the local community involved. the project was designed in order to study and prevent teen sexting and was developed as a partnership between cremit,viii spazio giovani ix and industria scenica, x with the support of the provincial office of the ministry of education and the local health authority service (asl) whose mission is to protect and promote health and healthy lifestyles for all people, in particular the youth. the direct beneficiaries of the project were high school students, while indirect beneficiaries of the project were parents, teachers and social educators living in monza-brianza (in the metropolitan area of milan, with 55 municipalities). the high school population (14–18) in the 2013/2014 school year was made up of 28,341 students in 561 classes. public high schools are located in 12 municipalities. the main aims of the research can be summed up as follows: to define the phenomenon of sexting; to promote better knowledge of sexting, helping adolescents to deal with it properly with empowering tools; to work with adolescents in order to prevent sexting, using peer&media education as the main framework and to train and inform adults (parents and health professionals), in order to make them more responsible and informed about digital media, identity and social practices (not just sexting). 3.2 methodology and tools as is common in action research, image.me is more of a holistic approach to problem solving, rather than a single investigation method. it “aims to contribute both to the practical concerns of people in an immediate problematic situation and to further the goals of social science simultaneously. thus, there is a dual commitment in action research to study a system and concurrently to collaborate with members of the system in changing it in what is together regarded as a desirable direction. accomplishing this twin goal requires the active collaboration of researcher and client, and thus it stresses the importance of co-learning as a primary aspect of the research process” (gilmor et al., 1986).xi what is peculiar in this case is the peer&media education framework as adopted to address sexting, with some differences, that we sum up here: the connection between formal and informal contexts to collect and discuss data (in school, outside of school); seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 126 the use of active empowering methodologies and the use of social media, such as facebook, as a new space to work in and as content to reflect on. 3.2.1 literature review and questionnaires in its initial phase, the research aimed to build a “knowledge map” of sexting through a national and international literature review, in order to highlight the extent of the phenomenon and study the survey instruments used in previous research. this made it possible to create three questionnaires, with an educational “soul” and a scientific background, aimed to reach adolescents, parents and health professionals from local health services (our three main targets). we collected 889 questionnaires from 20 secondary schools, reaching 45 classes. the participants were 49.7% males and 50.3% females: 29% from the first class (13–14 years old), 22% from the second class, 20% from the third, and 17.7% and 11.3% from the fourth and fifth classes, respectively. the data collected through questionnaires were gathered and input into a research-specific online software.xii this allowed an initial overall view of the key aspects to focus on, based on descriptive statistical measures. then, by exploiting its embedded tools, the researchers were able to draw correlations between the most interesting variables (pisati, 2003). this further step could not be applied to the facebook quiz due to the lack of a structured frame (questions were not posted as a whole set) and also to the very purpose of this tool, which of course was intended to collect answers free from parental or teachers control and also to prompt engagement in the active phases of the research. in the main questionnaires, however, the core questions aimed to analyse the use of digital media in everyday life (especially mobile phones and social networking sites), the effective knowledge and ideas on sexting, adolescents’ experience with sexting and the link between social media, identity performance and identity building. as for the analysis of data coming from sources other than questionnaires (selfies, facebook posts and other miscellanea), it was carried out following a qualitative approach, which is best suited for such an aim (cardano, 2003). 3.2.2 seminars and training sessions the results of the questionnaires xiii have been delivered during three seminars and have become the new background through which training sessions with adolescents, parents and health professionals have been organised, using peer&media education techniques (video making, group analyses, peer education). the aim, with adolescents, was to discuss the topic of sexting to build knowledge and tips on how to deal with it and make videos to address peers’ interest and public awareness on sexting. with parents, the main aim was to help them to deal with sexting and learn new pedagogical issues around digital media and digital citizenship. all videos are on youtube.xiv with health professionals, the aim was to discuss the new working “arena” where they can meet, reach and help young people, as prevention no longer seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 127 takes place in hospitals and caring and counselling services (see peer&media education 2.0). 3.2.3 #respectyourcyberself to meet formal and informal contexts and to provide a common framework for every single action (as integrated and linked one to each other), image.me designed an original campaign—called #respectyourcyberself—based on the study and creation of a recognisable mascot to meet the research target (the character ops, a very large-eyed puppet, see figure 1) and organised several social events to disseminate awareness on sexting in different scenarios: markets, streets, schools, conferences, scientific events, shows, public places and discotheques. figure 1: ops, the mascot of the research project the campaign has been supported by the active use of a facebook page,xv a website (www.imageme.it),xvi stickers, the mascot ops and a video clip of an original song written by locally known rappers (scarty e tempo, “respect your cyberself”). 3.2.4 social media as tools and scenario as said before, image.me is intended to connect formal and informal spaces and education, including two more actions: a quiz on facebook and a smallscale work on selfies (as a very common way to depict identity and bodies via digital media) during informal social events, both based on data collected during the research. the idea of using a facebook quiz is interesting for educational purposes, as it can help raise awareness among a community or allow the community to express its point of view and take a stand. as the topic was somewhat of a touchy subject, many interesting aspects were not addressed in the form of a questionnaire (delivered at school), but rather took place on facebook as a common ground for adolescents. the work with selfies (as format and content) meant not only to share opinions on how youngsters define body and beauty status, but also on how they deliver identity and build it with mash-ups, memes, colour editing etc. xvii the research staff is now facing the complex analysis of all the products collected (videos, screenplays, posters, brainstorming ideas, slogans). the results will be a good starting point for future projects and a firm basis for further research in the same subject area. http://www.imageme.it/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 128 3.3 from data to ideas to work with adolescents the literature argues the need for educating young people about the consequences of sexting (muscari, 2009; brown, keller, & stern, 2009). we have tried to do it, using the peer&media education model, both to research and to create interventions with adolescents. we started with the idea that understanding sexting from the perspective of teens is fundamental to developing strategies for preventing potential harm (heath et al., 2009). the insights from the first quantitative study (questionnaires) have been used to discuss with peers so they can design their work in schools and on facebook (using the quiz function) to support online reflection. 3.3.1 searching for a definition what we immediately identified was the lack of a definition of sexting, and not only among teens. in actuality, it is a sort of an umbrella-term that covers different definitions and behaviours. eighty per cent of facebook respondents consider sexting as “sending and receiving sexually explicit images via mobile phones”, and 13,3% say it is just “to take a photo in a sexy pose”. other recent studies have highlighted this multifaceted phenomenon (saleh et al., 2014): 1. creating and sending “sexual” images—47% of teens (40% female) reported they had sent or posted sexual images: 3% was 10–12 years old, 15% was 12–14 years old (21,8% male; 8,8% female), 18% was 16– 17 and 11% was 16–18 years old; 2. receiving sexual images—68% has received sexual images or texts, the majority female (71% vs. 64%). the reaction, as showed in figure 2, is to reply (male 56%; female 36%), to show the message to friends (20%) or to delete it (female 60%); 3. sharing received images—21% has shared sexual images mainly with friends (81%) but also images of people they do not know (e.g. famous people like actors, singers or meme pictures, 43%), friends’ images (26%) and images of people they know (18%) and 4. being asked to send an image—this datum came from the qualitative phase of the research. figure 2: reaction to a sexually explicit messages or images by age distribution delete reply show to friends share speak about withadults 14-15 years 48% 36% 12% 5% 0% 16-17 years 38% 48% 11% 1% 2% 18-19 years 34% 51% 13% 1% 1% 20-21 years 24% 61% 11% 3% 3% + 22 years 20% 40% 40% 0% 0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 129 nowadays there is a variety of contents included under the term “sexting” (livingstone et al., 2011). as young people are growing up in an increasingly sexualised world driven by technology (mcgrath, 2009), we need to consider the phenomenon and allow teens to become co-researchers in order to reflect on behaviours and contexts and to help them to be able to critically receive media discourses about sexting. to reach this goal, we needed a different methodological approach and a new investigative direction: we found it in peer&media education. 3.3.2 peer work in the classroom we trained peers to manage focus group sessions in the classrooms. then they managed a brainstorming session around the idea of sexting (to get their representations of it) and reflect on the causes and effects using video-cases (for example, an amanda todd video). xviii facing with peers allowed the youngsters to freely express their representations of media and personal behaviours. the collection of representations allowed us to reach two main goals (ferrari, 2009): to leave a deterministic idea about media and behaviour (for example, the idea that social media foster sexting) and to consider users in terms of their personal needs, skills, knowledge and performances as the starting point of educational intervention.xix commenting on why teens might engage in these behaviours has led peers to distinguish between “aggravated or experimental cases”xx of sexting (wolak, finkelhor, & mitchell, 2012). according to the questionnaires and facebook quiz, sexting is conducted and experienced particularly to have fun (20%), to impress or gain attention (12,6%), to be popular, (11,6%) and to engage couple relationships or flirting (10,2%). this behaviour is not focused on harming or harassing individuals. peers, supported by media educators, fostered the intervention, reflecting on what to do if they lose control by means of a “joke”. the viral spread of these images and the associated shame reportedly leads to social, psychological and legal consequences for victims (katzman, 2010). students and peers became authors of suggestive prevention messages at different levels due to the process in which they were involved, such as videos and texts. 3.3.3 mixed methodology for deeper results as already stated in discussing the methodology, school-based surveys have some limitations in terms of the questions allowed. from the data collected in the first phase, the research team decided to analyse possible correlations of sexting with gender (davidson, 2014), age (mitchell et al., 2012) and sharing practices using mixed methods to reach deeper results. gender differences exist in term of underlying motivations, social conditions and attitudes toward the behaviour. girls are significantly more likely than boys to be bothered by receiving sexting images, and they mainly felt embarrassed (female 39% vs. male 9%). twenty-two per cent of females confirmed receiving messages from unknown people (1.9% of males). but girls seem more open to sharing facebook pages than boys and pay special seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 130 attention to their looks (70% versus 50%) in taking a selfie. moreover, they use artistic photos to represent themselves on facebook. the literature points out the risks of coercive gender, discussing as sexting as an adult dynamics toward female teens (temple et al., 2012). referring to age, emotions dealing with sexting among youngsters are significantly different from those of older individuals: that is embarrassment versus fun, respectively. sharing has a social connotation in adolescence. it “may often occur within the limit of one-to one relationships, forwarding and sharing implicitly involves one or more third parties and may typically occur without the concern or knowledge of the image’s original sender. this not only suggests a nexus between sexting and bullying behaviour but also feeds into potential legal issues surrounding the distribution of illegal pornographic material” (saleh et al., 2014, p. 266). so, we connect this with the intimacy implied in relationships. there is a different connotation of an image sent between partners, between partners and shared with others or between young people where at least one person hopes to be in a relationship with the other. the exchange of sexting among partners is considered a common behaviour among adults (83.2%) and less so among teens (16%). from the focus group to the analysis of the selfies, it is clear that images of young women are reportedly being distributed without their consent, but they all with pictures taken without forcing them. the protagonists had not thought about the effect of images “gifted” to the internet. the participants (aged 16– 21) also argued that if someone doesn’t think before taking a photo or posting it, that individual is guilty and responsible for that act. this (as other data showed) points out how pictures and images are the strongest tools to represent identity and states of mind among adolescents and that we all need to become aware of the risks of this practice. even in this situation, the research confirmed that adults are not included when something bad happens online or when sex-related contents are delivered or received. 4. conclusions at the end of this paper we will present three highlights from our research, which can suggest new strategies for healthcare and education and open new directions for research and experimentation. first of all, it is clear that nowadays media are no longer simply tools available at the edges of our social lives. on the contrary, they are the skin of our culture (de kerkhove, 1990): they are what makes possible our knowledge of things, our representation of reality and our relations with other people. our research aimed at discovering how youngsters use the media for body and selfrepresentation, for expressing themselves and their sexuality and for building up and breaking apart their relationships. it is a chance for freedom but also a risk. viewed in this way, media really become the new space into which each of us is called to be a citizen: media education is no longer something we can choose to accept or not; it is the core part of our lives. this new idea of the media, and of their social presence, asks scholars and educators to imagine new methodologies of research and strategies of intervention. this is the case with peer&media education and the use of social media and social animation. as we saw in this paper, peer&media education is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 131 a new opportunity both for health operators and for educators: it views the media simultaneously as tools and spaces for peering and as an issue about which we have to take care for prevention and education. on the other hand, our research showed how facebook can be used as a focus-group space, or how to use drama (as in the case of the puppet ops and of its performances outside discotheques) for elaborating youngsters’ representations and ideas. research in the field of educational sciences has to provide solutions and not simply put youngsters under the lens of its microscope. finally, peer&media education leads media education out of the school and allows for it to meet youngsters in their real-life environments. this means that critical thinking—really the main issue in the case of media education— can be extended to everyday life and behaviours. references b o y d , d . ( 2 0 1 4 ) . it's complicated: the social lives of networked teens. new haven, london: yale university press. brown, j., keller, s., & stern, s. (2009). sex, sexuality, sexting, and sexed. adolescents and the media. the prevention researcher, 16(4), 12-13. buckingham, d. (2003). media education. literacy, learning and contemporary culture. london, new york: polity press. cardano, m. (2003). tecniche di ricerca qualitativa. roma: carocci carenzio, a., gnemmi, a., ferrari, s., & rivoltella, p. c. (2015). peer & media education: un nuovo spazio di intervento media educativo in ottica transmediale. in a. garavaglia (ed.), transmedia education. contenuti, significati, valori. milano: unicopli. croce, m., & gnemmi, a. (2003). peer education, adolescenti protagonisti nella prevenzione. milano: franco angeli. davidson, j. (2014). sexting. gender and teens. rotterdam: sense publishing. de kerkhove, d. (1997). the skin of the culture. investigating the new electronic reality. philadelphia: kogan page ltd. ferrari, s. (2009). instruments to collect media representations. paper at media literacy and the appropriation of internet by young people, faro 16-18 february 2009. gilmore, t., krantz, j., & ramirez, r. (1986). action based modes of inquiry and the host-researcher relationship. consultation, 5(3). heath, s., brooks, r., cleaver, e., & ireland, e. (2009). an introduction in researching young people’s lives. london: sage publications. jaquinot-delaunay, g. (2008). mediaeducation: quand il n’est plus temps d’attendre... media education: when the waiting is over. in u. carlsson, s. tayie, g. jacquinot-delaunay, & j. m. pérez tornero (eds.), empowerment through media education. an intercultural dialogue (p.59-66). göteborg: nordicom. jenkins, h. (2006). convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. martin barbero, j. (2002). el oficio de cartógrafo. traversias latinoamericanas de la comunicación en la cultura. santiago del chile: fce. mascheroni, g. (2012). i ragazzi e la rete: la ricerca eu kids online e il caso italia. brescia: la scuola. masterman, l. (1990). teaching the media. london: routledge. http://www.euromeduc.eu/spip.php?article181 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 132 mcgrath, h. (2009). young people and technology. a review of the current literature. melbourne: the alannah & madeline foundation. mitchell, k. j., finkelhor, d., jones, l. m., & wolak j. (2012). prevalence and characteristics of youth sexting: a national study. pediatrics, 129(1), 13-20. muscari, m. (2009). sexting: new technology, old problem, medscape. public health & prevention, may. ottolini, g., & rivoltella, p. c. (eds.) (2014). il tunnel e il kajak. teoria e metodo della peer&media education. milano: franco angeli. pavlic, b. (1987). unesco and media education. educational media international, 24. pisati, m. (2003). l'analisi dei dati. tecniche quantitative per le scienze sociali. bologna: il mulino rivoltella, p. c. (2001). media education. roma: carocci rivoltella, p. c. (2005). media education. fondamenti didattici e prospettive di ricerca. brescia: la scuola. rivoltella, p. c. (2013). educare (al)la cittadinanza digitale. rivista di scienze dell’educazione, 51(2), 214-224. rivoltella, p. c., bricchetto, e., & fiore, f. (2012). media, storia e cittadinanza. brescia: la scuola. temple, j. r., paul, j. a., van den berg, p., le, v. d., mcelhany, a., & temple, b. w. (2012). teen sexting and its association with sexual behaviors. archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 166(9), 828-833. saleh, f. m., grudzinska, a., & judge, a. (2014). adolescent sexual behavior in the digital age. consideration for clinicians, legal professionals and educators. new york: oxford university press. wallace, p. (2000). la psicologia d internet. milano: raffaello cortina. i pier cesare rivoltella had the scientific responsibility for the research project “image.me”; in this paper he wrote §§ 2 and 4. simona ferrari was the research project coordinator; in this paper she wrote §§ 3.1 and 3.3. alessandra carenzio wrote §§ 1, 3.2. lorenzo de cani and sara lo jacono took part to the research project: they worked with the survey and focus groups. ii pavlic, b., (1987). unesco and media education, educational media international, 24, 32. a few years later, the same cict proposed a broader definition that sees media education as a viable path "at all levels: primary, secondary, post-secondary, adult education and continuing education and in all circumstances", expanding the place occupied by the media, no longer conceived only as " practical arts and techniques". iii see “sexting: new study & the ‘truth or dare’ scenario". url: http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=28684 iv http://www.lse.ac.uk/media%40lse/research/eukidsonline/home.aspx. v ghittoni, e., & ottolini, g. (2011). un seminario che apre al futuro, in g. ottolini, (ed.), verso una peer education 2.0? (p. 6). animazione sociale, 251. vi since its establishment in 1991, this foundation aims at operating on the basis of the principle of subsidiarity, anticipating needs and fulfilling its special mission of being a resource that helps social and civil organizations better serve their community. see http://www.fondazionecariplo.it/en/grants/major-landmark-grants/minor-landmarkgrants.html. vii http://www.fondazionecariplo.it/en/the-foundation/la-fondazione.html viii cremit is the research centre on education about media, information and technology based at the catholic university of milan. the main activities developed by cremit can be summed up in five nodes: school support concerning research, training http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=28684 http://www.lse.ac.uk/media%40lse/research/eukidsonline/home.aspx http://www.fondazionecariplo.it/en/grants/major-landmark-grants/minor-landmark-grants.html http://www.fondazionecariplo.it/en/grants/major-landmark-grants/minor-landmark-grants.html http://www.fondazionecariplo.it/en/the-foundation/la-fondazione.html seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 2 – 2015 133 and educational actions in the media field; research activities in the field of media education and information literacy; development and analysis of products and didactical tools (kits, guidelines etc.); implementation of educational projects in the field of media education; and seminars, meetings and conferences dedicated to media and technology education. web site: http://www.cremit.it. ix spazio giovani was established in italy in 1994 as a non-profit company, active in the field of youth work, supporting and empowering young people in their growth and personal development, their parents/teachers/educators inside local communities to make them acknowledge youth as a local resource (and not as a social problem) and support their growth with positive approaches. web site: http://www.spaziogiovani.it/cms/. x industria scenica is a cultural non-profit organization that enhances the creative act of individuals and communities through social performance in order to generate development and cohesion, to promote economic growth and cultural innovation and cultivate a specific territorial identity. web site: http://www.industriascenica.com xi gilmore, t., krantz, j., & ramirez, r. (1986). action based modes of inquiry and the host-researcher relationship, consultation, 5(3), 161. xii http://www.questionpro.com/ xiii we have collected 99 questionnaires from parents and 100 from employees working in health and prevention. xiv videos are collected on the youtube channel of industria scenica, one of the research partners involved in video making sessions with adolescents and parents: https://www.youtube.com/channel/uccgzi-jjqfzdnevriyg_7mw xv https://www.facebook.com/progettoimageme?fref=ts. xvi 4,235 visits, 54,254 pages viewed. xvii we have worked on 146 selfies. xviii we have worked with four groups of peers during seven sessions for a total amount of 15 hours of work for each group. peers then visited 45 classrooms (distributed in four schools) during two sessions. xix representations can predict subjective media use, relationship and functions supported. analysing the performances would then bring out personal connotations given to the media (in terms of personal development, social development, personal discomfort), the emotional side (positive, negative, ambivalent) and main expectations. reflecting together on motivations helps to take into account “the manner in which the behaviors are commonly framed by in the context of media reports, policy discourse and research” (saleh et al., 2014, p. 265). xx the first includes cases involving adults with the explicit intent to harm, needing immediate police involvement, and the second deals with the majority of the situations studied, starting with sharing a sexual explicit message based on fun. http://www.cremit.it/ http://www.spaziogiovani.it/cms/ http://www.industriascenica.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/uccgzi-jjqfzdnevriyg_7mw https://www.facebook.com/progettoimageme?fref=ts alessandra carenzio pier cesare rivoltella asting and swanberg the importance of learning organizational behaviour and management seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 how can we make junior business students understand the importance of learning organizational behaviour and management? a lesson learned: experiences with the use of various teaching and learning tools in the course organizational behaviour and management at the bi norwegian business school. cecile asting department of leadership and organizational behaviour bi norwegian business school email: cecilie.asting@bi.no anne b. swanberg, ph.d bi learninglab bi norwegian business school email: anne.swanberg@bi.no abstract teaching behavioural subjects to business students is a challenge, increasingly so with growing class sizes. in this paper we focus on these special challenges, particularly drawing attention to how feedback can enhance student learning and understanding. one-to-one feedback is not possible in large classes, but students can receive feedback on their progress through well-planned teaching and learning activities. we implemented a range of different feedback activities in our course to support student learning. measuring learning effects is difficult and, in this case, comparison of grades was not possible. our experience, however, led to a somewhat better understanding of what can be done and what needs further development to provide valuable feedback for students in their learning process. keywords: teaching, learning, organizational behaviour, feedback. introduction teaching large classes presents a variety of challenges. in this paper we focus on how to give and receive feedback when class sizes exceed 100 students. our main interest is to understand how teachers can work with feedback systematically to improve student learning. essentially, there are two different perspectives: the teacher giving feedback to the student and the teacher receiving feedback from the student. both are important to the student and the teacher, in that the student receives guidance in his/her learning process and the teacher understands what problems are most frequent. together, these seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 70 feedback exercises can enhance teaching and learning in higher education institutions. modern society demands an increasingly competent workforce; as a result, more students are entering higher education. the consequence for many institutions has been larger classes and a body of students more diverse than only a few decades ago. in the past, students seeking higher education were largely motivated by curiosity and knowledge; today, however, a degree may be seen as a necessity for future employment and thus becomes merely an instrument and not a goal in and of itself. it is possible to argue that students who view education as a means and not a goal will take a more strategic approach to learning than students motivated by learning to understand. this diversity in attitude and behaviour impacts on how teachers plan, teach, and give feedback. it is possible to argue that today’s students often need to be motivated to spend enough time on a subject, and the challenge for the teacher is how to stimulate students’ interest. in addition, students may need more extended and differentiated follow up and more assessment to guide them. special challenges in teaching organizational behaviour and management the students at bi norwegian business school have already made a clear choice when they apply. their interest is in business and business-related subjects and many are attracted to quantitative courses. the course organizational behaviour and management may therefore surprise many of our students, as initially they may not be interested in human behaviour and relations. the course is taught in the second semester of a bachelor’s degree, and scheduling the course at this early stage in a student’s major field could add to the difficulties in teaching the course. our experience from teaching these topics for a number of years, reading student evaluations, and discussions with students and other teachers leads us to propose several reasons why this might be the case: • many students use their first year to get acclimatized to their new situation, and their study habits are therefore not yet optimal. • first-year students are young and many lack work experience, which may make the content of organizational behaviour and management harder to understand. • the topics covered in organizational behaviour and management may tend to be underestimated since they are generally expressed in everyday language. • some students’ perceptions of the class have been tainted by negative comments made by previous students. • some students believe that organizational behaviour and management is a course that requires little work and that they therefore do not need to put much effort into preparing for the exam. • the fact that students are familiar with the exam questions in advance may result in some students working less rather than (as intended) being stimulated to greater effort. • student evaluations reveal, to a relatively large extent, negative attitudes towards the different topics in organizational behaviour and management. this list is not exhaustive but includes enough information about the challenges facing the teacher in this particular course for our question: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 71 how can we help junior business students understand the importance of learning organizational behaviour and management in preparing them for work? theoretical framework there is a large demand for higher education, creating a substantial and nuanced challenge for institutions at university level. our interest is in providing quality teaching and learning for students with a wide variety of interests and motivation. constructive alignment (biggs & tang, 2007) is a concept designed to respond to this challenge and provides a framework for teachers to enhance student learning. biggs and tang (2007) define two types of students who have very different reasons for wanting a university degree: academic susan and non-academic robert. “susan is academically committed; she is bright, interested in her studies and wants to do well. she has clear academic or career plans and what she learns is important to her” (biggs & tang, 2007: 8, 9). robert, however, is “at university not out of a driving curiosity about a particular subject or a burning ambition to excel in a particular profession, but to obtain a qualification for a decent job” (biggs & tang, 2007: 9). the idea behind the theory of constructive alignment is to plan and implement teaching to make robert’s learning more like susan’s. by constructing learning outcomes and planning learning activities to achieve the intended learning, robert can learn and understand more and better. this type of teaching, according to biggs and tang (2007), reduces the teaching gap between different types of students’ learning engagement, as students are required to perform learning activities directly linked to learning outcomes. learning outcomes are what students are expected to know for the exam at the end of a course. during the course students attend classes and perform activities to receive formative feedback to support their learning. formative feedback provides the student with information on how s/he is performing according to learning outcomes. the documentation of the student’s learning outcomes is the summative evaluation or the grade the student receives on the final exam. the principle is visualized in the model below (based on biggs & tang, 2007). l e ar n i n g p ro c e s s • te a c h in g • s tu d e nt a c tiv it ie s d o c u m e nta tio n f e e d b a c k l e a r n in g o u tc o m e s c o n str u c ti ve a lign m e nt m o de l 1 ; a visua lisa t io n o f b ig g s c o nst r uc t ive a lig nm e nt (b ig g s a nd ta ng 2 0 0 7 ) taras (2002) claims that higher education is too focused on grades at the expense of the learning process. formative evaluation is a helpful pedagogical tool to enhance student learning. ramsden (2003) expresses the same view and argues that formative evaluation is also helpful for the teacher as it allows the teacher to detect which part(s) of the curriculum may create the most seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 72 misunderstandings and mistakes. brookhart (2001) points out one important relationship between learning outcomes and formative evaluation when he argues that for formative evaluation to be effective students need to be familiar with learning outcomes. another condition for formative evaluation to succeed is that students are able to compare their own work with work of the desired quality. furthermore, they need knowledge about how to work to attain learning outcomes. feedback is of no use if the recipient is unable to use it to improve his/her own work; that is, students need to be taught how to use feedback for improvement. biggs and tang (2007) argue that assessment in large classes can be solved by using self and peer assessment. the advantages are 1. “self and peer assessment give the student first-hand, active involvement with the criteria for good learning. 2. students learn how to select good evidence. 3. judging whether a performance or product meets given criteria is vital for effective professional action” (biggs and tang 2007:233). the importance of teaching students why they are asked to perform the feedback task, and how, is underlined. biggs and tang (2007) describe and use the solo (structure of the observed learning outcome) taxonomy, a method based on study outcomes in several academic areas. course objectives given at bi norwegian business school are based on bloom’s taxonomy, which mckeachie (2002) describes as “a popular framework to improve an instructor’s ability to teach thinking, regardless of the discipline. bloom’s taxonomy became a foundation for teaching across all levels” (mckeachie 2002:285). biggs and tang (2007) point out the difference between the two taxonomies by referring to bloom’s as less hierarchical and less based on student learning than on how educational administrators judge the learning. a list of verbs used for formulating learning outcomes has been developed for both taxonomies, making constructive alignment a practical method in terms of both taxonomies. one well-known feedback exercise is the one minute paper (omp). omp “may be defined as a very short, in-class writing activity (taking one minute or less to complete) in response to an instructor-posed question, which prompts students to reflect on the day’s lesson and provides the instructor with useful feedback”i. according to chizmar and ostrosky (1998), omp is a simple, lowtech innovation tool to obtain feedback from students. it is widely used, and college teachers see the omp as a tool that can easily improve their teaching. in large classes feedback is often seen as a challenge, and one reason is that many students feel embarrassed to ask questions when something is unclear or not fully understood. the omp may ask the students to answer what they think are the most important and the most difficult aspects to understand, giving the teacher important feedback about how to improve or clarify problem areas. method pilot description in 2009, bi norwegian business school implemented a new structure for its study programme, the so-called “bachelor reform.” this new structure was a direct result of the norwegian quality reform in higher education (the norwegian follow-up of the bologna process)ii. the course organizational behaviour and management was taught for the first time as a second semester course in spring 2010. the course was a reinstitution of an old course but with seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 73 a revised and extended curriculum, textbooks in newer editions, and a total of 7.5 ects for an exam pass. this was also made the only mandatory course in its discipline for the norwegian business school’s bachelor programmes. interested students could, however, choose from a variety of electives within the organizational behaviour field in their second and third year. in spring semester 2010, approximately 4000 students signed up for the course; their goal was to pass the exam on may 19. at the oslo campus, the course was taught in seven parallel classes for almost 2000 students. to inspire students to work throughout the semester and thereby enhance interest and learning, the students were given the potential essay questions for the exam. the course was designed to have 14 lectures, each covering a particular topic. each week one exam question was published online for the purpose of preparing students. the teacher gave a short briefing in the upcoming lecture. this provided a framework for the student in helping them to determine the focal points and structure of their answers. only students who attended class received this information. organizational behaviour and management was a “double” pilot this particular semester. bi norwegian business school was introducing a new learning management system (lms), which includes a range of different options on how to communicate with students. to gain some experience with the system, organizational behaviour and management, as a large-scale course, was chosen as a pilot. this meant we had access to new technology for publishing, communication, and feedback that would help to enhance teaching and learning. course pilot activities spring 2010 the course organizational behaviour and management, giving 7.5 ects, is estimated to require 200 hours work for the students, divided into the following activities and quantities. activity hours time spent in class 42 reading set books 84 task solution 42 study groups and additional readings 27 exam 5 total recommended time 200 one result of the bachelor reform is that all courses describe learning outcomes at course level. these outcomes are divided into three areas: knowledge, skills and attitude. for organizational behaviour and management, the course learning outcomes are knowledge: students will acquire a knowledge of basic psychological and organizational theory relevant to employment and further studies in organization and management. skills: students will be able to explain key concepts, processes and theories and how these relate to effectiveness in organisations. attitude: students will develop an understanding of the psychological characteristics and processes and organizational conditions that are important for optimal functioning in the workplace. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 74 in addition, a number of feedback activities to enhance students’ learning processes were implemented. the activities are presented in the following table and explained further below: activity hours time spent in class 42 detailed learning outcomes for all topics 14 published exam questions 14 recommended answer to exam question 14 framework for self-peer assessment exam questions 14 students grading previous exams 4 individual decision style test 1 electronic tests 8 one minute paper 2 however, the course learning outcomes were not detailed enough to be consistent with the constructive alignment theory. accordingly, using verbs described in biggs and tang (2007), intended learning outcomes for all topics were developed according to bloom’s taxonomy. it was possible to do this quite accurately since all exam questions were already known. in the weekly lecture the teacher presented a possible answer to the exam question for the topic under discussion, with the aim of helping students learn how to answer this kind of question. the presentation outlined a “role model” for the students. the answer was not published online. as mentioned, the reason for publishing exam questions was to motivate students to work with organizational behaviour and management throughout the semester and thereby have a better learning outcome. bi norwegian business school has a business model that requires teaching in large classes at bachelor level. the framework for self and/or peer assessment of the exam questions was developed to help the students in their learning process. teacher assessment was not possible in this case because of the large number of students. to provide training in assessment skills, students were given four graded exam answers from a previous course. using the assessment framework the students were asked to consider if this was a good or poor performance. the aim of this activity was to initiate a class discussion about the different parts of the exam, pinpointing where the student had or had not attained intended learning outcomes. the intended learning outcome from the individual decision style test was that students understand that a problem may be approached in different ways by different people. a class discussion following the test gave the students an option for additional feedback. results how should learning be measured? course grades given upon examination are, in this respect, our only objective measures. according to the constructive alignment theory this is the documentation. given that the course seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 75 (organizational behaviour and management) was being taught for the first time, a comparison of results with grades from earlier exams, such as from spring 2009, does not provide accuracy since the two courses were not identical. we also surveyed students to get feedback and reactions to the implemented method. at the end of the semester students were asked to report their reactions regarding learning outcomes, teaching methods and their own achievement. unfortunately, few students completed the survey. these facts represent considerable weaknesses in our measurement; thus, our discussion relates only to the most significant feedback, in this case the answers given to one teacher, representing 1200 students. results in terms of grades are available for all students taking the exam. nevertheless, we believe that it is possible to discuss our experience to try to understand where we succeeded and failed in this pilot. the following discussion is therefore based on our subjective experiences and beliefs related to the available results. discussion according to the constructive alignment theory, all activities in the learning process should support learning outcomes. intended learning outcomes, exam questions and suggested solutions to exam questions formed the main activities in the course. the exam questions and learning outcomes were published on the lms before every lecture, a load-bearing activity introduced to motivate students to work toward goals throughout the semester. in the lectures, students, by comparing the teacher’s answers to their own, received important feedback on their work/progress. according to biggs and tang (2007), the learning process is enhanced by student activity; in this case, this meant being familiar with, and using, the learning outcomes to solve the exam question assignment. students’ self-reports show that 68% were familiar or partly familiar with the learning outcomes and 53% claim to have worked with all 14 exam questions. on the basis of these figures, we acknowledge that our intention to motivate the students by using the exam question assignment as preparation failed to a certain degree. taking the percentages alone, it is possible to argue that these results are satisfactory; however, very few students answered and, as this activity was constantly stressed as being the most important, it should have resulted in the students’ believing in its importance as well. our experience in class, in discussion, and via email with students indicated that most students only wrote the assignment after the teacher had provided a possible solution. it could be that students are generally used to attending class first and working on a topic later, which might suggest that these types of assignments are difficult for young students for a number of different reasons. it is possible to assume that students who had worked with the exam questions did better in the exam than students who did not work on the assignments. accordingly, we could also argue that the learning effects for students who came prepared to the lecture were better than for students working after a lecture. the challenge of motivating students to work more assiduously with the exam questions is two-fold: first, motivating a larger number of students to complete the assignment, and second, motivating more students to work with the topic before class. in addition, the learning outcomes are not always as coherently expressed as they should be and some revision would make them a more helpful and motivating tool. intended learning outcomes. it was not mandatory for teachers to state learning outcomes either on the lms or during lectures, with the result that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 76 these were published either occasionally or not at all. some students who had heard about, but not were given, learning outcomes during the semester requested them. in some classes the learning outcomes for all 14 questions had been published by the end of the course. in conclusion, we argue that developing and publishing learning outcomes positively affects teaching in terms of focusing on the most relevant topics for students wishing to pass the exam. it also seems to have a positive effect for students using them as a tool for understanding. however, it also made students even more strategic in their approach and perhaps less curious about the topic being taught. several teachers reported that many students questioned why they were required to discuss theories in class that were not mentioned in the syllabus, even if this was done to provide better understanding. another less fortunate result may be a direct focus on the reproduction of theories with less understanding and application. after grades were published, many students who had earned a b asked for a formal explanation of the assessment. it seemed that they assumed that memorizing theory was adequate to earn them an a, an attitude which devalues the importance of theory application and the complexity of the subject. framework for self/peer assessment exam questions. this framework was developed for students to give and receive feedback on their work with the 14 exam questions. this tool was initially meant to be a class activity. students brought their answers to class then exchanged them with the student sitting beside them; both students then provided feedback using the framework for self/peer assessment. this activity is intended to enhance learning via two different perspectives: giving and receiving feedback. another advantage of using the framework is that it underlines individual differences, an important lesson in organizational behaviour and management. as mentioned, few students had worked with the different topics before class, and as the exercise asked them to expose their own work, it may have been frightening for some of them. as brookhart (2001) suggests, students need to learn how to give and use feedback, which is a point we did not give adequate thought to. as we are now more aware of this, we have devoted more time to considering how and why to use the framework during the present semester. students grading previous exams. this was a popular activity mainly because many students were unsure and gained confidence by being able to read answers from previous exams. students who used the assessment framework to assign a grade may have learnt a lot. however, they were probably outnumbered by others who did not perform the task but thought they learnt something simply by getting to know the grade. decision style test. the individual decision style test is translated from an american textbook. the reason for this test is to pinpoint the individual differences that are stressed in this course but that are not always understood by students. the test was taken in class and the results were discussed. the aim was for students to understand the many different ways of approaching a problem and that these different approaches can give a range of outcomes. the goal was to provoke class discussion and underline differences and to demonstrate how discussion works, but not necessarily to provide students with a right or a wrong answer. this activity worked in terms of showing how dissimilar views result in different outcomes since students received some feedback on their way of thinking. in terms of discussion, the aim was not fulfilled; the barrier was the large class size, which does not promote discussion or the give and take of asking and answering questions. nevertheless, the test provided a change from the normal lecture and created activity that made the students think about how they make decisions. it also demonstrated that there is no right or wrong answer. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 77 electronic tests. at the end of the semester a set of eight electronic tests was published online as a help for students in reviewing the syllabus. unfortunately, these tests were not aligned with the learning outcomes and were therefore less helpful as an activity underlining what the students needed to write a good exam. we found it difficult to use the lms for testing according to the learning outcomes in organizational behaviour and management; however, additional experience with our new platform will allow us to revise the tests, making them more useful in terms of constructive alignment. one minute paper. omp was used twice during the semester to uncover difficulties or areas that were unclear. omp was surprisingly effective: even in very large classes it was quite easy to uncover areas that needed to be repeated. we feared it would mean a great deal of work to cover all areas, but the students were, in this respect, very united in where they were experiencing or not experiencing problems. feedback was given primarily in class, but also on the lms. one advantage of using the lms was that it was possible to give an immediate response, while class feedback meant waiting until the next class. our conclusion was that omp is a powerful tool that can help teachers reveal problem areas and thereby improve student learning. conclusion this article summarizes our subjective experience from working with the course organizational behaviour and management in spring semester 2010. it has been very useful in terms of planning teaching according to constructive alignment, making the teacher focus more on what is most relevant in the syllabus. in a distributed course of this nature, this method can theoretically ensure that students get roughly the same information regardless of teacher, class, or campus. unfortunately, this was not the case in practice, since using the material was elective and use of the different tools varied among different course instructors. to reduce these discrepancies, compulsory use of the published material may be worth considering. as described in this paper, we achieved rather varied results. some activities worked according to intent while others were less useful. however, we still believe that active students learn and that these activities, if further developed, will help students learn more and better. in the introduction we asked, “how can we make junior business students understand the importance of learning organizational behaviour and management?” this question remains unanswered. what we have obtained, however, is some greater understanding of what activities can be readily implemented in large classes and which need more work to make them an appropriate tool for the teacher. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 78 references biggs, john & tang, catherine (2007). teaching for quality learning at university, (3rd ed) maidenhead, uk: srhe and open university press. brookhart, s. (2001). successful student's formative and summative uses of assessment information. assessment in education 8(2): 153-169. chizmar john f. and ostrosky anthony l. (1998), the one-minute paper: some empirical findings. journal of economic education; winter98, vol. 29 issue 1, p3-10, 8p, 3 charts mckeachie, wilbert j. (2002). mckeachie’s teaching tips, (11th ed) boston, houghton mifflin company. ramsden, p. (2003). assessing for understanding (pp 176-206). in: p. ramsden (ed.) learning to teach in higher education. london, routledgefalmer. taras, m. (2002). using assessment for learning and learning from assessment. assessment&evaluation in higher education 27(6): 501-510. internet documents/references http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/awareness012.htm http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/about/ i www.oncourseworkshop.com ii http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/about/ title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 norwegian nurses’ experiences with blended learning: an evaluation study edda johansen lecturer buskerud university college edda.johansen@hibu.no thomas harding associate professor buskerud university college/ australian catholic university thomas.harding@hibu.no tone marte ljosaa lecturer buskerud university college tone.marte.ljosaa@hibu.no abstract an increasing number of nurses undertake continuing education via information and communication technologies. development of best practice, based on students’ own experiences, is vital in order to create the most effective learning environment. this paper describes the challenges to and facilitators of learning for a group of norwegian nurses enrolled in a postgraduate course in wound management delivered by blended learning, which combines face-to-face and online components. data was gathered through a focus group interview and inductive content analysis was used to identify themes emerging from the data. a number of both personal and academic facilitators, and challenges impacted on these adult learners. technical and academic problems combined with a lack of time created a steep learning curve for these adult students. valuable feedback, it support at home and an increased competence eventually gave them a foundation for lifelong learning. blended learning is an important way to offer postgraduate courses to give adults access to continuing educational programmes independent of geographical location. both academic and personal challenges and facilitators should be taken into account when educators design blended learning courses in order to facilitate an effective learning environment for adults through the best blend of face-to-face and online learning. keywords: blended learning, electronic learning, adult students, academic discourse, deep learning approach, lifelong learning, evidence based nursing mailto:edda.johansen@hibu.no� mailto:thomas.harding@hibu.no� mailto:inges@hum.ku.dk� mailto:inges@hum.ku.dk� mailto:tone.marte.ljosaa@hibu.no� seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 55 introduction nurses comprise the largest group of health care professionals in norway (statistics norway, 2004). given this fact, the provision of quality health care services depends to a considerable extent on the knowledge and skills of nurses, individually and collectively. it is essential, therefore, that nurses maintain currency with respect to their field of practice (eason, 2010). over the last two decades an important influence on nursing practice and education has been evidence-based practice which has seen “an explosion in the amount of best practice evidence available to nurses” (kedge & appleby, 2009 p. 635). accompanying this has been a focus on nurses as independent lifelong learners (eason, 2010; kedge & appleby, 2009; roberts, 2011), which to be effective requires a deep approach to learning (cowan, roberts, fitzpatrick & while, 2004), information literacy, writing skills (tarrant, dodgson & law, 2008) and evidence-based nursing (eason, 2010). this has resulted in nurses in many parts of the world having to undertake continuing education in order to maintain licensure or registration. in a country such as norway which has a relatively small population of 4.9 million people (statistics norway, 2011) dispersed over a wide and geographically diverse area it can be difficult for nurses to engage in continuous learning when they may live at some distance from an appropriate educational institution. as well, lack of employer support and family commitments can prevent attendance at professional development opportunities at institutions of higher learning. given these factors, e-learning has been embraced by many as means to provide opportunities for engagement in on-going learning. e-learning is a key component of what has become known as ‘flexible learning’, where the underlying principle is being able to study without the requirement to attend classes at a specified time or place (kliger & pfeiffer, 2011). as an increasing number of nurses world-wide are undertaking continuing education via information and communication technologies (ict) there is a concomitant imperative to understand what constitutes effective implementation and design of courses using flexible learning (atack, 2003; cook, garside, levinson, dupras & montori, 2010; levett-jones et al., 2009). one approach to flexible learning is that of ‘blended learning’, which combines face-to-face and online learning (singh, 2003). quality education and student satisfaction is important for success (brown & mazzarol, 2009; gruber, fuβ, voss & gläser-zikuda, 2010) and to ensure quality in higher nursing education it is important to listen to stakeholders’ experiences (reames, 2010). effective course design should be a continuous process taking into account ongoing changes within the health care sector as well as students’ experiences related to facilitators and challenges to learning. even though e-learning has been widely embraced it is surprising to learn, as a number of authors assert, that little is known about students’ experiences and attitudes towards flexible learning in higher education (atack, 2003; atack & rankin, 2002; bekele, 2010; moule, ward & lockyer, 2010; yu & yang, 2006). studies of satisfaction and motivation in internet-supported learning are dominated by quantitative research (bekele, 2010) and this study addresses the gap in qualitative research by investigating the experience of a cohort of norwegian registered nurses undertaking a postgraduate course in wound management through blended learning. the aim of the study was to reveal those factors which either challenged or facilitated participants’ learning. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 56 description of the wound management course chronic wounds are a significant health problem and are generally caused by diabetes, arterial and/or venous disease, pressure or cancer (kranke, bennett, debus, roeckl-wiedmann & schnabel, 2009). the true incidence and impact of chronic wounds are difficult to assess (kranke et al., 2009), but prolonged life expectancy and the occurence of life style diseases is expected to raise the incidence. effective prevention and treatment requires specialist expertise and the blended delivery course investigated in this study was developed in 2007/2008 at a norwegian university college following a request from the norwegian wound managament association. as there was no national educational standard for nurses working with chronic wounds in norway up until 2007 it was recognised that there was a need for formal education to address the impact of chronic wounds on the norwegian population. the course used blended learning to provide norwegian nurses an opportunity to attain, independent of geographical location, a formal qualification in chronic wound management. according to picciano (2009), a generally accepted definition of blended learning does not exist; however, at a fundamental level it involves a combination of face-to-face and online learning (singh, 2003). what is not clear is the ratio of online learning to face-to-face learning that constitutes an effective blended learning environment (garrison & kanuka, 2004). in this example, decisions on course design, content and delivery are underpinned by the work of salmon (2004), salmon & edirisingha (2008), thornhill, asensio & young (2002), the “norwegian diamond” i this course combined: (1) four face-to-face meetings; (2) four clinically relevant assignments; (3) podcasts; (4) discussion boards; and (5) use of email. the e-learning platform that was used for these disparate components was fronter. during the 5 ½ month duration of the course there were 13 days of face-to-face meetings. as argued by stølen (2008) adult students benefit from well organised studies in order to successfully combine study, work and home life, therefore a study guide was developed, which detailed the timelines, assignments, assessment criteria, recommended readings, and contact information. (bjørndal & lieberg, 1978), previous students’ feedback and the authors’ experiences as nurse educators. it is essential that the pedagogy, not the technical aspects, determine the structure and content of e-learning (adams, 2004) and this course was underpinned by constructivist and sociocultural approaches to learning. constructivist theory emphasises peer-to-peer interaction to develop multiple perspectives (anderson, 2004); students were therefore expected to collaborate on written assignments and to provide feedback to their peers. the overall aim was to facilitate nurses capable of learning-to-learn, problem solve and develop critical understanding (medel-anonuevo, ohsaka & mauch, 2001). a deep learning approach promotes self-directed learning which is synonymous with effective lifelong learning (jarvis, 1987). deep learning might be facilitated through interactive dialogue in learning (garrison & kanuka, 2004) with the use of practice-related problems being beneficial for facilitating lifelong learning (jarvis, 1987). therefore, two of the four clinically focused assignments required collaboration between 3-4 students. relevant tasks are likely to promote deep learning (entwistle, 1986); therefore, the assignments were situated in the students’ everyday work experiences. the main aim of many postgraduate courses is to reflect on existing practice and use available literature to master or improve existing practice (danielsen, 2008) and in this example the students’ assignments were based in reflection on existing practice and literature searches for new, improved or “best practice”. the first face-to-face meeting at the university college introduced the course and provided the students with essential knowledge on how to access and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 57 navigate fronter, the learning platform, and the library databases. the four face-to-face meetings were predominantly dominated by lectures and workshops. the workshops were either partly instructional, focusing on practical skills in wound care or were problem solving sessions in which students collaborated on clinical scenarios. the philosophy was that combining face-to-face meetings, clinically relevant assignments, information literacy, academic skills and competence in evidence-based practice prepared students for lifelong learning. the online learning component involved the use of fronter for communication, discussion, posting assignments, responding to peers and accessing course material. for students to become familiar with, and master, simple tasks in fronter they provided a picture of themselves with short textual description as an initial task. the idea was derived from the five-stage model of online teaching and learning developed by salmon (2004). fronter was constructed so that the groups of 3-4 students had a private area within fronter, in addition to the common area all students could access. the first assignment was an individual written task which was shared only between group members who provided feedback to one another. this was done in order to minimise stress for these adult students who might have had little experience in writing academic papers or who had not been engaged in higher education since their undergraduate studies. additionally, the private domain within fronter was available to students for communication and collaboration around the assignments which was later shared with the whole cohort for reading and peer response. discussion boards were created and moderated by the course leader, to provide quick responses to questions and a supportive forum for course members. one discussion board was open to all questions, a so-called “student room” or “coffe-shop”. students were encouraged to post any conceivable question here as both the questions and the course leader’ s answers might be relevant to all participants. other discussion boards were created for particular assignments and peer feedback, or to specific workshops and related questions. private questions for the course leader were posed by e-mail or telephone. podcasts, combining audio and text, were available on fronter to assist students with academic writing. some focused on generic academic skills while others addressed issues pertaining to specific assignments. podcasts showing real-world examples of patient assessment and management by wound care specialists were also available. one of these podcasts contained an interview with a patient on his experience of living with a chronic wound and the services he received. the close collaboration between clinicians and faculty staff made these recordings and productions of real-life podcasts possible. the third type of podcast was short lectures, which combined audio, video and slides. these were available prior to face-to-face meetings to provide students with foundational material for the interactive workshops. the online lectures were designed for clarity and conciseness and were less than 5 minutes in length to avoid providing nothing more than “talking heads”. both clinicians and academic staff were present at the workshops to ensure interaction, and clinical and academic feedback. the close collaboration between clinicians and academic staff allowed students to receive feedback jointly on two of the four assignments. method participants a total of 22 female nurses, aged 32 – 59, were enrolled in the wound management course. the nurses came from a geographically spread out area of norway and were employed in hospital outpatient clinics and wards, nursing homes, community care and by suppliers of wound care products. all seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 58 the participants in the course were invited to take part in the study. written and verbal information about the study’s purpose and how it would be undertaken was provided. it was originally planned to undertake purposive sampling from those who agreed to participate in order to have a group that represented the age, workplace and geographical diversity of those enrolled in the course of study. as only six students agreed to participate in the study they were all included in the study. they did, however, come from a geographically widespread area within the country and from a variety of work settings which included outpatients’ departments, suppliers of wound products, a veterinary surgery and district nursing. all were female, with an age range of 32 -54 years. ethics prior to student recruitment, the study was approved by the norwegian social science data services. written information, outlining the study and its aim, was given to students two months prior to the interview by the first author at a face-to-face meeting. the same information was sent by e-mail to all students one month prior to the interview to remind them of the opportunity to participate in the study. participation was voluntary and participants were guaranteed anonymity, and signed, informed consent was collected. data collection a descriptive design was used asking semi-structured questions to a focus group in february 2011. focus group interviewing was chosen as (1) the method fits well when the aim is to improve practice (lerdal, 2008) and (2) the course emphasises collaborative learning and peer response, so experiences with collaboration might be uncovered through group discussion. the questions used to guide the interview were: (1) tell us about your experiences with the course, for example, the design, technology, your work environment and the support you have received?; (2) what was helpful for your learning?; (3) what was challenging?; (4) can you describe your experiences with collaboration and communication with both peers and teachers?; (5) how did your ict competence develop during the course?; and (6) what suggestions do you have for further improvements? to facilitate participation it was conducted on the students’ last face-to-face meeting at the college. the interview lasted 90 minutes. two of the researchers undertook the focus group with one leading the interview and the second keeping field notes. at the outset their roles were clarified for the participants. the first author (ej) conducted the interview. she was also the course administrator, a lecturer and the principal moderator of the e-learning environment. field notes were made by the third author (tml) who was also a lecturer on the course. at the beginning of the focus group lunch was provided and the participants were thanked for their participation. the study’s purpose was reiterated and the themes to be explored were described. emphasis was placed on there being no right or wrong answers and that everyone’s experiences and opinions were valuable. the focus group was audio taped and transcribed by an external transcriber. analysis the transcribed data was subject to inductive content analysis where the outcome of the analysis is to extract categories and themes to describe the phenomenon (elo & kyngäs, 2008; king & horrocks, 2010). the data from the focus group was analysed independently by the first and the second authors. the second author (th) had not been present at the interview and therefore his undertaking the analysis provided neutrality and increased dependability (plummer-d’ amato, 2008) as the interview moderator was closely linked to the students and the course itself. the use of the second researcher for the analysis potentially reduces bias and enhances trustworthiness (plummer-d’ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 59 amato, 2008). categories and themes from the independent analyses were discussed and a consensus was reached by the first and second author. categories and themes where discussed with the third author to verify the findings. the analysis was guided by the process described by king and horrocks (2010). the first step of the analysis required close reading and re-reading of the transcripts. those sections of the transcripts that appeared to provide understanding of the students’ experiences were highlighted, written down as self-explanatory descriptive codes and what was of interest was noted. thereafter, the descriptive codes that seemed to share some common meaning were grouped together to focus the interpretation of meaning. this process involved having both those sections of the transcripts that were of interest, and the descriptive codes, tabulated in order to be able to view all stages of the analysis while keeping the research questions in the forefront. the final step was to elicit the overarching themes (elo & kyngäs, 2008; king & horrocks, 2010). findings the analysis revealed two overarching themes related to these students’ experience with blended learning: challenges and facilitators. these two themes there were further able to be subdivided into two related domains: personal challenges or facilitators and academic challenges or facilitators. associated with each of these were a further nine and ten concepts respectively which facilitated or challenged the students learning. these domains and their subthemes are presented schematically in figures one and two. figure 1: challenges to learning. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 60 figure 2: facilitators to learning. in the discussion that follows text from the participants is translated from norwegian and denoted by use of quotation marks or indented excerpts. discussion being overwhelmed a major theme was how overwhelmed these adult students were at the start of the course. the challenges were manifold but essentially were related to the academic environment and its demands, and the personal demands they experienced at both work and at home. these two domains, the personal and the academic challenges, intersected so that the students felt overwhelmed by competing demands and saw themselves as ‘time poor’, balancing study, work and home life. other authors have noted that adult students’ experiences are centred on this balance and meeting conflicting demands (for example: loureiro-koechlin & allan, 2010; lowe & gayle, 2007; o’connor & cordova, 2010). in their study, lowe and gayle (2007) found that adult learners spend as much as 59-71 hours per week combining work and study. most participants in this study spent a lot of time on computer related problems, and on writing the assignments according to academic requirements. a lack of time could therefore partly be explained by technical and academic challenges that absorbed the limited time available to these students. the fact that most also held a full-time job as well might also contribute to the challenging start to their studies. as one participant commented, “i was a little out of my depth, i think. i really didn’t have as much time as i thought.” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 61 a lack of time for study, which was identified by most of the participants, coupled with a perceived lack of it competence created a potent barrier to online learning. this finding has been documented elsewhere (for example: atack & rankin, 2002) and has lead to some nurses dropping out of their studies altogether. indeed, the second time this course ran one participant’s colleague withdrew citing frustration with the time required by the it components: i had a colleague – he started here last year or the year before – he left the course because he couldn’t open the audiofiles and so on, so he just gave up. honey (2004) found that a lack of time hindered nurses’ using the internet for learning because a lack of skills lead to online activities being time consuming. in this study, one said “i have spent so much time on the written assignments, so to avoid using extra time on fronter, i just skipped it”. it would have been easy to ascribe lack of computer skills to the age of those enrolled in the course and their previous learning experiences. for example, as one said “when i went to nursing school, we certainly wrote assignments by hand. so i felt completely high and dry in relation to computers”; however, having it competence may not be predictive of whether or not students adapt to the blended learning environment (wilkinson et al., 2004). the so-called digital natives – those born 1980 onward – were technically experienced with a high degree of computer literacy but had limited understanding of how to apply the technology for learning (margaryan, littlejohn & vojt, 2011). it would appear, therefore, that being a younger age or having competent general computer skills are not necessarily predictors for success in blended learning. even with ‘everyday’ computer literacy the use of computers for writing assignments correctly and participating in an online learning environment can be challenging. as noted by one, “from my perspective the learning curve was quite steep especially with respect to using a computer. i work with computers a lot every day, but not in the way we use it for course work”. it seems the everyday computer skills of these nurses are insufficient with respect to searching databases or other e-learning related activities. it is argued that the integration of technology into teaching and learning has caused a paradigm shift in educational practice (desai, hart & richards, 2008; stanley & dougherty, 2010). in addition to the technology and academic requirements is familiarisation with the blended learning environment and a course designed upon constructivist and collaborative principles: quite different pedagogical constructs than those to which they may have previously been exposed. there has been a shift from teacher-centred to student-centred learning within higher education (stanley & dougherty, 2010) with virtual learning environments (vle’s) used to support learning. as one participant commented, “it is like a new world to me, i didn’ t know that i could look for knowledge like this. to realize that “oh my god, i can use my computer to find loads of information about things i have actually been wondering about”. this new academic environment, which has moved away from didactic learning practices centred around lectures and tutorials can be both timeconsuming and stressful (holley & dobson, 2011). for adults, already stressed by the competing demands of study, work and home life the new learning environment might be one challenge too many: to go into the forum in fronter has been totally out of the question for me. i simply don’t dare. it isn’t my thing. although the technology which supports online interaction and dialogue might be unfamiliar, this type of learning is usually appreciated by adult learners (desai, hart & richards, 2008). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 62 e-learning can promote deep learning (desai, hart & richards, 2008) which involves relating ideas and evidence to previous knowledge and experience to develop conclusions (entwhistle, 1994; newble & entwhistle, 1986). it is an approach that is synonymous with lifelong learning (jarvis, 1987). nevertheless, online activity and interaction might be hindered by technical problems and unfamiliarity with the pedagogy. academic demands another theme that emerged clearly from the transcripts was the demands of academia, particularly with respect to writing assignments. the requirements of academic writing and scholarship have little in common with the day-to-day written requirements in nursing practice. this lack of congruence with their everyday, lived reality was for one almost ‘insurmountable’: “what have i got myself into? this is not going to turn out well. writing assignments, how do i do it? how do i follow the rules and requirements? it appeared completely insurmountable”. the nurses undertaking a postgraduate course in tarrant et al’s (2008) study also expressed concern about academic writing. as well, literacy competency can vary markedly among students undertaking further education, with the academic requirements, such as referencing styles, becoming more challenging than the learning itself (fowler, 2008). those who are more likely to succeed in higher education are those who have already participated in higher education and have confidence in their skills to produce scholarly, academically rigorous, reflective writing (ryan, 2011). this finding was borne out by the experience of one of the interviewees who disagreed with the others with respect to the burden of academic writing. her academic confidence was related to having participated almost continuously in higher education since graduating as a nurse. technical problems, the time consumed by searching the literature and limited writing skills can be obstacles to adult students demonstrating their critical thinking skills (bekele, 2009). it is argued that assessment methodology requires a paradigm shift to incorporate workengaged learning (mantz, 2011), yet the most common assessment form continues to be academic essays with academic staff valuing grammar, spelling and punctuation over critical thinking in these assignments (kreth, crawford, taylor & brockman, 2010). evidence-based practice is an important component of contemporary nursing education and alongside information literacy this wound management course incorporated this aspect as a key factor to facilitate developing competency for lifelong learning. information technology skills are essential for finding the evidence for best practice (tarrant, dodgson & law, 2008) and the participants in this study were not hampered in this respect solely by limited information literacy or lack of computer skills but also by the fact that a significant proportion of nursing research is published in english. for adult learners already struggling with the demands of technology, academia, work and home life this was an additional obstacle to their participation and success in the course. e-learning requires more collaboration and interaction compared to ‘traditional’ teaching and learning (desai, hart & richards, 2008); this proved to be challenging for some participants. although, some enjoyed the experience and saw the value of group work to develop a wider perspective they found that there were difficulties inherent in this style of assignment. there were problems with allocation of the work between the group members, lack of clarity with respect to the optimal size of the groups and ambivalence was expressed as to whether the assignment topic was conducive to group work when the participants were from diverse work places. according to one: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 63 if you don’t have any experience with how home care is organized, it can be difficult to write about improvements [of practice]. we knew a little and it gave us enough insight to cope with it. it went pretty well, but it was tough and difficult. while another noted: on the other hand, perhaps it is rather important to have different point of views when writing an assignment, as not everybody works in home care … but perhaps the assignments could have a different design … because i think that perhaps one of the most important things in continuous education is to see all the functions of the health care system. both the hospital, wards, home care, general practice surgeries, wound supplies – everything that actually surrounds the patient with a wound. the problems with collaboration could be related to the academic challenges, distance and having to use fronter between face-to-face meetings when they wrote the assignments. another explanation could be that collaboration simply was time-consuming in an already pressured situation of combining work, home life and study. finally, the participants may not have agreed on rules for collaboration and lacked the negotiation skills required for successful collaboration. feeling powerless to institute change these students discovered a new world of knowledge with increased information literacy, new skills in how to reflect on existing practice and search databases for information which in turn impacted on their experience of their work places. although, they found themselves in a position of holding new skills and knowledge, they were lacking work colleagues with whom to discuss their new understandings, while at the same time they found themselves feeling powerless to influence changes in clinical practice. one expressed the discomfort this created for her: i think there are so many things which aren’t working right. i feel so hurt inside. oh my god, there is so much one could do. and this course makes us wake up a little and realise that we have so much to put straight. but it is clear there are so many obstacles. getting to grips with technology and academic demands despite the overwhelming start the participants stated that they eventually got to grips with both the technology and academic demands. according to one, “the initial period was the worst. and then it lightened”. getting to grips with the academic and technological demands was certainly important for these students to move beyond the initial feelings of being overburdened and on a “steep learning curve” as one put it. another significant factor in the development of self-confidence was receiving positive feedback on their assignments. the feedback on the first assignment was provided by both academic staff and clinicians, and this seemed to not only be valuable information to guide them further but also instilled confidence and motivation to continue. one described the initial fears and the settling influence of positive feedback had: but i got a grip, strangely enough. after the first assignment when i got feedback which told me that something actually was correct. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 64 despite the demands of academic writing and the time required for the assignments, the students thought they were important to their learning: it is the assignments. to be pushed to read and do what you need to do. yes, the assignments. although initially daunting the focus group revealed that the students valued the assignments because they perceived them as realistic, relevant and providing the opportunity to reflect on their own practice. it help at home lowe and gayle (2007) found that while work and family life could produce negative consequences for part-time adult students, there could also be positive effects. in this study, it was evident that having somebody at home to help with it was a source of relief. as one said, “i must admit that i got some help from my husband when my computer crashed. i don’t know what i would have done without him”. all the participants in this study were female and this may have played a factor in the positive influence of the home environment with respect to the it component of the course. this has been found elsewhere, for example chu (2010) found that female adult students relied more on practical help from family members to increase their internet selfefficacy compared to men. the limited number of participants in this study does not allow exploration as to whether this is a gender difference or related to the age of the participants. academic milieu even though it was a challenging process with many obstacles they still enjoyed the course. a number of factors intersected with respect to their new found ability to cope with the demands: family support, feedback, new competencies and enjoyment of the academic milieu. the students were really thankful that they had the opportunity to participate in the course and one described it as a “huge privilege” to be accepted onto the course, while another described her excitement with respect to online education, “i really looked forward to starting school. i have been waiting for this internet education for many years – and finally it arrived!” to study without being fixed to a certain time or place seems important for participation and might be related to commitments at home, work or geographical distance from the university college. these students were highly motivated to undertake further education and despite the challenges and frustrations they all spoke positively of the experience, the lecturers, course administrators, and the support they received from the it department at the university. fantastic lecturers, fantastic. they are really the masters in wound care. it has somehow been the best of the best. new competence and discovering a new world of evidence. the transcripts reveal a sense of personal growth and increased selfconfidence in their abilities, from being on “swaying ground many times” to “having justifiable recommendations” to questions raised by colleagues in the field of practice. evidence-based practice is facilitated through the assignments where the students search the literature for new, improved or “best practice”: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 65 but it is through the assignments that i have gained enormous knowledge. we have dived into the knowledge. to learn how to search for articles has been especially useful. for another, to be able to search for evidence: is a new world for me, because i didn’t know that i could search for knowledge. to understand that, oh my god, i can use my computer to find answers to my questions. because i have questions all the time, i will now use many more articles to find answers to them. future recommendations it is evident that online and blended learning can provide opportunities for adult learners to engage in reflective practice and critical thinking (garrison & kanuka, 2004) as well as the development of other academic and technological competencies. given the potential for personal and professional growth uncovered in this study it is vital that course designers and facilitators address those issues which promote student satisfaction, motivation and retention. not only are the majority of online learners adults (ke & wie, 2009) but they also are likely to be engaged in paid work (lowe & gayle, 2007; tarrant et al., 2008); therefore, not all the challenges (and facilitators) to learning will be related to the learning environment and activities. it is important then to investigate and understand appropriate course design and those factors which create a positive learning environment. early focus on supporting the students to develop information literacy, general computer skills and confidence to navigate the vle will help them become self-directed learners who can focus on the course rather than being overwhelmed and distracted by the technology. as blended learning relies heavily on technology to facilitate access to learning and for the provision of academic support (honey, 2004), the sooner the students master computer use the quicker they will being to focus on the learning experiences per se. in this study, one student commented on this aspect: someone talked about computers here ... which perhaps relates to me as well. i have used so much more time on it, that i thought, “darn! i could have read a book here instead!” some adult learners are disadvantaged in relation to many younger learners as they are challenged by both general computer use and the technology used in the online learning environment. atack and rankin (2002) recommend that the teachers take a pro-active approach at the start of the course and communicate with at risk students; thus, early identification of such students is imperative. a pre-module course to enhance students’ technical and academic competencies might also be of use; the design of such courses to meet the adult learners’ needs might be complex, but most likely should address local needs (michaud, 2011). tarrant et al. (2008) describe how they offer both a pre-module course and ongoing support, arguing that without structured and directed learning experiences adult students might become unduly stressed and anxious while becoming information literate and competent writers. such courses, to prepare undergraduate entrants for the academic demands of their courses, are increasingly common in higher education. a pre-course should be considered for future students to address the needs revealed in this study. the applicants for this course were provided with a limited amount of information on the technical skills required and limited support on how to access and use the vle, and library databases at the first face-to-face meeting. honey (2004) recommended that postgraduate students in blended learning seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 66 environments need to be well informed about the required information literacy at the outset and be provided with opportunities to improve computer, internet and library skills. what is now being considered in the redesign of the course is the adequacy of the information and support provided and how to design this to better support the student and reduce the impact of the ‘overwhelming start’. the importance of teaching students how to navigate the vle is described by hole, larsen and hoem (2010) but time constraints meant that only a short time period at the first face-to-face meeting was put aside for this. since they are challenged by both general computer use as well as computer use for learning, support on the overall use of computers needs to be taken into account. limitations generalisation of the findings is not possible due to the qualitative approach and the few respondents but the findings might be meaningful in relation to students with similar characteristics. since there is no widely accepted definition for blended learning (picciano, 2009), the study findings should be interpreted in relation to the course design chosen for the wound management course. as the focus group interview was conducted by the course administrator and principal e-moderator bias is possible. nevertheless, the focus group interviews provided an insight into the challenges and facilitators in a blended learning environment for this group of female nurses. the knowledge might assist other educators when designing blended learning courses for a similar group of students. conclusion blended learning can offer adult students access to continuing education independent of geographical location. education via ict, however, may present a number of both personal and academic challenges for adult learners. the students balanced studies, home life and full-time jobs, finding the learning process challenging owing to a lack of basic computer skills and experience in the use of technology for learning. while participants were able to get to grips with the technology and academic requirements, they reported that it was time consuming and demanding in the early stages. from a positive perspective the course encouraged deep learning and the use of evidence based practice which opened up a new world to the participants as they reflected on existing practice and used the computer to find evidence to underpin new, improved or “best practice”. blended learning can facilitate nurses’ access to continuing education, and the findings indicate that adult students could benefit from being better informed about the necessary computer requirements and the academic and information literacy skills used. knowing that many adults do not have those necessary skills, course designers should also assess the need for pre-entry courses with a view to offering the right initial and ongoing technical and academic support to avoid unnecessary stress and facilitate an effective lifelong learning environment. acknowledgement both the development of the blended learning course and this study was made possible by funding from norway opening universities (norgesuniversitetet). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 8 – issue 1 – 2012 67 references adams, a. m. 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(2006). attitudes toward web-based distance learning among public health nurses in taiwan: a questionnaire survey. international journal of nursing studies, 42, 767-774. i the so-called “norwegian diamond” or “didactical model of relations” consist of six elements that interrelate and influence each in planning, carrying out, evaluating and changing education: aims; content; methods; assessments; operating conditions; and teachers and students prevailing conditions. norwegian nurses’ experiences with blended learning: an evaluation study edda johansen thomas harding tone marte ljosaa abstract introduction description of the wound management course method discussion being overwhelmed academic demands feeling powerless to institute change getting to grips with technology and academic demands it help at home academic milieu future recommendations limitations conclusion acknowledgement references title older adults’ coping with the digital everyday life   wenche m. rønning department of education and lifelong learning, norwegian university of science and technology e-mail: wenche.m.ronning@ntnu.no (corresponding author)   astrid m. sølvberg department of education and lifelong learning, norwegian university of science and technology e-mail: astrid.solvberg@ntnu.no abstract this study was motivated by a concern for how older adults adjust to their digital everyday life. theories of motivation and self-efficacy are applied in order to understand how older adults master and adjust to the rapid development into a paper-free, online world. a sample of eighteen older adults (62-90 years) were interviewed about the reasons and motivations underlying their ict usage, and how this affects their perception of mastering their everyday life. a semi-structured interview guide was developed for this purpose. the data were analyzed using an inductive coding procedure involving descriptive and interpretive phases based on the theoretical assumptions about motivation and mastery. three overarching categories were evident in the data material; challenges, connectedness and expanding. the first category describes new challenges mastering everyday life activities, and how this brings about feelings of pressure, barriers, and fear. the other two categories give a more positive picture of how older adults perceive the new developments. internet and social media is perceived as positive because it enables them to stay connected to family, old and new friends. it also enables them to cultivate and expand leisure and hobby activities in new ways. based on the findings we underscore the necessity of devising strategies that will prevent older people from being marginalized in relation to the digital everyday life. keywords: older adults, ict usage, digital divide, everyday life, motivation, mastery. 1 older adults’ coping with the digital everyday life over the past 20 years, technology has infused every aspect of the modern society, and use of digital technology is becoming an integrated part of people’s everyday lives. the result of constant technological development is that many services and resources are now accessible only through digital means. along with this trend, virtually every country in the world is experiencing growth in the number and proportion of the elderly population (united nations, 2015). these changes introduce many new challenges to society. although older adults represent an increasing group of technology users (vroman, arthanat, & lysack, 2015), many find themselves without sufficient user skills (hill, betts & gardner, 2015). without appropriate skills, they may risk being excluded from participating fully in society. this, according to macedo (2017), is considered critical for both the economy and the society. moreover, the digital divide is likely to widen as more information and public and private services migrate to the virtual world. friemel (2016) describes this as the “second-level” digital divide.   while digital divide reasons related to a lack of skills remain important, several researchers put forward that we must look for multilevel explanations for older people’s use and non-use of ict, that include both demographic and individual factors (e.g. helsper & reisdorf, 2013; selwyn, 2003; selwyn, 2004a & 2006). international studies show that older people’s ict usage is associated with their level of education, income, employment, class, gender, disability, racial and ethnic background, and often happens at the intersections of these factors (e.g. peacock and künemund, 2007; selwyn, gorard, furlong & madden, 2003). individual factors such as attitudes (macedo, 2017), interest or motivation (damodaran, olphert & sandhu, 2014; hernandez-encuentra, pousada & gomez-zuniga, 2009; morris, goodman, brading, 2007) and self-efficacy (czaja, fisk, rogers, charness, nair, & sharit, 2006) are also found important in determining an individuals’ engagement with technology. for instance, recent studies suggest that motivational reasons seem to have increased in importance over time (sandhu, damodoran & ramondt, 2013; helsper & reisdorf, 2017).   in norway, the population is facing major changes as there has been a nearly complete digitalization of the society. for instance, from 2017, the public sector has decided that all communication with the general public will be carried out electronically. the idea is to “renew, simplify and improve” all public activities and services (white paper st27, 2015). a “digital mailbox” has been developed to facilitate data exchange with enterprises and private persons. this was introduced at the beginning of 2016 as a tool through which all information from the public sector is imparted to the general public. the banking system and many private organizations have “gone digital” as well; many services and resources are accessible only through digital means. digital technologies also provide access to a range of information (e.g. news), goods, entertainment/leisure activities and social net­working opportunities. in other words, it is crucial to become a competent digital citizen quickly, if one is not already. being online and managing to use the net is thus essential for being able to participate fully in society as well as maintaining a sense of inclusion.   the greater part of the norwegian population has surrendered to this fact and most are fairly or highly competent users of the internet. the majority of the population is well equipped for this purpose and use digital platforms like tablets, smartphones, computers and so on. a national survey conducted in 2017 shows that 90 % of the population (16–79 years) use the internet on a daily basis (ssb, 2017). however, within the age group 65–74 years, fewer use the internet (69%) this frequently. in the oldest group (75–79 years), daily usage is even more infrequent (43%) (ssb, 2017). the survey also shows examples of the everyday life activities they engage in: online banking (79%), reading or downloading online news (76%), e-mail (77%), finding info about goods and services (62%), searching for services related to travel and accommodation (41%), seeking for health-related information (41%). these statistics also show that within the age group 65–74 years 30 % use social media daily, while fewer in the older group (75–79 years) use social media this often (16%) (ssb, 2017). however, these statistics do not provide in-depth knowledge about the reasons and motivation underlying older adults’ ict usage. nor do these numbers provide in-depth knowledge about how they master and experience the nearly complete digitalization of their everyday life. this paper addresses these issues by presenting findings from a study of the lived experiences of older adults’ ict usage in norway. the study was guided by the following research question: what are the reasons and motivations underlying older adults’ ict usage, and how does this affect their perception of mastering their everyday life? motivation and mastery in the digital era two key factors are known to govern human behavior: i) motivation and ii) belief in one’s ability to cope with a task (self-efficacy). these factors are in play in a variety of situations that older adults encounter when coping with the digital everyday life. several studies show that motivation, confidence and self-efficacy influence digital technology usage among older adults (e.g. czaja, fisk, rogers, charness, nair, & sharit, 2006; ng, 2008; hernandez-­encuentra, pousada, & gomez-zuniga, 2009; russell, 2011; tsai, shillair, cotton, winstead & yost, 2015). aspects of motivation – intrinsic and extrinsic self-determination theory (sdt) may be helpful in understanding people’s willingness, ability and efforts to become digital citizens at a mature age (deci & ryan, 1985, 2002). implicitly, there must be some degree of volition and autonomy present in such a demanding competence development process late in life. sdt defines intrinsic and extrinsic sources of motivation, and discusses how social and cultural factors facilitate or undermine people’s volition and initiative, as well as their well-being and the quality of their performance. according to this framework, psychological well-being and optimal functioning predict the individual’s experience of autonomy, competence and relatedness. sdt proposes that the degree to which these needs are unsupported or thwarted within a social context will have a detrimental impact on wellness in that setting.   deci and ryan (1985) make an important distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, meaning whether a behaviour is autonomous or externally controlled. these two types of motivation may help shed some light on the study of older adults’ way of coping with the digital society, and the (implicit) demand to acquire new competencies.   when people are intrinsically motivated they will experience full volition, meaning they are willing to behave in certain ways. characteristics of this type of motivation are that one is inherently interested and the task appears enjoyable. this type of motivation is also closely connected to a person’s values and beliefs, and it is assumed that being intrinsically motivated results in high-quality learning and creativity, better performance and positive emotions. a consequence of people acting on their inherent interests is that they increase their knowledge and improve their skills (ryan & deci, 2000). however, there are certain conditions that elicit, sustain and enhance this type of motivation as opposed to those that subdue or diminish it (ryan & deci, 2000, p. 58). intrinsic motivation is enhanced if the task causes feelings of competence. several studies have shown that optimal challenges and positive feedback on performance enhance and maintain intrinsic motivation (deci, 1971; harakiewicz, 1979). on the other hand, negative performance feedback seems to diminish it (deci, 1972). there also needs to be a sense of autonomy present in the situation for people to experience that their behaviour is self-determined (ryan & deci, 2000).   many older adults find themselves in the midst of complex processes where acquiring new competencies is essential for them if they are to be digitally aware and competent citizens. ideally, this should be motivated from “within”. in other words, a sense of volition (willingness to learn) must be present, meaning that in some way they value the perceived outcome of a behaviour so they can cope with ict and the implications it has in their everyday life (ryan & deci, 2000).   on the other hand, extrinsic motivation may be the driving force, where a person chooses to learn how to use new technology as a result of external pressure or anxiety, not because of a genuine interest. in this situation, people may see the necessity of learning to become “digital citizens”, either through seduction or coercion. in both cases, it may result in a sense of tension and anxiety that has negative consequences both for performance and well-being (deci & ryan, 1985). however, the degree of autonomy of the activity, a feeling of choice and desire to obtain an outcome, varies, even though it is of instrumental value. these processes are described as a continuum. internalization is the point where an individual adopts the value of a certain activity or behaviour, while integration means that the person fully transforms it into his or her own. finally, identification occurs when the person has identified with the personal importance of this activity, and accepted it as his or her own, in concert with one’s other values and needs (deci & ryan, 1985; ryan & deci, 2000). however, this continuum is still extrinsic because the outcome of behaviour motivated by such regulations is assumed to have an instrumental value, even though it is volitional and valued.   applied to older adults’ attitudes and behaviour towards the digitalization of society, they need to surrender to the fact that this development includes everyone. there is no way around it, the instrumental value of mastering the digital society is unavoidable. there is another strong force in play as well: the pressure from society, the family and even the pressure felt by the elderly themselves and having to relate to what others think, feel and do (ryan & deci, 2000). self-efficacy – implications for mastery the belief in one’s ability to perform a given task, like learning how to use ict in everyday life, is a crucial determinant both for a person’s behaviour, and for the outcome of this. in bandura’s terms, expectations of personal mastery affect both the initiation and persistence of coping behaviour (1977, p.193). furthermore, according to bandura, the strength of people’s convictions in their own effectiveness is likely to affect whether they will even try to cope with given situations (p.193). self-efficacy will influence the willingness to embark on the journey to become a digitally competent citizen late in life. for many older people, this may be frightening due to the lack of prior familiarity with the phenomenon (damodaran, olphert & sandhu, 2014). bandura claims that it is normal to try to avoid situations “one believes exceed one´s coping skills” (1977, p.194). secondly, skepticism might also influence the learning effort in itself: why do i have to learn something i don’t need? bandura claims “efficacy expectations determine how much effort people will expend and how long they will persist in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences” (1977, p.194).   to many older adults, the perception of such obstacles may be connected to experiences shared by most people late in life; some degree of reduction in their cognitive, physiological and psychomotor functioning (umemuro, 2004; charness & boot, 2009; berner, 2014; hawthorn, 2000). the short-term memory function decreases, which makes it more difficult to remember passwords and codes. it also becomes more challenging to organize and interpret massive quantities of information, which is a typical characteristic of the digital world.   another example is reduced vision that may impair the ability to see letters, numbers and symbols on a keyboard properly. in other words, it is not surprising if some have a low belief in their mastery of the digital world, and therefore are more apt to decline opportunities they may have that would help them get started.   on the other hand, others will feel motivated and eager to start out to learn what they need so they can cope in an increasingly digital society. if their perceived self-efficacy is strong, it will have a positive effect on their efforts and activity (bandura 1977, p. 194). however, regardless the initial level of self-efficacy, in the process of acquiring a fair or good level of digital skills, mistakes will be made that need to be corrected. people will make a mistake from time to time, things do not work, they cannot quite grasp what is wrong, and they will be left in a state of digitally induced despair. in other words, all the typical frustrations that almost everybody is confronted with in the digital world, independent of prior skills, will be present. however, with strong self-efficacy, “corrective experiences reinforce the sense of efficacy, thereby eventually eliminating (…) defensive behaviour” (bandura, 1977, p. 194).   however, mastery expectations alone will not produce a desired outcome, and in the present context this means becoming digitally competent. capability is also a prerequisite, particularly when it comes to choosing an activity willingly (bandura 1977, p. 194). therefore, to many older newcomers entering the digital world, this altogether might represent a challenge and perhaps an obstacle. they start from “ground zero”, and slowly need to build a base of skills for personal efficacy beliefs to grow. if this is to happen, bandura claims that people are dependent on different information sources known to produce a sense of efficacy; but primarily their own performance accomplishments (bandura 1977, p. 195). methodology an interview study was conducted to obtain a better under­standing of the reasons and motivations underlying older adults’ ict usage and how this affects their perception of mastering their everyday lives. sampling procedures and participants purposeful sampling (patton, 1990) was chosen to obtain information-rich cases for in-depth study. the sample was recruited with help from the national, non-governmental organization seniornet. among the many tasks this organization is involved in, is the key function of helping and instructing seniors in using technology. we chose trondheim as our research field because there are many activities taking place every week, at different locations (public libraries, clubhouses etc.). we received permission to attend these weekly arrangements, and the intention of our visit was announced to the group of older people present. between 5 and 10 persons showed up every week at each location. we decided to approach people at random, and we asked one-by-one if they were willing to be interviewed. we had no prior information about the informants. we applied gender as a selection criteria. none refused to participate. fifteen persons were recruited in this way. in addition, three other information-rich cases from the network around seniornet were included in the sample.   all in all, 18 older adults participated in the study (12 women and 6 men). they ranged in age from 62-90 years. those who seek help and guidance from seniornet´s staff of volunteers are all users of ict, but on different levels, ranging from uncertain newcomers to moderately experienced users. this variance was mirrored in our sample. the participants had a variety of educational and professional backgrounds, from no education beyond secondary school to higher education. all had working life experience ranging from unskilled labour to professional positions in higher education. data collection we carried out 18 semi-structured interviews. thirteen parti­ci­pants were interviewed at three different seniornet premises, an additional two were interviewed at a cafe, while three were interviewed in their homes. before each interview began, the purpose of the study was explained to the participant and informed consent was obtained. the two researchers collaborated closely in planning the interviews and both were active contributors in the interview situation. the interviews lasted up to one hour and were recorded and thoroughly transcribed (418 pages).   the interviews were structured around their ict usage, motivation and mastery. at the start of each interview basic demographic information was obtained. the core topics were: how they came to use ict, how they use it, how they master it and what the outcomes are. data analysis theoretical assumptions about motivation and mastery provided a point of departure for exploration and development of categories during the data analysis. such grounding in the literature may counteract bias by expanding the researcher’s understandings of multiple ways of viewing the phenomenon (morrow, 2005). the data analysis involved the interplay between the researchers, the transcribed data material and theory.   the aim of the analysis was to identify what fetterman (1998) refers to as patterns of thoughts and behavior and by this, to answer the research question (merriam, 2009). in the search for patterns of thoughts and behavior, the data material was analysed by means of constant comparison (glaser & strauss, 1967), a process that involves breaking down data into manageable pieces within each piece compared for similarities and differences. this initially involved that both analysts (the authors) read the interview transcripts to gain an overall sense of the data. all of the data were then read again by both analysts and “open-coded” independently to produce an initial code list. next, a collaborative coding procedure (saldana, 2009) was applied which involved that the analysts compared the codes by discussing similarities and differences. this involved constant considerations and revisions of the codes (miles & huberman, 1994). this descriptive phases of the analysis built the foundation for the interpretative phase where meaning is extracted from the data (patton, 2015). in the interpretative phase, the analysts started searching carefully for recurring traits in the data material. these regularities revealed patterns that were sorted into categories. during the descriptive and interpretative phases of the data-analysis processes credibility was enhanced through the close collaboration between the two researchers as each served as a peer de-briefer for the other throughout the analysis. we engaged in “critical and sustained discussions” (rossmann & rallis, 2003) and thus served as a mirror reflecting each other’s responses to the research process. analyses and results all participants owned their own computer or tablet, and all of them owned a cell phone or smartphone. all of them were users of ict, but at varying levels. some described themselves as reasonably competent users (e.g. using programs such as word and excel in addition to using the internet for a variety of purposes), while some described themselves as uncertain users (e.g. with a limited range of activities like only playing solitaire and simple games on the net, avoiding internet banking etc.).    three main categories became evident in the data material. the category challenges describes new types of challenges that the participants experienced in their everyday life due to the rapid digitalization of society. the participants also touched upon topics such as perceived pressure, technology as a barrier and feelings of fear. the category connectedness describes how the participants experienced positive feelings when being connected to other people and what was going on in society. the third category expanding describes how the participants experienced positive feelings about technology usage as a tool contributing to the expansion of their everyday life activities. challenges a recurring trait appearing in the data was the emphasis on challenges. the participants experienced that the rapid digitalization of society had brought about a number of new challenges in their everyday life. these were related to activities that they up till now had managed well in their everyday life, for instance using bank, health and public services (e.g. checking on pensions and tax returns) and buying tickets for public transportation. the participants provided examples of how they were encountering more problems due to the “paper-free” society. one of the relatively competent users expressed that internet banking is a good solution, but there are challenges:   i must say that it’s (internet banking) easy and a better solution. however, there’s a lot of stuff you need to pay attention to. you need to control everything! everything is delivered electronically (bills). if you’re on holiday, you can’t just forget about it all, there may be a bill that needs to be paid. one must be on all the time. you cannot just go hiking in the mountains for three weeks and leave the digital world behind. when you’re back home again you may find that there are bills you haven’t paid in time. (oliver, 76 years).   despite being a relatively competent user, this man is not completely in control. he is obviously not aware of the bank function where you can preset a date for payment of your bills, if you have no access to your computer for a period of time. in other words, there is a lot to relate to – people feel they need to be “plugged in” to have full control over such aspects as their personal finances.   another participant told about problems he got into when it came to using public transportation:   now we have these electronic tickets on buses, and the timetables are gone. that was a bad thing the bus company inflicted on us. this new arrangement came too suddenly, and it was implemented in a clumsy way. they (the bus company) tell us that everything is online – everybody can find their bus route on the internet. i needed help to download the route to my phone. now i have lost the overview, and i get confused if i need to change buses. i can’t quite understand how they think. the time was not ripe for removing the printed timetables. (mike, 76 years).   this man explains that he has lost the overview and gets confused. one of our oldest informants also told that the digitalization of the bus timetables had restricted her radius. she said: “i sit and wait for the bus, i don´t know when it arrives anymore. i don´t know when it leaves from downtown either. i really don´t know what to do…” (sally, 90 years).   overall, these utterances illustrate some of the problems that older people are exposed to in everyday life, and the impression is that regardless of their user level, it is not easy to master all the new elements of being a digital citizen. the informants seem to be deprived of mastery in their everyday life, which they previously used to master without problems.    another challenge was a perceived pressure to start using digital technology. the rapid digitization of society was seen as an external and thus inevitable force. this external pressure was widely talked about by the participants in our study:   society is forcing people to get everything from the net (...). beyond a doubt, all the elderly just have to accept that this is the way it’s going to be. and they have to learn in one way or another. (bob, 88 years).   it’s like you have to keep yourself updated. it’s a bit wrong to say that the computer world isn’t something you have to care about. because it gets really hard in life if you can’t use the computer. (frederick, 65 years).   the banks are not open anymore for personal service. you can’t withdraw money there, and the atms are gradually disappearing. in other words, everything is now online. we don’t have any alternatives. they force this on us (oliver, 76 years).   as seen in these utterances, this “force” is strongly inflicted on them since failing to keep up with the developments would place them at risk of being incapable of dealing with basic aspects of everyday life. although some participants found it very difficult to use ict and expressed an unwillingness to keep up with developments, they realized the necessity of mastering it:   i feel that i have to get into this computer thing, but i feel it’s very difficult for me. because i do not want to do it. i just do it because i have to. because i feel…..left behind in a way…. in a situation where everyone else is sitting on another planet saying: hello there, you don’t master this, you need to come here – because it’s good to be on this planet. (gabriela, 76 years).   as shown in this utterance, some of the interviewees were also worried that they risked being isolated and excluded from society and activities they had been part of before the digital “revolution”. their motivation to try to avoid this was, in other words, extrinsic.   yet another dimension of the category challenges was connected to negative experiences in trying to handle the complexity of the digital technology in itself. the perpetual updates, the variety of programs for different purposes, remembering passwords and being exposed to information overload on the net was perceived as a barrier:   i tried to update to windows 10 myself, but it caused problems […] i had to ask for help. however, even the specialist ran into problems. it’s “greek” to me. i don’t understand anything of what he’s doing … he’s fumbling back and forth … and all these new windows keep popping up. he dives into the deepest secrets of the computer. so, it’s not easy, you know! (oliver, 76 years).   it’s the net that’s confusing. you orient yourself about the net – and then come the updates, and then comes all these unnecessary things, that’s where it gets complicated to keep yourself up-to-date. the net expands ten times, like – all the impulses and things you have to decide – you have to understand in a way. there is so much to grab hold of. (mike, 76 years).   these utterances illustrate that despite being a user with some skills and knowledge of technology it is at times difficult to master all its aspects. digital terminology itself also presents a challenge for some:   there are so many concepts –you lose sight of what each one of them means – the terminology you haven’t grown up with and learned. (oliver, 76 years).   this unfamiliarity with the universe of technological concepts caused problems. some avoided asking others for help for fear of being ridiculed and laughed at. the english language also represents problems for quite a few of the oldest informants. all in all, the informants pointed out that dealing with technology as such was quite difficult and represented a barrier that undermined their confidence.   last but not least, a feeling of fear was another dimension of the category challenges. this fear was associated with data security matters and personal vulnerability. this was explained in terms of losing control and concern over having personal data stolen or manipulated. particularly, digital banking and online shopping was mentioned. some of the informants had run into problems themselves, and others had heard “horror stories” about other people losing money:    i manage digital banking, which is not the problem. however, two years ago, when i was trying to log on to pay my bills, a warning popped up: “someone has tried to access this website”. i panicked, and since then i have not touched the computer. i kept wondering who this might be […] the computer, online banking, and all these things turned me off… (hollie, 70 years).   it can be quite scary you know (online banking). some people don’t know how things work, and they feel they might ruin things. losing their money is the most scaring thought. for this reason, you need to be confident in using the computer before you start using online banking, or else you run into problems. (janet, 74 years).   many shared the fear that intruders might break into their bank account. punching the wrong button on their keyboard was another factor in the fear scenarios they described. people feel out of control and helpless because they are unable to protect them­selves (physically) from deception and crime.   another fear that arose was the risk of being cheated while shopping online. some of the interviewees shopped online, but many others expressed that they were skeptical about buying things on the net:   one thing i don’t like – that’s online shopping. i don’t trust the people selling the products. there are so many scoundrels around. (philip, 79 years).   i will never ever do it (online shopping). dangerous, dangerous! i will never leave my credit card code on the net. never in my life! (ruth, 76 years).   however, most informants were aware that online shopping is becoming more and more common, and in a few years perhaps it will be inevitable, but they still expressed a high degree of insecurity and unwillingness to submit to this fact.   for older people, it is obviously a challenge to master and control all elements of the digital society. our data material shows that this challenge includes handling the devices themselves, gaining sufficient skills to use them and developing confidence in being an internet user. our informants displayed various levels of skills, but there was a note of underlying skepticism and fear in everyone. it is not always easy to navigate safely in this complex landscape. in other words, compared to their “pre-digital life” they experienced a decline in mastery connected to dealing with basic everyday life activities. connectedness  despite all the challenges the older adults encountered, they also emphasized that their ict usage had some positive impact on their everyday lives, especially when it came to social aspects. their motivation for using social media was that it opened possibilities to connect in new ways with society, family and friends. most of the participants used the internet to access information, like the news and the weather forecasts. many of them also used e-mail, skype, mms on smartphones and facebook to communicate with others. by far, facebook was the most used communication channel, and many described it in positive terms:   i use facebook a lot. i have many old friends in the states from when i was a sailor, 40 years ago. we talk to each other, you know, and send private messages. i think it’s great to be on facebook, so much fun. i have not met them in person, but i searched for them on facebook and invited them to be friends. wow it’s so much fun, they say! (frederick, 65 years).   and then i’m on facebook, you know. i kind of like that, with family and things like that – pictures and things […]. it’s quick, you know, chatting, right? compared to what it used to be like, i’d send a letter (laughs). (carol, 76 years).   by enabling social contact with family and friends, the use of technology has added a new sense of joy in their lives. this seemed to support social inclusion and feelings of connectedness:   yeah, it means a lot. because i think – i don’t know how to explain it … i get into touch with a lot of people, and – keep an eye on what’s going on, a little. things like that. because i live alone, like, and then i need to have something to do. (irma, 69 years).   most of our informants used new social media and perceived this as a positive aspect in their lives. we found few indications of fear or being out of control in this respect. on the contrary, they felt connected to other people and what went on in society. this indicated the presence of a distinct inner motivation about this activity. expanding the third category “expanding” reveals that ict may be used in ways that make older adults feel that everyday activities are expanded, for instance enabling them to overcome physical barriers. one of the oldest informants told that she used her ipad to take pictures, and she often went on the net to “re-live” her many trips from some years back when her health was better:   i travel to where i used to go. i look at the map (google). and i have taken so many beautiful pictures – it gives me much joy. (alice, 85 years).   digital technology was also used to pursue a wide range of personal hobbies and interests. some participants were members of interest groups on the net while others searched for information about their special interests and hobbies:   i took a course once in painting and joined the others from the course on facebook. i was able to stay in touch with them, see how they worked. it was very nice (diane, 72 years)   i’m interested in old cars, so i search a lot on the net to keep updated – and to find spare parts for my veteran car. i’m a member of both the veteran car club in town and the mercedes club, and i keep in touch with the other members through the net. (neil, 62 years).   in this way, the net contributed to expanding their possibilities to keep updated about their hobbies and interests. it also opened for online participation in interest groups and online contact with likeminded people all over the world. this way of using the net is an indication of autonomy. in other words, using ict is motivated from within, and is perceived as enjoyable for many. discussion this article set out to explore the reasons and motivations underlying older adults ict usage, and how this affects their perception of mastering their everyday lives. our main findings indicate that the digitalization of society has brought about rapid, comprehensive changes in terms of how to deal with activities of daily living that our participants previously managed without problems. examples of this were having to access the internet in order to buy tickets for public transportation, online banking, and dealing with the health and public services. this brought about feelings of urgency and perceived pressure to keep up with the latest developments. our sample expressed that failing to be part of the developments would put them at risk of being incapable of dealing with important and until now familiar everyday activities. this is in line with selwyn’s (2004b) and sandhu et al.´s findings (2013). in deci & ryans terms (1985, 2002), such lack of autonomy and feeling of competence may lead to reduced psychological well-being and optimal functioning in their everyday life. in other words, they described having to adopt to digital technologies as something that was forced upon them and unavoidable without devastating consequences. fear of isolation and exclusion from society was an obvious scenario for many (helsper, 2012). according to deci & ryan (1985, 2002), when individuals’ need for relatedness (i.e. being connected to society and other people) is unsupported, it may have a detrimental impact on wellness and feelings of inclusion.   however, the results from this study show that nearly all the participants have access to the devices and the net that they need to be active digital citizens. there was no access gap that frequently is referred to as the ‘first-level’ digital divide (blank & groselj, 2015; friedmel, 2016; philip, cottrill, farrington, williams & ashmore, in press). despite this, most of them seem to lack sufficient skills to feel relaxed and able to keep up with the rapid developments. this is similar to the findings from other studies (i.e. sandhu, et al. 2013, hill, betts & gardner, 2015). new things are introduced constantly, and need to be addressed quickly. this situation calls for permanent vigilance so one is not “left behind” in terms of skills and control, a state that characterizes the second digital divide (friedmel, 2016). we also found tendencies in our study that indicated a further divide that is worth attention, the so-called “grey divide”. this implies the existence of differences within the group of older adults, often connected to having been a computer user or not before retirement (friedmel, 2016, p. 325, kania-lundholm & torres, 2017).   the motivation for trying to keep up with the increasing rate of digitalization, especially when connected to vital everyday activities, was, to use deci and ryan’s terms, extrinsic and internalized (1985; 2000). many of the participants had some prior, although varying skills from their working life. our sample of older adult users seem to fit into prensky’s category “digital immigrants”, meaning that they had acquired their skills later in life (not born into the digital world) (prensky, 2001). this may offer an explanation to why most of them expressed a certain resistance to and resignation about the situation, and many felt a certain fear. this shows that users as well as non-users may experience some degree of what selwyn (2003) describes as “technophobia”. however, they acknowledged the value of being “more digital”. the reluctance and the doubts that were expressed in relation to their ability to learn and master the digital world were due to low self-efficacy (bandura, 1977, damodaran, olphert & sandhu, 2014). many of the interviewees could not imagine how they would be able to cope with the technical complexity of the devices, software updates, information overload, fraud and deception on the net, not to mention the problems remembering passwords. these factors reveal fears that may be rooted either in experienced, or suspected cognitive decline that naturally occurs with aging (i.e. memory, organizing large amounts of information) (umemuro, 2004; sandhu et al. 2013, berner, 2014). most of the participants in this study were in their late 70s and 80s, people bandura claims are prone to avoiding situations they believe “exceed their coping skills” (1977, p 194).   on the other hand, many of the participants claimed that their use of technology created positive experiences and feelings of connectedness. this was in particular linked to using social media, for example facebook, which enabled them to connect to other people. a similar result was also found by selwyn 13 years ago (selwyn, 2004). this way of using new technologies and mastering the social aspects of everyday life can be understood in terms of deci & ryan’s (1985, 2002) emphasis on individuals’ need for relatedness. googling the weather forecast, news and information about what was happening in society was also popular and viewed as a rewarding activity. this was an aspect of the technology that was perceived as voluntary and not forced upon them; conse­quently, it was an intrinsically motivated and autonomous activity, driven by interest and joy. they felt that their world expanded and new possibilities had opened up to them. even though different levels of skills and mastery also were present here, most of the participants basically felt that they were able to cope with what they needed to do.   our study of how older adults cope with the digital everyday life has some limitations. first of all, the study is based on a small sample. new studies with larger samples might enable the re­search­ers to search for contrary and parallel cases with reference to broader data material. also, multilevel explanations could have been applied to explore variations of use in our sample. as shown from previous research (e.g. friemel, 2016), the reasons for both eagerness and reluctance to use icts among this group are also structural and refer to social contexts, networks, material res­our­ces, education and so on. these limitations notwith­standing, the study provides new insights into a varied group of older adults’ introduction to and perception of their digital everyday life. these findings may be helpful to policymakers when they plan for future developments. as aspects of daily life continue to become increase­ingly reliant on digital technology, it is vital that older adults are provided with opportunities to gain sufficient skills. this leads to the vital question: how do we go about ensuring that older adults are able to participate fully as competent citizens in today’s digital society? to satisfy their need for competence, it is important to be aware of how such instruction and advice can best be conveyed to them so they can increase their skill level and self-confidence. this means considering carefully the learning environments, contexts and teaching practices that can be most beneficial so this can be achieved. the main aim, as we see it, is to protect and enhance these older learners’ self-efficacy and motivation to learn.   references bandura, a. 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(2017). the emergence of a «digital underclass» in great britain and sweden: changing reasons for digital exclusion. new media & society, 19(8), 1253-1270. hernandez-encuentre, e., pousada, m., & gomez-zuniga, b. (2009). ict and older people: beyond usability. educational gerontology, 35(3), 226-245. hill, r., betts, l. r. & gardner, s. e. (2015). older adults’ experiences and perceptions of digital technology: (dis)empowerment, wellbeing, and inclusion. computers in human behavior, 48, 415-423. kania-lundholm, m. & torres, s. (2017). older active users of icts make sense of their engagement. seminar.net: media, technology and life-long learning, 13(1), 1-17. macedo, i. m. (2017). predicting the acceptance and use of information and communication technology by older adults: an empirical examination of the revised utaut2. computers in human behavior, 75, 935-948. merriam, s. b. (2009). qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. san francisco: jossey-bass. miles, m. b. & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. morris, a., goodman, j. & brading, h. (2007). internet use and non-use: views of older users. universal access in the information  society, 6, 43-57. morrow, s. l. (2005). quality and trustworthiness in qualitative research in counselling psychology. journal of counseling psychology, 52(1), 250-260. ng, c-h. (2008). motivation among older adults in learning computing technologies: a grounded model. educational gerontology, 34(1), 1-14. oecd (2016). skills matter: further results from the survey of adult skills, oecd skills studies, oecd publishing, paris. doi:10.1787/9789264258051-en patton, m. (1990). qualitative evaluation and research methods (169-186). beverly hills, ca: sage publications, inc. patton, m. q. (2015). qualitative research and evaluation methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. peacock, s. e., & künemund, h. (2007). senior citizens and internet technology. european journal of ageing, 4(4), 191-200. doi: 10.1007/s10433-007-0067-z philip, l., et al., the digital divide: patterns, policy and scenarios for connecting the ‘final few’ in rural communities across great britain, journal of rural studies (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.12.002 prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants. on the horizon, 9(5), 1-6. rossman, g. b. & rallis, s. f. (2003). learning in the field: an introduction to qualitative research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. russell, h. (2011). later life ict learners ageing well. international journal of ageing and later life 6(2), 103-127. ryan, r.m. & deci, e.l. (2000). intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: classic definitions and new directions. contemporary educational psychology 25, 54-67. http://www.idealibrary.com. sandhu, j. damodaran, l. & ramondt, l. (2013). ict skills acquisition by older people: motivations for learning and barriers to progression. international journal of education and ageing, 3(1), 25-42.  saldana, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. los angeles, ca: sage publications. selwyn, n. (2003). apart from technology: understanding peoples’s non-use of information and communication technologies in everyday life. technology in society 25, 99-116. selwyn, n. (2004a). reconsidering political and popular understanding of the digital divide. new media & society 6(3), 341-362. selwyn, n. (2004b). the information aged: a qualitative study of older adults´ use of information and communications technology. journal of aging studies, 18, 369-384. selwyn, n. (2006). digital division or digital decision? a study of non-users and low-users of computers. poetics 34, 273-292. selwyn, n., gorard, s., furlong, j., & madden, l. (2003). older adults` use of information and communication technology in everyday life. ageing and society, 23(5), 562-582. ssb (2017). ict usage in households, 20172nd quarter. statistics norway, tables 06998 &11437. https://www.ssb.no/en/teknologi-og-innovasjon/statistikker/ikthus tsai, h. s., shillair, r., cotton, s. r., winstead, v. & yost, e. (2015). getting grandma online: are tablets the answer for increasing digital inclusion for older adults in the u.s.? educational gerontology, 41(10), 695-709. umemuro, h. (2004). computer attitude, cognitive abilities, and technology use among older japanese adults. gerontechnology, 3(2), 64-76. united nations (2015). world population ageing. department of economic and social affairs, population division. new york, united nations. vroman, k. g., arthanat, s. & lysack, c., (2015). “who over 65 is online?” older adults’ dispositions toward information communication technology. computers in human behavior, 43, 156-166. white paper st27 (2015). digital agenda for norway in brief. ict for a simpler everyday life and increased productivity. norwegian ministry of local government and modernization. oslo, norway.     1               we thank the participants who kindly shared their time and experiences with us. we thank seniornet norway and seniornet trondheim for their valuable assistance.     constraints in film making processes offer an exercise to the imagination key concepts in education: critical issues beyond definition and discursive practices theo hug professor, institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies university of innsbruck, austria coordinator of the interfaculty innsbruck media studies research forum email: theo.hug@uibk.ac.at abstract along with the processes of digitization, medialization and the globalization of communications and lifeworlds, new topics, subject matters, conceptualizations and methods have been developed in educational research and practice. on the one hand, from a diachronic perspective we can notice how new aspects of education (bildung), upbringing (erziehung), learning and communication have been addressed. on the other hand, from a synchronic perspective we can see a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous in terms of understandings, approaches, methodologies and forms of mediation and collaboration. although more and more open initiatives and open educational resources (oer), as well as international collaborations and transnational intellectual networks, are being brought forward, epistemological aspects about using different key concepts are widely underestimated. the paper starts with: (1) an outline of selected understandings of education and literacy, followed by (2) a discussion of critical epistemological aspects by way of contrasting and correlating conceptual dimensions. lastly, the contribution aims at (3) a sketch of polylogical design principles for educational knowledge organization. keywords: blended learning, dialogue, social system, reflecting upon practices, cooperative learning, videotaped meeting introduction generally speaking, many would agree that new topics, subject matters, conceptualizations and methods have been developed in educational research and practice along with processes of digitization, medialization and the globalization of communications and lifeworlds. if asked for relevant examples, some would point to e-learning practices and the introduction of computers or mobile devices in schools; others would foreground aspects of new learning cultures or the role of media in life-long, life-wide or life-deep learning, while others again would put their fingers on e-inclusion policies, positive chances for a desirable future of learning or problematic aspects such as mental enfeeblement or "flickering minds" (oppenheimer, 2003). as soon as we take a closer look, we discover a multitude of loosely or not at all connected approaches, concepts, methodologies and opinions. some of them seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 mailto:theo.hug@uibk.ac.at are widely accepted or at least discussed, whereas some are relevant only to small groups or even just to individuals. the scope of this simultaneity of the asynchrony of various understandings, conceptualizations and modes of foregrounding themes and problems, as well as approaches to solving them, is commonly undervalued. indeed, one might say that in view of the multitudinous heterogeneity, strategies of ignorance are necessary in order to be able to work on certain issues. this argument can easily be strengthened by pointing to contrary if not contradictory basic positions such as widespread taken-for-granted ways of talking about "social media" or "new media", as opposed to the argument that "there are no new media" (cf. geoghegan, 2005). • moreover, there seems to be no reasonable chance of achieving even partial connections if we realize the far-reaching consequences of basic decisions as related to, e.g.: • different epistemological horizons of reflection in the wake of pictorial turn(s), cultural turn(s), mediatic turn(s), etc.; • various descriptions of generally relevant societal dynamics and diagnoses of "the" times; • conceptual, methodological and technical frames of framing issues, as well as ways of dealing with problems of terminology and translation; • communicative, academic and intellectual styles (cf. galtung, 1985; thiel/rost, 2001); • interpretations of academic freedom and institutional peculiarities. then again, it seems that there are too many centrifugal forces at work, and too many of them in self-sufficient and not very thoughtful ways. however, it has long been impossible to read all important publications on a subject, and there is no end or limitation of academic paper production in sight. quite the contrary, more and more journals are available, immense amounts of online documents are being published, and books and e-readers are on sale as never before. in view of the ongoing production of different forms of knowledge and information dynamics, developing both general and specific concepts of academic information entropy has become quite a challenging task. in this paper, i am going to outline some critical issues concerning key concepts in education such as education and literacy and considerations beyond definition and discursive practices in search of viable solutions for middle courses between lopsided approaches, implicitly absolutized positions or mutual ignorance on the one hand, and epistemological hopelessness or indifference, arbitrary selection or the invocation of "difference" on the other. education and literacy as key concepts in education if we consult handbooks and introductions to educational studies, we can quickly establish that: (a) they contain different terms even if their scope is similar, (b) they do not give the same attention to these terms and (c) specific concepts go through historical cycles of usage. for example, in the 1960s and 1970s terms such as socialization, qualification, development and learning moved to the centre of the german-speaking educational discourses. roughly 130 years earlier, in the introduction to umriss pädagogischer vorlesungen (1841), johann friedrich herbart (1776-1841) emphasized two aspects that are relevant for the determination of the study of pedagogy: §1, "the basic concept of pedagogy is the educationability [bildsamkeit] of the student," and §2, "pedagogy as a science depends on practical philosophy and psychology. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 44 former indicates the aim of education, the latter the route, means and obstacles" (herbart 1841, p. 1). elsewhere, herbart discusses terms such as “variety of interest” or “moral strength of character” as fundamental ideas, and combines the concepts of “education” and “teaching” in the compound “educational teaching” (cf. herbart, 1806). he became known not least because he demanded to focus on basic concepts that are "native" (that is, original or endemic to the discipline) and gave the following reasons: it would arguably be better if pedagogy remembered its endemic [einheimisch] concepts as accurately as possible and made an effort to cultivate independent thinking, whereby it would become the center of a research sphere and avoid the risk of being governed by a stranger as a distant, conquered province. (herbart, 1806, p. 8) more than 200 years later, the situation has become a lot more complex, and partial or extensive "claims to government" in educational matters not only come from state, economic or ecclesiastic powers, but also from media institutions. moreover, the scope of issues has been expanded beyond foci related to teaching, and now includes diverse extra-mural topics and the entire curriculum vitae. the field of related disciplines has also widened considerably so that, aside from philosophy, psychology and sociology, in recent times cybernetics, information technology, cognitive sciences, biology and neurosciences have come to play a very prominent role in some areas. in addition to that, we can observe tendencies toward the europeanization and internationalization of the education system, in addition to dynamics of individualization, globalization, medialization and mobilization that are highly relevant not only in societal contexts and to our system of education, but also to scientific systems and particularly to educational science itself.i besides, if we become aware of the challenges and interrelated problems of the kind connected to such topics as demographic change, media convergence, knowledge-based economy, new work order, climate change, energy supply or environmental and security policy, we will quickly realize that the communication about the educational dimensions of these interrelations is by far not limited to the proper translation of terminologies, which by itself often seems an unsolvable problem.ii while the term “competence” is frequently used in the german-speaking area today in regard to aspects of education theory and practical pedagogy that are related to these challenges, on the international level the use of “literality” is more common. as in the case of the many different concepts of education, the competence debates also contain greatly differing basic understandings (see for example elliot & dweck, 2005; erpenbeck & von rosenstiel, 2007). looking at the term “literacy”, the situation is similar (see for example street & lefstein, 2007; olson & torrance, 2009).iii it has been fashionable for a while to generate new concepts of literality and literacy, transfer them to various areas and apply them in metaphorical ways (cf. gee, 1999; leu, 1999; sting, 2003). many descriptions of new literacies are pragmatically motivated and many are kept very simple (cf. sheridan, 2000), whereas others are quite differentiated (richardson et al., 2009) and clearly focused (cf. institute of museum and library services, 2009). but it is not only the variety of different conceptualizations and the multitude of compound terms that invite a review of discursive developments. it is also the fact that different terms are sometimes used for similar phenomena, that unclear or hidden meanings are at work and that epistemological shortcomings are often underestimated. large parts of concurrent discourses on literacies, and especially on visual literacy (cf. hug, 2011), seem rather odd and restricted to the thinking of the linguistic turn. but these days, dealing with the methodological and epistemological challenges linked with the pictorial turn (mitchell, 1994) and the iconic turn (boehm, 1994, p. 13f) is long overdue. moreover, also in view of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 45 discourses on one or several mediatic turns (cf. margreiter, 1999; friesen/hug, 2009; hug, 2009) and the digital turn (cf. kossek/peschl, 2012), it is about time for considerations beyond literacies (cf. hug, 2012). at least in my view, the ongoing processes of the literacification of everything seem to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. correspondingly, we need conceptual alternatives that are relevant for media pedagogy and educational theory. aspects of educational philosophy and considerations beyond definition and discursive practices from a historical perspective, the tension between normative aspects of internal and external legitimation and educational discourses on conceptual clarifications of the core areas and responsibilities of the discipline, on the one hand, and the increasingly multi-faceted demands of society on the discipline and the educational institutions, on the other, can be differentiated by means of educationalization formulas (pädagogisierungsformeln) and their historical relevance. hermann veith (2003, pp. 183-201; see tab. 1) provides a helpful historical overview of reproduction problems and educationalization formulas for the german-speaking area. this overview could be expanded in a number of ways, namely in regard to: • reproduction problems and educational formulas in different countries and regions, as well as comparative analyses; • interdependences and interferences of different relevance formulas in national, international, transnational and global contexts; • interplays between cultural, technological and societal dynamics (cf. rusch, 2007) beyond considerations of societal change; • chronological updates and contemporary observations. correspondingly, medialization can nowadays be regarded as a pedagogical relevance formula which, together with the “competence development” formula and key concepts such as “internal/external control”, “emergence”, “interconnectedness”, “participation” and “(new) culture of learning”, marks a contemporary discourse that refers to the changed medialized conditions of socialization and sociation [vergesellschaftung], the dynamics of relevant process logics, and not least, the requirements of life-long, life-wide and lifedeep learning. the difficulty constituted by the fact that the relevance of relevance formulas, and also that the corresponding problem descriptions are relative, can be alleviated by steering clear of the pitfalls of epistemological foundationalismiv and arbitrary positings [setzungen]. the way to achieve this is to pay differentiated attention to the plurality of relevance formulas and the corresponding problem descriptions,v and to put this plurality into context in a contrastive manner. for epistemological purposes, a non-foundationalist or “antifoundationalist” approach of the kind proposed by roel van goor, frieda heyting and gert-jan vreeke (2004) proves promising and useful here (cf. also heyting, 2001). on the one side, such an undogmatic and non-static orientation accommodates the undecidable character of many questions; on the other, it counters premature, oversimplified or arbitrary solution strategies by means of a threefold contextualization of specific problems and topics (reflection on the meaning context, personal context and discourse context; cf. van goor/heyting/vreeke, 2004, p. 176). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 46 date reproduction crisis author/theory educational formula 1519 crisis of orientation luther school teaching crisis of stability ratke didactics teaching (unterricht) 1648 crisis of faith comenius moral education crisis of poverty pietism vocational education rationality deficit early enlightenment beneficialness (nützlichkeit) 1740 crisis of supply philanthropism usefulness (brauchbarkeit) structural change sextro industrial education upbringing (erziehung) 1789 erosion of solidarity pestalozzi popular education crisis of legitimacy humboldt development of self (subjektbildung) foreign rule fichte national education 1815 restauration schleiermacher humanistic education value shift herbart character education 1849 inequality diesterweg teacher education class struggle herbartians ideological education education (bildung) 1871 loss of tradition progressive education spontaneity critique of profession meumann development 1914 scarcity of raw materials stern talent consequences of the war humanities acquirement of culture 1945 new beginning pedagogy of the german democratic republic practical learning rebuilding pedagogy of the federal republic of germany maturity 1961 need for innovation action pedagogy (tätigkeitspädagogik) creativity education calamity (bildungsmisere) pedagogy of learning capacity to act 1990 globalization competence discourse self-organization learning table 1: reproduction problems and educational formulas (cf. veith, 2003, p. 185) such an approach opens up manifold possibilities of historically and systematically deand re-contextualizing key concepts beyond collections of comparative definitions and beyond efforts of translating and integrating existing thesauri, or the more or less taken-for-granted foregrounding of discursive practices in one language. furthermore, this type of approach may be characterized as relational insofar as definitions, conceptual, theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as corresponding objectives, phenomenal domains and practices, may be differentiated and correlated from multiple perspectives without encouraging hegemonic tendencies in the politics of scientific discourse. this applies to both intrinsic and comprehensive aspects of discourse. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 47 in the course of such a context-sensitive approach, it may also become clear which expressions actually figure as key concepts in which discourse communities and how, and to what extent, parallels, similarities, differences and historical changes are distinguishable. for instance, for many european educationalists, terms such as “education”, “media education”, “literacy”, “media literacy”, “competence” or “media competence” may represent current key concepts of their discipline or at least of media education (medienbildung). to date, however, it seems that corresponding definitions, explanations, characterizations and conceptualizations, in addition to related aims, structures, systems, practices and ideologies, have all been contrasted in detail only rudimentarily.vi the same holds true for the global level. during an international expert meeting in june 2003, the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) defined the term “literacy” as follows: literacy is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society. (unesco, 2004, p. 13) in particular, the further remarks in the document explain how the proposed operational definition can be used for measurement purposes and how it is to be understood in the context of aspects of creating literate environments, literacy governance, cultural identity, civil society, community learning, gender equality and formal and non-formal education, as well as the monitoring and assessment of literacy. the authors attach importance to a plural understanding of literacy (unesco, 2004, p. 7), and want to suggest "concrete actions by which policy-makers and program providers might expand and improve their work and thereby address the learning needs of those deprived of learning opportunities" (cf. unesco, 2004, p. 29). they also refer to the history of the concept, starting with literacy in the sense of the ability to read and write, as well as having knowledge, skills or competence in the sense of socio-economic dimensions of functional literacy and dimensions of politically active participation, in addition to the ability to critically argue about the written word, and on to social practices of literacy beyond individual skills. at the same time, they highlight that metaphorical uses of literacy "in domains other than those immediately concerned with written texts, such skills as 'computer literacy,' 'media literacy,' 'health literacy,' 'eco-literacy,' 'emotional literacy' and the like do not form part of the plural notion of literacy at issue here" (unesco, 2004, p. 7).vii therefore, the authors may sidestep those problems of the literacification of (nearly) everything, which are part of the problem rather than the solution (cf. hug, 2012). however, this excludes the subjects and problem areas that have become increasingly important not only or not primarily with letters, words and written texts, but with images, numerals, formulas and digital material of all sorts in globalized, mediated and mediatized worlds. towards a polylogical design for educational knowledge organization it is quite obvious that neither online tools such as wikipedia, nor printed reference works such as the international encyclopedia of education (peterson/baker/mcgaw, 2010) or the routledge international encyclopedia of education (mcculloch/crook, 2008), meet the requirements related to the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 48 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unesco considerations outlined above. this is not so much due to absent contents and conceptual deficits in regard to the justification of epistemological and methodological points of departure. instead, the decisive factors are the focus on a medial form, the very limited extent of the pursued linking of information and the missing efforts to interrelate historical and systematic perspectives. at this point, it is certainly possible to argue that, in view of the complexity of scientific requirements, the lack of available grants for basic projects with a global and egalitarian focus, the foreseeable technical difficulties, translation challenges of all kinds, the dubiousness of practical benefit, the shortage of political opportuneness or the absent orientation on mainstream developments, the endeavour for a multilingual-, multicodal-, multipurpose and interand transnational project aimed at interrelating key concepts and key issues in (media) education, seems futile and would amount to the experimental creation of an omnipotent tool. yet, i do believe that there is creative room between monolingual reference works with selected perspectives mostly limited to a few countries, continents and scientific-culture backgrounds, in addition to the vain search for an all-in-one device suitable for every purpose. in my opinion, there are quite useful starting points for developing such an ambitious project without ethnoor eurocentric dominance and beyond common discursive practices in academia. specifically, some are provided by the model of polylogical research (cf. wimmer, 2001), which can also be applied to educational and pedagogical questions. just as it is "necessary to inquire about the conditions for the possibility of systematic philosophy under the premise of different cultural imprints, which can be effective on every level of reflection and argumentation" (cf. wimmer, 2001, p. 382), the effect of implicit assumptions and culturally determined ways of thinking can and must also be foregrounded and reflected on in an educational discourse. wimmer (2001, p. 389f) distinguishes among four types of cultural centrisms that can be seen as "loopholes" out of the dilemmas of culturality: (a) in expansive centrism, there is development only through unilateral impact, but not through equal cooperation. "the truth" of a cause is already available and simply needs to be disseminated. the centre influences the periphery, while influences in the other direction do not matter. (b) integrative centrism is also based on the belief that one’s own positions are objectively superior, assuming "that their desirability per se is sufficient to attract and incorporate everything foreign" (wimmer, 2001, p. 389). (c) separative centrism means an attitude towards other cultures and societies that lacks the claim to absolute superiority, as different convictions and "truths" can coexist side by side. according to this view, not uniformity but plurality is at the core, yet the culturally conditioned differences in thinking are regarded as insurmountable or, as it were, natural. (d) lastly, in the case of tentative centrism, one's own view, held out of wellfounded conviction, is thought to be a prerequisite for "understanding the equally subjectively motivated differing conviction of others, not only as a fact but also as a legitimacy. yet at all times, the own view as well as the other view are considered to be revisable. again, plurality forms the basis but in such a way that its respective form represents something potentially temporary" (wimmer 2001, p. 389f). moreover, each of these types can be seen in a holistic or partial sense, with different notions and positions identifiable on an intraand intercultural level. the crucial point is which influence processes are being favoured or becoming seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 49 effective, and whether they tend to show mutually manipulative or seductive, persuasive or convincing characteristics. three basic models of such influence processes may be distinguished (cf. wimmer 2001, p. 392): (a) unilateral centristic influence: monologue position x attempts to influence all other positions so that they adjust to position x. other positions can ignore one another, they have to be changed, overcome or removed (cf. catchwords such as "westernization," "cultural imperialism" or "acculturation").viii (b) partial reciprocal influence: dialogue unquestioned assumptions of superiority play a modified role here. even when mutual understanding is considered to be unlikely or impossible, the results are still seen as an achievement of everybody involved in the sense of a selective acculturation. (c) complete reciprocal influence: polylogue this model concerns dialogues between several or many positions, the ideal scenario being that all basic concepts, assumptions, starting points and methods are debatable, and every participant is equally open to arguments. the nature of the resulting form of the polylogue is that "for each tradition [...] every other one [is] 'exotic' in the sense that each is foreign to all the others and none of them are beyond question" (wimmer 2011, p. 392). even though the presupposition of actual equal status, the notion of universally balanced interests and the willingness to question all basic concepts and assumptions have a counterfactual character, the model of polylogical research as a concept regulating practice is still helpful in regard to: • the encouragement of (self-)perception and openness to different approaches and problem descriptions; • the description and analysis of culturally conditioned ways of thinking; • the stimulus to mutual education, by all means also in light of a need to rethink the enlightenment (cf. elkana, 2011). as far as relating key concepts and key issues in education is concerned, this idea of regulating practice may also be helpful insofar as different perspectives, initially based on a few points of crystallization, can be contrasted and contextualized beneficially and from multiple perspectives, without having to invoke all types of approaches, conceptions and cultures. to the degree that the points of crystallization refer to key issues and key concepts considered to be important by all participants, and that their nature allows for connections to new contrastings and further perspectivations, they also open up possibilities for learning and development, as well as education potential for all participants. in this context, an essential challenge may be to let the contemplative character of the communicative effort come into effect and not misinterpret the polylogical activities in the technical sense of working off routines, thereby ultimately subordinating the efforts to technical discourse. the latter can be avoided if: (a) the scopes of thought and action are not needlessly limited by permanently established design principles and design patterns, and (b) the participants are actively involved in the processes of reasonably and iteratively (re-)designing the rooms for manoeuvre. unlike the design-based research of the learning sciences,ix the concern here certainly contains differentiated metaseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 50 theoretical rationales and an involvement with categories, theories and methods from design science. in my opinion, the fact that design science has had to grapple with similar problems of legitimation and recognition as education studies (cf. glanville, 1999, p. 80) is an argument for and not against such a debate, one which offers numerous reference points for the flexible design of polylogically-oriented efforts for understanding that include educational key issues and key words (cf. krippendorff, 2006, esp. chapter 7). the point here is not to get a grip on things by means of a correct scientific method, but to design "enabling spaces" (peschl/fundneider, 2008) that take into account material, social, cognitive, epistemological and technological dimensions, and also to raise our awareness of the extent to which the various scientific perspectivations and approaches may be regarded as restricted acts of design: "(scientific) research is a subset of design, not the other way round" (glanville, 1999, p. 89). as to technological aspects of the creation of enabling spaces for polylogical efforts at understanding, a few provisional references must suffice here. on the one hand, some initial steps should be possible using existing tools such as semantic mediawiki (smw)x or integrated tools such as cocoflash (cf. naeve et al., 2006; naeve, 2001a, b). on the other hand, there exist pioneering works such as, beyond paranoid computing (krieg, 2003), which also consistently consider polylogical approaches to complex problems on the level of programming.xi conclusion the variety of academic cultures and the proverbial cultural diversity in europe are too often bemoaned instead of taken as a resource for innovation and future-oriented developments. within educational, communication and media studies as well, and not least the networks of the european educational research association (eera),xii the diverse meanings of key words and key concepts are developed and used side by side, rather than put into networked relations. there is also a lack of interdisciplinary and integrative theoretical and methodological discussions aimed at clarifications and contrastive contextualization. as outlined above, working towards a multilingual-, multicodaland multicontextual understanding does not necessarily have to lead to an increase of hegemonic tendencies or to a loss of authority for educational studies and (media) educationalists. on the contrary, polylogical forms of knowledge organization can support a mutual understanding beyond marketing hypes and short-lived fashions, and promote context-sensitive webs and networks of interconnections. correspondingly, the point is not to insist on systematicity or to bring methodology and theory to perfection for their own sake, but to clarify subject matters and key issues, as well as to strengthen argumentative potentials and to enable collaboration with representatives of other disciplines. at the outset, i took a stance for "middle courses" between lopsided approaches or mutual ignorance and epistemological hopelessness or arbitrary selection; i hope that my explanations have made clear that these middle courses can make sense, and that we neither have to start from scratch nor limit our efforts to historicist reactualizations. between l'art pour l'art and the principal focus on impact points, creditable and evaluable thoughts, and phrasings worthy of funding, there is leeway for an exploration and communication that has rarely been fathomed before. in regard to future explorations, i consider organizational, economic, and not least the following aspects, to be important: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 51 • we need to modify and differentiate the demand for a rediscovery of "native concepts", which is supposedly due to the danger of "being governed by a stranger as a conquered province" (herbart, 1806, p. 8). the advice may not be historically obsolete if you look at some premature and occasionally encroaching reasonings from perspectives of learning technology, neurosciences, biologism, psychologism or sociologism. nevertheless, it appears to me to be equally important to appreciate that, to put it simply, we cannot do without anything foreign or “other”. only the contrast of different perspectives reveals strengths, weaknesses, blind spots and the need for clarification. • even as an independent entrepreneur, education studies remain dependent on other disciplines. still, even in contexts in which they are considered a subsidiary of other disciplines, we should remember that "education towards truth is always education towards the truth of the educator" (mitterer, 2001, p. 67). this statement by josef mitterer continues to be relevant for educationalists and educational scientists alike. • if we accept that difficulties have arisen from basing the internal differentiation of knowledge systems on individual media and their dispositives (cf. leschke, 2010, p. 303), transversal and transmedial dimensions become important, which is also true for inventories of educational knowledge. in this respect, it seems reasonable to focus, also in this context, on media forms as classification devices in the transversally linked media system (cf. leschke, 2010, p. 305). • the debates on media competence, media education and media literacy have reached a point where the opposition between technophobic humanities and techno-euphoric engineering and natural sciences appears to have become obsolete. considering all of this, it would be a mistake to interpret the remarks in this paper as a simple call to "do culture" in educationalist academia, and less so because "culturality" is, sometimes abusively, held high in the name of tactically motivated correctness. what is more important is a solid skepticism in view of tendencies of "truth-telling", of implicit moralizing and of the education towards truth in pedagogical contexts. for example, the analytical potentials of the "art of government" in a foucauldianxiii sense are all too often somehow pruned and finally turned into moral stances. in so doing, the concept of de-governmentalization emerges as a concept of regovernmentalization on other levels (cf. hug, 2008). in other words, if dieter lenzen and niklas luhmann write in the preface to the collected essays on bildung und weiterbildung im erziehungssystem (1997) that "upbringing [erziehung] is an impertinence, education [bildung] an offer," they not only raise the question of a polylogical debate on an object-related level. on a second-order level, the statement also challenges the offers and impertinences of educational studies. the more precisely the key concepts and key issues can be articulated and made plausible also vis-à-vis non-specialists, the better the chances of a fruitful discourse and successful practice. references boehm, gottfried (1994). die wiederkehr der bilder. in boehm, gottfried (ed.). was ist ein bild? munich: wilhelm fink, pp. 11-38. elkana, yehuda (2011). rethinking the enlightenment. in approaching religion, 1(2). retrieved june 6, 2012, from: <http://ojs.abo.fi/index.php/ar/article/view/117/97>. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 52 elliot, andrew j. & dweck, carol s. 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(2007). handbuch kompetenzmessung: erkennen, verstehen und bewerten von kompetenzen in der betrieblichen, pädagogischen und psychologischen praxis. stuttgart: schäffer-poeschel (first edition 2003). foucault, michel (1982). the subject and the power. in dreyfus, hubert & rabinow, paul (eds.) michel foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. brighton: harvester, pp. 208-226. foucault, michel (2006a). geschichte der gouvernementalität (vol. 1: sicherheit, territorium, bevölkerung). frankfurt a.m.: suhrkamp. foucault, michel (2006b). geschichte der gouvernementalität (vol. 2: die geburt der biopolitik). frankfurt a.m.: suhrkamp. friesen, norm & hug, theo (2009). the mediatic turn: exploring concepts for media pedagogy. in lundby, knut (ed.) mediatization: concept, changes, consequences. frankfurt a.m. et al.: lang, pp. 63-83. galtung, johann (1985). struktur, kultur und intellektueller stil. ein vergleichender essay über sachsonische, teutonische, gallische und nipponische wissenschaft, in: wierlacher, alois (ed.): das fremde und das eigene. prolegomena zu einer interkulturellen germanistik. münchen: iudicium, pp. 151-193 (originally published as: structure, culture and intellectual style. an essay comparing saxonic, teutonic, gallic and nipponic approaches. in: social science information/sur les sciences sociales, 20 [1981], pp. 817-885). gee, james paul (1999). critical issues: reading and the new literacy studies: reframing the national academy of sciences report on reading. in: journal of literacy research, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7edb=all%7econtent=t775648132 %7etab=issueslist%7ebranches=31 v31 31(3), pp. 355-374. geoghegan, bernard michael (2005). there are no new media: a narrative of new media. paper given at the 4th media in transition conference, may 6-8, 2005 at mit, cambridge/ma. glanville, ranulph (1999). re-searching design and designing research. in design issues, 13(2), pp. 80-92. retrieved june 6, 2012, from: <http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/papers/glanville/glanville98design.pdf>. günther, gotthard (1973). life as poly-contexturality. in fahrenbach, helmut (ed.): wirklichkeit und reflexion, festschrift für walter schulz. pfullingen: verlag günter neske, pp. 187-210. retrieved june 6, 2012, from: <http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_life_as_polycontexturality.pdf>. günther, gotthard (1990). die tradition der logik und das konzept einer transklassischen rationalität. klagenfurt: iff. retrieved june 6, 2012, from: <http://ubdocs.uni-klu.ac.at/open/voll/tewi/ac00472123.pdf>. herbart, johann friedrich (1806). allgemeine pädagogik aus dem zweck der erziehung abgeleitet. göttingen: j. f. röwer. herbart, johann friedrich (1841). umriss pädagogischer vorlesungen. göttingen: verlag der dieterichschen buchhandlung (second edition).1 1 cf. http://books.google.de/books?id=ofjmaaaacaaj&printsec=frontcover&dq=umriss+p%c3%a4dagogis cher+vorlesungen&source= bl&ots=arqmue6jdf&sig=wjvviqo6iw5as5mfnp3z_sxezmw&hl=de&sa=x&ei=4fcjunkyemfktaa seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 53 http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7edb=all%7econtent=t775648132%7etab=issueslist%7ebranches=31%23v31 http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7edb=all%7econtent=t775648132%7etab=issueslist%7ebranches=31%23v31 http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7edb=all%7econtent=t775648132%7etab=issueslist%7ebranches=31%23v31 http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7edb=all%7econtent=g917739515 http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/papers/glanville/glanville98-design.pdf http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/papers/glanville/glanville98-design.pdf heyting, frieda g. (2001). antifoundationalist foundational research: analysing discourse on children’s rights to decide. in heyting, frieda g.; lenzen, dieter & white, john (eds.): methods in the philosophy of education. london: routledge, pp. 108-124. hug, theo (2008). education towards truth? reflecting a sentence of josef mitterer. in riegler, alex & weber, stefan (eds.): the non-dualizing philosophy of josef mitterer. constructivist foundations, 3(3), pp. 249-253. online available at <http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/articles/3/3/249.hug.pdf>. hug, theo (ed.) (2009). mediatic turn – claims, concepts and discourses / mediale wende – ansprüche, konzepte und diskurse. frankfurt a.m. et al.: lang. hug, theo (2011). visual competence, media literacy and "new literacies" – conceptual considerations in a plural discursive landscape. in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning. 7(1), pp. 1-17. retrieved august 8, 2012, from: <http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol7issue1/hug-visualcompetencemedialiteracyandnewliteraciesconceptualconsiderationsinapluraldiscursivelandscape.pdf>. hug, theo (2012). media competence and visual literacy – towards considerations beyond literacies. in journal of social management (forthcoming). hug, theo; friesen, norm & rourke, liam (2007). nutzenerwartungen und wissenswandel kritische betrachtungen im spannungsfeld von nutzloser nützlichkeit und nützlicher nutzlosigkeit am beispiel der learning sciences. in reinmann, gabi & kahlert, joachim (eds.): der nutzen wird vertagt … bildungswissenschaften im spannungsfeld zwischen wissenschaftlicher profilbildung und praktischem mehrwert. lengerich: pabst-verlag, pp. 173-197. institute of museum and library services (2009). museums, libraries, and 21st century skills (imls-2009-nai-01). washington, d.c. retrieved april 15, 2010, from: <http://www.imls.gov/pdf/21stcenturyskills.pdf>. kossek, brigitte & peschl, markus f. (eds.) (2012). ’digital turn’? – zum einfluss digitaler medien auf wissensgenerierungsprozesse von studierenden und hochschullehrenden. vienna: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, v&r vienna university press. krebs, uwe (2001). erziehung in traditionalen kulturen. quellen und befunde aus afrika, amerika, asien und australien 1898 -1983. berlin: reimer verlag. kress, gunther (2003). literacy in the new media age. new york: routledge. kress, gunther & van leeuwen, theo (1996). reading images: the grammar of visual design. london: routledge. krieg, peter (2003). beyond paranoid computing. berlin. retrieved july 12, 2005, from: <http://pilesys.com/beyond%20paranoid%20computing.pdf>. krieg, peter (2005). die paranoide maschine. computer zwischen wahn und sinn. hannover: heise zeitschriften verlag. krippendorff, klaus (2006). the semantic turn: a new foundation for design. boca raton, london, new york: taylor & francis crc. lenzen, dieter & luhmann, niklas (eds.) (1997). bildung und weiterbildung im erziehungssystem. lebenslauf und humanontogenese als medium und form. frankfurt a.m.: suhrkamp. leschke, rainer (2010). medien und formen: eine morphologie der medien. konstanz: uvk. stih4aw&ved=0cdmq6aewaa#v=onepage&q=umriss%20p%c3%a4dagogischer%20vorlesungen&f= false seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 54 leu, donald j. (1999). the new literacies: research on reading instruction with the internet and other digital technologies. retrieved july 15, 2010, from: <http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~djleu/newlit.html>. mcculloch, gary & crook, david (eds.) (2008). the routledge international encyclopedia of education. new york: routledge. margreiter, reinhard (1999). realität und medialität: zur philosophie des “medial turn.“ in medien journal, 23(1), pp. 9-18. mitchell, w. j. thomas (1994). the pictorial turn. in mitchell, w. j. t., picture theory: essays on verbal and visual representation. chicago/london: university of chicago press, pp. 11-34. mitterer, josef (2001). die flucht aus der beliebigkeit. frankfurt a.m.: fischer. naeve, ambjörn (2001a). the concept browser a new form of knowledge management tool. in proceedings of the 2nd european web-based learning environments conference (wble 2001), lund, sweden, october 24-26, 2001. retrieved july 15, 2012, from: <kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/conceptualbrowsing/conceptbrowser.doc>. naeve, ambjörn (2001b). the knowledge manifold an educational architecture that supports inquiry-based customizable forms of e-learning. in proceedings of the 2nd european web-based learning environments conference (wble 2001), lund, sweden, october 24-26, 2001. retrieved july 15, 2012, from: <http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/knowledgemanifolds/knowledgemanifold.pdf >. naeve, ambjörn et al. (2006). cocoflash: conzilla, confolio, and flashmeeting integration for enhanced professonal learning. in proceedings of the icalt2006 conference, pp. 1186-1187, kerkrade, the netherlands, 5-7 july, 2006. retrieved july 15, 2012, from: <http://kmr.nada.kth.se/papers/conceptualbrowsing/cocoflash-icalt.pdf>. olson, david r. & torrance, nancy (eds.) (2009). the cambridge handbook of literacy. cambridge et al.: cambridge university press. oppenheimer, todd (2003). the flickering mind. the false promise of technology in the classroom and how learning can be saved. new york: random house. peterson, penelope, baker, eva & mcgaw, barry (eds.) (2010). international encyclopedia of education. oxford: elsevier science (third edition). peschl, markus f. & fundneider, thomas (2008). emergent innovation and sustainable knowledge co-creation. a socio-epistemological approach to “innovation from within”. in lytras, miltiadis d.; carroll, john m.; damiani, ernesto; et al. (eds.): the open knowledge society: a computer science and information systems manifesto. berlin, heidelberg: springer, pp. 101-108. (online available at <http://mpra.ub.unimuenchen.de/10215/1/mpra_paper_10215.pdf>). rorty, richard (1979). philosophy and the mirror of nature. princeton, nj: princeton university press. rusch, gebhard (2007). mediendynamik. explorationen zur theorie des medienwandels. in navigationen. zeitschrift für medienund kulturwissenschaften. 7(1), pp. 13-93. sheridan, susan r. (2000). a theory of multiple literacies. retrieved october 2, 2007, from: <http://www.drawingwriting.com/multlit.html>. sting, stephan (2003). stichwort: literalität – schriftlichkeit. in zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaft, 6(3), pp. 3317-3337. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 55 http://www.drawingwriting.com/multlit.html street, brian v. & lefstein, adam (2007). literacy: an advanced resource book for students. london: routledge. thiel, felicitas & rost, friedrich (2001). wissenschaftssprache und wissenschaftsstil. in hug, theo (ed.): wie kommt wissenschaft zu wissen? vol. 4: einführung in die wissenschaftstheorie und wissenschaftsforschung. baltmannsweiler: schneider verlag hohengehren, pp. 117-136. united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) (eds.) (2004). the plurality of literacy and its implications for policies and programmes. education sector position paper: 13. paris. retrieved july 15, 2012, from: <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001362/136246e.pdf>. van goor, roel; heyting, frieda g. & vreeke, gert-jan (2004). beyond foundations: signs of a new normativity in philosophy of education. in educational theory 54(2), pp. 173–192. (doi:10.1111/j.1741-5446.2004.00013.x) veith, hermann (2003). lernkultur, kompetenz, kompetenzentwicklung und selbstorganisation. begriffshistorische untersuchungen zur gesellschaftlichen und pädagogischen konstruktion von erziehungswirklichkeiten in theorie und praxis. in arbeitsgemeinschaft betriebliche weiterbildungsforschung e.v./projekt qualifikations-entwicklungs-management (eds.): was kann ich wissen? theorie und geschichte von lernkultur und kompetenzentwicklung. (= quem-report, schriften zur beruflichen weiterbildung, issue 82). berlin, pp. 179-229. retrieved august 8, 2012, from: <http://www.abwf.de/content/main/publik/report/2003/report-82.pdf>. wimmer, franz martin (2001). polylogische forschung. in hug, theo (ed.): wie kommt wissenschaft zu wissen? vol. 3: einführung in die methodologie der sozialund kulturwissenschaften. baltmannsweiler: schneider verlag hohengehren, pp. 382-393. bionote theo hug holds a dr. phil. and is a professor at the institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies at the university of innsbruck. he is the coordinator of the innsbruck media studies research group. his areas of interest include media education and media literacy, e-education and micro learning, theory of knowledge and methodology and philosophy of science. he is particularly interested in interfaces of medialization and knowledge dynamics, as well as learning processes. weblink: http://hug-web.at/ address institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies division of media education and communications culture university of innsbruck, schoepfstr. 3, a 6020 innsbruck, austria e-mail: theo.hug/at/uibk.ac.at tel.: +43-(0)512-507-4048 fax: +43-(0)512-507-2854 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 56 http://hug-web.at/ mailto:theo.hug@uibk.ac.at i for example, this concerns the mobility of researchers, the increasingly standard employment of technology-based collection and evaluation procedures in empirical research, or the education on everyday and scientific myths on the basis of new methods, as provided for instance by hans rosling concerning "insights on poverty" (http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html) and myths about so-called developing countries (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ ever_seen.html). ii the term “education”, for instance, may be translated in german to “bildung”, “ausbildung”, “bildungswesen”, “bildungsweg”, “erziehung”, “edukation”, “unterricht”, “schulung”, “training”, “unterweisung”, as well as “bildungswissenschaft” (the course of studies) and “erziehungswissenschaft” (the academic discipline). iii in both contexts, numerous compound terms are used; here is an incomplete list of examples: action competence, coaching competence, cognitive competence, communicative competence, competence measurement, design competence, diversity competence, ecological competence, emotional competence, gender competence, intercultural competence, key competencies, leadership competence, media competence, meta competence, organizational competence, pornography competence, self competence, social competence, visual competence, etc., as well as art literacy, computer literacy, consumer literacy, digital literacy, diversity literacy, ecological literacy, emotional literacy, environmental literacy, film literacy, food literacy, geographical literacy, hacking literacy, health literacy, information literacy, internet literacy, library literacy, multicultural literacy, numerical literacy, sexual literacy, television literacy, visual literacy, etc. iv the problems of classical foundationalism (empiricism, rationalism and transcendentalism) were pointed out more than 40 years ago by richard rorty (1979) in philosophy and the mirror of nature. v as an example, i refer to formulations of the purpose of education in light of the problem definitions and challenges as sketched above, as they have been drafted in various contexts, including online (see, for example, http://purposed.org.uk/ or http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/). vi see, for example, the european charter for media literacy (http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/), although in the results it is fairly difficult to identify the different accentuations and special features of the individual approaches. vii cf. debates about "new literacies", e.g. as discussed in leu (1999) and literacy in the new media age (kress 2003). viii on the other hand, even studies that are not geared to the assimilation of all other positions to one’s own position may show a monological character. for example, the monolingual sourcebook on education in traditional cultures (erziehung in traditionalen kulturen, krebs 2001) provides a number of findings and reports from africa, america, asia and australia. however, the reader does not hear from the described groups themselves; the different views of education and their cultural contexts, as well as the educational relevance of the findings, are not discussed from african, (latin-)american, asian and australian perspectives. ix cf. the critical observations on design-based research and recent learning sciences in hug/friesen/rourke (2007). x cf. http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ xi cf. erez elul's "pile machine", which in contrast to the turing machine, has a polylogical structure and consistently represents objects as generative structures in the form of relations (cf. krieg 2005; as well as http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/19/19187/1.html). in his theoretical treatises on nonhierarchical yet layered emerging structures, peter krieg refers in particular to the polycontextural logic of gotthard günther (cf. 1973, 1990), which also offers numerous connecting factors with knowledge organization in regard to key concepts in education. xii http://www.eera-ecer.de/ xiii with the concept of “governmentality”, foucault aims at a new understanding of power beyond the issues of consensus, will or conquest. he writes: "the relationship seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 57 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html http://purposed.org.uk/ http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/ http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/ http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ http://www.eera-ecer.de/ proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government" (foucault 1982, p. 221). foucault advocates a concept of power that focuses on various forms of social control in disciplinary institutions (for example, schools or hospitals), as well as on different forms of knowledge in contrast to widespread conceptualizations of power in the sense of hierarchical, top-down power of the state. accordingly, the concept of “government” is not limited to state politics alone. it includes a wide range of control techniques that apply to a variety of phenomena, from one's control of the self to the "biopolitical control" of populations. thus, foucault defines governmentality as the "art of government" in a wider sense, which includes organized practices (mentalities, rationalities and techniques) through which subjects are governed, and which is linked to related concepts such as biopolitics and powerknowledge (cf. foucault 2006a, b). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 58 key concepts in education: critical issues beyond definition and discursive practices theo hug abstract introduction education and literacy as key concepts in education aspects of educational philosophy and considerations beyond definition and discursive practices towards a polylogical design for educational knowledge organization conclusion references bionote address title the pedagogy of digital storytelling in the college classroom rachel raimist assistant professor department of telecommunication and film the university of alabama email: rramist@ua.edu candance doerr-stevens ph.d. candidate department of curriculum and instruction university of minnesota email: doer0026@umn.edu walter jacobs associate professor and chair department of african american & african studies university of minnesota email: wrjacobs@umn.edu abstract in the fall of 2008, rachel raimist and walter jacobs collaboratively designed and taught the course “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” to 18 undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines. candance doerr-stevens audited the class as a graduate student. this article examines the media making processes of the students in the course, asking how participants used digital storytelling to engage with themselves and the media through content creation that both mimicked and critiqued current media messages. in particular, students used the medium of digital storytelling to build and revise identities for purposes of rememory, reinvention, and cultural remixing. we provide a detailed online account of the digital stories and composing processes of the students through the same multimedia genre that the students were asked to use, that of digital storytelling. keywords: digital storytelling, identity, media literacy, pedagogy rethinking media literacy “digital storytelling in and with communities of color.” storytelling is a tool for preserving memory, writing history, learning, entertaining, organizing, and healing in communities of color. it is in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 280 mailto:wrjacobs@umn.edu mailto:doer0026@umn.edu mailto:rramist@ua.edu telling of stories that communities build identities, construct meaning, and make connections with others and the world. in this course we will investigate modes and power dimensions of digital storytelling, analyze the role of digitized media as a method of individual healing, and examine media as tools for community organizing and development. we will explore media making, creative writing, and memoir in both literary and digital writing, and examine the gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions of digital storytelling. we will create projects to tell our stories, examine our social ghosts, and work with community members as part of the 40th anniversary of the african american and african studies department to develop digital stories about twin cities communities of color. students will learn to produce creative work (writing, video, photography, sound, and artwork) and gain technical proficiency in macbased editing. students will produce photographic and video work that will be shared on the course blog. no technical expertise is necessary! (course description for “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” undergraduate class, university of minnesota, fall 2008.) in the 2005 book speaking the lower frequencies: students and media literacy walter jacobs investigated strategies for encouraging undergraduate students to become critical consumers of the media without losing the pleasure they derive from it (jacobs, 2005). in the communication review “media literacy and the challenge of new information and communication technologies” article, however, sonia livingstone notes that in the digital age literacy should provide students with “the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and create messages across a variety of contexts” (livingstone, 2004, p. 3). in other words, students need to become producers of media content in addition to being critical consumers of media worlds. media theorists have argued that a focus on media production must be at the center of any critical media curriculum in order to foster perspectives that cannot be developed through analysis alone (fabos, 2008; kellner, 2004). yet in focusing on the production practices of media, pedagogy must attend to the particular conditions and contexts that shape how media producers negotiate their production practices between social reproduction and critique (hill & vasudevan, 2008). in a new project rachel raimist, candance doerr-stevens, and walter jacobs explore this expanded understanding of media literacy. our book-in-progress speaking the lower frequencies 2.0: race, learning, and literacy in the digital age examines pedagogy and literacy through theories and practices of digital media making, specifically digital storytelling. speaking the lower frequencies 2.0 is a collaborative interdisciplinary project. jacobs – a sociologist interested in critical pedagogy and popular culture – connected with media maker and feminist scholar raimist, who was a graduate student at the time. they decided to develop and co-teach a course that fused questions of media, storytelling, and identity; “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” was cross-listed between the department of african american & african studies and the department of gender, women, and sexuality studies. doerr-stevens, a graduate student interested in literacy and learning in the digital age, audited the class, and was invited by raimist and jacobs to be a research collaborator. the epigraph to this section provides an overview of the main elements of the fall 2008 “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” course. in the course the students read jacobs’ memoir ghostbox (jacobs, 2007), and discussed it with him in class. students also watched and critiqued a digital story representation jacobs made at the berkeley, ca center for digital storytelling (cds) in may, 2008. (his digital story “letter to my mother” may be viewed at http://tinyurl.com/jacobsds/ ). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 281 http://tinyurl.com/jacobsds/ figure 1. picture from the story letter to my mother. in these and other discussions, students explored the cds social processes of digital storytelling (lambert, 2006). for example, students learned that it takes courage to share their stories publicly; they risk judgment from others. but once they develop confidence and commitment to the storytelling process, students can generate many new insights related to media production as a vehicle for engagement with culture identity work through producing short videos and by remixing and repurposing existing media content to tell new stories. raimist and jacobs expanded the cds model of digital storytelling into a critical process where students were taught not only the technical skills necessary for creating and sharing their own digital stories, but also were provided with a framework they could use to interrogate themselves and engage with other contexts for purposes of responsive content creation. to lay the foundation for this framework, the students evaluated written texts such as “in our glory: photography and black life” (hooks, 2003), “chicana/o artivism: judy baca’s digital work with youth of color” (sandoval & latorre, 2008), and cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet (nakamura, 2002), and also analyzed many online digital stories. in reading and viewing these texts, we examined issues of media ownership and the power of media content to represent multiple truths. we asked students to consider how these media truths have shaped their own identities. building on livingstone’s (2004) focus on content creation as a route to media literacy, we then asked students to explore their own stories and thus contribute their own truths to the larger media mix through the process of digital storytelling. circles of feedback an essential element of the digital composing process was the “story circle.” based on a component of the 3-day cds standard digital storytelling workshop jacobs attended, the story circle is an in-class workshop where students share their story ideas and get feedback from others in the class. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 282 ground rules of the cds story circle were: (1) let each person present to the end without interruption; (2) give an affirming comment as the first response to a participant; (3) frame critical feedback with the construction, “if it were my story, i would…”; and (4) assertive folks should try to let the more shy participants speak first. we added a fifth ground rule when we used the story circle technique in our “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” class: (5) while some stories may appear to be more “serious” than others, they all reflect the speakers’ truths, so don’t judge them against one another. in adding this fifth rule, we intended to create a space for students to begin resolving the various tensions involved in the conflicted cultural and identitybased work of digital storytelling. after the story circle the students went through the process of building their digital stories with extensive feedback from the instructors and from each other. to amplify the sense of audience involved with digital storytelling, the students were then required to post their digital stories to a public blog, and provide comments on fellow students’ digital stories. the blog also drew commentary from the students’ families and friends, as well as feedback from the general public. the blog, which served as a public forum, may be accessed at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/afroam/storytelling/. in light of bell hooks’ description of memory and re-memory as redemptive, we encouraged the students to see their storytelling as self-affirming and potentially liberating (hooks, 2003). for some students, digital storytelling became a process of synthesis, in which the students made sense of their stories through a deliberate sorting of multimodal content (lambert, 2006). for others the process was one of self-definition in that play with elements of narrative and visual expression allowed for identity revision (lundby, 2008). in both cases the process of storytelling was one of “vernacular creativity” (burgess, 2006) in which the students transformed their own everyday stories into a “shared public culture” (p. 210), one that creates a space for sorting through conflicting media messages while also forging new possibilities for seeing themselves and others. the students’ digital stories can be viewed online: http://tinyurl.com/umstories/. figure 2. pictures from students’ stories. multimodal ways of knowing drawing on the expressive potentials of multimodal storytelling, we too have created a digital story on “the pedagogy of digital storytelling in the college classroom” to more extensively share our thoughts on how a college class on digital storytelling can help students expand understandings of themselves and their roles in communities inside as well as outside of the university. just as we asked our students to critique media through making media that talk back, we use the storytelling modes of image, motion, music, and voice to examine what it means to embrace media creation in the classroom. our online presentation, thus, is both an example of a digital story and is an exposition on digital storytelling as a route to media literacy in the digital age. to view “the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 283 http://tinyurl.com/umstories/ http://blog.lib.umn.edu/afroam/storytelling pedagogy of digital storytelling in the college classroom” digital story go to http://tinyurl.com/dspedagogy/. video 2 will be inserted here. according to leslie rule’s oft-quoted definition, “digital storytelling is the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling. digital stories derive their power by weaving images, music, narrative and voice together, thereby giving deep dimension and vivid color to characters, situations, experiences, and insights” (rule, 2009). by the end of the semester, the students in the fall 2008 “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” class at the university of minnesota were well versed in the power of digital storytelling in a university setting. in sharing our experiences, we invite readers from places throughout the educational spectrum to explore how they may similarly help their students develop strong voices and create digital stories as tools to more fully comprehend complex lived realities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 284 http://tinyurl.com/dspedagogy/ references burgess, j. (2006). hearing ordinary voices: cultural studies, vernacular creativity, and digital storytelling. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 20(2), 201-214. fabos, b. (2008). the price of information: critical literacy, education and today’s internet. in d.j. leu, j. coiro, m. knobel & c. lankshear (eds.), handbook of research on new literacies (pp. 843-874). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. hill, m.l. & vasudevan, l. (2008). media, learning, and sites of possibility. new york: peter lang. hooks, b. (2003). in our glory: photography and black life. in l. wells (ed.), the photography reader (pp. 387-394). new york: routledge. jacobs, w. (2007). ghostbox: a memoir. new york: iuniverse. jacobs, w. (2005). speaking the lower frequencies: students and media literacy. albany, ny: state university of new york press. kellner, d. (2004). technological transformation, multiple literacies, and the revisioning of education. e-learning, 1(1), 9-37. lundby, k. (2008). digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media. new york: peter lang. lambert, j. (2006). digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community (2nd ed.). berkeley, ca: digital diner press. livingstone, s. (2004). media literacy and the challenge of new information and communication technologies. the communication review, 7(3), 3-14. nakamura, l. (2002). cybertypes: race, ethnicity, and identity on the internet. new york: routledge. rule, l. (2009). digital storytelling. retrieved from http://electronicportfolios.org/digistory/ sandoval, c., & latorre, g. (2008). chicana/o artivism: judy baca’s digital work with youth of color. in a. everett (ed.), learning race and ethnicity: youth and digital media (pp. 81-108). cambridge, ma: the mit press. online media references “the pedagogy of digital storytelling in the college classroom” digital story: http://tinyurl.com/dspedagogy/ “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” blog: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/afroam/storytelling/ “digital storytelling in and with communities of color” digital stories: http://tinyurl.com/umstories/ “letter to my mother” digital story: http://tinyurl.com/jacobsds/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 285 http://tinyurl.com/jacobsds/ http://tinyurl.com/umstories/ http://blog.lib.umn.edu/afroam/storytelling/ http://tinyurl.com/dspedagogy/ http://electronicportfolios.org/digistory/ the pedagogy of digital storytelling in the college classroom rachel raimist candance doerr-stevens walter jacobs abstract rethinking media literacy circles of feedback multimodal ways of knowing references online media references microsoft word laws_digital storytelling as an emerging documentary form.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 digital storytelling as an emerging documentary form ana luisa sanchez-laws ph.d. department of information science and media studies university of bergen email: ana.laws@infomedia.uib.no abstract this contribution presents the idea that digital storytelling can be fruitfully studied using concepts and perspectives from documentary theory. two definitions of digital storytelling are analysed and compared to how documentary filmmaking has been characterized. from this comparison, it is possible to argue that digital storytelling works within a contextual contract similar to that of documentary filmmaking, especially in regard to the positioning of the audience and the media product. the study of digital storytelling might accordingly benefit from the ongoing discussions in documentary theory about authorial responsibility and claims of realism and truthfulness. keywords: digital storytelling, documentary theory, autobiographical documentary, first-person film, emergent media forms. the question: can we look at digital storytelling through the lens of documentary? one can say that at the heart of digital storytelling lies a desire to get to the core of someone’s life history, to reach a deep understanding of an individual through audiovisual means. exactly the same can be said about the first person documentary. can one claim, however, that digital storytelling presents a contextual contract between a media creator and his/her public that is markedly different from that of the autobiographical documentary, that it is a different genre? or would it be useful to discuss digital storytelling as an emergent subgenre of documentary? it is in what concerns the understanding of the products the digital stories where i feel more research should be conducted, and where i would like to propose a look into documentary theory. a discussion of the formal aspects of digital stories can help activate a much-needed debate about the kind of media literacy it might be useful to promote at digital storytelling workshops. in addition to enhancing processes of community building and personal exploration, the educational role of digital storytelling could also address some of the concerns of documentary theory. topics such as our trust in the first person testimonial or the reflexive voice (especially in relation to its performative aspects), our belief in archival material as indexical of reality, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 360 and a critical look at the use of the three act structure as the preferred basis for telling a story – all very deep concerns in documentary theory – could be discussed as part of digital storytelling workshops. i would argue that those debates need not only concern media students but should also be part of the workshops for “non-professionals” who are the main target of digital storytelling promoters. in turn, adding digital stories to the repertoire of products that can be scrutinized under the light of documentary theory could help shed new light on the discussions about truth claiming and the role of first person narratives in documentary. my intention throughout this paper is to explore how documentary theory can be applied to digital storytelling so that we enrich both our understanding of digital stories and of how emerging digital forms impact documentary filmmaking. my interest in trying to make a bridge between documentary filmmaking and digital storytelling comes as a result of my experience as lecturer in the autumn of 2009 at the “portrait and documentary” course and the planning of the upcoming course in the autumn of 2010 entitled “documentary and reportage”, both part of the media sciences programme at the department of information science and media studies, university of bergen. there are several reasons why i think a discussion of digital storytelling could be useful in university level documentary courses. one is the possibility of using a digital storytelling workshop to prompt a discussion about ethical issues in documentary production. having to go through the experience of creating a personal story can help raise awareness about the impact filmmaking can have on one's subject. at the same time, being confronted with the uncertainties of one’s own story can bring clearer understanding of the challenges of claiming truthfulness for one’s audiovisual documentation when relying on the testimonies of others. emerging forms such as digital storytelling can be understood as part of a larger shift in media practice in general towards a reconsideration of the role of subjectivity. this is a topic that has been highly prevalent in the agenda of recent documentary theory (for example, bruzzi 2006, austin & de jong 2008) and also in the literature about interactive documentary, digital media, and other emerging digital forms such as docu-games (for example, walker 2005, skartveit 2007). a second reason is how digital storytelling can help raise questions about the role of a media producer as a community facilitator. this aspect of media making is one that i have found easy to leave unexplored in courses at university, as so much emphasis is put on the final product. let me start, however, by briefly going through the definition of digital storytelling by some of its leading experts, then turn to some considerations from the point of view of documentary theory. defining digital storytelling digital storytelling has been presented as personal stories told and made public using digital media which fit into a short format (see couldry 2008: 42, also meadows n.p.). it has also been presented as a media practice that aims at creating opportunities to connect with others through conversational production (lambert 2006a: 87). more specific definitions of digital storytelling can involve two different components, one being the practitioner (the digital storyteller) and the second the product itself (the digital story), as is the case with the definition provided by the center for digital storytelling (cds) in berkeley, california. in the cds model, a digital story is “a short, first-person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds”, and a digital storyteller is “anyone who has a desire to document life seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 361 experience, ideas, or feelings through the use of story and digital media”. the cds definition further portrays the digital storyteller as an amateur who needs help from professionals in order to be able to tell the story: “usually someone who has little to no prior experience in the realm of video production but can spend a few days participating in a workshop, exploring and sharing a story with creative, and technical assistance from compassionate, and talented technically skilled cds staff” (center for digital storytelling, n.d.). other definitions of digital storytelling also portray the digital storyteller as an amateur, while at the same time stating the precise formal requirements that define a digital story. such is the definition provided by daniel meadows at the bbc digital storytelling website: “digital stories are short, personal, multimedia scraps of tv that people can make for themselves … this project requires commitment for, as well as all the technical stuff that must be learnt, script writing, picture editing and performance skills are also needed and these have to be worked on, which is why most digital stories are made by people attending workshops where participants can benefit from the help and advice of facilitators”. about the formal aspects, meadows states that “there's a strictness to the construction of a digital story: 250 words, a dozen or so pictures, and two minutes is the right length. as with poetry these constraints define the form … and it's the observation of that form which gives the thing its elegance” (meadows, 2008). from these definitions, i would argue that digital storytelling puts less emphasis on the final product (since its formal aspects have been preestablished as reflexive voice over, archival photographic material and nondiegetic sound) than on the process of creating the digital story. this process has been qualified as, amongst other things, a process of community building and bridging across generations, a process of inner exploration or personal healing as in talk therapy, and even a means for political activism when used to connect personal stories with the broader public issues that a community faces (see lambert, 2006b). the (kind of) special attention to the contract between media maker and public in relation to truth or realism claims present in the final product that is so important in discussions about documentary filmmaking is not found in the two definitions of digital storytelling cited above. what are the reasons for not paying as much attention to the finished digital story as to the process of creating it? lambert has pointed out that “in the 20th century we got spoken to in the language of film… in the 21st century we get to talk back” (2006b). this position mirrors the way in which emerging practices (that are) attached to the use of digital technologies have often been discussed, in which the emphasis of the discussion is mostly on the practice and, in some cases, not enough on the products. new digital media practices are said to represent a break with the mass media system, a break that, in turn, has become synonymous with a break with a restrictive technological order, a move from passive audiences to active (or rather inter-active) publics and, as manuel castells points out, the inclusion of a multiplicity of messages and sources (castells 1996: 339-40). martin lister and his colleagues also argue that new digital technologies have brought with them changes in relationships between subjects and media technologies (users as producers), new experiences of the relationship between embodiment, identity and community (changes in how we experience ourselves and the world), and new patterns of organization and production (lister et al. 2003: 12). nevertheless, should the way the amateurs talk back not be as thoroughly discussed as the way we have been talked to? or should only the professionals be scrutinized for how they say things? in this sense, i am missing a discussion about the products, the digital stories, and i think it is essential that this discussion be started if digital storytelling is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 362 to make its way into the media studies curriculum at university level. the work of theoreticians and “professional” media makers should not be ignored in the literacy campaigns of digital storytelling promoters. there should be a concern with the digital storyteller’s claims as present in the finished digital story, as is the case with documentary filmmakers. in fact, documentary practice is currently more and more willing to not only allow but (even) strongly encourage a critical view of their claims as the healthiest point of departure for their audience. let me now take a closer look at how these debates have unfolded in the literature about documentary filmmaking, especially in relation to the autobiographical or first person documentary. the first person documentary michael renov has worked with issues of documentary filmmaking (see renov 1993) since the 1990s. renov has also worked with issues of autobiographical documentary, or as he also calls it, the first-person film, since the early 2000s (for example, renov 2004, renov 2008). one of the arguments that renov lays out in his most recent writing is that documentary studies have often been too entangled in trying to prove that it is possible to produce “verifiable knowledge” through facts and logical arguments, for which reason the autobiographical documentary or first-person film has not been an easy to accept form of nonfiction (renov 2008: 40)i. renov argues, however, that what is interesting about autobiographical documentaries is that even when composed of photographical images (often used as proof of truthfulness in documentary), the veracity of these films remains doubtful and, i would add, depends on our trust in the speaker. in this way, autobiographical documentary can but profoundly contest the larger truth claims of documentary. the first-person film calls attention to the uncertainties and equivocations that are present in the topic that we should know best: our own selves (see renov 2008: 41). for renov, the questions raised by the first-person film have become increasingly prominent in documentary theory. he argues that there is a growing focus on questions about the subjectivity / objectivity dichotomy in documentary, as “the subject in documentary has, to a surprising degree, become the subject of documentary" (renov 2008: 49, 2004: xxiv). some of the problems that renov points to might be better understood in light of the more general discussions about documentary filmmaking and what skartveit refers to as “the documentary contract” (see skartveit 2007: 38). for skartveit, this is also a discussion that can be understood as one about genre. skartveit argues that genre is essentially “a mutual agreement between the audience and the artwork” which, if not met, makes the audience feel cheated (skartveit 2007: 39), and goes on to point out that, as a genre, documentary asks of the public to believe that what is presented is authentic and furthermore, it asks the audience to take actions in the real world (skartveit 2007:41). through this agreement, documentary turns spectators into witnesses, and as such, demands of them to be more than voyeurs pleasantly contemplating the horror of others. documentary filmmaking demands a moral engagement with the events being depicted, for which reason it has often been used as a tool for political activism. some of the similarities that i want to point out between digital stories and documentaries can be explored now. first, both documentary filmmaking and digital storytelling share a concern to connect the personal with larger public issues, to be effective as tools for political and social activism (as argued by lambert 2006b). second, both digital stories and documentaries try to position the audience as witness, since what is claimed is that we are watching seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 363 a deeply personal (and truthful) testimony. third, in the same way as digital storytelling is seen as a response to the restrictive order of the expository voice of big broadcasters, documentary has risen as a response to what was perceived as another restrictive order, “the sensationalized, oversimplified representation of reality offered by the average fiction film” (nichols 1991: 47, quoted in skartveit 2007: 47). renov’s discussion about the poetics of documentary and its rhetorical and aesthetical functions can also help advance the argument that digital storytelling can be validly and fruitfully viewed from the perspective of documentary theory. he argues that the rhetorical and aesthetical functions of documentary practice fall within four fundamental tendencies, namely 1) to record, reveal or preserve, 2) to persuade or promote, 3) to analyse or interrogate and 4) to express (renov 1993: 21-35). let me now provide a closer look at these tendencies while also linking them to digital storytelling. 1. to record, reveal or preserve: for renov, our will to document the historical world responds to our desire to “cheat death, stop time, restore loss” (renov 1993: 25). this also includes an impulse to “rework” the past through audiovisual means, as avant garde artists have done with filmed diaries where they reflect upon their lives (renov 1993: 25). this tendency is clearly found in digital storytelling: as i pointed out previously when discussing definitions, there is a desire to record and preserve, “a desire to document life experience, ideas, or feelings” (center for digital storytelling, n.d. – my emphasis). many of the digital stories on display at the center for digital storytelling website, at the bbc digital stories website, or sites such as museo da pessoa, have to do with remembering someone that passed away (a grandparent, a friend) or events that the storytellers consider essential parts of their identity. likewise, along with the wish to preserve the photographic record of a time past, many of these digital stories also reflect upon the events, perhaps trying to “rework” what happened, to reveal the inner truth of the images. 2. to persuade or promote: the persuasive tendency so common of the griersonian style of documentary filmmaking of trying to educate the public is also present in digital storytelling, though in the form of testimonials. instead of the proverbial voice of god, the voice of the self tells us how things really were, and this is even harder to contestii. it is the indexing of digital storytelling as the honest and truthful account from the part of the digital storyteller that aids its persuasive intentions. 3. to analyse or interrogate: when lambert points out that digital storytelling can be a way of working with intercultural differences in a learning situation (see lambert 2006b), he is underlining how digital stories can be tools for interrogation and analysis. for renov, the interrogation that takes place in documentary is between the filmmaker and the audience, and it is a process in which the filmmaker is looking for ways of empowering this audience through critical reflection (renov 1993: 32). a digital story that provides us with a window into a personal reality that was until then unknown to us and that shakes our preconceptions about an individual and thereby a community, is a powerful means to prompt the kind of interrogation (that) renov refers to. 4. to express: perhaps the tendency (that is) most obviously encouraged in digital storytelling, the desire to express, has been one of the most repressed in some strands of documentary filmmaking. it brings us back to the discussion about objectivity / subjectivity and claims to truthfulness and realism. there is a question in documentary theory about the ethical problems of manipulating images to strengthen the argument made by the filmmaker. bruzzi is amongst the theoreticians to point out that perhaps there is an inescapable performativity component in documentary seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 364 filmmaking, that there is always a negotiation between filmmaker and reality (bruzzi 2006: 186). bruzzi has also argued that in the last decades the repression of the author prevalent in documentary making is giving way to more expressive, reflective approaches (bruzzi 2006: 198). the kind of reflexivity over the role of the author, and suspicions about the truth claims of the story presented, is in my view not yet part of the critique of digital storytelling, at least not as much as it is of documentary filmmaking. conclusion: is it useful to look at digital storytelling as an emerging documentary form? the above reflections are not exhaustive of the topics that can be deduced from documentary theory for discussions of digital storytelling. finding the connections between previous and emergent media forms seems to me essential in order to dispel the false impression that new technologies represent a break with past media formsiii. perhaps the current discussions about performativity in documentary filmmaking could help rethink daniel meadows’ scripted dialogues with his webcam and critically view the way they are offered as truthful testimonies of personal events. perhaps a critique of the public trust in the photographic archive could be an enriching addition to the digital storytelling media literacy agenda. finally, perhaps it would be useful to criticize and reconsider the use of non-diegetic sound in digital storytelling to emphasize emotion and present the inner world of the storyteller, and to problematize its use as a persuasive device that seeks primarily to elicit an emotional response. i hope the parallels i have attempted to draw can support the argument that digital storytelling and autobiographical documentary work within similar contextual contracts and that it could be useful to explore digital storytelling through the application of documentary theory – even to think of if as an emerging documentary form. for its concern with factual information and its desire to produce change in the world through the representation of real life, i am inclined to consider digital storytelling as very closely related to documentary, and would argue that it is an emerging documentary form. a look at the issues that have been raised about documentary and the way they might be present in digital storytelling seems to me essential as we witness big broadcasters such as bbc harvest users’ thirst for content production (in this way managing to maintain their gate keeping role) and as we see corporations relabeling the tried and true testimonial advertisement as a digital story. these and other issues that have been central in discussions of documentary production and ethics can be, i argue, fruitful additions to our understanding of digital storytelling. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong 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(2008). digital storytelling, mediatized stories. new york: peter lang publishing. lambert, joe (2006a). digital storytelling. capturing lives, creating community. berkeley: digital diner press. lambert, joe (2006b). digital storytelling workshop talk at university of maryland, baltimore county (umbc). retrieved november 20, 2010 from http://www.umbc.edu/studio/videos/qtdetail?id=388 lister, martin, et al. (2003). new media: a critical introduction. london: routledge. lundby, knut, ed. (2008). digital storytelling, mediatized stories. new york: peter lang publishing. meadows, daniel (n.d.). digital storytelling. webpage. retrieved november 20, 2010 from http://www.photobus.co.uk/index.php?id=2&gallery=polyfoto.flv meadows, daniel (2008). “introduction to digital storytelling”. pdf. retrieved november 20, 2010 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/yourvideo/pdf/aguideto digitalstorytelling-bbc.pdf museo da pessoa. website. retrieved november 20, 2010 from http://www.museudapessoa.net/index.shtml, http://www.museudapessoa.net/ingles/life_stories.htm nichols, bill (1991). representing reality: issues and concepts in documentary. bloomington: indiana university press. nichols, bill (1994). blurred boundaries. questions of meaning in contemporary culture. bloomington: indiana university press. nichols, bill (2001). introduction to documentary. bloomington: indiana university press. renov, michael, ed. (1993). theorizing documentary. new york: routledge. renov, michael (2004). the subject of documentary. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. renov, michael (2008). “first-person films. some theses on self-inscription”. austin, thomas and wilma de jong (eds.). rethinking documentary. new perspectives, new practices. berkshire: open university press. 39-50. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 366 skartveit, hanne-lovise (2007). representing the real through play and interaction: changing forms of nonfiction. ph.d thesis. department of information science and media studies (infomedia), uib. walker, jill (2005). ”mirrors and shadows: the digital aestheticisation of oneself”. proceedings, digital arts and culture conference 2005 (1-3 december 2005). i nonfiction is here used as “texts where the audience is asked to believe that the events portrayed took place in the actual world” (skartveit 2007: 31). ii in fact, a discussion of nichols' documentary modes and the way these have helped cement the idea that the expository mode is always authoritarian while the reflexive mode is “truer” could be a rich addition to the discussions of digital storytelling workshops (see nichols 1994: 95, nichols 2001 and the critique by bruzzi [2000] 2006). iii for a broader discussion of this topic, see lister et al. 2003. title comparing the use of computer-supported collaboration tools among university students with different life circumstances miikka j. eriksson e-mail: miikka.eriksson@uef.fi päivi rasi e-mail: paivi.rasi@ulapland.fi hanna vuojärvi* e-mail: hanna.vuojarvi@ulapland.fi postal address for correspondence author: university of lapland / faculty of education hanna vuojärvi po box 122 fi-96101 rovaniemi, finland abstract the proportion of higher education students who integrate learning with various life circumstances such as employment or raising children is increasing. this study aims to compare whether and what kinds of differences exist between the perceived use of synchronous and asynchronous computermediated communication tools among university students with children or in full-time employment and students without these commitments. the data were collected in a finnish university by the means of an online questionnaire. the results indicate that students with multiple commitments were using more virtual learning environments and less instant messaging (im) especially when communicating with their peers. the low level of im might be an indication of not being able to or not wanting to create close ties with their peer students. the practical implication of the study is that pedagogical choices should support different kinds of learning strategies. students with multiple commitments, and especially students with children, should be encouraged and assisted to create stronger ties with their peers, if they are willing to do so. keywords: computer-mediated communication; university students with commitments, higher education, students’ use of information and communication technologies introduction the proportion of higher education students who integrate learning with various life circumstances such as employment or raising children is increasing (broadbridge & swanson, 2007). these commitments might limit the opportunities to participate in classes and extracurricular student activities as well as to interact with peers and instructors (graham & donaldson, 1999). a low level of academic and social integration can have negative effects on the progress of students’ studies and degree completion (tinto & pusser, 2006). in their review of the literature on the conditions within universities that are seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 mailto:miikka.eriksson@uef.fi mailto:paivi.rasi@ulapland.fi mailto:hanna.vuojarvi@ulapland.fi needed to promote student success (defined as the completion of a college degree), tinto and pusser (2006) concluded that “the key concept is that of educational community and the capacity of institutions to establish educational communities that involve all students as equal members” (p. 8). the literature provides inconsistent results on the effects of term-time employment on the progress of studies (reviewed in riggert, boyle, petrosko, ash, & rude-parkins, 2006). however, broadbridge and swanson (2007) noted that the overall focus of studies investigating the relationship between “earning and learning” has been on the negative effect of combining these roles. the research suggests that term‐time employment leads to poorer adjustment to university life in terms of academic performance, social inclusion, and psychological well‐being. broadbridge and swanson (2007) argued that it is difficult to draw generalizable conclusions regarding the interrelationship between university life and part‐time employment roles. having young children at home has, however, been found to adversely affect women’s (jacobs & berkowitz-king, 2002) and both male and female divorced parents’ degree completion (taniguchi & kaufman, 2005). students with job or family commitments need flexibility in order to organize their everyday lives (miller & lu, 2003). since multiple commitments may diminish the amount of face-to-face interactions in which they participate, the use of computer-mediated communication (cmc) applications may offer an alternative for study-related communication and collaboration. earlier studies have indicated that the possibilities offered by social networking sites (sns) such as facebook, with multiple ways of communication, play an important role in maintaining and advancing students’ social networks (ellison, steinfield, lampe, & vitak, 2011), but that online communication is primarily used for maintaining existing ties (ellison, steinfield, & lampe, 2007). therefore, without first getting to know their fellow students the possibilities provided by cmc may not be realized for students with multiple commitments. this is a case study of a finnish university’s students’ self-reported use of both synchronous and asynchronous cmc tools for collaboration and communication through laptops and information networks (ins). the main objective of this study is to compare whether and what kinds of differences exist between the perceived use of synchronous and asynchronous cmc tools among students with children or in full-time employment and students without these commitments. collaboration is defined in this article in its broadest sense as a situation in which two or more people attempt to learn something together (dillenbourg, 1999). communication is here defined as any social interaction that is mediated by cmc tools on laptops and ins, i.e. as cmc (jonassen, davidson, collins, campbell, & bannan haag, 1995). the “digital native” label is often used to explain how young people born after 1980 use technologies, but according to a review of research into university students’ use of technology, it may be too simplistic (margaryan et al., 2011). in their own research, margaryan and others (2011) found that the use of newer cmc applications such as sns was low for learning and socializing (and in the u.k. in 2007) and dependent on students’ age and discipline. the academic usefulness of sns was also found to be low in the study by vrocharidou and efthymiou (2012). margaryan and others (2011) concluded that future research should take into consideration a broader range of variables that relate to university students’ use of technology, such as students’ life circumstances. the study presented here addresses this aim in particular by focusing on students with extra commitments along with their studies. hence, the specific research questions of this study are as follows: 1. are there differences in the self-reported use of cmc tools for communicating with peers, instructors, family members, and friends between students with and without a job or family commitments? seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 122 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 2. are there differences in the self-reported use of laptops and information networks for collaboration with peers between students with or without a job or family commitments? university students’ use of cmc tools in communication and collaboration cmc tools can be used for both information exchange and collaboration, as well as to fulfill students’ social needs. the tools can be roughly divided into synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. instant messaging (im) is one of the most popular of these, but its use has been restricted to one’s “real space friends,” people whom they first met face-to-face in physical space settings (grinter & palen, 2002; mesch, 2012). hu et al. (2004) found that the amount of im use was positively associated with verbal, affective, and social intimacy and that frequent conversations using im actually encourage participants to meet face-to-face. asynchronous cmc tools include e-mail, discussion boards, and virtual learning environments (vles). the advantage of these applications is the opportunity to interact even if arranging a mutually convenient time for interaction is a challenge. although im has increased in popularity, especially among younger generations, e-mail still has a broader range of users (jones & fox, 2009). recchiuti (2003) found that university students made greater use of email in the case of task-related communication, reflecting a more instrumental form of cmc, while im use was more biased toward socially oriented forms of cmc. according to students, e-mail helps them to express their ideas to instructors better than in face-to-face situations (jones, 2002). a central premise of this study is that all use of technology is socially shaped and locally situated. accordingly, understanding students’ use or non-use of technologies requires that we situate their use of technology in the context of their everyday lives, including, for example, their social relationships, life stage and lifestyle (haythornwaite, 2001). research results on university students’ use of the latest forms of cmc, such as sns platforms (e.g. facebook, myspace), also support these findings. the latest forms of cmc had not yet reached the mainstream in finland when this study was conducted in 2008. these sites integrate a combination of asynchronous and synchronous tools (see, e.g., vrocharidou & efthymiou, 2012). compared to the more traditional forms of cmc, snss provide more flexible and personalizable forms of sociability, allowing students to maintain both weak and strong ties more easily (ellison et al., 2011). in the case of sns, it seems to be easier to “make friends” even with people who are merely acquaintances. pedagogical challenges and opportunities in the use of cmc a sense of community is essential for successful e-learning, and the lack of it is experienced as a major challenge by e-learners due to the limited social bonds and social presence among community members (hung & yuen, 2010; cf. tinto & pusser, 2006). therefore, hybrid communities that mix online interaction with face-to-face interaction may be ideal in terms of developing a sense of community. the use of social networking tools could contribute to university students’ positive learning experiences, and these experiences relate to the information-sharing feature and interactional function of technology (hung & yuen, 2010.) seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 123 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 research has indicated that peer and tutor support is a motivating force in blended learning settings and it results in improved coursework submission rates (hughes, 2007). furthermore, im conversations among peers have been shown to offer a means of practical and empathetic peer support for students (timmis, 2012). based on the arguments outlined above, students with multiple commitments may benefit from the opportunity of using communication tools in lieu of or in addition to face-to-face communication with their peers and instructors. their studying is determined by their responsibilities, based on schedules which are often asynchronous to those of their peers and outside the office hours of their instructors. it is probable that they would prefer to make greater use of asynchronous communication and less use of synchronous communication than other students. further, more frequent use of laptopand network-aided collaboration by students with multiple commitments could be expected. in our experience interactions within vles are usually instructor-initiated and very often, participation in online discussions is compulsory. because the social network is already “built into” the course structure, communication within vles might be easier than in traditional classroom-based course designs. students with multiple commitments may also be more eager to select courses that can be carried out in vles (dutton, dutton, & perry, 2002). data collection and analysis this study was conducted at the university of lapland in finland, where a laptop program was launched in the autumn of 2004. new students had the option to purchase a laptop partly sponsored by the university. the pedagogical use of laptops is, however, greatly dependent on the field of study, and on individual instructors and students. however, the use of the laptop in teaching depends to a large extent on the field of study undertaken and on individual instructors and students. data were collected by means of an online questionnaire inquiring into students’ experiences with the laptop program in 2008. as the data were collected some time ago, it is legitimate to question the ongoing validity of this study, especially given that we operate in the field of research into the pedagogical use of icts and the technologies are changing rapidly. however, although technologies change rapidly, this is not necessarily true of people and the ways in which technologies are used in everyday life, particularly in learning processes. recent research has discovered that university freshmen still use a fairly limited range of technologies (guo, dobson, & petrina, 2008; jones, ramanau, cross, & healing, 2010; kennedy, judd, churchward, gray, & krause, 2008; thompson, 2013), and they are not utilizing the internet to its full potential or critically reviewing the information they obtain (thompson, 2013). when assessing the period after the data collection in 2008, the pedagogical practices of applying technologies in teaching and learning processes do not seem to have been developed in sequence. although young adults enrolling in their university studies use icts in their everyday lives, they do not necessarily exploit the opportunities offered by technologies in learning (thompson, 2013). students’ learning histories do not necessarily include greater experience of using icts now than they did prior to 2008. the questionnaire was generated using the webropol website (www.webropol.com) and then delivered to students by e-mail. in april 2008, a personal link to the questionnaire was delivered by email to all the 2,888 seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 124 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 students who entered the university of lapland in the fall of 2004 or later. some students who had entered the university before the fall of 2004 but had later changed their majors were also included. reminder emails were sent a week later. the survey measured student experiences and knowledge of using computers and the internet, as well as experiences with laptops and networks in teaching, studying, and learning. in the questionnaire that comprised 119 items students were asked to provide background information (e.g., age, marital status, number of children, and work commitments during term-time). questions regarding students’ use of cmc tools and laptop-aided collaboration took the form of multiple-choice questions using a five-point likert-type scale. the questionnaire was accompanied by an e-mail, in which the research was introduced and students were asked for informed consent. the questionnaire was tested before delivery to students; overlapping questions were eliminated, and the questionnaires were shortened. the data were analyzed using spss version 15.0 (spss for windows). factor analysis (principal component analysis; varimax rotation) was used to group 14 individual communicationand collaboration-related items into meaningful categories (table 1). to test whether the student background characteristics have an effect on respondents’ self-reported patterns of communication and collaboration, the resultant categories were used to create scales. the internal consistency of the created scales was tested by calculating cronbach’s alpha (cronbach, 1951). cronbach’s alpha takes values from 0 (indicating no correlation) to 1 (indicating identical results), and an alpha value of about 0.7 or above is considered evidence of acceptable internal consistency (nunnally, 1978). all scales were recoded into five-point scales for further analysis. the kruskal-wallis χ2 test was applied to analyze the relations between the scales and background information (contingencies). as the kruskal-wallis test is not a good indicator of the strength of a relationship and is partially dependent on n, goodman and kruskal’s tau, an additional measure of association was used (goodman & kruskal, 1954). goodman and kruskal’s tau follows the proportional-reduction-in-error logic (reynolds, 1984) and takes values between 0 (no association) and 1 (completely related). when possible, the exact significance was computed—otherwise, a monte carlo estimation of the significance based on 10,000 samples was used (mehta & patel, 1996). statistical differences were deemed significant at p = 0.05, and each tested association is mentioned as significant in the results section only if both statistical tests used indicate significant results. correlation analysis (spearman’s rho, ρ) was used to test correlations between the created scales and data on computer and internet use. respondents a total of 575 students opened the link to the online questionnaire in 2008, 183 of whom did not complete the poll. therefore, only 13.6% (392) of the whole target population (2,888 students) filled in the questionnaire. of the 392 respondents, 372 had either a university-sponsored laptop or a laptop of unspecified provenance in their use and were therefore in a position to answer all the questions included in this particular article. one reason for the low response rate was probably the cover letter in which it was stated that the study concerned the use of laptops and wireless networks at the university of lapland—naturally excluding many students who did not have a laptop and were therefore unable to take advantage of the wireless networks. the proportion of male (26%) and female (74%) respondents was fairly representative of the whole target population. each of the university’s four faculties was represented in proportion to its student population. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 125 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 the mean age of the respondents was 28.5 years (median = 25), with the youngest students being 20 and the oldest being 59 years old. 22.2% of respondents had children, 48.5% were married or cohabiting, 19.1% were had a partner, and 32.4% were single. a majority of the students worked during term-time either regularly (34.4%) or occasionally (39.3%), while 26.3% of the respondents did not work at all during their studies. much have you used laptops and results first, a factor analysis was conducted in order to group 14 individual communicationand collaboration-related items into meaningful categories. four factors with corresponding items and eigenvalues over 1.0 emerged from the data (table 1). table 1. factor analysis (principal components; varimax rotation) results of fourteen items describing students’ self-reported computer-mediated communication and laptopand network-aided collaboration. factors items 1 2 3 4 estimate, how much have you used laptops and networks to … do group work with your peers while working in the same space? .611 do group work using e-mail or virtual learning environments? .627 work on a shared document online with your peers? .647 work together on a shared idea? .801 publish information and pass it on to others? .679 how often have you used … virtual learning environments to communicate with peers? .807 discussion boards to communicate with teachers? .789 virtual learning environments to communicate with teachers? .839 discussion boards to communicate with peers? .735 instant messaging to communicate with peers? .887 instant messaging to communicate with family members and friends? .883 e-mail to communicate with peers? .771 e-mail to communicate with family members and friends? .700 e-mail to communicate with teachers? .679 cronbach’s alpha 0.841 0.749 0.790 0.628 these four categories were used to create scales that were tested for internal consistency (cronbach’s alpha; table 1) and named as follows: 1) communication with peers and instructors using vles (vles), 2) laptopand information network-aided collaboration with peers (collaboration), 3) communication by im (im), and 4) communication by e-mail (e-mail). the actual use of im with instructors was practically non-existent (0.3% of respondents) and was therefore omitted from the factor analysis. the factor analysis showed that communication by each communication tool differed somewhat from each other, as communication by each tool was grouped into its own category. however, as cronbach’s alpha for “communication by e-mail” was only 0.628 and a value of 0.7 is considered evidence of acceptable reliability (nunnally, 1978), communication with peers, instructors, and family members or friends (other than peers) using e-mail were all analyzed individually without creating a common scale. to make the comparison between e-mail and im use easier, the use of im with peers, instructors, and seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 126 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 family members or friends were all analyzed individually. as far as the internal consistencies of the other scales were concerned, the reliability loadings were well above 0.7 (table 1). self-reported use of cmc for communicating with peers, instructors, family members, and friends significant differences in the self-reported use of e-mail with peers (table 2) or instructors (table 3) were not found between students with and without family commitments, employment status, genders, or different age groups. however, goodman and kruskal’s tau suggests that students working regularly or occasionally might have been somewhat more active users of e-mail for communication with peers than students not working at all. as far as the self-reported e-mail use for communication with family members or friends was concerned, the results indicate that having children, regular employment during termtime, and increasing age all significantly increased e-mail use (table 4). gender did not influence the self-reported use of e-mail with family members or friends. table 2. students’ self-reported use of e-mail and instant messaging (im) for communication with peers, and use of virtual learning environments (vle) for communication with peers and teachers. e-mail im vle mean (sd) χ2 τ mean (sd) χ2 τ mean (sd) χ2 τ have children 2.930 0.002 65.949** 0.073** 19.609** 0.017** yes 3.18 (1.09) 1.58 (1.09) 2.21 (0.88) no 3.43 (1.02) 3.26 (1.56) 1.74 (0.72) employment 3.365 0.011* 19.778** 0.026** 6.133* 0.028** yes/regularly 3.36 (1.09) 2.38 (1.63) 1.97 (0.77) occasionally 3.48 (1.01) 3.09 (1.56) 1.76 (0.75) not at all 3.25 (1.00) 3.29 (1.57) 1.78 (0.83) gender 0.128 0.002 12.518** 0.014** 1.352 0.001 male 3.41 (1.00) 3.41 (1.52) 1.74 (0.72) female 3.37 (1.05) 2.73 (1.63) 1.86 (0.80) age 7.562 0.009 100.117** 0.123** 32.203** 0.035** 19–20 / < 24 3.36 (1.05) 3.70 (1.38) 1.62 (0.68) 21–25? / 24–25 3.41 (1.04) 3.35 (1.52) 1.69 (0.74) > 25 / 26–29 3.60 (0.96) 2.87 (1.59) 1.86 (0.77) / > 29 3.17 (1.05) 1.55 (1.11) 2.20 (0.81) total 3.38 (1.04) 2.91 (1.63) 1.83 (0.78) note: mean values (sd), the results of the statistical tests (kruskal-wallis chi square = χ2 and goodman and kruskal’s tau = τ), and their significance (* = p< 0.05, ** = p < 0.01) are also included. differences in the self-reported use of im for communication with peers (table 2) and family members or friends (table 4) were very clear, as students with children, students working during term-time, older students, and female students were all significantly less active users of im than the rest of the respondents. only a few students reported having used im for communication with instructors, and no significant differences were found between students whose life circumstances differed (table 3). the self-reported use of vles was very low (table 2). students with children, students in regular employment, and older students all made greater use of vles for communication than other students (table 2). it should, however, be noted that more than 35% of all respondents had never used vles for communication. gender had no effect on the self-reported use of vles for communication. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 127 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 table 3. students’ self-reported use of e-mail and instant messaging (im) for communication with instructors. e-mail im mean (sd) χ2 τ mean (sd) χ2 τ have children 0.449 0.003 0.001 0.001 yes 2.99 (0.93) 1.05 (0.22) no 2.90 (0.89) 1.08 (0.35) employment 2.857 0.008 3.321 0.010 yes/regularly 3.01 (0.98) 1.11 (0.40) occasionally 2.93 (0.86) 1.05 (0.28) not at all 2.79 (0.82) 1.05 (0.30) gender 1.928 0.004 1.479 0.003 male 2.82 (0.90) 1.12 (0.46) female 2.95 (0.89) 1.05 (0.27) age 4.143 0.008 5.930 0.014 19–20 / < 24 2.79 (0.87) 1.04 (0.28) 21–25? / 24–25 2.94 (0.88) 1.03 (0.16) > 25 / 26–29 3.07 (0.92) 1.13 (0.46) / > 29 2.92 (0.90) 1.09 (0.36) total 2.92 (0.90) 1.07 (0.33) note: mean values (sd), the results of the statistical tests (kruskal-wallis chi square = χ2 and goodman and kruskal’s tau = τ,) and their significance (* = p< 0.05, ** = p< 0.01) are also included. table 4. students’ self-reported use of e-mail and instant messaging (im) for communication with family members and friends (other than peers). e-mail im mean (sd) χ2 τ mean (sd) χ2 τ have children 15.582** 0.011** 35.707** 0.032** yes 4.13 (0.86) 2.71 (1.51) no 3.56 (1.12) 3.85 (1.31) employment 13.586** 0.022** 22.189** 0.025** yes/regularly 3.94 (1.13) 3.08 (1.58) occasionally 3.59 (1.05) 3.79 (1.27) not at all 3.48 (1.07) 4.01 (1.27) gender 1.000 0.004 6.987** 0.007* male 3.56 (1.21) 3.95 (1.29) female 3.72 (1.06) 3.50 (1.46) age 27.230** 0.028** 52.770** 0.057** 19–20 / < 24 3.34 (1.04) 4.09 (1.16) 21–25? / 24–25 3.58 (1.14) 3.87 (1.27) > 25 / 26–29 3.80 (1.05) 3.82 (1.19) / > 29 4.08 (1.04) 2.58 (1.59) total 3.68 (1.10) 3.61 (1.43) note: mean values (sd), the results of the statistical tests (kruskal-wallis chi square = χ2 and goodman and kruskal’s tau = τ), and their significance (* = p< 0.05, ** = p < 0.01) are also included. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 128 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 self-reported use of laptops and information networks for collaboration with peers having children, employment during term-time, gender or age did not affect the amount of self-reported laptop-aided collaboration. the chi square test suggested that men were slightly more active users of laptops and in for collaboration, but this was not supported by goodman and kruskal’s tau. table 5. students’ self-reported use of laptops and information networks for collaboration with peers. collaboration mean (sd) χ2 τ have children 1.074 0.002 yes 2.53 (0.84) no 2.64 (0.82) employment 3.639 0.011 yes/regularly 2.73 (0.88) occasionally 2.57 (0.76) not at all 2.56 (0.83) gender 4.110* 0.004 male 2.77 (0.87) female 2.57 (0.80) age 1.470 0.008 19–20 / < 24 2.56 (0.82) 21–25? / 24–25 2.68 (0.76) > 25 / 26–29 2.66 (0.82) / > 29 2.60 (0.88) total 2.62 (0.82) note: mean values (sd), the results of the statistical tests (kruskal-wallis chi square = χ2 and goodman and kruskal’s tau = τ), and their significance (* = p< 0.05, ** = p < 0.01) are also included. table 6. correlations (spearman) and their significances (* = p< 0.05, ** = p < 0.01) between computer use measures and the use of cmc tools and computerand network-aided collaboration. how often have you used … computer at home internet at home computer on campus internet on campus your laptop on campus wlan*** on campus e-mail with peers 0.162** 0.175 0.204* 0.230** 0.220** 0.219** e-mail with instructors 0.036 0.055 0.105* 0.089 0.099 0.088 e-mail with family friends 0.038 0.064 –0.003 –0.010 0.026 0.000 iming with peers 0.218** 0.231 0.192** 0.280** 0.216** 0.251** iming with instructors 0.016 0.029 0.091 0.103 0.133* 0.208** iming with family members or friends 0.174** 0.210 0.197** 0.235** 0.206** 0.233** vles –0.043 0.001 0.102 0.051 0.207** 0.142* collaboration 0.063 0.072 0.263** 0.245** 0.315** 0.303** ***wireless local area network the results of the spearman correlation analysis indicate that most collaborative work with laptops is conducted within the campus area (table 6). the use of vles correlated only with laptop and wlan use on campus, while the overall use of vles for communication was at a very low level and further conclusions based on this data should not be drawn. e-mail use with instructors and family members or friends was the only variable that in no way—or only to a negligible extent—corresponded to computer and internet use measures. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 129 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 discussion this case study has inquired into the extent and nature of finnish university students’ self-reported use of e-mail, im, and vles for both collaboration and communication. the results indicate that students with a job or family commitments, as well as older students, all reported having used significantly more vles and significantly less im for communication than other students. e-mail seems to be an important communication tool for students in general, regardless of their life circumstances, as it was frequently used by all participants. the only differences were to be found in communication between students and their family members and friends. other researchers have found that greater use is made of online communication with friends than with family members, probably reflecting a generation gap in technology skills (baym, zhang, & lin, 2004). in a study carried out by lo and leung (2009), a majority of respondents (college students) indicated that they would choose im rather than e-mail if they were compelled to choose just one medium to communicate with friends and family members. this trend points to a gradual shift in communication from e-mail toward im and sns as younger generations have reached higher education institutions. neither students’ life circumstances nor age had an affect on the self-reported activity of collaboration using laptops and ins, but males collaborated more actively than females. the insignificant differences in the degree of collaboration between students in different life circumstances and age groups indicate that the students with family or work commitments have been successful in using their laptops and ins for collaboration. however, based on the data collected we can only surmise whether students with commitments are still excluded from some of the face-to-face collaboration and are compensating for this deficiency by selecting courses in which priority is given to, for example, vles. because laptop-aided collaboration correlated most strongly with laptop and wireless local area network (wlan) use on campus, the results indicate that most collaborative work with laptops is conducted within the campus area or at least between partners who have the opportunity to spend time on campus— and therefore the opportunity to establish such social relations with peers that enable successful cmc and collaboration. this is in accordance with the results of bryant et al. (2006) and mesch (2009), who suggested that, although cmc may facilitate the formation of new social relationships, its main function is still the maintenance of existing social ties. whether the courses, in which these student have participated, have been able to foster the creation of these relationships is not known. however, to gain a deeper understanding of factors associated with collaborative work with laptops, one should take into account curricula and pedagogies, both of which shape the use of laptops for collaborative work (e.g., tinto & pusser, 2006). instead, in the case of students with extra commitments, the use of vles is probably related to the fact that they are keen to select flexible online courses that do not depend on either face-to-face or synchronous online communication (see also miller & lu, 2003). it should be noted that at the time the vle used in the university of lapland did not allow synchronous communication between participants. however, when all course students are obliged to participate (e.g., through the conversations that were most often asynchronous in these learning environments during the course) previous social connections might not have such a strong effect on students’ communication activity. students with a job or family commitments as well as older students used im significantly less for communication with their student peers than other students. although the frequency of e-mail use was at the same level among stuseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 130 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 dent groups, it should be noted that students without extra commitments probably use more face-to-face communication with their peers, which consequently decreases the need for cmc. since most students with commitments make frequent use of im for communication with their family members and friends (table 4), the low use of im with their peers (table 2) suggests that communication through im requires stronger ties than communication by email. this conclusion is supported by the results of mesch (2012) indicating that im is primarily used to maintain existing ties rather than to develop new ones. however, these conclusions do not concur the results of kim et al. (2007), who studied college students’ mean closeness in communication relationships by medium and ranked im and e-mail use at the same level of closeness. the other explanation for the low frequency of im use with peers might be that students with commitments find it hard to arrange a mutually convenient time for synchronous communication and collaboration with their student peers, or, that they prefer to study independently and follow their own schedules. because the motivation for using im would seem primarily to be social (quan-haase, 2008), it is unlikely that the low level of im use with fellow students has an adverse effect on the successful outcome of the studies undertaken by these students. it could indicate that students with commitments have a low level of social support from their fellow students either by choice or because establishing strong social ties with peers is challenging for them due to their other engagements. the results of the factor analysis suggest that the use of cmc tools differs from each other. this might be because user characteristics (e.g., personality type) affect the choice of cmc tools (e.g., wilson, 2000) or because the content of communication (e.g., social vs. study-related communication), on average, differs between these tools (e.g., mesch, 2009). although e-mail use with peers, instructors, and family members or friends were all grouped into the same category by the factor analysis, reliability tests (cronbach’s alpha) indicated their incompatibility for a common scale, as the amount of e-mail use was clearly dependent on the target of communication. it therefore seems not only that students’ use of cmc tools depends on the students’ background and the target of communication but also that the content of communication has an effect on the choice of cmc tools used. on the basis of the study presented here it can be concluded that university students’ individual life circumstances have an effect on how they use cmc tools for communication. the practical implication of the study is that pedagogical choices should support different kinds of learning strategies. students with multiple commitments, and especially students with children, should be encouraged and assisted to create stronger ties with their peers, if they are willing to do so. sometimes it may be more convenient to conduct studies individually without having to negotiate timetables and distribution of work in a condition that is largely dictated by other commitments. further research, however, is needed to clarify and explain this topic. when interpreting these results, one should remember that this is a case study, so all respondents come from one university. in addition, the survey is not representative of the experiences across the whole student population in the university but only those actively using computers and ins, so generalizations should be made with caution. acknowledgements the results reported here are part of the mobit project (developing mobile network-based teaching, studying and learning processes) surveying university students’ expectations and experiences of laptop computers and networks. the project was funded by the ministry of education for the years 2007–09. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 131 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 references broadbridge, a., & swanson, v. 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(2000). student characteristics and computer-mediated communication. computers & education, 34(2), 67–76. biographies miikka eriksson, phd, received his phd from the university of joensuu, finland, in 2007. his doctoral thesis focused on forest ecology, but since then he has conducted research into mobile icts in teaching and learning both in vocational and higher education. his research interests include primary and higher education pedagogy and especially the pedagogy of science education as well as the use of mobile icts in teaching and learning. currently he is a university lecturer in biology and geography in the university of eastern finland’s philosophical faculty, school of applied educational science and teacher education. päivi rasi (previously hakkarainen), phd, mssc, title of docent, received her phd from the university of lapland, finland, in 2007. her doctoral thesis focused on the educational use of digital videos for supporting meaningful learning. currently she is university lecturer in adult and vocational teacher education at the university of lapland's faculty of education. her research interests include higher education pedagogy; icts and moving images in teaching and learning; online teaching and learning; and internet in elderly people’s everyday life. previously she worked as university lecturer in media education, and project manager and researcher in several national and international research and development projects encouraging the educational use of icts. she has published her research in international scientific journals and compilation works. for further information, please visit: http://paivihakkarainen.wordpress.com hanna vuojärvi, phd, received her phd from the university of lapland, finland, in 2013. her doctoral thesis focused on conceptualizing personal and seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 134 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 http://web.ewu.edu/groups/academicaffairs/ir/npec_5_tinto_pusser_report.pdf http://web.ewu.edu/groups/academicaffairs/ir/npec_5_tinto_pusser_report.pdf http://paivihakkarainen.wordpress.com/ mobile learning environments in higher education from university students’ point of view. she is currently university lecturer in media education at the university of lapland’s faculty of education, centre for media pedagogy. her research interests include learning environments; decentralized and mobile simulations in health care education; and mobile icts in teaching and learning. previously she has worked as a lecturer of information technology at the department of research methodologies and as a researcher and a project manager in projects focusing on educational use of mobile icts in vocational and higher education, and simulation pedagogy in medical education. she has published several international peer-reviewed articles and chapters in books. for further information, please visit: http://hannavuojarvi.wordpress.com seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 135 vol. 10 – issue 2 – 2014 http://hannavuojarvi.wordpress.com/ comparing the use of computer-supported collaboration tools among university students with different life circumstances abstract introduction university students’ use of cmc tools in communication and collaboration pedagogical challenges and opportunities in the use of cmc data collection and analysis respondents results self-reported use of cmc for communicating with peers, instructors, family members, and friends self-reported use of laptops and information networks for collaboration with peers discussion acknowledgements references biographies title seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 education for all revisited: on concepts of sharing in the open educational resources (oer) movement theo hugi professor, institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies university of innsbruck, austria coordinator of the interfaculty innsbruck media studies research forum e-mail: theo.hug@uibk.ac.at abstract ii relationships between the private and public sphere in education have been discussed repeatedly and in various ways. however, the role of media and media dynamics is widely underestimated in this context. it is only recently, since the digital turn, that the focus of the debates has changed. in the past few years, manifold initiatives have aimed at opening up education on various levels using digital communications technologies and creative commons licenses. additionally, massive open online courses (moocs) have been d eveloped. today, oer (open educational resources) is used widely as an umbrella term for free content creation initiatives: oer commons (http://www.oercommons.org/), open courseware (ocw), oer repositories, ocw search facilities, university ocw initiatives, and related activities. shared resource sites such as connexions (http://cnx.org), wikieducator (http://wikieducator.org), and curriki (www.curriki.org) have an increasing number of visitors and contributors. on one hand, the motif of ‘education for all’ is once again appearing in related debates and practices. on the other hand, notions of sharing play a crucial role in open content and open education strategies. this purpose of this paper is threefold: it starts with an outline of selected understandings of sharing in educational contexts; it then addresses their relevance for oer development through examining contrasting and relational conceptual dimensions. lastly, the contribution aims to sketch different forms of sharing related to media forms. keywords: open educational resources (oer), open education (oe), universal education, sharing, educational philosophy theo.hug@uibk.ac.at seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 11 introduction the relationship between the private and public spheres in the context of educational processes is significant to pedagogical and educational discourses in multiple ways. in the western tradition of thought, historical research sometimes refers to plato’s private academy, to his educational teachings, and his idea of establishing an educational state as an initial milestone. for plato, education was tantamount to stepping out of the cave with its shadows and false images. evidently, people who are tied to their chairs must be liberated and led out of the cave. eventually, those who accomplish the difficult and painful ascent to find the sunlight of ‘ultimate reality’ can consider themselves fortunate and pity those who are left behind. although individuals must accomplish the ascent for themselves, they can only do so through a collective effort, and by heeding the advice of a midwife. in this process, opportunities are distributed unevenly; they are tied to age, social status, and gender, and in plato’s model it is only male adult philosophers who can obtain the highest level of education. such men, once they have advanced to the idea of the ‘good’ and the ‘true,’ are capable of reasonable action both in private and public life. generally speaking, plato’s model is that of an authoritarian corporate state consisting of workers and farmers as well as guardians and rulers. in this model, the education of individuals is subordinate to the objectives of the state, thus representing an elitist view that relies on training and drilling. various elitist views of education have been present since greek antiquity. regarding the public sphere, such views generally manifest as social norms. even when one comes to the conclusion, as urban (2004) does, that elitism and democracy are not incompatible (urban, 2004, p. 35), doubts regarding the equality of opportunity (see bourdieu & passeron, 1971) and the issue of the “possibility of an equality of opportunities” (bremer, 2008) persist. we need to remember that formal efforts of establishing equality of opportunity have had undesired secondary effects, or have resulted in the contrary, which in view of the many paradoxes that exist in educational settings (winkel, 1986; hug, 2011) is not altogether surprising. in german-language educational manuals and reference books the term “public sphere” appears in the second half of the 19th century, with the corresponding educational subjects studied throughout the 20th century (brüggen, 2004, p. 724). public opinion, understood as a relative consensus of large sections of the population, has always played a role by providing points of orientation for government and the groups and individuals in a society governed. this applies to traditional, pre-bourgeois societies and the bourgeois and postmodern ones, with the respective complementary phrases being public vs. secret and public vs. private. many of the more recent reinterpretations and new understandings of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’—key themes in the social and cultural sciences ever since the enlightenment—have been taken up in pedagogy and educational science. this is particularly true of the fields of primary and secondary educational pedagogy, educational anthropology, and philosophy of education (see, for example, oelkers, peukert & ruhloff, 1989; oelkers, 1993; levin 1999; casale & horlacher 2007; amos, meseth & proske, 2011). in these contexts, media-related subjects and the dynamics of media change were referred to only occasionally (meder 1989; vogel 1989; korte 2007). at least in the german-speaking world, no systematic overview of the ways in which current concepts of the public sphere have been discussed by educationalists exists (seubert, 2013; wallner & adolf, 2011; internet & gesellschaft’s collaboratory, 2011). seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 12 however, for several years, digital media, aspects of openness, and the public sphere have been discussed under the headings of open education (oe) and open educational resources (oer; atkins, brown & hammond, 2007; caswell, henson, jensen & wiley, 2008, bergamin, müller & filk, 2009; iiyoshi & kumar, 2010; butcher, 2011). it is telling that these debates are conducted vigorously on the internet, but they do not (yet) appear in specialized manuals and reference works (mcculloch & crook, 2008; tippelt & schmidt, 2010; bockhorst, reinwand & zacharias, 2012). in these debates, the more long-standing issues of open access to education, to educational opportunities, and to learning materials are addressed once again and reconsidered under the conditions of mediatization, digitization, individualization, and globalization. in historical terms, calls for “free educational infrastructures” (stallman, 2010, p. 155), “enabling universal education” (caswell et al., 2008), and “free education for all” iii are anything but new (comenius, 1967, tenorth, 1994), yet oer debates tend to be characterized by a disregard for history. iv one key concept in this context, and one that also figures prominently in debates of web 2.0 and net culture (castells, 2009, p. 126; sützl, stalder, maier & hug, 2011), is sharing. to be sure, models and practices of sharing are not a novelty in pedagogy and education, or in the culture of communication. v however, the frequency and the varying ways in which the term is used the web 2.0 context (john, 2013), and in oer debates, makes it necessary to consider the term more closely. the fundamental importance of sharing practices with respect to socio-technical aspects of processes of opening and the creating of (partial) public spheres also makes such consideration necessary. what does ‘sharing’ in education, and in the discussion of oer in particular, refer to? what meanings and conceptual dimensions might be identified? in this paper, my intention is to attempt an answer to these questions, and to sketch briefly various forms of sharing in media terms. sharing in educational contexts and in the oermovement sharing is part of our everyday experience insofar as most of us have been taught the concept in one way or another and are thus acquainted with various ways of approaching sharing. in line with the educational styles, relationships, and sociocultural customs present in our upbringing, we were encouraged to share food, toys—as well as time and knowledge. we may consider the results of these educational efforts pleasant or disagreeable, incomprehensible or obvious, and these efforts may have generated the desired results or their opposite; whatever the case may be, the confluence of our experience and of the use of the word ‘sharing’ has familiarized us with some of the communicative, distributive, and moral meanings of the term. definitions include: to divide something into parts, to take part, to empathize or sympathize, to be involved in something, to have something in common, or to have something together, to cede, to make available, to pass on, to distribute, to communicate, to use together, to show, to experience something together, to share concerns, to care for something, to be concerned about somebody or something, etc. (in german, many of these verbs contain the root teil, as in teilen, sharing). yet even if we have not systematically thought about these experiences, and about the related insights in terms of education, socialization, and enculturation, there are generally three aspects that stand out as relevant:  the various forms and rationales of sharing correspond to affects such as joy, sorrow, anger, or shame. given that situational contexts and seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 13 patterns of experience are repetitive by nature, we can expect affective-cognitive interactions that are stabilized intrapersonally and through communication, and then are normatively assessed in cultural contexts. subsequently, when perceptions or thoughts of sharing give rise to certain feelings, which in turn modify cognitive functions such as memory, remembrance, attention, and combinational thought, we can speak of an affective-logical context in as defined by ciompi (1997).  furthermore, the aspect of time is relevant: sharing may refer to moments of showing, or dividing, to short-term and situationally circumscribed forms of jointly using a resource, to medium-term common experience (such as the temporary care of someone), or to permanent friendships. vi  and finally, we learn that the promises behind the admonishments and requests to share may or may not be empty promises. we learn that sharing is a more or less risky behaviour, the outcome of which is open, and that others may well reap the fruit of our sharing. even if the people around us expect sharing to pay and that it is legitimate to expect a return on it, there may on occasion be a large gap between insistent promises and the outcomes observed. sharing may be risky, or, in other words, the difference between sharing common values, and sharing as an unconditional value may be a painful experience. as a pedagogically relevant phenomenon, the moral dimension of sharing is evident in a wealth of manuals/can be seen in the wealth of guide books. for some time now, the sharing of custody (german uses ‘erziehungsberechtigt’ or having the right to educate, to raise, to bring up a minor) has become a common theme in divorce procedures. however, in recent pedagogical and educational manuals and reference works, the term ‘sharing’—in spite of its ubiquitous relevance and centrality as a keyword—does not appear. this is different in works on media socialization and, above all, work on teaching and learning with digital media. here, the term ‘sharing’ appears with increasing frequency, and the term ‘sharism’ has occasionally been used, too (ackermann 2011, pp. 2–3). vii in the past few years, a variety of new initiatives aim at opening education on various levels, using digital communication technologies, creative commons licensing, and massive open online courses (moocs). today, open educational resources (oer) is widely used as an umbrella term for free content initiatives, oer commons, viii open courseware (ocw), oer archives, ocw search tools, academic ocw initiatives, and similar activities. commonly used resources such as connexions, ix wikieducator, x and curriki xi have a constantly growing number of users and collaborators. the first public mention of the term open educational resources occurred in 2002 at the unesco forum on the impact of open courseware for higher education in developing countries (unesco, 2002). the discussions focused on open courseware and possibilities of improving access to open teaching and learning resources mostly in what the united nations regarded as developing countries. in working towards a definition, the following preliminaries were indicated: in defining open educational resources, the elements to consider are: – the vision for the service: open access to the resource, with provision for adaptation. – the method of provision: enabled by information/communication technologies. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 14 – the target group: a diverse community of users. – the purpose: to provide an educational, non-commercial resource [...]the recommended definition of open educational resources is: the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes. (unesco, 2002, p. 24) figure 1: global open educational resources logo xii in a report for the oecd’s centre for educational research and innovation, jan hylén sums up a widely used definition, adding to it as follows: open educational resources are digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.' to clarify this further , oer is said to include:  learning content: full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.  tools: software to support the development, use, re-use and delivery of learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.  implementation resources: intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice, and localization of content. (hylén, 2006, p. 1–2) this and other open definitions of oer xiii contain a certain amount of imprecision and ambivalence, of which some writers are fully aware. xiv the same applies to the term ‘sharing.’ its use in oer literature is frequent, but usually it is not accompanied by a detailed discussion of the term. in his report, hylén first asks for the reasons of sharing, preparing a point that is relevant both to open source software (oss), open access (oa), and oer: the first and most fundamental question anyone arguing for free and open sharing of software or content has to answer is – why? why should anyone give away anything for free? what are the possible gains in doing that? advocates of the oss, oa and oer movements of course have arguments in favour of their specific cause. but there are also general arguments that apply to all three. these can be divided into pull arguments seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 15 which list the gains to be reached by open sharing of software, scientific articles and educational materials, and push arguments that register threats or negative effects that might appear if software developers, scientists and educationalists do not share their work openly. (hylén, 2006, p. 5) xv hylén points to the risk of marginalizing traditional academic values as a result of business interests as well as of hard and software monopolies, and emphasizes the advantages of sharing: on the other side, a number of possible positive effects from open sharing are put forward, such as that free sharing means broader and faster dissemination and thereby more people are involved in problem-solving which in turn means rapid quality improvement and faster technical and scientific development; decentralised development increases quality, stability and security; free sharing of software, scientific results and educational resources reinforces societal development and diminishes social inequality. from a more individual standpoint, open sharing is claimed to increase publicity, reputation and the pleasure of sharing with peers. (hylén, 2006, p. 5) according to hylén, there are also several points that speak in favour of a commitment to oer from an institutional perspective, the foremost of which is altruism: one is the altruistic argument that sharing knowledge is a good thing to do and also in line with academic traditions, as pointed out by the oa movement. openness is the breath of life for education and research. resources created by educators and researchers should subsequently be open for anyone to use and reuse. (hylén, 2006, p. 5) no precise meaning of ‘sharing’ is given in the report. as in many other works on oer, the term is used frequently, but lacks precision. below are a few more examples of this kind of use: lerman, miyagawa & margulis (2010) take the open courseware development at mit (margulies 2004) as their point of departure, and state, at the outset of their contribution: open sharing of knowledge is at the heart of the academic process. for many faculties, it is an intrinsic value, convincingly demonstrated in their teaching and research. opencourseware (ocw), developed at mit, is a structured, institutional manifestation of this personal and professional value. (lerman et al., 2010, p. 213) lerman et al. emphasize that in 2010 as many as 150 other academic institutions launched, or were in the process of launching, ocw websites, and in doing so were promoting a culture of sharing. we believe that this increasing adoption of the ocw concept will promote an even more widely accepted culture of open sharing, which will become more and more mainstream and will eventually become customary practice in education at all levels. (lerman et al., 2010, p. 213) further into their contribution, they refer to a “global culture of sharing“ (ibid. pp. 223–224) and to “two-way sharing through communities of practice” (ibid., pp. 225–226) as the next steps in this development. furthermore, they refer to the benefits generated for mit, and to the positive effects within the institution (ibid. p. 221), without, however, discussing the problematic aspects of ocw as a tool of marketing and recruitment, or as strategy of commercialization. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 16 topics directly discussed in the commonwealth of learning’s basic guide to open educational resources (butcher, 2011) include, inter alia, quality improvement and marketing aspects: taking a demand-driven approach can be justified in terms of the improvements in quality that can flow from it. in addition, though, this approach to materials development is cost effective. a further advantage is that, as an obvious by-product, it will typically lead to institutions starting to share a growing percentage of their own educational materials online, released under an open licence. most institutions and educators are instinctively nervous about this, but evidence is now starting to emerge that institutions that share their materials online are attracting increased interest from students in enrolling in their programmes. this in turn brings potential commercial benefits, because the sharing of materials online raises an institution’s ‘visibility’ on the internet, while also providing students more opportunities to investigate the quality of the educational experience they will receive there. as students in both developed and developing countries are relying increasingly heavily on the internet to research their educational options, sharing of oer may well become an increasingly important marketing tool for institutions. (see butcher, 2011, p. 15) the authors list various benefits which can arise from sharing content under an open license (2011, pp. 11–12), and they are also aware of concerns: a key concern for educators and senior managers of educational institutions about the concept of oer relates to ‘giving away’ intellectual property, with potential loss of commercial gain that might come from it. this is often combined with a related anxiety that others will take unfair advantage of their intellectual property, benefitting by selling it, plagiarizing it (i.e. passing it off as their own work), or otherwise exploiting it. these concerns are completely understandable. in some instances, of course, when educators raise this concern, it actually masks a different anxiety – namely, that sharing their educational materials will open their work to scrutiny by their peers (and that their peers may consider their work to be of poor quality). whether or not the concern is justified, it is important to determine what is truly driving the concerns of educators. when the concern is the loss of commercial opportunity, this requires a particular response (engaging with the incentives for sharing). but when this masks a concern about peer and student scrutiny, this needs to be dealt with differently (and will usually involve some policy or management drive to overcome resistance to change). (butcher, 2011, pp. 9–10) additionally, i wish to cite two examples from the german-speaking world that present a similar argument. with reference to hylén (2006), barbara rossegger (2012) writes: by freely sharing and reusing materials developed at public institutions using tax payer's money, other public institutions will be able to benefit from them. content and materials do not have to re-invented, although this continues to be a widespread practice. (rossegger, 2012, p. 23) bergamin and filk (2009) adopt a more sceptical position, asking whether “oer serve the sharing of knowledge, or whether they should rather be seen as part of a ‘new’ culture in which everything can be consumed for free” (p. 26). they question the feasibility of a didactical change of course—away from traditional towards oer-based learning and teaching—and also ask “who will beneseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 17 fit from this new form of distribution of knowledge and educational materials” (p. 36). elsewhere they point to a general relevance of media-didactical and mediapedagogical transformations in the age of web 2.0, and in modern, knowledge-based societies, where “new ways of combining teaching and research must continuously be conceptualized and tested” (filk & bergamin 2009, p. 10). if we agree that through the web learning continues to become an increasingly autonomous and individual activity, we may assume, given the user numbers presented by open courseware providers, a similar development to take place on open-resource e-learning portals. a general success of such projects, including their specific adaptation to the various levels of learning, might in fact not only be expressive of a mediapedagogical and media-didactical change of course, it might indeed be indicative of a larger change of direction in educational policies and educational science in this domain, away from the ‘privatization’ of knowledge (internalization) and from the respective modes of communication, to the ‘sharing’ of knowledge, and ultimately to a cooperative production of teaching and learning themes. (filk & bergamin, 2009, p. 10) leading on from this speculation, the authors ask whether “open educational resources will in future define a sui generis (media) pedagogical standard of education” (ibid. p. 11; emphasis in the original). many other examples could be added here. most of them have several points in common:  they consider sharing as having a key role in the oer movement;  practice-centered, pedagogical, socio-technical, economic, and policy-centered perspectives are predominant;  although the use of ‘sharing’ is frequent, an explicit discussion of various ways in which the term could be understood rarely takes place. given the key significance implicitly or explicitly attributed to practices and dynamics of sharing, it does seem remarkable that theoretical discussions of the sharing phenomenon are largely absent. the focus on practical application has pushed differentiated theoretical approaches—as they might be made in philosophy, cultural theory, educational science, media studies, and communication—into the background, or at least such discussions are not taken up in any detail. however, these reflections on sharing in educational contexts and in the oermovement should not detract from the fact that both sharing and openness or “going open” are not restricted to oe and oer discourses. on the one hand, the connection between ideas of open/openness and sharing is related to relatively narrower perspectives, for example the vantage points of private enterprises and mainstream political economy perspectives, as well as broader perspectives such as those related to free culture, free education and the use of free/libre and open source software (f/loss) (cf. gonçalves & figueiredo, 2014) in different ways. interplay and overlaps of different meanings of sharing and openness vary depending on discursive contexts of employability, formal education, media activism, or expansion of the human horizon by activities of humans, animals or robots. on the other hand, concepts and values of open(ness) and sharing in educational contexts as well as in communicative seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 18 contexts are generally related to media constellations and the corresponding dynamics of opening and closure (cf. leschke, 2012). versions of sharing: towards a dynamic conceptual understanding if we wish to investigate the theoretical aspects of sharing more closely, going beyond its noted communicative, distributive, and moral meanings, then we can do so by looking at the philosophical, theological, and social science discourses that explicitly address various aspects of sharing. for some time, current work that focuses on the question of sharing in digital culture has been available (in particular benkler, 2004; stalder, 2011; stalder & sützl, 2011; sützl et al., 2011; john, 2013; sützl, 2013). faced with problem of explaining sharing, belk (2010), for example, describes the phenomenon as a “fundamental consumer behaviour that we have either tended to overlook or to confuse with commodity exchange and gift giving” (p. 715). considering a number of different attempts at defining sharing, and prototypical forms of sharing, such as “mothering and the pooling and allocation of resources within the family” (p. 717), he highlights the aspects of connecting and bonding: sharing tends to be a communal act that links us to other people. it is not the only way in which we may connect with others, but it is a potentially powerful one that creates feelings of solidarity and bonding. (belk, 2010, p. 717) his contribution aims at a better understanding of consumer behaviour and takes socio-cultural and socio-psychological approaches into consideration. overall, his reasoning can be positioned within the economics discourse. nicholas john, in his empirical study sharing and web 2.0 (2013) sums up a new meaning of sharing that emerged in tandem with the development of web 2.0. using grounded theory methods, he analyzes 44 of the largest and most widely used social networking sites (sns). accordingly, his interest is not in how pre-existing concepts might be applied, but in exploring relevant practices: my analysis does not seek to apply a name to a set of observed phenomena, but rather to interrogate the name that has already been given to the practices that underlie those phenomena. (john, 2013, p. 168) he reaches the conclusion that the new meaning of sharing in web 2.0 comprises three key features: “fuzzy objects of sharing; the use of the word ‘share’ with no object at all; and presenting in terms of sharing functions of social network sites that used not to be so described” (john, 2013, p. 167). he sets out major changes occurring at a time of transition: the data show that the years 2005−7 constitute a watershed in terms of the use of the concept of sharing. as described above, terms such as ‘share your world’ or ‘share your life’ did not appear before then; similarly, the injunction to share (without any object at all) did not appear until the second half of the 2000s either. i have also shown how certain activities, such as keeping in touch, came, over time, to be described as sharing. (john, 2013, p. 178) wittel (2011), too, examines new forms of sharing, such as they developed through the spread of digital technology, and brought a qualitative change to seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 19 the social aspects of sharing. these changes concern the possibilities of largescale sharing as well as ways “in which digital technologies can transform the sharing of immaterial things” (p.7). according to wittel, sharing is characterized by exchange and reciprocity: “in the pre-digital age sharing is always mutual, always social, and always based on the principle of generalised reciprocity” (p. 5). in his conclusion, wittel underscores the difficulties of understanding what precisely surfaces when several different purposes of sharing come together. definitions and meanings of words are not set in stone. they change over time and so does the term ‘sharing’. whereas sharing in the pre-digital age was meant to produce social exchange, sharing in the digital age is about social exchange on the one hand and about distribution and dissemination on the other hand. what makes sharing with digital media so hard to understand is exactly this blurring of two rather different purposes. (wittel, 2011, p. 8) the various analyses and characterizations referred to here should certainly make a differentiated discussion of the phenomenon of sharing in the digital age more feasible, both in general terms and with regard to oer developments. even if the sources cited may seem exceedingly theoretical from the point of view of applied scholarship, researchers with an interest in metatheoretical questions will need to enquire into the relationship between the established and the new definitions of sharing. indeed, they will have to ask how the different perspectives, often in contradiction to one another, such as they appear in the various discourses on sharing, can be related to one another at all. are we perhaps looking at a plurality of incommensurable descriptions of sharing? the answers to these questions will largely depend on the epistemological orientations chosen, and on the preliminary choices. for example, if our enquiry is based on the conviction that the various basic understandings of sharing are part of incommensurable language games, vocabularies, and discourses, then we may highlight the strengths and problem-solving capacity of a particular perspective, in keeping with our argued preference. however, the perspectives themselves will remain placed next to one another, without any interrelation. one way to address this problem constructively is offered by goodman’s concept of variations (goodman, 1978; goodman & elgin 1988). xvi his thinking is guided by the belief that questions of knowledge cannot be settled once and for all on the basis of a stable foundation. there is no innocent view from the outside, no mega-perspective to which all other perspectives might be reduced. goodman illustrates this using, inter alia, examples of worldviews in physics, phenomenology, and everyday life: the physicist takes the world as the real one, attributing the deletions, additions, irregularities, emphases of other versions to the imperfections of perception, to the urgencies of practice, or to poetic license. the phenomenalist regards the perceptual world as fundamental, and the excisions, abstractions, simplifications, and distortions of other versions as resulting from scientific or practical or artistic concerns. for the man-inthe-street, most versions from science, art, and perception depart in some ways from the familiar serviceable world he has jerry-built from fragments of scientific and artistic tradition and from his own struggle for survival. this world, indeed, is the one most often taken as real; for reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit. ironically, then, our passion for one world is satisfied, at different times seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 20 and for different purposes, in many different ways. (goodman, 1978, p. 20; italics in the original) we may each adopt different perspectives, but we cannot bring them together into a single, overarching perspective, or make universally valid judgments from some kind of superior, all-inclusive point of view. on the other hand, the various worlds are not made up of nothing, but generated from other worlds (goodman, 1978, p. 6). they are created “by making such versions with words, numerals, pictures, sounds, or other symbols of any kind in any medium; and the comparative study of these versions and visions and of their making is what i call a critique of worldmaking” (goodman, 1978, p. 94). the worlds thus created can certainly be related to one another, not by tracing them back to a universal underlying reality, but by thinking of these descriptions as variations and as relational. this concept of variation refers to the philosophical aspects of the potential conceptual interrelations among different worlds, rather than to the psychology or the sociology of world-creation. the variations may in principle be seen as representations of an original, but there is no original ‘in itself’ that could serve as a criterion for comparing the descriptive variations. rather, individual perspectives bring about the similarities among the descriptive variations, and these perspectives also generate the difference between the given version and the original (goodman & elgin, 1988 p. 69). the similarities with the original, which make a variation a variation, are always created by a certain perspective. a decisive role is played by metaphorical transfer and the differentiation of similar and contrasting conceptual dimensions. like metaphors, variations are about similarity and contrast at the same time. next, in addition to this formal condition, a functional one is necessary. goodman and elgin explain this using music as an example: first, to be eligible as a variation, a passage must be like the theme in certain respects and contrast with it in others. second, to function as a variation, an eligible passage must literally exemplify the requisite shared, and metaphorically exemplify the requisite contrasting, features of theme, and refer to it via these features. being a variation derives from functioning as such: a variation is a passage that normally or primarily or usually so functions. (goodman & elgin, 1988, p. 71–2; italics in the original) in keeping with this statement, our purpose cannot be to search for an original form or variation of sharing ‘in itself’ that could serve as a criterion towards comparing varying descriptions. rather, we must seek to explicate potential conceptual interrelations among different worlds and variations as suggested by goodman and elgin (1988, pp. 66–82). in other words, we must seek to explicate perspectives that make the various descriptions of sharing appear as variations around a common theme. with the afore-mentioned examples of sharing in mind, we can readily identify such conceptual perspectives: private and public the relationship between the private and the public represents a conceptual dimension present in all forms of sharing—whether it is martin of tours sharing his cloak, whether we share the use of a car, a computer, a home, or a sailing boat, or whether we share our holiday photos on a social media platform. in all these cases, sharing also amounts to an interpretation of these relations and their components. just how different these interpretations may be is readily apparent when we look at various areas such as the private sphere (the intimate sphere, or civil society), the public private sphere (particularly family and friends), the public sphere (such as the state apparatus and public discourse in habermas’ sense). xvii seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 21 in these cases, our understanding of sharing will be a result of our interpretations of these arenas, and how we interrelate these interpretations. even if an industrial secret is shared only by some among a given workforce, these workers represent a partial public, independent of any desired or inevitable effects the secret might have in a larger public. xviii interpreting these relations along with the corresponding processes of subjectification (see sützl, 2013) as well as opening and closure (leschke, 2012) generates difference. in the process, aspects of openness and closure will serve as instruments of power in media cultures in ways that differ from how they are used in industrial or tribal societies. the specific modes of private and social exclusion or openness, the regulation of access and belonging, and the degree of flexibility with which they are addressed are significant. spatial and temporal reach spatial and temporal reach is a variable that allows significantly different basic understandings of sharing (for example, sharing can be ad-hoc, short-term, indefinite, medium-term, life-long, relating to narrower or larger experiential spaces, globally oriented, etc.). additionally, sharing can be the result of intentional actions, or occur as a secondary effect. in any event, sharing is positioned within temporal and spatial horizons. spatial and temporal designs are the foundation of respective understandings and practices of sharing. materiality materiality is another variable that allows the differentiation of sharing forms. even variants of sharing that concern ideas will involve some kind of object relationship. in many cases such objects may readily be identified (for example, objects used on a daily basis , blog entries, or video postings) or may at least be named (for example, thoughts, experiences, knowledge), yet the material dimension tends to be complex and hard to explicate in digital cultures of sharing. but even when sharing is referred to as sharing ‘in itself,’ without an apparent context, or when it takes the form of a grammatical imperative, as in “share!” or “share your life!,” we are looking at an experiential context that involves a variant of “productive contributing” (fassler, 2012). thus, even when no defined object seems apparent at first sight (john, 2013, p. 174) there is a memory of an experiential context of sharing that one knows, and an incentive to participate in or contribute towards something. mediality potential conceptual interrelations among varying worlds of sharing may also be generated by aspects of mediality and mediatization, as sharing will inevitably involve communication. the conceptual dimensions of mediality and mediatization will determine the modes of communication that may be relevant in an individual case. different basic understandings of media will result in different perspectives on sharing, and the same is true of the various historically relevant media constellations, means of communication, media offerings, media institutions, media technologies, media programs, media formats and, not least, symbolically generalized communication media (recognition, power, love, etc.) and algorithms that function towards enabling and directing processes of sharing. economics economic aspects are widely considered as key to a definition of sharing, whether these aspects are framed in an affirmative or critical mode (belk, 2010). various perspectives of sharing may be articulated against the seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 22 background of exchange and the gift. new forms of creating, distributing, and using digital materials allow new “economies of sharing”xix and new business models. the various concepts applied here and the different kinds of capital at play (economic, cultural, social, symbolic, informational, biopolitical) allow corresponding designs of sharing to emerge. economies of affect i referred to affective and cognitive interactions earlier. affect plays a role in all forms of sharing. however, the ways in which affective and cognitive dimensions are connected, and the stability of the patterns that emerge, may differ greatly. the various ways in which sharing creates bonds (or fails to do so) may be specified by explicating this point of view. normativity processes of sharing always possess a normative dimension. depending on the rules and the forms of assessment involved, various sharing designs may emerge. these may be conceptualized in a non-purposeful or a goal-oriented way, or they may be structured around care, responsibility, utilitarianism, or didactics, with the respective moral, psychological, pedagogical, and political convictions in place. in no case will all possible aspects of this dimension be relevant, with a limited number of aspects determining how a specific variant of sharing functions. this outline might be substantiated and differentiated further. the aspects indicated mark perspectives that allow corresponding possibilities of contrast without requiring an ontological definition. they represent a common denominator that brings the various descriptions of sharing into view as variations around a theme. discussion as noted, there is a diverse range of possibilities for describing the conceptual interrelations that characterize various worlds of sharing. depending on the goals set by theoretical or practical research, these descriptions will not necessarily replace the specific definitions or discursive localizations; however, they will encourage a dynamic view of and, thus, flexible analyses of the various cultures of sharing. so what is the significance of this for sharing in the context of oer? first, i think it makes it clear that a differentiated and explicit analysis of sharing—a term often used loosely in oer discourses—is valuable and allows a better understanding of its fundamental relevance. it does so without any need to draw on specific theoretical tenets, but also without relapsing into a random diversity. secondly, it makes it clear that we are well advised to consider historical forms of sharing as relevant in education, rather than allowing ourselves to think of them as behaviours made obsolete by digital technologies. instead, it makes sense to fathom the commonalities and differences among the various dynamics of sharing, rather than pit the ‘good old times’ against ‘new ignorance’ or to praise new or old forms of sharing as objects of world hope or condemn them as sources of educational and social ills. thirdly, the outline demonstrates that a narrow understanding of educational economy will fail to live up to the relevant dynamics of sharing in oer settings. sharing is more significant than oer marketing and the impact of oer; it concerns more than creatively responding to budget cuts in education by attaching the label ‘open’ to educational materials, the quality of which requires examination. accordingly, a broader understanding of educational economies would focus not only on the expected or evident effects that educational measures seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 23 have on individual and macro-economic outcomes in the labour market, or on evident or covert forms of privatizing costs in education; rather, such an understanding would consider the interplay of various kinds of capital, the interests that new business models serve, and the role played therein by sharing. moreover, critical-examination must be applied to the tendency to ‘educationalize’ processes, and even more so to the risk of using the concept of sharing as a tool to limit education. the flexible possibilities offered by examining both contrasting and relational conceptual dimensions of sharing give rise to several additional considerations that can be summarized as follows:  the potential large-scale dispersion of oer will require attention to quality assurance. adjectives such as ‘massive’ or ‘open’ have no meaning with regard to improved equality of opportunity, educational deliverables beyond mere qualification measures, or the material or didactical quality of oe and oer. the focus must be on the quality of sharing processes and their results, and the definition of criteria for quality assurance. even if it is true that in systems of public education more is learned from popular culture than is generally admitted, the differences in standards between education, popular culture, and entertainment should be acknowledged even when the three combine in productive ways.  affective and cognitive interactions are relevant to educational processes in many respects. they concern aspects of the psychology of learning such as improved memory or problem solving capacity, social dimensions of group-belonging, subjective meanings of teaching content, and so forth. given that we are examining questions of sharing, we are also looking at balancing the dynamics of giving and taking, and the differences between connecting and bonding. the latter are particularly relevant to digital cultures of learning. here, too, we must critically examine the quality of the networking occurring as well as the quality of the social relationships created and the bonding patterns that emerge. large-scale connecting without quality bonding among students, and between students and teachers, cannot justify hope for high-quality educational processes.  both sharing and openness tend to have positive associations, particularly in oer environments. however, this should not keep us from remembering that both of these terms do not per se represent values—as is the case with terms such as laziness, security, punctuality, etc. in these instances, whether we can appropriately speak of positive or problematic values will depend on the contextual and situational conditions, on the constellation of actors, on study requirements and educational objectives, and on desired or undesired outcomes and secondary effects. just as in some group processes, trust can only emerge when the group members are able, at least temporarily, to rely on a closed structure, advocating unlimited openness may be counterproductive. thus, it is important to consider the limits that correspond to specific forms of sharing and openness.  inasmuch as in digital cultures of sharing the dividing line between production and consumption is blurred and new mutual dependencies between processes of production and consumption arise, there are implications for the design and the distribution of open educational resources. educational competencies regarding design and seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 24 production are not evenly distributed in society (the same is true in general of specialized knowledge). given the path the development of media cultures has taken thus far, there are reasons to doubt whether “something like a universal competence in media production is a meaningful objective of cultural development at all” (leschke 2012, p. 65). regarding sharing in oe and oer environments, we must also ask how media competencies of action, design, and use are distributed across society, in which forms they exist, what their level of quality is, and, finally, what these indicators mean for education.  the various forms of sharing in oe and oer may play a special role in so far as they can form part of a larger reflection on the means and contents of educational processes. this creates an opportunity that can be grasped better in the absence of a certain view of sharing that acts as an unquestioned mode of execution, but when, instead, various models of sharing may be contrasted, experienced, and critically discussed. the above points are by no means a full representation of the relevance and the possible results that a meta-theoretical analysis might yield towards a critical study of the oer movement. however, they demonstrate that the distributive and communicative aspects of sharing require differentiated perspectives, and that a theoretical perspective on sharing can be a rewarding enterprise in itself. by way of summarizing, we might conclude that we need medium-range concepts that allow us to describe adequately both the stability and the dynamics of media constellations, given the diversity of sharing practices in media cultures, the loose usage of concepts of sharing, and the prominent role played by them in demands for free education for all. these new constellations require a new kind of formal knowledge. while in the humanities the complex of hermeneutic knowledge, identity construction, and self-concept was historically largely based on book printing, leading to a generalized ability of reading and generating meaning, the current media constellations, including augmented reality, the interchange of forms among media, and the subtle transits between entertainment and technical media, require mostly formal knowledge. (leschke 2008, p. 49) once we agree that it has become problematic to organize our understanding of systems of knowledge around individual media technologies and dispositifs (leschke, 2010, p. 303), then transversal and transmediatic dimensions will gain in importance. rainer leschke suggests a focus on mediatic forms as aids in organizing our knowledge of transversal media systems (leschke, 2010, p. 305). the various forms of sharing can be described as such mediatic forms. building our knowledge of these forms and analyzing them is relevant in terms of examining and creating cultural, social, and educational concepts and practices. the core of leschke’s (2008) theory of medial forms is a flexible concept of dynamics that provides a description and analysis of exchange processes between different media as well as between mass media and arts. this theory is consistent with, albeit a further development of, ernst cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms. it is compatible with the concept of variations presented by goodman and elgin (1988) and also with narrower concepts of schemata formation (winkler, 2012), wider theories of media dynamics (rusch, 2007) and media-cultural philosophy (schmidt, 2008). accordingly, and in contrast to both concrete and abstract conceptualizations (see fig. 2), the theory of medial forms may be applied with versatility in contexts of sharing, too. seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 25 figure 2: forms and media: scopes and selected examples (author’s depiction) regarding oer, we may expect more from a differentiated consideration of the various conceptual dimensions of sharing than from lamenting the disappearance of some cultural spaces and forms of knowledge. this applies in particular to education, teaching, and learning in the context of schools, where the oer movement can also draw on a critique of primary and secondary education that is grounded in media theory. thus far educational designs drawing on media theory (böhme, 2006) have been mostly absent from the discussions on pedagogy and educational policies. yet this may change, in spite of widespread reluctance towards reform in the primary and secondary educational system. insisting, implicitly or explicitly, on primary and secondary schools as standard-bearers of book-based education (böhme 2006, p. 70) may still represent the majority opinion in educational policy, theory, and technology. nevertheless, in the future we will increasingly have to shift our focus to the conceptualization and design of transmediatic educational spaces xx if we are to resolve current problems in education. to this end, the oer movement offers a range of guiding concepts for all levels of education. at present, however, it is unclear whether the hopes for change in our educational culture will remain unfulfilled, as they were with respect to e-learning, or whether the developments in oer will lead to the establishment of new (media) pedagogical educational standards. conclusion sharing processes inevitably involve several areas of potential tension: first, there may be tensions among those who share; secondly, between sharing as an activity and shares as parts, partial aspects, or segments; and thirdly, between the activity of sharing and sharing in relation to a larger imaginary or real and available whole. in other words, we are not just looking at tensions among the agents of sharing, or at tensions between the parts and the whole, or at tensions arising from the activity of sharing in light of an imagined whole, seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 26 or at tensions originating from the sharing in the face of limited resources, etc., but also at a dynamic interplay of all these areas of tension, an interplay that can be more or less balanced. the logic of affect plays an important (and foundational) role as well. it plays a part, not only in the creation of tension, but also in its stabilization or destabilization, resulting in further changes of affect. affect is relevant inasmuch as the interaction between cognitive patterns, models, and interpretations on the one hand, and the corresponding affective states of individuals, groups, and communities on the other, is continually destabilized in communicative, economic, and socio-cultural ways, resulting in this interaction taking on describable forms. we have seen that material and immaterial objects play a role both in predigital media constellations and in the digital age, and that such distinctions are of relative significance. based on a dynamic and analytical view of the cultures of sharing that draws on the concept of variations as proposed by goodman and elgin (1988), it is possible to think of the various forms of understanding sharing as conceptual designs of practices and experiences, and to examine them for commonalities and contrasts through metaphorical exemplification. in doing so, it appears that forms of sharing supported by algorithms facilitate and promote a mass distribution of content, of media poor in content, and of systems of production without any content at all. however, these forms of sharing, considered as the quintessence of sharing by some segments of digital culture, are relatively weak forms of sharing, as opposed to stronger forms of sharing rooted in social psychology, theory of education, philosophy, and criticism as well as political theory—which are differentiated and form part of an explicit and (self) reflexive argument. xxi regarding sharing in the oer movement, these stronger and weaker forms of sharing play a role in the current debates. in both cases, there seems to be an obliviousness regarding history. this is true, on the one hand, of various efforts to teach “everything to everyone,” a phenomenon known in both dated and more recent history of educational science, and on the other hand, of the results and the implications of critical-emancipatory programs and pedagogical media promises. paradoxically, the oer movement is not immune to promoting elitist notions of education as well as half-realized education (halbbildung) and noneducation. oer discourses that are overly euphoric, anti-theoretical, or tied to the media industry should therefore be regarded with a certain scepticism. when such discourses are dominant, it may well happen that oer turns out to be the problem it promises to solve. in this case, efforts towards oer would amount to a delusion that does more towards pacifying the collective conscience of a minority of elitist educationalists than they are willing to admit (herra, 1988). if this were the case, then the oer movement would not be concerned primarily with sharing and re-sharing knowledge, educational materials, educational opportunities, or a ‘new’ culture “in which everything may be consumed for free” (bergamin & filk, 2009, p. 26). rather, it would amount to a kind of opium for the masses, and facilitate re-governmentalization in the name of de-governmentalization of the educational mainstream. nevertheless, oe and oer might promote a paradigm shift in education if attention is paid to theoretically informed oer discourses that cast a differentiated light on the role of sharing in open educational resources—discourses that are historically aware and willing to explore the boundaries of openness in educational resources, and that consider education both as a public and a private good (giesinger, 2011), and which therefore critically assess the results and secondary effects of the oer movement. such a paradigm change would merit its name, it would open transmediatic spaces of education, allow innovaseminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 27 tions in our educational systems, and be desirable both from an individual and a societal perspective. i share the opinion of many of my colleagues in the field that at this point it is still unclear which direction the oer movement will take. references ackermann, e. k. 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(supporting highly gifted students and creating elites) in: bundeszentrale für politische bildung (ed.): aus politik und zeitgeschichte: eliten in deutschland (pp. 35–38) (of politics and contemporary history (journal), elites in germany).. http://www.bpb.de/files/0wwk0i.pdf (last accessed february 15, 2014). acknowledgment: this paper has been prepared with support of the austrian science fund (fwf): p21431-g16. i bionote theo hug holds a dr. phil. and is a professor at the institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies at the university of innsbruck. he is the coordinator of the innsbruck media studies research group. his areas of interest include media education and media literacy; e-education and micro learning; theory of knowledge; and methodology and philosophy of science. he is particularly interested in interfaces of medialization and knowledge dynamics as well as learning processes. weblink: http://hug-web.at/ institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies division of media education and communications culture university of innsbruck, schoepfstr. 3, a 6020 innsbruck, austria e-mail: theo.hug/at/uibk.ac.at tel.: +43-(0)512-507-4048 fax: +43-(0)512-507-2854 ii the paper was translated from german by victoria hindley and wolfgang sützl. iii see http://www.openeducation.net/ iv , the subject has awakened little scholarly interest. in publications to date only fleeting reference has been made to the subject which still awaits extended treatment (see peter and deimann 2013) . older issues regarding open access to education concern a wide range of topics including the educational reform and reorganization of knowledge by petrus ramus (1515–1572) and elementary education promoted by johann heinrich pestalozzi (1746–1827).also included are the reform of pedagogical concepts aiming at http://www.zu.de/deutsch/forschung_forschungsprojekte/zuschnitt_022.pdf http://www.i-r-i-e.net/inhalt/015/015-wittel.pdf http://www.i-r-i-e.net/inhalt/015/015-wittel.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001285/128515e.pdf http://www.bpb.de/files/0wwk0i.pdf http://hug-web.at/ mailto:theo.hug@uibk.ac.at http://www.openeducation.net/ seminar.net – international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 10 – issue 1 – 2014 32 more open schools, the introduction of free school books for all pupils in some countries several decades later and debates concerning open learning and open curricula, and more recently, open and distance education (cf. evans and nation 1992). v in digital culture, the cultural and economic significance of time-sharing and, in particularl, file-sharing have played a major role from the beginning (see aigrain 2012). vi consider the idea of a shared history and shared knowledge symbolized by a split coin whose halves are carried by people in friendship—an ancient example of communication as symbolon (krippendorf 1994, p. 82). vii surprisingly, the neologism ‘shareaholic’ is being used in application-oriented online networks (https://shareaholic.com/), but so far has not been employed in mediapedagogical research on excessive or addictive use of computers or the internet. viii http://www.oercommons.org/ ix http://cnx.org x http://wikieducator.org xi http://www.curriki.org xii http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:global_open_educational_resources_log o.svg xiii in “giving knowledge for free,” a report by the centre for educational research and innovation (ceri 2007), oer is defined as follows: “open educational resources are digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (ibid. p. 30). xiv hylén, for instance, is fully aware of the ambivalence of the terms ‘open’ and ‘educational’ and of the need to clarify them (hylén 2006, p. 2). however, theoretical attempts at clarification seem to play a subordinate role across the entire oer discourse. xv see also centre for educational research and innovation (2007, p. 573). xvi josef mitterer’s non-dualistic philosophy offers a similar possibility (mitterer 1992). xvii even if we invert our perspective and examine sharing phenomena on the basis of concepts of the public sphere in political theory, it is clear that concepts of public as constituted by using the share button on social media sites should not be confused with the concepts of the public sphere as theorized by kant and arendt (frick and oberprantacher 2012). however, it does not follow that various forms of sharing have nothing to do with one another. i have already referred to the variety of current concepts of the public sphere that might be relevant in this context (seubert 2010; wallner and adolf 2011). xviii however, the hackneyed phrase “the private is political,” often used in such contexts, is merely an example of circuitous thinking. xix see economies of sharing as discussed in the context of “economies of the commons” (http://ecommons.eu/session-the-economies-of-sharing). xx in simplified terms, this refers to educational spaces that are not primarily or exclusively based on oral presentations and printed materials as well as an occasional use of audiovisual media. instead, there are cross-mediatic structures in which media technologies and communication media are connected in ways that allow both constrasting perceptions and transmediatic complexes of meaning, thus promoting educational processes. xxi see hierdeis’ discussion of self-reflection as a component of pedagogical professionalism (hierdeis 2009). https://shareaholic.com/ http://www.oercommons.org/ http://cnx.org/ http://wikieducator.org/ http://www.curriki.org http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:global_open_educational_resources_logo.svg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:global_open_educational_resources_logo.svg http://ecommons.eu/session-the-economies-of-sharing microsoft word guest+editorial+vol.6+iss.1.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 1 introduction to the special issue on visual learning in higher education brett bligh, rolf wiesemes and roger murphy visual learning lab university of nottingham higher education throughout the world is undergoing various processes of change, pressurised by demands to provide education for greater numbers of students and to do so using a variety of models of increasing number and diversity. among these changes, the use of new technologies to support learning is attracting significant amounts of attention as university teachers and students seek to make the best use of the opportunities which they provide to both modernise learning methods and make learning and teaching more effective. right at the heart of this enterprise is the understanding that higher education involves attempts to allow students to gain new knowledge, understanding and skills. at the core of the disciplines of higher education are complex concepts, theories and ideas — as well as epistemological assumptions and traditions of disciplinary discourse. effective university teachers and students are constantly searching for better ways to both engage in teaching and facilitate new models of learning within these disciplines, thus aiming to transform students from relative novices in an area to domain experts. but a commonly argued point is that the informal learning which occurs outside the academy, for example in leisure settings or using mobile technologies while travelling, is both exciting for learners and takes into account a rapidly changing global environment. it is argued that universities, on the other hand, remain wedded to plodding mass lectures and arcane texts — ossified teaching mechanisms of dubious benefit and relevance to learners. clearly, differences of context mean that higher education cannot adopt models from outside in a straightforward fashion, but if institutionalised learning at this level aims to become more stimulating for learners, then a focus on the visual is a plausible avenue for progress. so the key pedagogical approach which is the main focus for this special issue involves the use of visual techniques and technologies to support effective student learning in higher education. those of you who work your way through some or all of the papers assembled here will find that visual concerns take many different forms in relation to pedagogy. in the realm of higher education models, diagrams and pictures can play a crucial role in supporting learning of complex ideas. visual learning is however much more than just good diagrams. visual aids to support learning, even in otherwise conventional university lectures, are ubiquitous. many university courses now involve elaborate simulations, digital images (both moving and still), and many other techniques to open up whole new areas of learning, which can occur off-campus, in work places, and when students are engaged in their own individual study activities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 2 when the higher education funding council for england commenced its largest ever teaching and learning programme back in 2005, it was making an attempt to reinforce some of the very best work which was going on to modernise and improve teaching methods in higher education. teaching and learning in higher education in the uk had become somewhat neglected as differential funding for research across the he sector was driving institutions to compete for better research ratings, often at the expense of their attention to educational development and teaching quality. the two aims of the centre for excellence in teaching and learning (cetl) programme were: “to reward excellent teaching practice, and to further invest in that practice so that cetls funding delivers substantial benefits to students, teachers and institutions”i. our team at the university of nottingham were delighted to get our growing interest in visual learning recognised and resourced through this initiative. as one of the 74 centres accorded cetl status, the activities of the visual learning labii (vll) were informed by several agendas. we began from the realisation that research into visual learning within he was underdeveloped, even though visual learning itself was acknowledged as an effective tool for accelerating thinking, understanding and learning. we understood that different people meant different things when they referred to visual learning, and that any general definition would have to take into account traditions as diverse and overlapping as information visualisation, teaching techniques, methods of communication between learners (and between teachers and learners), technological developments, and an understanding of the psychological processes underpinning the comprehension of visual stimuli. on top of all this, our remit was developmental. tasked with improving the student experience and working with academic staff across the university to inform their materials and processes from a visual perspective, we could not retreat to the relative comfort zone of debating theory. so the vll was built by people operating from the conviction that visual learning could be a practical framework for improving learning within higher education. looking back to that starting point it is clear that the initial collaborators — from engineering, education, geography, psychology, nursing, pharmacy and english teaching backgrounds — were aware of the importance of cross-disciplinary insight and that the initially proposed projects were varied: uses of videoconferencing, geo-visualisation, simulation environments, visual databases, reusable learning objects, and methods for presenting digital work. the intervening time has reinforced these early notions while also impressing upon us the moving nature of our target: he learners, a product of society more widely, have changing expectations and identities (oblinger & oblinger, 2005); the emerging focus on learning spaces serves to contextualise and inform in new ways our work on visual learning (bligh & lorenz, this issue); and the pace of technological developments mean that some of the interesting work in which we are now engaged is based around settings we could not have envisaged at the start of our project. the recently published vll showcase reportiii documents a cross-section of our current projects, and in comparing that document with our initial project list it is interesting to note the evolution of focus. attempting to define visual learning is difficult, in part because of the different disciplinary perspectives of those who are interested. early in the life of the vll we spent a lot of time fielding queries and dispelling the notion that we were interested in visual learners in the sense of learning styles (dunn et al., 1984). over time these queries have declined in frequency, perhaps reflecting an attendant decline in focus on learning styles as a topic, though we note the inexorable reliance on this approach within the wikipedia page on visual learning at the time of writingiv. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 3 our own notion of visual learning consists of a multi-layered framework in which the environment (from natural medium through to deliberately designed learning space) serves as a foundation for both teaching and learning activities and technical tools, while this combination in turn forms the basis for a layer of interpretation and meaning-making, understood through both a cognitive and socio-semiotic lens. the papers in this special issue include several written by those working in or with the vll, plus a selection from those at other institutions working on aspects of visual learning whose approaches supplement well our own multifaceted and flexible work on the use of visuals within learning and teaching. in clustering the papers for this issue, which are suitably varied in both content and form, we use the above framework as a central organising principle, moving gradually from space through tools and curricula and on towards teaching itself and the meaning making which occurs as a result. in the first paper, the rhetoric of multi-display learning spaces: exploratory experiences in visual art disciplines, brett bligh and katharina lorenz argue that more serious attention needs to be paid to the role of spatial context within learning. beginning from a three-tier structure of technology, space and methodology, the authors demonstrate how new kinds of technology enhanced spaces such as multi-display learning spaces, where facilities are provided for the large-scale display of information across wallsized surfaces, can support styles of teaching which encourage students to engage better with processes of disciplinary argumentation. drawing upon examples from postgraduate teaching in classics, the paper focusses upon issues of spatiality in teaching and the ways in which people can relate to visual displays (for example, to direct attention using movement). drawing upon a theoretical background taken from the learning spaces research agenda, the authors propose a structure for understanding this new learning scenario where technology (multi-display systems), space (multi-display learning spaces) and pedagogical models (multiple perspective learning) are seen as mutually supportive and interacting. next, in video conferencing for opening classroom doors in initial teacher education: sociocultural processes of mimicking and improvisation, rolf wiesemes and ruolan wang move the focus to scenarios in which two physical spaces, both sites of teaching and learning, are connected using videoconferencing technology. videoconferencing technology itself is not new, and the focus of this paper is on the pedagogical implications, taking into account work on interactive teaching and learning observatories (coyle, 2004; wiesemes et al, 2007) undertaken over many years by those at nottingham associated with the vll and engaged with pre-service teacher education. building on the notions from this prior work and others that suitable videoconferencing teaching scenarios can be associated with the contextualisation of theory and decontextualisation of practice by students, wiesemes and wang argue here that such sessions can additionally be linked with mimicry and improvisation as students internalise shared experiences and relate them to potential for action in future practice. in doing so, the authors raise the important point that apparent improvisation by teachers in responding to unexpected or serendipitous events actually relies heavily on prior experience, and they examine how videoconferencing as a technical tool can provide access to suitably contextualised experiences for student teachers. continuing the segue into the tools-focussed section of the paper, in visual considerations and mathematical proof lara alcock and matthew inglis from the mathematics education centre, loughborough university categorise the considerations which must be made when presenting mathematical proofs to undergraduate students in lectures. concentrating initially upon the syntactic issues of layout which can be used to make subject content within this potentially problematic area of teaching more comprehensible, the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 4 authors describe considerations including the chunking of equations and the separation of these chunks, the use of layout to emphasise similar subarguments, and the overall layout of the proof on the available canvas. after considering the importance of gesture in live presentations of proofs, the authors move on to consider how such visual issues are manifest when proofs are instead presented online, as an eproof, and the design decisions which need to be made explicit when using the authoring tool expound. notions of context are increasingly seen as important when considering the use of visual technologies. in smart morning in an african village: diversifying technologies within a tanzanian context, mikko vesisenaho and erkki sutinen from the university of eastern finland consider the difficulties of developing technologies in a context different from their eventual deployment. the authors document their cati model (contextualise, apply, transfer and import) and describe how this is used within a contextualised it curriculum in finland which seeks to involve end users, in this case school students from tanzania, in the design process for robotic visual educational devices known as i-blocks. in doing so, veisienaho and sutinen relate he visual learning to notions of ethnocomputing and the teaching of applied it design principles whose relevance extends far beyond the academy. moving from physical tools to virtual environments, damien schofield and edward lester, from the state university of new york and the university of nottingham respectively, consider the provision of simulation software and its use within an engineering education curriculum. in virtual chemical engineering: guidelines for e-learning in engineering education, the authors detail the virile tool (virtual reality interactive learning environment), which simulates the configuration and operation of a polymerisation plant, is used by undergraduate chemical engineers for purposes including familiarisation with equipment and to emphasise the importance of safety within hazardous environments. schofield and lester document here a set of appropriate tasks to accompany such tools, and report student feedback in terms of perceived difficulty, enjoyment, graphical realism and disciplinary expertise. clearly, an examination of visual tools needs to be concerned with more than the tools and tasks themselves. many visual tools within the literature have been proposed to support small group work. in self and peer assessment and dominance during group work using online visual tools, edward lester and damien schofield, together with peter chapman from the school of psychology at the university of nottingham, consider the composition of these small groups of learners in terms of temperament dominance. having undertaken a virtual reality-based problem solving exercise, which was filmed, groups of three students were asked to score themselves and their peers. the results of student scoring show that decisive students receive higher marks from their peers, and analysis of the sessions themselves demonstrates that dominant extroverts tended to undertake more physical movements of shared devices such as the computer mouse and keyboard. while lester, schofield and chapman are careful not to over-generalise the implications of their study, it is clear that studies which seek to further our understanding of student group dynamics are crucial if visual tools and attendant tasks are to be appropriately designed. roger murphy and namrata sharma, in what don’t we know about interactive lectures?, move us on from a focus on tools and curricula towards an examination of teaching and learning and the way in which visual tools are seen to underpin and enhance interaction within large group lectures. murphy and sharma’s starting point is a critical examination of the apparently “straightforward didactic act” which constitutes lecturing, wherein an orator performs in front of an apparently passive audience. having problematised seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 5 this view, the paper outlines a variety of models which have been proposed in the literature to promote ‘interaction’ within lectures of a more overt nature, some of which are predicated upon the facilities offered by innovative visual teaching technologies. the authors conclude by calling for a renewed research interest in the activity of lecturing, based around an agenda which takes into account the processes of interactive lecturing as well as, more conventionally, the associated outcomes. finally, creating and reading images: towards a communication framework for he learning by natasa lackovic focusses upon the processes of meaning-making which form a crucial part of our understanding of the visual aspects of learning. outlining a framework for communication within higher education learning, based upon the creation and subsequent interpretation of images as representations of concepts, lackovic uses a socio-semiotic lens to focus upon image-based communication and proposes a task structure involving students creating representations of the core concepts of a lesson which have been nominated by teachers. lackovic proposes to make use of web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs, as repositories for these images and narratives and to support discussion in pairs between learners engaged in the processes of deconstructing meaning. in doing so, lackovic links together two of the issues — visual communication between people for the purposes of learning, and the role of innovative technologies to support such activities — which have always represented the core interests of the visual learning lab. acknowledgements in addition to the authors and reviewers, the editorial team would like to extend our thanks to do coyle, formerly co-director of the visual learning lab and now professor in learning innovation at the university of aberdeen, whose inspirational early work in visual learning practices at the university of nottingham was instrumental to our programme of work and continues to underpin many of our ongoing innovations. we would also like to thank professor yngve nordkvelle of høgskolen i lillehammer, norway, for his assistance and encouragement in bringing this special issue to fruition. references coyle, d. (2004) redefining classroom boundaries: learning to teach using new technologies. canadian journal of educational administration and policy, 32 [online]. accessed at http://www.umanitoba.ca/publications/cjeap/ on 1 march 2010. dunn, r., dunn, k. & price, g. e. (1984). learning style inventory. lawrence, ks: price systems. oblinger, d.g. & oblinger, j.l. (2005) educating the net generation. boulder, co: educause. wiesemes, r., coyle, d., bligh, b. & carter l. (2007) developing borderless learning spaces: interactive teaching and learning observatories. alt-c: beyond control, nottingham, uk, 4-6 september. accessed at http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/timetable/abstract.php?abstract_id=1190 on 24 march 2010. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 6 note from the general editor this issue also contains an extra article in which visual learning is a topic, but not in a higher education context. in the article does ms photo story 3 make a difference? the views and experiences of a group of norwegian secondary school teachers, gerd wikan, bjørn faugli, terje mølster and rafael hope of the hedmark university college examine views and attitudes of secondary school teachers on the role of ms photostory 3 as a learning-enhancing artifact. the examination is based on the analysis of empirical data, collected from an ongoing project involving teachers and pupils at a norwegian secondary school. they propose that it was necessary to upgrade the teachers’ computer skills on a very basic level in order to give the teachers confidence to use ict in their teaching. it is a pleasure to present this piece of thorough empirical work in this issue. i  http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/tinits/cetl/ accessed 24 march 2010.  ii  http://www.visuallearninglab.ac.uk/ accessed 24 march 2010.  iii  http://www.visuallearninglab.ac.uk/contexttextual/vll_showcase.pdf accessed 24  march 2010  iv  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/visual_learning accessed 24 march 2010  olson seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 title lecturers' conception of learning and use of methods in blended learning courses at three swedish universities ulf olsson universitetspedagogisk sentrum stockholm university sweden email: ulf.olsson@upc.su.se abstract this study examines the extent to which 387 lecturers at karlstad university, mälardalen university and the university of gävle use certain methods in their blended learning/web-based courses. the teaching methods are compared to the lecturers' conceptions of learning as indicated in the survey. questionnaires have been used for the survey and responses from lecturers in 10 subjects are compared to each other. the main aims are to compare chosen teaching forms to conceptions of learning, and to compare subject areas with each other according to lecturers' use of methods. in the order of frequency of use, the main stated purposes of using the web tools are: distribution of materials, communication, administration, evaluation, examination. three out of four lecturers use a learning management system in their teaching, while only a few use e-meeting tools. the results show similarities at both the department and faculty level, though there are large differences between how lecturers of various subjects report the frequency of use. the relationship between the lecturers' conceptions of learning and the teaching methods used reveal some inconsistencies. keywords: teaching methods, e-learning, learning conceptions, higher education introduction lecturers in higher education are influenced by both general trends in society and deliberate intervention from outside to utilize information and communication technologies (ict) to a larger extent. the aims to use ict in education can be many. ict can enable increased and widening participation, facilitate handling of course materials, etc. high expectations for ict in educational settings bitwise were held, both within the university staff and among the students. the expectations and study approaches are influenced and existing quality criteria are affected and have to adapt to the new educational setting. many studies show, however, that access to icts will not be expected to exert any major impact on education unless both technologies and practices for both lecturers and students undergo some changes. laurillard recalls the roles of the teacher to include not only the subject matter in an educational situation, but also how we learn and how we view the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 35 construction of knowledge. “every teacher plays a part in their nurturing students' epistemological values their conception of how we come to know and hence their conception of what learning is, and how it should be done” (laurillard, 1993, p. 21). this is often not expressed in the curricula, but is found in the discussion of the objectives of a course and forms of implementation and evaluation. teaching through seminars, lectures and other classroom-based activities has been and is typical in higher education (nunes & mcpherson, 2003) but it is increasingly common for campus courses to be transformed into blended learning. the use of ict elements in teaching have often been dependent on individuals (ict-interested lecturers) or encouraged by the university management to broaden and increase recruitment. not infrequently, the common teaching methods used in the classroom are transformed into “new” methods in which course materials and lectures shift into digital forms. there is a risk that the participation approach to learning decreases and the transmissions approach to learning increases, though this is not the intent. this can occur when the lectures are recorded and made available through the internet without the opportunity for students to actively discuss or ask questions, or by examinations carried out through automated functions. it can also occur when the time for seminars and group activities is reduced, while the element of one-way activities (from teacher to student) is increasing, often with a more effective outcome in sight. ramsden (2003) describes the increased potential of technology to transform education in a way in which the role of technology is to streamline the “delivery” of information to students. garrison and anderson (2000), who in their research focus on flexible education expressed concerned that the technology will only enhance the competency to search for information rather than the quality of education. “the question is will technologies be used, in the stronger sense, to create quality learning environments and outcomes, or will they be used simply to enhance presentation quality and access to more fragmented and potentially meaningless information?” (garrison & anderson, 2000 p. 33). siemens wrote in his 2006 review that “learning management systems have been effective in eliminating the challenges faced by educators in selecting and aligning particular tools with particular tasks” (p. 19). zemsky and massy are pointing in the same direction when they argue that the learning management systems make it almost too easy for faculty to transfer their standard teaching materials to the web (p. 53, 2004). the relationship between the course design and the students' study approaches are important for achieving a quality education (prosser & trigwell, 1997). thus, the issue of quality in education is also a question of the conception of learning on the part of lecturers. the link is obvious, but the causality unclear. course design can be related to the lecturers' conceptions of learning and the methods and forms that they choose to use in their teaching with their subjects. the conception of learning is accordingly indicated by the choices that the lecturer makes regarding different methods of teaching and examination, as well as forms of ict utilized in the course settings. entwistle and peterson (2004) refer to the study of prosser and trigwell, and consider that: university teachers using approaches indicating a student-oriented approach to teaching and a focus on student learning (as opposed to a transmission approach) are more likely to have, in their classes, students who describe themselves as adopting a deep approach in their studying. (p. 422) the introduction of ict in courses affects teaching practice, but the existing practice also affects the choice and use of technique. the potential to exploit ict is great even though habits and tradition exert a strong influence. even when the lecturers are focused on helping students to understand, the actual teaching has tended to focus on knowledge transfer (kirkwood & price, 2006). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 36 when higher education is expected to encourage a more deeply oriented study approach, this will affect both teaching and examination methods. the relationship between teaching method and study orientation is supported by several studies (chan & elliot, 2004; wierstra et al., 2004; entwistle & peterson, 2004; kember & kwan, 2000) and often points to the examination forms as being especially influential for the students' study orientation. while other activities in a course are student-centered and can be related to constructivist ideas, the exam form can often be related to learning as reproduction (bottino, 2004). students who use a surface orientation tend to appreciate clear factual content, and an exam directly linked to this. students with deep-oriented study approaches prefer teaching that is relatively more intellectually challenging, as well as examination methods that allow their own ideas to be expressed. the relationship between good teaching and a deep approach and the (negative) correlation between the appropriate assessment and surface approach are apparent (ramsden, 2003, p. 104; kember & kwan, 2000). with this relationship, the methods used in teaching could be related to the lecturers' conceptions of learning and the conceptions of knowledge that exists in the subject, which is the idea of this paper. method this studyi examines how lecturers from three swedish universities consider how often they make use of certain methods and forms of teaching in their blended learning courses. as used in this study, the concept of blended learning is education in which some form of computer use, together with the internet, takes place. this means that ict use is limited to the teaching and learning situation, and some form of communication via the internet occurs. this description excludes the use of ict in the planning, administration and production phases of a course. the description also excludes the use of computers as stand-alone word processors, etc. the study is based on material collected from an online questionnaire distributed by e-mail to lecturers at karlstad university (kau), mälardalen university (mdh) and the university of gävle (hig). at karlstad university, the invitation was sent to those who had accounts in at least one of the two learning management systems used at the university. for mdh and hig, the invitation to respond to the questionnaire, which was addressed to lecturers in blended learning, was sent to all lecturers. the analysis included 387 responses filled in online (159 from kau, 91 from mdh and 137 from the hig). the response rate cannot be determined by percentage, as the numbers of lecturers who use ict in their courses vary with their perception of being included in the definition of blended learning and whether they actively used the web at the time of the survey. we can suppose that the lecturers that responded to the questionnaire were the ones who were the most interested in using ict in education. the internal loss is zero on the question of which institution and which faculty the lecturers belonged to. three percent did not specify the subject in such a way that it was possible to classify according to existing topic titles. the questions posed to the lecturers focused on the use of ict in their courses, the activities they undertook and how they described learning as a concept. likert scales with varying degrees of assent (“never”, “seldom”, “sometimes”, “often”, “very often” and “totally disagree”, “agree to some extent”, “agree to a large extent”, “fully agree”) are used. we shall notice that the analysis is based on lecturers´ statements on the degree to which they use the tools and not on objective tracking or data mining. the assumption that the lecturers interpret the concepts used in the questionnaire differently, both teaching forms and conceptions on learning, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 37 should also be taken into account. the conditions of how many students they meet in practice are due to the number of courses the responding lecturers have, how many students participate in the courses and so on. the possibility of making statements about the lecturers´ conceptions of knowledge through the methods used in their courses is limited, whereas the terms and tradition of practice in different subjects are diverse. some subjects require laboratory work, while other topics may require involvement of the practice fields in order to facilitate understanding of key elements. the consequence is that the subject terms and context strongly affects the possibilities for the design of a course. it is not possible to generalize forms of education outside of its content (shulman, 1986). zemsky and massy stated that “...early adopters need to understand that their success depends as much as the context in which they operate as on the power of the technology they employ” (p. 57, 2004) when they explain the slow adoption of e-learning. thus, the degree of “reproduction” and other parameters can only partially be measured by the same scale for different subjects. a course has also to be designed differently depending on the level and type of education that it may encompass. if the course is in a program designed to attract “new” student groups, containing elements such as gatherings at local study centers or distance learning, then controlling the full course designs is beyond the lecturers' reach. to comment on the relationship between the conceptions of learning and the actual methods used is delicate, particularly since a questionnaire simply generates an instant map of answers that should be completed by other methods to achieve higher reliability. all data and results should be interpreted with all these remarks with reliability and validity in mind. findings and discussion three out of four lecturers indicated that they either “often used” or “very often used” a learning management system in their courses. just as many, or rather a slightly larger proportion, stated that they used e-mail in their teaching. hig had the highest percentage (87%) of universities using the learning management system, which can be explained by the institution's strategy to invest in development, user training and support of the learning management system in use. mälardalen university does not use videoconferencing at all. only a small percentage was using web conferences at the three universities. a total of 69% of the respondents had never used web conferencing in their teaching. some lecturers indicated that they used skypeii, but only a few. the results show similarities at the department and faculty levels, although there are big differences between how lecturers of different subjects report their frequency of use. in order of frequency of use, the main uses of ict are distribution of material, communication, administration, evaluation and examination (see table 1). distribution of materials is often the easiest way to use ict in a course adapted to both the lecturers' and students' expectations and desires. to make use of evaluations and examinations requires the lecturers to be more familiar with the possibilities offered by the ict tools. moreover, examination is the final change of the methods in a course when changing from reproductive thinking to more constructivist ideas (bottino, 2004). in the current study, 14% more lecturers who used ict for more than four years, compared with those lecturers who used ict for less than two years, used the examination tools often or very often. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 38 table 1 ict for different purposes in teaching as indicated by lecturers in 10 subjects the values within each use differ from 21% and 31% for distribution of materials and communication, up to more than 50% for evaluation and examination. the question of whether this difference is due to subject traditions or something else is not unproblematic to comment on. nevertheless, some indications are given by lecturers' conception of learning. table 2 lists the average lecturers’ conception of learning in 10 subjects. in the table, and in the following tables, the highest and lowest values for each conception of learning are highlighted. it is interesting to compare pedagogy lecturers with lecturers of computer science. furthermore, to agree that “`learning is a process between people”, lecturers of pedagogy have indicated to a relatively high degree that “learning has to do with feelings” and that “learning is a cultural and historical process”, while lecturers in computer sciences have indicated relatively low values for these characterizations of learning. considering that both these subjects have relatively large amount of respondents, the result is not biased by only a few answers. learning has to do with thinking learning is a process between people learning is an individual process learning has to do with feelings learning is a cultural and historical process mean 3.6 3.0 3.4 2,4 2.2 n 24 24 24 24 24 computer sciences std.deviation 0.7 0.7 0.6 0.9 1.0 mean 3.5 3.3 3.4 2.9 2.4 n 32 32 32 32 31 business administration std.deviation 0.5 0.7 0.6 0.7 0.8 mean 3.6 3.1 3.4 2.9 2.9 n 14 14 14 14 14 psychology std.deviation 0.5 0.7 0.6 0.9 1.0 mean 3.7 3.2 3.5 2.9 2.5 n 11 11 11 11 11 chemistry std.deviation 0.5 0.9 0.5 1.0 0.9 mean 3.7 3.1 3.3 2.8 2.5 n 16 16 16 16 16 mathematics std.deviation 0.5 0.8 0.7 0.9 1.0 mean 3.3 2.8 3.5 2.8 2.5 n 12 12 12 12 11 biology std.deviation 0.7 0.7 0.5 1.1 0.9 mean 3.6 3.7 3.2 2.9 3.0 n 14 14 14 13 13 public health std.deviation 0.6 0.5 0.7 0.8 0.7 nursing mean 3.6 3.4 3.3 3.2 2.8 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 39 n 42 42 42 42 42 std.deviation 0.7 0.8 0.8 0.8 1.0 mean 3.7 2.9 3.2 3.2 2.6 n 12 12 12 12 11 english std.deviation 0.5 0.9 0.7 0.9 1.0 mean 3.6 3.7 3.2 3.5 3.5 n 37 37 35 37 37 pedagogy std.deviation 0,6 0.5 0.8 0.7 0.7 mean 3.6 3.3 3.3 3.0 2.8 n 375 377 373 373 371 total std.deviation 0.6 0.7 0.7 0.9 0.9 table 2 conceptions of learning indicated by lecturers as derived from likert scales with varying degrees of assent (“totally disagree”, “agree to some extent”, “agree to a large extent”, “fully agree”). the options have been replaced with the value 1, 2, 3 and 4, which generates the means in the table. lecturers in chemistry have indicated to a relatively high degree that “learning has to do with thinking” and “learning is an individual process”. the biology lecturers indicated to a high degree that “learning is an individual process” and accordingly to a low degree that “learning is a process between people”. but at the same time, they indicate to a low degree that “learning has to do with thinking”. it is noteworthy that the english lecturers' have higher degrees of indicating that “learning has to do with thinking” and relatively low degrees of indicating that `learning is a process between people’. a comparison of the lecturers' use of ict tools and the lecturers' conceptions of learning cannot be made in a simple way due to the different circumstances linked to the various subject areas. in the various subjects, the lecturers are using different types of methods. some methods are dependent upon information technology such as databases and students' own discussion forums in the learning management system. other methods can be used in all courses regardless of whether information technology is available or not. some further relations are also noteworthy. pedagogy lecturers indicate to a high extent that “learning is a process between people” and are the group of respondents who most frequently use ict for communication purposes. lecturers in biology who use ict primarily for distributing material have indicated that “learning is an individual process”, while also indicating that they use ict for communication to a greater extent than lecturers in other subjects. a lack of correlation has been found among the lecturers in public health, who characterize learning as a “process between people” more than other groups, but who use ict for communication less than other groups. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 40 table 3 used methods in teaching as indicated by lecturers in 10 subjects table 3 shows how the portfolio methodology, the use of teaching material databases and student-produced materials, including days at the university and study guides, occurs. the data is based on the respondents' statements. lecturers in english can be said to use the portfolio method to a great extent. more than half the english lecturers use it often or very often. only one other subject, pedagogy, will reach as much as 25%. english lecturers also use educational databases to a greater extent than others. “material produced by students”, as well as the other statements, can be interpreted in various ways, though we can note that the english lecturers are those with the highest percentage (50%), thereby indicating that they use them often or very often. “days at the university…” denote that the students travel to the university to participate in activities. these activities are often scheduled at the beginning and completion of the course. they include both days with workshops and days with lectures. one-third of the lecturers organize these activities often or very often. two out of three english lecturers organize days at the university with seminars often or very often. two out of three public health lecturers of organize days with lectures often or very often. study guides are used often or very often by 50% of the mathematics lecturers and up to all 11 biology lecturers who answer that they use study guides in their teaching. the biology lecturers´ use of study guides is not surprising, as they have indicated to a higher degree that “learning is an individual process”. this can be compared to the mathematics lecturers who also indicated that “learning is an individual process” to a higher degree, but who use study guides the least of all. table 4 includes the types of methods which are relevant to the student's possibility of adapting studies to their preferences and possibilities. the lecturers indicate that they use individual assignments often or very often. more than 90% of biology lecturers and public health lecturers indicate that they often or very often use individual assignments. it is worth noting that only two out of three chemistry lecturers indicate the same level, despite the fact that these lecturers indicate that learning is an individual process to a large extent. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 41   table 4 use of student study groups in teaching as indicated by lecturers in 10 subjects the extent of the use of student groups at local study centers largely depends on the type of course. some courses are advertised so that applicants can find out about a course and apply to their local study centers by using a specific application code. half the nursing lecturers indicated that they use this type of student group often or very often. half the english lecturers are using geographical cross-study groups. this is probably related to the fact that they are the lecturers who use (individual) web conferencing technology to a larger extent than other lecturers. the same proportion of these english lecturers lets the students use their own discussion forums for students groups in the learning management system. one in three biology and computer sciences lecturers provides the opportunity for students to study at their own pace. the choice of whether to or not work in a group was named to the greatest extent in mathematics (38%). formative assessment can be understood to represent different things. although the assessment could be well defined conceptually, both the realization and follow-up can differ greatly. in any case, formative assessments were extensively indicated by the biology lecturers. two of three public health lecturers of indicate that they use learning management systems (“lms” in table 5) to conduct course evaluations. a larger proportion, three of four, psychology lecturers indicate that they use a course evaluation tool outside the learning management system (see table 5 below). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 42 table 5 methods of assessments and course evaluations in teaching as indicated by lecturers in 10 subjects lecturers were asked to state the extent to which they use tests and examinations, in addition to which forms of these they use (table 6). from a total of 10 subjects, the most frequent response was take-home exam followed by exam at the university. a total of 77% of psychology lecturers stated that they used the take-home examination often or very often. eighty percent of mathematics lecturers indicated that they used exams at the university often or very often. this can be compared to the result that only a few pedagogy lecturers indicated that they used exams at the university. a larger proportion of pedagogy and english lecturers than those of other subjects indicated that they use portfolio examinations instead (54% and 58%). table 6 examinations in teaching as indicated by lecturers in 10 subjects exam opportunities at local study centers exist in most subjects, albeit on a small scale, whereas alternative forms of examinations are little used. only one seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 43 in five lecturers in computer sciences indicate that they let students choose the examination form often or very often, which was even more unusual in other subjects. self correcting tests, for example, in the learning management system, as well as self-assessment or diagnostic tests online in the learning management system, were used on a small scale (see table 6). conclusion in order of frequency of use, the lecturers´ main uses of ict in this study are distribution of material, communication, administration, evaluation and examination. the results show similarities at the department and faculty levels, but indicate that the lecturers in the 10 subject areas differ considerably according to their use of ict and their conceptions of learning. we can assume that these differences are the result of many factors, which are specific to individual lecturers, subjects, faculties and other external variables. the possibilities of recruiting new students and well-established cooperation with local study centers could also have shown an influence. we also noticed that the lecturers were asked to state the extent to which they use the tools. this method, and the assumption that the lecturers interpret the concepts used in the questionnaire differently, should be taken into account. the question of whether this difference is due to subject traditions or something else is a delicate one to comment on. some indications, however, are given by lecturers' conception of learning. it is interesting to compare pedagogy lecturers with computer science lecturers of. pedagogy lecturers have indicated to a relatively high degree that “learning is a process between people”, “learning has to do with feelings” and that “learning is a cultural and historical process”, while lecturers in computer sciences have indicated relatively low values for these characterizations of learning. the biology lecturers indicated to a high degree that “learning is an individual process” and to a low degree that “learning is a process between people”. but at the same time, they indicate to a low degree that “learning has to do with thinking”. it is noteworthy that the english lecturers´ indicate to a high degree that “learning has to do with thinking” and to a relatively low degrees that “learning is a process between people”. besides the difficulties of comparing conceptions of learning to the use of ict in a valid way, it is interesting to compare the different conceptions themselves and the various uses of ict. pedagogy lecturers indicate to a high extent that “learning is a process between people”, and are the group of respondents who most frequently use ict for communication purposes. lecturers in chemistry have indicated to a relatively high degree that “learning has to do with thinking” and “learning is an individual process”, but make use of individual assignments and study guides to a lesser extent. some further relations are also noteworthy. lecturers in biology who use ict primarily for distributing material have indicated that “learning is an individual process”, while at the same time indicating that they use ict for communication to a greater extent than lecturers in other subjects. a lack of correlation has also been found among the lecturers in public health who characterize learning as a “process between people” more than other groups, but who indicate the use of ict for communication less than others. we can pose the question as to the extent to which threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge in respective subject areas determine the lecturers’ choices in relation to other factors. in the development of pedagogy and teaching methods, we can assume that an exchange of ideas and experience between lecturers from various subject areas and faculties is a learning opportunity for all lecturers. references seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 44 bottino, r. m. (2004). the evolution of ict-based learning environments: which perspectives for the school of the future? british journal of educational technology, 35(5), 553-567. chan, k., & elliott, r. g. (2004). relational analysis of personal epistemology and conceptions about teaching and learning. teaching & teacher education, 20(8), 817-831. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2004.09.002 entwistle, n. j., & peterson, e. r. (2004). conceptions of learning and knowledge in higher education: relationships with study behaviour and influences of learning environments. international journal of educational research, 41(6), 407-428. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2005.08.009 garrison, r., & anderson, t. (1999). transforming and enhancing university teaching: stronger and weaker technological influences. in terry evans and daryl nation (ed.), changing university teaching: reflections on creating educational technologies, (pp. 24-33). london: kogan page. gowin, d., & kember, d. (1993). conceptions of teaching and their relationship to student learning. british journal of educational psychology, 63(1), 20-33. kember, d., & kwan, k. (2000). lecturers' approaches to teaching and their relationship to conceptions of good teaching. instructional science, 28(5), 469490. kirkwood, a., & price, l. (2006). adaptation for a changing environment: developing learning and teaching with information and communication technologies. international review of research in open and distance learning, 7(2), 1-14. laurillard, d. (1993). rethinking university teaching: a framework for the effective use of educational technology. london: routledge. nunes, m. b., & mcpherson, m. (2003). constructivism vs. objectivism where is difference for designers of e-learning environments? third ieee international conference on advanced learning technologies, athens, greece. 496-500. doi:http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/icalt.2003.1215217 prosser, m., & trigwell, k. (1997). relations between perceptions of the teaching environment and approaches to teaching. the british journal of educational psychology, 67(1), 25-35. ramsden, p. (2003). learning to teach in higher education. london: routledgefalmer. siemens, g. (2006). learning or management system? a review of learning management system reviews. learning technology centre, university of manitoba. retrieved 17 may 2011 from: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wordpress/wpcontent/uploads/2006/10/learning-or-management-system-with-referencelist.doc shulman, l. s. (1986). those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching. educational researcher, 15(2), 4-14. wierstra, r. f. a., kanselaar, g., van, d. l., lodewijks, h. g. l. c., & vermunt, j. d. (2003). the impact of the university context on european students' learning approaches and learning environment preferences. higher education, 45(4), 503. zemsky, r. & massy, w.f. (2004) thwarted innovation. what happened to e-learning and why: a final report for the weatherstation project of the learning alliance. retrieved 17 may 2011 from: http://helearningalliance.info/weatherstation.html seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 45 i the study was conducted thanks to collaboration in the network penta plus. special thanks to peter aspengren, mälardalen university, and mats brenner, university of gävle. ii skype is a trademark for ip telephone and conference. microsoft word nordseth, ekker, munkvold_tools for peer assessment.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 tools for peer assessment in an e-learning environment hugo nordseth senior lecturer faculty of agriculture and information technology nord-trøndelag university college e-mail: hugo.nordseth@hint.no sonja ekker assistant professor faculty of agriculture and information technology nord-trøndelag university college e-mail: sonja.ekker@hint.no robin munkvold assistant professor faculty of agriculture and information technology nord-trøndelag university college e-mail: robin.munkvold@hint.no abstract our exploration of peer assessment in the formative feedback of themes within itl111 digital competence for teachers (15 ects) and geo102 physical geography (15 ects) is based on support from tools within the lms, sets of learning based outcomes, rubrics and six thinking hats. the overall effect is improved quality of the student assignments and deeper learning. the best results were registered with the use of rubrics where the students were presented with clearly defined criteria for expected performance on a sample of different themes within the course. in order to perform the peer review, the students had to acquire the basic knowledge of the various themes. in addition, seeing how others solved the assignment provided the student with reflections on the themes that would improve the student's own final portfolio. keywords: peer assessment, intended learning outcomes, learning management system, rubrics, portfolio, six thinking hats, deeper learning introduction peer assessment has relevance for teaching and learning in different contexts, specifically related to the use of portfolios and guidance for students preliminary work on a portfolio. a search for the keyword peer assessment in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 325 norwegian web-sites shows a lot of activity in the period 2004-2005, but not much afterwards. peer assessment was developed as a basic didactic tool for the health care study program at oslo university college (havnes, 2005). walker (2004) has published a paper on learning to give and receive relevant critique using peer assessment. peer assessment is used in study programs at several university colleges and universities in norway. a report of international trends in assessment (dysthe and engelsen, 2009) concludes that self assessment and peer assessment will replace assessment by the teacher or the external grader. the goals of the project assess-2010 are to investigate how to make costefficient assessments in the learning process for students in courses with many students. a lot of courses are still working with traditional teaching and with limited support for the learning process before the final exam. in this context, we wish to gather empirical evidence on adequate tools for learning activities in an e-learning environment using principles for deeper learning. carmean and haefner (2002) synthesized various theories on learning into five core deeper learning principles: social, active, contextual, engaging and studentowned. deeper learning occurs through these five principles, but they don’t have to be present all the time nor all at once (ibid). our experience from this project is based on peer assessment in two pilot courses at nord-trøndelag university college. the feedback on student reports before the exam portfolio delivery was mainly based on the peer assessment method. we introduced several tools to improve the quality of the peer assessment process. first, the peer assessment was connected to intended learning outcomes (biggs and tang, 2007). second, we applied a set of criteria the students had to follow when they were giving feedback to each other, using a rubrics tool based on ideas from fjørtoft (2009). in addition, we introduced the six thinking hats as a tool for making relevant and constructive feedback (de bono, 2010). in this paper we present our experiences with peer assessment in an elearning environment. the research question is defined as follows: how can tools like learning objectives, rubrics, six thinking hats and discussion forums within the lms promote better quality for the student assignments and make the students achieve deeper learning? our research model is presented in illustration one. figure 1: the research model. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 326 the research process the pilot courses use web-based learning for a mixture of both on-campus and distance students. mainly, the teaching activities include web-based learning with both lessons and feedback on student assignments. in addition, the distance students have an on-campus gathering with full time teaching for three days in the beginning of the semester, and a second gathering midway in the semester. the fulltime students on campus follow regular two-hour lectures per week. the final exam is a portfolio consisting of the best of the previously submitted assignments. both pilot courses have on the average 60 students. some of the student assignments are organized as group activities, which give the student the opportunity to build relations with other students that are participating in the courses. the main reason for choosing itl111 digital competence for teachers and geo102 physical geography as pilot courses was that they have more students compared to the other courses at our university college. another reason was that the courses are delivered with a wide use of e-learning environments for teaching and learning purposes. our research process is based on the use of selected tools for peer assessment. earlier researches discuss the terms peer assessment and peer feedback. liu and carless (2006) explained the difference between the two, where peer feedback primarily is about rich detailed comments but without formal grades, peer assessment denotes grading. in our cases the task was to give feedback on three other student assignments, and we also provided tools for measuring the student assignments by giving a mark on each requirement in the rubrics. our university college uses fronter as the learning management system (lms). the challenge in connection with our research project is that fronter lacks specific tools for peer assessment, and we had to explore alternative ways of managing peer assessment in this environment. we prepared a specific archive or "room" within fronter for each group consisting of 3-5 students. the students had write access to this archive, and we recommended them to establish a discussion forum as a method for feedback in the peer assessment process. case one: the course itl111 digital competence for teachers in the last of four student assignments of the course itl111 digital competence for teachers (15 ects), the task was to produce a set of multiplechoice questions for their own class in primary or secondary school. during the peer assessment process, the students wrote a report where they presented and explained the introduction to the multiple-choice test in addition to six of the questions from the multiple-choice test and the marking policy. the report was posted in the dedicated archive in fronter where a group of 3-5 students had access. each student reviewed the report from the other students in the group based on the following tools for peer assessment: the intended learning outcomes, rubrics and feedback based on the six thinking hats. the second part of the student task was to write an individual reflection report where the students presented their own feedback and reflections on the peer assessment process. the students were to consider and reflect on the learning effects of using the method of peer assessment. the instruction for individual reflection report was to present: 1. your evaluation and feedback to three of the other student assignments. 2. your reflection on the use of intended learning outcomes and the rubrics in the peer assessment process consider it both from a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 327 student and a teacher perspective. what are the possibilities and what are the limitations of these tools. these individual reports of feedback and reflections were delivered in a portfolio archive for student reports and teacher feedback in fronter. based on the feedback from fellow students, each of the students could improve their preliminary portfolios before delivering their final portfolio. the final portfolio was evaluated by an external grader of the course in addition to the teacher. case two: the course geo102 physical geography in the course geo102 physical geography (15 ects) there are three mandatory student assignments. the instructor gave each student feedback on two of these assignments, and the peer assessment method was used as the feedback in the third assignment. the class was divided into groups with about 4 students in each group. each student read through the papers of the other group members and gave feedback on their work. the tools for the student feedback were the relevant intended learning outcomes in the course, a set of criteria presented in a rubrics with guidelines for different marks, and in addition a simplified version of the six thinking hats. the rubrics with guidelines for different marks were presented since the students were expected to set a preliminary mark on the assignments of the other students. in terms of "the thinking hats", the students were instructed to give feedback on some positive aspects, some negative aspects, and provide some suggestions for improvements of the fellow student's assignment. the completed evaluation ought to be about one half a4 page. in the reflection report the students were required to submit later in the class, the students were asked to write a reflection report where they answered some questions: 1. did the assessment tools help in the process of evaluating the other students´ assignments? 2. were you inspired to write a more thorough paper knowing that other students would be reviewing the work in addition to the instructor? do you think the feedback given by the other students in you group helped you in the process of improving your portfolio? did the process of peer review assignments make you learn the subject more effectively? did you get helpful tips by reading the other students´ assignments? case study the research can be categorized as a case study of two different applications of the peer assessment method. case studies are conducted in situations where the phenomena are studied in their natural context. in this situation, the research is based on several data sources to ensure the most thorough and detailed investigation (askheim and grenness, 2008). our empirical data are based on the students' reflection reports and activities in the fronter archives of the two courses. tools and learning effects of peer assessment our approach has two primary theoretical aspects. first, our case study of peer assessment is based on support from relevant tools in the e-learning environment, intended learning outcomes, rubrics and the six thinking hats for evaluation. what is the adequate use of these tools for peer assessment, and what is useful in our context? second, we want to investigate the perceived learning effects of the peer assessment process for our cases. what seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 328 are the perceived effects of using these tools in peer assessment for the teacher and the learners? intended learning outcomes for the learning activity an important goal for the project assess-2010 was to get experience from alternative learning theories that are supporting portfolio teaching style. the method developed is based on the idea of "constructive alignment" (biggs & tang, 2007) and is an educational framework to see the connections between what students are expected to learn (intended learning outcomes), evaluation and the learning process. process evaluation is part of the learning process leading up to the students to reach their goals for learning. process evaluation is a formative assessment of students during the learning process and will provide feedback to students about how they are performing in relation to the goals for learning. it is thought that feedback contributes to increased motivation in learning the course (assess-2010). the student assignment on multiple-choice and feedback by the process of using peer-assessment had three learning outcomes: after working with the lesson of creating multiple choice questions you should be able to · make a criteria based tool for assessment of a given theme/goal · give constructive feedback to fellow students · evaluate suitability of the assessment method and student assessment the assignment used for the peer review in physical geography was on the topic of quaternary deposits and landscape formation. the learning outcomes for this part of the curriculum were defined as follows: · describe the quaternary deposits in norway · describe how they are formed, where they are deposited and the landscape formation rubrics the website assessment is for learning (2010) has a glossary defining the concept rubrics: a set of graded criteria, often in the form of a grid, which describes the essential quality indicators of a piece of work or product, in order for it to be accurately assessed. rubrics provide learners with learning intentions and success criteria, and can also be useful for encouraging interactive dialogue about quality. for example, they can demonstrate the key features at a variety of levels, which indicate to learners what would be a poor, an average and a very good piece of work. they can be used before, during and after activities, and can be helpful in providing learners with quality feedback as well as enabling opportunities for self and peer assessment. fjørtoft (2009) has presented a number of rubrics to improve assessment practices for a lot of subjects in norwegian schools. based on his ideas we made a specific rubrics for defining learning outcomes, by placing marks from a (best) to e (poor) for each requirement and assessment goal. for assessment of the assignment on multiple-choice, six points of requirements were seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 329 presented in the curriculum (table one). we introduced requirements for making a good introduction, feedback strategy, and skills for making multiplechoice questions. the students used fronter or it's learning for making their multiple-choice tests. the tools for making multiple-choice questions have several options for making questions, like radio bar, multiple check-boxes, yes/no-arrow, drop down list, short text, long text, click-on-screen, and connect from two sets of statements. there was also a requirement for using stimuli in the questions, like a picture, a web-address, a map, an animation, a figure, or an illustration. we also introduced requirements connected to a new version of blooms taxonomy for making questions that cover different aspect of learning: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating (overbaugh and schultz, 2010). requirement/ level a b c d e the introduction all claims all claims some requirements short intro thin intro sort of questions 4 types 3 types 2 types single type single type the use of stimuli different types different types minimal only questions only questions blooms taxonomy > 3 + reasoned 3 + reasoned 2 + based 1 + justified unfounded scores -feedback differentiated reasoned differentiated reasoned single reasoned single single simple and without feedback total valuation advanced and superb fit the target audience very good and fit the target audience good and adapted to the target audience easily simple minimum solution table 1: rubrics with requirements for the assessment on the multiple-choice assignment. table 2 shows the set of requirements for the a e marks to be given to the students’ works in physical geography. the table gave the students a common platform they could use to set a preliminary mark to the fellow student. the table also made the students conscious of what is needed in order to get a good mark on a student assignment. a b c d e references in text ok ok mostly ok missing something deficient reference list ok ok mostly ok missing something deficient concepts many correctly many correctly taken with the most common must have some little content master the curriculum + additional info as well master the curriculum key points missing a part, some errors lacking a lot table 2: rubrics with requirements for preliminary marks given to student work in physical geography. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 330 feedback process using six thinking hats "six thinking hats" is a technique that helps us look at project ideas from a number of different perspectives (de bono, 2010). it is also defined as a thinking tool for group discussion and individual thinking. it helps us make better decisions by pushing us to move outside our habitual ways of thinking. the technique is mainly developed for collaboration groups, in order to make the participants think more easily together. this way of organizing feedback within collaboration groups has a psychological effect, because the participants are more aware of the roles that they are playing, and therefore will not be afraid to give both positive and negative feedback to the other participants’ work. de bono defines the six thinking hats like this: • white hat: calls for information known or needed: this means that the participants give feedback on their understanding of the subject and input on known and needed information regarding the theme. • red hat: signifies feelings, hunches and intuition: this means that the participants give feedback on their feelings, hunches and intuition towards the subject being presented. • black hat: judgment -the devil's advocate or why something may not work: this means that the participants give feedback on things regarding the subject on which they think will fail. in general: looking for problems and mismatches. • yellow hat: symbolizes brightness and optimism: this means that the participants give feedback on what they like regarding the given theme and what positive (side) effects they assume the idea will bring. • green hat: focuses on creativity: the possibilities, alternatives and new ideas: this means that the participants give feedback on what they mean are the possibilities regarding the subject and on new ideas they might have that might bring the project further. • blue hat: is used to manage the thinking process: this means that the project owner tries to summarize the process this far and gives the participants the opportunity to give feedback on the big picture of the theme and on the content of what has been discussed. learning effects of peer assessment introducing peer assessment in a course has effects both on the learner and the teacher. the conceptual rationale for peer assessment and peer feedback is that it enables the students to take an active role in the management of their own learning (liu and carless, 2006). the main argument here is that the learners monitor their work using internal and external feedback as catalysts. falchikov (2001) argues that peer feedback enhances student learning as students are actively engaged in articulating the evolving understanding of the subject matter. liu and carless (2006) give some other relevant arguments. first, the learner would receive a greater amount of feedback from peers, and it happens quicker than when the feedback comes from the teacher. second, the learning is to be extended from the private and individual domain to a more public domain. we learn more and deeper through expressing and articulating to others what we know or understand. brown et al (1997) argue that the resistance by students to informal peer feedback is rare. the resistance to formal peer assessment for summative purposes is frequently based on three reasons: dislike of judging peers in ways that 'count'; a distrust of the process and the time involved. in our cases we, therefore, focused on the informal peer feedback and applied the tools in the assessment of a preliminary portfolio instead of the final portfolio. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 331 liu and carless (2006) also mention some possible reasons for resistance to peer assessment: • reliability. this is connected to grading and marking. in our project the student just made marks at the preliminary student assignment. • perceived expertise. academics are expected to have far more expertise than students. some students may feel that their classmates are not qualified to provide insightful feedback, whilst other may find it easier emotionally to accept feedback from peers. • power relations. to assess is to have power over a person and sharing the assessment with student leads to sharing of teacher's power. in our project most of the students are teachers or in a teacher study program, and it should be important to practice on giving feedback and assessment. • time. peer assessment demands spending more time spent on tasks like thinking, analyzing, comparing, and communicating. from the teacher perspective an earlier research showed that using selfand peer marking on a mid-term portfolio both saved staff time and enabled students to receive feedback more promptly (boud and holmes, 1995). with increasing resource constraints and decreasing capacity of academics to provide sufficient feedback, peer feedback can be a central part of the learning process (liu and carless, 2006). the teacher perspective also deals with: • reliability. are students making correct marks during the peer process? how can we assure that the mark and the feedback are relevant? • perceive expertise. a key solution is to give the students relevant tools that they can apply in the peer assessment process. • time. when introducing peer assessment the teacher spend more time scheduling and planning rather than teaching and coaching. when planning the peer assessment assignments, we had to deal with some challenges concerning the aspects of supporting the students in the learning process and to give support in order to avoid problems with resistance against the assignment. table 3 presents an overview of the main aspects. it shows the challenges a teacher encounters in the project of using peer assessment. these questions also give the structure for reporting the results and the empirical findings in this paper. aspect teachers challenge learners feedback or results reliability how do we manage reliability? is there any resistance against giving marks? empirical feedback on reliability? perceived expertise how do we support insecure students with lack of competence and work progress? are the tools of the rubrics, the intended learning outcome and the six thinking hats useful for the student assignment? empirical feedback on perceive expertise? time spent on the peer assessment process do teachers spend more or less time administering the course with a peer assessment assignment and process? empirical feedback on time consumed in the peer assessment process seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 332 quality of the student reports do the students get deeper learning using the peer assessment process? compare the quality of students assignments support from the e-learning environment does the e-learning environment have relevant tools for the peer assessment process? empirical feedback on the support from the e-learning environment table 3: challenges on planning and duration of peer assessment in our projects. results from our two case studies in this chapter we present ways of dealing with the challenges presented in table 3, and some empirical findings from the students’ reports, e-mails and results from the learning process of using peer assessment. managing reliability in the course itl111? we made two main goals for the control of the feedback process on the student report from the multiple-choice test. first, we had to control that every student received feedback from at least two other students. second, we had to control that each student received feedback with proposals for improvements. the students documented their feedback process through the individual reflection reports of this process. through this quality control we found that two students did not receive feedback at all, and we had to provide our own feedback to these students. this teacher feedback was given in the forum for peer assessment. and every student received relevant proposals for improvements. is there any resistance against giving marks? two of nine groups decided not to give marks in the peer assessment of the student report. the students here are all teachers as occupation or teacher students, and should be skilled in giving marks. this observation indicates some resistance against giving marks in peer assessment. are the rubrics useful for the student work? the rubrics were an important incentive for the students when they developed a multiple-choice test, and also for the later work on the report on the peer assessment process. as one of the students said: "knowing that other students will have access to my report gives me motivation to perform better." the rubrics were first used when the students made the multiple-choice test. it was important to make questions and a test that fitted the requirements for a good mark. the next use of the rubrics was when the students made their report from the multiple-choice test and the peer assessment process. they wrote the report, chose questions and argued for their decisions that would fit the requirements for a later peer assessment. and they had to learn a lot about the specific requirements for making their own report. during the peer assessment process, they had to evaluate and give feedback on the other student reports. this process required the student to have good knowledge about the reports’ topic so he could give advice for improvements to the other students. as the students said: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 333 a great advantage is that one has to dig more deeply into the theme because one has to do peer feedback ", "assessing other students works makes me better prepared for assessing my own report" and "it has made me more aware regarding the demands for assessing the assignment. it’s learning and fronter have different options and solutions for making multiple-choice tests. our students used either it’s learning or fronter for their student work at this topic. by using peer assessment with users from different lms, the students got ideas and new perspectives on how to make multiple-choice tests from each other. the feedback process also includes tools for how to give adequate feedback. we gave no such tools in the introduction, and some of the students made their own rubrics for giving feedback based on the given requirements. table 4 shows an example on how to give feedback. based on the feedback given in the peer assessment process, the students were allowed to improve their own reports before posting it to the final portfolio. as part of this process they also had to find the adequate feedback. for example, when they got three different feedbacks from the peer students with incompatible advices for improvements, the students had to decide which one was the most adequate for their own assignment and report. this is illustrated by the following statement from the participants: the advantage of giving peer feedback in an open forum is that one receives a variety of feedback and in many cases different students provide different feedback even though they have the same criteria/rubrics to follow. requirements for feedback marks and evaluations based on the requirement suggestions for improvements 1: introduction to the test mark b: good and adequate introduction to the test, but not complete. supply more information to the pupils. what is the max score? what type of questions will they find in the test? 2: type of question mark b: there are 3 different types of questions in a proper way. you also can use a question with drop down list for this test? 3: use of stimuli mark c: you have good pictures for some of the questions. make a better connection between the picture stimuli and the question. 4: use of bloom's taxonomy mark b: you have questions in level4 at blooms taxonomy. no suggestions! 5: score and feedback mark c: you have just a final score as feedback discuss the use of negative points for wrong answers. 6: total valuation mark b/c: you have a well performed test and report work with the introduction and apply more and better stimuli table 4: example of student feedback based on the rubrics. another source of improvement was the ideas that were given in the peer assessment of the reports. could good solutions found in someone elses report improve your own test and report in a way that gives you a better mark? copying questions from each other was not easy, and directly adequate, because of the concept of individual goals for the multiple-choice test. at least they can use similar alternative questions or tools when they make their next multiple-choice test. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 334 the table, which defined the requirements for the student assignments, also provided instructions for an individual note for feedback and reflection. the first part of this note was concerned with the documentation of the feedback the student gave in the peer assessment process. most of the students made adequate evaluations, proposals and feedback based on the given requirements for the multiple-choice test and report. some of them came up with a clear structure for feedback like in table 4. the reflecting part of one of the questions was to give opinions about using a table of requirements for different marks. most students reported that the use of the rubrics had been very useful. they felt that it made the process on peer feedback much easier, more accurate, more fair, systematic, and constructive. they also pointed out that it was important to have an open space where they could freely write comments and suggestions on their peer student report. the rubrics seems to make the students focus quite well on each detail, as they comment the peer student reports with a narrow focus on each little element (criteria) within each rubric, making them miss out on the overall picture. our use of the criteria "overall impression" is therefore evaluated very positively in the empirical data that are collected from the reflections done by each student in the process of this work a great challenge is to make the content of the rubrics as clear as possible so that each peer feedback is done as fair as possible. accordingly, the students also pointed out the importance of our classroom walkthrough. it gave everyone a better understanding of the meaning of each element in the rubrics and on how they were to use it when they gave constructive feedback to each other. is the tool of intended learning outcome useful for the student work? there are a few concrete comments on this tool in the reflecting notes from the students. we continued to work on it in a research on how to make intended learning outcome in another course, in the spring of 2010. is the tool of six thinking hats useful for the student work? the principles of the six thinking hats were first presented to the students. then they were divided into several groups where they were given a small assignment to practice on how to use the tool for peer feedback in later assignments. through this exercise the students were made aware of the possible use of the six thinking hats as a tool for making constructive peer feedback on the given assignment. even though several students reported that they used the tool, only a few commented directly on its effect. one of the comments from the students who took the course was: using six thinking hats made it easier to give peer feedback. the negative feedback becomes less personal as the peer can reflect that “this is said when wearing the black hat, …” and so forth. when discussing the tools and their possible effects on making constructive peer feedback, several students pointed out the psychological effects of the method. the tools made them less uncertain when giving peer feedback. the criteria for peer assessment in physical geography have three components: the students were asked to comment on the positive aspects, on the negative aspects, and to suggest improvements to the student work submitted in a feedback report of about a half a4 text page. the purpose of the criteria was to ensure uniform feedback to the students. in addition, it was seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 335 necessary to demand of the students to be critical in their reviews of their fellow students so that errors and weak points of the work submitted would be clearly visible. the requirement to give negative comments in addition to the positive feedback made this evaluation more legitimate, and acceptable, in the cases where the students knew each other well. what are the changes in time usage when making a peer assessment assignment? the student work with multiple-choice assignments and a student report was done in both 2008 and 2009. in 2008 the students only received a teacher feedback on the first version of their work in the portfolio. this work can be compared with the student work done in 2009 by using tools for peer assessment as described above. our impressions as teachers for both courses are: • the multiple-choice tests are in general more advanced, and more tools were used in 2009. the students’ skills for making multiple-choice tests are higher in 2009. the use of the rubrics for visible and clear goals seems to be the most important tool here. • the students spend more time in 2009 than in 2008. the statement is based on the working list for what to do in this student work. they had to do more work in 2009 by making a discussion with personal feedback for three other students. visual and personal feedbacks to others demand a deeper understanding and more skills of the learning material than a simple report to a teacher without any consequences. • the teacher had to focus on making adequate rubrics for the student work, and he had to prepare the student for making the peer assessment. quality of the student reports most of the students reported that they spend more time with the assignments knowing that other students in the class would be reading and evaluating their work instead of just the teacher. they were also more concerned whether the content of the assignment was correct. a few of the students were skeptical to the method of peer assessment since the assignment could be used as part of the final portfolio. they expressed doubts like if i come up with a lot of good ideas and put a lot of work into my assignment, other students may copy my good work and get better marks without having worked for it. therefore, i will reserve most of my good ideas and hard work for the final portfolio. using the method of student feedback, the instructor would spend less time giving feedbacks on each individual assignment. some of the students felt concerned about not getting the same amount of feedback and comments from the teacher as they usually would. it was important since the teacher was the one who would be grading their final portfolio. others, however, indicated that they were happy to get several evaluations and comments instead of only one evaluation from the teacher. all the students agreed on the fact that the process of giving feedback to the other students in the group consumed a lot more time than they otherwise would have spent on this particular assignment. mainly, the extra time was spent on consulting the curriculum literature to ensure that the comments they gave in the evaluations to the other students were correct, and also to check and see if the answers given by the other students in their assignments were correct. the overall result was more time spent studying the subject matter so that the students obtained more knowledge and better understanding of the themes in the assignment. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 336 have the e-learning environments relevant tools for a peer assessment process? the common lmss used in higher education in norway do not have proper tools for peer assessment. in the tool for portfolio in lms like fronter and it's learning, there are two main roles. the student role can save student work and read feedback of the work. the teacher role has write access and can write comments directly to the student work, and can give feedback in different ways to the student work. for real peer assessment inside the portfolio, the student needs read access to all other student work, and the opportunity to give feedback to each other inside the portfolio. for the peer assessments in our courses, we had to find alternative tools in fronter. our decision was to create common archive folders with sub-folders in which a group of students had write access. in the course itl111 we selected a compound across the former group of sections to avoid friends and colleagues having to consider each other's work. in physical geography the whole class was divided into groups alphabetically. among the campus students this resulted in groups where some of the students knew each other quite well. all the students uploaded documents for review to the archive folder. for feedback, we recommended the students to create and use a discussion forum. for the peer-assessment some groups made a common forum for a united response. alternatively, some groups chose to create multiple forums, but with clear headlines so it was visible to the recipient. the teacher control at this peer-assessment process was to review the feedback given to the students and compare the reviews given to each of them. only two students got no feedback from other students, and the teacher had to make ordinary feedback of the student assignment. the student work could be further developed until the final submission of the portfolio. time spent for students and teachers using the peer assessment concept our alternative teaching approach for these cases was a traditional portfolio student work and with feedback from the teacher. for the students this approach is more demanding with respect to the time spent, but also a more effective and meaningful learning. conclusion our exploration of peer assessment in the formative feedback of themes within itl111 digital competence for teachers (15 ects) and geo102 physical geography (15 ects) is based on support from tools within the lms; sets of learning based outcomes, rubrics and six thinking hats. net based peer assessment can be used within a lms even though most lms do not have specific tools for peer assessment. we used fronter and chose to establish regular archives for publishing the student assignments. access to these archives was limited to the members of each student group and the teacher. the students gave their peer assessment by using the discussion forum. in courses with many students, the method with peer assessment will provide opportunities for an increased number of feedback responses on student assignments. in turn, this will provide an improved learning outcome for the students. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 337 the overall effect is an improved quality of the student assignments and a deeper learning. the best results were registered with the use of rubrics where the students were presented with clearly defined criteria for expected performance on a sample of different themes within the course. in order to perform the peer review, the students had to acquire the basic knowledge of the various themes. in addition, seeing how others solved the assignment provides the student with reflections on the themes that could improve the student's own final portfolio. we also confirm earlier research that some of the students have resistance against giving marks in peer assessment even in formative feedbacks. references assessment is for learning (ailf). glossary. retrieved february 15, 2010, from http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/assess/index.asp. askheim, g. a. & grenness, t (2008). kvalitative metoder for markedsføring og organisasjonsfag. oslo: universitetsforlaget. assess-2010. prosjektwiki for assess-2010. retrieved february 15, 2010, from http://assess2010.wikispaces.com/. biggs, j. & tang, c. (2007). teaching for quality learning at university. (3. edition). berkshire, uk: open university press, mcgraw – hill education. bound, d & holmes, h. (1995). self and peer marking in a large technical subject. in d. bound (ed.): enhancing learning through self assessment. london: kogan page brown, g., bull, j & pendlebury, m. (1997). assessing student learning in higher educations. london: routledge. carmean, c. & haefner, j. (2002). mind over matter: transforming course management systems into effective learning environments. retrieved may 3, 2010 from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0261.pdf de bono, e. six thinking hats. retrieved february 15, 2010, from http://www.debonothinkingsystems.com/tools/6hats.htm http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newted_07.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/six_thinking_hats http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php. dysthe, o. & engelsen, k. s. (2009). mapper som læringsog vurderingsform. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.ituarkiv.no/emnekategori/1083650082.59/1083574061.39.1.html ekker, s (2009). assess-2010, pilot – naturgeografi. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://assess2010.wikispaces.com/pilot+-+naturgeografi falchikov, n (2001) learning together: peer tutoring in higher education. london: routledge falmer. fjørtoft, h. (2009). effektiv planlegging og vurdering, rubrikker og andre verktøy for lærere. bergen: fagbokforlaget and landslaget for norskundervisning. havnes, a. (2005). medstudentvurdering som læring – erfaringer fra sykepleierutdanningen. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.hio.no/enheter/pedagogisk-utviklingssenter/arkiv/tidligeresider/fou-prosjekter/tverrfaglig-forskningssamarbeid-om-peerlearning/medstudentvurdering-som-laering-erfaringer-frasykepleierutdanningen liu, n. & carless, d. (2006). peer feedback: the learning element of peer assessment. in teaching in higher education vol. 11, no 3, july 2006, pp 279-290. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 338 retrieved february 16, 2010, from http://web.edu.hku.hk/staff/dcarless/liu&carless2006.pdf munkvold, r. & nordseth, h. (2009). assess-2010, pilot – ikt for lærere. retrieved february 15, 2010, from http://assess2010.wikispaces.com/pilot++ikt+for+l%c3%a6rere overbaugh, r. c. & schultz, l. bloom's taxonomy, new version. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm walker, j. (2004). å lære å gi og motta konstruktiv kritikk gjennom medstudentvurdering. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://jilltxt.net/txt/medstudentvurdering.html microsoft word hole, larsen, hoem_promoting the good e-teacher.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 promoting the good e-teacher: didactical choices when developing e-pedagogical competences grete oline hole associate professor centre of evidence based practice bergen university college grete.oline.hole@hib.no anne karin larsen associate professor dept. of social education and social work bergen university college anne.larsen@hib.no jon hoem phd, associate professor the media centre bergen university college jon.hoem@hib.no abstract the article gives an overview of how the development of a blended epedagogy course for higher education teachers have used the experiences from many years of international online courses for european ba students. influenced by the situated-learning perspective, this course employs studentcentred teaching and learning methods. moreover, inspired by the community of inquiry, this programme emphasizes the importance of cognitive, teaching and social presence in the virtual learning environment. the students plan their own courses in accordance with the stages of becoming an e-learner. one uses the ecological “model of relations between didactical categories” as a framework, and the e-pedagogy course is customized to be “hands-on” learning experiences, which promotes the desired e-teacher competences. during the course the students are engaged in discussions and co-operation by using different ict-collaborations tools. at this time, the course has been held twice, and is available for everyone as an online learning resource under the creative commons license (http://www.virclass.net/eped). evaluations by students have demonstrated that this hands-on training course can help students attain the necessary competences needed to be skilled e-teachers. keywords: e-pedagogy, didactical model, communication tools, web 2.0, blended learning, on-line collaboration, community of learners, social work education, virtual campus seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 297 introduction the european project virclass (the virtual classroom for social work in europe) has developed and carried out e-learning courses for ba students in social work all over europe since 2005 (larsen & hole, 2007a). in virclass the partners have developed competence-based curricular plans for two modules in social work with a comparative perspective, credited 5/10 ects credits (european credit transfer and accumulation system). in october 2009, the fifth cohort of students began module 1, and altogether 326 students and 13 teachers have been involved in these courses. in 2008 the virclass consortium, with new partners, received a grant from the lifelong learning programme – virtual campus to develop a social work virtual campus (swvircampi). the overall aim is to make an international specialization within social work at the ba level. one way of achieving this goal has been to initiate a new e-learning module, community work from an international perspective, credited with 15 ects credits, with new learning material, a quality guide and a new framework agreement for a sustainable virtual campus. an analysis of the experiences of those working with e-learning courses shows a need for increasing the e-teacher competences among the staff at the partner institutions. accordingly, an international course in e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education institutions (hei) was developed with a grant from norway opening universities. this article outlines the teaching and learning philosophy underlying all our elearning courses and describes how this orientation has influenced the development of an e-pedagogy course for teachers in higher education (he). finally, the findings from the students’ evaluations of the course will be presented. methods the experiences reported here can be seen as a ‘single-case study’ (yin 2003) within a mixed-methods approach (cresswell & clark 2007). years with the virclass courses have revealed the importance of educators having a robust knowledge and understanding of the available technological tools on the internet. it is important that the ‘virtual teachers’ know how to enhance elearning. they need to know which tools are most likely to promote the desired learning activities, and how these can enable the students to accomplish the desired learning outcome. the educator must be aware of how to stimulate productive learning by using the different ways of presenting the learning material offered by ict. the process of converting the virclass courses to the sw-vircamp project involved a significant expansion of the teaching staff involved. earlier, teachers shared their knowledge and had ‘hands-on’ training with the virtual learning environment (vle)ii during the teacher meetings. the decision was made to organize the training in a more systematic and formalized manner through an ects-credited course. outline of the e-pedagogy course during spring 2008, the curricular plan and the virtual-learning material were developed, and the authors outlined a detailed study programme supplemented with tasks. updated readings and relevant web resources were found and made available for the students. during the first course, the list of readings and collaboration tools were supplemented, partly because of suggestions from the students in the course, and partly because of the discussion among all participants involved. the course lasts for 12 weeks, with seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 298 a face-to-face (f2f) week at bergen university college (hib) during week 3. it was credited with 7.5 ects credits the first year. students’ evaluations after the course, as well as the teachers’ judgement of the workload related to the fulfilment of all tasks, resulted in an expansion to 10 ects credits. the course was arranged twice during the springs of 2008 and 2009, with 12 participating students. participants the course was promoted among the virclass partners, as well as through the international social-work network eusw.iii because of the grant, participants only had to pay a small fee, but their home institution had to pay the travelling costs and accommodation for the campus week in bergen. the first year, nine hei teachers began the course. some of these were experienced virclass teachers who wanted to formalize their competences by achieving the credits; others were educators well acquainted with e-teaching from other courses; and some were novices to virclass, to the vle used, and to eteaching. in addition, some of the other virclass partners were able to participate in the campus week, giving a hand in the teaching sessions and in the hands-on training. this mixture of different competences among both the “teacher-students” and the participating educators created a fruitful learning environment that encouraged the exchange of information and knowledgesharing. the second time the course started, in april 2009, all the students were teachers from partner institutions in the sw-vircamp project. not being familiar with e-learning, they used this opportunity to gain in-depth experience with the vle and the techniques of e-teaching and e-tutoring. students evaluation the students, immediately after they had delivered their final exam, were asked to evaluate their experiences of participating in the course through an online survey. one objective was to explore whether the course had influenced the participants’ way of teaching, and thus a new survey was sent to all of the students in january 2010. this survey had three main parts. the first asked some of the same questions as in the initial survey to see if their view of these issues had changed over time. the second part investigated the extent to which the former students had practised as e-teachers after the course. and finally, some questions aimed to find out if the knowledge and experience from the course had influenced the way the students practised their ordinary classroom teaching. both surveys had a mixture of statements graded on a likert scale and openended questions where the students could express their opinions in their own words. while seven out of nine and two out of three students answered the surveys immediately after the first and second courses were finished, respectively, only 50 per cent (six of twelve) answered the last survey. nevertheless, since it was then six and 18 months since they partook as students, respectively, the response rate must be considered as quite good. this article presents the authors’ own experiences as well as the findings from both surveys. only the descriptive analyses are done with the quantitative data, while simple text analysis of the open-ended questions has been carried out. in regard to the small numbers of respondents, one must be careful when interpreting the results. but the answers to the open-ended questions from the respondents provided many useful comments. this information made it possible both to refine the course before the second one had started and to give us an impression of how they had experienced the course. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 299 pedagogical approaches behind virclass & swvircamp the underlying teaching and learning philosophy behind virclass follows social constructivist (brown, collins & duguid 1989) and socio-cultural theories (säljö 2001). the last year’s research in how learning takes place has widely changed both the professional and lay view of teaching and learning, and has introduced changes in heis all over the world. student-centred approaches and problem-based or case-based learning, which follow the principles that guide professionals’ education in the 21st century, are widely used. these methods are recognized as ways of “narrowing the gap” between ‘theory at school’ and ‘real life practice’ (bruner 1996). the underlying idea is that there will be an improvement of the possible learning outcomes because these study-methods require more engagement from the students during the learning process (biggs 2003; marton et al. 1986/2000). learning is viewed as a situated process (dysthe 2001) that aims towards promoting a community of learners who help each other towards a new understanding. building on the knowledge of how student-active learning methods are important for creating resilient learning experiences (biggs 2003), the computer supported collaborative learning (cscl) paradigm has been central in the planning of the courses. the students learn by taking part in activities in the community of practice (lave & wenger 1991; wenger 1998), which includes collaboration in problem-solving activities as a kind of ‘learning-by-doing’ perspective. with a cooperative pursuit of knowledge, as opposed to the more traditional competitive pursuit among learners, the teacher’s role is not to be the authority and chief source of information, but is more a facilitator and resource guide (koschmann 1996). the creation of a student-centred teaching and learning virtual environment places emphasis on making a transparent and a “safe and friendly” atmosphere in the virtual classroom. students’ reflections over their learning process are important because such reflections raise an awareness not only of their new knowledge but also of the obstacles involved in the learning process. this “meta-learning” can be seen as a parallel to the problem-solving process involved in the relationship between social worker and client. observations made by the social-work students on their own learning and problem-solving processes may be useful in their later work with clients (larsen & hole 2007a). since the beginning of virclass, there has been the use of portfolio assessments, which follow the principles outlined by paulson et al. (1991). the students are given different tasks during the course of study, and they deliver their assignments in their own working portfolio, which is open for all participants to see. they receive comments on their work from both peers and educators. at the end of the course the students are told which of the tasks will be included in their final exam. the tasks and assignments are tailor-made to stimulate the students towards a comparative approach. for example, the students were asked to present a theme or problem to be discussed from the perspective of their home country, and then to compare this presentation with information supplied by peer students from two other countries. different tools promote interaction and co-operation, such as synchronic and asynchronic written discussions, online conferences, weblogs and shared documents like google.docs. this is a new way of learning for many of the students; the beginning of the course presented a lesson in task-oriented approaches and emphasized student activity as an important aspect of elearning. following gilly salmon’s advice (salmon 2004), the instructors introduced the students stepwise to the use of technology and to the learning content. mastering the simpler tasks before being asked to perform more advanced assignments gives confidence and promotes further contributions. gilly salmon (2004) has introduced a model of the stages involved in becoming an e-learner. the model clarifies the teacher’s role and her responsibilities to meet the student’s needs in the learning process. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 300 figure 1: stages of being an e-learneriv (virtual book, e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education) the stages begin with access and motivation. the students must be socialized in the virtual classroom in order to be able to exchange information with others. this socialization allows for knowledge construction, where they are ready to develop their competences. because another important issue is to create “social presence” (garrison & anderson 2003) in the virtual classroom, the first tasks seek to establish this. students are asked to write a short presentation of themselves and to upload a picture in their personal account in the vle. these simple tasks let the students to become acquainted both with the learning environment and with the tools available. by constructing their personal presentation, they can decide how they want to appear in this transparent classroom. at the same time this stage allows the students and teachers to “meet” as individuals with faces and histories, not only as written names on the screen. the underlying teaching philosophy in the course all the students participating in the e-pedagogy course were trained educators. this made it possible to use e-pedagogy as a supplement to their earlier pedagogical and didacticalv knowledge. the focus was on how the students could use their teaching competences in a virtual campus. in contrast to teaching at their home university, the teaching material is delivered through a computer, and the students’ learning-work takes place through the internet. however, teachers must still use their knowledge of the topic they teach and their didactical skills when planning their courses. within the field of professional education, the underlying teaching philosophy is often taken for granted. the professional, as an educator at a hei, tacitly transfer his knowledge to newcomers. to raise awareness both of how the different theories of teaching and learning affect the outline of the actual course and of how students are expected to learn, the beginning of the course included a presentation of a brief overview of learning theories. the course participants were told not to disregard the behaviourist, the cognitive/constructivist or the socio-cultural/situated perspective seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 301 (munkvold et al. 2008) without careful consideration of the topic and the learning objectives for the planned session. this lesson relates to the situated approach of virclass and sw-vircamp. the tasks given to the students require cooperation, where students must share their experiences and help each other in order to increase their knowledge. much interaction, discussion and collaboration take place during these courses, as these are seen as essential skills for future social workers. the e-pedagogy course follows these strategies. the students were reminded of how one must choose methods and strategies in accordance with the topic one covers and with the overall wanted outcome. the tasks and assignments are important tools for the students’ learning; the way they are constructed can trigger learning in different ways. students can be invited either to collaborate or to pursue individual learning. this learning philosophy should always be reflected in the way the teacher constructs the course and plans the tasks for the students. one useful guide for the students in their planning process is the “didactical model of relations”, or “the norwegian diamond” (bjørndal & lieberg 1978vi). the “norwegian diamond” although the virclass teachers are familiar with different didactical models, the “norwegian diamond”, as it is called, has shown itself to be very useful for teachers planning a teaching session. whether one is preparing a full course or a single lecture, there are some central didactical principles to keep in mind. all elements in the model are interrelated and influence each other. figure 2: the norwegian diamond (virtual book e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education) as figure 2 shows, there are six main elements: aims, content, methods, external conditions, participants’ knowledge and assessment. the first thing to do when planning a course is to decide what the aim of the course should be. what are the intended learning outcomes? depending on what the students need to learn, teaching strategies will differ. in professional education, there is a trend towards a competence-based curriculum where knowledge, skills and attitudes are integrated as ‘core competencies’ (adams 2002; larsen et al. 2008). this approach has consequences on the course’s structure, and on the planning of the assessment. compared to more traditional academic courses, a professional educator should be aware of the following nuances: should students learn in solitude and study by themselves, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 302 or should one stimulate a more collaborative learning situation where dialogue, discussions and reflection are important? one things is the teachers intentions, but the goals the students’ set for themselves will often differ. do they really want to put a lot of work into the course they sign up for, or do they just want to pass and get the credits? a good way to explore this question is to ask the students to present their learning expectations in the beginning of the course. the starting point for planning the content of a course should be the approved curricular plan. from that, the weekly structure of the course must be decided. this involves several questions. how should the course progress? how can one stimulate the students’ learning? in line with this, one needs to decide what learning materials should be available for the students during the course. one must find and decide upon the concrete syllabus, such as literature and lectures, web-links and audio-visual material that can trigger learning. planning how the students should work with the learning material is also vital: what tasks and assignments will result in the wanted learning outcomes? taxonomies linked to the expected learning outcomes can be helpful when deciding how students’ progress through the course should be. bloom’s taxonomy of the cognitive outcome (bloom 1956) classifies knowledge in six steps: from “knowing of” via “understanding” to the “application of knowledge”. the last three steps comprise the “analyzing”, “synthesizing” and “evaluation” of knowledge. figure 3: bloom's “taxonomy of knowledge” (virtual book e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education) other useful taxonomies are krathwal’s taxonomy of attitudes and simpsons’ taxonomy of skills (munkvold et al. 2008). with respect to the methods in e-learning, one of the first things to do is to plan how to familiarize the student with the virtual-learning arena. by means of good tutorials and small introductory tasks, the students can find their own way through the virtual classroom. giving the students a pre-start period seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 303 before the learning work starts, just to get to know this learning environment, has been useful (larsen & hole 2007b). what are the methods chosen for letting the students acquire the wanted competences? are the students going to read and study on their own, or are they expected to discuss, reflect upon and share information? with the latter approach, there has to be some planned group work among the students. since many students choose e-learning owing to the flexibility, it is especially important to present a schedule of the course programme in the beginning so that the students can incorporate this into their overall planning of activities. given that the participants in an e-learning course do not have f2f contact, group work and synchronic communication should create an experience of being in a shared classroom. the educators should carefully consider the desired outcome from the communication session. they must keep what access students have to different tools in mind when deciding what to use and when to use it. different tools are available: chats or a virtual conference room, the keyboard for written communication, a headset or web camera for talk and audio-visual communication. different tools should be used for different purposes. if the aim is to let the students reflect and work with their comments, an asynchronic discussion forum, where students can participate when it suits them, should be used. this gives them time to think, to discuss facts, and to check their spelling before they write an answer. sorting out the access, tools and equipment are important parts of mapping the external conditions of an e-learning course. other elements in the study situation must be considered as well. the students’ learning situation, the teachers’ own working situation, the time allotted for the work along with many other peripheral factors will influence the course’s progress. is this a mandatory part of the students’ study programme, and will they have time to do what is expected? or is this a voluntary course “on top of” all other duties? do you have part-time students who study in the evenings and weekends? if so, then you might have to adjust the delivery dates for their coursework. and as the experience from virclass has shown, in an international course, the different holidays through europe, as well as the diverse start of the terms and other exams all influence the students’ participation. as figure 2 illustrates, the participants’ knowledge is another point to consider; however, it is one that is often taken for granted. the curricular plan presents the expected learning outcomes, but students seldom knows what expectations the teachers have regarding their prior knowledge. this should be assessed in the beginning of the course, because good learning starts with building on already existing knowledge. the last element in figure 2 is assessment. depending on the overall aims for the course, the assignments should be constructed in different ways. how the students’ learning outcome is assessed is also important. if one wants to stimulate a student-centred and reflective learning process, one must make sure that there is an assessment of this process! our experience has taught us that portfolio assessment is a good way to ensure this. an e-portfolio may consist of reflection notes and different tasks the students have done during the course, with comments from teachers and peers. in their final assignment, they may be assessed on some of the products in their portfolio, which they have had the chance to work further with and to improve before submitting them. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 304 collaboration and transparency traditionally, online courses do not promote interaction and cooperation. this might be the reason why e-learning often is seen as individual and isolated. virclass and sw-vircamp focus on collaborative learning methods in a community of learners. when this takes place in an international online course, it is important to plan the conditions for collaboration carefully. students must feel that there is an open, friendly and inviting atmosphere in the virtual environment. they must learn to navigate in the vle so that they can manage the technical aspects of their new learning situation. an online chat in a synchronic discussion forum during the first or second week of the course can help students feel as part of a group of students in the same classroom. future students will have different attitudes and expectations in how they access, use and produce information. close to 90 per cent of college students begin an information search by visiting a search engine (ciber 2008). the changes that are taking place are transforming teaching and learning, and they calls for new ways of communicating in education. transparent e-portfolio all tasks and assignments during the study are tailored to fit into the student’s own teaching work at their home university. all tasks performed during the course are stored in the student’s e-portfolio for further development. during the 12 weeks the course lasts, the students are guided ‘step-wise’ towards more complicated tasks, a structure that follows salmon’s (2004) model. the level of complication related both to the technical tools they need to learn to use and to the level of cognitive challenges the tasks demands are considered. one part of the final assignment is to outline a sketch for a course, and to demonstrate the content for its start, middle and end. another part is to state the reason for their didactical choices. this statement should be linked to the six elements in the “diamond”, with references to relevant pedagogical literature. while this paper should be around 2000 words, the students should also write a reflective note of 1500 words about their own learning process. one of the mandatory tasks during the campus week was to write a daily weblog describing the reflections of their experiences. during the rest of the programme, the students were encouraged to reflect in their weblog and to look into and to comment on peer-student’s weblogs. in their final reflection, the students are expected to go back in their blog and to find citations to illustrate their ‘learning journey’. collaboration through web 2.0 an important requirement was that the different learning activities should be interwoven with the students’ everyday work processes. to be a practitioner in social work, one has to be able to reflect upon one’s work, and to share and discuss experiences within a community of trusted peers. in e-learning, parts of these processes are moved into the virtual domain, and the virtual learning environment must support similar ways of communication. any online learning environment has the potential to interact with other forms of web resources. with the increased use of the internet, there is reason to expect that most students already participate in various social networks online. thus, a learning environment often comes in addition to these activities, and a number of thematic connections may occur. one must, however, be aware that the various arenas have different “rhythms”. a social network has a relatively large number of participants, and the users are likely to expect frequent activity. a personal website, on the other hand, is updated seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 305 much less frequently. this creates different expectations, which has consequences for how users engage with the different services and tools. users of social-networking services can expect new content every time they visit the site; however, in the case of an individual website, a journal or a weblog, one cannot expect daily updates. figure 4: weblogs have qualities that make them able to fulfil different communication needs, form one-to-one discussions to collaboration within an online communityvii figure 4 illustrates how weblogs “bridge the gap” between different forms of asynchronous computer mediated communication (cmc). weblogs find their place between personal communication and communication within a community. thus, weblogs are useful tools in educational situations where one wants to encourage individuals to present and reflect upon their personal experiences, and to discuss this with their fellow students. weblogs are normally written by an individual, but often with close connections to a number of other users. thus, weblogs share some features both with asynchronous discussion forums and standard web pages. weblogs are developed to fulfil the needs of individuals, who become able to connect their learning activities to other users within various peer networks. vles, on the other hand, are to a larger extent developed to provide more centralized educational services (siemens 2006; hoem 2009). compared to vles one can argue that weblogs are more oriented towards what is happening on the internet, and offer individual users a safe haven from which they can approach and reflect upon external information resources. most vles, including the one used to support parts of this course, often try to facilitate a number of different ways of communicating. these systems normally include individual pages, personal journals, forums, chat-rooms, a variety of tools that support different tests, and so on. from one perspective this makes the system “complete”. however, one can argue that the large variety of tools does not always encourage communication on a more personal level. when one wants students to take a stand and to express their personal opinions on a specific topic, one sometimes needs other tools. weblogs and similar tools seem to have some of this potential, and the students should learn how to master these tools as a personal learning environment (ple) (hoem 2009). one noteworthy difference between ples and most vles is how they differentiate between users. on the one hand, in an ordinary vle there are distinct differences between the possibilities offered to the educators and those offered to the students. in some situations, this is a necessary feature, say, when doing individual assessments. on the other hand, when one uses weblogs, the educators and students have the same possibilities. there are no “backdoors” that allow educators to see information that is hidden from the other users. one can argue that this creates another level of trust: neither the educators nor the students are able to hide any information from their peers. in such an open environment, all users are able to see their peers’ work and the responses from tutors, other students and even from persons “external” to the learning environment. an open environment stimulates the students’ interest in developing a positive presentation of their work, and encourages seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 306 the students to contribute, share and refine information through what can be characterized as collective knowledge-building. as part of the course, the students were introduced to some “web 2.0” tools. few educator use web 2.0 tools as an integrated part of their pedagogy. many students do, however, use this kind of tool quite extensively. this represents a largely untapped potential in higher education. the instructors, therefore, introduced the participants in the course, most of them hei teachers themselves to essential web 2.0 tools. weblogs (blogger.com) were used to publish the students’ reflection upon their own work and their progression. the course instructors also introduced the students to social bookmarking (delicious.com and google reader) to facilitate both the collection of online resources and the sharing of these resources. finally, the students learned to work with shared documents (google documents) to be able to collaborate on texts and presentations. the blogs were also used as a “hub” where the different elements (bookmarks and documents) could be presented. international collaboration as mentioned above, one of the challenges that international e-learning courses face is the students’ holidays, exams and other duties at their own university. these variations make it hard for the online course to follow a strict schedule. it is critical, therefore, that the weekly programmes are structured with assignments going over a period longer than one week, which makes it possible for students to find time for collaboration. giving them an overview of all the weekly programmes, tasks and readings in the beginning of the course is also helpful. because of these small amendments, the students get a chance to plan their work. audiovisual triggers or a short video case can provide a “common starting point”, and results in deeper reflection and better discussions among the students. mandatory comments from peers can be planned by letting students comment upon each other’s work. following the principle of “transparency” in the classroom, the students present their products and assignments in eportfolios that are open for everybody to read and comment. the teachers’ feedbacks to each student are also available for the others to read and learn from. when planning the tasks for the students, it is important to be aware of the difference between collaborative learning and cooperation. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 307 figure 5:viii cooperation/collaboration (virtual book e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education) in the picture on the left in figure 5, the students cooperate; they are solving small tasks on their own, as parts of a jig-saw puzzle. here, they only learn from what they have done, but not from other students’ work. if the students have to solve ‘authentic’ tasks where they have to share knowledge, discuss, and create a new understanding, their knowledge will be increased through collaboration within a community of learners. the e-pedagogy course makes the students aware of the theories of garrison & anderson’s (2003) model, “the community of in inquiry”, which gives useful hints for the planning of an e-learning course. figure 6: community of inquiryix (virtual book, e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education) as one can see from figure 6, social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence are equally important for the students’ learning process. by letting students and teachers present themselves in the vle and to share professional and personal experiences, social presence is created. a well structured course, facilitated discussions and chats, and the use of open seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 308 commentary to students support the teaching presence. authentic tasks for comparative work create a cognitive presence and challenge the students to develop and co-construct knowledge. this element is important in order to achieve deep learning (marton et al. 1986/2000). peer support among students and open feedback from teachers make a bridge between social and cognitive presences, and thus support dialogue and critical reflections. a virtual book: the e-pedagogy course ac creative commons one of the goals in the e-pedagogy project was to create an online learning resource. with the help from the staff at the media centre at hib, the educators started to develop the content for the virtual book in between the two courses. the material was presented to the students of the second cohort, and their reactions and comments were taken into consideration when the book was finished. figure 7: the front page of the virtual learning material (virtual book epedagogy for teachers in higher education) here the curriculum plan, an overview of the main readings, an outline of the 12-week programme and the tasks is presented, along with 5 screen-lectures (figure 8). through a creative commons licensex , the teaching material is presented in the web resource the virtual book, e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education (http://www.virclass.net/eped/ (larsen & hole 2009). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 309 figure 8: screen lectures (virtual book e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education) figure 9 – illustration of features (virtual book e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education) the screen lectures are supplemented with a pdf file with the manuscript, as well as with a list of suggested readings. earlier experiences have shown that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 310 the opportunity to listen to the lessons while viewing the teacher, as well as reading the manuscript, makes it easier for non-english learners to understand the content (larsen, fahlvik & hole 2007). in one of the screen lectures, associate professor (phd) jill walker rettberg from the university of bergen presents the use of weblogs in the learning process. figure 10: blogging as a tool for reflection and learning (virtual book epedagogy for teachers in higher education). (http://www.virclass.net/eped/index.php?action=static&id=29) student experiences to what extent does the course give the students the wanted outcomes? did they find the course useful, and has the course influenced the way they teach? in the final survey, 100 per cent of the respondents (six of 12) agreed that what they had learnt during the course had influenced their ordinary teaching. at the open question regarding how and why, they mentioned: “… more focus on how to give feedback” “….giving more attention to students” “… more student-activity during my course” “…and transparency has been an important value in the classes. i have employed participative tools as google docs, blogs, etc. i use a more ample use of audiovisual resources, among other things” both transparency and peers’ comments were highly valued, as well as practice-related course content and the strict weekly structure whereby the tasks were addressed on the bulletin board. the intention of designing the course as hands-on training, where students had demonstrated examples of how to do it, was successful, as far as the surveys tell us. “the way this course is structured gives me a terrific example on how this works. during this course i often thought that it is amazing how the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 311 content of the course and the way it is set up contributes to this learning process” the ones who benefited most from the course were students who already had some digital literacy; lack of basic ict knowledge was a problem for some. this could have been sorted out by defining a minimum level of ict competence for applicants. even though this was an e-learning course, the campus week was highly valued. both immediately after the course had ended, and at the last survey, all students stated that the f2f week was important. some even suggested that there should have been more time at the campus. conclusion experiences from many years of international online courses for european social work students have been utilized in developing a blended e-pedagogy course for teachers in higher education. with the ‘model of relation between didactical categories’ as framework, a community of inquiry was created by following salmon’s step of becoming an e-learners within a situated-learning perspective. even though all the students in the course were experienced teachers, they clearly expressed the need for new skills relating to technical issues connected to e-teaching. they know their topics and how to transmit these to their students in class. but to do this in a virtual environment, they felt that both the confidence through the mastering of the different tools and the competence to choose the best tool for the expected learning outcome were essential. we find that by using principles and methods for sound e-learning and eteaching in an online course, the student can reach the wanted learning outcomes. the students’ evaluations have demonstrated that a carefully designed hands-on training course ensures that the students acquire the necessary competences to be efficient e-teachers. references adams, r. (2002). social work processes. in adams, r., dominelli, l. & payne, m. (eds.) social work themes, issues and critical debates. 2nd edition, london: macmillan press. biggs, j.b. (2003). teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. society for research into higher education, philadelphia: open university press. bjørndal, b. & lieberg, s. (1978). nye veier i didatikken: en innføring i didaktiske emner og begreper. (new ways in didactics: a introduction to subject and terms). oslo: aschehoug. bloom, s. (ed.) (1956). taxonomy of educational objectives: the classification of educational goals handbook i: cognitive domain. susan fauer company, inc. brown, j.s, collins, a. & duguid, p. (1989). situated cognition and the culture of learning. educational researcher vol. 18, issue 1, pp 32-42. bruner, j. (1996). the culture of learning. cambridge, mass, harvard university press. cresswell, j.w. & clark, v.l.p. (2007): designing and conducting mixed methods research. th. oaks, california, sage publ. ciber (2008). "information behaviour of the researcher of the future", ('google generation' project). executive summary . retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 312 dysthe, o. (ed.) (2001). dialog, samspel og læring (dialogue, interaction and learning). oslo: abstract forlag. garrison, d.r. & anderson, t. (2003). e-learning in the 21st century. a framework for research and practice. london and new york: routledge falmer. herring, s.c., scheidt, l.a, bonus, s. & wright, e. (2004): “bridging the gap: a genre analysis of weblogs”. proceedings of the 37th hawaii international conference on system sciences 2004. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/stonerm/genreanalysisofweblogs.pdf hoem, j. (2009). personal publishing environments. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://infodesign.no/2009/08/personal-publishing-environments-all.htm koschmann, t. (ed.) (1996). cscl: theory and practice of an emerging paradigm. mahwah: n. j. : lawrence erlbaum associates. lave, j. & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. larsen, a.k. (ed.) (2006). the virtual book – a guide to social work in europe. bergen, bergen university college, virclass production. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.virclass.net/virtualbook/promo.html. larsen, a.k. & hole, g.o. (2007a). arranging digital studies in an international learning community. in myklebust, g. & skare, o. (eds.). om re-mediering av undervisning og læring gjennom samarbeid. refleksjoner over prosjekterfaringer 2006. norway opening universities publications 2/2007 pp 147-169. larsen, a.k. & hole, g.o. (2007b). ‘the role of the virtual classroom in opening up the european curriculum’. in e. frost, m. j. freitas & a. campanini (eds) social work education in europe. carocci, roma, pp. 73–88. larsen, a.k., fahlvik, m. & hole, g.o (2007). developing a virtual book – material for virtual learning environments. seminar.net vol 3, issue 3. the future of the learning management system. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.seminar.net/. larsen, a.k., astray, a.a., sanders, r. & hole, g.o. (2008). e-teacher challenges and competences in international comparative social work courses. social work education vol. 27, issue 6, pp 623-633. larsen, a.k. & hole, g.o.(eds.) (2009).virtual book e-pedagogy for teachers in higher education. retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://www.virclass.net/eped nordkvelle, y. (2004). technology and didactics: historical mediations of a relation. journal of curriculum studies, vol. 36, issue 4, pp 427-444. marton, f., entwhistle, n. & hounsell, d. (1986/2000). the experience of learning. edinburgh, scottish academic press. munkvold, r., fjeldavli, a., hjertø, g. & hole, g.o. (2008) nettbasert undervisning: en ressursbok for undervisningspersonel. (internet-based teaching. a resource for educators). høyskoleforlaget. paulson, f. l, paulson, p. & meyer, c. (1991). what makes a portfolio a portfolio? educational leadership vol. 48, issue 5, pp 60-63. salmon, g. (2004) e-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online. london, routledge falmer. siemens, g. (2006). "learning or management system?". retrieved february 15, 2010 from http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wordpress/wpseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 313 content/uploads/2006/10/learning-or-managementsystem-with-referencelist.doc. säljö, r. (2001). læring i praksiset sosiokulturelt perspektiv. (learning in practice, a socio-cultural perspective) oslo: cappelen akademiske forlag. yin, r. k. (2003): case study research: design and methods. thousand oaks, california: sage. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. i the sw-vircamp was funded by the eacea project number 142767-llp-1-2008-1no-erasmus-evc. the partners are høgskolen i bergen (hib), inholland university of applied science (inh), universidad complutences de madrid (ucm), högskolan i jönköping (hhj), institutio superior miguel torga (ismt), hochschule mannheim (hsma), swansea university (swansea), hochschule mittweida (hsm), liepaja university (lpa), høgskolen i bodø (hibo), lusofona university (ulht), and katholieke hogeschool kempen (khkempen). ii the commercial vle it’s learning is used. but the course has taken care to ensure that all teaching and learning materials are independent from any specific vle. iii european platform for world wide social work, http://www.eusw.unipr.it/ iv we are grateful for the permission to use this model from salmon (2004, p 29). v in norway the europeanor german-influenced way of speaking about “didactic” is used. wit roots in the german geistwissenchaft und bildungstheorie, didactic in this sense relates to the “art of teaching”. the concept is used in a more “narrow” meaning within anglo-american teaching, referring to the “methods of teaching” (nordkvelle 2004). vi introduced by bjørndal and lieberg in 1978; several norwegian educational researchers have since elaborated the model. vii from herring et al. (2004, p. 23). viii after munkvold et al. (2008, p. 43). ix we are grateful for the permission to use this model from garrison and anderson (2003 pp. 28). x http://creativecommons.org/ hugseminar net_corr seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 visual competence, media literacy and "new literacies" – conceptual considerations in a plural discursive landscape theo hug professor institute of psychosocial intervention and communication studies university of innsbruck coordinator of the interfaculty innsbruck media studies research forum austria email: theo.hug@uibc.ac.at abstract debates on media competence and media literacy have been going on now for a few decades. many concepts have been developed in various disciplines. along with that, discourses on visual literacy have been intensified, too, although visuals have been used in educational contexts throughout history. but only recently, after almost three thousand years of historiography, turns like the iconic turn, pictorial turn or mediatic turn have been claimed. "competencies of visuals" (ratsch et al. 2009) and their epistemological relevance are intensively discussed in arts, architecture and philosophy as well as in educational, communication and media studies. in this situation, we are facing new conceptual challenges for media education and media literacy discourses. the paper starts (1) with an outline of some points of departures, followed (2) by a discussion of selected concepts of 'visual competence,' 'media competence' and 'media literacy.' in part (3), "new literacies" are questioned. finally (4), the contribution aims at conceptual clarifications and the relativization of literacy concepts. in this context, medial forms sensu leschke (2010) are being considered as a fruitful framework not only for future developments in media theory but also in media education and educational theory.i keywords: mediatic turn, visual competence, visual literacy, media theory, media education points of departure from the cave paintings of the cro-magnon people to plato's allegory of the cave and its ideology, from the prohibition of images to imaging techniques, from the "biblia pauperum" to the digital presentation media, from the first illustrations in scientific textbooks to the visual sociology of knowledge (raab seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 2 2008) and the "networks of emerging iconocracy" (faßler 2010, p. 9) – visuals and questions of visuality have always been relevant to processes of human communication. the trends and popularities have been quite variable, just like the corresponding relations between sense and sensuality, mediation and dissemination dynamics of knowledge, and not least epistemological and pedagogical hopes and significances. no matter which shape we give to the disruptions and continuities here in view of long-term dynamics, new emphases and developmental dynamics, qualitatively and quantitatively different from earlier ones, have been emerging for a while. the proliferation of digital image editing technologies and not least the mass use of web-based image and video platforms have been accompanied by a quantitative increase of images, unlike with any other historical advance of visualization. in qualitative respect, ways of using visuals and viewing practices have changed in many areas of life. their significance in processes of knowledge and communication is reassessed, the "logic of the pictorial" (logik des bildlichen, heßler/mersch 2009) is addressed, and processes of "visualizing imaginary things which do not exist for our senses" and forms of "micrologicizing perception" (faßler 2009, p. 290f) are reflected. and with a view to biocybernetic reproductive technologies, w. j. t. mitchell writes: [t]he oldest myth about the creation of living images, the fabrication of an intelligent organism by artificial, technical means, has now become a theoretical and practical possibility, thanks to new constellations of media at many different levels. the convergence of genetic and computational technologies with new forms of speculative capital has turned cyberspace and biospace (the inner structure of organisms) into frontiers for technical innovation, appropriation, and exploitation—new forms of objecthood and territoriality for a new form of empire. (mitchell 2005, p. 309; italics in original) the history of the imaginary images (vorstellungsbilder) of the possibilities and boundaries of the realization of imaginary images and their reflection is thus set in motion again. new forms of the intentional materialization of imaginary images are coming into consideration; at least that is suggested by multi-billion investments in genetic engineering research. examining the previous research results more closely, the metaphor "coming into consideration" turns out to be misleading insofar as we are rather dealing with typical technological promises here and less with concrete scopes for design or choice, for instance in the treatment and generation of diseases. to phrase it slightly more carefully: in the interplay of bioand computer technologies, computed images can become alive in a material sense which goes beyond esthetically motivated forms of the digital technogenesis of the visible, for instance in the movie industry.ii the metaphor at least suggests a new way of reading the antecedence of images. in his book ein bild ist mehr als ein bild (an image is more than an image, 2002), christian doelker lists several variants of the well-known dictum "in the beginning, there was the image": "writing was preceded by the petroglyph, articulated language by the mimic expression, rational thought by the mythical belief" (ibd., p. 16). in the age of biocybernetic reproducibility, add to that: the creation of synthetic cells is preceded by the vision of artificial life on the drawing board, or better, via computers programmed by bio-engineers.iii even if the biocybernetic developments are just beginning and costly in many ways, along with them, new challenges for media anthropology, media epistemology,iv media criticism and not least for media communication and media pedagogy are beginning to show. this is about more than the interaction of bioand infospheres and questions concerning the co-evolution of natural and cultural processes. for the discourses of visual competence, media competence and "new literacies," a new structural change of the public seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 3 is significant as well, as heinz moser (2008) points out in the wake of appadurai (1996). this concerns the role of imaginary images which circulate in the area of conflict between media and migration, as well as a flexible framework of networked "scapes" which is suitable for studying cultural phenomena in globalized economies that cannot be adequately examined using center-periphery models (cf. appadurai 1996, p. 32). the neologisms introduced in this context by appadurai (ibd., p. 33) are "ethnoscape" (in the sense of the transnational mobility of persons), "technoscape" (global configurations of technological networks), "financescape" (landscapes of global cash flows), "mediascape" (flow of images and media offers of every kind) and "ideoscape" (politically relevant imaginary images, ideologemes such as liberty, wealth, sovereignty, etc.). the individual "landscapes" are regarded as disjunctive areas with their own dynamics which function as building blocks for imaginary worlds. excluding, for one thing, the fact that these descriptive perspectives lack differentiation, the interdependence of the developmental dynamics deserves more attention here, in my opinion. this does not only concern the interactive dynamics between cash flows and "technoscapes" or between "ideoscapes" and medialized forms of communication; it applies to all mentioned areas and, furthermore, to other forms of capitalv and to bioand infoscapes. we are dealing here with complex relations and no less complex, networked dynamics, all of which are not made possible, developed, limited, unleashed, critiqued and reflected in a media-free space but under the conditions of medialization and mediatization. this introductory sketch already makes clear how important the reflection of perspectives for describing present times is for treating questions of visual competence and media competence. they open up different horizons for reflection and possibilities of contingency processing, and they suggest various conceptual differentiations and problem layouts (cf. hug 2008, p. 46-48). the focus here is less on maximally influential definitions of transformation diagnoses or claims about the "true" state of societal or medial reality than on the tentative, temporary and context-sensitive application of well-founded descriptive perspectives and the gradual review of their connectivity, usefulness and viability. of the numerous concepts of societal self-description currently available, the following appear particularly relevant to me: • the perspective media-culture society brings into focus the co-evolution of media-related, social, political, economic and cultural changes. historically, the introduction of new media has time and again created new scopes for communication and cognition as well as for politics and economy. the historical media constellations, then, represent the structural socializing conditions and the construction of reality for certain periods of time (cf. schmidt 2000, p. 175ff). • the perspective knowledge society deals with the dimensions regarding the creation, disposition, dissemination and transmission of knowledge. a key aspect is the significance of different forms of knowledge as well as their interaction and their status as production factors. precisely the polymorphic quality of knowledge, of its representational forms and social distribution pose a special challenge for pedagogy. this challenge cannot be met with euphoric proclamations of the knowledge society but only with differentiated offers of reflection and orientation (cf. stehr 1994, höhne 2004). • in the perspective network society, an age-old human practice is developed further (cf. castells 2001; faßler 2001). through the influence of information technologies, traditional networks today are evolving into information networks which have launched far-reaching transformation processes in the educational, working and life-worlds. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 4 i view these perspectives of describing analyses of present times in a complementary relationship to one another. they turn out to be sustainable from an analytical and creative standpoint and correspond moreover to recent proclamations of a "turn" which are relevant to the subject matter of this article. even if such turns have been announced in ever shorter intervals over the past few decades and consistently remain very limited in their impact, i consider worth discussing in particular the methodological and epistemological challenges linked with the pictorial turn (mitchell 1994) and the iconic turn (boehm 1994, p. 13f). the same holds true for the issues put up for debate together with the proposals of mediatic turns. while over long stretches during the linguistic turn, the emphasis was on linguistic dimensions and, in its approaches based on linguistic analysis, on conceptual analyses, the mediatic turn puts a heightened focus on symbolic, material, social and digital dimensions. accordingly, the discourse on one or several mediatic turns means, on a meta-theoretical level, an alternative and addition to the established paradigms that is characterized by an emphasis on media, mediality and medialization (cf. margreiter 1999; friesen/hug 2009; hug 2009). on an empirical level, the significance of the media for processes of communication, knowledge-building and the construction of reality receives emphasis. the expression "medialization of life-worlds" in a way includes both aspects: the experienceable common-sense world and observations of media saturation, on the one hand, and the uncircumventability (unhintergehbarkeit) of medialized worlds and their function as starting points for our efforts to gain knowledge, on the other. visual competence and media competence – visual literacy and media literacy the current state of research in visual and media studies in general and concerning questions of visual competence and media competence in particular is extremely disparate. this does not only apply to the large number of involved disciplines together with the corresponding concepts of science, methodical preferences, terminologies and combinations of useand/or knowledge-oriented research interests.vi it also concerns tendencies of • the call for interand transdisciplinary research projects without the establishment of adequate funding instruments and gratification systems, • the cultural dynamics of knowledge and reception in different language areas (who in the eu region takes serious notice of research results from africa, asia or latin america? who in north america receives scientific texts written in spanish, french or german? etc.) • the threefold proximity to everyday life, technology and politics in mainstream discourses. the latter is valid not least for the mainstream of the relevant discourses on media competence. they tend to be focused on technology and are primarily oriented on application, regardless of the state of research achieved so far in media and communication studies and especially in media pedagogy. their proximity to everyday life, technology and politics is apparent (1) in the everyday-theoretical use of expressions which are also applied in the theories and models of learning and in didactics, (2) in the modalities of the selection and representation of topics insofar as they are more or less oriented on the status quo of the industrial development of mobile equipment, instruments and relevant technologies, and (3) in the reductionist conjunction of freemarket orientations with instrumental notions of learning and fictions about the computability of learning outcomes and academic achievements, as they become apparent from the ict grant programs where the spending on learningand education-oriented activities is in the range of interest of the total expenditure. here, the proportionality of the means is important. it is not subsidies for technology as such, which are problematic per se, especially since they are necessary. rather, the issue here is the inadequate distribution of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 5 means to different purposes, the fictions of control as well as the pars pro toto tendencies and hegemonic claims displayed by some special discourses. they who promote and support learning and education technologies have, in the favorable case, accomplished a prerequisite for successful processes of learning and education. yet many misinvestments in the area of e-learning have long demonstrated that the sowing of software products does not necessarily lead to a successful harvest of learning and educational achievements. conversely, it is also true for critical concepts of education that they may be used for the mediation of ideologies or may revert to such. in contexts of everyday life, school and science, it can be observed time and again that, and how, justified criticism turns into the dogmatization of individual aspects, dogmatic blindness or missionary strategies for conviction and persuasion. where technophobia becomes a habit, "critical" concepts of education become no less questionable than ict programs in which new software technologies are sold as didactic innovations or educational measures. my point here is not to illustrate what 'successful processes of learning and education' can mean in detail and which authorities regard such processes as more desirable than routines of superficial knowledge or lack of knowledge that are rarely called by their names. i am concerned with the question of the double dynamics of metaphorical expansions and pragmatic focuses. what does this mean? i use 'double dynamics' for the complementary process of expanding areas of meaning, conceptual usages and routines of the figurative transfer of contexts, on the one hand, and use-oriented concretizations, mainstreaming activities and hegemonic claims of asserting particular interests, on the other. these double dynamics affect processes inherent to science and such in other "scapes" as well as in everyday-life practices or political discursive contexts. the interplay of expansionary dynamics and focusing tendencies in this context goes beyond the familiar question regarding many options and few ligatures insofar as, in times of epistemological pluralism, the diffusion of events and perspectives as well as the contingency of methodologies and scientific forms of knowledge are frequently associated with expanded possibilities of the "escape from arbitrariness" (flucht aus der beliebigkeit, mitterer 2001). in short, if experts argue, it may enliven the scientific discourses and encourage new alternatives of problem solving. incidentally, however, elusive ties and binding non-commitments are in fashion to the extent that they are considered useful in view of the general non-commitment. the argument concerning metaphorical expansions can be illustrated in the context of the development of discourses and programs on media competence. the term 'media competence' (medienkompetenz) has been popular in the german language area for about twenty years. the origin of the debates dates back further, to the 1970s, as is well-known. the term 'communication competence' was introduced into the pedagogical discourse by dieter baacke (1973a), who subsequently refined the concept and named it "compound media competence" (kompositum medienkompetenz; see also baacke 1996). baacke thus gave the crucial impetus not only for the media-pedagogical debates on media competence but also for interdisciplinary connections and advancements. the term, in varied differentiations, has remained significant until today beyond the scope of media pedagogy, in the context of the theory and practice of education, social and cultural work as well as in the discourses of economy, politics, law, psychology, information science and technology (cf. gapski 2001). while the majority of efforts in the area of media competence, both the practically and theoretically motivated, over many years remained mostly limited to regional or national perspectives, the area of tension between media competence and media education (medienbildung) (cf. for example schorb 2009; spanhel 2010) and attempts at international communication have seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 6 recently gained significance. in this context, particularly designations from the english-speaking world are attracting attention, such as the following definition by namle:vii media literacy is seen to consist of a series of communication competencies, including the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate information in a variety of forms, including print and nonprint messages.viii (emphasis in original) in addition and for the purpose of clarification, namle offers further definitions such as: media refers to all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used to transmit messages. literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols and to synthesize and analyze messages. media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages. media education is the study of media, including ‘hands on’ experiences and media production. media literacy education is the educational field dedicated to teaching the skills associated with media literacy. (ibid.) it becomes increasingly obvious in the debates that the european exchange is hardly facilitated not only by the language-theoretical roots of the literacy concept but also by the various linguistic and cultural traditions as well as the performative characteristics. this is apparent particularly from the integrative efforts in the context of the european charter for media literacy,ix which pointedly describes the following, among other things: media literate people should be able to: use media technologies effectively to access, store, retrieve and share content to meet their individual and community needs and interests; gain access to, and make informed choices about, a wide range of media forms and content from different cultural and institutional sources; understand how and why media content is produced; analyse critically the techniques, languages and conventions used by the media, and the messages they convey; use media creatively to express and communicate ideas, information and opinions; identify, and avoid or challenge, media content and services that may be unsolicited, offensive or harmful; make effective use of media in the exercise of their democratic rights and civic responsibilities."(ibd.) even though representational and conceptual as well as practical and application-oriented aspects remain to be discussed in detail, the international communication efforts have set in motion important debates which can be related to discourses of educational theory, life competence and the art of life. similar extensions and differentiations can be reconstructed by means of the terms 'visual competence' (visuelle kompetenz),x 'image competence' (bildkompetenz), 'visual education' (visuelle bildung) and 'visual literacy' (visuelle literalität). in the german-speaking world, christian doelker in 1997 was the first to use the terms with a media-pedagogical intention and propose a differentiated concept (cf. doelker 2002) which included receptive and creative dimensions. a core part of his concept is the image-semantic layer model. visual competence here refers to those abilities and skills which are necessary for exploring the tectonics of subjective, inherent and intended meanings and of the qualities of visuals (validity, comprehensibleness, coherence, tenability). in regard to the literality of images, doelker's argument is based on an extended notion of reading (cf. doelker 2002, p. 151), which is significant not least for the clarification of artistic claims. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 7 "he term literalität [literality] is not to be confounded with 'literalität' as the 'german' counterpart of literacy = reading competence. (transl. from doelker 2002, p. 151; italics in original) accordingly, doelker works with a broad definition of 'reading' which relates to all forms of recorded configurations in and with which meanings can be discerned. what doelker here considers to be an expansion based on visualtheoretical and educational-policy motivations, others, among them müller (2008), view as a relatively narrow ‘literacy approach’ which does not cover many aspects relevant for their (broader) idea of 'visual competence' (ibd., p. 102). their research group regards the latter as an interdisciplinary concept, more specifically, a paradigm for "basic research on the production, distribution, perception, interpretation and reception of visuals, aimed at understanding visual communication processes in different contemporary social, cultural and political contexts" (müller 2008, p. 103). fig. 1: visual competence cycle (müller 2008, p. 103) this model distinguishes four areas of competence which are dynamically related: visual competence, as defined by jacobs university’s research group, is subdivided into four intertwined, but still distinct competencies: perceptual competence, decoding and interpretation competence, production competence, and intraas well as intercultural perception competence. (ibd., p. 105) correspondingly, pedagogical standards of dissemination are located as subordinate aspects in a comprehensive concept of visual communication. lothar mikos, on the other hand, regards visual competence as a precedent area of media competence. he argues for paying more attention to nondiscursive esthetic experiences and adding presentation elements to discursive media competence (cf. mikos 2000, p. 10). he bases his argument on mannheim's notion of 'conjunctive experiential space' (ibd., p. 2) and emphasizes aspects of socialization theory that pertain to the subject matter.xi i want to leave it at exemplary references at this point. they already point out some terminological and translational problems and difficulties concerning the relation between the various conceptualizations. moreover, they clarify that connotative aspects are also important in the attempt to relate more narrow concepts to broader ones. thus, the role of visuals and visual concepts seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 8 in educational, socializing and perceptive processes is considered to be controversial not only in regard to media system contexts. with the question as to the "competences of visuals" (kompetenzen der bilder, ratsch et al. 2009), the further differentiation of the discourse on competence and the expansion of the competence metaphors has reached a point that suggests rethinking the role of visuality in the structure of perception. new literacies – unlimited? in the current debates, not only english terms such as 'information literacy,' 'visual competence' or 'digital fluency' are increasingly significant. recently, calls for new skills and abilities, so-called new literacies, have entered the picture. what does this mean? how do "traditional" areas of reading, writing, information, image and media competence relate to new skills such as multitasking, transmedia navigation or networking? renee hobbs (2008), in her latest synopsis of debates about new literacies, distinguishes four approaches: "media literacy, information or ict literacy, critical literacy, and media management" (ibd., p. 433). on the one hand, these approaches are quite similar to one another in regard to the following aspects: 1. the constructed nature both of authorship and of audiences within an economic, political and sociocultural context. 2. the circulation of messages and meanings, and the relative contribution of audience interpretation and specific features of message design, format and content. 3. an exploration of questions about how texts represent social realities, reflect ideologies, and influence perception, attitudes and behaviors about the social world and one's place in it. (hobbs 2008, p. 437) on the other hand, they are linked with various framings and focusings of problems together with correspondingly different proposals for solution. as an example, let me mention the white paper by henry jenkins et al. (2006), which—based on current social challenges of media convergence, participation and collective intelligence—favors a (media-)ecological approach: rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them. (jenkins et al. 2006, p. 8) forms of problem solving and learning with a playful approach hold a special importance.xii the authors list the new skills and abilities as follows: play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details distributed cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities collective intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources transmedia navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 9 information across multiple modalities networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms. (jenkins et al. 2006, p. 4; emphasis in original) the authors emphasize the crucial role of "social skills" and "collaboration and networking" (ibd.). they gear their remarks at "average consumers" and point out the connections to traditional forms of literacy: these skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom. (jenkins et al. 2006, p. 4) there is no doubt this white paper presents important aspects that are worthy of discussion and attention in the context of contemporary debates about media competence and media literacy. however, my statement is meant in the sense of critical considerations rather than in a simple affirmative sense because the focus on popular cultural developments (for example, remix cultures, modding, fan fiction, videogames) points to an understanding of the problem that is primarily directed to northern american circumstances and in which intercultural, education-policy and economic aspects receive extremely little attention. to what extent do the new literacies represent trend-setting concepts and inevitable innovations in the light of media-cultural developments? to what extent do the new literacies constitute the problem that they are pretending to solve? i do not think there are general or easy answers to these questions. first of all, paradoxes and ambivalences such as the following must be kept in mind: europeanization and internationalization of the education system – resistance to reform, lacking readiness for innovation economic capability, new work order and market-oriented qualification – equal opportunity and character building theoretical and science-systematic standards – economic and practical exploitation orientations modalities of science-internal recognition, performance testing and profile establishment – use-oriented expectations of benefits and dependencies caused by the policies regarding grants and subsidies. they delineate contexts which are significant for assessing what makes sense and what does not in the area of conflict between trend-setting innovation and the marketing of empty clichés. secondly, i attach importance to the distinction between continuities, new areas of phenomena and transitions and changes. a re-evaluation of playful ways of learning is in order just as much due to historical-anthropological considerations and forms of play intended to be purpose-free, as it is in view of new medialized forms. it should not be ignored that the relation of education and entertainment was addressed not just in the century of the mass media or the "digital age" but repeatedly in the course of the entire history of education. questions concerning desirable and problematic ways of living learning or the desirable and problematic aspects of entertaining didactics – with or without the use of technical aids – are not as new as they may seem from some accounts and critiques of edutainment. the case is similar with the focus on participatory culture as argued by jenkins et al. (2006) in their white paper. on the one hand, following manuel castells and sonia livingstone, they rightly point to new problems caused by excluding seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 10 subgroups (ibd., p. 14) and emphasize media-cultural interrelations, setting their argumentation apart from technology-oriented variants. on the other hand, historical and systematic considerations are clearly neglected here. the popularity of questions regarding participatory opportunities should not hide the fact that they have always been significant at least in the mediapedagogical debates on media competence in the german-speaking world. even baacke referred to the relevance of this aspect in his theoretical statements at the beginning of the 1970s (cf. baacke 1973b, p. 219). – yet, participatory culture must also be critically weighed under systematic aspects insofar as questions of the commercialization of communication require consideration. even though it is true that educational values of pop-cultural offers are hardly taken into account in the german-speaking world and the proverbial baby is often thrown out with the bath water there, the euphoria about participating in northern american popular culture appears one-sided and criticizable. to pick one prototypical example of the "challenges of participatory culture" (jenkins et al. 2006): if twelve-year-old girls create their pop stars online,xiii perform in competitions, judge each other and can win a cheap backpack for their amazing creations every now and then, i see it rather as an example of a truncated argumentation and not a carefully balancing deliberation concerning the status of commercial dimensions in socalled new media cultures. such a shortened argumentation could not withstand critical objections particularly in the sense of critique of knowledge and governmentality (cf. heel 2005). outlook – beyond literacies? finally, i want to highlight some further conceptual difficulties. in the context of the discourses on media competence, the language-theoretical roots of the competence concept have long represented a blind spot and in many places continue to do so, and the situation is similar with the roots of the literacy concept. especially the "new literacies" show that the figurative transfer of literacy to many different contexts is debatable since it is less about writing than about aspects of educability, orientation and the ability to act appropriately in a given situation. without a doubt, along with the media-cultural developments particularly in the past twenty years, the spectrum of questions and topics pertaining to the skills of written culture has expanded as well. in this respect, it is also a concern to further define literacy as an educational task (cf. bertschikaufmann/rosebrock 2009). yet the basic assumption that social life "is overall determined by forms of written communication" (günther/ludwig 1994, p. viii) must be qualified today in light of processes of medialization and mediatization (cf. lundby 2009). i think that many contemporary authors would approve of such a relativization. opinions are divided over the question of how it can and should happen and which conceptualizations appear useful for which purposes. it has been fashionable for a while to generate new concepts of literality and literacy, transfer them to various areas and apply them in metaphorical ways (cf. gee 1999; leu 1999; sting 2003). the spectrum ranges from numerical, visual and musical to family and environmental to emotional and sexual literacies. no end of the new creations is in sight. many descriptions of new literacies are pragmatically motivated, many are kept very simple (cf. sheridan 2000), others are quite differentiated (richardson et al. 2009) and clearly focused (cf. institute of museum and library services 2009). by and large, a need for clarification emerges. street & lefstein (2007, p. 4647) suggest to resolve the conceptual confusion by means of two strategies: on the one hand, they encourage separate studies in which the analyzed objects are clearly defined and terminologies clarified by means of ethnographic methods in the sense of a "closeness to the ground" (ibd., p. 46). on the other hand, they argue for reflecting the significance of (new) literacies for the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 11 persons concerned by the area of conflict between life-world aspects and "new work orders" (ibd.). as to the terminological differentiations claimed by the authors, there are definitely studies available in which also epistemological dimensions beyond single-discipline aspects receive attention (cf. for example olson/torrance 1991, 2009). in addition, numerous points of contact exist in regard to the political dimensions, ranging from considerations of ideological critique (cf. gee 1996) to critical visual-pedagogical approaches in the context of political education (cf. holzwarth 2008) to approaches of "visual activism" (sheridan et al. 2009), of media activism (cf. meikle 2002) and tactical biopolitics (da costa/philip 2008). this does not exhaust the need for clarification, however. even though the epistemological dimensions are often highly neglected in single-discipline studies and the call for application-oriented concepts is virtually ubiquitous, not least in media pedagogy, i do not see a way around basic theoretical reflections here. in my opinion, they reach beyond (questions of) literacies at least in a twofold sense. widespread modalities of the "universal pragmatic" connection of literacy to various areas of phenomena, such as outlined above, all too easily hide the fact that letters, words, images,xiv numerals, formulas, etc. are linked with various forms of meaning creation, significance attribution and knowledge building. maybe we had better clarify the characteristics literacy, numeracy or mathemacy and picturacy and their relations than create expansions in the sense of mathematical, quantitative and visual literacy or apply metaphorical uses in the manner of everyday theory. in this regard, gunther kress proposes the following naming practice: 1. words that name resources for representing and their potential – speech, writing, image, gesture; 2. words that name the use of the resources in the production of the message – literacy, oracy, signing, numeracy, (aspects of) 'computer literacy' and of 'media literacy', 'internet-literacy'; and 3. words that name the involvement of the resources for the dissemination of meanings as message – internet publishing, as one instance. (kress 2003, p. 23) this suggestion has not yet been taken up on a broad basis, although it establishes useful ideas for a differentiated handling of the subject matter. moreover, it could be further refined – for instance based on the mediaphilosophical considerations by schmidt (2008) – and it can be connected to questions concerning design theory (cf. krippendorff 2006) and the logic of images (cf. nyíri 2004; heßler/mersch 2009). the elaboration of corresponding differentiations has consequences that should not be underestimated. one or two odd formulationsxv are likely to be the least problem as long as the descriptions are comprehensible. what is more difficult, from my point of view, is the overcoming of self-evident assumptions, such as the distinction of five senses, which on closer examination is anything but self-evident (cf. surana 2009). presumably, these and similar basic distinctions relevant to perception can be relativized most likely in the context of polylogic approaches to research (cf. wimmer 2001). true, media pedagogy and art pedagogy cannot be limited to examining the results of media-philosophical or cultural-semiotic projects. in that regard, it is certainly essential to find a balance between theoretical and practical motives and demands. overall, at present certain tendencies seem to emerge that prefer studying competences over esthetic experiences and educational processes since they are easier to verify. this does not mean that all relevant efforts already resemble those of the proverbial drunkard who looks for his lost keys under the streetlight because the light is better there. it does mean, however, that we should make the prerequisites and conceptual assumptions as explicit as possible and put them into context if we want to communicate about the significance of mediality and constructiveness and about "gains and losses" (cf. kress 2005) in new media configurations. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 12 such efforts at communication are not exactly easy under the assumption that the forms of knowledge are contingent and on the conditions of transversal connections in the media system (not to mention of widespread interests of the strategic implementation and tactical overcoming). institutionalized education as an example demonstrates how much literacy-based forms of the communicative stabilization of learning cultures can restrict the probing of creative, conceptual and critical-reflexive scopes. while media literacy is being discussed as an alternative to media regulation (cf. hobbs 2008, p. 443-444), school is largely administered in the sense of a "monomedial province" (böhme 2006). suggestions for media education in new cultural spaces (cf. bachmair 2010) have led to school trials and pilot projects here and there, but over large parts, school is designed in terms of a "literal counterculture" or a "media-resistant polis" (cf. böhme 2006). admittedly, franz pöggeler wrote almost twenty years ago: the fact that pedagogy and educational science these days pay closer attention than in the past to images, next to print media, is certainly a result of the new weighting of the verbal-literary component of education in relation to the visual one: in our society's communication and information system, visualization is playing an ever increasing part. print media are losing some of their prestige and impact even within the school system, whose history was largely identical with that of the spread of writing. (pöggeler 1992, p. 11; translated by the author) however, it seems to be a long way from the pedagogical iconology envisaged in this text to the realization of new educational potentials of transmedia network cultures (cf. böhme 2006). in this regard, i consider two aspects to be important for further consideration: • the debates about media competence have reached a point at which the opposition between technophobic humanities and cultural studies, on the one hand, and techno-euphoric engineering and natural sciences, on the other, has become historically obsolete. • there is reason to doubt "whether it [...] makes sense that the internal differentiation of a knowledge system continues to be oriented on the individual media and their apparatuses" (leschke 2010, p. 303). the key function of media forms in a transversally integrated media system is relevant not only to media theory. to the extent that they represent "just as well the material of media communication as the aspect of the ideal of media technology," they are connected with objections "to the cultural-scientific neglect of technology and to a monovalent techno-determinism" (leschke 2010, p. 300). what is even more, the theory of the dynamics of media forms also offers trend-setting perspectives of how to account for demands concerning the conceptualization, composition and critique of visual competence as well as of media competence and media education. these are not established once and for all on the basis of (un)critical statements but consistently developed anew as moments in the (co-)evolution of medialized configurations. references anschober, b. e. (2005): visuelle kompetenz. unpublished diploma thesis, university of innsbruck. appadurai, a. (1996): modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis/london: university of minnesota press. baacke, d. (1973a): kommunikation und kompetenz: grundlegung einer didaktik der kommunikation und ihrer medien. munich: juventa. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 13 baacke, d. (1973b): sozialisation durch massenmedien. in: walter, h. (ed.): sozialisationsforschung. vol. ii: sozialisationsinstanzen, sozialisationseffekte. stuttgart/bad cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, p. 187-226. bachmair, b. (ed.) (2010): medienbildung in neuen kulturräumen: die deutschsprachige und britische diskussion. wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften. bertschi-kaufmann, a. & rosebrock, c. (eds.) (2009): literalität: bildungsaufgabe und forschungsfeld. munich, weinheim: juventa. boehm, g. 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(eds.): kompetenzen der bilder: funktionen und grenzen des bildes in den wissenschaften. tübingen: mohr siebeck, p. 289-314. faßler, m. (2010): sichtbarkeit und wissen: netzwerke entstehender ikono-kratie. in: hug, theo & maier, ronald (eds.): medien wissen bildung: explorationen visualisierter und kollaborativer wissensräume. innsbruck: innsbruck university press, p. 9-28. friesen, n. & hug, t. (2009): the mediatic turn: exploring concepts for media pedagogy. in: lundby, k. (ed.): mediatization: concept, changes, consequences. frankfurt a. m. et al.: lang, p. 63-83. gee, j. p. (1996): social linguistics and literacies: ideology in discourse. new york: routledge. gee, j. p. (1999): critical issues: reading and the new literacy studies: reframing the national academy of sciences report on reading. journal of literacy research, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7edb=all%7econtent=t775648132%7e tab=issueslist%7ebranches=31 v3131(3), sept. 1999, p. 355-374. günther, h. & ludwig, o. (eds.) (1994/1996): schrift und schriftlichkeit: ein interdisziplinäres handbuch internationaler forschung. 2 vols. (= hsk 10). berlin, new york: de gruyter. heel, t. (2005): die subjekte der medienkompetenz: der pädagogische medienkompetenz-diskurs im lichte des gouvernementalitätsansatzes. unpublished diploma thesis, university of innsbruck. heßler, m. & mersch, d. (eds.) (2009): logik des bildlichen: zur kritik der ikonischen vernunft. bielefeld: transcript. hobbs, r. (2008): debates and challenges facing new literacies in the 21st century. in: livingstone, s. & drotner, k. (eds.): international handbook of children, media and culture. london: sage, p. 431-447. höhne, t. (2004): pädagogik und das wissen der gesellschaft: erziehungswissenschaftliche perspektiven. retrieved july 28, 2010, from: <http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2004/1830/>. holzwarth, p. (2008): bildpädagogik und medienkompetenzentwicklung als politische bildung. in: moser, h.; sesink, w.; meister, d. m.; hipfl, b. & hug, t. (eds.): jahrbuch medienpädagogik 7. medien. pädagogik. politik. wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften, p. 97-116. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 14 hug, t. (2008): medienphilosophie und bildungsphilosophie – schnittstellenerkundungen. in: hrachovec, h. & pichler, a. (eds): philosophy of the information society. proceedings of the 30th international ludwig wittgenstein symposium kirchberg am wechsel, austria 2007, vol. 2. frankfurt et al.: ontos, p. 43-73. hug, t. (ed.) 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(2000): ästhetische erfahrung und visuelle kompetenz: zur erweiterung der diskursiven medienkompetenz um präsentative elemente. medienpädagogik. online-zeitschrift für theorie und praxis der medienbildung, 1/2000. retrieved july 28, 2010, from: <http://www.medienpaed.com/00-1/mikos1.pdf>. mitchell, w. j. t. (1994): the pictorial turn. in: mitchell, w. j. t., picture theory: essays on verbal and visual representation. chicago/london: university of chicago press, p. 11-34. mitchell, w. j. t. (2005): what do pictures want? the lives and loves of images. chicago: the university of chicago press. mitterer, j. (2001): die flucht aus der beliebigkeit. frankfurt a. m.: fischer. moser, h. (2008): die medienpädagogik und der zweite strukturwandel der öffentlichkeit. in: moser, h.; sesink, w.; meister, d. m.; hipfl, b. & hug, t. (eds.): jahrbuch medienpädagogik 7: medien. pädagogik. politik. wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften, p. 23-50. müller, m. g. (2008): visual competence: a new paradigm for studying visuals in the social sciences? in: visual studies, 23(2), p. 101-112. nyíri, k. (2004): kritik des reinen bildes: anschauung, begriff, schema. retrieved august 20, 2010, from: <http://www.philinst.hu/highlights/pecs_kant/schema.htm>. olson, d. r. & torrance, n. (eds.) (1991): literacy and orality. cambridge et al.: cambridge university press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 15 olson, d. r. & torrance, n. (eds.) (2009): the cambridge handbook of literacy. cambridge e al.: cambridge university press. peez, g. (2005): einführung in die kunstpädagogik. stuttgart: kohlhammer. pöggeler, f. (1992): bildung in bildern – versuch einer typologie pädagogisch relevanter bildformen. in: pöggeler, f. (ed.): bild und bildung: beiträge zur grundlegung einer pädagogischen ikonologie und ikonographie. frankfurt a. m. et al.: lang, p. 11-52. raab, j. (2008): visuelle wissenssoziologie: theoretische konzeptionen und materiale analysen. konstanz: uvk. ratsch, u.; stamatescu, i. & stoellger, p. (eds.) (2009): kompetenzen der bilder: funktionen und grenzen des bildes in den wissenschaften. tübingen: mohr siebeck. richardson, j.; milwood horgrave, a.; moratille, b.; vahtivouri, s.; venter, d.; de vries, r.; brudick, b. & coakley, c. (2009): the internet literacy handbook. 3rd ed. strasbourg: council of europe. retrieved july 6, 2009, from: <http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/standardsetting/internetliteracy/hbk_en.asp>. schmidt, s. j. (1999): blickwechsel: umrisse einer medienepistemologie. in: rusch, g. & schmidt, s. j. (eds.): delfin 1997. konstruktivismus in der medienund kommunikationswissenschaft. frankfurt a. m.: suhrkamp, p. 119-145. schmidt, s. j. (2008): media philosophy—a reasonable programme? in: hrachovec, h. & pichler, a. (eds.): philosophy of the information society. proceedings of the 30th international ludwig wittgenstein symposium kirchberg am wechsel, austria 2007. vol. 2, frankfurt et al.: ontos, p. 89-105. schorb, b. (2009): gebildet und kompetent: medienbildung statt medienkompetenz? merz. medien + erziehung. zeitschrift für medienpädagogik. 53(5), p. 50-56. sheridan, d.; michel, t. & ridolfo, j. (2009): kairos and new media: toward a theory and practice of visual activism. enculturation 6.2 (2009). retrieved july 28, 2010, from: <http://enculturation.gmu.edu/6.2/sheridan-michel-ridolfo>. sheridan, s. r. (2000): a theory of multiple literacies. retrieved october 2, 2007, from: <http://www.drawingwriting.com/multlit.html>. spanhel, d. (2010): medienbildung statt medienkompetenz? zum beitrag von bernd schorb (merz5/09). merz. medien + erziehung. zeitschrift für medienpädagogik. 54(1), p. 49-54. stehr, n. (1994): knowledge societies. london: sage. sting, s. (2003): stichwort: literalität – schriftlichkeit. in: zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaft, 6(3), p. 317-337. stokes, d. e. (1997): pasteur's quadrant: basic science and technological innovation. washington d.c.: brookings institution press. street, b. v. & lefstein, a. (2007): literacy: an advanced resource book for students. london: routledge. surana, v. (2009): indische sinnesfelder in alltag, kunst und philosophie. polylog. zeitschrift für interkulturelles philosophieren. no. 22, p. 15-24. wimmer, f. m. (2001): polylogische forschung. in: hug, t. (ed.): wie kommt wissenschaft zu wissen? vol. 3 (einführung in die methodologie der sozialund kulturwissenschaften). baltmannsweiler: schneider verlag hohengehren, p. 382393. film gattaca. director: andrew niccol, 1997. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 16 about the author theo hug, professor at the faculty of education at the university of innsbruck and coordinator of the interfaculty innsbruck media studies research forum. areas of interest: media pedagogy and communication culture, e-education and microlearning, general educational science, theory and methodology of knowledge. numerous publications, including media communities (with co-editor brigitte hipfl, münster, 2006), didactics of microlearning (münster, 2007), medien – wissen – bildung (innsbruck, 2008/2010), mediatic turn – claims, concepts and cases (frankfurt a. m. et al., 2009), visual competence (with co-editor andreas kriwak, innsbruck, 2011). website: http://hug-web.at. i translated by mag. susanne toelken-mettauer. ii cf. for instance the science fiction movie gattaca (director: andrew niccol, 1997) about genetically engineered strategies of "optimizing" human life and their impact on society. iii after all, in 2010 craig venter and his team succeeded in creating a living bacteria cell which is controlled by a chemically synthesized genome (see <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/craig_venter_unveils_synthetic_life.html>) – "a first breeze of artificial life," said the title of sven stockrahm's article in the online edition of die zeit from may 20, 2010 (see <http://www.zeit.de/wissen/201005/bakterium-kuenstliches-leben>). iv cf. especially schmidt (1999) and faßler (2009, p. 293). this also presents new challenges to approaches of third-order cybernetics, such as the ones brought forward in the context of the theory of organizational development (cf. kenny/boxer 1990). v cf. the forms of cultural capital in the sense of pierre bourdieu and also the new informational capital formats emerging from the concurrence of "digital capitalism" (peter glotz), "cognitive capitalism" (hanno pahl, lars meyer), "topological capitalism" (maristella scampa et al.) and "bio-political capital" (toni negri et al.; cf. faßler 2010, p. 19). vi cf. the expansion of the influential distinction between applied research and basic research by vannevar bush from the 1940s into a matrix model with four quadrants (stokes 1997). that model includes (1) pure basic research with differentiated knowledge-constitutive interests with no intended application ("bohr's quadrant"), (2) applicationor use-inspired basic research ("pasteur's quadrant") and (3) applied research without epistemological demands ("edison's quadrant"). stokes (1997) leaves the fourth quadrant vacant; it could be filled with examples for the isolated determination of facts or the unsystematic exploration of phenomena. these distinctions serve primarily political purposes of research funding. in the empirical and philosophical study of science, they represent only one slice of the panorama containing relevant distinctions of knowledge forms and knowledge-constituting interests. vii national association for media literacy education (http://namle.net/), previously alliance for a media literate america (amla). viii cf. <http://namle.net/publications/media-literacy-definitions/> accessed february 18, 2011. ix cf. <http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/charter.php> accessed november 12, 2010. x for an overview of recent developments on the subject of visual competence cf. anschober (2005). xi in the context of art pedagogy, peez (2005) calls for basing research on an expanded concept of visuals (ibd., p. 24) and accordingly consider productive and receptive as well as active and contemplative aspects of imageand presentation competence; the mentioned examples demonstrate that this demand is definitely met in adjacent discursive contexts. in my opinion, this makes the operative dimensions come to the fore as well. the call for a performative turn thus appears at least partially redundant, the more so as in the context of earlier debates on the pictorial turn and the iconic turn, not only narrow understandings of visuals had been dealt with. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 17 xii cf. for instance the applications of the "education arcade," available online at <http://www.educationarcade.org/>. xiii cf. <http://mypopstudio.com/>. xiv cf. the distinction of pictures, images and icons and the problematization of the "world's readability as caretaker of the written universe against the invading images" (faßler 2009, p. 29). xv cf. for example "visual empowerment" ("visuelle selbstbefähigung") as well as "visuality-competence" ("bildlichkeits-kompetenz") and "visuality-in-competence" ("bildlichkeits-in-kompetenz") by faßler (2002, p. 21 and p. 95). collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.3599 ©2021 (reidun lid, simen a. steindal og hanne maria bingen). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education reidun lid faculty of health studies vid specialized university email: reidunelisabeth.lid@vid.no simen a. steindal lovisenberg diaconal university college email: simen.alexander.steindal@ldh.no hanne maria bingen faculty of health studies vid specialized university email: hanne.maria.bingen@vid.no abstract background: this paper is based on implementation of salmon’s model for online collaborative learning in a blended learning context for part-time nursing students at a norwegian university. objectives: the aim of this study was to explore and describe students’ experiences and to assess the relevance of salmon’s model applied in a blended learning course in physiology. methods: the study used a qualitative descriptive design. data were collected from students enrolled in a physiology course in 2011 and 2012. qualitative data came from survey and focus group interviews. collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 findings: three themes emerged from this study: participation in both steps of the twostep design is important but challenging; online socialisation and a sense of group community support student participation and learning in group e-tivities; and the students’ perception of responsibility when collaborating online. conclusions: the teacher’s facilitation of online socialisation, participation, collaboration, feedback and intervention promoted a sense of community and was crucial for the students’ learning of physiology. however, a lack of confidence concerning professional physiology knowledge led to a greater dependency on the teacher than salmon’s model suggests. the model may have limited potential in physiology, which requires causal reasoning. we suggest combining salmon’s asynchronous model with synchronous activities. keywords: student’s role, teacher’s role, nursing, salmon’s model, bioscience, physiology introduction with the increase in online teaching approaches, including nursing education, a new teacher role has developed (koch, 2014; massey et al., 2019). similarly, students’ experiences with online learning influence their role as learners in terms of the challenges and opportunities of productive collaborative learning processes (jeong & hmelo-silver, 2016; massey et al., 2019). the aim of this study was to explore and describe students’ experiences and to assess the relevance of salmon’s (2004, 2011) model applied in a blended learning course in physiology. the effect of learning is highest when the teaching programme helps students to be active and reflective (biggs & tang, 2007; means et al., 2010). furthermore, social interactions are essential components in learning and knowledge creation (fossland & tømte, 2019; lave & wenger, 1991). collaborative learning is one of the most common forms of active learning (prince, 2004), and interaction is an essential factor in online collaboration (markova et al., 2017). collaborative blended learning refers to a careful mix of educational activities conducted face-to-face and online (garrison & kanuka, 2004). the use of blended learning strategies has increased in the nursing curriculum (mcgarry et al., 2015). a challenge in nursing education is that students often struggle more with the study of physiology than other nursing subjects. research shows that this is both an international challenge (bakon et al., 2016) and a national issue in norwegian nursing education (bingen et al., 2019; jensen et al., 2018). physiology is often taught early in the curriculum as a separate discipline, and it can be difficult for students to understand its relevance to nursing practice (craft, hudson, et al., 2017; mcvicar et al., 2015). mcvicar et al. (2015) identified obstacles to supporting students’ learning of the principles of human physiology. craft, christensen, et al. (2017) recommended integration of active learning strategies in collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 physiology courses. however, physiology may be difficult to learn due to the nature of the discipline (rather than the way that it is taught), as it requires causal reasoning (michael, 2007; slominski et al., 2019). online collaborative learning may be synchronous or asynchronous. synchronous communication between students and the teacher takes place simultaneously (i.e., in verbal or written dialogues). asynchronous communication is flexible regarding time and location; the students read and write online when they have the time and opportunity (massey et al., 2019; morley, 2012). asynchronous written communication could give students more time to reflect on the topic discussed (dysthe & hertzberg, 2008; garrison & kanuka, 2004). teachers have begun to adopt a new and more involved role in e-learning by designing online learning activities; facilitating and intervening in online collaboration; and dealing with the challenges of student participation (brindley et al., 2009; dodson, 2017). the use of a didactic model in online collaboration to clarify roles, expectations and obligations is recommended (koch, 2014; mattsson, 2008). salmon’s (2004, 2011) model of online teaching and learning is a theoretical framework for online collaboration through facilitating, guiding, supporting, counseling and teaching online groups. the teachers’ role changes from that of lecturer to guide in an online environment, as they become e-moderators who facilitate online collaboration through asynchronous written communication (salmon, 2004, 2011). online education is valuable because it offers flexibility regarding time and space as well as the opportunity for students to reflect between log-on times. teachers must lead and encourage students to find and construct knowledge online together with peers. salmon (2004, 2011) also emphasised that socialisation between students and non-threatening communication can help students to feel confident in the online learning environment. a review of students’ perceptions regarding online instruction found that teachers should focus on design, technology, socialisation, interaction, dialogue and feedback (mancusomurphy, 2007). another study on how students experience the teacher’s role in an asynchronous learning environment identified five established roles – pedagogical, design, social, technical and managerial – and one new one, life skill promotion (gómez-rey et al., 2017). studies of the students’ role have focused on active learning with peers, responsibility, time management skills and being self-directed and -motivated (fossland & tømte, 2019; mancuso-murphy, 2007). technology gives students opportunities to engage in joint tasks, communicate, share resources, monitor and regulate collaborative learning as well as find and build groups and communities (jeong & hmelo-silver, 2016). further, diep et al. (2016) found that a sense of belonging and norms of reciprocity significantly predicted collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 increased student participation in online collaboration. there has been a lack of intervention studies in physiology in nursing education (jensen et al., 2018). much research has been conducted on the teacher’s and students’ roles in online collaboration, but there is still a need for further studies in this area (koch, 2014). some researchers have applied salmon’s model in the study of reflective, discursive topics in health studies (mettiäinen & vähämaa, 2013; westbrook, 2012). however, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have applied salmon’s model to physiology courses, which require causal reasoning rather than discursive reflection (michael, 2007; slominski et al., 2019). based on this, the research question is: based on salmon’s model, how do nursing students experience their own, their peers’ and their teacher’s roles in physiology learning through online activities? a two-step intervention for this study, we used a four-year part-time nurse education programme offered by the university. the students lived geographically dispersed and had job and family commitments alongside their studies. for many, it had been some years since they had last attended school, and their data skills varied. few had experience with studying online, and most lacked experience in writing academic posts online. based on this, the students were offered a two-step intervention, with an introductory precourse before the physiology course began to prepare them for online learning. both courses were designed in line with salmon’s (2004, 2011) five-stage model of teaching and learning online (figure 1). • stage 1: access and motivation focuses on welcoming the students and giving them access and technical support to help them to explore and master the online learning environment. a feeling of mastery increases motivation. • stage 2: online socialisation involves the students establishing online identities and finding others with whom to interact. salmon emphasised that online socialisation is important for successful online collaboration. while the students are learning to send and receive simple online messages, they are also getting to know each other. • stage 3: information exchange revolves around exchanging information and performing tasks. interaction takes place at two levels: with the course content and with other participants and the teacher. the participants exchange information relevant to the collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 course and the topic of study. • stage 4: knowledge construction results in course-related group discussions and interactions that becomes more collaborative and dependent on a common understanding. the teacher’s role is to facilitate the discussion by following up on the content, summarising, giving feedback and sparking further professional reflection. • stage 5: development results in decreased collaboration. the participants focus on achieving personal goals and furthering their own learning process. figure 1. salmon’s five-stage model of teaching and learning online a form of cooperation occurs in stages 1–3, which are meant to support the students’ learning process. the interaction between the participants is highest during stages 3 and 4 and then gradually decreases in stage 5 (salmon, 2004, 2011). in salmon’s (2006, 2013) concept, online learning activities are referred to as e-tivities. key features of successful e-tivities are described in figure 2. successful e-tivities should be motivating, engaging and purposeful; based on the interaction between participants; and mainly provided through written message contributions (asynchronous). they should be designed and led by an online teacher. key features: • a small piece of stimulus, information or challenge, • online activities, such as individual participants posting a contribution, • a participative or interactive element, such as responding to others’ postings, • summary, feedback or critique from an e-moderator, and • all the instructions needed available in one online message. figure 2. successful e-tivities the pre-course and the physiology course were planned in 2010. the design of the etivities was therefore based on the second edition of salmon’s (2004) model, which focuses on written asynchronous online collaboration through a learning management system (lms). the pre-course was scheduled for december in preparation for the course beginning in january. it was designed as an online christmas calendar that revealed a new e-tivity each day. the purpose was to prepare the students for online collaborative learning. the collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 physiology course was designed for blended learning. a teacher facilitated and followed up with eight online groups during the learning e-tivities. each e-tivity in the christmas calendar had exactly the same design as each e-tivity in the physiology course, in line with salmon’s model. each e-tivity had a purpose; task; spark; completion date; and instructions telling the students what to do, how to respond to peers and how the teacher would intervene (salmon, 2006). participation in e-tivities was voluntary in the two-step design of the two courses. the physiology curriculum was divided into five topics. four of these included online collaboration, each of which represented one group e-tivity. in parallel with the e-tivities, teachers also gave lectures in anatomy and physiology inside the lms through videos, illustrations and text, according to the blended learning context. both in physiology and other subjects, asynchronous online lectures were chosen to increase the flexibility for the students. physiology was taught throughout their first semester in parallel with other subjects, and the course concluded with an exam at the end of the semester. half of the study time per week was allocated to the physiology course. table 1. an overview of the christmas calendar and the blended learning physiology course in relation to salmon’s five-stage model christmas calendar (stages 1-3) stage 1: access and motivation purpose: get to know some of the peers in the class and write your first post in an online forum stage 2: online socialisation purpose: get to know your group and help each other to manage the lms stage 3: information exchange purpose: get to know some of the peers in the class and write your first post in an online forum videos and information behind the doors of the calendar: welcome and greetings from the university • presentations of the staff • study information • how to write in an online forum individually e-tivity: • log onto the lms • send an email to the teacher and get a welcome greeting videos and information behind the doors of the calendar: • presentation of the teachers and the first semester subjects • how to collaborate in an online forum • how to find what you are looking for in the lms group e-tivity in an online forum: • present yourself and give a response to a peer videos and information behind the doors of the calendar: • presentation of study strategies within the blended learning design • presentation of how to study in online groups group e-tivity in an online forum: • share with your group how and where you study best and give a response to a peer (maybe you have some recommendations or want collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 from the teacher group e-tivity in an online forum: • describe the weather where you are and give a response to a peer who is a place you would like to be (maybe you have something in common) • find specified material on the lms, ask for help from peers and assist peers your peer to elaborate) group e-tivity (2011 class): • share with your teacher and group why you want to study nursing (write this in a word document and upload it to the lms) group e-tivity (2012 class): • share with your group whether you trust information you find online, and respond to a peer’s post about what you think is important to look for in these situations videos behind the doors of the calendar: • christmas greetings physiology course (stages 3-4) stage 3: information exchange purpose: get to know some of the peers in the class and write your first post in an online forum stage 4: knowledge construction purpose: integrate knowledge from different parts of the syllabus and help each other to understand physiology the 5 subjects: • subject 1: hygiene and care • subject 2: circulation and respiration • subject 3: the movement apparatus • subject 4: senses and reproduction • subject 5: digestion and elimination for each subject, online lectures include: • videos in which the teacher makes drawings and offers explanations • texts that summarise the explanations for subject 1, 2, 4 and 5, one of the group e-tivities includes: • background information about the exercise question • a question: ‘explain why…’ • hints and tips from the teacher • assignment: write 1–2 sentences and respond to at least two posts from peers regarding anything they are missing, how to simplify their explanation and if their explanation requires elaboration and then make suggestions on how to reformulate this collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 methods the study used a qualitative descriptive design, with the data collected from a survey with open-ended questions and two focus group interviews. open-ended survey questions can be used to collect qualitative data about experiences from multiple informants simultaneously (sverdrup, 2002). because students collaborate in groups, focus group interviews allow researchers to learn more about their experiences, attitudes and viewpoints in an interactive setting. focus groups can generate data not found in individual interviews as a result of group dynamics (malterud, 2011). participants and data collection methods data were collected from first-year part-time nursing students from two different classes (2011 and 2012) who participated in a blended learning nursing programme. the two classes completed identical online group e-tivities in the christmas calendar and the physiology course. table 2 gives an overview of how pre-course e-tivities and group etivities in physiology were dispersed throughout the timeline and when and how the data were collected. table 2. an overview of e-tivities and data collection for class 2011 and class 2012 pre-course e-tivities christmas calendar 2011 class week 48–50, 2010 2012 class week 48–51, 2011 group e-tivities in physiology subject 1 subject 2 subject 3 subject 4 subject 5 exam 2011 class weeks 2 and 5 weeks 6 and 7 learning activities in the nursing subject weeks 13 and 14 weeks 15 and 17 week 23 2012 class weeks 2 and 5 weeks 6 and 7 learning activities in the nursing subject weeks 13 and 15 weeks 16 and 17 week 23 data collection electronic survey focus group interview nr 1 focus group interview nr 1 2011 class weeks 26–35; answer open-ended questions collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 2012 class week 4 week 19 electronic survey in class 2011 a questionnaire consisting of both closed and open-ended questions was sent to the nursing students enrolled in the physiology course in spring 2011 (n = 63). the survey had a response rate of 65%. it was distributed electronically inside the lms at the same time that the results from the physiology exam were published. the questionnaire was developed to investigate students’ experiences regarding attending all the physiology group e-tivities in the lms. the questions were based on experiences from surveys in previous classes, as recommended by sverdrup (2002; figure 3). the data material compiled from the answers to the open-ended questions in the electronic survey for class 2011 consists of 24 pages. the open-ended questions covered students’ experiences of: • the significance and benefit of the teacher’s facilitation and support, • design of the framework for e-tivities, • significance and benefit of participating in e-tivities, • peers’ contributions, • progress and • motivation. figure 3. the themes in the open-ended questions used in the survey focus group interviews in class 2012 the findings from the survey conducted in 2011 were further explored by inviting a group of nursing students enrolled in the physiology course in 2012 to participate in two focus groups interviews. purposive sampling was used and a group of seven students from one of the eight learning groups were included. the group consisted of both males and females, some of whom actively attended e-tivities and others who did not actively engage in etivities in the christmas calendar. they were aged 22–45 years, and none of them knew each other before enrolling in the nursing programme. the first focus group interview was conducted in january 2012 when the students attended the first face-to-face meeting at the campus after having participated in one of four etivities in the physiology course. the second interview was conducted in may 2012, after collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 the physiology course had ended and prior to the exam (table 2). the interviews lasted 45–50 minutes. author 3 acted as the moderator, while author 1 served as the secretary. an interview guide with two initial open-ended questions and predetermined themes was used to facilitate reflection and discussion during the interviews (figure 4). the interview guide was based on the answers from the open-ended questions in the survey. figure 4. interview guide the initial open-ended question was: tell us about your experience with the activities in the christmas advent calendar and what you have learned from working with peers in your online learning group. the predetermined subjects were: • attending e-tivities, • getting to know peers and options for communication, • design of e-tivities, • writing and reading posts, • giving and receiving responses, • experiences with support in the group and • helpfulness or challenges of group work when it comes to learning. the first interview was audiotaped and transcribed verbatim by an external transcriber. the audio recorder failed to tape the second interview. the moderator and secretary immediately wrote a summary separately and thereafter compared and merged their results. this summary complemented the data of the analysis of the first interview. it also supported the analysis of statements in the survey data collected among the students who had participated in four group e-tivities in the physiology course. data analysis the open-ended responses from the survey and the first interview were analysed using qualitative content analysis as described by graneheim and lundman (2004) and based on the guidelines created by frankland and bloor (1999). the data from the survey and the interview were first analysed separately. authors 1 and 3 first read the statements from the survey to become familiar with the content. the statements were reread, and index codes related to the aims were created based on the study’s research questions to generate subthemes. the interview was also analysed independently by authors 1 and 3. the transcript was read to gain an understanding of the content of the material as a whole and to note patterns or themes of interest. the data were reread while attaching index codes based on the research questions to generate sub-themes. the authors then discussed the sub-themes with a collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 special focus on deviant cases until a consensus was reached. the authors reread the transcript independently a third time to ensure consensus regarding sub-themes and to identify quotations corresponding to the sub-themes. the sub-themes found in the analyses of the survey and the first interview were then analysed together. the sub-themes from the transcribed interview and from the survey were compared, final consensus was reached, and a theme emerged. table 3. excerpts from the analysis data source meaning unit condensed meaning unit and interpretation of the underlying meaning sub-themes themes electronic survey: answers to openended questions this form of learning is new to me, and voluntary participation in group activities does not run counter to seeking my or others' contributions to group activities. one of my challenges is being able to participate within the deadline, as i am in a 100% job alongside the studies. against this background, i need to learn how to be more proactive and plan more concerning the group assignments. (survey) although the course is voluntary, the teacher should contact group members and encourage them to participate because engaging with online group e-tivities is a new study skill that is crucial for learning in the physiology course. the voluntariness of the two-step design was a challenge in learning physiology in group e-tivities participati on in both steps of the twostep design is important but challengin g first focus group interview if i hadn’t participated in that christmas calendar, i wouldn’t have known that on january 2 i’m going to start reading that and tomorrow i’m going to read that. because [by] then i participation in the christmas calendar was crucial in order to succeed in the following physiology the voluntariness of the two-step design had impact on initial competence in collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 data source meaning unit condensed meaning unit and interpretation of the underlying meaning sub-themes themes had quite clearly figured out [that i needed] to read as much as possible to keep up with the syllabus. (student b) in week one where you were discussing physiology, i had to sit down and try to get the christmas calendar done to try to learn the lms. then there was a backlog all the way forward’ (student d) course. group e-tivities at the start of the course maybe point out in the beginning that there is so much group work that it is important to get started with the group right away so that you do not fall off with the group right away, because then it is a little harder to hook up again (student e) took some time before i got into that christmas calendar ... so it was a bit much to catch up with. so i agree that it should have been a little better information in the welcome letter. (student f) the school did not clearly communicate how important participation in the christmas calendar was for preparation for the physiology course. the voluntariness of the two-step design had impact on participation in group e-tivities in the physiology course collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 trustworthiness author 3, who was one of the teachers of the physiology course, conducted the interviews. author 1 acted as the secretary and was familiar with the students as a teacher of another course. the development of the interview guide, data collection and interpretation of the data may have been affected by the authors’ preconceptions (kvale & brinkmann, 2009). nevertheless, the authors’ knowledge about the physiology course and the e-tivities was essential for developing the interview guide. to enhance reflexivity, the interview guide was developed through collaboration between authors 1 and 3 and was based on the findings from the survey. during the interview, the secretary asked questions such as ‘do you mean…?’ or ‘have i understood you right if...?’ to assess the validation of immediate interpretations. during the interview, the students were relaxed, spoke in a friendly tone, actively engaged and highlighted things they believed could have been done differently. investigator triangulation was used to facilitate credibility. there was a continuous dialogue between authors 1 and 3 during the analysis process. the findings were discussed in a research group that had diverse research and pedagogical expertise, which enhanced different perspectives during the analysis of the data and interpretation of the findings. transferability was facilitated by providing a description of the student group and the data collection and analysis processes. ethics all participants were given information in advance of the study and informed that participation was voluntary. one of the questions in the questionnaire was ‘may we anonymise what you have written and use it in research?’ all students who answered the open-ended questions answered yes. the privacy policy of the norwegian centre for research data was followed, and the audiotape was deleted after transcription. students attending the focus group interview gave written informed consent to participate. findings three themes emerged from the data analyses: 1) participation in both steps of the twostep design of the physiology course is important but challenging, 2) online socialisation and a sense of group community support student participation and learning in group etivities and 3) the students’ perception of responsibility when collaborating online. an overview of themes and sub-themes is shown in table 4 below. table 4. overview of themes and descriptions of sub-themes collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 themes sub-themes participation in both steps of the two-step design is important but challenging a. the design should give a clear description of what could be expected from the teacher. b. the design should give a clear description of what is expected of the students. c. clearer communication for why the christmas calendar is crucial for preparing for the physiology course could facilitate participation. d. the volunteerism of the two-step design is a challenge to participation and learning in the physiology course. online socialisation and a sense of group community support participation and learning in group e-tivities a. a sense of group community makes the students feel confident in relation to other students in the group. b. feelings of being left outside increase the risk for dropout. c. a sense of group community can contribute to a caring attitude for group members at risk for dropout. d. a sense of group community strengthens the students’ motivation to learn together and to give and receive constructive, critical feedback. the students’ perception of responsibility when collaborating online a. the teacher should facilitate collaborations and feedback. b. the students’ perceptions of responsibility regarding participation and learning c. the students’ sense of achievement concerning professional knowledge enhances their sense of responsibility for participation and learning. participation in both steps of the two-step design is important but challenging according to the students, the two-step design should give a clear description of the teacher’s and students’ roles concerning expectations, obligations, time schedules and group e-tivities. the course design was perceived as clearly stating what could be expected from the teacher. the students found it valuable that the teacher fulfilled the course collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 promises and followed up with them during their learning process. they appreciated that the e-tivities provided a concise description of their content and layout: a spark, a purpose, a task, a completion date and instructions on how to give feedback. after completing all group e-tivities, the survey participants described the teacher as motivating, supporting and knowledgeable. the teacher’s monitoring, feedback, summaries and reassurance of the professional quality of their collaborative work was perceived as crucial for their learning. the students expressed that physiology was a very difficult subject to learn. they felt confident that the teacher would intervene if they were confused or mistaken about the academic content, and they expressed a need for feeling professionally confident and being reassured that they correctly understood the physiological mechanisms: ‘nice to get feedback on posts and stuff you are working on,… so you know that you’re on the right track’ (survey). the following survey responses illustrate that the design helped the students to structure the study: ‘the design facilitated group e-tivities, and helped me learn physiology in a structured way, with steady progression’ (survey) and ‘there was a systematic and orderly review of the themes that provided inspiration and cohesion with the desire to contribute to the group activities’ (survey). however, the students experienced uncertainty about what to expect of their own and their peers’ roles. they seemed uncertain and frustrated regarding how to handle the fact that course participation was voluntary. several expressed that participation in the christmas calendar was crucial. it helped them to explore and master the online learning environment and to gain an initial competence that was necessary for mastering group etivities in the physiology course. the following comment illustrates the potential impact of not participating in the christmas calendar on the learning of physiology: if i hadn’t participated in that christmas calendar, i wouldn’t have known that on january 2 i’m going to start reading that and tomorrow i’m going to read that. because [by] then i had quite clearly figured out [that i needed] to read as much as possible to keep up with the syllabus. (student b) according to another student: ‘in week one where you were discussing physiology, i had to sit down and try to get the christmas calendar done to try to learn the lms. then there was a backlog all the way forward’ (student d). the students emphasised that it should have been more clearly communicated how important the christmas calendar was as preparation for the physiology course. the students wanted to know how many peers they could count on in the collaborative learning activities. they valued the teacher’s monitoring of participation and activities, and most of them agreed that the teacher would contact those who did not attend. however, collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 they disagreed on whether the two-step design should be voluntary or mandatory. some emphasised that voluntary participation enhanced flexibility, which is necessary for parttime students. others expressed frustration: it’s a paradox that one is requested in something that is voluntary. therefore, i think group e-tivities shouldn’t be voluntary.… if you have to work in a group, you have to and [should] not have the choice to drop it. (survey) some students felt that participation in the christmas calendar could prevent dropouts: ‘if they don’t get that christmas calendar when they start, they don’t understand the lms, and then they don’t know where to begin reading subjects. then they realize that it’s too much for one to manage’ (student b). it was challenging to achieve full participation in the two-step design, which was important for participation and learning through group etivities in the physiology course. online socialisation and sense of group community support participation and learning in group e-tivities several students appreciated that they got to know each other through the christmas calendar e-tivities and the physiology course: ‘the group e-tivities were a great way to communicate with fellow students’ (survey). online communication, which allowed them to become familiar with each other before meeting face-to-face, was highly valued by the students and enhanced their participation in e-tivities. socialisation and a sense of group community enhanced the students’ motivation and feelings of confidence. however, two students experienced challenges socialising with the rest of the group; it should be noted that neither of them participated in the christmas calendar. one voiced a lack of engagement in participation, both online and face-to-face on the campus, and gave an impression of not feeling confident, being demotivated and being at risk for dropout. the student appeared lost concerning expectations, obligations, time schedules and group e-tivities. she seemed uncertain whether she was welcome in the group, while at the same time expecting her peers to send her information. students with a sense of group community were concerned about how they could contribute to a caring learning environment and how to include peers who were feeling left out of the online group. they encouraged these peers to be persistent and sent supporting messages such as ‘come on, join us, don’t give up!’ (student c). regarding a sense of group community, the students considered their own and their peers’ roles as more important than that of the teacher. a strong sense of belonging enhanced the motivation for learning physiology together through group e-tivities while simultaneously getting to know each other: ‘it is fun to learn together with other students!’ (survey). collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 this enabled them to remind each other of the fact that they were undergoing the same learning process and all struggling with a subject that was perceived as difficult to learn and understand. several experienced a sense of group community by sharing feelings, thoughts and knowledge with the online group: for me, the threshold was high when i first had to post a message. i was worried about being misunderstood, writing something wrong or showing my ignorance. however, when i had done the first posting, i realised it was pretty harmless. you are allowed to try and to fail. that’s how we learn. (student e) socialisation and a sense of group community were prerequisites for giving and receiving constructive peer feedback. the students had various opinions of the value of peer assessment in the course design, but they were mostly positive about receiving feedback from peers: ‘it’s nice that someone has read what you wrote’ (student b). many found it challenging to give critical feedback instead of praise, or they did not feel confident enough about the academic content, as demonstrated by this student: ‘i didn’t experience peer responses [as] very constructive. i was often unsure whether the peers understood the topic, or i was unsure myself. the responses often sounded like this: awesome! how clever you are!’ (survey). the e-tivity’s specific demand for providing feedback and the explanation of how it should be done was helpful, as illustrated in the interview: we are often more hesitant when it comes to providing critique – not negative feedback, but constructive – but now when we have met, it’s ok. it helps that providing a response is required. it is somewhat difficult to say something about your peer student in the beginning, but not later. (student a) the students’ participation and learning were supported by online socialisation and a sense of group community. the students’ perception of responsibility when collaborating online the sense of group community promoted the students’ ability to feel and act responsibly. however, they experienced a conflict between taking responsibility themselves and counting on their peers to act responsibly. several claimed that it would have promoted responsibility if participation in the online group had been mandatory instead of voluntary. the students were unsure about if and when they should take responsibility in the group, and how long they should wait for those who had not participated before continuing the etivity. the ‘waiting game’ was a concept that resonated with many students: ‘i believe we could have been without the voluntary ideas from the beginning. then we would all have been more committed. it became a “waiting game”. we sat and waited out of politeness collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 18 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 and to allow others to participate’ (student a). the students wanted their peers to take responsibility and to be committed to group collaborations. one student felt that it was ‘positive that people are demanded [to participate], [as] some need it to get started. yet it was frustrating to wait for people in the group who might still not attend’ (survey). the students were concerned about the balance between the teacher’s responsibility for monitoring participation and follow-up and the students’ responsibility for coordinating and ensuring collaboration. some claimed that it would have been easier if the teacher had designated a leader for the group, while others accentuated their own responsibility: ‘we all have a responsibility to keep ourselves updated. it is important that you take responsibility for your own learning’ (student e). some said that if the teacher had emphasised more clearly the importance of online participation, it would have enhanced their sense of responsibility. the students’ sense of achievement concerning professional knowledge seemed to enhance their perceived responsibility for participating in e-tivities. lacking a sense of achievement affected the participation: ‘it was challenging to write follow-up questions and quality-assure peers because i was often not up to date with the syllabus. i felt stress from questions from peers and certain insecurity regarding the way of communicating’ (survey). insufficient time was perceived as an obstacle to participation, which complicated the students’ learning process. they were surprised by the workload, high number of group etivities and deadlines in the course. moreover, the students claimed that responsibility for participation had an influence on their learning. for example, one student felt that ‘one of my challenges is to participate within the deadline, because i work fulltime. i have to be pro-active and plan according to the group e-tivities. overall, the experience [of] learning physiology online is positive’ (survey). another student said: when someone put something out, they might put in mechanisms that make something happen in the brain, which means that you suddenly understand something because it’s phrased a little bit differently. then you could take the discussion further because a process has been started. i believe this way of working is important for learning. (student a) this last quotation shows the student’s perception of the learner’s responsibility and illustrates how learning contributed to a positive experience of mastering a task through group e-tivities. collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 discussion the study aimed to explore and describe the students’ experiences and to assess the relevance of salmon’s model when applied to a blended learning course in physiology. teachers’s vs. students’ roles the students wanted a clear description of what could be expected from the teacher in the online learning environment for the physiology course. in line with research recommendations (jeong & hmelo-silver, 2016), the course’s design facilitated a careful selection of the learning tasks, sequencing of activities and technical and social support. the students felt that promises were fulfilled by the teacher. as recommended in a previous study on the christmas calendar (bingen & lid, 2012), the two-step design facilitated online socialisation and participation in the pre-course according to salmon’s (2004) model, and it prepared the students for the physiology course. the way the teacher performed her role seemed to have a strong impact on the students’ participation. in line with previous studies (michael, 2007; slominski et al., 2019), our students found physiology difficult to learn. nursing students often experience anxiety related to this subject (craft et al., 2013; mcvicar et al., 2015). however, our students perceived the teacher’s knowledge, motivation, support and intervention (if they were mistaken concerning the academic content) as crucial for their learning. participation in the pre-course appeared to enhance the students’ sense of belonging and group community and to promote their online participation in the physiology course. a sense of belonging could predict online participation (diep et al., 2016). moreover, some students stated that participation in the christmas calendar could prevent dropouts. similar to diep et al. (2016), we found that the students needed time and the opportunity to build a trusting relationship and to develop a group culture in which learning could take place in a social context. a previous study indicated a mutual self-reinforcement between increased participation in asynchronous written collaboration and an increased sense of group community (bingen & aasbrenn, 2012). the students claimed that the teacher should have emphasised more clearly the importance of the christmas calendar as preparation for the physiology course. perceived learning benefit is an important factor for online participation, which must be made clear for the students (diep et al., 2016). the teacher monitored participation and activities and made friendly contact with those who did not attend or interact with fellow students. this was highly valued by the students. those students who were contacted by the teacher felt ‘seen’ and appreciated that demands were made of them. social involvement from the teacher may enhance online participation (markova et al., 2017) and may be more important to prevent dropout than socialisation with peers (aurlien et al., 2019). the collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 20 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 teacher acted in line with gómez-rey et al.’s (2017) five roles for teachers in an asynchronous learning environment: pedagogical, design, social, technical and managerial. further, the teacher also fulfilled a new, sixth role discovered by gómez-rey et al. (2017) dubbed life skill promotion. this new role includes helping students to behave responsibly, to develop positive attitudes towards themselves and others, to communicate effectively and to acquire negotiation skills (gómez-rey et al., 2017). despite the two-step design’s focus on online participation, it was surprising to find that students felt uncertain and frustrated about how to perform their roles in online collaboration. one explanation could be that participation was voluntary. the dilemma of voluntary vs. mandatory participation was a challenge without a clear solution. because the pre-course was scheduled before the beginning of the semester, participation in the two-step design had to be voluntary. mandatory participation is challenging due to the principles of flexible learning for part-time students (garrison & kanuka, 2004). similar to mancuso-murphy (2007), we found that a lack of initial participation may impede feelings of confidence; hamper the ability to accomplish tasks; and, as a worst-case scenario, contribute to feelings of loneliness, demotivation and a desire to drop out. in contrast, students with a sense of group community took initiative to motivate peers to be persistent, to not give up and to participate in tasks before the deadline. this resembles what xie et al. (2017) described as relationship and task leadership. relationship leadership facilitates team interactions like caring and empowerment and can improve group wellbeing. task leadership behaviour involves coordinating task logistics and keeping track of tasks, which improves learning performance. both task and relationship leadership can encourage group cohesion, online engagement and selfdirected learning strategies (xie et al., 2017). the waiting game and self-directed learning strategies the waiting game was a concept that resonated with the students. the students were unsure about when they should take responsibility in the group and how long they should wait for peers to catch up with the course programme or to participate in e-tivities before continuing the discussion. not knowing whether or when a response would come seemed to demotivate and inhibit communication and reflection in e-tivities. the students hesitated to take responsibility for joint learning progress. several said it would have been helpful if peers clearly stated when they would respond or whether or not they could attend. this could have decreased the frustration and allowed voluntary participation to continue as intended. flexibility regarding time and location are advantages of asynchronous online collaboration (garrison & kanuka, 2004). however, the students’ perception of the waiting game seemed to decrease their flexibility regarding time, as the waiting game delayed the collaboration and learning process. collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 21 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 the physiology course was designed to give the students freedom within given limitations. however, the determined structure may have inhibited students from using self-directed strategies to identify their learning needs and to make their own plans to achieve learning outcomes. aurlien et al. (2019) highlighted the importance of self-directed strategies to help students continue their studies and complete a study programme. asynchronous communication made our students feel frustrated about unclear expectations of responsibility and the time spent reading and writing numerous messages and waiting for written feedback. furthermore, the role of the student in online collaboration should transform from that of a passive recipient to an active, autonomous and self-directed learner who assumes responsibility for learning, has self-discipline and exhibits time management skills (mancuso-murphy, 2007). the students must be able to identify their own learning needs, make plans to achieve learning objectives and be knowledgeable about online course expectations (aurlien et al., 2019). our students perceived insufficient time as a critical obstacle to participation, which also may have decreased their motivation to participate in the online groups (brindley et al., 2009). the students were frustrated with the workload and felt overwhelmed by the curriculum. although the students appreciated the peer assessments, they found it challenging to give critical feedback on the professional physiology content. three steps were needed to evaluate other students’ arguments: 1) understanding the physiological statement, 2) assessing the correctness of the other students’ understanding of physiology and 3) providing a comment that was useful both for the other student and for the rest of the group (the social aspect). our students felt confident and had a sense of group community; however, they hesitated to give responses to other students for fear of saying something wrong. consequently, the teacher should use active and self-directed learning strategies to help students integrate the content (craft, christensen, et al., 2017). the teacher should be present in the online learning environment (dodson, 2017; thomas, 2013), but students’ expectations of teachers’ response times is often based on what is technically possible instead what is humanly reasonable (salmon, 2004, 2011). the comprehensive tasks in salmon’s model, especially at stages 3 and 4, put an unaffordable workload on the teacher, who had to follow eight groups with seven to eight students each in the physiology course. the students perceived online asynchronous communication as challenging regarding time issues, design and workload. this may have decreased their perception of flexibility in the physiology course. researchers recommend strategies for facilitating online synchronous learning that complement asynchronous learning in a blended learning design (yamagatalynch, 2014). collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 22 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 the relevance of salmon’s model to online collaboration within the physiology course given the right conditions, we consider salmon’s (2004, 2011) model to be helpful for students learning physiology through online collaboration. our study supports that the model enhances online socialisation to create a welcoming learning environment and has useful recommendations on how the teacher can develop and facilitate group e-tivities (salmon, 2006, 2013). however, the students’ experiences ranged from being successful in the course to being at risk of drop out. their participation in both steps of the two-step design was a key factor for success. we found an embedded challenge in the design, as voluntariness inhibited many students from participation and, furthermore, appeared to enhance the risk of drop out. a goal for the e-tivities was that the students should reach stage 4 (knowledge construction) together to advance their understanding of physiology. however, the students never reached stages 4 or 5 (development). a lack of confidence concerning professional knowledge in physiology seemed to lead to a greater dependence on the teacher than salmon’s model suggests. the waiting game was another obstacle; however, if we had assigned a leader, as salmon (2004, 2011) recommended, this may have helped the students to feel and act more responsibly. because of scarce resources, the recommendation that one teacher should not follow-up more than 20 students became unattainable. this is a serious issue considering that physiology is difficult to learn. insufficient time to learn physiology is an international challenge in nursing education (taylor et al., 2015). this was supported by our study, in which the part-time students also had other obligations alongside their studies. our study supports the challenges salmon (2004, 2011) addressed regarding time issues and the risk of providing too much structure in the course design. a too tight course structure may be perceived as inflexible and may prevent students from developing selfdirected learning strategies. furthermore, the waiting game illustrates that asynchronous online collaboration may counteract the advantages of having more time to reflect. salmon (2013) proposed the addition of synchronous online activities. in line with this suggestion, we recommend that asynchronous online collaboration be combined with synchronous online activities to help the students avoid the waiting game in blended learning courses in physiology. we argue that the application of an asynchronous online collaboration model like salmon’s (2004, 2011) could be especially challenging for physiology courses. in addition to the challenges discussed above, we suggest that the model could have even greater potential for reflective and discursive topics in health studies (mettiäinen & vähämaa, 2013), unlike physiology, which requires causal reasoning. collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 23 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 limitations the students’ relationship with author 3 as their teacher in physiology may have influenced what they were willing to share during the focus group interviews, which may have affected the data collected. according to neumann and neumann (2012), it is essential that researchers situate themselves and reflect on how their social position and background can influence the research process. throughout the research process, authors 1 and 3 reflected on their own roles and preconceptions as well as the power relationship between teachers and students to remain cognizant of how this could affect the study’s reliability and data validity. due to technical problems with the audio recorder, the data material from the second focus group interview was based only on written notes after the interview. these notes may have been influenced by the authors’ interpretations. however, summaries of the interview were written down immediately after it was conducted and was agreed upon by both authors 1 and 3, who were both present during the interview. the quotes provided in the findings section were translated from norwegian into english. due to the translation, the wording may deviate slightly from the speakers’ original meaning. conclusion the students who participated in this research perceived the teacher’s design for facilitating online socialisation, participation, collaboration, feedback and intervention as crucial for learning physiology. the students’ participation in the pre-course promoted a sense of group community and online collaboration in the physiology course. however, the voluntary nature of the participation in e-tivities in the pre-course and the physiology course created uncertainty regarding their own and peers’ responsibilities and increased the risk of drop out. a lack of confidence in the professional content and uncertainty about how to perform their role prevented the students from acting responsibly. a waiting game occurred, which may have prevented them from developing self-directed learning strategies. we recommend combining salmon’s asynchronous model with synchronous activities. physiology is difficult to learn, and a lack of confidence concerning professional knowledge could lead to a greater dependency on the teacher than salmon’s model suggests. acknowledgement the authors would like to acknowledge martin aasbrenn for his participation in the discussions about the data analysis and the results. collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 24 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 references aurlien, i., bjørnsrud, k., haugom, e., & thrane, c. 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(2014). blended online asynchronous and synchronous learning. international review of research in open and distance learning, 15(2), 189–212. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v15i2.1778 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.000q40.2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.12880 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2013.07.005 http://www.eurodl.org/materials/contrib/2012/westbrook.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12594 https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v15i2.1778 collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education abstract introduction a two-step intervention methods participants and data collection methods electronic survey in class 2011 focus group interviews in class 2012 data analysis trustworthiness ethics findings participation in both steps of the two-step design is important but challenging online socialisation and sense of group community support participation and learning in group e-tivities the students’ perception of responsibility when collaborating online discussion teachers’s vs. students’ roles the waiting game and self-directed learning strategies the relevance of salmon’s model to online collaboration within the physiology course limitations conclusion acknowledgement references the pandemic and higher education issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 1 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4388 ©2021 (yngve troye nordkvelle). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. the pandemic and higher education yngve troye nordkvelle inland norway university of applied sciences email: yngve.nordkvelle@inn.no none of the papers presented here reflects on the pandemic situation. in due time, journals will be filled with research papers on the effects and workings of the pandemic for academics, students and organizations in higher education. one general theme will be if the changed contexts for teaching and learning we have seen in the time span from february/march 2020 until the present situation will throw significant light into how the future will be. in a report presented by the us organization educause, well before the pandemic, the following trends were foreshadowed: in the social domain, wellbeing and mental health, demographic changes and equity and fairness will be high on the agenda. in the technological domain, ai, new digital learning environment, and leaning analytics and privacy questions will cause concern. in the economic domain, cost, adjustment to the labour market and climate change will take foreground. in the political domain, decreasing funding, estimation of value of higher education and political polarization will need attention. finally, the dynamics of higher education itself will influence our path to the future: changes in student population, alternative pathways to education and online education. none of these forecasts anticipated the demands of a rapidly evolving pandemic globally. the latter points of the list provided by educause have been the focus of this journal over the last 17 years. we have seen trends come and pass, and watched trends oscillate with the shifts of fashion. in our experience we see that global actors take over the market: blackboard, moodle and canvas. zoom and webex are winning similar positions and a host of add-ons and potentially brilliant contenders try to gain the same advantages. one example comes to mind: one software – no name mentioned – cost a norwegian institution nkr 30 000 for a license for a studentbody of 40 000 – before the pandemic. after the pandemic, the price for a smaller institution with a studentbody of 15 000, has risen to nkr. 350 000. another example: the realization of strict gdpr regulations in the pandemic and higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 1 – 2021 europe hampers the use of software in significant ways. the main vle/lmsconfigurations are affected by the different gdpr-arrangements in us vs. other continent and states. the global market for educational software are seriously affected by the globalization and the escalating disharmonies in international collaboration. it does not help that some providers act like profiteers at this time and age. in this edition of our seventeenth volume we offer five articles. in the first, marcia håkansson lindqvist of mid sweden university, contributes with an analysis of one swedish one-to-one laptop initiative. her take is on how parents conceive of this phenomenon. she describes how the initiative was a mixed blessing, and one sees easily its applicability to the present condition for most student. in the second paper, rob miles, of the united arab emirates university, has written the paper: “identifying the contradictions in the technology enhanced language classroom”. it contains an account of a theoretically sophisticated – and highly critical research project in a region not often reported from in northern academic journals. the paper questions the positive impact of a 1:1 laptop initiative in a context quite different from the swedish example. tor jørgen schjelde and ingrid nilsen lie of tromsø university, the arctic university, present the third paper: “the impact of emotions on learning and motivation in producing and presenting digital stories.” digital stories have been a strong interest for this journal over the years, and their paper opens new avenues of research into the role of emotional engagement in the production – and reception of digital stories. three authors, reidun lied, hanne maria bingen of vid specialized university and simen a. steindal of lovisenberg diaconal university college present the paper: “collaborative online learning using a blended learning design for a physiology course in nursing education”. it describes an implementation of salmon’s model for online collaborative learning in a blended learning context for part-time nursing students. salmon’s model is widely used and is here contesting its applicability for this group of students. last, brita bjørkelo of norwegian police university college/university of bergen, aslaug grov almås of western norway university of applied sciences and ingrid helleve of the university of bergen present their joint paper: “perceived adequate education in ethics:a way to tap into ethical social networking sites awareness?”. it provides a very good argument for applied training in ethical issues in teacher training also will prepare them for counteracting illegitimate student use of social network sites. the pandemic and higher education title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 student attitudes toward teaching english with technology gard b. jenset faculty of education, bergen university college, norway email: gbj@hib.no abstract the present study investigates attitudes among student teachers toward using electronic resources in teaching. two groups of student teachers, one composed of students in their first semester and the other composed of students in their third or fourth year, were asked to assess their skills and attitudes, before being shown an example of how opensource, web-based data and software can be used in teaching english culture and history. the results show that student teachers are positive toward using technology, but that the teacher training program changes neither their attitudes nor their self-reported skills to any large extent. keywords: it, attitudes to it, open-source software, english, web-based resources for teaching introduction web-based resources and data provide new possibilities for online teaching and learning, as well as for blended approaches mixing online and face-to-face teaching (dudeney & hockly, 2007, pp. 136-137). however, such e-learning requires teachers that are both willing and able to make use of new technology in their teaching. the present study investigates attitudes toward using electronic resources in teaching english among student teachers enrolled in the english program at bergen university college (hib). survey data and statistical methods are used to ascertain whether there are noticeable differences between experienced students (3-4 years of study experience) and new students (first semester at hib), with respect to attitudes toward using electronic and web-based resources in teaching. with the norwegian national curriculum in english from 2006 (henceforth lk06), using digital tools has been included as one of the basic skills in english (ministry of education and research, 2006). hence, it is of some interest to chart the attitudes and skills that student teachers specializing in english have with respect to such digital tools, or electronic resources (eresources). furthermore, it is interesting to measure to what extent these attitudes and skills are in place before the students embark on their studies, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 60 and to what extent they are shaped during their time as students. the study will hopefully provide an indication of the practices of the future teachers (with some caveats pertaining to the gap between attitudes and practice, as well as the limited size of the sample). following dudeney and hockly (2007, p. 136), e-learning is taken to refer to “learning that takes place using technology, such as the internet, cd-roms and portable devices”. the term is understood in a wide context, which includes both online approaches (such as all-internet based courses) and blended approaches, including approaches that make use of internet resources in face-to-face course delivery. teaching english with technology goes back at least to the 1980s. its history can be further extended to the 1960s and 1970s if we include technologies such as language labs (dudeney & hockly, 2007, p. 7). the advantages to teaching english with technology are often discussed in connection with activities such as reading, writing, communication exercises, or grammar practice, see e.g dudeney and hockly (2007) or lund (2009). the present paper will address two other perspectives that are relevant for teaching english with technology, namely historical and cultural background knowledge, and the ability to interpret numerical information in a graphical form. these are skills that are included among the intended learning outcomes in lk06 on a par with linguistic and communicative skills, and, as the second part of this paper aims to illustrate, numerical information and web-based visualization techniques can provide new insights with respect to historical background knowledge. the study will report on findings from survey data and an informal classroom experiment involving the same respondents as test subjects. method subjects the test subjects were all students of english at the faculty of education, bergen university college (hib), either in their first, or their third or fourth year. for each group there were 26 respondents, 52 in total. the students were, for the purposes of this study, classified as “new” in the case of the firstyear students, and “experienced” in the case of the third or fourth year students. such a classification is of course not exhaustive, and students in the “new” group might conceivably have considerable experience before starting their first semester at hib. however, a difference in mean age between the two groups (2.5 years) does indicate that the “experienced” group on the whole is somewhat older (mean age experienced students: 24.0 years, mean age new students: 21.5 years); the difference is statistically significant with a welch ttest ( = 2.22, p = 0.03). in other words, there is a small, but real, age difference between the two groups, which can reasonably be interpreted as a consequence of the additional amount of higher education taken by the “experienced” group. thus, given the difference between the groups, we would also expect systematic differences with respect to attitudes and skills. both groups of students were following broadly similar courses in english, although at a different pace and with some differences with respect to how the course modules were organized. another potential confounding factor is that the “new” students attended a program aimed at primary school, whereas the “experienced” students attended a program aimed at primary as well as lower secondary school. the effects of these factors are discussed in the analysis section. data collection the data was collected by means of a questionnaire in two separate sessions, one for each group. each respondent was asked to assess his or her own it skills in general, as with respect to using the web, and with respect to using office type software. for general it skills and web skills, the distribution of responses was more or less identical (see distribution for web skills in figure seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 61 2). the distribution of office-software skills was somewhat different, as seen in figure 2. furthermore, the students were asked to indicate the approximate number hours they had spent using a computer during the last 7 days, in addition to their attitude toward teaching with technology (websites, programs, online data etc.), both in general and in english. finally, they were asked to supply their age, sex, and native language (with the exception of four students in the “experienced” group, all reported norwegian as their native language). all the assessments (with the exception of the number of hours spent using a computer) were done using a 5-point scale, where 1 was low (“not useful”, “poor skills”) and 5 was high (“very useful”, “excellent skills”). the main trends in the data are presented in figures 1 and 2. figure 1 shows that attitudes toward teaching english with technology are, on the whole, positive (median 4), and that there is no clear correlation with either age or the number of hours spent on computer use. figure 2 shows reported it skills and attitudes to teaching english with technology broken down by group. although “new” students report somewhat higher general it skills, no dramatic differences between the groups present themselves in any of the plots. however, students appear to rate their office software skills lower than other it skills. figure 1: bubbleplot showing attitudes toward teaching english with technology (horizontal axis) plotted against age of respondent (vertical axis). i seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 62 figure 2: reported it skills by group (“new” and “experienced”), with added nonparametric regression lines. ii figure 3: student teachers are more confident in their web skills than in their officetype software skills. iii hypothesis the hypothesis to be tested was that the more experienced students held the use of electronic resources in teaching in higher regard than the less experienced students. although there was a clear age difference between the groups, it seems unlikely that this difference would be large enough to give rise to any general age-related differences in attitude to, or skills in, computer use. for all practical purposes these students must be considered to belong to the same age cohort with respect to their e-savviness. consequently, it was predicted that any differences that might arise between the two groups would seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 63 be due to the more extensive training which the more experienced students had received during their enrollment in the teacher training program. analyses three parallel strategies were pursued in trying to measure the differences between the two groups with respect to attitudes and self-reported skills. first, initial testing for group differences was carried out by means of standard statistical tests for differences between groups or conditions with respect to it skills. second, ordinal regression was used to estimate the influence each variable had on attitudes toward teaching with technology. finally, a visualization technique called multidimensional scaling (mds) was used to reduce the variation in the dataset to a two-dimensional plot of distances, which essentially clusters responses together based on shared characteristics including ratings and variables. see venables and ripley (2002) for details on these two latter methods. all statistical tests were computed with the opensource statistical software package r (r development core team, 2010), using general functions and the following user-supplied libraries: design (harrell, 2009); mass (venables & ripley, 2002). in all statistical tests, the conventional alpha level of 0.05 was used to determine statistical significance. possible differences in it skills and attitudes figure 2 indicated that the two student groups on the whole rated their it skills similarly. this impression is supported by a friedman rank sum test showing that the differences between the two groups in terms of the three types of self-reported it skills (general, office-software, and web) are not significant (friedman = 3.71, p = 0.16) . the lower right plot of figure 2 furthermore suggests that the two groups of students do not differ in their attitudes toward teaching english with technology, and this is supported by the non-significant result of a wilcoxon / mann-whitney test (w = 320.5, p = 0.74). despite this lack of group differences, it would appear from figure 2 that office type it skills are rated lower by all students. figure 3 plots the overall ratings of office type and web skills, respectively. it seems clear from the plot that students rate their office software it skills lower. this difference (tested for web-skills and office-type skills) was found to be statistically significant with a wilcoxon signed rank test for paired samples (v = 334, p = 0.02). hence it seems warranted to conclude that, contrary to the initial hypothesis, new and more experienced students do not differ in their reported it skills, but that all students in the sample are less confident in their office software skills in they are in their other it skills. predicting attitudes: ordinal regression despite the lack of differences between the two student groups with respect to it skills and attitudes toward teaching english with technology, there might be other sources of variation in the data. two such sources are age and sex. the age of respondents ranges from 18 to 47, and 44 out of the 52 respondents are female. although it would be possible to conduct a number of separate hypothesis tests on these variables with respect to attitudes toward teaching with technology, it is no desirable for two reasons. first, several related tests on the same data would increase the risk of spuriously significant results. second, it would be interesting to investigate whether all these variables interact or influence each other in systematic ways, while at the same time measuring their correlation with attitudes to teaching with technology. to achieve this, an ordinal regression model was used to estimate the effect of the variables study program, age, sex, general it skills, web skills, office software skills, hours spent using a computer, on attitudes to teaching english with technology. although some of these variables were shown to be uncorrelated with the attitudes in isolation, they were included in the model to estimate any potential interaction effects between them. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 64 the dependent variable in the model was the self-reported attitudes to teaching english with technology. these were ratings on an ordinal scale, and the model calculated the odds that the attitude of a given respondent was a given rating or higher, based on a linear combination of the independent variables, or predictors, mentioned above. the model indicated that none of these variables were statistically significant, i.e. that despite having information about all or any of these variables, the model does no better at predicting the students’ attitudes to teaching with technology than it would if it had been guessing at random. furthermore, there were no significant interaction effects between any of the variables. this strongly suggests that there are no systematic correlations between any of these variables and attitude towards teaching english with technology among the students in the sample. the full picture: multidimensional scaling the conclusion in the previous paragraph is further strengthened through a multidimensional scaling (mds) map. mds is a technique for reducing the variation among observations on an ordinal scale to a structure which is suitable for representing as points in a two-dimensional plot, allowing us to interpret distances between points. figure 4 shows an mds map for the two groups of students with respect to the three categories of it skills, as well as attitudes toward using technology in teaching english, as well as in teaching in general (the number of hours spent on computer use was removed to ensure a better representation). as the plot clearly shows, the two groups are more or less identical, despite some outliers. had there been systematic differences between the groups, they would have formed separate clusters in the plot. the structure revealed in figure 4 indicates that for all practical purposes the two groups are identical with respect to attitudes and self-reported skills. interim summary the present section has demonstrated that there are no discernable differences in skills and attitudes between the two groups of students. despite both a significant difference in the time spent in the teacher training program and some differences in the aims of the programs (primary school only versus primary and lower secondary school), the two groups of students consistently rate teaching english with technology as something positive, and they consistently rate their office software skills lower than other it related skills. possible confounding factors such as age, sex, or hours spent using a computer were not found to be significant predictors of student attitudes. the mds map in figure 4 shows that despite their differences, the new and the more experienced student groups overlap to such an extent that it is not possible to distinguish them based on attitudes to teaching english with technology or self-reported it skills. based on this, it seems that the initial hypothesis, namely that the more experienced students have heightened their skills in and attitudes to teaching with technology, can be rejected. this conclusion is based on several different statistical techniques, which suggests that the results are reliable. however, a significant difference was found with respect to selfreported it skills: all students tended to rate their office software skills lower than their web skills. the next section will consider the effect of the experiment involving demonstrating web-based software to the students. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 65 figure 4: mds map showing the two groups of students (“new” and “experienced”) with respect to self-assessed e-skills and attitudes towards using e-resources in teaching. iv intervention: animated bubbles on the web the other main question this study attempted to answer was whether the students might change their attitudes towards teaching with technology if they were given a demonstration of such resources in use. such an effect would not be entirely unexpected, as it could be a learning effect. of course, it would be naïve to expect attitudes (the phenomenon being measured) to change in the course of one lecture. however, it does reflect fairly well the actual teaching conditions. time is always at a premium in teaching, and it is not uncommon for a lecturer to only have one or two lectures at his or her disposal to cover a given topic. hattie (2009, pp. 220-221) reports an average medium sized learning effect of computer assisted instruction which is unrelated to the duration of the instruction itself. hence, the learning effect (if any) of an exposure to a single, brief instance of e-learning is not entirely unrealistic, nor is it without interest. teaching english history with animated graphs after the student teachers had completed the first part of the survey (reported on above), they sat through a teaching session on english political and social history. the session consisted of the following elements: a brief traditional, introductory lecture, a set of tasks related to english history for in-class work in pairs, and finally a demonstration using online data and software. the intention behind the demonstration using online data was two-fold. the first goal was to use available statistical data as a means of teaching english history. although numbers might seem dry, they do provide a valuable and interesting complement to prose narrative as a source of information about the past, if presented in an appropriate way. furthermore, reading and creating graphs and working with numbers are skills that are now integrated in several subjects in the lk06, including english (ministry of education and research, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 66 2006). the second aim was to investigate whether such a demonstration might positively influence attitudes toward using teaching english with technology. for the purposes of this demonstration, a website was constructed displaying an animated graph which maps the relationship between population size, wheat prices, and wages for two different groups of workers in england between 1259 and 1750. the raw data for this demonstration are freely available from a website maintained by the dutch international institute of social history (http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/data.php). the software for creating the animated graph is a freeware implementation of the “bubbleplot” software created by the gapminder organization for displaying health and economics data (http://www.gapminder.org/world). the original gapminder data can only display the data already entered into their databases. however, the google docs office suite supports a freeware implementation in the form of plugin to their spreadsheet software. with this web-based software it is fairly easy to create such animated graphics for any dataset and to publish it on the web. figure 5 shows a screenshot of the graph. the full animated graph created for the purposes of the current study can be accessed at http://home.hib.no/ansatte/gbj/population.htm. figure 5: screenshot of an animated graph displaying the interaction between population size, wheat prices, and wages for two categories of employees (farm workers and building craftsmen) in england between 1259 and 1750. v results after the presentation, the students were asked to turn their survey sheets and complete the remaining questions. the questions concerning attitudes towards teaching with technology were identical to those on the front page. the mean ranks suggest a small increase both for the more experienced students (before: 4.15, after: 4.31) and for the new students (before: 4.19, after: 4.35). however, the difference between the two groups is not statistically significant as measured with friedman’s rank sum test (friedman = 2, p = 0.16), which suggests that if any learning effect takes place, it is too weak to be objectively distinguished from other sources of variation in the data. one possible interpretation of the results is that the students considered the software and the data irrelevant with respect to teaching english with technology. another plausible explanation could be that the students exhibited a highly positive attitude towards computer teaching with technology even before the demonstration; consequently, there was simply very little room for influencing attitudes further. however, a third possibility is that the students were unsure about the skills needed to use the software that was http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/data.php http://www.gapminder.org/world/ http://home.hib.no/ansatte/gbj/population.htm seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 67 demonstrated. as previously demonstrated, the students consistently rated their office software skills lower than their web skills. since the graph software required precisely those kinds of skills (working with spreadsheet data), it is possible that the students found the specific approach that was demonstrated less appealing than other resources for teaching with technology. discussion and conclusions the present study has shown that, with respect to teaching english with technology, there are no differences in attitudes and skills between student teachers in their first semester and those in their third or fourth year. nor do the students differ with respect to their self-reported skills. furthermore, it was shown that simply demonstrating web resources does not significantly affect the students’ attitudes. one reason for this, as discussed above, could be that the students already are very positive to using technology in teaching, both in general and in teaching english. as such this is a positive result, because it indicates that these future teachers are highly motivated for computer assisted teaching. however, the results also raise some concern. as pointed out above, there are no significant differences between the more experienced and the less experienced students, both with respect to attitudes and, crucially, skills. furthermore, the data above clearly showed that while the students were confident in their web skills, they were less certain about their ability to handle office-type software. it is precisely the latter set of skills that will enable them to e.g. make animated graphs using google docs, use word-processing software efficiently, or even make the most out of presentation software. while it should be kept in mind that the present study is based on a small sample which might not be representative of all norwegian student teachers of english, the results are nevertheless robust, having been arrived at through a number of different statistical methods. the fact that web surfing has become an everyday activity does not mean that a lack of relevant it skills is no longer a factor that prevents the use of teaching with technology. some of these practical difficulties with it experienced by teachers are discussed in e.g. rimmereide, madsen, husøy, gjøvik, and ekker (2009), who report that some teachers were frustrated by technical problems. interestingly, hattie (2009, p. 223) reports large gains in learning effect sizes when teachers have received training in using computers as teaching and learning tools, which further indicates that the question of teachers’ it skills is still something that merits attention. although the present study is small, it ties in with these previous studies in that it points to a possible gap in the teacher training curriculum. the students are highly positive to teaching with technology; however, while they assess their web skills as being fairly good, they have less confidence in their office software skills. the web provides a rich source of data and presentation modes, as the animated graph of historical english data used in the study attests to. however, for student teachers to fully benefit from such possibilities and integrate them into their teaching, they require confidence in their own skills to work with office software, such as google docs. the results discussed in the present study suggest that the future teachers would benefit from more extensive training in the use of office software, which will allow them to bring both specific and general it skills to bear on their positive attitudes to teaching with technology. references dudeney, g., & hockly, n. (2007). how to teach english with technology. harlow: longman. harrell, f. e. (2009). design: design package. retrieved from http://cran.r-project.org/package=design. accessed 01.11.2010. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 68 hattie, j. (2009). visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. london: routledge. lund, a. (2009). å være digital i engelsk. in h. otnes (ed.), å være digital i alle fag (pp. 87-104). oslo: universitetsforlaget. ministry of education and research. (2006). knowledge promotion. retrieved from http://www.udir.no/artikler/_lareplaner/_english/knowledgepromotion---kunnskapsloftet/. accessed 01.11.2010. r development core team. (2010). r: a language and environment for statistical computing. vienna. retrieved from http://www.rproject.org. accessed 01.11.2010. rimmereide, h. e., madsen, t. g., husøy, g., gjøvik, ø., & ekker, s. (2009). digitale mapper og konsekvenser for læringsmiljø i høgere utdanning. in h. haugen (ed.), læringsmiljø på nett: erfaringer fra forsøk og prosjekt (pp. 231-247). trondheim: tapir. venables, w. n., & ripley, b. d. (2002). modern applied statistics with s (4. ed.). new york: springer. i each point corresponds to a student, and the bubble around each point is proportional to self-reported computer use (hours) in the week preceding the survey. the two outliers with respect to age (18 and 47, respectively) do not change the general conclusion: there is no significant correlation between age, amount of pc use, and attitudes toward teaching english with technology. ii the horizontal axis shows “new” students, the vertical axis shows the “experienced” group. similar ratings show up as straight lines. no clear group differences present themselves, but office-type skills appear to have lower ratings. the lower right plot shows reported attitudes to teaching english with technology by group. iii the vertical axis shows the number of respondents, the horizontal axis shows the self-reported skill level, from 1 (very poor) to 5 (excellent). the difference is statistically significant with a wilcoxon signed rank test for paired samples (v = 131, p = 0.02). iv each label corresponds to a respondent; labels in the same position on the map are printed on top of each other. as the map clearly shows, there is an almost complete overlap between the new and more experienced students. the two-dimensional representation is fairly good, with a kruskal stress value of 12.16%. v the full animated graph can be accessed at http://home.hib.no/ansatte/gbj/population.htm. http://home.hib.no/ansatte/gbj/population.htm copeland & miskelly making time for storytelling.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 192 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 making time for storytelling; the challenges of community building and activism in a rural locale sarah copeland phd student faculty of innovation north leeds metropolitan university email: s.copeland@leedsmet.ac.uk clodagh miskelly doctor, consultant and researcher in culture, media and arts in social change and development, and participatory media facilitator email: miskellaneous@hotmail.com abstract the uneven projection of voices from or within a community can be addressed, in part, by methods such as digital storytelling in a technology and media-savvy society. whilst the use of digital storytelling to facilitate constructive dialogue has proved successful for those who participate, instilling a sense of motivation to become involved at the outset can pose a challenge. members of different types of community groups, whether geophysical or practice-based, will not necessarily be drawn to involvement in social action through group workshops without prior personal engagement. this paper considers which other participatory media techniques can be employed to encourage involvement in community digital storytelling workshops to inspire activism, and examines barriers to participation, with emphasis on the necessity of mandate, for project success. to help answer these issues, one particular workshop in a case study in north yorkshire, uk will be used to identify the importance of place and incorporation of methods when undertaking community digital storytelling. keywords: social change, activism, rural community, intergenerational, participatory, community media, creative practice, motivation, mandate introduction the growing phenomenon of digital storytelling has many strands, one of which is concerned with a geo-physical connection: community digital storytelling. this paper draws on the experiences gained by the authors; a doctoral researcher and experienced practitioner-academic, in a community digital storytelling workshop held as part of a doctoral case study. this community informatics intervention seeks to investigate the effectiveness of digital storytelling as a cross-boundary method for community building and activism, set in a rural location in the uk, by exploring issues and experiences with local residents. attracting residents of a geo-physical community to give seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 193 their time to participate in such projects has proved to be a challenge; investigating how and why this is the case and what can be done to overcome the barriers encountered in this project is examined, with particular interest in the issue of mandate. use of the word ‘community’ creates its own discourse as it is a generic term applied to a number of contexts. in this case, community is considered to be the unique structures that residents of a geo-physical place are caught up in. bauman (2001) describes the negotiation between security and freedom, and it is this balance that perhaps restricts open communication in small communities. it is important not to underestimate the range of interests, contrasting experiences, age, gender and class differences of people within communities, and hence within community media or informatics interventions. some literature on community and participatory media stresses the importance of moving beyond any understanding of community as a homogenous block with one shared viewpoint to addressing rich, dynamic understandings of community. a project may well encounter or reveal overlapping affiliations, varied perspectives and experiences which may be complementary, contradictory or competing (tomaselli, 1989; juhasz, 1995, p.236; miskelly and fleuriot, 2006). alongside communication, activism, or intentionally taking some form of action, can also be affected by the structures at play. any geo-physical community, from urban neighbourhoods to rural villages, will include residents with differing viewpoints. while not all residents enjoy an equal voice in a community, they face the effects, at some level, of regionwide issues through impact of changing habits of society. according to the yorkshire dales national park management plan (2007), global market forces are changing the domestic farming demand where the history of livestock farming is still “deeply interwoven into … life and culture” (p.8) and has made the landscape what it is today. this in turn has built a tourism industry, now being adversely affected by cheaper flights abroad. in addition, the better links to larger commercial centres have brought businesses and incomers, who demand further infrastructure with inevitable environmental impact. with the increase of cars in the region, “social exclusion and a sense of isolation” (ibid, p.10) has been accentuated for those without private transport. furthermore, the lack of affordable housing for the many low-wage earners, while housing stock is given over to holiday homes and second houses, is a thorny issue. in places of rural dwelling, power relations can be amplified in smaller-sized community groups. as the demographic of such geo-physical communities change, the more marginalised groups of residents such as the elderly and youth can find their voices have reduced influence. in an effort to increase communication channels amongst residents and between decision makers, an appropriate community informatics (ci) approach was sought to developing an intervention. ci is concerned with use of information communication technology (ict) to “enable and empower community processes” (gurstein, 2007, p.11), often communities considered to be at a disadvantage. further, day (2005, p.6) promotes ‘social cohesion’ in ci by highlighting social dialogue to be “a central dynamic of active community life”. when researching techniques to cross boundaries between different groups within a community, taking action through an intervention should be sensitively designed with ethical considerations. designing the intervention the researcher was moved to design an intervention to address issues of conflict in small rural locations in north yorkshire, having moved to the area and taught in a local college. initially, a blended learning approach was seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 194 considered through units of e-learning materials in combination with group discussion, both face-to-face and on-line. but the need for a participatory approach to entice engagement revealed digital storytelling to offer a better solution for the social cohesion through dialogue that day (2005) advocates, still retaining the ict learning element. particularly, the model developed by the center for digital storytelling (lambert, 2006) has been shown to help to bring about change in attitude through the transformational process of their workshops and to work in boundary-crossing settings in many situations, such as race relations, disadvantaged youth empowerment programs, transformational change in developing countries etc. (for example tacchi, 2009; clarke, 2009). when considering the role of narrative within the context of culture, erstad and wertsch (2008) have described ‘cultural tools’ that we use for making sense of how our lives change over time. mediated action can be fundamentally altered as a result of the “transformations embedded in the development of cultural tools” (p.36). freidus and hlubinka (2002) assert that digital storytelling for reflective practice, in a variety of settings, “is a valuable, transformative tool for personal, professional, organizational, and community development.” they suggest one outcome of sharing stories is that the sense of community itself can be strengthened. after the story development cycle has been completed, they “serve as objects which mediate relationships” (p.26) and couldry (2008) describes transforming society through media. given the capacity of the cds model (lambert, 2006) to be empowering to participants and to cross boundaries, it became central to the design of the intervention. however, a pragmatic and flexible approach to this design was necessary taking into consideration the specifics of this rural context where participants would not be brought together by an existing local organisation or around a single issue, as is often the case with community-based digital storytelling. from a research perspective, this project was designed as an intervention into a community and intended to mobilise local residents. the project was informed by specific local rural concerns and communication gaps including well-known regional issues and the concerns that local residents raised with the researcher. it did not however grow out of a local movement. as with any externally resourced or initiated project, this required careful negotiation of the tensions between the desires and objectives of those taking part and the constraints of the researcher’s time and resources. in addition to these negotiations, the requirement to fulfil a research brief can require intricate balancing. in terms of running the intervention, a participatory approach was deemed desirable but it was the case that practical constraints required copeland to effectively manage the workshop as a research project, albeit in a facilitative role, inevitably relinquishing some of the control away from the participants. this paper examines one workshop series in a case study that proved particularly challenging when recruiting committed participants. this case study was designed to review the effectiveness of digital storytelling to help strengthen community ties by facilitating communication channels and enabling some aspect of social change by amplifying lesser heard voices through ict. although some reported projects are located in rural areas, such as parts of the bbc capture wales audience and through organisations such as the rural media company (http://ruralmedia.co.uk/), the majority seem to be based in urban settings, for example london’s voices (thumim, 2009). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 195 a north yorkshire case study the research project discussed in this paper aims to assess the effectiveness of digital storytelling in rurally-located settings, where many groups in the communities are disadvantaged by their location. focus was given to the perceived experiences between different generations living in the villages. the project findings are still being analysed, however the process of recruiting participants is complete and offered a new set of issues and results that proved as interesting as the initial research questions. this paper centres on a digital storytelling workshop facilitated by both authors. one of two locations in this case study, this small town was chosen on account of both its remote position, with many of the aforementioned issues evident, and the presence of an educational facility in a local museum which could host a workshop. the town is at the centre of a regional livestock farming territory, and demographically holds a mix of families with a long history in the area and incomers who have been attracted to a rural life. amongst the many location-specific issues from which this town suffers, entertainment facilities for secondary school-aged children alongside other similar issues have emerged as a key concern during this research project. prior to this project, copeland had worked on a regional dialect project recording local dialogue and contextual conversation, and thus contacts were formed where expressions of interest in a digital storytelling project had been made. as she would have been considered an ‘outsider’, that’s ‘offcumden’ in dialect incidentally, these first contacts were a vital entry point to recruiting participants to the digital storytelling workshop. the workshop was designed to follow the cds three day workshop method (lambert, 2006) as closely as possible, but as with many projects, it was necessary to adapt the process to fit the local context (for example, tacchi, 2009). copeland planned to act as workshop facilitator with miskelly as cofacilitator so that more time could be spent observing participant interaction in addition to mediating stories. this intervention began with participant recruitment through local events and networking. a willingness to share life stories was key, but also important was a representation of the three identified age bands; 14-19, 20-60 and 60+. when recruiting, the workshop was described as an opportunity to share experiences of living in the area and being able to create a multimedia memory. the cultural association with the area is important, and participants whose families had lived in the town for generations were very keen to be able to create heritage artefacts. these ‘cultural tools’ (erstad and wertsch, 2008) became the most prominent selling point for the workshop in terms of attracting participants from different generations, although the younger people approached were more interested in the opportunity to learn new software. from a research perspective, the range of participants who agreed to take part offered a reasonable platform to investigate the effectiveness of digital storytelling to act as a cross-boundary method in eliciting discussion. however, a wider range of participants would have been desirable, particularly from the younger generation. prior to the workshop, the researcher visited each participant to discuss the aims and outcomes of the project, hold a semi-structured interview to learn about the participants’ typical daily interactions with the locale, and listen to the participants share their experiences of life in the area. a facilitative rather than directive role was followed by the researcher through a process of mediation and framing of the story (thumim, 2008; erstad and wertsch, 2008). next the digital storytelling workshop took place on a reduced schedule seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 196 of two days to make it more feasible for participants to make time to attend. all participants attended the story circle on day one. time was allocated to completing scripts and audio recording took place. the next step was to deliver the photo-editing and movie-making workshops. finally, postproduction on stories of those participants who were not able to attend the entire workshop was carried out primarily by the researcher in regular contact with the participants. on completion, the finished stories will be shared in a central location with all participants present. follow-up interviews have been planned to investigate any changes in perception of local issues resulting from the story sharing. during the interviews, to aid analysis of the context of place in this research project, the participants were asked to identify which areas of their locality they visited and with what regularity, as well as how far away from the village or town they travelled and for what purpose. this technique of mapping helps to view how much the geo-physical community can meet the residents’ needs, particularly in view of generational differences. the image shown here approximates the distances the participants are required to travel by vehicle for facilities such as secondary schools, supermarkets, and sports and entertainment centres, denoted by the largest markers. these larger conurbations are still small towns, none exceeding a population of 4,000. it also gives an idea of the topography of the area, and how isolating it can be for those without access to private transport. figure 1: the area surrounding the location of this workshop and proximity to nearest towns participatory approaches with community media digital storytelling is part of the tradition of participatory uses of arts and media for activism and social change. this tends to involve community groups in organised projects and deliberate uses of media in community settings, as opposed to everyday practices of domestic media-making or record-keeping. it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 197 is worth situating digital storytelling within the wider context of community media practice to help consider how participants become involved, what might constitute a mandate or focus for such a project, and how a project might be understood as successful in, for example, strengthening community ties, or amplifying lesser heard voices. community media is “a notoriously vague concept” (howley, 2002) covering a wide array of uses of media to represent community experience, however there are common assumptions and claims made for community/participatory media production and digital storytelling. it is often underpinned by a belief in the right to self-expression and access to means of production as an instrument for social change. it is generally understood to result in products that can be used to catch the ear of others and to constitute processes that involve developing new perspectives of one’s own or shared experience (berrigan, 1979, p.8; nigg and wade, 1980, p.7). in addition to these emphases on advocacy and social change, an agenda for education and creative process-focused projects has become a significant part of community media practice (howley, 2002; sobers, 2004; miskelly and fleuriot, 2006). to avoid oversimplifying, romanticising community or intentionally reinforcing communication divides, community media practice needs to be carefully shaped to take into consideration the complexities, specificities and communication practices of each setting. tacchi, who has researched local communication practices across a range of contexts in developing countries, states: there is no one single model for local communication initiatives that can be applied universally, […] each place requires an approach to the development of projects tailored to local needs, which take account of local lives and environments (tacchi, 2003, p.1). furthermore, establishing and maintaining a project and a mandate to work in a participatory way in community contexts often involves a process of negotiation and a pragmatic and improvisational approach with ongoing adaptation to add, remove, reshape and weave constituents, and to fit with others’ productions and motives (beeson and miskelly 1998; porter 2007). it involves overlapping interpretive communities and multiple motivations for participation including individual and social motivations which are not necessarily closely related to any perceived aims of the project, but nevertheless lead to significant contributions. for some participants, individual or shared projects form through involvement and not vice versa (miskelly 2002). light and miskelly (2008), reviewing the work of a range of actors involved in creative and /or design projects for social change, point to the brokering, synthesising, connecting and weaving that goes on to make social change projects happen, and to gradually develop a sense of project ownership. this can take time and requires on the ground presence and ongoing reviewing of ideas and methods. jackie shaw (2007, p.190), writing about the use of participatory video to influence local social change, stresses that we need to be aware of the whole gamut of agendas and to embrace these in developing community media projects. work that aims to be empowering by its very nature intervenes in established power relationships. encountering conflicting agendas and the resultant tensions and difficulties does not indicate a poor project. rather it reflects the reality of attempting to tackle social exclusion. participatory video can contribute to changing the balance of power both within a group and wider society; it can give space for groups to generate their own knowledge and to facilitate communication with other groups seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 198 and institutions. to achieve this potential, facilitators and other project workers need to consider how this transfer of power is managed, and how their own power in the situation can affect the process so that inclusion of socially excluded participants is truly transformative, rather than superficial. all stakeholders need to think about how a project can be manipulated to support vested interests and agendas that control rather than empower, as well as about the approach that is needed if they are genuinely committed to hearing from excluded groups. digital storytelling projects fit into ongoing community processes and will be situated within a network of activities, tensions, agendas, modes of self representation, and approaches to community and social change. these may or may not be articulated, and mandate may not be obvious to participants. as such, community-based work is messy, and digital storytelling is a method or opportunity that fits into that messiness at particular moments to tell particular stories with the people who are available and sufficiently motivated or predisposed to that process at that time for a variety of reasons. there is very little written about how people come to be involved in digital storytelling workshops in local community contexts. the growing literature on digital storytelling has a rich variety of case studies which illustrate the many different contexts and the wide range of socially motivated organisations adopting digital storytelling as a method. however, with few exceptions there is little critique of how participants are recruited, who is excluded from involvement and why they might be excluded or exclude themselves. there are similarly few accounts in the literature of the expectations that people have of the process or workshops going wrong, not happening, or creating problems within a group. in contrast, within informal community media and digital storytelling networks there are frequently told stories of difficult and challenging projects, projects that did not get off the ground for example. we do not see the unfinished stories, and we do not know what the unexpected outcomes of those projects might have been, where abandoning story may have led to other community-strengthening activities. more analysis is needed of what might be called problematic or challenging digital storytelling projects; but we can also look to the wider literature on community media and involvement for some indications of what can work or what might prove to be barriers to involvement or earlier steps to be taken. addressing barriers to participation in digital storytelling projects here we identify a number of issues that constituted barriers during this project in north yorkshire: resources, venues, time-commitments, context of place, incentives and motivations to participate, and sense of self confidence or mandate for the participants. in our discussion of these issues, we draw on this case study but also on the wider community and participatory media literature and on our other experiences of facilitation, participation and research in digital storytelling and other community-based social change work. resources digital storytelling workshops are time and resource intensive requiring facilitation and significant amounts of digital technology, and as such are costly to run. the cds, whose model (lambert, 2006) has been successfully adopted internationally in a wide range of settings, offer both open workshops and workshops tailored to suit particular settings in collaboration with different organisations. in fully open workshops, participants are required to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 199 fund their own place at the event, and this would necessarily exclude a great many people, in particular those who are already excluded from opportunities due to financial and related constraints. in practice, community digital storytelling in community and social change contexts is usually funded as part of a wider intervention or to work within the remit of socially or culturally motivated organisations; making participation free. this is easier to achieve where such organisations have access to workshop space and equipment. so what then happens if the cost barrier is removed? this is usually the case where charities and other intermediary organisations commission workshops, where the participants are invited to take part at no cost to themselves as part of a shared community. there remain issues around recruitment and confidence as discussed below, and also how participants are recruited. removal of the cost issue does not guarantee interest or involvement. other contexts like social and cultural capital may need to be present for a person to even discover that such a workshop is happening, let alone consider or be considered for involvement. on top of funding the facilitation, the equipment, software and suitable room can be difficult to obtain, if the workshops are set outside of an up-to-date itequipped place or organised by groups who do not have access to such provisions. in this case study, the equipment was loaned by the researcher’s university as it would have been otherwise difficult to source enough laptops with appropriate software, recording and projection equipment for all of the workshops. time a strength of digital storytelling methods is the intensive focused process which enables participants to engage in-depth for a few days with their story. however, this requires a significant commitment of time and energy and within quite a fixed format and process. while the process can be approached in different ways to suit different groups and needs, there is less opportunity for flexible degrees of participation than with other kinds of media and story making for social action. the cds model of a weekend workshop requires attendance of up to three full, consecutive days. this time is needed to take a group from the story circle to conclusion of their journey with a completed digital story shared at a final screening. in classroom or informal community settings, this format is not practical and so workshops are often broken down into blocks of time on a weekly basis. designing a community workshop to maximise attendance should be context sensitive and is key to success. it can be a daunting starting point and difficult to establish motives or mandate for such an activity. to encourage people to give enough time where they may not have had opportunity to reflect on how it might be of value to them or others in the community, particularly where they will encounter difficulties in making time, can be difficult. in this research project, it was the seeking of participants willing to commit the time to attend a workshop that proved to be one of the most challenging barriers. the first of the case study workshops spanned a number of evenings over several weeks. however, the workshop being examined here was held over two full days. both approaches had flaws which became apparent when attracting participation. running a series of drop-in sessions in the evenings was far more flexible for participants, and they genuinely seemed to come when they could, but the end result was not a cohesive learning event; the facilitator was seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 200 constantly repeating next steps as each participant progressed at a different rate. there was also little interaction amongst the participants. consequently, this following workshop was run as a two day block over a half-term holiday, to allow school-aged children to attend. however, this proved too much of an obstacle for many of the adults. only two committed to both full days, and both had a vested interest in experiencing the technique as educators. the reality was that neither of these adults was there start to finish on both days due to pressures of work and family commitments. to overcome the problem, it was arranged that the participants could all attend the story circle at the start of the first day, and follow up workshops would be help at convenient times to complete the stories on a personal level. the group will be brought back together again, assuming participant availability, for the final screening of completed digital stories. there is no perfect method or arrangement for community participation, but in some contexts a digital storytelling process may be too intensive a commitment as a starting point. participation and ownership are key issues in community-based media and it can be counter productive to introduce a process which will mitigate against participation in the first instance. stuart (1989, p.8) argues that it is damaging to attempt to make rigid definition about what is participation and how members should participate. participation is not a binary attitude. it exists in many forms and shades along a grand continuum running from inactivity/passivity manipulations to responsible concerted action/empowered participation/grassroots movement. modes of participation cannot be matched to personal or shared outcomes in any programmatic way and significant changes in perspective or discovery about self or community might only involve slight engagement with the mediamaking process (miskelly, 2002). therefore other methods and activities which are less time and resource intensive may be more appropriate where initiating a project outside of an already constituted group. this might mean approaching personal telling in different ways. photovoice uk use storytelling in their participatory photography projects, including digital storytelling, in contexts where the nature of participants’ lives makes sustained involvement difficult, such as with sex workers in east london who produced postcards with their own photograph and a very short story about their lives as the legend on the back. (http://www.photovoice.org/html/projects/photovoiceprojects/ukandireland /changethepicture.html). some initial work can be needed to get people thinking about their lives or community in creative ways which can precede a more intensive workshop process. a range of methods such as reflect have been developed for use in low resource contexts such as rural villages in developing countries. these very flexible techniques like mapping, drawing, shorter story exercises, local walks can be ways into a reflection and can help form and share ideas for the stories and for the wider interests of community building or social change that may be motivating involvement (http://www.reflect-action.org). place relationships to place can be important in establishing local groups and ideas about that locality or community and what stories you might want to tell (miskelly, 2006). a walk is a popular method in participatory development; this simple way of taking time to look at your environment and articulate your thoughts about it with someone else can be a powerful motivator for action. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 201 for example, during a participatory video project in belfast, miskelly joined local residents on a walk down a residential street which led to a conversation with a local woman about the dangers of children playing in a house which had lain derelict but open for several months. within two days of the event, the woman and several other residents had made a complaint to the council and the house had been secured (miskelly, 2002). several participants for the north yorkshire workshops were recruited as a result of walking around the localities. walking and talking to residents also opened up issues of local discontent, which in some cases were discussed in the story circle. in others, the researcher gained personal insight into experiences that were not to be repeated to the group. it is also important to remark that digital storytelling, once underway, can be a powerful means to demonstrate the richness and diversity within any local community and the overlapping communities, loyalties etc. that exist within a locality. further, spaces to share these collaborative efforts, without relying on virtual territory, can prove helpful. typically, classrooms (taub-pervizpour, 2009) and museums (thumim, 2008) offer accessible local places. message (2009) argues that uk policy makers have placed museums as cultural guardians at the forefront of changing society as increasing levels of interest in social citizenship rights are revealed. regional regeneration programs are put in place through social cohesion policy, to encourage individuals to value and identify with their local area over nationalised homogeneity. in this case study, the local museum offered a convenient, familiar meeting place where the participants were able to benefit from the confidence of remaining close. in a small rural community, and in this case study in particular, place in the sense of proximity and intimacy played a great part in the decision making process of potential participants. in one example, a participant only agreed to attend if no questions were asked of them at the interview stage, as they felt strongly that all of their personal choices and decisions affect the way that neighbours interact with them. motivations and incentives participants have a range of motivations for being involved in a community story telling project – which may have more to do with other collective or personal goals than with the initial intentions in establishing the project. for example, participants in one community digital story project described a range of personal and social motivations some of which changed during the yearlong project. they included developing personal skills, community building, celebrating achievement, raising profile, making an historical record, helping to get a qualification, impressing funders, curiosity, to please others with influence, and seeing the project as way into finding a role within a wider project and community (miskelly, 2002). to have or discover a stake in a project is important but can prove difficult where individuals do not hold to a well-defined or identifiable role in the community. for those without a well-defined role, involvement in the digital storytelling may in itself lead to creating a role or getting a sense of how they fit in (miskelly, 2002, pp.242-247). motivation might include the opportunity to gain skills or access to equipment and in that case sufficient mandate for taking part might be having digital media expertise in the room. just as it cannot be assumed that every group will want to include as many voices as possible in its media production, it should also not be assumed that everyone wants to be a producer. due to their individual focus within a mutually supportive group process, digital storytelling workshops can be very powerful in allowing a group of people to work alongside each other on stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 202 that have strikingly different visions of the same community and thus accommodating a range of motivations. however, without a clear common or individual purpose for involvement people may not take the time and see the point of being involved. even where motivation is apparent, such as one younger participant in this case study keen to use the movie-editing software, his girlfriend had travelled a reasonable distance to visit him, and after the lunch break he disappeared; the motivation was not strong enough despite incentive. confidence, identification, power power relationships play out at all levels of community and participatory projects and there is not the space here to do a full power analysis on this case study. we will focus however on one aspect of power as it plays out in the relation to social identity and confidence. porter (2007) stresses that different formal approaches will lead to the involvement of different people. in-depth work at a youth centre to devise a script for a film in which the members will then act will lead to a very different community story involving very different participants than a project initiated by a local leaflet drop inviting young people to an audition. some of the young people from the youth centre would never consider themselves as someone who might go to an audition or be involved in filmmaking had they picked up the leaflet in the first place. a sense of powerlessness, in all its forms, deprives a person of the will to take up opportunities that will enable him or her to engage actively in both the economic and social life of the wider society. one of the keys to such engagement and a sense of empowerment can come from developing the skills to express yourself and be heard (ibid, p.91). but how do you develop the skills to express yourself if you the lack confidence or resources to seek out such opportunities? for youth, this begins with a redefinition of the self and consolidation of new ideas (erstad and wertsch, 2008, p.34). even members of a well-constituted group like class, a life long learning group in south bristol, can lack confidence when it comes to expressing their own views and reflecting on their own experience. this mainly female, mainly retired group agreed to work with researchers to explore the potential for community uses of emerging location sensitive media technology by recording their thoughts, stories, opinions and poetry about the local area where some of them had lived their entire lives and about which they conducted local history research. however, they were concerned about having their voices recorded as their bristolian accents might undermine the authority of what was being said. they wanted actors to record their texts. they were also deeply sceptical as to the value or interest of their own experience as opposed to synthesising and recording public local history information. they did not value or think others would value their life experience. the project overcame these reservations in two ways. the theme of childhood wartime experiences was chosen for a second phase to the project (a theme that had emerged but which would also attract funding). as survivors of the bristol blitz, rationing and other wartime experiences on the public record, these participants were able make the link between personal stories and public histories and were more prepared to share their stories. to overcome their concerns about the way they spoke, a range of techniques were used to record the stories which included group reminiscence sessions followed up by retelling favourite stories informally to the whole group or in a private story booth (miskelly et al., 2005; miskelly and fleuriot, 2006). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 203 in this case study, several residents who were approached to take part declined graciously, citing lack of interesting life story or charismatic storytelling experience. even in the story circle, there was an apparent perceived hierarchy of importance in story from some group members, deferring to more focal members of the community. for example, there was a headmaster present as well as a senior member of a well-established family from a local shop. other participants were observed checking details of their own stories, where they overlapped with these highly-regarded community members. from the facilitator’s perspective, every participant present had equal status in the context of the story circle, but it appeared it was difficult to transcend the understood but unwritten structure. further considerations all of the above observations relate to spending time within a community and to giving time to allow people to consider what it is they want to say, as well the opportunity to say it, and being ready to address or accommodate the range of motivations, concerns and expectations. often this is the work of long-term established community organisations which commission digital storytelling facilitators to come and work with them to run workshops once funding has been established and other resources begged or borrowed. but in communities which lack the investment in youth or community structures, what happens? gidley (2007, pp.39-61) in an overview of his extensive evaluation of a 5 year media inclusion project identifies different aspects of involving young people in media activities intended to empower them and include them, amplify their voices and provide them with skills: • the non-authoritarianism of the workers/facilitators in these processes • the hook – a medium or subject or opportunity (such as digital storytelling) • the flexibility of tools and processes to work in different contexts and with different constituencies he also stresses that work with ‘excluded’ individuals and communities, especially young people, must unfold in a long-term sustained way; “doing justice to the uneven, non-linear stories of participants” (ibid, p.52). he cites the example of a participant who after a brief involvement in a media project became re-engaged having bumped into the media worker in local takeaway and developed a rapport. once relationships are established, then more structured activities like digital storytelling can take place perhaps because trust and a sense of relevance have developed. this almost casual approach to developing local projects is not unusual; nigg and wade (1980) writing about 1970s community media describe andy porter’s participatory filmmaking practice which involved waiting around for young people who might not turn up at all, and miskelly has had similarly ad hoc experiences working with a range of ‘seldom heard’ groups. nonattendance, erratic attendance or inconsistency should not be confused with lack of motivation, rather seen within the particular contexts of participants’ lives. digital storytelling is not always the right method in that place at that time, but within the restrictions of funding and commissioning, it can be a brave step to take another direction; into community mapping or photography or even just facilitating a dialogue. if the project aim is for members of a community to tell their own stories and to amplify their voices with a view to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 204 moving towards social change through activism, then successful criteria may need to be broader than achieving completed well-crafted stories. however, this can be difficult to see when your focus and energies are invested in the valuable process of enabling storytelling. in terms of the case study, mediating cultural digital stories has been viewed with importance on the part of the facilitators and the participants. however, drawing together a disparate group of residents deliberately, has given rise to the issue of mandate. in an informal community gathering which is not based in an existing organisational structure, such as in this case study, recruiting participants proved to be difficult to the point that the already adapted cds model was further adapted to bring together eight people (five stories) to unite for the story circle. had the participants viewed the workshop in the light of clear personal or collective incentives and/or as having a mandate from the community to both address imbalances and to create cultural and historical records, then we argue that a commitment to the full two day workshop would have been more likely. to foster this increased motivation, pre-workshop activities, as suggested above, could be implemented over a longer time to build perception of relevance and a sense of self-purpose. legitimising community media workshops for social change a key issue emerging is that of mandate, whether mandate to hold a workshop or mandate to take part and tell a story. without a specific objective in taking part or a sense of legitimacy as a representative of a community, a potential participant seems much less likely to be willing to commit. this appears to be the case particularly when collaborating for the greater good, beyond the realms of producing a personal reflection, in the form of social activism. furthermore, this is a workshop initiated as part of a research project; day and schuler (2004) remind us of the need to conduct collaborative community research with sensitivity, and that it should be “completely open, beyond reproach and sanctioned by the community itself” (ibid, p.220). this can be difficult to achieve given local or community based barriers to participation. however, where it is apparent that issues causing discontent to one group or another in a locality exist (and they exist everywhere) we would argue that there is a legitimacy to intervene. the mandate to facilitate communication channels in a mediated environment comes from the discontent and desire to improve the situation on the part of or with the residents. and in the context of community/participatory media and informatics, projects have usually arisen out a combination of local activism and external enthusiasm. building successful community media projects does not just happen organically; porter (2007, p.79) writing about his 30+ years experience of community media in london stresses that this work and practice is stimulated usually from people outside of the local communities and who have to work and spend time to develop projects and build relationships. the people didn’t rise up and demand tv. it was an interaction. if i look at the people who were involved in community video projects across london, in the main they were college educated. and initially we didn’t come from within the communities in which we were working. we were propelled there by a mixture of beliefs, hopes and aspirations for social and political change, and i am reckoning often a personal experience of exclusion, of not belonging to the system in which we had been nurtured. not all residents may see the existence of a mandate for activism or even storytelling, particularly where their experience in the community is not seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 205 adversely affected by the issues in question. this returns us to a primary goal of digital storytelling for community building and activism: amplifying the lesser-heard voices in the community. providing opportunities for the underserved members of a community to share their experiences through stories more widely is an important first step in social change. inviting focal members of the locality that represent each of the groups to take part can act as mandate and motive for others, by being seen to legitimise the discussion. this is particularly helpful where some present have connections with the locally-elected representatives at council level, or other formal or informal organised groups from the community; awareness of issues can be discussed with the insight of more than one viewpoint. however, as we noted during this case study, having local authority figures present can silence others or shape what they choose to tell. this is the case both for formal authority figures such as a head teacher as well as those imbued with informal authority such as business owners and community elders. so there is a potential contradiction between the community mandate given through the involvement of such figures and limiting of the mandate of individuals or lesser heard groups. there may in some instances be a case for disaggregated workshops where the dialogue and mobilisation is focused at the point where completed stories are shared. this has resource implications. in this case, the ethical considerations of both the participants and the wider community must be put before any research agenda to promote activism and social change through the issue of mandate which is generated from within the community. conclusions and further developments a number of issues have been identified and discussed in this paper that often prove challenging barriers to overcome when organising and facilitating community digital storytelling workshops: the resources to fund equipment and places at workshops, time available, the context of place in the group, motivation to participate, and a sense of self-confidence in a participant that allows an activity such as storytelling to be considered. we have discussed how some issues pertinent to rural community storytelling can help to shape participatory workshops, such as how the “new cultural tools change the use of narratives and the act of storytelling in fundamental ways” (erstad and wertsch, 2008, p.37). further debate regarding the practical issues of organising and facilitating community based digital storytelling workshops would be welcomed. unlike many educational or organisational (including publicly-funded and charityled) programmes, informal community interventions can suffer from lack of time, resources, motivation and opportunities to be flexible in approach. through a growing community of practice of digital storytelling facilitators, finding workable solutions to the barriers discussed in this paper will continue to be a helpful development. however, more open discussion of projects that are less successful will enhance our practice and our understanding of processes intended to enable social change. after all, the so-called ‘classic’ model of digital storytelling developed by the cds (lundby, 2008) has proved powerful in personal empowerment and transformation due to the process, and “there are all kinds of stories in our lives we can develop into multimedia pieces” (lambert, 2006, p.27), so let us continue “capturing lives, creating community” (ibid.) by using digital storytelling as part of the wider community media genre for activism and social change. this may prove to be the key to instilling mandate for digital storytelling practice in informal community settings. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 206 references bauman, z. (2001). community: seeking safety in an insecure world. cambridge: polity. beeson, i. & miskelly, c. (1998). ‘discovery and design in a community story”. proceedings of 5th biennial participatory design conference. seattle: usa. berrigan, f. (1979). community communications: the role of community media in development, reports and papers on mass communications (90). paris: unesco. clark, m. a. (2009). developing digital storytelling in brazil. in hartley, j. and mcwilliam, k. (eds.) story circle: digital storytelling around the world (144154). oxford: wiley-blackwell. couldrey, n. (2008). digital storytelling, media research and democracy: conceptual choices and alternative futures. in lundby, k. (ed.) digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media (41-60). ny: peter lang. day, p. & schuler, d. (2004). community practice in the network society: local action global interaction. london: routledge. day, p. (2005) sustainable community technology: the symbiosis between community technology and community research. journal of community informatics, vol 1(2) . [online] http://cijournal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/217/177 erstad, o. & wertsch, j. v. (2008). tales of mediation: narrative and digital media as cultural tools. in lundby, k. (ed.) digital storytelling, mediatized stories: selfrepresentations in new media (21-40). ny: peter lang. freidus, n. & hlubinka, m. (2002). digital storytelling for reflective practice in communities of learners. siggroup bulletin, (23)2. gidley, b. (2007). ‘beyond the numbers game: understanding the value of participatory media’. in: inclusion through media, edited by dowmunt et al, (39-61) goldsmiths: university of london. gurstein, m. (2007) what is community informatics (and why does it matter?). milan: polimetrica. howley, k. (2002). communication, culture and community: towards a cultural analysis of community media. the qualitative report, (7)3. 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(2003). evaluating community-based media initiatives: an ethnographic action research approach. ourmedia iii conference. baranquilla: colombia. [online] http://ictpr.nic.in/ethnographic/report3.pdf taub-pervizpour, l. (2009). digital storytelling with youth: whose agenda is it? in hartley, j. and mcwilliam, k. (eds.) story circle: digital storytelling around the world (245-251). oxford: wiley-blackwell. thumim, n., (2008). ‘it’s good for them to know my story’: cultural mediation as tension. in k. lundby (ed.) digital storytelling, mediatized stories: selfrepresentations in new media (85-104). new york: peter lang. thumim, n., (2009). exploring self-representations in wales and london: tension in the text. in hartley, j. and mcwilliam, k. (eds.) story circle: digital storytelling around the world (205-217). oxford: wiley-blackwell. tomaselli, k. (1989). ‘transferring video skills to the community: the problem of power’, media development, 4, 11–15. microsoft word jedeskog and landstrom ict an ally and an alien.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 ict – an ally and an alien the role of ict in swedish popular adult education organisations gunilla jedeskog associate professor department of behavioural sciences and learning linköping university email: gunilla.jedeskog@liu.se inger landström postdoctoral research fellow, phd department of behavioural sciences and learning linköping university email: inger.landstrom@liu.se abstract this article is focused on swedish folk high schools and study associations as organisational settings (and not explicitly at teaching efforts and educational activities). it concerns results from a research project about introducing and implementing information and communication technology (ict) in these value based organisations. our research has mainly been conducted through interviews with people engaged on different organisational levels. in this article empirical results are analysed in relation to actor-network theory (ant). human and non-human actors are linked together in a web of relationships referred to as an actor-network. interaction among actors, contradictory roles of ict and relations to essential values in these organisations are discussed. keywords: information communication technology; popular adult education organizations introduction the relationship between information and communication technology, ict1, and organisation has been paid attention to by researchers during the last decades. in organisations, in general, ict applications become more and more complex but also more tightly integrated. ict is a crucial, powerful factor as it simultaneously is seen to have a transformative capacity that enables and facilitates restructuring or changing of organisations and their members, in particular related to organisational, economic and social consequences (bloomfield et al., 1997; monteiro, 2000). furthermore, it has become increasingly apparent how new technologies play a key role in organisations (lanzara & morner, 2003). there also exists a mutual dependency between seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 2 the use of technology and social context. if there is a need for information and communication the technological push is matched by the demanding pull in the organisation (orlikowski & robey, 1991; bloomfield et al., 1997;). thus the relationship between ict and organisation can be seen as aspects of social structure that are mutually implicated. however, so far, there have only been two studies, a survey carried out in 2003, focusing the use of ict in swedish popular adult education organisations (landström, 2004) and a follow-up (mellberg, 2007). these studies were aimed to get knowledge about the use of ict, organisational conditions and strategies, according to administration, communication and pedagogical settings. accordingly there is a demand for research focusing the interaction between ict and the organisational dimension in these settings. the aim of this article is to from an organisational point of view investigate and describe what happens in popular adult education organisations, such as folk high schools and study associations, when ict is introduced. what is the role of ict? what does the interaction between ict and different employees in these organisations look like? the article concerns results from a research project2 about introducing and implementing ict in these value based organisations. swedish popular adult education in sweden folk high schools and study associations constitute the ‘popular’, or ‘liberal’, non-formal and voluntary educational system for adults, but financially supported by the state. 3 ’folkbildning’ refers in turn to study circles, courses and cultural activities organised by these organisations. the term is difficult to translate in a good way. in swedish ’folk’ means ’people’ and ’bildning’ means ’enlightenment’. the term ’folkbildare’ refers to teachers, study circle leaders, administrators or project leaders who are working within folk high schools and study organisations. swedish popular adult education has a long and strong tradition since the 19th century. what is unique in this sphere of educational activities compared to other educational institutions and working places, are the non-profit character of work and the organisational independence towards educational regulations for the public school system. owners of folk high schools and study associations are county councils, popular movements and civic organisations with manifold interests. often they declare particular values or political ideologies. about a third of the folk high schools have county councils as trustees connected to regional public sector organisations. all these educational organisations are traditionally value based and in their sphere of activities more or less oriented towards the civil society. besides education they arrange a broad range of cultural activities. in practice the democratic intentions are manifested in the whole organisation, not just in teaching and learning settings where all members, working in groups and study-circles, are said to be equally taking part in the dialogue. the face-to-face interaction is an essential platform as well as active participation. the importance of dialogue is stressed in these contexts and as a consequence an electronic network, folkbildning.net, has been built up to offer options to communicate virtually on net, meant as a complement to real face-to-face interaction (fbr, 2005, 2008). in 1996 the popular adult education was offered subsidies with the aim to develop and try out methods for the pedagogical activities in distance education, using ict (andersson, 2002). there are no regulations from the state when it comes to course content or teaching methods. the folk high schools are free to create courses according to their particular interests and own profile. to attend a folk high school you seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 3 have to be at least 18 years old. normally people with short earlier schooling are preferred for admission. all schools have a general long-term course qualifying for studies at university, besides many longand short-term specialised courses in music, media, arts, handicraft, theatre and languages, some of them vocational. study associations organise mainly study circles, but also, for example, public cultural events. every study association has more or less its own profile. the activities are very much the same as in the folk high schools, however, running more infrequently, mostly a couple of hours once a week (laginder & landström, 2005). theoretical framework focus is on the role of ict as well as the interaction between ict and employees in folk high schools and study associations, organisations with a traditionally strong anchorage in face-to-face interactions. four different settings were selected and visited in 2005–2006. concepts of the actor-network theory, ant, are used as tools of analysis to understand the role of ict in these contexts. the theory describes how actors mutually create and assign each other roles in constructing and working in networks. the interaction among actors involved is stressed. actor and network constantly redefine each other; one is dependent on the other. the actor-network theory claims that any actor, whether person, object or organisation is equally important to a social network. thus, human and nonhuman actors are linked together in a web of relationships referred to as an actor network (latour, 1987). developed as an analysis of scientific and technological artefacts, ant’s theoretical richness derives from its refusal to reduce explanations to either natural, social or discursive categories while recognizing the significance of each (latour, 1993). interaction between people and technology is looked upon as a sociotechnological whole, in which the human and the non-human are assigned equal value in terms of negotiations. an important component of the actornetwork theory among the actors is the negotiation of their roles with other actors when achieving their own positions by participating in the network. the whole process, e.g. the introduction of ict, deals with processes of negotiations that include strategies to mobilize allies, actors who represent the initiators constituents properly, to get the innovation stabilized and institutionalized. thus, from an ant perspective, everything in social life can be seen as the result of successfully negotiated networks (latour, 1987, 1998). in this approach, the role of technology, such as of ict, is treated in the same way as that of the human actors, which means that even non-human actors can be assigned power to affect the setting. when developing technologies, interests of various actors will become embedded in the artefact, so-called inscriptions. because technologies are social artefacts their material form and function will embody their sponsors’ and developers’ objectives, values, interests and knowledge of that technology. social meaning but also power can be inscribed into any material or medium including formal texts and technical objects. that means that components of organised human agency and knowledge are inscribed into and delegated to technology. non-human artefacts can be used as delegates for particular human interests as well as hide decision processes from view (callon, 1991; bloomfield et al., 1997; lanzara & morner, 2003). the way that technologies are shaped by actors and how in turn actors are shaped by technologies reflects the declaration of actornetwork theory that the world is full of hybrid entities containing both human and non-human elements whose analytic separation is difficult (latour, 1993). in the networks that thereby emerge and in which both people and artefacts are integral parts, everyone is viewed as an actor whose influence is decided by the development process or the social context (grint & woolgar, 1997; bigum, 1998). the heterogeneous nature of actor networks also makes up the context seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 4 under the influence of a wide range of surrounding factors (akrich & latour, 1992). interpretations of technology, the role of ict and technological frames, are central to understanding technological development, use and change in organisations. technological frames are cognitive structures or mental models that are held by individuals or by groups of individuals. the concept technological frame is used for examining the underlying assumptions, expectations and knowledge that people use to understand technology, here in organisations (orlikowski & gash, 1994). there is no orthodoxy in ant and different authors use the approach in substantially different ways (latour, 1987). hence, the way the theoretical frame, actor-network theory, is used in this article to some extent means a limitation of the theory as the concept actor is the main point. the interaction between the non-human actor, ict, and human actors is the prominent figure. the concept network, certainly a part of the interaction, mostly constitutes the background, here actors at the organisational level in these popular adult education organisations. when analysing what happens in these organisations when ict is introduced, interaction, negotiation, power, inscription and technological frames are the main concepts dealt with. four case studies the empirical base is case studies involving two folk high schools with dissimilar ownership, and two local study association settings, also grounded and run by various popular (or social) movements. it means that two folk high school settings and two study associations have been involved and similarly examined, in total four units. they are located in different parts of sweden, to get geographical diffusion. these four are examples of organisations that constitute the popular non-formal and voluntary educational system for adults in sweden. the research has mainly been conducted through interviews. in all 33 interviews took place, each of them for the duration of 1–2 hours. employees and decision makers engaged at different organisational levels, mainly local and regional, and with varying focus due to their differing tasks were interviewed. typical assignments for employees within the organisations, beside educational activities, are supervising, course administration and market-oriented activities. the empirical data was accomplished by qualitative analysis (starrin & svensson, 1994) related to the actor network theory (latour, 1987, 1993). the four visited settings will be presented below. character of the folk high schools and the study associations the first folk high school visited belongs to the trade union and is located in the countryside near a big city. it was started in the middle of the 20th century by the labour movement to recruit participants from the whole country to short-term trade union and political courses. in 2005, when visiting the school, a distance course concerning trade union and political issues was offered. in this context ict appears as a natural tool at an organisational level but also in courses aiming at information and communication activities. the second folk high school, run by a county council, is still a typical boarding school with an aesthetic profile. this school was established at the end of the 19th century to fulfil regional needs of education for the youth in a rural area. the school culture rests on a grundtvigian and humanistic tradition. ict is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 5 important, besides being an administrative tool, mainly for conducting a ‘writers (authors) course’ at distance. both folk high schools also had one branch school each where most students were immigrants participating in general long-term courses. the two study associations are rooted in different popular movements. traditional interests of the first one, a local setting of the adult education association, are about rural areas and regional development. target groups are immigrants, senior citizens and disabled youth. a lot of study circle activities concern aesthetic subjects and handicraft, but also relevant ict/computer courses. the second local setting consists of two earlier study associations that some years ago joined together in the census study association. with the fusion two different cultures were combined, a religious and social organisation and an organisation representing salaried employees. the offering of courses is fairly wide, sometimes with ict support. there are courses concerning existential issues, language and music, as well as courses aimed at vocational certificates in ‘economic’ subjects. target groups are mainly immigrants, senior citizens and employees needing further training due to their professions. henceforth the four cases are generally not separated but looked upon as one institutional context of popular adult education. ict – an actor of change a general conclusion drawn from our empirical data is that in the early 21st century computerising of the administration in these popular adult education organisations has turned out to be more and more common, as in other kinds of organisations (cf: bloomfield et al., 1997; monteiro, 2000). the greatest importance of ict is connected to the central administrative system, dealing with economic matters. however, the role of ict is not equally strong in all of the four organisations. the trade union school seems to be the most frequent ict-user, probably because of its close relationship to the network of trade union organisations outside the folk high school. in trade union settings ict was strategically introduced already in the 90s as an administrative tool. furthermore, in this folk high school the use of ict was early on regarded as a guarantee for “the quality of popular adult education”, with dialogue as a key word. one of the informants states that: everyone was given the possibility to communicate with everyone else on the net. any actor is looked upon as equally important to the network within the organisation. the popular adult education settings are not isolated but have to be regarded as a part of society, not only influenced by the implementation of ict. competition with other agents and economic realities are other tangible conditions. the increasing amount of distance courses (cf: byström et al., 2004) is one example of how to claim the existence of this kind of organisations. the role of ict might strengthen these organisations as regarding this nonhuman actor as a facilitator of communication, contributing to promote ‘the democratic development in society’, for example by inviting everyone to take part in their courses without geographical limitations. according to the ideological platform of the popular organisations, for example due to the importance of face-to-face interactions and discussions, virtual meetings imply a change. participating in virtual distance courses means activities independent of time and distance on one hand, but on the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 6 other there will be a loss of the close individual face-to-face dimensions. one of the informants states: the perspective of the specific popular adult education is lost” and the folk high school is compared to a correspondence school. moreover distance courses and the use of ict may constitute a threat to the existence of folk high schools in their traditional form as a boarding school, because of financial reasons. especially in some target groups’ perspectives it is cheaper to take part in a course online than attend a course physically. not just the way of distributing courses but also the content of affording courses, distance courses included, means a change. there seems to be an increasing amount of courses with quite a new content in these traditional popular settings, like keep-fit measures, licence to drive a horse transport, sacred dancing etc., sometimes with ict support. this change is to be understood in relation to current trends but also as a strategy of survival for these organisations, threatened for example by the widespread access to ict, internet, in sweden. in 2007 more than 80 percent had access to internet at home (scb, 2007). a lot of people, who earlier visited popular adult education organisations may nowadays pursue interesting activities on their own without organisational involvement. technological affordances also offer possibilities to take part in e-learning settings and courses all over the world. the role of ict in that context is not just that of a competitor to popular adult education actors but simultaneously a challenger and an actor of change regarding structure as well as content of the organisations. based on our empirical data the social context of those four value based settings seems to be influenced not just by changes and opinions in the surrounding society but also by the affordances by the non-human actor ict (akrich & latour 1992; grint & wolgar, 1997). in the following we will go on to examine the interaction among human and non-human actors in these social contexts. contradictory roles of ict people interact differently with the non-human actor, ict, due to their individual technological frames such as needs, earlier experiences, interest in technology etc. the extent and use of applications differs in the organisations among the employees. some of them have as a matter of course integrated ict as a collaborator, a kind of equivalent actor, in their daily life both inside, among the staff, and outside the organisation. others consciously strive, and manage, to reduce their interaction with ict radically. working all day at a computer in the office means lack of interest for using ict outside work. an administrator comments: i have not got any computer at home and i do not want any either. ict has got the role of a ‘nobody’ in her private life. the interaction between the actors is reduced and ict has got the role of an alien. the individual interaction with ict is also influenced by the length of the period as an employee in the organisation. there is a difference in human relationship to ict according to “who was inviting to the meeting”. with more than ten years in the organisation, you probably were there before the nonhuman actor ict appeared, and may experience a pressure, f.ex. from the management, to accept the influence of a new powerful actor. when asked about the introduction of ict in the organisation some years ago there were comments like: “one day ict just occurred” without asking for it, nor realising its roles. in cases like this the role of ict may be that of an alien introduced seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 7 without any negotiations (grint & woolgar, 1998). on the other hand there are employees, newcomers, mainly young males, who as economists have an intense interaction with ict. according to their ict competences they are not just responsible for ict in the organisations but are also regarded as ‘an expert’ involved in projects at national levels aimed to implement ict for administrative purposes. ict is by them seen as an ally, a kind of gatekeeper and assisting authority, inviting them into the decision making level of the organisation. the non-human actor is even strengthening other actors’ power in the organisation. ict is often looked upon as a natural tool, a facilitator, making work easier and quicker, also as a rapid distributor of information. from a hierarchical top-down perspective ict can be seen as a powerful promoter, but also as a distance maker, when distributing messages from the national to the local level, from management to practice. in that sense ict implicitly is able to include inscriptions, ideas and demands, hidden in the non-human actor. the non-human actor again demonstrates its, to some extent, embedded power. employees claim that opportunities for dialogues and negotiations between levels have been changed, mostly limited. when ict has got the role of a distributor of information from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective it usually deals with reporting local activities and economy, asked for by the management. more seldom there is a spontaneous communication between the different levels in these organisations, ict serving as a ‘democratic tool’ in the opposite direction, a way for the management to get informed by the local employees. findings like this may be applied to any other organisation (cf: lanzara & morner, 2003) but have to be given particular attention in those kind of value based organisations dealt with in the article where democracy and participation are guiding stars. as an employee you are expected to take part in discussions and decision making, a democratic policy emphasized by these organisations. in addition, there is an amount of written information circulating inside and outside the organisation, not always relevant for everyone. this amount of information may cause organisations suffering from stress to attribute ict the role of a stress factor, expressed by an administrator. everything nowadays tends to go faster, we are demanding rapid answers from each other, that is why we are sending e-mails all the time also inside our organisation. that also means if you do not answer your emails you are supposed to accept the content, even if you have not got time to read it. the comment also demonstrates a kind of democratic dilemma. you get an opportunity to be an involved and well-informed employee sometimes overwhelmed by reading messages or to be a perhaps non-informed employee selecting your messages. some employees are even asking for support by selecting information before distribution. from a hierarchical perspective the individual interaction with ict might to some extent depend on the individual position in the organisation. at the management level, for example, there is mostly an active and intense interaction with ict and the attitude to ict is rather inviting too. ict is again an ally. however, the role of ict does not differ just according to technological frames but also to the social context and individual missions in the organisation (cf: walsham & sahay, 1999; orlikowski & robey, 1991). ict seems to contribute to strengthen already powerful actors’ positions within these organisations. in our empirical data there is one group of actors whose interaction with ict obviously differs from the others, the study circle leaders. they are working part-time only a few hours a week and do not have an office or computer at seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 8 work. often their courses are located somewhere else, at a school or a hospital for instance. this means that they seldom get involved in small talk and spontaneous information. they are, compared to all other groups in these organisations, less equipped and therefore forced to use their private computers, if any. although study circle leaders are an important group managing the main activities in their organisations they are mostly excluded from information and communication on the intranet. reasons pointed out are financial restrictions, part-time employment and a supposed engagement in a competing study association. hence, there again might be a connection between a powerful position in these organisations and an active interaction with ict? furthermore, the role of ict as a controller is a question of power and possibility for actors to participate in the organisational life. red flags and messages as – ‘sender has requested notification that you have seen this’ – may serve as a controlling indicator, again an inscription embedded in technology. to quote an executive at the local office: we have got an account applied for everyone using the net. that means that we know exactly who is online, every moment. and we also know, if we need to, because of security reasons, where they are surfing. so we are able to control everything. ict, when allied with authorities, is assisting not just when controlling employees’ fulfilment of duties but also their individual interaction with ict. the non-human actor then becomes part of the power concentration, sometimes in an invisible manner like a ‘controlling eye’, but is also serving as a means demonstrating employees’ abilities and capacities to handle amounts of information up towards the management level of the organisation. even when technology is frequently used, and its possibilities in respect to communication are accepted, employees regardless of hierarchical position recommend the physical meetings face-to-face. this is a traditional expression according to the swedish popular adult education settings. technology is not always viewed as the best way to convey a message due to the weight of the body language hardly possible to mediate electronically. the empirical data also demonstrates how a more technological approach to communication, and the role of ict, might cause more distance between human actors. to avoid the role of ict as a distance maker some employees meet regularly every day face-to-face or use the phone when communicating. ict, in terms of the computer, is by them consciously excluded and again reduced to the role of a ‘nobody’. thus human actors have at least a twofold relationship to ict. for example, on one hand ict is made an actor, included and active in the interaction and used to assist in everyday work, an ally. in this role ict can be understood as an independent actor. but on the other hand ict can be a ‘nobody’, consciously excluded by human actors, for example when employees refuse to open emails or open them just to get rid of annoying ‘red flags’ (unopened messages), as a strategy to survive a stressful situation. in negotiations the non-human actor then fails to be equal to the human actors, an alien. that means a conscious human decision, to reduce the role of ict. to sum up, findings from our empirical data demonstrate that the non-human actor, ict, is mainly to be regarded as a powerful actor in these organisations, an ally, just occasionally by some employees treated as a ‘nobody’, an alien. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 9 conclusions our empirical findings expose contradictory roles of ict in the popular adult education organisations such as: facilitator, assistant, promoter, distributor, stress factor, controller, distance maker, gatekeeper, authority, and ‘a nobody’. some of the roles are contributing to an intense interaction and negotiations with human actors, an alliance. ict is made an ally in all categories of human actors to the extent it is found appropriate for them to use. concerning the relation between hierarchical levels in the organisations ict has become an ally mostly for administration and management, but also for those human actors who get access to networks within the organisation. the individual position in the organisation influences the interaction with ict. if you are looked upon as a more or less powerful actor in the organisation, you probably more actively take part in the interaction. technological frames may also contribute to a more accepting attitude to the role of ict, a relationship that can be characterized as an alliance involving actors assigned equal conditions dependant on each other (latour, 1987, 1998). simultaneously there are to some extent human actors in these organisations demonstrating nonacceptance related to their technological frames, then treating ict as a ‘nobody’ (bigum, 1998). on the other hand ict demonstrates power and authority contributing to other actors’ exclusion from the network. when ict is not offered as a tool it becomes an alien in the work for those excluded, e.g. study circle leaders. but it also might be possible to conclude that ict in turn is excluded as a conscious decision, at least by some of them. however, it has to be taken into consideration that traditionally study circle leaders are autonomous and not involved in the daily organisational life in the study associations (grint & wolgar, 1997). ict appears to be an actor of influence in interactions and negotiations with human actors at the organisational level in the four visited settings. from an actor-network perspective, related to these value based organisations, the nonhuman actor, ict, can be regarded as one actor among others, but mostly a rather powerful one with embedded inscriptions representing interests and values (callon, 1991) not necessarily in agreement with those of the popular adult education settings. that also means that prominent democratic values in these organisations, like participation, dialogue and democracy, in some contexts tend to be less focused than before. however, the increasing number of employees, newcomers without explicit traditional popular educational experiences and ideological views, may also contribute to this trend. the ideas of the popular adult education settings are not as evident and stressed as before for all employees. besides changes in society, related to societal and economical conditions, requirements and demands from new target groups, e.g. immigrants and unemployed as well as new expectations from youth of today also mean changes inside the organisations. the competition among educational organisations, with or without ict profiles, is another important factor influencing changes, stressed by the employees in public adult education settings. many actors of today are aware of the built-in possibilities in information and communication technology and do not want to turn back. in introducing and implementing ict however, there have often been real enthusiasts, early adopters and innovators, taking it in use at the same time as those who adopt a wait-and-see policy tried to keep it back (jedeskog, 1996). furthermore, ict demands specific competences that force employees to lifelong learning in a different way than before, as new technological innovations appear all the time. a varying attitude between forerunners and stragglers, between gatekeepers and the driving forces implementing ict, is still there but the gap has narrowed (cf: landström, 2004). to sum up, the non-human actor operates in a context influenced by a lot of surrounding factors. however, the study has pointed out ict as a rather seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 10 powerful actor also in popular adult education organisations, allied particularly to other powerful actors. a next step in using this power of ict would be to employ it as a facilitator aimed to more explicitly strengthen the democratic values of these organisations. the power of ict in these contexts may require other actors in the network to become actors contributing to improve ‘the democratic development in society’ and ‘the public discussion’ inside and outside these organisations. references akrich, m. & latour, b. (1992) a summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies. in: bijker, w. e. and law, j. (editors) shaping technology/building society. mit press pp. 259–264. andersson, p. (2002) it-stött i folkbildningen. en utvärdering av utvecklingssatsningar 1999–2001. folkbildningsrådet utvärderar no 2 2002. stockholm: folkbildningsrådet (fbr). axelsson, l-e., bodin, k., norberg, r., persson, t. & svensson, i. (ed.) (2001) folkbildning.net, an anthology about “folkbildning” and flexible learning. stockholm: folkbildningsrådet (fbr) & distum. bigum, c. (1998) solutions in search of educational problems: speaking for computers in schools. in: educational policy, vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 581–601. bloomfield, b. p., coombs, r. & knights, d. (eds.) (1997) information technology and organizations: strategies, networks and integration. oxford: oxford university press. byström, j., sundgren, g. & tegnér, k. (2004) flexibel folkbildning? ikt-stöd och distansutbildning på folkhögskola och i studieförbund – styrning och utveckling. slutrapport från projektet lärprocesser i folkbildande verksamheter (lifv). stockholm: lhs och cfl. callon, m. (1991) techno-economic network and irreversibility. in: law, j. (ed.) a sociology of monsters? essays on power, technology and domination. london: routledge, p. 132–164. fbr. (2005). folkbildning of the future, its role and objectives. stockholm: folkbildningsrådet (also available at www.folkbildning.se). fbr. (2008). facts on folkbildning in sweden. a brief overview. stockholm: folkbildningsrådet. grint, k. & woolgar, s. (1997) the machine at work. technology, work and organization. polity press. jedeskog, g. (1996) lärare vid datorn. linköpings universitet: skapande vetande laginder. a-m. & landström, i. (ed.) (2005) folkbildning – samtidig eller tidlös? om innebörder över tid. linköpings universitet: mimer. landström, i. (2004) folkbildningens it-mönster. en kartläggning och analys av nuläge och förutsättningar att använda modern informationsteknik. folkbildningsrådet utvärderar no 1. 2004. stockholm: folkbildningsrådet (fbr). landström, i, jedeskog, g. & andersson, p. (2007). “two swedish study association settings and ict.”, paper at the second nordic conference on adult learning 17–19 april 2007 linköping, sweden (revised from 35th nera congress turku, finland 15–17 march). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 11 lanzara, g. f. & morner. m. (2003) the knowledge ecology of open-source software projects. paper presented at 19th egos colloquium, copenhagen, july 3–5, 2003. latour, b. (1987) science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. milton keynes: open university press. latour, b. (1993) we have never been modern. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. latour, b. (1998) artefaktens återkomst: ett möte mellan organisationsteori och tingens sociologi. stockholm: nerenius & santérus förlag. mellberg, t. (2007) folkbildningens it-mönster. en uppföljning av en tidigare kartläggning (2003) om nuläge och förutsättningar att använda modern informationsteknik. folkbildningsrådet utvärderar no 1 2007. stockholm: folkbildningsrådet (fbr). monteiro, e. (2000) actor-network theory and information infrastructure. in: c. ciborra (ed.), from control to drift. the dynamics of corporate information structure, oxford univ. press, pp. 71–83. orlikowski w. j. & gash, d. c. (1994) technological frames: making sense of information technology in organizations. in: acm transactions on information systems, vol 12. no 2. pp. 174–207). orlikowski, w. j. & robey, d. (1991) information technology and the structuring of organizations. information systems research, (2), pp. 143–169. scb, (2007) statistics sweden, (2008 03 03). stockholm: statistiska centralbyrån. starrin, b. & svensson, p-g. (ed.) (1994) kvalitativ metod och vetenskapsteori. lund: studentlitteratur. walsham, g. & sahay, s. (1999) gis for district-level administration in india: problems and opportunities. mis quaterly, (23), p39–66. 1 ict – information and communication technology, to underline the important communication function added to the computer. the kind of technology focused in our project is mainly work place computers (they could either be stationary or laptops). the applications are the internet, e-mail and administration and office-applications. 2 “ict-strategies, the identity of folk enlightenment and networks in popular adult education organisations”, running 2005–2007. the aim of the research project has been to create new knowledge about what happens when the new technology for information and communication meets the particular ideological views and frameworks in organisations of popular education [folkbildning] (landström, jedeskog & andersson, 2007). 3 in 2006 there were 148 folk high schools and 9 study associations divided into 428 local settings. (fbr 2006). vesisenaho-sutinenx seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 60 smart morning in an african village: diversifying technologies within a tanzanian context mikko vesisenaho assistant professor research and development center for information technology in education (toty), school of applied education and teacher training, university of eastern finland. e-mail: mikko.vesisenaho@uef.fi erkki sutinen professor edtech∆ research group, department of computer science university of eastern finland e-mail: erkki.sutinen@uef.fi abstract information technology (it) can make a difference in a developing country only if it is designed in close collaboration with its users. the experiences from an ethnocomputing-based it education initiative at tumaini university, located in the rural area of southern tanzania, indicates promising opportunities for engaging children and students as creative codesigners and users for diversifying, novel information technologies. the local context with its needs was taken into account when using robotics (iblocks) and culture-based learning materials and implementing students’ village outreach projects in local schools and hospitals. the cati model suggests the steps contextualize, apply, transfer, and import for sustainable, inductive it design. together with the concept of ethnocomputing, the cati model proved useful for building and starting a new needs-based, contextualized it undergraduate program at tumaini university in tanzania in 2007. keywords: contextualization, concretizing, visualization, ict4d, it education, tanzania, localization introduction the vision of the world summit on the information society (wsis, 2003) offers all people the opportunity to use information technologies. schools and other educational institutions – whether rural or urban, rich or poor – should not be excluded from such opportunities. what inspired the wsis to enunciate such a vision in the first place is an evident worldwide inequality in accessibility to and use of new technologies. this inequality, which has many ramifications, has become a central issue in the world today. ancillary to this seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 61 the wsis encourages the development of the content and technical conditions that will enable all the languages of the world to be used on the internet. part of our work has been to identify and describe ways in which information technologies and it education can support local development, especially in higher-education institutions, without any sacrifice of local identity. the risk is that the globalization especially creates new needs and opportunities that benefit the western societies, but more seldom the developing countries. one of the challenges is to integrate new information technologies (its) to support and respect the local community and development. there is an threat that the increased use of it will create even a bigger gap between the innovators of western countries and the end users of western products in developing countries. the forms of technology can enrich rather than diminish local knowledge and culture. the net-generation phenomenon is widely discussed internationally. this generation has grown up with technology and is typically media literate. the people of this generation are also socially active in online networks (oblinger & oblinger, 2005). prensky (2001) suggests that the whole educational system ought to be changed based on needs, action cultures and skills of this generation. on the other hand, there are also critical views on the issue; how prepared are the students for this kind of change (bennett, maton & kervin, 2008; valtonen et al., 2009)? further, considering the developing world the starting points and needs for the changes are likely to be different because the technological and cultural background of the students differs from that of the typical western net-generation students. today’s students in the developing countries might not have any it experience from their childhood, but they are being surrounded by information technology in an increasing speed (sutinen & vesisenaho 2006; see tabscott, 2008). despite the qualitatively essential differences between the context of western and developing countries, the expectations from it are too easily equaled in these two different kinds of environments. this is seen in almost all the perspectives of it: technologies, applications, information systems, and curricula. individual, not even to mention cultural, characteristics of users have been mostly ignored. our research initiative called for a novel perspective to the design of it that would facilitate everyday life based on people’s identified needs. this starting point, as we hoped, would distinguish both the research process as well as its results from conventional approaches that mainly aim at reusing existing technology for new needs. contrary to this, we wanted new technologies designed and developed to meet existing needs, contexts, and cultures. the idea of smart morning in our title refers not only to the attribute of novel technologies but also the continuity from yesterday with respect to the needs. context of development the necessary national infrastructure for the support of it in tanzania is largely lacking, but under rapid development (table i). the number of internet users in proportion to the general population was ten per 1000 in 2007, and the ratio of personal computers to the general population was nine per 1000 in 2007. statistically, there was one subscriber per 1000 persons in 2007, which shows the general state of broadband connections’ availability (world bank, 2009). the east africa submarine system project was designed to meet this urgent need for supplying a reasonable amount of bandwidth in the future. it looks promising, reaching tanzania in 2009 or 2010. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 62 year computers/ 1000 persons internet users/ 1000 persons broadband subscribers/ 1000 persons international internet bandwidth (bits/second/ person) population covered by mobile telephones 2000 3 1 0 0 * 2004 6 7 0 0 25% 2007 9 10 1 3 65% note: * no data available table i. it infrastructure statistics in tanzania (world bank, 2004 & 2009) our tanzanian partner, tumaini university, iringa university college, is located in the town of iringa, the capital of a rural region. a population of 350,000 lives within its municipal boundaries, whereas the region’s population is 1.5 million, and most inhabitants live in rural areas. the town of iringa is located in the southern highlands of tanzania. agriculture is the main source of income and livelihood in the municipality, although there has been a gradual increase in small-scale industries. the iringa municipality area is home to several primary and secondary schools, some vocational education centres and four private-owned universities. the number of higher level educational institutions has been growing lately. tumaini university, iringa university college, was established in 1994. tumaini university comprises five faculties: faculty of arts and social science, faculty of business and economics, faculty of law, faculty of science and education, and faculty of theology. the student body in 1999 was 200 but has been increasing quickly, even reaching 3,000 in 2009. tumaini university has offered it-application courses since the mid-1990s. the focus of the it courses has been in the use of office software. because of the lack of infrastructure and educational opportunities, a specific project in 2000-2004 sought to implement modern it infrastructure and better access to information. the key areas were (1) human resource development, (2) institutional capacity building, and (3) infrastructural development (ashford, 1999; kemppainen 2006). an essential part of the project was to establish internet connection to the campus. the local area network was installed and internet connection was finally obtained in 2002 after two years of delay. accessing information still remained a problem in 2004 because the bandwidth of the university was as limited as 128/64 kilobits per second for the whole university campus and even in 2009 the capacity was about 704/128 kilobits per second for a university that possessed over 300 windows xp p4p5 computers. the fee for using such a connection was as high as 4,000 usd per month. over and above the cost, there are practical problems, such as frequent incidences of power cuts in tanzania, which impacts the use of it. apart from these, the basic infrastructure of the university is good by local standards, and it offers a solid foundation for educational development. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 63 a new b.ed. program specializing in the teaching of mathematics and computer applications as a minor started in 2002. this new program eventually offered a whole range of new it courses including a programming course – the development of which is the focus of this research. finally in 2004 there were eight courses that focused mostly on computer applications. the four foundational courses, information technology i, information technology ii, information technology (journalism), and information technology (business). the new b.ed. program offered four new courses: instructional technology in mathematics teaching, system support and administration, introduction to computer networks, and computer programming. while most of the courses were quite traditional in design and intent, the system support and administration course was designed for student teachers who might in the future need to work with an inadequate it infrastructure such as that which is powered by current generated by solar panels for laboratory electricity. computer programming, the course that is the only one typical of a computer science degree syllabus. the method of teaching the course before 2004 was strongly based on the kind of teaching method one would find in western universities where most of the students have already had extensive experience of icts of one kind or another even before their university studies commence. the course content was also partly out of date. thus, for instance, programming was being taught by means of qbasic. a more recent pedagogical strategy has been to teach a large number of difficult concepts such as trees and stacks by using c language one cannot help noticing that because students were being taught data structures and algorithms even before they had any knowledge of even basic programming concepts, the chance of their having learned anything beyond what they could memorize by rote without any real understanding was unfortunately minimal. tumaini university was interested in continuing to develop it education on the basis of the program outlined by infrastructural project and extension of it courses. we jointly decided to start from a concrete case of a particular university course. because of the students’ very limited background in it, we decided to support comprehension and innovation by using concretizing technologies, such as visualization and robotics, creating context-related learning material, and having the students apply their it skills in village outreach projects. finally, we expected to be able to extend accumulated expertise capacity locally and internationally beyond the original context. first we worked for the background and continued with practice, model, and theory development. we organized several experimental workshops in 20032004 for the feasibility analysis of supporting technology (lund & vesisenaho, 2004), and the first whole contextualized introduction to programming courses for b.ed. (math education) students at tumaini university was organized in 2004-2005 with the new supportive learning technologies. later in 2007 a whole contextualized it degree program began. diversifying it: toward viable models for sustainable technology in order to support and evaluate sustainable design, education, and use of it in tanzania and developing countries at large, it is essential to come up with models and approaches which help in this effort. the models introduced below are based on the empirical participation described above. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 64 we shall now introduce an ethnocomputing approach and a pragmatic cati (contextualize, apply, transfer, and import) model to support the needsbased it education. of these two approaches, the concept of ethnocomputing emphasizes the idea of several alternative entry points to it, whereas the pragmatic cati model provides its users with concrete guidelines for building sustainable it solutions for real needs. ethnocomputing approach our approach for designing an it course is based on the concept of ethnocomputing – finding culturally suitable entry points for understanding, utilizing, and producing it in a relevant way (sutinen & vesisenaho, 2006; tedre, sutinen, kähkönen & kommers, 2006). this often means that education should be more community-needs-based instead of theory-driven. ethnocomputing in any given socio-cultural setting can be analyzed from the point of view of representation, utilization, and appropriation. representation refers to conceptual models, mental models, and methods of teaching. utilization deals with the various uses of technologies, diffusion patterns, and social attitudes toward technology. appropriation refers to creative initiatives that challenge our mainstream ideas about what should be happening. these include the use of technology for nonstandard purposes, job creation that is stimulated by innovative business ideas, and the creation of effective ad hoc solutions to technological problems (vesisenaho, kemppainen, islas sedano, tedre & sutinen, 2006; vesisenaho, 2009). this kind of approach can be deeply related to long-term design and development research. the dual objectives of the research were to develop creative approaches that would solve a variety of problems in teaching, learning, and performance while constructing a body of design principles that could be used to guide future development. such an objective requires a pragmatic and collaborative approach to the application of learning theories as they are applied by researchers, practitioners, and other participants in the process. at the same time, development research provides information that can be used in making future decisions (reeves, 2000). in this case the process can be summarized as preparations, including background inquiries, consultations, theoretical studies, and technological development; pre-testing and re-testing; experimental parts; analyses; and reinventions. the development process is often cyclic or spiral, which takes time, but it can lead to sustainable development (see reeves, herrington & oliver, 2005; vesisenaho, 2009). cati model during the years of the collaboration we have developed a cati model (vesisenaho et al., 2006; vesisenaho, 2009) which can be used for developing sustainable it in developing countries, for analyzing the planning and implementation processes of it, for it education, and for evaluating the ability of a person to apply previously acquired knowledge. the basic levels of the model are contextualize, apply, transfer, and import. each of these focuses on the level of localized efforts in different phases of action (see figure 1). each level of this model refers to a particular aspect or phase of development, and we briefly explain them from the technology and knowledge-transfer standpoint. in regard to implementation, the levels can be defined in the following way: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 65 when the planning starts with the local, contextual needs, the output implementation has a solid base, and has good opportunities to be applied in a context-required way (bottom-up). this type of approach can lead to local innovations and long-term sustainability with respect to development and, for example, maintenance. if the project is only based on non-local-needs analyses and, say, donor-driven ideas, the output can be very mechanical and shortlived, and unsustainable in educational sector (top-down). figure 1. cati model for contextual it development (vesisenaho et al., 2006; vesisenaho, 2009) ethnocomputing and the cati model for it-education development the approaches presented – the concept of ethnocomputing and the cati model – bring induction and empirical participation into the core of the import import refers to any situation where a technology or knowledge, or both, is imported without prior-needs analysis of the local conditions. while it is relatively easy to make the technology locally available in the physical sense, disregard for the specific local conditions and needs may make the technology completely opaque, alien, and unusable for local operators. transfer transferred technology, innovations, knowledge, and skills have been made accessible to their users and may thus hold some potential for application in a local context. this may occur even if the local-needs analysis has been deficient or somehow inadequate and incomplete. apply application means that the potential of transferred assets such as innovation or technology has been realized. a local it operative has been successful in making his or her technology and skills relevant, useful, and affirmative to some extent in practice in the local environment. contextualize contextualizing means that local users and developers have become capable of integrating it with the needs, conditions, and concerns of their local communities. local and immediate conditions and innovations form the basis for the contextualized use of it. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 66 contextualized design, education, and use of information technology. this is maybe easiest to see when comparing the approaches to their opposites. much of it training aims at conveying the conceptual understanding of it experts into the mindsets of novice it professionals. while relevant and to some extent even advisable in an it-mature environment, the approach might produce theory-mastering professionals who have limitations when brainstorming with their customers about new solutions. a professional conceptualizing technology from only a given viewpoint might not be helpful with customers representing alternative or even contradicting mindsets. an ethnocomputing perspective might also be more viable when learning new, not-yet-existing technologies and computing paradigms. following the ideas of it as an agent of change is much too often equated to its direct application for immediate benefits, although this might not have been the essence of the concept of “agent of change”. retail chains, for example, might use it just to cut their personnel costs while reinforcing their existing core business model, whereas they could rethink and enrich their overall service concept by designing more innovative, context-based it solutions. the same tradition-conserving principle can be seen in the current trend of replacing small schools with more efficient mass schools, equipped with modern it laboratories, and the accompanying discussion in several western countries as well. the conventional approach to it is deductive: take an existing technology and transfer it directly to several, possibly completely different situations. rethinking a service concept – according to the cati model – requires a profound analysis of the context, which has been done over years with tanzanian academic faculty members, and using all this data combined with various technologies to design inductively a novel solution for existing needs. implementation based on ethnocomputing and the cati model in the academic year 2004-2005, our research group offered a course called contextualized introduction to programming for 27 second-year teacher students studying in the bachelor of education program at tumaini university. the main goal of the course was to encourage the students to use it in their future school work, especially from the aspect of making their own students more aware of novel it uses for existing needs. that is why the community outreach project of the course was essential for reaching the learning objectives. because tanzania lacks well qualified teachers, the students had enrolled in the program from all over tanzania to upgrade their degrees to university level. they had nine years of teaching experience in average, which offered us an excellent opportunity to discuss and elaborate with them realistic possibilities of it uses at schools. there were 11 females and 16 males in the group and their average age was 35. their previous experience of using computers was to a large extent based on the it-literacy courses that they had completed at tumaini university. together with our tanzanian colleagues at tumaini university at iringa, we started the project in a very pragmatic way, by arranging pre-workshops for some students and analyzing how activating technologies could change learning of introductory information technologies. based on the promising experiences and feedback from the events, we have carried out a carefully analyzed project of running a whole course on contextualized introduction to programming, including their field work at local schools and even hospitals. in particular, the students used, for example, i-blocks (lund, 2003) as concretizing tools that were later modified according to feedback, to fit better into the context. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 67 i-blocks i-blocks, short for intelligent building blocks, are physical artifacts to support learning by construction and, more specifically, to support programming by building. by attaching a number of basic building blocks, each containing a microprocessor and communication channels, together, the user constructs an artifact that can perceive input, process the input data, and produce output. the i-blocks also introduce an idea of distributed intelligence, which can be linked to a structure of a functional society (vesisenaho & lund, 2004). the form of the blocks is a lego duplo brick. i-blocks are developed by the adaptronics group, at the university of southern denmark (lund, 2003). figure 2. students building with i-blocks in the field school i-blocks (figure 2) allow users to build a program by connecting blocks of the following three types: • input blocks with a sensor or mechanism to set a value; • output blocks to produce, for instance, a tone, light or signal and to display a value; and • operator blocks for arithmetical or logical operations. there is also an interface that allows students to program i-blocks for different functions in an easy way. the qel micropro program was used to download programs to the microchip inside each i-block. we started to use the first version of i-blocks in 2003. the analysis of their use in programming by building workshops in 2003 and 2004 had indicated clear potential in their usefulness for leaning it (vesisenaho & lund, 2004). the whole contextualized introduction to programming course started by a similar hands-on it workshop. the aims of the workshop were to understand the basic idea behind robotics, programming, and technology and to open students’ eyes to identifying it around them in everyday life (figure 3; see also nielsen & lund. 2006; nielsen & lund, 2008). when we started the use of i-blocks with students, they were nervous with this kind of experimental “play”. this was related to their authoritarian educational tradition, and probably concern on breaking new and expensive tools. but very soon students started to express their ideas and to build new constructs with the i-blocks. they were inventing, for example, car alarm systems and gadgets to help blind people. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 68 figure 3. students working with i-blocks digital learning material the digital learning material for the contextualized introduction to programming course was created for learning the java programming language, and it was based on the metaphor of a learning village, referring to the idea of it around the students in their everyday lives (see figure 4). tanzanian art illustrating different village settings were used to represent each week of the learning material. very often it is thought to be theoretical and alienated from everyday life. however, several it concepts can be found from normal life; for instance, the ideas of data structures can be found in a village structure (see eglash, 1999). students using the site could obtain the information they needed by clicking on the huts and the people in the village. this symbolism was deliberately used to demonstrate that computer programming does not have to be presented in obscure high-tech, western-specific formats, but that it can be made easy to grasp from imagery and concepts that are entirely derived from the local social and cultural context. although there were weekly problems to solve, the students would also be encouraged to come up with their own ideas and plans for making programs. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 69 figure 4. a learning village in the course material of the contextualized introduction to programming course course activities were continuously linked to the local context (as well as the material) and the i-block concretizing experiences. one practical example of repetition structure (loops) in the material was to boil water. “as long as the water is not boiling you need to add firewood to the fire. but as soon as the water is boiling you will stop adding firewood.” the condition was: “continue while water temperature is less than 100 degrees”. the work to be done within the loop was “add firewood to the fire to increase the temperature”. another example was relating tanzanian life to modern technology by mobile phones. according to the students, mobile phones are the everyday modern technology they have most experience of. with this in mind, we used an approach of programming mobile phone functionalities by java, which effectively unfolded the mysteries of it and programming. the students reflected their learning experiences with their work and society weekly in their learning diaries, for example, “contextualization means applying new skills and knowledge to your own life or community. give at least one example on how to contextualize your learning of this week?” finally, the connection to context was concretized especially in the field projects which concluded the course (see section outreach projects). outreach projects and results we started the course with the i-block programming workshop and continued on to programming language (java), but had all the time linkages back to the surrounding environment and ideas introduced in the starting workshop. finally, we completed the course with the village outreach projects to connect students’ experiences to the society and their profession. three groups of students from the year 2004-2005 had their village outreach projects in secondary schools, teaching the basics of robotics and information technology. the remaining groups were required to use java programming to develop programs that would be beneficial to secondary-school teachers or students. the java groups programmed a calculator, made graphic representations of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 70 polynomial functions, created a program for a simplified bao game, and coded three different mathematical presentation programs for educational purposes. all of the project outcomes were immediately applicable and relevant to future subject teachers of mathematics and science (see figure 5). the village-school experience was good for the teachers in a sense that they needed to apply their skills in an environment with very limited resources. for instance one of the village schools had a solar-panel system for producing a limited amount of electricity and there was no internet connection. still, the pupils were active and very happy for the opportunity to work with technology. figure 5. young patients at the ilembula hospital in rural area tanzania playing with the i-blocks and the next prototype-version, a-blocks. also, some of the students applied the technology in special circumstances as a part of bachelor project. they had outreach projects at the ilembula hospital with hospitalized children who, for example, had leg fractures and were normally bedridden for six to eight weeks (see figure 5). this process highly activated the patients, who able to attend school, but also reached the relatives who were with them in the hospital. the next step of this process could be modifying this kind of robotics to physiotherapy. an example of the use of cati model is the evaluation of students’ ability to apply it in their work after the programming course. most of the students from the year 2004-2005 reached the application level of the knowledge in the final interviews of the course. and even though the responses of some of the students show that they remain on the transfer level, various contextual elements are discernible in many of their answers. while it takes time for a student to make the move completely to the contextual level, it was nevertheless gratifying to note that even this short intervention inspired a number of impressive application ideas in the university setting and in the local society. there were also several students who thought that they would be able to teach programming or to support their schools in this way, or both, in the future. several students felt that they could even start their own business in the field, and share in that way their knowledge. this is one way how contextualized it education can lead into locally meaningful development and innovations (for more details see vesisenaho, 2009). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 71 a cross between needs and models: design of a contextualized it degree program as this tanzanian case indicates, the needs of local communities in east africa are quite different from those of western or industrialized countries. in relation to the term “net generation”, the phenomenon appears different in east africa. there are limited facilities and infrastructure, which account for the lack of ubiquitous it that in the western world seems self-evident. the environmental issues are demanding and financial issues challenging. however, the development is fast despite the huge gap between the rural and urban areas. these were the main motivators for us to start thinking of an alternative, comprehensive pattern suitable for a tanzanian degree program in it. the inductive, empirical starting points of ethnocomputing and the cati model helped to scaffold the new program and to distinguish it from most, if not all, other it curricula in tanzania. the undergraduate it program started in september 2007 at the iringa university college of tumaini university is based on the following principles: it education should be contextualized, that is,, the whole learning process should be linked to the culture, concepts, practices, needs, infrastructure, resources, and potential of the tanzanian society at large and the iringa region in particular; most of the it education should be organized around projects where students need to identify problems and to solve them; it education should be practical so that the graduates are able to take a comprehensive responsibility of it in their future jobs from technical details to it management and planning, in a bottom-up rather than top-down style; and in an interdisciplinary way, it education should consist of elements from both computer science and engineering. according to these principles, the three years’ curriculum is content-wise internationally recognized and constantly evaluated and promoted further by an interlinked research program. instead of a list of courses, the program is built around four components: (1) use and administration of hardware and software, (2) basic concepts of computer science and engineering, (3) students’ application projects that are linked to the local science park and other business activities, including a student-run computer clinic for local people, and (4) a bachelor project which runs throughout the three years (for more details see tedre, bangu & nyagava, 2009; vesisenaho, 2009). the effects of ethnocomputing and the cati model on the degree program can be seen in table ii. the multidisciplinary studies of the degree focus on entrepreneurship for self-employment and modules can be included from business administration, law, and mathematics. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 72 component ethnocomputing cati model use and administration of hardware and software hands-on activities with broken hardware and wrongly installed software etc. real-use cases for office software basic concepts of computer science and engineering cultural analogues or representations for basic computational concepts, including localized visualization and concretizations applications participatory design process follows the steps of scenario development, activity and user analysis, implementation, and test with users. the needs are taken from the areas of agriculture, health care, education, commerce, legislation. bachelor project the whole process aims at students’ being able to represent, utilize, and appropriate the technologies in their own context. table ii. examples of the effects of the concept of ethnocomputing and the cati model on the components of the contextualized it undergraduate program. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 73 concluding remarks and future challenges the era of globalization has witnessed several economies emerging. however, this extensive phenomenon of new opportunities, especially due to the smart use of information technologies, has hardly touched africa. the way that technology has transformed and revitalized life in other parts of the world has not yet completely materialized in east africa. there are unique challenges but also opportunities regarding the earlier mentioned itbackgrounds, infrastructure, a gap between rural and urban, environmental, financial, and cultural issues in relation to the “african developing net generation”. also, the local tribe and relative-based networking culture without the “net” offers very interesting viewpoints. therefore, africa needs novel initiatives to promote development and to enrich life by information technology. the concrete examples described above indicate a possible direction. innovations can be found within a particular context. this requires that researchers and locals combine their efforts to identify and analyze existing needs. in this task, the real users – whether in rural areas or disadvantaged townships – are the best experts to listen to. diversification is the key characteristic of an information technology that transforms the conditions of its users. technology needs to bend – in an inductive way – according to the stream of individual, existing needs; new needs should not be created to fit, deductively, an existing technology. an innovative approach to technology is, therefore, empirical or inductive rather than theoretical or deductive. designing and creating diverse, meaningful technology on an experimental, contextual basis needs, however, solid models. our two approaches to modeling the contextualization process of information technology are the concept of ethnocomputing and the design-implementation-evaluation framework of cati. both of these approaches share the same empirical background. on the one hand, ethnocomputing starts from acknowledging multiple entry points to information technology, including those that might be alternatives to the mainstream ones used for conceptualizing it and its conventional uses in a certain society. on the other hand, the cati model can be applied in a concrete situation for scaffolding the steps for a needs-based intervention by creating appropriate it solutions. information technology cannot be used, not even to mention its contextual design, without proper education and training. a problem-based it curriculum is a natural consequence of crossing needs as starting points and models as guidelines to building novel technology according to the needs. it is analogous to modern medical education which starts with the patient. in a similar way to a medical practitioner, an it professional, especially in a situation that is new to it, needs to learn to listen to the user of it and, based on the diagnosis, to match the needs with a fit, possibly completely novel, technology. the examples from a tanzanian context illustrate the importance of diversifying information technology. the future is, however, what matters. introducing alternatives proposes threats to the conventional and traditional solutions of importing both technology and its training from the countries that have, thus far, used it successfully. only efforts between the needs-aware and it-aware can turn the smart morning of africa into a day of improvement and progress. diversifying information technologies requires collaboration that is committed, long-term, and multidisciplinary. this article widens the scope of an individual research project to that of a more comprehensive collaborative process between our three universities of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 74 joensuu (eastern finland since 2010), southern denmark, and tumaini. the process has helped us, based on empirical participation of concrete it user scenarios, to model a new approach for designing, learning, and using it in the context of a developing country. we expect that our experiences will also have a fundamental impact on the way that technology can be used in the western societies. despite of all the enthusiasm, the existing experiences merely indicate the first steps of novel opportunities of smart technologies for africa, and needs-based education for all. acknowledgements many thanks for the joint journey with mr. marcus duveskog, professor nicholas bangu, mr. raimo haapakorpi, professor henrik hautop lund, mr. jyri kemppainen, mr. ebenezer laisser, mr. emmanuel lupilya, mr. fredrick ngumbuke, dr. niko myller, dr. jacob nielsen, ms. carolina islas sedano, and professor matti tedre; and to tumaini university and the academy of finland (decisions 201682, 128577). references ashford, r. (1999). internet project strategic plan. iringa: tumaini university, iringa university college. bennett, s., maton, k., & kervin, l. (2008). the ‘digital natives’ debate: a critical review of the evidence. british journal of educational technology, 39(5), 775786. eglash, r. (1999) african fragtals: modern computing and indigenous design. new brunswick: rutgers university press. kemppainen, j. (2006). building ict facilities for education in a developing country. analysis of an ict project at tumaini university / iringa university college 2000-2004. master thesis. university of joensuu, finland. lund, h.h. (2003). intelligent artefacts. in m. sugisaka & h. tanaka (eds), proceedings of the 8th international symposium on artificial life and robotics, isarob 2003, january, oita, japan (pp. i11–i14). lund, h.h. & vesisenaho, m. (2004). i-blocks in an african context. in sugisaga (ed.), proceedings of the 9th international symposium on artificial life and robotics, isarob 2004, january, oita, japan, (pp. i7 – i12). nielsen, j. & lund, h.h. (2006). contextualised design of african i-blocks. in h.h. lund, e. sutinen, m. duveskog, kinshuk & a. mkocha (eds), proceedings of the 4th international workshop on technology for education in developing countries, tedc 2006, july, iringa, tanzania, ieee (pp. 14-18). nielsen, j. & lund, h. h. (2008). modular robotics as a tool for education and entertainment. computers in human. behavior 24(2), 234-248. oblinger, d. & oblinger, j. (2005). is it age or it: first steps toward understanding the net generation.in d. oblinger & j. oblinger (eds), educating the net generation, educause. retrieved march 3, 2010, from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub7101.pdf prensky, m. (2001). digital natives, digital immigrants. on the horizon, 9(5), 1-6. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 75 reeves, t.c. (2000). socially responsible educational technology research. educational technology 40(6), 19-27 reeves, t.c., herrington, j. & oliver, r. (2005). design research: a socially responsible approach to instructional technology research in higher education. journal of computing in higher education, 16(2), 97-116. sutinen, e. & vesisenaho, m. (2006). ethnocomputing in tanzania: design and analysis of a contextualized ict course. research and practice in technology enhanced learning, rptel, 1(3), 239-267. tabscott, d. (2008). grown up digital: how the net generation is changing your world. london, mcgraw-hill. tedre, m., bangu, n. & nyagava, s.i. 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(2004). i-blocks for ict education development, case iringa, tanzania. in f. flückiger, r. ruprecht & r. scheurer (eds.), proceedings of the 33rd international symposium igip / ieee / asee, september–october, 2004, fribourg, switzerland (pp. 364-371). fribourg: university of applied sciences of western switzerland. world bank. (2004). ict at glance. tanzania. retrieved march 30, 2007, from http://devdata.worldbank.org/ict/tza_ict.pdf world bank. (2009). ict at glance. tanzania. retrieved august 30, 2009, from http://devdata.worldbank.org/ict/tza_ict.pdf wsis. world summit on the information society. (2003). geneva declaration of principles. retrieved december 10, 2009, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html editorial. digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4493 ©2021 (valentin dander; theo hug; ina sander; rachel shanks). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. editorial digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives guest editors valentin dander fh clara hoffbauer potsdam, university of applied sciences theo hug university of innsbruck ina sander cardiff university; helmut-schmidt-university, hamburg rachel shanks university of aberdeen introduction one famous narrative of the internet is that it is a free and liberating space that has been invaded by big business. this narrative is as well-known as it is criticized for its oversimplification. nonetheless, we can observe certain shifts within the infrastructure of the internet and other digital technologies: from open, interoperable protocols and formats to ‘walled gardens’ of social media platforms; from non-commercial sharing economies to profit-driven services; and from the web as a transnational structure to nationalized internets with location-specific services, restrictions and regulations. as digitization and datafication continue to extend into all areas of society, digital capitalism becomes equally ubiquitous and universal. the aforementioned examples illustrate how economic and political interests are at work. these examples highlight some of the difficulties in the conceptualizations and practices of digitization. digital capitalism, https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4493 digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 and related phenomena such as data, surveillance or platform capitalism, operate on the basis of a comprehensive expropriation and exploitation of personal data profiles. it functionalizes life worlds and places of education to an unprecedented extent. while we are facing new ways of dealing with quantitative dimensions of education, nonmeasurable dimensions of education as well as media critical perspectives are often neglected. moreover, the limitations of mathematical languages and algorithmic rationality very often remain unnoticed as well. education, in this context, obviously plays a ‘critical’ role in an ambivalent sense. on the one hand, (media) education can be seen as an important countermeasure in raising people’s awareness, as well as their levels of criticality and reflexivity. in this sense, educational work within media education corresponds with the critical analysis of digital capitalism and datafication, informing knowledge about contextual dimensions of big data as well as promoting facilitation of critical literacies, self-determination, enlightenment regarding the distribution of responsibility, solidarity with underprivileged groups and personal agency. on the other hand, education in many cases extends digital capitalist ideologies (cf. technical solutionism), tech services and practices to the development and utilization of human capital. examples include large tech companies lobbying for their equipment, cloud-based services, datafied learning and automated learning systems in schools or he, especially in the context of the emerging global education industry (gei). political and educational actors largely embrace these metrics-based solutions, as they promise an effective way of reducing complexity in formal education settings, but they may not always be aware of the implications of these systems. what position/s can media education in research and application take to respond to these developments? which theories, concepts and methods help to formulate adequate analytical, critical and transformative answers? overview this special issue opens with horst niesyto’s theoretical essay on “digital capitalism and critical media education”. the author takes two of his previous writings about challenges for media education in light of developments in digital capitalism as a starting point. he points out affinities between capitalist and digital structural principles as well as related problems regarding structures of social inequality, power relations, processes that promote and endanger democracy, and influences of it industries on education. in his conclusion, niesyto argues for strengthening critical media education and promoting alternative pathways to the commercial offers that large it corporations provide. in the paper “refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education” jeremy knox examines how division can be understood through the distinction between learning in and learning from educational platforms. knox uses zuboff’s work (2019) the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power and digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the term ‘division of learning’ to consider educational platform software. there is the distinction or division between those who use technologies and learn in educational platforms and those that own the platform software. knox explains how zuboff uses the term ‘shadow text’ to denote the body of data that is gathered from users, below the surface, unseen by the users but seen by the knowledge elite who derive insights into human behaviour. in the second part of his paper, knox suggests that researchers and others need to engage in a purposive, political and emancipatory form of data science rather than calling for people to become experts in data science, which zuboff appears to be doing. in her paper “critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy”, fieke jansen takes a socio-political perspective towards critical data literacy. the author provides a thorough overview of recent approaches to (critical) data literacy and unpacks the assumptions that underly these redefinitions. reflecting on years of experience in creating data literacy resources in the third sector, the author advances the argument that data literacy needs to be (re)politicized: both in terms of the competencies learners need to influence political processes and challenge existing power structures in datafied societies, and in terms of the assumed ‘neutrality’ of the data literacy concept itself. throughout the article, jansen underpins this argument by engaging with recent scholarly debates as well as reflecting on her own practical experience in the field, highlighting “blind spots” in recent data literacy concepts and suggesting concrete approaches for politicizing the practice of critical data literacy. with the digitization and datafication of our societies, the term ‘consent’ has developed a new meaning, describing the click of an ‘ok’ or ‘i agree’ button, and constituting the legal necessity for using the digital ecosystem. in “a feminist critique to digital consent”, elinor carmi analyses this new understanding of consent in the digital age and asks: “who benefits from digital consent?”. in search of an answer, the author analyses feminist understandings of consent, presenting a feminist critique of digital consent mechanisms and uncovering the power asymmetries that digital consent enables. the article identifies the current digital consent system as flawed and argues that cosmetic changes toward a more ‘ethical’ consent mechanism only strengthen this broken system. finally, the article highlights the broader educational effects of digital consent, as it nudges people towards behaving with narrow agency and in ways that preserve asymmetric power relations. while the research field critical data studies has grown significantly in recent years, most studies in the field focus on social, cultural, political, and economic factors rather than technical dimensions of data systems. the article “towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures. a technogenetic analysis of the experience api” by christoph richter, lars raffel and heidrun allert aims to broaden the analytic scope of critical data studies in education by examining the technical dimension of emerging educational data infrastructures. as a case study, the authors examine the ‘experience application programming interface’, or xapi, which has been developed to digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 support the recording, exchange, and retrieval of learning processes across digital educational platforms. based on first-hand experience in implementing the xapi, the authors unravel the social, historical and cultural assumptions and perspectives underlying educational technology standards like the xapi and demonstrate the rather restricted idea of learning and education that such systems support. dan verständig’s paper on “critical data studies and data science in higher education” gives a very useful introduction to the thematic field around data and algorithms: including various contexts; differentiated power relations; and inequalities within or through data practices. the author, then, presents and reflects upon a course project for masters students in higher education. the course mainly addressed students from computer science and education and was based on problem-/project-based learning and a wider understanding of transformative learning. students in the course acquired insights into a range of concepts from critical data studies and data science, as well as skills in programming and the use of data retrieval and analytics tools. in the core of the course, a joint group project was conducted, accompanied by a steady process of discussion and reflection upon ethical aspects, power relations or team processes. while the paper is mostly based on personal considerations by the author, it provides valuable insights into a pedagogic approach to critical data literacy at the intersection of data science and media education in an interdisciplinary setting. xavier giró gràcia and juana m. sancho-gil’s paper “artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism” provides a useful overview of the issues facing educators, policy makers and educational researchers in this field. they first introduce the concepts of big data, artificial intelligence, learning analytics and machine learning algorithms and then explain how they are deployed as ‘black boxes’. they consider the possible impact on education that these developments can have. the paper then focuses on the underlying educational discourses that present information and communication technologies as a panacea for solving educational problems and suggest these are reductionist solutions to wicked problems. the authors point out the need to analyse not only the advantages of these technologies but also their possible negative effects. the paper concludes with a call for education on algorithms and the impact they can have on our lives. in their paper on the “global education industry”, theo hug and reinhold madritsch explore the “state of affairs in austria”. departing from general remarks on processes of economization and digitization in education, especially under pandemic conditions, the authors draw on anthony picciano’s notion of the “educational-industrial complex” (eic) as an analytical heuristic to investigate the development and status quo of digitization within the education system and educational politics. the concepts offer three dimensions – ideology, profit and technology – with which the authors shape their analysis. their national case study encompasses material such as websites from public authorities, learning portals, business networks and marketing materials from commercial providers digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 for learning technology and content. the paper depicts and disentangles the interdependencies of public and commercial actors. the authors suggest that to counter the previously analysed networks within the eic it is necessary to strengthen public responsibilities for partly outsourced sectors as well as the “ethics of the commons” (e.g. in using free software) and “digital sovereignty”. in the first part of the final paper by geir haugsbakk, he examines international debates on the influence of technology giants on educational policy. he provides a synopsis of contemporary research about edtech industries and the kinds of relations and networks that have been established since the early 1990s. in the second part of his paper, the author focuses on networks and channels of influence in a norwegian context. the author comes to the conclusion that there are some similarities in terms of edtech dynamics in different countries, especially regarding a general level of how digital technologies are valued as a way of improving teaching and learning. however, the author also found aspects specific to the norwegian context, for example well-funded public schools that leave less leeway for privatization and commercialization. the paper concludes with a demand for more systematic approaches in dealing with a whole range of complex questions related to the technology giants and their influence on education policy. the editors of this special issue hope that you enjoy the contributions and that they help to further your understanding of the issues raised and maybe prompt you into considering your own data traces and entanglements with digital capitalism. editorial digital capitalism, datafication, and media education: critical perspectives guest editors introduction overview constraints in film making processes offer an exercise to the imagination interactive whiteboards as artefacts to support dialogic learning spaces in primary schools kari nes professor department of social science hedmark university college email: kari.nes@hihm.no gerd wikan professor department of social science hedmark university college email: gerd.wikan@hihm.no abstract the interactive whiteboard (iwb) is a technical digital medium for multiple forms of interaction technical, physical and conceptual. it is a point of departure for this article that the iwb has the potential to support learning, given that the teacher has a dialogic teaching style. our research is embedded in a social constructive learning philosophy implying that interaction between learners as well as learners and teacher will lead to increased insights for everyone. dialogue is seen as a characteristic of education, but not all learner talks are dialogic; there are different types of pupil conversations competitive, cumulative or exploratory. it is in particular the exploratory talk that has the ability to increase learning through interthinking and thus create a dialogic learning space. the article reports findings from a study of 7 primary school teachers and their use of the interactive board. the main findings are that they do not use the full potential that the iwb gives to support collaborative learning. we discuss what teachers need in order to develop their practices to exploit the potential of the iwb for creating a supportive dialogic learning space. keywords: interactive whiteboard, dialogic space, talks, primary school, teacher learning introduction whole class learning is back on the educational discussion scene in norway (klette 2004). it is a reaction to the increasing degree and the kind of individualisation of learning that has been developing over the last few decades. this individualisation of the classroom has been reinforced by the introduction of computers to every learner in many classrooms (bachmann & seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 mailto:kari.nes@hihm.no mailto:gerd.wikan@hihm.no haug, 2006). various forms of individual development plans, work plans or other ‘self technologies’ as practiced in many schools, also go a long way to systematising the individualisation of learning at the cost of the learning community and socialisation (klette, 2007). much of the introduction of new technology in the classroom has been technologically rather than educationally driven (mercer, warwick, kershner & staarman, 2010). a wide range of research findings indicate that both the teachers’ role and their pedagogic practice are critical factors for the successful implementation of ict-supported learning processes. the implementations of such processes should focus on enhancing the understanding of the interaction between teachers, learners and the technology (wikan, faugli, mølster & hope, 2009). the question is how a learning community in the classroom is best promoted, and whether and how digital artefacts can be useful in this respect. the challenge is to create an arena for learning by providing today’s learners with all learning materials that are currently available, including digital ones. smith, hardman & higgins (2006) find that the use of iwb means that more time is being spent on whole class teaching and less on group work. but it is up to the teacher to take a central role in determining how iwbs are used, and this is mostly in accordance with the teacher’s existing practices. without intervention an iwb in the classroom does not change the teachers’ overall pedagogical approaches because it is the teacher and not the tool that has the agency. this applies not only to iwbs, but also holds true for most technologies (bennet & lockyer, 2008; warwick et al., 2011). in the present study we ask what happens when a digital artefact such as an interactive whiteboard is introduced in the classroom. how are teachers using the interactive potential of iwb? further, we discuss how this artefact can stimulate learning through dialogic teaching. we also briefly ask how teaching styles may be changed through continuous professional development. the dialogic space the dialogic space is not to be understood as a physical space, but as the social entity in which one can think and interact. in education, the dialoguei is not just a means but an end in itself, since education involves a shift from monological to dialogic thinking (wegerif, 2007). mercer et al. (2010) are studying learners’ opportunities for learning in interaction by interacting with others, and they note that certain forms of digital technology can be the instruments for such learning. they use dialogic space (wegerif, 2007) as a term to describe the arena for the common learning activities. they argue that interactive whiteboards have the potential to support the creation of dialogic space. mercers own research has shown that with proper guidance learners can learn not only to interact, but to ‘interthink’ (mercer, 2000). ‘interthinking’ means more than just interacting; it means developing joint understanding of curriculum topics. in order for this to take place pupils need to develop their talking skills. thus, ‘interthinking’ is a characteristics of the dialogic classroom. in dialogic teaching the teacher 1) gives students opportunities and encouragement to question/ state points of view and comment on ideas and issues which arise in the lessons; 2) engages in discussions with students, which explore and support the development of their understanding of content; seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 69 3) take students’ contributions into account in developing the subject theme of the lesson and in devising activities which enable students to pursue their understanding themselves, through talk and activity; 4) uses talk to provide a cumulative, contextual frame to enable students’ involvement with the new knowledge they are encountering; 5) encourages the children to recognise that talk is not merely the prosaic chat of everyday life but is a valuable tool for the joint construction of knowledge. (mercer et al., 2010:369-370) in the dialogic classroom it is essential to encourage children to talk and discuss, but how the learners talk is not irrelevant. mercer et al. (2010b) distinguishes between three different types of talk; exploratory, disputational and cumulative talk. exploratory talk is the most effective for collective problem solving. in the exploratory talk learners share all relevant information, and they are critical and constructive. they are active, ask each other questions and listen to other people's answers in calculating in order to arrive at a common result. in science education the way several aspects of exploratory talk influence learning outcomes positively has been documented (howe et al., 2007). disputational talk is the second type of talk. according to mercer et al. a characteristic of this style of talk is that learners do not share relevant information, but rather compete among themselves according to their individual interests. according to the authors this conversation form is not associated with inclusive or cooperative behaviour or with good learning results. the third talk type of talk is cumulative talk. this includes, for example, 'brainstorming', which can be helpful in introducing a new theme. the aim is to facilitate exploratory conversation in the classroom. this talk is friendly and cooperative, but lacks the critical-constructive perspective inherent in of exploratory conversation. some researchers find that also cumulative talk is important because it allows a variety of opinions to be expressed, and, in the case of classes with special needs children in particular, this might be the most one can achieve (warwick, hennessy & mercer, 2011). through their studies in science mercer et al. (2010) show how, under certain conditions, the use of interactive whiteboards has a potential for creating a dialogic space through the support of exploratory talk. however, in order to achieve a learning community where the iwb supports learning, it is necessary to develop ”’talk rules’ for conversation and collaborative reasoning” (kershner, mercer & warwick, 2010 p. 381). how can interactive whiteboards support the dialogic space? interactive boards are sold by manufacturers as a technical aid with the capacity to increase interactivity in the classroom situation. the board offers the teacher easy access to sources and a flexibility to support and investigate ideas that come up during lessons. “its particular affordances offer strong support for cumulative, collaborative and recursive learning. its effective use by teachers can provide appropriate scaffolding to help create knowledge through opening up dialogic space” (hennessy et al, 2011:483). studies that have looked at the way interactive whiteboards are used by the teacher in the classroom indicate that there is an analytical distinction between three types of interactivity: technical interactivity, physical interactivity and conceptual interactivity (mildenhall, marshall and swan, 2010). technical interactivity means that it is the teacher who uses the various interactive opportunities of the board. it may help learning by making the lessons more interesting (kennewell, tanner & beauchamp, 2008). physical interactivity seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 70 means that learners are invited forward to touch the board, write on it etc. conceptual interactivity means that through this technology learners support each other alongside the teacher (scaffolding), interact, share and construct understanding together (mercer et al., 2010b). sundberg, spante & stenlund (2011) differentiate between technical interactivity and pedagogical interactivity, and conclude that teacher training should include both technical instruction and pedagogical options in order for the teacher to be able to fully exploit the potential of the technology. without a conscious focus on using iwbs to promote interactive teaching, research shows that they are only used to support existing pedagogy, and that traditional patterns of classroom interaction persist (beauchamp, 2004; blau, 2011; twiner, coffin, littleton &whitelock , 2010; wikan & mølster, 2010). it is easy for most teachers to incorporate them into existing practices, such as in the case of teacher-guided instruction (digregorio & sobellojeski, 2009 2010; smith, hardman & higgins, 2006). however, even this can improve learning outcomes since it increases motivation. the effect of this is probably only temporary and it is the teacher’s responsibility to integrate the use of the board so that it also stimulates intellectual involvement (jones, kervin & mcintosh, 2011).the impact of iwb as well as of other types of digital technology and learning material depends on the teacher’s ability to utilize the potential to stimulate learning (kennewell & beauchamp, 2007). however, it has been observed that the iwb technology is so flexible that it makes it possible for the teacher to create a space for investigation and dialogue more than do other technologies (mercer et al., 2010). to create such a learning environment teachers must be willing to allow learners to take control of the technology (gadbois & haverstock, 2012). in addition to the boards there are also a number of contextual factors that should be borne in mind. it is essential to have a school culture that supports dialogic learning, teacher training is important, and time is important it turns out that it takes two years before a teacher can fully exploit the interactive potential of the technology (hennessy, mercer &warwick , 2011; deaney, chapman & hennessy, 2009; warwick & kershner, 2000). methodology the design of the study was a mixed qualitative methods approach. classroom observations and teacher interviews were carried out in 6 norwegian primary schools (cf thagaard, 2003). photographs were taken to provide contextualising data (cf hennessy & al., 2011). we visited 8 classrooms in the 6 schools, which were recruited through an open invitation among schools connected to the teacher education programme in our college. as far as iwb use is concerned, the sample included experienced and less experienced teachers. the majority had undergone some formal training in the use of the technology, but usually very little. 7 teachers were interviewed, one male and 6 female. in the presentation of findings all informants are referred to as female in order to maintain anonymity. for the classroom observations an instrument based on the “student membership snapshot” (rivers, ferguson, lester & droege, 1995) was developed. categories for different types of iwb use and learner talk were included in the instrument: technical, physical and conceptual interactivity as well as disputational, cumulative and exploratory talk. this allowed easy identification of the frequency of the various forms of interaction. the duration of the each observation was usually of one to three hours, and the data collection took place throughout the autumn term. to supplement the observations the teachers in the observed classrooms were individually interviewed afterwards in a semi-structured interview according to an interview guide. some of the teachers responded to the questions by e-mail seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 71 instead of being interviewed face-to-face. in the analysis all school and personal data have been anonymised. no person is identifiable on pictures shown in public. findings in the following our findings are presented according to the different types of interactivity with the iwb; technical, physical and conceptual. technical interactivity most of the lessons we observed started with the teacher in front of the class and in charge of the interactive white board. the use the teacher made of the board and the extent to which she/he invited the pupils to talk varied. the following example is typical. lesson 1 the lesson starts with the iwb switched on and it is a whole class setting. on the screen the pupils’ names are visible. each pupil is invited to step forward, find her/his name and drag the name into the “present today” box. everyone is concentrating on the board. next phase: the teacher is at the board – date, season, morning song are on the board. she asks questions to which the pupils respond. today’s learning objectives are opened on the screen. the teacher is at the board talking and presenting the lesson. she is checking on the pupils’ understanding by asking questions. sometimes she asks the whole class, sometimes a specific pupil. the pupils are competing to answer;there is no discussion between them or between teacher–pupils. the teacher is also preparing and explaining the group work which will be coming up. all the pupils are seated and appear to be concentrating the teacher, the board and the topic of the lesson during this sequence, which took about 20 minutes (2nd grade). the lesson by this experienced teacher was well planned and carried out. most of the pupils stayed concentrated and were motivated both in the whole-class setting and in the group work. the teacher was largely engaged with white board activities that had been planned for a whole-class setting. occasionally the pupils were invited to approach the board and touch it to indicate the answer. they were not challenged to discuss or find solutions as a class or as a group. the talk took place between the teacher and the pupils. physical interactivity in most of the lessons we observed physical interactivity was an integral part of the lesson, meaning that pupils were invited to approach the board and touch it. lesson 2 shows a typical example of this. it is the teacher who is in charge of the activity – she asks questions and those pupils who respond are invited to come and drag or touch the right answer. lesson 2 the lesson starts in a whole-class setting. the pupils are sitting in a semicircle in front of the teacher and the iwb. the teacher uploads songs and they all sing together a literacy song. then she loads up a blank lined page on the screen and asks the pupils to come up with words containing the norwegian letter ø. the pupils answer individually, while the teacher seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 72 writes on the board. next she uploads up a program from the publisher of the text book –a text about the letter øand, the pupils listen. a new page is uploaded by the teacher,; she asks the pupils to take turns to come up to the board and find the correct answer. they are listening and watching tentatively and sitting very quietly. this was a long sequence that lasted 40 minutes. the whole classes then were setting ends with the teacher demonstrating on the board the tasks to be carried out in the pupils’ individual exercise books. the remainder of the lesson consists of individual work. (1st grade). this lesson was in grade 1 (6 year olds) and it was obviously very motivating for the pupils to have the iwb in the classroom. these young pupils stayed concentrated for almost 40 minutes. the teacher is very much aware of the motivating effect of the board – it is motivating for the pupils to be allowed to come forward and touch the board. there is a great deal of readymade learning material she can use, as demonstrated in the observed lesson 2. much of this learning material is colourful and lively, and combines figures, sounds, letters and short movies. lesson 3 present in this lesson is a group of 10 pupils considered to be low achievers. the subject is norwegian, and the exact topic adjectives. the iwb is switched on before the pupils arrive and it immediately catches their attention. the pupils listen to the teacher’s questions (right or wrong answers) and raise their hands. all pupils then come up to the board in turn and give examples of adjectives, opposites etc. next, they write sentences on the board. the teacher saves the text for use the following day. finally the pupils write the sentences in their exercise books. as a treat towards the end of the lesson a wheel of fortune appeared on the screen, and each pupil chose a task. all the pupils seemed active and concentrated in this 45 minute lesson (5th grade). lesson 3 exemplifies how technology can be used in adapting to learners with below average learning capacity. several of the teachers emphasise the potential of iwb to motivate pupils with a broad range of individual capacities, including learners with a language minority background or special educational needs. conceptual interactivity we have observed much technical and physical interactivity and hardly any conceptual interactivity. typically, the teacher is in charge of and much of the time in front of the interactive white board. in a whole class setting learners are often asked to come forward and touch the board and find and/or drag the right answer into position. we have also observed more active physical interactivity during station work. however, being divided into smaller groups did not help the learners to collaborate better; we did not overhear any spontaneous discussion between the pupils in order to solve a problem. in one situation we did observe that the teacher tried to encourage pupils to cooperate in order to find a solution; however what we observed was closer to competitive rather than collaborative talk. lesson 4 the teacher is in front using the iwb to talk the pupils through the stations work that is coming up in groups. she is not trying to elicit a dialogue with the class or individual learners. the stations work starts. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 73 one of the stations is in front of the iwb; the teacher stays at that station. on the screen there is now an interactive programme and the learners have to find the correct answer to each question. the teacher leads this by requesting the correct answer; she mostly addresses pupils by name. the pupils are allowed to touch the screen and drag the correct answer into the right position. in the case of one group she asks the group members to discuss and find the correct answer before one of them approaches the board. they do discuss, but it is more of the form of competition than listening to and building on each other’s ideas (5th grade). the teacher in this class tells the pupils that “ we can also find out about things that come up in class on google right/straight away – like what siamese twins are like” – as they had done the other day. in this case there was a cumulative search for facts, but probably not exploratory talk in mercer’s sense of the notion. closer to that is the following account from another teacher: whenever i work with the iwb, i ask the children to explain to the class or to their friend how they are thinking about the answer they are about to give, especially in the case of mathematics. since children think and explain in different ways, listening to others may cause new insight eureka! (3rd grade) but this example is the exception. in our material there is no trace of a longer dialogic sequence of ‘interthinking’ between learners, prompted by the iwb. one of the teachers explicitly stated that this was not the way she used the board. it should be noted that in our limited inquiry we did not ask how the teachers might attempt to stimulate common exploration in other ways than by use of the iwb. the teachers’ views of the potentials of the iwb we asked the teachers to evaluate the usefulness of having access to iwb in their classroom. most teachers said that an iwb in the classroom enhances learning outcomes because it enables the pupils to stay active and obtain instant feedback either from the board or from the teachers. and they said that it is different from pcs. the pc is for individual use, whereas the iwb supports group work or whole class learning. thus a group or the whole class can work together to find a solution to a problem. one fairly new iwb user also recounted how the children helped her find out about the use of the board. according to some of the teachers the iwb gives excellent opportunities to support learning in different modalities, both in teacher-centered and learnercentered learning styles. this is another advantage over individual use of pcs. the board lends itself to cooperation, problem solving and encourages pupils as producers of knowledge, not just consumers. “iwbs have the potential to support enhanced learning because i can visualize, i can concretize, i can support pupils in taking active part in the lessons and they can learn to cooperate”, says one of the teachers. she continues: another advantage of the board is that it actually helps to keep the focus on the one item that is on the iwb; in that way it helps me to keep the pupils concentrated on the same object. and it supports different learning styles. the board challenges me to plan more for learners to be active and cooperate during the lesson in order to solve problems. thus, my lessons in classrooms with interactive boards differ from classrooms without them. i find that planning lessons takes longer than it did before. this is especially true when i need to create my own learning material. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 74 we did observe that the learners stayed active and were motivated, though cooperation between learners was limited. but from the comments we acknowledge that some of the teachers see that as a potential. one of the teachers compares teaching in a classroom with iwb to taking the learners out of the classroom. she argues that with iwb she can show concrete examples, such as pictures, and the learner can “feel” the subject by touching the screen. most teachers say that they use iwb in all subjects and all classes. however, some find it especially useful in mathematics, social science and initial literacy teaching. according to our informants these are all subjects that allow teachers to be concrete, give many examples, and showpictures and films that are useful in order to enhance learning. in these subjects there is a great deal of available pre-made learning material for iwb produced by the text books publishers. for instance in counting the children can start with concrete blocks, “then i can open the interactive board and show the same blocks and the learners can touch and drag to find the right answer”, one of the teachers explained. we would call this modality semiconcrete. lastly, the pupils can solve the same problems in their exercise books. by sequencing the lesson in this way, all the pupils’ senses are challenged. in the lower grades it is very important to use a variety of modalities and therefore the board is extremely useful in these grades. when working with such young pupils, it is important to be as concrete as possible, : they must feel, see, smell and touch, as one teacher put it. she continued: “and i do think that that is what enhances learning, not the iwb. however, the iwb allows for more varied lessons and it is also an easy means to help angle the lesson differently and motivate the learners to stay focused”. “iwb has become indispensable, and i would feel totally helpless without it”, as another teacher commented. the most frustrating aspect is when the technology fails, as sometimes happens! even so, all interviewees – experienced in iwb use or not were enthusiastic about this artefact in the classroom. the board works well in all grades but is by our informants seen as especially appropriate for the lower grades as it allows the option of including the learners in the lessons in various ways. however, since it is so flexible it can be used at all grades and thus it is easy to adjust to different individual or group needs, according to the teachers. it also works well in an inclusive perspective to support individual learners’ needs. the technology catches the children’s attention for instance using something from you tube and because you can adapt it to different needs. and, it is motivating with the physical activity/touching. so “iwb is particularly useful for low achievers. they stay calm if they know that they will have their turn. the reward is a song or something in the end”. according to many of the teachers, iwb supports learning because it gives pupils a sense of mastering and it teaches the learners that it is ok to get up in class and that you will have a new chance if you fail. therefore it is very useful seen from an inclusive perspective. to sum up, the teachers are happy about having an iwb in their classroom and they find it useful in enhancing learning. they use various sources of learning material, prefabricated for school subjects on the web, from publishers, from the board, from colleagues as well as creating their own learning material. initially, planning the lessons with iwb was more time-consuming but after a while it really does save because they can use much of the same materials over again and it is easy to transfer learning material to a new setting, new subject or grade/group. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 75 iwb and the dialogic space a discussion the question we set out to explore in this article was: do primary school teachers use interactive white boards as artefacts to support dialogic learning spaces? in this study the typical lesson we saw in norwegian primary school classrooms involved a great deal of technical interactivity and some physical interactivity – and very attentive children. but we only observed one situation where the teacher tried to stimulate dialogue between the learners. however, from the interviews with the teachers we noticed that some of them had the dialogue as an aim and saw the potential that the iwb had to help to stimulate the dialogue. we noted above that iwb use tends to continue traditional teaching patterns. many of our observations seem to fall into the well-known whole-class structure of ire: initiation – response – evaluation (bellack, kliebard, hyman & smith, 1966). a typical pattern is that of the teacher starting by asking a question, not an open-ended question, but one with a correct answer, leading to an answer from one or more pupils, and then the answers are evaluated or followed up by the teacher. in this way the partners take turns in the classroom talks. however, this didactic model has been heavily criticized for its teacher dominance. a rule of 2/3 was shown by bellack et al. and also later researchers, implying that the teacher was speaking 2/3 of the time. according to sahlström (2012) the relevance of this criticism is reduced by the fact that only half of the lessons observed in recent nordic classroom studies were whole-class teaching. often combinations of different models were observed in the same lesson – whole-class teaching in combination with individual or group work, just as we found in our inquiry. so, in many lessons the pupils actually talk a lot more than the teacher. in fact, in studies of norwegian classrooms the role of the teacher has been found to be vague and nonintervening, and voices are raised to call for more whole-class teaching (klette, 2004). it should be noted that when an excessive usage of individualization strategies in norwegian classrooms is challenged, we do not believe that an increased traditional teacher dominated ire whole class approach is the answer. in order to support a genuine dialogic space we argue that the quality of the conversations in the classroom is the essential issue. but it is incorrect to maintain that the only effect of interactive boards in the classrooms observed is merely to support traditional teacher-oriented teaching. we saw young pupils who were very motivated; they stayed concentrated on school work for longer period than might have been expected and we did not observe any pupils dropping out. the iwb seems to be helpful in keeping the pupils focused and in keeping the class together. we also observed the same beneficial effect when used in situations with pupils with learning difficulties. according to the teachers, the iwb helps to differentiate the lessons and reach all pupils irrespective of ability, even the young and marginal learners and those from a language minority background. to sum up, the use of iwb for motivating and activating pupils is frequent and much appreciated in most subjects and at all ages in the primary schools we visited. the inclusive potential of the iwb as a focus for common experiences for very diverse pupils was also emphasized by most of the teachers. this is valued in a country where about 97% of pupils aged 6-16 attend the same mixed ability state school, without any permanent ability grouping or streaming. instead, the pupils are entitled to adapted education in heterogeneous classes. however, our classroom observations and the interviews with the teachers reveal that the potential of the iwb to help establishing a dialogic space is not seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 76 being exploited. only to a very limited extent did we note an awareness in the teachers to encourage pupils to ask questions or to contribute in some way by giving their opinions. we did not see teachers actively using conversation to create a framework for pupils’ involvement in the acquisition of new knowledge, cf the list of 5 points in mercer et al. (2010b) cited earlier. in the interviews most teachers did not express recognition of the importance of talk as a tool for the co-construction of knowledge. we noted what most researchers have observed, namely that the iwb does not in itself create dialogic spaces. it is only the teacher who can help to establish this, and this, in turn, would probably require specific teacher training. in order to develop the dialogic space, the teacher must plan, perform and involve the learners in dialogic talk. however, it is not easy to bring about a change in teaching and learning styles. according to guskey (2002) in order to succeed one must be aware of the fact that teachers only change their way of teaching when they have experienced that the “new” style is more effective in reaching their objectives. inviting interested teachers into a participatory action research project might help them to explore, master and develop a new teaching and learning style which exploits the interactive potential of the iwb (kemmis & mc taggart, 2005). nes and eriksen (2009) argue that classroom action research is supplemented by input of relevant research-based knowledge as this will support development in the desired direction. a possible point of departure could be to establish a ‘dialogic learning space’ outside the classroom where teachers and researchers are welcome to share experiences and, hopefully, prompt ‘interthinking’ and exploratory talk. to support teachers – and faculty who wish to develop practice and theory various models exist to be considered for participatory research or co-inquiry between practitioners and researchers. examples are network learning across schools (veugelers & o’hair, 2005) or the workshop model suggested by hennessy et al. (2011). both models have been tried out successfully as digital innovation strategies in schools, cf for instance lund (2011). in any case, the participants must be aware that this is a long process which should be seen as part of continuous professional development. references bachmann, k. & haug, p. (2006). forskning om tilpasset opplæring. høgskulen i volda og møreforsking: forskningsrapport nr. 62, 2006. bakhtin, m. (1998). spørsmålet om talegenrane. oversatt og med etterord av rasmus t. slaattelid. bergen: ariadne forlag. beauchamp, g. (2004). teacher use of the interactive whiteboard in primary schools: towards and effective transition framework. technology, pedagogy and education, 13(3), 327-348. bellack, a. a., h. m. kliebard, r.t., hyman & smith, f.l. jr (1966). the language of the classroom. new york: teachers’ college press. bennett, s., and lockyer, l. (2008). a study of teachers’ integration of interactive whiteboards into four austrialian primary school classrooms. learning, media and technology, 33(4), 289–300. blau, i. (2011). teachers for “smart classrooms”: the extent of implementation of an interactive whiteboard-based professional development program on elementary teachers’ instructional practices. interdisciplinary journal of elearning and learning objects, 7 , 275-289. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 77 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_3?_encoding=utf8&field-author=ronald%20t.%20hyman&search-alias=books&sort=relevancerank deaney, r. a. chapman & hennessy, s. (2009). a case-study of one teacher’s use o an interactive whiteboard system to support knowledge co-construction in the history classroom. the curriculum journal,.20(4), 365-387. digregorio, p. & sobellojeski, k. 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(2008). analysing the use of interactive technology to implement interactive teaching. journal of computer assisted learning, 24, 61-73. kershner, r., n. mercer & warwick, p. (2010). can the interactive whiteboard support young children’s collaborative communication and thinking in classroom science activities? computer-supported collaborative learning, 5, 359-383. klette, k. (ed.) (2004). fag og arbeidsmåter i endring?: tidsbilder fra norsk grunnskole. oslo: universitetsforlaget. klette, k. (2007). bruk av arbeidsplaner i skolen – et hovedverktøy for å realisere tilpasset opplæring? norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, 91(4), 344-358. lund, t. (2011). skoler i nettverk – dialogkonferanser som læringsarena. in o. erstad & t.e hauge. (eds.) skoleutvikling og digitale medier – kompleksitet, mangfold og ekspansiv læring(161-181). oslo: gyldendal akademisk. mercer, n. 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(2011). disparity in practice: diverse strategies among teachers implementing interactive whiteboards into teaching practice in two swedish primary schools. learning, media and technology, 37(3), 253-270. thagaard, t. (2003) systematikk og innlevelse: en innføring i kvalitativ metode. bergen: fagbokforlaget. twiner, a., c. coffin, k. littleton & whitelock, d. (2010). multimodality, orchestration and participation in the context of classroom use of the interactive whiteboard: a discussion. technology, pedagogy and education, 18(2), 211-223. veugelers, w. & o’hair, m.j. (2005). network learning for educational change. maidenhead: open university press. warwick, p. & kershner, r. (2008). primary teachers’ understanding of the interactive whiteboard as a toll for children’s collaborative learning and knowledgebuilding. learning, media and technology, 3(4),269-287. warwick, p, s. hennessy & mercer, n. (2011). promoting teacher and school development through co-enquiry: developing interactive whiteboard use in a ‘dialogic classroom’. teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 17(3), 303324. wegerif, r. (2007). dialogic education and technology: expanding the space of learning. new york: springer. wikan, g., b. faugli, t., mølster & hope, r. (2009). does ms photo story 3 make a difference? the view and experience of a group of norwegian secondary school teachers. media, technology & lifelong learning,.6(1),136-147. wikan, g. & mølster, t. (2010). norwegian secondary school teachers and ict. european journal of teacher education, 34(2), 209-218. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 79 notes on contributors both authors work in teacher education and educational research at hedmark university college, norway. gerd wikan is a professor in human geography and has worked in ict and teacher education lately. she is also carrying out research on education and development in africa. kari nes is a professor of education whose main research interests are within inclusive and adapted education in norwegian and international contexts. i the concept of dialogue is used in many ways and in many traditions a discussion we will not enter into here, cf for instance dysthe (2001). by dialogue in our context we refer to the interactions/negotiations between learners and teacher-learners in developing knowledge, acknowledging different voices (cf bakhtin 1998). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 9 – issue 2 – 2013 80 interactive whiteboards as artefacts to support dialogic learning spaces in primary schools kari nes gerd wikan abstract introduction the dialogic space how can interactive whiteboards support the dialogic space? methodology findings technical interactivity physical interactivity conceptual interactivity the teachers’ views of the potentials of the iwb iwb and the dialogic space a discussion references notes on contributors title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 94 self and peer assessment and dominance during group work using online visual tools ed lester associate professor and reader of chemical technology department of chemical and environmental engineering university of nottingham e-mail: edward.lester@nottingham.ac.uk damian schofield director of human computer interaction department of computer science state university of new york e-mail: schofield@cs.oswego.edu peter chapman associate professor school of psychology university of nottingham email: peter.chapman@nottingham.ac.uk abstract an experiment undertaken with engineering undergraduate students at the university of nottingham involved 26 groups of three being filmed during a study using a virtual-reality-based problem-solving exercise. after the exercise, each individual filled in a questionnaire relating to the exercise which allowed them to score themselves and their peers for contribution and overall grade. the comparing of video evidence with perceived contributions made it possible to observe patterns of behaviour based on temperament dominance. this ‘dominance’ was based on two simple parameters extracted from an electronic version of the myers-briggs test: first, the time taken to complete the study, called ‘decisiveness’, and secondly, the degree of extroversion/introversion. the more decisive subjects received higher marks from their peers, despite the absence of any video evidence that they had actually contributed more than their peers. the most dominant extroverts appear to ‘do more’ with respect to the physical operation of the mouse/keyboard and interaction with the visual simulation during the virtual-reality exercise. however, there was no link with these simple temperament measures with the degree of enjoyment of the tasks, which appeared to be highly consistent. the authors do not argue that visual-media tools, such as the virtual-reality environment described in this article, might offer solutions to problems associated with group work in engineering, but rather that information regarding the character traits of the participants may help to create more effective teams and to help understand the interpersonal dynamics within teams undertaking such tasks. https://fronter.com/hil/links/files.phtml/4bc4b14812937.165097059$434403512$/arkiv/versjon+til+publisering/volume+6+-+issue+1/edward.lester@nottingham.ac.uk https://fronter.com/hil/links/files.phtml/4bc4b14812937.165097059$434403512$/arkiv/versjon+til+publisering/volume+6+-+issue+1/schofield@cs.oswego.edu https://fronter.com/hil/links/files.phtml/4bc4b14812937.165097059$434403512$/arkiv/versjon+til+publisering/volume+6+-+issue+1/peter.chapman@nottingham.ac.uk seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 95 keywords: peer assessment, group work, dominance, virtual environments, myers-briggs introduction e-learning is increasing across all sectors of higher education, including engineering, where implementation can augment and enhance a range of student learning experiences (rosenberg, 2000; littlejohn, 2004; bates, 2005; felder & spurlin, 2005). past examples have included visual tools to help familiarise students with lab procedures, software to enhance communication in small groups, technology to facilitate feedback, etc. the authors have previously published papers detailing a number of application areas and uses of virtual environments in chemical-engineering education (schofield et al., 2005; lester et al., 2006). however as these learning technologies mature and become more graphically sophisticated, their potential for integrated learning and assessment becomes more real (topping, 1998; mohan & brooks, 2003). assessment may come from the learning technology itself, with the correct submission of answers or procedures, but may also come from self and peer assessment. if this is the case, understanding how users interact with visual elearning environments, alongside their peers, becomes important (hanrahan & isaacs, 2001). if the package involves group work, how does one assemble a group? are there techniques for putting a group together that can establish good practice for stand-alone practical sessions? devising methods of assessment that are fair to individual students, without imposing unmanageable burdens on the time of staff, can be a big challenge. a number of researchers have reported that students are over-assessed and apportioning marks for group efforts can sometimes be difficult and inaccurate (gatfield, 1999; shepard, 2000; willis et al., 2002). peer and self assessment can sometimes be problematic and therefore these methods are rarely used in a summative context (somervell, 1993; topping, 1998; dochy et al., 1999). however, visual technologies such as the virtual environment described in this paper could be part of the answer to the problematic, recurring issue of overassessment whilst strengthening the learning experience of the student (mennin & kalishman, 1998; swanston et al., 1998,). the context of self and peer assessment is critical when reviewing successes and failures. if groupwork occurs over a period of weeks there is usually the opportunity for academics to monitor the peer-review process and foster good practice (stanier, 1997; sluijsmans et al., 1998; elliott & higgins, 2004). however, there may be situations in which assessment needs to be more immediate, where marks are attributed in a single sitting, for example, after a practical or laboratory experiment. many e-learning activities could be included in this category of ‘fire-and-forget’ sessions, and it is in these situations where confidence in the marking system is often needed. the authors have been particularly interested in establishing whether it is possible to use simple electronic temperament tests to formulate groups for visually focused e-learning work. ‘simple’ can defined as simple questions that require neither high standards of english nor any prior knowledge about psychometric evaluation. there are several standard tests used by companies for assessing ‘temperament’ (plomin & dunn, 1986; wiggins & pincus, 1992; furnham, 1997; asher, 2007). classic tests include the kolbs learning styles (willcoxson, l. & prosser, m., 1996), gardner’s multiple intelligences (gardner, 1993 and gardner, 2006), firo-b personality assessment model (furnham, 1996), vak learning styles model (vincent & ross, 2001), the big five (45 questions on a sliding scale of 1 to 5) (busatoa et al., 1998), myers briggs (70 questions seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 96 answered a or b) (myers & myers, 1977; myers & mccaulley, 1985), the tci test (240 questions, answered yes or no) (agrell & gustafson, 1994; kivimaki et al., 1997), and belbin’s team roles (belbin, 1993; fisher et al., 1998). there are several overlaps in the traits that each test assesses (furnham, 1997; asher, 2007). for example, most will measure degree of extrovert/introvert tendency. the big five test (busatoa et al., 1998) measures extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and negative emotionality (neuroticism). these parameters are measured on a sliding scale where a ‘poor score’ means that the subject is not, for example, highly ‘open’. myers-briggs (myers & myers, 1977; myers & mccaulley 1985) also measures extraversion as a tendency to be more extrovert or introvert (resulting in an e or i notation, respectively). one criticism of the myers-briggs test, compared to the big 5 test (srivastava et al., 2003), is that the results are bi-modal, that is, a person is deemed to be either extrovert or introvert, etc. however, it is clear that most people are not bimodal and can demonstrate a more complex set of behaviours (wiggins & pincus, 1992; asher, 2007). the myers-briggs test uses 70 questions to gauge extraversion and introversion (10 questions), intuition to sensation (20 questions), thinking to feeling (20 questions) and perceiving to judging (20 questions). the authors were particularly interested in the first question because it is the most common trait, measured, to some degree, by all other tests. the use of the data from the 70 questions that form the myers-briggs test was important for this study, since it was presented to the study participants as an e-version. in this study we recorded the response times and answers to every individual question. in this way it was possible to apply a ‘strength-ofresponse’ measurement to each of the traits based on a correlation between the time to answer and the answers to the 70 questions in the questionnaire. if a long time was taken for a response, then the subject could be considered to be ‘hesitating’. a quick answer could be taken as a ‘decisive’ response (lester et al., 2006). combining the times and answers allows each subject to be ranked against their team partners in terms of ‘dominance’. this combines the ideas of myers-briggs with the sliding scale style result of the big five. ranking dominance of decisiveness and extroversion since the average engineering student is an introverted thinker (mccaulley, 1990), expressiveness and co-operation during group work is not necessarily a natural mode of learning for them (mccaulley, 1987; wankat & oreovicz, 1993; elliott & higgins, 2004). as a result there are a number of problems with group work in engineering education (felder et al., 2002), relating to how groups are put together from a pool of individuals and how the output from each group can be assessed effectively (felder & spurlin, 2005; lejk & wyvill, 2001). it should be emphasised that the authors are not seeking to validate or compare the relevance of the myers-briggs test with behaviour. there are many different personality tests and each has advocates and critics. this exercise was based around correlating the use of a simple psychometric test and any detectable behavioural patterns in group work, particularly peer and self assessment. extraversion and decisiveness were the two specific parameters used in this study. the time taken to answer the questions was labelled ‘decisiveness’, since it is fair to say that the ability of the subject to make decisions based on a simple question (a or b) has to denote some level of decisiveness (laruelle & valencianon, 2005). figure 1 shows the distribution in ‘decisiveness’ from the subjects in the study. there is a wide distribution from four minutes to 27 minutes. the main group of students were around four to 10 minutes. a second grouping lasted around 10-13 minutes and another from 14-20 minutes. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 97 figure 1 – the spread of decisiveness across the 78 participants since, in the standard myers-briggs test, there is a total of 10 questions relating to ‘extroversion’ and ‘introversion’, eight responses towards extraversion and two for introversion would, for example, indicate a high ‘strength’ towards extraversion. four introvert responses and six for extroversion indicate weak extraversion. figure 2 shows how this strength of response can be applied to the data from each individual. in a group of three, there might be three extroverts, or three introverts, but the level of extroversion or introversion will vary. with the three introverts, one will likely be ‘less introverted’ than the other two, and this is where relative extrovert dominance may occur. it is possible also that whoever is the most “x” (x being a measurable character trait) dominates the group, regardless of the ‘strength’ of the trait on an absolute basis, but simply on a relative basis within any given group. figure 2 – the sliding scale of strength of response for the 10 i/e questions seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 98 figure 3 – a sample test where the correct path across the platform needs to be worked out by the group rather than focusing specifically on the relevance or rigour of a particular temperaments test, this study is focused on investigating whether a virtual learning environment could be used as a simple test that could be adopted and that could give measurable results which could be related to trends in actual group behaviour. this paper describes a group based, e-learning experiment involving a set of virtual-reality tasks that are completed with self and peer assessment. this experiment was carried out to identify how students perceive themselves and the other members of their group with respect to contribution and whether any simple character traits have a specific bearing on the way they allot these marks. if marks were to be summative, then some conclusions could be drawn as to how these marks were affected by the personality traits of the ‘assessor’ and the ‘assessed’. the authors do not argue that e-learning tools, such as the virtual-reality environment described in this paper here, might offer solutions to problems associated with group work in engineering, but that information regarding the character traits of the participants may help to create more effective teams and to help understand the inter-personal dynamics within those teams. the virtual-reality-based e-learning groupwork test the exercise was devised in the form of a game scenario with virtual-reality tasks taking place on board a space station. in the experiment, 26 groups of three were assembled and each team was asked to solve the eight tasks as quickly as possible within a maximum time limit of one hour. within the virtual environment each of the tasks required different skills, some required a computer-games-like dexterity (for example, traversing a set of floating platforms or shooting at targets), some required memory and planning (for example, navigating through a maze, an example of which is shown in figure 3) and some required creativity and intuition (for example, manipulating abstract shapes to create a letter or number form, an example of which is shown in figure 4). the rationale behind this virtual-reality environment was to create a number of different, location-specific tasks, each requiring different skills to solve, which users could complete individually or as part of a team. hence, the dynamics of how the users interacted with each other and which team member performed which function could be monitored and recorded. as the users entered the red planet virtual environment they received the following instructions: “you are currently situated in a bunker on a red planet. outside there are 6 rooms and a maze. within each room is a puzzle for you to solve. if you solve the puzzle correctly you will be given either an operator or a number. there are a total of 3 of the 4 operators (i.e. +, -, /, or x) and 4 numbers (all between 1 and 9). collect all operators and numbers and rearrange them to solve your given equation. this will be the last of 8 separate tasks” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 99 the users then navigated their viewpoint around the world, entering the rooms in which the tasks were located and receiving detailed instructions for each task. upon completion of these tasks the users received a series of numbers and arithmetical operators which they manipulated to form a complete, mathematically correct equation. each group was recorded on video during the exercise in order to analyse and assess the interaction of the individuals, the dynamics of the groups as a whole and the type of contribution made by each individual. one section of the analysis form used to ‘code’ each group is shown in appendix a. after each session was completed, either by finishing the tasks or by reaching the one hour time limit, each student was asked to assess their perceived level of input as well as that of their peers. a copy of the participant questionnaire is included in appendix b. using the video evidence and the assessment forms, the overall performance of the group and the degree of contribution from each member was quantified and compared. it was also possible to consider the behaviour of individuals on a group-bygroup basis, which might also yield interesting trends; for example, if a highly extroverted student was placed with two other highly extroverted students, the group interaction might not be any different from a group with three strong or moderate introverts. “decisiveness” the results for the group metrics and awarded scores (self and peer assessment) are given in tables 1 and 2, respectively. the consistencies across both tables are the most noticeable feature. the least dominant character tends to make far fewer ‘non-related’ comments during the exercise. all appeared to enjoy the task at hand, however. the only significant difference in the groups (table 2), when ranking the most and least ‘decisive’ character was the way that marks were allocated. the most dominant characters were very consistent in the marks given to themselves and to the other two less dominant members of the group. the next most dominant appears to be equally as consistent. the least dominant however, awards significantly more marks and contributions to the other two members of the group, for example, 28.7 per cent contribution awarded to self compared with 35.3 per cent and 36.0 per cent to peers. the same is seen with mark allocation at 55.6 per cent to self and 62.2 per cent and 62.9 per cent for peers. the participants do not feel they have done (or earned) more than their peers. this is supported by video evidence (quantified in table figure 4 – a number puzzle where the groups must assemble or guess the number from the fragments seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 100 1) but in contrast to the assessment of their peers, which shows some variations in allocation of marks and contributions. the most dominant characters appear to value the least dominant, marginally more highly than themselves, even though the least dominant ones clearly do not. ‘indecisiveness’, as the opposite of ‘decisiveness’, has been shown to be a measurable trait in younger people (germeijs et al., 2006). clearly there are those who can make decisions more rapidly than others (ream, 1922) and the key issue is around the relationship between these more ‘mobile’ or ‘rapid-fire’ types and the more ‘deliberate’ types. in this exercise, there were multiple challenges and multiple strategies for tackling each problem. most of these challenges allowed the authors to monitor and record decisive acts that were performed by the users. for example, figure 4 shows one of the objectmanipulation problems the users were faced with; some of the groups guessed at the number without attempting to reorganise the shapes, while other groups would spend inordinate amounts of time manipulating the objects, to prove that the shape was indeed the number four. how a group decides to adopt either strategy, or switch from one to the other, is made by a mutual (team) or non-mutual (individual) decision, and this requires a choice to be made, at some stage in the process. extroversion figure 5 shows the distribution profile for introversion/extroversion across the group of participants. based on this figure, there is clearly a bias towards extroversion, rather than introversion, which is at odds with other studies on engineering students. the other finding is that the study did not involve any extreme introverts. figure 5 – the distribution of extrovert/introverts in the study group. the most extrovert member of each group appears to carry out more actions at 39.0 per cent compared to 30.4 per cent and 31.0 per cent (table 3). interestingly, total utterances appear to be consistent through each group although the most dominant extrovert appears to make significantly more unrelated comments during the exercise. it is possible that this is reflects the nature of the exercise, where there is time for reflection during the problemsolving sections. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 101 enjoyment of the exercise and the virtual-reality task as a whole appear very consistent (table 3). all three members of each group consistently award marginally higher marks to peers irrespective of whether they are more or less extrovert. it is possible that the least dominant extrovert could also be classed as the most dominant introvert, hence it is possible to say that many of the differences between e and i within each group are marginal. the success or outcome/consequence of these virtual tasks can impact the stimuli of introverts (grey et al., 1983). there have been a number of interesting previous studies on the effects of extroversion and introversion in group work (buckingham, 2002). links have been made to temperament and physiological arousal during such exercises, as measured by skin conductance and heart rate (davis, 1988; robinson 2001). there is also some evidence the more dominant introverts are more easily fatigued and struggle to concentrate on external based tasks (like group work) for extended periods of time (helmers et al., 1997; goldberg, 1993). the implication from this research is that the length of the whole task could be crucial in determining the success of the group-work exercise. if a task is set that becomes too lengthy, it is possible that the dynamic of the group will deteriorate simply because the focus of the individuals on the visual task will reduce at different rates. from table 4, a number of interesting observations can be made. the most extroverted characters in the groups did not appear to score themselves more highly than their two, lesser extroverted, peers. in fact, the most dominant member of the group consistently valued the other two members as more significant. the least extrovert awards consistent marks, whilst acknowledging that the other members ‘did more’. it is possible that this table shows that the most extrovert character is able to value the contributions of the more ‘deliberate’ members of the group. the contributions made by each individual can be quantified (table 3) but these contributions are made as a result of what might be described as ‘covert cognitive operations’ (boddy et al., 1986). the covert, or hidden, nature of many of the cognitive operations performed during the experiment precludes unequivocal attribution of superior task performance to the application of external stimuli. as such, this makes it difficult to prove whether there is evidence to support gray’s theory that extraverts are differentiated from introverts by their response to positive and negative stimuli – namely, successes and failures during the exercise (gray 1970). it is concluded that, although findings appear to support j. a. gray's theory that extraverts are differentiated from introverts by a reversal in the balance between behavioural activation and behavioural inhibition systems, the covert nature of the cognitive operations precludes unequivocal attribution of superior task performance in negatively reinforced introverts to the accentuated excitation of the behavioural inhibition system (bis). conclusions this article has described an experiment where 78 engineering students undertook a series of tasks in a virtual-reality environment in teams of three. each participant underwent a psychometric evaluation using a myers-briggs test and an additional measure of decisiveness based on the time taken to complete the test. as the groups undertook the visual-media experiment their actions and communication were monitored on video and these actions were later coded and measured. upon analysis of these results there are some clear behavioural trends with respect to marks allotted to self and peers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 102 decisiveness (not a function in the myers-briggs test) appears to be an influence in the assessment but not in the activity within the virtual world, apart from the relatively superficial activity of unrelated utterances. decisive people award marks evenly, but the least decisive in a group context tend to award more marks to their more decisive team members. the way a group is configured appears to affect dynamics and behaviour as well as the assessment and recognition of contribution. this poses some difficult questions, not just about group work which utilises visual-learning media, but also about the reliability of self/peer assessment in a group context. this will require further thought and development. although a number of conclusions and trends were seen in the data regarding how different team members performed and assessed each other, it should be noted that some of the measured quantitative differences were small and hence can only be used to indicate trends rather than draw strong conclusions. the length of the task set in the virtual environment could well have an impact on the success of such group exercises. clearly, introverts and extroverts work differently in relation to internal and external stimuli, and in their responses to the visual media presented to them. the ability to focus and concentrate on the task at hand is crucial, particularly where peer and self assessment is required. there is some evidence to suggest that temperament influences focus. if members of a group appear to lose interest then the scores or contributions that they will receive from their peers will probably not reflect their overall input, but be skewed by their final level of engagement. it is possible that the dynamic of the group will deteriorate simply because the focus of the individuals on the learning media will reduce at different rates. it would be wise to take this eventuality into account when designing visual e-learning exercises for groups, ensuring that ample time for breaks are planned to ensure that all temperament 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(2002). small-group work and assessment in a pbl curriculum: a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of student perceptions of the process of working in small groups and its assessment, medical teacher, 24(5) 495-501. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 106 appendix a individual variables a b c room 1: stepping stones group vars time taken minutes seconds timed using minutes actions keyboard seconds using minutes mouse seconds silent reading minutes instructions seconds other completed task (1/0) actions failed attempt at task writes down notes writes down answer task irrelevant actions utterances total number task reads instructions to group related asks question answers question requests help suggestion explanation other statements task-unrelated utterances miscellaneous utterances celebration congratulation apology laughter expletive seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 107 appendix b 1. name: _______________________ 2. what letter did you have in your group? (circle one) a b c 3. how well do you think you group performed compared with the likely performance of other groups? much worse than average average much better than average please circle a number: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 4. what contribution do you think each group member made to the overall group performance (including yourself) much worse than average average much better than average 4(a) group member a: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 4(b) group member b: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 4(c) group member c: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 5. what percentage of the overall work do you feel that you contributed? (0 to 100) % 6. how well do you think your group performed on each of the individual tasks? much worse than average average much better than average 6(a) the maze: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6(b) the stepping stones (room 1): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6(c) shooting practice (room 2): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6(d) the conveyor belt (room 3): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6(e) box jumping (room 4) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6(f) number puzzle 1 (room 5): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6(g) number puzzle 2 (room 6): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6(h) the final sum: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7. what contribution to you think you made on each of the individual tasks? much worse than average average much better than average 7(a) the maze: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7(b) the stepping stones (room 1): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7(c) shooting practice (room 2): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 108 7(d) the conveyor belt (room 3): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7(e) box jumping (room 4) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7(f) number puzzle 1 (room 5): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7(g) number puzzle 2 (room 6): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7(h) the final sum: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. what grade do you think please give a percentage grade for each group each group member should member including yourself. use the standard receive if the task was part university system, where a grade below 40% is of your assessed coursework? a fail and a grade above 70% is a first. 8(a) group member a: ________________ % 8(b) group member b: ________________ % 8(c) group member c: ________________ % 9. how much did you enjoy working as part of your group? not at all very much please circle a number: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10. how much did you enjoy working on this task? not at all very much please circle a number: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 please give any other comments about the task you have performed in the space below: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 109 table 1 decisiveness group metrics action total utterances unrelated utterances group work enjoyment task enjoyment most dominant 33.3 32.7 33.7 5.3 5.3 middle "man" 33.8 34.8 39.0 5.5 5.7 least dominant 32.9 32.5 27.3 5.3 5.3 (out of 100) (out of 100) (out of 100) (out of 6) (out of 6) table 2 decisiveness awarded scores contribution awarded mark awarded to self next dominant least dominant to self next dominant least dominan t most dominant 33.1 33.2 33.7 61.5 61.7 63.4 to self more dominant less dominant to self more dominant less dominan t middle "man" 32.4 33.2 34.4 59.3 60.9 60.1 to self most dominant more dominant to self most dominant more dominan t least dominant 28.7 35.3 36.0 55.6 62.2 62.9 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 110 table 3 extrovert group metrics objective measures action total utterances unrelated utterances group work enjoyment task enjoyment most dominant 38.6 34.4 37.1 5.5 5.5 middle "man" 30.4 32.1 31.2 5.2 5.4 least dominant 31.0 33.5 31.7 5.4 5.4 (out of 100) (out of 100) (out of 100) (out of 6) (out of 6) table 4 group metrics contribution awarded mark awarded to self next dominant least dominant to self next dominant least dominant most dominant 31.7 35.2 33.2 58.4 63.2 62.0 to self more dominant less dominant to self more dominant less dominant middle "man" 31.1 33.9 35.0 60.2 63.2 64.5 to self most dominant more dominant to self most dominant more dominant least dominant 31.4 34.5 34.1 57.9 59.6 58.6 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects issn: 1504-4831 vol 16, no 2 (2020), e4047 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar4047 ©2020 (rachel shanks). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects rachel shanks university of aberdeen email: r.k.shanks@abdn.ac.uk abstract over the last thirty years educational technology has not impacted the delivery of education that might have been predicted for it. part of the lack of impact may relate to the introduction of new technologies through one-off educational technology projects which lack permanence and effective evaluation. in this paper i present a reflective and reflexive account in relation to seven educational technology projects carried out, over the last ten years, in scotland. while reflecting on one project i developed a framework to understand why some of these educational technology projects were successful and why others were not. the framework includes four factors: purpose; planning; passion; and pedagogy. i have attempted to learn from my involvement in past projects in order to influence and shape future experiences. it is hoped that this work can help to link practice back to research as well as indicating a way for lessons to be learnt in future educational technology projects. keywords: educational technology; educational technology project; reflective practice; reflective evaluation. introduction the use of technology to educate has greatly increased with the closure of school buildings and other educational establishments due to the coronavirus covid-19 pandemic. however, up until now, the way to successfully implement educational technology has been elusive. part of the difficulty may be that educational technology is often adopted in short-term temporary projects. to explore this, i present a framework to assess https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar4047 mailto:r.k.shanks@abdn.ac.uk 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 educational technology projects based on reflections on seven discrete projects. i explicitly take a more practical stance than scholars have argued for, e.g. selwyn (2010). in addition to the issue of educational technology’s effectiveness, there are democratic and social justice issues involved in the success of educational technology projects, for example ensuring that public funds are not wasted on projects unlikely to succeed, and that inequality is not further entrenched. it is useful to define the concepts being used. the project management institute defines a project as ‘a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result’ (project management institute, 2020). januszewski and molenda’s (2008) define the concept of educational technology as: educational technology is the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using and managing appropriate technological processes and resources (1). learning is put at the centre of their definition on purpose (januszewski & molenda, 2008: 13). to successfully implement digital technologies, we need to think and act differently in relation to our teaching and learning (underwood & dillon, 2011). pedagogy needs to be rethought with primacy given to learners with teachers taking a step back (wan & nicholas, 2013). using the term ‘educational technology project’ means there does not have to be a choice made between ‘technology-enabled’ and ‘technology-enhanced’ although the former is to be preferred as it fits with facilitation and does not imply the positive effect that ‘technology-enhanced’ conveys (kirkwood and price, 2016). therefore, combining definitions of project and educational technology, in this paper ‘educational technology project’ refers to: a venture to create a unique resource or process to facilitate learning. from defining what is understood by the term ‘educational technology project’ now the process from taking part in several educational technology projects to creating a framework through which to understand them is presented. over the last thirty years, educational technology has not changed the delivery of education as much as might have been predicted. hardware like tablet pcs or a new platform such as google classroom may make people think that this particular technology will finally turn the classroom inside-out (opening up opportunities beyond the classroom walls) and outside-in (bringing the world into the classroom). using technology in this way would mean schools reflect what is happening in much of the rest of society, both at home and in the workplace. perhaps, in response to the global coronavirus covid-19 pandemic, with the closure of so many school, college and university buildings, educational technology will revolutionise the understanding of how education can be delivered, received and assessed. while academics are exhorted to be reflective practitioners in relation to their teaching, following schön’s seminal works (1983; 1987), here i suggest that academics have not been active enough as reflective practitioners in relation to educational technology research, in 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 particular when we are asked to be part of a project introducing a new tool or teaching process when we are part-insider in the implementation project as well as part-outsider trying to evaluate and research the phenomenon at the same time. in this work i have tried to embody both sides of practitioner-researcher and researcher-practitioner as schön stated: reflective researchers cannot maintain distance from, much less superiority to, the experience of practice. reflective research requires a partnership of practitioner researchers and researcher practitioners (1983: 323). the projects presented below have my involvement in common so i am aware that part of the problem, when the projects did not go to plan, may relate to my own actions. nonetheless, i aim to explore the ‘swampy lowlands’ (schön, 1987) of educational technology work where we cannot see what is ahead nor be sure of what was behind us. reflection and evaluation of educational technology projects with educational technology projects there can often be an assumption that change, in particular, improvement is required (spector & yuen, 2016). the focus for evaluation is then to what extent the desired change or improvement took place. romiszowski (2004) created a matrix of possible problems and their causes for e-learning projects which included problems in the design/decision-making process (such as need, context, constraints, risks, logistics and infrastructure) and problems in project execution (namely, project planning and implementation, project management and evaluation) (23). while khan’s framework for e-learning focuses on eight dimensions: pedagogical; institutional; technological; interface design; evaluation; management; resource support; and ethical considerations (khan, 2003). as spector and yuen (2016) state ‘an explanation of why observed changes did or did not occur as planned is a primary focus of evaluation’ (13). tennyson (1995, cited in spector & yuen, 2016) developed a more complete model of evaluation of projects that included the domains of design, foundation, production, maintenance and implementation as well as situational evaluation. this type of evaluation divides educational technology changes into projects, programs, products, practices, policies and combinations of these. theory-based evaluation, also termed theory of change, or the intervention logic, might include implementation theory or program theory. there can also be theory-driven evaluation which can be understood as causal-model evaluation and considers which components of the change worked well and which did not. effective evaluation of educational technology projects requires effective planning and project management, for example gap analysis – the project is conceived to fill an identified gap. evaluation is difficult if there has been no logical chain linking a current problem or situation to a desired goal to improve the problem or situation with a proposed intervention or solution. too often we perhaps presume that form, such as an intervention, follows function, for example a defined purpose of intended outcomes. while in some projects the introduction of digital technologies per se is the objective in other instances it 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 is a tool for achieving other goals (pettersson, 2018). however, whatever the goal of the project, digital knowhow is not enough to implement lasting change, technological, pedagogical and organisational understanding are still needed (ibid). as kenny (2004) stated: new learning technologies require staff not only to acquire skills in using the technology in a learning environment, but also to re-consider its implications for educational design and teaching practices (391). in relation to educational technology projects it has been found that pedagogy is important to the success of such projects (kenny, 2004; khan, 2003), as well as planning (romiszowki, 2004) and enthusiasm (kenny, 2004). kolb (2017) encapsulated these elements as engagement, enhancement and extension. schools identified as digitally competent schools have been divided into two different categories: goal-oriented schools; and culture-oriented ones (pettersson, 2018). an important finding in pettersson’s study was that in goal or structure-oriented schools there was more focus on formal structures and courses for professional learning while in cultureoriented schools there was more emphasis on collegial learning. this difference between schools in relation to digitisation has also been found in relation to how new teachers are treated in learning environments with expansive and/or restrictive practices (attard tonna & shanks, 2017). without collegial support teachers can suffer stress, what syvänen, mäkiniemi, syrjä, heikkilä-tammi and viteli (2016) termed ‘technostress’. in educational technology projects it can be necessary to learn about new tools and technologies which may lead to an increased workload and less time for other duties. if we can critically reflect on the implementation of educational technologies then we can avoid what brookfield (1995) referred to as being the victims of fate; we can combat our own exploitation; we can teach with excitement and purpose; we can be grounded in practice; and we can know that what we do can change the world by developing trust and maintaining democracy (265267). methodology in order to explore the educational technology projects that i have been involved in i used a process of reflection. the aim was to understand why some projects were more successful than others. dewey defined reflection as ‘an active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends’ (1933: 9). he saw reflection leading to a conclusion while not specifying the mechanics or process of how to reach that conclusion (ibid). following a systematic literature review marshall provided the definition: ‘reflection is a careful examination and bringing together of ideas to create new insight through ongoing cycles of expression and re/evaluation’ (411). reflection has been defined as an ‘in-depth 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 review of an event’ (bolton, 2018: 9) with the reflector considering ‘why?’ questions. this can bring experiences into focus, particularly if many angles are considered including people, places, relationships, timing, chronology, causality and connections (ibid). beyond reflection, reflexivity leads us to work out how our own presence has influenced knowledge and actions. argyris and schön (1974) wrote of practice development as single loop reflection and then double loop reflection and reflexivity which includes more why questions. kolb (1984) wrote of the need to examine our beliefs and theories and schön referred to theories-in-use as well as reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (1983; 1987). when being reflexive it can be disconcerting to realise things that went unnoticed at the time of the events. in this situation it is necessary to reflect on the pressures and prevailing discourses and ideologies which may have distorted perceptions at the time. by examining the political and social structures that influence or prevent action we are doing more than practising a confessional. as a critical reflective and reflexive practitioner, i wish to understand the core of my practice in the educational technology projects i have worked on. it is important to challenge assumptions about ourselves and our work. in one project covered in this paper massive open online courses were found to be a ‘means of achieving the reflexivity required for lifelong learning professionals to meet an emerging need linked to online learning with their participants’ (mcardle, al bishawi, marston & shanks, 2015: 25). by looking at problematic situations we can begin the process of working out solutions as schön (1983) stated: when we set the problem, we select what we will treat as the ‘things’ of the situation, we set the boundaries of our attention to it, and we impose upon it a coherence that allows us to say what is wrong and in what directions the situation needs to be changed. problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them. (40) the implementation of educational technology is a problem that cannot simply be solved by the application of professional knowledge. first, it is necessary to ‘set’ the problem. this often involves widening our vision to include aspects of the context within which the problem rests economic, political, social, educational and so on to explore multiple definitions of the problem and the key concerns. if too tight a focus is taken with complex problems, such as introducing new practices or tools, too soon in the process of problem setting, this can lead to defining the problem prematurely and perhaps examining the problem from limited theoretical, philosophical or other perspectives. brookfield (1995) set out four lenses through which we can reflect on our teaching: our own eyes; students’ eyes; colleagues’ eyes; and through the lens of literature. this paper may only achieve the first lens, the autobiographical one, but as a researcher and user of educational technology it is an important first step to acknowledge what has gone before to 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 understand professional practices as both researcher and university teacher. as brookfield notes, critical reflection entails dangers as well as hopes, and the pressure to publish can result in people focusing on positive outcomes rather than learning from mistakes. reflective practice can also be understood as a form of experiential learning as it entails learning from, sometimes painful, experience, learning from failures as well as successes. by reflecting on the educational technology projects, i have taken part in, i wish to take part in what jarvis (2003) terms the higher forms of reflective learning which enable us to develop individually and collectively. these higher forms of learning include contemplation, reflective practice and experimental learning. there is a real danger that if we do not take time to reflect, then much of our experience will remain at a level, which is neither critically examined nor used as a springboard for further development. as tarrant notes ‘reflection should be something initiated by the individual, for the individual’ (2013: 64). however, reflection can also take us beyond our own actions. by critically reflecting it is possible to better understand the ideological basis for the implementation of educational technology. the figure below shows how experiences can be used in a reflective process to produce new perspectives and be ready to change behaviour in future activities. experience(s) reflective processes outcomes figure 1. the reflection process in context (adaption of boud, keogh & walker’s 1985 model). after reflecting on one project on which i worked for two years, i then considered the many other educational technology projects i had worked on as a freelance researcher and/or permanently employed academic. i used boud, keogh and walker’s 1985 model (see figure 1 above), to understand the experiences of working on these seven different educational technology projects. in this process of reflection, i considered the lessons that had been ‘learnt’ and/or reported at the end of each project. lessons such as understanding that the hardware should not overshadow the pedagogy (two school projects), that overcoming people’s lack of confidence using digital technology was important (professional learning project), that it was hard to change practice (multiple projects), then i thought about what was present and also what was missing in the successful and unsuccessful projects. i behaviour ideas feelings returning to experience utilising positive feelings remove obstructive feelings re-evaluating experience new perspectives on experiences change in behaviour readiness for application commitment to action 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 considered questions that would be useful for future projects: could participants/stakeholders explain why the educational technology was being adopted/implemented? secondly, were the teachers and students passionate about using the technology? thirdly, what planning had been done? finally, on what pedagogical basis was the educational technology being adopted? in the table below i provide some anonymised details of the seven projects that i reflected upon. table 1 details of the seven educational technology projects that were reflected upon. scope of the project end results bespoke software to analyse video recordings of everyday classroom activity. pupils and teachers identified pupils’ learning moments. municipality firewalls prevented school access to the project software. two teachers who were fully engaged in the project had both previously studied at a distance. proto-type moocs for professional learning of rural and remote practitioners with aim to model moocs as a learning tool for them to then use in their practice. some practitioners were prevented from accessing the moocs because of work firewalls. practitioners enjoyed the second mooc which had one platform (google communities). the project did not have the ripple effect intended with no subsequent practitioner-led moocs. ipads used in a cultural and heritage outdoor learning project multiple digital artefacts (e.g. an e-book, a podcast, an animated film) were created by different classes and schools. ipods for all pupils and teachers in one primary school mixed results with some teachers using ipod activities as a ‘treat’ to do when other work was finished. schools and a university sharing learning spaces for professional learning, initial teacher education and pupil learning with live video conferencing via interactive smartboards initial teacher education students observed school classes and eight schools joined together in some live activities. 1-to-1 ipads for secondary school pupils and teachers several teachers incorporated the use of ipads into their teaching and learning in action research projects. the use of ipads for reflective blogging activities was most popular. podcasts for parentcraft (antenatal) education in remote rural areas podcasts became integrated into the text service the health authority had implemented with reminder texts and links to the podcasts sent to all pregnant women. while there are similarities with kolb’s (2017) triple e framework (engage, enhance, extension) i assessed the projects using a four-part framework of purpose, planning, passion and pedagogy. kenny’s (2004) study relating to the management educational technology projects in universities referred to the need for autonomy, a distinct but flexible team with shared goals, good communication, enthusiasm, staff development and support at all stages of the project. i use the term ‘passion’ in my framework rather than 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 ‘enthusiasm’ as i considered that more than enthusiasm was needed to see a project to fruition. there had been enthusiasm for the project i was analysing but this had not been enough to make it successful, in particular it was not sustainable. after reflecting on my experiences in that one project i then turned to my experiences in other educational technology projects. as table 2 below shows there were very few projects that i have assessed as being excellent to good in all four areas. often a lack of communication compounds deficits in the four areas (al bishawi, 2015). clearly if a project is lacking purpose then it is unlikely to be well-planned with a clear pedagogy, however some projects did have a clear purpose which focused on pedagogy but then were not planned out well and lacked passion in the organisers and/or practitioners/participants. for ethical reasons, the projects are not named (brooks, te riele & maguire, 2014). findings it is useful to note that the educational technology projects mainly took place across the north of scotland, including in remote rural areas. the use of educational technology can be a solution to different types of isolation. there is physical isolation from centres of population but also professional isolation, for many are sole practitioners who do not have the opportunity to meet or collaborate with colleagues in their field on a regular basis, for example school subject specialists, gaelic medium educators and community learning and development practitioners. the seven projects included in this reflective process involved educators in the school, community and higher education sectors. four projects centred exclusively on participant learning: one with primary school pupils learning with ipads (shanks & bain, 2015); one with primary school pupils learning with ipods (cornelius & shanks, 2013, 2017); and one via podcasts with parents-to-be (nhs highland, undated). two projects covered both professional learning and the teaching and learning of school pupils: using 1 to 1 ipads (shanks, coyle & thomson, 2017); and videoing lessons and teacher education students through live smart board video conferencing (al bishawi, 2015). one project exclusively concerned professional learning: community learning and development practitioners learning in mini-moocs (mcardle, al bishawi, marston & shanks, 2015; mcardle, al bishawi & shanks, 2015). in the table below i have brought together the reflections that i noted for each project and what actions i would take in the future. i present my assessment of whether a project had a clear purpose, good planning and project management, the extent to which key players were passionate about the project, and whether there were clear pedagogical goals. in the final column i have noted how i would act differently if i was involved in a future version of a similar project. i have changed the order of the projects from table 1 in order to anonymise them as much as is possible. the projects are rated 1 for excellent to good, 2 for adequate and 3 for poor. 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 table 2 reflections on my experiences of seven educational technology projects (rated 1 for excellent to good, 2 for adequate and 3 for poor). purpose planning passion pedagogy future actions authentic and clear purpose. (1) detailed planning and well-developed project management. (1) teachers, pupils and local authority staff were all keen. (1) clear goals for pupil learning and professional learning also took place. (1) ensure staff are involved in planning their own projects. time was taken to ensure that there were clear goals for the implementation of the technology devices. (1) detailed planning linked to a masters course. good project management – organised to suit the staff involved. (1) many teachers and pupils were enthusiastic. (1) teachers completed a masters course based on the changes they introduced. (1) what worked best was making the teachers choose their own project. initially there was not clarity but after individual visits to the schools and teachers each teacher found an individual purpose. (1) there were some difficulties with firewalls which prevented teachers using the project software in schools. this was a planning error. (2) teachers, pupils and university staff were keen but other stakeholders were not so interested. (2) professional learning for teachers and the enhancement of pupils’ metacognition skills. (1) do more at the beginning and throughout the project to ensure buy-in from all stakeholders. it was left up to each teacher how to deploy the technology so there was no clear purpose for the school as a whole. (3) due to the donation of technology devices there were not clear goals or planning to begin with. (3) some of the teaching staff, younger pupils and local authority staff were keen. (2) pupil learning was the focus of the project with teaching staff also learning along the way. (2) taking more time to discuss clear pedagogical goals with each teacher. clearly defined purpose which was part of a research project. (1) some detailed planning but also tension between project members about the use of different technologies. at times it felt like we were ‘spinning plates’ online as so many different platforms were being used simultaneously. (2) university staff and some practitioners were enthusiastic, but it was hard to introduce technology to those who saw themselves as ‘people people’. (2) the pedagogy was clear – to enable more reflexive practitioners. (1) take time to ensure clear understanding between educationalists and technologists. there was a very clear purpose – to ensure availability of up to date information in an accessible way. (1) detailed planning took place with scripts peer reviewed. (2) some hospital staff were more passionate than others. (2) aim to increase knowledge, understanding and confidence of parents. (2) successful project due to determination of key staff members. purpose was not clear at beginning and due to high turnover of headteachers the the project had many strands and themes and a focus on a smaller number of themes may not all teachers, local authority staff and university staff were keen. several learning for pupils, teacher education students and application process for schools. educationalists and technologists 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 purpose planning passion pedagogy future actions agreed themes were not ‘owned’ equally by all stakeholders. (3) have been easier to manage. (3) headteacher changes in the schools. (2) professional learning of teachers. (2) spending more time together at the start. in the next section i discuss the four factors in relation to the overall success of the projects. discussion in this study a series of reflections were performed on seven educational technology projects that the author had been involved in. from these reflections several factors to increase the likelihood of success for a project emerged: purpose; planning; passion; and pedagogy. in one of the most successful projects the teachers and learners appreciated that the technology was not simply being used for the sake of it. in that particular project mobile devices enabled various artefacts to be created such as an e-book, a podcast and an animated film. there was a clear purpose for the activities: to link local history and places together by the pupils through digital technologies and the key aim for the education administrators, that of improved literacy, was achieved. without a clearly defined purpose for educational technology projects it may be harder to persuade people to set aside the time to learn how to incorporate it into their everyday practice. closely aligned to having a clear purpose for an educational technology project is planning the project. as noted above, my intention in this study has been to reflect on my experiences of educational technology projects, reflecting on the positive and negative aspects in order to re-evaluate my experiences and learn from these reflections for future projects. while reflecting on the seven projects in terms of planning, i assessed them as excellent/good (two projects), adequate (three projects) or poor (two projects). planning can be understood as a project management issue but is linked to school culture. petterson’s (2018) study found that school culture was a defining feature in relation to digital technologies: a digitally competent school organization can be said to embrace the environment in which actors and practices are given room to change and evolve, where conditions for new forms of digitalized teaching and learning are provided and where goals on digitalization and educational change can be accomplished. furthermore, petterson (2018) notes that it is necessary that a school is well-organised for there to be digital learning that is sustainable with ‘shared goals and visions in both long30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 term and short-term perspective’ and that what is needed is ‘an organization that recognizes the importance of supporting its actors and what culture and structure are needed for sustainable technical and pedagogical development’. in relation to a time-limited project, the level of passion for the project may be linked to school culture. without passion those involved may see involvement in an educational technology project as an additional duty that takes them from other more ‘important’ work. organising collaboration, joint events and training can be difficult but planning how and what to do together is an essential part of a successful educational technology project. in one of the projects i worked on the schools that took part were allocated by the municipality rather than the schools asking to take part and this appeared to impact on the level of passion for the project. one reason that teachers and other educators may shy away from educational technological innovation is that of ‘technostress’ (syvänen, mäkiniemi, syrjä, heikkilä-tammi & viteli, 2016) and as i noticed when reflecting on the various projects i have been involved in, if teachers or other professionals were not keen or passionate about the project then it was much harder for the project to be successful. part of the lack of passion was likely to have been due to the factors that lead to technostress, namely competence in using the technology, their style of teaching fitting with the use of the technology, support from the school, and their attitude to educational technology (ibid). i found that without clear pedagogical goals for an educational technology project it is hard to define its purpose or create and sustain passion for it. kenny (2004) stated it is imperative that learning is embedded into technology projects. neither new pedagogical goals nor new knowledge are necessarily required as existing goals and professional knowledge may simply be achieved and deployed in new ways. for example, in the creation of a new data observatory, much of the professional knowledge and skills utilised in the development of the project were already known; it was the way in which they were then brought together that was unique (shanks, scharlau, saevanee & stelfox, 2018). as noted above the themes that developed when reflecting on my experience in multiple educational technology projects was that for successful change to take place it was important to have clear purpose, planning, passion and pedagogy. without a clearly defined purpose for the introduction of new technology, people will not set aside time to learn how to incorporate it into everyday practice. organising collaboration, joint events and training can be difficult but planning how and what to do together is an essential part of partnership working. in several projects there were challenges that needed to be overcome when developing digital professional learning communities and it has been found that issues of power and control are often absent in discussions of workplace learning (hodkinson, hodkinson et al., 2004). without passion those involved in such work see it as an additional duty that will take them away from other work. if there are no explicit and defined pedagogical goals, then it will be difficult to track or assess the 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 difference that the educational technology has contributed to. conclusion in this small-scale personal reflection on seven educational technology projects i have attempted to understand what factors i could use to increase the likelihood of success for future projects. i saw that without a clearly defined purpose it was harder to persuade people to set aside the time to learn how to incorporate new technology into their everyday practice. in addition, to ensure passion for a project it was not helpful for municipality staff to choose which schools would take part in a project rather than asking for schools to apply. from several projects i saw that technical issues needed to be speedily resolved. after difficulties in one of the seven projects, a new position of ‘relationship manager’ was created in a university in order to ensure that researchers and it colleagues were able to communicate more usefully. this leads back to kolb’s advice not to be a bystander but to shape what happens: for the reflective person the awakening of the active mode brings a new sense of risk to life. rather than being influenced, one now sees opportunities to influence. the challenge becomes to shapes one’s own experience rather than observing and accepting experiences as they happen. (1984: 145). while many educational technology projects and programs are not planned nor executed as we would want, there are other problems such as the lack of evaluation of wider digital technology policies (spector & yuen, 2016) at municipality, regional and national level. through this study i have attempted to learn from my involvement in past projects in order to influence and shape future experiences. it is hoped that this work can help to link practice back to research as well as indicating a way for lessons to be learnt in future educational technology projects. references argyris, c. & schön, d.a. (1974). theory in practice: increasing professional effectiveness. san francisco, ca: jossey bass. al bishawi, r. (2015). bridging the divide between educationalists and technologists. education in the north, 22(special issue), 80-83. attard tonna, m. & shanks, r. 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(eds). new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203728703-13 spector, j.m. & yuen, a. h. k. (2016). educational technology. program and project evaluation. abingdon, england: routledge. syvänen, a., mäkiniemi, j.-p., syrjä, s., heikkilä-tammi, k., & viteli, j. (2016). when does the educational use of ict become a source of technostress for finnish teachers?. seminar.net, 12(2), 95-109. retrieved from https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/seminar/article/view/22812016 tarrant, p. (2013). reflective practice and professional development. london: sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526402318 underwood, j., & dillon, g. (2011). chasing dreams and recognizing realities: teachers’ responses to ict. technology, pedagogy and education, 20, 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939x.2011.610932 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203728703-13 https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/seminar/article/view/22812016 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526402318 https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939x.2011.610932 30 years of ict in education: reflecting on educational technology projects abstract introduction reflection and evaluation of educational technology projects methodology findings discussion conclusion references microsoft word strand and hjeltnes design of customized corporate e-learning.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 design of customized corporate e-learning knut arne strand phd candidate faculty of informatics and e-learning sør-trøndelag university college e-mail: knut.arne.strand@hist.no tor atle hjeltnes assistant professor faculty of informatics and e-learning sør-trøndelag university college business developer tisip e-mail: toratle@tisip.no abstract today's educational institutions deal increasingly with external commercial organizations in connection with e-learning deliveries. production and delivery of e-learning to corporations is different from both traditional campus education and online distance education for independent online students. this study discusses challenges related to e-learning production and delivery for corporate customers. consequently we have identified appropriate guiding principles that should contribute to the specification of a model for design of customized corporate e-learning. we place particular emphasis on collaboration and stakeholder involvement, formative evaluation, utilization of technological opportunities, and relevant training for all parties involved. moreover, we propose to benefit from concurrent design principles to achieve effective and efficient multidisciplinary collaboration in the design process. the study is based on primary data from two different projects where an educational institution offers e-learning for external corporate customers. in addition we collect secondary data from available research literature on e-learning and supplementary data from colleagues with long experience in this field. keywords: online distance learning, corporate e-learning, e-learning design, concurrent instructional design, stakeholder involvement, formative evaluation. introduction corporate e-learning can occur in different forms and there are several challenges to consider. how do we ensure that our customers get the elearning program they want? at the same time, how should we fulfill the requirements for effective and efficient production and delivery, where sharing and reuse are means to achieve benefits? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 2 in the e-learning business there are several market domains with different providers and customers. the e-learning providers emphasized in this study could be categorized as academic research and development institutions. this means that the e-learning provider has a focus on effective and efficient use of e-learning technology for rather complex educational programs. this is in some contrast to commercial e-learning providers who have to focus more on making profit (hoppe & breitner, 2004). in this study, the academic institution emphasizes production and delivery of e-learning education ordered by external organizations. the customers are external companies and organizations who want approved academic courses giving credits, but also a certain degree of business customization. in one of the cases we focus on, the customer wants vocational training in a non-academic context, e.g. without student credit points. we use the term corporate e-learning to indicate that the deliveries are ordered by external commercial organizations. in the following reading, the external commercial organization will also be called customer or client. we have collected primary data from two projects which are carried out by our academic institutions. these projects are both in the category of corporate elearning, but they are quite different with respect to the customers' requirements. the assignment from one customer was to deliver self-paced elearning for vocational training. the other customer requested a customized higher educational program at bachelor level with student credit. the purpose of this study is to highlight what should be considered when an educational institution develops a model for customized corporate e-learning production and delivery. the study is based on three categories of research data: primary data was collected from two projects briefly described in the method and material section, secondary data was taken from the e-learning literature and supplementary data was gathered using general knowledge and skills required through earlier production and delivery of e-learning at the academic institutions. the study is exploratory and the empirical data are meant to illustrate some challenges that must be considered in the context of customized corporate elearning production and delivery. we place particular emphasis on the stakeholder involvement, formative evaluation, collaborative processes and possible support tools. in the future, we plan to further describe and practically test procedures and processes to get more firsthand knowledge regarding a new model for design of customized corporate e-learning. in this article, we start by describing the research method and material used in the study. this section contains a brief description of the involved academic institutions and the two current projects, as well as data collection and data analysis methods used in the study. then, we have one section concerning production issues and one section concerning delivery issues related to customized corporate e-learning. finally, we discuss what we should emphasize when the goal is to develop a design model for customized corporate e-learning. method and material this study uses a mixed method approach which emphasize on qualitative data collection (creswell, 2003). primary data were collected from two specific projects. tisip research foundation and faculty of informatics and e-learning at sør-trøndelag university college were the educational providers in the projects. • the tisip foundation was established in 1985. tisip performs educational research and development work. tisip offers courses to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 3 corporations, public agencies and academic institutions. the foundation cooperates with the faculty of informatics and e-learning at sør-trøndelag university college. tisip is involved in several research projects regionally, nationally and internationally (tisip, 2009). • the faculty of informatics and e-learning (aitel) educates specialists within computer information technology. there are currently 475 students at the ordinary programs with 40 employees at the faculty level. aitel is one of the largest norwegian providers of distance learning university college courses via the internet (sørtrøndelag university college, 2009). two different customized corporate e-learning projects two projects (bitøk and animalia) are used as a basis to discuss challenges related to e-learning production and delivery in this study. these projects are very different when we consider what kind of e-learning solution the customers want. what they have in common is the fact that the customer is a commercial corporation or company who wants to buy customized e-learning from an academic institution. • in the bitøk project the customer wanted the academic institution to develop and deliver eight customized e-learning courses. all eight courses had to be a part of an already existing bachelor degree, offered by the institution. it was also a demand from the customer that students who had completed all courses in the program should be able to continue on a full bachelor program afterwards. the idea behind customizing already existing bachelor courses was that this would help to make sure that the courses would be sustainable and reusable. the courses should be based on online synchronous lectures using webconference software. the recordings of the lectures had to be available for streaming and downloading, together with text based training material and corresponding mandatory exercise work administrated by a learning management system (lms). the lms was used to present all learning material related to the courses. in addition the local corporate organizer had to set up an independent portal for administrative purposes. it was also important for the customer that the courses could be followed by the students in a flexible way, since most of the students were company employees with many job related tasks and limited spare time. the eight 7.5 credit courses were to be offered over a two year period, with two courses in parallel each semester. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 4 fig. 1 – infrastructure for lectures in the bitøk project. • in the animalia project the assignment was to develop a self-paced e-learning course based on web pages containing, text materiel, oral presentations, video presentations and animations. the evaluation program in the course was based on multiple choice tests and the course participants received instant feedback on their answers. the subject domain area for this e-learning course was unknown to the educational provider, meaning that the customer had to contribute as a subject matter expert (sme), and therefore help to describe the content and develop a suitable knowledge model for the training course. the course, once developed, had to be reusable without involvement from the customer or the educational provider. the course was only meant for the customer’s employees. this training course was in the area of vocational training for slaughterhouse workers. fig. 2 – a web page from the self-paced e-learning system developed in animalia. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 5 the qualitative research approach qualitative data were collected from the bitøk and the animalia project through, project documents, scheduled interviews with involved project participants, and analysis of open (free-response) questions from two questionnaires. in addition, we have conducted informal interviews with relevant project participants, and we have taken part in some of the project activities. moreover, we have used external material such as books and research articles covering relevant topics for this study. this includes the article by mikalsen, klefstad, horgen, & hjeltnes (2008) which has previously been published from the animalia project. the four instructors who lectured the first semester in the bitøk project, and the ict-technician who was responsible for the technical equipments, were interviewed in semi-structured interviews. each of these persons was interviewed once and the interviews took between 30 and 70 minutes. in these interviews, data were gathered about: (1) relevant background and experience, (2) preparations before the program started, (3) preparations before the netbased lectures, (4) problems or challenges faced the first semester, (5) positive experiences and what has worked well the first semester, (6) possible adjustments and improvements, (7) issues to be retained and reinforced, (8) fulfilment of the students' expectations, and (9) if the program had been sufficiently adapted and customized with respect to needs of the customers? all interviews were taped and transcribed into text protocols. the quantitative research approach two electronic questionnaires were given to the students who followed the two courses in the bitøk project in the first semester. these questionnaires were conducted primarily to get an indication of how the students perceived the overall quality in the courses. a mix between free-response questions, dichotomous questions, multiple-choice questions, checklists and rating questions with the likert scale were used. the instrument designs for these questionnaires were based on cooper & schindler (2008, chap. 12 13). it was also used several free-response questions that have been used in the qualitative analyzes afterwards. the questionnaires were distributed to the students as part of the mandatory exercise program. all 33 students answered the first questionnaire and 29 students answered the second questionnaire. at the end of the semester 27 students took the final exam in one or two of the courses in the first semester of the bitøk project. summary of research method and material the research method used in this study collected data from three different sources. • primary data from the two projects carried out by the academic institutions. mainly relevant project documents, interview protocols and questionnaires. • secondary data collected from the e-learning literature. a lot of research literature on e-learning in conjunction with higher education is available; and relevant elements in relation to e-learning and customization for corporations are drawn out in this study. the search strategy included electronic databases and hand searches of some published books on e-learning. we have used databases like acm digital library, ieee xplore, isi web of science and citeseerx. in addition, we have used google scholar that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources (google scholar, 2009). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 6 • supplementary data taken from the academic institutions. they have both offered internet-based distance education since 1994. this represents a lot of expertise and experience but it is also a challenge to take advantage of this knowledge in the research, since much of it is tacit knowledge among the employees (leonard & sensiper, 1998). production of customized corporate e-learning e-learning or distance education are terms that cover several very different techno-pedagogical realities. technical media used in distance education can help to categorize the scheme (williams, nicholas, & gunter, 2005), but we should also be concerned with the instructional needs of the students, rather than unambiguous focus on the technology itself (sherry, 1995). paquette (2004) defines six teaching model paradigms to help classify different elearning or distance education schemes. if we categorize the projects in this study with the help of these categories we could define bitøk as a mix between a distributed classroom and an on-line training project and animalia as a mix between a performance support system and a hypermedia self-training project. the distributed classroom in bitøk is realized with web-conference software and all participants are present at the same time, synchronously. in addition, video recordings of all lectures are made and transferred to the lms. these can later be downloaded and played in the browser (avi files) or with an iphone (mp4 files). learning events are presented live by the instructor and a variety of instruments such as sound and image transmission, slideshows, application sharing features and smart boards are utilized. the on-line training dimension covers the asynchronous mode and this part is mainly supported by services provided via the lms. animalia is a mix between a performance support system and a hypermedia self-training project. individual and autonomous learning are central in animalia, and it focuses on competencies and skills that are directly related to the daily production at the workplace. educational designers are likely to have a different approach when they are in a university context with traditional students, compared to a more business oriented context with external organizations as clients. nevertheless, they almost completely agree on central principles for educational design, and they claim it is important to start the design process from the needs of the learners in all cases (kirschner, van merrienboer, sloep, & carr, 2002). if you are to describe the needs of the learners you must have a close dialogue with the customer. corporate customers are heterogeneous and their needs vary in the different corporations. a corporation must consider the individual needs and balance these needs up against the corporation’s total needs. corporations are also different from educational institutions as a learning arena, since they do not have learning as a primary objective. learning in corporations aims to serve the goals and needs for the business and is a mean to achieve competitiveness, profit, efficiency, etc. (welle-strand & thune, 2003). the production of sustainable e-learning programs adapted to corporations must therefore balance the different needs of the educational institution and the corporation on an organizational level. moreover, it is important that we meet the needs of each individual and the organization as a whole. the different stakeholders have to be involved sufficiently when e-learning is developed, and this applies increasingly for customized corporate e-learning. designers of corporate e-learning (business designers) are much more clientoriented and emphasize the importance of client involvement in the process to a much greater degree than university designers (kirschner et al., 2002). the importance of involving the stakeholders is also confirmed by several of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 7 sixteen instructional design principles from visscher-voerman (1999), which is also referenced in kirschner et al., (2002). the stakeholders receive special attention in principle three, six and seven. • principle three. “during the design process, designers should pay as much attention to creating ownership with clients and stakeholders, as to reaching theoretical or internal quality of the design.” (kirschner et al., 2002, p. 97). • principle six. “designers should not only ask clients and (future) users for content-related input, but should also give them the right to decide about the design itself.” (kirschner et al., 2002, p. 97). • principle seven. “a useful means to help clients, partners, and other stakeholders to choose a solution and to formulate product specifications is by showing products from former projects.” (kirschner et al., 2002, p. 97). we aim to develop and deliver e-learning that meet the expectations and we need to involve all relevant stakeholders in this context. in addition, it is important to conduct evaluation activities early in the process, and to integrate this formative evaluation within the design and development process (visscher-voerman & gustafson, 2004; davidson-shivers & rasmussen, 2006). the web-based instructional design (wbid) model by davidsonshivers & rasmussen (2006) has special focus on evaluation. in the wbid model both formative and summative evaluation is planned early in the project. moreover, the formative evaluation is an integral part of the design and development process and it is important to determine whether the upcoming system actually meets the requirements and needs in the best possible way. this formative evaluation should be iterative and continue during the whole project period. summative evaluation is conducted after full implementation, which is also common for traditional analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (addie) models for instructional design. in the same way, as for the stakeholders, we also find the importance of making the evaluation embodied in several of the design principles from visscher-voerman (1999). formative evaluation receives special attention in principle eight, ten and fourteen. • principle eight. “in order to clarify product specifications, designers should spend their time on carefully planned formative evaluations of early versions of a prototype, rather than on an elaborate preliminary analysis.” (kirschner et al., 2002, p. 97). • principle ten. “for efficient and effective formative evaluations, several (about three) sources and several (about three) data gathering instruments should be used.” (kirschner et al., 2002, p. 97). • principle fourteen. designers should conduct formative evaluations themselves. (kirschner et al., 2002, p. 97). our primary data from the bitøk and animalia projects also confirm that it is important but difficult to involve stakeholders in the project, and to conduct formative evaluation along the way. this is important because it is only the stakeholders who know what they actually want, and it is the stakeholders who ultimately determine whether the system have met their expectations. our experience, particularly from the animalia project, was that a lot of changes had to be performed late in the project. the reason was too little stakeholder involvement along the way and too little formative evaluation integrated into the design and development phases of the project. necessary information and material with sufficient quality was not made available early enough. this led to major changes after the first delivery when the first summative evaluation was conducted (mikalsen et al., 2008). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 8 some of the weaknesses in the bitøk project can also be traced back to low stakeholder involvement. both students and lecturers in this project believe that there is a great potential for improvement of the customization of the elearning courses, but this requires a closer dialogue and more involvement from the corporate employees. experience shows that it is difficult to involve the external stakeholders. this is especially the case with the stakeholders who have the adequate decisionmaking authority. it is therefore extremely important to utilize the available time well, when you are in dialogue with these stakeholders. it is important that the customers really understand the existing opportunities, so that they can better evaluate them against their actual needs, when decisions are to be made. likewise, the provider needs to understand the subject domain, as well as customer requirements concerning the business, organizational needs, individual needs, technical factors, etc. “at a general and highly abstract level, the process of organizing and planning learning activities needs to take into account the following considerations and interrelationships: why learning activities are being planned; who the learners are; what is to be learnt; how it is being learnt; where and when the learning activities are taking place; and, what the effects are.” (welle-strand & thune, 2003, p. 186). delivery of customized corporate e-learning the challenges in relation to deliveries vary between e-learning projects in different categories. the animalia project deliveries were self-paced elearning courses where the challenge by far is limited to technical matters, and requests for changes that occur after the system is put into production. the main focus when we describe the challenges in connection with delivery of elearning in this section is related to the bitøk project category, which is a combination of distributed classroom and on-line training. several researchers have described relevant success factors in connection with delivery of elearning, online learning, distance learning, web-based learning, blended learning, etc., and this covers a very broad range of challenges. in this section, however we restrict ourselves primarily to challenges associated with distributed classroom and on-line training projects. based on a literature study, five independent categories of distance education success factors are identified by menchaca & bekele (2008). these are: (1) technology-related factors that represent the infrastructure and the tools used, and how the varied use of technology in different contexts affects the learning environment, (2) user characteristics and the importance of having experienced participants (instructors, facilitators, students, etc.) that can leverage the technology, (3) course-related factors that generally refers to quality issues, such as structured material, well formulated learning objectives and clearly defined expectations, (4) learning approaches that include pedagogical conditions as well as online collaboration and interactions between the participants, and (5) support services that include administrative and technical support for both students and instructors. other researchers also discuss success factors for e-learning, and the five factors mentioned in menchaca & bekele (2008) are also mentioned by other researchers. several researchers underline the importance of an optimal functioning technology. involved parties must learn to master the technology and aim for varied technological usage during the course period (webster & hackley, 1997; volery & lord, 2000; easton, 2003; o’neill, singh, & o’donoghue, 2004). “the most important factor for successful distance learning is a caring, concerned teacher who is confident, experienced, at ease with the equipment, uses the media creatively, and maintains a high level of interactivity with the students.” (sherry, 1995, p. 343). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 9 moreover, it is interesting to observe that several researchers studying the instructor’s role in online distance learning point to increased time and workload. required work is significantly larger in an online and distributed classroom environment, compared to equivalent face-to-face teaching on campus (smith, ferguson, & caris, 2002; easton, 2003). primary data from the bitøk project confirms that the technology must work perfectly and that instructors need training in order to exploit the technology. the instructors use significantly more time in an online and distributed classroom environment, where customized e-learning is delivered to external customers, compared with corresponding lectures for traditional campus students. in relation to the technological solutions, 100% online data feed availability while the lectures take place is crucial. it is important to install and use the technical equipment correctly and test the configuration in advance. our study shows that sound quality is really important in a distribute classroom environment. the whole experience will be spoiled if the sound is not good enough. the image quality is also important and a means to achieve good communication with students. large screens providing good image quality helps the participants in the interaction between the instructors and students, and this stimulates the communication. in addition, the instructor must be confident with technical equipments, such as the tools embedded in the webconference software (slide presentation tools, application sharing features, smart board features, etc.), if they should be able to utilize the possibilities and vary the use in relation to pedagogical objectives. our study identified several factors leading to increased workload for instructors in a distributed classroom environment. first, the instructor must spend more time to organize the customization and find examples that are relevant for the companies’ students. secondly, the teaching method must be adapted to the technology and the pedagogical setting. it takes time to prepare the lecture, and it is extremely important to maintain a good flow through the whole lecture, when the students participate through distributed classrooms. thirdly, the examples must be prepared in a different way. this may particularly be the case in practical subjects where it is natural to, send hardware components around the physical classroom or let the students physically configure software settings. generally, this shows challenges concerning transference of constructivist teaching techniques from traditional classrooms, to distributed classroom environments. last, but not least, the increased preparation time is related to the video recordings that will be distributed via the lms. filming leads to increased preparation time, since the instructors to a greater extent feel they must think through what to say in advance. this challenge increases further if there are requirements concerning reuse. smaller recorded parts from a long lecture could function as an independent and reusable entity, and this requires thorough preparation. in the same way as we need to be aware of the workload for instructors, we must also think of the students. attending a course in addition to a full job is challenging. the bitøk project study showed that about 75% of the working students felt comfortable taking one course (7.5 credits) per semester, while this percentage dropped below 30% when we asked about two courses (15 credits) per semester. towards a model for design of corporate e-learning production and delivery of customized corporate e-learning can be a complex process and it requires the involvement of several different stakeholders (sherry, 1995; kirschner et al., 2002; visscher-voerman & gustafson, 2004). providers and customers should meet because the customer must understand seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 10 the opportunities that exist, and the provider has to understand customers' requirements. it is only through a unified collaboration between these parties that a common understanding can be established. e-learning programs are sometimes very complicated and there are many different challenges that influence each other. companies have business needs and financial constraints that act as overall guidelines. moreover, they must consider organizational needs and the needs of the employees. sometimes the stakeholders from companies are the only ones who know the relevant subject domain for the elearning system. companies also tend to have restrictions in relation to technological choices, adoption to existing technical infrastructure, security policy, etc. on the other hand, the educational provider must take responsibility to represent the knowledge, develop the pedagogical program, develop the learning material and arrange the delivery of the whole e-learning package to the customer. in total this represents many different disciplines and we need to involve people in different roles in the cooperation. the clearest roles in this context are perhaps: (1) smes who are experts on the subject domain, (2) instructional designers who prepare the pedagogical program, (3) instructors who are responsible for course delivery, (4) students, (5) customer's decision-makers who may be responsible for various areas such as economy, the subject content, pedagogical guidelines and technological guidelines, (6) the provider's decision-makers, (7) developers and graphic designers, (8) engineers who are responsible for production, (9) quality assurance people who are responsible for ongoing formative and final summative evaluation, and (10) the project manager who is responsible for the project within the approved frame of time, cost and quality. several models for the production of e-learning are based on a problemsolving process with a series of defined phases like analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (addie). research shows that instructional designers have different approach to the addie models. this depends on experience and background among the involved project participants, as well as the different kinds of products that are developed. visscher-voerman & gustafson (2004) discusses how the approaches to addie phases are for different instructional designers, and presents four different paradigms and rationalities related to addie. although the customers to some degree are involved in all these paradigms: (1) instrumental paradigm, (2) communicative paradigm, (3) pragmatic paradigm, and (4) artistic paradigm, we find the greatest degree of customer involvement in the communicative paradigm. here the customer works as a co-designer and co-decider in addition to provide needed information. in this way, the customer is drawn deeply into the production process. "ultimately, we believe that all of the paradigms and their accompanying perspectives, tools, and techniques can and do play useful roles in designing effective, efficient, relevant, and engaging instructional experiences. we believe that all practicing professionals should be aware of the value of each paradigm, and use the one that is most appropriate for the specific situation. to do less is to be less than a complete and competent practitioner.” (visscher-voerman & gustafson, 2004, p. 87). an organization that has worked with e-learning over time has a lot of tacit and implicit knowledge (stenmark, 2001), concerning how e-learning programs should be developed and delivered. “[designers] are influenced by their theoretical background or frame of reference.” (kirschner et al., 2002, p. 101). when something customized for a specific audience is developed, the necessary domain expertise may be missing and it may be a challenge to extract this knowledge from the customer and have it represented in the elearning system. these are knowledge acquisition challenges that knowledge engineers have worked with over decades and several techniques and tools are developed (boose, 1989). we can also find such techniques and tools used in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 11 models for e-learning production. the instructional engineering model misa contains a knowledge model to represent the knowledge and competencies to be developed in addition to the instructional model, the media or learning model and the delivery model. the misa model is based on phases and has much in common with traditional addie models. the four models (knowledge model, instructional model, media model and delivery model) are integrated and the different models evolve in parallel through the different phases (paquette, 2004). moreover, they have a focus on development tools related to the different models, such as the telos (telelearning operation system) scenario editor and the telos ontology editor that are discussed in connection with the conceptual framework telos (paquette & magnan, 2008). the wbid model by davidson-shivers & rasmussen (2006) also explains that some stages are conjoined rather than isolated and must be performed in tandem. this is described as concurrent design, and indicates that the design, development, and formative evaluation tasks are conducted simultaneously. “with many web-based instruction projects, especially complex ones, it is not possible to complete all of the design activities for the entire project before starting development. constraints of resources, time, and money, and the desire to be responsive to the customer suggest that concurrent design may be a good approach. concurrent design also permits unforeseen technical difficulties to be resolved well before the final web-based instruction is completed.” (davidson-shivers & rasmussen, 2006, p. 172-173). in other engineering disciplines, we also find concepts like concurrent engineering and concurrent design. this has been a research area for a long time within space technology institutions such as the european space agency (esa) and the national aeronautics and space administration (nasa). “concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to integrated product development that emphasises the response to customer expectations. it embodies team values of co-operation, trust and sharing in such a manner that decision making is by consensus, involving all perspectives in parallel, from the beginning of the product life-cycle.” (bandecchi, melton, gardini, & ongaro, 2000, p. 329). concurrent design is the early phases of the concurrent engineering process where multifunctional teams, possibly distributed in time and space, work together for designing some product (lonchamp, 2000). esa established a concurrent design facility in 1998 and the key elements on which the implementation was based on were a process, a multidisciplinary team, an integrated design model, a facility, and an infrastructure (bandecchi et al., 2000). fig. 3 – drawing of aitel’s room where collaborative design of customized corporate e-learning is to be implemented. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 12 conclusion and further work in this study, we have discussed some challenges related to customized corporate e-learning. when an academic institution develops and delivers elearning for external customers, it is extra important to involve all stakeholders, and to ensure that evaluation is carried out continuously through the process. furthermore, it is important to utilize technological opportunities, and to ensure that all involved parties receive enough training in this context. our findings from two specific projects confirm these challenges and these findings are consistent with the e-learning research literature. however, we find little documentation on how this should be done, and this forms the basis for our further work. we will work further to develop a new model for design of corporate elearning. in connection with this work, it will be important to leverage existing instructional design models, but also to utilize collaborative and multidisciplinary principles from concurrent design. we will focus on: (1) the preparation of processes for customized corporate e-learning design, (2) definition of relevant roles that involves all stakeholders in the design process, (3) specification of needed sub-models that constitute a whole and integrated model for the e-learning system, (4) establishment of a facility, including software tools and hardware equipments, where the team of specialists meets to conduct design sessions, and (5) specification of an infrastructure for exchange of information between working environments at the customers site, the providers site and the customized facility. fig. 4 – picture from aitel’s room where a team practices on the concurrent design method. it will be important to draw on the experiences that we have described in this article. the technology must be exploited in the best possible way, we need a continuous evaluation process, we must ensure that all involved parties receive the necessary training, both in terms of the production and delivery phase, and we must find and utilize tools that are suitable in certain situations for all participants. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 13 references bandecchi, m., melton, b., gardini, b., & ongaro, f. (2000). the esa/estec concurrent design facility. i proceedings of 2nd european systems engineering conference (eusec 2000). boose, j. h. (1989). a survey of knowledge acquisition techniques and tools. knowledge acquisition, 1(1), 3-37. cooper, d. r., & schindler, p. s. (2008). business research methods (tenth edition). boston, ma: irwin mcgraw-hill. creswell, j. w. (2003). research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (second edition). thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. davidson-shivers, a. g. v., & rasmussen, k. l. (2006). web-based learning: design, implementation, and evaluation. upper saddle river, new jersey: pearson prentice hall. easton, s. s. (2003). clarifying the instructor's role in online distance learning. communication education, 52(2), 87-105. google scholar. (2009). retrieved march 6, 2009 from the google scholar web site: http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html. hoppe, g., & breitner, m. h. (2004). business models for e-learning. multikonferenz wirtschaftsinformatik. essen, 3-18. kirschner, p., van merrienboer, j., sloep, p., & carr, c. (2002). how expert designers design. performance improvement quarterly, 15(4), 86-104. leonard, d., & sensiper, s. (1998). the role of tacit knowledge in group innovation. california management review, 40(3), 112-132. lonchamp, j. (2000). a generic computer support for concurrent design. i advances in concurrent engineering: presented at seventh ispe international conference on concurrent engineering: research and applications, lyon cluade bernard university, france, july 17-20, 2000 (bd. 4, p. 119). crc press. menchaca, m., & bekele, t. (2008). learner and instructor identified success factors in distance education. distance education, 29(3), 231-252. mikalsen, a. b., klefstad, b., horgen, s. a., & hjeltnes, t. (2008). an integrated multimedia e-learning model for vocational training. proceedings of the networked learning conference 2008. o’neill, k., singh, g., & o’donoghue, j. (2004). implementing elearning programmes for higher education: a review of the literature. journal of information technology education, 3, 313–323. paquette, g., & magnan, f. (2008). an executable model for virtual campus environments. in adelsberger, h. h., kinshuk, pawlowski, j. m. & sampson, d. (eds.), handbook on information technologies for education and training (second edition) (pp. 363-403). heidelberg: springer-verlag. paquette, g. (2004). instructional engineering in networked environments. san francisco: pfeiffer. sherry, l. (1995). issues in distance learning. international journal of educational telecommunications, 1(4), 337-365. smith, g. g., ferguson, d., & caris, m. (2002). teaching over the web versus in the classroom: differences in the instructor experience. international journal of instructional media, 29(1), 61. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 14 stenmark, d. (2001). leveraging tacit organisational knowledge. journal of management information systems. doi: 10.1.1.16.1636. sør-trøndelag university college. (2009). retrieved february 9, 2009 from the sør-trøndelag university college web site: http://www.hist.no/content.ap?thisid=5239. tisip. (2009). retrieved february 9, 2009 from the tisip web site: http://www2.tisip.no/engelsk/. visscher-voerman, i., & gustafson, k. l. (2004). paradigms in the theory and practice of education and training design. educational technology research and development, 52(2), 69-89. visscher-voerman, j. i. a. (1999). review of design in theory and practice. universiteit twente. volery, t., & lord, d. (2000). critical success factors in online education. international journal of educational management, 14(5), 216-223. webster, j., & hackley, p. (1997). teaching effectiveness in technology-mediated distance learning. the academy of management journal, 40(6), 1282-1309. doi: 10.2307/257034. welle-strand, a., & thune, t. (2003). e-learning policies, practices and challenges in two norwegian organizations. evaluation and program planning, 26(2), 185192. doi: 10.1016/s0149-7189(03)00006-5. williams, p., nicholas, d., & gunter, b. (2005). e-learning: what the literature tells us about distance education: an overview. aslib proceedings: new information perspectives, 57(2), 109-122. rodriguez digital storytelling in study abroad.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 219 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 digital storytelling in study abroad: toward a counter-catalogic experience karen rodríguez, phdi director, ciee study center in guanajuato, mexico visiting professor, visual arts department, universidad de guanajuato email: krodriguez@ciee.org abstract this article examines a pilot project incorporating digital storytelling into a short-term study abroad program in the small city of guanajuato, mexico. after contextualizing the project’s pedagogical and theoretical concerns, the article examines the resulting stories, underscoring their potential for helping students pay attention to specific sites, to think beyond the usual images one is bombarded with and to spark critical thought. it argues that digital storytelling allows both students and host community members to become authors and representers of their experiences, thus creating a “counter-catalogic” study abroad experience, i.e. one that goes beyond the staid images used to market these experiences abroad. digital stories afford an exciting mode for thinking about how to create critical, intimate and dialogic encounters with others. keywords: digital stories, study abroad, sound, image, critical representation introduction for many us international educators raised in the pre-digital era, the question of whether technology separates the student sojourner from a more embodied, emotional experience in a foreign study site has been a prominent subject of late. too many students come abroad only to spend their time tightly wired into skype, the internet and facebook, seemingly more concerned about capturing images for those at home than actually experiencing the wonders at their fingertips. others rarely hang up the cell phones that connect them to significant others and family members, which can also prompt onsite educators to question whether they are truly “here” or not. but students are also using new media in intriguing ways, and within the field, there exists a growing fascination with employing new media to help students engage with the study site and to connect with local community members in meaningful ways. this article examines a pilot project that includes digital storytelling within a study abroad program in guanajuato, mexico. with approximately a dozen american undergraduates per semester, the ciee (council on international seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 220 educational exchange) study center in guanajuato is a small operation which espouses a critical, experiential pedagogy. in both january and july, the center runs a three-week, community-based course that precedes the regular semester. the pilot project described in this article took place within one of these short, for-credit courses. the project is embedded within the study center’s larger digital culture initiative whose goals are: 1) to harness the possibilities new media affords for enhancing dialogue with and reflection about the local community; (2) to become more aware of local uses of technology as we incorporate our study abroad students into university courses; and 3) to use technology to create critical cultural information about the programs we run in order to attract students in a manner consistent with our pedagogy. therefore, we are hoping to construct new ways of learning and communicating as part of a larger structural transformation. this article attempts to critically connect emerging ideas concerning theory with our first experiments in practice before embarking upon a next round of digital projects. while digital storytelling does not embody or ensure critical intercultural thinking, i argue that it has a tremendous potential for recreating both students and host community members as authors and representers of their experiences, thus creating a “counter-catalogic” study abroad experience that goes far beyond the staid images used to market these experiences. the stories created here were experimental in both theme and technique. notwithstanding, the ideological and pedagogical possibilities they embody, however modestly, demonstrate the viability of using the digital story as a tool in critical study abroad programming. toward a counter-catalogic experience: the spectacle of study abroad student experiences are mediated long before they arrive on-site. in an early study of educational tour brochures on latin america, casella (1999) examined how the media constructed knowledge about what type of people, landscapes, artifacts and lifestyles to expect; namely, she identified repeated images that promoted latin america as exotic, colorful, primitive and natural (p. 188). today’s images may have expanded in their breadth; nevertheless, they have multiplied into so many forms and into so many new spaces that the would-be sojourner is bombarded with pre-packaged visuals (as well as an increasing amount of audio material) about what to expect on-site. in this decade, we have also witnessed the burgeoning of social networking sites where students ask about where to get x at the abroad site, whether or not you can wear y, how others evaluate classes at the local university, the sort of host family experiences to expect and so on. their experiences become highly regulated, not only as academic oversight and safety precautions increase, but also as cultural encounters become over-documented and readily available out of context in both virtual and other sites not attached to the locality where students will study. indeed, as debord noted in his 1967 society of the spectacle, modern life has become a spectacle. representations are everywhere and are often preferred over the real thing. not only has everything that was once lived bodily now been replaced by images and representations, but images mediate social relationships as well. debord’s premises of the 1960s are even more relevant for today’s society: from news reports to tourism brochures, online photos and study abroad catalogues, there is a clear need to recognize the spectacle of culture that precedes the experience abroad. correspondingly, we must find ways for students (and others) to respond critically with counter-images which first, reinsert the bodied, emotional individual back into the experience; and second, break away from the stereotypical images promoted through nonneutral media. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 221 we define a “counter-catalogic” experience as one which resists pre-imaged types of sojourns and results in more intimate, unique representations. this sort of experience resists not only the tourist gaze, but also the inherently monologic orientation of a study abroad catalogue. catalogues respond to the needs of stakeholders – universities, parents, students – by promoting messages that: 1) comply with good business policy, articulating what goods (experiences) will be delivered for what price; and 2) communicate necessary tenets: you will be safe, you will learn, you will be accepted into the community and form meaningful relationships... they also reveal what one can expect to see, which means that anomalies, ephemeral experiences and exceptions to the cultural rule must invariably be kept out. catalogues play a specific and needed role, as do syllabi and other sorts of documents involved in academic programs abroad, and my goal is not to attack their content. but with the proliferation of new media formats, we are afforded an opportunity to promote other messages that celebrate the impromptu, the unexpected and the delightfully complex, gray areas involved in living and learning in another cultural context. digital storytelling fits into this framework because the stories that result are about both developing agency and hearing other voices as well; they are designed to let people represent themselves and their experiences, something the catalogue genre cannot permit. definitions of what a digital story encompasses vary widely, although for the purposes of this article a digital story is defined as a 2-5 minute recording with voice or sound joined to a visual component that could include a video clip, still photos, ambient sound or music. as is the case with traditional storytelling, digital stories revolve around a chosen theme and often contain a particular viewpoint. the stories are typically just a few minutes long and have a variety of uses, including the telling of personal tales, the recounting of historical events, or as a means to inform or instruct on a particular topic. (robin, 2006: p. 709) while there are myriad types of digital stories, fletcher and cambre (2009) assert that “if there is an overriding quality found in digital stories, it is their sincerity” and their brevity (p.115). they offer students an opportunity to engage “real” individuals in specific contexts and to listen deeply to their stories which might otherwise go unheard. digital stories can be created using free software (such as apple imovie, apple gargageband, windows movie maker, audacity) or purchased programs (e.g. dreamweaver, photoshop). they can be hosted online on blogs, websites and social networking sites, as well as downloaded and shared offline. often, they are works in progress that are edited and updated regularly. because they can be produced by just about anyone, they open up participation in culture making (or challenging). as henry jenkins has observed, a media creator is not a specialist, but rather “someone who has created a blog or web page; posted original artwork, photos or stories, or videos online; or remixed online content into their own new creations” (2009, p. 3). digital stories thus constitute a powerful and widely accessible means for challenging the status quo, whether by launching previously unseen/unheard representations, by exposing situations of inequality/injustice or by offering hopeful solutions to existing problems and inviting everyone to be an author. since the pioneering work of joe lambert at the center for digital storytelling at berkeley in the early 90s, and with the advent of other new media forms over the past two decades, digital stories have certainly been widely used in educational programs. they have served as a tool for developing multiple literacies as well as a means to help students engage relevant topics in their own and others’ lives within their communities. these stories engender social critique as they bring marginalized, neglected stories to light (see for example, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 222 storycorps, its defunct predecessor site soundportraits.org and the center for the study of human lives at the university of southern maine to name just a few). just as frequently, they function as a vehicle of empowerment, affording students and others a way to create “an agentive self” (hull and katz, 2006): through the narrating and visualizing of their own story, people regain a sense of coherency, meaning and control over their lives. in study abroad, one can easily see the appeal of these modes of storytelling. students abroad struggle to reassert their subjectivity and agency as they confront both subtle and radically different ways of making a life, and social critique is certainly central to critical education. nonetheless, when studying abroad, students are repositioned in communities that are not necessarily “theirs” to critique. in the guanajuato program, students find themselves in a decidedly middle-class setting, and one of our stated program rationales (in our own catalogue no less!) is precisely to provide views of mexican daily life that connote neither telenovela/drug czar wealth nor third world urban or rural poverty. for that reason, we are striving for something which edges into a different territory. one of our promotional slogans is “what will your story be?” in our experimentation with digital stories in guanajuato, we aim to open this up to an “our story” or at the very least, a “my story with you, another protagonist, in it.” however, as onsite workers we are aware of the risks involved – the implementation of digital storytelling could further objectify local community members; it could serve as a techno refuge for shy students or those who are hesitant to engage in a more embodied way; and it could be very “mecentered” and not provide any deep connection with local people and spaces at all. with these hopes and concerns in mind, this pilot project was launched. theory: in search of a more grounded point of departure while many theoretical perspectives could (and should) be fruitfully enlisted for making critical sense of digital stories’ potential, the study center focused on two main framing ideas for this first project: (1) the ideological quality of images and the non-neutrality of sound digital story making is about creating a representation through the purposeful, thoughtful choice of images and sounds. images and sound, however, are imbued with ideological content. as researchers garoian and gaudelius argue, images “teach us what and how to see and think” (2008, p. 24). tourist images particularly embody this pedagogical aspect. aimed at both locals and outsiders, they point viewers to certain readings of city space (dilley, 1986; schneider and sonmez, 1999). when considering the context of a study abroad program, one must immediately ask how to open up (or at least acknowledge) the institutional gazes at hand, as well as consider who might be viewing the stories from which power points. visual scholar gillian rose advocates: a critical approach to visual images is therefore needed: one that thinks about the agency of the image, considers the social practices and effects of its viewing, and reflects on the specificity of that viewing by various audiences, including the academic critic. (2007, p. 26) rose discusses both images and visuality, or how we look at and understand images (consciously or not) within a specific socio-cultural context. she underscores images’ ability to reveal or hide difference, emphasizing that they seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 223 have agency and produce ideological effects. an institution’s gaze may smooth over differences or highlight certain types of differences, or both, thereby creating messages about how to view a place. researchers from many areas have echoed the idea that images have power. foucault’s discipline and punish (1977) posits all of us as being subject to visuality, even colluding in our own surveillance. in psychoanalysis, visual images are studied with reference to the gaze and power, and related to desire, voyeurism, sexuality and consumerism (lacan, 1978; mcgowan, 2008; ewen and ewen, 1992). among others, john urry (1990), catherine lutz and jane collins (1993) and michael cronin (2003) have written on both the tourist gaze and institutional image making of the other. in their different disciplinary voices, they tell us that images affect how we understand ourselves and others and produce intellectual and affective reactions that in turn have social consequences. there is also a long tradition of analyzing what it means to create images of cultural others as part of a research project (in anthropology, see bateson and mead, 1942; collier, 1967; and more recently pink, kurti, & afonso 2004; pink, 2006; pink, 2007; in the social sciences, see john berger, 1972; banks, 2001; sturken & cartwright, 2005). all would concur with stuart hall (2003), who emphasizes that representations are not reflective of fixed realities; rather, they are constructed, constantly changing and intimately related to the context in which one produces and/or views them. one soon discovers that meaning is not straightforward or transparent, and does not survive intact the passage through representation. it is a slippery customer, changing and shifting with context, usage and historical circumstances. it is therefore never finally fixed. (p. 9) in short, understanding images is a challenge and creating images is perhaps even more so. rose concludes rather succinctly that in order to create or understand representations, researchers must “take images seriously” (p. 12). following this, we must consider the effects and agency of a photograph taken by a student or a complete digital story. how can students (or anyone for that matter) think critically about a photo’s infinitely multiple meanings as the resulting digital story is viewed by city residents, by their friends and family in the us and by people in other sites around the world? how will each viewer contextualize this within his or her idea about “what mexico is like?” the multiple audiences involved (local, “home,” and global/virtual) make any sort of representation complicated indeed. while it is not within the scope of this article to investigate all the potential viewings at hand, we were forthcoming during the project with the difficulties associated with image making about a place, and students critically reflected on what kind of images of mexico are widely promulgated through the media. our key aim with regard to visuality was to ask: what themes would students identify on their own as worth studying and how would they choose to represent them through their digital photographs? would these images differ significantly from common representations in us media, tourist and catalogue information? of course, digital stories are not purely visual; they also include sound, something that must be politicized as more than a neutral, multimedia add-on. working with sound makes us conscious that “…being fundamentally oriented toward visual communications, modern culture has little appreciation for the emotional importance of hearing” (blesser and salter, 2007, p. 6). sound is often taken for granted, yet like imagery, it is imbued with ideological content. it is made sense of from specific cultural/power locations (ferrington, 2003), which in turn contribute heavily to places’ identities (blesser and salter, 2007; schafer, 1977/1994). researchers have examined soundscapes since schafer’s seminal work in 1977 (e.g. columbijin, 2007; courbald, 2007; guastavino, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 224 2006), while other scholars have also investigated the anthropology of sound (steven feld and basso, 1996) and the technicalities of listening as audio specialists, a level that most of us will never attain (everest, 2006; corey, 2010). studies of sound are complexly intertwined with the spaces and places of diverse sites that affect our experiences of different locales. schafer suggests that it is even more difficult to study sound than images because we have a limited vocabulary for discussing sound and because sound is not easily notated by the non-specialist. moreover, we cannot achieve a sound equivalent to an aerial photograph, making sound even more detailed and context-specific than an image. additionally, he asserts that “the ear is always much more alert while traveling in unfamiliar environments,” referencing the work of thoreau, heine and robert louis stevenson (1994, p. 211), an intriguing idea for study abroad work. finally, as with images, digital sound recordings are copies of the original: in its new saved rendition, sound is no longer “the” event – the same slippage that occurs between images’ meaning and the “thing” signified is repeated in the sonic sphere. while we have worked with visual themes in a non-digital context in the past, this project marked the first time that we experimented with audio work. from reading about sound, we began thinking about how one might hear a city story through the sounds it makes. can we hear that cultural differences still exist, despite the presence of global music and the sounds of multiple languages on the street? could paying attention to the emotional and intellectual resonances of sound afford students a new means for engaging the local community in both its human and natural aspects? these are the questions we took into the project. (2) the critical collage nature of online postings visual scholars garoian and gaudelius (2008) argue that the collage genre affords a dialogic opening in the way in which we view images, which is an argument that can also be applied to sounds. rather than merely doling out information, capturing a scene, recording history, or telling a story, the aim of collage narrative is to raise critical questions [my emphasis] thereby generating new cultural discourse through art. (p. 4) the collage metaphor is particularly well suited to the gap filled complexity of the digital mediascape. websites, blogs, facebook profiles…all bring together fragments, creating a digital “contact zone” of sorts, a space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (pratt, 1991, p. 34). in other words, a blog filled with digital stories becomes a radical collage in which stories exist in juxtaposition without fitting into a single narrative, which allows for more writerly versus readerly interpretations (barthes, 1975). unlike the seamless look produced in catalogues and brochures, a blog forces the reader/viewer to think about how each piece, each digital story in our case, speaks to one another, encouraging more questions. though garoian and gaudelius critique the debordian spectacle in which we are irretrievably enmeshed, they posit a flip side within which students can seek out ways to critically respond. they identify strategies for interruption and intervention in the artistic techniques of collage, assemblage, installation and performance. they contextualize these strategies within place, encouraging “site specific performance(s)” (p. 33) in an attempt to ground the use of imagery within the local. digital stories created in study abroad answer this call directly; students work to capture local experiences and local residents’ stories and thoughts are undeniably site specific. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 225 finally, polyphony, as first proposed by mikhail bakhtin, relates directly to the collage aesthetic; it is the visual collage’s aural counterpart, a multi-voiced text in which the narrator’s voice does not dominate other voices. not surprisingly, the applicability of bakhtin’s theory to digital storytelling has already been discussed: hull and katz (2006), for example, discuss voice/double-voiced discourse in the context of digital stories; nelson and hull (2008) examine heteroglossia and addressivity in relation to the multimodal aspect of digital stories, while hayes and matusov (2005) advocate for a focus on addressivity versus ownership in digital storytelling work, something exceedingly appropriate for digital work when studying abroad. from these concerns emerged a desire to create a polyphonic blog that would bare both the connections and disjunctions among the various stories. accordingly, the umbrella-blog on which our center’s stories are posted (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/) is also problematized as a nonneutral space of exhibition and interaction, something taken up in more detail below. methods the pilot project to incorporate a digital story component into formal study center teaching and learning practice was initiated in january, 2010. twelve students and three staff members created a range of loosely defined digital stories during this intense, three-week program. the pilot project was exploratory in nature which, not surprisingly, produced ample errors both technologically and pedagogically. students were asked to engage in conversations with local people and to create a short story incorporating their own and the other person’s words. the theme of the interaction and the person/people involved were left entirely up to each student. this is not the obvious or only way to tell a digital story –it does position the student, rather than the community member, as narrator – but given our linguistic and intercultural goals related to catalyzing interactions, the project was structured this way. the stories that resulted thus captured an interaction more than one person’s personal story; even so, this approach could certainly expand in myriad directions in future iterations of the project. study center staff also created several stories within this timeframe in order to accompany students in the learning process; they used the same technology, but did not do the stated assignment. in all the stories, students used inexpensive handheld digital recorders to record sound and their own cameras for visuals, ranging from cell phone cameras to stand-alone digital cameras which varied in quality. they were asked to shoot 4-5 candid photos during the experience, with no advice given on how to take to a good photograph. students were simply told to: 1) ask permission, and 2) make sure not to include photos of children that could be easily identified, given the extortion issues/kidnapping threats that the city endures along with the rest of the nation. study center staff put audio and visuals together using an inexpensive program downloaded from the internet (soundslides), and the finished stories were uploaded onto a new program blog that we created using wordpress. the production aspect of the process was efficient and easy. despite the extremely constrained turnaround time from story creation to the end of this short program, over a dozen projects were produced from everyone’s raw materials and posted in 3-4 days. for everyone, the time constraint was tight, and in a few cases, students switched photos and re-recorded bits of the audio files, although most of the stories were only edited once. as was expected, errors occurred. several pieces were seriously flawed vis-avis the sound quality, which had to do as much with the quality of the digital recorder (and the lack of a good microphone) as it did with simple error or not seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 226 pointing the recorder consistently at the speaker. we also realized postexperiment that we needed more photographs than were solicited from the students, and that aesthetically, more preparation on what sorts of visuals would create interest and variety would have been helpful. in sum, more time would have permitted more editing possibilities. nonetheless, our stated emphasis was on the linguistic and cultural interaction, and we wanted to leave everything as unconstrained as possible in this first round of story production. while the open-ended, do-it-yourself approach has many advantages since it elicits student generated themes, we will most likely define the subject matter more narrowly in the next iteration of this project in order to push it toward a more focused, critical discussion that examining various aspects of a sole theme would afford. given that students were new to the site, their own critical vision was still very much in the process of emerging. were students to create digital stories later in the semester, we would certainly see a different level of criticality as their cultural knowledge expanded and their local social interactions deepened. discussion of the resulting pilot stories beyond the usual images the stories that emerged included images unlike the images produced by the city for tourist purposes and unlike those in our organizational catalogue. tourist texts produced by the city emphasize the romantic and colonial aspects of this place; they are rarely peopled, focusing more on iconic historical sites or architecture that conveys the correct colonial look – 200-year old buildings, large baroque or churrigueresque church facades, empty spanish-style plazas, and the like. together, these images on billboards, tourist brochures, posters and postcards work to tell a certain story about what one finds in this locale. notably absent are the trappings of contemporary life (cars, modern grocery stores, imported goods, etc.) and actual people or individuals. our organizational catalogue for latin america produces images that fit within a different set of categories, most of which are student centered. these include: student groups usually with their arms around one another smiling directly at the camera; students with arms around smiling hosts (communicating that intercultural friendships are forthcoming); students in action, often performing something linked to learning (shoveling for service work, observing a museum exhibition, listening to a host lecture); students interacting in various local sites, as well as city, university, and larger framed scenery shots. together they are designed to show what the experience will be like for the student, the subject of study abroad. while these images are carefully woven into a larger pastiche of “what latin america looks like,” what they do not show is much about the diversity of the local lifestyle. additionally, one easily observes that one city or country looks awfully much like the next. the institutional gazes in tourist and catalogue photos are prominent. in students’ digital stories, however, the photographs take us behind the doors into the non-special, concrete aspects of everyday life in guanajuato. their images are place-specific, proper-noun-oriented (corpus gym, san sebastian bakery, margarita, gorda), and emerge from each student’s interaction with one person or group in a particular moment and place. their photos do not fit into a generic latin american pastiche, thereby resisting standardization into an institution’s monologic discourse. also, unlike the catalogue, the stories are not me-centered; students themselves are not featured, nor are the activities captured in the photos contracted for students’ entertainment or learning. more importantly, despite the fact that students were asked to initiate contact with someone to do the assignment, the person chosen is centered as the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 227 protagonist. the images show the protagonist’s locale, things, tools and sometimes (but often not) their faces. this seems to work against the inevitable subject/object relationship of “i need to do this for a class/you must help me” since the protagonist is there, shaping the story and often opining about which images can and cannot be shot by the student. in this mode, students work against the power differential built into this, demonstrating a certain “correct disposition.” another focus which comes through in the images is the emphasis on how things are made (processes) versus what can be consumed (products) (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/adentro-de-unapanaderia/; http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/hora-delalmuerzo-un-puesto-de-gorditas/; http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/%c2%a1haciendotortillas/). these stories testify to the students’ shift beyond a consumer role (i like it, i buy it), as they permit an encounter which allows those creating to contribute knowledge to their emerging understanding of everyday life in the city (you know things, i listen). therefore, rather than imaging a market relationship, the stories feature images of tortilla machines and cooking braceros, trays of bread and the regional gorditas snack, and so on, and corresponding stories about how each is made. while the images in the digital stories created for the pilot project are not, for the most part, particularly artistic (as per the stated focus of the project on the interaction), they are not voyeuristic, they do not objectify and they do not standardize the experience into a type of event or type of person you are guaranteed to interact with while on the center’s program, therein lies their critical value. the possibilities of sound visuals make up a key part of digital storytelling, but although the pilot stories also illuminate the potential to think about sound in new ways. for example, one story juxtaposed audio taken at a local catholic church and at the blue mosque in istanbul, where our organization’s most recent conference was held (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/ 2010/01/22/the-sounds-ofspirituality-in-two-cities/). in both cities, the day is punctuated by calls to worship. are these two sounds radically different or much the same? here we find a point of departure for reconsidering such black and white responses as these two recordings together offer the possibility of considering seeing human similarity across cultural/religious differences, as well as the specificity of sonic practices in a given area. another story in which the city is the protagonist highlights the quotidian sounds of life in guanajuato (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/ 2010/01/24/everyday-sounds-of-the-city/). this story records the common sonic denominator of the city, testifying to the presence of a type of democratic cacophony as both wealthy and poorer city dwellers experience the same everyday sounds. unlike those in us cities and suburbs, neighborhoods in guanajuato are not class zoned: everyone hears the gas man, the early morning water truck, the symphony of barking dogs at night, the trash bell, etc. on another level, several of the noises captured here indicate the presence of an economic soundscape or a sonic economy: these sounds represent the various everyday goods and services that a range of workers offer. to live here and obtain access to these essential goods, one must know how to identify each sound. sound offers an unexpected tool for gauging students’ specific onsite, experiential knowledge. while the sonic economy example demonstrates an underlying similarity throughout the town, one can go deeper to root out neighborhood specifics. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 228 indeed, the more closely one looks (or in this case, listens), the more one finds an “infinity of differences in finite spaces” (cronin, 2000, p. 18), as one neighborhood looks slightly different from the next, linguistic accents may shift across town, etc. – all are an argument for paying attention to the complexity available even in a small city such as guanajuato (population approximately 130,000). for example, slightly up the street from the study center’s office, there is a man who sits and sings 1960s tunes every day for about six hours (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/whenthe-aural-clashes-with-the-visual/). he serves as an anomalous aural marker on the city map, an idiosyncratic feature of this particular pedestrian street. would this crooner of heavily accented beatles, elvis and bob dylan songs show up in a catalogue? no, but he provides an aural sign of place and his interruption (the accented rendering of songs from the previous generation and from another country’s musical repertoire) points to a moment in which the aural contradicts the visual yet another area not covered in the catalogues which tend toward more complete and smooth displays. from national markers to the city specific, a final piece brings the viewer down to a truly intimate level. on the last day of the three-week session, one of the students sang a mexican folksong, “yo no sé si tú me quieres” (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/christopher-hall-yo-nose-si-tu-me-quieres/) at our closing celebration. as noted by forrester: …we don't “hear” acoustic signals or sound waves, we hear events: the sounds of people and things moving, changing, beginning and ending, forever interdependent with the dynamics of the present moment. (p. 1) for the winter/spring students this term, this song will resonate not only with mexico and guanajuato, but with the embodied memory of friendship and a shared meal in addition to group experiences of cultural immersion when they were brand-new. thus, the stories related to sound emphasized particular and shared events, ephemeral and repeated experiences, as well as connections and disconnections. the sound experiments offer a rich, complex area for further study and open up new ways to represent difference and locality that cannot be experienced in a traditional study abroad program catalogue. as catalogues are digitalized, video and sound are or will undoubtedly become commonplace; the question remains as to whether city sounds will be incorporated or whether we will simply hear students discussing their onsite experiences. incorporating sound – not only speaking/hearing, but also the act of listening – provides a way to: 1) balance the visual-centric nature of contemporary life; 2) capture another aspect of the urban (or rural) landscape; and 3) remind us of the importance not only of “me-speaking,” but of others talking back, something woefully underemphasized in discussions of student learning onsite. mapping the intimate: creating an increasingly polyphonic blog finally, as mentioned above, the stories were posted on the study center blog created for this experiment. while many international education programs have blogs, they often reiterate catalogue images, echoing at least to a certain extent basic marketing discourses, albeit from a more locally situated, “authentic” perspective. we aspire to a more polyphonic, critical collage-like blog that includes a diverse representation of who and what are in the spaces where students study, though this is not a straightforward task. our blog is not structured to be polyphonic and democratic. it is authored by the institution, the ciee study center in guanajuato. it is not open access since contributions are posted by staff and could, in theory, be rejected or edited to fit our pedagogical ends. this relates to liability issues, safety questions and a host of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 229 other professional responsibilities that require thinking carefully about the consequences of a posting before making access open to all. therefore, despite the fact that we are aware that our editing power contradicts the ideas underlying critical pedagogy/participatory methods, this issue remains and must be problematized. that said, we do hope that the content can indeed be polyphonic in the bakhtinian sense (1984) – multi-voiced so that the blog as a whole will not represent a single and narrowly defined ideological position of the study center. for that reason, we attempted to construct a first layer of polyphony for this pilot project on which to add future work. the resulting stories brought out voices that would not be heard in a catalogue. the blog further embodies an emerging polyphony in that it showcases both multiple and individual voices that are not tightly woven together to create a particular reading. we hear the voices of a baker speaking about his work, a host mother’s opinion on healthcare, a migrant discussing his unexpected return to the city, a professional at the university press discussing book production in guanajuato – the variety of walks of life comes through in the different voices here (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/una-opinion-sobre-elsistema-de-salud-2/; http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/ venta-y-produccion-de-libros-en-la-universidad/) consequently, there is no assumption that the blog captures “the” local experience or “the” local opinion. rather, the stories map the unique and the personal, thereby opening up the potential for critical discussion about a local reality that is not fixed and finished. for example, one student’s story focused on his host mother’s knitting hobby, a seemingly non-radical, domestic topic (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress. com/2010/01/27/tejer-como-hobby/), yet it opens up some significant issues. while women from all classes may knit, hobbies are a middle-class pursuit and his contribution: 1) disrupts expected narrations about saving money, and 2) gently nudges the viewer/listener to rethink previous ideas about gender in mexico by underscoring the fact that women pursue interests on their own terms. as the señora notes, she chooses projects that she enjoys, not projects that are dictated by others’ needs, which also reminds viewers to avoid jumping to any quick conclusions that this is a “feminine task” in the traditional or patriarchal sense. in this story, knitting is a source of pleasure, and the señora herself asked that the accompanying images be of her creations rather than of herself, again inserting her own agency. other stories are provocative and polyphonically-oriented more for the juxtapositions they create than for the individual stories themselves. for example, one student inquired about exercise and weight problems, noting her own observations and speaking with a gym owner, while another student spoke with the teacher of a zumba class, who was the owner of a different gym: (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/al-gimnasio-la-dieta-y-elejercicio/; http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/a-moverse-unaclase-de-zumba/). taken together, the viewer/listener is immediately exposed to two different perspectives, which forecloses or at least stalls the possibility of jumping to conclusions based on a single story. uncovering both the similarities and distinctions within several stories opens the way for critical thinking. in one instance, students wondered about how other people in the same line of work would approach a similar conversation and how their own ideas about these topics might evolve further over the course of the semester. had they not engaged these two women centered in their digital stories, the students would not necessarily have voiced their own questions or thought further about these issues. finally, across the blog content one can find myriad connections and disconnections between the various stories. the juxtaposed religious sounds of guanajuato and istanbul are paralleled at the gustatory level as the ubiquitous seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 230 tacos al pastor, frequently referred to in mexico as “tacos árabes” or arab tacos, found their counterpart in the corner stands of istanbul (http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/if-we-are-what-we-eat/). another link emerged between the sound posts and literary mappings in which local poets were inspired in turn by dogs barking http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/noche-de-perros/ and the gasman’s calls http://cieeguanajuato.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/the-gasman-blues/. it is this sort of messiness and layeredness that permits the blog to take on a strong place-based orientation. and i contend that these juxtapositions disrupt how a viewer/reader might think about such everyday things like dogs and food. most notably, the conversation that emerges between the different images and sounds in the blog shuttles student thinking between the oppositions, breaking the divide between intellectual/everyday and inside class-learning/outside real living, creating the more holistic learning that study abroad aims to engender. this beginning series of stories on the blog provides us with a dialogic overall text infused with students’ and local residents’ voices. while a study abroad catalogue strives to create a representation that suggests a coherent, seamless experience abroad, the blog establishes the open spaces between a city’s different aspects of self and the representations we make of a place. moreover, the stories are produced in spanish, which counterbalances the tendency to translate everything for an english-speaking audience: to think about the “write up” of field experiences in the local language for a potentially local audience reverses the outdated model (already rejected in anthropology) of researching “them/there” and writing/publishing/disseminating for “us/here.” jean burgess, who studies vernacular creativity, writes that “digital storytelling…is explicitly designed to amplify the ordinary voice” (2006). in digital storytelling, she continues, “…narrative accessibility, warmth, and presence are prioritized over formal experimentation or innovative ‘new’ uses for technologies.” the study center´s pilot stories, humble and homemade as they are, do exactly this – they amplify the intimate and make available to others the individual, insider encounters that are not possible to highlight in the program catalogue or tourist brochure genres. digitalizing intercultural experiences abroad while technology could hinder students’ integration into a local community during a study abroad experience, this article has attempted to show that as a broad yet specific technological endeavor, digital stories can also provide a route toward more intimate and engaged experiences of place. by standing behind the camera or recorder, students slow down the parade of images they have already been exposed to, and create more thoughtful representations that emerge from their own dialogue with others. simple as they may be, these representations also begin to bring the other senses back in, allowing us to move away from a disembodied or exclusively ocular-centric portrayal of other sites. at least in a partial manner, digital storytelling restores a liberatory possibility of responding to the spectacle with (not for) others and of interrupting expected accounts of this particular place. educator parker palmer contends that teaching and learning spaces “should honor the ‘little stories’ of the students and the ‘big stories’ of the disciplines and traditions” (1998, p. 74). to date, the big story of international education has been overwhelmingly constructed by the american side – polarizing the “us” (sending schools, site staff, even if native; students) and the “them” (local community members, local universities, local sites). the students’ “little stories” created during this short program inject the personal, the other, the anomalous and the contradictory into the would-be fixed narrative that higher seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 231 education tells itself about forming global citizens and internationalizing the curriculum. more importantly, the stories opened a way for local community members to insert their own voices into the representing process. the stories thus interrupt, intervening in the gaps between catalogues, news media and tourist propaganda to inject energy back into representations of place. john hartley notes that “digital stories are simple but disciplined, like a sonnet or haiku, and anyone can learn how to make them” (2008, p. 197). while catalogues must concern themselves with truth in advertising, showing images of what is guaranteed to be experienced, these mexican haikus of daily life in guanajuato highlight the fact that there are other equally important truths within the ephemeral, quirky and individual encounters that infuse a place with intense emotion and meaning. undeniably, digital storytelling affords us one way to ensure that students will have counter-catalogic experiences filled with little stories of their own encounters with people and places. references bakhtin, m. 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(1996). senses of place. santa fe, n.m.: school of american research press. ferrington, g. (2003). soundscape studies: listening with attentive ears. telemedium. the journal of media literary. 49/50 (1), 42-45. accessed 3. january, 2010. retrieved from: http://users.auth.gr/~paki/files/soundscape/ referances/attentive_ears.pdf fletcher, c. and c. cambre (2009). digital storytelling and implicated scholarship in the classroom. journal of canadian studies, 43 (1), 109-130. forrester, m. (ed). auditory perception and sound as event: theorizing sound imagery in psychology. sound journal. accessed 4. january, 2010. retrieved from: http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/sound-journal/forrester001.html foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. new york: vintage books. garoian, c. r. and gaudelius, y. (2008). spectacle pedagogy: art, politics, and visual culture. albany: state university of new york press. guastavino, c. 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(2009). confronting the challenges of participatory culture: media education for the 21st century. cambridge, ma: mit press. lacan, j. (1978). the four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. new york: norton. lutz, c. and j. collins (1993). reading national geographic. chicago: university of chicago press. mcgowan, t. (2007). the real gaze: film theory after lacan. albany: state university of new york press. morgan, n., a. pritchard, and r. pride (2004). destination branding: creating the unique destination proposition. second edition. oxford: elsevier butterworthheinemann. munster, a. (2006). materializing new media: embodiment in information aesthetics. interfaces, studies in visual culture. hanover, n.h.: dartmouth college press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 233 nelson, m.e and g. hull (2008) self-presentation through multimedia: a bakhtinian perspective on digital storytelling. in k. lundby (ed.) digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media. new york: peter lang palmer, p. j. (1998). the courage to teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. pink, s. (2006). the future of visual anthropology: engaging the senses. london: routledge. pink, s. (2007). visual interventions: applied visual anthropology. new york: berghahn books pink, s., lászló k., & afonso, a. i. (2004). working images: visual research and representation in ethnography. london: routledge. pratt, m. l. (1999) “arts of the contact zone,” in d. bartholome and a. petrosky, (eds.) ways of reading. new york: bedford/st. martin’s. accessed 7. january, 2010. retrieved from: http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/~stripp/2504/pratt.html raimbault, m., and dubois, d. l. (2005). urban soundscapes: experiences and knowledge. cities. 22 (5), 339-350. robin, b. (2006). the educational uses of digital storytelling. in c. crawford et al. (eds.), proceedings of society for information technology and teacher education international conference 2006. (709-716). chesapeake, va: aace. accessed 14. january, 2010. retrieved from: http://dsresources.pbworks.com /f/educaional-uses-ds.pdf rose, g. (2007). visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. london: sage. schafer, r. m. (1994). the soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. rochester, vt: destiny books. schneider, i. and s. sonmez. (1999). exploring the tourist image of jourdan. tourism management. 20, 539-542. sturken, m., and cartwright, l. (2005). practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture. oxford: oxford university press. urry, j. (1990). the tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies. london: sage. i the author would like to thank study center staff members eduardo rodríguez and alma rosa silva and winter-spring (2010) students for their efforts to create these first digital stories. special thanks as well to doug reilly at hobart william smith for an ongoing discussion about study abroad pedagogy and all things technological. he either suggested the term counter-catalogic or provoked the conversation which led to it (neither of us remember). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 the constant transformation and re-configuration of educational knowledge through the internet lessons from norway stephen dobson professor lillehammer university college email: stephen.dobson@hil.no rune sarromaa hausstätter research fellow lillehammer university college email: rune.hausstatter@hil.no abstract this essay explores the transformation and re-configuration of educational knowledge, where norway occupies the position of a case and the goal is to develop concepts that are generative and might be applied to other countries. in order to understand changes in educational knowledge, the internet and technological advances are important. the main theoretical perspective developed draws upon and transposes burawoy’s understanding of public sociology into the field of education. in general terms therefore, the goal is to generate and develop concepts that enrich an understanding of educational knowledge and its socio-cultural constitution. in traditional terms this might be called a sociology of educational knowledge. introduction what has been happening in norwegian education? different governments have introduced a long succession of national education reforms (fauske, 2004). they have covered further education through ‘reform 94’ (reform 94), primary and lower secondary schooling in ‘l97’ (curriculum 97), higher education through ‘kvalitetsreformen’ (the quality reform), a reform of teaching practices and most recently, st. meld. nr. 30 and www.kunnskapsloeftet.no signalise, a move to increase competence among teachers and pupils through new curriculum plans in primary and secondary schools. it is possible to argue that these reforms are indicative of a more general malaise in norwegian education (telhaug and volckmar, 1999). løvlie (2003) has described the malaise as a crisis in education’s self-understanding as a discipline; threatened as it is by other more independent disciplines such as psychology, organisational studies and sociology, it has neglected its true cultural-political task, to educate pupils to independence and full citizenship. instead of enlightenment and bildung, educationalists have sought to implement education policy in a largely uncritical manner (solberg, 2003). the malaise can also be understood in more general terms as examples of the following: weak school leadership, below-standard teacher training, bullying seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 2 in the school-yard and the poor performance of norwegian pupils in the international pisa tests (dale and wærness, 2006). the malaise extends to educational research, as noted by a committee appointed to assess norwegian educational research: there is a risk that the funding structure of national research programmes and national evaluations can lead to a too conformist and instrumental research that restricts research of a more questioning and critical character (norwegian research council, 2004: 135). 1 the malaise thesis asserts that norwegian education needs medicine in the form of reforms reaching into every ‘nook and cranny’ of educational practice and research. in response there has been a call for more competent teachers and research on their professional practice (hovdenak, 2005; kupp, 2004; hole, 2005; program for praksis rettet fou research and development programme in educational practice, 2005-2008; lillejord, 2005). an alternative thesis is that education reforms have become fashionable, following trends in other fields and countries to introduce large scale reforms (røvik, 1992). the european trend towards harmonisation of higher education is a case in point. it may be, and this is the argument of this essay, that the patient has been falsely diagnosed, not in fact suffering from a general malaise or lethargy. nor is it necessary to chase after the fashionable, as demonstrated by norway’s refusal to take part in international school tests for many years. a different conceptualization of what is happening in norwegian education is proposed; one that takes as its point of departure the view that a constant reconfiguration and transformation of educational knowledge is taking place (payne, 2002). and the product, re-configured and transformed educational knowledge, is being used to justify and support the implementation of these very policy reforms, changes in professional practice and different forms of learning and assessment. accordingly, this essay shifts the focus to the constitution of educational knowledge and its use by different actors, such as researchers, politicians, civil servants, civil society, teachers and pupils. the country chosen for our argument is norway, but our contention is that the concepts introduced and developed possess generative value for other countries. we propose a sociology of educational knowledge in the spirit of bourdieu (1996:2), where actors are immersed in different fields of practice (each field possessing its own logic and set of dominant concerns): while it is no doubt true that agents construct social reality and enter into struggles and transactions aimed at imposing their vision, they always do so with points of view, interests, and principles of vision determined by the position they occupy in the very world they intend to transform or preserve. secondly, the work of burawoy (2005) in a neighbouring discipline sociology is drawn upon and transposed to conceptualise a division of educational labour and how this is connected to the following knowledge generating questions: • educational knowledge for whom? • educational knowledge for what? thirdly, in answering these questions, it is our contention that the role of the internet is central to an understanding of the constant transformation and re seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 3 configuration of norwegian educational knowledge. actors have to keep in mind that knowledge produced will no longer remain in the form of printed books, reports or textbooks: it can be, and increasingly is, digitalised and communicated through the medium of the internet. this has implications for educational alliances/coalitions by different actors in different fields of educational practice and the networks that result. developing an alternative conception of norwegian educational knowledge to conceptualise educational knowledge we draw upon burawoy’s (2005) presidential address to the american sociological association, where he contended that sociologists have tended to downplay their public role, undervaluing not only the importance of public statements but also the need to make connections with the different groups and members of civil society. we transpose and develop his concepts to understand the field of norwegian education. thus, where he conceptualized and promoted what he called public sociology within the wider field of sociological knowledge, we shall develop a concept of educational knowledge in a public sphere located within a wider field of educational knowledge. the bulk of his address concentrated on conceptualizing public sociology. he identified a traditional public sociology where sociologists write in national newspapers, so that: the publics being addressed are generally invisible in that they cannot be seen… the traditional public sociologist instigates debates within or between publics, although he or she might not actually participate in them (burawoy, 2005: 7). in addition to this invisible public he identified a visible public, namely organic public sociology, ‘in which the sociologist works in close connection with a visible, thick, active, local and often counter-public.’ (2005:7) in many senses this is the view of the sociologist as activist or partisan, where the goal is to strike ‘up a dialogic relation’ where the topic is a conversation about ‘values or goals that are not automatically shared’ (p9) by the sociologist and members of civil society. the knowledge generated in the practice of traditional public sociology and organic public sociology are however not the only possible forms of sociological knowledge. burawoy identifies three other kinds of sociological knowledge: policy sociology (‘to provide solutions to problems that are presented to us, or to legitimate solutions that have already been reached’), professional sociology (‘that supplies true and tested methods, accumulated bodies of knowledge, orienting questions and conceptual frameworks’) and critical sociology (‘to examine the foundations – both explicit and implicit, both normative and descriptive – of the research programs of professional sociology’). these three kinds of sociological knowledge, along with public sociology, are not to be thought of as mutually antagonistic and autonomous, but exist in a relationship of organic solidarity where each type can derive ‘energy, meaning, and imaginations from its connection to the others’ (p15). they constitute what burawoy calls a ‘division of sociological labour’. for each of these types of sociological knowledge, it is possible to identify a corresponding type of education knowledge in the field of education. education policy knowledge covers not only the efforts of civil servants producing policy documents but also the labour of research institutes and educational academics who undertake commissions for the norwegian government and its departments or local municipalities. one example would seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 4 be the commissioned report by haug (2003), which presents the results of the many researchers engaged in evaluating the 1997 national curriculum reform. professional educational knowledge covers knowledge of the field of practice most familiar to educationalists, namely schools, teaching and teachers. six main topics can be identified in the norwegian context: educational psychology, history of education, educational philosophy, special needs, didactics/classroom studies, socio-cultural understandings of education (norwegian research council, 2004: 108-114). others, such as school development and school leadership, can be incorporated in or across these six topics. critical educational knowledge examines the normative and descriptive foundations of professional educational knowledge. erling lars dale, in his work over the last 30 years, has been an exponent of critical education from a theoretical standpoint inspired by adorno. one example is his recent book (2006), oppdragelse i det refleksivt moderne (upbringing in the reflexive modern). critical educational knowledge also includes what happens outside of the schools, on the streets, in leisure time, what might be called informal education (dobson et. al, 2006). for the last of the four types of educational knowledge the term public education, which would be a direct translation of burawoy’s term public sociology to the field of education, is unsuitable. public education has associations with the manner in which schooling is organized, in terms of public as opposed to private provision. the somewhat unwieldy term knowledge belonging to education publics is therefore proposed because it covers the multiple publics in civil society in which educational knowledge can be found: newspapers, radio, television, the debates of local and national politicians, parent association meetings, the meetings of school boards (governors or their equivalent). accordingly, the knowledge belonging to education publics can be traditional and for invisible publics, as in the columns of newspapers, or it can be organic and visible, connected more directly to members or groups of civil society in a role of advocacy. hanslien (2005) researched a semi-professional football team in a middle sized norwegian town. he explored how players were educationally socialised into the club and its ideology. this was an example of organic and visible knowledge and constitutive of an education public, where the communicative distance between his research and the players was small and the research identified and strengthened the club’s inclusive culture. the four types of educational knowledge constitute a division of educational labour, each occupying a distinct field of practice with its own logic. the division of labour is revealed if two questions are asked: • education knowledge for whom? • educational knowledge for what? in answer to the first question, critical educational knowledge and professional educational knowledge are for an academic and practitioner audience, while education policy knowledge and knowledge belonging to education publics are for an extra-academic/extra-practitioner audience. in answer to the second question, professional knowledge and policy knowledge are instrumental and entail a dialogue about means, while critical educational knowledge and the knowledge of education publics are reflexive and entail a dialogue about ends. the table below illustrates these different positions: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 5 for whom? for what? academic/practitioner audience extra-academic/extrapractitioner instrumental knowledge professional educational knowledge education policy knowledge reflexive knowledge critical educational knowledge knowledge for education publics table 1: the division of educational labour put simply, the question ‘for what?’ is about the weberian distinction between technical and value rationality, while the question ‘for whom?’ is about the degree to which educational knowledge should be hermetically sealed as knowledge for knowledge’s sake. students undertaking teacher training are an interesting case. they are concerned with acquiring instrumental knowledge of the profession (for what?), and yet they do not constitute members of the profession because they are still members of the extra-academic/practitioner group (for whom?). it is therefore possible to identify groups with mixed interests, incorporating different aspects of the division of educational labour. coalitions in burawoy’s (2005: 18) presentation of the sociology field, a ruling coalition between professional and policy sociology and a subaltern mutuality of critical and public sociology’ was identified. he argued that this reflected the manner in which instrumental knowledge, supported by government money and power, spoke louder than reflexive knowledge, especially in the usa. is there a ruling coalition in norway between two of more of these four types of educational knowledge? telhaug (2004: 434) is of the opinion that critical, theoretical ‘insight has lost terrain in relation to practical insight and competence’ favoured by educational policy makers and the teaching profession. he also argued that norwegian educational researchers have received steadily more funding for commissioned research, but what they have produced is of ‘a more descriptive character’, lacking in critical insight. in other words, an alliance can be identified between professional educational knowledge and educational policy knowledge, with educational researchers as willing supporters. this alliance is evident in lillejord and fevolden’s (2005) book kvalitetsarbeid i skolen (ensuring quality in schools) where the first author is an academic in a teacher training institute (bergen university) and the second author is a highly ranked civil servant in the norwegian ministry of education. they write about the manner in which professional knowledge of schools is increasingly influenced by national quality criteria proposed by policy makers in an educational directorate (utdanningsdirektorat) established in 2004. they propose that a paradigm change is taking place: while teaching and learning have not been considered problematic until now and regarded as the responsibility of teachers and pupils, the learning process has increased in significance, and the school as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 6 organization is given a part of the responsibility for its quality (lillejord and fevolden, 2005: 14). and this change is connected with: through the national quality assurance system the opportunity is created for administrators and politicians to exert a decisive influence over what is taught and not the least what is learnt (lillejord and fevolden, 2005: 113). quite simply, the reforms of the 90s covered structural changes, such as reducing the starting age for school from 7 to 6 years, whereas quality and learning outcomes are now in focus (lillejord and fevolden, 2005: 126). nevertheless, from the perspective of educational knowledge there is a line of consistency despite the purported paradigm change, connecting professional educational knowledge with educational policy knowledge. the transformation and re-configuration of norwegian educational knowledge when the move is made from the analytical to the real world it is possible to find examples of the different types of knowledge merging and combining in different ways. this process indicates the perpetually changing character of educational knowledge in response to the actions of politicians, civil servants, academics, teachers, pupils and parents. as a result the four kinds of educational knowledge outlined above are transformed and re-configured to suit the needs and desires of these different actors. through the examples that follow, the argument will be made that an important driving force in this process is the arrival of the internet. burawoy’s otherwise inspiring theorisation of the field of sociology has little to say precisely about the role of the internet and its implications for sociological knowledge. such a disregard for the internet must be avoided when it comes to conceptualising knowledge in the educational field (payne, 2000). however, this is not to mean that a form of technological determinism is taken to be the main or even the sole driving force in the constant re-configuration of educational knowledge. european pressures towards standardisation (the bologna process in higher education) and neo-liberalism (the concern with cost-effectiveness and the principles of effective management in schools and other educational institutions) are important in this respect (green, 1999). secondly, taking account of the role of new technologies in educational knowledge must not mean that technology is regarded solely as a tool for the communication of knowledge; it can also be indicative of a form of cultural expression in itself, such as resistance or agreement, and as a source of new socio-cultural relations (løvlie, 2003: 13). accordingly, new technologies give rise to new social bonds. with these points in mind two examples will be presented to illustrate in particular, the driving force and socio-cultural role of the internet in the transformation and re-configuration of the four kinds of educational knowledge outlined above. example 1. the introduction of national tests in norway in the wake of poor performance in pisa 2000 and pisa 2003 (oecd-pisa, 2001, 2003, 2004) educational policy knowledge offered national tests as the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 7 antidote and a means of improving the standard of education. take for example the formulation in the government report (st. meld. no. 30: 4.5.2): the ministry of education’s intention is that (the results of) national tests are to be a part of the final grades in some of today’s common, general subjects. from the perspective of critical educational knowledge, commentators such as løvlie (2005:3) argued that increased use of testing in schools will have the function of ensuring control and system loyalty by both pupils and teachers. but, they will have little time for dialogue, care and solidarity. national tests were trialled in 2004. but this was not without opposition in the form of pupil boycotts. a pupils’ organisation mobilized support through its web page www.elev.no and through an action entitled “pupil action against national tests”, arguing among things that national tests would lead to a public ranking of schools and teaching to the test, rather than teaching with the goal of learning. teachers joined public appeals against the tests (www.utdanning.ws, 06.04.05). these forms of defiance and the appeals from different groups constituted knowledge belonging to what has been termed knowledge for an education public. it was knowledge of an organic, visible character, demonstrating the voices of different groups in civil society, but it enlisted what buroway calls the invisible medium of the newspaper, along with the internet, which, as noted, he chose not to consider. thousands of pupils boycotted the tests in 2005 (stavanger aftenblad newspaper, 27.1.05). the mathematics test for the 10th grade was leaked, so that its validity was threatened. here is the web-page used by the pupils’ organization in their appeal to boycott the national tests: title: pupil boycott web-page seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 8 the minister of education both before and after the january tests expressed her opinion of events on the radio and in different media. for example in a statement to the press (http://odin.dep.no/odinarkiv/norsk/bondevikii/ufd/ pressem/045051-070008/dok-bu.html, 20.1.05) it is possible to read the following: pupils who choose to boycott the national tests must be clear that such an action can have consequences for their progress in subjects and also their final grades. academics at a national conference on national tests (nasjonale prøver – veivalg og utviklingsmuligheter, 8-9th feb.,2005), along with research funded by the education directorate (lie et al. 2005) provided further resistance to national tests: despite several of the tests having undoubted diagnostic potential… 4060% of teachers answered that the tests did not provide them with new information about their pupils (lie et al., 2005: 22). the current minister of education has indicated that there will be no national tests in 2006, but they will be introduced once again in autumn 2007. the example of the introduction of national tests in norway illustrates the manner in which knowledge for education publics is constructed in and through the use of the internet. the internet in this sense is both a driving force in the events above and a contextual factor making possible a set of socio-cultural relations and alliances. thus, actors in this field of practice (knowledge for education publics) enlisted the support of professional knowledge (national conference), responded to policy knowledge (government report) and drew upon critical knowledge (the research that was against the 2005 tests), so that the dominant alliance between policy knowledge and professional knowledge, identified by telhaug (2004), was averted on this occasion. what counted as educational knowledge was transformed and reconfigured through the struggles between the different actors in educational publics. example 2. the educational researcher in norway and the media telhaug (2004), as noted above, criticized educational research for being descriptive and not producing enough critical knowledge. this might reflect the funding structure of educational research by the norwegian research council among others, where professional knowledge and educational policy knowledge are given high priority. in the following example it is precisely the conditions and possibility of critical knowledge that are in focus. on 2nd may 2006, dobson (http://demo.hil.no/sd/index.html, 08.03.07) published a video-lecture on the public page of lillehammer university college website at 10 am. the topic was a piece of research undertaken on the educationally valuable implications of norwegian high school celebrations, what are known in norway as russ festivities. they run between 1st and17th may every year throughout norway. participants drink, party and dance for a large amount of this time. the regional national broadcasting channel (nrkoppland) saw the video lecture and had a radio interview and television interview with the author on the same day, and also published an article on the nrk main web-page. for the next two weeks the author was interviewed on different national radio programmes (p1, p3, p4, kanal 24, nrk sami radio, oslo student radio), seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 9 appeared on national nrk breakfast tv and the national independent tv2 breakfast tv. ntb (news agency) and the main net research paper in norway (www.forskning.no), other net newspapers also carried interviews and reports of the research findings. print newspapers carried reports and high school students were interviewed by journalists to see if they agreed with the researcher. the media coverage ebbed out with a full page article by dobson and hausstätter in a national daily 15th may 2006. 2 the caption for several of the interviews and articles was “russ er sunt” (to be a russ is healthy). this provoked debate because the main assertion was that russ revelry was the source of educationally valuable and healthy experiences. dobson’s goal (and also together with haustätter in the newspaper article) in terms of the question ‘educational knowledge for what?’ was the production of critical educational knowledge of a reflexive character. it is important to note how the validity of the critical knowledge proposed faced challenges in civil society. it was reported on television and in newspapers that russ revelry might have tragic consequences (a russ girl was raped by two other russ). it was also argued that the american prom tradition might be a less costly alternative for youth (article in aftenposten newspaper (4.5.06). the research findings were “condensed” from the video-lecture and a journal article upon which the lecture was based (dobson et al., 2006) to the 5 topics listed below: • self-development and learning from the rite of passage experience, despite the normal view that students were merely looking for an excuse to drink and party in public, • care of others in a positive socially inclusive activity, in opposition to the normal view that youth are narcissistic and uncaring, • peer learning as opposed to teacher-pupil hierarchal learning, • learning on their own premises as opposed to learning within the school institution and according to curriculum plans, • it is a planned normlessness and the high school students learn from the year long planning before 1st may when the annual celebrations begin. this series of media engagements provided an example of the manner in which critical knowledge formed an alliance with knowledge in education publics. the question introduced earlier, ‘for whom was the educational knowledge produced?’ can be answered by looking at the main participants in the education public. first and foremost it was the russ high school students throughout norway who heard about this research and discussed it. they were not invisible, but organic and visible in the terms of burawoy. secondly, parents of the russ participated in the education public along with teachers, police and health workers. as in the first example, the role of the internet played a crucial role in the communication and constitution of educational knowledge as it was transformed and re-configured to suit the needs of different actors. it was a driving force and also a contextual factor supporting a set of socio-cultural relations and alliances. on a general level the internet strengthened and intensified a societal process commonly known under the term the society of the spectacle (debord, 1995). accordingly, the number of viewers increased when knowledge was exhibited in the fashion of a spectacle on the internet, radio, television and in printed media. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 10 on a socio-cultural level, the internet-supported networks connecting media professionals, such as journalists, with education researchers/academics, teachers, civil servants, politicians, pupils and members of civil society, such as parents. moreover, members of civil society could make their own internet mediated networks e.g. e-mailing to each other about the russ spectacle and its coverage in different media. the networks created opened up for greater public participation and a plurality in knowledge for education publics. the concept of networks answers the ‘for whom’ question of education knowledge, covering both the academic/practitioner and the extra academic/practitioner audience. with respect to the ‘for what’ question of education knowledge, referring to education knowledge that is instrumental or reflexive, the internet was able in this example to support a critical, reflexive knowledge. conclusion the focus throughout this essay has been on norway as a case. however, the concepts we have developed possess, in our opinion, generative potential, so that readers will be able to apply them to their own countries and assess their suitability. this is especially the case with respect to table 1 depicting the division of educational labour and its different fields of practice and knowledge. norwegian education is not suffering from a malaise, nor should it be conceptualized on the basis of fashionable educational reforms and what they entail. instead, it has been argued that norwegian education should be understood in terms of the constant transformation and re-configuration of what counts as education knowledge in different situations. moreover, the presence of the internet cannot be ignored as both a driving force and a contextual factor supporting existing and emerging socio-cultural relations between different producers and users of educational knowledge. accordingly, educational knowledge’s four components, identified as professional educational knowledge, education policy knowledge, critical educational knowledge and knowledge for education publics have to come to terms with the presence and socio-cultural potential of the internet: • alliances: the internet makes possible different alliances between these types of knowledge, for different interests and different goals. respectively the ‘for whom’ of academics, pupils, parents, politicians, civil servants, teachers and the ‘for what’ of instrumental and reflexive knowledge. • networks: the internet makes it possible to constitute new networks, joining media professionals with education researchers, civil servants, politicians, pupils, teachers and parents. this is not to mean that the internet is the sole influence on the transformation and re-configuration of educational knowledge. international processes such as the bologna process in higher education seek to develop a common set of standards in europe and exert a pressure on education policy knowledge, in the direction of new-liberalism and the marketing of education as a commodity (karlsen, 2005). secondly, the transformation and re-configuration of the four types of educational knowledge also depends on the shifting interests of different actors. thus, in the spirit of concepts proposed by bourdieu (1996), each type of knowledge constitutes its own logic and field of practice in which different interests struggle for influence, domination and control over what counts as legitimate knowledge, both in terms of ‘for whom’ and ‘for what’. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 11 the concept re-configuration has much in common with elias’s (1986) concept of figuration. firstly, like elias, we are talking of the inter-connections, or networks, between different actors who represent different interests. secondly, it is possible, in the spirit of elias, to map and follow transformations over time in the interests and actions of the actors. however, in opposition to elias, we have focused upon the question of educational knowledge, how it is constituted and under what conditions it gains support and legitimacy. bibliography bourdieu, p. 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(2004): gudmund hernes: politiker og ideolog med sosiologien som veiviser [gudmund hernes: politician and ideologue with sociology as guide]. in h. thuen, and s. vaage, (eds) pedagogiske profiler [educational profiles]. oslo: abstrakt forlag. green, a. (1999). education and globalization in europe and east asia: convergent and divergent trends. journal of education policy. vol. 14 p. 55-77. hanslien, h. (2005). fotballkulturens påvirkning på motivasjon til fotballspillere, med tanke på dannelse av klubbfølelse [football culture’s influence on player motivation, with a focus on the formation of feeling for the club]. unpublished master dissertation. lillehammer university college, norway. haug, p. (2003). evaluering of reform 97: sluttrapport. [evaluation of reform 97: final report] oslo: norges forskningsrådet. online: www.forskningsradet.no (08.03.07) hoel, t. (2005). kupp-programmet og behov for profesjonsforskning [kupp research program and the need for research on professions]. norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, no. 6. hovdenak, s. (2005). education reforms and the construction of identities at a macros and micro level – the norwegian case. nordisk pedagogik, no. 4. karlsen, g. (2005). bologna prosessen en –markedtilpasset – standardising av utdanning? [the bologna process – a market adjusted – standardisaiton of education?] norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, no. 4. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 12 kupp (2004): kunnskapsstatus for forskningsprogrammet [research program knowledge development in professional educational practice]. oslo: norsk forskningsråd. lie, s., hopfenbeck, t., ibsen, e. and turmo, a. (2005). nasjonale prøver på ny prøve. [national tests on trial again]. olso: institute for teacher training and school development. lillejord, s. (2005). hva er pedagogisk kunnskap? et eksempel fra praktisk-pedagogisk utdanning [what is educational knowledge? an example from teacher training]. nordisk pedagogik, no.2. lillejord, s. and fevolden, t. (2005). kvalitetsarbeid i skolen [ensuring quality in schools]. oslo: universitetsforlaget. løvlie, l. (2003): det nye pedagogikkfaget [the new education discipline]. norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, no. 1/2. løvlie, l. (2005): ideologi, politikk og læreplan. norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, no. 4. norwegian research council (2004): norsk pedagogisk forskning. en evaluering av forskning ved utvalgte universiteter og høgskoler. [norwegian educational research. an evaluation of research at selected universities and colleges] oslo: norges forskningsråd. oecd-pisa (2001). knowledge for skills for life. first results from pisa 2002. paris: oecd publications. oecd-pisa (2003). the pisa 2003 assessment framework: mathematics, reading, science and problem solving knowledge and skills. paris: oecd publications. oecd-pisa (2004). learning for tomorrow’s world. first results from pisa 2003. paris: oecd publications. payne, j. (2002). a tale of two curriculums: putting the english and norwegian curriculum models to the test of the ‘high skilled’ vision. journal of education and work. 15, 2. p. 117-143. payne, j. (2000). the unbearable lightness of skill: the changing meaning of skill in uk policy discourses and some implications for education and training. journal of education policy. 15, 3 p. 353-369. program for praksisrettet fou (2005) [research and development in educational practice in primary and secondary schooling and teacher training. program plan] oslo: norsk forskningsrådet. røvik, k. (1992). den ”syke stat”. myter og moter i omstillingsarbeidet. [the ”sick state”. myths and fashions in re-organisation] oslo: universitetsforlaget. solberg, p. (2003). pedagogikken og danningsperspektivet. (education and the perspective of formation) norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift. no. 3/4. st. meld. nr. 30 (2003-2004). kultur for læring (culture for learning). norwegian government report. telhaug, a. (2004). pedagogikkvitenskap i krise? [educational science in a crisis?] in, norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift. nr. 6. tellhaug a and volckmar, n. (1999). norwegian education policy rhetoric 1945-2000: education philosophy in the political party platform. scandinavian journal of educational research. 43, 3 p. 275-293. www.kunnskapsloeftet.no (raising knowledge – policy document) (15.7.2006) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 13 11 all translations from norwegian have been undertaken by the authors. 2 regional nrk radio and regional nrk tv (2.5.06). net newspapers (www.nrk.no 2.5.06, www.forskning.no 4.5.06, ntb – 3.5.06, helseogarbeid.no – 4.5.06, bergen net student newspaper – 5.5.06, aftenposten net edition – 4.5.06). radio interviews (p1 – 3.5.06, 8.5.06, 9.5.06, p3 – 6.5.06, kanal 24 – 4.5.06, radio nova – 4.5.06, nrk sami radio –11-5-06). print newspapers (gd – local daily – 6.5.06, national daily dagbladet, little note in national daily vg – 4.5.06). national breakfast tv (nrk 1 – 9.5.06, tv2 – 10.5.06) lakovic-revidert seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 121 creating and reading images: towards a communication framework for higher education learning natasa lackovic learning sciences research institute visual learning lab/school of education the university of nottingham email: psxnl1@nottingham.ac.uk abstract this article offers theoretical underpinnings that can support an imagebased communication framework for higher education. this framework targets students in higher education for the purposes of their productive engagement with curriculum content through visual materials and accompanying narratives. its structure is presented in the concluding part of the article and arises from the reviewed literature throughout the article. within this structure, blogs are suggested to serve the purpose of an image and narrative repository. the main argument in the article is that imagebased communication provides a tool for externalizing students’ process of concept understanding. that understanding is seen to surface while students create, explain in writing and then discuss the created images with their peers and teacher. in that respect, the suggested framework might provide a channel for expressing students’ prior knowledge and cultural background alongside being an alternative way of communication method in higher education. keywords: image-based communication, understanding, concepts, higher education, students, teaching and learning learning and understanding with images “‘learning’ is, most often, figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you currently think. there are many ways of doing that. some are more intuitive; others are formally derivational. but they all depend on knowing something ‘structural’ about what you are contemplating how to put it together. knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it. it permits you to go beyond it.” bruner, j. (1984, p. 183.) in the extract above, bruner points to the heart of learning: understanding what is being studied by using some structure for bridging prior learning experience with the new and ongoing one. this structure should help in new knowledge construction. one important strategy to support knowledge seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 122 construction is scaffolding. wood, bruner and ross’ (1976) notion of ‘scaffolding’ builds on vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (valsineer & vandeerver, 1997) and refers to a dynamic structure involving an interaction between the learner and someone more knowledgeable. the latter helps the former reach a higher level of understanding than that held at the moment of the activity. in metaphorical terms, the teacher ‘scaffolds’ the development of the student. this dynamic interaction in learning is not a simple happening; it has some form and structure which features action and response, judgment and assistance. this article attempts to offer a device around which a scaffolding encounter can be built, in this case a discussion and reflection triggered off by images. the term ‘image-based communication’ is suggested rather than ‘visual communication’ because ‘communication’ in this article implies conversation and verbal feedback triggered by the particular potential of specific images. this article argues in favour of developing image-based communication in higher education (hereafter he) and suggests a possible framework for such communication. the framework appears at the end of the article in the form of a conceptual structure and a list of constituents building on the reviewed literature that supports it. first, the article provides theoretical underpinnings that relate to the general importance of images in communication and then to their more specific importance in he. it goes on to provide further theory and research informed examples that support the importance of an image-based communication framework with sections on: understanding and learning experience, creative multi-cultural communication, communicating concepts through images and narratives, and suggesting a platform for that communication blogs. the article finishes with a possible framework for image-based communication in he, acknowledging the challenges within it. communication as the main marker of human cultures the primary concern of human culture could be defined as ‘the production and exchange of meanings between the members of a society or group’ (hall, 1997, p.2). every person carries certain cultural specifications when entering any form of communication, and university communication is no exception. culture is seen as a set of signifying practices (hall, 1997).that means that whatever we do, there is some meaning behind it. the production and exchange of such meanings is realized through different communication means/modes (hodge & kress, 1988, p.1). communication resources are human-made artefacts that can carry meanings – language (spoken and written), a piece of music, furniture, technology, machine, film, painting, photography. all of these forms, since they carry meanings, can be read (fairclough, 1995).there is a high degree of symbolism and metaphor in communication and human-made artefacts (texts); the meaning of human communication is rarely literal or straightforward. we actively read each others’ signs (language, gestures, movements, actions). human-made artefacts are seldom perceived in a narrowly defined way. moreover, even the objects found in nature may be turned into metaphors by humans. for example, ‘rose giving’ is most likely to signify ‘attraction’ or ‘passion’ from a man’s perspective when directed towards a woman (barthes, 2000, p.113). this act is a pure cultural artefact. in the same manner, speech, written words, photographs or drawings being cultural artefacts have signifying properties. discussing any object, concept, or artefact’s signification (meaning) using some structural framework of meaning making can become a possible learning method: one which might uncover unravelling significations in learners’ minds. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 123 although human-made artefacts have the property of making multiple meanings, defining the meanings of artefacts is useful and necessary, especially in education. humans do define the meanings of artefacts (e.g. in dictionaries) in order to avoid chaos and confusion in shared activities. discursively sharing private perceptions of an artefact and/or a concept may cast light on how humans create meanings of that particular concept or artefact. one of the possibilities for discussing images is achieved through applying the twin lenses of semiotics and social semiotics (also called ‘sociosemiotics’).this general interpretative approach offers versatile tools for ‘reading images’ and investigating meaning making. people can always ignore and challenge the meaning-making potential of communication signs and refuse to make or accept any meaning (musson, cohen & tietze, 2007; rose, 2007; jewitt, 2008a, p.4). however, they may not succeed in escaping interpersonal communication. in the case of education, what full-time university students are not supposed to escape (although some may do so) is classroom experience with their peers and teachers. within this paper, i am advocating an enhancement of classroom experience which might externalize students’ understanding through image-based communication. the following section provides an overview of the importance of image-based communication dealing with the concepts of visual tools’ strength and persuasiveness, meaning making, image interpretation and multimodality. it finishes with a view on the importance of proper instruction for any communicative task as an overture for the following section on image-based communication in he in particular. image-based communication and interpretation image-based communication has gained special attention in our postmodern society (jewitt, 2008a, p.1), in spite of the fact that it has existed as long as the early cave paintings (prosser,1998). kress and van leeuwen (1996) rightly argue that ‘given the importance of visually displayed information, there is an urgent need for developing adequate ways of talking and thinking about the visual’ (ibid, p.33). visual inputs inform viewers about many aspects of society. they are influential. the persuasive strength of visual input is exemplified in michael apple’s (2004) discussion of the power of media-created imagery in audience’s mind. apple admits that he could not escape the influence of such imagery (apple, 2004, pp. 159, 160). seeing the footage of the 9/11 attack, he could not suppress a hollywood-manufactured idea of how such an attack would look. apple expected to see more smoke and fire, a bruce willis-style magnadestruction like the explosion pandemonium of ‘die hard’, and a plethora of similar hollywood films. in this example, apple questioned his own foundations of reality when something happened for real, because he compared reality to what that reality was expected to be in his mind. in this way, visual media shape our consciousness and influence our thinking. many scholars have investigated visual representations and meaning making, placing their focus on different visual resources such as: advertisements (barthes, 2000; amouzedah & tavangar 2004), health leaflets (jewitt, 1997), cd roms (jewitt, 2002), monuments (kruk, 2008), video clips (martinec, 2000), and so on. what they all have in common is the idea that visual representations convey meanings. this idea offers a possibility for analyzing and discussing those meanings, and thus offers a versatile approach for learning and teaching. if visuals are accompanied by a narrative-based explanation, there is formed a powerful multimodal form of expression. it is this point that hull and nelson (2005) make in defining what is so powerful about multimodality: the richness and variations of expression modes. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 124 making meaning-for-learning of images is one mode of expression. it functions in accordance with certain spatial rules and the orchestration of visual material, as argued by the leading scholars in instructional (multimodal) design and application (mayer, 2001, weinstein & mayer, 1983; mayer & moreno, 2002; carpenter & shah, 1998). this approach has led to emphasis on the information processing nature of learning from image. knowing how a visual message is decoded at the cognitive level is important and should be considered when visuals are discussed. however, the focus in this article is not the cognitive debate that surrounds image processing. the article focuses on why and how learners can construct and use images in order to support he communication and why such communication is important for understanding the taught concepts. images and language are different modalities of communication. the same kind of meaning can be conveyed in different modalities (kress, 1998). it is proposed here that students may create digital artefacts in which both an image and an accompanying narrative convey the same meaning (or a similar one). in that respect, students may be encouraged to create their representations of taught concepts through their own digital multimodal artefact, for example by using the medium of a blog. digital and multimedia expression ‘privileges personal voice and expression of popular culture and local/private knowledge’ (hull & nelson, 2005, p. 233) and is in line with the need for personal expression and an acknowledgment of students’ socio-cultural backgrounds and prior experience. this supports the communication framework presented here and the educational practices it invites. this procedure may start with a scientific/disciplinary concept chosen by the teacher (from a book, an article, or a lesson). after reading and after attending a lesson, students may be given core concepts (by the teacher) through a type of conceptual grid. this grid may contain the teacher’s definition of concepts intended to be learnt as well as important terms and issues that relate to them. students may then subsequently use images and accompanying narratives to present their understanding of those very concepts. that understanding relates to the image students create in their mind while thinking about the concept. it may happen that students do not form any images of concepts. however, thinking is most likely multimodal, thus not only words are formed in the mind but other accompanying modes that affect understanding: context, shape, sound, smell, emotion, colour. each mode offers a possibility of transformation into a different mode. for example, emotion ‘sad’ could be represented through colour ‘blue’, the smell of something through the image of that something. in each case, students are expected to create accompanying narratives which would act as the main source of expressing their understanding. once the images are created, communication may be built through discussing and interpreting them, for example following the principles of semiotic meaning making. proper instruction prior to interpretation interpretation occurs when a percept (what is seen) is assimilated to the memory structure (existing cognitive architecture) (zoethout & jager, 2009). in simple terms, this means that prior experience and knowledge structure should be evoked in order for interpretation to occur. ausubel’s (1963) ‘advance organizer’ reflects the importance of connecting the prior to the ongoing knowledge base: learning is more meaningful if the information presented to the students sets up cognitive scaffolding on which to build understanding of new information. the setting up of cognitive scaffolding is seen to be an ‘advance organizer’ (ibid.). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 125 an advance organizer makes the assimilation of existing and new structures of information easier. it refers to instruction and task preparation – what is told to the students, how the task is set, what structure is offered for their learning, and why. this is useful for teachers to consider when they use images for the purposes of communication around taught concepts. explaining concepts with images and setting relevant tasks requires careful and purposeful explanations. for example, teachers can set a task for students to create images and explain to them that the purpose of such a task is revision and consolidation of the taught concepts: their images will thereby serve classroom communication and expose their understanding of the taught concepts. students can discuss their creations in pairs, with other peers, and with the teacher. importantly, teachers can preserve the ownership of the lesson as well as knowledge base development and control. thus, they can move (scaffold) students’ interpretation towards the disciplinary concepts taught in their domain in he practice. supporting the framework for an image-based communication in he the potential of image-based communication for higher education practice is not a new idea. david sless (1981) argued in the concluding part of his book ‘learning and visual communication’ that: ‘..the overall culture in our societies is increasingly dominated by hybrid forms that use many visual forms of communication which our education system either ignores or simply takes for granted. if our general education does not, in the formative years, develop and enlarge the expectations students have of visual materials, we lose a potential method of understanding which higher education cannot fully take advantage of without engaging in the remedial activity.’ (p.180) the questions that can be asked today relate to this ‘old’ concern: have students shifted their notions of the visual (e.g. beyond the superficial, decorative and illustrative)? have academics accepted it, applied it, and embraced it? an educational concern with the visual started much earlier than the 1980’s – in the us, edgar dale’s ‘audio-visual methods in teaching’ was first published in 1945. still, it seems that despite decades of research acknowledgment and frequent appeals for providing an appropriate space for visual inputs in learning, little has changed in universities today. visual materials continue to be considered as less academic reserved for use in school, or simply associated with routine illustrations (stanzcak, 2004, p.1471) or children’s entertainment. something we depart from when we grow up. it is true that these days’ universities are more open to the use of visual materials under the web 2.0 breakthrough (o’reilly, 2005; andersen, 2007) and the new millennium culture of digital media communication. however, the question is whether this use is pedagogically well-defined. one may also ask whether there has been proper attention to the messages sent through a vast amount of literature on the potential and useful application of visual materials for educational purposes (e.g. sless,1981; barlex & carre, 1985; winn, 1993; marr, 1982; carney & levin, 2002; kress & van leeuwen, 2006, jewitt, 2008b). it may be that a certain misuse and misunderstanding of the visual could have contributed to academic scepticism. the point of this paper is to argue that if visual material is treated in a manner that engages students enough and puts them in the position of creators and scrutinizing analysts, rather than idle glancers (sless, 1981), then the future for pedagogical seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 126 use of visuals may be brighter. seeing is not believing, and nor is it learning. what matters is how this human ability of seeing is articulated within educational practice. it may be a challenging but worthwhile and creative practice for students to tease out ways of linking visual materials to taught disciplinary and curricular concepts. they may thereby be prompted to present their understanding both visually and in words. generally speaking, the university is yet to employ an appropriate, learningoriented use of visuals. hull and nelson (2005, p.225) quote delpit’s metaphor of ‘logocentric, essay driven universities’ (delpit, 1995). of course, the primacy of letters is noted. there need be no intention of overthrowing it, just acknowledging other media. this acknowledgment might include the concepts of multiliteracies. the term multiliteracies as meant in this article originated with the new london group. this group concluded that one side of multiliteracies deals with ‘the multiplicity of communication channels and media’ (cope & kalantzis, 2000, p. 5). those channels include visual tools. for example, still images are one distinct group of visual tools. in that respect, certain taxonomies of still images and their relation to language that can be used for educational purposes do already exist (e.g. sless, 1981; winn, 1993; carney & levin, 1985; martinec & salway, 2005). an adequate inclusion of still images and other visual materials is sought in order to position them appropriately in teaching and learning practice not to jeopardize books and articles (barlex & carre, 1985, p.21), or establish some new visual educational order. that inclusion again calls upon the previously mentioned notion that visuals are to be seen as a ‘potential method of understanding’ (sless, 1981, p.180). the following section deals with the importance of externalizing students’ understanding of what they are learning as well as teachers’ understanding of their students. understanding and learning experience no one would argue that understanding is not important in real learning. the understanding which is the main concern of this article is students’ understanding of taught concepts. theorising students and the processes of how they make sense of the taught is one thing; another thing is to predict outcomes or to assess them (sless, 1981). predicting responses and outcomes (assessment) is necessary and valid, but not the concern of this paper. rather, its focus is placed on exploring what and how individual students understand within curricular content: this is important to bring to the surface in any teaching and learning practice. barlex and carre (1985) point out the importance of understanding the audience whom the message is directed to which connects to the idea of understanding students as ‘target audience of the teacher’s message’. the authors invoked the true example of the pioneer plaque: a pictorial message to other species (see figure 1). the pioneer craft was sent to outer space in search of other life forms. it carried a message that was meant to depict humans and their ‘position’ in the universe. the main point of this example (also presented by sless, 1981) is that without knowing how alien species make meaning, communicating with them might be problematic and futile. message designers incorporated their best guess as to what shared frames for message decoding might be and there is little they could have done better. still, there is a lingering question: will aliens have the same message decoding structures that enable them to read human message in the same way humans read it? it would also be interesting to see how many humans would interpret the message in the same and similar way in the first place, let alone aliens. this is certainly not to say that teachers are humans and students are aliens. nor does it call for the overexposure of students’ lives and backgrounds. instead, this metaphor expresses the idea that those two (teacher and student) come to the classroom with different knowledge bases and meaning making approaches. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 127 this article argues that finding channels where students’ interpretations of the heard, seen, and taught can be recorded might result in an enhancement of the learning experience and process. that enhancement simply includes an exposure of the prior knowledge base (beliefs and constructs), or cognitive architecture (zoethout & jager, 2009) that connects to the ongoing process of learning, so as to open up a different window of understanding. figure 1: pioneer space craft plaque (the image taken from barlex & carre, 1985) the framework proposed here may serve as a tool that opens up that window of understanding. in that way, students develop as learners, and hence grow in their respective fields. furthermore, teachers may provide more adequate feedback, securing an avenue for an effective face to face interaction with the students, showing empathy and concern about the process of learning and difficulties encountered on the way (e.g. related to prior experience or cultural background). image-based communication may provide an alternative opportunity for he to foster students’ creativity but also humanist values, through being sensitive to students' multi-cultural backgrounds. the following section tackles those issues. creative, humanist and multi-cultural communication although outcomes and results are important for the university establishment, focusing on the actual process of teaching and learning as well as building humanist values and creativity among students is just as important (reisz, 2010). it has been concluded that uk universities nowadays (perhaps universities in general) lack the necessary humanist character of education, not securing enough space for imagination and creativity (molesworth, nixon & scullion, 2009). as these authors put it, in referring to fromm’s humanist philosophy: ‘the current market discourse promotes a mode of existence where students seek to ‘have a degree’ rather than ‘be learners’’ (p.278). however, ‘an education can not be had, but experienced’ (ibid., p.280).the notion of immersion in subjects in order to develop and change as a person is critical for preserving university’s pedagogical worth and valuable teaching and learning experience. the teaching and learning experience in british higher education is offered to a multi-cultural student population. it is not simply that overseas students increase cultural diversity but home uk students are highly multi-cultural too (cortazzi & jin, 1997).therefore, there is a need to develop inter-cultural competencies and offer learning tools to students which are explicitly seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 128 sympathetic to their cultural differences and help them overcome language barriers and inhibitions. it could be that non-native speakers may feel inhibited and overpowered by the language competency and mastery of their colleagues who are native english speakers. cortazzi and jin conclude that the learning community needs to develop inter-cultural skills, ‘both learning to communicate across cultures and communicating for learning across cultures’. (cortazzi & jin, 1997, original emphasis, p. 79). this is important because through expressing their ideas visually, as argued in the article, all students are equal in that image-based opportunity of expression as opposed to the language one. their chosen and/or created images may provide fresh opportunities for discussing the role of culture and prior experience for the formation of new knowledge constructs during lessons. in essence, every lesson aims at presenting some concepts to the students that are intended to be learned. as already mentioned, defining the meaning of concepts and artefacts is central for learners’ understanding. that is what builds disciplinary knowledge. books and articles abound with concept definitions. however, is that what is formed in students’ minds while reading a definition or listening to it? is that how a concept is learnt? dealing with only a line of words? concepts are represented through words and definitions in university literature. however, effective concept formation might require concept images. the following subheading deals with the notion of concept definition and concept image in order to point at their relatedness and overlapping existence. hence, it calls upon image inclusion for the purposes of concept learning and understanding. communicating concepts through images concept definitions that are created in academic disciplines are a result of our experience with the concept (vinner, 1983). they are seen as a description of our concept image (ibid.). therefore, a definition formation originates in human experience and imagining: a concept exists in the world – humans experience the concept – humans create concept images in their minds – humans create concept definitions – humans operate with concepts. sless (1981) concurs on this point, providing examples of the way some great scientists and inventors produced their theories. they first visualized them. einstein claimed that the words of language did not seem to play any role in his thinking – in expressing himself yes, but not in his thinking (sless, 1981, p. 130). einstein had an image in his mind, a visual representation of the phenomena which then he transformed into words. nikola tesla disclosed in his autobiography that he experienced a type of vision or visualization of his inventions before getting down to formulate them on the paper and construct and prove them in experiments (tesla, 2002). he would also visualize the use of those inventions far in the future in different spaces and places, in a way predicting their future use. further examples include watson’s discovery of dna or kekule’s discovery of the benzene ring (sless, 1981, p. 131) and possibly many others. in learning, visualization of concept images might cast light on students’ concept understanding and push them to employ their imagination and creativity. when learning new concepts, students form concept images related to concept definitions in their minds (vinner, 1983). after a time, what remains is concept image rather than concept definition (ibid.): although this might evoke concept definition. in spite of the fact that vinner (1983) refers to the case of definitions and images only in maths, there exists a possibility of transferring this idea to other educational domains. exploring the images that students create with peers and teachers might uncover the ongoing processes of concept reasoning in almost any domain. vinner’s (1983) approach seems to support the idea proposed here that creating and reflecting on a concept image is beneficial for students’ understanding of that concept. furthermore, attending to prior experience (dewey, 1938, 1993) by explaining the possible seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 129 routes to understanding a new construct may be beneficial for formulating the meaning of that new construct. beside the mental picture formed in the student’s mind, there is a set of properties associated with that picture, namely the properties the student has associated/acquired in connection with the concept. in zoethout and jager’s (2009) terms, those properties build cognitive architecture and are called socio-cognitive representations (scrs). concept definition is a 'verbal definition that accurately explains the concept' (vinner, 1983, p. 293). this statement might raise the question of how useful this approach is for social sciences and humanities. natural sciences, physics or maths might be seen as having many laws and therefore precise definitions, whereas the social sciences and humanities might be defined as having less rigorous, looser concept definitions. hence, depending on the discipline, the ‘rigour’ of concepts’ definition might vary. nevertheless, there is a general idea of what taught concepts should be taken to mean, otherwise, anything could be taught. teachers always introduce certain concepts during their lesson and operate with a more or less defined knowledge base for those concepts. barlex and carre (1985, p.53) quotes arnheim’s (1970) idea that ‘if concepts take shape in thinking through the realm of images, many of these must be highly abstract and visual; some may occur subconsciously’. the occurrence of those images in mind during thinking is not transparent. channeling image externalization might make the process of students’ understanding transparent. the images produced will not be the same as the ones occurring during the lesson; nevertheless they might be powerful enough tools for depicting the thought processes. this still doesn’t mean that all the students will necessarily form concept images in their minds. students may offer their definitions through their short stories around chosen images in order for the teacher to direct/scaffold the development of students' understanding balancing the concept definition and description he/she knows as a knowledgeable other with the ones presented by the students. usually, when teachers introduce new concepts to students they expect them to perform further learning to fill in the gap between their own concept image (developed at different levels or not developed at all) and the science-, domain and curriculumdriven requirements for concept image creation (vinner, 1983, p.294).the image-based communication framework proposed here encourages students to express how they understand a concept through an image accompanied by a short, personal, explanatory narrative. the following section tackles narrative as a constituent of that communication framework, the framework being the central idea and contribution of this paper building on and supported by the arguments and literature review throughout the article. communicating through narrative narrative or story-telling is another form of meaning making seen to benefit cognition. when coupled with an image in the form of a multimodal digital artefact, it offers a powerful richness for cognitive investigations. in his article ‘narratology as a cognitive science’ herman (2000) argues that narrative theory should be viewed as a sub-domain of cognitive science. the main point here for the communication framework is the importance of narrative as a resource for analogical thinking (ibid). a story-like information flow is important – it is a story line that captures the learner’s attention and provides a high degree of involvement. barlex and carre, (1985, p.4) stresses the importance of ‘a high degree of involvement’. narrative plays a crucial role in intersubjectivity, which can be defined as the communicative process by which “mental activity including conscious awareness, motives and intentions, cognitions, and emotions is transferred seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 130 between minds" (trevarthen (1999) quoted by herman, 2000, p.415). narrative in my suggested communication framework functions at two levels. first, it is a short story entry that explains an image – a form of students’ concept understanding towards a disciplinary concept definition. for example, a narrative might be written as an event with student-constructed characters and story-line. second, the same narrative is discussed in classroom communication, where a new purpose of narrative is created: the one for consolidation and revision of the concepts monitored by the teacher. that level of narrative builds on the first one which is a reflective and interpretative one. narrative certainly deserves more space than this short commentary but it has been presented here merely as a part of the communication framework which is explicitly presented at the end of the article; each section so far contributing to its structure. the next section presents blogging as a possible image and narrative repository within the communication framework, adding to the previously argued importance of images, concept definitions (and images), externalizing understanding through communication, creating a narrative and providing feedback. blogging is seen as a platform for students’ image and narrative creation. blog connects language, image and modern technology. it may offer a viable solution for image-based learning in he which is supported by ict. going web 2.0: blogging a combination of image and text is prominently apparent in the case of designs for blogging. ferdig and trammell (2004) argue that blogs are beneficial for education. their concern is with teachers encouraging students to blog, so the benefits are explored through the benefits for students which are regarded as equally beneficial for teachers. the pedagogy behind blogs is seen to be constructivist learning in the spirit of vygotsky, where the main aspect of knowledge construction is ‘discursive, relational and conversational’ (ibid., p.2). blogs are meant to be publicly visible and available. in that respect, publication is claimed to be the strong side of blogging since it allows space for reflection, revision, analysis, and feedback (ferdig & tramell, 2004). however, if students and teachers wish not to be publicly exposed on the web, there is an option that blogs provide: they can ‘hide’ their urls and share them only within their own circle. it is recommended that teachers encourage students to blog securing a clear connection to the studied concepts (ibid.). the transformational use of blogging is noted by sime and priestley (2004) who analysed an on-line forum interaction of a group of student-teachers. this form of communication is defined as a useful medium for validating ideas and sharing the others’ personal experiences. ‘by doing this, participants transformed these experiences from personal and often ephemeral knowledge into shared and memorable events that came to constitute a body of knowledge, evolved through group reflection and co-construction.’ (ibid, p.139). the following section of this article closes the argument in favour of the imagebased communication framework for he teaching and learning. it suggests the constituents of the mentioned framework which arise from the arguments and literature review in the article so far. it features the actual framework’s graph. towards the framework for an image-based communication in he this article has offered a variety of theoretical underpinnings and perspectives in favour of a framework for of an image-based communication. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 131 framework should be used for engaging university students to expose and discuss their understanding of the taught concepts. the article provides reasons why the use of visual materials is important for he learning and teaching practice. judging from the reviewed literature, there emerges a need for a framework that: connects prior and ongoing knowledge, is sensitive to cultural background and language-related insecurities, uncovers the process of students’ understanding of the taught concepts, externalizes students’ concept images rather than definitions, provides visual and multimodal means of expression, connects image, text and modern technology (e.g. through blogging). the following constructs are envisaged to be the constituents of the framework. the framework is seen to be a tool for practitioners, scholars and policy makers for future educational initiatives and engagements: • a conceptual grid of a lesson’s concepts prepared by teachers • blogs as repositories for students’ images and narratives • student (and/or teacher-) -chosen images that represent concepts • short narratives that explain images • discussion about images in pairs • image interpretation based on meaning making theories (e.g. social semiotics) • peers and teacher’s feedback the following graph illustrates steps in building and performing image-based communication through an ordinal structure emphasizing the framework’s constituents (note that some actions can be performed simultaneously (e.g. 5, 6 and 7) and that the graph does not present links among the constituents (e.g. ‘feedback’ is provided within the ‘blog’ or during ‘discussion’)): seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 132 figure 2: the suggested image-based communication framework introducing this framework may face a few constraints. students are envisaged to be given a choice for their expression through still images: to find them on the web (through any image search engine), or to create them personally using photography, personal albums or drawing. however, it must be noted that there might be difficulties encountered with each option. for example, if images are suggested to be found on the web, there is a time-consuming issue of copyrights. still, it is expected that the existing free image repositories might be sufficient and that a system of using images for educational purposes will be developed in the future. some students may not feel comfortable with drawing and dealing with images. therefore, it could be a challenge to augment students’ trust and confidence in the framework and their own creative and drawing abilities. it is true that not everybody is equally inclined towards and talented for imagebased expression. however, certain factors for the success of image-based communication might be predicted: this type of communication being different from what both teachers and students are used to – would require careful introduction and explanation as to why it helps teaching and learning as well as fitting into assessment and curriculum requirements. this article has provided theoretical pillars that hold the structure of the suggested image-based communication framework in he. it has pointed at a possibility for visual tools to act at two levels: as an alternative avenue for externalizing students’ understanding and as alternative initiators of classroom communication. it is presumed that the framework might help 7. teacher’s feedback 6. peer’s feedback: 5. pair discussion and interpretati on 4. narratives related to the images: describing and explaining 3. blog as image, narrative and comment repository 2. images that represent concepts: choosing and creating 1. conceptual grid: concepts prepared by teachers after lessons imagebased communica tion seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 133 towards enhancing students’ learning experience and understanding when dealing with new concepts. applications of the framework are on their way to being made in practice, subject to one year’s field work. the article is an overture to future results and outcomes of the framework’s use, and offers an open invitation for commenting and thinking. thinking indeed, but as aristotle said: ‘without image, thinking is impossible’. references amouzedah, m. & tavangar, m. 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(2009,). a conceptual linkage between cognitive architectures and social interaction, semiotica, 175 (6): 317-333. natasa lackovic is a phd student in learning sciences with the learning sciences research institute and visual learning lab, school of education at the university of nottingham. the focus of her research is image-based communication in he. she is an english teacher by background and holds an ma in 'lifelong learning: policy and management' from the institute of education, london. microsoft word wiesemesandwang_videoconferencing foropening classrooms.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 6 – 2010 28 video conferencing for opening classroom doors in initial teacher education: sociocultural processes of mimicking and improvisation rolf wiesemes visual learning lab school of education university of nottingham email: rolf.wiesemes@nottingham.ac.uk ruolan wang visual learning lab school of education university of nottingham email: ruolan.wang@nottingham.ac.uk abstract in this article, we present an alternative framework for conceptualising video-conferencing uses in initial teacher education and in higher education (he) more generally. this alternative framework takes into account the existing models in the field, but – based on a set of interviews conducted with teacher trainees and wider analysis of the related literature – we suggest that there is a need to add to existing models the notions of ‘mimicking’ (copying practice) and improvisation (unplanned and spontaneous personal learning moments). these two notions are considered to be vital, as they remain valid throughout teachers’ careers and constitute key affordances of video-conferencing uses in he. in particular, we argue that improvisational processes can be considered as key for developing professional practice and lifelong learning and that video-conferencing uses in initial teacher education can contribute to an understanding of training and learning processes. current conceptualisations of video conferencing as suggested by coyle (2004) and marsh et al. (2009) remain valid, but also are limited in their scope with respect to focusing predominantly on pragmatic and instrumental teacher-training issues. our article suggests that the theoretical conceptualisations of video conferencing should be expanded to include elements of mimicking and ultimately improvisation. this allows us to consider not just etic aspects of practice, but equally emic practices and related personal professional development. we locate these arguments more widely in a sociocultural-theory framework, as it enables us to describe interactions in dialectical rather than dichotomous terms (lantolf & poehner, 2008). key words: video conferencing, improvisation, sociocultural theory, initial teacher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 29 introduction in this article, we present a sociocultural-theory framework for conceptualising video-conferencing uses in initial teacher education and in higher education more generally. we suggest that existing frameworks remain valid and that video-conferencing facilities used in teacher training allow to open classroom doors. at the same time, we also argue that there is a need to develop a model which focuses on the affordances of video conferencing for developing improvisation. following this introduction, we provide a literature review focusing on video-conferencing uses in education and specifically in initial teacher education. we describe in somewhat more detail two similar set-ups in initial teacher education in the uk – the instep programme at the university of sussex and the interactive teaching and learning observatory (i-tlo) at the university of nottingham, as they are similar with regard to the general principles underlying them. we shall, however, focus predominantly on a detailed analysis of i-tlo data as both authors are based at the university of nottingham and shall review our findings in relation to the literature in the field. we shall also discuss new findings which suggest a somewhat extended framework for videoconferencing uses in initial teacher education (ite) and which suggest that video-conferencing uses in ite contribute to developing improvisational processes with new teachers. video conferencing has been in existence for more than 40 years since first demonstrated in 1968 (barnes, 1997). whilst it was expensive and costly in the past, the advent of fast broadband connections and the capacity to conduct video conferencing via internet protocol (ip) links have reduced the cost of video conferencing calls dramatically. in parallel, the costs of videoconferencing systems have also been reduced, so that they have become more affordable for schools, teacher-training institutions and generally the higher education sector. together with the initial drive for developing educational information and communication technology (ict) uses as a change agent in education, as well as its potential contribution to reducing co2 emissions by cutting travel, video conferencing is now attracting more and more attention from various users. video conferencing is introduced predominantly as a means for long-distance communication, to allow learners and teachers to link to external partners such as non-school based educational providers (e.g., museums), to partners abroad (e.g., overseas partner schools) and initial teacher-training institutions. in the uk, most universities tend to have video-conferencing facilities which are used for an increasingly wide range of purposes ranging from meetings with national and international partners via remote lectures to links into practice settings such as school classrooms or healthcare settings. to date, as far as we can ascertain, there are two uk-based teacher-training institutions that have integrated video-conferencing systematically into teacher training: the university of sussex in the field of science education through the ‘in-school teacher education project’ (marsh et al., 2009; mitchell et al., 2008) and the university of nottingham in the field of foreignlanguage teacher education through the ‘interactive teaching and learning observatory (i-tlo)’ (coyle, 2004). both initiatives share many common concepts in initial teacher training and are similar (though not identical) in the ways that both are theorised. in this article, we argue for an extended conceptualisation of key teacher-training concepts, based on a content analysis of interview data and a reinterpretation that there is a need for extending current models further to include video conferencing practices as a means for enabling mimicking and improvisational practices that facilitate seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 30 unplanned and spontaneous personal learning moments through improvisation. we also locate these arguments in a sociocultural-theory framework as it allows us to develop a more thorough understanding of affordances of video conferencing by considering it as a semiotic learning and teaching tool. viewing video conferencing in teacher education as a tool allows us to analyse related learning and teaching interactions as dialogic processes which are dialectical in nature (as proposed by lantolf & poehner, 2008) and facilitate a sociocultural analysis of observed learning and teaching interactions (as outlined for example by mercer & littleton, 2007). in the following section, we review the related literature in more detail. literature review video-conferencing uses in education have been reported widely in the related literature. for the purposes of this article, we focus primarily on a review of literature that focuses on video-conferencing uses for initial teacher education. a simple search on the eric database provides 309 references on video conferencing from 1966 to date. of these 309 references 20 publications refer to specific uses of video conferencing for teacher training. the review also confirms the increasing use of video conferencing for initial teacher education as reflected in a variety of publications (wright & cordeaux, 1996; cullimore, 1999; coyle, 2004; hu & wong, 2006; mitchell et al., 2008; hunter & beveridge, 2008; marsh et al., 2009), with some studies focusing on schools students (thorpe, 1998; doggett, 2007). this literature explores a wide range of aspects of teacher training in a range of contexts and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. using video conferencing for initial teacher education has been growing since the late 1990s. geographically, such uses have been integrated systematically into initial teacher-education programmes in australia, followed by the usa and the uk. the development of video conferencing in australia (boylan, 1999; crawford et al., 2002) reflects the long-standing tradition and necessity of distance education. the increasing uses of video conferencing in the uk are due to a range of factors: first, the additional funding that was made available to schools and teacher-training institutions in the late 1990s, for example, as part of the training schools initiative which funded the original equipment used in the interactive teaching and learning observatory at the university of nottingham’s school of education (coyle, 2004). another factor was the increased availability of video-conferencing equipment in the market and the fact that video conferencing plays a significant role in maximising staff time, reducing unnecessary travel and related co2 emissions (wang et al., 2008). technologically, it is also important to take into account some changes, as they have an impact on the availability, cost and quality of video-conferencing uses. whereas video-conferencing uses in the 1990s relied on establishing connections via multiple integrated services digital network (isdn), which resulted in high running costs, since the advent of video conferencing via ip connections the quality of links has increased owing to larger bandwidth capacity whilst the running costs have been further reduced. the literature indicates that the theoretical perspectives of various studies in this field tend to emphasise a limited number of frameworks such as: use of constructivist approaches to education (coyle, 2004; taylor & hsueh, 2005) and opening classroom doors by video-conferencing tools (lee, 1997; coyle, 2004). coyle (2004) locates the teaching and learning observatory (tlo) in social constructivism. she writes: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 31 social constructivism provides a theoretical approach to learning in which students construct their own knowledge as a result of interacting with their environment and of mediating their understanding through meaningful cultural and social contexts contained within it. (coyle, 2004, p. 6) she links her social constructivist understanding of tlo interactions to lave and wenger’s notion of learning as an ‘evolving continuous renewed set of relations’ (lave & wenger, 1991, p. 50). these conceptualisations focus on the role of teacher trainees as learners through joint observation and related (scaffolded) discussion and dialogue. at the same time, coyle also makes reference to video-conferencing uses as contributing to ‘redefining classroom boundaries’ and explores this by referring to a blurring of virtual and real classrooms and potentially changing roles of observed students in schools. these arguments are similar to lee’s (1997) arguments that refer to video conferencing as a means to ‘open classroom doors’, that is, video conferencing is considered as a way to make classrooms more accessible to interested outsiders and to open them up to learners in the classroom. these different foci of frameworks illustrate the richness of teaching and learning interactions that video conferencing can facilitate. it is for this reason that we suggest a sociocultural-theory (sct) framework for analysing these interactions as it allows us to capture and analyse the multi-faceted interactions that video conferencing facilitates. in order to set the context further for developing this sct framework for video conferencing in education, we present two main uk teacher-training institutions that have systematically integrated video conferencing into their teacher-training courses. the similarities and differences between these two similar uses of video conferencing for teacher training are briefly reviewed in the following section. the university of sussex in-school teacher education programme (instep) instep was introduced in the academic year 2004-2005 by the university of sussex’s science teacher education programme in collaboration with six partner schools. as reported by marsh et al. (2009), ‘the purpose of the scheme was to “bring excellent teaching practice” (adamczyk, 2005) to an audience of trainee teachers so that: 1. trainees would observe good practice in real time as part of their pgce programme, 2. tutors in the teacher education classroom would be able to interpret what was being said in real time so that rather than just being taught theory, the trainees would thus be able to observe “theory in action”. 3. following such instep observation sessions there would be subsequent discussion of these activities with either or both the pgce tutors and school teachers involved, enabling and enhancing trainees’ reflection (this is reflecting on the observed practice of others although the original intention was that the trainee teachers would also reflect upon their own practice)’ (marsh et al., 2009). the authors conclude with the comment that ‘it seems to us that the value of instep might lie in its capacity to bring the practical learning of the school classroom into the university setting’ (marsh et al., 2009). this also confirms earlier findings (mitchell, 2008) that describe instep benefits as contextualising theory and decontextualising practice. the university of nottingham’s interactive teaching and learning observatory (i-tlo) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 32 the i-tlo was first introduced in 1999 as part of funding for the training schools initiative. it was originally set up as a means to overcome physical distance between a beacon partner school and the university of nottingham’s school of education. coyle (2004) focuses in her description of the programme on the various interactive uses of video conferencing, which are similar to the ones from the university of sussex, but using somewhat different technologies. also, it is important to point out that the i-tlo is primarily used with foreign-language teacher trainees rather than science teacher trainees. in theoretical terms, coyle (2004) stresses the development of ‘communities of practice’ as part of an overall constructivist framework and further theorises the i-tlo as a means to ‘redefine classroom boundaries’ owing to the multilayered nature of possible i-tlo interactions and argues for i-tlo uses as a means to overcome the boundaries between virtual and real classrooms. coyle’s notion of ‘redefining classroom boundaries’ is also reflected in some of the other literature in this particular field (lee, 1997; hunter & beveridge, 2008) where reference is made to metaphors such as ‘opening classroom doors’ to indicate the opportunities for collaboration offered by videoconferencing uses in initial teacher education. whilst we accept the existing conceptualisations as valid and relevant, we also suggest that these need to be expanded to develop stronger models of video conferencing. similarities and differences between the in-step and i-tlo the video-conferencing set-ups in both institutions focus on providing teacher trainees with access to good practice as a means to enable them to observe and critique experienced teachers’ classroom performances. technically, the setups are somewhat different. whilst in-step provides the teacher with a separate microphone as well as a separate view of the classroom simultaneously, the i-tlo does not provide the same facility and does not have the capacity to offer simultaneously different views of the classroom. however, the i-tlo allows recording of live lessons for later more detailed discussion and analysis onto dvd and switching between two cameras (coyle, 2004). it also provides a zoom-tilt-pan facility which allows ‘observers’ to focus on small parts of the classroom as needed for some parts of observations. common to both video-conferencing set-ups is the focus on enabling teacher trainees to observe live lessons, that is, teacher-learner classroom interactions, as a group. in the following section, we present the findings from a focus-group interview with teacher trainees from the university of nottingham in order to develop our understanding of video-conferencing uses in initial teacher education further. interview data and analysis in this section, we develop our understanding of video-conferencing uses in he as a means to develop and support mimicking of practices and learning through improvisation. we shall present an analysis of focus-group interview data collected with a group of eight foreign-language teacher trainees at the end of their teacher training year in june 2009 to illustrate how videoconferencing uses can be conceptualised somewhat further. the teacher trainees interviewed had all taken part in interactive teaching and learning observatory (i-tlo) uses at the university of nottingham’s school of education, primarily in the initial university-based phase of their pgce training year. these data confirm existing conceptualisations of video conferencing as reviewed in the recent literature presented above, but also lead us to suggest that video-conferencing uses can encourage the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 33 development of improvisational learning through the initial mimicking of practices. unsurprisingly, the key topics raised by the teacher trainees confirm earlier research findings as discussed in the previous section. we present these briefly first. we refer to the interviewed teacher trainees as ‘pgce students’ throughout this interview-analysis section. accessing a range of classroom practices at a practical level, video-conferencing uses allow students to get access to a wider range of educational practices. this is illustrated by the following interview quotations: s1 i suppose it’s the chance to see people teaching and students learning that you wouldn’t get a chance to see normally because you’re not going to travel to all these different schools or across the country – so that was useful. s2 and just getting all the different types of school because we’ve only seen two [as part of our teaching practices]. and also i think it was quite good to see what lessons were like and what the pupils were like and what the classroom was like without actually having to sit there and be there and you can literally relax and observe and see every little detail that you might be worried about before you actually have to go and do it yourself. pgce students refer in the interview quotation to the affordance that video conferencing provides them, with easy access to a wider range of teaching practices in schools and classrooms. the technology allows students to observe these practices remotely, independent of distance and locations. video-conferencing uses as a means to link theory and practice these findings confirm the findings presented by the instep team in a range of publications reviewed above. video-conferencing uses as part of the pgce programme allow students to link theory and practice together. in other words, video-conferencing uses seem to raise the consciousness of students to the applicability and practical worth of educational theories. students refer to ‘visualising theory’ through classroom observations as illustrated in the following interview quotation: s1 i think maybe if we had a session on learning or the behaviour of learning and doing the session and then having an observation almost to consolidate things. because once you can identify the strategies that were being used you can then visualise it and you can put it into practice. i think a lot of what we’ve got [at the university] is theory and it’s not until you’re in a classroom and you see it going wrong that you realise that this is what they were talking about. s2 that [classroom observation] would contextualise the theory and that would have been really useful. at the same time, pgce students point at the differences between being a lone observer in the classroom and observing remotely via video-conferencing link as a group: s3 […] the main advantage that stands out between the two of them is that we can do group discussions and group observations live. int. is that important for the group? s5 yes just on the reflection side which you can’t do when you’re by yourself and at the beginning, when you are first learning how to do observations, you don’t really know what you’re supposed to be looking for and i was writing down almost everything that was going on and it was not really helping me. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 34 also, it is important to point out the impact that observing as a group via video conferencing has on the pgce students when they first go into a classroom setting as part of their first placement. they repeatedly refer to ‘having [observation practice] before going into the 1st placement’ and point also at ways to improve ‘observation practice’ as part of using video conferencing as a more systematic means to prepare students for teaching practice: int. do you think video observations have any impact upon how you observe later on during your school experience? s1 i think it’s good to have the practice before you go out there because you don’t really have anyone then to guide you on how to do this. s2 and i think it can help the tutors because they can show us what we are supposed to be looking for. s3 i think when we did the target language session we were divided into groups and some of us had to watch the teacher and some of us had to watch the reactions of the pupils and that was helpful. s4 and when you do the observations you do need to have a focus rather than just trying to see everything which is impossible because you don’t know what you are supposed to be looking for. s5 i think it could have been exploited more though. we were saying that it was good but if we had more focus on observing lessons so that when we then went into schools we’d already been used to looking for certain things. i think that’s where it could be more fully used because i think it is good. s1 i do as well and i think that’s where it comes back to being able to record stuff and then they could have used more recorded lessons and not just live ones and that could be useful. in this sense, we suggest that rather than solely linking educational theory and practice, video conferencing also supports the development of professional behaviour and related practices. this also relates to coyle’s (2004) claims that video-conferencing uses support constructivist models of learning and teaching. we explore these constructivist viewpoints further in the following section. video-conferencing uses as a means to support the development of professional dialogue through the joint construction of knowledge coyle (2004) adopts a constructivist view of video-conferencing uses in initial teacher education and combines this with the development of communities of practice. although it is somewhat unclear how far communities of practice can be understood in lave and wenger’s (1991) sense, our findings confirm the formation of learning communities of pgce students as part of classroom observations via video-conferencing link as illustrated in the interview quotes below: s1 instead of sitting there by yourself you can see it with others and discuss it while it’s going on and you can get everyone else’s point of view. s3 […] when you’re on school experience you only get that teacher’s point of view on their lesson which is just one opinion and it is biased, isn’t it, because it is their lesson. so if you’ve got a situation where we are all sitting here and we can switch off the microphone and we can discuss it as things are happening – as you were saying as well because we’ve all got different opinions on the same thing that we’ve just seen. so you’ve got all those different opinions and ideas that you can take away and then think about and then apply. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 35 s4 and we can still have a chat amongst ourselves while we were watching. so we could hear them but they couldn’t hear us. our findings also confirm earlier points made by marsh et al. (2009) and by coyle (2004) regarding the development of professional dialogue as part of video-conferencing uses within trainee teachers’ learning communities. s2 and it was great to get conversations going about what we thought was good practice or not. so that was really useful in terms of our pgce before we even started doing it ourselves. the support for the development of an i-tlo community of practice also contributes to processes of professionalization as illustrated in the following quotation: s1 because instead of just saying: ‘oh that was rubbish’ it helped us to talk about it in a more professional way and actually being able to look at it from both sides and actually how to address people and how to talk about things you’d seen. so i think that was good. in retrospect, the pgce students interviewed were also able to comment more analytically on video-conferencing uses and to make reference to ‘reflective practice’ as illustrated in the following interview quotation: s3 and discussing what you’ve just seen as a group can help you if something you’ve seen happens to you in the future because it can make you more reflective. the pgce students also point at processes of depersonalising practice where they consider observations via video conferencing as a means to ‘distance’ oneself from individuals and to observe interactions instead as illustrated in the following interview quotation: s2 but when you are just watching the class and it’s not going to be your class at all and you are just away from it then you can just concentrate on observing how they teach and what they’re doing and how everyone is interacting. but when you’re thinking that you might have to teach this class you’ve got so many different things going on in your mind that you’re not really focusing on particular aspects. the interviewee contrasts two scenarios. whilst it is important for new teachers to get to know their students and to develop a professional relationship with them as part of their teaching practices, the interview data suggest that processes of depersonalisation or distancing have an important contribution to make. distancing allows one to focus on observations of actual teaching and learning practices and related classroom interactions rather than on individual students’ behaviours. in this sense, video observations have an important role to play in providing a somewhat depersonalised classroom setting which allows students to explore jointly and supported by their tutors’ classroom interactions rather than focusing on individuals’ behaviour. pgce students also commented on observing teaching practices which they might not agree with. they commented on these instances of practice as follows: s1 you can still find out the rationale of why people do this particular activity or task in a certain way and it could be because of their group or anything. so you can still pick up tips. even to realise that you might not try that because there are still both sides of it so i still think it’s valid to observe someone and think that you wouldn’t do it that way personally. i don’t think there is anything wrong with that side of observations because you still want to know how things are done. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 36 this suggests that whilst it might be preferable to get students to observe what might be considered as exemplary practice, practice is also always personal and contextual. video-conferencing uses seem to provide pgce students with a wider repertoire of desirable and sometimes undesirable practices. this process of disagreeing with some examples of practice is useful in the sense that it serves as another entry point for the development of personal reflective practice in a group learning environment where a community of practice shares and develops their understanding of teaching and learning processes. at the same time, student teachers referred to information overload that they might be confronted with when observing: s1 sometimes you get so much information that you can’t always register where it’s from. s2 we hadn’t even gone on to school experience so we really hadn’t got any sort of professional experience ourselves to be able to say this or that or they could have done this. it might be argued that this is unavoidable. it also is a part of becoming a teacher. however, as pointed out by pgce students before (and as practised as part of the observation sessions via video conferencing) this information overload can be managed by developing foci for classroom observations which allow students to identify specific classroom practices. pgce students also refer to the personal-emotional aspects of their pgce year and link video conferencing to this as supporting emotional aspects of the pgce: s4 pgce is not only intensive on the learning curve but also on the emotional side it’s very hard and very trying and we’ve all gone through times when we thought that we just couldn’t do it and it’s just usually through talking to other people that you realise that you’re not the only one struggling. so that is another one of the benefits of being able to observe as a group and then // s3 and from different angles. s2 yeah so you can just get all these different points of view and all the shared emotions as well. s1 it’s like a safety net, isn’t it? and you’re not on your own either. again, it seems that group observations serve as a ‘safety net’ which enable the development of professional dialogue whilst taking into account the highly emotional and personal aspects of the pgce training year. in summary, throughout the interview, pgce students refer to a wide range of video-conferencing uses, say, for professional development, in order to observe examples of specific practice, in order to get practical tips and hints, in order to develop reflection (and as a means to build on practice perceived as negative), and as a means to support newly qualified teachers. these student comments suggest that they can see a wide variety of uses for video conferencing (and some of these uses they have been exposed to). these comments also point at a current lack of systematic integration of video conferencing into a range of training activities such as observing examples of specific practice and as a means to support newly qualified teachers. at the same time, these comments seem to indicate a continuum of a range of initial teacher education and continuous-professional-development (cpd) activities. this continuum of activities could be facilitated via the systematic and integrated use of video conferencing in teacher education and adapted to different pgce course phases and students’ changing needs. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 37 so far, drawing from our interview data, we have focused primarily on presenting conceptualisations of video-conferencing uses, which support previous arguments made for the use of video conferencing in teacher education. in the following section, we want to focus and expand on some final data that seem to suggest the need for the development of a more generic framework for video-conferencing uses in initial teacher education (and more widely in practice-related training in he and potentially other sectors) that is related to supporting processes of improvisation. emerging themes: mimicking and improvisation in this section, we aim to extend our analysis and understanding of the data further by focusing in particular on the emerging themes of mimicking and improvisation. pgce students refer to a process of ‘mimicking’ when describing their initial practices as new teachers: s2 and also you’re stepping into somebody else’s shoes so you’re almost mimicking what they do and you see how they treat that particular kid and you make a mental note of that and you’re not observing the practice so much. but with video observations you are never going to see the kids or the teacher again and you’re not going to teach them so you can just observe and that’s it. and so you can take in all the little things that you would otherwise miss. the process of ‘mimicking’ referred to by the pgce students is nothing new and constitutes a key part of new teachers starting to develop their own practices and underlying beliefs and informal theories. this process is necessary. this process can also be limiting in the sense that it is based often on the observation of limited teaching practices that might be appropriate in one particular setting with one particular class, but detrimental to learning in another classroom setting. when asked to explain this comment further the pgce student linked ‘mimicking’ as follows to video-conferencing uses for classroom observation: s1 well, you are mimicking but not so much it’s like you’re saying: ‘i wouldn’t do that but i would do this’. but when you are on school experience and you have no experience at all of teaching you’re thinking you have to do it like that with these kids because that’s what they are used to and that’s what they expect. it’s different when you get your own class because then you can start afresh and you can say that this is what you expect from the kids and this is what the kids can expect from you, but when you are taking over someone else’s class you don’t want to undermine their authority by doing things your way especially if you don’t have your own way. s2 […] with video conferencing you can see a load of different things and how to use different things and getting different ideas. this particular pgce student comment triggered additional contributions from the other interviewees such as: s2 yeah lots of different ideas from different people rather than one person’s way of teaching. s3 and the same idea but done differently because everyone has their own style. s4 you can mesh a load of ideas together and you can take one person’s style which you tweak a little bit and you can see if it works or not and then you can take other ideas from other people and it’s a lot more flexible. it gives you a chance to see a wide range of practitioners. especially if you are in a school with a small language department because you might only see only two or three teachers in the same school. s5 and even with some teachers they will say: ‘oh don’t do that with that class because they can’t do it’ but then you do do it and it goes very well. so those teachers have their own stereotypes and their own clichés and they will always seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 38 teach in a very similar way so it’s quite interesting to see how you can change that. it has to be taken into account that these comments were made when the pgce students had reached almost the end of their pgce year. it also has to be added that they participated in the interview voluntarily. therefore, we would suggest that these comments need to be considered carefully in relation to integrating video-conferencing technologies into teacher-training programmes or similar fields. these comments also relate closely to notions of improvisation in teaching which we would consider to be key for the development of current and future practice of teachers. ‘mimicking’ constitutes the initial part of improvisational processes that we consider to be vital for new teachers to be enabled to develop their classroom practices in a safe and mutually supportive environment which allows group discussion, reflection, depersonalization of practices and reacquisition and reinterpretation of others’ practices through initial observation. we suggest that video-conferencing uses in ite can make a significant contribution to learning and teaching as improvisation. therefore, the notion of improvisation is one of the key concepts that we aim to use as a means of developing our understanding of video conferencing in ite and more widely in he. the concept of improvisation originally comes from jazz and theatre performance. wiesemes (2002) and humphreys and hyland (2002), for example, see teaching processes as jazz improvisation. wiesemes (2002) has developed this jazz metaphor originally as a means to analyse and critique his own classroom practices in a (bilingual) secondary-school content and language integrated learning classroom setting. in this sense, the use of a jazz metaphor allows him to distance himself from his own practices. humphreys and hyland (2002) describe the challenges and complexities of teacher-learner classroom interactions through a jazz-performance metaphor and relate these to initial teacher education specifically as follows: ‘in berliner’s (1994) account of the critical faculties of jazz musicians, entitled the never ending state of getting there: soloing ability, ideals and evaluations, he notes that: by observing critical discussions and participating in them, learners become sensitive to wide-ranging criteria appropriate for the evaluation … and they gain a deep respect for the refined listening abilities that attune seasoned artists to every nuance and detail of improvised performance’ (pp. 234-4). we would suggest that the creation of such a critical dialogue between mentor and student in an environment of demonstration, rehearsal and practice is the cornerstone of effective teacher education. we are arguing for a return to the preparation of teachers through ‘an exploration of the performance and improvisatory aspects of the art of teaching’ (humphreys & hyland, 2002, p. 12). lobman and lundquist (2007) use the term ‘unscripted learning’ to describe the scenario of improvisational learning in classrooms. they argue that both teachers and students are essentially improvisers and performers. we would suggest that whilst improvisation in classrooms might look unscripted, it is not. it is rather a reflection of teachers’ ability to use, select and adapt a wide range of standards (in the jazz sense as opposed to the national curriculum sense) according to contextual and immediate needs and demands. improvisation is the ability to take existing pieces and to put them together in a new combination for a purpose. this process is vital for new teachers in order to learn from experienced practitioners and to develop their own improvisational practices in and for different contexts. overall, improvisation of learning is an activity of collaboration, transformation and discovery. this description of improvisation in learning and teaching as a metaphor for praxis is also generally apparent in humphrey and hyland (2002), floden and chang seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 39 (2007), loveless (2007) and montero et al. (2008). this notion of improvisation also allows us to take into account re-interpretation and change of practices according to changing contexts. improvisational practices in classrooms are a vital part of day-to-day classroom interactions. video-conferencing uses in initial (and continuous) teacher education allow one to make sense of practices in different settings and to analyse the semiotic processes that video conferencing might facilitate (or not), as suggested by tochon (2007) when he argues for the development of video pedagogy. we argue that ‘mimicking’ as raised by the interviewees constitutes an initial step in developing improvisational practices. we locate these video-conferencing observations within sociocultural theory. video-conferencing observations support mimicking and lead potentially to improvisation because observed practices are clearly located at the three levels of human activity that are key in sociocultural theory – the cultural, the psychological and the social levels (mercer, 2007). teacher trainees are enabled through video conferencing and related interactions to become part of a dialectical process of negotiating meaning (lantolf & poehner, 2008). understood in this manner, the use of video conferencing creates a dialogic learning zone which mercer (2006) calls an ‘intermental development zone’ (idz). mercer and littleton describe this as follows: for a teacher to teach and a student to learn, they must use talk and joint activity to create and negotiate a shared communicative space, the idz, which is built from the contextual foundation of their common knowledge and aims. […] the idz represents a state of shared consciousness maintained by a teacher and learner, which is focused on the task in hand and dedicated to the objective of learning (mercer & littleton, 2007, p. 21). video-conferencing uses in initial teacher education for classroom observation constitute an idz that is highly dynamic and allows teacher trainees to explore observed classroom activities through shared observation and related dialogic practices. at the training level, the tutor is able to create an idz by providing an environment that is unfamiliar to the new teacher, but that is made accessible to the teacher trainee through joint and supported (or scaffolded) observation between tutors and trainees. at the same time, the use of video conferencing as an observational tool adds a means for contextualizing theory and decontextualising practice (as argued for by marsh et al., 2009) through joined and supported observation that provides access to an environment (or a stage) that is semi-public and perceived as risky whilst remaining in a safe (somewhat distant from the real classroom) environment. this videoobservation environment enables safe observation of practices that can be reflected upon jointly by the students and can be ‘mimicked’, that is, transferred to other learning and teaching environments that the teacher who is being observed actually will never set foot into. this ‘safe and structured’ environment is believed ultimately to encourage and capture the emerging unplanned personal learning moments of improvisation. conclusions in summary, we argue that whilst current conceptualisations of videoconferencing uses remain valid, they need to be expanded further. our data analysis suggests that one way to expand these conceptualisations is to consider video conferencing as a semiotic tool that enables development of improvisational techniques and performances. we locate video conferencing as a semiotic tool in sociocultural theory. we argue that sct provides a framework that allows exploration of both scaffolded and dialogic interactions seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 40 between teacher trainees and tutors that are supported in turn through ‘safe’ audiovisual access to observed classrooms. conceptualised as an idz the use of video conferencing for teacher training and development creates a semiotic space where video conferencing becomes a tool that facilitates processes of understanding through supported dialogic practices. in this sense, whilst we accept marsh et al.’s (2008) arguments about video conferencing facilitating the contextualising of theory and the decontextualising of practice, we suggest that video conferencing for teacher education allows mimicking and promotes improvisatory practices. this means that video conferencing supports practices that are personalised by students based on the repertoire of practices that video conferencing makes available and on the related dialogic interactions as a group in the idz. this also implies that instead of solely copying one practice, students have the opportunity to explore jointly a range of practices and to make these parts of their emerging improvisatory repertoire as suggested strongly by humphreys and hyland (2002). conceptualised in this manner, this points at the potential of much wider and more systematic uses of video conferencing for teacher training and other professional practices where access to practice sites is vital in initial training (e.g., in healthcare education). locating video-conferencing uses for training in an sct framework in particular opens up further avenues for developing international practices that could facilitate a range of intercultural (learning) dialogues and have a real impact on a wide range of teaching and learning settings. references adamczyk, p. 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(1996). rethinking video-conferencing: lessons learned from initial teacher education. innovations in education and training international 33(4), 194-202. bakøy & kalnes the hadia story.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 248 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 the hadia story: digital storytelling in election campaigns eva bakøy professor faculty of television production and film studies lillehammer university college e-mail: eva.bakoy@hil.no øyvind kalnes assistant professor faculty of humanities, sport and social sciences lillehammer university college e-mail: oyvind.kalnes@hil.no abstract digital storytelling in election campaigns is a relatively recent phenomenon, which needs to be investigated in order to enhance our understanding of changes and developments in modern political communication. this article is an analysis of how the norwegian-pakistani labour politician, hadia tajik, has used digital storytelling to construct her political identity, and a discussion of the consequences of her experiments with this genre. the focus is on the five video stories she released during the 2009 parliamentary election campaign and the reactions they evoked on the net and in the traditional media during the same (time) period. during the 2009 electoral campaign tajik moved from being a relatively unknown politician to becoming a political household name and the only member of the new parliament with a migrant background. the digital stories were instrumental in this development for numerous reasons, the most important probably being that they gave her prime time television coverage. norwegian news media have in general been very concerned with web 2.0 and tajik’s videos were regarded as an innovative kind of political communication. the videos also functioned as an effective marketing tool on the net. as an integral part of her extensive viral network, they attracted numerous views and they were with a few exceptions met with positive reactions. this was probably due to their relatively high production values and their catch-all communication strategy that downplayed her ethnic, educational and political background and emphasized her universal human qualities. keywords: digital storytelling, net politics, viral networking, multicultural, election campaigns seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 249 introduction this article is an analysis of how the norwegian-pakistani labour politician, hadia tajiki, has used digital storytelling as a political tool. it examines the five video stories she released during the 2009 parliament election campaign and the response they evoked on the net and in the traditional media during the same year. the 2009 election made her the only member of parliament with a migrant background. using digital storytelling for party political purposes is a relatively recent phenomenon that so far has received little attention from researchers focusing on online election campaigns or digital storytelling in general. a study of tajik’s digital videos and the considerable attention they received in the norwegian public sphere may provide important clues to the role digital storytelling will play in the political life of the future. the term digital storytelling refers to a great variety of emergent digital forms (lundby, 2008, p. 8). in film studies the term simply means storytelling that explores the options of digital technology. in education digital storytelling is often associated with the center for digital storytelling founded in berkeley, california in 1998.ii this center defines digital storytelling as a workshopbased cultural practice “by which ‘ordinary people’ create their own short autobiographical films that can be streamed on the web or broadcast on television” (burgess, 2007, p. 192). the ideological premise of this concept of digital storytelling is to give people with limited economic means and technical skills a chance to communicate their personal, artistic or political vision to a broader audience. this definition connects digital storytelling to antiauthoritarianism and resistance to social hierarchies and systems of domination and privilege. it also encourages an aesthetic concerned with technical simplicity: still photography rather than live actions embedded in a first person narration. however, today digital storytelling is also part of the establishment. businesses, politicians, government agencies and other organizations are slowly discovering the power of this mode of communication (salmon, 2010). in this context, digital storytelling is defined more loosely as a media genre consisting of small-scale web stories with a personal mode of address, which can be used by professional or non-professional media producers alike. this is how hadia tajik and this article use the term. in norway, where political advertising on television is not allowed,iii publishing videos on the web provides politicians with an unique opportunity to communicate multimedia messages to potential voters directly without intervention, editorship or control of anyone outside the electoral campaign. tajik embraced this chance with the support of the labour party and the professional multimedia company, cik media. this article will argue that tajik’s digital stories contributed significantly to her present status as a political “celebrity” in norway with frequent appearances in the media. since technological transitions in the mass media always inspire speculations about radical systemic changes in politics, as well as in other areas of social life, tajik’s videos will also be discussed in terms of how electronic media have changed political communication. distribution of personal videos on the internet is part of what has been referred to as web 2.0 iv, a new breed of internet applications that open the web for active user participation through generating content and engaging in multilateral discussions and networking (o'reilly, 2007; pascu, osimo, ulbrich, turlea, & burgelman, 2007). the scope of the applications varies enormously, including blogging, podcasting, wikis, peer-to-peer technology and social networking sites. the expression “eruptions” (pascu et al. 2007) refers to the “potentially disruptive power” contained in web 2.0. but an analysis of how political parties have used 2.0 in the uk questions the disruptive scenario, by arguing that established parties and politicians tend to enter web 2.0 carrying a “mindset” of pre-existing goals and norms” which ensures “politics as usual” (lilleker & jackson, 2009). the development of web 2.0 in norwegian politics appears close to this last seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 250 scenario, although currently passing through a steep learning curve of trial and error (hestvik, 2004; kalnes, 2009a). digital storytelling’s concern with personal stories told in the storytellers’ own words (lundby, 2008, s. 5) is compatible with the hypothesis that the internet is going to make politics more candidate and image oriented at the expense of party politics (røsjø, 2008). the political use of this genre, with the support of a professional production company, can also be interpreted as symptomatic of observations in the party literature that political parties have become increasingly sensitive to the necessity of campaigning and communicating with voters outside the “classé gardé”v of the “mass party model” (duverger, 1967). in the process they have been transformed into “catch all” (kirchheimer, 1966) or “electoral-professional” parties (panebianco, 1988) that use experts from outside the traditional party ranks in order to catch as many voters as possible. the next section presents background information about party politics in norway, its web activities and why hadia tajik became an important person for the labour party’s web experiments. the rest of the article is divided into three major parts. the first part outlines the analytical approach. the second part discusses the main purpose of tajik’s digital stories on the basis of a qualitative text analysis, while the third part explores the role of her videos in making her a political household name, by using a number of relevant data published on the web. background: the labour party’s online guinea pig as a consequence of the electoral system and the persistence of a relatively strong centre-periphery cleavage, norway has a multi-party system, but with the social democratic labour party (arbeiderpartiet) as its epicenter. although far from its complete dominance in norwegian politics in the period 19451961, the party still manages to pull around 1/3 of the vote and remains strongly identified with the development of the norwegian welfare state. during the last fifteen years norwegian parties have adapted to the rise of the internet. by 2005 they had made party web sites geared towards professional political marketing, conforming to a standard resembling web 1.0. in the local elections of 2007, web 2.0 came into play as a campaign tool, and today all norwegian parliamentary parties have their own youtube channels as well as being active participants in other web 2.0 activities. besides the much smaller liberal party, the labour party has so far developed the most deliberate web strategy using tajik as their online guinea pig (heftøy, 2009a, 2009b). she quickly established a presence on numerous web 2.0 sites, and ventured into digital story telling in order to “communicate her views, tell stories about herself and set the agenda” (cik media, 2009). the labour party’s choice of tajik as their online guinea pig can be related to her status as a relatively unknown political figure when her candidacy was proclaimed in october 2008. she then replaced the scandalized parliament member saera kahn another young, female politician with a multicultural background.vi furthermore, occupying the marginal number six position on the labour party’s candidate list for the constituency of oslo made strong promotion of her particular candidacy necessary and beneficial for both tajik and the party. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 251 analytical approach to explore the main functions of tajik’s campaign videos and their relationship to the changes in political communication mentioned above, the analysis has focused on the following questions: 1. what is the main communicative strategy of the videos? 2. how does tajik present herself in the videos? 3. who are the implied viewers of the videos and how are they addressed? the first question will be discussed in terms of three different paths a candidate can follow in pursuing the goal of election: the party oriented path, the issue oriented path or the image oriented path (bimber & davis, 2003, p. 44). the party oriented strategy underlines the link between candidate and party. the issue oriented path involves the candidates taking stances in line with various groups of voters, while the image oriented approach makes the personality of the candidates the main selling point. the three paths are usually intertwined to varying degrees in most campaigns. norwegian politics have traditionally been party oriented, since the electoral system is based on proportional representation and voting for party lists. consequently, the opportunities of the candidates depend on the success of the party. individual candidates matter more in the single member constituency systems of for instance the uk and the usa. however, several studies indicate that the effect of television has encouraged a more personalized and candidate-centered politics in norway too. the analysis of tajik’s self-presentation will focus on three dimensions: “…qualification, identification with voters, and empathy” (bimber & davis, 2003, p. 74). qualification refers to the need for the candidates to convince the voters they can fill expectations towards the role of a public official. the second dimension, to communicate identification with the common voters, is about persuading potential voters that the candidate is able to represent their interests. this is typically done by highlighting the fact that the candidate has a background similar to the people in the constituency. the third dimension, empathy, is about showing the voters that the candidates are able to understand their situation, using statements such as “i feel your pain” (bimber & davis, 2003, s. 74). the issue of self-presentation will also be discussed in terms of the degree of formality/intimacy of the candidate’s behavior. on the basis of erving goffman’s idea of social life as a multistage drama where human behavior has “onstage” and “offstage” dimensions (goffman, 1959), joshua meyrowitz has argued that the electronic media require a new middle region behavior from politicians. this is a “behavior that lacks the extreme formality of former front region behavior and also lacks the extreme informality of traditional back region behavior” (meyrowitz, 1986, s. 271). meyrowitz argues that this is caused by the fact that television stimulates voters to evaluate candidates not just according to their political messages but also in terms of their personal attractiveness, charisma and charm. the camera invades the personal spheres of the candidates and reveals their human shortcomings, making them more like you and me. politicians try to control the situation by hiring communication experts and personal shoppers and by exposing selected, positive aspects of their back regions in order to please the viewers. but meyrowitz underlines that: “yet there is a difference between coping with new situation and truly controlling it “(meyrowitz, 1986, s. 271). the term “implied viewers” denotes the hypothetical figures a given text is designed to address. vii internet videos are in principle open to all kinds of viewers over a long period and have a potential for gathering a much larger audience than traditional television programs which may be aired only once. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 252 but there are numerous difficulties involved in reaching the internet audience. unlike radio and television (if they are turned on), the web cannot interrupt the focus of the citizens and capture their attention. the web visitor must take several steps in order to view a message, including getting online and actively searching for a particular web site among millions of online choices. the way that people interact with the web has been described as selective exposure, which means that people tend to seek out information consistent with their ideologies and partisanships. and if they are inadvertently exposed to information that collides with prior beliefs and values, they are likely to reject it as false (bimber and davies, 2003, p. 149). the general conclusion among strategists working in the usa has been that traditional party web sites do not seem to provide a way to convert voters from one candidate or party to another, and because of this political campaigns on the net now address and try to engage three basic audiences: supporters, undecided voters and journalists (bimber and davies, 2003, p. 47). reactions the reactions to tajik’s videos have been analyzed in terms of attention from net users and traditional media, viewer evaluations and the crucial question of how to attract viewers to the videos in the first place. counting the number of views compared to the response to videos by other politicians is an obvious first step in measuring the amount of online attention the videos have received. a next step is to look at where these views originated from, in order to find out what may have triggered them. are they a consequence of the author’s direction, successful networking or attention generated elsewhere? the data used for number of views and their origin were retrieved on december 10th 2009 from the youtube page of each individual video. the extension of the analysis to other media is necessary, as simply counting views on the web would lead to an underestimation of the impact of the videos. digital videos and the internet are observed by, and referred to, in the traditional mass media, leaving a considerable potential for double spin-off effects. the first spin-off effect is videos leading to exposure in traditional mass media, causing the second, this exposure attracting viewers to the videos. data on attention in the printed press were gathered through the news service retriever (retriever, 2009), while the databases of the two major national tv channels nrk and tv2 were searched for appearances of tajik in their tv programs during the same period. the data above say little about individual reactions to tajik’s videos. the most visible indicators of reactions are of course the elements on the youtube page that allow the users to interact through comments, discussion, marking as favorite or rating the video. while valuable, these types of visible reactions are limited to only a small portion of the total viewers and should not be taken as representative statements. viewer reactions also include comments in the press and how guests in the talk show, grosvold, have evaluated tajik’s digital stories. the text analysis: a catch-all strategy during the campaign in 2009 tajik published five digital stories on the net. the first two videos, hadia behind the scenes (bakomfilm – hvem lager hva?) and the hadia story (fortellingen om hadia), were both released on january 30th . the next video the women’s day – someone is fighting for their lives (kvinnedagen – noen sloss for livet) was published on march 2nd, six days before the celebration of the international women’s day. the last two videos, the main challenges of the school system (hovedutfordringene i skolen) and safety in oslo (trygghet i oslo) were available for net users on june 1st and on seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 253 august 17th. in the following, the hadia story will receive most attention since it plays a key role in establishing tajik’s political persona. the other four videos can be regarded as an elaboration of the character she constructs in this video viii. figure 1: the hadia story. source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fko9n7wvkoe, available june 14, 2010 tajik’s video campaign appears to be based mainly on an image-oriented and issue-oriented strategy. the videos published in late january are heavily image-oriented, while the last three videos present the political issues she is most concerned with: violence against women, teenagers that drop out of school and making oslo a safer city. however, tajik’s visual presence and/or voice-over addressing the viewers directly, are the threads that run through and dominate all the videos. her connection to the labour party is only briefly mentioned in the backstage video. studies of online campaigning in the usa indicate that downplaying party affiliation is not unusual. it can partly be explained by the assumption that most of the viewers are supporters who already know what party the candidate belongs to, and partly by worries that too much stress on the party affiliation might scare some of the viewers away (bimber & davis, 2003). apart from introducing tajik as a parliament candidate for the labour party in oslo, the short backstage video (53 seconds) has four major functions. firstly, by opening the video with an image of a clapperboard familiar from movie making, tajik is placed in a context associated with a certain glamour. secondly, it announces her plan to use digital storytelling in order to “tell good stories about important issues”. thirdly, it communicates that she is responsible for the messages the videos are sending : “i write my own scripts and pick my own topics”. and finally, it gives cik media some free advertising: “without you i would never have managed this. thank you!” this video constructs tajik as a grateful and resourceful person who can stand on her own feet and make her own decisionsix. by underlining that she is in control of the messages, it also identifies her as a dedicated individual rather than a professional party player. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 254 figure 2: hadia behind the scenes. source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqiup0fl4p0, available june 14, 2010 degree of intimacy as already underlined, the hadia story is the video most explicitly devoted to constructing tajik’s image. dealing primarily with her personal background, it is also the video that corresponds most closely to the conventional concept of digital storytelling. this genre could have inspired tajik to reveal more of her ‘back region’ behavior than she would have done in a television performance. and the hadia story has an intimate dimension that makes it different from how television usually presents politicians. while tajik is talking about her past, the viewers receive the privilege of watching photographs, apparently from her family album. looking at someone’s personal album is usually regarded as an act of intimacy. however, the grainy old photos reveal surprisingly little and can best be described with reference to meyrowitz as ‘middle region’ shots: the pictures of her place of birth, bjørheimsbygd, are two long shots where it is impossible to see details of the village or the house she and her family live in; the pictures of her parents, siblings and friends are also long shots where facial features are very hard to distinguish. qualifications during the three minutes and thirty-two seconds that the hadia story lasts, tajik tries to convince the viewers that she is a hardworking, goal oriented and experienced person in spite of her young age: she began reading newspapers very early and soon decided to become a journalist. while still in school, she published several articles, and before turning eighteen she landed a summer job as a journalist in norway’s largest subscription newspaper aftenposten. the shots where tajik is telling her story directly into the camera emphasize her seriousness, trustworthiness and eloquence: she is filmed in a medium close up against a black background. the lighting, which makes the right side of her face a little darker than the rest, adds a hint of depth and mystery to the image. her young face, framed by long wavy dark hair, appears attractive but apart from her hairstyle her femininity is not underlined with visible make up or jewelry. borrowing an expression from the feminist film scholar, laura mulvey (mulvey, 1975), her image does not connote “to-be-looked-at-ness”. the lack of interesting details in the shot and the fact that tajik looks directly into the camera with sincere eyes invite the viewer to listen rather than to gaze. tajik speaks in a rather slow rhythm emphasizing every word, almost preaching to her viewers. her commentary appears well rehearsed: no stuttering or repetitions. the other four videos support the image of tajik as a serious, trustworthy and strong person dedicated to creating a better society. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 255 apart from the backstage story, which ends with a seemingly unstaged moment where tajik says “cut!” and giggles into the camera, she does not smile much. and the intense, serious voice and the neutral dress and make up are consistent devices in all her digital stories. the communication of identification with the common voters as a child of migrant parents and born far from oslo, tajik is confronted with a difficult task when trying to communicate identification with the common voters of her constituency. this challenge is addressed by using pictures from oslo in four of the five videos and by underlining how important oslo has been in her life. the beginning and the end of a text are conventionally privileged moments. in the hadia story the first words tajik utters is “my first real stay in oslo changed me”, and the last sentence of her commentary also refers to oslo (see below). another strategy is de-emphasizing important features of her background, probably so as not to alienate potential labour voters. she does not dwell much on the fact that she is the child of immigrant parents. a single photo portrays her in pakistani clothing, and her commentary refers briefly to her multicultural background as a balancing act between two cultures. religious beliefs are never mentioned. in terms of social status, she reveals that her mother worked in a grocery, while the career of the father is a blank spot. she also ignores her own university education. instead, the video highlights features that tajik has in common with most norwegians. it contains several pictures of tajik as a child skiing and playing in the snow with friends and siblings. and she is concerned with not being regarded as a spokeswoman just for the norwegian immigrant population. early in the hadia story she tells the viewers that her teacher, terje, convinced her that in order to have a long life as a journalist she should not limit herself to writing about migrant issues: “…it is better to practice integration that to write about it”. at the very end of the video she finally solves the initial enigma about how oslo changed her: like her teacher, oslo made her realize that it is important not to let your ethnic identity and place of birth define who you are. her last words in the video are: we often talk about having a home, having roots somewhere. but people do not have roots, we have feet. we can move around freely. home is something we have in our hearts. and because i have feet and not roots, i am free – and it was mainly terje and oslo that made me realize this (authors’ translation). empathy tajik’s issue oriented videos put heavy stress on her empathic abilities. women’s day: some are fighting for their lives emphasizes her empathy with women who are battered by their spouses. building a bridge to the hadia story, this video also begins with a medium close up of tajik’s face looking seriously into the camera. she is still dressed in neutral black and the background is still dark, but now it consists of dark prison-like bars stressing the tragic dimension of the topic. tajik says: there are a lot of things that we do not talk enough about. this is one of them. one of four norwegian women has been beaten by someone they trust. the offender is a father, brother, boyfriend or husband. do you know how much it hurts when you love him anyhow? (authors' translation). it is especially the use of the personal pronoun “you” in last sentence that emphasizes tajik’s empathy. the first “you” is an appeal to the social seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 256 conscience of the viewers. the second “you” refers to those of the viewers who have experienced how it is to be abused by someone they are fond of. figure 3: women’s day – some are fighting for their lives. source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjxkxrq9loa, available june 14, 2010 in the main challenges of the school system tajik’s empathy is put on display by two stories demonstrating her ability to understand individual suffering. one is about amina who wants to become a doctor like her parents, and loves doing her homework. the second is about gøran, who like one of five norwegian pupils does not know how to read and write properly. both of them end up as” losers” in a school system unable to meet their particular needs. amina is ignored by the teachers and lacks intellectual challenges, while gøran is unable to graduate, like every third teenager in the norwegian high schools. figure 4: the main challenges of the school system. source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyntbe9ofqg, available june 14, 2010 in the video safety in oslo tajik’s empathy is directed at several social groups people who are afraid to walk in the streets of oslo; criminals with difficult lives, migrants who need help to become a part of norwegian society and young people who need more leisure activities. the video ends with a statement that underlines tajik’s empathic understanding of basic human needs: “and most important, everyone needs a job and security in their homes, and help if this is not the case.” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 257 figure 5: safety in oslo. source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj3f_tx2wio, available june 14, 2010 implied viewers and narrative engagement tajik’s choice of communicating to potential voters by means of the relatively new genre of digital storytelling can be regarded as a tactic for reaching young voters in particular. they are more active on the net than other age groups and are usually the most undecided voters. but the messages of tajik’s videos seem to address a much broader range of viewers. their mode of communication can be described as the previously mentioned “catch all strategy” (kirchheimer, 1966), which attempts to embrace as many voters as possible by appealing to the lowest common denominator. tajik presents herself by emphasizing common human values – trustworthiness, dedication, goal orientation. the issues she talks about, helping disadvantaged groups such as battered women, youth or migrants, are not very controversial. and the appeal of her videos relies to a considerable degree on basic entertainment values and eye-catching aesthetic qualities. in digital storytelling viewer engagement is primarily achieved through narrative means. the hadia story is structured according to basic and popular narrative principles found in fairytales all over the world (propp, 1968), as well as in mainstream hollywood moviemaking (bordwell, 1985). to spur the curiosity of the viewers it opens with an enigma: why is oslo so important to hadia? it continues with a positive presentation of hadia, designed to make the viewer sympathize with her and her desire to become a journalist. the video typically ends with hadia reaching her career goal, thereby satisfying the viewers who have identified with her quest. finally, the video reveals the important life lesson oslo has taught her: that she is free (see above). this video also attempts to appeal to the poetic sensibilities of the viewers through the rhetorical figure enthymeme: an incomplete or not quite convincing causal connection (bordwell & thompson, 1997, p. 140). the enthymeme in the hadia story is “…because i have feet and not roots, i am free”. the implied premise – that human being have feet and not roots is obvious – but the conclusion is rather dubious because having feet is usually not sufficient to ensure a person’s freedom. narrative principles are as indicated above also the main structuring principle of the issue-oriented video the main challenges of the school system. two characters are introduced: the clever but silent girl and the boy with learning disabilities. the conflict is their meeting with a school system that treats both in the same way in spite of their different needs. this video also catches the attention of the viewer because of its original visual design. the voice-over still belongs to tajik, but she is absent from the image track. this consists of an seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 258 animated film with highly stylized, almost abstract images, of the two main characters and their school surroundings: amina is an all red figure with no facial features, while gøran is an anonymous figure painted blue. the abstract imagery serves to underline that amina and gøran are just two of many teenagers who suffer a hard fate in the norwegian school system. their misfortunes are symbolized by a drawing showing a big hole in the floor of the school building. some of the pupils manage to avoid the hole, but hands stretching out of the gap indicate that not all have been so lucky. in the videos women’s day – some are fighting for their lives and safety in oslo narrative principles typical of digital storytelling are abandoned and replaced by a less entertaining categorical form which focuses on different aspects of the main category which is people living in oslo city. the aesthetic selling point of the first video is the surprising feature that most of tajik’s voice-over commentary is found written on objects in the pictures from the city. her spoken words are for example written on the side of a tram or a taxi, above a shop window or on a traffic sign. safety in oslo tries to appeal to the viewers by using images where the talking tajik is projected onto moving images of oslo city, sometimes shown in extremely fast motion. in general the videos have, as already indicated, little to offer audiences interested in political ideologies and how to solve societal problems. tajik identifies a number of political issues, but she is completely silent about how she is going to reach her political goals. her position as a labour party politician is ambiguous across all the videos, and the basic ideological message of the hadia story seems strangely at odds with the social democratic idea of the welfare state as the key to democracy and social justice. in this video, tajik constructs herself as the incarnation of the self made woman who has achieved her goal to become a journalist in spite of her youth and her immigrant background. little is said about how the political structure of the norwegian society has made this possible for her. on the contrary, she stresses her individual freedom and lack of ties to the surroundings, basically sending the viewers a liberalist message about the importance of individual freedom. summary the main purpose of hadia tajik’s video campaign seems to be convincing potential voters and journalists that she is a serious politician dedicated to creating a better society. she is portrayed as 1) a competent and trustworthy politician experienced beyond her years; 2) like most norwegians in spite of her migrant background and 3) with a strong ability to understand basic human needs as well as identifying deeply with disadvantaged groups independent of their background. the secondary goal of the videos seems to be a desire to entertain the viewers and appeal to their emotions and aesthetic sensibilities. this is not done by using intimate or sensationalist imagery. tajik reveals very little of her back region behavior and also moves towards the formal end of middle region behavior. the tools tajik uses to engage the viewers are primarily narrative enigmas, poetic phrases and fascinating visual effects. finally, the mode of address of tajik videos seems designed to include as many viewers as possible. the political issues she talks about tend to be uncontroversial, and her self-presentation appears neutral without any kind of eccentricities, seen from an ethnic norwegian perspective. the videos are in other words designed to be as non-offensive and inclusive as possible. reactions: cracking the viral code in comparison with her political colleagues in norway, tajik’s storytelling project has so far been a success in finding an audience on the web. by april 2009 the 420 videos on the official norwegian party channels on youtube had seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 259 accumulated 189,316 views (kalnes, 2009a, p. 23). by december the same year, hadia tajik’s videos had attracted 52,548 views, indicating a 20% market share for her five videos. the first video, the story of hadia, aroused the strongest interest with 62.5% of the views. it is quite sensational that a relatively unknown politician can spur such interest within a short span of time. the relatively high production qualities and entertainment values of the videos were of course important in attracting viewers. but using the internal viral qualities of digital social networking inherent in web 2.0 was also a vital factor. most parties or politicians do not yet appear to have cracked the code for taking advantage of these qualities. tajik’s party, labour, seems to be closer than the others. by april 2009, it was firmly established as the dominant player on youtube and other video outlets on the web. its youtube videos had captured 93% of all party video views, while having 37% in terms of number of videos (kalnes, 2009b, p. 27). tajik has been able to utilize the digital networks available on web 2.0, besides off-line activities, to pull viewers to her videos. in a recent presentation she identified some important pull factors, such as “..bloggers linking to the videos … people twittering about them … coverage in traditional media … ” (tajik, 2009). all of tajik’s own on-line and off-line activities were regarded as integral in her promotional strategy, as neatly summarized by herself in figure 6 below. figure 6. hadia tajik’s media strategy (tajik, 2009) consequently, tajik quickly established a diverse web presence extending beyond youtube. this included a personal home page (http://hadia.no), as well as profiles on social web sites such as twitter (http://twitter.com/hadiatajik), origo (http://www.origo.no/hadia), facebook (http://www.facebook.com/hadiatajik), and a personal page on the labour party's version of mybarackobama.com (http://mittarbeiderparti.no). she was also active in a number of web based social and political networks. according to tajik, one the functions of these other sites was to continue the debate triggered by her videos (kirknes, 2009). but they obviously also functioned to promote the videos, though conscious use of referrals and the opportunities offered by embedding of videos. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 260 tajik was very active on her facebook page, which reached 1,967 “friends” by january 11th 2010. she had a similarly high activity on twitter with 752 tweets and 4,274 followers by january 11th 2010. her profile was one of the most popular in norway. by may 19th 2009 she ranked as number six on the top list of all politicians and parties with a twitter profile (http://tvitre.no/norsktoppen). while twitter in general has a modest reach amongst norwegian net users in general, it is widely used by journalists. data retrieved from youtube (10.12.2009) x indicate that roughly 80% of the video views were triggered by external links, meaning the viewer saw or was referred to the video from other places on the web, through embedsxi or links. youtube's breakdown of the data into sites of origin suggests that up to 60% of the views are generated by networking. but the major part of the networking effect is via users other than herself or the labour party. the views generated by tajik's own website amounts to 10.37% of all views from external links. youtube provides no specific data on views from her personal facebook or twitter profile. however, youtube’s data on the views coming from these sites in general indicate marginal effects, as they only reach 0.52%. the share of sites associated with the labour party was at 3.15% , and a further 6.51% came from “playlists” and “related videos”. some of the views in the latter category are probably triggered by watching other videos by tajik and the labour party, or playlists set up by them. therefore, it may reasonably be estimated that less than 20% of the external views were generated directly by networking from tajik or her party. the rather diverse category in youtube’s data called “other/viral”, accounting for more than 37% of the external views, suggests that the major part of the networking effect is related to the activity of other users. the triggers for these users can be both the on-line and off-line visibility of tajik, but there is no data on the distribution among them. there is also a significant group of external views (35.04%) coming from search engines. by default, these viewers were not directly guided by the networking of tajik, the labour party or other web users. as web addresses are rarely provided in the off-line media (i.e. printed press, radio or tv), reports in these media can be expected to trigger use of search engines. like tajik herself expressed in the previously cited comment; a successful media strategy does not rely on single sites or media types, but on the conscious use of the interaction between all of them. this is discussed in the next section. spin-off effects between new and traditional media on-line networking, by tajik herself and others, clearly played a role in directing attention to her videos. but appearances in traditional media are still important in reaching voters, and activity on the web can be an instrument to attract the attention of these media. of course, this works both ways. appearances in traditional mass media can direct new audiences to the new web media, as indicated by the data in the previous section on the significance of search engines. off-line, traditional mass media were attributed an important role in tajik's media strategy and the success of her videos in finding an audience was boosted by journalistic interest. journalists are in general frequent visitors on the web and tend to focus on the news value of new technologies. this phenomenon is captured by the “hype-cycle” hypothesis put forward by the american ict-consultant firm the gartner group (fenn & linden, 2005; linden & fenn, 2003). according to this thesis, the media tend to strongly overestimate the effects of new icts while they are still immature. the media seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 261 attention is therefore disproportional to the actual use and usability of icts hence the “hype”. the relevance of the hypothesis for icts and politics in norway is shown by the growth in references to popular web 2.0 sites in the printed pressxii. the media exposure grew from almost nothing in the election year of 2005 to surpassing that of prime minister jens stoltenberg in the next election year of 2009. consequently, early adapters of new technology, such as hadia tajik, may get significant payoffs in terms of coverage in the traditional media. in the next instance, this stimulates public interest in her presence on the web, and in her political persona in general. while tajik got some coverage before the appearance of the videos, these definitely helped her get her some extra attention. her profile in the printed press was boosted in 2009, compared with the previous year: 393 articles mentioned her name against 167 in 2008xiii. data for the two major national tv-channels, the public service nrk and the commercial tv2, indicate the same trendxiv. on nrk she got three special tv appearances dedicated to the her videos, once in the saturday news (july 27th 2009) and twice on talk shows (i kveld on february 10th 2009 and grosvold on february 13th 2009). the talk show appearances came just days after the release of her two first videos. especially grosvold – a friday evening talk show with approximately 1 000 000 viewersxv – must have been invaluable. excerpts from the hadia story were shown in the program, and tajik herself was given considerable and positive attention for her innovative project (“grosvold,” 2009; weiby, 2009). hence, there is a double spin-off between new and traditional media. the new media increase “old media” exposure, thereby reaching a wider mass audience and then looping back to get new viewers of the videos. but presence in new media in itself is not a sufficient condition to get attention. it has to be part of a well planned and coherent media strategy. however, the ultimate yardstick for a successful media strategy is not the level of attention but its contribution to a positive image among voters. viewer reactions for individual candidates and political parties, video-generated attention can be a double-edged sword. traditional media use their journalistic filters. the characteristic web 2.0 technologies encourage user feedback, comments, sharing and re-framing, of which youtube is one of several exponents. as early as in the 2007 campaign, comments in the press from the party leadership and leaders of the information departments of the major and middle-sized parties indicated they all were aware of both benefits and risks of social media (lundh, 2007; moe, 2007; semmingsen, 2007). interviews of the parties’ professional web managers confirmed this ambivalence, one of them explicitly using the phrase “opportunity and nightmare” (kalnes, 2009a, p. 256). while welcoming the new wave of activity from the party members, these professionals obviously regarded “amateurish” videos of politicians as potentially bad publicity. many of these videos were ridiculed in both the online and off-line press (braaten, 2007; lüders, 2007; waagbø, 2007). however, tajik's videos turned out to be an exceptional success. they triggered mostly favorable reactions in the traditional media, including the judgments of “expert” commentators. the positive treatment of tajik in the talk show grosvold shortly after the premiere of the first videos may have been important in setting the premises (grosvold, 2009). one of the guests in the program, the conservative party’s per kristian foss, characterized the videos as charming, while the norwegian communication “guru” kjetil try found them well made. try regarded the videos as a smart move in helping an seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 262 unknown politician establish a public persona in an age where parties matter less and personalities more. other commentators viewed the project as innovative, although one expert found the portrayal of tajik as too polished to reveal the real person (aftenposten.no, 2009; helland, 2009). however, the latter critique may be beside the point, as the use of the “middle stage”, rather than “back stage” reflected a conscious choice (goffman, 1959; meyrowitz, 1986). on grosvold both politicians fully agreed that such videos should not be too close or private. the absence of politics in the hadia story was also criticized (eik, 2009; “grosvold,” 2009). tajik defended this by pointing out that this specific video was to be complemented by other videos about political issues (grosvold, 2009; heftøy, 2009a). however, as shown in the text analysis, while her later videos discussed political issues there was a striking absence of references to party politics or political ideology. regarding ordinary viewers, tajik’s 5 videos triggered relatively few reactions through the interactive tools available on youtube during 2009. by december 10th there were 281 registered reactions, in the form of 87 comments, 29 marks as favorite and 165 ratings, in total amounting to 0.5% of registered views. as there is a good chance that a single viewer uses several modes of reaction, far fewer than 1 of 200 viewers actually used the interactive tools. in general, these contained mostly positive feedback xvi. the average rating of 3.27 on youtube’s 5-star scale reflects the mainly positive pattern. many of the comments are also encouraging, saluting tajik for her storytelling initiative or general qualities as a politician. a user with the nickname the rat virgin wrote for instance in a comment to the hadia story: very nice video. it seems like you have had a very interesting upbringing, providing you with a good basis for political work. impressive that you were so young when you started writing in the newspapers. i think it is very important to get background information about the politicians we are supposed to vote for, it becomes more personal and one can get a sense about what kind of person you really are, unlike sterile tvinterviews or newspaper articles. great, looking forward to the next video. (authors' translation from norwegian). however, the risks of exposure and lack of control from the producer side are visible as well. while tajik herself had played down her immigrant background in the video, many of the comments referred to this, both in a positive and negative way. a substantial share had sexist or anti-immigrant connotations, of a more or less offensive type. two examples of sexism are the comments from the users amitk19 and torperik to the hadia story. the former informs other viewers of “nice saggy tits at 30 s(econds)” (original in english). the latter’s comment is less offensive: “she’s pretty, isn’t she” (authors’ translation) . some viewers used the videos to comment on the hijab-controversy xvii that hadia was involved in during the winter 2008/2009. the user kroeg11 wrote in response to the hadia story: what a completely hopeless candidate! – what impertinence, …. my dear girl, learn this: norway is a non-muslim country! we have western culture based on christian values, and not muslim. why cannot muslims live in their own muslim countries? …. (authors’ translation) the videos on violence against women and safety in oslo also triggered reactions from viewers hostile to her background, linking non-western seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 263 immigrants and islam to the issues. it is interesting that the comments indicate an audience beyond the already politically converted. this contradicts the idea that politicians on the web only reach the already converted voters. as noted earlier, the personal vote has little significance in norway, in contrast to the usa, especially in parliamentary electionsxviii. however, the information on the number of changes made by the labour voters in oslo tells us that tajik made a special impression on the voters. of the 23 candidates on the labour list only foreign minister jonas gahr støre had more voters changing his position on the list. while this was not sufficient to push her further up on the list, the labour party won the marginal seat in oslo at the sixth position where tajik was placed. one should be careful to draw any conclusion on the videos' effects on voting, but they undoubtedly contributed to establishing tajik as a well known norwegian political personality within a short span of time. conclusion social media still play a relatively modest role in political campaigns. according to recent surveys from tns gallup (tns gallup, 2009) and infact (andersen, 2009), only 16-17% of norwegian voters employed such tools to retrieve information or discuss politics during the 2009 campaign. compared with national tv ratings, the political audiences of the social media are miniscule. by april 2009 all the videos published by the political parties on youtube had reached less than 200 000 viewers (kalnes, 2009b). four daily election specials on nrk tv one week in august 2009, on the other hand, were seen by more than 2.5 million viewers. this does not necessarily imply that on-line videos are marginal political tools. during the 2009 electoral campaign tajik moved from being a relatively unknown politician to becoming a political household name. her digital stories were instrumental in this development, for several reasons. the most important is probably that they gave her prime time television coverage. norwegian news media have in general been very concerned with web 2.0. and tajik’s videos were regarded as an innovative kind of political communication. the videos also functioned as an effective marketing tool on the net. as an integral part of her extensive viral network, as well as the networking of others, the videos received numerous views and were mainly met with positive reactions. this was probably due to their relatively high production values and their catch-all communication strategy that downplayed her ethnic, educational and political background and emphasized her universal human qualities. tajik’s success in getting exposure on television and the printed press is of course also related to that fact that she is an extraordinary politician in today’s norway – a young, good-looking woman with migrant background – appealing to the traditional media’s need to include more migrants in their coverage, as well as to their desire to present attractive visual imagery. regarding the transformative power of digital storytelling on political communication, tajik’s experiments with the genre do not indicate substantial changes not already described in the party literature. web 2.0 tools have the potential to change political communication by creating a non-threatening and inclusive environment for people eager to express their political opinions, but not finding an attractive and available outlet outside the web 2.0 sphere. tajik has stated that she uses digital storytelling primarily in order to “engage” potential voters (tajik, 2009). and apparently her sympathetic presence in the video stories, her catch-all communication tactic and easily digestible political statements may encourage grass root political engagement. but the analysis has revealed that she also uses digital storytelling as a conventional marketing tool, trying to convince as many viewers as possible that she is a serious and goal oriented politician who understands the needs of the voters of her constituency. in this sense, her video can be interpreted as an attempt to steer seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 264 clear of the widespread opinion among voters of politicians as crude businessmen “trading in votes” (mclean, 1982). tajik’s use of digital storytelling, with support from cik media and her party organization, can also be regarded as evidence of the increased professionalization of political communication. her prominent presence in all the videos, combined with mostly uncontroversial political messages, support the thesis that modern politics are adapting to pressures from the electronic media that prefer personal charisma and slogans to serious debates about political ideologies. tajik’s self-presentation is otherwise consistent with the political middle ground behavior that meyrowitz has declared as the conventional degree of intimacy in modern political communication. this confirms the point presented in the introduction, that digital storytelling used in a political context is not for the time being representing an e-ruption, but rather politics as usual. references aftenposten.no. 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(2009). sosiale medier påvirket få personer i valgkampen. retrieved january 5, 2010 from http://www.tns-gallup.no/print.aspx?did=9088157 weiby, h. e. (2009, february 13). generasjonskløft i valgkampen. nrk nyheter. retrieved january 6, 2010 from http://fil.nrk.no/nyheter/1.6480891 waagbø, a. j. (2007, august 9). se valgvideoene ekspertene slakter. nettavisen. retrieved january 7, 2010 from http://pub.tv2.no/nettavisen/innenriks/valg07/article1266375.ece i tajik was born in norway in 1983, by pakistani immigrant parents. unlike most immigrants, who live in the norwegian capital, oslo, she grew up in a small village in the south-western part of the country. at the age of sixteen she became leader of the local branch of the labour party's youth organisation (arbeidernes ungdomsfylking). while taking university education and practicing as a journalist, her political career took off. from 2006 she served as political advisor in different government departments, including the prime minister's office. ii hompepage center for digital storytelling: http://www.storycenter.org/history.html, retrived april 28, 2010. iii a recent judgement in the european court of human rights challenged this prohibition, but the government has so far been able to avoid the dissolution of the law. iv see tim berners-lee for a critical discussion. v ”classé garde” refers to that the ”masses” mobilized – or sought mobilized – by particular parties belonged to specific social classes or –groups. vi khan had at numerous occations used her office phone to call a fortune teller. vii the term is taken from wolfgang iser (1972), a literary theorist belonging to reader-response criticism. viii as the videos are in norwegian, those not familiar with the language are advised to take advantage of the caption service on youtube to get english subtitles. this is available through the small arrowhead in the lower right corner of the video. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 267 ix it is not known to what degree the labour party was involved in the scriptwriting process. x active searches from users represent views triggered by referrals from the three search engines mentioned in the data; youtube's internal search engine, google and the norwegian abc-søk (http://verden.abcsok.no ). personal direction from tajik represents views triggered by linking to or embedding the videos on tajik's website (http://hadia.no). direction via party network represents views triggered by links or video embedding on sites or pages belonging the labour party, as well one important party members blog named by youtube (http://sosialdemokrat.blogspot.com) other specified is other sites specified, but not directly related to the party network. facebook and twitter may of course contain views triggered by tajik's or labour party presence on these sites. other / viral general are what youtube has classified as other / viral. xi ”embeds” are referring to instances where the videos uploaded to a site (in this instance youtube) can be viewed directly on other web sites/pages. this is possible through a particular code, often easily available beside the original page, which can be copied and pasted into any other page. xii the printed press were checked by number of mentions of twitter, myspace nettby, flickr, facebook, youtube and blog* against ”jens stoltenberg” in retriever (https://web.retriever-info.com/services/achive.html), which is the main national database of media contents. xiii source: retriever https://web.retriever-info.com/services/archive.htm. articles in major newspapers in retriever database containing phrase "hadia tajik" 01.01.2008 29.12.2009. xiv sources: search on nrk and tv 2 january 11.01.2010, http://www.tv2.no/tv2/do/fsearch?stolpe=all&querystring=hadia+tajik http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/sok/hadia+tajik. only results referring tvappearances included. xv this is an estimate from the 970 000 viewers reported watching the previous show (wekre, 2009). xvi representing a method of self-selection, the recorded user reactions cannot qualify as a representative sample of all viewer reactions. xvii at the time tajik was political advisor to the absent minister of justice and had apparently sanctioned the ministry’s accept of female police officers using hijab. xviii to have any effect more than 50% of the votes cast for the same party list must contain exactly the same change in the individual candidate’s position (oslo kommune, bystyrets sekretariat, 2009). wright & ryan meshing the personal with the professional.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 286 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 meshing the personal with the professional: digital storytelling in higher education mary f. wright assistant professor of middle and secondary literacy education uwrf faculty representative for digital storytelling in higher education university of wisconsin river falls mary.wright@uwrf.edu karen ryan director of the educational technology center director of the technology leadership cadre university of wisconsin system learning technology development council representative university of wisconsin – river falls karen.ryan@uwrf.edu abstract this paper chronicles a yearlong journey of learning about digital storytelling and leading the creation of five digital stories within a higher education community. we bring two complementary perspectives to guide this inquiry: as a faculty member in teacher education and as the university of wisconsin system representative for the learning technology development council as well as director of our educational technology center. our passion for the arts, aesthetics and education bring us to extend an inquiry into teacher identity and reflection by connecting our colleagues’ stories with the art of digital storytelling. we see its place and value in an academic environment; although not always currently clear, the roots of personal insight permeate the lives of professionals within the academy. digital storytelling spans the artificial divide between the experiences of the past and our professional identities. the myriad uses of digital storytelling in higher education are explored as a reflective tool for practice, to highlight academic projects, interests or initiatives, and most importantly, to simply reflect on how we are shaped by the stories we live and how we in turn share our diverse identities. link to video abstract: http://gallery.me.com/mfranceswright/100021 keywords: digital storytelling, teacher identity, self-study, reflective practioner. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 287 our digital storytelling journey begins this paper chronicles a yearlong journey of learning, sharing and experiencing the creation of five digital stories within a higher education community. this study yields two complementary perspectives: as a faculty member (mary) in teacher education and leader for digital storytelling on the university of wisconsin – river falls campus and as a representative (karen) for the university of wisconsin ltdc (learning technology development council) and director of the educational technology center. together, a passion for the arts, aesthetics, communication and education fuel a deep understanding and appreciation for the art of digital storytelling in an academic environment. dana atchley, who died in 2000, coined the term, “digital storytelling,” and referred to his “video campfire” as transforming “the oldest of performing roles, the campfire storyteller, and updated it for the 21st century. dana demonstrated that you could sustain the charm and intimacy of the ancient oral art form of storytelling while painting a backdrop with the magical new palette of digital imagery” (taken from a memorial, http://www.nextexit.com/memorial/obit.html). technology is indeed the new campfire for the digital storyteller and the glow of this campfire has the potential to ignite a global conversation, as listeners/viewers engage from afar. i (mary) taught language and literacy through the arts as a middle school teacher, often bringing in video response as a format for students to exhibit their understanding. as a doctoral student in literacy education, i created documentary films and digital short films as part of a self-study in coming to know myself more deeply as a teacher. retracing memories of childhood, my teacher self and my teacher educator self, i used the medium of film in part to “tell” my story. as an english educator for four years at the university of minnesota duluth, i worked with digital web tools for teaching and creating literary blogs for students to post digital videos as a response to literature. as part of what is now known as the “new literacies” (lankshear & knobel, 2002), digital tools such as podcasting, wikis, blogs and online photo galleries are tools in the classroom that engage students in critical thinking and creative ways of expressing and exhibiting information. as an english educator, i realize that digital forms of communication are now an integral component of classroom reading, writing and learning. there is a new authorial voice emerging that rushkoff (in richardson, 2006) refers to as a “society of authorship” (p.5). teaching content area literacy and adolescent literature at the university of wisconsin – river falls (uwrf), figure 1. showcases of five digital stories. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 288 digital video cultivates the authorial voice as a creative vehicle in course assignments and expectations. i firmly believe in the power of story to empower faculty members with a clearer understanding of who they are as teachers, researchers and people. i (karen) came to the uwrf campus in 1997 to serve as the director of the educational technology center, a facility which provides teaching/learning and technology support to faculty and students on the university of wisconsin-river falls campus. my prior multimedia experience includes teaching media design, 35mm photography and photo essay and layout in the communication department at st. louis university. i also directed a media center that served faculty and students, and taught instructional technology and desktop publishing at harris-stowe state university. since 1999, i have directed student members of the technology leadership cadre, who provide “just in time” personalized technology assistance to faculty and students on the uwrf campus. from1998 through 2009, i have enjoyed the role of uw-system campus representative to the learning technology development council, from here on referred to as the ltdc. “the mission of the ltdc is to encourage system-wide collaboration and individual campus efforts which promote professional development in the effective use of learning technologies and explore new teaching and learning applications of existing and emerging technologies.” (http://www.uwsa.edu/olit/ltdc/) in the fall of 2008, the university of wisconsin digital storytelling in higher education project’s goal was bringing together faculty and technology experts from each campus to learn about the process of digital storytelling. this first annual uw-system ltdc conference regarding digital storytelling was entitled, “digital storytelling in higher education: it’s not just for kindergarten anymore.” the title suggests that there is a resistance to storytelling as part of the academic milieu. the questions guiding the study were, “what are the uses of digital storytelling in higher education?” and “will there be a place for digital storytelling in the academy?” the dst faculty leaders were expected to return to the individual campuses to inform, recruit and engage fellow faculty members in telling their own digital stories. the university of wisconsin digital storytelling initiative in november of 2008, we attended a three-day workshop at the university of wisconsin madison. as in the story of noah’s ark, we came two by two, one ltdc representative from each campus (karen) and a chosen faculty representative from each campus (mary). there at uw-madison, leaders in the emerging field of digital storytelling explored the place of narrative as a valuable tool in higher education. joe lambert, founder of the center for digital storytelling in berkeley, california and author of “digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community” (2006) who led the three-day workshop, taught us the process of leading a digital storytelling workshop. roger schank, author of “tell me a story: narrative and intelligence” (1990), presented his views regarding storytelling’s place in education. there are many reasons for creating a digital story as seen by viewing the diverse array of stories from the center for digital storytelling’s website: http://storycenter.org/index1.html. while the stories of social justice, stories from academia, stories of personal change, stories of philosophy as well as those of reflective practitioners differed in subject, perspective and knowledge base, they all shared qualities of good digital storytelling. a digital story is like a poem; it is brief, essential and a crystallized experience expressed in narrative, image, sound and motion. the reflexive process of writing, rewriting and reflecting energizes the storyteller’s vision. as he/she conjures and selects images, photographs, video clips and music, multi-dimensional layers of meaning enrich the emerging story. although the digital storyteller in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 289 higher education addresses professional identity, the writer/storyteller’s voice is authentic to the extent that is it is essentially personal in its perspective. we learned from digital storytelling by experiencing the process. joe lambert taught us to scaffold the story using seven elements of good storytelling: point of view, dramatic question, emotional content, the gift of voice, the power of the soundtrack, and economy. narrative economy became a central focus as lambert (2006) explains, “storytelling with images means consciously economizing language in relation to the narrative that is provided by the juxtaposition of images” (57). story concepts are written on 4 x 6 index cards, using joe lambert’s four c’s of storytelling: context, crisis, change and closure. this exercise takes the listener/viewer to the moment by jumping into the context of the story. using this simple storytelling tool, we saw how personal voice emerges immediately, beckoning the listener to pay attention. listening to the voices of our colleagues as they read their stories illuminated how this deceptively simple device empowers the writer to launch a genuine story concept. every good story contains some crisis or conflict that institutes change, has a resolution and, hence, closure. for the faculty member uneasy about writing from a personal perspective, writing on a small index card eases tension. as lambert (2006) suggests, “the card is small. it is finite. it seems possible, perhaps even easy to fill. so for the novice, it is saying just get this much down, and we’ll work from there” (34). the seventh element is pacing, and we were reminded that just as in natural conversation, stories have pregnant pauses, a vocal pace that invites the listener to lend an ear to the story being told. as the index cards were completed and story concepts shared, joe lambert modeled the story circle (lambert, 2006; ohler, 2002) as a safe environment, a place of mutual respect and trust in which participants were empowered to share very personal narratives. after active listening, story circle members provided collaborative editorial feedback. implied within the story circle is the intrinsic value of peer review: to share what is heard, note what is confusing and suggest images or sounds to help the author with the artistic layering of his or her story. witnessing firsthand the magical power of shared stories, we realized that in a world filled with superficial dialogue as daily exchange, the story circle validates the voice of the individual. the three-day workshop culminated in a hands-on multimedia practicum involving digitizing images, selecting audio and video content, exploring special effects and creating titles and credits. pondering a timeline for unfolding our digital storytelling project on campus, we thought we would first introduce the idea to faculty, invite the submission of story concepts, hold a story circle and see the project through to production with a three-day multimedia workshop. leaving the university of wisconsin – madison campus, our goal was to bring the digital storytelling project to the uwrf community by engaging interest, inviting participants and supporting colleagues in telling digital stories. easing the technology burden, our campus offered “just in time” and customized technology support provided by karen’s specially trained student team, the tlc (technology leadership cadre). inspired by the conference, we were confident that our dual areas of expertise (technology and literacy education) would serve our campus well. i (mary) prepared to lead the faculty in this storytelling project, and i (karen) organized all aspects of multimedia support including the training and supervision of the students in the tlc. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 290 bringing it home in january 2009, we developed a plan of action for our uwrf digital storytelling project. i, (karen) wanted to prepare the members of the tlc with a comprehensive understanding of the digital storytelling process so that they could better support the faculty later in the semester. the tlc students assist both students and faculty with integrating technology in a teaching and learning context. on february 20, 2009, we conducted a digital storytelling in higher education informational session open to the campus community. in february, 20 colleagues found time to attend the session and out of the 20, 10 story concepts were submitted for consideration. our final working group consisted of five faculty members and one outstanding student who served on the university’s sustainability committee and was co-president of the campus eco club. next, we were to meet for a two hour story circle in april of 2009. a testament to the power of storytelling was the fact that all the participants voluntarily sacrificed a saturday morning in april to assemble for the story circle. as we learned firsthand, digital stories have personal roots, and storytellers are vulnerable as they read stories for the first time. the storytellers have what mcdrury and alterio (2002) call “primary ownership,” the understanding that the tellers own their stories, and thus within the story circle, it is imperative that the listeners “have some sense of empathy with the tellers” (156-157). to break the ice, i (mary) talked about the sensitive process of sharing stories, the importance of deep listening and giving appropriate feedback. as the first writers began reading, the silence in the room signaled the mesmerizing impact of the personal storyteller. there is a sacredness to sharing personal stories and a risk in opening up one’s personal voice to the public. at first, the participants exuded a certain timidity or reluctance, but as the stories were read and the voices were heard, a spirit of trust elicited constructive editorial feedback. excitement escalated as the group talked about what they “heard,” “saw” and “felt” while listening. suggestions for imagery, word choice, music and moving images spurred a spirited conversation about ways to further refine the stories. the next and final step in the project timeline would be the three-day multimedia workshop scheduled for june. storytellers had two months to gather artifacts (photos, images, artwork), choose the music and finalize the narrative. finishing touches: the three-day multi-media production workshop we had been in touch by e-mail and phone with the storytellers since the april story circle, helping with revisions and ideas. in mid-june, the group arrived as promised, armed with final drafts of their stories, artifacts, digital images and music selections to accompany their narratives. just as the first few minutes of the story circle had shown us, there again was an air of uncertainty and discomfort. the small group of five (one had dropped out due to a family emergency) now looked to us and the members of tlc to facilitate the final telling of their stories. we began by pairing up and listening to stories, using our ear to polish the craft of language, reminding participants of the quality of their voice as being integral to the authenticity of the story. reminding the participants of the natural flow of voice, we asked them to pretend they were addressing a oneperson audience and not to rush through or over-dramatize, but instead to read the narrative as if you were actually telling your story. the final readings were transformative and emotionally engaging. the work resulted in five uniquely powerful stories connecting personal with professional knowledge. at the core of all the stories was the message that personal experiences in life help to shape a professional identity. the diverse range of meaningful writing and the variety of perspectives surprised and delighted us. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 291 five digital stories: five distinct ties to teacher identity unlike traditional oral storytelling, digital stories are a multimedia art form layered with a vocal narrative, music and both static and moving images. in addition, they can be archived and accessed by an unlimited audience. digital stories are best understood through viewing and listening, so web links follow each story along with a brief description of the authorial voice. even though each writer tells his or her own unique story, there are common elements among the five. of the five stories, three were memoirs, two were tributes to people who had a major impact on their professional identities, two shared a sustainability thread and one was both a memoir and philosophical exploration of adolescence. we noticed that five themes emerged: etchings in adolescence, personal role models, professional role models, a sense of place and dual identities. levi super slims – etchings in adolescence a reluctance in telling was clear among all five. a consummate oral storyteller, the social studies/educational psychology educator selected a story he orally told students nearly every year. his story, levi  super  slims, reflects upon understandings acquired in adolescence in addition to the platform that provides for the teaching of adolescents. while addressing a universal adolescent rite of passage, his story hinges on a 12-year-old’s identity based on a fixation with obtaining a pair of levi super slims to attract the girl of his dreams. using pictures from his wife’s high school yearbook, the fantasy girl becomes replaced with the woman he married. the dance of love/life is symbolically represented with a brief video clip of this professor dancing through stacks of the university library to the narration, “where i’ve been waltzing ever since.” as a professor of educational psychology, he is able to use archival family photographs and music from the era to highlight both his personal and professional voice. this digital story, [see web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720463] masterfully conveys the concept of adolescent angst and the pressure to fit in. figure 2. digital storytelling in higher education. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 292 personal role models an early childhood education teacher recounted a childhood memory in, a trip  to  the  metropolitan, which deeply shaped her professional identity. an 80year-old friend of the family with whom she is still in contact returned to school for a second masters degree and took herself on an excursion to new york’s metropolitan museum of art. this experience is crystallized for us in the digital storytelling as memoir, making a clear connection to her lifelong interest in art, cultural pursuits and learning. her story began as a very brief vignette: [web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720479 ]. rewriting and retelling her story through narrative, photography and music, she meticulously aligned her narrative with carefully selected archival images representing memories in vivid detail. according to mitchell & weber (1998), almost nothing has been written about the significance of the culture of childhood in relation to teacher identity and teacher education. the tenacious thread of experience that holds and stores memories allows us to model ourselves after those who captivate our souls and stretch our imaginations. this story conjures those exemplary people in our lives that helped shape our teacher, artist and researcher spirits. professional role models the director of our principal licensure program composed a tribute to a man who forever influenced her concept of school leadership. her story, jerry’s story: servant leader, focused on concrete examples of the role of the servant leader within a school, which addresses special student needs. her story was never turned in as a digital narrative; it remained handwritten and only minor changes were made prior to her arrival at the workshop. choices for symbols figure 3. levi super slims. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 293 to convey emotion and meaning were very deliberate and critical decisions for the storyteller. she physically returned to the site of the story to take photographs that could visually represent the poignant memory that took place over 20 years ago. her story describes the loss of a consummate “servant leader” who cared about his faculty in emotional, spiritual and professional ways. up until this time, this particular storyteller found technology daunting. however, with the “just in time” and respectful support provided by the tlc, her uneasiness surrounding unfamiliar technology tools was assuaged. getting past her reluctance, she created a seamless video that would help her students appreciate the concept of a principal in the role of “servant leader.” once again, this very personal story [see web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720484] finds a place within the professional scope of this professor’s world. the imprint of those who stand before us as professional role models is universal in the telling of who we are and how we teach. a sense of place what are the places and spaces that increase our understanding of what it is to be human and engage in a human science such as education? coming from our university outreach center and working with land use specialists in the area and around the state, this story, the land tells us, reflects on a sense of place and ties to the land that area farmers had experienced. bringing forth narrative voices of a husband and wife as they share memories of struggling to keep the land they love and work on, this digital story presents interviews and faded photographs of the land as it was long ago. fresh new pictures of the same land today show the transition through time. as an historical piece, the story [web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720489] informs the viewer/listener, figure 4. the land tells us. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 294 chronicling a lifetime of work. in a university where sustainability has come to stand as one of our core themes, this digital story also speaks to the storyteller’s professional field of land use. coming to the story circle with many ideas for imagery, sound effects and music, the piece evokes the importance of places that shape our personal and professional identities. dual identities a student brings out a personal journey by bridging his love of hockey with a new understanding of sustainability. he traces his development from the days of growing up and playing hockey in rural manitoba to his carefree days as a college student at northland college in wisconsin, where a strange encounter with a “hippie” type introduced him to a new passion, ecology. as president of the eco club on the uwrf campus, bo’s initial story focused strictly on sustainability. the story circle’s editorial feedback broadened his vision as he discovered that it was really the value of the dual identity, his love of hockey and the natural world that labeled him as “an eco jock.” after several revisions, his story went from strictly having an environmental focus to the people, places and experiences that shaped this identity [see web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720475]. this story focuses on a shared love for both ecology and hockey as the primary determinants of a life path. just as in our life experiences, the intersection of the arts and our evolving pedagogy are inextricably connected. final thoughts from the start of this initiative, we noticed a symbiotic relationship between those fluent in the use of technology tools and the storyteller’s imperative to tell a story. the roots of personal insight permeate the lives of professionals within the academy. digital storytelling spans the artificial divide between the experiences of the past and our professional identities. there is a recursive process to writing and reading narrative stories that moves the writer to think in a multi-dimensional way. just as clandenin et al. (2006) recognized while co-composing a relational research text, we saw how the digital storytelling process: “… scaffolded new identity threads within us as well as new wonders and hopes about ways in which relational narrative inquiry, both in the living and in the telling, holds promise for further understanding interruptions in stories to live by as well as the deeply interwoven lives of teachers, children, families, administrators, and researchers as our lives meet on school landscapes” (39). our project was successful because of immediate access to technology tools, respectful expertise and enthusiasm for what ohler (2008) calls the fourth r in education: “art has indeed become the fourth r, a literacy in a very practical sense, as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic” (56). the digital storyteller becomes keenly attuned to the critical relationship of word, image and sound, bringing the audience directly to the moment of the experience. it has been almost a year since this initiative was launched. on october 20, 2009, we hosted a “red carpet premiere” [see fig. 1] honoring the five digital storytellers with a public viewing and celebration. on october 28-30, 2009, we gathered again at the university of wisconsin madison campus for the ltdc fall conference: the artistry of engagement: reaching learners in the age of technology workshop. as an invited panelist, i (mary) co-led a discussion with three other faculty representatives in a session titled, “ripple effect: embracing authentic learning and digital storytelling in higher education.” the title of this session intimates momentum within the academy. storytelling is not just for kindergarten anymore; it has been seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 295 expressed, interpreted and well received by some of our most esteemed colleagues. we reflect on our collective videos as we ponder the myriad uses of digital storytelling in higher education: as a reflective tool for practice, to highlight academic projects, interests or initiatives, or to simply reflect on how we are shaped by the stories we live and in turn share our diverse identities. we recognize how professional paths are influenced by personal experience and that there are more stories to be told. we believe that the ripple effect of digital storytelling will reach others who wish to affirm the vital link between the personal story and the professional life. references clandinin, d. j., huber, j., huber, m., murphy, m. s., murray orr, a., pearce, m. & steeves, p. (2006). composing diverse identities: narrative inquiries into the lives of children and teachers. ny: routledge. lambert, j. (2006). digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community. berkeley, ca: digital diner press. lankshear, c. & knobel, m. (2002). do we have your attention? new literacies, digital literacies, and the education of adolescents. in alverman (ed.), adolescents and literacies in a digital world. new york: peter lang. mcdrury, j. & alterio, m. (2003). learning through storytelling in higher education: using reflection and experience to improve learning. london: kogan page limited. mitchell, c. & weber, s. (1998). beyond nostalgia: reinventing ourselves as teachers. london, uk: the falmer press. ohler, j. (2008). digital storytelling in the classroom: new media pathways to literacy, learning, and creativity. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. richardson, w. (2006). blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. thousand oaks: ca. corwin press. videos posted as web links on blitz.tv.com: october 14, 2009. schank, r. c. (1990). tell me a story: narrative and intelligence. evanston, il: northwestern university press. url’s dana atchley’s memorial. retrieved october 26, 2009 from http://www.nextexit.com/memorial/obit.html the center for digital storytelling. retrieved october 27, 2009 from http://storycenter.org/index1.html the uwrf tlc digital storytelling website. retrieved october 27, 2009 from http://ww.uwrf.edu/tlc/digital.htm videos posted as web links on blitz.tv.com: october 14, 2009: levi super slims web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720463 a journey to the metropolitan web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720479 jerry’s story: servant leader web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720484 the land tells us web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720489 my journey as an eco-jock web link: http://blip.tv/file/2720475 title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 e-learning for sustainable development rationale, strategies, choices and actions. experiences from the study programme msc in development management sven åke bjørke senior consultant/university lecturer pedagogical development centre/centre for development studies university of agder, norway email: sven.a.bjorke@uia.no abstract the concept of e-learning is vague. ict-supported education, online education, distance education, e-teaching and e-learning – what is the difference? this article describes the differences and practical pedagogical consequences depending on the choices made and is based on a concrete example and experiences. modern ict-supported educational methods demand awareness of various classifications of knowledge when developing curricula and appropriate learning activities. in the quest for a more sustainable development, there are now opportunities to leapfrog several stages. the education sector may jump directly to state of the art in e-pedagogy for building blended or purely online learning environments. to achieve this, investments in the training of teachers might be even more crucial than investing in the technology. keywords: ict-supported education, education for sustainable development, transformative pedagogy, collaborative learning, communities of practice, intercultural communication, quality online education introduction the education sector in many countries invests heavily in information and communication technology (ict). unfortunately, the competence to use this technology efficiently may be wanting. education should be more learning than technology driven to succeed. the magic of dazzling technology must be matched with appropriate pedagogy. the quest for sustainable development requires a change in attitudes, and intercultural and global cooperation. the combination of ict and transformative pedagogy can be efficient tools for such change. traditional education is inadequate to meet the challenges of a global environmental crisis. education for sustainable development demands a new, transformational pedagogy. traditional education systems are to some degree seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 80 based on "copy, cram and reproduce‖ or the "ccr-pedagogy": paulo freire calls it the ―banking pedagogy‖ (freire, 2010, pp.71-73). this kind of education is inadequate to meet the challenges of our time. access to education is limited, its quality poor and the curricula often irrelevant to the needs of the learners and of social, cultural and economic development. emerging new industries need entrepreneurs, managers and skilled labour in order to be competitive; our outdated education systems continue to produce graduates without the requisite knowledge and skills (unesco, 2000, p.1). the "cram school" is the dominant pedagogy in most former colonial countries, china and india included. parts of asia have enjoyed economic growth in spite of the ―ccr-pedagogy‖ and the fact that creativity and critical thinking are not encouraged. this is known as "the asian paradox― (elmgren & henriksson, 2010, p.22). one result is that the environmental situation in parts of asia is in a critical condition. growth is not sustainable (american scientist, 2006). sustainable development can be associated with safer, more resilient and robust communities with increased social cohesion rather than just economic growth. creativity and entrepreneurship operate within a "green" economic framework where sustainable livelihood, healthy ecosystems and reduced ecological footprints are significant values. national governments, local communities and ngos should therefore work for a social transformation that includes the vulnerable rather than excluding them. this would be in accordance with the millennium development goals (mdgs). the mdg ambition is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and ensure environmental sustainability. vulnerable groups in emergencies are the poor and in particular young children, girls, women, youths, disabled, refugees and internally displaced persons. the vulnerable will multiply with increasing pressures from climate change, unusual and extreme weather and conflicts over natural resources. the future will be increasingly unpredictable, and sustainable development therefore demands a quality education system that builds generic and problem solving skills, creativity, innovation and critical approaches to established ―truths‖. according to the dakar framework for action, a quality education is inclusive and provides education to/for all. it is partly participant-driven, builds tolerance and helps handling conflicts constructively. it is based on respect for human rights and provides expertise and skills in critical thinking, environmental and crisis management (world education forum, 2000 §§ 3,6,8,24 and 42). according to the inter-agency network for education in emergencies (inee, 2010, p.3 and 77), quality education at basic levels provides competence in reading, writing, numeracy, information management and a relevant curriculum tailored to age groups and contexts. mdg2 demands primary education for all boys and girls. but a quantitative approach alone is inadequate. education must meet real needs, addressing hygiene, nutrition, disease prevention, freshwater management, entrepreneurship, sustainable finance and sound resource management to meet the demands of mdgs 3, 4, 5 and 6 on gender equality, reduction of child and maternal mortality and reduction in infectious diseases. if the next century is going to be a truly african century, for social and economic progress of the african people, the century of durable peace and sustained development, the success … depends on the success of our education systems. nowhere in the world has sustained development been attained without a well-functioning system of education, without universal and sound primary education, without an effective higher education and research sector, without equality of educational opportunity (unesco/thabo mbeki, 2000, p.1). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 81 reforms of educational management are urgently needed— to move from highly centralised, standardised and command-driven forms of management to more decentralised and participatory decision-making, implementation and monitoring at lower levels of accountability… it is necessary to harness new information and communication technologies (world education forum, 2000, § 55). according to inee, participatory management of education means that local communities are at least partly involved in the design of the curricula in order to contextualise and adapt to local conditions. the system must be flexible in the way that one can choose different educational approaches best suited to the learning objectives. the teachers should be competent academics and be offered regular and relevant training tailored to the needs. life-long learning requires online education, as most teachers and other groups cannot afford to leave their jobs for further training in a remote city. quality education should be affordable, easily accessible, gender sensitive and include openness to different cultures. learning resources should be adequate and varied. the size of the groups or classes should be tailored to the needs. it should be possible to provide quality education also in emergency situations: ―education's life-sustaining and life-saving role has been recognized and the inclusion of education within humanitarian response is now considered crucial‖ (inee, 2010, p.4). education for sustainable development should emphasise concrete and relevant knowledge, learning by doing, encourage creativity, information literacy, collaborative and cultural competence, individual and team management, ecological ethics, economic and social responsibility. this kind of approach is in line with the convention on the rights of the child (crc, 1990), requiring that children should be given the opportunity to develop to the fullest and to participate fully in family, cultural and social life. the copy-, cramand reproduce (ccr)-approach should be replaced by the more complex 'pedagogy of ececites': ecology, creativity and entrepreneurship, comprehension, inclusion, transformation, empowerment and social responsibility. ict-supported education may facilitate this, and might be the only option in many rural areas, where remoteness makes daily access to schools difficult. modern technologies can be important tools to achieve sustainable development. the new pedagogy must consequently be adapted to new communication realities connecting the entire globe in an ever closer electronic network. this approach is also in line with mdg8 that asks for global partnerships for development. many schools in poor countries struggle with expensive and outdated books if they have books at all. an environmentally friendly solution could be a transition to e-books available online. the internet increases capacity annually while prices drop, and technology now may combine laptop functions with the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone and i-pads. ict-supported and online education many schools have invested in computers and access to the internet. the impact on learning outcomes can be questioned. norway has a very high density of computers in schools. a recent survey, education, curricula & technology (ect, 2007-10) among teachers in norwegian secondary schools reveals that ict is abundantly present in schools, but there are few signs that its full potential is approached. traditional learning environments are used and standard software is the most common ict activity reported. apparently there is a lack of competent role models for teachers, who may be hampered by traditions. some feel overwhelmed by the new technology. to avoid that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 82 schools, remote areas or even whole countries are being left behind, measures that close the digital divide instead of accelerating it (bjørke, 2006, p.3), and that include rather than exclude are needed: …the growing digital divide is actually leading to greater inequalities in development, giving rise to paradoxical situations where those who have the greatest need of them – disadvantaged groups, rural communities, illiterate populations or even entire countries – do not have access to the tools which would enable them to become full-fledged members of the knowledge society… …the overwhelming majority of developing countries, despite difficulties, problems and fears, seek as far as possible to take part in the formation of the global educational community (unesco 2002, pp. 8, 64 ). there is more to education than technology. the ict must be placed in a productive context. a buzzword is ―e-learning‖. a common idea seems to be that students use the internet as a source of information. the teacher teaches the traditional way, while the internet supplements. veterans in the area of online education are keen on pointing out the difference between ―knowledge‖ and ―information‖ and prefer to define information dissemination in the form of websites, online lectures and self-instructional e-courses as e-teaching. emphasis is on traditional 'instructivist' teaching, where the point is ―getting the message across‖, and in the freire terminology ―banking‖ the ―correct‖ answer in the students‘ heads. we transmit information from the one ―who knows‖ to those ―who do not‖. focus is on the teacher and on content delivery. the cognitive learning processes hoped to take place in the recipients are of less interest. teachers and students are increasingly exposed to current global events. access to an ocean of updated internet information implies that the traditional, instructivist teaching mode should change. studying involves more than cramming a student‘s head with facts and information fragments. students need to understand, see connections and challenge the information presented. they should to be able to apply the information and gained knowledge in a concrete context. emphasis must be on learning how to learn and how to understand. higher levels of education are different from cram schools, in which the ―goal is to enable the students to "parrot," that is, to unthinkingly repeat information that is deemed necessary for particular examinations‖ (wikipedia 2010: cram school). in the information age, students should be encouraged to be critical, and maybe even question the teacher. ―information literacy‖ is the ability to search for relevant and reliable information to solve a problem, and critically assess the quality. rather than being passive recipients of decontextualized information, the students must to a large extent become proactive information literates, and the society might even find ways to a better democracy in the process (momo, 2008). ict in education demands communication between individuals, groups and networks. merely using the internet for obtaining information is useful, but it is the two-way or many-to-many communication that may change power structures. two-way communication takes place when a teacher sends lecture notes on e-mail or makes them available online. in response, students can send their questions by e-mail or upload on the internet as well. for students who are unable to attend a campus, the lecturer may videotape her lectures. with ‘blended‘ approaches, where on-campus teaching is combined with elearning, the difference between on-campus students and ―near-by‖ students appearing on campus now and then disappear. all interact and learn in learning communities, whether ―distant‖ student or not. combining virtual learning environments (vles) with interactive collaborative learning will entail a more socio-constructivist approach, reducing the traditional emphasis on instruction. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 83 only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking. without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education (freire, 2010, p.92). the transformation from teaching to learning will have implications on the way education is constructed and delivered. when the technological steps have been more or less managed, the next, more formidable step is that of a new, transforming and activating pedagogy for the information age which may help in steering development in a more democratic and sustainable direction. leap-frogging a traditional view claims that poor countries have to develop through the same stages as the industrialised countries. rostow (1960) claimed that development happens at take-off stages. the goal of development is to reach the mass-consumption society, with the american middle class as a role model. however, we now know that the mass-consumption society is not sustainable (scientific american, 2006). this means it will collapse sooner rather than later, and has per definition developed in a wrong direction. development in a true sense is rather reaching a state of resilient, sustainable livelihoods with healthy and robust ecosystems. secondly, development does not have to go through stages. people can take short-cuts, or leapfrog over stages of development. a stunning example is the rapid dissemination in the use of mobile phones all over africa: the experience is that technological shortcuts which 'leap-frog' to a high-tech solution can be absorbed effectively. …our priority should be to identify and support open-minded, creative individuals who will make any useful leap-frog possible. for this reason, it is extremely important that people continue to be exposed to technologies and in developing countries, icts should be mainstreamed across the different sectors (health, education, agriculture, governance, water, etc) making it possible for shortcuts to be identified and exploited, taking into account local human capacity and local priorities. in this way, development can truly be fostered. let's not assume that people always need to be exposed to low-tech and medium-tech solutions first before they can cope with high-tech solutions (figueres, 2010). it should be possible to implement the state of the art online education technology in large parts of africa and asia, almost as rapidly as it happened with the mobile phones. one of the issues is of course the power supply. the prices for photovoltaic cells have dropped dramatically lately, and there is a possibility of electrifying large parts of rural areas by solar power. running laptops by solar electricity has been successfully tried out e.g. at the arckenya resort with its newly opened fablab (arc-kenya, 2010). broadband capacity is still an issue. a pedagogical challenge is to find solutions that make online education work despite outages – and affordable to ordinary people. online education does not have to be synchronous, with live video streaming and same-time interaction between students and teachers. asynchronous e-learning can be just as effective, or work even better than the more technologically demanding synchronous modes. working with new technologies invariably involves the delegation of responsibility to learners and successful learning outcomes will depend on the learner‘s ability to work independently and autonomously from the teacher and, increasingly, to take control of the learning processes themselves (noss & pachler, 1999, p. 205). asynchronous modes facilitate this, and transfer power from the teacher to the students. to some extent learning can be defined as a social process: ―effective learning relates to four themes: active learning, collaborative learning, learner responsibility and meta-learning or learning about learning‖ (watkins et al.1996). the asynchronous on-line conferencing and collaboration seems perfect for metacognitive activities. time to reflect, combined with relative seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 84 anonymity, may encourage openness, honesty and deeper thoughts that otherwise would not have come up in a ―real-time‖ discussion. ―people will be more honest, or more intimate, or more personal, or more reflective, all of those things combined lead to people saying things online that they wouldn‘t ever reveal face-to-face‖ (prendergast, 2003). weak infrastructures are not necessarily absolute obstacles. and the reality in the field is rapidly catching up with the pessimists who have been arguing against offering higher online education to asia, africa, latin america and the middle east. statistics now show that the situation is changing dramatically. (internet world stats ) the usage growth is the highest in the so-called developing countries. it is thus reasonable to believe that access to internet will be widespread also in the developing world in the near future. therefore, current staff at higher educational institutions in these regions should be offered training in applications of the new learning arenas. this could be one way of meeting the requirements for education without spending most of available capital on campus constructions, buildings and centralised facilities (ask and bjorke, 2009, p.179). development of online education whether education is the priority issue when people starve and children die from easily preventable diseases can be discussed—not to mention the presumably luxurious online education. however, without education, it will be increasingly difficult to break a downward spiral. a wise strategy is raising the general competence level, not reducing it, when facing new and complex challenges. online education can enhance education and make it available to many more. state of the art e-learning pedagogy will take time to implement, as online pedagogy is not intuitive but a skill that teachers need to learn. teachers may try delivering education with computer games, taped lectures, an online library of articles, auto correcting quizzes, animated graphics, youtube videos etc. the next step will be to make the education more learning centred. students may be encouraged to interact with each other, e.g. by making role plays or utilising the power of ict through digital storytelling. a step up could be to deliver complete educational systems for development and delivery of degree-giving education with more or less 'blended', partly face-to-face, partly online, or completely online solutions. study programmes and courses may be more or less peer interactive, tutorguided and paced. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 85 computer supported collaborative learning (cscl), has been quite successful at the uk open university, the indira ghandi university and others. partners in networks making good online learning resources and developing good study guides with appropriate learning activities can be expensive, demanding and time consuming. in addition, to achieve some important aspects of education, international cooperation is important. it might therefore be of high value to collaborate in a partnership network of educational institutions. an international network can give substantial synergy to any study programme when managed well. there is power in the ability to share knowledge. hoarding information is old-fashioned. it is smarter to link with others, who in turn might be linked and interacting at a broader scale. e-pedagogy ict emphasises communication while e-learning adds peer interaction, tutor guidance, and a holistic view on education. in addition to computer skills, the teacher needs the more advanced competence of being able to combine subject mastery with appropriate learning activities, progression, assessment, quality assurance, grading system and student support system – all required to ensure the achievement of learning objectives or learning outcomes. according to delors (1996) education and learning implies ―learning to know‖: learning to learn, general knowledge and understanding. a second point is ―learning to do‖, involving skills, competence and practical abilities. in addition he brings in ―learning to live together‖, with tolerance, mutual understanding and interdependence as key components. a fourth point he terms ―learning to be‖, involving personal autonomy, responsibility, memory, aesthetics, ethics, communication and physical capacity. with these points as guideline, it is obvious that a mere transfer of information is insufficient, and that an appropriate, rich virtual learning environment is complex and pedagogically demanding. a similar classification of information and knowledge can be seen in the socalled dikw-pyramid. dikw is an acronym for data information knowledge wisdom. data can be structured to information. information can in turn be used to construct individual or group knowledge. as a principle, data and information can be disseminated, while knowledge, understanding and wisdom must be constructed individually (wikipedia, dikw). the dikw pyramid seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 86 bloom‘s taxonomy is also useful when classifying levels of knowledge (forehand, 2010), and seems to be increasingly used when developing learning activities. the idea of aspects of learning and classifying knowledge is further detailed in the system of the european credit transfer and accumulation system (ects), where the formulation of intended learning outcomes, standardisation and transferability is in focus. the system asks for classification of skills when formulating learning outcomes. this exercise is a deliberate effort in facilitating the transformation from teaching to learning centred pedagogy. education in the globalised “age of information” in the ―postmodern‖ information age, the central paradigm shift in education is probably the transformation from ―teaching‖ and the control of knowledge to ―learning‖ and the ability to synthesise networks of knowledge. in addition to mastery of general and subject knowledge, the globalised world asks for creative, critical thinkers with collaborative skills, information literacy, and ability to communicate efficiently cross-culturally using various media and to build personal, international networks. in addition they should have an intrinsic motivation for dynamic, life-long learning ensuring currency in information and knowledge, besides having integrity, performativity and self-direction. in other words, when designing up-to-date education, elearning included, the above points should be considered when developing the curriculum. the world bank in 2002 published a report entitled constructing knowledge societies: new challenges for tertiary education. the report states that a modern, globalised education is demanding and a prerequisite for development. a global networked education system should therefore encourage increased student mobility by systems for recognition of relevant prior experience. the report emphasises the importance of ict and its enhancing impact on learning and finds transition from remembering facts to methodological knowledge and analytical skills of utmost importance. generic skills and learning how to learn are highlighted. an interactive pedagogy facilitating transformation from student audience to student actors, and collaborative learning more than individual is encouraged. the report recommends multiand transdisciplinarity, a focus on methodological and analytical skills and internationalised, borderless education. to facilitate this, it is deemed necessary to develop international standards, degree equivalencies, tuition exchange schemes, internationally recognised degrees and qualifications combined with credit transfer systems. the report emphasises learning outcomes and student competence rather than input and process (world bank, 2002). collaborative learning theories and methods in constructivist pedagogy (bruner 1960 & 1973), instruction is based on the study of cognition. learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based on their current and past knowledge and experience. the learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses, tests these empirically and makes decisions, relying on a cognitive structure to do so (kearsley, 2011) constructivist theories and methods have been further developed and adapted to different learning environments, in particular in social constructivism, which in turn is associated with psychologists like vygotsky, saljø, bruner, engestrøm, lave, wenger and biggs. socio-constructivism means that students join a knowledge-generating community, a ―community of practice‖, and in collaboration with peers solve problems and assignments in a context of reality. in a socio-constructivist environment the generic skills of collaboration, intercultural communication, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 87 negotiation of meaning; problem-solving and creation of new knowledge are important goals. learning is a social activity where the students use information they gather actively by applying it in discussions with others. the students support their statements by referring to reliable and verifiable sources. the demands to academic rigor are the same as for the more traditional instructivist, lecture-based courses. studies should in principle be undertaken for a purpose, and the participants should critically assess information according to relevance and usefulness in solving the task at hand. virtual learning environments in international networks: a case the development management (dm) master of science is mainly an online study programme of agder university, norway, operating within an international network, with partner universities in four african countries, bolivia and sri lanka. students are recruited at these universities; each university has a coordinator in charge of communication in the network and assisting ‗home‘ students when necessary. except for two face-to-face periods in norway and sri lanka totalling seven weeks, the students study from their respective universities, from home or from anywhere. the coordinators assist in revising and updating the curriculum. working in an international network adds extra dimensions to globalised studies. such a network facilitates building tolerance between people of diverse cultures and value systems. an international, networked educational system facilitated by tutors creates new and powerful learning opportunities. asynchronous threaded discussions a main pedagogical tool for the dm study programme is asynchronous, threaded discussions arranged in a discussion forum in a virtual learning environment (vle). the asynchronous mode is less demanding on broadband capacity than the synchronous alternatives and enables an intercontinental study programme to overcome complex time frames. asynchronous interaction encourages reflection and gives room for information gathering and critical assessment before expressing opinions. the otherwise more timid participants are more easily included and it allows those with externally fixed schedules to participate. it seems that asynchronous, tutor-guided, peer interaction is conducive to cross-cultural and cross gender communication. otherwise quiet women raised in patriarchal societies realise after some weeks that nobody can prevent them from contributing as equals. framework system for course structures the involved teaching staff at the university of agder, its partner universities and some of the participants in the eu project called ‗model for a european networked university for e-learning (menu, 2004) have developed a framework system for course structures, a course description template, a quality enhancement and audit system ensuring that the quality criteria according to the european credit transfer and accumulation system (ects) are met, while also adapting the course to an online or blended environment. the course description presents a detailed overview of the course according to the philosophy of ‗constructive alignment‘ (biggs 2003, seigel 2004), with items like title, workload, aims, objectives, content, methodology, estimated number of student workload hours and intended learning outcomes. study guides, with a calendar containing deadlines, provide the course contents, with detailed goals, tasks, learning activities, working procedures, pacing in the form of timeframes and cut-off dates. students have online access to the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 88 university library and to online learning resources with videotaped lectures, interactive e-books, articles and website collections giving participants some degree of autonomy and selfdetermination. tutors guide and facilitate the learning process. an essential learning resource is the participants themselves. source: ask and bjorke (2009) results the msc dm study programme, with tutor-guided, paced and collaborative approaches can report of high degrees of student cohesion. the combination of continuous peer collaboration, frequent tutor feedback and mutual dependence in the virtual communities of learning and practice seems to establish a supporting group pressure. the learning outcomes as a rule are above average and the drop-out rates are low. of 94 enrolled students since 2005, six have dropped out. this is in contrast to most distance education programmes, where the drop-out rates often are above 50%. ―…dropout rates are high, graduation rates relatively low, and… the quality of graduates‘ degrees is below that of conventional institutions‖ (perraton, 2000, p.100). the director of centre for development studies, university of agder, professor arne olav øyhus, has been in charge of the development management study programme since 2005, says that: … the first cohort starting 2005, completed their msc in spring 2007 with average or above average grades, reporting surprisingly high student cohesion and good learning outcomes. the dropout rate was below 10%. in questionnaires that all participants have to answer at the end of the second or fourth semester, more than 80% of the students state that the collaborative approach had been decisive for their motivation to go through with the study seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 89 programme. they confirm that social learning activities increase their study resilience and motivation. the students also mentioned common problems, and complained that some group members tried to be ‗free-riders‘, taking too little responsibility. others felt that some participants were too dominant and impatient, making collaboration on equal terms difficult. as a rule, it may take almost two semesters of collaborative studying before these problems are handled efficiently. almost all report that after two years they have built personal networks, have gained experience in cross-cultural communication and been trained in expressing their own thoughts and managing groups and have been obliged to work more with the subjects than they would have done alone. some questions and replies taken from the student questionnaire: (nb! since the questionnaire has varied somewhat between the cohorts, the number of respondees can vary) the collaborative and at least partly constructivist approach has been: ..decisive for my motivation to go through with the study programme 47 .. not had any influence either way 9 ..mainly been a waste of time, preventing me from really studying the material 0 not answered 2 total 56 table 1: student rating of study approaches the mandatory group work has been rewarding because: you have gained experience in cross-cultural communication 21 you have gained experience in expressing your own thoughts 19 total 40 table 2: some positive factors mentioned do you think that you have increased your ability to communicate efficiently cross-culturally during the study programme? yes, very much so 25 yes, to some extent 32 uncertain 10 no 0 total 67 table 3: cross-cultural communication what to consider when venturing into online or blended education? there are solutions to the technological issues. solar electricity is increasingly available and affordable. new grids of fiberoptic cables with high capacity are being constructed. if the technology is not available today, it might be tomorrow. cheap computers can be assembled locally. the next step is to build competence among teachers. many will probably already know the basics of e-teaching and ict-supported education. this competence must be increased in quantity and quality. teachers with eteaching experience and some pedagogical training will soon be interested in stepping up the quality of education and ask for training in e-learning seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 90 pedagogy and online tutoring. this kind of training should be developed at the teacher training colleges and universities. the competence to give such training is not likely to be easily available. it might therefore be an idea to build this competence in international networks. operating international networks will require some standardisation, e.g. a common quality assurance, grading and credit transfer systems. collaboration over the borders on development of digital learning resources will require a common metadata system and agreements on ownership rights and how to share resources. unesco has developed an ict competency standard for teachers that might be helpful (unesco, 2008). semester based or course modules? when working in a network, it might be advisable to make course modules rather than operating in entire semesters. course modules are as a rule more flexible than courses running over an entire semester. if all partners follow the same standards for the development of a course and course modules, they can be made interchangeable, and the entire network may be invited to contribute with course modules. this demands standardisation of e.g. the course descriptions, where the common description must fulfil all requirements of all the network members. course content and structure a study programme at bachelor or master‘s level may contain several courses. the european credit accumulation and transfer system (ects) has been developed bearing in mind the need for standardisation of course modules for international network purposes, such as student and staff exchange and transfer and accumulation of credits in the network as a rule of thumb, a course should as a minimum be 5 ects, corresponding to between 120-150 hours of student work. when considering flexibility and interchangeability, 5 or 10 ects courses are advisable (european commission, 2004). each course may have 3-5 course modules, catering for one or two of the defined learning outcomes. each module may contain one or more learning tasks. a learning task or learning event must always define the topic or issue to learn in accordance with the defined learning outcome (in question). in turn, every learning task should have one or more learning activities. when the learning activities have been completed, the learning tasks should have been fulfilled. the learning activities should be paced, with deadlines and cut-off dates. every course should have a small library of various learning resources and learning objects to enhance and facilitate the learning activities. all these components should be streamlined according to the principles of ‘constructive alignment‘ (biggs, 2003). conclusion globalisation impacts on many aspects of our lives: on our economy, our workplaces, how we produce, consume, interact, communicate and how we develop and deliver education. ict has facilitated global communication and instantaneous contact between persons, organisations and businesses situated on different continents at a reasonable price. the number of people with access to the internet in the world is rapidly increasing, with africa having relatively the most expansive growth of over 2300 per cent the last decade. the people connected to the internet have the opportunity of synergic collaboration, access to services and updated seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 91 information in all areas, and can work more or less independently of governments and national laws. rapid population growth and lack of qualified teachers in developing countries make the need for education, maybe with a focus on training new teachers, ever more urgent. ict is a vital tool for development. however, technology is not enough. education must always be more learning than technology driven. when venturing into e-learning, there are many issues to consider. a crucial issue is the pedagogy. transformative, collaborative pedagogy is probably decisive for building good online learning environments. this approach also encourages information literacy, creativeness and critical thinking. these may be crucial factors for our ability to meet the challenges of a seemingly imminent global, economic and environmental crisis and to steer development in a sustainable direction. references american scientist (2006) an interview with lester brown http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/lester-brown accessed january 2011. arc-kenya (2010) majiwa modern technology and majiwa modern computer centre http://www.arckenya.org/aro/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&itemid=2 7 accessed january 2011. ask, b. & bjørke, s.å. (2009) networked learning and approaches to ict supported education – collaborative learning in a global setting, social networking, proceedings of international conferences, silesian moodle moot 2009, innovation of education institute, ostrava, tsjekkia http://virtuniv.cz/index.php/konference_silesian_moodle_moot_2009_p%c5 %99%c3%adsp%c4%9bvky accessed november 2010. biggs, j. (2003) aligning teaching and assessment to curriculum objectives, imaginative curriculum project, ltsn generic centre. bjørke, s.å. (2006) globalisation, ict and impacts on education. the digital divide a developmental challenge? nvu http://www.nvu.no/nvukonferansen2006/bjorke-ask-paper.doc bruner, j. (1960) the process of education, cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bruner, j. (1973) going beyond the information given, new york: norton crc (1990) convention on the rights of the child http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm delors, j. et al. (1996) learning: the treasure within – report by unesco task force on education for the twenty first century http://www.unesco.org/delors/ ect (2011) education, curricula & technology http://www.hsh.no/fou/forskningsprogram/ect.htm elmgren, m. & henriksson, a.s (2010) universitetspedagogik, uppsala universitet, norstedt, sweden. european commission (2004) european credit transfer and accumulation system http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/publ/pdf/ects/en.pdf . accessed november 2010. figueres, c. (2010) introducing the new managing director of iicd http://www.iicd.org/articles/introducing-iicds-new-managing-directorcaroline-figueres accessed november 2010 forehand, m. (2010) bloom’s taxonomy http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=bloom%27s_taxonomy accessed november 2010. freire, p. (2010) pedagogy of the oppressed, the continuum international publishing group, new york. http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/lester-brown http://www.arc-kenya.org/aro/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&itemid=27 http://www.arc-kenya.org/aro/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&itemid=27 http://www.arc-kenya.org/aro/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&itemid=27 http://virtuniv.cz/index.php/konference_silesian_moodle_moot_2009_p%c5%99%c3%adsp%c4%9bvky http://virtuniv.cz/index.php/konference_silesian_moodle_moot_2009_p%c5%99%c3%adsp%c4%9bvky http://www.nvu.no/nvukonferansen2006/bjorke-ask-paper.doc http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/crc.htm http://www.unesco.org/delors/ http://www.hsh.no/fou/forskningsprogram/ect.htm http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/publ/pdf/ects/en.pdf http://www.iicd.org/articles/introducing-iicds-new-managing-director-caroline-figueres http://www.iicd.org/articles/introducing-iicds-new-managing-director-caroline-figueres http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=bloom%27s_taxonomy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 92 guardiankatine (2010) reporting on how technology is transforming africa http://community.eldis.org/guardiankatine/.59c30b50/.59d9d8f9 accessed november 2010. inee (2010) minimum standards for education: preparedness, response, recovery, unicef, www.ineesite.org accessed 25 november 2010. internet world statistics (2011) http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm accessed february 2011. kearsley, g. (2011) the theory into practice database. http://tip.psychology.org , link to constructivist theory, http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html accessed february 2011. model for a european networked university for e-learning (menu) http://ans.hsh.no/lu/inf/menu/products.htm accessed november 2010. momo, s. (2008) implementing new technologies in the south: a chance for people in developing countries to realise their own projects. a conversation with caroline figueres spandanews 2008 http://community.eldis.org/.59c4bd40/spandajournal_education%20and%20 development.pdf accessed november 2010. noss, r. and pachler, n. (1999) the challenge of new technologies: doing old things in a new way, or doing new things? in mortimore, p. (ed): understanding pedagogy and its impact on learning, london, paul chapman publishing. perraton, h. (2000) open and distance learning in the developing world. routledge, london prendergast, g. (2003) computer conferencing: interviews with linda harasim, gerry prendergast and betty collis, open university, uk. rostow, w.w. (1960) the stages of economic growth: a non-communist manifesto, cambridge: cambridge university press, 1960 http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ipe/rostow.htm accessed 13 november 2010. seigel, s. (2004) constructive alignment: biggs, scaling the heights, http://www.resources.scalingtheheights.com/constructive%20alignment%20a nd%20biggs.htm accessed november 2010. unesco/mbeki, t. (2000) speech at conference on education for african renaissance in the twenty-first century, johannesburg, south africa, 6 december 1999 http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/wef_2000/regional_frameworks/fra me_africa.shtml accessed november 2010. unesco (2000) education for all: a framework for action in sub-saharan africa http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/wef_2000/regional_frameworks/fra me_africa.shtml accessed november 2010. unesco (2002) open and distance learning. trends, policy and strategy considerations, division of higher education, paris. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001284/128463e.pdf accessed november 2010. unesco (2008) ict competence standard for teachers http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.phpurl_id=25740&url_do=do_topic&url_section=201.html accessed november 2010. watkins c., carnell e., lodge c., wagner p., whalley c. (2002) effective learning. nsin research matters, institute of education, univ. of london wikipedia (2010) cram school. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cram_school accessed 13 november 2010. wikipedia (2010) dikw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dikw accessed 13 november 2010. world bank (2002) constructing knowledge societies: new challenges for tertiary education http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intafrregtopteia/resources/constr ucting_knowledge_societies.pdf accessed 13 november 2010. http://community.eldis.org/guardiankatine/.59c30b50/.59d9d8f9 http://www.ineesite.org/ http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://tip.psychology.org/ http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html http://ans.hsh.no/lu/inf/menu/products.htm http://community.eldis.org/.59c4bd40/spandajournal_education%20and%20development.pdf http://community.eldis.org/.59c4bd40/spandajournal_education%20and%20development.pdf http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ipe/rostow.htm http://www.resources.scalingtheheights.com/constructive%20alignment%20and%20biggs.htm http://www.resources.scalingtheheights.com/constructive%20alignment%20and%20biggs.htm http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/wef_2000/regional_frameworks/frame_africa.shtml http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/wef_2000/regional_frameworks/frame_africa.shtml http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/wef_2000/regional_frameworks/frame_africa.shtml http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/wef_2000/regional_frameworks/frame_africa.shtml http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001284/128463e.pdf http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-url_id=25740&url_do=do_topic&url_section=201.html http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-url_id=25740&url_do=do_topic&url_section=201.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cram_school http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&prev=_t&u=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dikw http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intafrregtopteia/resources/constructing_knowledge_societies.pdf http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intafrregtopteia/resources/constructing_knowledge_societies.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 2 – 2011 93 world education forum (2000) dakar framework for action, http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/ed_for_all/dakfram_eng.shtml accessed 28 november 2010. http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/ed_for_all/dakfram_eng.shtml microsoft word jentoft facilitating practical knowledge by using ect.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 facilitating practical knowledge by using ect rita jentoft associate professor university of tromsø, department of health studies email: rita.jentoft@uit.no abstract practical skills constitute essential knowledge in occupational therapy. the knowledge is situationand experience-based, generated from within the situation. in a particular program for educating palestinian occupational therapists in gaza, facilitating such knowledge proved to be difficult. due to travel restrictions and an unstable political situation, teachers and students were separated. educational communication technology (ect) like videoconferences, internet and videos became new and necessary tools. this article is based on results from an action research project which followed the process of using flexible forms of learning and developing an internet based learning programme named ergonet. the learning process of the students using it was examined with the aim of answering the following research question: how can flexible forms of learning be developed and used to facilitate practical knowledge in occupational therapy education? the development and implementation of ergonet as a supporting device in students’ learning of practical skills is described through the experience of the teachers involved. the results indicate how rotelearning and lack of reflective and critical thinking, firmly established among palestinian students, have been challenged and changed by the didactic use of ergonet. keywords: educational communication technology, practical knowledge, situated learning, reflection, problemsolving, critical reflection challenges in facilitating practical knowledge of occupational therapy students in palestine isolated from education the impetus for the development of this project was the situation of 10 students from gaza who, due to israeli travel restrictions, were physically isolated from teachers and students. gaza, with a population of 1.5 million people, had no education and only one occupational therapist. the students had scholarships and were accepted at the occupational therapy (ot) program at bethlehem university (bu), west bank from 2003-2007. during these years their cause of “right to freedom of movement” was heard in the israeli high court several times without success (2007). since travel restrictions also affected palestinians from the west bank, foreign seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 2 occupational therapist teachers, employed at bu, travelled to gaza to teach the students from 2003-2005. however travel to gaza became impossible when the situation deteriorated in 2006 due to the publication of cartoons of the prophet mohammad in a western newspaper, followed by the conflict between the political parties fatah and hamas in 2007 and the israeli closure of gaza. the students completed the entire 4-year program inside gaza except for two weeks in each of the 6th, 7th and 8th semesters. during the total of 6 weeks teachers and students met for practical skills training and evaluation/exams in egypt. in this situation the use of alternative teaching tools such as videoconferences, internet and video had to be considered. these flexible forms of learning or educational technology (ect) are defined by garrison & anderson (2003, p. 34) as: “those tools used in formal education practice to disseminate, illustrate, communicate, or immerse learners and teachers in activities purposively designed to include learning”. to support the process of changing the teaching strategies an action research was implemented, lasting from 2005-2007. i was the project coordinator and facilitated the research process combined with my work as an occupational therapist teacher in norway. the participants were 3 occupational therapist teachers working at bu, originally from palestine, sweden and new zealand. in addition to the political conflict and travel restrictions the teachers were concerned with how to deal with professional, pedagogical and cultural challenges in the process of facilitating practical knowledge in the education of the gaza students. professional, pedagogical and cultural challenges the main courses to facilitate practical knowledge in the bachelor program are four courses in occupational therapy theory and skills and six clinical fieldwork, constituting 95 credits altogether. lectures in occupational therapy (ot) theory are combined with skill training in the classroom. the teacher demonstrates assessment and treatment strategies for the students to practice. students also watch demonstrations with clients. supervised clinical fieldwork is most important. however the lack of clinical occupational therapists in gaza to demonstrate and guide the learning process to facilitate practical knowledge presented a major challenge. stimulating factual knowledge by internet and videoconferences on the other hand was obtainable. in palestine rotelearning and memorising is firmly established as the main learning strategy at all levels. the educational system is hierarchically built and the teachers are supposed to be experts. evaluation and exams measure factual knowledge and the learners are expected to use surface approaches, like memorising, in learning (blair & randall, 2002). because practical knowledge is situated and embodied (alve, 2006; merleau-ponty, 1994), it can hardly be obtained by reading only. deep approaches such as reflection and problem-solving are not emphasised and are therefore basically unfamiliar to the students. this often results in a “low-level engagement” (biggs, 2003, p. 4) like passivity, teacher dependency, lack of creativity and problem-solving skills. the gaza students impressed the teachers by correctly reciting factual knowledge, but they had problems transforming such knowledge into practical situations. for an occupational therapist the ability to adjust knowledge to different practical situations is a prerequisite, and the students’ lack of practical knowledge therefore represented a challenge to the teachers. they needed to find ways to facilitate active participation and deep approach learning activities (biggs, 2003; garrison & anderson, 2003; marton & booth, 1997). problem based learning (pbl) is acknowledged as a learning strategy that can enhance deep learning and stimulate students to become more practical (biggs, 2003) which concurs with my experience as a teacher in norway. however, due to the specific pedagogical conditions, introducing such a strategy was found too challenging for all participants, as well as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 3 inappropriate for “imperialistic” reasons. we therefore had to find another strategy to meet the demands of teacher-student separation in facilitating practical knowledge. this article aims to answer the research question: how can flexible forms of learning be developed and used to facilitate practical knowledge in occupational therapy education? the intention is to describe a process departing from a more traditional pedagogical learning perspective of “knowing that” to a more comprehensive and practical oriented perspective of “knowing how and knowing from within the situations” (nortvedt & grimen, 2004). in the article i will first present the theoretical perspectives applied on understanding practical knowledge and reflective learning and explain the research design and background for developing flexible form of learning, before results are presented and discussed. theoretical perspectives practical knowledge practical knowledge is “knowing-in-action” according to molander (1996). it is grounded in the living tradition, founded on dialogue and participation. it originates from the questions to be answered and tasks to be completed within different human occupations. practical knowledge is understood as a unit of different aspects of learning combining factual knowledge and practical skills together with cognitive, thinking skills such as problem-solving, including clinical and ethical reasoning (creek, 2007; creek & lawson-porter, 2007; mattingly & fleming, 1994; polanyi, 1983). practice together with skilled occupational therapists is important for the professionalization process, developing professional skills, language and an occupational therapist identity. lave & wenger (1991) call this situated learning, and consider it crucial in learning practical skills. by observing several masters and by meeting many different patients, the acquisition of skills is learned in different practical contexts through observation, imitation and supervision. critique towards apprenticeship learning may be that the quality of the staff determine the quality of learning. if we examine the process of the students’ learning of skills, the dreyfus brothers (1986) have a description of skill learning in a 5-stage hierarchy that seems highly relevant. herbert dreyfus (2001) expanded it to 7, including skill learning on the internet: 1. the novice learner learns a few, simple elements of a task by rules. focus is on the technical performance and the learning is context free. 2. the advanced beginner uses rules learned from a practical situation in a specific context, but is not able to modify the rules to other situations. 3. the competent performer masters the rules, notices many different elements central in action and can reflect and evaluate his/her performance, but has problems finding better solutions. 4. the proficient performer has engagement, an overview of the situation and ability to reflect on her/his actions. the person has not enough experience to react automatically, but has to decide what to do by thinking through the rules. students rarely enter stage 5-7, referring to expertise, mastery and practical wisdom. the graduates can reach these stages by participating, reflecting on and taking the result to heart. dreyfus asks critically if and how skills can be learned on the internet, because they presuppose involvement in situations seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 4 and embodied competence. technology takes bodily engagement away. if the body cannot be a part of the learning process, relevance, skills and meaning will fade away (dreyfus, 2001, p. 7). reflective and transformative learning reflection, problem-solving and critical reflection are important aspects of developing practical knowledge. both teachers and students have to become reflective practitioners (mattingly & fleming, 1994; schön, 1987). reflection is the ability to assess, rethink and critically analyse experience (nortvedt & grimen, 2004). for reflection to develop, an environment of trust which accepts trial and failure, and also time as well as space to reflect, is necessary (biggs, 2003; creek & lawson-porter, 2007; dreyfus, 2001; lave & wenger, 1991). the student’s reflection before, in and after action is supported and supervised by the teacher and clinician. their tasks are to demonstrate skills and supervise and challenge the students’ knowledge (schön, 1987). reflection is closely connected to critical thinking by questioning established practice, theory and research (mezirow, 2000). an element of self-reflection is also important in order to develop sensitivity and a critical attitude towards how one’s own values and attitudes affect relational situations (goffman, 1959). by reflection, the ability to organise and structure thoughts, considering different views, getting new perspectives and constantly exploring other topics and possibilities are included, challenged and enhanced. these are challenging processes, constantly solving problems and questioning one’s own attitudes (bie, 2007). mezirow (2000) claims that adult learning mostly is based on problem solving. reflective actions and interaction are based on critical assessment of assumptions by stopping, reviewing and asking questions like: was this the best action or should i have acted differently? whereas the scope of reflection regards the how in actions, the scope of critical reflection regards the why in actions (pettersen in grepperud, 2008). critical reflections therefore go deeper than reflection, criticizing the foundation of our convictions, and include exploration of conscious and unconscious habitual expectations. when the learner is able through interpretation and analysis to create and find meaning in an experience, a transformative learning occurs related to mezirow (1991). this demands creativity, initiative and hard work from both students and teachers. the teachers must be role models who facilitate discourses and reflections by constructively critiquing practice (dreyfus, 2001; garrison & anderson, 2003). in the program for the occupational therapist students we wanted to stimulate the development of practical knowledge and abilities in reflection by: 1. practice and skill training, where the student has to practise different techniques used in assessment and therapy, like teaching a stroke patient to transfer independently from bed to wheelchair. 2. discussion of and reflection on how to use techniques, thereby explaining in professional terms what is happening. this process includes mental actions in framing problems and working out the best solutions using clinical and ethical reasoning, reflection and analysis. 3. personal performance in practice. this builds on the ot tradition and is strongly influenced by occupational therapist masters, memories, and the stories told, thus creating a professional identity. because of the special circumstances for the bu students we needed to develop learning tools regardless of geographical barriers. video was seen as a medium suited for capturing the essence of practical knowledge, and action research as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 5 a research method capable of dealing with cultural and pedagogical challenges to systematically support and explore the change process. research method action research is a strategy which aims at solving problems, acknowledged by a partnership of practitioners and researchers and (at) enhancing knowledge amongst them, as well as generating knowledge related to the processes of change (mcniff, lomax, & whitehead, 2003). action research today includes a wide range of practices where one major difference regards how active the stakeholders are in the research (furu, 2007). there is a strong bond between researcher and participants which could compromise the analytical and critical stance of the research, and may constitute a reduced validity of a study, according to critics of the research strategy. levin and greenwood’s (2007, p. 3) definition of action research is relevant to this project: action research is a social research carried out by a team that encompasses a professional action researcher and the members of an organisation, community or network (stakeholders) who are seeking to improve the participant’s situation. action research promotes broad participations in the research process and support action leading to a more sustainable, or satisfying situation for the stakeholders. as teachers involved in the education of gaza students in different ways, our task was to improve the facilitation of practical knowledge in a learning environment where teachers and students had very limited opportunities for direct contact and had quite different assumptions regarding learning. we saw the need for developing flexible forms of learning in general and the creation of an internet tool which could mediate videos in particular. we therefore formed a research team, consisting of 3 female occupational therapist teachers working at bu, from new zealand (nz), palestine (p) and sweden (s) (left midway), and myself. the teachers were familiar with the culture and had experience from clinical work in palestine and in teaching the occupational therapist students both in bethlehem and gaza. they did all the teaching, grading and evaluation of the students. my role was to act as a practical facilitator, cooperating with and supporting the teachers to define their own problems, plan strategies for changes, and to reflect together with the stakeholders on the changes caused by their actions. as action research is a two-sided process, there are actions going on, not only to produce new knowledge, but also to contribute to improvement in the field studied by active participation from the researcher (kalleberg, 1996). one very important result of the process was the development of ergonet, an internet-based tool which mediates videos and texts, which was implemented into the ot education in various ways. the leader of the ot programme (nz) was responsible for the professional development of ergonet, while i was responsible for design and technological support. the reflecting circle, developed by kemmis and carr (1986), has guided the process of change in facilitating practical knowledge in the occupational therapist students. the circle represents the spinning process of planning, action, observation and reflection, a strategy used to monitor the process and intervene together with the teachers in order to improve teaching by using ect. the systematic collecting of information, analysis and documentation in the research process was my responsibility. mixed methods (greene & caracelli, 1997) like fieldwork, individual and group interviews, e-mails and the text and videos in ergonet, were used to collect data. the project lasted from 20052007 following the 4th 8th semester of the ot program. table 1 gives an seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 6 overview and timeline of the two parallel processes: the action using flexible forms of learning and the methods used in the research process were: year semester actions using flexible forms of learning /ect research methods evaluation videos education videos developing ergonet implementing ergonet evaluation videos education videos developing ergonet implementing ergonet 2005 spring x x x x fall x x x x x x 2006 spring x x x x x x fall x x x x x nz, p, s 2007 spring x x x x nz & p fall x x x x nz & p p, nz table 1: used flexible forms of learning and research methods. the analysis of the data was done in different phases. the first consisted of sharing reflections and knowledge within the group of teachers; an inside reflection. further analysis and intepretation in view of theoretical perspectives was mostly done by me after the project was finished (jentoft, 2009); an outside reflection necessary for creating a distance from the material. in the following i will discuss the impact the actions had on facilitating practical knowledge in teaching. i will present the result of four “actions” where video was used in teaching for both on-campus and off-campus students: • videotaped evaluation of bu and gaza students after a skill training course. • video demonstrating practical transfer skills used for stroke patients made and distributed to all the students on a dvd for practising on their own. • development of ergonet with video sequences, analysed and integrated with a knowledge base • implementation of ergonet in teaching the gaza students in their final year of study. results in action evaluating students’ practical skills by video during the first skill training courses in egypt the teacher was impressed by the gaza students’ ability to explain their practical knowledge related to medical conditions, ot assessment and intervention, but as she said: “they did not manage to transform their knowledge into a practical situation” (s). the students showed a lack of embodied knowledge. “they were very hardhanded on each other… you know, not having a grip that is convenient”. the teacher related this to cultural bias: “they are not that used to touching each other”. she recommended that the students practise skills on their own in gaza which is appropriate when being on the first level of the dreyfus hierarchy; learning of basic skills in a specific context. the techniques are concrete and recipe based. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 7 eight months later their skills had not improved to the expected level. it was obvious that they did not manage to practise skills on their own. another teacher exemplifies this, referring from her experience of role-playing a “patient” without language who needed help during a transfer between bed and wheelchair due to paresis. some of them were giving some commands that i could not respond to. a couple used totally inappropriate techniques. they were moving me inappropriately. they did not put the brakes on the wheelchair when they were transporting me, and i fell down on the floor. they rolled me off the bed. they… were supposed to get me up but had no idea whatsoever and it became a big argument (nz). the students had not even learned the basic rules in stage 1 (dreyfus et al., 1986), and it was obvious that the knowledge wasn’t characterized by familiarity with the environment or incorporated bodily (alve, 2006; merleauponty, 1994). this could be due to a socially insecure environment, insufficient learning strategies, the lack of teachers and the absence of occupational therapists to stimulate apprenticeship learning. the teachers also experienced that the students had problems in accepting feedback. they decided to try video to enhance the students’ abilities in reflection, problem solving and critical reflection. after the practical skill course both gaza and bu students had a videotaped exam where they demonstrated their skills with teachers and actors playing “stroke patients”. when they were asked to evaluate their own performance, at least 85% of both groups graded themselves a. the students became very upset when the teachers’ grading was lower. “there was a lot of arguing about why they did not get the best grade. i felt like i was getting nowhere, like i was banging my head against the wall” (s). the students’ reactions could be related to the concept of honour, with personal and cultural significance, and important to self-perception in the middle east. “they do not differentiate between doing a critical evaluation in order to learn something from it, and presenting themselves well” (nz). because the trial and fail methods are important in aquiring practical knowledge, this attitude constituted a learning barrier. the learner needs to recognise feelings, thoughts and experience by reflecting both in-action and on-action, both on the content and the process. because of their cultural values, a change in this direction would represent a learning change of transformative character: i think for palestinians in general. it is more acceptable in this society for the therapist to be an expert. looking at what you have done wrong is not something that is kind of inbuilt, because as a therapist, you do not do too much wrong. this is a much stronger mentality in gaza than it is on the west bank. so it is very difficult for them to make that kind of shift. it is quite difficult for them to criticise each other honestly (nz). since none of the teachers’arguments led to critical reflection, they decided to watch and evaluate the videotaped exam together with the students. when they did this something new evolved. “then! then, they could see for themselves. then they could actually become more self-critical too” (s). another teacher said: “when we showed them the video, they were able to see why they got the grades they did. they used the feedback that they got and worked very hard” (nz). watching and discussing the videos opened their eyes, provoked self-reflection abilities, and made them able to see themselves from an outside perspective. in berger and luckmann’s (1967) terms, selfreflection is called a mirror response to the attitude of the other, a way of reflecting on personal behaviour in encounters with patients. by using the video, the students could study their interaction with another person and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 8 become aware of how their values and attitudes affected the situations. seeing themselves on the video and reflecting together with teachers brought about an important change and facilitated critical thinking. it became a transformative learning change (mezirow, 2000). but facilitating practical knowledge still represented a challenge and the teachers decided to make videos to demonstrate clinical skills. demonstrating transfer skills by video – enhancing practical knowledge a very instructive transfer videotape was made, visualising different techniques used by the experienced occupational therapist when instructing stroke patients to transfer independently and manage personal activities of daily living. the students got a copy of the video, and could watch it over and over, to try to copy the actions, and practise them until they mastered them. the teacher experienced that the video helped the students to increase their observational skills and become more focused. it made it easier for them to understand, reflect and discuss techniques (in the video.) when the bu students got the opportunity to take the exam again there was a dramatic improvement in their grades. “we would never have come this far without the video” (p). it gave the students an option for repetition and master learning in a specific context (dreyfus et al., 1986). in the next practical exam the “clients” had spinal cord injury problems, which represent other challenges than stroke patients. different knowledge and therapeutic strategies were needed to support clients with spinal cord injury to transfer. but the students came into the room, read the instruction and went straight to the client and used the same transfer techniques they had learned from the video. “they were just flashing in their head and bringing up a picture of the transfer video” (nz). they had learned it “the traditional palestinian way” (p). the teachers had to reassess the way of using the demonstration video: there is a disadvantage in that because they kind of rote-learn it. this has not occurred to me before i sat and watched them actually doing it, because they do not do that. we need to use it in a different kind of way. i think we have to emphasise the problem-solving when we are teaching them (nz). the students had learned rules to manage transfer techniques in one context, but they had not learned to modify the rules to new contexts and different problems. their competence did not exceed the level of advanced beginners (dreyfus et al., 1986). in this example the apprenticeship learning through video facilitated traditional memorising strategies, something which was insufficient to meet different kinds of transfer problems. the teachers had to provide learning material where the students could experience the importance of adjusting the technique to the context. obviously neither evaluation nor demonstration videos were sufficient to do this. in other words, if the students were to reach the third level of dreyfus’s skills hierarchy, they must be challenged to take a leap from a surfaceto a deep approach in the learning of practical competence (biggs, 2003; marton & booth, 1997).how could this be stimulated in the gaza students whose learning context was without occupational therapist clinicians to supervise them? the following section describes the development of the internet-based tool ergonet as the next action that was taken to facilitate practical knowledge and a deep-surface learning strategy. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 9 developing ergonet to facilitate practical knowledge the aim in developing ergonet was to visualise ot practice and occupational therapist reasoning and practical knowledge. in the ergonet developing process the teachers’ experience from the practical skill courses became valuable input. videos were made where professional occupational therapists handled different clinical situations. their practice was visualised, as well as described, analysed and discussed, which made their practice and its underpinning rationale open to reflection and critical examination. ergonet was developed as a knowledge reservoir to present practical and theoretical competence in experienced clinicians and teachers in different ways. to enter ergonet a password is needed. after an introductory text (fig.2), the students can choose learning activities from 6 options. in the following i will describe and discuss the development of two of the options: the knowledge base and (video) analysis. they represent the two most valuable learning resources in stimulating practical knowledge and deep approach learning strategies. figure 2: the introduction page. developing the knowledge base we started constructing the knowledge base (fig.3) with key concepts presenting ot in accordance with the palestinian culture and context. practical skills include awareness of how cultural aspects affect therapeutic values, attitudes and activities. this is important to counterbalance the influence of textbooks written by western occupational therapists. comparing and reflecting on occupational therapists’ practice in different cultures and context can sensitise students’ own cultural values and attitudes. our native cultural style is embodied and pervasive which makes it almost invisible to us. therefore it helps us to contrast our style with other cultural styles and compare how it is learned (bourdieu, 1992; bourdieu & nice, 1990; dreyfus, 2001). the knowledge base describes factual and experience-based knowledge in a more reflecting way than in textbooks. it provides links to websites and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 10 references that expand the topics. the base hierarchy presents knowledge related to three main professional areas: environment, occupational therapist and client. each area is divided into nodes. environment has three nodes: institutional, socio-cultural and physical. the physical environment is further divided into sub-nodes like natural spaces (fig.4) and built spaces (fig.5). figure 3: the knowledge base. figure 4: physical environment in the knowledge base. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 11 figure 5: built spaces in the knowledge base. initially we decided on the key concepts and the hierarchical organisation of them in ergonet. choosing concepts and structuring ot knowledge was a difficult but interesting and stimulating process, full of challenges. because we had to be accurate with reference to expert clinicians, articles, books and internet, the work was time consuming. during this process we became aware that we followed the typical way of learning in the western world today: first learning the concepts and later how they can be implemented to guide practice (hermansen, 2006; molander, 1996). we had a transformative learning experience and decided to turn our strategy upside down: “developing the knowledge base is through the videos rather than the other way around” (nz). making and analysing videos to meet the needs of the gaza students and criteria of the curriculum, clinical videos presenting ot assessment and intervention for children and adults with neurological diseases were our first priority. occupational therapists and the teachers presented clinical situations with patients (or actors) in institutions, society and in their homes. the videos were made in three different languages: english, arabic and norwegian (english sub-text). they were edited and divided into short clips with text (fig.6). the text combines descriptions, analyses and reflections on attitudes, skills and knowledge needed in the clinical situation at hand. photos and central concepts from the knowledge base were hyperlinked into, and could be opened in, the text. the green coloured word “doing” is linked to the term bank, a dictionary with a description of the word that can be opened directly (fig.7). the blue words “compensatory approach” are linked to the knowledge base for more detailed information (fig.7). fig. 6, 7 presents videos and analysis of two of nine sequences from a gross motor assessment. ahmad is 10 years old, lives in an institution and suffers from spastic cerebral paresis. for ethical reasons there is no picture visible. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 12 figure 6: overview of video sequences and text from the assessment of ahmad in analysis. figure 7: the combination of film and text with concepts hyperlinked from the knowledge base and terms. the teacher’s analyses of the videos were based on an interview with the therapist combined with her own knowledge and factual knowledge from books and articles. in making an analysis the teacher watched the video several times to find the main issues which were later analysed step by step, to make ot knowledge more open (fig.6). in principle the videos can be analysed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 13 over and over again by different occupational therapists. it will never be completed because praxis can not be captured by words only. when words come to an end only praxis is left. there is always something more hidden (wittgenstein, 1967). being involved in the production of videos was a learning process for the occupational therapists. “seeing ourselves in the video helps us to reflect more critically and next time make changes”(p). for instance major cultural differences in handling children with cerebral palsy were discovered when the situations were compared. the norwegian therapist worried after the assessment whether she had interfered too much in the situation, while the palestinian therapist talked and interfered continually through the assessment. the differences were obvious to both of them, and contributed to reflection also among students and teachers about therapeutic attitudes and cultural differences in upbringing and the belief in physical and verbal stimulation as motivational cues to initiate action. this serves as an example of how videos can be used to enhance more consciousness about how culture shapes behaviour by comparing different cultures (dreyfus, 2001). in the texts following the clinical videos the teachers critically questioned their own performance. it was unfamiliar to the students that teachers and/or clinicians could question or criticise themselves. “they think i think about myself as perfect”(s) in the text. rather than aiming at “perfection”, the critical reflection opened up new perspectives, something which was considered to be the most important learning approach. could the teachers’ own transformative learning experience from making and analysing videos in ergonet be helpful to facilitate practical knowledge and enhance reflection, problem solving and critical reflection among the gaza students? implementing ergonet in teaching the students got access to ergonet in the 8th semester. their first assignment was to plan and videotape a clinical assessment situation with children in gaza. the teachers evaluated their videos and gave them detailed feedback needed for their next assignment; to plan and videotape ot intervention with the same child. these videos were meant to be the main pedagogical tool on the last trip to egypt. unfortunately egyptian restrictions only allowed half the group to cross the checkpoint. the students had to analyse 5 minutes of the intervention video using ergonet as “role model”. the first exploration of ergonet’s possibilities was done at an internet café, not an ideal place for learning, but the only access to internet. the students did not seem familiar with ergonet, indicating that using it on their own was not successful.the teacher decided to explore the two films of the children with cerebral palsy with the palestinian and norwegian occupational therapist. the objective was to discuss the films and the accompanying text, facilitating reflection, critical reflection and problem solving. “this was very helpful for them, to a certain level”(p). but even with teachers’ additional detailed feedback, the students were still unsuccessful in making their own analysis in an analytical way. “they did a two-page written description saying that the therapist did this, and the child did that. they thought this was a waste of time, they had already done this”(nz). because the intervention videos did not reach the therapeutic standard expected and most of the analyses were superficial and descriptive, the teachers had to realise that: “some of them completely misdiagnosed the problem and did not pick up important aspects (nz). they started working in the classroom with the cases most obvious misdiagnosed. in the beginning the students defended themselves as usual. “when we started it was like this “no, no, no, no”(p). when the teachers stopped the video and gave concrete seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 14 examples, a change happened. “it really was not before we were in the classroom, and presented their analyses, that they could see the difference between the way they were thinking and the way we were thinking and looking”(nz). the teacher noticed changes in the students’ self-reflection and problem-solving strategies. the students started to pay attention and ask questions: “was this the right thing to do at the moment? how can i do this differently? what kind of things do i need to change for the client to be more functional, to have fewer functional problems? yes, i think it was very helpful”(p). critical reflection and problem solving were initiated. the transformative learning change in the students is related to several factors. being able to watch the videos and analyses repeatedly and getting written feedback from the teachers related to their own videos was helpful, but not enough. most important for change was analysing their own intervention videos together with the teachers. the videos represented a sort of mirror for their own embodied and situated practice, which became a source of learning where they could stop and look into sequences. research shows that students become more reflective when making their own videos (aars, 2006) and that learning becomes more flexible, personal and active compared to using educational videos, role plays and workshops (ramirez martinel, 2009). the teacher was pleased with the end result: “there was a total change in some of their analyses, in their result and in the skills they demonstrated with the client”(p). the process of change in the development and pedagogical use of flexible forms of learning, from videotaped evaluations and demonstrations to the construction of ergonet with possibilities of visualising professional knowledge as well as discussing students’ own practical knowledge, was probably successful because of the action research approach which enhanced the process. in the project group we took time to stop and reflect, evaluate and discuss the relationships between students’ learning and their own actions as teachers, and to plan other actions to stimulate their abilities in practical problem-solving and reflection. at the stage we arrived at at the end of the project period, the students had to make their own clinical videos and analyse them in terms of factual and experienced-based knowledge. our own way to deal with the construction of ergonet, from describing theoretical concepts to beginning with practice, actually proceeded in a similar way when the pedagogical use of ergonet was developed. we first tried out ergonet with the focus on copying and discussing masters’ competence in ot, but found that the teacher – student discussions of students’ own work made a much stronger impact on the learning of critical reflection. clark (2001) claims that the important key to success for distance students is participation in active learning. only active interaction is a significant indicator of an online student’s perception of his/her learning. all of the gaza students graduated in december 2007 with only 8 months delay. under extreme conditions they had impressively managed to obtain the knowledge and practical skills acceptable to perform professional occupational therapy. some of the students managed to enter stage 4 of the dreyfus hiearchy and became competent practioners. “they are looking at several perspectives. they are looking at how to assess these people to have better quality of life… so it is a total shift”(nz). they managed to reflect on their performance and how they could do things differently. their ability for critical reflection and problem-solving increased and transformative learning occured. conclusion in an action research strategy different forms of flexible learning were tried out over a period of 3 years to make up for the distance between students and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 15 teachers in facilitating practical knowledge and close the gap between theory and practice in a group of palestinian students. most of the time was spent in developing the content and pedagogical use of ergonet. this period represented a journey of learning for all participants involved; practitioners, teachers and students. today ergonet contains clinical videos analysed with texts from several masters’ perspectives, and central concepts in ot, highlighting palestinian culture. the students and teachers highly value ergonet. working on the development of ergonet motivated the teachers in a difficult and unpredictable situation with a high workload. it helped them to become more structured and professional in their work, developing their critical and reflective teaching. “it was a very big challenge, but it has been one of the very most enriching experiences in my professional life”(p). facilitating practical knowledge in the students from a great distance was not surprisingly found to be difficult. access to videos and ergonet which structured and visualised ot practice presented and analysed by masters seemed to narrow students’ perspectives. we failed to recognize the importance of contextual aspects in learning and that masters’ knowledge does not necessarily facilitate problem-solving and critical reflection. ”you cannot just send the students off to use it”(nz). by using ergonet as “role model” for the students when they analysed their own practice on the other hand seemed far more successful when it comes to stimulating practical knowledge and critical reflection. then the transformative learning came about, and made the students capable of choosing the best professional and ethical actions for a particular client and discussing how environment and occupations can influence a client’s occupational performance, recovery and health. for professional reasons, not technical, we chose a content management program as the basis for ergonet. through the process we also developed the software program to suit our pedagogical needs. to me it seems that ergonet has high pedagogical potentials, and we hope to develop it further to support education and get users around the world. the action research is finished, the gaza students graduated, but occupational therapists in new zealand, palestine and norway are still cooperating and developing ergonet. references alve, g. 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(2006). improving professional practice by using internet: experiences in using the tailor made tool "physio-net" in physiotherapy. tromsø, norway: tromso university college, department of health studies critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4280 ©2021 (fieke jansen). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy fieke jansen data justice lab, cardiff university email: jansenf@cardiff.ac.uk abstract data literacy is slowly becoming a more prominent feature of contemporary societies, advanced on the premise of empowerment it aims to increase the learners ability to grapple with the negative externalities of datafication. literacy as such is seen as a social emancipatory process that should enable people to make informed choices about their data environment and increase their ability to actively participate in the discussion that determines the socio-technical systems that will impact their lives. if we accept the notion that data literacy is a key social response to datafication we need to reflect on the politics embedded within the practice, as such i will argue that the mere act of centring data in a literacy approach is political and value ridden. this demands critical reflection on the conceptualization of the learner, the perceived competencies needed to actively participate in a data society and the seemingly 'neutrality’ of the practice in itself, which i refer to as the (re)politicization of data literacy. to conclude, this act requires those active in the field to reflect on their own practices and learn from other disciplines who have a more bottomup approach to dismantling power structures, understanding inequality and promoting political participation. keywords: big data, data literacy, surveillance, privacy, discrimination, justice, critical social studies, critical data studies critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 introduction the introduction of the internet, mobile communication and cloud infrastructures have allowed for unprecedented extraction and processing of data about people and objects. while datafication is hailed by some as revolutionary (brynjolfsson & mcafee, 2014), a growing number of voices raise concerns about its implications for people’s position in society and social justice concerns more broadly. critics argue it has given rise to an economy which is no longer organized around labour and capital, but increasingly around data extraction, profiling, prediction, and modification of people’s behaviour for economic gain (cohen, 2019; mayer-schönberger & cukier, 2013). often referred to as information or surveillance capitalism (cohen, 2019; zuboff, 2015), this new economic paradigm is characterized by a centralization of knowledge, power and wealth in the hands of a new capitalist class (hardy, 2014; sadowski, 2019), whose continuous ambitions towards more robust data extraction processes are deteriorating the ability of individuals to define, understand and control their data environment (brunton & nissenbaum, 2015; schneier, 2015). simultaneously, data has given rise to new forms of algorithmic governance that aim to detect, pre-empt and manage social problems (amoore, 2020; dencik et al., 2019; katzenbach & ulbricht, 2019). here, the state’s enthusiasm to engage with data-driven practices works to intensify surveillance systems that disproportionally impact those individuals and communities most reliant on public services; in effect further institutionalizing “long-standing binaries of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ citizens” (redden, 2018). in light of these developments, data literacy emerged as a field of enquiry. the advent of information capitalism has been the subject of much controversy, pointing to the power dynamics at play and the role data plays in shaping life chances of individuals and communities. to date, the main legal, technical and social responses to datafication relate to notions of individual privacy and data protection. for example, one can think of europe’s general data protection regulation, privacy protecting technologies and educational campaigns. this article builds on pangrazio and sefton-green’s (2020) argument that the traditional responses to deal with externalities of datafication, namely regulatory, tactical and educational responses, rely on data literacy as “an important part of a strategy in democratic societies to come to terms with living in a digital world” (pangrazio & sefton-green, 2020, p. 209). i argue that, if we accept the notion that data literacy is associated to individual and collective agency we must critically engage with what it means to centre data in a literacy approach. as such, this article will first explore different theoretical approaches to data literacy, after which i will reflect on its actual practice to argue that to further embrace the empowerment pedagogy embedded within data literacy concepts we need to offer the learner more thoughtful and actionable pathways forward. this requires a more holistic understanding of the who of the learners, the what of data literacy and the how of the practice; i.e. the competencies needed in a data society and a critical reflection on the 'neutrality’ of the practice itself to ensure that it will not entrench and perpetuate stereotypes and inequality. to conclude, that the practice of critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 data literacy should be (re)politicized and more profoundly engagement with decades of work on issues of power, inequality, discrimination and civic participation. data literacy a response to the emergent datafication of society alongside the emergence of a critical discourse on the societal implications of datafication there has been a renewed sense of urgency for individuals to obtain the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the complexities of contemporary societies. here, the field of data literacy offers an entry point into building these competencies. to begin, i want to reflect on the term literacy. conceptualized as a pedagogical approach that allows for continual processes of learning, literacy is considered both central to the operation and critique of capitalism (pangrazio & sefton-green, 2020). economically, literacy is associated with the up-skilling of the labour force, as such, in the context of datafication an emphasis is placed on learning general computerand data-skills needed to become an economically productive member of society. socially, literacy is seen as the emancipatory process of understanding and critically engaging with one’s context (golden, 2017; špiranec et al., 2019; tygel & kirsch, 2016). in other words, literacy is more than learning how to read and write, it is about economic resilience and agency, about a person’s ability to economically and socially participate in society. inspired by paolo freire’s (1970; 2018) pedagogy of the oppressed, which connects education to empowerment, most data literacy approaches tend to focus on the social, aiming to develop competencies needed to control and act within datafied societies (markham, 2020; pangrazio & sefton-green, 2020; špiranec et al., 2019). in this emerging field, golden (2017) draws our attention to the idea that data literacy is not a singular concept but encompasses a range of literacy practices that build on top of broader media and digital literacy traditions, suggesting that we should speak about data literacies in the plural. therefore, i will start to outline different data literacy concepts, engaging with their emancipatory angle and audiences before moving on to explore the tensions that emerge from explicitly centring data in literacy efforts. at its inception, data literacy focusses on competencies for economic resilience, for instance learning how to process, visualize and interpret data. recently, more critical data literacy approaches have emerged that connect literacy to the emancipatory ideology of learning, building competencies that allow individuals to respond to the multiplicity of ways they are affected by data. this shift in data literacy from an economy to an empowerment approach is seen in crusoe’s (2016) argument to expand the concept of data literacy beyond a focus on proficiency in the use of data to include knowledge needed to make informed decisions about privacy and security. he argues that a person is primarily a user of digital services, a data subject whose data has become a market commodity, a governance subject who is subjected to data-driven decision-making, and only in a small number of cases a data processor. to account for these different power relationships, data critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 literacy needs to be redefined to encompass “knowledge of what data are, how they are collected, analyzed, visualized and shared, and […] the understanding of how data are applied for benefit or detriment, within the cultural context of security and privacy” (crusoe, 2016, p. 38). his empowerment angle associates literacy with increased ability to control one’s privacy and security in the data environment. d’ignazio’s (2017) approach to data literacy differs from this, where she sees empowerment as people building competencies that will allow them to co-create the data infrastructures that shape their lives. her concept of creative data literacy starts from the premise that education should offer “pathways for non-technical learners to ‘speak data’” (d’ignazio, 2017, p. 15). engaging learners with didactic resources that do not come from the technical field should allow them to develop skills, knowledge and vocabularies needed to engage in conversations about the technology. like others in the field of data literacy, she explicitly builds on paulo freire’s (1970) popular education model that connects education to empowerment, arguing that it is not enough to focus on the acquisition of specific skills, but that education must increase people's ability to understand and engage with their political, social and economic surroundings. the concept of creative digital literacy translates this idea into an approach that privileges skills and vocabulary needed for a non-technical learner to ‘have a seat at the table’ and become part of the technical discussion that shape their lives without having to up-skill their technical capabilities. another distinct entry point into data literacy for empowerment is that of data infrastructure literacy (gray et al., 2018), here the authors argue that the conceptualization of data literacy should be expanded to account for the infrastructures that enable the datafication of society. data infrastructure literacy as such will allow the learner “to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed” (gray et al., 2018, p. 8). if one draws a comparison between this concept of infrastructure literacy and rafi santo’s (2011) concept of hacker literacies, the notion of malleability emerges. a proposition is made that with increased knowledge of the intricacies of infrastructural arrangement, a critical mindset, and the belief that one can exert agency, the datafied society can become malleable. gray, gerlitz and bounegru (2018) conclude their paper by encouraging a critical engagement with data infrastructure choices as mechanisms that can enable or restrain participation and deliberation. they refer to the trend whereby public authorities and education institutions are outsourcing their data infrastructures to commercial entities which limits the learners' choices when it comes to managing their data environment and entrenches “a dependency on an economic model that perpetuates the circulation of data accumulation” (dencik, 2021). thus foregrounding a clear tension in data literacy practices, where promoting the concept of informed decision-making conflicts with educational solutions that continuously narrow infrastructure space towards a specific economic model. a final entry point into data literacy as empowerment is that of personal data literacies critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 (pangrazio & selwyn, 2019) and critical data literacy (sander, 2020a, 2020b). like crusoe (2016), these theories build on the idea that the increased reliance on data for economic, political and social gains requires individuals to have an awareness and understanding of the risks and benefits of it. these two concepts depart from crusoe’s (2016) conceptualization of data literacy when it comes to their understanding of the risks of datafication, here learning how to critically engage with personal data should allow the learner to move beyond questions of technology, privacy and security and engage with its broader social implications. or as sander (2020b) argues, critical data literacy is directed to “enable them to question and scrutinise the socio-technical systems of big data practices, to weigh the evidence, to build informed opinions on current debates around data analytics as well as to allow them to make informed decisions on personal choices such as which data to share or which services to use” (sander, 2020b, p. 5). as such, agency is seen as more than individual actions in relation to their data environment as argues by crusoe (2016), d’ignazio (2017) and gray, gerlitz and bounegru (2018), it also involves engaging in the political realm through public deliberation and debate. in response to the datafication of society we see ongoing efforts to redefine data literacy to account for the myriad ways it is impacting people's lives. in this emerging field, i argue, it is time to reflect on the question of literacy, asking toward what end these approaches aim to build critically informed users or critically informed citizens? when we centre data in educational approaches, whose literacy practices are then valued and made visible? this article will build on the discussions around redefining data literacy as empowerment through reflecting on a decade of work as an ngo practitioner in which i, along with other colleagues, have debated and created a range of guides, materials and training approaches that have been conceptualized by others as critical data literacy tools (sander, 2020a) or folk pedagogies of data (pangrazio & sefton-green, 2020). these products include, amongst other things, the digital first aid kit, me and my shadow, the data detox kit, totem, and the low tech canvas against high tech surveillance. for this reflection i draw on my work as a practitioner, conversations with critical race scholars and political activists, and localization workshops aimed at making some of these resources better suited to the needs of a more general audience. from this perspective, i will engage with data literacy theory to advance the argument that in order to take into account the externalities that emerge from centring data in literacy efforts we need to (re)politicize the practice. on the one hand, by advancing the idea of politicizing the learner, who, next to the knowledge of the risks and opportunities associated to data, will need to gain competencies to be able to influence political processes and challenge existing power structures. on the other hand, i argue that the practice of data literacy in itself needs to be politicized, by critically reflecting on its blind spots related to structural inequality and power. critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the absence of political competencies in data literacy the categorization of data literacy tools points to a wide range of resources created both within and outside of educational institutions (pangrazio & sefton-green, 2020; sander, 2020a). my reflection in this article relates specifically to those resources that have been created within the third sector, and are aimed at increasing literacy of human rights defenders, civil society organizations, journalists and activists on issues related to surveillance, digital security and data profiling. from the outset, data literacy resources in the third sector primarily focused on teaching people new skills in relation to the security of their computer and email communication. for example, how to use alternative operating systems, specific encryption tools and password managers. since then, a lot has changed, we have witnessed an increase in corporate and state surveillance practices, growing diversity of communication tools and the rise of monopolistic american technology platforms. accordingly, the third sector is confronted with a myriad of new risks and challenges which requires those working on data literacy resources to expand their approach beyond tools and include strategies and tactics that strengthens the target audience’s ability to make informed decisions about their technology, protect their identity and networks, and demand certain changes from politicians and technology providers. below, i will first explore the rationale for centring data at the heart of these literacy resources, arguing that when these are used for a more general audience, they need to be adapted to include non-data competencies. throughout the years, a number of principles and best practices have informed how the civil society training community approaches data literacy, specifically when engaging with questions around data, surveillance, digital security and profiling. first and foremost, most interventions start from a do-no-harm approach (higson et al., 2016, p. 152), where the community believes that all interventions have consequences, both positive and negative. as such, data literacy interventions should be aimed at increasing the positive impact while reducing the negative. it is an explicit choice not to scare people into action. experience has shown that stress and fear are not conducive for learning, this is especially pertinent when working with actors who operate in volatile and hostile political environments, as scare tactics can reinforce existing stress and trauma and can lead to a clear loss of trust in the educator. the second important principle is that these resources have been created for adult learning purposes (level up, 2016). building on the assumption that adults learn differently than children, these resources are designed to be problem-oriented, experiential, actionable and relevant to the learners' context; for example, engaging with ways to protect the identity of sources and activist networks, and threats that emerge from the learners specific (geo)political context. the learning objectives as such relate to empowering the learner through building knowledge, skills and attitudes around issues of data, surveillance, digital security, and profiling. an integral part of this learning process critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 relates to (re)politicizing abstract issues into the social, political and economic context of datafication. the third consideration is about the content, focusing on its tone and design. here, providing independent, accessible and practical content, in a neutral and nonpatronizing tone, is considered a best practice. often this is reflected in the design choices that shy away from ‘the matrix’ like images, locks or other popular ‘tech’ images, and offer more playful, colourful, friendly and informal visuals. pangrazio and sefton-green (2020, pp. 216–217) refer to the above mentioned data literacy resources as personal and folk pedagogies of data; approaches that aim to offer individuals control in their everyday digital practices and raise awareness on the externalities of the data economy. considering the ever increasing asymmetry in knowledge and power between economic and government surveillers and the individual (andrejevic, 2014), these authors raise a crucial point of whether or not these data literacy approaches can do more than encourage reflection on datafication. bringing this paper back to the question of literacy to what end? to more clearly articulate the gaps in current data literacy concepts, this article draws on viljoen’s (2020a, 2020b) critique on contemporary data governance frameworks. she argues that ascribing rights and controls to the individual will never be a comprehensive response to the complexity of datafication, as this requires an institutional response to the population-level interests at stake in data production (viljoen, 2020b). in her work, she argues that scholars and legislators are too preoccupied with the vertical relationship between the state and market actors who collect and process data from the individual. this neglects the horizontal relationship of data collection in which individual rights become less relevant now that technology companies are increasingly interested in data extraction to derive “population-level insight from data subject for population-level applications” (viljoen, 2020b, p. 1). this horizontal relationship, where people are increasingly exposed to decisions based on population-level insight, impacts even those who have a critical relationship with data. here, we need to recognize that literacy approaches that primarily engage with the vertical data relationship will reinforce the notion that the learner is responsible to protect themselves against digital exploitation and oppression, kazansky (2015) has positioned this as the responsibilization of the user. such an approach runs the risk of leaving the learner feeling frustrated and resigned as it does not offer adequate pathways forward. as such, when data literacy is associated with empowerment, the externalities of the horizontal data relationships should become an integral component of it. the focus on the vertical data relationship in current data literacy resources brings me to the question of audience. the above mentioned resources were developed with a specific audience in mind, i.e., human rights defenders, activists and investigative journalists, who are expected to have a certain proficiency when it comes to capitalist critique and political participation. in this context, unpacking data in all its complexities should allow the learner to keep themselves and their networks safer and more secure, and expand their toolbox of action to include an analyses of how data and data infrastructure are critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 transforming and perpetuating historic and ongoing struggles over how society is organized. a clear tension emerges when these resources are reused in different literacy contexts. at face value a different audience might miss intrinsic motivation to engage with certain privacy enhancing practices that will make their digital experience more cumbersome. more importantly, while these resources will increase their literacy around the opportunities and risks associated with data, a more general audience might lack the competencies needed to intervene in, engage with, and challenge broader power structures, i.e., community organizing, campaigning, lobbying and influencing, advocacy, collective action and policy-making. building on d’ignazio’s (2017) approach to creative data literacy, which promotes non-technical competencies and vocabularies that allow learners to have a seat at the ‘technology table’ without having to learn how to code, i argue that when data literacies are aimed at a more general public, they need to be (re)politicized. people need to learn how to ‘speak politics’ to be able to participation in political and social structures that enable and constrain datafication. here, data literacy efforts can learn from and engage with those pedagogical approaches that build competencies around democratic engagement, dismantling power structures, policy reform and activism. (re)politicizing the practice of critical data literacy in this second part of my article, i will advance the argument that the practice of data literacy itself needs to be (re)politicized. in the emerging field of data literacy there is a lack of research that engages with the relationship between literacy and power. janks (2009) draws our attention to the notion that the ‘how’ of literacy is political in itself, it is not a neutral practice and should be considered “central to social processes that systematically include or exclude people” (golden, 2017, p. 377). data literacy approaches that do not explicitly engage with questions of power run the risk of perpetuating historical and ongoing systems of inequality and oppression. for example, literacy towards what end becomes an important point of contention when we reflect on the use of data harms borne by some in society for the learning of others. ground-breaking academic analysis and critique have foregrounded how data and algorithms are contributing to the perpetuation of racism and social inequalities in society (benjamin, 2020; buolamwini & gebru, 2018; eubanks, 2017; noble, 2018; perez, 2019). current data literacy resources engage with these data harms by including examples such as the propublica investigations into facebook's exclusion of specific ethnic and religious groups from seeing job and housingrelated advertisements (gillum & tobin, 2019) and their work on the recidivism risk scoring tool compas that hard-wired racial biases into the criminal justice system (angwin et al., 2016). these examples offer an entry point into talking about the impact of datafication on society and assume that even if this form of discrimination would not directly apply to the learner it might create friction with their values and as such make critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 them more inclined to engage in certain privacy-preserving practices or public discussion on these topics (sander, 2020b). however, reducing data harms to a mere illustration in itself will not offer the learners the ability to unpack complex racial and social justice issues nor provide pathways forward for dismantling power structures that perpetuate injustices. it is imperative for data literacy approaches to reflect on the instrumentalization of data harms experienced by black and brown, gendered and under-resourced communities as this can be considered an extractive and oppressive practice. (re)politicizing data literacy practices does not mean shying away from social and racial injustices, but requires a more profound engagement with decades worth of work on issues of power, inequality and racism to create a more rigorous and thoughtful approach. carmi and yates’ (2020) work on digital inclusion and digital divides foreground another dimension of the relationship between literacy and power. they argue that digital inequality comprises of layers stacked up, “one over the other, so depending on your starting point in society, be it age, gender, socio-economic status, ability and education you will have to break through more or less layers of challenges" (carmi & yates, 2020, p. 8). this raises the question of how existing data literacy approaches engage with the existing and interrelated social, political and economic inequalities and disparities of their audiences. in their work on data infrastructure literacy gray, gerlitz and bounegru (2018) argue that it is important to make space for collective inquiry, yet do not elaborate on who this collective is or who should be included in these infrastructural debates. likewise, in her creative data literacy concept d’ignazio (2017) also fails to clearly articulate the composition of her non-technical audience, and as such does not fully engage with the implicit power dynamics that emerge when a non-technical learner, especially from a less privileged community, sits at the 'technology table'. in sanders (2020b) research, she provides a detailed explanation of the sample of learners for her experiment but does not articulate an audience for her critical data literacy concept, nor how their standing in society might impact their ability to learn and take action. as a result, these data literacy approaches create a homogeneous understanding of the learner and their needs, which runs the risk of invisibilizing the inequalities and disparities amongst them. (re)politicizing the practice of data literacy as such also means explicit engagement with the idea that learners will differ from each other in language, age, gender, ethnicity, education level, (learning) disabilities. my final point about the relationship between literacy and power is about the language, metaphors and words used to convey knowledge and understanding of datafication in literacy resources. sally wyatt (2021) reminds us of the importance of the words that are used to describe a phenomenon. she argues that “metaphors are not only descriptive. they also carry normative dimensions. lakoff and johnson (1980) express this clearly when they write that metaphors ‘have the power to define reality. . . . [w]hether in national politics or everyday interaction, people in power get to impose their metaphors’ (p. 157)” (wyatt, 2021, p. 409). in the practice of critical data literacy, it is common to both unpack critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 specific problematic metaphors like 'the cloud' and at the same time use other problematic concepts to draw attention to specific issues. take for example the popular reference to surveillance capitalism, which is used to describe a new logic of accumulation but in itself privileges a critical understanding of surveillance issues over that of capitalism (sadowski & ongweso, 2021). the word bias in relation to algorithms privileges a technological centric perspective to inequality over more social and historic approaches that engage with long-standing issues of discrimination and injustice. word choices become particularly pertinent when we reflect on the function of metaphors and concepts in literacy, which are presumed to shape not only the learners’ understanding of specific issues, but also which (alternative) futures can be imagined (mager & katzenbach, 2021). ultimately, politicizing the practice of data literacy will require a careful examination of the languages and metaphors used to convey the learning to prevent the perpetuation of the dominant sociotechnical imaginaries that offer limited pathways to address structural challenges. conclusion against the backdrop of datafication, a new field of literacy emerged that associated knowledge, skills and understanding of data and data infrastructures as indispensable competencies to navigate contemporary society. reflecting on the different data literacy approaches it becomes clear that they build on literacy traditions that see education as empowerment, a learning process which should enable people to understand and critically engaging with one’s context. while these literacy approaches critically engage with the negative externalities that emerge from the datafication of society, there is less reflection on the politics embedded within the practice. if we accept that data literacy is prominent in the societal responses to datafication, the relationship between the practice and power becomes more pertinent, and requires us to ask the question, literacy towards what end? which literacies are valued and privileged? at the moment, data literacy concepts and practices embed assumptions about the prominence of data (infrastructures) in shaping learner’s life chances, the pathways that will lead to empowerment, notions about the abilities and needs of the learners and the neutrality of the practice, which run the risk of discounting the power structures that enable and perpetuate systemic inequalities. therefore, i argue that centring data in literacy efforts is a political act in its own rights that needs to be unpacked and scrutinized. throughout this article i advance the argument that data literacy needs to be (re)politicized, both in terms of the perceived competencies learners need to acquire and the practice itself to account for the externalities that emerge from centring data in literacy efforts. how then do we (re)politicize data literacy? to account for the horizontal relationship of datafication i draw on peña gangadharan and niklas’ (2019) concept of decentering technology. here, the authors argue that in the dominant discourse around technology and discrimination, the process of decentring can “bring nuance into the debate about its role critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 and place in the production of social inequalities” (peña gangadharan & niklas, 2019). as such, i want to encourage future lines of inquiries in the field of data literacy to engage with critical literacy and racial and social justice theories and practices to allow for more thorough analysis of power structures and inequality and offer different pathways towards social political participation. acknowledgements research for this article is part of a large multi-year project called ‘data justice: understanding datafication in relation to social justice’ (datajustice) funded by an erc starting grant (no. 759903). references amoore, l. 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(2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/44-how-to-think-about-data-ft-salome-viljoen https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/44-how-to-think-about-data-ft-salome-viljoen https://doi.org/10.1017/dap.2020.5 https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.2.1479 https://doi.org/10.1162/ijlm_a_00075 http://informationr.net/ir/24-4/colis/colis1922.html http://informationr.net/ir/24-4/colis/colis1922.html https://doi.org/10.15353/joci.v12i3.3279 https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/data-as-property https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3727562 https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820929324 https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 critical is not political: the need to (re)politicize data literacy abstract introduction data literacy a response to the emergent datafication of society the absence of political competencies in data literacy (re)politicizing the practice of critical data literacy conclusion references bjørgen boundary crossing and learner identities boundary crossing and learning identities – digital storytelling in primary schools anne mette bjørgen phd candidate research fellow at lillehammer university college/institute for educational research, university of oslo email: anne-mette.bjorgen@hil.no abstract this article contributes to academic discussions on how digital storytelling in an educational setting may have potential to build and develop learning identities, agency and digital competences. with a socio-cultural framework on learning and identity as a point of departure, the article sets out to study these issues approached as boundary crossing between the intersecting contexts of leisure time and school. the analysis draws on three examples of digital storytelling among 5th 7th graders in three norwegian primary school classes. my findings suggest that digital storytelling might represent a boundary crossing enabling pupils to adopt new roles as producers of creative content, as mentors or guides, to explore new technology and software in a context different from that of outside school and to learn and develop competences related to production processes and multimodal resources. i argue that digital storytelling has a potential to contribute to learning, learning identity and agency, provided it is based on a more fully developed pedagogical strategy of carefully linking school and leisure time. keywords: digital storytelling, learning, identity, agency, digital competences, contexts. introduction today, an increasing proportion of young people communicate, create and share narratives and self-presentations by using digital production software and social networking sites (ito et al., 2008; ofcom, 2009). digital technology, and digital storytelling in particular, has become increasingly prevalent in school settings around the world. as a multimodal means of expression, digital storytelling is aimed at engaging pupils in activities familiar to them from outside school. digital storytelling is assumed to develop identity, agency and digital competencesi by providing new ways of learning and identity expressions (nyboe & drotner, 2008). the extent to which this is so has not been systematically addressed. it is also pertinent to discuss how digital storytelling, as a “new cultural tool” (erstad & wertsch, 2008, p. 36), challenges traditional assumptions of what knowledge formation implies in formal educational settings (drotner, 2008). this articleii compares and discusses three examples of digital storytelling among 5th 7th graders in three norwegian primary school classes. i describe seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 161 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 and analyse how the pupils relate to learning in school and leisure time. the centrepiece is learning and learning identity related to the notion of agency. i approach schoolchildren as learners across these contexts and as subjects in their learning according to how they respond to, and influence, the contextual arrangements (dreier, 2008; hedegaard & fleer, 2009). i also approach learning identity and agency from a more epistemological and ontological perspective. the analysis focuses on how the pupils' experiences of digital technologies outside school are similar to or different from their experiences of digital storytelling in school, according to how they use multimodal resources and how they relate to the production process. when pupils get opportunities to combine “cultural codes” from leisure time with the formal codes in school in a collaborative and explorative manner this may enhance identity formation and agency (erstad & silseth, 2008, p. 214). this leads on to the question of how their leisure time practices possibly supplement or contrast with their practices in school and how digital storytelling as educational practice can be a mediating resource and example of boundary crossing between school and leisure time as part of developing their digital competencies. it is important to study how schoolchildren conceive of the interconnection between school and leisure time activities, through qualitative and empirically based discussions (erstad & silseth, 2008). by comparing how teachers organise digital storytelling production (dsp) in the classroom, it is possible to learn more about the importance of contexts in enhancing competences, agency and learning identity. this is relevant since school remains our principal setting for joint and equal formal competence development. against this background, the article is guided by these three research questions: 1. what are the possibilities and challenges of using digital storytelling in primary schools to develop learning identity and agency? 2. to what extent does digital storytelling represent a boundary crossing between in and out of school activities involving the use of digital technology? 3. what is the impact of teachers in framing pupils' activities with digital storytelling in classroom contexts? the aim is to study these issues approached as boundary crossing (e.g. walker & nocon, 2007) between leisure time and school as two intersecting contexts. i argue that dsp has a potential to contribute to learning, learning identity and agency, but only if it is based on more fully developed pedagogical strategies carefully linking school and leisure time activities. an underlying premise is a socio-cultural framework on learning and identity (wertsch, 1998). after an introduction to the theoretical framework, the empirical context of the study, the data and methods are presented. the primary data were derived from interviews with pupils and teachers, and video observations of pupil interactions while making their digital stories. the analysis is structured around the three classrooms as examples. i discuss digital storytelling according to contexts, learning identity and agency, and conclude by pointing to some implications for future research on digital storytelling in schools. digital storytelling as a new cultural tool – a sociocultural approach from being a way to engage people and communities in reflection on their own life condition through performance (lambert, 2002), to being an important after-school alternative engaging young people in learning through the use of digital media (hull & greeno, 2006), digital storytelling is now implemented worldwide as a methodological approach in educational settings (nilsson, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 162 2008). the recent national curriculum (2006)iii has moved the concepts of digital competence and multimodaliv texts into centre stage. studies of school reforms (e.g. cuban, 2001; kløvstad, hatlevik, ottestad, skaug, & berge, 2009) reveal both high hopes and difficulties in implementing and using new technologies in educational settings. one difficulty is that teachers and pupils have different ways of relating to technology in these two contexts (seftongreen, nixon & erstad, 2009). i do not claim that schools ought to adopt pupils' out-of-school practices uncritically. central here is to study the relationship between school and leisure time as intersecting contexts rather than in terms of gaps and binaries (e.g. hull & greeno, 2006), in order to grasp how pupils experience the differences referred to (erstad, forthcoming). the interrelationship between school-based and leisure time learning is nothing new in educational research (e.g. moje et al., 2004; hull & schultz, 2002), neither is the use of educational media in school (e.g. buckingham, 2003; haugsbakk, 2008; nordkvelle, 2007). what is new is the emergence of user-friendly software such as moviemakerv and photostoryvi, providing opportunities for young people in particular to explore and elaborate different modes of identity expression and learning activities in new ways (scott nixon, 2009). in this article, dsp covers varied types of narrative production in schools. i will analyse how pupils position and re-position learning identity as they handle and manage different digital practices while crossing between and orienting themselves in different contexts (erstad, gilje, sefton-green & vasbø, 2009). i will elaborate some key concepts of relevance to this approach. i draw on the socio-cultural and the new literacy studies tradition of studying digital practices, learning and identity from an ethnographic point of view (e.g. säljö, 2006; wertsch, 1998; scribner & cole, 1981; lankshear & knobel, 2008). accordingly, dsp is addressed as digital practices embedded and situated within broader social and cultural practices occurring within and across contexts. this implies a move beyond the traditional transfer-metaphor on knowledge between individual minds (e.g. beach, 1999). dsp represents a new cultural tool generating new structures, conditions for, and conceptions of knowledge and learning (erstad & wertsch, 2008). i draw on the concept of context as developed by cole (1996), as “that which weaves together” (p. 135). he argues that boundaries between tasks, tools, goals, and contexts must be seen as ambiguous and dynamic, not as clear-cut and static. this goes beyond a more traditional approach in educational research conceiving of “classroomas-container” where teachers and researchers expect learning to “take place” (leander, phillips & taylor, 2010, p. 329). the concept of boundary crossing is sometimes used as an alternative to transfer, to indicate the transition from one context to another in the way people relate to available resources in different learning environments (e.g. engeström, 2001; tanggaard, 2007). walker & nocon (2007) argue that learning environments can support learning across boundaries by connecting related practices and providing opportunities for pupils (or novices) to connect to ‘expert networks‘, for instance teachers and adults. competence developed in situated practices can contribute to competence in related practices through identity work that “weaves together both achieved and potential forms of competent engagement with repertoires from different socio-cultural contexts” (walker & nocon, 2007, p. 178). the concept of identity is emerging as central in studies of the relationship between inand out-of-school learning and is approached in a number of ways (e.g. lemke, 2008; hull & greeno, 2006). of specific relevance here, is an ontological approach to identity and learning. we have recently been witnessing a focal switch from technology implementation towards technology as provider of more pupil-centred learning activities and linked to ontological and epistemological approaches to learning (erstad & silseth, 2008). wortham seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 163 (2004, 2006) argues that learning is an experience of identity because it transforms who we are and what we can do. social identification and academic learning can overlap and partly constitute each other because curricula concepts play a central role both in social identification and in learning the curriculum (wortham, 2004). learning changes not only what we learn but also who we are and become in certain contexts. when learning to produce digital content, pupils become participants in new social activities as producers and mentors for fellow pupils. by adopting new practices, we may also change positions in the communities we participate in (e.g. wenger, 1998). learning is approached as the capacity to adapt to changing roles within different contexts (hull & schultz, 2002). dsp may alter traditional relationships between teacher and learner and generate experiences linked to learning behaviours (sefton-green et al., 2009). the concept of epistemic agency has been used in relation to learning situations where the participants, rather than the teacher, govern the learning. learning is approached as something to be explored in dialogical activities, not as something given, according to erstad and silseth (2008; see also scardamalia, 2002). they see dsp as an example of how questions of epistemic agency clearly relate to the extent to which pupils are given the opportunity to integrate and build on their own cultural background and identity. for the purposes of this article, epistemic agency is understood as “an ability to create new knowledge and craft identity” (erstad & silseth, 2008, p. 219). agency is seen as, “properly attaching to groups functioning on the intermental plane”, not to individuals alone, and as involving mediational means (wertsch, tulviste & hagstrom, 1993, p. 341). mediation is the term used to describe the links between contexts, and comes into being when digital technology is used as part of socially situated practices (drotner, 2008b). questions of identity and agency touch upon multimodality as a central issue in dsp (erstad & silseth 2008). dsp offers new ways of combining multimodal expressions subsuming the written, the visual, and the oral, the graphic and sound into one entity, and by drawing on a variety of sources. this may demand and develop competences linked to choices of such modes according to the desired affordances, or possibilities to communicate what you want to communicate (kress, 2003). the concept of digital competence can be defined as socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accomplish tasks within a given context (e.g. scribner & cole, 1980). a central point in this article is that digital practices taking place outside school, and the processes of learning involved differ from most digital practices within school in relation to scope, objectives, control and what is recognised as proper knowledge (drotner, 2008). digital practices in leisure time are based on personal interests, experiences and a desire to find out things. in most schools, we find a more traditional approach focusing on conceptual knowledge, abstract thinking and knowledge as product rather than process (drotner, 2008). i assume that participation in certain digital practices in certain contexts provides possibilities to develop certain aspects of digital competences involved in these practices. as involved in broader cultural activities in everyday life, digital competences must be recognised as complex and compound (lankshear & knobel, 2008). leisure time based and alternative forms of knowledge are defined as key future competences enabling young people to handle increasing cultural, economic and social complexity (drotner, 2008; rychen & salganik, 2005). nyboe and drotner (2008) discuss three basic categories of competences as involved in dsp: technical, social, and cultural competences. this is a promising starting point for examining digital competences. however, it must be supplemented by an ontological and epistemological perspective on learning identity and agency if we are to understand how learning can be facilitated. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 164 the study – context, empirical basis and methods the article is based on empirical data gathered during a period of video observation of dsp in three classes in three norwegian primary schoolsvii, 5th – 7th graders aged 9-13. the a class consisted of 18 girls and 16 boys, and pupils both from 6th and 7th grade participated in the dsp. the b class consisted of 16 girls and 30 boys, all 6th graders. the cviii class consisted of 14 girls and 8 boys, all 5th graders. the three schools can be characterised as representative of norwegian primary schools in terms of size, technical facilities, number of pupils and teachers and socio-economic status. however, they cannot be considered as representative in a general way since they were strategically chosen because of their participation in the national project “the learning network”ix. this project turned the spotlight on the new national curriculum and on pupils' digital competence (ottestad, skaug, & synnevåg, forthcoming). the three classes were chosen because of their dsp at the time of data collection. we can assume that the three schools involved in the study are more clearly focused on the intentions in the new curriculum than other schools. all three classes had some experience with dsp prior to this particular study, except for the 5th graders in the c class. this study draws on two kinds of qualitative data: video observations and semi-structured interviews individually and in groups. in a period of one and a half months during spring 2008 i conducted video observations of dsp in the a class for four days, the b class for eight days and the c class for four days. each observation lasted from three to six hours a day. the total number of video episodes, or instances capturing different phases in the production, was 319, each lasting from 15 seconds up to 4 minutes. to supplement the observations i interviewed four pupils in each class, two girls, and two boys. in each class, 3 4 pupils were also interviewed in groups, each interview lasting for 30 minutes. the pupils were questioned about the dsp, the use of digital technology at their school in general and about their digital practices in leisure time. the three teachers were also interviewed to contextualise the pupils' answers. all the interviews, except for one telephone interview with the teacher in the c class, were audio-recorded and took place at school prior to, or after the dsp. the teachers helped in selecting pupils for interview, in which participation was voluntary. prior to visiting the schools, i tested the interview guide on a 5th grader. the unit of analysis is mediated action, or “agent-acting-with-mediationalmeans” (wertsch, 1998, p. 24). this highlights the relationship between actors, contexts, and technology. the unit of analysis required adoption of an ethnographic approach (skaar, 2009). all interviews were transcribed and coded according to thematic analysis (bernard & ryan, 2010). the videos were also transcribed and analysed thematically, with the aim of illuminating themes in the interviews and with emphasis on what was talked about in front of the screen, for instance negotiating design. story content and form were not analysed. comparing the schools was not initially planned. as they were shown to approach dsp differently, however, it became relevant in the study of dsp as boundary crossing to contrast them as three “cases”. this study was conducted according to the ethical code of the norwegian social science data service. digital storytelling production in the classrooms this section presents and analyses the dsp in each of the three classrooms according to how the pupils handled (video) and interpreted (interviews) the production process and the multimodal resources. this is related to statements on how their digital practices outside school are similar to, or different from, their experiences of dsp at school. the overarching aim is to explore positioning and repositioning of learning identities and agencies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 165 involved in the dsp in the three classrooms. digital storytelling in the a class: focusing on pupil participation the first case, the 6th and 7th graders in the a class, reveals how dsp can enhance learning identity and agency by offering a high degree of pupil participation. the dsp assignment was to find and present facts relating to the topic “travelling outside europe”. according to the teacher, the pupils were introduced to computers and diverse software from day one at this school, and they seemed to be quite familiar with the technology involved. within the limits of the assignment, the pupils could choose with whom to work and which multimodal resources to use. they could also choose which theme to work on: for example ict, food/cooking, travel agents and dance/music. all groups had to find information on the internet, for instance about particular dances, food traditions etc. the pupils worked both individually and in groups of two or four. they could choose where to work: the classroom, media-lab or the gym. the dsp covered seven subjects in the curriculum: information and communication technology, social subjects, arts, food and health, music and mathematics. the final presentations in the gym, with the entire school and families present, took very varied forms. some groups presented their stories in a “digital” manner, some in an “analogue” manner, and others used a mix of both (figure 1): travelogues with moviemaker or powerpoint illustrations supplemented by oral presentations or role-play, dance performances, and wallpapers (pictures and texts) combined with exhibitions of food, clothes and souvenirs: figure 1: digital stories in a digital and analogue manner. a group interviewx with four girls illustrates a high degree of pupil participation in making the dsp. it seemed important to them to be able to work in the same group, something they were not used to: we decided almost everything ourselves […]. it was cool because we were allowed to choose whom to work with. because it isn't always fun to work with um … everybody, with people we don't like to be with. yes, we worked a lot at each other's places, in a way. they explained, with some giggling, that the teacher usually wanted them to mix with other pupils both during breaks and in lessons (“that's stupid”). they were clearly concerned with the notion of popularity at school, thus positioning themselves as “successful” learners. the girls told stories about what happened when they were working together on this project at home. in the excerpt below, they elaborated on the content of their story – three girls on vacation – and what happened during the film recording: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 166 […] and then we started laughing. it was really stuff and nonsense (laughter). the first cut was a load of rubbish. yes! with the spa and all, we just um … we were talking all the time (laughter), and we were shopping. the example highlights some of the differences between working in and outside school. at home they could act silly, try things out and laugh. at school they talked about the curriculum work they were expected to do, being disciplined and goal directed. they clearly thought it was rather unfair that they were not allowed to laugh when working as a group at school. the difference between home and school also became obvious when they explained, in twisted voices, that they sometimes were allowed to play computer-games “a little” on fridays after finishing their work. it can be suggested that the twisted voices emphasizing “a little” express a notion of awareness and acceptance of the differences between technology-use inside and outside of school. the girls also experienced how technology is not always compatible across boundaries. because of a missing cable, their movie couldn’t be played at school. they had to remake their story using live role-play and powerpoint. i suggest that dsp represents a boundary crossing in terms of opportunities to bring competences from outside school related to methods of working, being together, being flexible and solving problems. the girls had to adapt to institutional rules in some aspects (“we couldn't stop laughing”). they seemed to accept the constraints and managed to finish their story in time for the presentation. notions of personal engagement and agency are perhaps reflected in the way these girls thought it was fun learning how to create flyers and produce movies in moviemaker. when asked if they could think of working with a similar project in their leisure time they all agreed. this is important and might suggest that their project engaged them on a personal level, promoting agency by exploiting experiences and ideas from the way they engaged in digital technology outside school. numerous examples from my material document how the pupils, both inside and outside the classroom, argued and negotiated personal taste and identity linked to choice of multimodal resources. in this way, it is possible for them to develop abilities or competences related to teamwork: give and take criticism, rethink ideas, give and receive moral support (nyboe & drotner, 2008). these ways of working reflect back on formal schooling, especially how teachers and pupils conceive of what is valid knowledge and where to search for it (drotner, 2008). this also applies to the ability to choose multimodal resources. a majority of the pupils interviewed in the a class created a variety of digital content in their leisure time — powerpoint of lego, space creatures, still pictures and videos of friends and pets, music, birthday cards for granny, front covers for their schoolbooks —and they blogged about their hobbies. outside school, they use a range of multimodal expressions, while at school they rely on more traditional forms of textual and oral expressions (e.g. arnseth, hatlevik, kløvstad, kristiansen & ottesen, 2007). my material shows that choice of multimodal resources might provide alternative opportunities for agency and identity expression reflecting hobbies and interests important outside school (e.g. scott nixon, 2009). the four girls created a role-play, supplemented by powerpoint, about a trip abroad including spa treatment and shopping. it might also be suggested that choice of multimodal expression, when approved by the teacher, can provide opportunities for pupils to position themselves as “good learners” at school. however, my material reveals that choice of multimodal resources in school also reflects important differences between school and leisure time practices in terms of objectives. the four girls were in the habit of using powerpoint and moviemaker at home, “when we have nothing else to do.” this might support a notion of school-based digital practices as implying goal-directed learning as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 167 opposed to leisure time digital practices displaying inconclusiveness and a sense of making things up as you go along (e.g. drotner, 2008). teacher a emphasised pupil participation and the need to link content, multimodal resources and methods to life outside school as an established strategy. teacher a was responsible for ict at this school and engaged in the dsp with what seemed to be a combination of instructions and guidance. teacher a characterised the teacher role as being ever-present most of the time and as “the person pulling the strings to keep the dsp moving along”. teacher a gave a number of reasons for this involvement: insufficient infrastructure, lack of time and of relevant technical skills among other members of staff. digital storytelling in the b class: focusing on finding facts the second case, the 6th graders in the b class, shows how the dsp could help to develop learning identity by inviting the pupils to reflect about ways of defining knowledge. their project focused on information searches on the internet, a practice a majority of the pupils in all classes were engaged in outside school. the assignment was to find and present facts about the nordic countries (figure 2). the pupils were required to write a manuscript, save it on the learning management system, download still pictures and texts and use photostory to combine textual information with still pictures. using powerpoint, microphones and headsets, they were then to present their stories to the rest of the class. each production was to contain the following elements: name of country, flags, capital, government, population, famous citizens, landmarks and famous food dishes. the pupils had decided themselves to work with the geography curriculum. the dsp was carried out in the classroom, which was a noisy experience owing to lack of space and the layout of the computers lined up along the walls. the pupils had access to a computer each while working in groups of two or three. they had been given a brief introduction to photostory and were familiar with computers, search engines, and the learning management system at school. figure 2: digital stories about the nordic countries. the pupils could decide what kind of multimodal resources to download from the internet, although their choice had to be relevant to the assignment. they could choose whether to use internet or books. their engagement in the production seemed to initiate reflections around affordances provided by different technologies, as revealed in a number of interviews from all three classes. a number of pupils described books as boring and out of date while the internet was conceived of as flexible, easier and more fun to use. in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 168 group interview signe and eli reflected on affordances provided by the internet and computers: “you imagine what you were writing in your head. yes! and then it sort of pops up, new things and stuff.” their reflections contrast with traditional approaches to knowledge as transmitted into pupils' heads from the teacher or from books. as a girl in another class explained: “we learn other things than the teacher tells us”. it is relevant to suggest that using search engines is a practice intersecting between school and leisure time (e.g. arnseth et al., 2007). surfing the internet seemed to be a popular leisuretime “messing around” practice (ito et al., 2008, p. 20) among a majority of the pupils in all three classes. their searches related to hobbies as well as information to use in homework. however, it is questionable whether the curriculum in itself enhanced personal engagement, agency and learner identity in the same way as the digital practice of searching seemed to do. this dsp appeared to be based on a lesser degree of pupil participation as regards choice of multimodal resources, tools and methods. the approach seemed to rest on developing technical skills and “mastering the office package,” according to the teacher. teacher b explained a dilemma concerning the balancing of pupils' competences, their freedom of choice, and the number of points to be included in the stories. this latter aspect was characterised by teacher b as “a straitjacket” tending to constrain engagement. teacher b demonstrated full control over the technology and was in charge of ict implementation at the school. teacher b engaged in the production process with what seemed to be a combination of instructions and guidance. most of the time teacher b remained in a rather withdrawn position behind the desk occupied by the pupils working at the computer. teacher b emphasised the importance of getting the pupils to work according to the given timeframes. when reflecting on the teacher role in this project, teacher b explained, “to organise and nag the pupils to include all the points in the assignment“. digital storytelling in the c class: focusing on aesthetic production the last case from the 5th graders in class c emphasises how the assignment can both provide and limit learning identity and agency. the dsp evolved around front doors (figure 3) expressed in still pictures and poems, which was the teacher’s idea. the assignment was to choose a still picture, put it on paper, devise a title, write a poem to the front door, build the presentation using photostory and paintxi, decide how the pictures would appear/be presented, then add text and music. in groups of three, the pupils shared one computer located in the media-lab. the pupils read their own poems into the story with the help of microphones and headsets. the dsp covered three subjects: norwegian, art and music. for different reasons they did not manage to present their products when the project period ended. figure 3: digital stories about front doors. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 169 this project introduced these pupils and the teacher to photostory and creative production at school for the first time. teacher c started each lesson by giving a brief introduction on how to use the technologies involved, encouraging the pupils to play with the software with the purpose of getting used to it. teacher c approached the production process with what seemed to be a combination of instructions, demonstrations, questions encouraging their curiosity (what do you think will happen if..?), and trial and error together with the pupils. teacher c monitored each group production closely. the following example from the video-observation shows how dsp in school can mediate potential links and differences between leisure time and school and thus be important for learning identity and agency. when negotiating how to colour their story, two boys discussed their use of google in leisure time: erling: at home, you know ola, i look up stuff about dinosaurs on google. do you do that? ola: yes, sometimes. erling: i watch videos so's to find out how to do things um … and i look for pictures too. the boys positioned themselves as learners, drawing on their leisure time experiences and interests in technology. erling spent a lot of time at home creating powerpoint presentations about dinosaurs. in the class, he was one of the most technically skilled. he helped in scaffolding other pupils and supported them when the teacher was guiding others in the class. in this way, erling took the role as mentor and introduced several repertoire elements from his digital practice from outside school. it can be argued that his contributions influenced individual and collective development within the class and this meant that erling affirmed and increased his values identity within the class (e.g. walker & nocon, 2007). i suggest that projects like this enhance agency and learning identity among pupils with keen interest in technology and good technology skills. to pupils of lesser technical ability, dsp might reinforce lack of learning identity and agency, as with anders. he did not seem particularly interested in either the technology or the assignment. anders presented himself as neither particularly interested in computers nor skilled. he had a strong interest in rock music and he spent time searching for song lyrics on the internet. the subsequent video clips could possibly have given anders a chance to demonstrate his initiative in drawing on these sources. however, there seemed to be growing tension between the pupils' and the teacher’s preferences in relation to content, form and production processes. anders and his group wanted to create what anders termed as a “big black city crowded with people carrying guns.” as simon handled the keyboard, anders started to swing his chair and hummed a self-made rock song: “i am driving fast with the wind in my hair, life is good.” simon immediately picked up his song and wrote it out as a poem. the teacher turned up, clearly wanting them to express themselves in a more collected and scholarly manner: teacher c: but, have you started to write a long poem instead? anders (pointing at simon): no, it’s just um … he’s creating something out of the blue. simon: yes, anders is helping me a little. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 170 teacher c: so you’re creating the poem right now? that wasn’t what the language teacher wanted you to do. you were supposed to use the poem you wrote in the language lesson. i liked that one. simon: but i don’t. the group went on to finish their poem, read it aloud with a laugh while teacher c sighed and went away. dsp seemed to provide these pupils with an opportunity to mediate between school and leisure time context by engaging them in a dialogue on matters of importance to them and their identity formation. however, their choice of multimodal resources and their related competences clearly met with the teacher’s disapproval. the dsp did not seem to help anders to position himself as a “successful” learner at school. the teacher’s choice of theme appeared to limit possible agency. almost all the pupils, including those from the other classes, confirmed that they would have created something different in leisure time digital practices. this is important and might indicate that this type of production, largely teacher-organised, faces difficulties in trying to link to the pupils' everyday life outside school because of differences in scope and objectives (skaar, 2008). dsp also seemed to mediate tensions between media culture and norms, principles and ideology in schools. a number of pupils engaged in discussions related to leisure time use of youtube while composing their stories. in all three schools, the use of youtube was forbidden. discussion and conclusion: reading learning identity across three classrooms and across boundaries between leisure time and school the examples given are all located in a primary school context and examine how learning, learning identity and agency criss-cross borders between school and leisure time. the first research question concerned the possibilities and challenges of using dsp in primary schools to develop learning identity and agency. what is evident from my material is that dsp makes explicit the relationship between school and leisure time as different learning contexts influencing the learning process (erstad & silseth, 2008). dsp reveals tensions between institutional regulations, norms and rules, and the experiences, competences and expectations that pupils bring into the classroom from their use of digital technologies. according to erstad and silseth (2008), these tensions can be linked to a number of dimensions: collective learning, teacherstudent roles, epistemic orientation in school based learning, and multimodality. my material indicates that dsp can enhance learning identity and agency by providing opportunities for engagement in collaborative and explorative production practices familiar to a number of the pupils from leisure time. another important point is the way the pupils, by becoming mentors and knowledge producers, may be able to challenge the traditional relationship between teacher and pupil with the teacher as deliverer of knowledge to passively reproducing pupils (erstad & silseth, 2008). from my research, it is evident that dsp is an interesting way to engage pupils in personal ways, since it allows them to choose multimodal resources relevant and familiar to them from digital practices outside school. dsp may thereby enhance learning identity and agency, two concepts important for learning and the development of digital competences. from my point of view, it is vital that pupils can have an impact on their own learning activities in educational settings (erstad & silseth, 2008; drotner, 2001). from this perspective, the study has revealed both possibilities and challenges in the present educational system. in the following, i will discuss this matter in relation to the two remaining research questions. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 171 my material reveals that dsp may represent boundary crossing between in and out of school activities involving the use of digital technology. the pupils brought digital practices and competences from leisure time into the classroom. when taking on the role of guide for their classmates, some pupils obviously draw on out-of-school competences related to technical skills and genre conventions. for others, dsp represented an introduction to new ways of learning that could be further explored in leisure time digital practices. however, for pupils like anders and his group, dsp seems to represent boundary crossing only to a limited extent. dsp also stimulated discussions and reflections tied to out-of-school use of e.g. youtube, google, books, and ways of obtaining information. i found evidence of “transformations of new forms of related activity” (walker & nocon, 2007, p. 192). in the school context, information searches and content production crossed boundaries and were then seen to be supporting similar activities but with different objectives and scopes. this may enable pupils to enhance their understanding of how familiar technology can be helpful in developing other kinds of competences related to the curriculum. this brings us to the last research question concerning the impact of teachers in framing pupils' dsp activities in classroom contexts. although pupil participation was largely evident in the children's use of multimodal resources and ways of working, the study illustrates how dsp in an educational setting is an example of production modelled and predetermined by the teacher (weber & mitchell, 2008). it is reasonable to suggest that the teachers' approaches in many ways restricted rather than enhanced agency and learning identity. this was obvious in anders' group, together with the finding that most of the pupils preferred to produce digital stories with a content that was more exciting or more tied to personal interests than the teacher-given assignment allowed. however, the material also illustrates how dsp is capable of enhancing and supporting learner identity. as suggested in research on the use of technology in schools (e.g. erstad, 2005; arnseth et al., 2007), our three schools also seem to be faced with challenges in realising the full potential of new technology for changing educational practice (erstad & silseth, 2008). this study has illuminated some important prerequisites such as pupil participation and an assignment clearly linked to digital practices outside school, as in the a class. in the b class, the use of search engines seemed to reflect more of a technical orientation, thus linking the activity to leisure time. discussions and reflections on e.g. google as an information site seemed not to evolve in any of the three classes. an unclear curriculum in which these aspects are insufficiently brought out may be the explanation. schools may also have good reasons for restricting access to social networking sites. however, popular leisure time technology, such as social networking sites, might have pedagogical benefits if examples drawn from everyday practices among the pupils were seen as broader cultural practices (lankshear & knobel, 2008). there may be potential through dsp for creating a “third space” expanding learning as the worlds of teachers and pupils meet and interact to create new knowledge and meaning (e.g. moje et al., 2004). if the teacher had listened more carefully, for instance to pupils like anders in the c class, she/he might have communicated to everyone in the class that their leisure time digital practices were relevant as a bridge into the classroom. in this way, the teacher might have developed the pupils' understanding of their own learning identity, which is, “. . . crucial to their literacy performance” (erstad et al., 2009, p. 105). one conclusion to be drawn from this study is that teachers need to adopt an ontological and epistemological perspective on learning identity in the interest of developing learning and digital competences based on what pupils already know from their engagement with technologies outside school. teachers must seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 172 also recognise that there is a lot young people need to know about technology (buckingham, 2003). from the examples presented here, it is obvious that young people are unable to develop the skills of critical reflection, cooperation, agency and learning identity on their own (drotner, 2008). we need further investigation of the relationship between dsp in school and leisure time, especially in relation to pupils' sense of self and agency and how to develop digital competences carefully linked to leisure time. we also need further studies of how pupils frame leisure time and school as intersecting learning contexts, if we are to gain further understanding of the challenges attached to the educational use of digital technology. references arnseth, h. c., hatlevik, o., kløvstad, v., kristiansen, t. & ottesen, g. 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(2006). læring og kulturelle redskaper: om læreprosesser og den kollektive hukommelsen. oslo, cappelen akademisk. tanggaard, l. (2007). learning at trade vocational school and learning at work: boundary crossing in apprentices' everyday life. journal of education and work, 20 (5), 453–466. walker, d. & nocon, h. (2007). boundary-crossing competence: theoretical considerations and educational design. mind, culture, and activity, 14 (3), 178195. weber, s. & mitchell, c. (2008). imaging, keyboarding, and posting identities: young people and new media technologies. in buckingham, d. (ed.) (2008): youth, identity, and digital media (pp. 25-47). cambridge, ma: the mit press. the macarthur foundation series on digital media and learning. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge, cambridge university press. wertsch, j. v. (1998). mind as action. oxford university press. wertsch, j.v., tulviste, p. & hagstrom, f. (1993). a sociocultural approach to agency. in forman, e.a., minick, n. & addison stone, c. (eds.): contexts for learning. sociocultural dynamics in children's development. new york : oxford university press. wortham, s. (2004). the interdependence of social identification and learning. american educational research journal, 41 (3), 715–750. wortham, s. (2006). learning identity. the joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. cambridge, university press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 175 http://www.oecd.org/edu/statistics/deseco http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/uk_childrens_ml/ http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/media_literacy/medlitpub/medlitpubrss/uk_childrens_ml/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 176 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 177 i i prefer to use the concept digital competence instead of literacy, which is the common term in international literature. the reason is that the competence-concept is in use in the norwegian curricula. ii i want to thank my supervisor, professor ola erstad (institute for educational research, university of oslo) for critical and helpful comments, suggestions, and support. i also want to thank the reviewers for constructive contributions. i am also grateful for encouraging support from my colleagues at the faculty of humanities, sport and social science, the pedagogics-section. iii the knowledge promotion: http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kd/selected-topics/compulsory-education/knowledge promotion/what-is-the-knowledge-promotion.html?id=86769 iv multimodal texts are here used to refer to the norwegian concept of “composite texts” (in norwegian sammensatte tekster) which is the term in the national curricula. v http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.msp vi http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx vii the a class belonged to a school located in a small town and has 110 pupils in in 1 th -7th grade and 11 teachers. school b, where the b class belonged, is located in a larger town and has 350 pupils (in 1 th -10thgrade) and 30 teachers. school c is located in a small town and has 170 pupils in 1th -7th grade and 24 teachers. viii note that the presentation of classes ranging from a-c is random and has nothing to do with the quality of their work with digital competence. measuring quality is not the scope of this article. ix http://www.itu.no/no/om_itu/english/ x since the material consists of 5th and 7th graders their norwegian expressions have been translated into informal english. for this reason, it has sometimes been impossible to find corresponding words. the group interviews are not quoted with names since it was difficult to identify from the tape who did the talking. xi http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/mspaint_overview.mspx? mfr=true http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/mspaint_overview.mspx?mfr=true http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/mspaint_overview.mspx?mfr=true http://www.itu.no/no/om_itu/english/ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.msp http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kd/selected-topics/compulsory-education/knowledge-promotion/what-is-the-knowledge-promotion.html?id=86769 http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/kd/selected-topics/compulsory-education/knowledge-promotion/what-is-the-knowledge-promotion.html?id=86769 boundary crossing and learning identities – digital storytelling in primary schools anne mette bjørgen abstract introduction digital storytelling as a new cultural tool – a socio-cultural approach the study – context, empirical basis and methods digital storytelling production in the classrooms digital storytelling in the a class: focusing on pupil participation digital storytelling in the b class: focusing on finding facts digital storytelling in the c class: focusing on aesthetic production discussion and conclusion: reading learning identity across three classrooms and across boundaries between leisure time and school references microsoft word kristen m snyder the digital culture.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 the digital culture and “peda-socio” transformation kristen m. snyder, ph.d. department of educational science mid sweden university kristen.snyder@miun.se abstract this paper presents a concept called the digital culture, which emerged during a five-year research project of online professional development networks for educators. turning first to a discussion about the digital culture model, i suggest that technology is no longer solely a separate, objective entity in society. the integration of technology in human communication engages technology as part of the communication act and therefore as part of the process of creating meaning. developing an awareness of the implications for behavior, norms and values, and meaning making is integral to understanding the digital culture. following a conceptual explanation of the digital culture model, i explore the implications for education, both in relation to opportunities and points of concern. my intent in this paper is to raise awareness and stimulate dialogue among educators about the need to see technology integrated with pedagogy, communication, and organizational systems. while considerable research has addressed dimensions of technology in learning and societal development, educational systems have yet to develop a holistic model that integrates all four. i suggest that this is a missed opportunity not only for schools, but also for engaging youth in lifelong learning and social transformation. as an adult living in a technological age i find myself in something of a dilemma. as a participant in organizational and social life that utilizes email and sms my life is certainly technologically oriented. but i feel like something of an outsider to a developing generation that has been born in and thoroughly baptized into a digital age for which technological immersion is the norm, access to information is increasing rapidly, the amount of information to which one needs to respond daily is at times overwhelming (for adults perhaps), and social networking is understood without even being discussed. while i recognize that my perspective predominantly represents life in the developed countries, the rate at which rural and underdeveloped communities around the world are gaining access is increasing daily. i observe these phenomena from the outside as an adult, as well as experiencing them from the inside, both culturally and organizationally, as email and sms communication are increasingly institutionalized. as an educator interested in creating learning spaces for youth that are meaningful to human development, stimulating and contribute to the development of society, i am continually pressed with the question: why are we not learning from youth and integrating the digital culture in the school today? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 2 statistics have shown for many years that keeping students stimulated in schools is tough. while the majority of youth succeed in the school systems around the world, there remains a substantial number who drop out for many reasons, including boredom. survey results of 400 high school students in the u.s. showed that 89% of respondents found school itself to be somewhat or very boring (shaw, 2004). studies in adolescence and truancy report understimulation as one of the key variables in student dropout (bridgeland, dilulio, and morison, 2006). getting youth to school is often not the problem; keeping them there is. compare this to a rapidly growing cyberculture in which youth are engaged daily in online activities with friends locally and globally. in fact, parents in many countries are now concerned with the amount of time students spend online (reflecting among other things family disengagement). studies in sweden report that each week 88 percent of swedish youth aged 1520 are actively engaged in a cyber community, and this number is growing (johansson, 2004). among the activities of engagement are homepages, chat, podcasts, and email. while studies are still examining the motivation for online behavior, initial findings suggest that the opportunity to create one’s own identity and explore life with others is enticing. the ability to use one’s own imagination and to develop questions of interest in dialogue with others empowers youth to take command of their own social relations and knowledge development. similar cyber communities exist in other countries as well, including china, india, and korea, and their function is on the rise. one study reports that in india, youth are using the internet to worship, linking technology and religion (majumder, 2007). the website serves as a host for religious services, making the practice of prayer and meditation more accessible to people who don’t have time or access to large cities. an even more encompassing recent development is second life, which is a 3d online digital world, “imagined, created and owned by its residents” (www.secondlife.com). the second life website, at the time of writing this paper, reports that 3,568,651 residents participate in the digital world, which is characterized by new “creations”, a marketplace, social networking, and a cyberdollar (linden dollars) for economic transactions. business week online (may 1, 2006) reports that second life, once characterized as a game, is really more akin to an alternative world, and as such “real-world” businesses are exploring questions about how a virtual system such as second life can “provide a template for getting work done, from training and collaboration to product design and marketing” (business week online cover story, may 1, 2006). considering this reality of life outside the school, in which youth are actively and captivatingly engaged in social networks, creation, exploration, self empowerment and identity development, we begin to see that youth have both the motivation and the skills to connect and learn. a question that emerges then is what can schools do to adapt their learning environments, systems and curricula to build on the energy and opportunities of youth culture today that is already connected to societal development. i speculate that if we continue to develop schools only in relation to a model that focuses on academic or vocational achievement, we will lose more and more students to cyberland. one could certainly argue that cyberland has the potential to serve as a new community for those who don’t like school, and in fact new research studies are examining the phenomenon of cyberland so as to better understand what motivates youth (näslundh, 2003; 2005). the question i would like to pose is what would happen if schools connected the curriculum, teaching and learning to the culture of life in a technological age, building a digital culture in which youth are actively engaged in social learning networks through and with technology in collaboration with others. while the educational system often perpetuates a division between youth culture and academic learning, schooling would become much more stimulating and invigorating if the two were to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 3 connect. furthermore, education would serve a major role in helping youth not only to develop identity through social networks but also to grapple with the emerging phenomenon of sensemaking, ethics, and perception that are changing with the integration of technology and human systems. in this paper i would like to explore a concept called the digital culture, which emerged during a five-year research project of online social networks (snyder, 2005; 2006), and the implications for educational development. i do not advocate a radical overhaul of educational traditions, nor do i wish to suggest that integrating technology, pedagogy, and human systems can serve the needs of all learners around the world at the present time. i do suggest, however, that given the trends in technological development, as well as its impact on social interaction, educators should explore the implications for learning and citizen development that goes beyond the classroom, building a foundation for lifelong learning, active citizenship, and social involvement. turning first to a discussion about the digital culture model, i will suggest that technology is no longer solely a separate, objective entity in society. the integration of technology in human communication engages technology as part of the communication act and therefore as part of the process of creating meaning. developing an awareness of the implications for behavior, norms and values and meaning making is integral to understanding the digital culture. following a conceptual explanation of the digital culture model, i would like to explore the implications for education, both in relation to opportunities and points of concern. my intent in this paper is to raise awareness and stimulate dialogue among educators about the need to see technology integrated with pedagogy, communication and organizational systems. while considerable research has addressed dimensions of technology in learning and societal development (much of which informs this argument), educational systems have yet to develop a holistic model that integrates all four. i suggest that this is a missed opportunity not only for schools, but also for engaging youth in lifelong learning and social transformation. digital culture: a conceptual framework the concept of the digital culture emerged from a five-year study of an international social learning network for educators (snyder, 2005; 2006), in which a void was identified in the discussions and development of technology in education. traditionally within the field of education, research has focused primarily on technology as a learning device, exploring developments in didactics and learning theory as they relate to classroom or online learning. while these contributions have been significant for expanding views about knowledge development and the importance of social dynamics in the learning environment, they have not addressed the development of social behaviors, norms, and values that cultural theorists suggest are being altered through interactions with technology. as a culture theorist studying schools, it became evident to me that the focus of technology in education was too limited to achieve certain stated goals in educational policy that call for schools to prepare youth with skills and knowledge for working in the global knowledge society, including an orientation to lifelong learning, active citizenship, networking, entrepreneurship, and communication skills for understanding others (field, 2000; naval, print, veldhuis, 2002). furthermore, the growing social development of youth in cyberspace communities potentially reinforces a divide between schooling and society as youth are creating alternative sources of connection and stimulation for learning and social networking that appear to mirror the very characteristics of living and working in the 21st century. seeing both the void and the growing divide raises questions about what schools can do to embrace a digital culture of learning that does not see seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 4 technology as secondary to learning but rather as a co-creator in the learning environment for promoting both academic and social development. technology has taken on an integrated and integrating role in our socialhuman systems, which leads to new values, norms, and symbol systems that transcend the culture of nations and social groups (lull, 2000). the digital culture is a reframing of the relationship between technology and humans, suggesting both dimensions are interchangeably subject and object within a cultural manifestation. this concept is embedded in cultural theory, which posits that culture is the shared values, assumptions, beliefs, rules and social practices that give rise to meaning and identity (geertz, 1973; lull, 2000; schein, 1985). with reference to this definition, i suggest that technology has become an integrated part of our human communication system, and as such it is a constituent of the meaning-shaping process. given the increasing global connection for learning and living today (castells, 2000; snyder, ackerhocevar, 2000), we need to ask ourselves in what ways are our perceptions, behaviors, values, and norms being shaped through our interactions with technology, and what are the implications when we consider technology in education from a social-cultural perspective of learning? furthermore, what are the implications for education in the development of citizenship? to understand this more fully, i turn to the constructivist notion (berger, 1966) of sense-making and weick’s (1995) notion of sensemaking (intentionally spelled differently) as they both describe processes in which we, as humans, give meaning to identity, events, experiences, and encounters. both concepts have elements that are relevant to understanding digital culture. constructivist theory posits that we co-create our realities together, as we share and react to our perceptions and experience in response to situations. through this co-construction we give meaning to our realities, resulting in common language, symbols, values, behaviors, norms, and understanding. as learners, we make sense out of our world by analyzing and synthesizing our experiences in an attempt to give meaning. the elements that contribute to our sense making process are those parts of an event or experience with and through which we interact and act. in contemporary society, technology and media have become a part of this social interaction process. weick’s (1995) theory of sensemaking posits that as humans we are confronted by ambiguity and uncertainty in our daily encounters about which we must make sense. through a series of stages characterized by “identity, social, retrospective, ongoing, enactment, and cues and plausibility” (p. 17), we give meaning to events and experiences, which become the process of sensemaking. he suggests that this is distinct from understanding, interpreting, or attributing, as those require a certain predetermined knowledge or framework in which to place information. the uniqueness of sensemaking then is that it takes place over time in response to patterns of experience, rather than in response to a predetermined knowledge framework. this theory has direct application to the digital culture, as we encounter daily ambiguities and uncertainties in our communication with and through technology that create the need for us to make sense out of our experiences. these ambiguities and uncertainties are stimulated by a variety of factors that characterize life in a digital culture today: technology, rapid information intake and synthesis, flexible and dynamic communities of exchange, asynchronous exchange, the broadening of perspective and experience with the expansion of our social communities, etc . referring to social constructivist theory and weick’s notion of sensemaking, i identify three key elements that are central to the digital culture argument. the first is that we, as humans, give meaning to experience, events, and encounters socially. in a growing world of connectivity and social networks we are connecting with a greater number of people across communities and cultures, expanding the type of encounter and experience in which we engage, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 5 as well the persons with whom we shape meaning. this has the potential to impact the kind of reality that we co-construct, as our social groups expand. the second element is that this social construction takes place through the act of interacting with one another and our surroundings. as technology is central to human interaction today, it necessarily becomes a part of the act of communicating, and influences perceptions and behaviors. studies from reeves and nass (1996) support this claim. they found that we treat computers like real people and places, suggesting that the way in which we receive a message is impacted by our relationship to the technology. in their studies they have shown that people tend to respond in a social manner to computers. for example, a negative attitude towards computers will affect the evaluation of a message received through the computer, no matter who the sender. the presence of technology in human communication is thus changing our behaviors and perceptions of one another, through which we socially construct a digital culture of meaning. the third element relates to weick’s notion of ambiguity and uncertainty. as the tools of technology advance, our acts of communication are met with ambiguity and uncertainty, causing us to ask new questions about how can we understand one another. the old frameworks for understanding human communication, based on knowing how to interpret verbal and non-verbal cues, are no longer helpful in much of our exchanges today that are characterized by text-based messages and asynchronous exchange. we are now faced with the ambiguities and uncertainties of how to interpret one another, placing us in a space of what weick calls: sensemaking. when we consider weick’s (1995) concept of sensemaking and constructivist theory in the context of our use of technology in human interaction, it is possible to see the way in which digital media are not only integrated into our daily lives, but have also become a layer in our culture and in the meaning making process. in an earlier paper (snyder, 2005), i suggested that: no longer are we living in an era where ”online communication” is a separate phenomenon from our daily lives. it now permeates our organizational walls and human systems to create a digital culture, which is reflected by the integration of technology in everyday life such that our human systems of interaction and work transpire in a physical and virtual space interchangeably (snyder, 2005; 7). the message is that the place of technology in our lives and its role in connecting humans also contribute to the process of shaping meaning. this is in contrast to the technological determinist (chandler, 1995) theory that suggests that technology drives development, and that we as humans do not participate in shaping its purpose or function in society. contrary to this view, i suggest that not only do we as humans shape our realities through interaction with our surrounding context, but that elements, such as technology, also take on new meaning and become a part of the culture, shaping it and being shaped by it. in an earlier work (snyder, 2005), i argued that mcluhan’s (1964) notion of the “medium is the message” is powerful, albeit unidirectional: it omits the interaction that now exists between humans and technology through which we communicate. radio and tv (as in mcluhan’s examples) address a unidirectional relationship of sending and receiving, in which case meaning making takes place in a separate act disengaged from the technology. in contrast today, with the current advances in communication technology, the media have become a part of the sense making equation, thus calling for an interactive perspective (denzin, 1992), rather than a deterministic view. using culture theory as a lens, i would like to illustrate ways in which the presence of technology in our human communication systems is altering our seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 6 behaviors, challenging social norms and expectations, and contributing to the development of our perceptions. as a cultural dimension, technology has taken on a value-laden symbol and role as connector. those who are “connected” are perceived differently from those who are not. we see this both at the global level, and at the human user level. at the global level, the spread of communication technology was initially hailed as a potential stimulus for bringing about greater equity among nations and cultures around the world (castells, 1996). many countries within the european union developed a 10year plan to provide connectivity to every household and community in eu countries. ten years later, such plans have brought about considerable change, as many more persons and cultures are connected. yet there still remain areas in countries (i.e., villages in china, sweden, russia, and africa) where connectivity is non-existent. consequently, the world is witnessing a new set of inequities, economically and socially brought about by the quest and promises of connectivity (capra, 2002; castells, 2000; friedman, 2005). at the institutional level the value of connection has led to new assumptions and codes of conduct in both human communication as well as work production. in the initial years of technology in the workplace, value was given to our “ability to use” technology; today the value is on “ourselves as users”. not only are we expected to know how to use a computer and the appropriate software, it is anticipated in many settings and countries that we are comfortable communicating through email and virtual platforms, and accessing and working with information storage and sharing systems. the assumption is that technology is no longer an external tool to our human interactions, but an integrated dimension of working and living in the 21st century. on the one hand, the value of connection is opening new models of work and knowledge development, built on networks (stephenson, 2005). on the other hand it is amputating our ability to be fully present in many of our human exchanges, both in formal settings as well as the informal social settings of family life. in places of business and schools, for example, the presence of the telephone is so common that we don’t even blink twice when our meetings are interrupted by a telephone call or students sms their friends (we can be frustrated, but not surprised). in organizations where wireless connections are made possible, many people take their computers to meetings and remain connected online while they also engage in the face-to-face meeting. in addition, for those working in virtual organizations, it is not uncommon for the stationary phone to ring (and be answered) while they are participating in a web-cast meeting. in the context of family, bakardjieva, (2005) found that computers are altering family dynamics and parenting in dramatic ways. with access to “everything” through the internet, youth are spending more time online than with family. they are still at home, yet absent. the impact of our connections through technology today is great for it both extends us and amputates us. on the one hand, the ability to get work done wherever we are and to stay connected contributes to an energy and productivity for those engaged. for those on the outside of the connection, perception can develop about how they are valued by others, reinforcing technology over human aspects, which impacts our perceptions, social dynamics and emotions. another phenomenon that emerges from the need to be connected is “information overload”, which is leading to new behaviors of retreat and hiding for some, and task overload for others. with the 24/7 exchange of information, instant messaging, and emails, finding time to complete intended tasks is difficult as the definition of work shifts focus to “reading and replying to email” or “answering the mobile telephone”. in some cases, people are taking it upon themselves to develop new work habits, either setting aside a specific time to respond to email or phone calls, or just completely ignoring emails altogether because they take too much time away from the intended work. the new, emerging codes of conduct are not yet institutionalized, and as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 7 such are shaping people’s perceptions of information and one another. human communication and sensemaking are impacted as some people “switch off”, while others sit waiting. the speed of connection and information exchange also contributes to changing perceptions, behaviors, and expectations. without thinking, we have developed a social dynamic in which we often ”assume” that a person will respond to us immediately as we have become so ingrained in the “instant response” capability of technology. as technology and human action become integrated, we no longer associate “instantaneous” with the technology, but rather with the human act of communication. when the response isn’t immediate or as anticipated we often begin to speculate why. sometimes we speculate falsely leading to new actions based on something that doesn’t exist. we perceive that because the person has the technology at their disposal they should be available for open communication “when we need them”. our changing perception alters social dynamics, as well as the communication exchange shaping sensemaking. among youth this is quite prevalent and also problematic as technology is adding to stress and addiction with the need to stay connected and always available. the östersund post reported recently an increase in adolescent stress caused by youth sleeping with their telephones turned on so they don’t miss calls in the middle of the night. during school time they stay connected with friends through sms. an australian study (australian youth facts and stats, 2005) reported that more than one-third of australians age 14-24 cannot live without a mobile phone. and lonkila (2004) found that mobile phones are increasing our connectivity and the strength of our social networks, “impacting the very nature of sociability” (p. 59). whether it is the computer and connections to the internet or the mobile telephone, our need to be connected and available 24/7 has become a norm and value in our global society. as a last example, i would like to address power. power is a complex phenomenon in any social culture. how it is shaped, defined, and used can differ from group to group, resulting in very different cultures. within a digital culture, perceptions of power are emerging that result from a number of factors, including our personal relationship to technology (reeves and nass, 1996), our perceptions of the written word (ramberg, 1996), and how digital communications are used to include or exclude members of a work environment. these elements are adding a new dimension to existing power structures in some cases, and in others giving rise to new perceptions of power bases and, consequently, to the ways in which communication is mediated by technology. studies (reeves and nass, 1996) have shown that technology itself has a perceived power, and that those who use it obtain a kind of power over others in some organizational settings. in this case it can matter who is sending, as well who isn’t sending. further, it can matter who is included and who is excluded. in some organizations and social groups, email, for example, can be used to privilege the sender, giving them a perceived power. this can be achieved by sending emails to only a few, creating an “in” group and an “out” group. power can thus also be perceived by the way in which the digital dialogue takes shape. if only a few recipients of a group email, for example, respond and continue to engage in the dialogue, they build a power-base that eventually can exclude those who don’t participate. in such a case, it becomes critical to understand the reasons why only certain people respond: time, role, expectations, or knowledge. digital communication has the power to reinforce existing power structures or invite collaboration. in addition to our own relationship to technology, perceptions of power are affected by how we perceive the written word (reeves and nass, 1996). when we receive an email, we perceive the text and the computer to be the communicator. in order to see the sender (and hold in perspective the power seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 8 of the message) we are required to envision or fantasize beyond the text and the technology to the person. it is in this space that we often stop short of the fantasizing and relegate the text and computer to a higher position in the communication than the sender. depending on our relationship to text and technology, as reeves and nass (1996) suggest, our perception is altered and so is our sensemaking, for it is often our actions with technology that we hold first and foremost. connecting this with the growing use of emoticons and acronyms as a language system of communication and sensemaking, we might ask ourselves the ways in which our communication is changing our perceptions, giving rise to an unintended social order. these are but a few examples of the ways in which technology plays a key role in contributing to a new culture of social interaction which influences our perceptions and sense making. in an era when knowledge development is perceived as social and networking is more and more the structure for working, living, and learning, new questions arise about the need for a holistic understanding that integrates technology in the sensemaking and knowledge development process. seen once as an external tool, technology is now an integrated artifact in our cultures and a part of our processes of shaping meaning, perceptions, behaviors, norms, and values. so what does this have to do with education? i believe there are two primary dimensions to consider and they relate to the pedagogical and sociological responsibility and context of schooling today. there are a number of questions raised about the pedagogical practices in schools because changes in society as they relate to a higher value placed on knowledge development and human capital, the ability to network and be entrepreneurial are raising questions about the pedagogical practices in schools for citizenship preparation. moreover, the need for a digital literacy in which one can use technology for communication and work reinforces not only our technological know-how, but also an awareness of and social responsibility towards using technology to promote human equity and sustainable societal development. while advances in technology have opened the door to the kinds of changes we are witnessing in society, it is the social dimension that has become so critical, calling upon education to play a role in helping develop citizens with the skills necessary to interact in a global and local context. the premise of the digital culture is to suggest that we as a society, including our social institutions, have a responsibility to understand the process of sensemaking in general, as this becomes a more complex phenomenon in a multi-cultural landscape. moreover, as our human connections are conducted more and more with and through technology, we need to understand what is happening to our perceptions, norms, values, behaviors, and customs as these all relate to the ways in which we shape meaning. for schools the challenge is how to embrace a digital culture that cares for both the pedagogical task of education, as well as the social development of citizenry, which includes an understanding of the implications for knowledge development and sensmaking. through the digital culture then, education can contribute to both a pedagogical and sociological development, which i refer to as “peda-socio” transformation. the digital culture and education the current rhetoric, policy, and programming models in education are calling for a focus on lifelong learning, entrepreneurship, networking, digital literacy and active citizenship. to this end, a number of key competencies for success in life and the workforce have been developed. rychen and salganik (2003) categorized the key competencies for successful life and a well-functioning society into three broad areas: 1) interacting in socially heterogeneous groups, 2) acting autonomously, and 3) using tools interactively. the european commission on education (2004) refers to the knowledge worker, with skills in networking, entrepreneurship, lifelong learning, and active citizenship. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 9 thomas friedman’s (2005) theory that the world is flat suggests the need for workers to be prepared for a new business model built on in-sourcing, outsourcing, networking, collaboration, and open sourcing and digital living. also emerging are concerns about human caring and social engagement that have led to a plethora of arguments for developing skills in dialogue, collaboration, appreciative inquiry, caring, and spirituality (bohm, 1996; 2004; brown and isaacs, 2005; nodding, 1991; 2002; russell, 1998; wells and claxton, 2002). in 2004, the european union commission on education identified eight key competencies that should underpin education in the 21st century, of which “digital competence” is one. they state that ”ict skills comprise the use of multi-media technology to retrieve, assess, store, produce, present and exchange information, and communicate and participate in networks via the internet” (p. 22). included in the equation now is the social dimension, reflecting a pedagogical shift from individual learning to a socialcultural model (claxton, 2002; wells and claxton, 2002). the stimulus for the above competencies and focus on networking and lifelong learning stems from advances in technology and changes in organizational, economic, and national systems. in 1996 manual castells (1996) awakened us to the concept that we were “living in the network society”. his basic message was that the growth in technology would create possibilities for people to connect within and across cultures, anticipating advances in democracy, solidarity and peace around the world. while later observations (castells, 2000) have shown that this has not happened yet, the network society did lead to the expansion and significance of social networks in shaping global transformation. capra (2002) states that, “in the information age, networking has emerged as a critical form of organization in all sections of society. dominant social functions are increasingly organized around networks, and participation in these networks is a critical source of power” (p. 149). with the use of the internet, blogs, faq pages, and chatrooms, video conferencing and asynchronous conferencing systems, for example, we have upped the ante on the power of social networks for global transformation through knowledge exchange. thomas friedman (2005) posits that, “we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network, which—if politics and terrorism do not get in the way—could usher in an amazing era of prosperity” (p. 8). central to pedagogical development in the changing society are social learning networks (köhler, 2004; stephenson, 2005), which through technology have an important role in developing global citizenship and engaging education in societal transformation. in a digital culture, social networks engage educators and youth in global communities of practice (wenger, et. al. 2002) based on collaborative learning (soresen and tackle (2002). curriculum is generated through human exchange in response to social conditions, rather than from a set of governmental standards derived from a model of measurement and competition. lave and wenger (1991) suggest that where learning is concerned, community creates the curriculum and that the conditions for effective learning appear to be related to our direct engagement in community. together, these elements create a pedagogy of engagement in a digital culture that has the potential to help youth meet the key competencies for lifelong learning and sustainable development in the knowledge age. contrasting this with the dominant pedagogical model found in most schools today, there is a vast divide between k-12 education and preparation for living, working and lifelong learning. recent studies examining technology in schools (fredriksson, et al., 2006) demonstrated that most of the innovations related to ict in schools have not impacted pedagogical or school development. the dominant model based on individual psychology has yet to be replaced with a pedagogy based on the socio-cultural. it is not until we come to the higher education level and professional development that we witness learning models that are reflective of the social context of living and work today. in fact, the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 10 majority of research on learning communities and online learning has been conducted at the college and university level. so what then can educators do to respond? i suggest that there are four key components that can frame advances in education and ultimately develop a platform for lifelong learning at a young age. the four components are: technology, pedagogy, communication and organizational systems. the premise is that by integrating the four, rather than holding them as separate aspects of education, learning can become a dynamic process in which youth are engaged in social networks and communities of practice, shaping their own knowledge in relation and response to society and the workforce. at the heart of the interaction is the digital culture of sensemaking that emerges through human interactions with one another in the presence of technology. figure 1 illustrates the four elements, which intersect with one another to shape a digital culture of sensemaking. for example, technology is used for communication and learning (pedagogy), which impacts the role of the student, the teacher, views of knowledge and learning. technology is developed to meet learning needs and capacities, which extend both human communication and technology. the organization of learning and the educational institution in relation to scheduling, resource allocation, use of space, teaching models and the organization of the curriculum are all impacted. figure 1 to understand this in practice, i suggest the need for educators to explore the development of knowledge and the focus on social connections. it is important to see knowledge in a broad context that contributes not only to economic growth and development, but also to social and human caring. further, educators need to understand what kinds of technology are available today (all forms of media, internet, blogs, podcasts, second life, virtual communities, web-based conferencing systems, etc) and how they can be used to facilitate and stimulate learning. it is also important to recognize the need to create a culture of learning at all levels of the school to facilitate lifelong learning and the continual advancement of pedagogy in response to societal growth (snyder, acker-hocevar, snyder, 2000). according to tuckett (1997) “at the heart of the learning society are learners and potential learners and the communities in which we live” (p. 24). table 1 highlights a few of the dimensions available or present in schools today that can be further developed in relation the digital culture for “peda-socio” development. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 11 global learning context technological context of learning knowledge development in the global age • active citizenship • digital literacy • networker • entrepreneurial • multi-cultural awareness • team work • collaborative/collaboration (?) • value for humanity and the environment • cultural heritage • communication online • social learning networks • collaborative learning • role relationships • multi-media • asynchronous conference systems • portfolio systems for assessment • social constructivism • social collaborative learning versus individual learning • knowledge acquisition versus knowledge development • self-directed learning • real-world based curriculum table 1: dimensions of pedagogy in the digital culture referring to elements from table 1, i offer an example: take as a starting point the fact that many youth spend their evenings online, in chat forums, interacting with blogs and making their own podcasts, etc. their world is reflected in the three dimensions of table 1: global learning context, technological context of learning and knowledge development through social interaction. what could happen to learning environments in schools if they engaged the cyberworld of youth in the classroom? this could include letting youth build their own social networks of learning in the school and across schools, through which they work together to develop a collective curriculum. the work of the teacher then is not to decide what and how students should learn, but rather to facilitate learning and growth in relation to a social curriculum, focusing on issues of democracy, ethics, values, reading, writing, math, and so forth. further, teachers have an opportunity to help facilitate awareness among youth about how the digital culture in which they are engaged shapes their perceptions, norms, behaviors, and expectations of one another as a way to develop citizenship. the basics of schooling need not change; the question is from where does the curriculum develop and what role do students have in the development process? if we return to the examples of connectivity, speed, information overload, and power mentioned earlier in the paper, to what extent are teachers using such scenarios as learning opportunities? currently in sweden, for example, there is a move to legalize the rights of teachers to remove mobile phones from students in schools. while this is certainly one model of responding to the effects of technology in our social systems, one might also ask what learning opportunities are being missed. in what ways could teachers, instead, help youth explore implications about technology for themselves in order to be a part of shaping a responsible and creative digital culture of learning and living in the future? as adults, we may not have the degree of technological savvy that lies in youth, but we do have the historical experience and awareness from which to raise new questions about social and human dynamics in a digital culture. conclusions in this paper i have put forth a thesis to suggest that there is more to technology in education than meets the eye. the current efforts in schools show little innovation, reflecting a sense that if we just put a computer in the classroom, schools have somehow integrated technology into education. a few years ago a principal of a school said to me, “our students are living in another world than we as adults. it is our job as educators to learn from them about how to develop the future school”. his words came in the late 1990s before virtual communities were popular among youth, yet he was able to see that what youth were doing already with technology was far more advanced than seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 12 how educators were thinking. in many ways this divide has only continued to grow, and now researchers are beginning to study the phenomenon of the cyberworld in the hope of understanding more about motivational theory to engage students in schools. as students’ after-school world expands rapidly with social connections and whole new virtual worlds of identity and meeting places, schools fall farther behind in their ability to capture the attention of youth. it is in this space that i believe schools have both an opportunity and a responsibility. the opportunity arises from the possibility to build learning environments based on the social, communication and technological aspects found in society today. the responsibility relates to developing awareness about the impact on sensemaking in a digital culture. with the growing challenge and public demand for schools to foster future citizens in the information age, educators have a natural context in which to expand and transform their knowledge and understanding of the relationship between humans and technology from a variety of perspectives. building a digital culture in schools implies that educators use a range of multi-media to facilitate learning in a social context, in which youth are networked interculturally, and where the global community informs the curriculum. youth of today need to learn in a context that mirrors the society they already know so well, which is based on connections, networking, rapid rates of high-volume information, and a changing cultural landscape. moreover, educators who see themselves as members of the digital culture, interconnected in their own social networks of learning and knowledge development, can assure a pedagogy that is responsive to changing societal conditions. the digital culture is one in which we are all members, connected in a variety of communities of practice (wenger, et. al., 2002) shaping society and culture. such a pedagogical shift necessarily recognizes the integration of technology in our lives and its impact on our human connections and learning. shaping a digital culture of learning in the global age is about more than technological innovations in schools. it is about creating a working culture in which staff and students engage in shaping their own learning and social development. borrowing from the fields of culture and communication studies, we are reminded that as learners we are not just students in a classroom following a curriculum. we are members of a larger culture that becomes our curriculum. as we engage with one another in active exchange, we give meaning to a collective space. using media and technologies contributes to our communication, giving rise to new knowledge to shape a global ecumene. educators have the possibility to take the next step and support the development of schools as living systems, not just bureaucratic institutions. as living systems, composed of cultures and networks, schools can adapt their learning environments to respond to changes in society and prepare youth for lifelong learning and living in a global age. biographical description kristen snyder is senior faculty at the department of educational sciences at mid sweden university. her research focuses on school and leadership development in a global age, with specific emphasis on social networks for learning and professional development and the digital culture. she is the author of numerous publications, including the co-authored book: living on the edge of chaos: leading schools into the 21st century. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 13 references australian youth facts and stats (2005). media and entertainment. online statistics published by australian clearinghouse for youth studies. http://www.youthfacts.com.au/index.php?option=displaypage&itemid=261&op =page downloaded november 4, 2006. bakardjieva, m. 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(2002). collaborative knowledge building in web-based learning: assessing the quality of dialogue. international journal of e-learning, 1 (1), 28-32. stephenson, k. (2005) trafficking in trust: the art and science of human knowledge networks in : enlightened power : how women are transforming the practice of leadership, ed. l. coughlin, e. wingard, and k. hollihan (san francisco : jossey-bass, c2005) pp. 242-265 tuckett, a. (1997) lifelong learning in england and wales. national institute of adult continuing education, leicester. weick, k. (1995) sensemaking in organizations. thousand oaks: sage publications wells, g. claxton, g. (2002) introduction: sociocultural perspectives on the future of education. in. gordon wells and guy claxton (eds) learning for life in the 21st century: sociocultural perspectives on the future of education. oxford: blackwell publishers. when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency. a communication perspective on undergraduate students' media use issn: 1504-4831 vol 16, no 2 (2020), e4049 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4049 ©2020 (anne mette bjørgen/yvonne fritze). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency. a communication perspective on undergraduate students' media use anne mette bjørgen inland norway university of applied sciences email: anne.mette.bjorgen@inn.no yvonne fritze inland norway university of applied sciences email: yvonne.fritze@inn.no abstract this article explores how students on a bachelor's course in media education understand the educational framework for teaching based on how they choose to participate in the teaching communication. the norwegian educational quality reform has promoted expectations of student-activating teaching methods to increase the scope of student-active learning. digital technology was introduced in response to this challenge. data was gathered through group interviews, a survey, and information from activity logs in the university college's learning platform. the article aims to shed light on what media practices the students consider as important and how their experiences correspond with the teachers' academic use of media. students seem to prefer to study effectively, at the expense of activating teaching methods and of being active producers of learning. although students are expected to be digitally competent, it should not be assumed that they master technology as expected in higher education. by drawing on luhmann's communication theory the educational consequences of the students' media use in teaching and in independent study work is discussed. https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4049 when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 keywords: media, communication, higher education, student-activating teaching, educational framework. introduction “it has been great to be able to relax a bit. i feel i don’t have to make such an effort [...] i mean it’s [the video] much easier to follow than someone who is explaining [lecturer]”. the above statement shows how one undergraduate student describes his experience of the lecturer's use of video as an opportunity to relax. the lecturer's intention in using the video clip was to generate discussion and invite students to take part in teaching. this statement illustrates what has often been described as a tension between how students choose to use technology in education and the use made of technology by lecturers (moll, linder & nielsen, 2015; selwyn, 2016). along with similar statements, the above student’s remark has made us wonder whether attempts to facilitate student-activating teaching by using digital technology really would result in increased activity, such as critically assessing academic sources, collaborating, producing and sharing digital content, participating in dialogues, to mention a few. the norwegian educational quality reform in higher education (st.meld. no. 27, 20002001) places emphasis on student-activating teaching and the increased use of digital technology as a means to promote learning and teaching quality (krumsvik, 2016, p. 321). the reform draws on international trends promoting active teaching as pedagogical strategy to engage students in their learning process (fischer & hänze, 2019; prince, 2004). in a study conducted by the norway open university1, it is argued that students want teaching that involves the active participation of students, and with the use of technology with which they are already familiar but that it must be used differently from the way teachers use it (ørnes, gaard, refsnes, kristiansen & wilhelmsen, 2015). wittek (2015) summarises the results ten years after the reform, noting, inter alia, that the completion of studies are largely unchanged despite the fact that many teachers have been working hard to create activating teaching including the use of digital technology. as a result of decades of testing different forms of digital technology in education, we also know that technology use does not necessarily result in students being more diligent (moll et. al., 2015). there are a number of prerequisites, such as competent professionals, didactic facilitation and technical support (krumsvik, 2016). it is also important that students are adequately prepared and actively participate a prerequisite that is often disregarded 1 now known as the norwegian agency for international cooperation and quality enhancement in higher education: https://diku.no/en https://diku.no/en https://diku.no/en when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 (tønnessen, 2016). there is a widespread assumption that today's young students who have grown up with digital technology have effortlessly become competent in technology in all arenas (moll et al., 2015). from a professional point of view, the claim that young people as a homogeneous group can be described as digitally native or, digitally competent, is rejected and it has been pointed out that there are individual significant differences as far as the use of technology is concerned (nordkvelle & fritze, 2015; livingstone, 2012; buckingham, 2006). we have investigated what media practices third-year students on a bachelor's programme consider as relevant and important and how their use and experiences corresponded with the media use for academic purposes in lectures. we have also investigated which aspects of their social media use were related to their academic interests and needs. within the context of these issues this article is based on the following research questions: • how did students relate to teachers' arrangements for media use in lectures and seminars? • what do the statistics tell us about the way students use the learning platform? • how and for what purposes did students use social media and online resources in teaching and in independent study work? the article is based on results from group interviews with students, a survey, and information from activity logs in the study's learning platform. as researchers and teachers on the bachelor course in media education we have experience with students' media use. the discussion of the results draws on perspectives from luhmans' (2000) communication theory. our intention is to explore how students understand the current framework in higher education and why they choose to be part of the communication within a teaching framework. the terms “media” and “technology” are used interchangeably. although the terms analogue and digital are used, in tandem, our chief concern has been digital technology (tønnessen, 2016, p. 240). the article contributes to a growing research trend that examines young people's perspectives on their own media practices (bjørgen & erstad, 2015; burnett, 2015). research on students' media use in higher education several studies show that students want and expect that the technology they are familiar with from their leisure time is integrated to a greater extent into learning activities, such as reading and writing texts and critically assessing sources (buckingham, 2006; krumsvik, 2016). according to a survey carried out by the norway open university almost all when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 students prefer to use non-institutional technology when communicating or researching subject material rather than the technology offered by the teaching institution (ørnes et al., 2015, pp. 74-75). students state that they use google more often to search for subject matter, rather than wikipedia or databases available in the institution's library. similar results can be found in drange and birkeland (2016) in their study of how students enrolled in norwegian teacher training education use media when studying (p. 63). further, drange and birkeland show that students use different strategies to work with teaching materials but common to these strategies is that they are not practiced digitally. according to tømte and olsen (2013) students use social media rather than the institution’s email service to contact each other (p. 45). the research literature documents how students mainly use facebook for entertainment as well as to cultivate their own identity and friendships. they set up facebook groups where they organise colloquium groups and help each other with independent study work. students experience facebook as a private sphere, a “free space” from teachers (adalberon & säljö, 2015; moll et al., 2015). many teachers use facebook to connect with students, as they often find that students do not visit the learning system or use the email system available at the institution (tømte & olsen, 2013). moll, linder and nielsen (2015) argue that it is highly desirable that teacher educators teach students to appreciate the learning potential offered by online knowledge networks and how exactly students can broaden their academic perspective. in contrast, selwyn (2009, p. 173) argues that teachers should avoid facebook, thus allowing students to explore their own role as students unhindered. however, tønnessen (2016, p. 246) points out that some students take on a mediator role, where they mediate questions between the teacher and students from private facebook groups. moll, linder and nielsen (2015, p. 10) argue that students' media practices show that they are most concerned with fast and effective, albeit superficial, solutions to academic challenges. tømte and olsen (2013, p. 42) highlight a similar trend by showing how students often share written work among themselves instead of choosing strategies that promote genuine collaboration. further, drange and birkeland (2016) shows that many students prefer to be consumers rather than active content producers when using social media. theoretical considerations in our investigation of how teachers and students communicate via media we make reference to luhmann's (2002) understanding of communication, including how communication ensures the maintenance of the (teaching) system. in line with this approach, on-campus teaching typically lectures and seminars as well as online teaching and independent study work are seen as interaction systems where different frameworks when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 and inclusion and exclusion mechanisms maintain the teaching system. in the communication theory the transfer metaphor is often used. however, luhmann rejects the transfer metaphor and disagrees with the premise that the uniformity of a transmitted information between a sender and a recipient is guaranteed through the content quality of the information. thus, communication is understood as a “chain of selections”, or series of choices: the unity of information, communication and understanding (luhmann, 2000, p. 182). at least two people are required for communication to take place. luhmann (2002, p. 142) understands teaching as an intentional form of communication, the goal of which is to bring about change within the students. in teaching, other temporary systems may also come into play, but the aim of most of these systems are often without an intentional goal of creating learning. these may take the form of exchanges on social media with a private and social goal for communication. learning occurs mainly through “interruption” from the social environment, which means that support for learning must be communicative, whether technology is used or not (rasmussen, 1997, p. 137). according to luhmann, there are ways to define types of communication where every situation is coded, and we communicate through codes, which provide the communication with a specific focus. thus, the complexity of the situation can be limited and regulated (luhmann, 2000, p. 202). there are also specific codes and sets of frameworks for different types of teaching. for example, it is expected that the lecture, with its conventions on a relatively monologic mode of communication, can be immediately understood as a lecture by the students (fritze, 2005). the specific communication codes create a framework and a common focus. in an educational setting we interact differently with each other and with media from the way we interact in non-academic or informal settings, for example at home with our family (burnett, 2015, p. 200). since the media preferences of students and teachers differ, these codes sometimes become blurred when we use different technologies in traditional higher education lectures. this issue is related to another important starting point in this study, namely that individual interpretations are also framed by, and mediated through, the technology used. digital technologies have an impact on both the activities they become part of and how we think and talk about the activities in question; what we need to learn, what technologies can be used in given situations and by whom (säljö, 2010). in this article, digital competence means taking into consideration the student’s expectations of how to use technology for specific activities and contexts (lankshear & knobel, 2006). thus, to ensure that communication is secure and predictable, it is perhaps necessary to create clear references to established communication codes (bolter & grusin, 2001). however, a more corrective framework or inclusion and exclusion mechanisms may also be necessary to create focus and maintain communication in teaching communication. a when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 key issue in systems theory is how to maintain such a system. according to luhmann (2000), it is important for the maintenance of educational systems that communication consists of teaching, rather than other forms of communication. at the same time, the ability to observe each other's "face" or communicative actions, irrespective of the teaching takes place face-to-face or online, is essential for gaining understanding of the ongoing communication and thus maintaining the communication system (luhmann, 2000). methodology the article is based on several data sources collected over a period of about four months. data consists of qualitative group interviews, activity logs in the learning platform and a survey. the examples presented are mainly based on qualitative interview data. we used a qualitative approach to increase our understanding of the articulated experiences and perceptions of a sample of norwegian students. we have employed a “participatory research design” which implies that we engaged our students as participators in developing the research design, research questions, data collection, and discussing the results (noffke & somekh 2005; heath, hindmarsh & luff 2010). in the learning platform fronter we had access to statistics concerning the extent and duration of student logins during the semester. in this context, it was interesting to note the extent to which the students used the information published and whether they used the information before or after teaching sessions. we have not identified individual traffic on the learning platform, but have followed the overall traffic as a group. the kahoot-based survey was conducted in conjunction with a social media lecture where we asked students about their use of social media at home and during lectures and seminars, for instance: how often do you use social media in the presence of friends? how often do you use social media during teaching? how often do you think your fellow students use social media during teaching? 61 out of 82 (n) students participated in the lecture where the survey was conducted. 51 of these participated in the survey (72%). we conducted five group interviews with two to four students in each group. a total of 13 students participated; eight male and five female students, all between 22 and 25 years of age. the students volunteered to take part. we suggest that the sample is representative of the course group as a whole as well as of undergraduate students on the local campus. our aim has been to capture a wide range of experiences related to what characterised the student’s media use for academic purposes, and to consider this in relation to teachers' arrangements. we developed a relatively open and semi-structured interview guide including key issues regarding the reasons for using online resources and social media in lectures and in teaching and in independent study work, as described by moll et al. (2015), selwyn (2009; 2016), tønnessen (2016) and ørnes et al. (2015). in line with the expected when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 learning outcome in the subject media education, we encouraged the students to reflect on their experiences with media from lectures and in their independent study work; how and why they engaged with different media in order to communicate, collaborate, seek information. we also invited them to reflect on their experience with the learning platform fronter. finally, we encouraged them to elaborate on their experiences of media use for academic purposes in lectures and seminars, focusing on what engaged or distracted them, with a particular focus on lecturers’ use of video clips. all group interviews took place at the local campus. each interview ranged from 40 60 minutes in duration and was recorded and transcribed. based on a thematic analysis approach (bernard & ryan, 2010), we aimed to obtain descriptions expressing students' attitudes to media in a variety of educational settings. both authors conducted close reading of the interviews to gain an overall understanding of themes and the main issues mentioned in the interviews. during the coding process, we used different colour labels to highlight the main descriptions in which the true experience was present as well as patterns and variations in students' articulated experience. these descriptions were analysed according to key themes in the interview guide, as well as new themes arising as a result of engaging with the material. we discussed the relationship between key themes and sub-themes comprising the main themes on a continual basis. based on the analysis of the interviews, and on impressions gained from activity logs in the learning platform and from the survey, we identified the following main themes: • students' thoughts on teachers' arrangements for media use in lectures and seminars • statistics on students’ use of the learning platform • students' thoughts on using social media and online resources in teaching and in independent study work. all interviews have been translated from norwegian into english by the authors. in the interests of anonymity, students' descriptions were partially edited when presenting the results in order to clarify the meaning and content specified in the categories (kvale, brinkmann, anderssen & rygge, 2015, p. 212). the study is conducted in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the norwegian data protection services. this is a small-scale study that has some limitations, such as the difficulty of applying results directly to other situations. since both authors were academically and administratively responsible during data collection this might have had a positive effect on the recruitment, the development of research design, and the interview guide as well as the interviews and the interpretation. it might also have influenced students' answers and our interpretations. we could supplement the analyses with reflections on didactic organisation. however, we have tried to gain benefit from our knowledge of the students and the bachelor's course by reflecting on our assumptions. our findings are supported in when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 similar studies of media use in higher education (selwyn, 2016; tønnessen et al., 2016). presentation of the subject of study this study seeks to create awareness among students about their own media use. thus, we suggest that participation in this study may prompt further reflection. the subject that forms the basis for this investigation is a full-time course in media education and takes place in the third year of a bachelor's programme in education. 82 students were enrolled on the course, which is organized into seven thematic sessions over two days during a period of about three months. there are three work requirements on the course: one individual assignment and two based on group work. the final part of the course consists of a portfolio examination. as far as the curriculum is concerned, students will gain insight into three areas of media education; media socialization, teaching about media and teaching with media. the following activities are central: media analysis, didactic analysis, critical debate on media in society and the production of a digital story. students are expected to use a number of media, the learning platform, in particular, to distribute practical information to students about teaching, work requirements and exams. learning materials are available online before and after lectures and seminars, and the students submit and receive feedback on work requirements. students are expected to keep up to date on any information posted online. students use tablets and/or pcs and mobile phones for a number of activities, including note-taking, the production of digital narratives, analysing television programmes, and to document (camera) museum visits. in addition, mobile phones are used on an ongoing basis to answer quizzes and surveys in kahoot where we typically test students' attitudes towards media and ask about their own media use. however, we discouraged them from using mobile phones during lessons and seminars if it is not for academic use. during lectures and academic seminars, teachers make extensive use of youtube videos or other audiovisual material to illustrate the syllabus and as a starting point for discussions. “polls” via kahoot is also used as a background for discussions. the teachers also often visit the learning platform during lectures to show which teaching materials are posted and where this can be found. in addition, pages with practical content are displayed, for example assignments and exam preparation. when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 students' thoughts on teachers' arrangements for media use in lectures and seminars we have grouped the presentation of the results from the empirical study into the core themes presented above. in the interviews, we asked the students about their use of tablets, pcs and mobile phones during lectures and seminars. the majority said they used pen and paper for taking notes. everyone said they used their mobile phones to participate in the kahoot survey. however, several students explained that, in common with other students, they used mobile phones, pcs and tablets for non-academic purposes, such as watching youtube videos and television, or communicating via social media. the kahoot survey gave us initial insight into how many students used media during lectures and seminars for non-academic activities. when asked how often they visited social media during lectures and seminars, 72 % of students (n = 82) responded that they visited social media during all lectures and seminars, while 12 % visited them a couple of times a week. 9 % responded that they rarely used social media during lectures and seminars, while 7 % said that they never used media in non-academic activities. when we asked them how many of their fellow students used social media during lectures and seminars, the number was somewhat higher. figure 1. students' use of social media during lectures and seminars figure 1 shows that as many as 93% reported that they noticed fellow students using social media during all lectures and seminars. only 2 % reported that fellow students rarely or never used social media during lectures. since we often show video clips in lectures to create engagement and variety, we asked the students how they experienced this practice. they claimed that video could be both engaging and distracting: 0 20 40 60 80 100 never rarely use a couple of times a week during all lectures and seminars how often do you use social media during lectures and seminars? how often do your fellow students use social media during lectures and seminars? when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 it’s interesting to have a different perspective of a particular problem. but sometimes it’s a bit much. the lights are turned on and off and sometimes there are technical problems, which we are all very familiar with [...] it’s easy to just switch off. i lose interest and switch off immediately if there is a hassle with the sound (female student). her fellow students agreed with this statement. when we wasted too much time on the technology, switched between movies or turned the lights on and off the result was disruption. the students described such episodes as “an unwelcome interruption”, they “lost concentration” and became “disconnected” from the lecture. some students remarked that watching a video on youtube was more relaxing than listening to the teachers. however, a video could still help to drive the message home. one male student explained how he shifted his focus when he watched video: [...] so that's what you associate with youtube. when you watch movies you usually relax more. i don’t know why but the message sinks in better when it's in movie format [...] you’re more used to this format. i've spent more time on youtube than in lectures. it’s just a matter of what you’re used to. it is clear from the quotation presented in the introduction that students consider the use of video clips in a different way from that intended by the lecturer, namely to prompt action. whereas the students were relaxed and did not feel they had to pay attention to the lecturer, the teacher's intention was to prompt students to reflect and encourage an atmosphere for reflection and discussion. several students said they preferred lectures that were related to the syllabus and with specific explanations on how to understand it, rather than lectures with an element of activating elements, such as discussion of theoretical points based on video clips. one male student described the way he received reading instructions as follows: [...] i miss the more concrete instructions: ‘you can find such and such in this book and such and such in that book’ [...] then you have a better idea [...] i really can’t tell which of the three books to use. his fellow students agreed. when we asked whether the reading list we had drawn up for each lecture was sufficient the same female student responded as follows: [...] but we’re too lazy to actually read them. it might be ok if they were put in a powerpoint presentation where you explain what it’s about and where you could find it in the books. i mean, it shouldn't be that difficult to pick up that book. statistics on student use of the learning platform from the learning platform statistics, we gained an overview of the students' use of when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 learning resources and at what time these were used. we noted that as few as 38 % of students visited the learning platform before lectures. the statistics further showed that only half of the students visited all seven pages of learning resources, and about 10 % visited the learning platform for the first time just before handing in the portfolio. as part of the seminar work, students produced summaries of the syllabus literature and posted these in the learning platform. it was evident from the statistics that less than 10 % visited all seven themes with learning resources. while only a few students were interested in reading the written work of their fellow students, all 82 students read feedback from teachers on work requirements. students’ thoughts on using social media and online resources in teaching and in independent study work when asked what was perceived as other relevant online resources, several students stated that google and wikipedia were suitable for “an initial overview of things”, such as a topic or an academic term. if some concepts are difficult to understand, i may google to find a definition so i can get a better idea of what it means. or i ask the girls i collaborate with [...] on snapchat or messenger, but if it’s something more complex we call each other or meet. but usually we send each other a snap like this: ‘i didn’t understand this. what about you?’ but if we don’t find anything on google, i send an email to the supervisor and ask for help (female student). in addition to google and wikipedia, several websites were mentioned, such as the norwegian encyclopedia, the norwegian directorate of education and training and the university college library. students said they used facebook, messenger and snapchat to organise colloquium groups to discuss assignments and to support and encourage each other while studying: "i use face mostly to organise the group, not for discussions". they used google docs to collaborate on tasks. several students had thoughts as to how they could combine different technologies, such as google and messenger: we exchange ideas in there [...] then it’s great to use messenger: ‘i’ve changed it. take a look’. instead of checking changes in the document you can go straight to the paragraph, and then you just copy and paste it into the word document (female student). the student describes how her colloquium group used messenger to notify other students when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 when they made changes to their texts. they gained a better overview of the texts. they were used to sharing the group work between them, and before submitting it, an “editor” compiled the entire text. they perceived written communication as challenging since it took "longer than expected". they preferred to meet face-to-face rather than through technology. discussion teachers' use of technology create disruptions and disconnections in this bachelor’s course in media education we use media to exemplify theory, i. e. youtube video clips or kahoot quizzes and polls because we believe that variety and redundancy in teaching can increase learning opportunities. however, we note that students disconnect from teaching communication when technical problems arise. according to luhmann (2000), such disruptions can also jeopardise the maintenance of the communication system, and it is therefore important that disruptions are kept to a minimum when teaching. this is an inherent disadvantage when we use technology. hence, our use of media does not only have positive educational effects. what is evident from the material is that technical problems can have an unexpectedly negative effect on students' participation in teaching communication and hence, learning opportunities. while teachers expect increased engagement when launching a youtube video, students describe how they sit still and no longer need to "pretend" to pay attention. this shows that students are entirely aware of established frameworks for a lecture, including what is expected, what counts and what is important (burnett, 2015). such descriptions, along with first-hand accounts of how they experience disconnection and rhythm interruptions when teachers tinker fruitlessly with technical devices, can be interpreted as negotiating frameworks. our findings are supported by selwyn (2016), who documents that students consider interruptions to be loss of valuable time, as well as attending lectures as a futile exercise: “students saw these disruptions as ‘lost precious time’ (...), ‘a hindrance to productivity’ (...), and contributing to a sense of there being ‘no point in attending lectures’ (...)” (p. 1012). the desire to negotiate frameworks is perhaps reflected in the students' stated wishes for time to be spent more efficiently on their independent study work, teaching and in the organization of academic resources. in common with our findings, tønnessen's (2016) contribution of the study habits of trainee teachers shows that they want to streamline both teaching and work requirements and exam work. are our students out of reach? despite our efforts to facilitate student-activating teaching by including a diverse range of digital devices, our survey showed that 72 % of the students (n=82) visited social media for non-academic purposes during all lectures and seminars. 93 % said that the other students when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 were using social media for non-academic activities. the numbers indicate that the use of non-academic media creates academic disconnections for the media user while also creating disruption for the other students. our survey indicates that when students choose to use social media during a teaching session, they switch off from the learning communication and enter a 'private' communication system (fritze, haugsbakk & nordkvelle, 2017; luhmann, 2000). unless one believes in multitasking, it means that students are excluding the intended teaching content in question. this also means that teachers must expect that as many as three quarters of the students are out of range of communication for a shorter or longer period of lecture time. the material contains detailed descriptions of how the students switch off from the teaching communication typically through social media. it then becomes difficult for the teacher and students to observe each other's understanding of the ongoing communication. further, the communicators do not have the chance to make a correction in understanding to the class as a whole, and it becomes harder for the teacher to adapt to the students' needs. there is much in the findings that provides a basis for claiming that the teacher’s communication may come across as no more than a monologue (fritze, 2003). student disconnection can also be interpreted by other students as a sign that the teacher and/or the content is boring or too difficult, thereby creating a negative collective understanding (luhmann, 2000). if the teacher experiences the disconnection as a sign of irrelevant or excessively challenging content, she/he can try to make contact by providing examples or prompting discussions or trying to make direct contact with those students who are disengaged. however, it should not be forgotten that an important "message" about the quality of teaching and/or about more structural problems in higher education can be seen in the way students in this study orient themselves. in many higher education institutes attending lectures and seminars is compulsory, because participation is considered important for learning. at the same time, many students work fullor part-time alongside their studies. given our findings of a massive disconnect from teaching communication via digital technology, one gets the impression that student' presence is about being registered in our system. compulsory attendance in lectures and seminars can be interpreted as a distraction to students in a more fundamental way. just how students in this study act can therefore also be understood as an expression of a desire to renegotiate the framework of traditional teaching methods (krumsvik, 2016). students' choices consumers or active content producers? a surprising finding is the students' desire for teacher-centered lectures where the syllabus and content is reproduced rather than discussed and which adds different theoretical perspectives. in the more debating kind of lectures, we often use video examples to when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 encourage students to participate, including a discussion of dilemmas and consequences of theoretical choices. in common with the study by moll et al. (2015), which shows that students tend to seek quick and effective solutions, our material shows that students want more syllabus-related lectures. we suggest that this can be interpreted as an expression of a need to streamline independent study work. from a communication perspective, the students' desires may also reflect their wish to be consumers of education rather than active content producers based on the teaching dialogue. drange and birkeland (2016) have documented similar behaviour in their study of the use made by teacher students' of social media, while the survey of the norway open university (ørnes et al., 2015) showed that students want more student activating-teaching. there is, however, one area in which students' media use is in line with the intended media use for academic purposes. they generally read our feedback on their written work requirements in the learning platform. this confirms our view that students are committed to improving efficiency, and that independent study work of especial relevance to exams is often prioritised (moll et.al, 2015). tønnessen (2016, p. 240) sees a similar trend towards streamlining independent study work, where strategic reading rather than systematically working through the syllabus is used to pinpoint relevant material for answering work requirements. the exams in this bachelor's course take the form of portfolio exams and include an opportunity to improve work requirements. in their preparations, students always read our feedback. although there is limited interest in the summaries produced by the students themselves and posted on the learning platform, it is still evident that strategic study work with an exclusive emphasis on essential information takes precedence. social media as a response to challenging institutional systems? a common denominator in our material is the students' descriptions of how they prefer social media rather than the university college's solutions when working with the syllabus on their own (tømte & olsen, 2013). in particular, our learning platform was regarded as complicated (drange & birkeland, 2016, p. 61; selwyn, 2016). the students said they visited the platform only occasionally, mostly to comply with the teacher's expectations. our findings show that facebook, messenger and google docs are considered relevant for academic purposes, such as monitoring and managing study-related work, such as sharing administrative information, and how to collaborate and participate in colloquium groups. the findings are in line with other studies (adalberon & säljö, 2015; moll et. al, 2015; selwyn, 2009). our results, however, are not corroborated by the findings from norway open university, which show that students want the educational institutions to use media they are most familiar with from their spare time to be used in student-activating teaching (ørnes et al., 2015). this can be explained by the fact that we only integrate social media into teaching to a limited extent, and therefore our students do not expect to use it. the limited use can also be understood from the fact that students do not want to give teachers insight into their private sphere on social media (selwyn, 2016). from the material it is when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 evident that the students prefer to use "private" media for communication related to their homework, hence, there is a transition between different communication systems (luhmann, 2000). when the teacher is not invited into the system, he or she will not be able to observe the students' communication. for the students this arrangement creates efficiency but can also interfere with the teaching system due to the references contained in the medium itself. based on these findings we suggest that the communication situation does not alone govern how we communicate; it is also important to take into account the media experiences that students bring into the learning environment (bjørgen & erstad, 2015; bolter & grusin, 2001; säljö, 2010). the students' descriptions of social media as relevant to information exchange and collaboration testifies to the fact that they think efficacy is of paramount importance. they seek help in tried and tested ways from their closest circle of friends on facebook, or with fellow students on campus (moll et al., 2015; selwyn, 2009). they search for easily accessible sources, such as google and wiki, because they find the institutions' databases difficult to access. in co-writing, the work is distributed based on the method: along the lines of “you do this and i’ll do that” (tømte & olsen, 2013, p. 42). it is obvious that the students interpret independent study work and teaching in an instrumental manner. moll et al. (2015) also document this, acknowledging the risk that such an approach results in quick and superficial solutions to academic challenges. conclusions this article has focused on what media practices third-year students on a bachelor's course consider as relevant and how their use and experiences corresponded with media use for academic purposes in lectures set by teachers. we have also investigated which aspects of their social media use were related to their academic interests and needs. like many other studies, our study shows that tensions exist between how lecturers prepare for media use, and what students perceive as relevant to a course of study (moll et al., 2015; selwyn, 2016; tønnessen et al., 2016). to sum up, we suggest that the examples discussed above raise a number of important questions that should be considered by educators and researchers when reviewing attempts to facilitate student-activating teaching by using digital technology. the students considered the institution's analogue and digital subject resources and learning platform to be of little relevance. any intentions to encourage learning through the use of technology in teaching seem to be perceived by students as disruptive or superfluous. conversely, we see that students' use of social media during lectures and seminars disconnects them from teaching. they enter a non-academic zone, creating disruptions for teachers and fellow students alike (selwyn, 2016, p. 1012). however, selwyn also reminds us that students' experiences of technology as problematic and disruptive should be taken as seriously as their experiences of technology as positive and when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 unproblematic (p. 1016). we have argued that both students and lecturers need to be more aware of the importance of how individual interpretations of media practices are shaped by contextual procedures and frameworks (selwyn, 2009). on the one hand, it can be argued that students ought to familiarise themselves with the institution’s technical solutions, learning platforms and academic databases. on the other hand, educational institutions and producers of new learning technologies must take into account students' experiences, skills and expectations from social media use. there is a great deal in the material to suggest that social media like facebook and messenger, together with online resources including google and wikipedia, are perceived as relevant for organising academic work and for social exchanges and reassurance. however, it is all too easy to perceive students as a digitally competent and homogeneous mass simply because they have grown up with digital technology. our findings document that the students find databases of the institution in question and the respective learning platform difficult to access. in other words, we cannot take for granted that students master what is required in an academic setting. if the tension between access to digital resources, students and lecturers' expectations, and real digital practices becomes too great, lecturers may lose interest in developing sophisticated digital learning arrangements (krumsvik, 2016, p. 322). the findings of this study also indicate that the students are engaged in negotiating an acceptable framework for media use in lectures, seminars and their independent study work. they have provided feedback on what they consider to be challenging regarding the institution's technological solutions, especially related to learning platforms. in sum, this can be interpreted as input into negotiations on how we might understand the role of the modern student. students often have to work fullor part-time and are unable to comply with the demands of a traditional university timetable. although student-activating teaching, somewhat discouragingly, has resulted in a slackening of attention and nonacademic activities, it can be seen in light of the modern student's desire for efficiency and streamlining. our findings point towards a scenario where modern students do not necessarily want more technology and student activating teaching. on the contrary, it is evident that the use of technology in teaching must take into account students' need for efficiency and learning strategies, as well as their previous experiences, competences, and preferences in using social media and online resources. research into how the so-called modern students relate to learning and technology use in higher education is still in its infancy. references adalberon, e. & säljö, r. 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(2015). investigating children's interactions around digital texts in classrooms: how are these framed and what counts? education, 3-13, 43(2), 197-208. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2013.800576 drange, e-m.d. & birkeland, r. (2016). digitalt innfødte eller digitalt velfødde? en studie av lærerstudenters tekstpraksis generelt og i studiesituasjonen. i e. s. tønnessen, n.r. birkeland, e-m.d. drange, g. kvåle, g-r. rambø, & m. vollan (red.). hva gjør lærerstudenter når de studerer? lesing, skriving og multimodale tekster i norsk grunnskolelærerutdanning. oslo: universitetsforlaget, 53-70. fischer, e. & hänze, m. (2019). back from “guide on the side” to “sage on the stage”? effects of teacher-guided and student-activating teaching methods on student learning in higher education. international journal of education research, 95, 26 25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2019.03.001 fritze, y. (2003). dialogiske monologer og monologiske dialoger. i y. fritze, g. haugsbakk & y. t. nordkvelle (red.). dialog og nærhet. ikt og undervisning. kristiansand: høyskoleforlaget. fritze, y. (2005). mediet gør en forskel. en komparativ undersøgelse af kommunikation i nærundervisning og fjernundervisning. doktorgradsavhandling, syddansk universitet, odense. fritze, y., haugsbakk, g. & nordkvelle y.t. (2017). digitale forstyrrelser i skolen erfaringer med begrensninger av elevers mobilbruk. norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, 101(3), 201-212. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-2987-2017-03-02 haugsbakk, g., & nordkvelle, y. (2013). den motvillige teknologen og læringssamfunnet. i p. arbo, t. bull & å. danielsen (red.), utdanningssamfunnet og livslang læring. festskrift til gunnar grepperud (pp. 113–138). oslo: gyldendal akademisk. heath, c.; hindmarsh, j. & luff, p. (2010): video in qualitative research. analyzing social interaction in everyday life. london: sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526435385 kvale s, brinkmann s, anderssen tm, rygge j. (2015). det kvalitative forskningsintervju. 3. utg., 2. oppl. ed. oslo: gyldendal akademisk. https://doi.org/10.1080/1554480x.2014.977290 https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2013.800576 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2019.03.001 https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-2987-2017-03-02 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526435385 when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 18 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 krumsvik, r. j. (2016). digitale paradoks og undervisningskvalitet: epilog. i r. j. krumsvik (red.) digital læring i skole og lærerutdanning (pp. 320 327). oslo: universitetsforlaget. lankshear, c., & knobel, m. (2006). new literacies: everyday practices and classroom learning. maidenhead: open university press. livingstone, s. (2012). critical reflections on the benefits of ict in education. oxford review of education, 38(1), 9-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577938 luhmann, n. (2000). sociale systemer – grundrids til en almen teori. københavn: hans reitzels forlag. luhmann, n.( 2002): das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp verlag. moll, r, nielsen, w. & linder, c. (2015). physics students' social media learning behaviors and connectedness. international journal of digital literacy and digital competence, 6(2), 16-35. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijdldc.2015040102 noffke, s. & somekh, b. (2005) action research. in b. somekh & c. lewin (eds.). research methods in the social sciences (p.89-96). los angeles: sage. nordkvelle, y. t. & fritze, y. (2015). digitalt innfødte eller bare medialiserte? i y. fritze, g. haugsbakk, & y. t. nordkvelle (red.). mediepedagogiske perspektiver. mediesosialisering, undervisning om og med medier. oslo: cappelen damm akademisk, 67-85. prince, m. (2004). does active learning work? a review of the research. journal of engineering education, 93(3), 223–31. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.21689830.2004.tb00809.x rasmussen, j. (1997): socialisering og læring i det refleksivt moderne. københavn: unge pædagoger. säljö, r. (2010). digital tools and challenges to institutional traditions of learning: technologies, social memory and the performative nature of learning. journal of computer assisted learning, 26(1), 53-64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.13652729.2009.00341.x selwyn, n. (2009) faceworking: exploring students' education‐related use of facebook. learning, media and technology, 34(2), 157-174. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439880902923622 selwyn, n. (2016). digital downsides: exploring university students’ negative engagements with digital technology. teaching in higher education, 21(8), 1006-1021. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1213229 https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577938 https://doi.org/10.4018/ijdldc.2015040102 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00341.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00341.x https://doi.org/10.1080/17439880902923622 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1213229 when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 st.meld. no. 27, 2000-2001 [(white paper]. gjør din plikt krev din rett. kvalitetsreform av høyere utdanning. kirke-, utdanningsog forskningsdepartementet. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/stmeld-nr-27-2000-2001-/id194247/ tømte, c.e. & olsen, d.s. (2013). ikt og læring i høyere utdanning: kvalitativ undersøkelse om hvordan ikt påvirker i høyere utdanning. oslo: nifu. tønnessen, e.s., (2016). oppsummering, drøfting og nye utfordringer. i e.s. tønnessen, n.r. birkeland, e-m. d. drange, g. kvåle, g-r. rambø, & m. vollan (red.). hva gjør lærerstudenter når de studerer? lesing, skriving og multimodale tekster i norsk grunnskolelærerutdanning. oslo: universitetsforlaget, 240–252. https://doi.org/10.18261/9788215026312-2016-11 wittek, l. (2015). ti år etter kvalitetsreformen ingen økning i studiegjennomføringen. uniped, 38(3), 160-163. issn online:1893–8981. ørnes, h., gaard, h., refsnes, s. i., kristiansen, t. og wilhelmsen, j. (2015). digital tilstand i høyere utdanning 2014. norgesuniversitetets ikt-monitor, norgesuniversitetets skriftserie 1/2011, tromsø: norgesuniversitetet. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/stmeld-nr-27-2000-2001-/id194247/ https://doi.org/10.18261/9788215026312-2016-11 when student-activating teaching conflict with students' desire for efficiency. a communication perspective on undergraduate students' media use abstract introduction research on students' media use in higher education theoretical considerations methodology presentation of the subject of study students' thoughts on teachers' arrangements for media use in lectures and seminars statistics on student use of the learning platform students’ thoughts on using social media and online resources in teaching and in independent study work discussion teachers' use of technology create disruptions and disconnections are our students out of reach? students' choices consumers or active content producers? social media as a response to challenging institutional systems? conclusions references microsoft word klefstad, maribu, horgen, hjeltnes_learning outcomes and a taxonomy .doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 learning outcomes and a taxonomy as a starting point for creating digital multiple-choice tests bjørn klefstad assistant professor department of informatics and e-learning sør-trøndelag university college bjorn.klefstad@hist.no geir maribu associate professor department of informatics and e-learning sør-trøndelag university college geir.maribu@hist.no svend andreas horgen assistant professor department of informatics and e-learning sør-trøndelag university college svend.horgen@hist.no thorleif hjeltnes associate professor department of informatics and e-learning sør-trøndelag university college thorleif.hjeltnes@hist.no abstract the use of digital multiple-choice tests in formative and summative assessment has many advantages. such tests are effective, objective, and flexible. however, it is still challenging to create tests that are valid and reliable. bloom’s taxonomy is used as a framework for assessment in higher education and therefore has a great deal of influence on how the learning outcomes are formulated. using digital tools to create tests has been common for some time, yet the tests are still mostly answered on paper. our hypothesis has two parts: first, it is possible to create summative tests that match different levels and learning outcomes within a chosen subject; second, a test tool of some kind is necessary to enable teachers and examiners to take a more proactive attitude to(wards) different levels and learning outcomes in a subject and so ensure the quality of digital test designing. based on an analysis of several digital tests we examine to what degree learning outcomes and levels are reflected in the different test seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 315 questions. we also suggest functionality for a future test tool to support an improved design process. keywords: bloom’s taxonomy, digital test, exam, learning outcome, summative and formative assessment, test tool. introduction to digital tests a digital test is a collection of questions that are designed, answered and graded using digital tools in order to measure competence within a given subject. paper-based tests have (conventionally) been used for assessment, especially when it comes to final exams and courses with a large number of students, because they fulfill the requirements for objective and effective grading (bjørgen and ask, 2006). digital tests offer extended possibilities for testers and test-takers, including several types of questions that differ from the traditional multiple-choice type. examples of these new types of questions are “drag and drop,” “order a sequence” and “fill-in-the-blank.” in addition, it is possible to use pictures, video, audio and links in the questions and in the answer alternatives. this makes it possible to ask more advanced questions and test competencies on various levels. the quality reform for higher education in norway lists several requirements for assessment methods with a special focus on continuous assessment (kvalitetsreformen 2001). learning management systems (lms) like fronter, it’s learning and moodle offer basic digital test tools. the introduction of lms tools in the area of higher education has turned the focus towards digital tests as a usable assessment method not only for summative assessments (exam) but also for formative assessment (i.e. continuous assessment). increasing numbers of teachers use digital tests in formative assessment. the benefits of digital tests are automatic grading, instant feedback, motivation, repetition and variation. many teachers regard the increased efficiency and students’ familiarity with such tests during formative use as motivation for also using digital tests in summative assessments. the challenges of designing digital tests are many. it is not easy to design high-quality questions, and multiple-choice tests are often criticized for testing basic knowledge only. sirnes (2005) argues for the importance of designing tests that are both valid and reliable. validity is a measure for the degree to which the test measures what it is meant to measure, regarding both subjects and cognitive level. reliability is a measure for how reliable the test is, i.e. to what degree we can trust the test and if it gives the same results when used again. there is a close connection between the form of the assessment, the learning process and the motivation. brooks (2002) emphasizes the effect of wytiwyg (what you test is what you get) that says assessment and learning are closely connected. when you have chosen an assessment method you have indirectly chosen a kind of learning. to use digital tests successfully for formative and summative assessments, we must strive for high quality in the design of the tests. the learning outcomes define the subjects and at what level the subjects should be learnt. our hypothesis: to ensure the quality of the test it is necessary to focus on the level and learning outcomes for every question. current test tools do not have a functionality that clearly shows this connection between the questions and the learning outcomes and taxonomy level. in this paper we present a method to help the teacher design precise tests and also suggest how a digital test tool can be used to reach this goal. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 316 learning outcomes a learning outcome is a description of what a student should know after fulfilling a given course. that is what the student should know, understand and be able to demonstrate on completing the course. until now courses have been described through a list of content and objectives and nothing more. such a description is mainly for the benefit of teachers and shows the institution’s intentions for the course. learning outcomes tell us what the student should be able to do after fulfilling the course, not the intentions of the institution and the teacher. learning outcome is a description of the knowledge, comprehension and skills the student should have obtained during the course. learning outcomes are a student-centered way of describing the course. learning outcomes are about learning, while objectives are about teaching. in this way, learning outcomes mirror the switch from teacher-centered teaching to student-centered learning. the concept of ‘learning outcomes’ is well documented in the literature about the bologna process (bologna uk-website 2009). that means the european educational ministers see learning outcome descriptions as a useful tool to implement a more transparent european educational system across international borders. thorough descriptions of learning outcomes make it much easier for institutions to approve courses from other educational institutions in european countries, and thus increase student mobility. learning outcomes have a specific structure, consisting of a verb and an object. the verb tells us what the student should be capable of doing after the course and the object tell us in what subject theme he/she can do it. a typical learning outcome is written in the following form: “after fulfilling this course you should manage to: separate gill mushrooms from pore mushrooms,” “explain how mushrooms breed,” “list the names of the six most consumable mushrooms” and “distinguish between the six most consumable mushrooms.” in the above examples we often see verbs like “distinguish,” “explain,” “list” and “identify.” there are many verbs that can be used in learning outcome descriptions. the verbs tell us what kind of knowledge will be attained and at what level, for example, basic knowledge or comprehension. typical verbs used for basic knowledge are define, list, describe, recognize, name etc. for the comprehensive level, verbs like explain, match, summarize, distinguish and locate are typical. taxonomies a learning outcome is not a new concept. as early as 1956, benjamin bloom at university of chicago published a list of learning outcomes (or “learning goals,” as he called them). this list is well known in the educational system and has experienced a renaissance in recent years, as a result of greater interest in learning outcomes among higher education institutions. the list is known as “bloom’s taxonomy” and classifies the learning outcomes that the teacher can create for students. bloom realized that there are three domains of learning: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. each domain is divided into several levels from the basic (level) to the complex. in this paper we look only at the cognitive domain. cognitive levels deal with knowledge and the development of intellectual skills, restating and recognition of facts, procedures and concepts. the six levels in the cognitive domain are: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 317 • knowledge • comprehension • application • analysis • synthesis • evaluation in the mid-1990s, anderson (2001) made some changes to bloom’s cognitive learning taxonomy. the most important change was renaming the six levels, from nouns to verbs, resulting in a more active formulation of learning goals (or learning outcomes, as we say today). • knowledge was replaced with to reproduce • comprehension was replaced with to comprehend • application was replaced with to apply • analysis was replaced with to analyze • synthesis was replace with to create • evaluation was replaced with to evaluate this reformulated taxonomy is more in line with the new thinking about learning outcomes. now we discuss actions, telling what has to be done to learn something, and not only describing what we wish to obtain. learning outcome descriptions can fit readily into bloom’s levels and are supplied with verbs to describe the learning goals for each level. typical verbs for the levels in bloom’s taxonomy in the cognitive domain are: • knowledge: define, describe, identify, list, label, recite, name. • comprehension: explain, group, distinguish, match, restate, extend, summarize, give examples. • application: prepare, produce, choose, apply, solve, show, sketch, relate, use, generalize. • analysis: analyze, compare, differentiate, subdivide, classify, categorize, survey, point out. • synthesis: compose, develop, design, combine, construct, create, plan, invent, organize. • evaluation: judge, evaluate, criticize, consider, recommend, support, relate, decide, discuss. using these active verbs, we can abandon passive phrases like “have more knowledge in,” “give an understanding of” etc. in the book teaching for quality learning at university (biggs 2007), biggs uses learning goals and levels to improve learning. biggs uses the name “outcome-based teaching and learning,” in which the focus falls on how to design good, descriptive and active goals for learning in courses. biggs uses the name “learning outcome” instead of “learning goal” because he wants to describe what the student should have achieved after the given learning activity is finished. with a bundle of learning outcome descriptions for each learning module, it is easy to measure what the student has learnt by reformulating the learning outcomes to questions in an assessment (for example, in an exam). and even better, the assessment questions can be made simultaneously with the learning outcomes, i.e. before the course or learning module starts. methodology teachers with some experience of using digital tests received a one-hour introduction to bloom’s taxonomy and then received instructions for how to analyze their own digital tests in the context of bloom’s cognitive levels. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 318 procedure was to make a subjective evaluation of the tests they have designed, and classify the questions according to which bloom level they belonged. the result of this analysis is a table showing the number of questions in each of the six bloom levels. the teachers were free to choose which tests they would include. the only requirement was that the test should be of the multiple-choice variety. the tests were used at the bachelor in information technology at sørtrøndelag university college in these courses: “information security management,” “programming in java,” “informatics 2” (with these parts: operating systems, lan management and data communication), “the itil standard,” “practical linux” and “ajax programming.” results and analysis the results in the table below show a significant predominance of questions from the knowledge level (over 50%) for the chosen tests. some questions are classified as comprehension, i.e. bloom’s second level. in the third level (application) only a few questions are found. bloom levels course knowledge comprehension application analysis synthesis evaluation total number of questions information security management 25 25 programming in java 16 8 1 25 informatics 2 52 2 54 the itil standard 40 40 practical linux 51 38 3 92 ajax programming 21 7 6 4 1 1 40 figure 1: number of questions for each bloom level in six analyzed tests. an empty cell means no questions at this level. the teachers had varied experience of designing multiple-choice tests, and therefore their subjective evaluations as to which level a question belonged to is very likely also variable. there is also some variation across courses in how necessary and challenging it is to design questions for the upper levels of bloom’s taxonomy. in summative assessments, multiple-choice tests can be used in combination with other assessment methods. therefore, teachers may prefer to design multiple-choice tests with all questions at the knowledge level because they intend to use other assessment methods to test the remaining bloom levels. in the course “ajax programming,” we see that all bloom levels are used. in addition, all questions in this test are given variable weighting, in contrast to the other five tests where each question is given one point. that means if we count the number of points instead of the number of questions for each level, the first five tests in the table will be unchanged, while the test for “ajax programming” includes 23 points at the knowledge level, 9 points at the comprehension level, 9 points at the application level, 10 points at the analysis level, 2 points at the synthesis level and 1 point at the evaluation level, giving 54 points in total. therefore this test differs significantly from the other tests, since the teacher is aware that questions at higher levels are more difficult to answer and a correct answer should therefore be more highly rewarded. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 319 the teachers behind these tests have used multiple-choice tests for several years. the teacher making the test for the course “ajax programming” shows a high awareness of bloom’s taxonomy in designing the test, because he distributed the questions among all the bloom levels. we have not estimated how valid and how reliable the chosen tests are, but pending a more thorough analysis it appears as though awareness of bloom levels will contribute to increased test quality. our analysis indicates that the questions in digital tests do not usually cover every level in bloom’s taxonomy. however, if the teacher is aware of the taxonomy levels they may find it easier to include them, and we think that some procedures and tools for the process of designing tests will further aid teachers in creating good tests. a procedure for designing good and valid digital multiple-choice tests we usually want to distinguish between competencies by using questions with different degrees of difficulty. in higher educational institutions bloom’s taxonomy has been used to classify assessments according to the different cognitive levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. with reference to bloom’s taxonomy, it is more demanding to comprehend something than to reproduce some knowledge (imsen 2002:208), and it is important to assess students at various levels. biggs argued for the importance of presenting the learning outcomes clearly to students, as well as of offering learning activities that build on the learning outcomes, and finally, of assessing students using the learning outcomes (biggs 2007). the learning outcomes should therefore be given a key role during the design of the test. we see the need for an increased focus on providing questions at all bloom levels and covering all learning outcomes in tests. our suggestion for a procedure to make tests better is first to design detailed, accurate learning outcomes for each course, and next to connect the tests to a chosen taxonomy, bloom’s for example. this connection will make it much easier to achieve the correct perspective, create an awareness of what we are testing and to what level, and in this way increase the quality of the tests we design. our hypothesis is that a good and valid test contains questions that cover various learning outcomes and taxonomy levels. if the teacher designing the test can specify which learning outcome each question fits into, and into which cognitive level, the quality of the test as a whole will increase. such a classification is subjective, so will have the greatest degree of consistency if the learning outcomes are well defined and if help (from a tool) is offered to classify the level of the questions. if each question is classified as we suggest, it is possible to create a number of questions for each learning outcome and level in a clearly arranged table. the autumn 2009 final exam in the course “web-programming using php” at sør-trøndelag university college was arranged on the internet as a digital test, weighted at 1/3 of the course; program development made up the other 2/3 of the students’ grades. the course has seven primary learning outcomes and about 60 secondary and more detailed learning outcomes. the table below shows how the test questions are distributed among the various learning outcomes and the levels in bloom’s taxonomy. since this was a final exam, the primary learning outcomes are used in the classification. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 320 learning outcome / bloom levels knowledge comprehension application analysis synthesis evaluation sum lo1: solve problems using php-scripts as a tool 2 (3) 2 (3) lo2: use php to create large web-based systems 1 (1) 1 (1) lo3: structure the program code in a good way 1 (1) 2 (3) 3 (4) lo4: find and implement working security actions for a web-solution 2 (2) 2 (2) lo5: create usable and functional systems lo6: program towards a remote database lo7: explain how a state can be saved with php 1 (1) 1 (1) 2 (2) none 1 (1) 3 (4) 2 (3) 6 (8) sum 5 (5) 5 (6) 4 (6) 2 (3) 16 (20) figure 2: table showing the distribution of questions (number of points in parenthesis) for each learning outcome and for various levels in bloom’s taxonomy. in the above table we can see that learning outcome lo1 has two questions on the level of “application.” since one of these two questions counts as two points, there are three points in total for lo1/application. learning outcome lo3 has one question on the level “knowledge” and two questions on the level “application,” and one of the questions counts as two points. no questions cover learning outcome lo5 and lo6, and there is no question covering the levels “synthesis” and “evaluation.” a table like this (one) gives the teacher a quick and effective overview of what learning outcomes and taxonomy levels are being used in the test. our hypothesis says that working in this manner will contribute to increase awareness of the quality of the test in regard to validity. the teacher can compensate for any shortcomings by creating more questions, or by seeing which learning outcomes must if necessary be covered by other assessment methods. the idea of the table is to show the big picture and to make the teacher aware of what the test will cover. in the table we also find some questions in the category “none.” these are usually questions that were created without thinking about learning outcomes, or in which the learning outcomes are too diffuse to be classified. biggs (2007) emphasizes that learning outcomes should be well formulated and specific. if the teacher finds out that the question in the “none” category is still relevant for the test, the table reveals some shortcomings in the learning outcomes for the test (and for the course). we therefore have to create a new learning outcome, for example, lo8: “master the syntax of the php language.” in that case it would be wise to switch several of the questions from category “none” into category lo8. the test and the table is therefore a great help for the teacher in focusing on the important learning outcomes. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 321 to make high quality tests that cover various learning outcomes and cognitive levels, it is crucial that the teacher receive the support and functionality of a test tool to classify the questions while working on creating a test. the important quality assurance is then completed during the design process of the test and not after a disappointing result. tools in lms systems (it’s learning, fronter, moodle) currently used in norway, good tools exist for designing digital tests. digital test tools help create many question types, for example “drag and drop,” “order in sequence,” “fill in blanks” and more. in addition, several kinds of stimuli can be included in questions and alternatives, for example, text, images, video, audio, links and other digital content. armed with all these possibilities, we can design advanced questions and alternatives and test various levels of competence in accordance with bloom’s taxonomy. based on our work, we suggest that a test tool should offer support for the design of questions, i.e. to conform with learning outcomes and bloom levels, and not only focus on question and stimuli types. existing test tools do not offer that kind of support. at the department of informatics and e-learning at sør-trøndelag university college, we developed a tool called digitest. this is a tool for designing, running and managing tests. we have implemented functionality to help the teacher control the learning outcomes and their connections to the chosen taxonomy. when the teacher designs a test, he begins by entering the learning outcomes into the tool. this procedure forces the teacher to decide which learning outcomes should be tested. the teacher next chooses a preferred taxonomy (for example, bloom’s). the test tool now offers an empty table that links learning outcomes and levels in the taxonomy. after defining the learning outcomes and chosen taxonomy, the teacher formulates the questions. in digitest the teacher can choose a learning outcome and a category within the chosen taxonomy for each question. figure 3: the teacher creates questions in the digitest tool after first having registered learning outcomes and a chosen taxonomy level. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 322 while the teacher is adding new questions, he can see a table showing the current state of the learning outcomes and taxonomy levels in the test, and the links between them. here the teacher gets the complete picture of the test and can easily see which learning outcomes and levels are covered and which questions must be created in order to make the test as complete as possible. figure 4 below shows such an example. figure 4: the teacher has so far created four questions. with digitest, one can visualize learning outcomes and taxonomy levels. we observed that without support from a tool, most tests only offer questions at the lower taxonomy levels, and not all learning outcomes are covered. it is our opinion that there is a strong need for a tool that helps teachers increase the quality of digital tests. conclusion and work still to be done it is demanding to create a valid digital test. our analysis of various tests shows that most of the questions end up at lower taxonomy levels. it is a goal for many educators to also test at higher levels, and test the complete content of the course. to ensure the quality and (the) validity of tests, we have seen a need for increasing teachers’ awareness of the importance of classifying the questions in a taxonomy and for using learning outcomes. one procedure to increase teachers’ awareness of these aspects is to build this functionality into a test tool. our way to emphasize this link is to let the teacher register the taxonomy level and the learning outcomes that each question covers. next, the test tool can add up all the questions covering each of the learning outcomes for the various levels. shown in a table, these numbers give the teacher an excellent overview of what learning outcomes are covered by the test and what learning outcomes are still uncovered. we will continue to work with digital tests for the years to come. after we gain more experience with this tool and its awareness-raising method, we will more closely examine the extent to which the method contributes to increased competency in creating digital tests for use in educational institutions. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 323 references analysis/data of (the) digital test used in this paper is available at http://digitest.no/diverse/paper-nvu-2010 anderson, l.w., krathwohl, d.r., airasian, p.w., cruikshank, k.a., mayer, r.e., pintrich, p.r., raths, j. & wittrock, m.c. (2001). a taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: a revision of bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. longman: new york (2001). biggs, j., & tang, c. (2007). teaching for quality learning at university. buckingham: open university press/society for research into higher education (third edition), (pp. 70-72), new york, mcgraw-hill. bjørgen, i.a. & ask, h.. (2006). “læringsmøter iv – kvalitetsreformen ved psykologisk institutt.” rapport ntnu, psykologisk institutt. bloom b. (1956). “taxonomy of educational objectives: handbook 1, the cognitive domain". new york: mckay bologna uk-website (2009): http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/bologna brooks, v. (2002). “assessment in secondary schools. the new teacher´s guide to monitoring, assessment, recording, reporting and accountability.” buckingham: open university. dave, r.h. (1975). developing and writing behavioral objectives. in: armstrong, r. j. (ed.). tucson, arizona: educational innovators press. fjørtoft, h. (2009). effektiv planlegging og vurdering: rubrikker og andre verktøy for lærere. bergen: fagbokforlaget. harrow, a. (1972). a taxonomy of psychomotor domain: a guide for developing behavioral objectives. new york: david mckay. imsen, g. (2002). lærerens verden. innføring i generell didaktikk. oslo: universitetsforlaget. kirke-, utdanningsog forskningsdepartementet (2000-2001). st.meld. nr. 27: gjør din plikt krev din rett. retrieved november 1st, 2009 from http://odin.dep.no/kd/norsk/dok/regpubl/stmeld/014001-040004/hov005bn.html simpson, e. j. (1972). the classification of educational objectives in the psychomotor domain. washington, dc: gryphon house. sirnes, s.m. (2005). ”flervalgsoppgaver – konstruksjon og analyse.” bergen: fagbokforlaget. title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 alternative online evaluation in a blended learning environment arvid staupe associate professor norwegian university of science and technology university email: arvid.staupe@idi.ntnu.no abstract this article describes testing of the use of alternative exam/evaluation and the use of an ict learning environment at the department of computer and information science, norwegian university of science and technology (idi/ntnu). the use of this particular learning environment is described in a previous article (staupe, 2010). thus, this article particularly describes the part which deals with the testing of alternative exam/evaluation formats. the students could choose between three different formats. 1) a 100% traditional exam with optional exercise reports. the exercises were looked over and commented on by those who had chosen the second alternative (13%). 2) a 50% traditional exam, 50% exercise work (10%). 3) exercise work counted for 100% (77%). in total, 129 students participated. keywords: evaluation, online, alternative, blended learning, learning environment, teaching arrangement, ict learning, exam format, defection, course completion, choice exam form, exam, self-assessment, build one’s own learning alternative online evaluation in a blended learning environment i had been working for several years on the development of the ict learning environment, and this article is very much based on the work described in a previous article, experiences from blended learning, net-based learning (staupe, 2010). on the theoretical side of learning, i worked from a hypothesis that it is the active student who learns. this means that it is not enough to passively follow the lectures and make an all out effort before the exam, or to study only occasionally. to me, it was important to come up with a teaching arrangement in which the students focus on not only facts, but they should also be able to produce and create through using subject material. my view on this topic is affected not least by steen larsen, professor at danmark lærerhøjskole (teacher’s university) (larsen, 1995). larsen believes that there is a foundational difference between teachings and learning something. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 46 according to larsen, recent learning theory equates the terms “learning process” and “work process”, and if they are not synonymous, they are at least two sides of the same story. for this course we made use of a learning environment similar to experiences from blended learning, net-based learning, staupe (2010). central learning forms were discovery learning, problem-based learning and project-based learning. all these various types of learning are closely related to each other and fall into the category that i choose to call active learning. discovery learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/discovery_learning) follows a learning process built on abstracting, experimenting, observing and reflecting. this is part of a loop known as a discovery loop. it is important that the students learn to articulate and present their reflections. the course was created according to the principles of problem-based learning (bjørke, 1996). for this course, we made use of a learning environment that was similar to staupe (2010), and the course was structured according to the principles of problem-based learning. a hyper system/multimedia system (jonassen, 2000) (known as the hyper system from now on) for the internet was developed for this course (warholm, 2000) (albinussen, 2003) and we used a traditional textbook. one part of the material only existed in the hyper system, e.g. animations. the learning environment consisted of a web page and access to services such as the hyper system and an oracle service. traditional lectures were usually recorded on video and synchronized with corresponding material in the hyper system. there was also an electronic workbook connected to the course, in which the students were expected to present their own and the group’s reflections. the obligatory practice system was based on problem-based learning in which group work was a requirement. the theory on group work was divided among the students and the work method was introduced by the student assistants (andersen & schwenche, 2001). i wished to continue and extend previous attempts and applied for (and was granted) funding for testing “alternative evaluation and exam formats”. what was new in this application compared to earlier attempts (staupe, 2010) was that the exercise work could count for 100%, and the students could choose from among three teaching arrangements; 1. a 100% traditional exam; 2. 50% traditional exam – 50% exercise work; 3. a new arrangement allowed the exercise work to count for 100% of the final grade. the background for this arrangement was that i had also previously achieved good results with traditional exams, i.e. when grading the exercises. it was quite obvious that the students put more effort into the exercises than with “approved/not approved”. all work was handed in electronically, but in order to be prepared for possible legal consequences, paper was also used. the total of all handed-in exercise work filled up 12 full 75 mm binder’s . in total, 129 students handed in exercise work, so the binders filled up almost 1 meter of my shelf space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/discovery_learning seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 47 figure 1 distribution of grades year x-1 and x in %. grade a is best. teaching arrangement the experiment was based on a teaching arrangement i had used before; this also applied to the learning theoretical platform, and an extensive exercise part with possible solutions was developed. the exercise arrangement was comprised of the foundation stock of the exercise part of the course. in total, there were three exercise sets. exercise set 1 was based on the first part of the syllabus and included 17 exercises. exercise set 2 was from the middle part of the syllabus and included over 20 exercises. exercise set 3 was the final exercise set and consisted of more than 30 exercises. all of all, this was a very extensive exercise arrangement. i chose an arrangement with exercises covering the entire syllabus instead of concentrating the exercises around a project in which one may risk using only parts of the syllabus. i wanterd to ensure that the students had to work with the entire syllabus, especially those who had dropped the traditional exam. one alternative could be to arrange three-four smaller projects covering various parts of the syllabus, or a combination of exercises and project work. i expected the exercise work to comprise at least one-fourth of the study per semester, three-four weeks of full-time work. we expected the students to provide extensive and thoroughly written answers. they also had to search the internet for information and make use of other sources beyond merely the course material, as a traditional exam answer would not be comprehensive enough. the students were allowed to use information they had found as parts of the answer; however, they had to be very clear on where they had found the information. many of the exercises required extensive use of the internet, e.g. when working on exercises related to computer crime, in which information was found from current sources, such as the norwegian national authority for investigation and prosecution of economic and environmental crime (http://www.okokrim.no/), research by the confederation of norwegian business and industry (http://www.nho.no/ ), etc. in addition to academic development, an important aspect of the exercise arrangement was to teach the students to search for information and to practice their writing skills. in the application for the experiment arrangement, it was emphasized that the students often had little training in writing when they reached the postgraduate level. i also focused on writing training due to the fact that language is one of the most important tools in the learning process for exploring and trying out, and for organizing and expressing thoughts and opinions. in other words, using seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 48 writing as a process to learn through, and not just for the documentation of what you know (dysthe, hertzberg & hoel, 2000), and for learning how knowledge is expressed. there is not always room for such learning within technical subjects, so itherefore found it crucial to allow for such training when possible. one important skill is to learn how to evaluate and verify work, both your own and other people’s work. thus, in the exercise arrangement for exercise sets 2 and 3, there was an exercise with an evaluation of one’s own work and an evaluation of someone else’s work that was handed out. based on a close reading of your own exercise set x, place your work on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 as the highest score. this is to be done for each exercise and as a final result for the entire exercise set. your comments should be arguments for placing on the scale, and it is to be written so that we can follow your evaluation. correspondingly, an evaluation was to be written for an exercise answer from an unknown student, colleague/peer evaluation, and this answer was handed out electronically. due to technical issues (“problems”), this was done only for one exercise set. in short, the students were supposed to learn: 1. purely academic material; 2. how to search for information within the subject; 3. writing training: a) learning process; b) documentation; c) expressing oneself, formulating answers; 4. evaluation of one’s own work; 5. evaluation of others’ work; 6.editing/correcting according to suggested solutions/answers, etc. the idea behind such evaluation was two-sided; first, that the students got training in self-evaluation; second, that they were able to work on the material according to suggested solutions/answers, and not just putting things away in “a drawer”. earlier, i had positive experiences with additional grading for each exercise part, as well as with grading the students’ work as a whole after they have been allowed to work on the subject material according to suggested answers. the main point is to learn about the subject, in relation to what you know after finishing the course and in the future. however, the students seemed to be highly focused on “being rewarded” for their work in the form of grades. some become even more focused on the grade than on the learning process. those two aspects should be two sides of the same coin. this is of course quite understandable considering the fact that students at universities are mostly evaluated through grades. two important examples are admission to a master’s program and as a scholarship holder for a phd. in the last exercise set, the students were supposed to perform a selfevaluation/assessment (jonassen, 2000) before submitting their answers. the main idea was to teach the students how to evaluate own work without any guidance solution. i have done this myself on exams when having any time left. i have graded my answers and looked through to see if any parts needed more work. it was interesting to see whether the students would hand in answers that qualified for a c, or if they had placed their answers higher on the scale. for the evaluation turnout, the majority of the students clearly knew if their answers qualified for an a, b or c when handing it in, which was a completely realistic evaluation. they had to give arguments for their placing seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 49 on the scale. even so, some students thought that they qualified for an a, but the result was a c. carrying out in the auditorium, there were big unexpected problems. the problems were technical, such as not being able to use the main canvas, and that some of the lights in the auditorium were out. the lighting was fixed, though the main canvas was never possible to use. the norwegian university of science and technology waited for the new parts for the entire semester and it was impossible to switch rooms. as a result, we were never able to obtain access to a video projector/computer. the students had to learn how to use the ict arrangement themselves, and that was not quite what i had planned. to a certain extent, the situation was saved by the fact that some of the previous lectures were available on video in the hyper system. in the hyper system there were also videos on the use of the ict learning environment. as it was normally for all open it subjects, each student assistant was responsible for following up large groups of 20 students. the large groups were allotted one lesson per week, including two hours in computer labs. it was there that the students could seek advice and guidance from the course assistants. as long as there were available seats, the students decided themselves which group to follow. they could choose when it was convenient to attend computer lab lessons, and with whom they wanted to collaborate. registration and administration were done on the course website. each large group was divided into work groups of one to three students. the composition of the work group was left up to the students to decide. most students chose to work in groups of two or three, but some preferred working alone. once the work groups had been formed, they were set throughout the semester. submitting assignments had to be done individually; however, close collaboration was allowed within the work group, except for the evaluation part. each student had to report who they had been working together with. if traces of similarities in answers with others than those reported were found, this would be considered as cheating. the norwegian university of science and technology exam regulations, with a special focus on what is considered as cheating, was published on the website and was also repeated on several occasions. each exercise set was to be submitted in three copies: two written in which the student got one in return with comments, and one for grading/censoring. copy number three was submitted electronically for future archiving and for use in connection with peer assessment. the exercise sets, and eventually, though past the deadlines, the solutions, were published on the website, from where the students also downloaded the exercises. we, the ones who were running the course, consisted of one exercise teacher, one course assistant for each large group and myself as the subject teacher. in total, we had meetings four times per semester. at least once a week, but also more often, the exercise teacher and i had a meeting. in addition, we also communicated online on an almost daily basis. the exercise teacher worked closely with the student assistants. except during the lectures, the students should primarily have contact with their course assistant, which applied to counseling and guidance in the computer lab as well as other enquiries. here, most enquiries were dealt with online. if the course assistant was unable to solve the problem, the enquiry was passed on to the exercise teacher and in some cases to me as the subject teacher. in order to carry out an exercise arrangement of this magnitude, it is important to be able to avoid an arrangement in which the subject teachers receives all enquiries, etc. for me, this would have been impossible to handle. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 50 thus, it was important to create an arrangement in which i could follow each student via the course assistants. an evaluation form was made in which the course assistants were to fill out one for each student. in addition to administrative information, the form also stated to which work group the student belonged, the names of group members, the quality of each exercise set, central points to pay attention to in each exercise set and their general impression in connection with deadlines, etc., in addition to a conclusion. for each exercise set, a detailed form with comments was filled out for single exercises plus discussion/comments connected to the exercise set and a conclusion for the set. by september 15th, the students had to choose one of the exam formats mentioned above. before this, they were given the first exercise set and could make up their minds about what the exercises asked for. the registration for the different exams was as follows: exam format number of students in % 1: exam counting 100% 13% 2: exam 50% and exercise 50% 10% 3: exercise counting 100% 77% figure 2 distribution of exam format after finishing the course, the students were asked if they would have wished for a different exam format than the one they chose. the result was as follows: figure 3 if one could choose again we see that of those who would choose differently, which was 16% in total, the biggest group of these (6%) would choose that the exam should count for 100%. the main reason for this is probably that some complained about the exercise part being too demanding. no one stated that they would go from 100% exam to 50/50% or 100% exercise. i got the impression that many of those who chose 100% exam did so due to the work situation. in total, we see that there was a bigger desire for the exam, rather than for more exercises, though the difference was small. the completion percentage achieved a record high of almost 80% compared to the initial registration for the course. if the candidates could have chosen again, 84% would choose as before, while: 5% would go from 50/50% to 100% exercise 5% would go from 100% exercise to 50/50% 6% would go from 100% exercise to 100% exam 5% ville gått frå 50/50% til 100% øving 5% ville gått frå 100% øving til 50/50% 6% ville gått frå 100% øving til 100% eksamen seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 51 figure 4 % with final grade according to the number registered for the course, course completion. x-1 is not possible to obtain. earlier, i checked against other it subjects to see whether there might have been factors other than the test arrangement that affected the result. two typical it subjects are presented as control subjects; basically, the it subjects followed the control subjects. for the years x-1 and x-2, it has not been possible to track down the number of students registered for this course, but only those who registered for the exam. for year x, i have saved the number of students registered for the course myself, but the norwegian university of science and technology does not have numbers for the other courses. as we can see, the completion percentage for the course was almost 80% for year x. the defection varied a lot between the three exam formats. figure 5 defection within the different exam formats we read from the table that the highest defection is to be found among those who chose a 100% exam arrangement, which was 67%. it may seem that their courage failed and that they felt unprepared. the defection is much lower for group 50%-50% at “only” 23%, this despite taking the same exam as those with a 100% exam arrangement. it seems as if working with exercises produces confidence. the students who choice 100% exam had the same possibility to send in exercises as those with 100 % exercises and those with 50/50%, but the research indicated that very few had done this. those with 100% exercises had only a 15% defection rate. students were asked why they chosen as they had done. the answers were: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 52 figure 6 reason for choice of exam form students were asked about the importance of choosing an exam form. their answers were: figure 7 the importance to choice exam form students were asked how important the exam and the exercises were in giving expression to their knowledge. their answers were: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 53 figure 8 number of students who thought that the exam or exercise work gave the best expression for their knowledge it is quite obvious that most students felt that exercise work expressed their acquired knowledge much better than exams. no one seems to have thought that exams expressed their knowledge very well, while almost 20, i.e. about one-third, stated that exercise work did. copy theft one of the things that required a lot of surveillance was trying to avoid copy theft, or what we call “boiling”, i.e. using sources without references, etc. here, we put a lot of effort into conducting research on potential sources, such as websites in which the students could possibly find and copy material. eventually, the course staff became very familiar with those potential sources and what material existed within the subject. unfortunately, some were tempted and made use of sources that they did not refer to, and some of these failed the course. we had to make sure that we acquired sufficient information on the topical sources in case of possible complaints, and perhaps we should have been even stricter. this should be discussed and reconsidered at a later point if something like this happens again. if “boiling” cannot be handled properly, such a teaching arrangement is not the way to go. i suggested to the department/the faculty that we needed to develop software tools for such purposes that are possible to realize. self-assessment evaluation/assessment (jonassen, 2000) of one’s own and others’ exercises was probably the most unfamiliar part. the students expressed that they were tired after submitting the exercise and did not wish to see it again. the selfassessment often seemed meaningless and was completed quickly since one was sick and tired of the exercise after having working on it “for soooooooo long”. in one comment, someone claimed that this kind of teaching arrangement was purely unethical, especially the peer-assessment. but most students had put effort into this and understood the purpose; working with the material as part of an evaluation process and seeing oneself in relation to a colleague, i.e.the “seventh intelligence”, self-knowledge, daniel goleman (1995), knowing/understanding oneself – strengths and weaknesses. the students solved this part of the exercise quite differently. here are a couple of examples, the grade scale ranges from 1 to 10, with 10 as the highest value . assessment of one’s own exercise solutions: 12. the answer is given a grade of 9. perhaps there should have been a clarification of which parts a process consists of, and what the relationship between the process and the operating system really is. 13. the answer is given a grade of 9. the race condition is described by the use of an example. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 54 14. the answer is given a grade of 10. the answer is relatively long, but it provides a thorough explanation of the different ways of avoiding the race condition. 15. the answer is given a grade of 5. the explanation is a bit vague. a more thorough explanation of how semaphores really work should have been provided. 16. the answer is given a grade of 10. the answer is fully satisfactory. 17. the answer is given a grade of 7. the presentation of the batch system is partially wrong since i claim that batch systems do not apply to multiprogramming. the truth is that the processes are allowed to run for a long time, but not until they are finished. the rest of the answer is quite similar to the solution. it was very difficult to evaluate my own answer since i easily spot many mistakes in my own material. i had set a goal before i started working on the exercise and i have not quite reached as far as i wished to. however, i also see my answer as compared to the answer that was handed out, in which my answer is clearly much better when it comes to language and context, even though my answer emphasizes the big picture instead of details. the total grade for my answer is 9 (median), while the arithmetic mean is 8.8. exercise 1 grade: 9 reason: i have now chosen 100% exercise and no exam. first i was a bit uncertain if i would end up learning less then when not reading for an exam. however, i have proven the opposite. since the exercises count for the final grade, you obviously want to do your best. and i have put a lot of effort into this exercise, which in turn has lead to new knowledge for me. this does not only apply to the things asked for in the exercises, but also to the knowledge one needs to answer the questions as best as possible. i have provided such thorough answers for each question that you just have to learn something from it. both my curiosity and my fascination for those different things have made me really eager to learn. i started early on the exercise in order to have control and enough time to finish the exercise early. i have not had the chance to collaborate with anyone; perhaps it would have been a good idea to discuss some of the issues with fellow students to obtain even better answers. so this is perhaps a negative side of my answer. neither have i received help from student assistants; this is something i need to become better at since this is something that would probably improve my answers. the reason for not giving myself the lowest grades on the exercise is that, through following lectures and reading a lot, i have worked hard with each and every question and therefore i do not deserve getting the lowest grades here. but all in all, i have learned a lot about a lot. so i think this is a very interesting way of working. this is the end of the self-assessment for the first exercise set (all the exercises from 1-17 have been evaluated). this student is obviously goal-oriented and it does not come as a surprise that this student ended up getting a straight a in the course. peer-assessment, example, exercise set 1, tasks 12-17. task 12, grade: 6 here i would have included more and answered a bit differently, but the answer is ok. task 13, grade: 7 here i think my answer was a bit short, should have included more. task 14, grade: 9 good answer, providing explanation of what happens. task 15, grade: 8 good answer, here the most important things are included. task 16, grade: 7 short and quite good answer to the question, could perhaps have elaborated a bit more. task 17 grade: 10 very good and clear, nice descriptions. exercise 1, grade: 7 this grade is based on the fact that i think some answers should have been more thoroughly written. also, i miss examples in some of the answers that could have been very informative. however, the answers are correct; i just think that some of the answers should have been longer, so i eventually ended up giving this grade. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 55 many answers failed since some of the students answered as they would on the exam. even though the answers were correct, they lacked a deeper aspect, and they have not been thoroughly worked on and there were no examples. i think the peer-assessment above shows this quite clearly. using exercise work to build one’s own learning figure 9 using exercise work to build own learning students were asked about how important exercise work is for their learning. most students, 87%, chose to work with exercises. we see that almost 50% think that “using exercise work contributes a lot to one’s own learning”, and 35% are close to such an evaluation. this means that almost 85% see exercise work as very important to their learning. only 2-3% stated that exercise work is not important though, and if we include those bordering to these, we find that 11% see exercises as less important. five percent are in a grey area. previous research (staupe, 2010) has shown that those who do not choose exercises get a grade of approximately 1 , according to the old grading system (i.e. a better grade, as 1 is the upper limit and 6 is the lower limitweak) for the exam than those who choose an exercise arrangement with grades. building one’s own learning, an overview figure 10 building one’s own learning, an overview if we calculate the average for what the students feel contribute to building one’s own learning and turn it into grades by letter we get: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 56 exercises; a solid a lectures; a solid b ict learning environment; a solid b peer-assessment; c self/own-assessment; c however, we are not looking for an “either/or” focus, but rather being able to offer a learning environment where several different teaching arrangements are being used. the ultimate arrangement would allow the students choose within a given selection, see figure 7 as an example showing how important the students think it is to be allowed to choose exam-/evaluation format. how many lectures? figure 11 how many lectures the students wanted the students were asked how many lectures they preferred, ranging from none to the number of given lectures during the course. the question was based on the fact that they had access to a good learning environment. more than 70% preferred the number of lectures given during the course. the rest of the students’ answers belong in groups 2 and 3. this means that barely 30% would wish to reduce the number of lectures to two – three per semester. it might be possible to arrange the lectures to meet both wishes: one lecture at the beginning, one in the middle of the semester and one summarizing at the end. between these, there would be “regular” lectures. no one ticked off the box saying that they did not want any lectures. it is hard to spot a relief in the work load for the subject teacher or an economic benefit, despite having access to a good ict learning environment. however, it was decided to alter the arrangement to a certain degree in order to meet more wishes/needs and to be able to offer a better learning environment in general. experience shows that students who have not been able to follow lectures in the auditorium have done well. this also applies to those students following video lectures on the internet. post-project work the best thing would be to give feedback in the form of grades during the year; however, this was not possible to combine with the arrangement we had with an external examiner. bringing in an external examiner several times during the semester was unrealistic. when using the grades “approved”/“not approved”, clear doubts could be reconsidered by the subject teacher, the rest could be taken care of by the course assistants. however, some students complained about not getting a grade for each evaluation. it is understandable seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 57 that it would be motivating to know at all times which level one had reached. but this would also be quite a commitment to the subject teacher throughout the semester. perhaps, it would be possible if we use multiple-choice tests/ multiple-choice tasks. even with skilled course assistants i cannot see how the grades would be set without involving the subject teacher. extending the academic year also makes it difficult for the subject teacher to participate in activities outside the course. one is expected to do research with collaboration across borders, to participate and preferably lecture at seminars and courses here and there, etc. if there is supposed to be an additional responsibility for grading with set deadlines at several points during the semester, there might be too little room and time to participate in activities outside the course. also, with grading comes some supplementary work, and thanks to a wellorganized arrangement it was possible to carry out. since this was the first time, it took a while before the examination results were ready. some students did not show an understanding for this. with experience, we might have spent two weeks less on the examination. however, the examination results were ready at the set deadline. as a basis, we, the external examiner and the subject teacher, had access to all comments given to the students when returning the answers, when going through all exercise sets in detail, exercise by exercise and a total assessment. this material was invaluable when going through the exercise sets. conclusion the students could choose between three different formats of evaluation, traditional exam, 50/50% traditional exam/exercise work or 100% exercise work. experiences from the course prove that the exercise conditions and the exercise arrangement seem to be more decisive for the quality of the results of the studies than the lectures, e.g., the defection drop from over 50% before testing alternative exam/evaluation forms to 21% after. the defection by percentage for each of these three groups: exam 100% was 67, 50/50% was 23 and for exercises 100% was the defection only 15%. also, we notice that good exercise conditions, both when it comes to accessing computer equipment and exercise assistance, seem to be of the most importance to obtain good results. the majority of the students expressed that an arrangement requiring an effort to obtain a respectable mark, and not only “passed/failed” on the exercise work, yields better professional results and knowledge than with a traditional arrangement with exam 100%. there were two main reasons for selecting exam form: give the best expression to their knowledge (43%) and it fit best with their working situation (31%). some (15%) answered that they disliked the traditional exam form. only 2% answered that they liked the exam. the majority of the students, 85%, expressed that it is important or very important to have a possibility to choose the exam form. only 7% said it had no impact. students were also asked how important it was in terms of the exam and exercises giving expression to their knowledge. they thought that exams have a low expression as opposed to exercises that the students considered to have a high expression. if we calculate the average for what the students feel contributed to building one’s own learning and turn it into grades we get: exercises; a solid a, lectures: a solid b, ict learning environment: a solid b, peer-assessment: ac and self/own-assessment, a c. one of the things that required the most surveillance was to avoid copy theft , or what we call “boiling”, i.e. using sources without references, etc. if “boiling” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 58 cannot be handled properly, it will be a very big problem to evaluate exercises and give marks. we need to develop powerful software for such objectives. references albinussen, t. (2003); navigering i internett og hypermedia, ntnu/idi, master’s thesis. andersen s. a., schwenche e. (2001) ”prosjektarbeid en veiledning for studenter” bekkestua: nki forlaget. bjørke, g (1996) ”problembasert læring – ein praksisnær studiemodell”. oslo: tano – aschehoug. dysthe, o., hertzberg, f., hoel løkensgard, t. (2000) ”skrive for å lære skriving i høyere utdanning” oslo: abstrakt forlag. golemans, d (1995) “emotional intelligence” new york: bantam books. jonassen, david h (2000) ”computers as mindtools for schools engaging critical thinking” upper saddle river, n.j. merrill prentice hall. larsen, s. (1995) ”man kan ikke lære nogen noget – mod et nyt læringsbegreb” in: christensen, a. (ed): individualisering og demokratisering af læreprocesser – muligheder og betingelser. københavn sel, 1995. lie s, thowsen, i., dahle, g. (red) (2000) “fagskriving som dialog” oslo, gyldendal akademisk. staupe, a. (2010); “experiences from blended learning, net-based learning and mind tools” seminar net ( www.seminar.net) http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol6issue3/staupe_experiences_from_blended_learning.pdf (retrieved 20.6.2011) warholm, h-o (2000); hypermedia i undervisningen, ntnu/idi, master’s thesis. http://www.seminar.net/ http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol6-issue3/staupe_experiences_from_blended_learning.pdf http://seminar.net/images/stories/vol6-issue3/staupe_experiences_from_blended_learning.pdf nilsson-developing voice in digital storytelling seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 148 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 developing voice in digital storytelling through creativity, narrative and multimodality monica nilsson department of didactic science and early childhood education stockholm university email: monica.nilsson@did.su.se abstract for simon, who is nine years old, reading and writing are obstacles rather than tools. however, when offered the opportunity to create digital stories, simon becomes deeply engaged. he creates complex stories within different genres based on a variety of subjects. he both expresses and creates meaning through his digital storytelling. he develops what elbow calls ´voice.´ in the paper i argue that digital storytelling became a resource for simon which triggered his interest in literacy because of two specific features: multimodality and narrative. vygotsky’s work on development of literacy and creativity comprise a theoretical point of departure and i claim that new media has the potential to play a significant role in this realm. keywords: digital storytelling, voice, narrative, multimodality, literacy, creativity. introduction simoni is a 9 year-old boy who has problems with school, or put differently, school has problems with him. among other things simon does not want to read and write and is considered generally restless with difficulty concentrating. he shows no patience for schoolwork and moreover, he has been diagnosed with tourette’s syndromeii—an illness causing him to tic severely—which puts an extra strain on him. simon’s teacher knows him to be creative and to have several interests such as dinosaurs, sports and origami. when offered the opportunity to create digital stories, simon becomes deeply engaged and demonstrates accuracy and persistence. why is this the case? in this paper i am concerned with literacy. here i understand 'literacy’ to mean two different things: on the one hand, learning to read and write, on the other hand, such things as drawing conclusions, making associations and connecting text to reality. moreover, literacy also means creating meaning, understanding and at the same time being critical (gee, 2008; new london group, 1996; säljö, 2005). but i am also interested in literacy and its relationship to creative ‘text based activities’ where text is not limited to script but implies a variety of modes such as script, image, and sound (kress, 2003). i am particularly interested in how text based or literary activities, broadly defined, can enable children and young people to communicate experiences, explore new meaning and knowledge, and perform self-representation and self-expression. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 149 literacy in educational contexts is most often approached as a motor skill and not as a complex social, cultural and creative activity (cole, 1996; gee, 2008). this reductive tradition of understanding literacy is reflected in the students’ texts, which often lack communicative meaning both for the writer and the receiver, who is often only the teacher (renberg, 2006). students look for short cuts to good grades by imitating patterns and models. renberg (2006) discusses this situation and claims that in the best-case scenario the texts work in the particular context (for example, as a school assignment) but it is obvious that the intellectual material is not processed, the perspective is unclear and the text basically lacks communicative purpose. thus, writing in school is reduced to a ‘technique’ but never becomes a natural way of communicating. a text that doesn’t ‘want’ anything lacks ‘voice,’ according to elbow (1981). a text that has a ‘voice’ is loaded with energy and has a clear, perceptible rhythm. elbow even distinguishes between ‘voice’ and ‘real voice:’ writing with voice is writing into which someone has breathed. it has fluency, rhythm, energy, and liveliness that are enjoying a conversation. some people who write frequently, copiously, and with confidence manage to get voice into their writing. writing with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand – the words go deep (elbow, 1981, 299). elbow holds the teaching tradition and the view of writing in the academic world responsible for texts lacking voice, particularly ‘real voice.’ elbow claims that in the school tradition language is ‘outside us.’ in school, learning to write is reduced to conquering a code. the exercise becomes a surface imitation of genres and text types without being rooted in what is the core of language; according to elbow (1981) this core is our need to express thoughts and feelings—to influence others. in his essay the prehistory of written language (1978), vygotsky discusses the problem of literacy teaching and learning in school: instead of being founded in the needs of children as they naturally develop and on their own activity, writing is given to them from without, from the teacher’s hands. this situation recalls the development of a technical skill such as piano-playing: the pupil develops finger dexterity and learns to strike the keys while reading music, but he is in no way involved in the essence of the music itself (105-106). as discussed above, the implication of teaching literacy can be devastating to the child. vygotsky writes that since the child has no intrinsic motivation to write, he needs to be encouraged to write about topics that are intrinsically understandable, that engage the emotions and most of all, encourage him to express his interior world in words. very often a child writes poorly because he has nothing he wants to write about. vygotsky cites blonskii (2004, 46), a child must be taught to write only about what he knows well and has thought about much and deeply. there is nothing more harmful to the child than giving him a topic about which he has thought little and on which he has nothing much to say. this practice tends to develop vacuous, superficial writers. to make a child into a writer one needs to develop in him a strong interest in the world around him. the best thing is for the child to write about what he is very interested in, especially if he understands it. the child must be taught to write about what he is deeply interested in and has thought about much and deeply, about what he knows and understands well. the child must be taught never to write about what he does not know, does not understand, and is not interested seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 150 in. and yet, the teacher sometimes does exactly the reverse and thus kills the writer in the child. thus, the challenge is to create within the child the motivation to write and then to help him or her master the techniques of writing. according to blonskii, suitable literary works for this purpose would be, for example, notes, letters and very short stories. autobiographical stories are particularly motivational. “when a child has something to write, he writes with great seriousness” (2004, 52). in this paper i show that simon, in his digital storytelling activities, developed what elbow calls ‘voice.’ i also show that simon, in close interaction with his teacher, developed his vocal voice (speech), which was impaired due to tics, as well as a need to use written language. i suggest that there are several reasons for this. one is that the themes in his digital stories were chosen by him and thus conveyed his interests, skills and knowledge. another reason is that his teacher actively and emphatically supported him in his efforts. moreover, i argue that digital storytelling made simon’s intense and creative activity possible due to two specific features, (i) a variety of modes (image, music, sound, speech, and writing) are possible to use and combine, and (ii) digital storytelling features narrative and dramatization, a mode of thought which is a natural way for children to express themselves. it is this latter issue that i will focus on in this paper, i.e., the role of narrative and multimodality in development of voice. two different kinds of data constitute the basis for analysis and discussion. the first kind is simon’s digital stories, in particular, one featuring himself as a biker and inline skater and another about dinosaurs. the second set of data is a text written by simon’s teacher that describes simon’s creative process when making digital stories. aspects of digital storytelling: multimodality and narrative in sociocultural theory, the basis for my reasoning in this paper, language— spoken and written—mediates development of the human mind and consciousness which vygotsky (1978) calls higher order functioning. however, there is no evidence that literacy, in and of itself, leads to the cognitive functioning of, for example, logical, analytical, and critical thinking that the ‘literacy myth’ (gee, 2008) prescribes (cole, 1996). rather, it is the social practices in which reading and writing take place that make a difference (gee, 2008). thus, in order for the child to be a significant participant in communities such as school, peer groups and society as a whole, literacy is essential for a child to develop. vygotsky discusses appropriation of written language as a stepwise utilization of signs. he asserts that the mastery of the complex sign system of written language is “the culmination of a long process of complex behavioral functions in the child” (1978, 106). he describes how this trajectory starts with the use of gestures and continues with the use of drawing and play and is eventually completed with the written word. vygotsky asserts, “only by understanding the entire history of sign development in the child and the place of writing in it can we approach a correct solution of the psychology of writing” (106). his discussion about appropriation of written language should be connected to his thought about creativity. in his essay imagination and creativity in childhood (vygotsky, 2004) vygotsky argues that each stage of childhood has seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 151 its own characteristic form of creativity. literary and verbal creativity is characteristic of school-aged children following stages where play and drawing dominate as a creative form. for vygotsky play is imagination and creativity embodied. he states that play is “imagination in action” (21987, 93). on the other hand, literary forms enable the youth to express more complex relationships, especially inner relationships, than does drawing. in the kind of digital storytelling that i discuss in this paper, these diverse forms of expression are present. they are also merged and intertwined. digital storytelling is made possible by digital technology (lambert, 2002; nilsson, 2008)iii combining different kinds of sign systems such as gesture, speech, images (still and moving), writing, music and sound. hull & nelson (2005) describe a digital story as a digital multimodal text. multimodality emphasizes the variety and combination of multiple sign systems or modes (kress, 2003). kress argues that different modes have different affordances. for example, he argues that language (written and spoken) is regulated by linearity and time; the internal order of the parts offers meaning. in addition, they argue that words are relatively empty of meaning; we have to fill them with our own images. bruner (1986) makes a distinction between two language-based modes of thought or knowledge: the narrative and logical-mathematical. in the latter we ask what something is and in this form of knowledge we mean exactly what we say. the scientific discourse is implied. in the narrative we ask what something means and we mean more than we say; otherwise the story becomes flat. this mode values interpretation rather than scientific, unambiguous and logical thinking. thus, there are different ways to employ language in the knowledge domain with different outcomes. in this paper i am interested in the narrative form. i will therefore discuss narrative in a little more detail but before doing so i will say something about the particular affordances that kress (2003) ascribes to images. kress (ibid) argues that in comparison to language the logic of the image is regulated by space and simultaneity. in addition, the image is filled with meaning but we do not have to read it in a given order. the positions of things located in the image offer meaning. if i write, ”i, monica, live in stockholm” it offers meaning based on how the words are related in sequence. for those who know me and know stockholm the sentence tells as much as a photo could. but for those who do not know stockholm or me, a photo could have provided more information than this short meaning, for example, whether i am long or short, blond or dark, that stockholm is on the water, etc. narrative the origins of the attempt to define the essence of narrative is probably aristotle’s poetics. here a narrative is a recounting of a whole, which has a beginning, a middle part and an ending. the plot is the essence in any narrative and comprises events that are ordered on a consequential basis. however, this definition of narrative has been problematized and today narrative is not only thought of as an object with a certain internal structure but as an activity. ochs & capps (2001), for example, conceive of narrative as a host genre that can encompass a huge variety of specific appearances. in their view, the narrative can be understood in terms of a set of dimensions (tellership, tellability, embeddedness, linearity, moral stance) that it displays to different degrees. they write, “each narrative dimension establishes a range of possibilities, which are realized in particular narrative performances.” (ochs & capps, 2001, 19). engel argues (1995) that narratives of children are primarily constructed to satisfy the child’s need to be understood. in their narratives children solve seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 152 cognitive puzzles in their world and make emotional sense of themselves and the people around them. according to hakkarainen, “narratives describe and organize the world in which the child lives and acts” (hakkarainen, 2006, p. 194). summing up narrative (written or spoken) or visual presentations are different ways to represent something in the world and they also offer different ways of making meaning (kress, 2003). thus as kress asserts, “the world told is different from the world shown” (2003, 1). kress further asserts that the combination of these modalities (language and image) requires more than interpretation of text and image separately. according to kress (2003), in multimodal texts, fantasy (imagination) is about filling words with meaning and creating order in the placements of the elements in the image. in digital storytelling the modes of language and image are combined which makes it particularly interesting to study as a semiotic means in the context of creative literacy and literary activities. putting vygotsky’s ideas about development of written language and leading creative forms in communication with the theory of multimodality has several implications. first, it becomes clear that the diverse modes are not only preparations for the written sign system but feature particular affordances in their own right. second, the theory of multimodality presented by kress offers opportunities to refine and develop our understanding of sign mediation, a concept first introduced by vygotsky. by taking into consideration the different ways that the diverse modes offer meaning and means for learning and communication, separately and in combination, we might better understand their role in mediated activities. third, the opportunities that digital technology offers tend to blur and transcend the boundaries between the leading creative forms that vygotsky discussed. the possibility of mixing, for example, sound, script and image enable children and young people to express complex thoughts and emotions, as we will see in the next section. another example would be the possibility of making images which information technology facilitates, for example, drawing (klerfeldt, 2002) and photography. finely, putting vygotsky’s thoughts about development of writing and creativity in dialogue with the theory of multimodality hopefully will furnish pedagogues in their task to facilitate children’s learning and development, particularly creative activities as ways of communicating and expressing themselves. studying digital storytelling is one way to start to investigate these questions. method for analyzing digital storytelling when analyzing the digital stories i draw on multimodality and visual analysis (kress & van leeuwen 1996; machin, 2007) as well as theory on children’s storytelling. in order to structure the analysis i employ the three metafunctions of language originally conceptualized by halliday and later appropriated by kress and van leeuwen (1996). these are the three basic requirements of any semiotic mode in order to function as a communicative system, that is, the ideational, interpersonal and textual meta-function. the ideational meta-function represents and communicates states of affairs in the world (who or what is involved in what processes or relations) (kress, et al. 2001). it represents ideas beyond its own system of signs (machin, 2007). in visual design, for example, blue might represent the idea of the ocean. the interpersonal meta-function represents and communicates the social and affective relations between the participants in the act of communication, that is, between the producer and the receiver. in this meta-function attitudes are expressed towards what is being represented. the color red might be used to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 153 create a mood of warning or romance. another example would be that the depicted person might be turned away from the viewer, which connotes absence of a sense of interaction. the textual meta-function is about a coherent whole, genres, and how parts are linked together. for example, in visual communication the color green could be used in a composition for the color of text headings to show that they are of the same order. the story about simon & simon’s stories simon is a third grader. according to his teacher, simon finds schoolwork boring and he seldom participates in classroom activities. he has been assigned an assistant teacher. simon’s tics are both verbal and physical. he easily gets angry and when he does he can become violent. simon’s teacher finds it hard to design assignments or themes that simon finds interesting even though simon is creative and has many ideas, according to the teacher. he often does not complete his projects because he lacks patience. if something goes wrong and he is unsatisfied with the outcome he destroys what he has produced. one and a half semesters before the digital storytelling project he refused to read and also he hardly wrote. the teacher got some advice from the local support center suggesting she stress simon’s creative capacity. the teacher writes “both the assistant and i felt disconsolate since everything simon produced, he destroyed, which was also a failure for the boy.” the following is the teacher’s story about simon and his digital storytelling endeavors. this spring the class worked with dinosaurs, making them out of papier mâché, which simon enjoyed. he also liked to draw dinosaurs. one day, after taking a digital storytelling class [at the university], and discovering that the photo shop editing software was installed on all the computers in the school, i introduced digital storytelling into the classroom. i decided to try to make a dinosaur movie with simon. since he has no patience we kept a fast pace. we started by painting a background and then building a landscape with sand. we borrowed plastic dinosaurs and some plants from the kindergarten. then we took photos with the digital camera. it turned out that simon enjoyed taking photos very much. i thought it was enough with 20 to 25 pictures but i could not stop him so i let him continue. when simon was done he had taken 60 to 70 snapshots. his creative capacity was highly visible in the many series of shots of the dinosaurs moving around and falling. we worked for 70 minutes straight. at the next lesson we looked at the photos and decided which ones to pick. it was now time for him to get rid of some pictures but even then we had too many. despite that we decided to use all the remaining pictures in the movie. then simon started to put the pictures in order. i knew that his idea was to have a fight between the dinosaurs, but in the process of ordering the pictures i realized that he had framed a more complex story. he was very precise and suddenly he became very patient ordering the pictures to make sure they fit together according to his plan. this took another 70 minutes. the next phase was to record the sound. in the beginning of the work with the movie simon had asked if he had to make a voice over. i interpreted this as his nervousness about this part because of his verbal tics. we decided that he could either tell the story orally or just have the sound effects and music. at the beginning he wanted to narrate but later he found it hard to remember what to say. then he came up with the idea that i would write in the “remember-screen”iv and he would read. he, who refused to read, now asked for supporting text! the ability of the software to make short recordings helped simon overcome his problem with tics. he prepared himself for short duration recordings by inducing his ticking behavior. when ready, he would say “now,” and then i pushed the record button. it’s important to note that simon’s ticking had been seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 154 severe during this period, and his speech could be unintelligible. but this is not noticeable in the movie. music and sound effects were also exciting to simon. he was very careful about his choices and it was when we were listening to different kinds of music that he heard a piece that he immediately associated with the second world war. “i will make a movie about the second world war where i will use this piece,” he asserted and at the same time he asked a classmate to come and listen. he invited the boy to make the movie with him. from this moment on the dinosaur movie became less important. instead simon started to plan for his next film. he usually likes to show the class what he has produced, for example, paper airplanes. but this time he did not ask. he was totally absorbed by his new idea. weeks later i asked him if he wanted to show the movie. he very much wanted to and was proud when he saw how impressed his classmates were. the second movie was made together with a classmate. it was not always easy for the two to collaborate since simon is strong willed and knows exactly what he wants. the friend did not have the courage to uphold his own opinion. simon’s ideas were very good but the editing software didn’t support his creative ideas adequately. in the process of making the second world war movie a third film idea was born—this time a spy thriller. this happened when simon was searching for sound for the war movie. this time it seems that it will not be enough with still photos/that still photos will not suffice but that we shall have to work with video recordings as well. whether we can let him make such a movie will of course depend on resources and the kind of staffing we have. simon continued to produce digital stories. he finished the second world war story and the spy story successfully. he made a story about a black spider and he made several about his hobbies: biking, inline skating, and skate boarding. below i analyze and discuss two: one features the dinosaur story and the other skating and biking. what and how does simon tell in and with these two stories? the country of the nasty valley the film described in the teacher’s narrative featuring dinosaurs is 3.14 minutes long. as told in the narrative, simon and his teacher created an environment in which to stage the story. the film contains 38 images, all photos taken by simon. the film starts with a half-length picture of a dinosaur drinking water from a pond. a roar replaces the sound of the drinking animal. simultaneously a voice says, “the country of the nasty valley” followed by a little laughter. then the voice says, “once up on a time there was a very beautiful valley. they were always together.” the image is replaced through a transparent transition. now it shows the trunk of a palm tree. a loud growling is audible and the voice says, “then there was a fight.” a caption on a sky like painted area reads: the country of the nasty valley. the voice continues: it was a dinosaur that hit another dinosaur. then he dies. suddenly a tyrannosaurus rex appears. he caught a triceratops baby. and then he killed it. the mom hit him so that he fell. then he left. then a styracosaurus showed up and hit the triceratops. then the horn hit the triceratops’s belly. and then the triceratops dies. then the tyrannosaurus returns. he killed a long neckv. suddenly there was a bomb burst with comets. they went panic-stricken. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 155 there were a lot of fights. then another iguanodon arrived to the tyrannosaurus. they had a fight and the iguanodon hit the tyrannosaurus rex. then he died. then they lived happily ever after. end. the photos are colorful and of different camera shots: close-ups, mid and long shot. they depict the animals drinking, fighting, and dying. zooming and transitions give a sense of video, i.e., moving pictures. in between some of the utterances there is silence, leaving the images to carry on with the story. the last picture depicts two dinosaurs from behind, one little and one big, side-byside. the voice is clear and firm without any signs of ticking. one can hear the gap in the recording and sounds from animals and bombing. the music is turned on and off. at an ideational meta-functional level of a text one would ask who the subject is and what he or she does. in the story we learn about a valley where the dinosaurs used to live together (in peace?). suddenly they start to fight and among others a baby dinosaur and his mom are being killed. they are also threatened and panic-stricken by raining meteors, which bombard the valley. eventually the fights stop, life returns to normal and the dinosaurs live happily ever after. as sutton-smith, et al. (1981) assert, younger children, from the ages of three to eight years, often tell stories about animals—wild and domestic—and monsters. the theme is often about a struggle between a subject and a more powerful force, for example a monster or a wild animal. the outcome of the struggle varies, often dependent on the child’s age, according to sutton-smith (ibid). in simon’s story the more powerful force wins after the subject’s (the mother) attempt to fight back. so, is this a story simply about dinosaurs and their lives or is it a story about human relationships, or even about simon himself and his complicated relationship with the school? the interpersonal meta-function describes the kind of interaction taking place between the participants in the communication displayed, that is, between the producer of a sign and the receiver of that sign. it is clear from the outset that simon is the author and that he has a story to tell us, his audience. finally, the textual meta-function has to do with the composition of the final product: how parts are linked together and what genres they comprise. the country of the nasty valley follows the traditional narrative structure with the conventional beginning of ‘once upon a time…,’ the middle part is filled with conflicts and tensions and ending with “and then they lived happily ever after” though sequenced through what sutton-smith et al. (1981, 7) call ‘chronicity’ performed through the conjunction “then.” his narrative is therefore a combination of what sutton-smith et al. (ibid) call verse stories and plot stories where the former structure, according to sutton-smith et al. (1981, 13) “parallels major modes in the arts, in particular those of music and decoration.” from a perspective of creative text production this notion is intriguing. finally, the images, sound and music contribute to the narrative structure but it is the dialogue that creates the order and causality in the text. untitled the second digital story, which does not have a title, is about a boy inlineskating and biking. the video is 1.53 minutes long. it is built from 19 photos, two pieces of music, and a text caption at the end identifying the creators. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 156 the video begins with an extended guitar chord from a hard rock song; simultaneously the camera zooms in on a door on the opposite side of a pedestrian bridge. one can assume that the door is to the school. we don’t go there – we stay outside in the schoolyard. the extended chord, lasting about four seconds (half of the time the picture is displayed) turns into intensive and heavy hard rock. when the zooming ends the first photo is replaced with one of a boy approximately 10 years old. the boy is displayed in profile, in such a way that he appears to be floating or flying in the air. we can’t see his face, which is obscured by his hand. his legs are bent, almost at a 45-degree angle against his body. he is wearing inlines. several photos appear in which the boy performs diverse acrobatic motions. for example, in one he skates on top of four concrete boards, which are lined up next to each other. a new theme appears which is biking. we are in a forest but we can catch a glimpse of a house far away in the background. simon’s house, one wonders? this is homeland. a light metallic sound replaces the hard rock music and turns into to a light flute and drum melody. the music is clear, calm, and rhythmic. a boy pops a wheelie with a mountain bike. in the next picture the level of difficulty has increased since the boy – still on one wheel – turns the front wheel sharply to the left. in the next to last picture the boy appears in the distance still on one wheel. his face reveals deep concentration – it looks like he is trying to move ahead on just one wheel. in the final picture we see the boy from behind on his bike, now bending forward with the back wheel in the air. this last picture has a caption: “the one that did the tricks is eric, the one that took the pictures is simon.” based on what is fore-grounded (the boy conducting tricks) versus what is back-grounded (school) (machin, 2007) one could interpret this film as being about a boy who shows his skills in inline skating and biking but also about a boy’s relationship to school versus his sports-and-peer world. i any case, i interpret this film as a self-representation (lundby, 2008), or call it ‘a report of one’s own personal experiences,’ as sutton-smith et al. (1981) calls these kinds of narratives.vi moreover, simon is showing us his coordination and skill in his sports, i.e., inline skating and biking.vii throughout the story the body is at the center of attention. in most of the pictures the body is in heavy motion, often shown from an oblique angle, connoting energy and movement (machin, 2007). the rider flies, jumps, bends and controls his vehicles with his body. we can read these poses as signs of strength and freedom (ibid). the peaceful and harmonic second piece of music underlines this impression. in most of the pictures the body is exposed in close-up, drawing attention to the subject as an individual (ibid). the head is seldom discernable and only a couple of images show the face. when we can see the face it shows concentration—we understand that simon has agency and is powerful (ibid). most of the time the audience see the boy from the side. he does not make eye contact nor does he watch us. the implication is, that simon does not invite interaction: this is a monologue and he offers us information (ibid). however, we usually see the boy at a neutral level, that is, he does not look either down or up on us. this displays an equal power relation with the audience (ibid). thus, even though (or because) simon beckons us to watch him (bäckström, 2004), we are considered ‘pals’ and equals. as a piece about inline skating and biking, described angles and camera shots make perfect sense because this sport is all about posture. bäckström (2004) has studied skateboard and snowboard cultures and explains that it is the esthetic expression, not the sensation in the ride, that is crucial in these sports. to pull a trick or fail creates strong emotions of happiness or anger. moreover, it is important to have style, particularly a unique style, and that the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 157 performance be beautiful and ‘clean.’ skateboarding and snowboarding are highly visual. it is important to see, make visible and to be seen. to ride together means to watch each other’s performance. in order to show others, the performance is often video recorded. bäckström (2004) summarizes the features of skateboarding and snowboarding with terms such as liveliness, vitality, strength, freshness, speediness, freedom and action. the story is a narrative built up with a calm yet persistent rhythm and carefully selected images and music. it can be described as a “descriptive digital story” (nilsson, 2008), that is, a description often of a trip, friend, hobby, pet or place. these kinds of digital stories are usually not centered on a conflict and thus the point of view is neither stressed nor conspicuous yet conveys a message. images in descriptive stories often serve to illustrate the spoken word. however, in simon’s story images and music are the basic components and offer meaning separately as well as in combination. for example, the music creates a narrative structure (scenes and ‘chapters’) with levels of meanings. this is done by the choice of music and by how simon uses it, e.g., where he inserts it and how he changes the volume level. development of voice through creativity, narrative and multimodality in applying a detailed reading and analysis of simon’s digital stories one realizes the kind of work that lies behind them. the films are not randomly assembled images, music, speech, captions and sound. on the contrary, they are consciously, creatively, well-reasoned and well-crafted compositions. it is clear that simon was immersed in a playful and creative process where he took on many roles: as scriptwriter, director, producer, photographer, actor, editor, etc. his digital stories represent different genres and offer multiple messages and meanings. through their content and form, simon’s multimodal texts express and communicate thoughts and emotions (elbow, 1981). an overall comment on simon’s digital stories would be that they convey “fluency, rhythm, energy, and liveliness” which, according to elbow (1981, 299), are signs of a text with voice. they do have the capacity to influence others. they are texts that, in elbow’s words “want something.” simon is at an age where, according to vygotsky’s (2004) scheme, he should utilize literary (script based) forms as his major form of creation. literary forms enable a youth to express complex relationships and dynamics, according to vygotsky. however, we learned from simon’s teacher’s narrative that writing in a mono-modal manner (kress, et al. 2001) was not possible for simon and that reading and writing were obstacles rather than tools for him. but, when simon was allowed to use a variety of semiotic modes of expression, particularly image and music, which are not usually valued as much as written language in the educational setting, he was able to create complex stories— complex digital multimodal texts—within the ‘host genre of narrative’ (ochs & capps, 2001). he created narratives both in the traditional sense, that is, based on language where meaning primarily was gained from the temporallyordered structure. but he also created narratives through images and music where meaning was gained from the chosen and amalgamated images and their combination with music and sound. as a result, simon composed digital stories shaped both by temporal and spatial structure.viii in both cases they were open to a variety of interpretations. thus, we might ask: is simon literate? if understanding literacy as a social and cultural activity where semiotic means of different kinds are used for producing texts in processes of expressing and creating meaning and communicating, then simon is highly literate. but if literacy is limited to forming and decoding letters then simon is not. thus, the way we define literacy also defines children as competent or seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 158 incompetent. i believe it is important to widen our perception of literacy to include new kinds of multimodal communication and thus texts which the new technology enables but also the diversity in creating meaning based on cultural and social differences (see, for example, gee, 2008; new london group, 1996). hopefully that would imply a better understanding of the significance of giving children access to a variety of semiotic resources also in the educational setting. such an approach to pedagogy would increase the opportunities for students to develop ‘voice.’ but a precondition is that adults become “new and multi-literacies” literate in order to communicate with those voices. as a result it might enhance children’s script based reading and writing. simon is a good example of this. while creating his digital stories, simon and his teacher collaboratively used tools and developed strategies to overcome obstacles, e.g., the ‘remembering screen’ and the inducement of his ticking behavior. these tools and strategies gave simon access to the spoken word and developed a need for, and turned written language into, a useful resource (vygotsky, 1987). in addition, the activity created motivation for further exploration in that simon imagined a film, requiring tools (video recorder) and resources (staff) that the school could not provide at the time but might be able to in the future. in this regard, digital storytelling created a zone of proximal development for simon (vygotsky, 1987). summing up, i believe that simon embraced digital storytelling because it enabled him to create stories about what interested him and about issues, which he had experienced and had knowledge about. he was able to create these stories because he was not limited to spoken and written language as the only semiotic modes but had access to multiple modes of expression. he was given the chance to communicate his experiences, skills, knowledge, interests and views in ways suitable to him. this case is a promising example of new pedagogical activities featuring multimodality and utilizing multimedia in education aiming at facilitating students’ creativity generally and creative literacy and literary development in particular. the ability to use multiple semiotic modes was made possible by digital tools such as the digital camera, editing software, and internet connections. does this mean that digital media offer new ways to be creative in the literacy and literary domain? creativity, understood from a sociocultural perspective, that is, as a sociocultural activity, implies the significance of technical abilities, tools, and traditions (vygotsky, 2004). thavenius (1995) stresses the significance that modern media, e.g. video and computers, play for aesthetic and creative production in schools. he claims that different kinds of software enable creativity, such as re-creation and use of images (still and video), music, sound, speech, and writing. from an educational perspective it is this creative potential inherent in new media that we have to embrace. digital storytelling is just one example of how it can be employed. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 159 references bruner, j. (1986). actual minds, possible worlds. cambridge, massachusetts and london: harvard university press. bäckström, å. (2004). liberty, youth, fellowship: stereotypes within skateboardand snowboard culture. published on internet, www.idrottsforum.org (issn 1652– 7224) 2004-12-14. cole, m. (1996). cultural psychology – a once and future discipline. harvard university press. elbow, p. (1981). writing with power. techniques for mastering the writing process. new york/oxford: oxford university press. engel, s. (1995). the stories children tell. making sense of the narratives of childhood. new york: guilford press. gee, p. (2008). social linguistics and literacies – ideology in discourses. london and new york: routledge. hakkarainen, p. (2006). learning and development in play. in j. einarsdottir & j. t. wagner (eds.), nordic childhoods and early education (pp. 183 222). greenwich, connecticut: information age publishing, inc. hull, g., & nelson, m., e. (2005). locating the semiotic power of multimodality. written communication, 22(2), 224-261. klerfeldt, a. (2002). sagor i ny skepnad – barn berättar med dator. in säljö, r. & linderoth, j. (eds.), utmaningar och e-frestelser. stockholm: prisma. kress, g. (2003). literacy in the media age. london: routledge. kress, g., jewitt, c., ogborn, j., & tsatsarelis, c. (2001). multimodal teaching and learning: the rhetorics of the science classroom. london and new york. continuum. kress, g., & van leeuwen, t. (1996). reading images: the grammar of visual design. lambert, j. (2002). digital storytelling. digital diner press. newlondongroup (1996). a pedagogy of multiliteracies: designing social futures. harvard educational review, 66, 60-92. lundby, k. (2008). digital storytelling, mediatized stories: self-representations in new media. new york: peter lang publishing ab. machin, d. (2007). introduction to multimodal analysis. london: hodder arnold. nilsson, m. (2008). digital storytelling: a multidimensional tool in education. in t. hansson (ed.), handbook of digital information technologies: innovations, methods and ethical issues. idea group publishing. ochs, e. & capps, l. (2001) living narrative. creating lives in everyday storytelling. cambridge: harvard university press. renberg, b. (2006). rytm och rap och retorik – om svenska, språk och estetik. in eva alerby & jórunn elidóttir (eds.) lärandets konst – betraktelser av estetiska dimensioner i lärandet. lund: studentlitteratur. sutton-smith, b. (1981). the folkstories of children. philadelpia: university of pennsylvania press. säljö, r. (2005). lärande och kulturella redskap. om lärprocesser och det kollektiva minnet. stockholm: norstedts akademiska förlag. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 160 thavenius, j. (1995). den motsägelsefulla bildningen. stockholm: östlings bokförl. symposion. vygotsky, lev s. (1978). mind in society. harvard university press. vygotsky, l. s. (2004). imagination and creativity in childhood. journal of russian and east european psychology, 42(1), 7-97. i all names are fictional in order to protect the human subjects. i want to thank simon and his parents as well as his teacher for permission to use the material analyzed in this paper. special thanks to simon’s teacher for kind and valuable help with files and information. ii tourette’s syndrome is a severe neurological disorder characterized by facial and body tics, often accompanied by grunts and compulsive utterances (the american heritage college dictionary). iii see, center for digital storytelling: http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html iv the remember screen is a small window in the editing program where you type in what you are going to record in the voice over. v a dinosaur with a long neck. vi the boy in the photos is simon’s friend eric. simon’s teacher says that simon is good at the tricks but that his friend “eric” is slightly better. simon is good at and interested in pictures and therefore he wanted to take the photos. his teacher says that simon has many ideas about angles etc. vii in one of the other films simon shows and names a series of skate-board tricks in close ups. thus, simon is also a skate-boarder. viii the temporal structure can be related to the “classical” hollywood style and the spatial structure with the montage-based style on mtv. digital capitalism and critical media education issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4224 ©2021 (horst niesyto). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. digital capitalism and critical media education horst niesyto former ludwigsburg university of education1 email: niesyto@ph-ludwigsburg.de abstract digital capitalism has produced a new concentration of capital, knowledge, and power unprecedented in history. quantification is fundamental to digital and capitalistic structural principles. in view of a comprehensive quantification and measurement of life and society, questions of meaning and significance must be asked beyond quantifying process structures. the first part of the article identifies capitalistic and digital structural principles, showing affinities between both principles. the second part points out central challenges and problem areas of digital capitalism. the third part discusses the manoeuvres of the it industry in germany to gain more influence on the education sector. against the background of these developments, the last part outlines the need for alternative pathways and presents dimensions of a critical media education.2 keywords: digital capitalism, it-industry, commercialization, digitalization, datafication, media education, media criticism, alternative pathway 1 retired since 2017 2 the article is based on two german language publications (niesyto, 2017a, 2021). https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4224 digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 digital capitalism – selected aspects of analysis the american scientist dan schiller published a book on digital capitalism in 1999. his analyses mainly refer to the development of transnational telecommunications companies and to the history of the internet: in this book, i show that the internet and, indeed, the greater telecommunications system with which the internet has intertwined comprise a leading edge of this epic transnationalization of economic activity (…) networks are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of the capitalist economy as never before. that is why i refer to this new epoch as one of digital capitalism (schiller, 1999, p. xiv). schiller elaborates on how a transformation process is taking place through capital formation processes to a digital capitalism. he also addresses negative effects on education and social services: ‘digital capitalism has already begun to prey on education, placing some of the most sensitive processes of social learning at the mercy of a proprietary market logic’ (ibid.). in the same year peter glotz (1999) published a book in german dealing with cultural struggles in digital capitalism. glotz was a communication scientist and politician.3 he analysed four basic trends that are closely linked to digitalisation: dematerialisation, decentralisation, acceleration, globalisation. glotz referred to the ‘point-to-point structure’ of new, digital forms of communication and analysed the strengthening of a ‘nomadic lifestyle’. regarding the further development of society, at that time he predicted: ‘unchecked and uncontrolled, the development triggered by digitalisation will inevitably lead to a division of society: into an elite that willingly keeps up with the high (working) speed, and into a new underclass that will be fed to a large extent by dropouts and refuseniks’ (glotz, 1999).4 this prognosis certainly contains elements of current developments. in germany, the sociologist of technology ulrich dolata had already presented a study in 2014 on the markets and power of internet corporations. this study analysed the global corporations google, facebook, apple, amazon and microsoft. dolata summarised: the five corporations studied not only shape the main services and markets of the internet. as operators of the central infrastructures, they also regulate access to the network, structure the communication possibilities of the users and are essential 3 glotz was a member of the social democratic party of germany (spd) and was the spd's federal executive director for several years. 4 the citation is from the blurb of his book. translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘ungebremst und ungesteuert führt die durch die digitalisierung angestoßene entwicklung unweigerlich zu einer spaltung der gesellschaft: in eine elite, die das hohe (arbeits-)tempo bereitwillig mitmacht, und in eine neue unterschicht, die sich zu einem guten teil aus aussteigern und verweigerern speist’. digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 drivers of the innovation process. not decentralisation, democratisation and cooperation, but concentration, control and power are, according to the thesis, the key processes and categories with which the essential development trends of the (commercial) internet can be adequately classified (dolata 2014, abstract).5 it is actually well over 20 years since the publications of schiller and glotz. global digital capitalism has since developed as different variants and in several stages. today, it permeates almost all areas of society. in the meantime, various analyses are available that accentuate different aspects and dimensions.6 i would like to highlight the publication by the us economist shoshana zuboff entitled the age of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019). as an important feature, the author names the expropriation and datafication of our experience as a free resource for the hidden commercial operations of surveillance capitalism. a 'surveillance economy' – according to zuboff – is the origin of a 'new instrumental power' that claims dominion over society. and the german sociologist philipp staab (2019) drew particular attention – in a continuation of the analysis by dolada (2014) – to the system of ‘proprietary markets’ that characterise digital capitalism: ‘classical monopoly companies operate on markets; the leading companies of digital capitalism, on the other hand, are markets’ (ibid., p. 30; italics by staab).7 in a recent publication, oliver nachtwey and timo seidl (2020) focus on the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and analyse normative foundations of entrepreneurial action in the digital economy. these and other analyses from the field of cultural and media studies (e.g. hepp, 2020; stalder, 2018) illustrate the need to view digitalisation not primarily from a technological perspective. without a doubt, a basic understanding of algorithmic processes, the approach of 'computational thinking' and the formability of digital-technological artefacts is also important for media pedagogy. however, technological developments cannot be detached from economic, political, cultural and social, ethical, and aesthetic questions. people's personal development and coexistence in communities and societies are inextricably linked with questions of enabling and limiting social living conditions, structures of economic and social inequality, power and domination relationships, and processes that promote and endanger democracy. 5 translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘die fünf untersuchten konzerne prägen nicht nur wesentliche angebote und märkte des internets. sie regeln als betreiber der zentralen infrastrukturen auch die zugänge zum netz, strukturieren die kommunikationsmöglichkeiten der nutzer und sind wesentliche treiber des innovationsprozesses. nicht dezentralisierung, demokratisierung und kooperation, sondern konzentration, kontrolle und macht sind, so die these, die schlüsselprozesse und -kategorien, mit denen sich die wesentlichen entwicklungstendenzen des (kommerziellen) internets angemessen erfassen lassen’ (dolata, 2014, abstract). 6 see an overview of selected publications from various academic perspectives in niesyto (2017a). 7 translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘klassische monopolunternehmen agieren auf märkten; die leitunternehmen des digitalen kapitalismus hingegen sind märkte’. digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 with the current efforts to describe and analyse the phenomena and structures of digital capitalism, it would not be helpful to refer in a generalised manner to a 'system of orientation' that was developed by karl marx (1867) about 150 years ago. this would not do justice to the multiple changes and the complexity of economic systems and social relations. this also includes a differentiated view of the mutual relations of 'base' and 'superstructure' and the overcoming of thinking in antagonisms and in categories of 'right' and 'wrong' consciousness. different variants of capitalism have also emerged worldwide in the context of different political systems (from parliamentary-democratic constitutions to autocratic and dictatorial regimes). nevertheless, the question of the analysis and critique of certain structural patterns and the transformation possibilities that counteract a growing gap between rich and poor, a permanent educational disadvantage and an overexploitation of natural resources. since the global financial crisis of 2008/09, basic capitalist structures and their effects on almost all areas of society have again increasingly become the subject of analysis, often in academic contexts. important questions in this context are: which basic elements of 'classical' capitalism analysis are still relevant in today's technological, economic, and (world) social conditions? what has changed in digital capitalism? capitalistic structural principles different types, such as advanced capitalism, finance capitalism, free-market capitalism, or welfare capitalism have a few characteristics in common that can be summarised as follows (cf. niesyto, 2017a, p. 16-17): 1. the principle of capital accumulation (pursuit of profit) on the basis of private property (land, raw materials, means of production, shares, etc.); linked to this: the principle of thinking in terms of quantitative growth. 2. the principle of monopolisation in order to achieve permanent dominance of the capitalistic structured (world) market through capital concentration processes; linked to this: globalisation in the sense of opening up and densifying globally distributed development, production, distribution, and sales locations. 3. the principle of reducing the costs of human labour in order to save capital in the long term through the use of new technologies; linked to this: acceleration and flexibilisation of work processes; computerisation and immaterialisation. 4. the principle of economising as many areas of society as possible in order to constantly open up new areas for the accumulation of capital; linked to this: quantification and measurement of institutions, 'consumers', and 'customers' – all the way into sensitive and intimate areas. the thesis is that the outlined capitalistic structural principles are still valid, and that capitalism received a huge boost through the utilisation of digital technologies. one of the reasons for this is that these principles have an affinity with digital structural principles digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 and that digital technology has opened up new social areas for the accumulation of capital. it is about affinities; the connectivity of both structural principles. no determinant interdependencies are assumed. digital technologies can be used for different purposes. this needs to be reflected again and again. digital structural principles the following structural principles should be mentioned here in particular (cf. niesyto, 2017a, p. 18): 1. the principle of binarisation: conversion of analogue signals into binary values (a complex series of 0 and 1 values), which appear only as grid points; numerical representation of data of the most varied kinds and their use, storage, processing, distribution, and representation in a binary coded form; binarisation as a precondition for the algorithmisation of processes and problems to be solved. 2. the principle of variability and simulation as the opportunity to enter into any media artefacts, to reprocess and change them bit by bit, to recreate imaginary spaces. writing, sounds, images, moving images, graphics, language, sounds, and music can be electronically processed and recreated. 3. principle of instantaneousness [german: augenblicklichkeit]: information, sounds, images, and so on, are transported at the speed of light and enable interactivity and worldwide networking in real time (point-to-point accessibility). 4. the principle of miniaturisation of individual components into functional blocks whose temporal circuits are in the nanosecond range (billionths of a second), as well as the principle of modularisation, namely the arbitrary exchangeability and compilation of digital production elements. affinity between digital and capitalistic structural principles above all, quantification is a fundamental common feature: the measurability of processes, cost factors, and profit rates corresponds closely with numerical representations of data. thus, big data projects in particular are in demand, which, in the face of huge amounts of data, enable targetted, rational, and efficient filtering and processing for various purposes on the basis of algorithmic procedures.8 in combination with the digital structural principle of instantaneousness, huge capital profit can be achieved in the shortest possible time in these quantifying processes, for instance in high-frequency trading on the stock exchanges (cf. vogl, 2011, p. 94, 107). this form of financial capitalism completely separates value creation processes from concrete objects and human labour and simulates financial worlds that have no equivalent in the 'real economy'. in general, digital networking and interactivity enable the constant and flexible 8 on quantification, see also the analysis by steffen mau: das metrische wir. über die quantifizierung des sozialen (mau, 2017). [english: the metric we. on the quantification of the social.] digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 availability of people and machines. in particular, spatial and temporal flexibility demands on manpower can be specifically implemented through the use of digital technologies. it is known from various fields of work that the constant accessibility, acceleration, and compression of work processes can lead to permanent overload and stress from the point of view of the employees concerned by the absence of regulations (time limits). the flexible, worldwide availability of people and machines is a central factor in being able to drive capital accumulation as a ‘global player’ in the direction of capital concentration and monopolisation (the search for the most cost-effective development, production, and distribution locations and their global networking). the digital structural principles of variability and simulation fit very well with capitalist structural principles that aim for permanent adaptability, efficiency, and economic usability. the 'internet of things' is an area in which it is currently becoming very clear how the interplay of physical and data worlds (also simulations) is becoming ever more fluid and intensive. the measurement of almost all life worlds and of one's own body (selftracking etc.) offer the optimisation of everyday life and the self (cf. mau, 2016). however, they have a hard capitalist core: the development of new sales markets, the commercialisation of more and more areas of life, the control and surveillance of the body. the miniaturisation and modularisation of digital components are important technological preconditions for reducing the amount of work and materials required, for computerising production technology and logistics in machine-to-machine communication (industry 4.0) and for pushing the human–computer interface in the direction of human enhancement. originally, the focus was on assistive computer technologies to support people with disabilities. in the meantime, numerous new fields of application are emerging. keywords: artificial intelligence, robotics, data glasses, augmented reality. whereas in the past media technologies primarily enabled forms of medial extension (to reach into the distance, e.g. telegraphy, television), digital technologies now extend these possibilities into the body. this is what i would like to describe as medial incorporation. it can be assumed that bioinformatics in particular will be heavily courted by various commercial enterprises in the future in order to open up new markets through the use of corresponding technologies. connected to this are fundamental anthropological, ethical, and social questions of being a human and a subject in digitalised societies. keywords: farewell to the autonomy of the subject, new forms of totalitarian surveillance and domination (cf. zuboff, 2019). digital capitalism – some challenges the analysis of structural affinities between digital and capitalistic structural principles is important in order to recognise connections between technological, economic, political, cultural, and also socialisation developments. for example, the (cultural) sociologist digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 richard sennett pointed out as early as 1998 in his book der flexible mensch. die kultur des neuen kapitalismus, the problematic aspects of a permanent pressure to which people are exposed in globalised network capitalism (see also sennett, 2007). structural principles such as constant, flexible availability and permanent adaptability promote a mode of socialisation that accelerates fragmentation in life-world contexts. what is required – according to sociologists lothar böhnisch and wolfgang schröer – is behaviour that is oriented from situation to situation, from point to point. people should be distracted from asking about the power structures associated with the demands for flexibility (böhnisch et al., 2009, p. 133). similarly, the sociologist hartmut rosa analysed increasing ‘short-short patterns’ of time perception: experiences remain episodic and are no longer linked to each other, to history, and to each person's own identity (rosa, 2005, p. 470). the structural principles and development trends outlined have the potential to fundamentally change everyday life and work as well as the way individuals live together in society. in particular, profitand technology-driven models of the future that ultimately subordinate the complexity of being human to profit maximisation and the precision of algorithmic calculations and unambiguities are to be critically evaluated. at the same time, it should be noted that digital technologies are being used in numerous areas for enlightened, critical, democratic, and participatory purposes. we are dealing with a contradictory situation: on the one hand, capitalism proves its self-renewal power by placing the systematic utilisation of digital data at the centre of its capital accumulations and (so far) manages to sell data expropriation processes to large parts of the population as an unproblematic concomitant and even personal advantage, in accordance with the motto: ‘i have nothing to hide, receive targetted information and offers in return, and can participate in the lives of many people’. on the other hand, the active use of digital technologies is associated with hopes and developments such as the sharing economy, decentralisation, cooperation, open access instead of the principle of ownership, democratisation of manufacturing, strengthening of social–ecological forms of economy, and so on. identifying these contradictions and dealing with them is a social and educational challenge and task. personality development is inextricably linked to questions about social living conditions, structures of social inequality, power and dominance relations, and processes that promote and endanger democracy. strengthening a perspective that is critical of society and the media is especially necessary in a situation where problem areas of digitalisation are becoming increasingly clear in the context of economic and political interests. the following problem areas are examples: • the commercial expropriation and exploitation of personal data profiles and the enormous commercialisation of life worlds linked to this; keywords: commercialisation of media communication and social spaces, influencer advertising, spread of a market-shaped way of thinking in many areas of life (e.g. digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 reißmann, 2014); • the emergence of new, partly totalitarian power structures in connection with big data, including the filter bubble problem, social bots, micro targetting; new forms of social control, monitoring, steering, and manipulation in many areas, also in education (e.g. pariser, 2011; gapski, 2015; zuboff, 2018; iske et al., 2020); • social inequalities and disadvantages, especially for older population groups and people with minimal formal education, or those who do not have sufficient resources and whose future is particularly uncertain in view of the digital transformation and new working relationships (e.g. hargittai, 2002; kutscher & iske, 2020); • the further technical and social acceleration of everyday life and work processes. keywords: tendency to dissolve spatio-temporal continuities and social milieus, fluid relationships, fragmentation of public spheres, constant excitement of media attention, loss of reflexivity (e.g. rosa, 2009; niesyto, 2012). the advance of the it industry in the education sector has developed into a special problem area. it involves various dimensions ranging from the targetted use of the buzzwords 'digital education' [‘digitale bildung’] to broad education policy lobbying and networking as well as subtle and overt forms of influence and advertising at schools and universities (hardware and software, learning platforms, digital learning materials, certification of additional qualifications, free offers, etc.). several analyses are now available under the term 'education industrial complex' or edtech (education technology) industry.9 the following section focusses on some aspects of it in germany and outlines how the buzzwords 'digital education' have developed into another ‘approach lane’ for the it industry in the education sector in recent years. the advance of the it economy in the education sector with the 'digitalpakt schule' (‘digital pact for schools’), the german government has for some time been making more public funds available for the digital-technological infrastructure equipment of schools. at the same time, considerably more public funds are needed for teacher training so that media-related education and learning processes can be supported. so far, the ministries of education and science in germany have failed to establish media education either in teacher training or in schools in a broad-based and sustainable manner (cf. niesyto, 2017b, pp. 182-188). apparently, education policy is now 9 see, among others, the publications by picciano & spring (2013), verger et al. (2017), williamson & hogon (2020). for publications in german language see for instance förschler (2018), münch (2018), hug & madritsch (2020), bernhard et al. (2020). digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 counting on the it industry to become more involved also in teacher training and ‘digital education’. the influence of the it industry on education has increased considerably in germany using the buzzwords 'digital education'. the prevailing education policy in germany focusses primarily on 'digitalisation'. everything is becoming digital, also research on 'digital education' is to be intensified (bmbf, 2020). it is true that 'digital education' is a catchy word that seems suitable for education policy arenas. but there are more and more critical voices. among other things, it is pointed out that the adjective 'digital' is factually incorrect with regard to education because there can be no 'digital' theory of education. ‘educational processes remain educational processes – with or without the aid of digital technology’, says the council for cultural education in a statement (kulturelle bildung, 2019; p. 22; cf. also fuchs, 2021, p. 163 and kübler, 2018). at the same time, the word 'digital education' shortens the view of the multidimensionality of the pedagogical task. basic competences that are elementary for educational and learning processes, such as the ability to reflect and criticise, educational and learning theory basics, and elementary pedagogical-didactic and media pedagogical competences are increasingly marginalised (cf. dgfe, 2017). finally, the digital hype overlooks the fact that besides change and 'disruption' there are also continuities. digital technology and digital aesthetics change previous analogue systems of symbols and signs. it is important to acquire competences in algorithmic processes and in handling and creating with digital media. but digital techniques and aesthetics do not replace basic knowledge and competences in symbol and sign systems, for instance in the field of visual design and communication with photos and film/video. in germany, business-related initiatives, foundations, and platforms have been significantly increasing their influence in public education for some time. these include the bündnis für bildung [alliance for education], the bundesverband digitale bildung [federal association for digital education}, the forum bildung digitalisierung [digitalisation education forum] and the netzwerk digitale bildung [digital education network] (cf. förschler, 2018).10 in the meantime, the it industry, in cooperation with the gesellschaft für informatik (gi), has succeeded in gathering voices from various fields for the support of a 'digital education charter'.11 this charter focusses on 'digital competences' in connection with 'digital education' with euphonious words such as the ‘ability to judge, creativity, self-determination, creative ability, sense of responsibility’. media education is no longer mentioned in the charter – although there was previously an exchange between representatives of computer science and media education.12 10 cf. https://www.bfb.org/; https://bvdb.org/; https://www.forumbd.de; https://www.netzwerk-digitale-bildung.de/ 11 cf. https://charta-digitale-bildung.de 12 cf. ‚dagstuhl-erklärung‘ (gi, 2016), ‚frankfurt-dreieck‘ (initiative kbom, 2019) https://www.bfb.org/ https://bvdb.org/ https://www.forumbd.de/ https://www.netzwerk-digitale-bildung.de/ https://charta-digitale-bildung.de/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 media education has been increasingly marginalised in recent years, while the it industry has spread into the education sector. this development becomes clear when one takes a look at the very important task of media criticism for media education, for example. fundamental dimensions of media criticism and an analysis of questions of digital capitalism and data capitalism are not desired by the initiatives mentioned previously and lobby groups. an analysis of documents of business-related it initiatives shows, among other things, that with the reference to 'digital sovereignty', it is primarily about an individual expansion of competences in order to constantly adapt to digital innovations and, in particular, contexts of economic exploitation (e.g. vereinigung der bayerischen wirtschaft e. v., 2018, p. 60 f.).13 it is also no coincidence that at national and eu levels, corresponding policy papers and funding programmes are increasingly being used to realise interpretive dominance and to enforce objectives in the education and science sector that are closely oriented to the economy . a study by altenrath et al. (2020), for example, comes to the conclusion that in the programmes and funding guidelines examined, economic competitiveness is the essential background for the argument (ibid., p. 6) and 'digital competence' is largely regarded as an individual prerequisite for employability (ibid, p. 8). although critical or creative competences in dealing with digital media are mentioned, they are not a focus – it is more about technological sovereignty (ibid., p. 14).14 the british media educator david buckingham comes to a similar conclusion: ‘advocates of digital education have increasingly recognized the need for young people to acquire digital media literacy. however, this idea is often seen in instrumental terms, and is rarely implemented in any coherent or comprehensive way’ (cf. buckingham, 2019). concepts of 'media education' and a broad understanding of 'media literacy' play virtually no role in economy-related documents and strategies.15 at the international political level (eu and unesco), there is now a tendency to equate 'digital literacy' with 'media literacy' (cf. trültzsch-wijnen, 2020, p. 218)—a tendency that has also been observed for some time in education policy in germany. while science ministries and most universities do not yet see themselves in a position to 13 regarding these adaptations, see also valentin dander in his article on ideological aspects of 'digitalisation'. in his summary, he states, among other things: ‘the formative task thus consists primarily in the adaptation that institutions and individuals have to carry out, and hardly in creating contextual conditions that make the use of digital technologies more likely, for example for social justice’ (dander, 2018b, p. 271; translation by h.n.; original text (german): „die gestaltungsaufgabe besteht demnach primär in der anpassungsleistung, die institutionen wie individuen an sich zu vollziehen haben, und kaum darin, kontextbedingungen zu schaffen, die den einsatz digitaler technologien etwa für soziale gerechtigkeit wahrscheinlicher werden lassen’ (dander, 2018, s. 271). see also dander's article in this issue of seminar.net 14 see also the article by altenrath et al. in this issue of seminar.net 15 at both national and eu level, there are also other policy papers and funding programmes in various fields of action that pursue not only economy-related objectives. as an example, the following can be mentioned with regard to the eu level: european guidelines for digital youth work (2019): https://www.digitalyouthwork.eu/wpcontent/uploads/sites/4/2019/09/european-guidelines-for-digital-youth-work-web.pdf https://www.digitalyouthwork.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2019/09/european-guidelines-for-digital-youth-work-web.pdf https://www.digitalyouthwork.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2019/09/european-guidelines-for-digital-youth-work-web.pdf digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 establish media pedagogy in a broad and obligatory way – especially in the form of basic media education16 – in pedagogical courses, various it companies offer schools workshops for teachers and teaching materials (in addition to selling hardware and software), including many free offers. there are now subtle and overt forms of influence via various advertising measures (schmerr, 2019). examples: apple encourages teachers around the world to train as apple distinguished educators in order to subsequently promote apple products in schools and at congresses; in a similar way, microsoft tries to gain influence in schools with its microsoft innovative educator experts program; google also advertises its own devices and software products with free teaching materials in order to generate brand loyalty among children as young as elementary school age. martina schmerr analyzes that the interests of the digital economy in the education sector are manifold – they range from improving their own market position, image cultivation and early brand loyalty to collecting data from young people and lesson designs from teachers (schmerr, 2019, 59f.). at the same time, there is a lack of reflection and regulation to ensure the quality of digital educational media. in a dossier on the activities of the digital industry in the education sector, the gewerkschaft erziehung wissenschaft (gew, 2019) analysed the large it corporations apple, microsoft, google, samsung electronics and the lobby association bitkom (germany). with regard to bitkom, the dossier summarises the association thus: ‘a one-sided focus on digital media becomes clear, in line with the orientation of the member companies, whose use is exclusively and fundamentally evaluated positively’ (ibid., p. 9). published in recent years, these in-depth analyses and articles are recommended on the topic of education, digitalisation, and the it economy: • annina förschler (2018) elaborated a critical and detailed policy network analysis on the 'who’s who?' of the german education digitalisation agenda. on the basis of a network ethnographic survey, it is shown that private-sector interests in the edtech industry are becoming increasingly closely linked to education policy programmes. the influence of various edtech actors is elaborated and detailed in particular using the example of the bündnis für bildung (bfb; engl.: alliance for education). • in a study on the economisation of school education, tim engartner (2020) analyses, among other things, how extremely lucrative sales markets are being created for it companies within the framework of the so-called 'digitalpakt schule'. engartner shows how digitalisation in schools has so far been shaped more by economic interests than by pedagogical concepts and how ministries have often 16 cf. imort/niesyto (2014), https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/grundbildungmedien-uebersicht/ and https://horst-niesyto.de/medienpaedagogische-grundbildung/ https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/grundbildungmedien-uebersicht/s https://horst-niesyto.de/medienpaedagogische-grundbildung/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 declared the application and usability of education for the labour market to be the standard of school teaching and learning processes. • sigrid hartong (2020) points out that a serious problem in the basic logic of digitalisation is the related datafication and algorithmisation of education. hartong states that a debate ‘about the powerful politics of modelling in educational software, school platforms, but also in school administration or school supervision software is so far almost completely missing’ – ‘and this although these systems increasingly influence decisions of educational actors’ (ibid.).17 • in an article, theo hug and reinhold madritsch (2020) first summarise the previous international discussion on education industry developments and then analyse the situation in austria. in their conclusion they state, among other things, that an ‘intensified support of the globalised education industry has taken place without broad public discussion’.18 they point out that there is much to be said against excessive outsourcing of the core tasks of the education system relevant to civil society and the rule of law to private service providers or tech companies (ibid., p. 35). antoni verger et al. (2017) present an analysis of the rise and consequences of a global education industry (gei), which describes new forms of private-sector, profit-oriented activities in education at the international level and explains this using selected examples (see also bernhard et al., 2018; münch, 2018). on the state of the development of googlefication of the classroom in the usa, natasha singer, among others, provides a (partial) insight into the state of commercialisation in the us education system: ‘the tech giant is transforming public education with low-cost lap tops and free apps (...) schools may be giving google more than they are getting: generations of future customers’ (singer, 2017). 17 translation by h.n.; original text (german): hartong konstatiert, dass eine debatte „um die machtvolle politik der modellierung bei lernsoftware, schulplattformen, aber auch bei schulverwaltungsoder schulaufsichtssoftware bislang fast vollständig’ fehlt – „und das, obgleich diese systeme in wachsendem maße entscheidungen von bildungsakteuren beeinflussen’ (ebd.). see also earlier publications on the subject area by sigrid hartong: https://www.hsu-hh.de/sozgov/team/prof-dr-sigrid-hartong/. a recent article presents a study on the implementation and transformation of state education monitoring systems in germany and the usa (hartong & förschler, 2020). 18 translation by h.n.; original text (german): ‘in ihrem fazit halten sie u.a. fest, dass eine „intensivierte förderung der globalisierten bildungsindustrie ohne breite öffentliche diskussion’ erfolgte’. see also the article by theo hug in this issue of seminar.net https://www.hsu-hh.de/sozgov/team/prof-dr-sigrid-hartong/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 strengthening alternative pathways and critical media education it is not only with regard to school education that the question arises of alternatives to the commercial offers of the large it corporations that are suitable for educational institutions and do not involve the constant expropriation of data. challenges are emerging here at various levels, including data protection issues, open access, and interoperability of systems. europe has enormous research and technology capacities – why is it not possible for hardware and software systems to be developed at eu level that offer a real alternative to the commercial offerings of the global it corporations in terms of usability which are at the same time compatible with local infrastructures? it also needs to be clarified how the quality of digital learning materials will be ensured in pedagogical contexts in the future. various actors need to be involved in this, especially pedagogical specialists and teachers, and also pupils and students – not only the providers of materials and representatives of state administration. this also applies to materials and platforms offered in the context of open educational resources (oer). quality assurance also includes a ban on advertising it industry products in public education institutions and various data protection issues. this requires, for example, data management systems that are compatible with the gdpr and whose compliance is also monitored (cf. hug & madritsch, 2020, p. 11 f.). and above all, there is a need for a basic media education for all pedagogical staff and in-depth studies in media education (cf. imort & niesyto, 2014). many fields of media education are still dominated by project-related funding and there is a structural lack of permanent staff positions. to overcome the situation of dependency on the system of ‘proprietary markets’ of digital capitalism (staab, 2019), political and legal framework conditions for global it corporations are necessary. this is not only about addressing the economic power structures of it corporations, but also the dependency structures that platform operators have now created via opaque algorithmic structuring of social relations and social communication (cf. dolata, 2020). at the same time, the development of democratic, public welfare oriented digital infrastructures and resource-saving processes beyond the commercial-capitalist exploitation interests of corporations is urgently needed. media and communication scientist robin mansell drew attention to the general need for dialogue on alternative pathways in connection with fundamental questions of the digital transformation: a dialogue is needed about possible alternative pathways, that is, alternative social imaginaries which themselves can start to shape action that leads to shifts in investment, in business models and in policies that will guide our choices about digital innovation pathways. (...) the ‘datafication’ of our lives is only a predetermined outcome if we persist in believing that it is (mansell, 2018, p. 61). digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 political forces that are not part of the education industrial complex should support the development at an eu level of an alternative infrastructure to the data capitalism of it corporations to be made available to public education as soon as possible. in this context, we need a discourse by society as a whole on the guiding principles of future social, economic, and media development – and also in its importance for the education system. for example, schools should open up substantially more new spaces for the experience of self-efficacy and for social participation and use the potential of digital media for this. it is a very important task of media education to participate in this discourse with a strong voice and to articulate its own proposals and demands. developing media education as a critical media and social analysis and at the same time as a subject-oriented, reflexive science of action and a pedagogical work area is not a contradiction. both are necessary: on the one hand, an orientation towards people, their needs, interests and ways of life, ambivalences, and contradictions is needed and on the other hand, the investigation of social media patterns and structures that influence people's perception, thinking and actions. it is necessary to strengthen a media-critical perspective as an elementary task of media pedagogy (niesyto & moser, 2018). in the following passage, i will outline three dimensions that, in my view, are primarily associated with 'media-critical'. first of all, it is about a critical-reflexive basic attitude (cf. niesyto, 2012, p. 48f., 59f.). the latin root of 'reflection' goes back to ‘reflexio’: to turn, to bend. to turn a thought and a position back and forth (re-flect), to put oneself in another position, to look at a situation from different perspectives is part of the standards of good education and science. this process of re-thinking is inseparably linked to the ability to criticise. the greek root of 'criticism' goes back to ‘krinein’: to distinguish, to decide, to separate. it is about distinguishing, comparing, evaluating facts, objects, actions. in the process of turning and comparing a thought, a thing, a situation (‘reflexio’) we discover differences. at the same time, we need criteria, standards for evaluating and classifying differences and for the question of what we decide (‘krinein’). the naming of criteria or standards is linked to norms and values, which are an important part of choice and evaluation processes. these processes are complex and also require (media) ethical reflections. it is not only a matter of conscious, rational considerations, but also of dealing with emotional-affective attitudes, unquestioned patterns of perception and behaviour, socialisation, and individual characters and dispositions. another dimension refers to the subject matter of media criticism. in an academic context, media criticism is a term used in various disciplines, especially in media and communication studies, journalism, and media education. media criticism in pedagogical contexts emphasises above all a quality-related analysis of social media offerings and reflection on one's own use, production, and communication with media. the broad spectrum of media-critical analyses and activities ranges from the analysis of stereotypical digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 images of roles and society in the media to the discovery of media sound and image manipulation possibilities in addition to reflexive phases in projects of active media work and the evaluation of various media products by children and young people, for instance in the context of film juries, reviews of computer games, or the evaluation of digital learning materials.19 in current discourses it becomes clear that media criticism in pedagogical contexts has additional requirements especially for well-founded data and technology criticism (e.g. dander, 2018a; iske et al., 2020; knaus, 2020) and of a critical analysis of media and society (e.g. niesyto, 2020). in this context, it is also about questions of social situations and educational inequality (permanently inadequate cultural, social, media, and economic resources), the explanation and reflection of normative orientations, and media criticism as part of a political-cultural and milieu-sensitive media education. for this, it is necessary to promote the ability of media criticism in a vivid and practical way in connection with one's own media productions – especially in structurally disadvantaged educational and social milieus (niesyto, 2017b, ch. 4-6; cf. also the approach 'digital citizenship', moser, 2018). finally, a critical media education is faced with the task of positioning itself more clearly again in the social context of education and professional policy (cf. niesyto, 2021). the goals and structures of profitand technology-driven digitalisation must be questioned, also in connection with differentiated technology impact assessments. media education should actively participate in this. many initiatives and fields of inquiry have developed to support education for sustainable development (esd). in german-language media education, there are currently contributions that also refer more strongly to these activities under media aspects (e.g. barberi et al., 2020; ring, 2020; schluchter, 2020). overall, it is about addressing social imbalances in the relationship between people, the economy, technology, culture, and nature, and about aspects of sufficiency in the production, use, and disposal of media as well as the development of alternative pathways to capitalist forms of digitalisation. for this, a broad alliance of media education with interested partners in as many areas as possible is essential to gain more attention and influence in the public and political sphere. without such a broad alliance, it will hardly be possible to realise sufficient infrastructural framework conditions for a considerably broader support of media education in the long term.20 at the european level, it would be desirable for media educators to become more involved in discourses and networks supporting alternative pathways (mansell, 2018) to the current 19 for theory, research and current discourses regarding media pedagogical media criticism, see niesyto (2020). see also a compact presentation on the net: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/medienkritik_(medienpädagogik). 20 see, among others, the demands and proposals of the initiative no education without media!: https://www.keinebildung-ohne-medien.de https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/medienkritik_(medienpädagogik) https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/ https://www.keine-bildung-ohne-medien.de/ digital capitalism and critical media education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 mainstream of strategies of digitalisation. in a report in the context of the corona crisis, williamson & hogon (2020) clearly make reference to a tension in view of increasing commercialisation in education: the shift in authority from the state to private actors might make sense on efficiency grounds, but also entails the undermining of democratic control of public education. (…) the commercial activities we have documented in this report indicate an emerging tension that will be at the core of any debates about education after the pandemic has passed: a tension over the very purposes of education, and of what knowledge or skills should be taught in schools to achieve those purposes. will this continued shift in authority to private actors further undermine democratic control of public education? (williamson & hogan, 2020, p. 66 f.) in this situation, it is an important task of scientists to articulate themselves publicly and, on the basis of a well-founded analysis, to oppose the increasing commercialisation in education and to participate in the development of alternative pathways. references altenrath, m., helbig, c., hofhues, s. 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https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation digital capitalism and critical media education abstract digital capitalism – selected aspects of analysis capitalistic structural principles digital structural principles affinity between digital and capitalistic structural principles digital capitalism – some challenges the advance of the it economy in the education sector strengthening alternative pathways and critical media education references a feminist critique to digital consent issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4291 ©2021 (elinor carmi). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. a feminist critique to digital consent elinor carmi university of liverpool email: elinor.carmi@liverpool.ac.uk abstract this paper presents a feminist critique to digital consent and argues that the current system is flawed. the online surveillance adtech industry that funds the web developed a mechanism that commodifies people, rendering their behaviors into data products that can be sold and traded for the highest bidder. this was made possible by objectifying, dehumanizing and decontextualizing human engagement and identity into measurable and quantifiable data units. in this context, digital consent serves as an authorizing and legalizing instrument to the exploitative business model of spying, selling and trading people in the online ecosystem. using four key feminist approaches process, embodiment, network and context this article shows the way digital consent is a mechanism that transfers responsibility to people and enables an exploitative-extractivist market to exist. the design of digital consent creates a specific interface that teaches people to behave in ways that preserve these asymmetric power relations. consequently, the article shows the broader educational impacts of digital consent, which conceive people as products with narrow agency and understanding of what they can do, think and imagine. the article concludes with a refusal to provide an easy solution to a flawed system. keywords: digital consent, feminist critique, surveillance capitalism, network, process, embodiment, context. introduction at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, advertisers quickly realized that audiences would not pay for internet content or services, and therefore moved to a different business model to fund the web, in which people’s behaviors would become the main currency (turow, 2012: 37). instead of paying to get content and services, people’s behavior would be measured, packaged as profiles/audiences and traded between different https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4291 a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 entities such as publishers, advertising networks and data brokers. all these procedures and online markets have been functioning in the backend, thanks to web browsers’ interface design and default settings, without people’s knowledge (carmi, 2020a). this new online and hidden market introduced new communication channels and ways to produce the body and how it behaves within these privatized spaces. to establish how this new relationship will be defined, operated and regulated, new types of contracts were introduced. an important type of contract to authorize this new business model was the digital consent mechanism, where people, mainly in the european union, had to indicate they consented to having ‘their data’ processed to be able to access free services. displayed in various ways, digital consent mechanisms ask people to express their agreement to being spied on throughout time, to the creation of multiple profiles by entities they are not familiar with and to being traded for the highest bidder in real-timebidding. as the sociologist zeynep tufekci argues in relation to the facebook cambridge analytica data exploitation incident: “given this confusing and rapidly changing state of affairs about what the data may reveal and how it may be used, consent to ongoing and extensive data collection can be neither fully informed nor truly consensual — especially since it is practically irrevocable” (2018). in other words, digital consent does not work for us, but it does work for the corporations that are involved in this online ecosystem. while legal, ethical and design academics have been debating on what is the best way to display and operationalize consent on different digital platforms and services, few have asked a much bigger question why do we have digital consent to begin with? this paper seeks to answer this question by using feminist critique to uncover the power asymmetries involved in digital consent. it highlights why cosmetic changes to digital consent in the shape of interface design will not change the problem. the article argues that design debates to create more ‘ethical’ consent mechanisms strengthen the current exploitative business model by legitimizing and normalizing the broken ecosystem that it relies on. the paper also focuses on how the architecture that has incorporated digital consent creates long-term consequences for the way people understand and think about data-driven technologies. in order to understand why digital consent is a flawed mechanism, i will use four key feminist approaches that will amplify how digital consent is used against people and not for people. these concepts are: process; embodiment; network; and contextuality. in the following sections, i first discuss what the political economy behind digital consent consists of, highlighting the design of the adtech online ecosystem and shoshana zuboff’s surveillance capitalism concept. in the next section, i highlight the debates of legal and design scholars around consent. here, i will show how within these fields the discussions and arguments operate within the normative boundaries of digital consent without questioning whether it is a suitable and legitimate tool. i then move to discuss the four key feminist concepts and how they help us to rethink digital consent and point to its a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 exploitative nature. next, i move to show what are the educational consequences of digital consent mechanisms. finally, i conclude by a call for action and refusal to consent to the current situation. the political economy of digital consent legally binding informed consent first appeared in 1957 in the biomedical field in the decision salgo v. leland stanford, where the court had to decide whether a patient was given the appropriate information before a medical procedure. as daniel lin and michael loui (1998) argue, by the 1970s and 1980s, different human rights groups from civic, gender and consumer spheres had included and promoted the issue of informed consent in their agenda. applying ‘consent’ as an ethical mechanism in different social relations is used to challenge the asymmetric power dynamic in different life spheres and give the individual more agency on choices that affect their bodies and lives. importantly, consent has been introduced in various spheres of life as a social-legal contract for people to have more control, agency and autonomy on their bodies and lives. from the 1990s, people’s lives have been augmented into the digital environment of the internet and world-wide-web. this also introduced new types of social relations which necessitated new types of contracts. during the 1990s, as mentioned above, a different business model started to emerge, in which people and their behaviors became the product, which can be characterized as surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2015) or data capitalism (myers-west, 2019). surveillance capitalism, as zuboff calls it, is a new type of information capitalism that aims to predict and change human behavior to produce revenue. one of the key stages that zuboff identifies is ‘extraction’ which is: a one-way process, not a relationship. extraction connotes a ‘taking from’ rather than either a ‘giving to,’ or a reciprocity of ‘give and take.’ the extractive processes that make big data possible typically occur in the absence of dialogue or consent, despite the fact that they signal both facts and subjectivities of individual lives. these subjectivities travel a hidden path to aggregation and decontextualization, despite the fact that they are produced as intimate and immediate, tied to individual projects and contexts (zuboff, 2015: 79). but how does this ‘extraction’ happen? and what type of relationship does this new adtech ecosystem create? when a person types the address of, for example, the guardian, the server of that publisher will send her the things that she asked for which will appear on her screen in the shape of images, texts and videos. but at the same time, and thanks to browsers’ default settings, the guardian’s server will also send her web-cookies. unlike the common definition of web-cookies as ‘just text files’, i argue elsewhere that they “are (bulk) communications conducted by non-human actors (users’ browsers and publishers or advertising networks) who ‘talk’ with each other about predefined ‘topics’ (specific behavior of people), and create ‘a flow of communication back and forth between that hard a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 drive and the website’s server” (carmi, 2017: 294). your behavior, preferences, location, broadband connection etc. become the message – the data – that is being communicated between your device and the server. this is all conducted at the backend of your screen, concealed behind nicely designed interfaces which make it impossible for you to know this is happening. in other words, the person becomes the message in an online market operating multiple silent communication channels trading and bidding her data in the backend of her screen. when cookies are sent from the server of the address that a person typed in the address bar they are called first party cookies, and when cookies are sent from other companies such as data brokers and advertising networks, they are called third party cookies. the amount of cookies sent to a person’s device is so huge it is hard to grasp, not one or two or even 10 companies, but rather hundreds and thousands of companies (for a good discussion and visualization check [christl, kopp, and riechert, 2017]). many people find it difficult to imagine what is happening to their data, but it is similar to hundreds of electrodes connected to a person’s body without their knowledge by companies they do not even know, that track, measure, record and store their every movement. the kind of ‘data’, or topics that are communicated on your behalf can be many types, like the browser you are using, your gender, location, age, religion, health, sexual orientation, musical preferences, what you do on multiple websites, apps and games and much more. all of this is happening in an ongoing process and it is not always clear how much of ‘you’ (data) is being communicated and for how long (carmi, 2020a). it is also not clear which parts of a person (rendered as data), are being used and how, by these companies when they store and trade you. in addition to using data extracted from people to create multiple profiles and audiences, these data brokers also bid on people and the type of content, connections and behaviors they should engage with through an online bidding system called real-time-bidding (carmi, 2020b). as zuboff argues, our subjectivities are converted into data objects that transform our subjective self into a commodity that can be packaged and repackaged as profiles and audience segmentations. as part of this conversion, there is a process that zuboff terms as an ‘un-contract’ because contracts move from the social context to a computer mediated process in which people are deprived from consensual participation, free will and protection of their rights. as david lyon argues, in surveillance capitalism “[t]here is no transaction with users or consumers, however. straight extraction is all that occurs at that level. the trade in data is entirely between large corporations” (lyon, 2019: 67). this extractive relationship also involves experimentations to modify people’s behavior with the intention to monetize these interventions for profit and control. similarly, data capitalism, as sarah myers-west argues, “places primacy on the power of networks by creating value out of the digital traces produced within them” (myers-west, a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 2019: 2). but it is not simply ‘traces’ which gives a passive sense of ‘leftover data’, as she argues, it is a special surveillance ecosystem designed to forcefully extract behaviors in a covert way. this novel form of capitalism relies on the monetization of productive intimacies between people and their machines. this new type of relationship creates asymmetric power where people provide both the labor and at the same time the currency/product of trade by being spied on continuously. in this new online economy, consent is meant to ‘empower’ and give us ‘control’ over ‘our’ data by indicating whether we agree or disagree to procedures of ‘processing’ of this data. processing, according to the european union’s general data protection regulation (gdpr) that came into force in 2018, “means any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organization, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction” (european parliament, 2016). as this definition shows, there are around 17 different procedures that processing can include and some of them can be conducted in conjunction with others. so, when we indicate that we ‘consent’ before we upload a webpage or use a service there are many possible procedures that can be applied to us. we also do not know which parts of us, which pieces of extracted data are being processed. the common argument is that if we just have the right amount of information about these processes we will be informed and act accordingly. as andrew mcstay argues: to give consent is to act. consent is not passive, but rather requires that people do something. this means that people must be informed and able to conceive an educated opinion so as to express will. without this there is no consent, but rather the application of force. in expressing will there is agency, volition, control, deliberateness and making something happen. to be devoid of understanding is to be unable to give proper consent (mcstay, 2013: 600). as mcstay highlights, without understanding what is happening to us in the online environment there is no consent, but rather – forcing us to participate. one of the problems is that we just do not have the capacities to understand what is happening in the backend. this is what mark andrejevic calls the big data divide which is created because “putting the data to use requires access to and control over costly technological infrastructures, expensive data sets, and the software, processing power, and expertise for analyzing them… the forms of ‘knowing’ associated with big data mining are available only to those with access to the machines, the databases, and the algorithms” (andrejevic, 2014: 1676). since most of us ‘regular’ people who use digital services and systems do not have these processing capacities, we simply cannot comprehend what can be done with the data extracted from our bodies and movements. in the next section i will outline the ways legal and design scholars have been debating ‘consent’, and especially what they have been a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 missing. “pro-choice” legal and design justifications of consent in the usa, the first broad recognition of consent within a privacy framework was the 1973 department of health, education, and welfare (hew) “fair information practice principles” (fipps) that were later adopted as part of the privacy act of 1974. in the european union, germany’s federal data protection act in 1977 and france’s data protection law from 1978 are considered to be the first iterations where consent is integrated within data processing laws. later on, consent was introduced in the 1995 data protection directive (95/46/ec) where it was defined as “any freely given specific and informed indication of his wishes by which the data subject signifies his agreement to personal data relating to him being processed” (european parliament, 1995). a few years later the definition of digital consent stayed the same in the e-privacy directive (2002/58/ec), which was a law that tried to regulate electronic communication. in 2018, the gdpr came into force and introduced new ways of operating consent, mainly requiring explicit consent through opt-in mechanisms which meant that inactivity or silence did not indicate consent. however, underlining this evolution is the fact that consent is about whether people agree to a specific communication about them, with data extracted from them, rather than communication between them, as the senders or receivers of messages (content). in other words, people became the message (data) and not the respondents of the digital/electronic communication. as the paragraph above shows, consent was mentioned in various eu laws, however, it is only in 2011, that the article 29 working party, an advisory body on data protection issues in the european union, provided a clearer definition of what consent means. according to them it has to be: freely given; informed; explicit; specific; informed; and unambiguous. this was framed under the notion that people gain control, agency, self-determination and autonomy by pressing a button that says ‘agree’. what these definitions illustrate is how western philosophy has influenced legal approaches to consent. they assume that with the right type of information, people will be informed and will have the freedom and control to express their autonomy by choosing the option that fits them. according to this approach, we all have the power and, at the same time, the responsibility to learn what is happening to the data extracted from us. however, as woodrow hartzog argues, “[e]ven users who attempt to educate themselves about websites' privacy policies often do not fully understand the policies and the powers they give websites regarding the use of personal information” (hartzog, 2010: 1647). as hartzog identifies, contracts that websites and services offer people are meant to protect the websites, and not the users. in this way, asymmetric power relations are created, and consent operates as an enabling a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 mechanism to this new type of exploitative relationship. legal scholars have been debating what the meaning of consent is in the digital environment and its validity, for more than two decades, mainly in the context of privacy laws. many scholars argue that the current legal system is problematic and insufficient for various reasons, such as the length of policies, the complex language, the inability to assess risk in these situations, and the limitations of real choice (cate and mayer-schönberger, 2013; acquisti et al., 2015; borgesius, 2015). as chris hoofnagle argues, “whether consent is manifested through visiting a website or the millisecond action of clicking on a box, we know it is a contrived exercise” (hoofnagle, 2018: 163). adding to this, solon barocas and helen nissenbaum have said more explicitly that consent is a deception: “commonly perceived operational challenges have distracted from the ultimate inefficacy of consent as a matter of individual choice and the absurdity of believing that notice and consent can fully specify the terms of interaction between data collector and data subject” (barocas and nissenbaum, 2014: 45). so, what is consent for? as barocas and nissenbaum argue, the discussions around consent are centered around the ‘operational challenges’; legal scholars mainly debate which elements of the law should change to make privacy laws more effective and efficient. daniel solove (2012) calls this the ‘consent dilemma’, which is the problem of trying to find a version of consent that protects privacy but avoids paternalistic solutions which might limit people’s choices even further. as julie cohen adds: meaningful consent requires meaningful notice, but the information provided about data collection, processing, and use tends to be vague and general. equally important, such disclosures tend to conflate important distinctions between remembering users’ preferences, creating predictive profiles that may also include other, inferred data, using those preferences for target marketing, and tracking users across multiple websites, devices, and location (cohen, 2019a: 4). along with issues around how consent should be applied to make sure people’s rights can be protected, the bigger issue seems to be the huge difference between formal laws and how things are conducted in practice. as alexandra giannopoulou identifies, “there is a discrepancy between the formal requirements of the law and the practices observed in real life applications of data protection” (giannopoulou, 2020: 4). in other words, many companies do not respect the laws that aim to protect people’s rights, and at the same time, digital consent mechanisms act as legally binding contracts that force people to participate in this extractivist datafied ecosystem without understanding what it means. some of the solutions offered by legal scholars have been: to move away from framing this new relationship as a type of free transaction to an exchange of value which preserves consumer protections (hoofnagle and whittington, 2014), separates the notice from consent (susser, 2019), and provides more transparency and alternative disclosures a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 (bruening and culnan, 2015). but these design solutions, along with the regulatory interventions such as gdpr, do not attend to the core issue of the exploitative business model and the deceptive ecosystem that enables it.1 some of the design biases that are part of digital consent revolve around problematic interface design and default setting, what is often called ‘dark patterns’. this can be whether the default setting of consent is opt-in or opt-out, or interface designs such as misleading wording, hiding away privacy-friendly choices, take-it-or-leave-it choices, preselected choices, or making privacy friendly options require more effort (forbrukerrådet, 2018; nouwens et al., 2020; gray et al., 2021). such design manipulations can constrain, restrict, nudge, shape, manage and construct how we behave on these digital spaces. as ari waldman (2018) argues, “our freedom is constrained by the design of the interface, the capacities of the server, and the platform's data use practices. and when we try to understand a website's privacy policy, we are similarly constrained by the way it is framed, presented, and designed” (waldman, 2018: 99). as waldman emphasizes, design configures people. when design serves and enables a specific business model, then any change made will still produce similar outcomes. design also flattens experience into a singular option, disregarding people’s levels of literacy which are influenced by their backgrounds, education, age, socio-economic status, physical and mental abilities and emotional state (carmi et al., 2020). the gdpr was supposed to provide citizens more power to object, contest and gain control over their personal data. for example, ‘article 21 the right to object’ is supposed to enable people to refuse the processing of their personal data, including common practices used by digital advertisers such as profiling. but how can you object to something when you do not understand how your data can be used to harm you? in order to object, people first need to know what data are, how they can be used and when, which companies are involved in this process, for how long people’s data can be used and for what purposes and more. in the next section, i will show how key feminist concepts reveal how digital consent is flawed. feminist critique in this section i present a feminist critique of the arguments outlined above about digital consent. i will focus on four feminist concepts to show that digital consent does not work for people but reproduces power asymmetries where people have no chance against technology companies. this critique is a larger critique of the way the online ecosystem is theorized and rationalized by legal and technical discourses, but specifically how consent has been used to authorize and legitimize exploitative and harmful practices to make the 1 however, a few legal scholars recognise this, such as julie cohen (2019), lilian edwards (edwards & veale, 2017), michael veale (veale, binns & ausloos, 2018), seda gürses (gürses, overdorf & balsa, 2018), and jef ausloos (2020). a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 current business model work. therefore, this critique is aimed at uncovering the systemic and institutional power asymmetries and how they harm people. feminist technoscience, cyberfeminists and posthuman feminists have been examining topics of the politics of knowledge production, science and technology, embodiment, digital spaces and information systems for decades. however, as the dominant discourses of science and law are still dominated by western theories of epistemology and ontology, feminist approaches have remained in the fringes. in order to show how digital consent is flawed, i will demonstrate how four key feminist concepts process, embodiment, context, and network counter the dominant discourses about digital consent. 1. process feminist technoscience scholars such as donna haraway (1988), rosi braidotti (2002) and karen barad (2003) have developed ‘process-based’ philosophies, each one in a different way. for example, braidotti (2002) calls this ‘becoming’ while barad (2003) calls this ‘performativity’ or ‘agential realism’. broadly speaking, they argue that different ontologies and epistemologies are not fixed but rather an ongoing process of being (co)produced. they reject fixity and essentialism and show the politics of the way different things come to matter. so instead of having clearly bounded boundaries of things like western philosophy often argues, feminist technoscience show that processes of making a distinction between fundamental categories we know such as human, nonhuman, machine and animal are not as clear cut as we were led to believe. digital consent is usually prompted by a banner, pop up window or other features which require people to indicate if they agree or not to processing of ‘their data’. the opportunity to express consent or rejection is presented at the beginning of the communication between people and different services and spaces. consent is presented to us as a one-time indication of agreement or disagreement of procedures conducted on our bodies. but just like when consent is applied in sexual contexts, this is not a one-time expression, but an ongoing process of negotiation. i can say i want to have sex with someone at the beginning of a date and change my mind after two hours. unlike sexual contexts, the type of communication, the architecture where it is happening in, the time of the ‘event’, and the actors involved are different. this is because, as i discussed above, i do not know who i am communicating with because i am the message. the gdpr does provide eu citizens the ability to access (article 15), object (article 21), correct (article 16) and erase (article 17) their data, but these actions can only be initiated after the person has already started the ‘communication’ and their data has been extracted, stored, packaged and repackaged. importantly, i do not know the dozens and hundreds of companies that are communicating ‘me’. these actions require people to know and understand what is happening to them to begin with. it requires knowledge, time and resources, which might take months if not years before their local data protection a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 authority will provide an answer. portrayed as ‘empowerment’, these rights actually put the burden on people to challenge the default settings of the digital consent process. this new ecosystem produces two separate processes: one which is fast and easy-to-use interface designs to extract, sell and bid for our data, and the other offers laborious and complicated procedures as well as time and resources constrained to challenge them. this is how power imbalances are produced. the problem is that we do not even know which part of us is being extracted and how it can be assembled and reassembled through other databases created by other data brokers. therefore, demanding changes to our data becomes a challenging task when our sense of what this data entails is unclear. as julie cohen argues, “[s]elfhood is a process, not a state, and that process is discursive and social; it is informed by a sense of the self as viewed from the perspective of others. interactions with automated logics disrupt processes of self-formation because the others whose perspective must be assimilated are so alien that their perspective cannot be imagined” (cohen, 2019b: 10). importantly, the temporal aspects of this communication process are unknown because it does not have a clear beginning and end. facebook, for example, was revealed as continuing to spy on people whether they had a subscription or not, whether they were logged into the platform or not, and whether or not people had asked to opt out of cookies. facebook is not alone, many other companies send cookies that continue to communicate people’s behaviors without their knowledge. as johnny ryan shows (2019), during real-time-bidding there is what he calls ‘data leakage’ which means that companies receive different data (us) during the bidding process even if they do not win the bid. that means that multiple companies continue to communicate data with different companies, and assemble a richer database of our profiles/segments. this goes far beyond the moment of arrival to a website or service and spans over an unknown amount of time during which we are traded continuously and within milliseconds. in addition, as i show above, the definition of ‘processing’ entails around 17 different practices, some are conducted simultaneously but in different times. so, although digital consent is presented to us as a single ‘event’, it actually involves multiple events that are happening continuously with actors we are not aware of and for purposes we are not aware of, or can understand. what these practices show is that unlike the premise of digital consent, this is not a ‘regular contract’, we “are forced to take an oversimplified binary option between agree or disagree, while the latest ultimately means opting for some level of digital exclusion” (peña and varon, 2019: 13). it is an ongoing process whereby people are given only one chance to express agreement to processing activities that are happening continuously. a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 2. embodiment one of the big confusions around the online ecosystem and specifically digital consent is around the relationship between us and the data that is extracted from us through surveillance mechanisms such as web-cookies. feminist technoscience scholars have always challenged rigid and fixed categories, especially of the body. as karen barad argues, “’[h]uman bodies’ and ‘human subjects’ do not preexist as such; nor are they mere end products. ‘humans’ are neither pure cause nor pure effect but part of the world in its openended becoming” (2003: 821). what she means is that there is no clear distinction between our biological bodies and computer simulation, or in our case data that is extracted from our behaviors, preferences and interactions. similarly, posthuman feminists like katherine hayles (1999) have been arguing that the human and posthuman are co-created and are always in the process of becoming. coming from the field of literature, she has been arguing that there are no clear distinctions between science and science fiction and that both feed into each other and co-create one another. as she argues “[t]he posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (hayles, 1999: 3). a good example for this is that there is no clear distinction between ‘being online’ and ‘being offline’. even if i am drinking with friends at a pub, my phone is still connected to twitter, facebook, my email and other digital environments, i am never really ‘offline’. the current datafied ecosystem has augmented our bodies in ways we cannot comprehend. one of the greatest achievements of the surveillance capitalism project was the ability to distance people from their data and dehumanize it to make it seem separate from us. “data is the new oil” is a slogan that has been promoted in various places such as the publisher forbes (bhageshpur, 2019) and government bodies such as the european parliament (2020). the separation of humans from the data extracted from them is a necessary step to turn them into objects and then products. in this way, people do not fully understand that when governments and businesses talk about the economic potential of ‘data’, this means spying, measuring and trading them. as koen leurs argues, many big data discourses reflect positivism and disembodiment, however, “aggregate data is still connected to embodied experience, even though there is the claim that it is removed from identity and personal meaning-making” (leurs, 2017: 132). data are us, our stories and our contextual experiences – even if many times they do not accurately represent who we are, what we think and what we want – they are still part of us. setting commitments for feminist data studies, the feminist data manifest-no scholars argue that they “refuse to understand data as disembodied and thereby dehumanized and departicularized. we commit to understanding data as always and variously attached to bodies; we vow to interrogate the biopolitical implications of data with a keen eye to gender, race, sexuality, class, disability, nationality, and other forms of embodied a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 difference” (cifor et al., 2019). but while data are us, they are only part of us; we do not equal our data. because when companies extract data from us, they take away the context it was performed in; it moves away from the history, culture, and social dynamics that made this behavior or preference meaningful to us (lupton, 2020). and precisely this dehumanization and disembodiment make data portable, an exchangeable currency in the adtech ecosystem. 3. contextual the reduction of our human lives into data that can be moved and traded also involves taking data out of context. because if data is out of context that means that it can be moved, used and applied in different contexts and importantly traded between different companies for different purposes. donna haraway (1988) argues that feminist technoscience wants to reveal the biases in scientific truth claims which are universal and presented as objective. as she argues “[f]eminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. it allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see” (haraway, 1988: 583). importantly, haraway calls for situated, embodied knowledges and partial perspectives, while going against irresponsible knowledge claims, those that cannot be called into account. continuing haraway’s project, feminist data scholars catherine d'ignazio and lauren klein (2020) call this big dick data, which are “big data projects that are characterized by masculinist, totalizing fantasies of world domination as enacted through data capture and analysis. big dick data ignore context, fetishize size, and inflate their technical and scientific capabilities” (d'ignazio and klein, 2020:151). the surveillance adtech ecosystem relies on big dick data, companies like google and facebook use different tracking mechanisms on a global scale to continuously track people on multiple digital platforms and services. they extract data to create and infer profiles and segments that are then traded in multiple places globally. big dick data needs consent to disregard your contextual preferences. while media scholars have been pointing out the complexities of context (marwick and boyd, 2011) what they mainly talk about is the type of communication, i.e. content, conducted by people in various places, for example when people tweet and do not expect strangers to read or use that. however, when we talk about digital consent the discussion is around how pieces of us are being used in contexts that we do not know about. that could be taking some data about us from facebook and then applying it in health insurance assessment conducted by our employers without our knowledge. so if you searched on google’s search engine for cancer, that information can then be used to assess what type of health insurance you should get, and if you might be considered as a health risk for a company and therefore should not be hired in the first place. this type of communication uses you as the message, but the communication is not between you and your employer, it a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 is between the insurance company, your employer and possibly several data brokers that have combined data about you that they thought would be relevant to them. one of the main media law scholars to discuss this issue is helen nissenbaum (2004) who argues for ‘contextual integrity’. as she argues, there are two types of informational norms: norms of appropriateness and norms of flow or distribution, and contextual integrity is maintained when both of the norms are being followed, and they are violated when one of them is not followed. norms of appropriateness “dictate what information about persons is appropriate, or fitting, to reveal in a particular context” (nissenbaum, 2004: 138) while norms of flow or distribution govern “movement, or transfer of information from one party to another or others” (ibid: 140). when it comes to data brokers, however, nissenbaum’s analysis seems to be problematic, how can there even be contextual information norms when the multiple contexts we are applied in are unknown to us? in a later account, barocas and nissenbaum argue about data that “because its value is not always recognized at collection time, it is difficult to predict how much it will travel, how much it will be in demand, and whether and how much it may be worth. in the language of contextual integrity, unless recipients and transmission principles are specified, the requirements of big data are for a blank check” (barocas and nissenbaum, 2014: 59). in other words, because we do not know which pieces of our data (us) companies use in multiple contexts, in multiple times and purposes we simply cannot know when informational flows are appropriate or maintain the norms of distribution. context matters, but when the adtech ecosystem decontextualizes and dehumanizes us it becomes impossible to apply norms that are appropriate to us, and instead, norms are enforced on us. 4. network one of the reasons people in the european union are required to give their consent to begin with is that there was an artificial line drawn between personal data and nonpersonal data. this division means that certain types of data are categorized as personal, and these are defined according to gdpr’s article 4(1): ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person (european parliament, 2016). feminists have long been arguing that the division between private (the personal) and public (not personal) was part of social constructions. the lines drawn between what are private and public spaces or bodies and what can be done in and on them, therefore, is highly political and influenced by social conventions. but while many feminists advocated a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 for an understanding that the “private is public” (mackinnon, 1989: 191), what we see in the online space is more complex. as i argue elsewhere, the new business model that the digital advertising industry created “required that only specific spaces and activities that would be dedicated for direct financial transactions will be private, such as email and paying for online shopping. the rest of the spaces that will yield indirect revenue for funding the web through advertising will be public and, therefore, not private” (carmi, 2020a: 136). this means that in the online ecosystem everything is personal. the situation in the online environment is different because the types of data that we produce overtly, or that are extracted from us covertly, leave multiple types of data points across multiple places from apps, to web and games. if we take our argument about embodiment to mean that different things that we do on mediated spaces are part of us, our bodies and identities, then even if these are specific pieces of us, they are still part of us, and hence identifiable and personal. therefore, when cookies, pixels and other spying mechanisms are sent to be attached to our bodies and communicate our activities to entities we do not know, they understand who we are and, importantly also our networks. as de montjoye et al. (2015) show, people can be identified with very few data points. other scholars like paul ohm (2009) have been arguing that we are never really anonymous and that true anonymization is not possible. going back to the gdpr definition of ‘personal’ data i would argue that since just a few data points can identify a person that makes all of our activities personal because they can be linked to us. as journalist shoshana wodinsky (2021) argues: any of these data points aren’t necessarily going to be tied to me, shoshana, because they don’t have to be to make other people money. what this data is tied to might be something like my computer’s unique ip address or my phone’s mobile ad identifier, which are, on their own, anonymous. but even that particular data point isn’t truly worth that much— advertisers, on a day-to-day basis, are looking at my data (and yours) as it’s aggregated with data from an untold number of other people. a person’s individual “data,” on its own, is pretty much worthless; after all, marketers can’t guarantee that i’ll be clicking on a given ad or buying the product they’re selling. what is valuable is when that data’s in aggregate, even if it’s “anonymized” and not tied to any one individual. the cambridge analytica case from 2016 is a great example of how the datafied ecosystem provides corporations power through networks of people. the company managed to reach more people thanks to facebook’s api that enabled app developers to extract the data of people’s friends. in addition, the company also used multiple datasets and combined them to create profiles. whether or not the campaign was successful is beside the point, the key take-away from that case is that different data that are extracted from people’s profiles and actions in various places are aggregated and analyzed, including their peers, family, colleagues and friends. in fact, many apps and games these days ask to get ‘access’ to your contacts, from linkedin, facebook, spotify and even pokémon go, and some of them even a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 ask you to ’find your friends’, which means you upload your contact list – your friends’ ‘personal data’ – to an unknown database. so pieces of you in various places may not mean anything in the particular context that they were expressed, but put together with other data aggregated from multiple places and corporations can gather or infer a profile on you, and from that produce similar audiences. therefore, the artificial distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘non-personal’ data, is wrong and ignores the affordances of computational processes that spy, aggregate, combine and recombine us and our networks in endless ways and within a millisecond. educating for consent now that we understand that digital consent is flawed, the next question is what are the consequences of this on people? it is difficult to establish what the impact of digital consent is, because people’s experiences vary according to their cultures, histories, socioeconomic and education backgrounds, emotions, cognitive and body abilities. all these factors and more influence the way people understand, interpret and behave, and therefore it is impossible to isolate consent from people’s experiences. but what we can do is show the accumulated effect on people; what this type of online ecosystem means in the broader sense. i will illustrate this through two main effects that show how consent limits what we do, think, understand and imagine: narrowing our agency; and surveillance realism. in the first case, we can see that through the false narrative of control, people’s agency has been narrowed. as robert gehl (2014) shows, this was an intentional strategy by the digital advertising industry who portrayed us as the ‘sovereign interactive consumer’ a free and autonomous self-manager who has the power to be educated about the ‘right’ choices on the internet. according to this logic, we have the power to know and understand what is the business model, how companies extract us into data and then trade us and then we can, if we choose to, change the privacy setting and use the gdpr to change how our data has been used. however, as gehl argues, if you decide you do not want to learn and educate yourself about these things this is considered as your fault, and the digital advertising industry will not help you. in this way, as lindsay weinberg (2017) argues, the responsibility is placed on people to “perform autonomous self-management and cultivate the skills and literacy necessary for determining whether to engage with certain services and platforms” (weinberg, 2017: 10). as becky kazansky argues, this kind of transferring the responsibility to people is known as ‘responsiblization’, and it encourages “an emphasis on the individual as the primary locus of responsibility for protection from harm… [and has] the convenient effect of deflecting attention from its causes” (kazansky, 2015). in this way, digital consent is used as a mechanism that transfers data and hence profits to companies while shifting the responsibility of harm to the citizens and this is how the power asymmetries are drawn, a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 enacted and preserved. as i argue elsewhere, digital consent: naturalizes and normalizes digital advertising and technology companies’ terms of use for their technologies and services. it teaches people the boundaries (actions and spaces) that they can operate in… it also marks the boundaries of what people can demand and expect from commercial actors and state regulators. this signals that what people could do on the web was not open for discussion, negotiations or multiple options (carmi, 2020a: 161). this leads us to the second effect: because people understand that their choices on the internet happen within the remit of the business model of surveillance capitalism it is hard for them to imagine the world without it. digital consent helps cement this business model as the only way and overrides possible alternatives. it helps normalize surveillance and actively construct it as inevitable, what lina dencik (2018) calls surveillance realism. as she argues, it restricts and regulates the public’s thoughts and actions. this means that people have come to accept and ‘give up’ or ‘resign’ (draper and turow, 2019) in trying to resist or create different narratives and realities in relation to surveillance, despite concerns and fears over the mass coercive collection and processing of their data. at the same time, people also consider surveillance as normal and start spying on their friends, romantic partners and employees in what is called ‘social surveillance’ (marwick, 2012). importantly, this normalization of surveillance has limited and prevented discussions of alternative ways of thinking about the online ecosystem. conclusion – refusing to consent in this article i argue that digital consent is flawed. i show this by using four key feminist concepts – process, embodiment, context and network. i argue that the new adtech ecosystem introduced new kinds of communication systems where we are the ‘message’. we are communicated between different companies that send various spying technologies to be attached to our bodies and continuously extract more data about what we do, where, when, and with whom. instead of a one-time event, surveillance capitalism operates multiple procedures in an ongoing process with our embodied data by dehumanizing and decontextualizing us to package and repackage us in various networks. this paper does not intend to offer an easy solution or ‘fix’ this, but rather refuse to acknowledge that this works for us. by doing so, i use what postcolonial feminists call ‘refusal’ to consent to the current situation. as audra simpson (2017) argues in relation to colonialism and the ruse of consent, settler governments forced indigenous people to sign treaties that were not signed under equal conditions. these agreements, as she says, meant that recognition was bound with consent and legally transferred rights to lands, resources and jurisdictions to settler governments. however, “’[r]efusal’ rather than recognition is an option for producing and maintaining alternative structures of thought, politics and traditions away from and in a feminist critique to digital consent seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 critical relationship to states” (simpson, 2017: 19). but since today’s big technology companies are bigger and more powerful than states, i choose refusal and apply it in the context of the exploitative surveillance adtech ecosystem they created and manage. as i demonstrate in this article, although legal and design scholars agree that digital consent is problematic, they nevertheless reaffirm the current asymmetric power relations by offering ‘solutions’ that will try and make it work. these cosmetic changes do nothing to challenge the power imbalance and, if anything, harm people further in educating them to understand that their life is an inseparable part of surveillance realism. i refuse this type of thinking that pretends to empower people by providing them ‘freedom of choice’, because what is actually happening is narrowing, limiting and controlling people’s agency, understanding, and imagination. i refuse easy answers to structural problems, and i invite you to join me in refusing to accept the current system. references acquisti, a., brandimarte, l., & loewenstein, g. 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(2015). big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. journal of information technology, 30(1), 75-89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipy002 https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.258 https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650317718185 https://gizmodo.com/anonymized-data-is-meaningless-bullshit-1841429952 https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5 abstract introduction the political economy of digital consent “pro-choice” legal and design justifications of consent feminist critique 1. process 2. embodiment 3. contextual 4. network educating for consent conclusion – refusing to consent references global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4254 ©2021 (theo hug & reinhold madritsch). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria theo hug university of innsbruck theo.hug@uibk.ac.at reinhold madritsch university college of teacher education tyrol reinhold.madritsch@ph-tirol.ac.at abstract digitization initiatives in the field of education always correspond with developments in the education industry. in recent years, globally networked development dynamics have emerged that are essentially characterized by an education-industrial complex and are also relevant in austria. while on the one hand the corona-induced developmental boosts of 'digital' education are welcomed, especially in edtech contexts, on the other hand the international discourses on the problematic role of the global education industry can no longer be ignored. this contribution ties in with these discourses and explores the current state of affairs in austria as regards formal education in schools. the lack of alternatives to an innovation path, which is often suggested by industry, education policy and education technology, is questioned. keywords: digitization, global education industry, education-industrial complex, digital capitalism, information privacy, surveillance capitalism https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4254 global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 introduction1 even before the corona crisis, calls for the “digitization of education” and “digital education” were so ubiquitous that the assumption of an educationalization formula (veith, 2003) suggests itself in view of the current societal problems of reproduction and the technological and media-cultural transformation processes. such calls are usually based on a very broad concept of digitization2 which refers to various changes of processes, things and events directly or indirectly related to the spread and increasing use of digital technological systems. a search for a differentiated definition of the relationship between dynamics of digitization, mechanization (technisierung), algorithmization, datafication, medialization, mediatization, mathematization, economization, optimization or educationalization in educational research will be in vain. such definitions seem to be made unnecessary by a diffuse concept of digitization which does not only emphasize the technical dimensions but also different dynamics of learning, education, media, society and culture. the casualness that often informs references to “digital education” and “digital competences” goes hand in hand with tendencies of (1) attributing digital features to arbitrary phenomenal domains and (2) the reduction of communicative, pedagogical and didactic processes to their representation in digital technical systems as well as (3) fictional assumptions of the extensive availability of processes of learning and education. since the corona crisis began, neither the reductionist tendencies nor the widespread orientation on the primacy of technological responsibilities and the correspondingly saturated discursive contexts have seen much change. on the contrary, the hopes that the claims for innovation in connection to “electronic” learning in education, frequently disappointed in the past, might finally be realized on a large scale were fueled. programs, strategies and initiatives of digitization are expected to be implemented in the area of education immediately so that up-to-date and functional forms of online learning and distance learning can become a reality. moreover, everybody involved should be adequately prepared in case of another lockdown. at least, the corona-induced short-term solutions at schools and universities provide reasons and motives, not only in educational policy, to promote improved technological solutions and develop optimized educational offers. application-oriented learning technology research and not least the education industry are also looking for solutions to the complex challenges. there is no need to argue that it is not viable in the long run to maintain the improvising handling of digitization topics and digital tools in educational contexts. furthermore, it is far from our intention to criticize the many honest efforts to find ad hoc solutions in difficult situations, which advise a certain modesty in view of the structural connections 1 a german version of this chapter has been published as “globale bildungsindustrie – erkundungen zum stand der dinge in österreich“. medienimpulse, 58(4), 2020, pp. 1-47. 2 a narrow concept of digitization, on the other hand, refers to processes of modelling, formalization and algorithmization for the purpose of generating, editing and storing digital representations. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 and technical challenges and for lack of established offers of training and further education in the area of media competence. instead, we want to focus on exploring and critically reflecting on some education-industrial developments which are not sufficiently discussed in austria as well as internationally. in recent years, globally networked development dynamics have emerged which are essentially characterized by an education-industrial complex and which are relevant in austria as well. this contribution ties in with international discourses on the problematic part played by the global education industry and explores the status quo in austria.3 the conclusion will question the lack of alternatives to an innovation path which is often suggested by industry, education policy and education technology. well-known tendencies of economization and recent education-industrial developments considerations on the economization of education are far from new. some may remember debates in the 20th century that criticized the commodification of education. since the 1970s, views of education as a commodity and a market, up to the instrumentalization of education for the market and the purchasability of education have been discussed time and again (cf. for example lith, 1985; krüger & olbertz, 1997; reheis, 2004). apart from the fact that, from a historical point of view, questions of the usefulness and serviceability of education have been relevant at least since antiquity (töchterle, 2009) and not only since the proliferation of human capital theories (diebolt, hippe, & jaoul-grammare, 2017), the promotion of autonomy and self-determination in action contexts conceived for their own sake was occasionally regarded as no less unduly simplified than vice versa the various fictions of the predictability of education on the basis of reducing people to factors of microeconomic calculation. as far as the situation of the education industry and its criticism is concerned (bernhard et al., 2018), there are definitely consistencies with a view to current developments, not least when it comes to the use of progressive vocabularies. “the reactionary education-positivism, which wants to develop an education industry comparable to the other sectors and in doing so uses a deceptive progressive vocabulary, indicates the possibility of a relapse from a painfully achieved freedom into the natural history of humankind.” (heydorn, 1980, p. 58) similar to the education-related discourses in ict, digitization discourses also contain rhetorics of innovation (haugsbakk & nordkvelle, 2007) which address socially relevant learning, future-oriented education and market-relevant employability at the same time. expressions like creativity, selfdetermination, critical thinking, media ethics and media 3 similar studies have been done, for example, by förschler (2018; 2021) as regards germany and, in this special issue, by haugsbakk (2021) with reference to developments in norway. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 education can also be found in definitions of “digital education” and “digital competences”. however, argumentative details of the corresponding specialist discourses are not usually taken into consideration. on the other hand, the present developments and technocratic reforms go far beyond what was possible in the 20th century education industry in terms of the production and distribution of materials or the influence of educational politics. the complex dynamics of the interconnection of market logics and media logics as well as the possibilities for enforcing global strategies in the 21st century also offer new scopes for the education industry. the same is true for the options of smallsized surveillance and the monitoring of communication processes and, not least, the monetization of digital interfaces. additionally, new developments in mathematics allow for, among other things, an interplay of educationand data-positivism that would have been impossible in the learning technology of the 20th century. the same applies to the interconnection of formal and informal contexts of learning in digital capitalism. wide parts of the digitization industries rely on instrumental logics of digital innovation and transformation, generally spreading suggestions that there are no alternatives to the path of innovation, and these suggestions need to be challenged (mansell, 2018). this holds true not only for learning and education, but also for other socially relevant areas, especially since the concurrent efforts to render contingencies invisible only highlight the need for clarification and reflection. since digitization functions in this context – like in many others as well – as a universally adaptable, rhetorical and technological “transmission belt”, as it were, we are well advised to take into account not only the transformative developments of media, social, cultural, educational and technological constellations, but also the education-industrial complex which corresponds with these developments. this task is relevant not least because, along with the corona-induced short-term solutions, medium-term and long-term developments were initiated in the area of education as well (williamson & hogan, 2020). parts of the “masterplan digitization” (bmbwf, 2018), aiming at “incorporating changes that result from the advancing digitization gradually and, above all, comprehensively in the austrian educational system” (ibid.), were implemented this year, earlier than planned. aside from the heroic gesture embodied in this plan,4 the question is as to which education-industrial developments are relevant in this context. 4 a differentiated examination of the concept of “masterplan” should include reminders of earlier uses of this term in the context of urban planning, synonymously used terms such as “framework planning” or “development planning” but also religious meanings (“his or her master’s voice“) and ai-related expressions in science fiction offers (“its masters voice“). global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the education-industrial complex – components and strategies the term ‘bildungsindustrieller komplex’ is used quite rarely in german, and only recently in a prominent way (münch, 2018). according to our research, the english equivalent, ‘education-industrial-complex‘ (eic) was coined much earlier by anthony picciano (1994) with reference to dwight d. eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation on january 17, 1961, in which the outgoing american president voiced his concerns in view of a “disastrous rise of misplaced power“ (eisenhower, 1961) and antidemocratic developments by means of the pointed expression “military-industrial complex“. not coincidentally, picciano used the term ‘education-industrial complex‘ in connection with the increasing application of digital technologies in schools, which he still saw in its infancy even though he stated there were already networks and alliances between media companies, suppliers of education technologies and producers of hardand software (see also picciano, 2008). he predicted that they would increasingly interact in the following decade and become a force to be reckoned with (picciano & spring, 2013). picciano and spring (2013) essentially characterize the eic by three components which are closely related and partly overlap: ideology, profit and technology. as for the concept of ideology, they basically have a critical take on the free-market ideology. for the purpose of this article, we consider ideologies as bundles of ideas, beliefs, values and practices as well as hegemonic strategies of both immunization and enforcement. as there are no data in this regard for austria, we want to provide a provisional overview in an initial approach along the lines of these three components. ideology austria’s public schools are subject to the state curricula specified by the federal ministry of education, science and research (bundesministerium für bildung, wissenschaft und forschung, bmbwf). private schools are granted public status by the bmbwf as long as they “offer the guarantee for instruction in accordance with the regulations and satisfying the requirements of the austrian school system” (bmbwf, 2004). thus, private schools are also bound to the curricula of the bmbwf and can only operate within the pedagogic freedom of teaching, but not fundamentally deviate. “it is the teachers’ task to enable the individual students to reach the goals determined by the curriculum by appropriately planning and designing instruction” (bmbwf, 2020e, para. 1). consequently, the approximately 1,000 private schools in austria that hold public status (bmbwf, 2020h) do not have the possibility to write their own curricula and oblige corresponding regulations in the practice of teaching. this seems to be an obstacle for the companies involved in the eic to let their ideology become effective in regard to the training, further education and the use in the classroom. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 nevertheless, the big international players have a cultural interest, not to be underestimated in economic terms, to lastingly position their products and services in schools and administrations. with a view to reaching economic business goals, they pursue different strategies which their public communication presents as beneficial for students and essential for protecting social wealth by using pedagogical framings of the activities and measures. what seems interesting here is the recommendation by the bmbwf to use digital technology in schools that was included in a message to all state education authorities, supervisory boards for schools and subjects and to the schools themselves. “the federal ministry of education, science and research, being responsible for maintaining federal schools, provides federal schools with centrally acquired software licenses for education on devices owned by the school. this concerns the following areas in particular: operating system and office applications, for example ms-ach (microsoft) software for vocational schools, or technical and commercial software (mathcad, 3dcad, mesonic, bmd, sap etc.)” (strohmeyer, 2018) looking at the big players on this market, we can roughly distinguish four parallel strategies that they use to position themselves and their products. through direct marketing, their activities are addressed either (1) immediately at students or (2) indirectly by way of the parents and teachers. indirectly, the companies try to reach the schools (3) through conventional advertising or (4) through lobbying with the federal ministry. moreover, in the wake of the big international providers there is a gathering of national for-profit and non-profit institutions, service providers, publishers etc. who also follow their veritable goals. they frequently do so by following the strategies of the big players, as figure 1 illustrates regarding practice tests for mos certifications by a national publisher of schoolbooks. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 figure 1 practice tests for mos certification (source: tecomp, 20205) the explanation of routines in working with commercial digital technical products is also the focus of #weiterlernen6, a joint initiative of the bmbwf and the innovationsstiftung für bildung7 in cooperation with ngos, companies and individual stakeholders in education. apart from references to edutainment and claims to facilitate “up-to-date education,” there are again parallels to the strategies of the big players, as shown by the following example: “acp eduwerk is a partner for all administrative, technical and pedagogical questions surrounding the introduction of digital learning companions in schools and other educational institutions. the goal is to have a positive impact on students’ motivation, fun and learning success and to live modern education. no matter if apple, microsoft or google – we will find the perfect solution for every school.”8 however, perspectives of the clarification of techno-economic connections or contemporary educational intents in the sense of an assessment of the views on the self and the world in the context of digitality and mediality have so far been as nonexistent as basic ethical questions or technological alternatives of free software or open-source software. profit through the financial crisis of 2008-2009, at the latest, the capitalist structures have received a boost towards reassessment in consideration of technological criteria and tapped new areas of society in order to accumulate capital (niesyto, 2017). the classical 5 the picture shows the range of mos pretests offered by an austrian schoolbook publishing house. the pretest serves as an aid to pass the mos certificate. the pretest questions do not form concrete tasks according to the microsoft's assessments, but increase the flexibility and the competence level of the candidates. 6 see https://weiterlernen.at/. 7 the innovationsstiftung für bildung was established effective january 1, 2017 through the federal national endowment act and has since come to take a prominent role in the context of digital innovation in education. it is headed by jakob calice. information on activities, board members, oversight boards and academic advisory council can be found online at https://innovationsstiftung-bildung.at/ as well as in the 2019 annual report (die innovationsstiftung für bildung, 2020, p. 9). 8 see https://weiterlernen.at/programm/programmpunkte/digitale-arbeitsablaufe-mit-google-classroom-1-2/ and https://eduwerk.acp.at/. https://weiterlernen.at/ https://innovationsstiftung-bildung.at/ https://weiterlernen.at/programm/programmpunkte/digitale-arbeitsablaufe-mit-google-classroom-1-2/ https://eduwerk.acp.at/ global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 form of capitalism has expanded to include new varieties such as communicative capitalism à la facebook (hill, 2015), platform capitalism such as the gafa companies (google, apple, facebook, amazon) or microsoft (srnicek & de sutter, 2017) and surveillance capitalism in which the knowledge about consumer behavior and its manipulation leads to monetization (zuboff, 2019). in the context of media education, these forms are sometimes summarized under the term digital capitalism (cf. buckingham, 2019a) while differentiated examinations of digital capitalism are ongoing (see, for example, schiller, 1999; staab, 2019; pfeiffer, 2021). reaching the business objectives by offering services and trading in content is only one feature of digital capitalism. an incredible amount of data is waiting to be collected in keeping with data protection guidelines, which quite often leads to seemingly free-ofcharge offers of services and products. the slightly changed line from classical advertising, “if the service is free, then you are the product – or at least your data is the product that is being bought and sold“ (buckingham, 2019a), puts this fact in a nutshell. efforts surrounding the development and application of learning analytics already play a role in higher education that should not be underestimated, something which was clearly expressed during the presentation of a white book by the fnma (forum new media in teaching austria) on the topic of learning analytics in fall 2019 (leitner et al., 2019). pedagogically and socio-scientifically informed alternatives to the data-positivist approaches in this field (see for example bachmair et al., 2018) remain unconsidered, however. as regards the school sector, there is also an indicatory passage on the website of the bmbwf: “in this context, offers for learning analytics and deep learning will play an even bigger role as well” (bmbwf, 2020a, chapter 3.2.2). it cannot be determined here to what extent the protagonists of the eic in austria can be seen as organizations guided by monetary and data-oriented goals. the complex diversity of pedagogical, political, technological and economic goals and motives still awaits detailed examination. it is quite obvious, though, that several companies focusing on digital services and the sale of content are trying to exert increasing influence on education policy. after all, austrian schools and their 1.1 million students (statistik austria, 2020) are a considerable number of future economic participants who will make use of their products and services. while advertising activities in schools are relatively strictly regulated by the school education act and supplemented by the circulars surrounding the topic “commercial advertising in schools – prohibition of aggressive advertising practices” (bmbwf, 2015, 2016), lobbying by representatives of eic companies who can effect policy changes on a government level is removed from public perception. informal conversations with highlevel representatives yielded suggestions at best, but no citable source. it is apparent, however, that even in austria there are a number of companies, organizations, networks and alliances seeking profit and influence. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 on its website, the bmbwf publishes “it offers and recommendations” for hardware and software, telecommunications, internet and it certifications (bmbwf, 2020b). it is hardly surprising at this point that this list includes such big players of international and national business as microsoft, adobe, novell, sap, telekom and t-mobile. technology the manner in which digital technologies are implemented and used in schools has changed significantly in the past twenty years. while in the 1990s the focus was on hardware equipment and standard software, educational technologies like simulations, games and integrated learning systems were of no major importance. the strategic planning of school authorities was still shaped by questions of technical requirements such as leased lines for teachers. from today’s perspective, one point of criticism is that the selection of a learning platform was actually decided by the producers of this platform. back then, schulmeister recommended a ten-point list of review and assessment criteria (schulmeister, 2000a) and also communicated this in an expertise for the bm:bwk (federal ministry for science and arts), as it was called at the time (schulmeister, 2000b). the example of learning platforms serves as a good illustration of how efforts to consider the needs of the users, for instance to allow didactic scope, were quite successful to a certain degree. however, the freedom of schools to choose their own platform is subject to the recommendation of the ministry, as it was twenty years ago, and thus this decision lies with the service companies and their networks, which do successful lobbying here. figure 2 may serve as an illustration of this. figure 2 step 1 of the online registration at https://serviceportal.eeducation.at/ (source: eeducation austria, 2020a) https://serviceportal.eeducation.at/ global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 figure 3 step 2 of the registration (source: eeducation austria, 2020a)9 the dilemma between free choices and the practical limits of handling a manageable number of platforms and tools is solved here clearly in favor of the big tech offers. no later than with the spread of the technologies subsumed under the concept web 2.0 (o’reilly, 2009), smaller national players in the digital education industry also succeeded in launching products which were either based on the already existing services or filled niches in the market. in austria just like in other countries (williamson & hogan, 2020), the global shutdown during the corona pandemic has contributed to advancing the dissemination of technology components and thus their influence on education. this has been accompanied by the grossly negligent failure to follow any data protection rules and warnings and by the suspension or at least flexible adjustment of pedagogical and ethical considerations. due to the user-friendliness, availability and universal acceptance of the internet, digital technology components will be further developed as well. in the process, economic amortization perspectives and trends towards control and disciplining on the basis of a quantifying performance comparison will continue to be significant, even though tendencies of “philanthrocapitalism” (münch, 2018, p. 11), found in a much more distinctive form in north america, can neither unfold without interference nor are they as inevitable as a law of nature. even though picciano and spring (2013) do not offer strong definitions of the terms ‘ideology’, ‘profit’ and ‘technology’, following their considerations offers a first approach to demonstrate the status quo in an exemplary way. it supports identifying relevant actors without claiming to provide a complete picture of the current situation. however, it would make sense to expand the framework and to further differentiate both conceptual and empirical dimensions. as regards conceptual differentiations, a wide range of theories of ideology offer relevant starting points. this includes marxist traditions from the work of 9 the screenshot shows a relevant part of the distance learning registration form for teachers. hereinafter, one can find access to a platform registration, if his or her school does not yet have an elearning or communication platform. the registration form leads to the microsoft office365 for education platform and lets enregistered teachers know that their students can also register at the distance learning service portal. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 antonio gramsci, louis althusser, theodor w. adorno, jürgen habermas and others, critical traditions following karl r. popper, hans lenk or ernst topitsch as well as more recent postcolonial, polylogical and meta-critical takes on ideologies that reject claims that all theories are “ideologies” or that there are no more ideologies to be considered since postmodernism. as for empirical dimensions, a starting point for a more in‐depth investigation would be the analysis of the economic and legal situation of the companies and organizations involved. the different legal forms with their possibilities of representation and integration of individuals play a significant role concerning possibilities of action and influence. the associated degree of networking and interconnectedness between business and politics or with the involvement of civil servants even senior ones would provide a revealing picture of the people behind the organizations, although data collection in this area is extremely difficult. furthermore, a differentiation of the companies involved according to their economic market position, reach and market penetration would also be worth considering, as effective market power is a factor that can be used to create facts or exert influence. accordingly, qualitative and quantitative empirical in-depth studies would reveal that these networks can be ideologically diverse both in national and transnational perspectives, and that various policy frameworks on public and private education can be involved. explorations using the example of austria – a snapshot the media and technology landscape in the austrian eic can essentially be divided into four areas which will be described in more detail in the following. • international, globally operating companies, making up a rather low number in the austrian education market but having an influence on educational policy that should not be underestimated. • national for-profit companies, among which the schoolbook publishers play a quite significant role. • national non-profit organizations (at least for tax purposes) like initiatives, associations and interest groups. • public authorities, above all the federal ministry of education, science and research as well as the education boards in the states and organizations acting on behalf of the bmbwf. the following diagram (figure 4) shows an overview of the four areas with important representatives and their influence on other eic members. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 figure 4 eic in austria (source: authors’ representation) 10 this compilation is of course not exhaustive due to the number of relevant companies and organizations, the complexity of the existing business structures, the interconnectedness of relationships among the individual participants and not least accelerated global and national development dynamics. in addition, only official sources and released documents were used to draw up the diagram in order to guarantee a legitimate interpretation of the facts. for a better understanding of the interrelations, we want to present and illustrate some relevant aspects in regard to the internationally operating companies. microsoft without a doubt, microsoft is the dominant international company in the austrian eic. producing system and applications software for all areas of use, microsoft windows stands out with a market share of 77.1%, a figure that increases to 92% in the case of office software in german companies (statista, 2020). these are sufficient arguments to insist that microsoft products are an important and indispensable part of education for 10 for an online version of figure 4 that shows all the details, see https://bit.ly/mapind_en. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 professions. apart from the company’s profit-orientation, microsoft operates as one of the three “biggest players in education reform in k-12 schools” (desai, 2015) in the usa with the philanthropic bill & melinda gates foundation. though formally independent of one another, it may be assumed that the business strategy of the sponsoring company, microsoft, is consistent with the initiator of the foundation (verger et al., 2016). microsoft established its own branch in austria in 1991. in 2003, either the education ministry or microsoft – depending on the perspective and whose website is consulted – succeeded in negotiating a general license, the austrian college and high school agreement (ms-ach), for the use of software products in secondary schools and teacher training colleges.11 for teachers, the ms-ach agreement contains a work-at-home license for lesson preparation and for supporting student projects. since 2013, students at qualifying institutions have been able to use the office 365 proplus benefit (microsoft, 2020b) until the end of their school career (bmbwf, 2020f). as a result, microsoft supplies approximately 790 schools with server, systems and o365 standard software. at intermediate and higher-level vocational schools alone, there are almost 24,000 teachers and 184,000 students (statistik austria, 2019) who are provided with microsoft products. especially for technology companies it is true that winning the trust of customers means keeping their trust, often for life. it is obvious that calls for integrating digital competences into the different curricula are not easily satisfied in the practice of daily school life. this was all the more reason for microsoft to aim at filling this gap with certifications and to position itself early in the game. already in 1997, the european computer driving license (ecdl) was established by the austrian computer society (ocg) and introduced with the ministry’s assistance at almost all school types starting in 1998. the tests for most of the required modules were based exclusively on microsoft products. today, the microsoft it certifications such as microsoft office specialist (mos), called manufacturer certifications, are actively and officially advertised next to the ecdl on the bmbwf website (bmbwf, 2020c). thus, microsoft achieves additional customer loyalty to its products in the courted target group. another microsoft offer for teachers is the educator center, a learning environment designed especially for this target audience (microsoft educator center, 2020). on the website, teachers are courted quite bluntly with the following lines: “microsoft supports a thriving community of passionate educators who are constantly learning, growing and working together to change students’ lives and build a better world. the microsoft innovative educator (mie) expert program is a 11 a complete list of qualifying schools can be found on the ministry’s website: https://www.bmbwf.gv.at/dam/jcr:dd40f2fe-bffa-47ec-b1d4-616d8e03eb4f/msach-schulenliste.xlsx. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 premier program created to recognize global educator visionaries like yourself.” (microsoft, 2020a, para. 2) the impact of these measures on it classes is quite obvious. while in curricula care is taken to use words like text processing, spreadsheet processing and databases, textbooks were and are almost exclusively used to teach on microsoft products. a rather proactively worded text in a schoolbook on office management from manz publishing reads like this: “preparing extensive publications […] how can you manage this without putting a lot of time and money into desktop publishing programs? with publisher (a desktop publishing program by microsoft) this is relatively easy […].” (baier et al., 2017, p. 48 f) the next page starts with the heading, “word or publisher? both programs are microsoft office programs and [...]” (ibid.). there is no reference to alternative software, neither commercial nor free options. this manner of pushing microsoft can be found throughout all editions of almost all textbooks for this type of school and culminates in the marking of chapters which represent an adequate preparation for the mos certification mentioned above. as it says on the website of the bmbwf: “training material includes the official preparation material from microsoft – available only in english, though – and also approbated schoolbooks” (bmbwf, 2020c, chapter “schulungsunterlagen”), the latter in german, making the production of separate material unnecessary. next, the website lists four publishing houses (manz verlag schulbuch gmbh, trauner verlag + buchservice gmbh, westermann gruppe österreich and te.comp lernsysteme gmbh) and provides links to tables that show which content can be found where. incidentally, these pdf files are stored on the server of etc-enterprise training center gmbh, which has a very special interest in the dissemination as it is the self-proclaimed number one provider of it seminars in austria (etc enterprise training center homepage, 2020, footer) and implementation partner for certifications in schools (bmbwf, 2020c). in this way, microsoft ideally positions itself along the lines of the company’s marketing strategy and effects an unprecedented penetration of the competitive education sector by serving the areas hardware (for example surface go 2 at a special price for qualified students, parents and teachers), system and applications software and groupware (msach for students and teachers). from the company’s point of view, this strategy has been successfully implemented – not without the help of public authorities –, but for students this has meant the loss of a heterogeneous software market and the educational chances related to this diversity. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 figure 5 mos content in a schoolbook (source: te.comp lernsysteme gmbh, 2018)12 where microsoft’s management team is planning to go in the future can be gathered from an article in the standard newspaper from november 21, 2019: “secondary school in graz becomes ‘microsoft flagship school’” (apa, 2019). microsoft equipped the “digital campus st. leonhard” of the city of graz with surface devices and o365 and provided the teachers with a pedagogical (microsoft-) concept by way of trainings. even though such solutions are presented as showcase examples for certain education-political and economic reasons, from the perspective of educational science, data criticism and learning theory they represent part of the problem. 12 overview of austrian textbook publishers and contents that are included in the free textbooks dealing with mos certificates. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 apple when you search the education ministry’s website for the term “apple”, there are hardly any results although apple has a strong presence in austria’s classroom with its ipads, as the 2018 it infrastructure survey in the federal state tirol shows. at the time of the survey, there were 194 tablets in use at elementary schools, 83.5% of which ran exclusively on the apple operating system ios. in all of compulsory education, there were 881 tablets with 60.7% ios (bmbwf, 2018, p. 5). furthermore, interesting answers resulted from the question, “does your school have its own pedagogical concept which guides the use of digital technologies for pedagogical purposes?” 84.8% of elementary schools negated this question. at the same time, 90.9% of primary schools leave the decision about the use of digital technologies to the respective teachers (bmbwf, 2018, p. 14). clearly, there is a pedagogical void developing here and it is no surprise that apple, being a big player in the eic, is focusing its marketing activities on tablets and offers support to schools as well as teachers. accordingly, the website announces in no uncertain terms that the “apl (apple professional learning specialists) provide […] professional learning plans to match learning goals” (apple professional learning für die schule, 2020, para. 5). this explicitly communicates the intention to exert influence on curricula which in principle have already been defined by the ministry of education. technology companies like apple have not just led the way in terms of aesthetic and lifestyle aspects. they have always been especially good at identifying the target group in the education market and communicating how technology will change learning and generate more active, creative and competent students and teachers (buckingham, 2019b). google with its g suite for education, google offers an integrated solution for communication and collaboration at educational institutions. it has been directly recommended by the bmbwf and is indirectly available for registration via eeducation austria as the central g suite authority (eeducation austria, 2020b). as the corresponding website of the bmbwf states, “with microsoft office 365 and google gsuite, free platforms are available to all schools to organize distance teaching” (bmbwf, 2020d). while ‘free’ platforms for all schools were communicated with effective publicity, the microsoft austrian college and highschool agreement, that is, the general license for the use of software products at secondary schools, was extended by another year (bmbwf, 2020g). google g suite contains a number of hosted services like google drive, google docs, google sheets, google slides and google classroom and by its own account conforms to eu data protection requirements with servers located in the eu. there are currently no data processing contracts between the bmbwf and the big players since “due to group law global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 regulations the three cloud service providers [have] no latitude when it comes to the wording of the text”, according to a reply received by mr. thomas lohninger from epicenter.works (fragdenstaat, 2020). when products are introduced autonomously by schools, “the school management in consultation with the it administrator is responsible for complying with data protection regulations” (fragdenstaat, 2020). this makes such a use a risk that is difficult to calculate since hardly a principal will be able to correctly assess the legal situation. national for-profit companies schoolbook publishers play a central role in the implementation of the curricula. de facto, the structure and content of schoolbooks have a significant influence on what is imparted to which extent. this makes them a factor that should not be underestimated by big players planning their marketing activities. this development should raise concerns not only in educationalist michael schratz, founding dean of the innsbruck faculty of teacher education: “given that today schoolbooks are regarded as the secret curriculum, then what does it mean when software giants have their foot in the door here?” (mayr et al., 2020, para. 7). apart from publishers, national for-profit companies are active especially as it service providers in various fields. their influence on teaching and school authorities is quite effective, as the following examples illustrate. the “schoolgames” by freyspiel gmbh offer innovative teaching materials which, according to their website (https://www.schoolgames.eu/), make school lessons more fun and relevant. however, the claim that the offer is free, as the page suggests, is no less questionable than the claimed relevance. on closer examination of the materials, it is striking that each practical example refers to an actual company. thus, these example cases give the companies a platform to transfer information to students, from their management philosophy to career opportunities. the communicated contents certainly do not violate the provisions in the bmbwf circular about “commercial advertising in schools – prohibition of aggressive advertising practices”, but they do not reveal the intention to give “employers” an opportunity to position themselves, unless one bothers to follow the link “for employers” in the footer of the website. there, the first paragraph already makes clear how the free offer is funded: “marketing is not sufficient when it comes to recruiting employees [...]. by getting involved with schoolgames you will advertise both your employer brand and your career opportunities to students and thus increase the quality of your applicants” (schoolgames, 2020, para. 1). the playmit gmbh (https://www.playmit.com/) calls itself austria’s largest online quiz portal and offers its own certificates that lead to the desired job. companies that will be glad to accept these certificates are conveniently listed on the website. does this certificate business (or rather nuisance) of various suppliers affect the reliability of officially https://www.schoolgames.eu/ http://www.playmit.com/) global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 18 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 recognized certificates? is it necessary in the austrian education system to supplement an application with additional qualifications in the form of a certificate in order to demonstrate achievements which are mostly part of the curricular requirements anyway? the starting point of this new system of parallel qualification was in 1997 with the introduction of the european computer driving license (ecdl). since then, 600,000 certificates have been issued and the ecdl program has reached 8.5% of the austrian population. the ecdl at least offers a globally standardized examination program with accredited test centers (ecdl, 2020), something which does not hold true for the quality of the quiz and the associated certificates from the playmit gmbh. that the ecdl exerts a significant influence on the curriculum and its contents becomes apparent in the following passage from the official text on the website: “in many schools, the contents of ecdl classes serve as the basis for it classes. with this approach austria sets a model example in europe […]. in schools, the contents are imparted either as part of the regular lessons or voluntary subjects, elective and other school offers.” (it4education, 2020, para. 1 f) the following detail from the diagram representing the austrian eic reveals an interesting constellation of a network of profit-oriented companies (figure 6). figure 6 eic detail (source: authors‘ representation) it is hard to discern an immediate connection to the eic, the bmbwf and thus the curricula, but this connection becomes cogent on closer examination of the organizational ties and the individual protagonists.13 bit media e-solutions gmbh (https://www.bitmedia.at/) provides it services in the fields of e-learning, e-government and e-solutions. it is in charge of sokrates school administration and a wholly owned subsidiary of eee group gmbh 13 all data regarding the status have been retrieved from the business directory firmenabc (https://www.firmenabc.at/). https://www.bitmedia.at/ https://www.firmenabc.at/ global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 (https://www.eee.group/), which is also active in e-learning and e-government, though on an international level. in addition, eee group owns 100% of protectr gmbh (https://protectr.at/). on the right side of the diagram there is bit group gmbh and its 100%-owned subsidiary bit schulungscenter gmbh (http://www.bit.at/), responsible for training courses, qualifications and consulting. bit group gmbh, in turn, holds 65% of went edv technik gmbh (https://www.went.at/), which also offers it services and deals in hardware. figure 7 structure of it4education (source: authors’ representation) this raises the question about the link that connects this shareholding network of it services. this link can only be found by looking at personal connections and responsibilities. it appears in the person of manfred brandner, who functions as managing director of eee group gmbh, bit media esolutions gmbh, went edv technik gmbh and mb project invest gmbh. furthermore, he owns 100% of mb project invest, which holds https://www.eee.group/ https://protectr.at/ http://www.bit.at/ https://www.went.at/ global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 20 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 25% of innocert international gmbh (http://www.innocert.at/). brandner is one of the managing directors of innocert, alongside with ernst karner, who additionally holds 50% of the shares. since innocert international gmbh co-operates with it4education (it in der bildunggesellschaft für innovation und technologie mbh), there is not just a strong tie but perhaps also one or the other conflict of interest. the connection is quite interesting because it4education is owned by three associations, which makes it a non-profit organization and comes with the obligation to report to selected persons within the bmbwf (it4education, 2020, para. 5). non-profit initiatives, associations, interest groups figure 7 shows the structure of it in der bildung-gesellschaft für innovation und technologie mbh. its mission is to “operate economically and implement the assignments of the owners (associations) in an efficient way” (it4education, 2020, para. 4). by its own account, one of its strengths is “the implementation of projects on behalf of the education ministry and the realization of ideas and visions in school education” (it4education, 2020, para. 2). the paragraph continues: “we support schools in order to live up to the demands of the economy”, which at least tends to suggest an interpretation of curricular contents in terms of economic requirements. the managing directors of the company, ernst karner and karl mezera, are accountable to the board of advisors (karl mezera, manfred brandner, robert beron) in all operations. because of this constellation it cannot be ruled out that there will be conflicting interests. while ernst karner and manfred brandner have close connections to for-profit companies via innocert gmbh, robert beron (former textbook author) runs two companies in the field of network administration and secure exam environments for schools (ipack gmbh and cybrsoft gmbh). what is also remarkable is the fact that all three protagonists are alternately on the boards of all associations and thus accountable to themselves. the objective of the associations that make up it in der bildung gmbh is mainly the brokering of certificates between organizing teachers or examiners and examining institutions. the offer ranges from ecdl (european computer driving license), typing (10-minute typescript), entrepreneur's skills certificate, certification as waste management expert, certificates for ssc basic/advanced (social skills certificate on a european level) and various sap certificates (it4education, 2019). the executing body for the ecdl and typing certification is the austrian computer society (ocg) (https://www.ocg.at), bringing it into a close partnership with it in der bildung gmbh. this territory is also coveted by the special interest groups for workers and employees (chamber of labor – ak) and businesses (austrian chamber of commerce – wko). while http://www.innocert.at/startseite.html https://www.ocg.at/de global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 21 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the curricula for the vocational matriculation exams offered by wifi and bfi closely follow the school curricula, there is a particular interest in elementary instruction for future apprentices. the chamber of commerce is strongly committed to economic education, entrepreneurship education and vocational orientation, for example with the platform “school meets economy” (“schule trifft wirtschaft”) for offers that businesses have for schools (schule trifft wirtschaft, 2020). the counterpart, the chamber of labor, provides simulation games and workshops in order to highlight economic and political connections from the viewpoint of the world of work (ak & schule, 2020). organizations working on behalf of the bmbwf beyond that, there are a number of organizations and institutions which act on behalf of the bmbwf and are thus very close to the implementation of the required educational objectives. in addition, there are platforms such as the education platform edutube (https://www.edutube.at/ ), which provides austrian schools, teacher training colleges, universities of applied sciences, adult education centers and universities with short videos and documentaries that are soundly researched and meet the quality standards of publiclaw broadcasting institutions. co-operations with universities and colleges allow connections to teacher training. a collection of different, also former projects and initiatives is the national competence center eeducation austria directed by andreas riepl. it includes a community surrounding digital competences (digi.komp) as well as the projects etapas, ebuddy-system, mint-tag etc. the examples listed in the category “resources” show the striving towards platform and software independence (eeducation austria, 2020a), though it is not always successful. it may be taken for granted that there is an influence on instruction in school as intensive networking is demanded and also exists on the platforms. on the whole, this investigation points out that even in austria there are not only discursive and institutional interrelations which cannot be adequately understood without rudimentary knowledge of the global and national education industry. pedagogicalpractical efforts in schools and colleges also largely follow the outlined educationindustrial framework. this does not mean that critical-reflexive ambitions, activities of differentiated media education or edtech alternatives such as the one by the initiators of free open source software in schools (https://linux-bildung.at/) are irrelevant. which practical role they (could) currently play in austria would have to be shown empirically. corresponding research could point out potentials for different innovation paths in education which are not located ex ante in the footer space of the global development views of big tech. at least for those groups which want to take the established global goals for sustainable developments seriously it should be a matter of consensus that, in order to reach these goals, it takes media-technological diversity but also, beyond that, leeway for education processes for their own sake and for the promotion of creativity, the capacity for self-determination and critical facility. https://www.edutube.at/ https://linux-bildung.at/ global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 22 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 those groups, however, who associate rhetorics of innovation and sustainability with programs of increased dependences on tech giants, a primacy of algorithm-driven logics of imparting and utilizing education as well as with the intensified promotion of commercialized educational structures, should not overlook that the global education industry has so far not furnished proof that it contributes to lastingly overcoming social and education-related dynamics of inequality. insofar as it contributes to the overcoming of national and regional dynamics of inequality in the sense of an engineered synchronization or cooptation of teaching and learning processes, this rather gives cause for skepticism, at least from a pedagogical and democratic perspective, and by no means for euphoric progress reports. conclusion and prospect the corona-induced necessities for action have shown that in the field of education – as well as in other areas of society – many things could be organized and designed differently. in that sense, the hopes for a “return to normalcy” and those for “taking the historic opportunity for renewal” are balanced. still, the creative, more or less successful ad hoc solutions cannot hide the fact that an intensive promotion of the global education industry has taken place without broad public debate (williamson/hogan, 2020). from that point of view, the developmental boosts affect more the known tendencies of commercialization, partial privatization, datafication and technicization of education and less the creative forms of didactization, data-critical information, solidary emancipation or participatory reformation. for an understanding of the digital, medial, organizational and economic transformations, it is indispensable to analyze the interrelations in the global education industry and educate the public about factual and foreseeable trends. such a clarification and the contrasting presentation of various potential paths of innovation in education constitute important building blocks of critical reflection and the exploration of possibilities how the historical-medial constellations can be shaped. highbrow accusations of a software colonialism are of as little help here as sweeping conspiracist statements concerning data prostitution, or glossy future scenarios of digital innovation serving an educationindustrial complex. as for developing software for educational purposes, it is important to learn the lessons from the disruptive time in order to avoid long‐term vendor lock‐in effects and to ensure data sovereignty in educloud solutions as they are currently emerging. examples for alternatives are offered, among others, by the free software foundation (fsf, fsf.org), the free software foundation europe (fsfe, fsfe.org), the austria‐based “freie open source software in der schule” (linux‐bildung.at) and the initiative “freie und quelloffene software” (foss‐free and open source software, foss.nrw) in the public administration of the city of dortmund. in contrast to suggestions of the global education industry, there are global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 23 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 many paths of digital innovation and transformation, if any. and as for educational content, there is a multitude of options for substantial support of co-ops and the cocreative production of commons. to conclude, the contribution illustrates some facets of the global education industry and austrian specifics. in view of the dynamic developments and the lack of research in this field, the explorations on the status quo can only be sketchy and could also have different emphases (see for example verger, 2016; münch, 2018). it strikes us as important that well-known concerns over democratic control, public debate and participatory design of schooling and education continue to be relevant. it would be naïve to assume that the big technology companies enter the different sectors of education primarily out of pedagogical, philanthropic or charitable considerations (buckingham, 2019b). a detail not to be underestimated lies in the widespread declaration of certificates as proof of additional qualifications which are obligatory for students in order to be prepared for the job market. at first glance, the excursus on corporate certificates may appear to be just another aspect of the study. however, considering this issue is of special importance in the context of the performance of the eic actors. it should therefore not go unmentioned. acquiring additional qualifications seems to be useful and beneficial for the individual student and his or her further career path, and it is. however, the associated, product‐ related certificates in the service portfolio of the big players represent an essential focus of their market penetration strategy, because these certificates promote and consolidate the bond with the product and its use beyond the school. certificates, badges and “driving licenses” – some crafted by the providers themselves and without transparent standards – have already achieved the status of a parallel universe next to official certificates and thus diminish the significance of the latter as reliable proof of achievement. in many cases, especially in the context of secondary schools, additional qualifications cover only parts of the syllabus, the entirety of which would be accounted for anyway and at no extra costs by graduation certificates (zeugnis and matura). the situation seems to be different in elementary schools, as the contents of the certificates that are offered highlight obvious gaps in the education system, especially when it comes to media education. these gaps could be a wake-up call for the decision-makers to incorporate media-pedagogical contents in the curricula and evaluate corresponding interdependences. one task of media and education research consists in contributing to the visibilization of contingencies within the ongoing transformation processes and pointing out possibilities to shape school lessons, education and training on all levels based on education, learning, knowledge and media theory. the subordination of processes of education planning and design under the quasimonopolist interests of a global education industry corresponds with interlinked dependencies which in the long run create more problems than solutions. global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 24 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 an education-economic perspective also supports abandoning the excessive outsourcing of core functions of education that are relevant for civil society and constitutionality to private providers or technology companies. this is also true for a small country like austria, which, considering european educational traditions, has both resources and potential for future-oriented alternatives to reductionist understandings of “digital education” in the sense of the commercialized application of digital tools for lesson plans and mechanistic learning processes prefabricated by the 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(2016). the emergence and structuring of the global education industry: towards an analytical framework. in a. verger, c. lubienski & g. steinerkhamsi (eds.), world yearbook of education 2016: the global education industry (pp. 3-24). new york/abingdon: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315720357 verger, a., lubienski, c., & steiner-khamsi, g. (eds.). (2016). world yearbook of education 2016: the global education industry. new york/abingdon: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315720357 williamson, b., & hogan, a. (2020). commercialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of covid-19. brussels: education international. retrieved june 25, 2021 from https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisa tion_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york: publicaffairs. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315720357 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315720357 https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq global education industry exploring the state of affairs in austria abstract introduction well-known tendencies of economization and recent education-industrial developments the education-industrial complex – components and strategies ideology profit technology explorations using the example of austria – a snapshot microsoft apple google national for-profit companies non-profit initiatives, associations, interest groups organizations working on behalf of the bmbwf conclusion and prospect references staupe_experiences from blended learning seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 experiences from blended learning, net-based learning and mind tools arvid staupe associate professor norwegian university of science and technology email: arvid.staupe@idi.ntnu.no abstract my experiences described in this article are based on lecturing at the intermediate level at department of computer and information science (idi) at ntnu. the primary cause for initiating the research projects, which lasted several years and with a gradual increase in the use of ict, was the tenfold increase in number of students over only a few years, from barely 20 to more than 250. two positive results were a significant improvement in grades and a large increase in the proportion of students completing the course compared to earlier years, despite a strong increase in number of students and a decline of resources. seventy percent of the students registered for the course completed and passed the exam, compared to forty nine percent the year before. for two other similar courses the completion percentages for this pilot year were thirty two percent and forty five percent, respectively. the average final grade improved from 3.2 to 2.5, where 1 is the highest grade in a scale from 1 to 6. the course was structured applying blended learning, net-based learning, and mind tools. the course was comprehensively evaluated with an external examiner and the results were compared to corresponding courses within the program with more traditional formats, and also to a more traditional format within the course itself. a traditional format includes lectures in an auditorium and approved/not approved when it comes to exercises in an obligatory exercise arrangement. the course was organized with a subject teacher, an exercise teacher (assistant teacher), and student assistants. there was one student assistant for each exercise group of 30 students. keywords: net based learning, mind tools, hyper system, multimedia, nitvis, theoretical platform, collaboration, learning in groups, learning environment, learning environment in internet, building own learning, internet, mapvier, collaboration tools, workbook, visualization tools, cookbook, correlation, results. experience from blended learning, net-based learning and mind tools over only a few years, the number of students registering for the course that i teach, operating systems, increased from 20 to more than 250. the teaching method may be appropriate in different fields. both the students’ exam grades and the proportion of students who took the exam dropped significantly. one easy explanation would be that the increase in number of students naturally caused a bad result; some kind of natural law. unwilling to accept this, i seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 340 devised a teaching format centred on online learning and the use of mind tools. i set out to research whether it would be possible to improve the completion percentage and whether the students would achieve better final grades than with traditional class formats. in this experiment, students spent a lot of time on exercises in class. this article presents a two-year experiment that used a strong focus on the use of information and communication technologies (ict). the following year, after a stop in the experiment, new experiments were carried out, this time with alternative evaluation. the students could choose between 3 different formats for evaluation; 100% traditional exam with optional exercise reports, 50% traditional exam and 50% exercise work or exercise work counted for 100% (staupe, 2011, forthcoming). these experiments were based on the teaching formats described in this article. learning theoretical platform from a learning theory point of view my work was based on the hypothesis that it is the active, hardworking student who learns. this means that passively following the lectures and making an all out effort just before the exam is not enough. to me it was important to come up with a teaching system where the students not only learn bare facts, which they can then reproduce at the exam, but are also capable of producing and creating something themselves by applying principles and methods learned in the course. my view on this topic is strongly influenced by steen larsen, professor at danmark lærerhøjskole (teacher’s university), who emphasizes that “one cannot “learn” others anything – it is the hardworking student who learns” (my own translations) (larsen, 1995). this view accepts the principle that the teacher can only communicate information for the students; it is up to the students to learn. larson interpreted one type of classroom experience as follows: “a chair is a misinterpreted bed, when you sit down your brain switches to standby mode and thinks that you are about to go to sleep” (my own translation). this means that a lecture is too often seen as a form of “entertainment” which one more or less passively follows. larsen focuses on the fact that there is a fundamental difference between teaching/education and learning. according to larsen, recent learning theories equate the terms “learning process” and “work process”, and even though these two terms are not synonyms, they are at least two sides of the same coin. unfortunately, he says, everyone involved in teaching and education has supported the students’ lack of responsibility and that it is the teachers who are responsible for the students’ learning. however, teachers cannot “learn” students anything, thus they cannot have that responsibility. teachers, however, can ensure a good learning environment so that students who want may learn. this means that as a teacher you are responsible to do your very best to create a good learning process so that students can learn if they choose to. the constructivist learning theory, on which larsen bases his work, has grown from piaget’s research on developmental psychology. piaget (1985) introduced a theory claiming that learning happens when new information interacts with previous knowledge through a process of assimilation and adaptation. one direction in constructivist learning theory, a socio-cultural approach, especially emphasizes that it is through interaction and collaboration with others that new knowledge is developed and how the individual gains new understanding. nonaka (1994) formulated a law saying that learning always happens at two levels, first at the inter-psychological level and later at the intra-psychological level. the internalization refers to the connection between the social and the internal levels, so that social speech is applied to interact with others, while internal speech is applied to talk to ourselves. other researchers (lave and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 341 wenger, 1991; mantovani, 1996; hutchins, 1995), have gone even further in emphasizing the importance of the complete environment/context in which communication happens (situated learning). these researchers focus on learning as a group product and do not attempt to analyze learning in relation to single components or individuals. thus, learning becomes part of a bigger context rather than just learning facts within a course structure. the learning process is then tied to the factual knowledge that is to be learned and to the environment in which the knowledge is to be used. how one learns, i.e. the learning process has become highly central. a student, who has a well-rehearsed learning process, will later find it easier to stay focused in a shifting knowledge environment; a process that lays the basis for lifelong learning. in the experimental teaching structure, there was a particular focus on: collaboration, learning in groups: through group activity we learn to establish trust and collaboration skills, asking motivating questions and participating in a creative process through dialog. in a good learning environment, we acquire two types of knowledge: the first includes specific/concrete knowledge. the second involves functioning as a learning individual within the environment, developing the ability to adjust to other people and to take joint responsibility. this focus is especially emphasized by researchers of situated learning. resnick (1998) points out that humans will for the greater part of life learn and work together and not alone and individually, which is in direct contrast to the situation in traditional schooling. most people will recognize the pleasure of being part of a well-functioning group where the group members trust one another, where they complement each others’ strengths and compensate for each others’ weaknesses, where the group has greater goals than those of the individuals and where group work leads to excellent results. in the end no one may remember who said or did what. desktop learning: learning by the use of interactive media, hypermedia/multimedia. using such media will support different learning styles and engage the students in their own learning processes. one may seek information covering a bigger scope than what has been possible within traditional lessons, which are based upon available printed material. by using interactive desktop learning, one is allowed to read, write, listen, and speak in a larger world of information. structuring a virtual desktop learning environment/competence network based on the learning principles discussed above, we see how available services in a desktop environment can be structured and applied in order to support a learning environment, and where the participants genuinely collaborate in a complete context. the resources/services available in a virtual competence network can be structured from tasks and the activities to be strengthened. i have chosen to structure the services in five arenas, according to which tasks/theories that are to be dealt with: a presentation/lecture arena to present and receive subject material/theories, a knowledge arena to access library services/online services and the need for answers to questions one might have, a working arena to administrate material/information and to produce new material, a private arena for personal notes and reflections that also can be gathered over time (a private folder), and last a communication arena which, together with the working arena, make up the core of a virtual learning environment based on constructivism and situated learning. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 342 figure 1. structuring a virtual desktop learning environment/competence network with sub arenas. presentation-/lecture arena one criticism against behaviourist learning theories has focused on the claim that “someone can learn someone something” and that learning is managed by the teacher. but we know that “the hard worker which learns”, (larsen, 1995). if this claim is true, then, the possibility of spreading subject material in a simple and flexible way by the use of a computer network must not be confused with learning. however, the subject material can be presented and structured well by the use of a computer and via a computer network by the use of different media, such as text, drawings, images, animations, video, and audio. the computer or the network can in this manner provide and help organize material, but a person must make use of this to learn. a teacher can help a student to organize and apply material, through which process the student may learn. the degree to which this subject material becomes new knowledge for the students depends on the knowledge and the effort of each student. the activities linked to this arena must both present subject materials in an interesting and comprehensible way, and receive subject material accurately, assuming that the collaborating partners are equal. based on cognitive principles, this arena will be very important if the subject material is well organized. how much activity there will be in this arena will depend on the value of the subject material to a given user at a given time. there will be a lot activity in this arena if the courses are linked to extensive use of the subject material (reproductive learning). you cannot expect so large activity in the arena if the aim for the course is to create something entirely new where there is not so much to “imitate”. you have to create your own completely new material in the working/private arena. knowledge arena for accessing online library, services, and answers to questions this arena is also an information arena. its purpose is active search for information/answers to topical questions. databases and libraries will be used to search academic information, and questions will be linked up against “oracle services” to get in touch with resource persons and/or digital information sources, such as artificial intelligence (ai) or stored answers in “frequently asked questions” (faq). the services both in the presentation arena and in the knowledge arena must mainly be seen as resources in the learning process of the learner. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 343 work arena for organizing and producing subject material this arena is for organizing personal material and is the real learning arena. it is based on constructivist learning theories. the learning happens through the learner’s processing of information and production of new material. the tools available in this arena are the same as those available in the presentation/lecture arena plus artificial intelligence, but here they are used to organize and produce new material. tools for group ware comprise the personal part of collaboration with others, while communication with others through group ware happens in the communication arena. here, in the work arena, a work book is available for working with personal material, while storage of the material is placed to the personal arena. private arena for personal notes and reflections the purpose of the private arena is to store personal material. this material can be in the form of a personal folder for life that you can take with you to develop further to use in solving future tasks. the workbook is stored here. one may also build material linked to artificial intelligence (ai). together with the work arena, this is the most important arena if the learning environment is based on situated learning. communication arena for interaction and collaboration this arena forms the basis of communication in the virtual learning environment/competence network. here we find group ware, e-mail, the world wide web (www), and other tools for communication in computer networks. structuring a virtual learning environment/competence network like an internet-based learning environment the learning environment consisted of a web page and access to services, such as the hyper system and an oracle service. traditional lectures were usually recorded on video and synchronized with corresponding material in the hyper system. an electronic workbook was connected to the course; here the students were expected to present their own and the group’s reflections based on project-based learning where group work was a requirement. we did not apply the most extreme form of project-based learning, i.e. that the students themselves are responsible for planning their studies. from experience, we know that most students would like a framework, an organized structure. however, at the same time we should keep in mind three basic principles for constructivist learning theory/situated learning: focus on active participants with a will and intention, focus on genuine collaboration among the actors, and focus on a complete environment/context that forms the basis for learning and genuine collaboration. the multimedia-/hyper system in the environment. one of the core parts of the learning environment was the multimedia-/hyper system, through which one can access the subject material and many of the functions listed as needs in a learning environment. the toolbar for this system is shown in figure 2 (warholm, 2000). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 344 figure 2. the toolbar in the multimedia-/hyper system on the left, we have first two navigation arrows, then mapvier (see below), text search, presentation of document structure, notes, videos, work palette, collaboration tool, paths, configuration, help, exit, history, storing personal work palette, and technical information about the document. mapvier a general problem in a hyper system is control (“lost in hyperspace”). what am i, how did i get here and how do i move further? through mapvier we get, when we wished, graphical control of information and where we are in the multimedia-/hyper system in the form of a document map. figure 3. example of initial screen, main screen, when choosing mapvier (tilbake; back, hjem; home, fram; forward, lås; lock, lenker; links, gjem; hide, uke; week, uker; weeks, mnd; month, år; year) (albinussen t, 2003). there are many options. you may present the document map in different ways: • as icons • as complete text • as a magnified image • drag a document to the desired spot on the screen • present the links that exist between the documents • choose parts of the documents seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 345 • get information about whether or not a document has been visited and how long since you visited the document. you can choose between 6 different colours from a palette to indicate it, one colour for one week and another colour for two weeks etc. documents with no special colour have never been visited. by using the document map one may navigate in two different modes, either just navigating around in mapvier or synchronizing the navigation with entries in the multimedia/hypermedia system. the documents will then be presented during the navigation. if you navigate around in the system in other ways, for instance with link entries, mapvier will always follow and be visible with the current document as the central document of the document map. you are not “lost in hyperspace”. in figure 3 the cursor is placed on “oversikt (outline)” and is presented with full text close to the document and with individual information windows with more information about the document if desired (right mouse button). the information window (“info”) tells us whether the document includes an image, time of last visit, external links from the document with url-addresses, whether it contains animations, document links to other documents with document names and belonging links to the document from other documents. you can freely select a document in the document map as centre document. notes it is possible to store personal notes/comments for each document. documents with notes for the user are shown as an icon (pen and paper) in the upper right corner of the document and the information can be accessed. all personal notes are also displayed in the work palette and can be accessed at all times. video video is available via an external but integrated service. one may choose to use windows media player, marratech, etc. with the functions these offer. work palette in this window the user may view all his/her own notes, add links to interesting documents, and read messages from the subject teacher. collaboration tools here, the user gets access to collaboration tools such as marratech. paths virtual links between documents. there are two types of paths: personal paths and paths that others have added, e.g. the subject teacher. navigation inside paths is supported. only the person who initially added the path, the “owner” of the path, may edit it at a later point. one of the modes in the system makes it possible to automatically trace the navigation in the document map, i.e. that documents gone through at a lecture for instance are added as a path. for a student, a possible path could be everything about unix, etc. when using playback you can choose path and then traverse it back and forth at your own tempo; stopping to go in-depth, watching/listening to videos, etc. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 346 configuration the user decides the layout of the documents. there is a parameter for deciding the size and the layout of the text, the colour of the links, background image, and language. our course was available both in norwegian and in english; one could switch at any time between the two languages. workbook an electronic workbook was created for the course. here the students were supposed to present both their own and the group’s reflections. in the workbook you had entries for transparency sheets/overheads, lectures, tasks, and miscellaneous. mode buttons for edit, comments, and help. a student who wished could design his/her own workbooks with corresponding functions. keeping an updated workbook was central. to ensure progress in the learning process, each group was responsible for making transparency sheets for the lessons according to the estimated pace for the course. the group members took turns to take responsibility for the lessons. the assignment was to create one series of transparency sheets that covered the entire course. transparency sheets that individual students had been responsible for were to be included in the workbook. with groups of four, each student had to make a transparency sheet every four weeks. the number of transparency sheets for each lesson was limited to seven. the transparency sheets were collected as a series in the workbook. each of the students was also assigned to write a summary of each lesson in her/his workbook. during the semester, a number of tasks were given in order to ensure progress. the tasks made up an important part of the work method. based on problems/tasks or problem indicators one was to indentify the learning needs in order to better understand/master/solve the problem. problem indicator means that we need to find the problem to able to solve it. the idea was that the tasks were to be solved as a joint project within the group and the result was to be entered in the workbook for each group member. the obligatory work on the lessons, the individual tasks, the workbook and the project counted for 50 % of the final grade. the deadlines had to be kept. at fixed intervals, copies of the workbooks were made. tasks handed in after deadlines were not approved; last minute all out efforts were to be avoided. the use of mind tools modern cultural psychology has strongly emphasized that “people think through tools (artefacts)” (cole, 1990). artefacts in a broad sense, that is. mind tools are ict-tools and ict–learning environments that have been developed to function as an intellectual assistant to the learner, to engage and support both critical thinking and learning at higher levels (jonassen, 2000). we might say that the use of work book to a certain extent belongs to mind tools, but i wished to go further and develop a new mind tool. jonassen, peck, and wilson in jonassen (2000) describe meaningful learning as: • active (manipulate/observe) – the learner interacts with the environment and manipulates the objects in the environment. • constructive (“putting into words”/reflective) – the learners integrate new experiments and interpretations of previous knowledge; constructing their own simple mental model to explain what they observe. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 347 • intentional (reflective/regulating) – the learners can present their learning aims, what they do, the decisions they make, the strategies they make use of, and the answers they find. • authentic (complex/happens in a context) – learning/teaching happens in a meaningful genuine practice or in a simulated or problem-based learning environment that illustrates reality. • collaborative (teamwork/co-operative) – the learners work in groups where they share a common understanding of a teaching system and expectations they have of methods in use, and where they as a group discuss and analyze the results. system-modelling tools are considered to be the most powerful mind tools (senge, 1990, 1999). two useful system-modelling tools are powersim (http://www.powersim.no) and stella (http://www.iseesystems.com). these include the whole spectrum of knowledge and skills within complex thinking, such as seeing connections (synthesizing) and not least seeing new connections, being intuitive, and being able to express one’s thoughts by the use of models. visualization tools are also mind tools. however, they are not always independent tools – they often appear in connection with other tools such as spreadsheets, software tools for mathematics, etc. visualization tools help the learners to perceive ideas and perform tasks that they otherwise would not be capable of, or that they would have problems understanding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/software_visualization). it is well known that many people more easily perceive new impressions through visualization, rather than having things presented as purely theoretical or abstract problems, as often is the case in education. one such case is the teaching of operating systems. when performing specific tasks such as programming parts of an operating system, teaching without visualization tools takes too long and does not necessarily provide us with the kind of knowledge we want. even if the students are capable of programming simple tasks, they often have problems completely understanding what happens. in many tasks the programming problems might become dominant over the other concepts and subject matter. nitvis a new mind tool was developed for the course, nitvis, see figures 4 and 5. figure 4. system layers in nitvis seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 348 the origin of nitvis was the idea of creating a learning process that involved visualizing various scenarios within the subject arena. being creative, and developing and working with such scenarios, will provide good learning; include many of the components from complex thinking – not least within creative thinking. our subject includes many abstract mechanisms, which are not always easy to understand. by studying specific scenarios, one more easily comprehends general concepts and mechanisms. by using a computer one may also visualize scenarios through animation, not just individual stages, but also the transitions between stages. the solution was to build models that the students could manipulate at a high level, with domain-specific terms. the model consisted of components from the subject arena. in order to visualize a scenario the student had to program a script called a scenario where the elements are declared and later given operations and commands. nitvis interprets the scenario and produces an animation that can be studied in an accompanying animation viewer in the form of a java-applet, so that the animations can be available on the website. one may also create a scenario for other domains. the teacher and/or the students can define the components, e.g. the students initially are allowed to access a selection of components – and then a library can be created, which may be expanded later. figure 5. example of an interface, scenario reading from disk, student hand-in exercise. the user had good control of the animations with well-defined states. when an animation reaches a new state it stops until the user wishes to go to the next, or chooses to go back for a closer study of what happened so far. one may also “jump” back and forth between different states. to choose state a railway track is used as a metaphor; one presses down a tie. it is also possible to run the entire animation in one go, from any state (the “play to end”-button). nitvis is a combination of simulation and visualization tools, but not being fully equipped with functions and services like we know from commercial dynamic simulation tools, such as powersim. thus a system is called scenario writing and not a simulation system. in a pedagogical context we would find seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 349 many similar characteristics. as with simulation, scenario writing is simulation of activity in a real system. system thinking/simulation/scenario writing could be at different levels, depending on one’s ambitions for the students’ learning, and how complex the system is: a) the students can run a fully developed model. b) the students can adjust and manipulate parameters in the current model. c) the students can change the current model. d) the students create their own models. steed (1992), quoted in jonassen (2000), argues that building models challenges thinking at a high level, such as evaluation, analysis, and synthesis development. system development represents some of the most complex intellectual activities that students face in an educational context. jonassen (2000, p. 148) wrote: i believe that building systems models requires deeper thinking and understanding of a problem than with any other type of learning activity. because it is so complex, learning to build systems models will require more time than learning to use other mindtools. the intellectual results will justify the effort. in a learning situation, it is important that the students develop the ability to think at a higher level and develop the ability to communicate their knowledge to their surroundings. jonassen (2000) lists three levels: 1. the students demonstrate their models in class. the class discusses and evaluates the models and comments as colleagues on disadvantages, weaknesses, and possibilities in the models. 2. the students develop their own theories. using the already-built models as starting points, the students should try to generalize the results in theories that characterize the models, either from entire models or bigger or smaller parts. 3. the students reflect upon the activity. instead of postponing the reflection process until they have completed a project or a task, the students should see this as a continuous process. do we achieve our goals? any changes needed? are we answering the questions or what we emphasize? after finishing the project one should reflect upon one’s learning outcome. what have we learned from developing computer models and developing our own mental models? what have we learned from working together? nitvis was developed for this learning environment. cookbook many different ict-tools were relevant for the course, and for those a “cookbook” was developed. here one could get guidance in the form of short video clips linked up to visualization and animation of the usage. it was easily accessible, one click away – choose tool – and it was there. it was partially developed by the use of nitvis. organizing and carrying out the course was organized with a subject teacher, an exercise teacher (assistant teacher) and student assistants. in all, 256 students registered for the course and 235 registered for the exam the first year. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 350 the second year, the course was first announced as an open study, then, due to financial arguments, it became closed, but then was opened again without notifying those that had been refused. there were many rounds back and forth, and therefore table ii doesn’t present a real picture of the interest in the subject. the result was 183 students registered for the exam. some students followed a traditional practice arrangement with approved/not approved and a requirement of handing in at least 30 % of the exercises, the rest followed the new structure with grades and all exercises submitted. the lectures were given on the traditional schedule of once a week. these were open to all students. since so many showed interests in the course and since the lecture halls were too small, each week’s lecture was presented twice. in addition, most lectures were made available on the internet as video on demand, synchronized with the content of the hyper system. some students only followed lectures on the internet, either because their preferred to, or because they were unable to physically attend the traditional lectures. others switched between auditorium/video or followed both. the idea was that one could search for videos while doing exercises. the exercise work was structured primarily as group work. the exercise group was first divided into the large groups of 30 students. in earlier semesters, these large groups were only 20 students. each student assistant was responsible for a large group. each large group was in turn divided into smaller groups of 4-5 students who collaborated and together produced the group part of the exercise work. one large group was an “online group” that worked and received guidance solely over the internet. the other groups attended a laboratory and received guidance in the traditional way at regular hours once a week, in addition to online guidance. in the introductory week of the course the focus was on learning methods; these were presented as an ordinary part of the course, with nothing said about exercise work. earlier, several student assistants had been trained and had practiced the different roles in project work; group leader, secretary, etc. the student assistants attended the start-up of each group to focus the group on how to succeed with group work. it was also possible to ask questions through an online oracle service via the internet. the student assistants, and to some extent the course teacher, answered the questions, often immediately. in the oracle service, the students could see if a student assistant or the course teacher was active, or busy answering other students. due to shortage of resources, this alternative does not offer the expected opportunities. however, at the end of the semester, we, to a certain extent, opened for this alternative and many questions were both asked and answered. experience from other courses showed great interest in the oracle service. no less than 2500 written enquiries were received and answered during a single semester for one course. even though the student assistants, and not the course teacher, answered most enquiries, all enquiries were made available for the course teacher to learn what kind of problems the students encountered and where the shoe pinched. the teacher could see and evaluate the responses the student assistants had sent. switching to a new course structure is not a simple operation and i probably wouldn’t have dared do this if the department hadn’t decided to assign more resources, especially to the exercise part, so that they equalled the use of resources in equivalent subjects. this was decided at a faculty meeting and was also confirmed later. feeling confident about decisions and assurances, we put the new arrangement to life. however, instead of having 20 students per group seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 351 the student assistants were now expected to serve 30 students. it became hectic. today (in 2010), we have a traditional arrangement of one student assistant per 10 students. meetings were held weekly between the subject teacher and the student assistants. when the subject teacher was busy, the exercise teacher led the meeting and wrote full minutes. obviously, the student assistant located in canada could not attend the meetings; however, she kept close contact over the internet – especially with the exercise teacher. the “around the world” placement would prove handy; many students work late at night and could then get quick answers from canada. result most groups and students handed in impressive workbooks. they had put a lot of effort into both the individual part and the group part. in the exercise part of the course, each part of the exercise was due on a deadline for entry into the workbook. then the student assistants read through and commented on the workbooks. each student handed in a workload of some 50 to 70 pages. each workbook was evaluated so that the group work and the individual work counted equally. in addition, virtues such as keeping deadlines were evaluated. the evaluation of workbooks and credit for keeping deadlines counted for 50 % of the final grade. in addition, the groups were, to some extent, evaluated on teamwork and how each member contributed to the group. the result from this evaluation was not included in the final course grade, but used as a basis for studying various aspects of group work. figure 6. correlation between grades for workbook and exam showing grades 1 to 6. grade 1 is best. many students achieved better grades on their work in the workbook than on the exam, some even much better. however, some students did better on the exam than in the workbook. it appeared that the latter group had put less effort into the workbook, and the groups to which they had belonged had not been well functioning. even if these students had been working on the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 352 material, perhaps we had a group that was not adept at expressing themselves in writing, even though they had time and available equipment. possibly, some of these are also incapable of following the written requirements of a master’s program. there seem to be many who quit a master’s study because they have problems completing larger written tasks; this despite the fact that they manage to do well in an individual subject with traditional written tasks and therefore were admitted to a master’s program. analyses of the workbook grades compared to exam grades show little correlation (0.2 – 0.3). chi-square analyses yield similar results. if we make a hypothesis saying that the exam grade is to exist within a certain distribution from the means between the workbook grades and the achieved exam grades, we see that the result is not within a 5 % level. this means that the observations deviate from what we consider as “reasonably normal”. it is obvious that different qualities and skills were measured when evaluating the workbook compared to what we traditionally measure on the exam. however, this does not mean that the qualities measured in the workbook are not as good or important. rather the opposite if we see this as a comparison between creating and producing material individually and creating and producing material in collaboration with others. as discussed in the section “learning theoretical platform” above, most learning in the educational system is individual, but much learning in the outside world is in a group setting. one should notice that even though there was only a weak correlation, the students achieved a significantly better result on the exam than the years before the experiences. an improvement in result of 0.7 grade points for the mean grade and the same for the median should be considered a significant improvement. so, one gets the best of both worlds; one has achieved a good “work result” and a good traditional exam result. the good results correlate well with the student assistants’ observations. on several occasions throughout the fall, they reported that the students were “much better than previous year”. the external examiner expressed the same experience and we discussed what changes were made in the teaching system. for those who followed traditional teaching we did not get the same good results, and the median was weaker than the mean grade; a tendency towards a weaker result than the mean grade. it should be mentioned that some students complained about the new teaching system, especially at the beginning of the course. they thought that writing belonged to norwegian as a subject and that they finished this in the upper secondary school. but they were not familiar with interdisciplinary work, where knowledge from one subject can be applied in another. and they were not familiar with writing and structuring of written tasks as part of a learning process. when discussing the course structure at the end of the course some students criticized the course for being too demanding compared to the number of study points. others strongly disagreed with this statement. they felt that the course was not more demanding than it ought to be. during the discussion it was also said that it was when one put off the exercise work and went for the “all out effort at the end” method that the course seemed very demanding. after the course was finished, i received a lot of feedback on the course structure from students who stopped by my office, and most of them were very positive. some expressed that all courses should have been structured like this. the exam was a traditional 4-hour exam. in order to pass the course one had to pass the exam. in addition to subject teachers, external examiners were being used. the exam counted for 50 % of the final grade. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 353 for year x+2 i went back to a traditional teaching system, see results in table i. table 1. structure of the study. first experiment year called x. grade 1 is highest/best, grade 6 lowest (*open/closed/open study, ** closed study). exam headings; attended, passed, not passed, mean grade, median, standard deviation, skew symmetric, better than grade 1.6 in %. curriculum text; traditional, traditional, traditional, traditional, traditional, new, traditional, new, traditional. as we can see, the exam grade for the new course structure improved from 3.2 to 2.5 the first year (x). in year x+1 the median rose slightly more, from 2.5 to 2.4. the course grade, which includes the workbook, has improved from 3.2 to 2.3 for year x and for year x+1 it rose further to 2.2. for students who chose a traditional arrangement the average grade were 2.9 for both years with a 3.1 median. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 354 table ii. summary of results; control courses in subjects i and ii and experimental course (the subject) (* data not available). table ii shows completion in control subjects, subject i and subject ii, and in the subject in which the experiment was carried out (subject). no less than 70 % of those registered for the course completed and passed the exam, compared with 49 % the previous year. for two other similar courses, the completion rates for the research year were respectively 32% and 45 %. for the years x-2 and x-1, only 43% and 49% of students registered completed the course and passed the exam. passing grade is 4. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 355 the use of ict and mind tools to support learning goals figure 7. the use of ict to support learning goals. extensive research was done on learning goals as evaluating construction of knowledge, self-discipline, collaboration, critical thinking, creative thinking and complex thinking, in all 24 questions. the questions went to both the student advisors and the students. figure 7 show that more than 90 % of the students’ own assessment and more than 75 % of the student advisors’ assessment show that mind tools contribute to some extent or strongly toward reaching specific learning goals. barely 5 % of the students thought that mind tools were of no value in reaching specific learning goals. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 356 figure 8. evaluation by students and student assistants of lecture, auditorium/video and ict-learning environments for building own learning. figure 8 shows that the average values attributed by students and student assistants to lectures and use of ict learning environments are almost equal; almost 50 % think that lectures, as well as ict learning environments, are “strongly important” or close to such a label. for this survey, we see that lectures are still of importance. it was difficult to separate between lectures in auditorium and on broadcasted two-way video, sometimes the students attended auditorium lectures, other times they followed video lectures, and some made use of lectures in auditorium and viewed videos later. they could freely choose. however, based on attendance statistics from use of the video, the majority – possibly all – of the students chose to follow video lectures in some form. the distant learners steadily used broadcasted video lectures and watched videos later. conclusion more than 90 % of the students’ own assessment and more than 75 % of the student advisors’ assessment show that mind tools contribute to some extent or strongly in reaching specific learning goals. barely 5 % of the students thought that mind tools were of no value in reaching specific learning goals. almost 50 % think that lectures, as well as ict learning environments, are “strongly important” or close to such a value, in their own learning. no less than 70 % of those registered for the course completed and passed the exam, compared with 49 % the previous year. for two other similar courses, the completion rates for the research year were respectively 32% and 45 %. the average final grade improved from 3.2 to 2.5, where 1 is the highest grade and 6 is the lowest. for the years x-2 and x-1, only 43% and 49% of students registered completed the course and passed the exam. passing grade is 4. based on experience from this course and several other courses, it seems that the conditions and the structure around the practice in a course affect the results much more than the lectures. this corresponds well with what to expect from a hypothesis saying that active learning gives better results than mediated seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 357 education. “it is the hardworking student who learns” (larsen, 1995 (my own translation)). both the scientific control group in the course and those students following the new practice system had access to the same lectures, both auditoriumand online lectures. however, the scientific control group only achieved a slightly better result than the two previous years’ classes; their average grade improved from 3.2 to 2.9 (median 3.1), compared to an improvement from 3.2 to 2.5 (median 2.4) for the new arrangement. practicing working closely in groups seems to be both demanding and timeconsuming. experiences from the course show that most groups practiced cooperative and not collaborative teamwork. most groups quickly divide the tasks among the group members who in turn send their parts to the one student responsible for putting it all together. or, some groups would meet once a week to link everything together into one solution. however, there were exceptions and particularly one group was able to carry out real collaborative teamwork. not all tasks lend themselves to collaborative teamwork, some of the students claimed, but this can easily be used as an excuse. in order to practice such work methods it is not enough to only grade the result of the practice system. one should probably also let the work method count – i.e. the work process. actually, it is not strange that we expect academics to be able to collaborate with others in solving complex tasks. in the course “eksperter i team” (experts in team) at ntnu this is emphasized and a separate grade is given as part of the final subject grade. when using a traditional teaching system it is difficult to attack a lecture-based education, which has been the basis of traditional education for decades – not to say centuries. in introducing something new one must expect criticism. but still, i decided to take my chances and did not move far from what the students were used to, the traditional lectures were kept. having the responsibility for 200-300 students, i chose to take things slowly, one step at a time. when we earlier pointed out that scarcity of resources were a huge disappointment, this was to emphasize the fact that the new arrangement was not completed because of a “flow of milk and honey”. however, it should be made clear that the exercise teacher and the student assistants did an excellent job. the teacher’s challenges are not made easier or less demanding, and that was never the intention. it is the responsibility for having done one’s best to organize the students’ learning process so that the students can learn if they actively make an effort that should be the teacher’s responsibility and main task. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 3 – 2010 358 references albinussen, t (2003). navigering i internett og hypermedia, ntnu/idi, master’s thesis. cole, m, (1990). cultural psychology: a once and future discipline? in bergman, j. j. (ed). nebraska symposium on motivation, 1989: cross-cultural perspectives, volume 37, (pp.279-336). lincoln: university of nebraska press. gardner, h. (1983). frames of mind. new york: basic books. gardner, h & hatch, t. (1989). multiple intelligences go to school: educational implications of the theory of multiple intelligence. educational researcher, 18 (11), 4-10. hutchins, e, (1995). cognition in the wild. massachusetts, mit press. jonassen, d. h. (2000). computers as mind tools for schools. merrill prentice hall. larsen, s. (1995). ”man kan ikke lære nogen noget – mod et nyt læringsbegreb” in: christensen, a. (red): individualisering og demokratisering af læreprocesser – muligheder og betingelser. sel, københavn 1995. lave, j. & wenger, e., (1991). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. mantovani, g., (1996). new communication environments from everyday to virtual. taylor & francis ltd, london. nonaka, i. (1994). “a dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation”, organizational science, vol. 5, no 1, piaget, j, (1985). the equilibration of cognitive structures: the central problem of intellectual development. chicago: university of chicago press. resnick, l. b., (1994). situated rationalism: biological and social preparation for learning, in hirschfeld, l.a. & gelman, s.a. (eds.) mapping the mind: doman. senge, peter (1990). the fifth discipline the art and practice of the learning organization, 5. paperback edition, currency doubleday, new york. senge, peter (1999). den femte disiplin. oslo: egmont hjemmets forlag. (norwegian edition). staupe (2011). alternative online evaluation in a blended learning environment. seminar.net, international journal of media, technology & lifelong learning. www.seminar.net (forthcoming). tapscott, d., 1998. growing up digital. the rise of the net generation. mcgrawhill. warholm, h-o. (2000). hypermedia i undervisningen. ntnu/idi, master’s thesis. microsoft word iqbal life long education.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 life long education: a conceptual debate muhammad javed iqbal dr., assistant professor distance, non -formal and continuing education department faculty of education allama iqbal open university, islamabad email: javediqbal1941@yahoo.com abstract this paper deals with the nature of a concept of lifelong education. lifelong education can be provided through informal, formal and non-formal education processes. hence, lifelong education can be defined as a process of both deliberate and unintentional opportunities influencing learning throughout one’s life span. dimensions of lifelong education have also been detailed along with its goals. pre-requisites of lifelong education, concept of integration, flexibility and diversity and lifelong education as a master concept are also given due consideration. keywords: education, learning, lifelong education, dimensions of lifelong education, integration introduction education is processes, events, activities and conditions those assist and encourage learning. education may be planned or random but it helps in learning. thus education is a service. lifelong education requires that someone i.e. government or other agencies who develop policies and devote resources to education; these cover a broad array of informal, non-formal and formal settings where deliberate choices are made. human beings consciously or unconsciously keep on learning and training themselves throughout their lives. this may be a result of the influence of the surroundings which mould their behaviour, their concept of life and the content of their knowledge. in recent time scholars and planners put the education in a broader view by promoting the concept of lifelong education. advocates of lifelong education view that education is a process that continues in one form or another throughout life. its purposes and forms are to be adapted to the needs of individuals at different stages in their development (rashid, 1993). education is seen as an integral part of life and all the institutions of society with an educative potential are considered resources for learning. it is that educational process by which individuals become more competent in their knowledge and skills so that they gain more control over their environment. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 2 lifelong education is a blend of pedagogy and andragogy. it can be provided through various modes like distance learning, e-learning, continuing education or correspondence courses. the concept of lifelong education has been under the process of continuous change because of increased duration of formal education and insufficiency of skills attained in schooling for future career and success. lifelong education was initially emerged as a blend of informal, formal and non-formal education with the aim of improvement in quality of life but now the concept covers all times and all places, starting from birth and ending at death. lifelong learning formally came into existence in 1970 after the advocacy of council of europe for permanent education, recurrent education from organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) and unesco report of “learning to be”. in the faure report of “learning to be” the term lifelong education was used instead of lifelong learning. it was in the 1990s when idea of lifelong learning again gained momentum and became global in its nature. it is a concept that claims it is never too late for learning. it is an attitude of openness to new ideas, decisions, skills and behaviours. one is provided with learning opportunities at all ages, all levels in various contexts. statement of the problem the study aimed at explaining and analyzing the concept of lifelong education. objectives the objectives of the study were: 1. to discuss the broader perspective of education. 2. to conduct the desk review of the concept of lifelong education. 3. to elaborate the pre-requisites for lifelong education. methodology the concept of lifelong education has implications for development of educational programmes, implementation and its evaluation. the study was descriptive in nature. library documents were used as tools for collection of data. after going through these documents, a detailed presentation according to objectives has been being made. presentation the ideas about lifelong education may sound like little more than enlightened common sense. first the concept of lifelong education contradicts the conventional wisdom where education is limited only to schools and colleges where children and young people are prepared for adulthood. a second profound implication is that the formal educational system must be reorganized so that it can be flexible enough to accommodate individual options and to prepare young people to continue their education as selfdirected and competent adult learners. the word life according to galbraith (1992, p.3) “conjures up definitions that range from political, religious, sociological, historical, anthropological and psychological perspectives”. understanding life involves determining how society measures it and views it in relationship to these various perspectives. life is composed of the growth and development of human being that takes seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 3 places from birth to death” so lifelong refers to life time span. lifelong education and lifelong learning are being used synonymously to mean and promote successful life. dave (1973, pp.14-25) has identified twenty characteristics of the concept of lifelong education in his book entitled “lifelong education and school curriculum”. some of these include: the three basic terms upon which the concept is based are “life”, “life-long” and “education”; education does not terminate at the end of formal schooling but is a lifelong process; lifelong education is not limited to adult education but it covers all stages of education; lifelong education includes both formal and non-formal patterns of education, planned as well as incidental learning; lifelong education seeks continuity and articulation along with vertical and longitudinal dimension along with integration at its horizontal and vertical dimensions at every stage in life with the universal flexible character to improve the quality of life. the concept of lifelong education was narrow and limited in its infancy but recent works has broadened it to a multifaceted and broader one. education is now seen both intrinsic and extrinsic. from this, expansion of cognition repertoire, increase in one’s skills and competencies continue throughout the life. in this regard, oecd ministers argued lifelong learning might aim at better democracy, inclusive society and more rewarding life which has made the concept of lifelong not only interdisciplinary but at the same time, existence of lack of clarity and shared understanding of the concept is also there. the faure report (1972) saw education not as means of promoting vocational competence and economic growth only but also as a means to expand individual freedom and enabling people to live fulfilled lives in a variety of roles. this faure report provided basis for the delors report of 1997: four pillars of education: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together and learning to be changed (ute, 2003). delors championed “learning throughout life” as heart beat of the society. in the european definition of lifelong education each action is connected with lifelong education aiming at improvement of one’s knowledge, skills and competencies with personal, civic and social perspectives (including employment aptitude). this definition includes all activities starting from early childhood to death: much more than basic skills i.e. acquisition of formal qualifications updating these to have renovation, advanced knowledge, activation of civil conscience, expansion of employment opportunities and social integration. to achieve this goal, formal, informal and independent training is suggested just to have knowledge based society. in general eu definition rests upon two groups of competencies (1) professional knowledge, skills and abilities (2) conveyable and adaptable skills. in october 2000 eu agreed on the memorandum on lifelong education which led to initiate the coordinated strategies and practical steps for the creation of opportunities for everyone and by 2010, achievement of an average level of participation in lifelong education at least 12.5% of the population aged 25-64 years. emphasis in this memorandum is on learning from pre-school to post retirement with the objectives of active citizenship, personal fulfillment and social inclusion as well as employment and related aspects (eu, 2001). with the continuous expansion in knowledge and skills, the demand of learners remains in transition as of old fashioned education cannot cope with the change. demand is on the updating of skills, knowledge throughout working lives. another contributing factor is increasing mobility at international level, so traditional and open universities are offering such seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 4 courses which help to reach out other parts of world: ict has a profound effect at lifelong education (mcintosh, 2005). lifelong education according to zaki (1975, p.59) differs from ordinary institutionalized education as this is more flexible and extends the opportunities of education by means of reading, study and instruction. this flexibility is in terms of “freedom of persuasion of courses of interest to themselves”. learning may take place in homes or at study centers. generally learning is a modular system of packages. lifelong education is reminiscent of saying of holy prophet (pbuh) seek knowledge from cradle to grave. learning and lifelong education many authors around the world use learning and education interchangeably. dave (1976, pp. 35-36) states that lifelong education seeks to view education in its totality. “… it is a process of accomplishing personal, social and professional development throughout the life span”. therefore it is to be incorporated in every dimension of society. wain (1987) supports this view by commenting “it is deeply rooted in the social circumstances which determine the motives of human action”. this can be a source of confusion. the notion of lifelong learning has little theoretical juice. some advocates of lifelong learning specifically reject the use of ‘learning’ to label a psychological construct and use it as to describe behaviour that is very much like education. these can be seen as under: dimensions of lifelong education the world known faure report made 21 major recommendations that pertained to four concepts – vertical integration, horizontal integration, democratization and the notion of the learning society. griffin (1998) outlines the dimensions of lifelong education as given in figure 1: old people ii i non-formal settings formal settings iv iii young people figure-1: dimensions of lifelong education. the lifelong learning and learning society reflects welfare policy model. it is public domain where government is responsible to bring positive changes into the conditions of social democratic society. educational systems assign an undue emphasis to the education of young people in formal settings (quadrant iii). in a learning society, there would be a more equal distribution of resources and emphasis on each quadrant. hence, there would be as much emphasis on education of young people in non-formal seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 5 (quadrant iv) as in formal settings (quadrant iii). there would be a emphasis on the education of older people (adults) in formal (quadrant i) as well and non-formal settings (quadrant ii) as well. each quadrant is of an equal size. this is because in a learning society there is the consideration for lifelong education. vertical integration the vertical dimension refers to the life-span aspect of lifelong education – the idea that education should occur throughout one’s life. there are profound psychosocial and structural barriers that affect the ability of people to opt in and out of education throughout their lives. in a vertically integrated system, structural barriers can be removed by adopting appropriate legislation. but equal opportunity does not automatically provide for equal participation. for this reason, it is natural to think that only facilitating access will overcome the historic tendency for formal education to produce unequal power relations. horizontal integration horizontal integration (or interaction) refers to the need to foster education in non-formal as well as formal settings. the advocates of lifelong education believed that it is intolerable to have a situation where education secured in formal settings results in better status than those that gained in non-formal, let alone informal settings where one secures few credentials and no status. if someone needs to learn how to run his computer or get along better with ones kids or spouse it does not matter if these things are learnt in school or in nonformal (out-of-school) or informal settings? at present usually formal and non-formal settings are like two parallel railway lines. formal settings have little to do with the non-formal. hence, school teachers know little about educating children at their scout or guide group, at the summer camp, at or in other non-formal educational settings. there are many non-formal educational settings (such as in prisons) where the processes are as rigid as those found in formal settings like in universities. formal settings are those age-graded credential-awarding schools, colleges, universities and similar settings, usually under the control of the ministry of education. non-formal are out-of-school educational settings such as community centers, mosques, prisons, workplaces, etc. the instructional processes employed in non-formal settings may be quite formal. finally, people also learn in informal settings through exposure to media, through conversations, casual and incidental encounters in community settings, tradeshows or public awareness campaigns or interaction with individuals and the environment. cropley and dave (1978) have classified integration into vertical and horizontal. galbraith (1992a) suggests a third category: learning to learn, as an important dimension of lifelong education. the pre-requisite for any educated community or society is that its people acquire the skill to learn how to learn”. this dimension suggests that the educated person learns how to adapt and change. economic and social changes in europe have given rise to a new approach towards the problem of qualification, education and social change which focuses on improvement of labour force competitiveness and national economy competitives by means of increased level of adaptation of people to the economic and social changes, encouragement of equality and participation in all forms of development. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 6 goals of lifelong education an understanding of the goals of lifelong education is important. these are based on the ideas of "learning to be" and the "learning society". the “learning to be” incorporates the goals of learning to think, of becoming a productive citizen, of learning to act and react as a full member of society, but it comprises something greater and deeper than these. for "learning to be" involves a process of self-discovery and the achievement of an awareness of our capabilities as well as own shortcomings. because life involves continuous processes of learning, adapting and discovering ignorance, so the process of "learning to be" is also a dynamic process. one should know more about oneself and one’s world. the learning society in which learners participate is also a continuous dynamic. it does not have a finite bank of knowledge to pass on, it is a society whose stock of knowledge is continuously expanding, being evaluated and updated where the process of learning is as important as its product. an essential attribute, therefore, of an individual in a learning society is the quality of educability, which means to learn and to go on learning. the idea that individuals can go on learning, may choose their own paths to learning. they continually seek to gain more enlightenment and must do all this within a "learning society". pre-requisites for lifelong education these may be defined as opportunities, motivation and educability a degree of effort being essential to both motivation and educability. opportunity will be differently interpreted and differently available. its interpretation will depend on philosophies of life, which may vary greatly between societies. but it must remain an aim for every society to achieve as much democratization as possible; to offer increasingly greater opportunities for members to go on learning and to help ensure that such opportunities are shared more equally than they have been in the past. but human and economic resources within countries can determine the extent to which opportunities are available. societies can hardly do more than offer opportunities of lifelong education to those prepared to take them. it is certain that in many cases the effort required to take advantage of such opportunities in a developing country is far greater than it would be in a technologically developed society. the question of motivation is thus very critical, and motivation is likely to vary quite drastically between those who want to find "room at the top" and who are supported by their families and communities in this resolve, and those whose cultural patterns do not particularly favour self-improvement. a real danger therefore exists that a combination of the factors of opportunity and motivation may lead to widening rather than narrowing gaps in the society. those who have opportunities may be also those who are motivated to seek more. therefore need is to ask ourselves how the poorly motivated can be helped and how new patterns of education can be devised to avoid the widening of such gaps in the society. in this respect, the motivation of the "haves" in a society to improve the conditions of the "have notes" becomes important. issues arising from opportunity and motivation according to hawes, (1975) are linked with aspects of educability. clearly the idea of educability, embracing as it does the receptiveness, the open-mindedness and the health of mind and body to accept new ideas as well as a complex of skills and attitudes which are further than mere numeracy and literacy. but the latter remains of considerable importance since literacy provides a key to flexible learning and the ability to profit from self-instruction. there is a possibility that those who possess certain skills will be able to adapt and progress far quicker than others. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 7 integrations as dimension of lifelong education lifelong education implies two types of integration. it implies horizontal integration, that is a bringing together of all the types of education being provided within the society, in school and out of it so that they can support each other; and it also implies vertical integration, that is the articulation of various types of education made available to individuals throughout their lifetime. there is a need to integrate these aims so that all educational efforts are made complementary: and also integration' of means to maximize resources and to avoid costly and overlapping of efforts. the task of achieving satisfactory horizontal and vertical integration is difficult but not impossible. in this respect the isolation of school from what goes on around it, from what has happened before and what will take place afterwards is particularly regrettable. indeed the length of time that a child spends in formal school can cut him off from his community. in the light of this concept of integration, current attempts to delimit areas of formal, non-formal and informal education would seem inappropriate. education can be viewed as a blend of opportunities from the most formal to the least formal depending on a number of variables such as how far it is planned, who provides it, where it is provided and the kind of reward system it offers. the task of achieving integration involves both promoting a dialogue between all those agencies involved in setting goals and providing educational opportunities, and devising policy machinery to transform the results of such dialogues into action. but the possibility of achieving integration rests on the willingness of human' beings to accept it. educational efforts' fruits, if more sharing of information and a greater degree of mutual understanding, are there. lack of such understanding, distrust, or unwillingness to give up a little authority on the part of a few can effectively inhibit change. it is equally important that the users of educational services should themselves be consulted especially. integration of different forms of education cannot be achieved without bringing changes in the nature and structure of the institutions, which provide it. flexibility and diversity another aspect of lifelong education is that of flexibility in the content of what is to be learned, what tools are used in the process of teaching and learning and how much the time is taken. because, if the center of the process is individual and the individual's relationship to the "learning society", logically there may be many paths to learning which may be recognized as suitable and appropriate not because they have always been used or because everyone uses them but rather in respect of how far they lead the individual effectively to where he wants to go. but these alternative paths also have obstacles; different values accord different contents and styles of learning e.g. inflexibility of administrative processes, the rigidity and centralization of the examination system. flexibility can be achieved through the use of new media, the loosening up of examination regulations, the provision of alternative structures of school and teacher preparation, and the replacement of rigid programmes e.g. ivory coast where television was used for children and adults. the provision of unstressed schools in saudi arabia, shorter alternatives to primary school courses for older/children in iraq or alternative programmes of basic education in brazil, the examination reform in tanzania, nai roshni school of pakistan. these all seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 8 prove that these goals are possible to achieve. but progress towards achieving them is slow because of many factors e.g. in the ivory coast parents reacted violently against widespread use of television in primary schools on the grounds that the regular teachers were not "teaching". conclusions lifelong education is form of education which covers whole of the individual life in one or other way. this concept has different characteristics and dimensions which reflect learning to be and learning society. while lifelong has prerequisites of opportunity, motivation and educability which all three are integrated in the concept making it flexible and diverse. bibliography cropley, a. & dave, r. (1978). lifelong education and training of teachers. oxford: pergamon. dave, r. (ed.s) (1976). foundations of lifelong education. oxford: pergamon, dave, r.h. (1977). lifelong education and school curriculum uie monograph 1. hamburg: unesco institute for education. delors, j. (1996). learning treasures within report to unesco of international commission on development of education. paris: unesco. european commission (nov.2001). communication from commission: making a european area of lifelong learning a reality. brussels, 21.11.01 com (2001) 678 final. european commission (nov.2001). making a european area of lifelong learning a reality. brussels, com (2001) 428 final. faure, e. et al., (1972). learning to be. the world of education today, and tomorrow. paris: unesco. galbraith, m.w. (1992). lifelong education and community in m.w. galbraith (ed.) education in rural american community. malabar, f.l: kriger. griffin, c. (1998). public rhetoric and public policy: analysing the difference for lifelong learning. in holfold, j., jarvis, p. and giffin, c. (eds.). international perspectives on lifelong education. london: kogan page limited. hawes, h.w.r. (1975). lifelong education and school curricula in developing countries. holmberg: unesco mcintosh, c. (2005). introduction. in mcintosh, c. (ed.) final lifelong learning and distance education. col/unesco. rashid, m. (1993). study guide advanced course on non-formal education (734). islamabad: allama iqbal open university. rojvithee (2005). the challenges for education in a global economic paper presented at global forum on edisto. smith, r. (1982). learning how to learn. new york: cambridge. unesco institute for education (2005). annual report 2003. hamburg: uue. wain, k. (1987). philosophy of lifelong education. london: croom helm. zaki, w.m. (1975). education of the people. islamabad: peoples open university. title seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 the nature and limits of interactive communication: a philosophical analysis halvor nordby professor faculty of health and social sciences university college of lillehammer email: halvor.nordby@hil.no abstract in many modern study programs, teachers and students communicate via internet and other interactive communicative channels. what is the essential nature of this communication? how does interactive communication differ from ordinary face-to-face communication in the most fundamental sense? the article uses conceptual analysis as a philosophical method to explore the intrinsic nature of the concept interactive communication. the aim of this method is to develop a concept definition that matches shared linguistic beliefs about informative examples from internet based communication and information exchange that is central in electronic teaching courses. the article examines several concept definitions and argues in favor of a philosophical information processing analysis of interactive communication. the significance of this analysis has two dimensions. first, it can give teachers and others who are involved in interactive communication a better understanding of the essential differences between interactive and face-toface communication. second, the analysis can stimulate pedagogical and critical reflection on the nature and limits of internet based communication and electronic teaching tools. keywords: interactive communication, electronic information exchange, conceptual analysis, information processing systems, philosophy of mind and language, communication and electronic teaching tools. introduction the most fundamental and basic human communication process is ordinary face-to-face communication, but new technology has widened the scope of human information exchange to a radical extent. nowadays, senders often convey information to audiences through communication channels that are interactive.i in one sense we all know what this communication involves. typical interactive communication channels include e-mail, ordinary phone calls, radio transmitters and well-known internet teaching programs like „it‟s learning‟ and „fronter‟.ii however, pointing to such paradigm examples does seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 19 not give us a more fundamental understanding of the concept interactive communication. that is, the different paradigm cases cannot tell us how the general, abstract concept should be defined. if it is possible to formulate a general definition of interactive communication, we can use that definition to achieve more substantial knowledge of the nature and limits of this phenomenon. in short, the definition can help us to understand, in a more philosophical sense, what we are doing when we are involved in interactive communication. the aim of this article is to use conceptual analysis as an a priori philosophical method for evaluating general definitions of interactive communication. the idea will be to formulate hypothesized definitions and then compare these definitions with robust beliefs we have about illuminating „test cases‟ (putnam 1962; burge 1979, 1986; harman 1999). most of the cases will be from electronic and digital communication, and i will especially focus on internet based communication that is central in modern electronic teaching programs. the aim will be to show how reflection on this form of mediated communication can give us a clearer understanding of the abstract meaning we typically attach to the term „interactive communication‟. conceptual analysis, in a fundamental sense, seeks to clarify a central core of an understanding that is „hidden‟ in our common language (boghossian 1996; boghossian and peacocke 2000; williamson 2005; peacocke 2006). the next section explains why a general definition of interactive communication can be fruitful for researchers, teachers and others with a relevant pedagogical interest. the third section presents and clarifies the method of conceptual analysis. the fourth and fifth sections use this method to examine various definitions of interactive communication. i will argue that all the definitions face one of two problems. they either exclude forms of communication that should fall under a proper definition of interactive communication, or they include phenomena that should be excluded from the definition. the sixth section presents a philosophical information processing analysis that avoids the problems the other definitions face. the basic idea in this analysis is that interactive communication must happen through a mediating information processing system – a system that transforms a sender‟s message into an internal coded language that is translated back to an audience at the other end of a mediating communication channel. i will conclude that the information processing analysis constitutes a promising starting point for discussing interactive learning and communication, and that it can have an important role in research, critical analyses and public discourse. why do we need a general definition of interactive communication? why not simply define the concept interactive communication as communication that does not involve an ordinary face-to-face encounter between (at least) two communicators? the problem with this definition is that it does not tell us much about the meaning of the concept unless we explain what face-to-face communication is. if we go on to define this as „communication that is not interactive‟, the problem re emerges: the explanation becomes circular in the sense that it takes knowledge of the meaning of the expression we are trying to define for granted in the explanation (quine 1960, 1985; boghossian 1996; devitt & hanley 2006). what we need is an explanation that gives us a more robust understanding of the term „interactive communication‟ in the first place. many attempts to elucidate conceptual content in a non-circular way have been pursued in philosophy of mind and language (ludlow 1997; nordby 2004; dewitt & hanley 2006). ever since kant and his well known claim that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 20 it is possible to formulate a priori meaning definitions like „a bachelor is an unmarried man‟ or „water is h20‟, philosophers have attempted to define controversial and disputed concepts to clarify their application conditions (putnam 1962; quine 1985; burge 1979, 1990; boghossian 1996; boghossian & peacocke 2000).iii an attempt to analyse the concept interactive communication falls under this general strategy. the aim of an analysis of interactive communication is to develop a definition that gives us a more substantial, general understanding of what the concept applies to. such an understanding can be important for many reasons, but two should be highlighted. first, the analysis can improve our epistemological, critical and pedagogical perspectives on the phenomenon of interactive communication. many discussions of the nature and limits of electronic information exchange aim to focus on interactive communication on an abstract level. that is, the discussions are not merely concerned with a particular form of interactive communication, like communication via e-mail or mobile phones. instead, they attempt to say something about interactive communication in general. but on this general level – when one quantifies over varieties of interactive communication – it is important to have a clear idea of the abstract phenomenon one intends to talk about (nordby 2006a). a general definition of interactive communication would make it clear what this phenomenon is.iv the second reason why it is important to elucidate the concept of interactive communication is methodological. in theoretical and practical discourse about human relations, people often use words like „communication‟ without explaining it. obviously, if there was good reason to believe that we all understood the concept interactive communication in exactly the same way, it would be unnecessary to clarify a general concept that could function as a shared conceptual platform. but „interactive communication‟ is not an expression with sharp, explicit boundaries it is not an expression that speakers will define in exactly the same way. furthermore, it is not a „producer-consumer‟ concept it is not an expression that has a clear standard „professional‟ meaning that laypeople normally are willing to defer to (putnam 1975; burge 1979; nordby 2004, 2008).v in sum, interactive communication is a vague concept that is explained in different ways in various „language-games‟ (wittgenstein 1953), and vague concepts are laden with ideologies, values and idiosyncratic associations (habermas 1990; nordby 2006, 2008). researchers who think they disagree about facts about interactive communication, may in fact talk past each other if they do not associate the term „interactive communication‟ with the same meaning. thus, if there was a shared definition, the probability of misunderstanding in theoretical and practical discourse would be reduced. one way to develop a definition would be to start out with theories of interactive communication, or of communication in general, and then explore how these theories can shed light on the content of the concept of interactive communication. the obvious problem with this strategy is that theoretical terminology is not necessarily based on a shared understanding that speakers of our language have (burge 1979; putnam 1975). in other words, there is a significant risk that a theoretical definition would be too narrow in the sense that it would not match ordinary discourse. it would not be a definition that people would defer to. this does not mean that the aim of an analysis of interactive communication should be to capture all the various associations that speakers attach to the term „interactive communication‟. the diversity of understanding implies that this aim cannot be achieved. a more promising strategy is to attempt to capture what peacocke (1998) calls a shared „implicit conception‟. this would be a common element in our ordinary use of the term, an underlying central seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 21 core of an understanding that most speakers of our language typically have (burge 1979, 1991; davies 2004; williamson 2005). the justification for holding that such an analysis of the meaning of interactive communication should be used in theoretical and practical discourse is not that it captures a reference to an objective reality. the reason is easy to understand: the way we understand a language expression does not necessarily correspond to the aspect of reality we intend to talk about when we use the expression (putnam 1962, 1996; burge 1979, kripke 1980; peacocke 2006). thus, our current conception of „interactive communication‟ is not necessarily true. it is always a possibility that further reflection will lead us to revise our ideas of what the term refers to (boghossian & peacocke 2000). however, this does not mean that an analysis of the meaning of „interactive communication‟ cannot have normative force. on the contrary, if an analysis is grounded in ordinary language use, then it is prima face correct unless good reasons for revising it can be given. compare an analysis that is grounded in ordinary language with an analysis that elucidates the meaning of „interactive communication‟ in the light of a specific theory. the ordinary language analysis would give us a plausible explanation of what the expression really means, as far as we understand it (putnam 1962, burge 1979). but if it is argued that the theoretical analysis captures the correct meaning of the term in our common language, then it is necessary to provide further arguments for why this is so. the reason is that theoretical definitions of concepts tend to be disputed, and that many theories explicitly involve narrow, stipulative definitions of controversial concepts (nordby 2008). the strategy of elucidating the general meaning of „interactive communication‟, on the other hand, has direct normative implications. if the strategy can help us to describe an implicit conception that is „hidden‟ in our common language, then the description constitutes a plausible starting point in discussions of how the term should be used (burge 1979; boghossian 2000). in other words, insofar as the aim is to define a meaning of „interactive communication‟ that is as theory-neutral as possible, it is natural to ground the definition in ordinary language use. in the next section i will explain how this aim corresponds to „conceptual analysis‟ a philosophical method for arriving at a clearer understanding of the public meaning of abstract concepts. method harman (1999) formulates the basic idea of conceptual analysis in an illuminating way: typically, attempts at philosophical analysis proceed by the formulation of one or more tentative analyses and then the consideration of test cases. if exactly one of the proposed analyses does not conflict with „intuitions‟ about any test cases, it is taken to be at least tentatively confirmed. further research then uncovers new test cases in which intuitions conflict with the analysis. the analysis is then modified or replaced by a completely different one, which is in turn tested against imagined cases, and so on (harman 1999, p.139). the idea is as follows: first one might simply formulate a hypothesised definition of interactive communication. then one turns to a set of real or counterfactual test cases, cases that are either clear (black) positive cases of interactive communication or (white) negative cases of communication that is not interactive. if the definition captures the positive and negative cases in the right way, then it is plausible. if it does not, it has to be rejected or modified to match the test cases. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 22 here the expression capturing „in the right way‟ has two aspects. first, the definition has to state conditions that are sufficient for a communicative process to be interactive. for instance, if the definition says that it is sufficient that an interactive communicative process involves some property x, then a counterexample to the definition would be a case of interactive communication that does not have property x. the sufficiency part of the definition is secured by using the conditional „if‟ in the form „event e involves interactive communication if x‟, where x states the proposed concept explanation. secondly, a proper definition has to state necessary conditions for communication to be interactive. if the definition says that it is necessary that the communicative process involves y, then a counterexample an example that is not captured by the definition – would be a clear case of interactive communication that does not involve y. this necessity part of the definition is secured by adding an extra clause to the definition, of the form „communication is interactive communication if and only if y.‟ by using „if and only if‟, the definition makes it clear that there are no other ways interactive communication can happen, than the way specified by the description y. it should be emphasised that this requirement about necessary and sufficient conditions is consistent with different ways of conceiving of the general nature of definitions. for instance, the requirement does not imply that the definition has to be essentialistic, that it has to capture an intrinsic essence of a state, object or event (kripke 1980; putnam 1996). the reason is easy to understand: all definitions attempt to state necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall under a defining description. but it would be unreasonable to hold that this means that all definitions have to be essentialistic. a further methodological point that should be mentioned is that a definition that captures a set of test cases is not necessarily correct. comparing a concept definition to new cases is a dynamic, holistic process (boghossian 1996, boghossian and peacocke 2000; williamson 2005; nordby 2007). the idea is similar to the basic assumption in hypothetical deductive method. a hypothesis is strengthened when it is support by a limited number of observations. but a limited set of observations can never verify a general hypothesis. the clue to acknowledging this logical fact is to make a distinction between justification and truth. a definition of interactive communication is justified when we have not (so far) been able to falsify it, just as many observations of white swans justify the hypothesis that all swans are white. however, we can never be certain that we have excluded all possible counterexamples.vi but as popper famously emphasised, justification is a valuable epistemic notion even though it is no guarantee for truth (popper 1972; chalmers 1999). this is an important point, since some think that there is something dubious about a priori philosophical methods like conceptual analysis (harman 1999). but this would be to misunderstand the nature of philosophical „armchair‟ methodology (davies 2004; williamson 2005). conceptual analysis is not a safe test, but an ongoing process in which we use our imagination and empirical knowledge to look for real or possible counterexamples to a formulated concept definition (boghossian 1996; williamson 2005). if a counterexample undermines a proposed definition, we should simply attempt to develop a new and improved definition. furthermore, the aim of conceptual analysis is not to uncover an aspect of a language-independent reality. the method is restricted to the „level of language‟ the aim is to capture the meaning of words we use to talk about the world around us. epistemic questions about our access to a reality seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 23 „beyond language‟ fall outside the scope of conceptual analysis (nordby 2006b). this means that the method is consistent with classical realism – the idea that there exists an external world that is independent of our beliefs about it (boghossian 2007). but it is also consistent with anti-realism – the view that we do not have access to a world that exists independently of the human mind (boghossian 2007). in a similar way, the method of conceptual analysis is consistent with different theories of the nature of language. is a language a fixed structure with clear boundaries? or is it much more fluent and dynamic, a system of what wittgenstein would call different „language games‟ with a „family resemblance‟? these questions are relevant for deciding how speakers qualify as „speakers of a language‟, and thus for deciding how a concept definition should attempt to capture a variety of linguistic beliefs (peacocke 1998; peacocke 2006). however, it would involve a misunderstanding to argue that the method of conceptual analysis needs to provide final answers to these questions. the method can rely on an intuitive conception of what it takes to master a common language. insofar as the aim is to capture an understanding that many speakers have, the method can adapt itself to different views about „borderline‟ cases and what it takes to qualify as a speaker of a language (burge 1979; putnam 1996). the aim is to capture a set of widely shared judgements, and specific theories of language mastery are not needed to determine whether this condition is met. it is important to remember that a definition of interactive communication that is grounded in a set of shared judgements is more valuable in public discourse than a narrow stipulative definition, designed to match an idiosyncratic, contextual understanding. the aim should therefore be to develop a concept definition that captures a common, ordinary usage of the term „interactive communication‟ – a definition that is prima facie plausible until the opposite is shown. burge formulates the general point in an illuminating way: “of course, ordinary usage of language is not sacred if good reasons for revising it can be given. but [in the case of conceptual analysis] none have been” (burge 1979, p 102). insofar as we are searching for the meaning of our common language, we have no choice but to focus on ordinary language use (nordby 2007). vii this does not mean that ordinary judgements of how the term „interactive communication‟ applies are not shaped by theory. on the contrary, theoretical considerations often underlie linguistic intuition (quine 1985; boghossian 1996; harman 1999). of course, if speakers‟ theoretical perspectives are very different, then this will influence particular judgements, and divergent judgements cannot be used to support a general meaning definition. in the literature, disputed concept applications shaped by different theories are often called „grey‟ applications (worhall & worhall 2001; nordby 2006).viii grey cases cannot be used to reject or confirm a general definition.ix the method of conceptual analysis presupposes that there is a sufficient degree of agreement among competent speakers of our language (burge 1979; nordby 2007). in our discussion here, the aim is to see how far shared beliefs about particular applications of „interactive communication‟ can help us to evaluate definitions. in the next sections i will argue that they can help us a long way. preliminary definitions we can begin by considering a simple definition of interactive communication, just to illustrate the method of conceptual analysis. definition (i). two people are involved in interactive communication if, and only if, they do not see each other when they communicate. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 24 face-to face communication would then be defined negatively, as communication involving communicators that actually see each other when they communicative. all the definitions of interactive communication i will discuss in this article have a face-to-face version – a negation of the (positive) definition of interactive communication. definition (i) might fit many cases we have robust positive intuitions about, but it is not difficult to find problematic test cases that undermine it. consider the following example: two persons are standing on two mountain tops about three kilometres away from each other. each is merely a black spot to the other. they can, however, see each other, and they are talking via mobile phones. remember that the method of conceptual analysis requires that we do not find a counterexample to a proposed definition. the mountain top scenario is a counterexample to definition (i). this is definitely a case of interactive communication since the communicators are communicating via mobile phones. however, they can see each other, and this means that definition (i) has the unreasonable consequence that the mountain top case is not a case of interactive communication. the problem with definition (i) is that the clause about necessary and sufficient conditions the „if and only if‟ clause as explained above implies that two persons can never observe each other when are involved in interactive communication. we need to refine definition (i) to avoid the mountain top case and other possible counterexamples. so what if the definition claims that it is lack of observations of body language that is crucial? definition (ii). two persons who are communicating are involved in interactive communication if, and only if, they do not see the body language of the other person. this avoids the problem that definition (i) faced. the mountain top case now becomes, as it should become, a case of interactive communication since the two persons are unable to observe body language. but there are other problematic test cases. according to definition (ii), communication between blind people is necessarily interactive, but this consequence is unreasonable. two blind persons who are standing face-to-face and use ordinary verbal language to convey information are definitely not communicating interactively. as long as they can hear each other, this is face-to-face communication even though the communicators are blind. furthermore, there are clear cases of interactive communication that is not captured by definition (ii). consider internet based chat programs like msn in which two persons who are sitting far away from each other can see each other via web cameras.x this is interactive communication in a very intuitive sense. the communication happens via internet, but the communicators can nevertheless see each other very clearly. they are, notably, able to see facial expressions and other bodily movements if the body of the other person is within the frame of the camera. in other words, interactive communication can sometimes involve visual observation of body language. in some forms of interactive communication it is possible to use recording equipment to capture much more than the words that are used. therefore, using the idea of lack of detailed observation to define the concept of interactive communication is a dead end – a strategy that cannot succeed. what if we attempt to pin down the nature of interactive communication from another perspective? some might suggest that it is the lack of physical closeness between communicators that defines interactive communication. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 25 after all, in ordinary face-to-face communication people are normally close to each other, so this strategy might seem more promising. furthermore, the initial „mountain top‟ case and the „web camera‟ case now fall down on the correct side of the analysis. both become, as they should be, cases of interactive communication since the communicators are far away from each other. so consider the following: definition (iii). two persons are involved in interactive communication if, and only if, they are not physically close to each other when they communicate. definition (iii) avoids the problems we have identified so far. in includes, in particular, interactive communication in which observations over a distance are mediated through modern electronic technology. but there are two other problems with definition (iii). first, two persons might sit close to each other but nevertheless communicate interactively by sending text messages or using the internet. indeed, nowadays this is a quite widespread phenomenon. using interactive communication channels can be a way of conveying information to a particular person without sharing it with other persons who are present physically. secondly, it is not clear that all communication over a distance necessarily is interactive. two persons might be yelling to each other and exchanging information without using any kind of technology. of course, one might attempt to exclude such cases by specifying that the distance between the communicators has to be very long, but this, at least, shows that definition (iii) is inadequate as stated. it is necessary to say something more about what a sufficiently long distance is. at this stage some might suggest that communicators are sufficiently far away from each other if they are unable to see each other face-to-face, but now we are once more begging the question. our task is to explain what interactive communication is – granted that it is the negation of face-to-face communication. so we cannot take a short cut by assuming that we know what the meaning of the expression „face-to-face communication‟ is. such an analysis cannot yield a non-circular meaning explanation. a better candidate? the three definitions we have considered were preliminary analyses. the main aim has not been to arrive at plausible , substantial analyses of interactive communication, but to introduce the reader to the method of conceptual analysis. hopefully, the discussion of the preliminary cases has illustrated how the method can help us to clarify our conception of the concept. this can be done on an individual level – it is possible for a person to formulate definitions and then compare them to what he regards as „black‟ or „white‟ test cases. but the method can also be used in collective practices – within a group of persons that seek to uncover a shared understanding. the discussion so far has also shown that defining interactive communication is not as straightforward as we might think. we need to develop more subtle definitions to avoid counterexamples of the above kind. so what about this suggestion? definition (iv). two persons are involved in interactive communication if, and only if, they are communicating, but merely indirectly observable to each other. here „indirectly‟ would mean that the observations are mediated through an information channel between the communicators. remember also that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 26 „observation‟ is a wide term. the indirect communication does not necessarily have to involve visual sense impressions. the idea behind definition (iv) is perhaps easier to grasp if we consider its negation – the definition of face-to-face communication that we now get. this definition says that face-to-face communication always happens directly; the language that a sender uses is accessible to an audience in an immediate, „open‟ way. as already emphasised, this does not necessarily have to involve the use of verbal language or visual sense impressions. an audience can hear a sender, or even feel bodily movements directly. definition (iv) is more promising than the other definitions we have considered, but it is not satisfactory. an obvious challenge is to explain in more detail what „indirectly‟ is supposed to mean. i said that the information must be mediated. a related concept is lack of transparency (boghossian 1994; nordby 2003). the idea would be that a sender‟s communicative behaviour cannot be transparent to an audience. this, i think, gives us some grasp of the essential nature of interactive communication. but it cannot be a sufficient understanding. if the crucial explanation of interactive communication turns on the use of the word „mediated‟, we have not got very much further unless we explain what this word means. and it is by no means obvious what the relevant explanation should be. consider sense impressions that are „mediated‟ through ordinary spectacles or magnifying glasses. this kind of information processing has got nothing to do with interactive communication. it is therefore necessary to say something more about the meaning of „mediated‟, in order to shed light on interactive communication as a narrow and specific form of communication. another way to put the same point is to say that „mediated‟ needs to be explained in everyday terms, in a way that matches the meaning of „interactive communication‟. but there is good reason to assume that it is not easier to define „mediated‟ than „interactive‟. the reason is straightforward: if these two words are synonyms – if they have the same meaning then the task of explaining „mediated‟ is, in effect, the same as the task of explaining „interactive‟. in general, two words with the same meaning must be explained in the same way (quine 1953, 1985; burge 1979; boghossian 1996; harman 1999). but then it becomes just as difficult to define „mediated‟ as it was to define „interactive‟. we might therefore attempt to explain „interactive‟ in selfexplanatory terms right away. using expressions that are supposed to be synonyms with „interactive‟ to define „interactive‟ simply shifts the problem as long as these other expressions must be explained. furthermore, it would not help to introduce theoretical terms like „digital‟ interactive communication. the obvious reason is that it is far from clear that interactive communication has to be digital. old fashioned telephone communication involve analogue signals, but it is nevertheless an intuitive form of interactive communication. in sum, instead of focusing on other theoretical or technical terms that do not have clear everyday meanings that cover the phenomena we are interested in, we might just as well attempt to derive the definition of interactive communication directly from our understanding of the term „interactive communication‟. focusing on other expressions that are supposed to mean the same does not help as long as these expressions are equally vague. the information processing analysis the problems we have located are twofold. extensional problems are problems of getting the extension of the definition right – of including cases of interactive communication within the definition and excluding other forms of communication. for instance, definition (i) faced an extensional problem seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 27 in the sense that the initial mountain top example became a case of face-toface communication. the other problems we located are intentional. these problems arise when it is unclear what the expressions in a concept definition mean (burge 1979; quine 1985; harman 1999). we have not achieved conceptual clarification if the terms in the definition are just as vague as the target concept we are trying to define (quine 1953). in my view, this is a problem that beset many explanations of theoretical and technical concepts in scientific discourse: the explanations are not easier to grasp than the concepts the explanations are supposed to clarify. in our discussion here, definitions (i) (iii) had obvious extensional weaknesses. definition (iv) did not suffer from similar defects, but that was precisely because it faced intentional problems. the fact that the term „indirect‟ did not have a clear relevant meaning, implied that definition (iv) had no clear boundaries that we could compare test cases against. however, the idea of an indirect and mediating communication channel did not seem to be wrong in principle. if we can elucidate this idea so that it becomes clearer, it should be possible to arrive at a satisfactory definition of interactive communication. i suggest that we can do this by making the analysis a bit more complex. instead of talking about „mediated information‟, we should focus on the idea of an information processing system (putnam 1960; davies 1994; smolensky 1994, cummins 1995). spectacles or written messages on a piece of paper are not information processing systems. they do not systematically interpret and transform a sender‟s communicative actions into a set of internal signals that are translated back to an audience in the other end. however, all the various forms of interactive communication tools involve this kind of interpretation and translation. phones, computers and radios are systems with a digital or analogical language that matches the language that is sent in and sent out. the inputs are patterns of voices or punches that are broken down into signals that have their own processing codes as an „internal language‟. these signals are then translated back in the other end as „output‟, in a language that the audience is supposed to understand. so the input is not only transmitted. it is processed in the sense that it is systematically computed within the system (smolensky 1994; fodor 1978, 1998). in fact, an information processing system can be understood as a similar to a cognitive model of mental representation in humans (davies 1994; smolensky 1994). in the most basic form, the classical idea is that the mind is a system that involves a perceptual „input‟ that is systematically processed in a way that yields a concept in the other hand (guttenplan 1994). this idea goes back to philosophers like locke and descartes, and it continues to shape theories within philosophy of mind and cognitive science (guttenplan 1994; lycan 1999). to illustrate how the traditional model works, cummins (1999) uses the idea of a tv-camera as a metaphor for visual perception: when the tv-camera is pointed at something, a percept is produced. percepts are fed into a sorter, which compares them with a stack of master cards called abstract ideas or concepts. when a percept matches a concept ... [the system] ... displays the term written on the back of the concept. any word can be written on the back of any concept; that is a matter of convention. but once the words are printed on the concepts, everything else is a matter of physics. concepts, of course, can have control functions other than the one just described, and percepts needn‟t be visual (cummins 1999, p.37). for instance, if my attention is directed towards a cat, then a cat percept is normally produced. the idea is then that this percept will be processed and eventually match the specific concept that prints out the word „cat‟ in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 28 other end.xi in other words, what makes a given concept the cat-concept is the fact that it is the concept that is picked out just by percepts of cats. and in the first place, “what makes something a percept of a cat is just that it has some features (some pattern of punches) that percepts come to have in the information processing system when, only when, and because the system is in perceptual contact with a cat” (cummins 1999, p.37). the same idea can be applied in an information processing analysis of interactive communication. thus, i suggest that the characteristic nature of interactive communication is as follows: definition (v). a communicative process is interactive if, and only if, it involves an information processing system between a sender and an audience. the key difference between definition (v) and an information processing analysis of human mental representation is that definition (v) focuses on interpersonal communicative relations. generally, for an interpersonal relational process to involve communication it has to involve someone who has the intention of conveying a message to someone else. this is the crucial idea in definition (v): the information processing system has to lie between the communicators. implications interactive communication, as described in definition (v), can happen in two ways. in immediate information exchange, information goes directly from a sender to an audience without any significant time delay. that is, the sender has the attention of the audience there and then, and there is no significant time span between the moment the sender expresses his message in some form of language, and the moment the audience receives it. phone calls and internet based chat programs are paradigm example of immediate, interactive communication. delayed interactive communication, on the other hand, involves information that is stored for a certain amount of time before it reaches the consciousness of an audience. in this kind of interactive communication senders enter messages that in some way or other is saved in the information processing system, and then transmitted to the audiences when they gain access to the informational content. e-mail is the paradigm example of this kind of communication. we often read our electronic mail some time after it has been sent. communication conditions are basic conditions for successful communication (nordby 2006a). many of the same fundamental communication conditions are relevant in immediate and delayed interactive communication. it is for instance necessary that the message that a sender intends to convey to an audience actually reaches the consciousness of the audience (nordby 2006a).xii this communication condition about attention can be met in two ways. the sender can have the attention of the audience there and then, but the message that is expressed can also reach the consciousness of the audience after some time. in other words, it is not the time it takes to communicate a message that matters. the crucial condition is whether the audience gets the message within the time the sender intends it to be received and understood. if i send an e-mail late at night i will not, normally, expect my audience to read it before the next day. but if the e-mail is not read at all, then the communication condition about attention is not met. similarly, if my audience reads my e-mail after a week, and if i assume that it is read within one or two days, then my communicative intentions are not fulfilled.xiii seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 29 the fact that definition (v) analyses interactive communication in a way that makes fundamental communication conditions relevant for determining whether the communication is successful, is a virtue of the information processing analysis. another virtue of the analysis is that it is neutral with respect to how the philosophical concept of information should be understood. to see this, consider two very different and influential models of informational content. one is the causal network model, inspired by traditions with functionalistic psychology (lycan 1999; fodor 1998). according to this model, information is events in causal networks that are defined by their function. in short, if an event has a certain function of transmitting information, then it has informational content that corresponds to that function (davies 1994; cummins 1999). the idea that it is causal role that determines informational content in computers and other information processing systems has traditionally been called „machine functionalism‟ (putnam 1960; guttenplan 1994).xiv quite another model of information is the atomistic model of informational content according to which conceptual content is defined by extension (fodor 1998). the central idea here is that the information a concept carries is determined by what it refers to in the world. for instance, the concept dog is not defined by its function but by its reference – it is the concept dog in virtue of referring to nothing but dogs. concept identity becomes a „vertical‟ relation between mind and world that exists independently of the concept‟s relation to other concepts. this means that “satisfying the necessary conditions for having one concept never requires satisfying the metaphysically necessary conditions for having any other concept (fodor 1998, p.13-14).xv an atomist is opposed to wittgenstein‟s holistic idea that the concept that a word expresses is determined „horizontally‟ on the level of thought, that “the meaning of a word it its use in language” (wittgenstein 1953, p. 20). it would fall outside the limits here to discuss these positions in detail.xvi the important point is that definition (v) is compatible with different theories about the nature of informational content. it is neutral with respect to how the concept of information processing should be understood, so it does not matter that philosophers and cognitive scientists have understood this concept in different ways. for the purposes of formulating a practical definition of interactive communication, these theoretical distinctions are not crucial. in sum, definition (v) gives us something robust to focus on. it is not easy for those who are engaged in interactive communication as teachers, researchers or simply practitioners to understand what this phenomenon really is. the information processing account can make it clearer to us what we are doing when we are involved in interactive communication. the method of conceptual analysis gives us a methodology for critical reflection, and i have argued that the information processing account constitutes a plausible starting point for further discussion. in these discussions, the most important aspects of conceptual analysis should be remembered. first, insofar as the aim of conceptual analysis is to capture the meaning of language, questions about knowledge, justification and our cognitive access to a language-independent reality are not directly relevant. issues of communication and understanding are first and foremost semantic, not epistemic. second, i have emphasised that the method of conceptual analysis does not have to presuppose universal agreement about the application-conditions of the concept that „interactive communication‟ refers to. the process of elucidating the nature of the concept is an ongoing, dynamic process grounded in linguistic intuitions among competent speakers. of course, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 30 questions about „grey case‟, linguistic competence and the limits of language can sometimes arise. but this cannot undermine the main idea: prima facie, a meaning definition that is accepted by persons who clearly qualify as speakers of our language should be regarded as a plausible definition. further reflection and intuitions of other speakers might lead us to revise the definition, but that is simply part of the whole process. third, it would involve a misunderstanding to criticize the method of conceptual analysis for not giving us a critical perspective on interactive communication. the aim of the method is not to give us a detached, critical perspective, but to elucidate what we mean. of course, we might ask critical questions about a meaning definition, but that would be further questions. conceptual analysis focuses on the first and most fundamental stage – what we mean to talk about in the first place. we need to know this, even when our goal is critical. finally, the aim of the analysis is to find a shared meaning that can be used in theoretical and practical discourse. this means that it would be wrong to start out with a narrow theoretical definition of interactive communication. if the starting point is a theory, it is necessary to provide further arguments for why the theory captures a common understanding. in other words, it is necessary to show that the definition matches a widely shared understanding. again, what one needs is a conceptual analysis in the first place. conclusion the aim of this article has been to introduce the reader to the philosophical method of conceptual analysis and to use this method to develop a definition of interactive communication. this has been done in a dialectic manner. by examining different definitions and identifying their weaknesses we ended up with an information processing analysis. the basic idea in this definition is that messages have to be processed in information processing systems, located between senders and audiences in communicative relations. as emphasised in the methodology section, correspondence between a concept definition and a set of test cases does not prove that the definition is true. so we have no guarantee that it is impossible to find further test cases that undermines the information processing account. however, claiming that this fact deflates the significance of the definition involves a misinterpretation of the method of conceptual analysis. it is not a safe guarantee for truth, but a method that can broaden our horizons and yield semantic insight in a holistic, dynamic manner. it would also be a misunderstanding to criticize conceptual analysis for not being based on objective „data‟. conceptual analysis is not a natural science method, but a conceptual tool that can be used to develop and gradually improve a dynamic and hermeneutical understanding in individual and collective practices. it therefore provides a useful tool for trying to understand what we all aim to talk about in discourse about interactive communication. references boghossian, p. 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(1953). from a logical point of view. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. quine, w.v (1985). two dogmas of empiricism. in: a p martinich (ed), the philosophy of language. new york/oxford: oxford university press. smolensky, p. (1994). computational models of the mind. in: s guttenplan (ed), a companion to philosophy of mind. oxford: blackwell. williamson, t. (2005). armchair philosophy, metaphysical modality and counterfactual thinking. proceedings of the aristotelian society, 105. wittgenstein, l. (1953). philosophical investigations. oxford: blackwell. worrhall, j. and worhall, j. (2001). defining disease: much ado about nothing? analecta husserliana, 72. i in this article i will, for the sake of simplicity, often focus on the communicative relation between one sender and his audience. it will be easy to understand how the arguments generalize to relations involving several senders and audiences made up of more than one person. it should also be emphasized that i do not mean to focus merely on „one way‟ communication. i will assume that senders become audiences when audiences become senders and attempt to communicative something in return. in other words, the analyses i will develop apply to authentic „two way‟ communication. ii see http://www.itslearning.com and http://www.fronter.com iii for an illuminating discussion of kant‟s original arguments, see harman (1999). iv of course, one might attempt to rely on an intuitive conception of interactive communication, and this will surely do for many purposes. but if the boundaries of the concept are defined, the clarity of the discussions will be improved. this point is valid not only in written academic discourse, but also in more or less informal and public discussions. v two kinds of typical „producer-consumer‟ concepts are natural kind concepts and basic medical concepts like „cancer‟, and „inflammation‟. when confronted with „specialists‟ who have a very good understanding, laypeople will normally defer to the explanations they get (nordby 2004, 2008). vi a limited set of observations of white swans cannot verify the hypothesis that all swans are white. believing that verification is possible involves a logical mistake vii it should for the same reason be emphasized that conceptual analysis does not presuppose a sharp distinction between empirical questions and robust .meaning correlations (boghossian 1996). empirical facts about the term „interactive communication‟ that is used in different ways – even new ways can perfectly well be part of the basis for a definition. viii this terminology is often used in conceptual analyses of controversial basic health concepts like the concept disease. multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome are often conceived of as grey cases of disease (nordby 2006b). ix but grey cases can support an analysis in a more indirect way. if a grey case really is vague – if it should be vague then a plausible concept definition should leave it vague. in this more subtle sense concept definitions may sometimes be tested against grey cases. x see http://www.msn.com xi if the language i use to think about cats is norwegian, the word will be „katt‟. in other words, the linguistic structure of the word that is „printed out‟ will depend on the language that the thinker possesses. xii another crucial communication condition is that senders and audiences must have acquired the same concepts. successful communication presupposes a platform of a shared language (nordby 2006a). xiii this example illustrates a point that has not received sufficient attention in theoretical analyses of interactive communication. successful communication does not merely presuppose that a message reaches the consciousness of an audience. it also has http://www.itslearning.com/ http://www.fronter.com/ http://www.msn.com/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 7 – issue 1 – 2011 33 to reach the audience within a period of time that corresponds to the sender‟s intentions about time. we can think of such time-relative intentions as second order communicative intentions. first order communicative intentions are basic intentions that messages will be received and understood. xiv the idea is that a computer program can be realized by any of a number of physically different hardware configurations. this software-hardware distinction can then be generalised to human mental representation: a psychological program can be realized by different organisms of various physiochemical composition. xv an atomist is committed to accepting that two concepts with the same reference must have the same content. he therefore faces the problem of explaining why coextensional concepts like water and h20 are different. fodor suggests that the solution to this problem is to distinguish content individuation from concept individuation: “[as an atomist] i can‟t afford to agree that the content of the concept h20 is different from the content of water. but i am entirely prepared to agree that they are different concepts..., that content individuation can‟t be all there is to concept individuation” (fodor 1998, p.15). xvi the deeper differences between functionalism and atomism are subtle. the most fundamental differences concern levels of explanations. a functionalist will claim that a concept‟s extension (what it refers to in the world) must be derived from an explanation of the function it has. an atomist will claim that the order of priory goes the other way: a concept has the function it has in virtue of having a certain extension. fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4689 ©2022 (siling tekoniemi, sirkku kotilainen, mari maasilta, kirsti lempiäinen). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education siling tekoniemi lapland university email: siling.tekoniemi@gmail.com sirkku kotilainen tampere university email: sirkku.kotilainen@tuni.fi mari maasilta lapland university email: mari.maasilta@unilapland.fi kirsti lempiäinen lapland university email: kirsti.lempiäinen@unilapland.fi abstract information disorder is a growing phenomenon, and fact-checking has long been recognized as an effective practice to evaluate media. still, knowledge about fact-checking is not coherent in higher education institutions, not even in the field of media education. the paper is based on a case study exploring the teaching of fact-checking in higher education as evaluation of an intercultural workshop online in the critical-pragmatic framework with mixed methods as part of erasmus+ project (2020 2022) titled as fact checking: european cooperation project on disinformation and fact-checking training. the case-based action research was actualized as a workshop online on fact-checking with the title “information disorder and fact-checking” in master level for 10 international exchange students. mixed methods approach produced rich data for thematic analysis. key https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4689 mailto:siling.tekoniemi@gmail.com mailto:sirkku.kotilainen@tuni.fi mailto:mari.maasilta@unilapland.fi mailto:kirsti.lempiäinen@unilapland.fi fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 findings focus on students’ learning outcomes, teaching practices and show participant’s challenges in facing unfamiliar media environments in the workshop. findings highlight a need for developing fact-checking teaching in higher education as digital media literacy in a framework which integrates pragmatic with critical approach as digital design and other hands-on educational practices together with culture-based contextualization. moreover, the study suggests that contents of digital media literacy need updating with fact-checking and algorithm-based communication for the recognition of technology as a counterpart in the organization of information disorder. keywords: fact checking, digital media literacy, higher education, media education introduction disinformation spread over the digital social networks has been identified as a threat to democracies, economy, and to individuals. threats such as fake news or conspiracy theories grasp communication and democracy and infect them with suspicion (e.g., carlsson, 2021). this alters the confidence of the general public of the media and tends to undermine the freedom of press and the freedom of expression. as highlighted in the report published by the high level expert group set up by the european commission (2018), tackling misleading information requires a multidimensional approach and strategy because of its technological, legal, political and educational implications. the global economic market which drives on efficiency, adaptability and being open for free mobility of ideas and people also urges us to think about information, truth, and empowerment in our teaching (see kreissl et al., 2015; stein, andreotti, bruce & suša, 2016; teichler, 2019). problems integrated to the global spread of disinformation have been mapped as information disorder (e.g., wardle and derakhshan, 2017) highlighting the needs for developing citizens’ skills in fact-checking as critical awareness of the differences in fake and trustworthy information. one can ask how to make that happen, for example, at schools, when the studies on fact-checking are in the evolving stage with growing demand for education for professionals like teachers (e.g., hobbs, 2017b)? according to hobbs (e.g.) knowledge about fact-checking is not coherent in higher education institutions, not even in the field of media education. this counts european universities as well as the disciplines giving fact checking teaching vary from country to country (beaudreau & fraumeigs, 2021). for example, in finland, all teacher education is academic producing masters. master level media education programs include teaching of digital media literacies (e.g. rasi, ruokamo and maasilta 2017) and, one can assume that they include teaching of disinformation as well. still, academic papers mostly are lacking on how fake news and fact-checking are integrated into media education. thus, the question is, how fact-checking could be taught as digital media literacy in higher education? fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 this paper is discussing the question with the focus on education, namely media education which mostly concerns education, media, communication and information sciences. for example, as focal points, libraries in the member states of eu are actively working to improve the overall level of literacy and inclusion in lifelong learning through their activities and services (for example: boosting digital skills and competencies for librarians in europe (https://www.biblio-project.eu/). this article is based on a case study in the joint european three-year erasmus+ project “fact checking: european cooperation project on disinformation and fact-checking training” (2020 2022). nova university lisbon served as coordinator of the project having eight partners from six countries including one portuguese press association and seven universities. in addition to portugal, countries involved were finland, france, greece, netherlands and poland. context of the project is higher education in europe. higher education is approached from the viewpoint of examination, so higher education institutions giving bachelors or master degrees are in the focus. these include universities and in some cases polytechnics that teach bachelors programs. project’s mapping study (beaudreau & frau-meigs, 2021) highlights that fact checking policies vary a lot at european universities. what is more, there are higher education colleges operating outside universities that teach fact checking in disciplines such as journalism or communication science, but these are not studied in the project. the main aim of the erasmus+ “fact-checking” project was to create a new master’s program on fact-checking for european higher education to develop the skills of media professionals and media education teachers. the new master’s program designed by the end of the project gives a study basis for the emerging profession of fact-checkers. forming the basic knowledge for the design of the new master program three studies were conducted including 1) a survey in european universities on fact-checking teaching followed by 2) a case-based action research as a workshop on fact-checking in a digital literacy master course in 2020. moreover, 3) a survey among european media professionals was conducted. this article is focusing on the workshop case study, practically a master level course for international university students implemented by the finnish team of the erasmus+ project. digital media literacy as fact-checking digital literacy encourages people to access, analyze, create, reflect, and act using digital tools (e.g., ferrari, 2013; buckingham, 2015). fact-checking is described as the practice of seeking factual information in order to promote its truth value. (miller, 2020). thus, taking fact-checking as practice relates to teaching practices. integrating fact-checking into fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 digital literacy teaching practice may encourage learners to practice with digital factchecking tools and to identify information in the digital platforms. this integration was the core task to explore in the workshop on fact-checking. renee hobbs (2017a) finds commonalities with digital literacy and media literacy as: a) critical analysis of messages, b) communication and advocacy, c) awareness online and d) balancing risks and opportunities in using media contents (e.g., buckingham, 2015). according to hobbs (2020) elements of mis, dis, and mal information belong to integrated digital media literacy of today with links to all of these commonalities. understanding of fake information is, first of all, about critical reading abilities following with other commonalities (b-d). julian sefton-green, ola erstad and helen nixon (2009) are mapping digital literacy in three different frameworks based on how communication and the user is understood. transmission framework is based on information processing and the focus is on evaluating skills of the user. pragmatic approach researchers are interested in practices and making sense of the users engagement online. finally, the transformative model highlights critical thinking and mindsets in dialogue by the user (e.g.). colin lanskhear and michel knobel (2015) suggest a sociocultural framework for understanding digital media literacies as multiple and contextual literacies. sociocultural framework is the base in this study as well in reflecting a workshop that was offered to international master students and realizes through the contextualized application of renee hobbs' aacra model (2017). this model helps learners to: access the media ecosystem and digital fact-checking tools; analyze media content using fact-checking strategies and tools; create fact-checking reports.; reflect participants' attitudes and critical awareness toward media and take action to solve problems related to their lives and careers (e.g.). there are many terms concerning false, misleading, and fake information (e.g., fake news, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation). first, fake news is defined as “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers” (allcott & gentzkow, 2017). even if the term is commonly used in everyday speech, its definition is vague (tandoc & al., 2017) and many researchers comment that, in many cases, it is not a correct expression (e.g., hobbs, 2017b; wardle & derakshan, 2017; carlsson, 2018). the term is inadequate because it is not able to capture the complex problem of disinformation, which may involve content that is not actually, or completely “fake” but fabricated information blended with facts. besides, there are also information practices that do not belong to the category of “news”, but includes for instance “some forms of automated accounts used for astroturfing, networks of fake followers, fabricated or manipulated videos, targeted advertising, organized trolling, visual memes, and much more” (european commission, 2018). moreover, the term has been used misleadingly by some politicians and their supporters, who have labeled the media coverage and news they find disagreeable as ‘fake news’ (european commission, 2018). fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 there is considerable debate over the most effective way to address “fake news.” some scholars argue that services like facebook and google are undeniably media platforms with a responsibility to flag false stories and even alter economic incentives for publishers (and facebook has indeed started to take some action). others argue the solution lies in teaching greater media literacy and “emotional skepticism” to the public. unfortunately, none of the proposed solutions are easy, and their effectiveness remains largely untested and may even backfire. for example, hobbs (2017b) suggests that educators pay more attention to the concepts of propaganda and disinformation. propaganda is effective communication to affect people's emotions. it can be the most important and difficult term for students to understand because it is closely related to people’s daily lives and can appear in many forms (e.g., advertising, sponsored content, or political promotion). some forms of propaganda, such as marketing or health communication are not always harmful; sometimes, they are beneficial. (hobbs, kanižaj, & pereira, 2019.) thus, hobbs (2020) recommends that propaganda is a significant subject for teaching practices in media education because it is related to more complex situations in real life. in addition to fake news and propaganda, wardle and derakshan (2017) recommend the terms misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation as the three types of information disorder. misinformation is defined as information that is false but not intentionally, it may be caused by, for example, a journalist’s mistake or error, while disinformation is by purpose designed, presented and promoted to cause harm or to gain financial profit. malinformation is the term used for truthful information that is spread without permission or with the purpose to cause harm. examples of malinformation may include leaks, harassment and hate speech. (wardle & derakshan, 2017.) many researchers emphasize that it is important for media literacy educators to help learners expand their knowledge on these different terms and definitions, because the knowledge can help them to better analyze and evaluate different types of information, raise awareness of all forms of media, and analyze information from different perspectives (e.g., hobbs, 2017b; wardle & derakshan, 2017). moreover, european fact-checking experts, journalists, media specialists and pedagogues highlight the importance of empowering students with critical thinking and digital information literacy skills to resist misand disinformation and aim to activate students to verify their social media content as most of the youth get their daily news through social media and youtube. according to the report towards a better democracy (rautiainen, 2019), there is a direct link between education and other factors/indicators (media freedom, trust, new forms of participation) that are key to preventing the spread of misinformation. the higher the media literacy index is, the greater the trust in public structures, the less likely it is to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation, and so on. the basic understanding is that the level of education, the state of the media, the level of trust in society and the spread of new forms of participation illustrate the existence of media literacy (e.g.). fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 several authors have recently been calling for the integration of media literacy with technology orientation as algorithm-based digital literacy or even artificial intelligencebased literacy for increasing the public awareness on information and contents in digital platforms (e.g. valtonen et. al, 2019; kotilainen & al., 2021). the most important is considered the critical adjustment of media practices. computational thinking augments media literacy from content orientation also to critical assessment of platforms and services as critical digital literacy (kotilainen et al., 2021). critical focus is suggested to lay, for example, on these aspects in digital platforms (valtonen et. al, 2019): user tracking, recommenders in the usage, dynamic content creation and reinforcement learning in platforms, attention engineering and content filtering curation during the usage of digital platforms. tracking and recommenders are about how recommender systems are tracking personal data, dynamic content creation mean, for example, how followers, news and bots are able to carry out conversations. considering attention engineering one should reflect on how the contents are tailored and in content filtering curation the focus should be on how social media is learning to curate content that the user prefers to use (e.g.). these are important integrations in the case of identifying fake information online as news or social media postings and platform communication in general. thus, in higher education it is calling for new understanding with media educational pedagogies together with digital media literacies as well. the workshop on fact-checking was testing contents and teaching practices at a master level. workshop on fact-checking the case-based action study, workshop online on fact-checking was conducted with the title “information disorder and fact-checking”. it was part of the 5-ects public elective course on digital literacy. the workshop was organized online so it was possible to involve two universities that are 680 km apart: tampere university in the southern part of finland and lapland university in the northern part of the country. the participants in this study were 10 international students, aged 22 to 35. the students attended the class in both universities together as nine females and one male. participants' origins were finland (6), ukraine (1), china (1), spain (1), and belgium (1). their study programs ranged from information sciences to education and to nordic studies (tekoniemi, 2021). educators conduct action research with students in schools to improve teaching practice (van der stoep & johnston, 2009). thus, this practice-based approach was applied because of the possibility to seek theoretical understanding of integrating fact-checking in the scope of digital literacy education in practice (e.g.). action research consists of four cycles: planning, acting, observing, and reflecting (kemmis & mctaggart, 2005), and it is usually conducted in more than two rounds. due to the limited time of the erasmus+ project with the need to test pedagogic methods, however, the present study is a casebased action study. it carries out one workshop in this study, and the second round will be fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 organized later during the first author’s phd study. the workshop followed action research cycles as planning the workshop and implementing it with the limits of existing curricula at the university. special focus was in observing through qualitative methods including researcher’s diary and reflecting, i.e. analyzing the collected data (e.g. kemmis & mctaggart, 2005). implementation as research followed research ethical manners from the beginning throughout the process as, for example, informing about the study, collecting research consents from participants in this way making the implementation transparent for students, and their participation to the study voluntary-based with the possibility to withdraw from the study at any time (e.g., shamoo and resnik, 2009) it was selected to focus fact-checking knowledge and teaching activities through renee hobbs' aacra model (2017a), helping participants to: a) access the media ecosystem and digital fact-checking tools. b) analyze media content using fact-checking strategies and tools, c) create fact-checking reports, d) reflect participants’ attitudes and critical awareness toward media, and e) take action to solve problems related to their lives and careers. activities related to the themes were arranged according to this model to serve the learning goals. the goals of this short intensive-kind workshop mostly were as such: expanding the knowledge of fact-checking and identifying information disorder with fact-checking strategies together with accessing digital fact-checking tools. moreover, solving problems through creation and production was a goal, for which to achieve the participants were required to design a fact-checking curriculum according to the target audience they chose. the workshop consists of two sessions. the first session, lasting about 1.5 hours, focused on the introduction of the workshop and the participants’ knowledge of fact-checking. session two, lasting another 1.5 hours, focused on the experience of fact-checking practice, the development of critical thinking, and the introduction of the assignments. after the workshop, learners continued with their independent learning process for more than 100 hours through work on the assignments. the case-based action study was organized to explore methodologically these sub questions as “core issues”: core issue 1. what are the learning outcomes of the workshop? core issue 2. how is the aacra model working in the fact-checking teaching practice? core issue 3. what are participants’ challenges? responding to the three core issues, mixed data collection methods were planned. for example, there are datasets as the workshop assignments that aimed to find out the learning outcomes of the workshop (core issue 1) and explore the relations of the teaching practices and the aacra cycles (core issue 2); and datasets (e.g. participant’s learning diaries and open questionnaire 1 and 2) looked into the results of learning outcomes (core fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 issue 1) and participant’s challenges and expectations (core issue 3); and also datasets (e.g. researcher’s diaries and interviews with participants) focused on the reflection of the teaching and learning processes (core issue 2) and feedbacks (core issue 3). (see table 1). table 1 data for core issues (tekoniemi, 2021) methods participant’s fact-checking reports participant’s designing productions of a factchecking curriculum participant’s learning diaries open questionnaire 1, open questionnaire y 2 researcher’s diaries interviews with participants purposes core issues 1 & 2 core issues 1 & 2 core issues 1 & 3 core issues 1 & 3 core issue 2 & 3 core issues 2 & 3 thematic methods are flexible for analyzing content under different structures (braun & clarke, 2006), thus the mixed data was analyzed thematically. the data were initially analyzed using different codes under the planned structure. total of 45 initial codes were found through intensive reading of the collected data several times. then, data was analyzed to find similarities and differences among different data sets and finally to create 11 themes. after the themes were formed, they were divided into three main categories as “learning outcomes, teaching and learning practices and expectations, challenges and comments”, responding to the three core issues 1-3. under each of these categories, there were two to six themes from the relative data source. for example, participants’ learning diaries are designed to students’ learning outcomes and their challenges during the course (core issues 1 and 3), however, many participants wanted to discuss their experiences in teaching activities as well in this assignment, so the data were also serving as a minor source for evaluating teaching activities in the workshop i.e., responding to core issue 2. findings findings based on the workshop data are mapped as learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities and challenges based on thematic analysis described above (tekoniemi, 2021). learning outcomes form the main in-depth findings of the study and, they are mapped into five key findings as such: the 1) students’ expanding the knowledge of factchecking and media ecosystem; 2) strengthening students’ critical thinking; 3) students enhancing their media analyzing skills and motivation; 4) increased experiences on digital fact-checking tools; 5) encouraging participants to solve problems through creation and production. findings of teaching and learning activities show out the importance of fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 students' own involvement to create and dwell into knowledge. challenges mainly concern students’ experiencing new untrustful media environments in the workshop, i.e., which they usually avoid in their everyday media usage. as learning outcomes, first (1) students show out the expanding of their knowledge of factchecking and the media ecosystem in several data sets (e.g., from participants' learning diaries, student 1,3,7, finland). before the workshop, most participants reported that they had neither any knowledge nor any study experience about the information disorder phenomenon. a few participants had a little understanding of the subject, but that knowledge was very limited. after the workshop, most participants' understanding was broadened and strengthened, and their knowledge was more systematic and deeper than before (e.g., from open questionnaire 1 and 2). second (2) strengthening students’ critical thinking was shown when they had come across disinformation in their lives, and their reactions were “anger,” “frustrate,” and “stop believing” (e.g., from open questionnaire 1) data showed that before the workshop, people seldom took action to report harmful information. after the workshop, however, participants tried to build up good attitudes towards media, and their critical awareness was strengthened. for example, participants described (from participants' learning diaries, student 4, belgium) their different understanding of the proper attitudes when engaging with the media. third (3) students enhancing their media analyzing skills and motivation to analyze showed out as identifying mis-, disand mal-information in the workshop since most participants showed great interest in analyzing media, and many of them actively shared their judgments based on their understanding. after the workshop, data showed that participants were able to consider several perspectives in media analysis, especially when working on their assignments (e.g. from participants' learning diaries, student 1,5, finland). fourth (4) students increasing their experiences in digital fact-checking tools was reported in multiple ways. for example, they had never before used any fact-checking tools, and some of them did not even know that there were any fact-checking tools in their countries. after the learning experience, however, most participants had practice in using digital tools and showed great interest in doing digital fact-checking. for example, some participants described their experiences using digital tools and tried to analyze some fact-checking tools after the workshop (e.g., from participants' learning diaries, student 1, finland and open questionnaire 2). fifth (5) encouraging participants to solve problems through creation and production was highlighted during the workshop. participants reflected on the challenges of fact-checking worldwide and suggested different solutions to fight against disinformation. in the fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 assignments, they also designed different fact-checking classes to help various target audiences. for example, to solve the problem of information disorder worldwide, many recommended that more training in fact-checking should be tailored for different groups in reaction to disinformation. findings of teaching and learning activities were mostly reported in data sets of participant’s fact-checking reports and participant’s own designs of fact-checking curricula. the main teaching activities adopted in this workshop included seminars and hands-on approaches. these activities were planned to integrate fact-checking into the framework of digital literacy education. for example, two activities as producing factchecking reports and designing a fact-checking curriculum were implemented as handson pedagogies, helping participants interact in aacra learning cycles in practice (hobbs, 2017a). many participants investigated to find much evidence to form their judgments, when producing fact-checking reports (e.g. from participants' fact-checking reports, student 8, spain and student 10, ukraine). and when designing a fact-checking curriculum, most participants were dedicated to solving problems by considering their target group, reviewing the fact-checking knowledge, and overcoming challenges in producing creative teaching plans (e.g. from participant's design of a fact-checking curriculum, student 4, belgium). other than the hands-on pedagogies, the seminar session was also essential to link fact-checking with digital literacy education in deepening participant’s fact-checking understanding based on their assignments. for example, many participants reviewed the knowledge and pondered fact-checking elements in producing teaching plans (e.g., from participant's designing production of a factchecking curriculum, student 4, belgium). these activities helped participants to become involved in aacra cycles, especially through creation. the biggest challenges were reported mostly in interviews and participant’s learning diaries, as a worry about adapting to new media environments in this workshop. some felt uncomfortable when engaging with unfamiliar media sources. for example, participants described that they usually limited their media access to trusted sources, as they felt uncomfortable accessing unfamiliar sources and tools in the workshop. moreover, many of them claimed that they did not get enough training in fact-checking during their academic studies in general, and they suggested that training should be given as early as possible in the degree program. discussion the case-based action study (tekoniemi,2021) integrated fact-checking into media education teaching practices following the hobbs (2017a; 2017b) aacra model in master level. the learning outcomes indicate that the approach was helping participants access, analyze, create, reflect, and act in learning digital literacies (e.g.). in addition to the fulfillment of learning goals, the design of teaching activities to achieve these goals can be fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 considered essential. data shows that the workshop met most participants’ expectations of learning fact-checking strategies, methods, and tools. furthermore, it also inspired them to use academic fact-checking tools in their study, and many learners also related the learning experience with their future careers. in all, the workshop was a good example of integrating fact-checking in media education. considering university students’ learning expectations, it tailored content and material to promote participants’ critical digital literacies and increased students’ motivation to fact-checking practices in their everyday life. thus, following hobbs’ model (2017a; 2017b) in higher education with the adaptation to fact-checking seems to be working in a media education approach. for developing the model further out of this local context, pedagogic culture-based contextualization should be promoted in teaching activities from the perspectives of the participants, especially when they have intercultural backgrounds. that may increase the student’s motivation in developing their own workshops when returning their home countries. moreover, the study identified some challenges for the international students participating in the workshop. for example, the limitation of access to unfamiliar media sources and tools, and the barriers of a digital learning environment were reported in the data. thus, future workshops should pay more attention to the promotion of participants’ access to digital tools and multiple media environments based on the different cultures of participants. moreover, they should emphasize the practice of different forms and types of the information disorder ecosystem following a similar intercultural manner and develop contextualization to cultures of origin of the students. when discussing the challenges of students to face new media platforms in the workshop raises the question from a technological perspective as well. several authors have recently been calling for the integration of media literacy with technology orientation as algorithmbased digital literacy for increasing the public awareness on information and contents in digital platforms (e.g. valtonen et. al, 2019; kotilainen & al., 2021). the most important is considered the critical adjustment of media practices including fact-checking practices. critical focus is suggested to lay, for example, on these aspects in digital platforms (valtonen et. al, 2019): user tracking, recommenders in the usage, dynamic content creation and reinforcement learning in platforms, attention engineering and content filtering curation during the usage of digital platforms. tracking and recommenders are about how recommender systems are tracking personal data, dynamic content creation mean, for example, how followers, news and bots are able to carry out conversations. considering attention engineering one should reflect on how the contents are tailored and in content filtering curation the focus should be on how social media is learning to curate content that the user prefers to use (e.g.). conclusion the objective of this study was to increase the understanding on how fact-checking is fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 taught as digital media literacy in higher education. recalling the history of media education, this study shows that fact-checking can be integrated in digital media literacy for enhancing the students' own involvement to create and dwell into knowledge in a short workshop to produce learning even in strengthening students’ critical thinking, even in a short-term workshop. this kind of learning experiences were possible in practice-based curriculum design and other critical reflection in seminars. in future, student’s task to design educational games as learning activities in master level could be considered. findings highlight a need for developing fact-checking teaching in higher education as digital media literacy in a framework which integrates pragmatic with critical approach as digital design and other hands-on educational practices. the research reflects a high learning demand by university students for the training in factchecking and digital media literacies. thus, there is a need for studies in future to integrate fact-checking-related subjects, e.g., propaganda and disinformation. the study suggests that contents of digital media literacy need updating with algorithm-based communication for the recognition of technology as a counterpart in the organization of information disorder. based on the case study there is a need for developing the field of fact-checking teaching further in higher education. in general, studies on digital media literacy mostly cover education, especially teacher education or information studies and, lacking other scientific fields. thus, there is a need to broaden research on media education to more professional perspectives covering higher education. this can be concluded based on the case study as well, for example, as a workshop online on fact-checking in master level which included participants from several scientific fields. case study followed hobbs’ (2017a) aacra model to help participants achieve digital media literacies through hands-on practices. it was tailored for international university students of different study backgrounds. thus, this kind of workshop model online can be considered as an example when designing fact-checking courses in other contexts. not a straightforward way, but to contextualize culture-based the workshop regarding contents and teaching activities based on, for example, available teaching resources or current themes on disinformation and participants’ backgrounds. references allcott, h. & gentzkow, m. 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(2009). case study research. design and methods (4th ed.). los angeles: sage https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-009-9002-7 https://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi:tuni-202106075736 https://doi.org/10.23860/jmle-2019-11-2-2 fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education abstract introduction digital media literacy as fact-checking workshop on fact-checking findings discussion conclusion references murphy-sharmax seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 111 what don’t we know about interactive lectures? roger murphy school of education, university of nottingham email: roger.murphy@nottingham.ac.uk namrata sharma school of education, university of nottingham email: namrata.sharma@nottingham.ac.uk abstract this article considers aspects of lecturer-student interaction within the context of lectures in higher education. in particular it considers ways in which lectures can involve observable interactions between students and lecturers, and how these sometimes involve novel uses of visualisation supported by modern technologies. it goes on to consider the different ways in which interactive lectures can involve the use of new technologies such as voting systems and sms messaging from mobile telephones. a full range of types of interactive lectures is reviewed, and the article notes the serious lack of research in existence which can inform thinking about what is a very widely used form of teaching throughout higher education. as well as considering the possible implications for students and lecturers of participating in interactive lectures, this article also goes on to consider ways in which this type of educational situation could be subjected to rigorous research investigations. it is argued that such research needs to focus both on the processes of interactive lectures as well as their impact on student learning outcomes. keywords: lectures, interactive lectures, technologies in higher education introduction lecturing has a long and distinguished history as the prime teaching method in higher education. to some it still encapsulates the very heart of university education, whereas to others it represents an outmoded form of instruction which dates back to the medieval origins of university education in the days before the invention of the printing press. in this article we want to take a look at what modern lectures can look like and to consider ways in which lecturing, in many settings, has moved away from being a straightforward didactic act. in making this distinction we are aware that even straightforward traditional lectures may not be conducted entirely in the absence of any interaction between the lecturer and their audience. lecturers generally can see and hear their audiences, and even a silent passive audience may convey messages to the lecturer through facial expressions and other forms of non-verbal seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 112 behaviour, or by non-attendance, late arrival or leaving the room while the lecture is still continuing, or both. in all such cases it can be argued that interactions are occurring, which may influence the behaviour of the lecturer and indeed the impact of the lecture on the students. however when we talk about ‘interactive lecturing’ in this article, we are referring to lectures which include observable attempts by the lecturer to introduce techniques or technologies, or both, into the structure of the lecture with the intention of eliciting interactions from their audience. in wanting to put our focus on modern lecturing, which tries to create more opportunities for audience engagement, participation, and active learning, we are aware that much has already been written about both public speaking more generally and university lecturing in particular (bligh, 2000; brown & atkin, 1988; brown & daines 1981). nevertheless given the importance of lecturing as the major means of teaching in higher education we want to argue that it has had little serious attention as the focus for in-depth research, and this does seem a serious omission given that the focus there now is on both expanding higher education and improving student learning experiences within it. compared to other types of ‘instructional methods’, such as classroom teaching in secondary schools, this field of education is, we would argue, both under-researched and indeed under-theorised. one reason for wishing to focus on lecturing at this time in this article is an increasing interest in the phenomenon of ‘adapting’ lectures deliberately to make them into a more interactive experience for students. compared to traditional lecture settings, where the teachers talk and the students listen, interactive lecturing generally sets out to promote two-way teacher-andstudent communication during the lecturing process. this may be done through the use of various techniques that enable students to engage in a discussion amongst themselves or to interact with the lecturer. however, interactive lecturing is not just restricted to human interaction, but can also take place through the student’s interactions with the lecture material and content. it is also possible to use a variety of modern technological devices to bring elements of interactivity into a traditional lecture-theatre setting. here we have in mind things such as handheld response pads and text messaging using ordinary mobile telephones, each of which, along with some other possibilities, will be considered at more length later in this article. the question of what could possibly make a lecture ‘interactive’ is clearly quite a complex one, because individuals passively listening to a lecture, which they find fascinating, might in all sorts of ways be interacting with the lecturer’s ideas in ways which stimulate all sorts of thought patterns, new ideas, and deep learning. generally that type of interaction is not what people have in mind when they talk about ‘interactive lecturing’. the more normal understanding of ‘interactive lecturing’ is where some form of communication occurs in both directions between the lecturer and their audience. in the traditional form of lecture, lecturers may take questions from members of their audience, either during or towards the end of their allotted time, or, inviting individuals to respond with suggested answers, they may themselves ask questions of their audience. with a large audience and a restricted amount of time such interactions may be quite limited and involve very few individuals. they do nevertheless break through the potential monotony of simple one-way communication from a lecturer to their assembled audience. with the increased use of new technologies in higher education, there are now additional technology-assisted techniques, which can be employed to increase the possibility of interactions occurring. lecturers employing such new technologies while lecturing may bring into their engagements with students quite a range of devices, which have the potential to make lectures both more varied and in some cases more interactive. these technologies can widen the scope of lecturer-student communication within the lecture theatre. they can also allow students to access recordings of lectures at a time that suits them seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 113 through a facility of web-based lecture capture. web-based lecture capture systems record live lectures and then make them available as web-based resources. in some cases such lectures are supported by other on-screen resources, which allow further possibilities with respect to audience interaction. although the issues faced with regard to analysing lecturerstudent interactivity change in such settings, they do at least go even further in illustrating what a changing landscape is now encompassed by the former seemingly straightforward category of ‘university lectures’. clearly when students are accessing a lecture through a web-based recording they necessarily have the facility to stop, start, and re-run parts of the lecture at their own convenience. it is our view that the research literature relating to conventional lectures is rather thin. in contrast to that state of affairs the research literature into ‘interactive lectures’, encompassing the range of developments, which have just been discussed, is almost non-existent, with major issues waiting to be examined. later in this paper we intend to map-out more fully an agenda for future research into ‘interactive lectures’. first we want to look in a little more depth at the key issues that are likely to shape such a research agenda. one of the major arguments in favour of ‘interactive lectures’ is based upon the assumption that students will learn more in educational settings where they have the opportunity to be active participants in the learning process. indeed those proponents of the benefits of active learning tend to hold out little hope for the effectiveness of conventional one-way didactic lectures, which anticipate a passive and receptive audience. in support of this stance research has shown the merits of interactive learning across various disciplines (gage & berliner, 1991; foley & smilansky, 1980; frederick 1986; papp & miller, 1996; saroyan & snell, 1997; steinert & snell 1999). some of these studies suggest that increased student participation takes place when student interest has been captured. however, there is a paucity of research that can provide evidence to support student learning. although there has been research in this area, studies are generally unable to suggest whether there is better student learning through interactive lecturing as compared to more didactic forms of teaching. in fact, some studies (e.g., van dijk et al., 2001; lake 2001) report a preference amongst students for traditional lectures over those with interactive elements, even when student performance was higher in the former (lake, 2001). also, potential disadvantages of making lectures more interactive have been identified, including loss of teaching time (lammers & murphy, 2002), reduction in factual content (murray & brightman, 1996), reduction in accuracy of transmission, and loss of control by lecturers over the class (huxham, 2003). there is also inadequate research on the pedagogical implications of the emerging interactive forms of learning. as this article argues, there is a need for more robust discussion on the theoretical underpinnings of how technological advancements in lecturing can improve student learning with respect to providing the enabling conditions that can facilitate knowledge of discipline-related content and also gain generic skills like critical and analytical thinking. this article draws up a theoretical framework to consider these issues that have wider implications for learning and teaching in higher education. different approaches to interactive lecturing various interactive techniques are being used to make lectures more interactive, which include the following examples selected from recent studies. • ivs, interactive voting system seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 114 interactive voting systems are an interactive means of presentation and communication which can support large group interaction (schijven et al., 1997). ivs consists of a series of electronic voting devices that presenters can use to keep in contact with their audience… in a lecturing setting ivs provides lecturers with the opportunity to ask questions about the subject matter, which students can answer anonymously using their voting devices. the results of the voting session can be projected on to a screen, thus making it possible for the students to see them. the lecturer can give feedback to the student answers. (van dijk et al., 2001, p. 17) • peer instruction peer instruction is an instructional method aimed at exploiting student interaction during lectures and at focussing students’ attention on underlying concepts (mazur, 1997). using pi in lectures implies departing from the traditional lecturing format. instead of presenting the level of detail covered in the textbook or lecture notes, lectures consist of a number of brief presentations on key points, each followed by short questions on the subject under discussion. the students are first given time to formulate answers and then they are asked to discuss their answers with each other. (van dijk et al., 2001, pp. 1718) • breaking the class into smaller groups this approach overlaps with peer instruction to some extent, although is significantly different as cooper and robinson (2000) make the argument for making large classes seem small through various case studies and examples. two interesting examples of this technique have also been presented by schwartz (1989), teaching biochemistry to a large number of students, and by stein et al. (1990), who incorporated small group teaching methods in a large group setting in clinical pharmacology. the general strategy is to break the class into small groups, using a judicious rearrangement of seating if necessary (gibbs et al., 1988; newble and cannon 1994)…small groups may be asked to discuss a limited topic for a few minutes (in what is often called ‘buzz groups’ because of the noise in the room) or they may consider broader issues for a longer period of time. (steinert & snell, 1999, p. 39) • questions for the audience or lecturer lecturers can either ask questions, which they invite members of the audience to answer, or they can invite members of the audience to ask them questions. both techniques can be used in a wide variety of ways, for example, to include the use of buzz groups, where students can either reflect on possible answers to a question that the lecturer has given them, or to frame questions, which they might ask the lecturer. this approach might also be supported by getting the students to brainstorm either ideas or questions. other approaches might involve the lecturer surveying the class (in which the lecturer adapts to audience needs and interest), or furnishing them with quizzes and short answers (to check up on learning), or giving them problems to solve, which might allow them to apply the ideas presented in the lecture. • using audience responses this can be done through interactive computer systems or flash cards. essentially the lecturer is hoping here to increase audience seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 115 engagement and interactivity through inviting responses to questions or dilemmas. as with the ivs approach, the results of such audience responses can be summarised and fed-back allowing further opportunities for reflection, discussion and interactions between the lecturer and the audience. • use of clinical cases as steinert and snell (1999, p. 40) suggest, the use of clinical cases has been found to be particularly useful in medical education. this technique is also used in other settings such as business, education, and social work. in all such areas the lecturer shares a ‘case’ with a group of students, inviting them to engage with it, and allowing opportunities for enhanced interactivity around a discussion of the case. • use of written materials distributing handouts, for instance, before or during the teaching session, is one possible way of facilitating interaction during the lecturing process. here much depends upon the nature of the handouts and their purpose. rather than simply summarising the key points from the lecture, handouts may provide stimulus material for students to reflect upon, analyse, and discuss, and can form the basis for lecturer-student interactions while the lecture is in progress. • organising debates, reaction panels, and guests students can be divided into groups in order to think of arguments from different perspectives (frederick, 1986, 1987). such an approach can be developed into a full debate or can just lead to group feedback for further whole group discussion. clearly this can be pre-planned or introduced spontaneously by a lecturer responding to an issue or argument that has emerged during the course of a lecture. in either case the properties of the learning space, where the lecture is taking place, will be of considerable importance. again the design of learning spaces is not the prime focus of this article, but it is an issue, which is considered elsewhere in this journal. lecturers using such techniques extensively may use lecture theatres that allow ease of movement for groups to form or even to disperse to rooms where smaller groups can meet and later provide feedback to the larger group. • using simulations and role plays simulations and role plays allow students to try out a real-life situation in a ‘safe setting’ and to receive feedback on their experiences (handfield-jones et al., 1993; steinert, 1999 in steinert & snell 1999). second life (sl) simulations have been used within various highereducation courses (and lectures have even been held within sl itself, with potentially problematic implications for interactivity). • sms text messaging in lecture theatres another emerging innovation in interactive lecturing involves lecturers providing students with an sms text messaging address to which they can send questions and comments while attending a live lecture. technology exists to allow this to be set up in such a way that the lecturer can view any text messages on a computer screen, while they are giving their lecture. advocates of this approach point to the benefits of students being able to remain anonymous in interactions seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 116 with a lecturer, and to the advantages of lecturers being able to scan a range of comments and questions before deciding how or whether to respond to them. although this approach does have some similarities to the use of electronic voting systems, it does differ with regard to the use of students’ own familiar personal devices and the facility for them to use free text in formulating their questions. • use of technology to connect the lectures to different places, people or contexts this includes for example, video-conferencing technology, which is increasingly being installed within lecture theatres, and which is used to link lectures to practice-based settings and external experts, etc. here the interactivity is being achieved with both people and contexts, which are external to the lecture theatre. most of these methods can be used across various subjects and can certainly act as triggers that can stimulate student thinking and promote enhanced engagement and discussion. rather than diminishing the role of the lecturer, several of these approaches can give the lecturer a bigger and more complex role in an interactive lecturing process, where they can act not only as an instructor, but also a guide or facilitator who aids the students learning process by responding to student inputs and reactions while teaching. the complexity of interactive lecturing means that it demands quite sophisticated research approaches both to understand what types of interactions are involved and to consider their impact on individual student learning. developing the conditions for learning one of the key pedagogical aspects in all the above techniques in interactive lecturing is that it opens up the possibility of a dialogic form of learning, and also aims to activate thinking so that students can experience higher levels of cognitive learning (biggs, 1987; entwistle & marton, 1984; nicholls, 2002; ramsden, 1992). as is normal when one seeks to understand real learning situations, the picture quickly becomes quite complicated as one seeks to unscramble impacts on both the behaviours and actions of individual students and lecturers, as well as on the learning outcomes which arise from particular interactions. a recent study into interactive lectures in engineering education suggests that interactive teaching will not automatically result in students who are more actively engaged, and this adds support to the idea that the interactive elements that might possibly enhance the likelihood of successful student learning need careful examination (van dijk et al., 2001). in order to assist the conceptualisation of this complicated network of issues and interactions we offer the figure 1 which is a depiction of the various processes that we consider need consideration if one is to develop a deeper understanding of interactive lecturing. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 117 figure 1: investigating the multiple dimensions which surround and impinge upon interactive lecturing. figure 1 indicates some of the complexities which interrelate with the concept of interactive lecturing. this is clearly not a single or simple phenomenon. interactive lecturing is surrounded by other factors which complicate it with respect to what happens before, during, and after it, as well as individual differences between students, lecturers, courses, and institutions. in the final section of this article we want to reflect a little further on how such issues could be addressed effectively through future research investigations. developing research into interactive lecturing in an earlier section of this article we looked at ten different categories of activities which could be undertaken within the context of lectures and which could potentially be regarded as constituting interactive lecturing. this list does not claim to be exhaustive, but as it stands it indicates something of the variety that exists within this field. also each of those separate categories will certainly include a great variety of practices, which in turn will be influenced by contexts, timings, facilities, disciplines, students, lecturers – not to mention new technologies and other related developments. therefore to understand interactive lecturing better we need contextualise learning in specific contexts and to study naturalistic settings in great detail. here we are arguing for detailed research investigations involving observation, and data recording of various types designed to record and understand different teaching interactions from the perspectives of key participants, including the role that interactions play in them. all such work will need to take place within an institutional and a discipline-specific context, and it is of course always complex to assume that teaching phenomena that occur in one context can be assumed to be characteristic of the phenomena that might occur elsewhere. therefore institutional and discipline-specific studies need to be planned and over time tested against research conducted in markedly different contexts. if we take just one example from our list, that of the use of sms text messaging in lectures, it is possible to indicate the breadth of this part of a research agenda. this relatively new phenomenon is as yet not all that well researched, and those designing pioneering studies in this area will want to look to see how such a technique is being used in different settings, for different purposes, and quite possibly how it evolves over time as it becomes more familiar to both students and lecturers. obvious things to wonder about are whether all students will use this facility, what will encourage or discourage them from using it, what kind of messages will they send, how will lecturers use the textseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 118 message information which they receive, what impact will this type of interaction have on the overall structure of a lecture, that is, the attendance, preparation, and follow-up. that is quite apart from the more technical concerns over how the system operates, the display of messages the lecturer can access, and the speed and effectiveness with which the messages get through. all of those questions relate in one way or another to a study of the processes which might surround the use of sms text messaging in the context of interactive lecturing. well designed research might allow us to gain greater insights into how this new phenomenon in higher-education teaching is being developed and used. such findings might help other lecturers to consider how they might or might not introduce such approaches into their own teaching practices, but many will also want to know whether this approach has the potential to improve the effectiveness of student learning. so, as well as research into the processes of interactive lecturing, we also need research into the impact of interactive lecturing on student learning. if learning processes are hard to study, then learning outcomes are as least as difficult. the learning objectives for higher-education courses are complex and often not defined in great detail. lectures play a part in a complex set of learning processes and are certainly about much more than knowledge transfer. in a so-called age of knowledge explosion an effective lecture might be more about inspiring students to become more interested in a subject and then to go off and to start engaging with it in their personal study, than about getting them to remember a fixed set of information. therefore, although we are here interested in much more than the processes of interactive teaching, we are not only interested in simplistic measures of learning outcomes. a sensitive approach to studying the impact of interactive lectures on students needs necessarily to encompass student engagement, student motivation, and the impact of participating in lectures in relation to what students go on to do after they leave them. ultimately there can be an underlying interest in enhancing student learning, but this needs to be approached wisely and to take into consideration the broader learning activities, which constitute student learning within higher education. essentially we are here arguing for a dual focus on both the varied processes of interactive lecturing and their impact on the broader learning achievements of individual students studying in different areas in different universities. we expect understandings to be complex and to be highly context-dependent. we therefore place more faith in detailed naturalistic studies, which can attend to contextual details and build knowledge sensitively, rather than large-scale surveys, which ride roughshod over important contextual variations. we ourselves already have a range of studies underway, most of which are looking at interactive lecturing in very specific settings, and involving detailed observations of such lectures as they happen, complemented by studies of what students and lecturers do before, during, and after such lectures, as well as their own thoughts and impressions in relation to their impact upon their learning. it is early days to be drawing big conclusions, but we certainly have evidence of some very effective practices, which lead to high levels of student engagement. this we take as a sign that the concept of the ‘university lecture’ is far from that which developed before the invention of the printing press, and is one which is evolving in new and interesting ways as higher education evolves within an age of information explosion and technological revolution. here we have an area of educational research which is emerging with great promise and prospects and which needs urgently to be developed to provide the type of evidence base that should have major applications within and beyond higher education and the countries where it is being developed. there is so much that we do not know about the possibilities for making learning in lecture-theatre settings more effective, and it hardly seems rash to imagine that increasing student-student as well as student-lecturer interactions may have powerful effects with regard to increasing students’ engagement and learning outcomes. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 119 finally it is necessary for us to state that we do not in any way assume that ‘interactive lectures’ will necessarily always be more effective than traditional lectures. what we have are some interesting indications that in certain defined contexts this may be the case, and what we are interested in is developing research to build a better knowledge base around the characteristics of good lectures, good uses of interaction within lectures, and ways of developing such approaches within a variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts with individual lecturers, who may or may not be ready or adequately equipped to be party to such changes in their teaching practices. we remain particularly interested in how visualisation can play a critical role in all of this, both by the use of visual images to stimulate interaction and by the use of visual technologies to help make concepts and ideas more vivid and engaging for both lecturers and their students. all of this we believe may have profound implications both for the future of lectures in higher education and the role of university lecturers when they 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(2001). interactive lectures in engineering education. european journal of engineering education, 26(1), 15-28. reed & hill don't keep it to yourself.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 268 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 “don’t keep it to yourself!”: digital storytelling with south african youth amber reed graduate student in anthropology phd candidate anthropology department university of california, los angeles email: amber.reed@ucla.edu amy hill ma, gender studies founder and director of the center for digital storytelling’s silence speaks digital storytelling initiative email: amylenita@storycenter.org abstract as resources become available, the tools of digital storytelling are being introduced into a wide variety of contexts, with new projects involving youth emerging in increasingly remote areas throughout the developing world. in 2008, the sonke gender justice network teamed up with the center for digital storytelling’s silence speaks initiative to work with a group of rural youth in eastern cape, south africa. the results of this project are eight digital stories by young xhosa people that capture the challenges they face and the futures they yearn for in post-apartheid south africa. by exploring the success and challenges of the project, we show the potential that thoughtfully designed digital storytelling efforts offer as both a psychological outlet and a tool for community education and social activism with marginalized youth. keywords: youth, digital storytelling, south africa, hiv/aids, participatory video, gender-based violence. “i liked what sonke did, so i told my friends. so now we do something like that. if someone has a problem we say, ‘don’t keep it to yourself! no – you can tell us.’ ” (tokozile, june 8, 2009) introduction what happens when youth are asked to share personal stories and take photographs in the service of producin g short-form videos that capture the challenges and opportunities facing their community? this article explores the possibilities and pitfalls of digital storytelling with marginalized young people seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 269 by presenting a case study of a project conducted in eastern cape, south africa in 2008. over the past 15 years, the emerging participatory media production method known as digital storytelling i has been taken up in numerous community, health, educational, and academic settings. drawing from well-established traditions in popular education, participatory communications, oral history, and, most recently, what has been called “citizen journalism,” practitioners of digital storytelling in localized contexts around the world are working with small groups of people to facilitate the production of short, first-person digital videos that document a wide range of culturally and historically embedded lived experiences (lambert, 2002; burgess, 2006). anthropological writings on youth resist ance have pointed to the importance of personal narratives in creating engaged citizens of a democratic state. as theorist and practitioner karen brodkin explains, the ability to narrate one’s own life story is an essential part of becoming what she calls a “political actor” (2007:14). brodkin continues: “to create a narrative is to exercise personal agency, to act upon society…being the interpreter of events makes the narrator an active agent in constructing the world” (50). lastly, she sees the telling of stories as often leading to exponential re sults, in which others are encouraged to speak out when they would have otherwise remained silent (53). at the level of community-based health practice, narrative is increasingly viewed as an effective tool for motivating and supporting health-behavior change. in their overview of this grow ing field, hinyard and kreuter write, “when audience members become immersed in a narrative, they are less likely to counter-argue against its key messages, and when they connect to characters in the narrative, these characters may have greater influence on the audience members’ attitudes and beliefs” (2007: 785). the center for digital storytelling’s sile nce speaks initiative builds on these perspectives in its work to support the te lling and witnessing of stories that all too often remain unspoken. the initiat ive is grounded in the notion that personal stories can inspire, educate, and move people deeply, and that when it comes to confronting complex social issues, the connections forged through storytelling can help people bridge the vast differences that often divide them and instead act with wisdom, compassion, and conscience. silence speaks stories are shared locally and globally, as tools for training, community mobilization, and policy advocacy to promote health, gender equality, and human rights both locally and globally. established in 2006, sonke gender justic e works in southern africa to create the change necessary for men, women, youth, and children to enjoy equitable, healthy, and happy relationships that contribute to the development of just and democratic societies. sonke uses a human rights framework to build the capacity of government, civil society organisations, and citizens to achieve gender equality, prevent gender based violence, and reduce the spread and impact of hiv and aids. crucial to the success of sonke's work is ensuring a central role for those most directly affected by violence and hiv. since 2007, sonke and silence speaks have been working together to enable young people and adults affected by violence and hiv and aids to share their stories. from cities to rural villages, the project offers participants a rare opportunity to talk about their own experiences and bear witness to the lives of others, in a supportive setting. through intensive, participatory video production workshops, rarely heard voices and images are brought into the civic arena. the hope is to deepen existing conversations about gender norms and the spread of these twin epidemics, by highlighting everyday stories. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 270 to date, eight workshops have been held, and four story collections with accompanying discussion guides have been developed. stories have been integrated into sonke training manuals on men’s role in supporting survivors of sexual assault and on gender and health issues within migrant communities. collections of the sonke digital stories will soon be aired on health and educational television channels and via community radio. the sonke – silence speaks collaboration has led to the creation of an important model of the multiple impacts of digital storytelling, which rests in a continuum of strategies for developing and sharing stories – from stories that are created as part of the individua l healing and growth of workshop participants, to stories that are utilized to educate, mobilize communities, and help change policy. below is a graphic representation of the continuum that describes the ways in which the digital storytelling process and the videos produced through this process can elicit and document change at a number of levels: figure 1. continuum of digital storytelling impacts the following two-part case study shows a particular instance of this model being put into practice. part i describes how south african youth were brought together by sonke and silence speaks to create digital stories about their lives, in a workshop that evaluation resear ch shows nurtured their reflective capacities and supported them in growing as young leaders. the stories these youth produced are being shared as prompts for community dialogue and action and as evidence for the need to address pressing health issues in eastern cape province, although these ac tivities were beyond the scope of the evaluation described. part ii describe s a small-scale exploratory research project that explores the feasibility of using the stories as teaching tools in classroom settings. case study part i: digital storytelling in eastern cape province mhlontlo municipality, located in east ern cape province, south africa, is characterized by high rates of hiv/aids , poverty, and violence. children and youth in this region deal with a host of challenges: losing family members to aids, witnessing domestic violence in their homes, enduring regular shortages of nutritious food and clean water, and experiencing sexual abuse and exploitation. they are growing up in the shadow of what many theorists have branded the “lost generation” that came of age in the years immediately following the demise of the apartheid regime, and, like this generation, have had little support for learning to oppose dominant power structures (o’brien, 1996, p. 55). to comp ound these problems, sonke’s experience in the field has shown that young people in mhlontlo have little access to formal counseling and supportive services that might help them cope with such stressors. sonke has pioneered several initiative s in eastern cape, including gender equality training, responsible fatherhood projects, and individual skill building for hiv and violence prevention. through its ongoing partnership with silence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 271 speaks, and in collaboration with schools and ngos in mhlontlo, sonke has begun bringing young people’s voices to the forefront of these efforts. the rationale behind this approach is that encouraging the telling of otherwise silenced stories will help workshop pa rticipants and other youth who view the stories learn to manage difficult expe riences in their lives and serve as a springboard for enhancing their capacities for leadership and involvement in community transformation for justice. in september 2008, sonke coordinators in the municipality began doing outreach to young people, to assemble a group interested in creating digital stories. potential participants were briefed in advance on the production methods to be used and on the fact that their stories would be shown publicly, as tools for community training and awareness raising about local gender and health realities. interested youth comp leted a short assessment to help them make informed decisions about whether or not to take part in the workshop and were offered multiple opportunitie s to talk with sonke staff about the implications of sharing personal stories in video form. the project partners view these steps as essential, in an environment where hiv stigma continues to be prevalent and where issues like sexual violence and abuse are rarely discussed.ii training provided by silence speaks and sonke staff during five weeks in october 2008 not only enabled participat ing youth to produce stories but also provided them with health education about gender and hiv and basic public speaking skills. working with facilitators, the young people shared stories from their own points of view; listened to and discussed each other’s stories; recorded first-person voiceover narration; and generated photos and drawings with which to illustrate their work. finally, silence speaks staff guided the participants through hands-on computer tutorials and supported them oneon-one in using a laptop to edit these materials into finished videos (sonke maintains a traveling production lab for digital storytelling; each young person was assigned a computer for the duration of the four-day production component of the workshop). throughout the process, the sonke and sile nce speaks facilitators talked with participants at length about what cont ent and images they felt comfortable including in their final videos. the yo uth were asked to obtain explicit permission from those they wished to mention or show (in photos) in their stories; others decided, with facilita tor guidance, that maintaining anonymity was appropriate. facilitators also assisted the youth with linking their personal stories to broader social issues, as a way of ensuring that the narratives would reflect the roles of both individual agency and larger structures in identity development. gr owing up in a country greatly impacted by oppressive apartheid legislation, youth were encouraged to highlight the complex interaction of factors that create obstacles in their everyday lives. as alex de wall and nicholas argenti explain, “we must see young people not just as victims of the misfortunes of africa over recent decades, but as a powerful force for change” [2002:134]. his work points to the fact that youth both are victims of post-apartheid conditions as well as capable agents in constructing new possibilities for the future. the eight students involved in the di gital storytelling workshop produced stories covering a wide range of topics – from sexual assault, to living with hiv positive family members, to the dangers of drinking contaminated drinking water. after tokozile decided to participate in the workshop, she approached a friend and “asked her to talk about it so it could help someone else who has been through the same thin g.” as tokozile explained, her friend “finally voiced out about it,” giving tokozile permission to talk about the incident in a digital story (note: the girl’s identity is not revealed, to protect her privacy, 8/6/09). here is an excerpt from the story script: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 272 she found comfort in h er boyfriend a few year s ago. he used to listen to her -he gave he r the love and atte ntion that she nev er g ot fr om home. she was at the tender age of 14, and he was 20 years old. one day she and her boyfriend were taking a walk. he was asking her to visit his home. she asked, “why do you want me to go there?” she did not want to go. he finally convinced her. things got out of hand indoors. she tried to pu sh him away, but he overpowered her. she lay there helplessly while he ra ped he r. … she ha s n ever ha d the coura ge to re port this ca se. she is afr aid that the police will blame her for going alone to her boyfriend’s h ouse. he still walk s fr ee, wh ile sh e liv es in fear of what he might attempt to do again. justice has never been served. figure 2. drawing by tokozile, from her story during two weeks in august 2009, amber reed conducted an assessment of the mhlontlo youth digital storytelling workshop. methods included not only in-depth, open-ended interviews with th e majority of participants but also a group story screening for and follow-up conversation between participants. the purpose of this assessment was to better understand the effects of story production on the participants as well as document possible recommendations for future sonke youth projects. in her interview, tokozile discussed th e friend she wrote about in her story and attributed changes in her friend’s behavior to the experience of having finally verbalized the previously untold story of the assault. according to tokozile, the girl now serves as a peer educator in local schools, where she discusses the issue of rape with the goal of increasing awareness among young people. a number of the other digital stories also demonstrate the potential positive results of speaking out about difficult life experiences and the pressures that young people in rural eastern cape province face to conform to accepted norms of masculinity and femininity. one student, kulile, described how sonke’s focus on gender equality reshaped his attitudes about men’s and women’s roles in his community: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 273 i thought okay fine, a man can cook, but it’s not important ritually. and when i met with sonke my mind comp letely chang ed. i mean if you ar e surrounded by people wh o ar e ster eotyping, you end u p also stereotyping. th ey say if th ere’s only one potato rotten in a bag they all get rotten. and i don’t think i can ever stereotype now, because everyone is equal. what you can do, i can also do [8/6/09]. for his digital story, kulile chose to write about gender roles in his community and personal life. this is demonstrated in an excerpt from his script: when i went to high school, i used to cook full meals for my family. my new fr iends wer e impr essed with what i was doing, they didn’t criticize me. we started competing, sharing recipes. we believed that the one who cooks best would attract ladies. we would bring the food we made to school. girls would taste it and say, “wow, it’s delicious, you are such a handsome guy, can you cook for me next week??” … people in my village sometimes gossip about me, saying , “u phakamile uyawuthanda umsebenzi wamontombazana. ” (he is a hig h-class person, and he likes women’s jobs). but ev en wh en i came back fr om circumcision school in july, i did not change my v iews. i am liv ing outside the box, being the kind of man i want to be, not the kind others want me to be. i live my life to be happy. figure 3. photo from kulile’s story for many participants, the workshop was their first exposure to using computers. along with the emotional and psychological benefits of digital storytelling, the project clearly demons trated the value of exposing young people to new forms of technology and offering them training to which they would otherwise not have access. one participant said, “i’ve learned how t o use a computer, it was my first time and i was excited when i saw it and i thought that it is going to be used by me. and i tell myself, inside myself, that this is the beginning of my life (sic)” (8/5/09). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 274 other students mentioned how they gained the confidence to speak in front of others as a result of the project. ab out a community screening of the stories that was held shortly after the workshop, one participant said: i was never used to talking to a crow d…then we had to talk to the whole hall, a lot of people from different places, old and young . so i lear ned how to talk to people, how to addr ess something that is a problem to someone else, and h ow to h elp others in th ings that they need h elp with. it’s very easy [now]! i can talk in front of school! [8/6/09]. another student talked about how the digital storytelling project got him back on track at school, showing the potentia lly valuable influence this method can have on young people’s sense of self-efficacy and goals for the future: i was drinking and doing such bad things…stealing some things off other people. so th en i decided th at when they chose me (to par ticipate in the digital storytelling workshop) that, okay, it seems as if i am still a person who can succeed in life. then i deci ded to change…they changed my life [8/7/09]. overall the workshop assessment reveal ed that the combination of skillbuilding activities and the creativity of digital story production, along with the support of attentive and engaged facilitators, led to a continuum of positive impacts for the youth storytellers involved and for the larger community. the most prominent criticism that aros e during the project assessment related not to the workshop process but to the lack of community outreach that has occurred using the stories to date. though participants felt extremely proud of their work, they were disappointed that more screenings hadn’t yet occurred. tokozile speaks to this when she mentions that she has not yet seen any community-wide screenings of the stories: …it would be helpful a lot. for like, youn g girls to ta lk, to not be afraid of certain things. it will help! it will he lp so that they gain knowledge of what is happening ar ound them. so that th ings th ey can pr event, or things they can pr otect th emselves fr om, they don’t do by lear ning fr om the stories that we did [8/6/09]. tokozile’s comment brings attention to the need for adequate follow-up and support for digital storytelling projects. though the participation itself builds youths’ sense of self-esteem and agency, facilitators have the ability to extend projects’ possibilities with structural support and plans for distribution of stories. another drawback to the program was th e small sample size of participants; many stories were likely left unhear d because funding and resources only allowed for eight participants. nombasa hi ghlights this in her interview: “i would choose more people, you know, to do it, not from only this community, from other communities, because there ar e schools not from here in town but in, in the rural area, so i’d choose those kids because most of them want to voice out but they cannot” (8/5/09). a pitfall of projects like the sonke – silence speaks effort in eastern cape is that they do not represent all youth in a community; what voices are left unheard must therefore be questioned. case study part ii: the value of sharing youth digital stories in the classroom as part of a pilot project during august 2009 designed to explore the potential educational value of the eastern cape youth digital stories , siyakhanyisa staff seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 275 (a local hiv/aids support organization) and amber reed took the stories to several schools within the mhlontlo muni cipality, sharing them with students who were unfamiliar with the digital storytelling project or sonke’s work. the goal of this endeavor was to further sonke’s mission of using the stories as teaching tools and test the efficacy of screening and discussing them in a classroom setting. in two, one-hour sessions, students were introduced to the project and then viewed two selected stories as a group. following the screening, students discussed the concept of human rights with facilitators and were asked to come up with their own version of a list of universal human rights – an exercise meant to foster dial ogue about the difficult issues raised in the stories. in the last segment of th ese workshops, students were asked to create their own written stories, wi th accompanying drawings, using the digital stories they viewed as inspiration. figure 4. students participating in a drawing project based on the digital stories. one student in these classroom sessions described the experience of viewing the stories as educational and uplifting: “i’ve learned a lot of things. they’ve given me the strength, courage of saying what i feel for once, you know? without people setting me back. they ma de me feel very emotional. i don’t know how…but they’ve brought courage and determination in me.” these pilot educational sessions were also useful in highlighting the challenges that sonke and local organizations face as they work for gender equality in rural areas, where particular attitude s about women and men are often deeply entrenched. one boy described how women in his community are lazy and “men are oppressed by the women here.” widespread homophobia also presented a problem in discussions of eq ual rights for all people, with some students objecting to equality for lgbt individuals. at the same time, using the sonke digi tal stories in the classroom allowed students to talk about issues not normally addressed in school and gave facilitators an opportunity to increa se dialogue, counter misunderstandings and assumptions, and provide accurate information on critically underrepresented topics in the classroom environment. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 276 the story-writing portion of these session s also offered an inside view of the challenges and preoccupations faced by rural youth. the anonymous nature of the writing activity encouraged studen ts to speak openly about otherwise taboo subjects and allowed facilitators to address the entire class during follow-up rather than single out particular students who may not have felt comfortable discussing sensitive topics. writings focused on issues such as rape, violence, death, and despair: text: i have a friend her mother passed away and she doesn’t go to school. she was abused by her stepmother and her father has abandoned her and now she had nowhere to go (sic). the social workers took her and she ran away and now she lives everywhere. figure 5. drawing by a girl, age unknown. another story directly begged for help against local violence: text: i am a girl of 16 years. i meet a guy which is too old he is wearing a black hat when i pass near with it, he told me to give him my bag i ask him that i can’t, he promise to kill me. i notice that this is a tsotsi (gangster) he take my bag off and he run away with it. i don’t know what can i do who can help me! (sic) figure 6. drawing by a girl, age 16. such powerful cries for help can allow facilitators to identify and address gaps in the educational curriculum and advocate for the provision of appropriate services and health/law enforcement interventions outside of the classroom environment. indeed, after this pilo t study siyakhanyisa staff made seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 277 arrangements to regularly visit a local school to provide follow-up support to students on the issues raised during the classroom session. the pilot study illuminated future work that sonke and its partners can undertake, in adopting unique and engaging ways to train rural community members on how best to address critically under-emphasized issues for young people. though the assessment showed the strength of using digital stories in the classroom, it also showed the importance of ensuring that adequate resources exist prior to conducting such educational sessions -resources that are rarely available in rural settings like mhlontlo. in their stories, many students expressed a lack of adults to tu rn to about difficult obstacles in their lives, raising ethical considerations about the value of using writing or creative arts to surface such obstacles in the absence of trained teachers, mentors, and counselors, and pointing to the responsibility of adults in the community to advocate for funding to support psychosocial assistance and justice for youth. and yet the value of peer support cannot be overlooked. these pilot educational sessions made it clear that the benefits of the youth digital stories project in eastern cape reached far beyond the excitement and skill building imparted to the original eight worksh op participants. in her interview, tokozile explained that sonke’s efforts in her community have encouraged her to gather friends and extend their ideals to other young people. she now travels with her friends around the co mmunity, seeking out those in need of gentle, peer-based emotional support for a variety of difficult issues. she describes an experience in this work: there was this girl in class…she’s so quiet, she is so distant! she never says anything. so we, like, talk to her. she says that she’s afraid of people. and in class we look like people that she wouldn’t talk with and stuff…she’s afraid of what she can say, maybe won’t accept her for who she is and stuff (sic). but now she’s ou r friend! she’s like the most silly in class! she can talk, she can do whatever [8/6/09]. another participant, nombasa, sums up the goals of the digital storytelling project nicely in her description of her own story: my story is about a woman standing up for herself. a woman talking for other women and trying to help th e children in my community, and trying to tell all th e people wh o’ve been inv olved in each and ev ery pain that we must be str ong and stay positiv e about whatev er happens. w e must also try to be free in our co mmunity and i’m telling those people who ar e abusing people, please let’s leav e this and be a community. a community with love and freedom and peace [8/5/09]. conclusion: looking ahead the sonke – silence speaks digital stor ytelling work with young people in eastern cape, south africa shows that, when carried out with appropriate thoughtfulness and sensitivity, this un ique participatory media production method can offer youth an opportunity to learn about new technologies, speak out against local challenges and hardships, and encourage young story viewers to give voice to their own life narratives. , and illuminate for adults in the community the ways in which the health and safety of young people are not being protected. the digital stories serv e as clear evidence of young peoples’ desires to improve their communities. it is incumbent upon practitioners and researchers working in marginalized, resource-poor settings to attend not only to the individual emotional needs of youth but also to become engaged at the community/political level by advocating for structural changes which will provide viable housing, education, healthcare, and employment. beyond the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 278 value of the youth stories as tools for peer education lies their potential for sensitizing local adult allies and public officials to the daily deprivations faced by mhlontlo residents and moving them to take action towards building infrastructure and opportunity. this is the challenge facing sonke as it moves forward into the next phases of its work in rural areas across south africa.iii figure 7. mhlontlo's youth digital storytellers for more information about the digital storytelling project: sonke gender justice network: www.genderjustice.org.za/ info@genderjustice.org silence speaks: www.silencespeaks.org / info@silencespeaks.org seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 279 references cruise, o’brien, donald b. (1996). youth iden tity and state decay in west africa. in postcolonial identities in africa. we rbner, richa rd, & ra nger, te rence, eds. new jersey: zed books. brodkin, k. (2007). making democracy matter: identity and activism in los angeles. new brunswick: rutgers university press. burgess, j. (2006). hear ing or dinary voices: cultur al studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 20(2). de waal, alex & argenti, nicolas (2002). young africa: realising the rights of children and youth. trenton: africa world press, inc. lambert, j. (2002). digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community. berkeley: digital diner press. hinyard, l., kreuter, w. (2007). using narrative communication as a tool for he alth behavior change: a c onceptual, th eoretical, and empir ical ov erview. health education & behavior, 34(5). i the term “digital storytelling” is used to describe a variety of media production practices and media forms. for purposes of this article, the term refers to practices originated at the u.s.-based center for digital storytelling, www.storycenter.org. ii a careful informed consent protocol was followed, with confirmed workshop participants obtaining written parental permission before creating their stories and signing a story release form at the conclusion of the production session. iii for more on sonke’s work with digital stories and to view selected stories, visit www.genderjustice.org.za/projects/digital-stories. podkalicka & campbell understanding digital storytelling.docx seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 208 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 understanding digital storytelling: individual ‘voice’ and community-building in youth media programs dr aneta podkalicka research fellow institute for social research, swinburne university, melbourne, australia. email: apodkalicka@swin.edu.au dr craig campbell manager the salvation army brunswick youth services, melbourne, australia email: craig.campbell@aus.salvationarmy.org abstract digital storytelling (dst) has been widely used as a means of empowerment for marginalised voices across community-based projects worldwide. this paper discusses uses but also limitations of the practice in the context of a melbourne-based youth media program for ‘youth at risk’ called youthworx. based on our ongoing, long-term ethnographic research, we explore the cultural production of digital stories as a co-creative process that exposes a range of controversies to do with the politics of ‘voice’, genre’s communicative potential and ethical considerations. concrete examples from youthworx’s pedagogical work serve to illustrate the values of self-expression (‘voice’), critical reflection and collaboration that form part of broader social transformations generated by these creative practices. the critique of dst practice offered here connects with existing studies concerned with the socially contextualised processes of media education, and the theoretical shift beyond ‘the right to speak’ towards ‘the right to be understood’ (husband, 2009). the paper recommends more analytical attention be paid to a dynamic social process of learning (of media, interpersonal competencies) and community-building, extending beyond the immediate dst situation, rather than narrowing the focus on end-result atomised media products. keywords: digital storytelling, youth, media education, ‘voice’, ‘right to be understood’, community-building introduction digital storytelling (dst) has been widely used as an empowering technique for marginalised voices across community-based projects worldwide. the idea of providing ordinary people with access to media and basic editorial skills to allow personal stories to be told through a simple, two – three minute digital format has found application across a range of educational, developmental, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 209 and public contexts. there is now a large body of academic literature that documents the development and various social uses of the practice (hartley and mcwilliam, 2009; lundby, 2008; couldry, 2008, spurgeon, 2009), in addition to guides or tool-kits meant for dst practitioners (ohler, 2008). digital storytelling, along with user-generated content, has become a symbol of the changing communication ecology (hartley and mcwilliam, 2009; lundby, 2008) and a fertile ground for theoretical discussions around ‘mediation’ (lundby, 2008), representation or participation (carpentier, 2009), identity formation (livingstone, 2008), and the concept of ‘voice’. in the area of community-based youth organisations, including our case study of youthworx media, the idea of empowerment though self-representation underpins much of the social inclusion work with disadvantaged youth. media education in these contexts takes advantage of the popular appeal of media making and autobiographical content to encourage young people to express themselves. it helps them to develop confidence, media skills and social competencies. the intention is that personal growth and agency acquired in the process translates into active engagement in education, employment or democratic processes (huesca, 2008). and yet media pedagogies or forms of participation based on the objective of ‘voice’ (soep, 2006; spurgeon et al., 2009), as promoted across community organizations, are not without problems. elizabeth soep, drawing on her experience as a radio practitioner and researcher, is right in her critique of the notion of an ‘authentic voice’ – often romanticised by artists or faciliators, or ‘automatically assigned an emancipatory value’ (soep, 2006: 201; see also buckingham’s [2009] critique of creativity as an atomised individualised ‘inner self’ process). soep proposes instead the consideration of a ‘youth voice’ as socially embedded ‘crowded talk’, a product of interactive processes underpinned by mimicry and ‘ongoing self-and peer-evaluation’ (ibid. 199). empirical studies of youth media participation programs demonstrate that the experience in cultural production of ‘voice’ is structured by social relations, including instruction and discipline (e.g. soep 2006), and influenced by reflections about potential audiences, genre conventions, social meanings and expectations attached to any cultural representation (buckingham, 2009; also livigstone, 2008). in the field of education more generally, lave and wenger (1991) draw attention to broader systems of relations between people, their actions, and the world – all mutually constitutive. learning, according to lave and wenger’s social model, includes networks of meaningful relations, evolving membership in ‘communities of practice’ rather than isolated, specific activities or just tasks (lave and wenger, 1991: 53). these accounts about the inherently relational, collaborative and structured nature of creative (media) processes resonate with spurgeon et al.’s conceptualisation of workshop-based digital storytelling as a ‘co-creative’ practice (spurgeon et al., 2009). in institutionalised contexts, spurgeon et al. (2009) note, dst relies on a series of interventions by experts and organisations that faciliatate and shape both the process and outcomes of the practice. in this paper we extend these discussions using empirical material from our case study media project for disadvantaged young people called youthworx media. we argue that participation in media production at youthworx, including dst, allows young people to express themselves by building on their individual capacities and personal interests. this is however a strongly collaborative, contextualised system of positive feedback (soep, 2006; see also heath and kramsch, 2004) and ‘understanding’ engendered by the project’s pedagogy and institutional culture (podkalicka and thomas, 2010). there are both educational and sociological reasons for this deliberate choice by youthworx to operate between the extremes of individualism or social determinism. learning always happens in a context, never in a vacuum. we learn in relation to other things that we know. likewise we function as people in relation to other people and settings (e.g. lave and wenger, 1991), seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 210 and this is especially important with young people who have experienced a profound exclusion from normal social support. this deliberate position agrees with a recent recognition within human rights and communication research that traditional politics of recognition and selfexpression needs to be balanced by attention to listening, captured by the notion of a ‘right to be understood’ (husband, 1996; downing, 2007; see also o’donnell et al., 2009; couldry, 2009). the conceptual focus on the reception rather than production side in the communicative cycle is also useful; it allows the move beyond the conventional privileging of individual ‘voice’ or ‘free speech’ towards the demands of dialogue and ‘understanding’ (dreher, 2009: 445). in line with dreher’s argument, this is not to underestimate traditional calls for increased opportunities to ‘speak’ and the assertion that they are no longer valid or socially unproductive (dreher, 2009: 446-7). rather than theorising ‘voice’ as ‘the simple claim to speak’, couldry insists on the ‘secondorder value of voice’ – of mutual recognition of other claims, reflexivity and entanglement in others’ stories (couldry, 2009: 580). our argument is similarly concerned with the key role that ‘linked practices of speaking and listening’ (ibid. 580) play in communication, opening up a possibility of a more broad form of social change. in the youthworx setting the ‘right to be understood’ flows from the right to be included, to be recognised and belong as a social being. communication is much more than voice; it is the interaction of the world of the speaker and the world of the hearer to create a third reality, opening possibilities beyond the imagination of either person (see, for example, gadamer’s [1991: 300-307] discussion of ‘horizon’). the focus on ‘understanding’ and effective communication underscores the importance of ‘sustaining difference and guaranteeing connectedness’ (husband in dreher, 2009: 450). media-making is a useful tool for fostering social connectedness, but it is neither unproblematic nor sufficient when it comes to sustaining learning or participation. additionally, husband raises critical questions about actual distribution and reception of ‘voices’ – often absent in celebratory accounts of the proliferation of new media-enabled communicative possibilities. in relation to digital storytelling initiatives specifically, this point of view is consistant with criticisms about the overemphasis on individual expression and the lack of ‘systemic considerations’ about dst content distribution (watkins and russo, 2009), media skills dissemination (rennie in watkins and russo, 2009: 273; see also rennie, 2010), or social implications beyond dst-training situations. as couldry notes, digital storytelling practice requires that attention be paid to ‘not just the forms and styles of dst (…) but [to] wider contexts and conditions [under which] digital stories are exchanged, referred to, treated as a resource and given recognition and authority’ (couldry, 2008: 388). our argument similarly highlights the value of dst for learning media skills, critical evaluation/reflection and social competencies. however, as we observe, the participatory potential of digital storytelling format is enhanced by its broader integration within a longer-term media education process centred on reciprocal systems of knowledge transfer and exchange rather than delivery of one-off dst workshops (see watkins and russo [2009] for the same argument concerning dst used across cultural institutions). empirical material presented here draws on our ongoing, long-term ethnographic research conducted at the youthworx media production site in a northern suburb of melbourne. it was conducted between june 2008 and november 2009 through a mix of regular participant observations, focus groups, one-on-one interviews and conversations. the names of young people quoted in the paper have been changed. the researcher functions as participant-observer, and the acknowledged subjectivity is a valuable stance enabling critical reflection from inside the digital story telling process. the researcher works from alongside the storyteller mapping history, context, educational and transformative impact. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 211 what is youthworx media? youthworx mediai (ywx) is a youth media organisation set up in 2005 as a product of collaborative partnership between the not for profit social agency youth development australia (yda), the salvation army, a local technical education college, youth community broadcaster student youth network (syn) media and researchers at swinburne university’s centre for creative industries and innovation. it engages marginalised young people in creative learning around media production to contribute to their positive transition. the definition of success depends on the student and their circumstances. for one it is the breaking of the cycle of criminal behaviour, when a past offence resulted in incarceration, and the returning to ywx on the day of release. for another student it is coming out of the isolation of his bedroom and suicidal ideation into a wholehearted engagement with the ywx program, and from this to a computer gaming course. the ywx media education program involves a small number of open access and accredited courses offered to ‘youth at risk’, a term that encompasses young people with a variety of personal circumstances. participants in the program can be between 15 and 21 years old, disengaged from education, homeless, in a refuge or foster care, with experience in juvenile justice or drug /alcohol abuse problems. digital storytelling at youthworx digital storytelling practice at youthworx is part of the program’s broader media pedagogy, including also original music recording, mini-documentaries, short films and radio making. the pedagogical tasks are deliberately sequenced to move a learner-participant through personal and subjective content towards more objective, critical and reflective tasks. digital storytelling is primarily used as an introductory media tool to lay the ground for a more professional engagement with media production based on stronger team collaboration and high quality standards. when young people join youthworx they get started on making ‘digital stories’ or ‘monologues’ – as they are called at ywx. the use of different vocabulary points to the project manager’s background in community arts and education where giving people an opportunity to find a ‘voice’ has a long tradition. young people are encourged to use a classic dst format to tell their stories, using picture stills, short video clips, voice-over and basic editing skills. rather than conducting typical for the genre story circle workshops (hartley and mcwilliam, 2009), individual monologues build on a rather formulaic narrative structure, prompting students to focus on selected key facts from their lives such as their name, age, hobbies, future plans. since ‘[the young people] basically talk about themselves’ (staley, 2009), participants work largely on their own, with minimal technical support from teachers. young dst-makers are generally comfortable with the format; they enjoy the production process, but some do admit to finding it difficult to ‘talk about themselves’. the monologue-making at youthworx can be a long process, sometimes stretching over a couple months, due to especially erratic attendance patterns. apart from working on a monologue on their own, many students have sought help from their co-students, either in the use of the camera, editing or material-selection. the project manager and a media facilator, jon staley observes, some of the students can be ‘suprisingly frank’ about what they are prepared to share through the digital form. staley elaborates: at times it surprises me how candid they can be about their lives. they are often quite revealing about their past, about the school, and things they’ve not necessarily done well at, [or] smoking dope or whatever it is, they often talk relaxedly about these kind of things, whereas i probably wouldn’t be that candid about things i’ve done once [laughs] (staley, 2009). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 212 the audience for ywx monologues is imagined as young creators’ friends and family, and a small circle of ywx students and staff. they are made aware that stories will be uploaded to the ywx website and screened at an in-house public screening that draws together students from the bys and the project’s stakeholders (e.g. nmit, yda, swinburne staff). monologues are also used as an advocacy tool to promote the project and forge new partnerships, rather than broadcast products per se. yet, this apparently low-risk media activity, with a small number of participants and very limited distribution is fraught with practical challenges, exposing a problematic associated with ‘voice’ production. it also exposes tensions inherent in ‘sustaining difference and guaranteeing connectedness’ (husband in dreher, 2009: 450). young people draw directly on their immediate life experiences, which are often riddled with endemic problems and put them ‘at risk’ of longstanding social marginalisation in the first place: violence, street crime, or substance abuse. as some educators point out ‘youth at risk’ ‘may have already developed a negative street-life-attitude’ (stauber, 2007: 38). this ‘attitude’ experienced thus far ‘as pressure, force or stigmatisation’ of their ‘regime-structures’ (stauber, 2007: 38) can materialise occasionally – as in the case of ywx participants in content that exhibits blatant racism, endorsement of public vandalism or ignorance. stories often connect and interweave thematically with other stories produced in this context. a fifteen-minute monologue that oscillates between self-hatred and self-abuse, a video interview with a nineteen-year old girl who recounts her last five years of homelessness or a rap song about hatred of ‘wogs from the neighbourhood’ are raw and powerful. stories are also being told disarmingly spontaneously, like a radio interview response on the rising number of teen pregnancies in the uk by a 15 year-old andrew. researched and rehearsed, the segment was turned on its head after the quiet and not very articulate teenager revealed: ‘well, i recently became a father myself’. his ‘closest’ mate-interlocutor was shocked too. he didn’t have any idea that andrew’s child was born a fortnight ago. the difficulty of working with and on young people’s ‘voices’ is exemplified by a story from ywx’s experience. it highlights the necessary flexibility of the pedagogic approach and the subtle ethical considerations that underlie creative processes in this context (see also huesca, 2009; taub-pervizpour, 2009): a 21 yearold scott locks himself in the radio studio to record a voice over for his monologue. he produces a 15 minute-long piece, too long to be acceptable for the short dst format but also – importantly not suitable for an audience content-wise. ‘so what’s the point of me being here?’ – asks the frustrated young man, and from now on refuses to do anything with the monologue. actually he refuses to speak at all for the whole week. one of the teachers suggests eventually grabbing a video camera and asking scott a series of questions. nothing scripted, not probing, just a casual interview. what comes out is again content of perceived self-uselessness, self-hatred and abuse. ‘we’ll leave it at that and use it as a draft’ – decided the somewhat defeated teacher. the boy leaves just after the morning coffee break. ‘have i pushed him too far? – wonders the teacher. but the boy is back the following day. some other kid doesn’t turn up for the scheduled radio show. teachers look for a volunteer to fill in urgently. scott is keen. surprisingly, he’s got a prepared cd with all the music as required. on the radio, he turns out to be really “switched on”; apart from getting into a bit of trouble with the syn trainer because he licks the mike at some stage. back at ywx, a proposition to make a micro-documentary instead of a monologue strikes a chord. he’s since made a charmingly quirky little video piece about his favourite blue sunglasses. praised for this creation, he’s now working on a companion piece about his extra-large jacket. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 213 sustaining differences and guaranteeing connectedness in its simplest form ywx seeks to work with young people who are disengaged from normal social supports, especially from formal education, in learning how to learn. scott’s monologue making process illustrates many aspects of this learning process, including voice, skills, understanding, empowerment and the pains and pleasure of transformation. in seeking to give an opportunity to ‘find a voice’, scott is offered a somewhat structured dst format: a few minutes responding to semi-structured questions. he exceeds the time frame, and, importantly, introduces content deemed by youthworx staff unacceptable to be produced. in essence this sets up the tensions inherent in this pedagogy between the free individual voice and the social voice that is formed and informed to enable a dialogue or understanding. a crafted voice requires the application of skills and a critical awareness of oneself and an audience for understanding to occur. scott resisted the offered dst convention: his voice-over was way too long, and importantly, the recorded material socially unacceptable. the idea of talking about himself materialised, in scott’s case, in content depicting self-hatred. both the student and the institution needed some protection from any future and uncontrolled use of this material, so responsibility for both content control and potential consequences rested ultimately with the expert facilitator. the process required editorial intervention, responsibility for youthworx students, and critical feedback not only to enable effective communication with others, but also to sustain a genuine learning engagement and encourage further participation. thus a tension arises between finding a voice in a looser, more general sense and gaining media competence and skills as such. the project’s staff recognised that if the institution or the student settled for expression of voice only, the opportunity for gaining excellence in communication might be lost. the young people quickly sense if they are being patronised and often then slip into the easy game of meeting the lowest level of demands. and yet, according to the youthworx media facilitators, overemphasis on skills development can remind the young people of continued failure in mainstream education, and ywx is then no longer a safe place where they can learn how to learn. ‘sustaining difference and guaranteeing connectedness’ demands such tension within the educational process. in scott’s case the non-linear dynamics described above take his task in a new direction. he refuses a second approach to the same task and seems to withdraw from active participation. surprisingly he grasps an opportunity for a different, unrelated radio presentation task and it is noted that he does remarkably well. he works with and builds upon his own strengths, and is caught ‘getting it right’. out of this the original task is reframed to a micro-documentary, apparently less personal but ultimately equally self-revealing. scott’s piece becomes the representative work shown to visitors to the ywx centre, expressive of the creativity of genuine voice skillfully crafted to communicate understanding and emotion. knut lundby is right to highlight the importance of institutional power structures that shape the dst activity (lundby, 2009: 181). careful attention to power relationships in the process is needed so that the story teller remains in charge of their own story while incorporating external feedback about what and how their story communicates. indeed the processes both of narrative media production and of identity and social transformation are non linear. cause is not followed by predictable effect. scott’s creative – and transformatory process is allowed to happen in an organic, flexible fashion, in the dynamic interactions between the storyteller and their peers and expert facilitators. ‘power with’ or ‘power from alongside’ was crucial to his experience. such power facilitated both voice and understanding. it was clear to the media facilitator that ‘power over’ would have silenced the voice. abdication of any power by the teachers, on the other hand, would have reduced the outcome to an over-long statement of self-hatred. the pain of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 214 process was palpable, for learner and teacher/facilitators. spontaneous applause greeted scott’s micro-documentary when it was publicly screened at the end of semester celebration, and his pleasure showed. in the balance of that semester he had flourished as an actor in the productions of other students’ work, as well as completing a companion piece to his own work. we witnessed a marked development in media skills for sharing understanding, along with an apparent deepening of sense of identity and social connectedness. dst is different from social media production practices. in the youthworx institutional context it provides a means for developing a capacity for not just self-expression but self-reflection, offering reasons as to ‘why’ something is not acceptable. participants are also guided through the production of their story for a successful media effect. ywx teachers go through young people’s scripts to help them tease out content that ‘the audience would be really interested in hearing more about’ (staley, 2009). although, as david wardell, a ywx media facilitator admits it’s hard to pin down what makes a good story. ‘sometimes a story about someone’s old blanket can work really well’, he tells us. ‘but generally, from my experience as a dst trainer at australian centre for moving image (acmi) a lot of stories can be not very entertaining from the media point of view’. and he adds, ‘it’s ultimately up to dst workshop participants how they tell their stories but we as trainers do suggest what photos, what bits of information, etc. can work better’ (wardell, 2009). this socially embedded media awareness has translated into new training arrangements that focus on more prescriptive strategies around script-writing and production, and less improvisation. acmi digital stories are shown now before the production of monologues to model pieces that other people, both young and old have done, present a diversity of storytelling styles, and ‘fuel the fire a little bit’ (staley, 2009). the social connectedness involved in dst comes to expression particularly in an educational task that sequentially follows making digital monologues. the next assignment requires more emphasis on ‘external’ content and knowledge/skill transfer. in the project manager’s words: …telling a story that’s outside you, an external thing, whether it’s a topic, you can be involved in it, but the idea is you’re using the form, the medium of film to start to tell the story that is relevant to a community, to an audience (staley, 2009). learning to interview others, for example, serves to introduce the idea of minidocumentaries. this exercise is followed by a main film project where collaboration and team-based work becomes crucial. one of the students, twenty-year old mark, chose, for example, to make a rap music video as his second media project. he drew in three less able learners, coached them into jointly recording his rap, and then took them to landmark sites in melbourne to record video footage. additional participants staffed the cameras and microphones. the impact this collaboration had on mark’s colleague performers was extraordinary, clearly noticeable on their faces during the public screening of their dvd clip, and revealed in our conversations with the students. one of these participants, an eighteen-year-old tom, is a recently arrived refugee from sudan. until this point he had been very tentative, as he struggled with language and adaptation to a new and alien culture. mark’s invitation into this creative process marked a turning point of inclusion and acceptance that continues to express itself. although tom continues to have difficulties with the technical aspects of media production – something that ywx media facilitators attribute mostly to his lack of linguistic competence – he never misses a school day, and is always present for additional recreation events. he joins in the meals, where formerly he contented himself with bread and butter eaten away from the group. now he smiles a lot, and will pause for conversation. it can be said, tom is ‘finding voice’, but more importantly is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 215 discovering understanding, and a sense of social connection that provides him with a supportive environment to explore his creativity. this example lends evidence to the thesis that voice alone is never enough; voice does not equate with communication. a right to voice is complemented by a right to be understood, and this in turn requires skill development and openness to interaction and a critical review among young people ‘at risk’. indeed, understanding arises from social connectedness and contributes to a deeper connection. young people who initially find it difficult to talk about themselves discover social networks and a sense of belonging that enriches their learning and confirms a stronger sense of self. conclusions youthworx is one of very many community-based organisations that engage disadvantaged young people in media training and production to reconnect them with further education or employment. digital storytelling is an important and relatively low-resource practice deployed to allow selfexpression and the extension of media competencies. the media skills, and, importantly, social competencies (self-confidence and effective collaboration with others) acquired in the process are intended to translate into other aspects of participants’ lives outside the project. while dst is a powerful tool for many youthworx participants to experience the pleasures of being a media creator and extend their social skills, the process is also fraught with problems. as we have illustrated, there are numbers of ethical issues that need a careful consideration in the description of the dst creative practice. crucially, the case study of scott’s experience with dst format is representative of broader issues at the heart of participatory media pedagogies and practices and not just those involving ‘disadvantaged’ young people. as we have seen, the emphasis on self-expression (‘voice’) needs to be balanced with the need to forge social competencies in relation to both interpersonal and media skills. processes of editorial guidance and moderation are part of learning selfreflection. still, the processes of dst offer markers that can indicate growing confidence and competence in the story teller, not just in the telling of their story in a media narrative or aesthetic sense, but also in their own identity and their connectedness with others. confidence and competence begin to emerge in the articulation of voice and grow at deeper levels in the critical processes of selflistening, peer review and expert input from a facilitator, as part of a deliberate, facilitated, sequential process of participatory learning. this confidence and competence is consistently confirmed in the creative directions that the learners develop, beyond the expectations of the expert facilitators. the potential of dst can be further enhanced by media projects in which students are invited to talk about ‘something else’. mark’s video clip is a clear example; many contributed to subject matter beyond their own personal stories, in a collaborative approach, and the emerging outcome is far greater than the sum of its parts. youthworx’s media pedagogy deliberately seeks to promote this social dynamic rather than narrowly focusing on the dst product. effective understanding, in husband’s sense is essential, as is an institutional culture built on the value of understanding between a youth organisation staff and young participants. our cultural observations reveal that young people involved in the project have responded well to more collaborative processes of dst, with students helping others in shooting short videos, choosing a soundtrack or editing. they have responded particularly well to public screenings organised to celebrate their achievements. the spirit of community belonging and mutual support is palpable in a genuine experience of connectedness that sustains difference. youthworx experience shows that the shift from self-expression to community-building is a basis for young people to be able to move on into a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 216 broader, less supported community setting, be it another educational course or a job. the role of projects such as youthworx is to facilitate a learning engagement that can lead to personal transformation. the proposed implication from our investigation is to focus on digital storytelling as process rather than product. this is consistent with calls from academics and practitioners (e.g. soep 2006: 200) for further research to explore various ways in which media and social competences acquired in the creative process translate into other aspects of young people’s lives, including their social networks, further education, or employment opportunities. the focus on the process rather than the final product opens avenues for the study of the complexities inherent in cultural production, and the ways in which social connectedness and differences particular to an individual storyteller are always negotiated. references buckingham, d. (2009) 'creative' visual methods in media research: possibilities, problems and proposals. media, culture & society, 31, 633-652. carpentier, n. (2009) digital storytelling in belgium: power and participation. in hartley, j. and mcwilliam, k. (eds) story circle. malden, wiley-blackwell. couldry, n. (2008) mediatization or mediation? alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. new media & society, 10, 373-391. couldry, n. (2009) commentary: rethinking the politics of voice. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 33 (4): 579-582. downing, j. (2007) grassroots media: establishing priorities for the years ahead. global media journal, 1, online resource. dreher, t. (2009) listening across difference: media and multiculturalism beyond the politics of voice. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 33 (4): 445458. gadamer, h. (1991) truth and method, crossroad, new york hartley, j. & mcwilliam, k. (eds.) (2009) story circle: digital storytelling around the world, malden, wiley-blackwell. heath, s. b. & kramsch, c. (2004) individuals, institutions and the uses of literacy. journal of applied linguistics, 1, 75-91. huesca, r. (2008) youth-produced radio and its impacts: from personal empowerment to political action. in carpentier, n. & cleen, b. d. (eds.) participation and media production: critical reflections on content creation. cambridge cambridge scholars publishing. huesca, r. (2009) when communication goals and ethical duties collide: lessons from u.s. youth radio training programs. iamcr. mexico city. http://www.iamcr2009mexico.unam.mx/pdf/cc00.pdf. husband, c. (1996) the right to be understood: conceiving the multi-ethnic public sphere. innovation: the european journal of social science, 9, 205-15. husband, c. (2009) between listening and understanding. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 23, 441-443. lave, j. & wenger, e. (1991) situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, cambridge, cambridge university press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 217 livingstone, s. (2008) taking risky opportunities in youthful content creation: teenagers' use of social networking sites for intimacy, privacy and selfexpression. new media & society, 10, 393-411. lundby, k. (2008) editorial: mediatised stories: mediation perspectives on digital storytelling. new media & society, 10, 363-371. o’donnel, p., lloyd, j. & dreher, t. (2009) listening, pathbuilding and continuations: a research agenda for the analysis of listening. continuum: journal of media & cultural studies, 33 (4): 423-439. ohler, j. (2008) digital storytelling in the classroom : new media pathways to literacy, learning, and creativity, thousand oaks, corwin press. podkalicka, a. & thomas, j. (2010). the skilled social voice: an experiment in creative economy and communication rights. international journal of communication gazette, 72 (4-5): 395-406. rennie, e. (2010) life of syn: a story of the digital generation, melbourne, monash university publishing. soep, e. (2006) beyond literacy and voice in youth media production. mcgill journal of education, 41, 197-213. spurgeon, c., burgess, j., klaebe, h., mcwilliam, k., tacchi, j. & tsai, m. (2009) cocreative media: theorising digital storytelling as a platform for researching and developing participatory culture. anzca. brisbane. staley, j. (2009) personal interview, 14 august 2009. stauber, b. (2007) motivation in transition. young, 15 (1): 31-47. taub-pervizpour, l. (2009) digital storytelling with youth: whose agenda is it? in hartley, j. & mcwilliam, k. (eds.) story circle. malden, wiley-blackwell. wardell, d. (2009) personal conversation, september 2009. watkins, j. & russo, a. (2009) beyond individual expression: working with cultural institution. in hartley, j. & mcwilliam, k. (eds.) story cycle: digital storytelling around the world. malden, wiley-blackwell. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 218 bio dr aneta podkalicka is a research fellow at the institute for social research, swinburne university, melbourne, australia. she is currently conducting an ethnography of youth participation project youthworx media. she holds a phd in media and communications from queensland university of technology, brisbane, where she carried out research into new media literacy, including fieldwork in europe, and participation in digital storytelling trainers’ training with former creative director of the bbc’s digital storytelling project ‘capture wales’, daniel meadows (2005). dr craig campbell manages the salvation army brunswick youth services (bys), a partner agency with youthworx. bys responds with young people from the north-western suburbs of melbourne who are disconnected from normal social support, especially those who have dropped out of education. he holds a doctor of ministry studies from the melbourne college of divinity. link to ywx website, for viewing of my glasses http://www.youthworx.org.au/youthworxmedia/students_work.html i this work was produced with the assistance of the australian research council through the arc centre of excellence for creative industries and innovation. the authors would like to thank all ywx young participants as well as project staff and partners for their collaboration. our thanks go also to the institute for social research academic staff for numerous discussions and for support, especially denise meredyth, david mackenzie, julian thomas, liza hopkins, chris wilson, ellie rennie, and jon staley. the arc cultural research network’s listening project also assisted through a number of workshops attended by aneta in 2008 and 2010. thanks to tanja dreher, justine lloyd, cate thill, and penny o’donnell. bligh-lorenz converted seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 7 the rhetoric of multi-display learning spaces: exploratory experiences in visual art disciplines brett bligh learning research systems developer visual learning lab and learning sciences research institute the university of nottingham uk e-mail: brett.bligh@nottingham.ac.uk katharina lorenz associate professor in classical studies department of classics the university of nottingham uk e-mail: katharina.lorenz@nottingham.ac.uk abstract multi-display learning spaces (md-ls) comprise technologies to allow the viewing of multiple simultaneous visual materials, modes of learning which encourage critical reflection upon these materials, and spatial configurations which afford interaction between learners and the materials in orchestrated ways. in this paper we provide an argument for the benefits of multi-display learning spaces in supporting complex, disciplinary reasoning within learning, focussing upon our experiences within postgraduate visual arts education. the importance of considering the affordances of the physical environment within education has been acknowledged by the recent attention given to learning spaces, yet within visual art disciplines the perception of visual material within a given space has long been seen as a key methodological consideration with implications for the identity of the discipline itself. we analyse the methodological, technological and spatial affordances of md-ls to support learning, and discuss comparative viewing as a disciplinary method to structure visual analysis within the space which benefits from the simultaneous display of multiple partitions of visual evidence. we offer an analysis of the role of the teacher in authoring and orchestration and conclude by proposing a more general structure for what we term ‘multiple perspective learning’, in which the presentation of multiple pieces of visual evidence creates the conditions for complex argumentation within higher education. keywords: learning spaces, multi-display systems, comparative viewing introduction the fundamental purpose of this paper is to argue that multi-display learning spaces (md-ls) can support interactions between teachers and learners during small group activity in innovative and useful ways. we open a discussion whose purpose is to understand the use of multi-display systems for learning from a learning spaces perspective and we clarify what we mean by seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 8 such a perspective early in the paper. we continue by contending that md-ls, such as the example shown in figure 1, can support the construction of complex, argumentational and disciplinary analysis based upon an ecology of the interactions between technology, space and pedagogy. though our paper is not an empirical report, we do briefly sketch practical experiences of using an md-ls space within a postgraduate classics module in order to illustrate our ecological view more concretely. currently, much learning and teaching is conducted using presentation software based around the paradigm of “a single, static slide projected onto one display screen, changing sequentially over time” (lanir et al., 2008a, p.695), such as powerpoint. although there is some evidence of the popularity of such systems with students (austin-wells et al., 2003; susskind, 2005), a body of opinion has developed which criticises the ways in which such sequential presentation systems mediate the communication which occurs within learning. sequences of thoughts become isolated onto slides (myers, 2000), the linearity of the presentation renders it difficult for the speaker to respond to the unexpected (adams, 2006), concepts are reduced to banal bullet points, placed into unneeded hierarchies and separated from analysis (tufte, 2003), and the use of prescripts such as slide templates encourages authors to modify their thoughts to fit the mode of presentation, rather than vice versa (fagerjord, 2005). figure 1: a multi-display learning space at the university of nottingham suggestions to address these issues can be clustered into the rhetorical and the technical. rhetorical solutions proceed from the basis that it is the poor usage of presentation systems such as powerpoint that are at fault, rather than the systems themselves (schwom & keller, 2003). by raising their awareness of media rhetoracy, presenters can use sequential presentation systems in a more focussed and deliberate way, as one component within a rhetorical toolkit rather than an instinctive mechanism (or even crutch) to disguise a poorly constructed presentation (kjeldsen, 2006). technical solutions, by contrast, focus on the development of new presentation systems which aim to overcome the aforementioned limitations through mechanisms such as using multiple simultaneous displays. examples include the polyvision thunder, smart seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 9 meeting pro and multi-slides systems under investigation at the university of nottingham (bligh, 2009), as well as the multipresenter system (lanir et al., 2008b), which is designed to enable spontaneous and non-linear presentation styles, easy revisiting of earlier information, and creative use of multiple information spaces, and to harness the cognitive benefits associated with large presentation spaces to facilitate dialogic communication. in this paper, we combine these approaches and broach the question: what are the rhetorical affordances of these newly emerging, multi-display systems for interactive small group learning? or to put it another way, do these systems enable and support innovative configurations of media-based teaching? such a question requires a holistic analysis which reaches beyond human-computer interaction. we must understand the learning context within which the system is to play a role, together with the learning space which encapsulates the systems, teachers and learners. acknowledging that, like other social and collaborative activities, learning is situated within its environment (suchman, 1987), in recent years the learning spaces research agenda has sought to focus on the role within the learning process played by the contextual space, through an explicitly interdisciplinary approach which links pedagogical theories with the built environment. more broadly and ambitiously, this increased focus upon learning spaces provides an opportunity to link the design of physical learning environments to an understanding of cognitive theories, a development process for technological innovations and the construction of teaching methodologies, all co-ordinated around a common aim of facilitating more effective models of student learning. within this paper we begin an ecological analysis of md-ls scenarios based upon a three-tier structure. in terms of learning technology, we describe multi-display systems as a group of technical systems allowing for the visual display of multiple pieces of visual information in an appropriately partitioned way which vary in their modes of information, control and interaction. in terms of learning spaces we describe multi-display learning spaces as configurations of learners, tutors, technology, environmental variables such as light and sound, furniture and boundaries, which differ in terms of their affordances for vision, listening, interacting and movement but have in common the provision of multiple surfaces to display information. although the md-ls we describe here contains a multi-display system, some md-ls may be configurations of multiple independent display surfaces within a space (for example, an informal learning area surrounded by digital signage). in terms of learning methodology we describe multiple perspective learning as a form of real-time, co-located multimodal argumentation which must be located within disciplinary epistemology and notions of evidence, and which takes forms aligned with the affordances of space, technology and learning objectives. learning is a process of meaning making which involves more than argumentation, subsuming inquiry, rote learning and other forms of construction, but nonetheless argumentation forms an important component of disciplinary communication (habermas, 1984). within this paper we use this lens to focus on how students within higher education can be supported in their formative attempts to communicate within their discipline, through a process which includes exemplary argumentation from a tutor in relation to visual stimuli together with a supportive structure for student response which corresponds well with the properties of technology and space. we describe in brief our experiences of using an md-ls space to support taught postgraduate classics students in the module ancient art and its interpreters. art history and related disciplines have long been concerned not merely with the visual impact of art, but also with the space in which it is viewed and the development of methodologies to support the construction of arguments based on the analysis of the viewer (dilly, 1995; nelson, 2000). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 10 thus the relationship between technology, space and disciplinary methodology is, in this case, genuinely dialogic in the sense of being interrelated and mutually interacting; while the art historical practice of comparative viewing (dilly, 1995) which we detail later represents a learning methodology whose aims are aligned with the affordances of md-ls, conversely contemporary md-ls could be viewed as having their roots in the dual slide projection lectures given by art historians since the late 19th century. within art history and related disciplines, a crucial concern is the construction of analysis and narrative around pictures and other visual evidence (grimm, 1892/1981). the methodological and technical mechanisms creating the conditions for such an analysis have developed in parallel over a period of two centuries (dilly, 1995; nelson, 2000), focussing upon the display and comparison of sets of visual evidence and the synchronisation of that evidence with verbal narrative within the comparative viewing process. this verbal narrative is deictic, based around the identity of the orator, requiring contextual information from supporting visual materials and utilising spatial and temporal relationships between argument and visual evidence. more specifically, comparative viewing involves the analysis of one piece of visual evidence in terms of another, enabling argumentation to be built around (deliberated) juxtaposition. the initial purpose of this paper, then, is to link md-ls scenarios with the requirements of comparative viewing, thus offering a good example of the methodology-technology-space relationship which forms the basis of our understanding of these scenarios. from the perspective of comparative viewing, md-ls offer opportunities to allow tutors to manage and present larger amounts of evidence, for the purpose of constructing democratised insession discourse based upon the wider range of presented perspectives, and they can reduce the technical skillset required to engineer such presentations. from the perspective of learning spaces, md-ls presents a useful example of the unification of space and technological systems in that these wall-sized systems can define the boundaries of the space and dominate it visually, while comparative viewing provides a useful example of an organisational and taskbased structure which can relate these elements to a process of learning — albeit in ways which are problematic due to its historical development as a method to allow art historical experts to structure their lectures in convincing ways. within the paper we begin by contextualising the work within the learning spaces research agenda, demonstrating the importance of linking learning space to learning technology and disciplinary methodology. we subsequently demonstrate how md-ls scenarios offer one good example of how this link can work in practice and describe the spaces and the technologies within them with which we have experience. next we outline the development of comparative viewing as a disciplinary methodology within art history, and draw upon our practical experiences to analyse the alignment of affordances of methodology, technology and space within it. we conclude by generalising our scenario, contextualising comparative viewing as a disciplinary specialisation of argumentation within higher education, and present the case that md-ls scenarios therefore represent a kind of learning space which can be used to scaffold complex argumentation within he settings through the presentation of visual evidence in an orchestrated way. we use the term ‘multiple perspective learning’ to describe this process of learning through, in our example, visually-stimulated argumentation. learning spaces it has long been recognised that the way in which people conceive space is determined by their goals and intentions and that space itself moulds behaviour (arnheim, 1977). but only recently have attempts been made to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 11 problematise the ways in which space interacts with theories of learning, usually under the topic heading learning spaces. definitions of the term learning space vary and are contested. from a perspective focussed on the environment itself, monahan (2002) uses the term “built pedagogy” to describe the notion that appropriately designed architecture can serve as an embodiment of pedagogical principles; conversely savin-baden (2008) defines learning spaces as “places of transition, and sometimes transformation, where the individual experiences some kind of shift or re-orientation in their life world”, and thus focuses upon the individual. such differences in focus can be explained in terms of disciplinary variation, and parallel those within studies of cooperative work where a distinction between space (the location) and place (personal being and acting) has become established (harrison and tatar, 2008). nonetheless, it is useful to note the kinds of relations between people, pedagogy and place which these foci imply, and the holistic conception of learning contexts required to operationalise those relations. from a built environmental perspective, van note chism (2008) identifies the common elements of what she terms “intentionally created spaces” and claims are harmonious with learning theory as: flexibility, comfort, sensory stimulation, technology support, and decentredness. from a psychological perspective, graetz (2008) argues that successful learning environments must balance elements of coherence, complexity, legibility and mystery. from a pedagogical perspective, savin-baden (2008, p12) acknowledges that learning spaces fulfil a contextual purpose, which may be for example bounded, formal, social, silent, writing, dialogic or reflective. thus, learning spaces as a specific focus for research can be viewed as a young field whose strength lies in the connections it makes between its progenitor fields of research and the opportunities it offers for collaboration between those of disparate disciplinary backgrounds. against this backdrop, and bearing in mind the large-scale investments in new learning spaces being made by many universities (jisc, 2006), it might seem reasonable to assume that the evaluation of these spaces in terms of their impact upon pedagogy and people would be underway in earnest. while evaluation and research clearly have different demands, interactional bases for such investigations can be derived from well-established literature. gaver (1992), for example, documents an ecological approach to understanding media (video) spaces, which focusses upon their affordances in terms of vision, sound, movement and structure of interaction and which might reasonably be applied to physical learning spaces. bielaczyc (2006) uses the term “social infrastructure” to relate the adoption of educational technology to factors including socio-technical space, as well as cultural beliefs, pedagogical practices and the relationship between the classroom and the outside world. more recently, notions of spatiality and space usage have emerged from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. the reality, however, confounds these assumptions about evaluation. pearshouse et al. (2009) conducted a study whose aim was to document the evaluation process for learning spaces at higher education institutions across the uk. although the original intention was to uncover those evaluation processes used to assess learning within learning spaces, such innovative practices proved difficult to find and the project was forced to conclude that that the high level of funding and innovation present within the field of designing and creating learning spaces had not been replicated within evaluation processes (bligh et al., 2009). instead, with a few notable exceptions, documented evaluations of learning spaces were driven to investigate space usage efficiency, to justify investment, or to satisfy the requirements of the uk’s national student survey, which explicitly focuses on student satisfaction rather than learning. moreover, many of the staff involved in executing evaluation were keen to emphasise that their activities were “not seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 12 research”, by which it seems they meant “not driven to investigate notions of learning seen as theoretical and difficult to measure”. such findings need to be placed within context, especially with regard to the issues often raised when solving problems which do not easily sit within a disciplinary category. collaboration between stakeholders can present problems within the field of educational technology. the relationship between technology and didactics has a troubled ideological history to begin with (nordkvelle, 2004), which is further compounded by recent political contexts which have seen teachers’ use of technology advocated and implemented largely by those outside the teaching profession and, furthermore, linked with increased workloads (fisher, 2009). if the learning spaces field is seen as a superset of educational technology requiring even more interdisciplinary collaboration from different academic tribes (becher & trowler, 2001) as well as professionals, students and support staff — including educationalists, psychologists, computer scientists, architects and built environment researchers, auditory engineers, estates professionals, artists and designers, evaluation experts, critical theorists, exponents of human geography, visual culture theorists, and more — then the obstacles to fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration are legion. while the situation is not surprising, it is nonetheless disappointing, since the design of new learning spaces needs to be based upon appropriately analysed findings from previous designs. the transformative potential of appropriate feedback, for both students and teachers, has been widely recognised within the assessment of many academic programmes (nicol & macfarlane-dick, 2006). here, a similarly iterative process, perhaps taking a design research approach based upon embodied conjectures which can be assessed (sandoval, 2004), offers a plausible way forward in relation to developing the new learning spaces, learning technologies and learning methodologies which we are contending are necessary. pearshouse et al. (2009) conclude by suggesting fels, a framework for the evaluation of learning spaces, which provides a common vocabulary to facilitate discourse around evaluations and a structured checklist of issues to be considered by individual practitioners and evaluators. the aim is to allow for the comparison and meta-evaluation of evaluations, and to facilitate conversations between practitioners. however, and perhaps wisely, fels does not attempt to prescribe a set of priorities for individual evaluations since these are likely to be heavily influenced by context. here, we propose multi-display learning spaces as an environment that can promote innovative forms of learning in a way that links elements of space, technological systems and pedagogical models. furthermore, the paper acknowledges these are highly visual in nature, and uses this as the basis to select an appropriate evaluative framework based upon an ecological view of environmental affordances which are related to the discipline-specific mode of teaching. multi-display learning spaces at the most simple level of analysis, a multi-display learning space is an environment in which facilities are provided for the display of multiple pieces of information simultaneously. although the md-ls discussed here use computer-based display systems to achieve this effect, it is possible to see this scenario as a further development of established examples including lecture theatres with multiple sliding blackboards within mathematics (lanir et al., 2008a) or dual slide projectors used within visual art disciplines (nelson, 2000). these examples, together with those we examine within this paper, are intended to support synchronous and co-present learning and are concerned with the physical space. we would like to retain a distinction between this seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 13 context and research into media spaces, which we take to involve distributed and sometimes asynchronous collaboration environments. we do acknowledge contexts where the two scenarios co-exist, such as in the itlo (interactive teaching and learning observatory, coyle, 2004) where video conferencing technology is used to link physical spaces across distance. a useful backdrop for considering md-ls scenarios is the study of large displays from a human-computer interaction perspective (czerwinski et al., 2006). usually contextualised within corporate office settings, and driven by a motivation to investigate and enhance productivity effects upon workers, research into the use of multiple monitors demonstrates cognitive benefits such as improved recognition memory and peripheral awareness, as well as an increased ability to manage flows of information within virtual worlds (tan et al., 2003). the use of multiple monitors to observe disparate pieces of information by experts was noted as a naturally occurring (or “indigenous”) practice within work settings long before computers with multiple monitors became a common occurrence (luff et al., 1992). more recently, hci researchers have noted the popularity of the multiple monitor setup for desk work. extrapolating this trend, and considering display space as a gradually increasing proportion of physical space, czerwinski et al. (2006, p.70) ask: “how might users cope with and benefit from display devices that provide 25% to 35% of their physical desk area or perhaps one day cover entire office walls?”. indeed, an early attempt to create a purpose-built environment to support group working using multiple displays was intended to support business decision-making processes. the pod (seward et al., 1993) is an important example since it was conceived as a room (space) rather than merely a technical system, and explicitly linked with notions of management decisionmaking (methodology). consisting of a purpose-built room with a series of projected “information faces” surrounding a round table and accompanied by a technician’s workstation, the pod could display information including 35mm slides, video footage and tv camera feeds, controlled either by the technician or a participant, to feed into processes such as group planning, reviewing and design activities. evaluation (ibid, pp.160-161) indicated that the pod allowed a high throughput of information, successfully retaining that information’s richness while reducing variety (complexity of information display) to a manageable state. the pod was therefore seen both as a high performance human-computer interface and as a space which increased the focus of its participants through good design of lighting and boundary conditions and the removal of extraneous distractions. the pod was claimed to raise group members to a higher level of performative consciousness: “middle managers thinking and acting like top managers, top managers thinking like the board” (ibid, p.160). it is important to emphasise that corporate professionals are not higher education learners, and nor are group decision-making processes by such people automatically good analogies for processes of critical learning or higher education argumentation, but experiences with the pod do provide a starting point in terms of considering the potential benefits of md-ls scenarios — particularly because of the emphasis on senior management. certainly, we would welcome environments which raised the level of thinking within student groups, but it is important to consider what such an improvement would mean within an he group activity context. within an organisational setting, seward et al. (1993, pp.154-156) define the interests of senior management as making judgements about the relevance, accuracy, validity and reliability of evidence, usually externally derived, at a high level of abstraction and without the benefit of complete information. these processes seem similar to those demanded of students, and are seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 14 analogous to those of argumentation, for example the “complex, partially structured, open” domains for which abductive argumentation can be useful within case-based collaborative learning (dowell & asgari-targhi, 2008, p.231). while this paper leaves most cognitive considerations for future study, the notion that the high throughput of visual evidence within the environment can be linked to this performance, perhaps through a process of cognitive offloading onto the technology (dror & harnad, 2008) is encouraging. on the other hand, the notion that the pod is a high performance normalizer (seward et al., 1993, p.159) which enables groups to arrive at decisions is problematic since the development of critical thinking within higher education is not synonymous with the gaining of group consensus. on the contrary, the transformations the individual undergoes at university desirably involve processes which are reflective, challenging, disjunctive and liminal (savinbaden, 2008, pp.70-74) rather than consensual, and might plausibly benefit from an inability to reach consensus as well argued but contradictory cases fail to be easily resolved. such an understanding therefore necessitates a different balance of learning space, technology and methodology than that which might be directly derived from the pod, because while the presentation and understanding of evidence is common to the two scenarios, the judgement processes which sit on top of these are not. how much change (if at all) must occur within each of the components of technology, methodology and space is, however, unlikely to be simple to determine except by gradual accretion of experience. other examples of multi-display systems exist, but few have been developed for education and fewer linked with notions of spatiality. a recent example of a multi-display system is multipresenter (lanir et al., 2008b), a presentation system aimed for use within lecture theatres equipped with two display screens. multipresenter aims to support innovative content delivery by lecturers by providing specialised systems for the authoring and live presentation of information. the system for live presentation supports presentation flow by using both scheduled, managed transitions and the impromptu ability to embed chosen sections of content upon the secondary screen so that they persist through the rest of the teaching session (lanir et al., 2008b, p.519). two distinctions can instantly be seen between the focus for multipresenter and the md-ls scenarios being discussed here. firstly, multipresenter is a piece of learning technology rather than a learning space. of course, multipresenter sits within an md-ls, but the spatial structure of the lecture theatre itself is regarded as a given by the project developers, and determinedly so since the easy integration of the system into existing lecture theatres, which already have multiple projection screen infrastructure in place, is regarded as a crucial enabler for the project. secondly, the learning scenario which the technology is intended to support is the mass lecture, rather than small group collaborative working. our interest in md-ls scenarios derives from our experiences in using multidisplay systems to support collaborative small group learning in a variety of higher education settings. in 2006, the visual learning lab at the university of nottingham purchased two polyvision thunder systems (milligan, 2008). thunder, a multi-display system consisting of a central “easel” designed to look like a paper flipchart (bligh & li, 2009), features digital versions of pens, erasers and other input devices and a series of projected screens designed to visually mimic the effect of flipchart pages being hung along a wall (figure 2). this system was installed to support small group collaboration within two spaces: a small seminar room and an open access library setting. what quickly became apparent were the differences between the two installations. while the small seminar room successfully supported, in quick succession, a variety of collaborative activity by students within academic disciplines such as built environment, history and education (bligh, 2009), the utilisation of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 15 system within the library setting was slow to develop and often problematic in practice. oldenburg (1999) has emphasised the importance within community building of “third places” distinct from home (first) and work (second) places. oldenburg’s thesis is that contemporary society actively seeks out places such as cafes, coffee shops, bars and community centres to serve as anchors within a community (ibid) which provide crucial venues for the serendipitous meetings and social interactions from which communities thrive (and which are also, it is worth noting, crucial to notions of informal learning). though a detailed comparison of venues requires another paper, the realisation that the physical space bounded by the technology interacted in different ways with the identity of the social place was instrumental in developing our understanding of the importance of spatial identity in the use of multi-display systems. the reports of thunder which have appeared in the literature concurrent with our use of the system (gilbert, 2008; hopkin et al., 2008) are technology-focussed, but all document installations within second places. while we wish to report on a system other than thunder, we continue that trend here and must be content with merely indicating the importance of studying md-ls within other contexts in the future. figure 2: polyvision thunder within (a) a seminar room and (b) an open access library setting at the university of nottingham more recently, we have begun to work with two other multi-display systems (bligh, 2009). the first, smart meeting pro, features multiple interactive whiteboards working within the same teaching session, and offers the possibility of direct physical interaction with each of the display surfaces; this contrasts with the thunder systems, where the projected screens could be manipulated only via the easel. the second system, multi-slides, has been developed as a plug-in for microsoft powerpoint which adds the ability to display the presentation over multiple projectors. a version of multi-slides is distributed along with a book on business meeting methods (peberdy & hammersley, 2009); like thunder and smart meeting pro, therefore, the system can be understood as a business tool being adopted into educational use. these two systems co-exist with one of the thunder installations in our multi-display learning space, with multi-slides configured (as in figure 1) to allow powerpoint slides to be displayed over 6 projectors (the three interactive whiteboards comprising the smart meeting pro system on one wall, plus the three projectors used to display thunder’s flipchart pages on the adjacent wall). to illustrate the use of the multi-display learning space within this paper, we concentrate upon our experiences in using the multi-slides system during a series of art history-focussed seminars within a postgraduate classics course. the next section will focus upon our learning methodology, comparative viewing, before we analyse the affordances our space offers in terms of the requirements of that methodology. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 16 comparative viewing comparative viewing, the description and analysis of a picture or object in relation or contrast to other objects and pictures, forms one of the most basic staples of art historical scholarship and other disciplines devoted to the study of visual arts, particularly with regard to the discussion of formal and stylistic characteristics (nelson, 2000, p.429; friedberg, 2006, p.196). procedurally, comparative viewing links differing aspects of the art work to form an analytical narrative, using comparison to facilitate detailed exploration. methodologically, its aims are to structure the process of viewing, turning it into a falsifiable heuristic exercise wherein the (in our case verbal) argument is constructed formally from the discernible features of the juxtaposed supporting materials and can thus be challenged on the same basis. the development of comparative viewing as a method can be attributed to the conditions created by technological developments. grimm (1892/1981), eulogised about his introduction of the skioptikon(lantern slide projector) to art history, likening its use to that of a microscope within a field he hoped to re-mould along the lines of a hard science, which for him meant primarily to base its findings upon quantifiable data (ibid, p.203). grimm’s innovation was successful, and the skioptikon was rapidly adopted by the discipline across the globe within illustrated lectures which, for many, have become synonymous with the discipline itself (dilly, 1995, pp.39-41; nelson, 2000, p.415). certainly, the new visualisation technology changed the rhetoric of the discipline, from an ekphrastic model in which the lecturer described the objects to which they referred, to a deictic model where the presence of the visual evidence was assumed and an argument constructed based upon the identity of the orator (who spoke on behalf of the paintings themselves). so lecturers, no longer forced to re-enact the art work for their audience ekphrastically, now spoke as part of a shared experience which some have characterised as enabling greater objectivity towards the displayed works (grimm, 1892/1981: p.204), greater plausibility for their own arguments (nelson, 2000, pp.416-420), and a more democratic lecture which could include those insufficiently affluent to have taken a grand tour of european art collections (ibid, p.423). at a practical level this deictic narrative was associated with the synchronisation of image (of paintings) and narration in time within the lecture, unobtainable previously even by the passing around of photographs. this allowed for greater comparison within the narrative structure of the lecture, and for the re-establishment of the art work as a piece of evidence in its own right, “de-historicised” from overarching grand narratives (grimm, 1892/1981, p.204; nelson, 2000, p.431). these methodological advantages were noted by wölfflin (1915), who extended the use of the skioptikon further by introducing double-projection, the simultaneous display of two slides using two projectors which could be operated independently of each other, with the intention of opening up an exploratory field for discourse between the two items on offer. wölfflin (ibid) used the new technology as the basis to construct an influential and integrated analytical methodology which used five binary concepts to describe art work, becoming an important foundation of formalist analysis. the analytical superiority of such presentations was seen to lie in the use of “anchor slides” (nelson, 2000, p.430). as wölfflin (1958, after fawcett, 1983, p.456) explained: it offers the possibility of continuously supporting the spoken word with pictorial demonstration. not only can more examples be shown, but variants and exceptions can be brought forward without danger of distracting the hearer, since the keynote may be immediately struck anew. finally, the lecturer has in greater measure the freedom to make seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 17 use of exaggerations for purposes of clarification (and entertainment), inasmuch as it is in his power to retract them at any moment. however, the introduction of the skioptikon and, later, double-projection, influenced not only the methodology of the discipline but also its spatial appearance. where previously art history lectures could be held in any space that could accommodate a congregation of people and was well-lit, so as to facilitate the passing around of drawings and photographs, now they required darkened rooms with projectors, large screens to project upon, and dedicated technical staff to facilitate the process. the environmental darkness combined with the brightness of the projected image has been seen to give the art work itself, or at least its slide-replica, an overwhelming, revelatory or “epiphanic” character (dilly, 1995, p.42), while the voice of the lecturer becomes a key device to guide the audience and prefigure their viewing experience, turning the lecturer into an “ideal beholder” (landsberger, 1924, pp.93-94) who speaks on behalf of the visual objects themselves. of course, from the point of view of student criticality, such an ideal positioning of the lecturer presents a problem which is further confounded since the students are inhibited from contributing by the darkness of the scenario. the role of the student, which was largely ignored in the literature of the time, seems to have been to become convinced. the potential for interactive viewing by the audience in a dianoetic sense, argumentationally derived from the structure of the presented evidence, is thus incompletely realised, as is the process of democratisation of the art history lecture. this has been observed to prompt a tendency towards sleep (or even absconding mid-lecture, under cover of darkness) when the audience is composed of students rather than, for example, peers at academic conferences or enthusiasts at public lectures (nelson, 2000, p.421). dual-projection, and the methodology surrounding it, survived in the classrooms of visual art disciplines until perhaps the mid-1990s, where it has now been replaced by powerpoint as part of a process which, within the discipline, has been poorly studied and documented. it is true that some of the arguments against the uses of powerpoint which we summarised earlier do not readily apply to its use in visual art disciplines, since art-historical argumentation tends to use a model of verbal narration structured around the pictures themselves as evidence. hence, when powerpoint was first introduced to these disciplines its ability to merge text and picture, or to present multiple pictures on one slide with relative ease during the process of authoring a presentation, was welcomed as an advance compared to lantern-slides. however, in praxis, powerpoint has forced a series of compromises which constitute backward steps for art history and related disciplines. the low resolution associated with powerpoint means that slides which juxtapose multiple images suffer in quality, decreasing the visualisation of evidence to such an extent that many presenters favour only a single image on each slide, thus returning to the fragmented arguments of the single skioptikon in which the spoken word must carry the comparison by describing those works which are not currently shown, as well as argue (structurally) and persuade (interpersonally). like the single skioptikon, such a scenario still represents an advance over the rhetoric of the slide-less lecture, yet in reintroducing an emphasis on the verbal, powerpoint serves to force a re-historicised argument independently of the visual evidence and the analytical focus — this serves neither the formalist approaches as inspired by wölfflin and others nor those more focussed upon the iconological, semiotic or visual cultural analysis of art works. in the next section we draw upon our practical experiences in using an md-ls to teach postgraduate students in classics using comparative viewing; in doing seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 18 so we seek to examine whether the md-ls can offer the opportunity to revisit the methodological benefits that powerpoint seems unable to harness. we describe the technology, the space, and the instantiation of the comparative viewing methodology we used, and we compare their relative properties. we seek to demonstrate the ways in which such formal learning can be improved through considering its components, while acknowledging the obstacles we encountered in practice and the limitations of our current version of our theories. a multi-display learning space in practice the primary purpose of the current section is to illustrate our use of an md-ls environment to conduct comparative viewing, to render more concrete the relationships between learning space, technology and methodology we have described within this paper and to illustrate the ways in which a consideration of these factors, within the context of md-ls, can lead to an improvement in the understanding of the learning which takes place. the secondary purpose of the section is to provide a tangible, specific starting point so that we can move on to more general considerations within our conclusion in a comprehensible way. we therefore seek to illustrate the rhetorical space opened up by the paper rather than provide a comprehensive study of our data, which we leave to future publications. figure 3: a diagram of the md-ls scenario within q8d501 ancient art and its interpreters. the md-ls experience we report here occurred within a graduate-level module in classics, q8d501 ancient art and its interpreters, during october and november 2009. the learning space we used was the one photographed previously within figure 1 and described within our section on multi-display learning spaces; to benefit our analysis, we have represented the salient features of the space diagrammatically in figure 3. four students, (i) to (iv), sat in a diagonally-aligned row behind a lengthy surface with curved ends which is composed of three free-standing tables (a rectangle and two semi-circles) while the teacher moved more freely about the room, though generally in the positions a to f. position a represents the seated location behind the computer terminal which runs the multi-display system software, position b represents the standing positions between the students and the large display screens a through f, while positions c, d, e and f represent seated positions behind and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 19 to the side of the student cohort. screens a, b and c are interactive whiteboards while d, e and f are projected images as described earlier; here, it is appropriate to remark that d, e, f are slightly larger than a, b, c. two other aspects of the space are also worth noting. first, that a computer terminal adjacent to c did not form part of the activity and was turned off. second, that a researcher was seated adjacent to the av rack making use of two video cameras and a research notebook to collect data about the learning space. the observations we make here are derived jointly from the teacher’s impressions and the researcher’s notebook. the multi-display system we used was multi-slides which, as we discussed earlier, has been developed as a plug-in for powerpoint to allow presentations to be displayed across multiple screens. once the plug-in has been installed, choosing the start multi-slide show option within powerpoint causes a configuration dialog box to be displayed (figure 4). each of the monitors attached to the system can be included or excluded from the presentation cascade, allowing some displays to be permanently used for information outside the presentation, such as live webpages or productivity packages. the order in which the cascade makes use of the monitors can also be defined, while configurable options allow the first monitor used by the cascade to display speaker notes and the final monitor to be used to display a summary screen of four reduced slides. within the sessions described here we cascaded the presentation across the six monitors in the order a, b, c, d, e, f, with the computer screen at position a duplicating the display at a. figure 4: configuring a presentation cascade within multi-slides ancient art and its interpreters is a graduate-level (master of arts), seminarbased module in which the cohort comprises students who, during their undergraduate degrees, had differing levels of exposure to art-historical and classical archaeological content. the students are introduced to a diverse set of key contexts (a corpus of statues, vases, paintings, sarcophagi, and so on) seen through the lens of key concepts in the study of greek and roman art and archaeology, such as stylistic analysis, visual narrative or urbanism. the students interact with both primary and secondary evidence: each student is assigned to read a different piece of (secondary) literature prior to the session, and they are thus positioned as “experts” informed by different perspectives during the sessions, in which verbal discussion around the (primary) evidence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 20 provided by the images is supported by the md-ls and orchestrated by the tutor. in this way, the learning methodology seeks to create dialogue around sets of images, which have been selected by the tutor with the intention of enabling comparative viewing. juxtaposed images included different views of the same object, intended for purposes of clarification, contrast, to illustrate a sense of narrative within the object composition, or to illustrate the importance of the viewer position. other sets of images contextualised an object: geographically or physically, within space; against contrasting objects; culturally, making use of other representations; within a stylistic progression, and so on. from the point of view of technology, the multi-slides system was able to display the material in a visually commanding manner, and allowed the transition between slides or sets of slides to occur quickly and unobtrusively. the system works by storing images of the finalised slides and sending them to the multiple projectors along with a bespoke transition effect; though this might have restricted the experience had information in modes such as video been required to support discussion, in this case the still images matched the requirements of the methodology quite well. on the other hand, the fact that only the most recent slide within the cascade was genuinely a live powerpoint, in this case at position a, meant that the possibility for annotation of slides was restricted. several instances were noted where a desired annotation rendered it necessary to traverse the presentation backwards, then annotate, then move forwards again, interrupting the flow of discourse between participants and, occasionally, being the subject of explicit comment by the tutor. in terms of the flow of the presentation slides, the system successfully supported what we have termed a “loosened” structure, less granularly bounded in the sense that slides had been grouped conceptually into chunks, yet still linear in terms of progression. supported by the visual affordances of the space, students were free to comment on any piece of evidence which was currently displayed (we consider whether or not they actually did so later, in relation to methodology). yet they were still ultimately governed by the sectional transitions orchestrated by the tutor and accomplished in a spatially distributed way through the use of a common usb wireless presenter unit. in addition to annotation, which was directly supported by the system using a finger on the live board, a direct form of interaction with materials was achieved through the use of a laser pointer, a disciplinarily-favoured mode of interaction, or cultural practice, using a laser pointing device housed within the same unit as the usb wireless presenter. the system therefore supported a mode of control which could be transferred, as applicable, to individual students but which could also be utilised by the tutor: in fact, the students were observed to use the laser pointer in making their arguments very frequently, yet rarely did they advance the presentation forwards themselves, through the slides, using the same handheld unit. from the point of view of space, a number of affordances were relevant to the support of learning. the field of view afforded to the students was good, and their ability to scan across the array of visual evidence using eye, head or body movements was the enabling factor for the loosened linear discussion structure which we have already described. the relative size of the screens, together with the positioning of the students, meant that imagery upon screens d, e, f was the best resolved, while the screen at a (ironically, the directly interactive live slide) was mildly problematic due to its smaller size, relative distance and least favourable angle of viewing. the overall visual resolution of the system was good, with brightly reproduced projected colour imagery dominating the room and enabling detailed inspection of evidence, although this necessitated the use of high quality imagery by the presentation author. the “information for three dimensions” (gaver, 1992, p.19) within the space allowed for a perceptual balance to be struck by students, who could direct their attention across the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 21 evidence, towards the tutor, towards each other, or in combinations thereof. indeed, students seemed to possess an instinctive awareness of such balances, and used arm gestures to direct the attention of others when they were speaking themselves. gesturing has been previously noted as important within media-supported argumentation (lanir et al., 2008a, p.700), while the manner in which such supporting motions were engaged within this space is reminiscent of the “lookings” noted by luff, heath and greatbatch (1992, p.166) within a professional context, where it was the size and position of evidence that provided the ability to monitor both gesture and materials, thereby “gaining access to the actions and activities” in which the gesturer is engaged, in our case the processes of constructing disciplinary argumentation. the affordances for movement within the space, and their implications for learning, were considerable. our attention to movement was first drawn by the tutor’s observation that she felt restricted by the screens, in that few positions existed around b which did not result in her obstructing the students’ view of the projected screens. a period followed in which the tutor favoured the seating positions a, c and d, but thereafter the realisation that the students tended to focus a considerable proportion of attention onto the speaker led to attempts to direct this attention by standing, within b, adjacent to the screen displaying the visual evidence upon which the tutor currently wanted the students to focus. in this way, an increased awareness of the spatiality within teaching was used as the basis to attempt to scaffold argumentation: an initial exemplar of analytical argumentation was accompanied by physical movement within b; over subsequent iterations, the attention of students was forced to become increasingly self-selected as the tutor retreated to a seated position. position c, in particular, was seen as useful by the tutor due to its physical position directly behind the cohort; when the situation called for a moment of questioning or less formal discussion, the students could turn towards the tutor and converse easily, yet at a moment of analysis the students, now facing forwards, were forced to select their own point of focus, either in constructing their own argumentational narrative or in listening to that of the tutor, which became a disembodied voice within the relative darkness. from the point of view of the methodology, a crucial consideration in the construction of the scenarios was the process of authoring undertaken by the tutor pre-session. multi-slides’ integration into powerpoint renders it unnecessary to learn a new authoring system, but also means that the authoring environment does not reflect the teaching environment in terms of the simultaneous display of materials, causing the tutor to focus more abstractly upon strategies for choreographing imagery in support of the desired pedagogical narrative. the tutor reported that the average number of slides used within the sessions approached double that for an equivalent, nonmd-ls, session, while contending that preparation time was not unduly increased since most slides now contained a single image at comparable scale, perhaps with a simple caption, rather than the time-consuming slide compositions of more traditional powerpoint presentations where intricate balances of visual elements had to be considered. slides within the presentations were arranged within “chunks” of six (the number being directly related to the number of display screens), with occasional individual slides to serve transitional purposes. these chunks were designed as the equivalent of individual slides within a more conventional presentation (albeit with a more consistent image scale and with screen boundaries defining information partitions) and, in introducing a sectional granularity of 6 rather than 1, were the enabling mechanism for the loosened linear discussion structure described earlier. in-session, the multi-slides system supported the intended methodology well with the exception of the annotational limitations already noted. the teaching style was designed to provide suitable evidence for students to analyse, together with examples of analysis offered by the tutor to which students were seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 22 invited to disagree, comment, or offer clarifications. though each lesson clearly had a corpus of material which was designed to be covered, the pace of teaching was relaxed in order to offer plenty of time for student contributions and original analysis. after suitable, spatially scaffolded, exemplars of analysis were offered by the tutor, the students were able to choose appropriate pieces of visual evidence from within the current slide-chunk to support their own arguments, as part of a process which saw the expert-centric methodology of comparative viewing adopted in part by the students. thus the materials and teaching style together supported lively discussion and debate. perhaps one unintended consequence of the use of the md-ls to support comparative viewing was a critique of the methodology itself. as an established methodology within visual arts, comparative viewing is intended to support the needs of the expert speaker in constructing and then enacting argumentational and performative (persuasive) discourse in front of an audience. while we were successful in engaging students with the process of arguing around images within the seminar, the space and technology here affords the potential for students to construct their own juxtapositions rather than merely reacting to those of the teacher, and we are eager to enact such student-created multimodal arguments in future work. we are also eager for students to escape from their chairs to enact the spatial movement within the process which we have currently restricted to the tutor. this section has sketched some practical experiences with md-ls scenarios and sought to illustrate the way in which considerations of learning technology, methodology, and space can be used to analyse learning spaces. in particular, we have illustrated examples of the multi-display systems (technology), multi-display learning spaces (space) and multiple perspective learning (methodology, in this case based around comparative viewing) which co-exist during md-ls scenarios. in the next section, we conclude by considering how these elements might be used to support learning more generally, using a rhetorical structure for md-ls based around notions of multimodal argumentation, enacted in real-time. conclusion within this paper we have sought to open a discussion to further the understanding of multi-display systems and their effect upon learning. though the importance of learning spaces within educational processes is now acknowledged much of the potential benefit remains unrealised, in part due to the unambitious view of such spaces implicit within many evaluation programmes. we have sought to address this situation through an ecological understanding of md-ls scenarios which balances elements of learning space with those of methodology and technology. the use of md-ls scenarios to support critical learning within disciplines can be understood through a rhetorical structure: “who is communicating to who about what, with what purpose (why?) and how?” (andrews, 2010, p.29). the methodology of comparative viewing used within the classics seminars acts as a disciplinary form of argumentation which structures visual materials in relation to the statements needed to establish a position within the argument. the methodology for authoring, and the subsequent performativity of the art historical lecture (nelson, 2000, pp.419-420) is an example of the choreography of argument (andrews, 2010, p.39) — developing the argument, exchanging views, and relating evidence to claims and propositions. however, in establishing the lecturer as an ideal beholder, the typical art history lecture manufactures a rhetorical space designed to maintain the traditional power relations between ‘rhetor’ and audience (ibid, pp.29-32). within the seminars we described here, such relationships between “who” and “to whom” have started to become blurred due to configurations of both space seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 23 and technology. the loosened linear structure of presentation which resulted describes an episodic format of discourse, bounded by sectional groupings of materials and the transitions between them. the power structures within episodes are still skewed towards the tutor, who has authored the materials, but less so due to the variety of views which provides the basis for development of alternative arguments, inspired by different secondary viewpoints. similar observations have been made about the visual argumentation which occurs within film, for example by alcolea-banegas (2009, p.260) who has stated: “we are neither compelled to share the point of view of the filmmaker, nor entirely free to supply pragmatic inferences or critical assessments of our own”. the power structure between episodes, on the other hand, still lies firmly with the choreographer who decides the moments of transition, and so a key point of future investigation is to adopt the methodological and technological changes which will allow such decision-making to be distributed more widely, as well as to monitor the roles of ‘rhetor’ and audience and scaffold more carefully the changing of such roles within md-ls scenarios. in considering the “why” of such modes of communication it is necessary to consider the position of evidence within argumentation. though the details differ by discipline (andrews, 2010, p.81), the purpose of academic argumentation is to drill down through evidence at a point of dispute. it is difficult for a single image as visual evidence to directly argue unless the tension between multiple perspectives is implicit within it (ibid, p.103), yet such tension can indeed be manufactured through the juxtaposition of multiple images. this, simultaneously, invites a choice of route through the work (ibid, p.108) which creates the space for the argument of the rhetor to be challenged through alternate readings. in this way, md-ls scenarios echo the photo essay, yet they provide space for the multi-voiced aspects associated with verbal dialogue; they also echo the presentation of multimodal video or web material, yet they provide the opportunity for real-time discussion of the case, and for the developing of shared explanations through a dialectical process within the classroom (dowell & asgari-targhi, 2008). in this way, the rhetorical “what” within md-ls can extend beyond the authoring of materials to support a central argument, providing the reflective, challenging, disjunctive and liminal (savin-baden, 2008, pp. 70-74) experiences which form the core aims of the higher education experience, within which the materials and the arguments of the rhetor are seen to be open to challenge. it is within the context of these affordances of argumentational methodology that the development of multi-display systems and, in turn, multi-display learning spaces must be viewed. the modes of content authoring, information display, control and flow, interaction and performance, and ability for permanent record offered by the technology must scaffold a process of argumentation which begins before the group convenes, supports synchronous and multiple perspective visual argumentation within small groups, and provides mechanisms for the knowledge created to feed into subsequent processes of learning. in turn, the space must offer affordances for vision, listening, speaking and movement within appropriate boundaries which will be at least partly defined by the technology itself and further complicated by its social identity. in these ways, md-ls can not only support innovative modes of disciplinary argumentation, but also provide an exemplar for linking learning methodology, technology and space which is much needed within the context of learning spaces research as part of its wider mission to re-imagine learning. acknowledgements the first author would like to thank mike sharples and charles crook for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, jitti niramitranon for his assistance with photography and duncan peberdy and jane hammersley for their work in implementing the multi-display learning space. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 24 references adams, c. 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(2005). powerpoint’s power in the classroom: enhancing students’ selfefficacy and attitudes. computers & education, 45(2), 203-215. tan, d.s., czerwinski, m. & robertson, g. (2003). women go with the (optical) flow. in g. cockton & p. korhonen (eds.), proceedings of chi 2003 – the acm conference on human factors in computing systems, ft. lauderdale, florida, usa, april 5-10 (pp.748-749). new york, ny: acm press. tufte, e. (2003). the cognitive style of powerpoint. cheshire, ct: graphics press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 27 van note chism, n. (2006). challenging traditional assumptions and rethinking learning spaces. in d.g. oblinger (ed.), learning spaces (pp2.1-2.12). boulder, co: educause. wölfflin, h. (1915). kunstgeschichtliche grundbegriffe: das problem der stilentwickelung in der neueren kunst. munich: bruckmann. wölfflin, h. (1958). the sense of form in art: a comparative psychological study. new york, ny: chelsea publishing company. schofield-lester seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 76 virtual chemical engineering: guidelines for e-learning in engineering education damian schofield director of human-computer interaction school of computer science state university of new york, ny, usa e-mail: schofield@cs.oswego.edu edward lester associate professor and reader in chemical technology department of chemical and environmental engineering the university of nottingham uk e-mail: edward.lester@nottingham.ac.uk abstract advanced three-dimensional virtual environment technology, similar to that used by the film and computer games industry can allow educational developers to rapidly create realistic three-dimensional, virtual environments. this technology has been used to generate a range of interactive learning environments across a broad spectrum of industries. the paper will discuss the implementation of these systems and extrapolate the lessons learnt into general guidelines to be considered for the development of a range of educational learning resources. these guidelines will then be discussed in the context of the development of virile (virtual reality interactive learning environment), software which simulates the configuration and operation of a polymerisation plant. this software package has been developed for use by undergraduate chemical engineers at the university of nottingham. keywords: engineering education, visual tools, process engineering, virtual reality, chemical plant background the modern world expects high levels of industrial safety. in general there has been continuous improvement in the safety performance of the developed industrial nations over recent decades. this has been due to a combination of factors including changes in management culture, enhanced design and planning, technological improvements and legislation. all of these factors have tended to reduce the chances of accidents and incidents and led to improved safety performance, however it is measured. accidents still happen however and in many ways the improved safety performance makes it now even harder to improve such performance any further. this particularly applies to the decreasing ability to ‘engineer out’ obvious problems. the law of diminishing seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 77 returns starts to play a role, incremental improvements in any of the above factors ends up only improving safety performance marginally. it is accepted that some industries are more hazardous than others. chemical engineering is generally seen can be a hazardous profession with higher-thanaverage rates of injury and fatality and there are many reasons for this and again there is clearly no single solution to the problem. closer investigation of the situation points to the important role that training can play in creating a motivated and safe workforce. training techniques have benefited from advances in technology but fundamentally in most industrial settings there has been no major change in training methodology in recent years (allison, 1992, halff et al, 1996, imache et al, 1995, thurman, 1992, wilson et al, 1996, schofield, 2005). this paper will demonstrate that there are alternative training methodologies now becoming available based on rapid advances in computing technology that have taken place over the last decade. with careful integration into a planned training strategy this offers the potential for further improvements in safety performance. advances in virtual reality (vr) technology mean that it is now both feasible and cost effective to consider mass training of workforces using simulated computer representations of the workplace. the ability to safely expose workers to hazardous situations, both routine and unusual, and to test their knowledge of safety procedures is key to this new methodology. downes (2003) summarised a key finding regarding the use of virtual environments for training: “so few people have grasped what it means to live and learn in the information age. however, many people who, for example, are only just now coming to grips with the internet find virtual environments a natural training mechanism as they mirror reality. “the very technology that makes self-directed (and self-motivated) learning possible, also makes it necessary. you don't get the benefits of becoming an agricultural society without also having to live on farms; you don't get the benefits of learning in an information society without also having to live with large amounts of information.” however the integration of such advanced technology into existing work systems and practices is not a trivial issue. a number of complex human factors and organisational processes interact and can create barriers to the successful development and implementation of such training systems (silvester et al, 2001, schofield et al, 2002, schofield, 2005). acceptance by the workforce is a crucial issue, and implementation strategies must be considered carefully. the paper will describe the development of the virile system, a polymerisation plant simulator used by undergraduate students at the university of nottingham. chemical engineering education early attempts at ‘virtual’ engineering teaching laboratories and training simulations have often consisted of little more than online calculators or interactive diagrams (ponton, 2003, karweit, 2003) and those that have ventured into applying three-dimensional computer graphics based technology have been constrained by lack of realism detail in their graphical interfaces and level of simulation (parker et al, 2000, bell & fogler, 1996). however, it has been also noted that even given these limitations, these virtual environments have the potential to allow users to experience situations which would not readily exist within the real world, e.g. to see ‘into’ a chemical reaction or to cause a major catastrophe through their actions (schofield et al 2001, nasios, 2002). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 78 recent advances in computer graphics and virtual reality technology, driven by the film and games industry, allow developers to rapidly create realistic threedimensional, virtual environments. research work at the university of nottingham, and previous work by the authors building, interactive, virtual reality based engineering experiments have shown the enormous benefits of using this type of learning in a university environment, and also highlighted a few of the potential problems (schofield et al 2003, tromp & schofield, 2004). these problems can arise from the expectations of younger users who naturally compare commercial game software to educational software. the former tends to be a high end multi-million pound development whereas the latter is severely budget restricted. this inevitably results in harsh comparisons is the interface is not sufficiently well developed. the chemical engineering virtual environments developed at the university of nottingham replicate both ‘laboratory’ experiments and ‘real’ industrial processes. the latter allows undergraduate students to experiment with large-scale equipment to which they would not normally be able to access. the authors were aware during the developmental stages that the front end (interface and appearance) should not be neglected whilst striving to create realistic chemical simulation data. e.g. from previous work the authors found that the level of enthusiasm of younger subjects was higher, but all the subjects were impressed with the visual representation of the virtual experiments. this reaction of the subjects overrules any suggestion of a reluctance to accept new technology. factors such as age and experience do not appear to affect the choice of a virtual reality based training system but these factors may influence the way in which people learn. through appropriate programming, the complexity of the virtual world and the level of content can be varied and designed to meet the diverse needs of students and the different laboratory and ‘real’ work situations in which they may operate. the previous exposure to a computer medium was quite high with 48 % of subjects having experience of playing computer games. all the subjects had computing experience and used computers everyday (mainly word processing, internet and e-mail software). the chemical engineering virtual environments developed at the university of nottingham replicate both ‘laboratory’ experiments and ‘real’ industrial processes. the latter allows undergraduate students to experiment with largescale equipment to which they would not normally be able to access. there is already substantial research which supports the case for using virtual environments for teaching and demonstrates marked improvements in student learning and retention (hollands et al, 1999, wilson et al, 1996, hussin et al, 2004). however, there has been little, relevant work on the mechanisms by which students learn when faced with interactive systems of this nature, although such work is starting to be undertaken (in collaboration with cognitive psychologists) by the authors at the university of nottingham. university chemical engineering laboratories present a significant challenge to health and safety personnel due to the many types of hazards that are present. laboratory safety is extremely important, particularly in those laboratories where students first develop practices and habits that they may carry with them throughout their careers. because this importance is widely agreed upon, most undergraduate engineering laboratory experiments include some amount of equipment familiarisation and safety training, encompassing at a minimum a long list of safety rules (jenkate et al, 2001). these rules are often handed out on the first day of laboratory work, along with the assessment policy, exam schedule, and instructor’s e-mail, office location etc. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 79 in spite of these precautions, however, accidents can still occur. two major causes for these are forgetfulness and complacency, the latter of which can be considered as forgetfulness of the importance and significance of the rules, as opposed to forgetfulness of the rules themselves. the important feature is that equipment operation procedures and safe practices are not always retained in students' memory (bell & fogler, 1999). those persons who have ever been involved in an accident, however, tend to remember their experience much longer and more vividly than any set of written rules. as a result, they tend to follow safe practice guidelines much more rigorously, in order to ensure that such experiences never happen again. theoretically, if all students could experience simulated laboratory and industrial accidents, then they should become more safety conscious (bell & fogler, 1999). proving this theory would make an interesting study in itself. chemical engineering training systems two virtual chemical engineering simulations developed at the university of nottingham are described in this paper: • an absorption column (where two packed columns absorb ammonia from an air stream). • a three-stage distillation process (where a feed process supplies a reactor which feeds the product into distillation columns). for the absorption column a real time dynamic simulation of the process needed to be created to allow interaction with the processing equipment. for the distillation process a large amount of process data was generated using commercially available, steady state chemical flowsheet simulation software called hysis. the authors undertook a series of tests and experiments to generate feedback on these virtual learning environments. a number of further tests are currently underway aimed at understanding the way students learn in this virtual world and how they improve their understanding of chemical processes using these systems. the results of this evaluation have been previously reported (schofield et al, 2005). figure 1: the ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ absorption column. the virtual absorption column packed columns are used extensively in distillation, liquid-liquid extraction and especially gas absorption and gas scrubbing operations (coulson & seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 80 richardson, 1998). fluid flow through packed beds is therefore something that chemical engineering students need to learn, in order to understand the significance of phenomena like pressure drop and adsorption kinetics. one university of nottingham pilot plant consists of two packed columns (figure 1), which share the same ammonia, air and sulphuric acid supplies. this equipment processes these substances at concentrations high enough to present a serious hazard to an individual exposed to them, and health and safety is therefore always an issue. the operation between the two columns is switched by changing four valves on the plant. dilute sulphuric acid flows down each column from the tank above and is metered. ammonia is supplied at 1 bar and is metered as it leaves the liquid cylinder. air is supplied at 2 bar pressure and mixed with ammonia before it reaches the columns. a rotameter measures the flow and a kerosene manometer measures the pressure of the combined air and ammonia stream, which enters the column at the bottom and exits at the top. a sampling point is provided at the top of each column, so that ammonia concentration in the gas outlet can be measured. any ammonia present is then scrubbed out downstream to ensure that only air is released into the atmosphere. indicators detect excess ammonia in the outlet stream. the three-dimensional environment of the ammonia absorption column was constructed using commercially available modelling and animation software. the total number of polygons in the environment was optimised as this has an impact on the rendering speed of each frame. objects needed to be constructed with appropriate detail in order to be easily recognisable. a number of texture maps were strategically used and a suitable portion of carefully chosen digital photographs were utilised in order to bring a sense of reality to the virtual environment (figure 1). a substantial amount of time was spent programming the dynamic features of the absorption column simulation to give high levels of realism in the virtual environment. the authors believe that this helps the students to gain a deep understating of the chemical engineering principles that govern this mass transfer process. the virtual plant operates in real time, using the shockwave 3d graphics engine, allowing the students have to monitor instrumentation and wait until the equipment reaches its steady state condition. the virtual absorption column: the experimental task students control three valves which open and close in stages, controlling the air, ammonia and liquid flows that enter to the packed column, three rotameters measure the flowrate of these streams. calibration graphs are provided for air and ammonia rotameters in order to convert their measured units to litres per minute. the liquid rotameter is pre-calibrated and measures litres per hour liquid flow. during the ‘real’ experiment the students measure the output ammonia concentration as they optimise the system parameters using a dräger tube instrument. in the virtual environment a gas analyser is connected to the output pipeline of the packed column. there is a monitor screen on a ‘virtual’ gas analyser where a graph is displayed that indicates the values of output ammonia concentration in parts per million (ppm). the graph is drawn dynamically and updated every second allowing students to monitor output ammonia concentration over a long period. one of the main purposes of the virtual reality system is to help the trainees to identify the chemical process equipment on the rig and to become familiar with its operation. this operation of chemical engineering instruments and the knowledge of this laboratory rig layout (gained by using the virtual reality seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 81 system) helps students to know exactly what tasks they should follow and what precautions they should take before they implement the experiment in the real laboratory. students are able to set experimental tasks in the virtual world, and if they make any mistakes they will learn what went wrong without damaging the equipment or themselves (nasios, 2002). an online version of the virtual absorption column learning environment was created and distributed to the students. this slightly cut down version is made up of three modules related to component identification, hazard identification and procedural operation respectively. figure 2: the ‘online’ absorption column the virtual laboratory rig is distributed in vrm 1 and allows students to navigate easily within the virtual world identifying and operating the process equipment. a number of detailed, linked, web pages with text and information on all the components of this equipment have also been provided. these enhance understanding of the rig’s layout and along with the linked technical documentation provide a useful internet resource for students writing up their ‘real’ experiments. by selecting any object in the threedimensional virtual environment, the student can gain access to a plethora of relevant information (figure 2). the dual framed web page with integrated vrml sections provides a highly interactive interface for the student because they can easily move within the virtual rig in the left frame and in the same time they can view the descriptive, photographic, diagrammatic and mathematical information that is available for the ammonia rig components in the right frame as shown in figure 2. virile: the virtual polymerisation plant one frequently identified problem in chemical engineering education is the student cohort’s lack of awareness about ‘real’ process equipment. question and answer sessions indicated that the undergraduates are often not only unfamiliar with full-scale industrial plant, but are also unable to identify some of the main components (schofield et al, 2003, schofield et al, 2005). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 82 figure 3: the virtual polymerisation plant figure 4: the realism of the virtual plant to address this issue it was decided that the next virtual environment to be developed should replicate a ‘real’ industrial process rather than a ‘laboratory’ experiment. this would allow the students to experiment with large-scale equipment to which they would not normally have access. it was decided to build a far larger scale virtual simulation where students are able to design and build a particular chemical plant and then operate the major equipment. key features of this project will include the design-orientated nature of the task facilitated by the interactive character of the technology. a continuous polymerisation plant was modelled, consisting of a pump and preheater section, a reactor section followed by a second heat exchanger system (cooling) and three distillation columns (figure 3). it is important not to underestimate the work involved in developing commercial quality, virtual reality software tools to a professional standard (figure 4). to a generation weaned on animated movies and computer games, the level of expectation of our student cohort is high. previous virtual learning environments developed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 83 have provided experience of the quality of the software required to gain a level of acceptance among the students. figure 5: the simulation engine massive amounts of simulation data was generated using hysis (steady state chemical flowsheet simulation software). a complex real-time, mathematical model was programmed to reference the data generated (figure 5). the final learning environment contains over a billion discrete configurable states, allowing the students unlimited scope for experimentation and configuration. this also allows academics to set individual tasks within the learning environment for particular students. a full economics and costing model has also been integrated into the simulation, giving students an insight into the constraints facing engineers in the real world (schofield et al, 2005). virile: the experimental task virile can be used at school level (year 12) upto final year undergraduate chemical engineering level. the complexity of the tasks can be adjusted to suit the user. for example with younger users and first year undergraduate chemical engineers, the following text is provided: what is virile? virile is a virtual reality interactive learning environment this virile is a chemical plant that makes hydrocarbons that are useful to the chemical industry. the process is relatively straightforward – small hydrocarbons (with less than 5 carbons) are pumped through a reactor packed with catalyst and the unsaturated molecules polymerise with each other to form larger molecules (with 6 to 10 carbons). these products are considerably more valuable to the chemical industry and can therefore be sold at seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 84 a higher price. chemical engineering processes can be broadly placed into three stages preparation – heating, grinding, cooling, pressurising, mixing are basic preparation stages reaction – chemical and physical reactions. separation – distillation, condensation, centrifuge, drying, spraying, adsorption, absorption, density separation are all basic separation technologies. in the virile chemical plant: preparation – the hydrocarbon feed is being pumped from a ship 2 miles away which requires some pressure to bring it on site. however, the reaction won’t take place at these conditions. the feed must be further pressurised and heated to increase the rate at which these reactions will occur. reaction – once the feed stream is sufficiently hot and pressurised, it is pumped through reactor vessels (large tubes packed full of catalyst material). reactors and the design of reactors is vital in ensuring good yields of product and also in operating safely. sometimes reactions can be exothermic and this can mean that the feed stream heats up during the reaction stage as a result of chemical bonds being formed or broken. since the temperature of reaction can effect the rate at which these reactions occurs, uncontrolled heating inside the reactor can lead to an increase in the rate of reactions (which in turn yields further heat) until there is a run away reaction which is not at all desirable. controlling this is of paramount importance. separation – normally the product stream is a mixture of products and unreacted feed compounds. these have to be separated since the value of the product is often dictated by its purity. the feed stream into the polymerisation plant contains several different compounds anyway, some of which don’t react, and this means that you have to separate them out at the end. in this case you have four distillation columns and must capitalise on the different chemical and physical properties of the chemicals in the product stream to separate them out. familiarisation with the controls view options this section enables you to move around the plant or simply view the plant from fixed locations. you can toggle between various ground locations and then move around in the plant. use your mouse to do this. if you press ctrl and drag up, you will lift upwards. if you press shft and drag your mouse around, you can alter the angle of view. you cannot alter the view from the 4 static overview cameras. you can walk through objects which become wire frames. reset you can press reset if you want to return to a ground view looking straight ahead. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 85 lines if you activate this feature you’ll see a red numbered object appear around the plant. right clicking on these diamond shaped objects brings up a summary of current conditions at that position in the system (temperatures and pressures). until the whole plant is configured some of these labels will appear blank. spend a few minutes familiarising yourself with the controls. perhaps follow the pipework round to see if you can work out where the plant starts and ends. year one, task one: general familiarisation draw the structure of the following compounds – butane, 1 hexene, 1 octene, i-butane, 1 heptene, propene, 1 butene, propane. • use the control panel to find out what the feed stream is composed of? • why is there a mixture being fed into the system? • what is the molar and weight fraction of each for the feed stream? • which of these are unsaturated and what does that mean? • what does propene become if it reacts with another propene molecule? • what happens if propene reacts with two other propene molecules? • rank them in order of perceived value? • how much do you think each one is worth per kg? • sketch out the plant layout as seen in the simulation showing the position of the various units and the pipework • using the following symbols for each unit, draw a simple flowsheet to describe the whole process. you will need to pay careful attention to the pipework on the floor to work out the sequence of units student evaluation as part of a larger evaluation exercise, all first year chemical engineering students (55 in total) were asked to use the virile software alongside 2 other software packages. one was a well known 3d spatial awareness test that is normally presented as a paper exercise – this was called cube test and a screenshot is given in figure 6. the other package was a real-time physics engine game that allows the user to alter parameters such as friction and speed to play a target hitting game (figure 7). the reason for comparing these other games in the evaluation exercise is to bring some perspective to the responses and feedback gained from the students. the tasks the students undertake in the virile environment do not all involve chemical engineering theory, knowledge and application. the students also have to be able to spatially understand, model and map the three dimensional equipment. they also have to understand how changes made to a simulation model affect the behaviour of objects in the virtual environment. hence, virile uses spatial skills (like cubetest) and is an interactive package with multiple parameters (like blingball) but also brings in an educational angle where the students are now bringing in knowledge from other disciplines into their interaction with the simulation. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 86 figure 6: cube test. the user has to identify the two most likely matches. figure 7: blingball. the user must hit the puck onto the target using by hitting it with a ball moving at the appropriate speed and direction. cubetest simply presents a challenging spatial awareness game with a limited graphical interface and limited ‘interactivity’. this test is used to assess the overall ability of a subject to use 3d information which some find straightforward whilst others struggle to rotate 3d objects in their heads. blingball allows significantly more interactivity (students can select multiple parameters in order to play the game – e.g. surface friction, ball speed, elasticity, ball size, puck size) with a more developed interface but the package is a game rather than typical educational software. figure 8 shows that there is a spread of results for each package with cubetest as the least straightforward. averages show this to be the case (3.9, 3.2 and 2.9 for blingball, virile and cubetest, respectively where 6 is a perfect ‘easy’ and 1 is a perfect ‘hard’). as expected, the game like blingball was deemed the easiest of the simulations to use. however, it is interesting to note that a specific, focussed, relatively trivial three-dimension spatial assessment task (cubetest) is perceived as being harder than interacting with threedimensional components of a complex chemical plant simulation (virile). one possible explanation for this is that the sophisticated levels of realism in the virile simulation, and application of the software to a real world, familiar problems make the task more engaging than the abstract nature of the cubetest problem. the fact that blingball is a straightforward game shows through in terms of ‘enjoyment’. cubetest shows a gaussian distribution for enjoyment (figure 9) with virile showing a more even spread of data. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 87 figure 8: perceived difficulty of virile, cubetest and blingball activities. figure 9: perceived enjoyment of virile, cubetest and blingball activities. figure 10: perceived graphical realism of virile, cubetest and blingball software. the graphics for each game showed quite interesting results as well (figure 10). virile had the best scores on average (4.6) with blingball in second place (4.1) followed by cubetest (3.4). this is not particularly surprising as the cubetest is the least graphically appealing with no variation in appearance with minimal interaction or virtual content. as described earlier in this paper, the authors and developers spent a large amount of time ensuring that the virile environment reflected a high level of graphical realism. computer graphics technology advances rapidly and students, who regularly watch animated movies and play three-dimensional interactive games, expect to see their tv/movie/game experience duplicated in the software they use. students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 88 expect professional visual representations illustrating complex processes, polished digital media displays demonstrating the location of spatially distributed objects and equipment and dynamic animated graphics showing event chronologies. figure 11: perceived discipline expertise required by virile, cubetest and blingball activities. figure 12: positive/negative response to the virile, cubetest and blingball. figure 11 shows that the users acknowledged that the physics engine blingball game was essentially maths and physics based whereas virile (chemical engineering) and cubetest (spatial awareness, psychology) were essentially outside standard science areas and did not require extensive ore knowledge in these areas to use these software products. the final part of the questionnaire asked the students to feed back on whether software packages should be more prevalent in education as tools to teach principles. the response was fairly evenly spread with all three packages i.e. users appear to be in favour of the development and integration of similar ‘tools’ in education. applying the guidelines the authors have developed a number of virtual reality based applications in the chemical engineering field, including the two described above (schofield et al, 2003, tromp and schofield, 2004 and schofield et al, 2005). experience has shown that the factors influencing the effectiveness of the industrial training software described in this paper are also relevant to chemical engineering educational software packages. although not an exhaustive list, the key factors and guidelines followed can be summarised as follows: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 89 graphical realism • a sophisticated level of realism, containing a high level of detail is necessary since modern trainees have high levels of graphical literacy. o both the absorption column and the polymerisation plant utilised graphical interfaces that were developed to a professional standard by commercial three-dimensional modellers. • combining abstract and realistic representations to enforce a training message can be effective, however, testing must be undertaken to ensure that the users are getting the correct message. o in the virile application a multi-modal display was utilised allowing the user to interact either in a three-dimensional environment or with a more abstract diagrammatic flowchart representing the plant layout. • a multi modal approach (combining high resolution, threedimensional virtual environments with photographs, plans and textual information) can be successful. o both applications allowed the display of information in a variety of formats. in particular the absorption column simulation contained an identification task in which the learner navigates around the virtual absorption column viewing photographs of the real column to increase familiarisation with the spatial layout of the column’s components and the connections between those components. • limiting the three-dimensional modelling necessary will shorten the development time required. o although both of the systems described utilised free-roaming three-dimensional virtual environments, the worlds were limited in scope allowing the software to be rapidly developed. learning / training • the training method is not as important as navigation ability; the user may need to be ‘guided’ through the training scenarios. o both the absorption column and the polymerisation allowed the user to free-roam around the virtual environments – however this functionality was not a crucial to the material being learnt. the user had the option to utilise a number of buttons and hyperlinks which automatically navigated the viewpoint to appropriate locations within the virtual environments. • it is important to ensure that general workplace layouts in all the software packages described would be familiar enough to the users to allow them achieve their work tasks in the real workplace environments. o the absorption column exactly mirrored an item of equipment in a chemical engineering laboratory at the university of nottingham. this was necessary since the aim of this particular piece of software was to familiarise students with the operation of that single item of laboratory equipment. the polymerisation plant, on the other hand, was developed as a generic environment rather than a specific polymerisation unit which could potentially divulge commercially sensitive information. • the ability to allow learners to experience ‘real’ accidents within virtual environments can have an enormous impact since those persons who have ever been involved in an accident tend to remember seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 90 their experience much longer and more vividly than any set of written rules. o both of the virtual chemical engineering simulations described allow the learners to make mistakes and to cause accidents. by visualising the consequences of their actions and mistakes in a safe virtual environment the learners gain a deeper understanding of the potential dangers. • the average person retains far more information presented visually, than information presented orally. o both simulations make extensive use of visual information presented through the medium of three-dimensional virtual environments. a combination of visual and verbal is cited as the most effective (web reference 1) • it is envisaged that improving the training of workers in hazard recognition and correct remedial procedures can reduce the high incidence of workplace accidents and fatalities. o both simulations involve hazard identification and allow the learners to perform risk assessments of the tasks they are performing in the virtual worlds. • interactive software resources inherently encourage their users to be active learners by forcing them to make decisions throughout the simulation. o both the absorption column and the virtual polymerisation plant are inherently interactive, requiring the user to make multiple choices and decisions regarding the operation of each particular item of equipment or plant component. • it is important that trainers do not underestimate the educational value of spending time providing feedback to the learners. o in both simulations there exists the functionality to record every action taken by the learner. this allows a lecturer\trainer to provide extensive feedback to the learner and to even re-create the entire training session. management • there is a move towards internet based software distribution which is the preferred distribution mode for many organisations. o as described above, the absorption column is currently distributed online, utilising vrml to run in a web browser. the virile software runs as a stand alone executable file. however, due to it’s relatively small size, this can easily be web delivered. • with litigation by employees and victim’s families becoming increasingly common, competency evaluations are more important than ever. o the functionality to record every action taken by the learner allows the competency of the learner to be evaluated. • the monetary value of an accident can be considered as the most important factor when trying to motivate an organisation towards a safer working environment. o both the absorption column and the virtual polymerisation plant include full economic models of the processes being simulated. conclusions interactive virtual laboratory environments can deliver highly realistic experiences through the medium of enhanced computer simulations. virtual reality simulations are enhanced through high-speed interactive immersive three-dimensional computer graphics (schofield et al, 2004). graphical, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 91 interactive environments inherently contain many other attributes, these were re-enforced by the feedback collected by the authors during the studies reported in this paper. the attributes include • interactivity and visual appeal should mean that the learning experience is enjoyable. • environments may be augmented using data visualisation to enhance understanding. • aesthetic appeal and graphical quality will lead to high levels of acceptance. students can be provided with more than traditional training and teaching methods can offer. this results in an improvement in terms of retention of knowledge of subject content and an increase the depth of understanding. students also receive an increased sense of ownership of the knowledge. they learn through active rather than passive actions and control the interaction and investigation of the knowledge contained within the world. the authors believe that these virtual reality based learning systems provide ideal environments to facilitate student exploration and student-centred learning. the students must interact not only with the graphical objects, but also with the simulation behind the virtual environment to achieve specific aims and objectives. vr software can be effectively used as a familiarisation tool prior to real experiments e.g. the virtual absorption column exercise. vr exercises can augment the student experience with multiple benefits including safer operation in the lab. these virtual experiments should not be considered as replacements for ‘real’ experiment but a new teaching method that can help students to execute and interpret ‘real’ experimental laboratory projects. however, this implementation is not straightforward, and it should be remembered that virtual reality is mainly used as a supplement to real experiences, or in situations where the real experience is inaccessible. the assessments carried out and the feedback from students using the systems show that these professional software products improves the quality of engineering teaching provision at the university of nottingham creating graduates with broader experience, deeper understanding and an improved ability to actually perform the tasks they will be asked to undertake in their professional careers. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge the work of dr. konstantinos nasios and mr. jeremy noond for the virtual absorption column and dr lorna goodwin, mr. eric gimber, mr. tim gilbert and dr. jack march who worked on the virtual polymerisation plant. the authors would also like to express their thanks to epsrc, the centre for teaching enhancement (university of nottingham) and the e-learning development fund (university of nottingham) who each funded different parts of the work described. the authors would also like to express their thanks to the directors of aims solutions ltd. 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(1988) applied measurement in education. hillsdale, nj: erlbaum. 1 vrml: the virtual reality modelling language, a common protocol for creating and distributing navigable, hyper-linked three-dimensional environments over the internet students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4672 ©2022 (erkko sointu, hanna vuojärvi, aino äjkäs). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar erkko sointu university of eastern finland email: erkko.sointu@uef.fi hanna vuojärvi university of lapland email: hanna.vuojarvi@ulapland.fi aino äikäs university of eastern finland email: aino.aikas@uef.fi abstract research studies are an important part of educational sciences curricula in finland. however, these studies are challenging to conduct, given the various issues associated with teacher-led activities, lack of social presence, engagement, students’ collaborative work and time management, and large-scale writing process management comprising this environment. this study aimed to develop a program of master’s thesis seminar higher education pedagogy that employed a flipped classroom (fc) approach. while the fc approach has been investigated in several contexts of higher education, it has only been minimally explored in the master’s thesis seminar. participating students views and mixed-methods were used. based on the quantitative results, students considered guidance and satisfaction with the fc approach high and difficulty low. moreover, the fc approach was well suited to, and preferred by, the students, while not being overly straining. based on the qualitative and mixed-methods results, the fc approach was seen as functional, goal-oriented, and flexible. team spirit and the supervisor’s presence were https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4672 mailto:erkko.sointu@uef.fi mailto:hanna.vuojarvi@ulapland.fi mailto:aino.aikas@uef.fi students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 considered to be positive aspects. however, negative experiences were also identified, such as time usage and opportunities for peer feedback. the results, discussion, limitations, and implications are presented in terms of research-based development work on an fc approach based master’s thesis seminar in higher education. keywords: flipped classroom, master’s thesis, higher education, pedagogy, online learning introduction research studies are a significant part of the curricula of educational sciences in finnish university-level education and are relevant to the study programs of both educational scientists and pre-service teachers. mandatory and elective research studies, often supported by methodological coursework (e.g., qualitative, quantitative, and mixedmethod designs) and the conducting of investigations, are included in these five-year master-level training programs. the study programs lead, first, to a three-year bachelor of arts degree (education; 180 ects), and then to a two-year master of arts degree (education; 120 ects). students in teacher education graduate to become teachers in various fields at all levels of support in the finnish education system. students who concentrate in the general study programs of the educational sciences do not gain a professional qualification to work as teachers; rather, they are generalists (rouhelo, 2008) who can specialize in various disciplines, such as adult education, media education, or educational leadership. research-based training in educational sciences and teacher education within finland’s higher education (i.e., university-level) programs that are specifically focused on the educational sciences and teacher education, the acquisition of researchbased knowledge is widely promoted (säntti et al., 2018; uljens, 2001), and to this end, studies aim to provide students with skills in conducting research in practice (see, e.g., finnish national agency for education & ministry of culture and education, 2021; uef, 2021; ula, 2021). such exposure improves the ability of students to solve and redefine educational and pedagogical challenges they may encounter in their future working life and to develop schools and other organizations as parts of society (toom et al., 2010; rouhelo, 2008). according to metsäpelto et al. (2020), finnish teachers are considered active partners in school development and collective decision making, and by acquiring research-based knowledge through their educational curricula, they are prepared to embrace this role in the future. students who graduate from a generalist education program possess the necessary competencies to, for example, apply theoretical educational knowledge to practice, manage projects, plan and conduct teaching and training, and operate in professional networks (rouhelo, 2008; tuominen, 2013). students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 research and methodological studies are implemented in practice when students write first their bachelor’s (6–10 ects) and later master’s theses (30 ects) (uef, 2021; ula, 2021). the bachelor’s thesis process introduces students to research and methodology themes, and the master’s thesis obliges students to demonstrate their familiarity with their discipline and their capacity for independent academic thought and work. the writing of the master’s thesis is supported by a mandatory seminar course (5–10 ects) that lasts approximately one academic year. this course typically consists of interactive face-to-face or online meetings and independent assignments and tasks that provide support to students in completing their theses. such activities can include reviewing relevant literature, engaging in written individual tasks, making a research plan for the thesis, and presenting and peer reviewing their theses during the seminars. in the seminars, students learn from one another and their various topics, share knowledge of different methods and viewpoints, and gain knowledge of the research process as a whole. the main objectives are to design the plan of the thesis process required by the research aims, prepare and present the thesis research plan at the seminar, and produce the main results. additional intended outcomes of the seminar course are to equip the student with scientific knowledge in the field of education and to discuss and choose appropriate theoretical and methodological frameworks related to the research enterprise. challenge of teaching a master’s thesis seminar the present study aimed to develop teaching methods grounded in research for the master’s thesis seminar. the seminar course that supports individual students in writing their master’s thesis is implemented in various ways in finland and in other nordic countries. few studies have reported on the development of master’s thesis courses. therefore, the current study may inspire ideas about how to develop one’s teaching methods in relation to the masters’ thesis seminar and give students a voice in the research-based development of higher education pedagogies. the motive for researchbased pedagogical development stemmed from teachers’ personal experiences of teaching master’s seminars and supervising students’ theses. prior to the pedagogical development described here, master’s seminars were organized as a series of either face-to-face or online seminar meetings. at each meeting, one or two students presented their thesis manuscripts, and these presentations were followed by discussions with the supervisor and other students enrolled in the seminar. however, this pedagogical format mainly engages the thesis authors and their discussants, making the role of other students in the seminar unclear (svinhufvud, 2015). as one seminar meeting typically included a presentation of one or two manuscripts, the teachers did not seem to have a clear vision of how the group as a whole was proceeding with their theses. this approach meant that general themes such as methodology, concepts, and theories had to be taught repeatedly over the academic year. in addition, students may have difficulties getting started in the writing process and in structuring a large research assignment (ward & dixon, 2014). they also struggled with students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 time management issues such as balancing their studies with family or work commitments. similar experiences have also been identified in other studies focusing on students’ perspectives with respect to the master’s thesis process (drennan & clarke, 2009; macfadyen et al., 2019; mccallin & nayar, 2012). flipped classroom to improve the functionality of the master’s thesis seminar and tackle the challenges described above, the flipped classroom (fc) was chosen as a pedagogical approach. the fc approach has two key features. the first is the sequencing of pre-class and in-class instruction and activities (e.g., bergmann & sams, 2012), which prepares students for faceto-face meetings with pre-materials (talbert, 2017). thus, according to abeysekera and dawson (2015), in-depth cognitive activity is facilitated in face-to-face meetings. the second key feature is the central role of technology in developing and applying the fc approach (aguilar et al., 2020; becker & birdi, 2018). technology and electronic materials (e.g., online videos) can be used to facilitate sequencing, thereby enabling more location and time-flexible learning and support for students’ learning process (alexander et al., 2019). however, some scholars have pointed out the current use of technology in the fc approach may not leverage the full potential of digital tools (e.g., becker & birdi, 2018). although there is no single model for implementing the fc approach (o’flaherty et al., 2015), some core features have been suggested that can make this endeavor successful: clearly structured learning materials (hung, 2015), consistency in sequencing (prober & khan, 2013), feedback and (formative) assessment (tusa et al., 2018; yeung & o’malley, 2014), timely support from teachers (kim et al., 2014), and guidance concerning the fc approach (sointu et al., 2022; gannod et al., 2008). previous studies have indicated that the fc approach encompasses both challenging and encouraging aspects in its pedagogical support of learning. in terms of challenges, students must possess time management skills and take responsibility for their own learning (boevé et al., 2017), which requires self-regulation (lai & hwang, 2016). for students with less developed self-regulation skills, the result may be increased task avoidance (hyppönen et al., 2019). study dropout may be more likely if students are unable to adapt to the new teaching approach (chen et al., 2014). moreover, unclear structure and guidance can easily lead to frustration for students (gannod et al., 2008). however, positive ascpets also exists. the fc approach has been found to enhance positive learning experiences (sointu et al., 2022; awidi & paynter, 2019; strelan et al., 2020), improve content learning (tusa et al., 2018; davies et al., 2013), and support a deeper level of learning in fc settings where the teacher is available to provide learning support (gilboy et al., 2015). students have been found to be more open to collaborative learning activities in fc (strayer, 2012), which is perceived as a positive factor of student learning (love et al., 2014; mcnally et al., 2017). kim and colleagues (2014) found that fc can facilitate a safe and open learning students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 atmosphere. fc also seems to improve teachers’ content, pedagogical, and technological usage qualities from the student’s perspective (sointu et al., 2019b). research studies are an important part of finnish university-level studies in the educational sciences. however, there has been less research on master-level thesis supervision and teaching a master’s thesis seminar than on doctoral-level thesis supervision (cornelius & nicol, 2015; drennan & clarke, 2009; marnewick et al., 2020). some studies have suggested models for the supervision of master’s thesis work (e.g., dysthe et al., 2006; macfadyen et al., 2019; marnewick, 2020), but studies that include the use of the fc approach in teaching a master’s seminar or applying it in fully online learning settings are, to our knowledge, scarce. therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the functionality of the fc approach in the master’s thesis seminar based on participating students’ views. methods research context the master’s thesis seminars, on which the pedagogical development and this study are focused, were conducted as a collaboration of three master’s thesis supervisors in two finnish universities during the 2019–2020 academic year. two of the supervisors (authors 1 and 3 of this article) worked as a pair using a co-teaching approach in one university and supervised seminar a, which had an enrollment of 30 master’s students. this seminar was conducted face-to-face until the restrictions caused by the covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020 obliged that it become an online group. the third supervisor (author 2) was responsible for seminar b in the other university. this seminar was arranged online and included 13 master’s students. both seminars a and b were conducted pedagogically using similar applications of the fc approach. the seminar groups met regularly during the academic year, and each meeting focused on a specific theme, such as concepts and theories, methodology, research ethics, or the writing of the results section. following the fc approach, each seminar meeting consisted of three phases: (1) pre-seminar, (2) seminar meeting, and (3) post-seminar (table 1). students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 table 1 application of the fc approach in the master’s thesis seminar pre-seminar phase seminar meetings post-seminar phase • introductory materials (videos, literature, online resources, etc.) • pre-assignments • asking and responding to questions • presenting (e.g., videos) • discussing (e.g., roundtables) • carrying out tasks • assignments • progressing with own thesis (writing, collecting and analyzing data, etc.) for the pre-seminar phase, teachers assigned students preliminary tasks that introduced them to the theme of the seminar meeting, for example, reading articles or other material and watching introductory video lectures that had been prepared by the teachers. in the seminar meeting, students’ knowledge of the theme was deepened through discussions. teachers responded to questions students had formulated during the pre-seminar phase, and students conducted group assignments or presented their theses. in the post-seminar phase, students wrote their theses according to the seminar’s theme or wrote other assignments. the role of digital technologies in facilitating learning was central as a key feature of the fc approach (bergmann & sams, 2012; becker & birdi, 2018). the seminar meetings were held on ms teams software, which allowed for various working methods during seminars, and the moodle learning management system was used as a course platform for delivering learning materials produced using several types of digital technologies and for returning assignments. altogether, there were 43 students enrolled in seminars a and b. the targeted time for completing a master’s thesis is one academic year. the completion of master’s theses in the two master’s seminars involved in this study is presented in table 2. twenty-eight students completed their master’s thesis in the targeted time, i.e., during the 2019–2020 academic year: four students completed them by december 2020 and six by spring 2021. three students had not yet completed their theses at the time of writing of this article, and two students postponed their seminars or masters’ theses for personal reasons. students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 table 2 completion of master’s theses thesis completed number of theses cumulative % by sept. 2020 28 65.1 % by dec. 2020 4 74.4 % by sept. 2021 6 88.4 % not yet completed 3 95.3 % postponed their master’s thesis or seminar for personal reasons 2 100 % note: the seminar course began in fall 2019. the expected timeline for completing the master’s thesis is the next fall from the start of the seminar (i.e., fall 2020). data collection data were collected via an anonymous electronic survey in late may 2020. overall, 29 students (67%) of the total of 43 course participants responded to the survey. student participation in the survey was voluntary (i.e., a convenience sample), informed consent was requested, and no identification data were collected. the survey included a questionnaire, individual statements, and open-ended questions. the citations among the results from the individual statements and open-ended answers in the questionnaire were translated into english by the second and third authors. the citations in the results were chosen to represent the most meaningful or detailed themes discussed. measures and data analysis a mixed-methods approach was used in this study to capture the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative methods (creswell & plano clark, 2018). we used (1) the short functionality of flipped classroom questionnaire (ffcq; sointu et al., 2022; hyypiä, 2019) to obtain quantitative data, (2) individual statements, (3) open-ended questions, and (4) a mixed-methods analysis to obtain a more holistic understanding of the fc approach to master’s seminar classes from the students’ perspective. quantitative data were collected using the ffcq, which includes three subscales: (1) satisfaction with fc (sfc; four items, e.g., “used teaching approach supported my learning well”), (2) level of difficulty (diff; three items, e.g., “the contents of the pre-materials were challenging”), and (3) guidance received during the fc study approach (guid; six items, e.g., “students were guided well by the teaching approach used”). students responded to the ffcq using a six-point likert-type scale (1 = i totally disagree, 2 = i mostly disagree, 3 = i slightly disagree, 4 = i slightly agree, 5 = i mostly agree, 6 = i totally agree). previous studies have indicated the adequate reliability (α = 0.78–0.96; hyypiä et students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 al. 2019, sointu et al., 2019a) and initial validity (sointu et al., 2022; hyypiä, 2019) of ffcq. with the ffcq data, we first investigated the internal consistency with cronbach’s alpha (α). nunnally’s (1987) criterion of α > 0.7 was used in this study for acceptable reliability. if α was acceptable, a mean sum variable of each ffcq subscale was calculated to maintain the original response categories for interpretation. these sum variables were investigated using descriptive statistics (mean [m], median [mdn], and standard deviation [sd]) (e.g., field, 2018) to describe the functionality of the fc approach in the master’s thesis seminar. quantitative data were analyzed via spss v27. individual statements consisted of statements regarding how students viewed the fc approach: whether it suited them, whether they would prefer to study in a more traditional manner (e.g., sointu et al., 2019b), and how motivating, meaningful, relevant, or challenging fc was for them (sointu et al., 2020). moreover, elements of usability (i.e., pre-materials, contact teaching, preparedness, use of time, support, interest, and quality) were investigated. the individual statements are presented with percentages in the results. in the open-ended questions, students reflected on their experience of studying in the master’s thesis seminar organized according to the fc approach; they described what they liked the most and the least in the seminar and provided general feedback and suggestions for developing the master’s seminar further. an inductive thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the textual data gathered through these open-ended questions (terry et al., 2017); nvivo pro software v12 was used to assist in the analysis process. first, the students’ texts were read through, with the aim of developing an overall understanding of and familiarity with the data. second, the data were coded using initial codes that were generated during the process to mark meaningful text passages in which students described their perceptions and experiences. during the third phase of the analysis, all data extracts with the same code were combined into potential themes, the combined data were re-read and re-organized as necessary, and the final themes were produced. this three-phased analysis process was cyclic in nature, and the work proceeded by going back and forth in phases and clarifying the themes (terry et al., 2017). in the mixed-methods phase, we further analyzed the qualitative results based on the quantitative ffcq difficulty subscale. the ffcq difficulty scale was categorized into three subcategories (1 = not difficult, 2 = in between, 3 = difficult). based on the categorization, the open-ended questions were subjected to a qualitative content analysis (e.g., newby, 2014; schreier, 2013). first, the data were examined to obtain an overall picture. second, the data were coded with colors based on the abovementioned categorization and organized according to the following questions: what did you like the most in the course? what were you the least satisfied with in the course? and how did you experience the overall flipped approach in the course? then, the statements in the subcategories were examined, and the content was analyzed to obtain an understanding of the differences or similarities in the students’ experiences in relation to the difficulty subscale. students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 results results of the quantitative analysis the internal consistency for the ffcq subscales of satisfaction with the flipped classroom (fc) (sfc α = 0.81), level of difficulty (diff α = 0.77), and guidance received during the fc study approach (guid α = 0.88) met the criteria set by nunnally (1978), indicating adequate reliability of the subscales. therefore, we were able to compute mean sum variables for further descriptive statistics. the data indicated that the sfc (m = 4.60, sd = 0.82) and guid (m = 4.88, sd = 0.81) were rather high, considering the original metric of the ffcq. more precisely, the means fell into the “slightly” and “mostly” agreement response categories, indicating that the students were satisfied with the use of fc in their master’s seminar as well as the level of guidance provided. moreover, the mdn approached 5 (i.e., mostly agree) in both of the subscales. on the other hand, the level of diff was lower (m = 2.08, mdn = 2.00, sd = 0.82), indicating that students mostly disagreed that the flipped master’s seminar was difficult. the data included individual statements is presented in the figure 1. based on these statements, (1) 55.2% considered the fc approach to suit them very well, while 44.8% considered that it suited them well (no negative responses); (2) only one student out of 29 (3.4%) would have preferred to study in a traditional master’s seminar. students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 figure 1 individual statements from the fc master’s seminar data+ (3) the majority of the students were motivated to study in their master’s seminar: 34.5% were somewhat motivated, 37.9% were well motivated, and 27.6% were highly motivated; (4) 13.8% of the students considered the master’s seminar to be straining, 75.9% considered it to be reasonably straining, and 10.3% considered that it was not straining enough; (5) from a learning perspective, 27.6% considered that they learned as much as in a traditional course, 55.2% that they learned more than in a traditional course, and 17.2% responded “i do not know”; and (6) from the future career perspective, the master’s thesis seminar was not at all relevant for 3.4% of the students or not very relevant for 10.3%, while 48.3% considered it to be somewhat relevant, 24.1% relevant, and 13.8% highly relevant to their future careers. students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 results of the qualitative thematic analysis this section presents the results of the thematic analysis of the textual data gathered through the open-ended questions. some data extracts are also presented to provide examples of coding. students responded to the survey anonymously and are referred to with pseudonyms. on a general level, students perceived the fc as a functional, goaloriented, and flexible pedagogical approach. according to their experiences, learning through the flipped approach in the master’s seminar was efficient and motivating; it helped them to anticipate and plan their master’s thesis process and enabled goal-oriented and individual progression. seminar meetings were characterized as dialogical and stressfree in nature. for some students, the flipped approach was a new working method requiring to consider their learning. i was remarkably more active. when i wasn´t only in a listeners’ role, i focused more (student 28) students were asked what they liked most and least in their master’s seminar. the three themes of the most-liked features, according to students’ responses, were (1) dialogicality, (2) student-centeredness and good team spirit, and (3) the logical and versatile nature of the fc approach. the master’s seminar provided students with an arena for discussions, questions, and peer feedback. the groups seemed to develop a good team spirit that was facilitated by the supervisors’ strong presence, as reflected in this student’s response: i’ll mention here the greatest one, which was extremely significant for me, and that is the teachers’ presence. they truly listened and truly understood. and before anything else cared! i felt that i had support no matter what kind of help i needed. if there was something i didn’t understand, all i had to do was ask. i didn’t feel at any point that i would have to do this alone, but there was always someone with me, particularly providing that mental support. (student 5) the assignments students conducted during the seminar were perceived as versatile, and students felt they gained a wide understanding of the kind of research that is conducted in their field of study and also of the different kinds of methodological approaches, as this extract from the data exemplifies: i gained a general picture of what is studied in the field of special education at the moment. (student 23) as a general note, there were fewer comments on the least-liked features of the master’s thesis seminars than on the most-liked features, reflecting students’ generally positive experiences. nevertheless, it was possible to identify three themes among the least-liked features in the data: (1) the small amount of peer feedback, (2) challenges in terms of time use and contents of the seminar meetings, and (3) differences in the progression of one’s own thesis and the seminar’s themes. the students seemed to perceive feedback from their students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 peers to be beneficial to their learning and would have liked to receive more of it along the way, as this student expressed: there were far too few opportunities for direct peer feedback during the research process. (student 6) students sometimes felt the seminar meetings repeated content they had already learned during the pre-seminar phase by becoming acquainted with the provided materials and other resources. in addition, they perceived the time management of the meetings to be confusing at times, as shown by this student’s experience: the only minor minus was that i think that in some seminar meetings we used too much time, for example, to go through things we had already been informed about or some other pointless items. seminar meetings need a strict framing so that only the agreed-upon contents are handled within the agreed-upon time limit. (student 18) the third theme included students’ experiences of progressing with their thesis at a different pace than the themes of the master’s thesis seminars. for some, it appeared as if the seminars were progressing faster or slower than they would have hoped, as in this student’s case: i didn’t get as much out of the meetings as i would have hoped for. for example, in one meeting, the theme was interviewing, and as my thesis was not quite there yet, i wasn’t able to participate. (student 8) in their responses, students provided general feedback and suggestions on to develop the master’s thesis seminar based on the fc approach in the future. a few notes in the feedback expressed students’ appreciation of the pedagogical development teachers had been engaged in: i think it is great that you’ve had the courage to start conducting the master’s seminar a bit differently. i hope you continue developing new kinds of working methods. (student 12) two themes for further development were identified in the data: (1) improving the structure and time management of the master’s seminar, and (2) developing the learning materials and assignments. students suggested using time more efficiently during the seminar meetings and clarifying the overall structure of the master’s thesis seminar as a course so that it would better suit their goal of completing their thesis in time, as shown by this student’s response: presentation times and time allocation in seminar meetings in general should be much stricter. the meetings went into overtime too often. (student 1) students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 the second theme included suggestions for developing the materials and assignments used in the master’s thesis seminar. students suggested more and smaller assignments to make it easier to structure the large writing task into smaller steps. they also suggest that written handouts could be used along with the introductory video lectures. pre-materials and videos could be accompanied by practical tasks, for example, by dividing the composition of the research plan into smaller phases through flipped assignments. (student 12) results of the mixed-methods analysis the results of the mixed-methods data are presented in three parts. overall, experiences of the approach used in the masters’ seminars were highly positive in all categories. some differences were found in relation to peer support or peer feedback, student-centered approach, versatile teaching methods, materials, assignments, and tasks when examining the subcategories (1 = not difficult, 2 = in between, 3 = difficult). students who experienced the course as not difficult (n=13) liked the peer support, peer reviewing, and support from other students the most. one student described the importance of peer support as follows: in contact teaching comfortably received support from other students for doing their own and working on their own thesis. perhaps it was that support and encouragement provided by others that were the best feature of this course. (student 20) the theme of the student-centered approach in the seminars was perceived positively, as were the versatile methods used in teaching. the students who experienced the course difficulty as in between (n =10) liked the assignments and tasks the most. they also reported the student-centered approach to be a positive theme in the course. peer support and peer reviewing were also experienced positively among these students, as were the versatile methods in teaching. the theme of versatile teaching methods occurred only in the statements of those who found the course not difficult or in between. those students who reported the course to be difficult (n = 6) similarly liked peer support, peer reviewing tasks, peer feedback, and overall support from other students the most. the studentcentered approach was also a theme that featured prominently in the statements of students who found the course difficult. students who experienced the course as not difficult (n =13) were least satisfied with the time allocation; they reported that the time was not optimal throughout the course schedule, or they felt more time was needed for the whole course. in addition, they believed that the assignments and tasks should have included more supportive materials and templates to assist in the actual writing of the thesis. the students who felt the course difficulty was in between (n =10) were the least satisfied with the time for peer support, students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 and they felt that more peer-reviewing tasks should have been included in the course. the students who found the course difficult (n = 6) were also concerned that there was not enough time for peer support and more peer-reviewing tasks, and they also felt that assignments and tasks should have included more supportive materials and templates for writing the thesis. students who experienced the course as not difficult (n =13) evaluated the flipped approach as being very efficient, useful, functional, easier, and more supportive when compared to the traditional methods approach used in other courses. one student expressed the usefulness of the approach as follows: i found studying to be useful and developing. i particularly liked that the use of advance materials increased my own responsibility and, by extension, my interest. (student 24) those students who felt that the difficulty was in between (n = 10) experienced the approach as supporting their own activity during the seminars and helping their well-being when they were already familiar with the topics they were to learn in the contact meetings. students who experienced the course as difficult (n = 6) had ideas about how to develop the materials, assignments, and tasks to support students’ learning to an even greater degree, as mentioned above in the qualitative thematic analysis results section. discussion the purpose of this study was to investigate the functionality of the fc approach in the master’s thesis seminar based on participating students’ views. based on the research purpose and mixed-methods approaches, the overarching aim of this study was to present research-based pedagogical development work on the master’s thesis seminar. the challenges associated with previous seminars were teacher-led activities, the lack of a social presence, the engagement and collaborative work of students, time management, and the writing process management of a substantial work of scholarship (i.e., master’s theses). we chose the fc approach to confront these challenges. the results of this study support previous findings that the fc approach can enhance students’ positive learning experiences and that guidance for the fc approach is an important factor of student satisfaction (sointu et al., 2022; awidi & paynter, 2019; manson et al., 2013; strelan et al., 2020). this was shown by the group-level results of the quantitative data, indicating higher levels of guidance and satisfaction and a lower level of difficulty. the individual statements also reflected the results at the group level, as did the qualitative data results in general. this may be due to timeand location-flexible learning (e.g., alexander et al., 2019), face-to-face meetings that facilitate in-depth cognitive activity (abeysekera & dawson, 2015), and well-guided pedagogy at the beginning of the seminar (sointu et al., 2022; manson et al., 2013). students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 based on the mixed-methods results, peer support, peer feedback, and peer reviewing were the themes that all students experienced as meaningful, regardless of their experiences of the course being difficult, in between, or not difficult. this is a clear message to higher education teachers that regardless of the teaching method or approach, students crave peer support, and it should be enhanced. the mixed-methods results also revealed that the greater the difficulty reported by students with fc in the master’s thesis seminar, the more they considered the need for peer support, peer-reviewing tasks with supportive materials, and templates for writing their theses. although the fc approach is thought to support students’ collaborative learning activities (strayer, 2012), there seems to be a clear need to facilitate more peer-supporting activities. peer support seems to be vital, especially for master’s students; therefore it is suggested that assignments and the practical organization of master’s seminar meetings be developed to promote the full potential of peer support for students’ work. in line with the core idea of the fc approach, its application in this study also fostered student-centeredness in the pedagogical organization of the master’s thesis seminars. the dialogical nature and openness of the seminar meetings promoted a friendly atmosphere and good team spirit, which have been identified as important in the process of conducting a master’s thesis (de kleijin et al., 2014). the teachers’ role and strong presence seemed to be highly important (gilboy et al., 2015), and the fc approach can enable this within the context of the master’s thesis seminar pedagogy. moreover, previous studies have indicated that a safe learning atmosphere is important for learning and collaborative learning (e.g., eteläpelto & lahti, 2008), and this can be facilitated by the fc approach (kim et al., 2014). in this sense, the learning of highly challenging content (i.e., writing one’s own master’s thesis) can be well supported in an fc context (see also gilboy et al., 2015). for some students, the fc approach may be novel; therefore, it would be helpful to allocate time for learning this new approach at the beginning of the seminar, particularly among students with lower self-regulation and time management skills (e.g., boevé et al., 2017; hyppönen et al., 2019; lai & hwang, 2016). an effort should be made to give students a clear understanding of the whole master’s thesis process at the beginning, as it will help them to plan their work more efficiently. sequencing of teaching using the fc approach can offer a solid platform for adhering to the timeline of master’s thesis studies and graduation, as the rate of master’s thesis completion (65.1%) in this sample shows. another important aspect of successful fc implementation is the clear structure of learning materials (hung, 2015) and consistency in sequencing (prober & khan, 2013). although the results showed positive aspects of the fc approach in the master’s thesis seminar, the qualitative and mixed-methods results also indicated challenges. the dual use of materials (i.e., using them in both the pre-seminar phase and seminar meeting activities) may confuse students and reduce engagement in the use of the materials, students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 especially pre-seminar materials. therefore, materials should be clear and, more importantly, clearly offered so that the students may follow bertter the sequencing. moreover, the data demonstrated that, for some students, the seminars did not match the pace of their thesis writing. in a yearly cohort-founded teaching schedule, this can be a challenge, as the teacher(s) of the seminar need to follow the curriculum and the pace of the majority of the students. however, the use of learning management systems with an fc approach might offer the possibility of customizing learning to enable students to conduct their masters’ seminars at their own pace. obviously, this creates a challenge for peer support and collaborative work; however, it could be an important future line of researchbased development work. therefore, more research is warranted. there was no difference in terms of students’ perceptions and experiences based on whether they attended the face-to-face or online courses. seminar a started as a face-toface course; however, rapid pedagogical changes had to be made in march 2020, due to restrictions caused by the covid-19 pandemic. such sudden changes in pedagogical arrangements during the pandemic have been defined in recent literature as emergency online teaching (eot) (hodges et al., 2020). as seminar b was organized as an online course from the beginning, the restrictions did not affect it, and because seminar a already had a strong foundation in the fc approach, the transition to eot was rather simple. therefore, the fc approach can offer a relieving venue for teacher(s) to adapt their teaching in sudden circumstances, such as those presented by covid-19. in particular, as social presence is often a challenge in online groups (e.g., donnelly, 2013), the already constructed pre-seminar phase materials can assist the teacher(s) in adapting and using time to build up the social presence for online learning. this study contributes to the current global discussion on developing higher education in the post-pandemic era. devlin and samarawickrema (2022) stated that in addition to effects of the global pandemic, the context of he has changed and become more complex due to increased student diversity, digital transformation, and evolving assessment philosophy and practice, among other issues. as the future seems just as unpredictable and complex, the focus should be on developing flexible and adaptive pedagogies that facilitate he students’ meaningful learning in a rapidly changing world. the overall experience of the functionality of the fc approach-based master’s thesis seminars were positive and encourage further development in this sense. although some challenges were confronted during the master’s thesis seminar and were reflected in the results, the main result was that the fc approach can be considered a suitable and meaningful approach for teaching research methods in master’s thesis seminars. the challenges associated with organizing a master’s seminar based on traditional methods (e.g., svinhuvud, 2015) can be addressed by creating an open atmosphere and a dialogic environment (e.g., de kleijin et al., 2014), which fc facilitates. more precisely, the fc approach seems to facilitate student-centeredness, social presence, active engagement, and collaborative work. it also supports time-management and the students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 large-scale writing process. research-based knowledge is widely promoted in the educational sciences and teacher education. research studies are a significant part of these studies, and the master’s thesis is a large part of the five-year master’s training in finnish university-level education. therefore, the fc approach can be implemented for the benefit of research studies. this study had some limitations. first, although the data were drawn from two finnish universities, they comprised a rather small convenience sample. future research would benefit from more representative data. additionally, the convenience sample may be biased owing to the voluntary nature of the participation. however, we used an existing questionnaire for the quantitative data, accompanied by individual statements and openended questions for qualitative and mixed-methods analysis to increase the trustworthiness of the results (including researcher and data triangulation). additionally, a rather large proportion (i.e., 67%) of possible respondents participated in the study. second, no attempt was made to control the learning or the differences between more traditional seminar teaching and fc seminar teaching. in the future, a larger replication with possible (quasi-)experimental designs should be considered. third, the seminars (i.e., seminar a and b in different universities) had different approaches for the flipped classroom (fc) in the beginning. seminar a used a face-to-face approach in contact meetings, while seminar b used online teaching. however, this changed due to covid-19, and both were in online teaching mode for the last three months of the seminar (including when the data were collected in late may 2020). additionally, the similarity of the approaches in seminar a and seminar b were well discussed and planned together from the beginning. nevertheless, future research would benefit from the individual implementation of the fc approach (i.e., face-to face or fully online), and outside of eot situations. finally, this research considered only master’s level theses. for implementing fc in bachelor’s theses or doctoral dissertation studies, we strongly recommend conducting research for these settings. conclusions our research-based, higher education development work has clear implications for higher education teachers, researchers, and developers. the background and research context information are shared in detail to facilitate the development of one’s own seminars based on the fc approach. this paper explains the foundations and key elements worth considering in this context. the research results, accompanied by our own thoughts and the limitations of the project, should provide assistance to those considering the possible benefits and challenges of the fc approach in master’s seminar teaching. this research approach could be used for other research purposes in higher education. overall, by providing one possible approach to development, this study can be used to consider how the learning of higher education students can be comprehensively supported. we would students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 18 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 like to emphasize the collaborative nature of research-based development work (which we engaged in here) and to encourage others to do this type of work collaboratively among colleagues. moreover, the importance of student voices in research development work should not be neglected; therefore, we encourage readers to plan and report their students’ research for the benefit of our higher education, research-based community. acknowledgements we wish to thank all of our seminar students for participating in our teaching and study as well as our colleagues for supporting our work. references abeysekera, l., & dawson, p. 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(2001). on general education as a discipline. studies in philosophy and education, 20, 291–301. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1011830623420 valtonen, t., hoang, n., sointu, e., näykki, p., mäkitalo, k., kukkonen, j., virtanen, a., järvelä, s., & häkkinen, p. (2021). how pre-service teachers perceive their 21stcentury skills and dispositions: a longitudinal perspective. computers in human behavior, 116, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106643 ward, g., & dixon, h. (2014). the research masters experience: the impact of efficacy and outcome expectations on enrolment and completion. journal of further and higher education, 38(2), 163–181. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2012.706804 yeung, k., & o’malley, p. (2014). making ‘the flip’ work: barriers to and implementation strategies for introducing flipped teaching methods into traditional higher education courses. new directions in the teaching of physical sciences, 10(1), 59–63. https://doi.org/10.29311/ndtps.v0i10.518 https://kamu.uef.fi/tietopankki/opinto-oppaat/filosofisen-tiedekunnan-opinto-opas-2021-2022/ https://kamu.uef.fi/tietopankki/opinto-oppaat/filosofisen-tiedekunnan-opinto-opas-2021-2022/ https://www.ulapland.fi/loader.aspx?id=4d865d69-43b4-44a3-a66d-b5ac3486d232 https://www.ulapland.fi/loader.aspx?id=4d865d69-43b4-44a3-a66d-b5ac3486d232 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1011830623420 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106643 https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877x.2012.706804 https://doi.org/10.29311/ndtps.v0i10.518 students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar abstract introduction research-based training in educational sciences and teacher education challenge of teaching a master’s thesis seminar flipped classroom methods research context data collection measures and data analysis results results of the quantitative analysis results of the qualitative thematic analysis results of the mixed-methods analysis discussion conclusions acknowledgements references critical data studies and data science in higher education: an interdisciplinary and explorative approach towards a critical data literacy issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4397 ©2021 (dan verständig). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. critical data studies and data science in higher education: an interdisciplinary and explorative approach towards a critical data literacy dan verständig otto von guericke university magdeburg email: dan.verstaendig@ovgu.de abstract this paper discusses an explorative approach on strengthening critical data literacy using data science methods and a theoretical framing intersecting educational science and media theory. the goal is to path a way from data-driven to data-discursive perspectives on data and datafication in higher education. therefore, the paper focuses on a case study: a higher education course project in 2019 and 2020 on education and data science, based on problem-based learning. the paper closes with a discussion of challenges in strengthening data literacy in higher education, offering insights into data practices and the pitfalls of working with and reflecting on digital data. keywords: critical data literacy, data science, media education https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4397 critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 introduction algorithms, big data and artificial intelligence (ai) are the remarkable developments of recent years and have not only found their way into society as conceptual terms, they shape everyday actions to different degrees, and this has long since gone beyond basic recommendation systems for better online shopping experiences (kitchin, 2021). spam filters screen out unwelcome mails from our inboxes, voice assistance systems set appointments and remind us of open tasks, automated predictions in road traffic keep us free from traffic jam and facial recognition software in public video surveillance systems records patterns, identifies people, and highlights unusual or suspicious behavior (lyon 2018). all of the mentioned examples have in common that they rely on the basic principle of computation and pattern recognition. however, the idea of processing even big data sets is not new; also, the concept of ai is not an innovation of recent years. there is a remarkable historicizing on the efforts of ai (buchanan, 2005). however, recent developments like the increase of computing power combined with networked technologies have unleashed a new quality of gathering, processing and working with big data. additionally, new data practices have emerged and they are touching political, social and economic areas and shaping what is called ‘the digital age’. there is a strong technological trend of turning almost every aspect of our daily life into data, be it social media activities, customer relation management, banking and health insurance or even smart cities. the digital age is characterized by datafication, as cukier and mayer-schönberger (2013) framed it and as it has been further elaborated and discussed in the light of “data literacy” by pangrazio and sefton-green (2020). in theory, processes of automation should make our lives easier and improve the individual quality of life as well as society in general. in practice, the processes of automation and computation not only increase complexity instead of reducing it, they also reproduce social inequalities and, thereby, punish the poor (eubanks, 2017). why does all of this matter for education? on the one hand, it matters because digital technologies are changing the ways in which we see the world, think and learn. therefore, knowledge about data, data practices and how data-driven models influence learning, our life in specific contexts and on a daily basis is an essential requirement in order to understand the digital world we live in. a confident, critical and responsible use of digital technologies is not only key to learning and working, but more generally for participation in society. on the other hand, educational practice and research are challenged not only to incorporate digital technologies into curricular agendas in order to enhance learning and to address lifeworld problems. educational research is called upon critical reflection on educational technology (ed-tech) (selwyn 2014) and digital capitalist ideologies such as technological solutionism (morozov, 2013). while discussions on the use of ed-tech are not critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 new, the covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing that followed have affected education in many ways. in order to keep education running, educational institutions had to quickly adapt to the situation and, therefore, a strong push towards the pragmatic use of ed-tech occured in school and higher education. the situation has become a new market opportunity for commercial services and digital learning platforms (cf. teräs et al., 2020). as teräs et al. (2020) point out, choices made under these specific circumstances can potentially echo in the future as “new relations of power and control, new forms of student inequity and inequality, and other unpredictable effects” (ibid., p. 865). while these shortterm actions and decisions taken by educational institutions might have long-term consequences (selwyn, 2020), the pandemic highlights the problems that are being discussed for quite a while now (cf. selwyn, 2019). these problems are related to the basic concept of education, the reduction of learning as an effective, computable process and the image of a learning person, shaped by arguments of enhancing learning through technological progress and “cruel optimism in ed-tech” (macgilchrist, 2019). while the rhetoric on the use of digital tools are often human-centered, the methods utilized are not. according to these outlined problems, the following question remains: how can education and media education contribute to ongoing debates about critical data studies (cds)? as pangrazio and sefton-green (2020) suggest, data literacy might be the most appropriate educational response to the outlined problems and arising complexity in the digital age (ibid, p. 10). still, the question remains how to foster data literacy and critical thinking? this paper discusses an explorative approach on strengthening critical data literacy using data science methods and a theoretical framing intersecting educational science and media theory to focus on the sociotechnical ‘‘data assemblages’’ that make up big data (kitchin and lauriault, 2014). following the inspirational book by richterich (2018) on data ethics and critical data studies, the goal is to path a way from data-driven to data-discursive perspectives of data and datafication in higher education. the overall aim of this article is to reflect on the challenges of teaching data literacy in higher education. therefore, the paper focuses on a case study, a higher education course project in 2019 and 2020 on education and data science, based on research-based learning. it closes with a discussion on the challenges on strengthening data literacy in higher education, offering insights into explorative data practices and the pitfalls of working with and reflecting on digital data. theoretical framing: data, power and algorithms the perspective established in this contribution is based on some pre-assumptions and theoretical considerations that are necessary in order to critically assess digital data and set a specific perspective on the implications of datafication. the following points with respect to the practice-based framework improving cds and data science established by critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 neff et al. (2017) are shaping the approach: 1) data are a form of power; 2) with big data context matters even more; 3) data and code are fundamentally linked. these three aspects will be briefly unfolded before focusing on the actual project and findings. data and power iliadis and russo (2016) open up their introductory article on cds with the statement that data are a form of power, since organizations “own vast quantities of user information and hold lucrative data capital” (ibid., p. 1). the power that private companies invoke with their user-centric business models can be framed as an economically driven act of mass data aggregation and user surveillance, which zuboff (2019) defines as surveillance capitalism. in her theoretical concept towards the end of utopian rhetoric of the deliberating internet, she describes how global tech companies such as google and facebook persuaded the users to give up their privacy for the sake of convenience and how the market shifted due to that development. the data gathered by these companies has been used not only to predict our behavior but also to influence and modify it. zuboff (2019) analyzes how this actually has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom and whistleblowers such as christopher wylie, who released a cache of documents prompting the facebook/cambridge analytica data scandal. this reminds us that social media targeting is not only a marketing hype but also an actual practice to influence the political process. in addition to this, couldry and mejias (2019a, 2019b) developed the concept of data colonialism. following the historically long developed and violently established practice or policy of control by one people or power over other people or areas in order to establish economic dominance, there is a shift of practices towards data and digital capitalism. with the digital quantification of the social fundamental patterns of colonialism still remain not only in the light of dataveillance or surveillance capitalism, but also in their very literal sense of offering a contract without transparency of the consequences. in data colonialism, data is appropriated through a new type of social relation, which they define as data relations. data colonialism justifies what it does as an advance in scientific knowledge, personalized marketing, or rational management, just as historic colonialism claimed a civilizing mission. data colonialism is a global phenomenon. however, data colonialism might be free of physical violence today, the prediction of behavior, the surveillance practices and the rhetoric by tech-leaders hiding the intention of profit has established a new form of power. a form of power in which citizens are intended to be fully transparent and private companies as well as governments hide their practices. this relation and shift of relational constraints is what pasquale (2015) describes as a black box society. transparency plays a vital role in algorithms, data and power structures; it is a topic that has been recently adopted by an increasing number of researchers in different perspectives highlighting data, processes, and stakeholder relations (o’neil, 2016; ananny and crawford, 2016; gillespie, 2016; seaver, 2017). there is still a lot of work to be done, not only for researchers but also for practitioners and critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 policy makers, in order to challenge bias in data and algorithms. eubanks (2017), for example, systematically investigates the impacts of automation, data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in america, to elaborate how power applies within the use of algorithms and data. she establishes a rich perspective on how profiling, surveillance and containment relate to exclusion and punishment in the digital age. instead of serving a better societal structure, digital technologies often worsen inequality and data can’t provide what poor people actually need. instead, they are treated like criminals on trial. for eubanks (2017), we have forged a “digital poorhouse from databases, algorithms, and riskmodels” (ibid., p. 12). drawing a historical line from county poorhouses of the nineteenth century towards the twentieth century, eubanks argues, that the digital poorhouse “replaces the sometimes-biased decision-making of frontline social workers with the rational discrimination of high-tech tools” (ibid., p.192). beside the problems that arise from automation, as described by eubanks in detail, there is a strong relation between the understanding of power relations and discrimination. according to d’ignazio and klein (2020), power can be described as “[t]he current configuration of structural privilege and structural oppression, in which some groups experience unearned advantages [...] and other groups experience systematic disadvantages—because those same systems were not designed by them or with people like them in mind.” (ibid., p. 24). d’ignazio and klein (2020) who focus on an intersectional feminist approach to show how unequal power structures in the realm of data are being produced. in their work, they highlight several attempts to overcome these structural inequalities. they explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization (cf. p. 73 ff.), and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by the automated systems around us (cf. p. 178 ff.). given these developments in emerging business models and personalized data, it is no great surprise that power relationships are also occurring in learning analytics. broughan and prinsloo (2019) note that interactions with data are strongly shaped by the question who is allowed to use and interact with data and analytics and in what roles, when they critically discuss the framing of learners as “data objects” rather than “data owners”. iliadis and russo (2016) also remark that researchers “invoke data in the name of scientific objectivity” while often ignoring that data with reference to gitelman (2013) are never “raw” but always “cooked” (ibid.). there is no neutral data, especially when working with digital technologies and doing research with digital data as in data science, a reflection on the social and cultural embedding and the narratives of the data is imperative. data are a form of power and the power relations are manifold. although theoretical concepts and empirical studies reflect a high complexity and a rich discourse, some basic considerations can be condensed in order to utilize this assumption for educational purposes. in order to understand the complexity that comes with digital data, it might be rewarding to reflect on some basic questions, such as the characteristics of the data: where critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 has the data been collected under what circumstances, and what was the intention? in addition, it might be important to consider by whom the data has been collected and how updating the data works. considering the concept of data colonialism, it is also important to think about different stakeholders, therefore understanding who the users are and how they have been involved in the process of data collection or processing. this can become an important aspect considering the (lack of) transparency of an algorithmic system and the data involved. data and context as already established in the section on data and power context matters. considering an educational setting, data and context can be understood in at least two ways. one the one hand, data are always embedded into social, cultural and historical contexts. examining the contexts of data can be linked to critical thinking and reflection on the circumstances under which the data has been collected. on the other hand, context can be added, reconfigured or adjusted. this usually can be seen as a process of adding related information to data in order to work with it, give it a specific meaning or notion or even make use of it. this is not a trivial issue, since patterns and correlations often stand out against a background of context. making sense of data is always framed in one way or another. while framing is necessary in order to find answers for specific questions, it might also be limiting, since one is probably leaving things out. context matters, but with occurrence of big data context matters even more. one of the specific characteristics of big data is that the data processing can be pointing to previously unrecognized connections. big data is not just more data, it describes a completely new quality that affects data assemblages, data collection analytics and challenges knowledge in particular. the latter can be observed in positions on new empiricism, as kitchin (2014) critically assesses when discussing new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. however, data driven science must not be an end of theory, it rather requires even more awareness on the range and limits of the tools used. there is no objectivity created by machines. as kitchin (2014) notes, “a piece of writing is not simply an order of letters and words; it is contextual and conveys meaning and has qualities that are ineffable” (ibid., p. 8). therefore, the human factor of deciphering meaning or context is most important. however, there are some challenges when following this approach, since big data requires automated processing and analyzing of data. additionally, the human factor does potentially not come without social determinism or human bias, as eubanks (2017) showed in-depth. however, this depends on the context as well; it might be helpful to think of data processing in analogy to critical reading and writing at this point. in addition, establishing such a narrative can guide through a learning process on big data principles. in their paper on big data as a socio-technical phenomenon, boyd and crawford (2012) argue that it is necessary to critically interrogate assumptions and biases concerning big data. therefore, they formulate and discuss a set of critical questions regarding the implications of data critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 analytics and social formations. retaining context remains a crucial factor and an ongoing challenge in the light of big data (cf. boyd and crawford 2012, p. 671). in addition, boyd and crawford (2012) highlight that there are questions of skills: “wrangling apis, scraping, and analyzing big swathes of data is a skill set generally restricted to those with a computational background” (ibid., p. 674). as already outlined with d’ignazio and klein (2020), it matters which persons are positioned in which settings and how to think of data science in the light of diversity. with the rise of digital methods, it is possible to scrape data from many places and despite ethical concerns of scraping publicly available data. as boyd and crawford (2012) note, that ethical questions need to be asked critically: should someone be included as a part of a large aggregate of data? what if someone’s ‘public’ blog post is taken out of context and analyzed in a way that the author never imagined? what does it mean for someone to be spotlighted or to be analyzed without knowing it? who is responsible for making certain that individuals and communities are not hurt by the research process? what does informed consent look like? (ibid, p. 672) as d’ignazio and klein (2017) highlight, it is not just on “the stages of data acquisition or data analysis that context matters. context also comes into play in the framing and communication of results” (ibid., p.164). therefore, critical data literacy is not only the ability to critically read data, but also to take into consideration how results can be framed. the numbers do not speak for themselves and data are always embedded into contexts. being aware that certain framing or language in data presentation can be suggestive or misleading is an important aspect in communicating own results clearly. the scale of data aggregation, the methods involved and the access to data are in power relations and always contextually framed. therefore, it is important to discuss the implications that arise with a) the use of, b) the work and research with big data and c) the presentation of findings. an interdisciplinary approach on the implications briefly outlined here is necessary, since it allows a group of learners to shed light not only onto the mathematical challenges but also the political, social and economic dynamics that affect our lifeworld in various ways. data, code and algorithms digital data, especially big data, can barely be discussed without considering the computer code and the algorithms incorporating the mathematical models to process the data sets, visualize results and explore new contexts. several researchers have highlighted the importance of considering not only data but also algorithms and their various implications on social relations and subjectivity (manovich, 1999; striphas, 2010; gillespie, 2014; pasquale, 2015; eubanks, 2017). for manovich (1999) the world is reduced to two kinds of software objects: data structures and algorithms. they are considered complementary to critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 each other: algorithms and data structures have a symbiotic relationship. the more complex the data structure of a computer program, the simpler the algorithm needs to be, and vice versa. together, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world according to a computer. (manovich, 1999, p. 84) manovich examines the notion of database as a cultural form of its own and in the new way, it is structuring our experience of ourselves and the world. the analytical distinction between potentially messy data and algorithms that are processing and in a way cleaning the data can be made. gillespie (2014) also thinks of algorithms as directly linked to databases in his article on the impact of algorithms on the public discourse: algorithms are inert, meaningless machines until paired with databases on which to function. a sociological inquiry into an algorithm must always grapple with the databases to which it is wedded; failing to do so would be akin to studying what was said at a public protest, while failing to notice that some speakers had been stopped at the park gates. (gillespie, 2014, p. 169) algorithms are designed to remain outside our grasp, and therefore unexpected encounters will remain. as there is no raw data and data sets are not neutral, but rather produced and embedded in various contexts, interdisciplinary perspectives from humanities remind us of the social value that is incorporated, echoed and reproduced in digital technologies. although algorithms could be understood as abstract mathematical and computational tools, they are embedded into practices and they are produced by humans. furthermore, data are not only a specific output of an algorithmic selection or process. the produced data can be seen as an input for further development and design of different algorithms. this describes a cycle in which data are output for given systems and models and input for future or other existing models and contexts. it also reveals some of the challenges considering the reflection of biased data. since, bias in data is not only a technical or automated result, but rather a complex configuration of data input, modeling, processing and output. data are generated in order to get specific insights, be it user information, shopping experiences or learning effectiveness, and it is the basis to reduce bias and optimize the algorithms we are engaging with. therefore, the strong relation of data and the computational systems processing data is worth considering for a deeper understanding of the complexity within and the potential possibilities that can encounter one on a daily basis. since algorithms often operate behind closed doors, the problem of accessing them remains. they might not be black boxes, but they are still opaque. however, most of the complex algorithms in the lived world rely on mathematical and computational models that can somehow be anticipated, be it algorithmic auditing or specific practices to re-contextualize data and playfully engage with the technologies. even if algorithms may be too complex to explain in detail; even if efforts to elucidate the algorithms might require the use of data that violates regulations, there are tactics to critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 understand the general algorithmic principles to strengthen data literacy for empowerment in technical and non-technical audiences. d’ignazio (2017) advocates for “creative data literacy” and establishes the term offering five tactics to engage with data. they range from working with community centered data or the writing of “data biographies” to the production of learner-centered tools (ibid., p. 8ff.). besides problem solving and critical thinking, creativity is one of the important transversal skills according to the digital education action plan (2021-2027) of the european commission. a playful, explorative and creative way to address bias in data and algorithms can reach a wider group and include non-technical audience. for the course project that i will discuss in the next sections, i follow the work of d’ignazio (2017) and the outlined theoretical and practical considerations on how to engage with data to strengthen creative data literacy. course project: education and data science there is a variety of framings and understandings of education and learning and the discussion on technologies in education has a long tradition. yet it holds the risk of emphasizing the technological dimension more than the challenges arising from pedagogical or educational work. such tendencies and critical counter movements can be observed within the field of learning analytics. the broad availability of educational data has led to an interest in analyzing processes of learning and learning behavior. this often goes with the promise of a better learning experience, effective output measurements and a more personalized learning environment that enables a more student-centered mentoring and teaching. however, education is a complex process and within the ideology of improvement and enhancement, there is little room for critical negotiation and negation. the latter is essential for critical thinking since it allows distancing from an artefact, situation or topic while reflecting about the experience one is confronted with. for educational settings, this is a crucial point and it requires an atmosphere of trust and openness. therefore, understanding education as a process of re-configuring and continuously transforming the individual self and world relation, it might be rewarding not only to question circumstances focusing on the processes of one’s individual positioning in a pluralized world, with different social norms and values, but also to consider structural transformations and societal challenges such as datafication. therefore, the understanding of education established in this course project is rather inspired by the idea of the philosophy of education than an output-oriented perspective on learning. of course, this has pragmatic limitations, since there is a goal for the students to complete the course and therefore tasks have to be accomplished, but considering education as a complex process of learning with a perspective transformation, it allows going beyond instructional learning and includes the moment of negation. critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 didactical approach and structure the course project covered a time period of one semester in which 18 students from the two study programmes computer science and media education (equally distributed), as well as one lecturer have been involved. the structure of the course combined theoretical considerations on data, media and data representation and practical implications with weekly tasks and exercises, hands on sessions and a joint course project in which all students participated. for the theoretical part, readings such as eubanks (2017), d’ignazio (2017), iliadis and russo (2016), kitchin (2014), gillespie (2014) and gitelman (2013) have been considered as basic references and partly discussed in depth. the practical part required knowledge in working with big data sets, therefore the series “making sense of data” by myatt & johnson (2009, 2012, 2014) has been introduced. the expected workload was about four to six hours a week considering the readings, programming assignments and the joint course project. this was quite high compared to a regular seminar or course in both study programmes. the didactical concept, especially of the joint course project, has been established around problem-based and project-based learning (mettas and constantinou, 2007) following a project-led education model developed by powell and weenk (2003). while the roots of problem-based learning reach back to the 1970s. this method offers a good entry point on data science. problem-based learning means to organize the curricular content around problem scenarios rather than disciplines. problem-based learning is intended to promote the acquisition of knowledge that can be used flexibly, the development of transversal competences (e.g. problem solving, creativity, critical thinking) (cf. duch et al., 2001). this approach also takes into account social competences and the ability to work in a team. of course, problem-based learning cannot replace traditional teaching and learning methods such as a lecture, but it can complement them. following duch et al. (2001) any subject area can be adapted to problem-based learning with relative ease, considering some basic principles such as students motivation, encouraging discussions and reflections, integrating the problem into previous courses and prior knowledge of the students and the right level of complexity. the course incorporated principles and methods of data science in order to offer an interdisciplinary introduction and to offer an entry point on how to actually work with big data under the condition of a research project. data science is the field that is dedicated towards the research and analyzing of data in several ways. it invokes creativity and individual problem solving and it requires openness towards the data and their social, cultural and political embedding. problem-based learning can be considered as an explorative way to foster a critical perspective on these phenomena. however, as a generic didactic approach, the framing is crucial and this is something the teaching staff should precisely take care of. this can be achieved by a set of measures, a selection of readings that highlight a critical perspective, by regularly encouraging discussions on the critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 implications of digital data and data practices and by highlighting potential challenges in applying data science methods on a basic level. additionally, the choice of digital tools can be considered as an important factor establishing a critical perspective on digital data and data practices. choosing the right tools to work with is also an important aspect. we used several tools in order to address the topic of data science in that specific perspective. the university offers an elearning management tool on the open source platform moodle, enriched with a few add-ons, so writing announcements, providing small tasks and dropping material there served quite well. additionally, we decided to use a project management tool in order to stay in contact and ensure social sharing. therefore, we decided to work with slack, which is a proprietary tool. the course was structured in three parts, the first and introductory part was about theoretical positions of education, data science and societal challenges in general. here, it was important to introduce not only the topic, but rather to enrich and stimulate discussions so the upcoming challenges and the complexity of the whole field in general could be anticipated. therefore, assumptions such as the relation of data and power, context and meaning and the role of algorithms as well as algorithmic thinking have been widely discussed for a couple of weeks. in addition to the paper-driven discussions, we had some regular hands-on sessions, where we started working with the python programming language and set up a common working environment in order to prospectively prevent long debugging sessions and error tracking procedures. in order to access data, we worked with pandas, which is a fast, flexible and easy to use open source data analysis and manipulation tool, built on top of the python programming language. going through the basic functionalities of pandas enabled the students to understand not only how this library works and how to utilize it, but also how python functions in general. the coding part at this point was not only an enhancement or a variety of the course, it is fundamental for the overall goal. this part was a circular and tentative process in order to identify interesting problems the students want to engage with on a deeper level. since the coding sessions have been set up as pair programming sessions of two students – a method derived from agile software development – it also served as a team building initiative. the second part was about basic machine learning principles, mathematical models and their application on data (cf. schutt and o’neil, 2013; finlay, 2014). at this point, we went into hands-on coding, using publicly accessible open data from kaggle, which is a subsidiary of google. kaggle is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners that allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment. as a community, the platform also enables users to work with other data scientists and machine-learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges. the data sets derived from kaggle served as an entry point to provide guided problem solving. we engaged with the titanic data set, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/machine_learning critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 which is a common and suitable starting point diving into machine learning (cf. farag and hassan, 2018). we used machine learning to create different models (logistic regression, k-nearest neighbor, naïve bayes) that predicted which passengers survived the titanic shipwreck. the prediction and efficiency of the algorithms depend greatly on the predictive model. by solving this problem individually and in the group, we also critically discussed the implications of missing data, interpolation and gender in the group sessions, as well as in the joint slack team. to some of the computer science students, this problem and the data set was not new, so we could also spend some time on critically reflecting on the overall structure of the data set and comparable tasks. after these first impressions of how to engage with a data set, the third part of the course was dedicated to the joint group project, in which all of the students have been involved with different roles. the data science project, which has been determined together and discussed since the beginning of the second part of the course, was about winter, christmas, cultures and globally shared emotions in the time of december 2019 to midjanuary 2020. we wanted to visualize and understand at which time people post in social media about topics like #winter and #christmas and what the basic sentiments on these hashtags are. we discussed several assumptions, such as that winter offers a high variety of emotional engagements and that it is geographically depending how emotions are being articulated, we were thinking of a correlation from tweets and weather data. since businesses on social media also use hashtags, we were discussing whether we could possibly find some patterns on official accounts from internationally recognized brands in various sectors, such as the food industry, service offerings and travel & tourism. therefore, we decided to work with the microblogging service twitter. the access to data is well structured and technically quite good to handle, since there is a well-documented api. although the actual joint group project has been introduced in the beginning of the course, it started only after setting the framing and basic assumptions. the work of step one and two took six weeks and it was necessary in order to align expectations, find a common ground and create an atmosphere of trust and openness within the group. after setting the topic and settling the idea, the joint group project can be divided into four steps: 1) surveying existing open data sets: we asked the question, whether it is necessary at all to collect data or if there is already a publicly available data set that would benefit the interest of the group. since we were looking for general usage patterns, an anonymized data set would have been a good choice. we found an open data set that met the requirements; the data set was fully anonymized and still offered some insights on the topic of winter and christmas. however, the data set was missing geographical information and metadata, so we discussed it in the group and figured out that we were not able to make sense of the data, so we had to skip it. nevertheless, this process was important, since data preparation and exploration is a vital factor in gaining a basic understanding of the data in general and for data science in particular. exploring data critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 means not only to review the general structure of the data, it also serves to identify specific characteristics (features) with statistical analysis methods, for example by determining minima and maxima, the position measures and the data distribution as well as correlation measures. this process is often called exploratory data analysis. 2) information retrieval and ethical considerations: the next step was to set up an environment for information retrieval and to collect the data. twitter was not the first choice, but according to the given time frame, tools and the available resources, we found consent on using it. again, access to data and data sources matters. access to data in that sense is dependent on the business and their terms of use. this dependency on tech companies and their business models was a crucial point in discussing the ambiguity of getting insights into a topic and relying on others (individuals as well as businesses and their algorithmic selection) to get data at all. at this stage and according to the theoretical framing, it is mandatory to discuss and reflect the ethical implications of collecting digital data. as boyd and crawford (2012) note, “just because it is accessible does not make it ethical” (ibid., p. 671). as they elaborate, there is a gap between the individuals and institutions that have access to the data and the social media users that produce the data. not all of the users active in public spheres would necessarily agree to have their data being reor decontextualized. therefore, we critically discussed the technological framework with regard to the ethical framework for publishing twitter data as established by williams et al. (2017) already before we designed the collection framework. we then assessed the potential field and user accounts and focused on businesses, users with a high follower count and a few user accounts of public figures, politicians and celebrities. this shaped our initial interest and narrowed down the project focus on a specific topic. the actual data collection was an automated process. this happened not as flawlessly as expected, since we had to reconfigure the automated process as we figured an error in the actual routine of storing the data properly. however, we got a data set to process and analyze. 3) data analysis and processing: at this stage of the project, the challenge was not only to find patterns with regard to the initially determined aspects and retrieved data, but also to align the data with other factors. for example, when following the idea of high snowfall or unusual cold or warm temperatures in a specific geographic area, only the collected tweets with given geographical information could be considered as reliable data to align with. while inspecting the data the process evolved as looking for a needle in a haystack, but this actually was not the problem. it was the haystack itself. we might have asked the wrong questions and we might have translated our questions in a misleading way into computer code in order to retrieve the data. nevertheless, at this point, this does not matter at all, for the purpose of critical data literacy and a deeper understanding of big data; it was a perfect situation, since it allowed reflection upon the way questions are directed towards digital data. while big data can reveal new insights or give answers to questions that have not been articulated, it can also be a hard task to beneficially analyze the data. in the case critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 of the joint group project, we literally ran out of time. this actually led to the decision not to further pursue the initial idea. it was demotivating for all participants of the course. however, we decided to go ahead with the setting and ended up with a web based app visualizing the tweets popping up around the globe and a basic adjustable user interface, such as a time slider. at this point, the project would have been a fail under real-world conditions. however, experiencing such a process under safe conditions, framed by discussions and reflections on the impact every single decision of this project had, it can still be considered as an exploration of the unexpected. 4) evaluation and closing: we finished the project with an evaluation over the course of two weeks. the evaluation and conclusive discussion was about the actual project, its implications, learnings, and the course in general. some of the students further elaborated the discussed topics by writing term papers on the course and the project; others attended hackathons and applied their (pre-existing and newly acquired) skills in other projects. while we faced many challenges, the explorative joint project holds rich insights pathing a way towards critical data literacy in an interdisciplinary setting for higher education. some of these insights, such as the importance of exceeding a specific disciplinary domain, teamwork, openness and the role of education will be outlined in the following sections. data science and interdisciplinary teams data science requires many skills that range from communication over technical expertise to flexible problem solving (cf. schutt and o’neil, 2013). these skills often exceed one domain and therefore it was the intention that students from different study programmes with different social, technological and cultural backgrounds come together in order to explore the work on digital data in a safe and guided educational setting. the students developed a strong connection to the topic and the team itself. the course started with a basic quiz on data and information. this was a team building measure, since we defined our long-term goals, talked about individual expectations and gave our team a name, based on the answers of the quiz. during the project, the roles of the project members have developed and the students became active learners. based on interest and skills they also switched roles between the different stages of the project. the pair programming tasks served well in order to strengthen the relationships between the students on an individual level. from a didactical point of view, it was beneficial to bring the students from both study programmes with a different level of expertise together in the pair programming sessions. some guiding questions that appeared helpful and might inform and inspire similar project/course scenarios could be: • what is the common ground for a team? • what are the individual expectations? • which tools are necessary in order to work together? critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 • how to ensure equally distributed participation among the team members? errors and openness it is important to address the errors that have been made, not only in the sense of changing further parameters and rethinking decisions, but also in how to cope with errors in general. since data science requires a lot of flexibility and experts with a well-equipped set of methods, it is important to address the errors that have been made. in the joint project, we have experienced many errors from simple coding errors and debugging sessions or finding a wrongly spelled character in the python script, to more complex structural errors such as an inefficient or not working model or the (unintended) process of making data messy when comparing different data sets. not paying enough attention to the possibilities for a solution could also lead to bad decisions. as the project provoked, relying on the data is not enough. it needs to be taken into consideration that there is always more than one possible answer to one particular question and each of the possibilities incorporates some level of uncertainty. therefore, practicing tentative and problem-centered approaches is vital in order to become the ability of applying theoretical concepts in practice. this applies for computational skills as well as for pedagogical competencies. as already outlined, openness is an important factor in order to stimulate the learning setting. this applies to the error management and decision-making as well as to the tools we used. we had a strong focus on using open data as well as open source software and we have discussed the topic in the beginning, as well as in the process of the joint group project. however, against this idea, we used a proprietary tool to organize our project management chats. an alternative to this is a self-hosted installation of an alternative software such as mattermost, which has been installed recently on university servers. mattermost would be the preferred choice for future courses. the discussions on openness can be summarized with the following guiding questions: • what access do we have? • how can we process the data? • how is use and reuse of the data governed? • what are the ethical implications of free and publicly available data? • how to ensure that principles like access and openness can be communicated? education and critical data literacy as introduced in the theoretical pre-assumptions, it matters who is working on which data and how social implications can be addressed properly. critical data literacy should go beyond being able to have mathematical and numerical skills. speaking with tygel and kirsch (2015) it is “the set of abilities (data reading, data manipulation, data communication and data production) which allows one to use and produce data in a critical way” (ibid., p. 117). the course and especially the joint course project integrated critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 this methodology in practice and revealed some unexpected findings in a higher education setting. as has been said before: skills matter. the course was open to students from different masters programmes, so the students were already able to draw on a wide range of methodological skills and knowledge from their individual learning experiences in their respective bachelors programmes. however, can this approach stand against other settings and be realized with non-technical learners or societal groups other than students who will prospectively work in the field? there are two distinctive answers to this question. the short answer would be optimistic and confidently opt for a yes, remarking that the course should not only be offered to students from media education and computer science, but rather for teacher education and social sciences as well. addressing critical data literacy in educational settings does not only fulfill the idea of raising individual awareness on the ongoing challenges of datafication, but must be understood as a process of multiplication on critical awareness, therefore prospective teachers benefit at least as much as media educational practitioners from such a course. second, problem-based learning might still be a key to easily adapt to a specific audience or group of participants. however, there are some limitations on scalability. the rather detailed description of the joint course project suggests that critical data literacy is a very complex topic and therefore it might be helpful to narrow the actual workshop down to a specific problem. this is depending on the given timeframe, prior knowledge and the specific goals. while it might be rewarding to discuss a specific data set – as a case study – in-depth with a group of experts, it might be demotivating to address technical issues within a non-technical audience. in order to raise awareness of the implications and the constellations of context and meaning in an educational setting, it might be helpful to rely on research findings that can be bound back to lifeworld problems, rather than discussing the significance of a graph. this means a didactical reduction in favor of explainability. some of the key considerations on education and critical data literacy can be framed as in the following guiding questions: • are there aspects of critical data literacy that should be highlighted in particular? • how to align an individual research project with institutional conditions? • how can the educational setting raise awareness for diversity and data practices? conclusion the goal of the course on education and data science was to establish a framework to address critical thinking on digital data with an interdisciplinary group of students of media education and computer science. an explorative project like the one presented here was highly depending on the motivation, engagement and endurance of the students. hence, the educational setting within a climate of openness and trust has been of high significance. even if the initial idea could not have been realized, the course offered rich insights into the complexity of getting in touch with big data. critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 education is more and more shaped by increased worldwide discussions on the importance of teaching digital competencies and, of course, digital technology can support high quality and inclusive education. according to the european commission and the digital education action plan (2021-2027) digital technology can meet the requirements of future skills such as digital and data literacy, but also creativity and analytical as well as critical thinking. furthermore, it enables to work in teams and communicate beyond the borders of one’s own domain. however, it requires a lot of flexibility to establish a creative and interdisciplinary setting as described within the course project. it requires openness towards the different languages that are being spoken. higher education meets these requirements and allows a tentative approach on this topic. nevertheless, efforts such as explorative projects on that topic are limited in their reach. neither do they replace a comprehensive agenda on critical data literacy, nor do they fully anchor into existing study programmes. at the same time, the joint course project identified the exact need of addressing critical data literacy at the transdisciplinary intersection of computer science and media education. a deeper understanding of the social and cultural implications on data and knowledge of algorithmic processes can seed further engagements. also, offering courses on data literacy is beneficial for students from computer science, since the skills developed in such projects are additional to what computer science curricula usually include. therefore, it is even more important to establish a broad perspective on critical data literacy at the intersecting fields of data science and education. references boyd, d. & crawford, k. 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(2018). the big data agenda: data ethics and critical data studies. london: university of westminster press. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/book14 schutt, r., & o’neil, c. (2013). doing data science (first edition). o’reilly media. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1556217 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1556217 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1556217 https://doi.org/10.1177/135485659900500206 https://doi.org/10.1177/135485659900500206 https://doi.org/10.1177/135485659900500206 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-006-9011-3 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118422007 https://doi.org/10.1089/big.2016.0050 https://doi.org/10.1089/big.2016.0050 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1707223 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1707223 https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1707223 https://doi.org/10.16997/book14 critical data studies and data science in higher education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 20 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 selwyn, n. 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(2016). contributions of paulo freire for a critical data literacy: a popular education approach. the journal of community informatics, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.15353/joci.v12i3.3279 williams, m. l., burnap, p., & sloan, l. (2017). towards an ethical framework for publishing twitter data in social research: taking into account users’ views, online context and algorithmic estimation. sociology, 51(6), 1149–1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038517708140 zuboff, s. (2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for the future at the new frontier of power. profile books. https://doi.org/10.18608/jla.2019.63.3 https://doi.org/10.18608/jla.2019.63.3 https://educationfutures.monash.edu/all---present/after-covid-19 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577392 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577392 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00164-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00164-x https://doi.org/10.15353/joci.v12i3.3279 https://doi.org/10.15353/joci.v12i3.3279 https://doi.org/10.15353/joci.v12i3.3279 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038517708140 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038517708140 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038517708140 critical data studies and data science in higher education: an interdisciplinary and explorative approach towards a critical data literacy abstract introduction theoretical framing: data, power and algorithms data and power data and context data, code and algorithms course project: education and data science didactical approach and structure data science and interdisciplinary teams errors and openness education and critical data literacy conclusion references wikan-faugli-mfl seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 136 does ms photo story 3 make a difference? the views and experiences of a group of norwegian secondary school teachers gerd wikan associate professor institute of social sciences hedmark university college email: gerd.wikan@hihm.no bjørn faugli associate professor institute of information science hedmark university college email: bjorn.faugli@hihm.no terje mølster associate professor institute of fine arts and information science hedmark university college email: terje.molster@hihm.no rafael hope assistant professor institute of fine arts and information science hedmark university college email: rafael.hope@hihm.no abstract this paper examines views and attitudes of secondary school teachers on the role of ms photostory 3 as a learning-enhancing artifact. the examination is based on the analysis of empirical data, collected from an ongoing project involving teachers and pupils at a norwegian secondary school. two teams, numbering a total of 9 teachers, participated in training programs from august 2007 to june 2009, with the objective of enhancing the teachers’ ict competence. they agreed to use ms photo story 3 as a presentation tool in a number of subjects for a period of two years. in parallel with conducting training programs for the teachers, qualitative data describing teachers’ views and attitudes were collected during regularly conducted focus-group interviews with teacher teams, by studying teacher-produced reflection notes and by participant observations of teachers and pupils in classroom activities. a main finding is that it was necessary to upgrade the teachers’ computer skills on a very basic level in order to give the teachers confidence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 137 to use ict in their teaching. insufficient ict competence and low confidence among the participating teachers has considerably hampered the utilization of the ict’s learning potential. keywords: ms photo story 3, knowledge creation, information and communication technology, norway introduction during the past decade, norway and many other countries have experienced that efforts to integrate information and communication technology (ict) into most aspects of school practice has received massive attention. the underlying motives for this focus on ict applications in schools and colleges are threefold. firstly it is believed that ict can contribute to a more rational organizing and running of educational institutions which is comparable with the motives of introducing ict systems in private and public enterprises. secondly it is widely accepted that competence in handling ict is a required and important asset of citizens in modern society. digital literacy is considered important and equal to other more traditional competences such as reading, writing and mathematics. this view is clearly reflected, among other places, in the white paper no. 30 to the norwegian parliament (2003-2004), “culture for learning” ,which emphasizes that achieving digital literacy is a goal in itself and pupils in elementary and secondary schools should receive systematic training in the use of ict. thirdly, the plans for introducing ict in norwegian schools is motivated by the assumption that the active use of ict is not only a goal in itself but a means of supporting pedagogical processes which will contribute to an enhancement of learning outcome in most subjects. the view that ict represents a very powerful tool for supporting learning is deeply rooted in many professional environments and cultures but most apparent in the informatics and computer science disciplines. in particular with the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, the belief in modern technology, as a kind of miracle cure for the enhancement of learning, increased considerably. however, despite the enthusiasm, the learning-enhancing effects of ictsupported learning processes on subject learning outcome is still not convincingly verified and reported. a common and frequently-phrased explanation of the apparent failure to obtain more clearly and measurable positive effects of ict supported learning is that the approach can be characterized as “technology driven” and resembles a “solution seeks problem” process. the development and implementation of ict in learning situations has failed to involve appropriate changes in pedagogy, the organizing of learning processes and the inclusion of the teachers and pupils as system users. this unbalanced approach to developing, implementing and using ict-based systems is paralleled to experience from traditional systemdevelopment processes conducted during the past few decades. failure to involve and understand the system users is believed to be a major explanation of the many unsuccessful ict projects in the past. in view of the criticism of the unbalanced implementation and use of ict-supported learning systems and the large amount of resources used to promote the use of ict in schools, it is of great importance to gain more insight into and a better understanding of ictsupported learning processes. in particular it is of paramount interest to investigate and examine the role of school teachers as both ict-system users and mentors for learners involved in ict supported learning processes. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 138 the knowledge-creation perspective and ms photo story 3 the present project encourages teachers to let pupils apply ms photo story 3 for creating presentations in most school subjects. we had in beforehand discussed ict issues with the teachers and agreed that they should be supplied with software which allowed the pupils to create their own presentations and ms photo story 3 is a powerful tool for video productions with a simple and user friendly interface. based on previous and ongoing research there is clear evidence supporting the view that subject learning can be considerably enhanced by emphasizing the knowledge-creation perspective (dons & bakken, 2003; hennessy, ruthven & brindley, 2005). it is also reason to believe that learners enhance their digital literacy by being producers and not just consumers of digital media content. being a knowledge creator implies that the learner is a producer on two levels: both as an active knowledge constructor according to constructivist learning theories and as a producer of digital representations. in relation to this perspective, papert’s notion of constructionism is highly relevant. based on the work of piaget, dewey and montessori he proposed a theory of constructionism stating that children learn best when they are in the active role of designer or constructor ( harel & papert, 1991). this view is supported by barak (2006), who argues that ict technology offers powerful tools for supporting these principles and points out that teachers should see computer technologies as a means of supporting knowledge discovery and construction, rather than letting the learner be a passive receiver of knowledge transferred from teachers. the learning perspective in the present project is simply that knowledge is actively created through relating to others and acting in the world (ackermann, 2004). thus we are working in a socio-cultural learning perspective. we see learning as an active and social process where the learner builds new knowledge based on previous knowledge in interaction with the environment. in this perspective project work is a central learning method. project work emphasizes the active creation of knowledge as opposed to a more passive transfer of knowledge from teacher to learner. dons and bakken (2003) find that pupils attain improved subject knowledge when assigned to communicate their knowledge to fellow pupils by creating video or animation presentations. they argue that the learners are motivated to obtain a deeper understanding of the subject matter when creating a digital multimodal presentation to be studied and observed by peers. research design the project referred to in this paper is conducted as a partnership project involving hedmark university college, a local secondary school and the municipal educational authorities. using ict for supporting subject teaching and learning as well as enhancing pupils’ ict competence has been given high priority by the participating school, and the school represents a culture, characterized by a more-than-average supportive attitude towards ict as a learning tool and the participating teachers were more-than-average enthusiastic. the project design has been developed together with the involved teachers and the headmaster at the school. in addition the municipal educational authorities have been part of the planning and function as part of a reference group. the teachers agreed to try out and reflect on the use of ict in subject learning and in particular try out ms photo story 3. a project group including team leaders at the school and two researchers planned all intervention and it was of paramount importance that the actions were integrated in the school’s teaching plans and curriculum. in this context it is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 139 important to emphasize that norwegian secondary schools differ considerably from secondary schools in most other european countries. in norwegian schools the curriculum is subject-specific, as it is in many other countries but teaching is normally organized cross-curricular. since the teachers are organized in cross-curricular teams they are mutually influenced by each other across subject-related traditions. the microsoft photo story 3 software was introduced to the teachers early during the action, encouraging them to apply this as a presentation tool. ms photo story 3 is a presentation software which enables the learners to present their work as short movies with pictures, music and recorded text. before the school year started, training programs were conducted with the teachers involving digital storytelling as a particular genre in addition to general software training. at the start of the project the majority of the teachers had a very enthusiastic attitude towards the idea of ictsupported learning but gradually they became more reluctant to the whole project and at one stage almost negative. many factors may explain these phenomena, but gradually it became apparent that the main problem was rooted in the lack of ict competence among the teachers. this initiated a series of elementary upgrading courses offering training in basic ict skills such as windows office, file handling and internet ethics in order to boost both teachers’ competence and confidence, which is considered as vital factors for the successful integration of ict in their daily practice and planning. the first phase of the empirical data gathering, starting in september, 2007, by conducting individual interviews with all teachers. later in the term, focusgroup meetings were used monthly in order to observe the teachers’ attitude and discuss their experience with using ms photo story 3. the focus-group meetings lasted approximately 1.5 hours and with a few exemptions all the teachers attended the meetings and communicated their experience. during the meetings the teachers came up with different examples related to their own subjects and elaborated on what impact ms photo story 3 might have on teaching and learning in the subject in question. between september 2007 and june 2009 two researchers conducted 20 individual teacher interviews and 10 focus-group interviews with the nine-member teacher teams. in addition, all members of the teacher teams and three members of the administration and teaching staff involved were encouraged to produce reflection notes, elaborating on particular experiences and their personal views. main outcomes and results approaching the task of describing teacher’s attitudes and views based on the present project is to a large degree inspired by investigations and examinations conducted relatively recently by other researchers in the same field (hennessy, ruthven & brindley 2005). it is however important to emphasize in this context that the theme categories are to a considerable degree interrelated and overlapping. this implies that discussions and references to teachers’ perspectives on each theme do not rule out that the same arguments are relevant for one or more of the other themes. however, before commenting on the teacher’s present attitudes with respect to possible positive effects ict has on pupils’ understanding of subject issues, a few comments on the teachers’ attitudes prior to the project action is required. and it is particularly important to emphasize that this is a matter of what they believed and expected and not based on results from exams or formal tests of pupils. and it became clear that teacher attitudes varied considerably and seem to be strongly related to teacher personality, teacher ict competence, subject matters, as well as preferred learning style. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 140 one of the science teachers expressed a very positive attitude: last year the 9th graders were introduced to the use of spreadsheets (excel) and this has been extended during the spring term to include exam problems in maths requiring the use of spread sheets. i consider this to be a useful tool for learning in maths, in particular with themes like statistics, production of graphs and diagrams, probability calculations, measurements (in science), calculations, economy etc. but other teachers, also highly ict competent, indicated a very different view, representing the opposite end of the positive-negative attitude dimension by clearly expressing that they believed little could be gained by using ict for supporting learning in maths. so far i have not used ict in maths. i don’t see how this can be beneficial. i definitely don’t think the use of ict will result in better insight into subject problem areas. having quoted both the extreme optimistic and the extreme pessimistic or negative attitudes expressed by the teachers involved in this research process it is reasonable to state that; the prevailing teacher attitude on integrating ict in learning processes can generally be characterized as reasonably sober. most of the teachers involved seem to approach the question of pros and cons by integrating ict in learning process with a slightly hesitant or “wait-and-see” perspective. however, all the participating teachers were aware of the expectations the national norwegian educational authorities have with respect to the benefits of integrating ict in learning processes, and teachers are continually making considerable efforts to find out or “crack the code” of how to utilize ict when performing their ordinary teaching jobs. ict competence and confidence the teachers’ own ict competence as well as confidence in applying ictsupported learning seems to be of paramount importance for their attitude towards the usefulness of using ict in subject teaching in generally and ms photos story 3 specifically. during the initial stages of the project the majority of the teachers considered themselves as not possessing the necessary ict competence required for functioning as mentors for ict-supported learning processes despite the fact that several of the teachers had previously received formal ict training. a typically comment from the teachers was that they found it difficult to find time to enhance their personal ict competence as the following quote illustrates: i am positive and not afraid of using ict. i am always eager to learn something new and i find ict important because we have a responsibility to give the pupils a varied approach to teaching and learning. i see the potential in ict for varying my teaching practice. at this stage of the project it became apparent that if the project was to continue as we had agreed with the teacher team we had to provide the teachers with the necessary ict training. most of the teachers, except 3, needed more ict upgrading. teachers’ lack of ict competence as well as confidence in the use of ict turned out to be a major bottleneck in the project. the implementation process of ict at our school had the same characteristics as the diffusion of artifacts known from other social systems. in the teams of teachers we had early adopters being very enthusiastic about this new tool and they immediately started to experiment with the technology. but so-called lagers were also observed. these needed to carefully observe how the technology worked for others before they considered taking the chance of implementing ict in their own teaching practice. however, the majority of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 141 teachers adopted an attitude expressing that they could clearly see the potential and possibilities of ict-supported learning but at the same time emphasized and pointed to numerous problems involved by using the new technology. these teachers wanted to use the technology more extensively, but first they had to “get their classes through the curriculum”. of the nine teachers involved only one was still refraining from using ict for supporting learning processes after a year of project action. this was a teacher in norwegian languages and it is known from other research that language subject teachers often don’t see that that ict will enhance the learning outcome in their subject (ruthven, k. et.al, 2005). technical constraints especially during the initial stages of the project both organizational and technical constraints represented considerable obstructions. the secondary school is well equipped with both stationary computers, laptops and designated computer rooms and video projectors are available in each learning arena. however, severe technical problems were put forward by the teachers as main arguments for not using ict in teaching. due to unreliable ict systems many teachers were reluctant to plan lessons using ict. they felt that they always needed to have back-up plans in case the ict systems did not work and the problems could be both technical and organizational. typical comments were: using ict is increasing my workload because i always have to have a back-up plan due to the unstable ict system at this school. in addition i spend a lot of time finding relevant rooms. these types of comments on technical problems reached a peak a couple of months into the project. from this stage the frequency of comments on malfunctioning technology decreased considerably and during later focus group meetings all teachers agreed that technical problems were no longer an excuse for not planning to use ict during lessons. ict gives us more and better learning material judging from interviews and observations all teachers consider internet access as a valuable support for teaching and learning processes. the ministry of education and many publishers of school textbooks have during the past years developed a number of subject-relevant internet resources and some teachers recommend these web sites for the support of pupils’ homework. in addition they also allow pupils to search and google on internet during classes. regarding the question of which categories of pupils benefit most from internet support, some argue that for the cleverest pupils the internet works well as an extra source of information but for the weaker pupils it is often too tempting to diverge to less-school relevant paths and become occupied with for example football results and internet games instead of school work. a typical statement which represents the teachers’ initial view on this issue is the following: the best pupils are also better at using internet as a source of information than the weaker pupils. those who are skilled writers and readers and experienced in using for instance library resources are also the best at using computer support. the weaker pupils avoid libraries and are very quick to start the computer. however they get little done. the norwegian schools are world champions in searching the internet, but what they get out of it in learning outcome is another question. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 142 the teachers also claimed that in order to be an efficient learning resource the use of internet must be planned and controlled by the teacher. the teacher must be the one who plans and decides how, where and when the pupils are to use the internet. it is not the pupils who should be responsible for finding knowledge and learning resources on the internet, it must be the teacher. it is meaningless for instance that a project period starts out with an internet search. this quotation reflects the views of how most teachers presently consider the internet as a learning-supporting artefact. they claim that the internet is useful but only if the teacher has made plans in advance for how to use it, which for instance means looking up relevant urls and creating efficient search words. this however is a very time-consuming process for the teacher and often in conflict with efficiency requirements in school situations. despite considerable initial skepticism to what is the best use of time recourses in order to reach subject goals reading textbooks, using the library or searching the internet most teachers gradually developed an increasingly positive attitude to the use of the internet. one teacher even said that he knew that the internet and ict could help him to change from teacher-controlled to learner-centered classes and to practice a more constructivist-based pedagogic style. the teachers became less critical towards the pupils work on internet because they have observed that the pupils worked more structured than they did in the beginning of the project. internet search is important in combination with ms photo story 3 in order for the pupils to find relevant and updated information. the work process and the product when it comes to the use of ms photo story 3 as a video presentation tool most teachers started out with a positive attitude and expressed that this tool had the potential to improve both the work processes, because it would be motivating for pupils to work digitally, as well as improving the product. a clear advantage of using ms photo story 3 is that it is easy to use and it is motivating to work with a combination of speech recordings, music and pictures. only one of the teachers was negative and said that this was a topdown project staged by the head teacher and her management team. the teachers commented that ms photo story 3 motivated the pupils to work harder and more concentrated, and this was confirmed in interviews with pupils. they explained that they had to work more with their homework because it was time consuming to extract for instance what was relevant information to include in a presentation. in additions, they spent a lot of time finding suitable music and pictures on the net. the main argument for using ict to improve the work processes, however, is that the pupils experience it as more motivating to work digitally. they listen better when the teacher is using ict in the introduction and they are willing to spend more time on reading from internet sites than in a text book and more time constructing digital presentations than the written or oral presentations. in this respect the use of ict simulates phases in the traditional learning and rehearsing process. this was especially motivating for the less able pupils, a point of view clearly expressed by several of the teachers. we have many pupils who never read books, but read on computer pages… some pupils have never delivered a presentation before but now they have made a photo story presentation. in english i can see that the pupils are more motivated and work harder...they learn a lot when they use the internet… i have seen that pupils who do not like to write now have managed to do their homework and the bright pupils become even better… seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 143 i think the pupils found it great fun to work with photo story…it was not at all a problem to motivate them to work. they did not find the software difficult to use and this shows how good they are on the computer…the problem is us the teachers. we are less ict-competent and more critical to use of ict…my pupils were very enthusiastic and even the weaker pupils worked hard and focused if they got some help with finding good sources on the net … by using ict systems the interest and motivation for my subject has increased. the presentation of products as a result of homework or in-school projects is perhaps, literally speaking, the most visible and conceivable application of ict in pupil learning processes and thus an issue most teachers were able to voice opinions about. with a few exceptions the teachers clearly expressed positive attitudes and expectations about the possibility of using ict tools for improving the presentation of pupil-produced work and the teacher comments were related to both the effects on pupil motivation and the learning process. for most of us it is inspiring to use computers when we are working. being able to present neat products with high esthetical quality such as text and pictures is a source of inspiration and this stimulates efforts and motivation to proceed with and complete work in progress. the effect of visualization was expected to both improve the learning process of individual pupils by providing feedback from the produced material as the work progressed and in particular by the possibilities offered by using ict to continuously edit and improve products during the work process. the positive attitudes were apparent with respect to most of the ict-tools but in particular digital storytelling and ms photo story were used to exemplify the expected positive effects. regarding advantages of ict-based presentations several teachers pointed out that especially for the less confident and more shy pupils the possibility of being able to prepare a presentation at home, using for example ms photo story 3, represented a considerable improvement. these pupils could then run a successful presentation by pressing a button in the classroom and thus avoiding the unpleasant experience of full exposure in a live setting. the teachers also claimed that pupils tended to increase their work load and that the quality of the work is enhanced when ict is used for presentations of school-work and homework. however one problem raised was that ms photo story 3 presentations were difficult to assess for the teacher and they asked for more training in this field. more independent pupils? the question of independent pupils’ approach to schoolwork is closely interrelated to and cannot be clearly separated from motivation. if the introduction of ict in school-based processes leads to higher motivation, it also leads to more autonomous learners and hence more independent approach to school work. but as opposed to the general teacher comment that the less able pupils seem to benefit most from the use of ict most teachers seemed to believe that when it comes to the degree of independence of pupil approach ict use will be advantageous for the more able pupils. however the less able pupils are also deemed to benefit, though not to the same extent as the most able pupils. yes to a certain degree, especially with the more able pupils. the less able pupils in my class have also shown an increased interest for the various themes and problems we have worked on in natural science classes when they have been allowed to process their knowledge by employing ict and making use of their ict competence. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 144 when the school work is more motivating, the pupils will be more independent, work harder and not require the teacher for pushing the work process. school work is frequently completed in a shorter time. but the pupils nevertheless need supervision and traditional learning. one of the more fundamental goals of the norwegian school system, in addition to enhancing subject learning, is to produce independent and critical citizens. if using ict in schools contributes to this goal, it is clearly interesting. since the early approaches to introducing ict-supported learning processes in schools a couple of decades ago, it has been predicted that the educational systems will soon experience a shift of paradigm from traditional knowledgepromoting teaching to a more supervision-based, constructivist learning processes. it was believed that with the introduction of ict-supported learning processes the days of the traditional teacher were over and the teacher could step aside and concentrate on giving wise and relevant comments to highly motivated pupils involved in more-or-less self-sustainable learning processes. observations of teachers at work in classrooms and particularly when meeting individual teachers in more informal communication settings confirms that the early predictions of paradigm shifts is far from becoming true. the teachers still want to be in control of the classroom and the learning process at the same time as they see the value of the independent learners. a quote from one of teacher can be used as a representative comment for all the teachers involved: as a maths teacher i don’t think the teacher’s role has changed with the introduction of ict. an initial introduction to theory followed up by problem solving is the recipe in maths. supervision remains the same, also when tasks where a computer is involved. i believe this is the case for all subjects. a new learning style? a frequently re-occurring comment from teachers is also related to the question of whether ict-based tools as ms photo story 3 represent and provide opportunities for new pedagogical methodologies or are merely a support-tool for making traditional teaching more efficient. teachers gave many enthusiastic comments about the use of, for example, ms photo story 3 but clearly had doubts about whether it would contribute to a change in teaching styles. attempting to extract what could resemble a kind of common denominator, characterizing teacher attitudes with respect to ict integration in learning processes for enhanced understanding of subject issues, is not a trivial accomplishment. but throughout the contact with the teacher team during the past two years it is justifiable to claim that all teachers seem to agree that integrating ict in learning situations in secondary school is clearly beneficial for the less able learners. pupils who normally are reluctant to get involved in any kind of learning activity seem frequently, but perhaps involuntarily, to be involved in learning-promoting activities when ict is involved. most of the teachers involved expressed positive attitudes when asked to elaborate on the potential ict has for enhancing learning. a frequently used phrase was “yes, i believe ict has a considerable potential for achieving more efficient learning processes and enhanced learning outcome”. however, faced with the question of whether this potential was properly utilized and if any enhancement of learning outcome could be documented by higher grades, all but two of the teachers said that they were unable to present proof in the form of higher grades. the teacher who claimed that progress could be documented by slightly higher grades was careful to emphasize that the changes were marginal and only related to the lessable learners. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 145 discussion the results of our research support findings from other recently-conducted research activities in the same field, indicating that the way teachers are adapting to the role as mentors for ict-supported learning process have the characteristics of an evolutionary process. the observations conducted in the present project revealed an uneven and cumbersome maturing process, metaphorically resembling a rollercoaster ride. initially the teachers were largely positive to the use of ict for teaching and learning support, but the main explanation of this phenomenon is most likely that this was considered a “politically correct” attitude at the time. as the project progressed, the level of teacher frustration fluctuated, but signs of a breakthrough or turning point could be observed when the teachers’ insight into and comprehension of the potential of ict as a learning-enhancing artifact gradually became clearer. the teachers gradually developed a more conscious relation to the task of combining ict-supported learning and alternative pedagogical approaches. in particular, our investigations indicate that conducting the learning process by applying ict in a knowledge creation perspective will contribute considerably to the utilization of ict as a learning-enhancing artifact. attempting to implement ict-supported learning processes, with the objective of enhancing subject-learning outcome but disregarding the necessity of a careful integration of pedagogy and technology, has also been criticized in other recentlypublished research reports (passey, 2006, watson 2001, cordon et al 2007). insufficient integration of pedagogy and ict is claimed to be one of the main factors explaining the failures of achieving enhanced subject-learning outcome as a result of ict-supported learning processes. throughout the school systems, ict is commonly used for increasing motivation among learners but rarely used for achieving the internalization of new knowledge. according to passey (2006) long-term positive effects on learning outcome cannot be expected unless ict is actively used for stimulating the learner’s internal learning processes. using ms photo story 3 as a presentation tool has a potential to inspire and motivate the pupils to work harder and in this way it might enhance the learning outcome, according to the teachers. evidence from a number of research investigations indicates that subject attainment depends on the teacher’s ability to identify suitable affordances and consciously plan for pupil learning with ict as well as providing appropriate support during lessons. by approaching ict-supported learning in a knowledge creation perspective, the present project places its main emphasis on ensuring that the teachers plan and implement learning processes in a way which stimulates knowledge creation. during the first part of the project we gained insight in the teachers’ situations and recognized that the teachers’ lack of general ict competence and confidence made it difficult to investigate the learning potential of ict. initially insufficient ict competence among the participating teachers has considerably hampered the utilization of the ict’s learning potential and necessitated more intense teacher training. in accord with results from other research projects (webb & cox 2004; watson 1993) we found that the teachers needed a deeper understanding of the nature of ict resources in general and the use of digital presentation resources and their potential for supporting learning processes in particular. at the present stage of the research project we can conclude that a significant explanation of some of the teachers’ lack of enthusiasm for integrating ict into classroom teaching activities is that the role of ict is still narrowly regarded as a simple technological tool and not as an artefact in a broader sense. bringing about a change with respect to the role of ict may, to a considerable degree, change the way schools and classroomlearning function as well as the role of teachers and learners. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 146 acknowledgements we would like to thank the participating teachers and the management at the secondary school, for their patience with the researchers and for their creative comments and suggestions contributing to enhancing the quality of the research process. and we would also like to thank the norwegian research council for providing considerable financial support for the project. 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(2002). tracing teachers’ use of technology in a laptop computer school: the interplay of teacher beliefs, social dynamics, and institutional culture. american educational research journal, 39(1), 165-205. issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4740 ©2022 (guna spurava, sirkku kotilainen). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder guna spurava tampere university email: guna.spurava@tuni.fi sirkku kotilainen tampere university email: sirkku.kotilainen@tuni.fi abstract the main question discussed in this article is: how can young people, as empirical experts, inform methodologies in studying digital media literacy? the discussion is rooted in a study based on youth consultation organized in finland in may 2021. the youth consultation was organised to help researchers of the european yskills project from three countries (belgium, czech republic, and finland) to plan a study on disinformation, conducted in the autumn of the same year. the youth consultation consisted of two parts: an online survey used as a qualitative research tool and an open semi-structured discussion. the results of the youth consultation were used to provide recommendations to researchers in the yskills research project. particularly useful was information on young people’s lack of understanding of algorithm-based communication and commercialisation on social media, which led to suggestions for additional thematic questions for the yskills study. overall, the findings suggested that young people could serve as empirical experts and advisors, particularly during the planning stages of research on the use of digital media to address not only questions related to digital media content but also to digital media infrastructure. the results suggested the importance of considering the next step in cooperation with youth in participatory research, such as co-designing research https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4740 mailto:guna.spurava@tuni.fi mailto:sirkku.kotilainen@tuni.fi young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 methods for the digital future and consulting young people as experts in the proposal phase. keywords: young people, participatory research, empirical experts, information disorder introduction the field of participatory research with children and youth rather than on them has been increasingly based on the children’s rights and empowerment discourse (e.g., bradburyjones & taylor, 2015; fargas-malet et al., 2010; livingstone, 2021; lundy et al., 2011; pienimäki, 2019). the significant challenge for researchers to develop strategies that respect young people’s right to be consulted and taken into account was noted approximately 25 years ago (morrow & richards, 1996). around the same time, it was suggested that empowerment through participation can be perceived as the end result of youth participatory research practices (barry, 1996). there has been a lot of emphasis since then on empowering youth through participatory research, but less attention has been paid on collaborating with young people as consultants to increase the validity and robustness of the research (e.g., bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015; pienimäki & kotilainen, 2018). in our article young people in the research are recognized as empirical experts on their own digital experiences assuming that their everyday expertise on digital cultures can affect the research process in multiple ways (e.g., pienimäki & kotilainen, 2018). young people mostly perceive and use digital technologies as valuable resources in their everyday lives (de leyn et al., 2019). that is a reason why their expertise and knowledge about the digital world can be useful for professional researchers to identify various new phenomena within it. previous studies demonstrated that children and youth live at the centre of digital information through daily activities, for example, social media communication and digital games (e.g., smahel et al., 2020). therefore, valuing young people’s voices and experiences as significant sources to inform research methodologies in digital life studies is essential. the idea of engaging young people as researchers of their own digital experiences is becoming more prevalent in the field of media education (williamson et al., 2019). however, the methodological perspective that perceives young people as consultants or experts in the digital sphere is only emerging in youth participatory research. the present study aims to contribute to this area considering young people as empirical experts in the research planning phase. the following research question was posed for this study: how do young people as empirical experts inform the methodologies in studying digital media literacy on information disorder? young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 this study was based on a youth consultation that took place in may 2021 in finland. the consultation was designed to inform methodological applications in the yskills research (hereafter, actual yskills study) planning process. the actual yskills study aimed to obtain information on young people’s capacities to cope with information disorder, more specifically, disinformation in social media communication on cyberhate. it was carried out later in the autumn of 2021 in three countries (belgium, czech republic, and finland) as a sub-study within the european yskills (youth skills) project. the yskills project is funded by the european union (eu’s) horizon 2020 programme and it provides a holistic, child-centric approach to the research on the use of the internet based on young people’s rights to ‘participation, information, freedom of expression, education, play, and protection from harm’(https://yskills.eu/). critical digital media literacy in the age of information disorder fake news has been widely discussed publicly and in academic settings as one of the most serious challenges in today’s information landscape (damstra et al., 2021; kim et al., 2021). however, it has been argued that the term ‘fake news’ does not sufficiently capture the complexity of current information pollution, and some authors have proposed the terms as ‘information disorder‘ or ‘information crisis’ to characterise the situation (lse truth, trust and technology commission, 2018; wardle & derakhshan, 2017). wardle and derakhshan (2017) described information disorder based on degrees of falseness and intention to cause harm. they defined misinformation as information that is false but not created with the intention to cause harm, disinformation as false information deliberately created to cause harm, and malinformation as information based on reality and used to inflict harm on a person, social group, organisation, or country. the london school of economics (lse) truth, trust and technology commission (2018) used the concept of information crisis and argued that it originated from profound changes in the media ecosystem. they classified the information crisis into five ‘giant evils’: a) confusion regarding what is true and who to believe, b) losing trust in even trustworthy sources, c) access to potentially infinite information but lack of agreed upon facts on which to base societal choices, d) irresponsibility and lack of accountability and transparency of social media platforms, and e) citizens disengagement from established structures and losing faith in democracy. similarly, huguet et al. (2021) outlined the problem with the quality of the information in public discourses caused by the rapidly changing media and technology ecosystem. changes in the media system create challenges for digital media users of all ages related to the credibility, trustfulness, veracity, and overall quality of information. digital media platforms, such as facebook, instagram, youtube, tiktok, and twitter, and search https://yskills.eu/ young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 engines, such as google, are the dominant actors in the current information landscape, and they are the main distributors of publicly available information curated through invisible algorithmic operations (carlson, 2019; kotilainen et al., 2021; lse truth, trust and technology commission, 2018; ptaszek, 2021). pre-digitally established truth filters, such as editorial infrastructures of legacy media, are undermined by the business strategies of platform companies, who do not guarantee that the content they offer to users is real or truthful (carlsson, 2019; lse truth, trust and technology commission; frau-meigs, 2019). in this way organized digital society is calling for critical digital media literacy to sustain democracies (carlsson, 2021; lse truth, trust and technology commission, 2018). digital literacy along with media literacy has been proposed as solution for creating order in these crises (buckingham, 2019; carlsson, 2019; hobbs, 2018; livingstone, 2021). citizens’ critical thinking and the ability to distinguish between what is fact and what is true is important to build their capacities to navigate the complex information environment. furthermore, recent literature argues that citizens’ ability to deal with emerging information disorder should not be separated from their ability to understand digital media infrastructures, business logics of dominant digital media platforms, and invisible operations of algorithmic content personalisation (carlsson, 2021; frau-meigs, 2019; haider & sundin, 2019; ptaszek, 2019). algorithmic awareness has recently been noticed in the focus of scholars interested in media education (hobbs, 2020; kotilainen et al., 2021; ptaszek, 2019) and it is considered equally important to the ability to assess individual information sources (gran et al., 2020; haider & sundin, 2019). following these authors, in the age of information disorder, merely fighting fake news by promoting content-related media literacy is insufficient, as mizukoshi et al. (2021) argued, it is also necessary to address digital infrastructure-related media literacy. youth involvement in participatory research on their own digital experiences in today’s dynamic digital world, researchers aim to comprehend a wide range of new phenomena, with particular attention to young people’s digital experiences. youth participation can inform professional research in this area, especially in investigating the same age group and their digital cultures (pienimäki & kotilainen, 2018). from the perspective of youth empowerment, previous studies show that participation is important for exercising young people’s self-determination and ability to make choices and decisions in their lives (percy-smith & thomas, 2010; pienimäki, 2019). one may assume that this also involves the ability to make reasonable choices and decisions in digital cultures. youth participatory research has intensified in recent years due to the rapid development of digital technologies and their challenges as well as innovative research approaches to young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 digital media use, digital skills, and media education (livingstone, 2021; stoilova et al., 2020; sukk & siibak, 2021). researchers have increasingly emphasised the role of young people in informing and evaluating research, with the goal of realising children’s right to participate and improving digital policies from a youth perspective (coleman & weston, 2018; european commission, 2021; livingstone et al., 2021). the youth consultation discussed here belongs to the same framework promoting children’s rights; however, the focus is better science rather than merely youth policies. young people were invited to take part in research as empirical experts as agents of knowledge regarding their own digital lives (mallan et al., 2010). they were perceived as respectable participants who know more about and better understand some dimensions of the constantly changing digital spheres, including consequences of the information disorder, which they could have been experienced in their everyday lives. although there is a growing interest in involving young people as co-researchers in studies on their digital experiences, participatory research with underaged youths, particularly related to information disorder or ‘fake news,’ is scarce ( e.g. bruinenberg et al., 2021; literat et al., 2020). our study aimed to contribute to research in this area. the broader perspective on youth research shows that engagement of youth is possible at all stages, including research design, method selection, data collection, data interpretation, and dissemination of results (bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015; coyne & carter, 2018). young people can be involved in participatory research in different capacities, such as interviewing each other and being authors or co-authors in publications and conference presentations (bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015; mallan et al., 2010; pienimäki & kotilainen, 2018). several researchers focusing on the participatory approach have called for children and youth to take a part in study planning, arguing that co-planning serves to realise children’s right to participation by involving them in generating recommendations (e.g., bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015; morris, 2016). youth involvement as co-researchers has been criticised due to their lack of research competence. however, as it is argued by some authors, it is more important for young people to have the capacity to form their own views rather than prove their research capacity (bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015; lundy et al., 2011). young people’s opinions should be valued as those of experts on their own lives (bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015; fargas-malet et al., 2010). this is especially crucial in the digital sphere, where the older generation cannot effectively advise the younger generation. inter-generational barriers can be overcome by working with young people as co-researchers (kellet et al., 2004) and digital divides can likely be overcome by dialogue with young people as experts on their own digital experiences. this would reduce the risk of ambiguity in adult researchers’ interpretations, improving data quality and overall research robustness (bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015). furthermore, young empirical experts require protection from potential young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 harm as much as young peer researchers or study participants. ethical considerations and child protection are paramount in research involving young people, regardless of the context or their role in the study (bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015; pienimäki & kotilainen, 2018). overall, youth participation in professional academic research can be perceived as transformative, critical research with the goal of changing society through the impact of young people and their voices (morris, 2016; pienimäki & kotilainen 2021). this approach is the foundation of the present study based on youth consultation. as for professional researchers, it was our aim to gain a deeper understanding of youth digital cultures in an effort to identify appropriate themes and methods for conducting yskills research. it was expected that youth would contribute to the research process in a methodological sense, providing an understanding of what to ask and how to collect data on their everyday practices online. methodological approach: consultation design youth consultation was organised in finland in may 2021 with the aim to help researchers from three countries to plan the actual yskills study conducted in october and november 2021. the actual yskills study sought to acquire information on young people’s capacity to cope with information disorder. it was focussing on the following research questions: how do young people cope with misand disinformation online? how do young people differentiate fact from fiction and truth from false? what are the epistemic processes underlying young people’s decision-making processes? the actual yskills study was designed in three stages using mixed methods research. the first two stages were based on quantitative data collection methods. at first, an online survey was conducted, where participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire assessing several aspects of media use, focusing mainly on news consumption. the second stage was a fictional at-risk situation, where both reliable news sources and sources with disinformation were presented using a mobile application developed for the purpose of this research. young participants were asked to answer questions about these sources. they were prompted on their own mobile devices to interact with information presented to them. the third stage used qualitative data collecting methods, and students were invited to participate in focus groups to discuss their experiences during the second stage. the actual yskills study was expected to benefit from the youth consultation, which was young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 organised as a separate study itself. the youth consultation was held in a city setting in finland, at a university teacher training school with the total of 900 students. besides primary, secondary, and upper secondary education, this school provides research activities and teacher training on a university level. all students and their parents are informed in advance that they may be invited to participate in research on a regular basis. nevertheless, students involved in this study were briefed on research process at the beginning of the consultation and informed that they were invited to participate as experts/consultants for upcoming research. the youth consultation drew a total of 16 ninth-grade students (15-16 years old). two faceto-face meetings (2 x 45 minutes) in the school auditorium were arranged with them during an english class. data were collected during these meetings in two stages: (1) an online survey as a qualitative research tool (braun et al., 2021) was combined with (2) an open semi-structured discussion. in both stages of the consultation, participants were encouraged to use english and finnish languages. students’ own mobile phones were used to collect data for the survey, and the mobile version of surveymonkey was used as the platform. the online survey contained only open-ended questions, highlighting topics related to information disorder, such as news sources, sharing news and information online, perceptions of source reliability, and also questions related to tracking, attention directing, and commercialisation in social media platforms. the group discussion with all 16 participants together was conducted immediately after they completed the online questionnaire. the discussion was mainly a reflection on their survey answers. the discussion was led by researchers involved in the actual yskills study. the discussion was recorded and later transcribed verbatim. finnish texts were translated into english. word clouds were used as visual representations of word frequency to analyse the results of the online survey and a qualitative thematic analysis was applied to analyse data collected during the discussion. findings based on the youth consultation based on the results of the youth consultation it was possible to provide recommendations for all three stages of the actual yskills study. first, the results of consultation identified a list of online platforms where young people prefer to share information (figure 1), which was used later for the quantitative survey in the actual yskills study. second, the results regarding opinions on unreliable news sources revealed the digital media platforms that was later included in the fictional at-risk situation, where news sources and sources with disinformation were presented (figure 2). third, an additional thematic section was added to the focus group interviews, with questions regarding various aspects of algorithm-based social media communication and business logics. the results of youth consultation came into light for researchers in the autumn, when the young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 actual yskills study not only revealed the significance of the suggestions made during the consultation, but the data highlighted similar trends in young people's online experiences. as mentioned before, a youth consultation yielded recommendations related to digital platforms on which young people prefer to share information. according to the results of the online survey, whatsapp, snapchat, and instagram were the most frequently mentioned platforms for sharing information, followed by tiktok, twitter, redid, and hangouts, as shown in the word cloud (figure 1). figure 1. digital platforms preferred for sharing information this information was later also used for the first stage of actual yskills study during the preparation of the questionnaire for quantitative survey. furthermore, based on this finding instagram, tiktok, and twitter were considered as platforms for presenting news in second stage of actual yskills study organised as fictional at-risk situations on mobile application. preliminary results of focus group interviews conducted as third stage of actual yskills study revealed similar trends for preferred platforms for sharing information online among finnish respondents (n=71). youth consultation provided several platforms as answers to the question: in your consideration, what are the most unreliable sources of news of the latest events? (figure 2). young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 figure 2. most unreliable sources of news as the word cloud illustrates ‘social media’ in general, and instagram, and tiktok were identified as the most frequently acknowledged unreliable sources of news. it must be noted that instagram was revealed as one of the top preferred platforms for sharing information as well as one of the top platforms perceived as unreliable information sources. these results supported the researchers’ decision to focus on instagram, tiktok, and twitter as platforms for a fictional at-risk situation in the actual yskills study. the actual yskills study revealed a similar set of unreliable sources during focus groups interviews in finland. based on the results of youth consultation, an additional thematic section about algorithm based social media infrastructure was included in the focus group interviews. during the consultation, young people were asked regarding their knowledge of certain elements of algorithm-based communication in social media, such as tracking and attention directing, along with a question on how social media make money. young participants in the youth consultation identified various ways that social media track them, including ‘hearing what i say even when my phone is on the table,’ ‘search history,’ and ‘follow my clicks.’ in addition, they reported noticing techniques social media use to keep their attention, such as ‘attractive content’, ‘communication with other users,’ or ‘notifications.’ similar findings emerged from the actual yskills study in focus group discussions in finland. however, preliminary analyses suggested age-related differences between eighth and ninth graders, with older students noticing these types of social media logic patterns more frequently and being able to explain them in more detail. most participants in the youth consultation identified advertising and subscriptions as sources of profit for online platforms. some participants provided specific answers, such as, ‘the more views or followers you get, the more money you have.’ some participants noted attention direction used by platforms: ‘they make money from ads and new innovations that grab the user’s attention.’ however, several participants of youth consultation even did not understand the questions regarding tracking and young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 commercialisation on social media. similar findings were observed in finland in focus group interviews during the actual yskills study, particularly the lack of understanding of the commercialisation of social media platforms. only a few respondents mentioned ‘selling our data’ and ‘collaboration of media companies’ as profit-making activities of social media. conclusions this case study was based on youth consultation with ninth grade students in finland and examined how young people as empirical experts can influence methodologies in studying digital media literacy. the youth consultation aimed to help professional researchers involved in the european yskills network gain a more profound understanding of youth digital experiences for developing themes and methodologies for the actual yskills study, which focused on young people’s capacity to cope with information disorder. however, this case study based on youth consultation may also provide insights for other researchers working on similar projects, where young people could be considered empirical experts on their digital lives. this study revealed that young people can contribute useful information during the planning stage of research, which may guide changes and additions to qualitative and quantitative methods. for the yskills research, the consultation served as a valuable pre-study for deciding on final themes and data collection methods. the findings of the youth consultation expanded on previous studies arguing for the inclusion of young people as experts early in the research planning phase (e.g., bradbury-jones & taylor, 2015). young people made an impact on yskills research and were valued as experts on their own digital experiences, with their views seriously considered in the actual yskills study. the youth consultation highlighted the challenges with digital infrastructure related media literacy among young participants. the results revealed differences in understanding algorithm-based social media communication and platform business logics. while some participants were able to precisely describe tracking, attention directing, and business logics of social media, others were unable to even comprehend the questions’ meaning. to achieve immediate benefit, thematic questions for discussing social media platform logics were added to focus group interviews in the actual yskills study. the preliminary results of the focus group discussions demonstrated that these new additions were important. furthermore, the results helped incorporate themes related to social media infrastructure and commercialisation into the research agenda of the actual yskills study. the initial analyses revealed that young people’s understanding of algorithm-based communication was basic. most respondents could describe how social media tracks them and keeps their attention; however, commercialisation seemed more difficult for young people to discuss. in sum, the findings demonstrated that young people can serve as empirical experts and young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 advisors during the planning stage of research on the 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(2021). caring dataveillance and the construction of ‘good parenting’: estonian parents’ and pre-teens’ reflections on the use of tracking technologies. communications, 46(3), 446–467. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun2021-0045 https://doi.org/10.15083/0002002825 https://doi.org/10.7202/1040147ar https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.1996.tb00461.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.1996.tb00461.x https://doi.org/10.1080/25741136.2018.1541371 https://doi.org/doi:10.1163/9789004448490_005 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119166900.ch21 https://doi.org/10.21953/lse.47fdeqj01ofo https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i4.3407 https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2021-0045 https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2021-0045 young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 wardle, c., & derakhshan, h. (2017). information disorder: toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking. council of europe. https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-toward-aninterdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html williamson, b., potter, j., & eynon, r. (2019). new research problems and agendas in learning, media and technology: the editors’ wishlist. learning, media and technology. 44(2), 87–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1614953 https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1614953 young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder abstract introduction critical digital media literacy in the age of information disorder youth involvement in participatory research on their own digital experiences methodological approach: consultation design findings based on the youth consultation conclusions references title 43 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 visual considerations in the presentation of mathematical proofs lara alcock mathematics education centre loughborough university email: l.j.alcock@lboro.ac.uk matthew inglis mathematics education centre loughborough university email: m.j.inglis@lboro.ac.uk abstract this article is about visual issues in the presentation of mathematics within teaching situations. it focuses particularly on the presentation of proofs to undergraduate students. we describe some of the decisions that a lecturer must make when presenting a written proof, from the layout of individual equations to the layout of a whole argument on the page. we consider the way in which these decisions are made explicit for lecturers who construct electronic learning resources termed e-proofs, and conclude by discussing the constraints and affordances of this technology. keywords: e-learning, lectures, mathematics education, undergraduate, visual introduction in some aspects of undergraduate teaching, visual considerations are naturally salient. lecturers give presentations and, whether or not these use electronic presentation software, some thought is given to layout. such considerations include how much to put on one page or board, what size the words should be, what to reveal at what stage, and simple practicalities such as how to use the space available so that all the students can see everything that is written. lecturers might differ in the extent to which they attend to these considerations and the extent to which the result satisfies their students, but mailto:l.j.alcock@lboro.ac.uk mailto:m.j.inglis@lboro.ac.uk seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 44 all make these choices on a day-to-day basis. visual considerations also have natural salience in some aspects of mathematics. in mathematics, one usually thinks of visual work as involving graphs or other types of diagrams, and a wealth of resources now exists to enhance our ability to create and animate visual images representing mathematical concepts and relationships. some of these resources have been put to extensive use in teaching, and will be discussed briefly in the next section. this article, however, discusses a different issue, that of how lecturers present mathematical proofs. a mathematical proof is, roughly speaking, a demonstration that a statement must be true, given established assumptions (axioms, definitions and laws of logic). proofs are ubiquitous in higher-level mathematics, which has been characterised as ―a proving science‖ (hilbert, renkl, kessler, & reiss, 2008). given the central place that proofs occupy in mathematics, it is unsurprising that comprehending proofs is the most common learning activity in undergraduate mathematics classrooms (weber, 2004). a stereotypical undergraduate mathematics lecture consists of the lecturer writing down successive definitions, theorems and proofs on a blackboard (or perhaps an overhead projector), coupled with verbal explanations and physical gestures designed to help the audience. many in the mathematics community are highly attached to this mode of teaching (baxter, 2005). here we concentrate on two distinct ways in which communication of mathematical proofs involves visual information: the layout of a mathematical proof on a page, and the gestures lecturers use to convey information about the structure of the proof. we consider the layout issue at three distinct levels: layout of systems of equations, layout of subarguments so as to highlight similar structures, and layout of proofs so as to facilitate the comprehension of the structure of the whole proof. we discuss layout choices that lecturers routinely make, and the compromises between choices at the different levels when deciding how to present any particular proof. we then highlight some ways in which gestures are naturally used to draw attention to the structures captured by any layout. finally, we draw together discussion of these two kinds of visual information by considering how a particular type of resource, termed an e-proof, encourages greater than usual attention to be paid to layout, and aims to capture information that would usually be conveyed by gesture in a lecture. visual considerations in mathematics as noted in the introduction, discussions of the visual aspects of mathematics have primarily been associated with representations such as graphs and diagrams that are clearly of a visual nature. one line of research in this area has focused on whether some individuals have a preference for visual reasoning, and the consequences if they do (alcock & simpson, 2004; dreyfus, 1994; presmeg, 1986). another, particularly in the context of calculus, has focused on whether students can accurately ―read off‖ information from graphical representations, and what sort of representation might facilitate conceptual understanding of concepts such as the derivative (tall, 1992). another has focused on ways in which students and teachers interact with dynamic geometry software (jones, 2000). such software facilitates the construction and direct manipulation of geometric figures, but one problem is that the immediacy and sense of obviousness obtained by manipulating figures on screen do not translate easily into the motivation to establish the logical relationships embodied by the figures (hadas, hershkovitz, & schwarz, 2000). thus in this strand of research, as in others (zazkis, dubinsky, & dautermann, 1996), some authors have argued that ability to translate between visual and other representations is required for successful visual thinking in mathematics. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 45 this is not the only approach to such issues, however. giaquinto (2007), for instance, argued that the distinction between ―visual thinking‖ and some contrasting type (often called ―algebraic‖, ―symbolic‖ or ―analytic‖ thinking) may be false, not because the focus should be on the translation between representation systems, but because for some representation systems it is not easy to make this classification. he suggested that there may be ―several independent features whose presence or absence unconsciously affects our inclination to classify thinking as symbolic or diagrammatic‖ (p.259), and cited commutative arrow diagrams as a case which is visual in the sense that ―relationships are simultaneously displayed rather that sequentially stated‖ (p.256) but for which there is also a syntax. importantly for our discussion, he also argued that algebraic manipulation involves visual experience in two significant ways: first, because algebraic manipulation involves imagery of sliding, rotating and so on (when manipulating algebraic expressions, we might consider ourselves to be moving all the x‘s to the left or swapping the physical positions of two symbols), and, second, because deciding what to manipulate (and how) involves recognising structures in written mathematics at various levels. for instance, he considered an expression to have primary form and non-primary form . in the non-primary form, ― ‖ is treated as a single unit which can be acted upon; seeing it this way requires shifting one‘s attention and so as not to be distracted by its component parts. giaquinto noted that making progress in algebraic derivations with such expressions involves making shifts of visual aspect between such forms (p. 199). researchers have investigated the degree to which students notice what giaquinto called non-primary forms. in mathematics education, the ability to do this is sometimes called ―structure sense‖ and is related to the ability to see an expression as a single object rather than as a process to be carried out (gray & tall, 1994; linchevski & livneh, 1999; sfard & linchevski, 1994). structure sense has been studied via cases in which a problem or exercise is straightforward if one sees the structure, but requires a lengthy chain of manipulations if attention is focused on the primary form. for instance, hoch and dreyfus (2005) studied 15-year-old students‘ ability to answer items such as factoring the expression . only 23 out of 88 participants treated as a single variable and made use of the nonprimary quadratic structure; many more (57) opened the brackets as a first move, attending instead to the primary structure.i in mathematics education and psychology, researchers have also focused on the impact of visual information on students‘ tendency to make or endorse incorrect algebraic ―moves‖. kirshner and awtry (2004), for instance, studied cases in which the salience of certain visual information is related to common errors in algebra. they observed that the many typical ―mal-rules‖ applied by students, such as , are analogous in form to correct rules (in this case ), and that such rules have visual coherence in the sense that the leftand right-hand sides appear naturally related to one another. they suggested two characteristics that contribute to this coherence of such (so-called ‗visually salient‘) mal-rules: ―repetition of elements across the equals sign and a visual reparsing of elements across the equal sign‖ (p. 229). in contrast, some genuine rules lack visual salience and are therefore particularly difficult for students to accept, for example, . in a separate line of research, landy and goldstone (2007) found that, contrary to various processing models of algebraic performance, the physical spacing of algebraic and arithmetic expressions influences how students engage with them. for example, when spacing respects the order of operations (e.g., ) it is easier to process than when the spacing is reversed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 46 (e.g., ). clearly, making use of visual information is important in interpreting notation correctly and in performing productive algebraic manipulations. our discussion in this article moves further in the direction of considering the visual impact of the way in which symbols and words are laid out on a page, this time in situations in which the immediate aim is for the student to understand an extended argument rather than to manipulate symbols. thus, we shall argue that while a proof like that shown in figure 1 would not ordinarily be thought of as involving ―visual‖ mathematics, in fact there are many visual issues worth consideration in its presentation. figure 1. a theorem and proof from an undergraduate mathematics course (screen taken from an e-proof). visual considerations in the layout of proofs in undergraduate mathematics lectures, lecturers state and prove theorems. both the theorems and the proofs are typically written using a combination of words and algebraic notation, the proportions of each varying with the subject matter and with the individual preference of the lecturer. the amount of both verbal and symbolic abbreviation also varies, but in most cases both the theorem and proof will be written so that, provided that the reader is familiar with the notation, they could read the whole out loud as they would read out any other coherent text. in this section we consider ways in which the visual layout of a proof might impact its readability to a novice audience and must be decided by a lecturer. layout of equations proofs often involve sequences of algebraic manipulations. the layout of these manipulations is under the control of the lecturer but is subject to competing constraints. for instance, the argument below is composed of a series of inequalities linked by logical equivalence symbols ( ): seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 47 this structure may be more discernible with extra spaces and longer arrows: this may be related to the effect giaquinto discussed (giaquinto, 2007, p.200) in which information is seen to be in columns or not depending upon the layout. here it may be that the inequalities can be more readily seen as chunks with the additional separation. layouts that are more recognisably in columns are also used. for longer chains of equations or inequalities, for instance, a horizontal layout can be visually confusing, as figure 2 illustrates. figure 2. a visually confusing layout for a chain of inequalities. a vertical layout is commonly used in such situations. this tends to mean that symbols that are being replaced by others are more closely lined up underneath each other. it also allows more space for adding reasons for given relationships, as illustrated in figure 3. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 48 figure 3. a vertical layout for a chain of inequalities. mathematical typesetting packages allow routine use of such vertical layouts, and it might seem obvious that they should always be used in similar cases. however, in undergraduate mathematics such a chain of equalities would often be embedded within a longer proof. this longer argument might have higherlevel structure which is more difficult to see if key elements are more separated on the page, as we discuss in the next sections. layout emphasising similar subarguments proofs can often be thought of as composed of sections of which each establishes some step in the whole argument. sometimes two or more of these have a similar structure, and recognition of this might reduce the apparent complexity of the argument for a reader. for example, consider the proof from figure 1. this has two places in which very similar reasoning is used twice, both of which are highlighted in figure 4. in the first, it is established that then that . this takes one line each time and the matching layout on these two lines is designed to facilitate the recognition of this. in the second, it is established that and then that . this takes two lines each time and, in the second case, involves an additional comment in the argument. again, however, the largely matching layout is designed to facilitate recognition of this difference. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 49 figure 4. proof with blocks of repeated reasoning highlighted. as with the discussion of equation layout in the previous section, it might seem obvious that where structures ―match‖, this matching should be reflected in the layout on the page. this often happens by default, since in many cases lecturers start a new line every time they start a new sentence. some textbooks also use this general tactic when presenting proofs (see, for example, the proofs in the appendix of j. stewart‘s (2008) calculus). this peculiarity of mathematical writing separates each deduction but also means that similar elements do tend to appear lined up. this does not always happen, however: many undergraduate textbooks present proofs in continuous paragraph text (e.g., stewart & tall, 1977). however, modifying a layout to highlight similarities may not have straightforward benefits. on the one hand, it might reduce the amount of work that a student has to do to ―see‖ similar steps in the argument. on the other, it is well known that students often learn mathematics by attending to syntactic regularities without understanding the underlying meaning (e.g., lithner, 2003). the salience of the matching might exacerbate this tendency and thus impede understanding of the proof as a whole, as discussed in the following sections. layout highlighting structure in order to understand a mathematical proof fully, it is not sufficient to understand each statement in isolation. one also needs to understand how the statements fit together to form a coherent and logically valid argument. the thinking this might involve can be illustrated by considering figure 4 again. the second highlighted box is preceded by a line saying now we shall prove that . and followed by a line that begins seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 50 hence … the point of the section in the box is that it achieves this stated aim of showing that , and in order to understand the proof fully one would need to recognise this. the proof achieves this aim by showing that cannot be less than or greater than . it does this via the two subproofs, each of which leads to a contradiction of the earlier statement that is the supremum of the set x. in order to understand fully, one would need to work out what exactly has been contradicted. this requires the reader to input previous knowledge of the definition of supremum and to refer to the point earlier in the proof at which x is defined in order to work out how it applies to give the contradiction in this case. various devices are used in mathematical writing to draw attention to this kind of structure. statements of intent (―now we shall prove that .‖) are one such device. another is to label part of the proof and to refer back to it later. for instance, one might put an asterisk by the third line where the set x is defined and refer to this to give a more detailed explanation of how exactly the contradiction arises. however, such additional information would increase the length of the proof, and it is rarely the case that every such structural element is specifically flagged and explained. so the reader necessarily has to do some work to identify this type of higher-level structure. learning to do so is perhaps analogous to learning structure sense as discussed earlier. layout discussion there are practical trade-offs among the constraints discussed in the above sections. using a vertical rather than horizontal layout for a system of equations increases the apparent length of a proof. this might interfere with the identification of structures at higher levels because parts of an argument that are logically connected will be physically more separated in space, especially if the length is pushed above one page. mathematicians routinely make decisions about such trade-offs as part of their teaching practice. indeed, they probably do so more consciously now that technology facilitates the production and distribution of printed and on-screen notes. the impact of layout in these notes is greater now for the same reason, since students have access to the materials exactly as the lecturer intended and not in their own handwritten copy in which layout might vary. nevertheless, lecturers likely make these layout decisions in an ad hoc, responsive way, deciding ―what looks good‖ for any given proof, without systematically considering the alternatives. there is no need to alter this model if we assume that the student should be able to identify the structures from any layout. mathematicians might reasonably see such work as a necessary part of coming to understand a proof, although students may not aim for the level of understanding that a mathematician would consider appropriate (selden & selden, 2003; weber, 2008). however, proof comprehension is a complex task involving coordinating information at different levels, if not simultaneously then at least in quick succession (weber & alcock, 2005; yang & lin, 2008). as a result, a student‘s success in understanding any given proof is likely to be affected by problems of cognitive load. whether high loads can be reduced by simple manipulations of layout is an open question, and we shall return to this point later. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 51 gesture a lecturer typically says much more than they write (or show) by giving rationales for construction of the proof in a certain way, reminders of the meanings of basic concepts, links to other parts of the course, etc. much of this speech will likely be accompanied by gestures, which therefore constitute another form of visual information available to students. like all communicators, lecturers make a variety of different types of gesture. for example, greiffenhagen (2008) analysed a lecture from a course on inductive logic, and found that the lecturer made gestures (among others): • to point to two quantities that he referred to in speech as ―those things‖, • to trace across the ―less than‖ symbol between the two quantities while talking about the space‖ between them, • to mime squeezing a number into a gap by making himself smaller then bigger, • to make a small upwards movement while pointing at one of the quantities and discussing another that is ―slightly bigger‖ (greiffenhagen, 2008). such gestures reflect the content of the mathematics in a meaningful way. research involving much younger students indicates that they can pick up mathematical ideas conveyed through gesture. such research has used procedures for solving very simple problems (of the type ), and has shown that children in individual instruction are more likely to reiterate the teacher‘s speech if it is accompanied by a matching gesture than no gesture, and less likely still if the gesture conflicts with the conceptual structure (goldin-meadow, kim, & singer, 1999). furthermore, children required to produce gestures consistent with an appropriate strategy tended to learn more than those required to produce partially correct gestures, and these, in turn, tended to learn more than those required to produce no gestures (goldin-meadow, cook, & mitchell, 2009). the message of this research is that gestures are not incidental in mathematical learning: teachers‘ gestures aid their students‘ learning, and students‘ gestures during learning activities aid retention. critically, however, during undergraduate lectures, lecturers‘ gestures are usually not recorded (either in student‘s self-taken notes, or in written handouts produced by lecturers), and students in lectures are not often (if ever) taught to gesture in a systematic way. in the next section we discuss e-proofs, a novel computer-based approach to presenting mathematical proofs that does attempt to record information usually encoded in gestures, as well as make explicit other types of information about mathematical structures as discussed in the earlier sections. e-proofs e-proofs are designed with the intention of supporting students both in comprehension of particular proofs and in developing an awareness of the logical structures they should attend to when reading proofs in general. in the current iteration, each e-proof has an underlying copy of a theorem and proof, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 52 multiple screens in which various sections are ―greyed out‖ to focus attention on particular parts and, for each screen, a verbal commentary with boxes and arrows that appear and disappear to highlight the relationships described therein. how e-proofs work figures 5, 6 and 7 illustrate the way in which an e-proof synchronises audio commentary and visual information. the figures show three images from one screen, demonstrating how the annotations change as the audio progresses; the commentary is reproduced in the captions. figure 5. “in the third line, we work on the second part of our expression above. we start here because this part is simpler to deal with”. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 53 figure 6. “at the end of the line, we see that we have mod of f of x minus f of a is less than epsilon over two mod g of a plus 1”. figure 7. “this is because we want to end up with mod g of a times mod f of x minus f of a less than epsilon over 2, and we want to avoid a situation where we are dividing by zero”. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 54 these figures illustrate the way in which the animations and audio can be used to focus attention on the way statements within a proof are coordinated in a higher-level structure. some of the other explanations focus instead on providing detailed explanations of a single line. along with other e-proofs, the version shown in figures 5–7 is currently on the university‘s vle page for the relevant course. students can interact with it in a number of ways: they can move from screen to screen using either the back and next buttons on the bottom left or the number buttons along the bottom; they can play the audio by clicking the play button under the lecturer‘s picture on the right; and they can pause this when they want to and play it multiple times (or not at all). this eproof was made using flash and the full working version can be seen and tried out at http://www.projectexpound.org.uk/.ii visual considerations in creating e-proofs the creation of e-proofs encourages consideration of visual issues in a way that the planning of ordinary lecture presentations does not. this operates on all the levels discussed in the sections on layout and gesture, and we shall now run through these (in the reverse order). first and perhaps most obviously, information that would normally be conveyed in gesture is converted to a combination of annotations and highlighting. constructing the annotations and highlights in advance encourages the lecturer to decide explicitly where they want to focus attention. the first author has argued (alcock, 2009) that e-proofs provide a more precise way of directing attention than would normally be achieved by spontaneous gestures, and that they capture this information so that it remains available once the lecture is over. this way of capturing gestures means that information that is normally implicit in a written proof can be made explicit. logical structures that cut across the proof can be highlighted, either as part of a line-by-line explanation or in separate screens designed to focus attention at this higher level. similar subarguments can be explicitly pointed out, either by focusing on their internal similarity or by focusing on the way in which they contribute to a higher-level argument (figure 8 shows an example of the latter, from the older style e-proof used earlier in figures 1 and 4). again, a lecturer constructing an e-proof needs to make decisions in advance about where to focus attention and how. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 55 figure 8. an e-proof screen focusing attention on the structure of the subargument showing that , as discussed earlier. this use of annotations and highlighting means that in some ways, e-proofs make visual information more salient than does an ordinary lecture or written presentation. they are designed to use such information to focus students‘ attention, and a lecturer designing an e-proof is encouraged to make more advance, conscious decisions about what visual information to include. however, the physical constraints imposed by font and page size are much less forgiving than in printed lecture notes or in a presentation at the board. while this could be offset by features that allow zooming or moving around within the text, we decided at this stage to prioritise maintaining a sense that the proof is a whole argument by keeping it all displayed at once. this restriction means that there are fewer options in deciding on the layout of equation systems or parts of the proofs so that similar structures are lined up. for proofs of the length shown here, it also means that there is a finite amount of space for statements of intent and other indicators of structure that might have appeared in ordinary printed or written lecture notes. these indicators can instead be captured by annotations and audio, but there is a trade-off in what can be included in what form, especially when one considers that the navigation facilities also take up space. pedagogical considerations in creating e-proofs e-proofs provide more information than a written copy of the underlying proof. however, they do not provide a great deal more: typically only one short explanation is offered for each statement or logical relationship. in a lecture, something quite different happens: multiple explanations are offered at speed, with ongoing gestures and with information at different levels mixed together. study of an e-proof might therefore improve a student‘s learning by allowing them to process a manageable amount of information at a time, or it might detract from it by denying them access to multiple versions of the same explanation. in a written presentation, something different happens again: no extra explanation is provided, so readers must decide where to focus and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 56 construct explanations on their own. study of an e-proof might therefore improve students‘ learning by giving them explanations that they would not otherwise construct, or it might detract from them by removing the need to think deeply about what a suitable explanation would involve. it is not clear how such concerns should be balanced in pedagogical practice, and therefore not clear whether and to whom e-proofs in their current form will be beneficial. some opinions are consistent with the idea that support for taking in explanations is needed: students often claim that it is impossible to write everything down in an ordinary mathematics lecture while also trying to understand what is said. other opinions are consistent with the idea that offering too much support undermines learning: lecturers often believe that if students do not have something to do they will drift off, and research indicates that taking notes does increase retention of presented information, (kiewra, 1989) (though it is not obvious how this applies in the common situation in mathematics lectures in which students write down exactly what the lecturer writes and no more). it is also possible that e-proofs or similar resources may be of great use to new undergraduates who are unaccustomed to reading proofs, but of minimal use or even detrimental at higher levels. further investigation is therefore needed to ascertain whether e-proofs benefit students at different levels in different ways and, indeed, whether different formats (with more or less explanation, or prompts for students to consider explanations of their own) would be more useful. to facilitate this and to allow lecturers to produce e-proofs of their own, work is now underway to construct a web-based e-proof creation tool called expound. this tool will allow choices about e-proof layout and will also allow text and diagrams to appear and disappear either over the proof or off to one side. for more detail see http://expound.lboro.ac.uk. conclusion visual information is abundant in mathematics, even in presentations of verbal/symbolic arguments that are not typically thought of as involving visual representations. here we have suggested that written proofs visually encode structures and relationships at various levels, and that decoding this information to retrieve these structures is an important part of understanding undergraduate mathematics. similarly, gestures embody information about mathematical objects, relationships between them, and (the aspect that is captured in e-proofs) indicators as to which part of a proof is supposed to be the focus of attention and how it is related to other parts. some of this visual information is thought about consciously by mathematics lecturers, and other parts not. lecturers make many decisions about layout in any written presentation, but they may not have any systematic rationales for these decisions, even though the outcomes are likely to be increasingly influential now that at least some pre-printed notes are commonly provided. similarly, while a lecturer might sometimes decide to point deliberately or to use a gesture intended to represent an object or relationship, many gestures used will be simply integrated as part of ordinary communication. constructing e-proofs encourages a lecturer to think deliberately about the visual information provided on top of a written format, and allows students to access this extra information at their own pace. extra resources with such facilities are often popular, and informal feedback from a secondand thirdseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 57 year course in analysis indicated that students liked e-proofs, felt that they understood proofs better when these were available, and would have liked more to be available across different courses (alcock, 2009). similarly, feedback from mathematics lecturing staff who have seen the e-proof system has been positive. nevertheless, informal feedback has serious limitations and does not, in particular, demonstrate effectiveness. further research is planned to compare the learning gains achieved by students studying with e-proofs with the gains made by those restricted to using traditional paper-based notes. author note this work was partially supported by grants from jisc and the msor network. references alcock, l. (2009). e-proofs: student experience of online resources to aid understanding of mathematical proofs. in proceedings of the 12th conference on research in undergraduate mathematics education. raleigh, nc: special interest group of the mathematical association of america on research in undergraduate mathematics education. alcock, l., & simpson, a. (2004). convergence of sequences and series: interactions between visual reasoning and the learner‘s beliefs about their own role. educational studies in mathematics, 57(1), 1-32. baxter, p. d. (2005). one year on — reflections of new lecturer. msor connections, 5(2) , 1-3. dreyfus, t. (1994). imagery and reasoning in mathematics and mathematics education. in d. f. robitalle, d. h. wheeler, & c. kieran (eds.), selected lectures from the 7th international congress on mathematical education (pp. 107-122). quebec, canada: les presses de l‘université laval. giaquinto, m. (2007). visual thinking in mathematics. oxford: oxford university press. goldin-meadow, s., cook, s. w., & mitchell, z. a. (2009). gesturing gives children new ideas about math. psychological science, 20(3), 267-272. goldin-meadow, s., kim, s., & singer, m. (1999). what the teacher‘s hands tell the student‘s mind about math. journal of educational psychology, 91(4), 720-730. gray, e., & tall, d. (1994). duality, ambiguity and flexibility: a proceptual view of simple arithmetic. journal for research in mathematics education, 25(2), 115141. greiffenhagen, c. (2008). video analysis of mathematical practice? different attempts to ―open up‖ mathematics for sociological investigation. forum: qualitative social research, 9(3), 32. hadas, n., hershkovitz, r., & schwarz, b. b. (2000). the role of contradiction and uncertainty in promoting the need to prove in dynamic geometry environments. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 58 educational studies in mathematics, 44(1-2), 127-150. hilbert, t. s., renkl, a., kessler, s., & reiss, k. (2008). learning to prove in geometry: learning from heuristic examples and how it can be supported. learning and instruction, 18(1), 54-65. hoch, m., & dreyfus, t. (2005). students‘ difficulties with applying a familiar formula in an unfamiliar context. in h. l. chick & j. l. vincent (eds.), proceedings of the 29th international conference on the psychology of mathematics education (vol. 3, pp. 145-152). melbourne, australia: igpme. jones, k. (2000). providing a foundation for deductive reasoning: students‘ interpretations when using dynamic geometry software and their evolving mathematical explanations. educational studies in mathematics, 44(1-2), 5585. kiewra, k. a. (1989). a review of note-taking: the encoding storage paradigm and beyond. educational psychology review, 1(2), 147-172. kirshner, d., & awtry, t. (2004). visual salience of algebraic transformations. journal for research in mathematics education, 35(4), 224-257. landy, d., & goldstone, r. (2007). how abstract is symbolic thought? journal of experimental psychology: learning, memory and cognition, 33(4), 720-733. linchevski, l., & livneh, d. (1999). structure sense: the relationship between algebraic and numerical contexts. educational studies in mathematics, 40(2), 173-196. lithner, j. (2003). students‘ mathematical reasoning in university textbook exercises. educational studies in mathematics, 52(1), 29–55. presmeg, n. c. (1986). visualisation and mathematical giftedness. educational studies in mathematics, 17(3), 297-311. selden, a., & selden, j. (2003). validations of proofs considered as texts: can undergraduates tell whether an argument proves a theorem? journal for research in mathematics education, 34(1), 4-36. sfard, a., & linchevski, l. (1994). the gains and the pitfalls of reification — the case of algebra. educational studies in mathematics, 26(2), 191-228. stewart, i. n., & tall, d. o. (1977). the foundations of mathematics. oxford: oxford university press. stewart, j. (2008). calculus. toronto, brooks/cole. tall, d. o. (1992). visualizing differentials in two and three dimensions. teaching mathematics and its applications, 11(1), 1-7. weber, k. (2004). traditional instruction in advanced mathematics courses: a case study of one professor‘s lectures and proofs in an introductory real analysis course. journal of mathematical behavior, 23(2), 115-133. weber, k. (2008). how mathematicians determine if an argument is a valid proof. journal for research in mathematics education, 39(4), 431-459. weber, k., & alcock, l. (2005). using warranted implications to understand and validate proofs. for the learning of mathematics, 25 (1), 34-38. yang, k.-l., & lin, f.-l. (2008). a model of reading comprehension of geometry proof. educational studies in mathematics, 67(1), 59-76. zazkis, r., dubinsky, e., & dautermann, j. (1996). co-ordinating visual and analytic strategies: a study of students‘ understanding of the group d4. journal for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 1 – 2010 59 research in mathematics education, 27(4), 435-457. i factorising directly gives . multiplying out gives , which must then be tidied up and refactorised. ii this e-proof was created by lee barnett and with the support of a loughborough university academic practice award. the expound website gives information about a follow-on project supported by a jisc learning and teaching innovation grant. microsoft word gunilla jedeskog ict in swedish schools.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 ict in swedish schools 1984 – 2004: how computers work in the teachers’ world gunilla jedeskog senior lecturer linköping university gunje@ibv.liu.se abstract for over twenty years government initiatives have promoted the use of computer/ict in swedish schools. this paper, based on national evaluations, briefly describes experiences about these processes, from 1984 to 2004. discussed are the actors, from outside the school arena, who sat in motion the campaigns and processes at both macro and micro levels. it is concluded that the involvement of teachers at an early stage and a combination of time, technology and the culture of schools are basic conditions for a successful innovation of ict in school. keywords: school, sweden, information and communication technology, innovation, longitudinal. introduction at the turn of the 21st century there are some keywords referring to school development circulating worldwide. learning to learn, digital literacy, collaboration, project work, team teaching, searching for information, lifelong learning, etc. are mentioned both outside and inside schools. a common goal of teaching is to help students develop the ability to manage their own learning, handle information, collaborate and solve problems. ict, information and communication technology, is expected to be a means to fulfil this goal and at the same time the use of ict may be regarded as one of the reasons for the goal. with respect to the contents of policy documents and expectations, it is possible to speak of a global trend among industrialised countries regarding the official view of computer and ict in teaching. the intention is to prepare students for life in a world permeated by ict (robitaille, 1997; pelgrum & anderson, 1999; kozma, 2003). computer and ict know-how are often seen as a student’s fourth basic skill, after reading, writing and arithmetic. the swedish history of the use of computers in school dates back to the early 1970s, when small-scale experimental work, initiated and monitored by the national board of education, was carried out in a few schools (riis et al., 1997). since the middle of the 80’s there have been a number of initiatives and campaigns introducing computer/ict into swedish schools. many projects have been implemented, differing from each other in regards to extension, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 2 agents and content. resource funds have been invested, with each campaign monetarily outdoing the one before (riis et al., 1997; nissen et al., 2002). the aim of the article is to discuss perspectives, contents and changes related to processes of ict innovation in swedish schools over the twenty years period of 1984 – 2004. in particular, attention is paid to that of the school and the teacher as they have responded to the ict policies over time and what knowledge has been gained about their role in change. the experiences and findings of four national campaigns directed at compulsory and upper secondary schools are considered. the evaluation reports of these four campaigns are the main sources of this article1. evaluators visited schools involved in computer/ict projects. teachers, students, parents, principals, politicians and school administrators were either interviewed or given questionnaires to describe their experiences with and express their opinions of computer/ict use in school. this article is based on a qualitative analysis of the evaluation reports. concepts as time, technology and the culture of school are focused on. the processes of innovation there are external as well as internal perspectives reflecting the driving forces of technology. the former indicates technological artefacts and processes influencing schools from a top down perspective. actors outside the school such as researchers, inventors, engineers and innovative industries, often with the assistance from marketing operations, are the decision-makers. the inside actors, teachers and principals are by themselves expected to implement ict. the other perspective, from the bottom up, involves a demand or need from teachers and principals to be fulfilled. they expect the decision-makers outside school to fund and support the implementation of ict in school. “there are problems when money ceases, when the equipment gets old, but we expect politicians to realise that” (riis, et al., 2000 p. 58). both of the perspectives are found in schools, although the first one is more common in sweden as elsewhere. innovation is a multi-layer, complex process. let us consider what these complexities are by looking at levels and stages of innovative activity. levels of innovative activity as pedagogical practices are multifaceted, an innovation can be analysed at different levels: macro, meso and micro. at the macro level, actors outside the school seek, as outcomes of national policies and guidelines, goals and intentions that often are influenced by international trends and issues of competitiveness and massive pressure from the information society. factors at the meso level are to be found inside schools. conditions, such as the role of context and school culture, readiness for change as well as leadership and the degree of support from the organizational environment have to be taken into consideration when analysing an innovation. at the micro level the classroom environment and its activities are in focus. teachers’ pedagogical and technological skills, size of the classroom, access to ict and the number of students, etc. are of importance (kozma, 2003). my own experiences show that successful implementation is characterized by close connections and cooperation between these levels. house (1981) and house & mcquillan (1998) identified three predominant perspectives regarding ways of introducing innovations: technological, political and cultural. the technological perspective at the macro level means decision-makers adopt an approach to innovation. the other two perspectives, which might be regarded as more considerate of the views of teachers, can be looked upon as more bottom up, as the innovation seen in its context. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 3 political perspective means that actors involved in innovation, and their interests, are taken into consideration by decision-makers through negotiation. at the micro level the cultural perspective puts the focus on teachers’ reactions and actions in encountering a technological innovation, which is expected to enter into and be used in the school. stages of innovation theoretically, changes are often described as linear processes consisting of different stages that have to be gone through before an innovation is implemented. fullan (2001) makes use of a three-stage process: initiation, implementation and institutionalization. the first stage includes decision making to initiate or to adopt the innovation. the individual receives information about the innovation’s existence. then she/he must form a favourable or unfavourable attitude and make a choice to adopt or reject the innovation. the length of the innovation decision period differs greatly between the potential adopters. depending on the innovation there is also a deviation in the length of the innovation-decision period. some innovations are adopted quickly, for example innovations that are relatively simple in nature, such as word-processing. the next stage deals with putting the innovation into use the implementation. in the third stage, institutionalization, the innovation becomes part of a regular practice. however, reality is more complex and complicated than level and stage modes suggest. those in schools are continuously involved in many different processes and changes. statements from teachers often suggest that they are concerned about the lack of time to deal with all that is demanded of them; time, for example, to learn how to handle and use the computer as a pedagogical tool. a teacher’s statement: “it takes more time than expected. it is like turning a transatlantic liner around, a very slow process” (riis, et al., 2000 p. 58). accordingly, a generous time-scale is an essential requirement. given this complexity of innovation it is worth considering what has happened in swedish schools over the life of these policy initiatives. what has happened to ict in schools over time? reasons for introducing computer/ict the curricula and syllabi (1994) as well as other governmental policy documents state that computer/ict literacy is important. one of the important guidelines for implementing ict in swedish schools is democratic: a right for all students irrespective of gender, class, ethnicity and geographical location to become familiar with ict in school. this democratic outcome presupposes ict to be disseminated to all schools and to be adopted by teachers in all subjects. other important reasons identified in policies for introducing computer/ict in the swedish schools concern: preparation for working life; improving learning; change involving school development and the internationalization of education (jedeskog, 2002). the democratic aspect involving student rights to become computer literate in school has been recognized in all campaigns launched by the state. the fact that a majority of swedish students have computers at home has not meant that access to ict in school has been emphasised any less. on the contrary, as ict literacy is now regarded as a basic skill in society, the school, according to this democratic rationale, has taken on the responsibility to guarantee all students this competence. it is regarded as a matter of course in a democratic society. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 4 the original reasons for introducing computer/ict in schools have permeated all the campaigns, but to a different extent and with different outcomes. argument for preparation of students for working life as well as the argument of internationalization of schools has been less emphasized than the others during this twenty years period. ict is also expected to bring about fundamental changes in the roles and functions of schools, teachers and students; and to reform educational practices by changing schools into more dynamic and innovative institutions. official school documents have expressed such intentions: “ict facilitates and supports writing”; “the internet provides unique opportunities for communicating in a simple way”; etc. (itis, 1998, p. 13). however, there is no unanimous research supporting the potential of ict to achieve such outcomes in school contexts. ict as a facilitator for learning and teaching is, as it turns out, a much more complicated issue. ict may enhance student learning, but it depends on time, technology and the culture of schools. they are all to be considered as crucial factors in this context. let us consider each of these in turn. time schools are large organizations with many actors and long traditions, and changes take time. this becomes evident when the change not only concerns attitudes, opinions and habits but when these also presuppose a certain technology. however, schools cannot neglect technological innovations that impregnate society at large. since the potentials for the use of ict change very rapidly schools are challenged to discuss their needs from the new applications offered and of the potential they hold. each new application can be related to fullan’s (2001) three stages. first, knowledge about the innovation’s existence and then making a decision whether or not to adopt it. second, to put the innovation into use, the implementation; and lastly, to consider continuing. each process is time consuming and as one innovation is being implemented another is knocking on the door. in the case of the 20 years period in swedish schools we can see a shift from initiation to implementation and, to some extent, to institutionalization of ict. furthermore, the computer as well as other technical innovations is often connected to contradictory attitudes and conflicting feelings. the computer is a very complex artefact involving everyday life. one may like or dislike the technology but one cannot avoid its impact. new technological innovations have often been rejected (jedeskog, 1996). one reason is the impact on practice that implementing this technology has had on other activities in school, e.g. teachers’ reactions against financial investments at the expense of other investments such as schoolbooks and the quantifiable representation of teachers (riis, et al., 2000). using ict in school means teachers need more time to discuss its use in terms of pedagogical issues. an essential component for pedagogical development and change is the opportunity teachers shape in order to adapt the technology to their practices (hargreaves, 2003). the last two campaigns have facilitated such meetings (chaib & tebelius, 2004). more teachers have been involved in discussing the potentials of ict and the barriers to implementation are not as great now as they were twenty or fifteen years ago (jedeskog, 1996; 2005). technology the technological challenges of computer/ict use have changed radically in the last twenty years; for example, from programming to using the internet (becker, 1998). teachers have, at different times, adopted applications suitable for their own teaching from teachers in mathematics and science involved in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 5 the first campaign to teachers irrespective of subjects in the fourth campaign. the internet has invited teachers and students to use ict inside and outside the school. the possibilities afforded by technology itself seem to have been of more importance than the pressure from outside decision-makers (chaib & tebelius, 2004). however, welcoming an innovation such as the computer in teaching reflects not just an interest in technology but also a positive attitude towards change in general. even if successful integration of ict in teaching takes as its starting point pedagogy and not technology, access to computers is important for successful use in schools. in 2004 municipalities complained about the lack of money for investing in both new equipment and support. this presents a risk that the use of ict in schools will decrease. these concerns arise from the fact that state subsidies for municipalities to purchase computers ceased in 2004 for almost the first time in twenty years. from 1984 to 2001, the state spent in total some € 450 million on computers and computer use in schools. moreover, the state required that the municipalities give an additional financial contribution; this added an estimated € 145 million to the expenditure. in all, within the swedish school system, approximately € 4,000 has been spent per swedish teacher or approximately € 500 per swedish student on computers and computer use from 1984 to 2001. (all amounts are given in the money value of 1999 at the start of the fourth campaign; 1€=9sek.) there was a “brutal stop” when government financing ended in 2001 (jedeskog, 2005). still, there is no official answer as to why the national ict investment in schools ceased. perhaps the state expects ict to be a “natural tool” in school today, supported by students and parents, as well as by teachers. and perhaps the compensatory political urgency has changed as most homes can afford and actually have computers? thus the use of ict in swedish schools can be regarded as a rather vulnerable activity, dependent on financial as well as human support. a complex issue in a complex context. the culture of schools in the mid 80’s actors outside the school made the decision to invest in the new technology in schools a top down initiative at a macro level. the confidence in technology was rather strong among decision-makers. at that time just a few teachers were interested and engaged in using the computers in their teaching. the first three campaigns were top down projects that influenced teacher engagement in an affirmative, but limited way. fifteen years after the first initiative, teacher involvement had changed. teachers were listened to and the outcomes seemed more successful than during the previous campaigns. the technological perspective had yielded to the political and cultural perspectives of innovations (house, 1981; house & mcquillan, 1998). the introduction of computer/ict can be compared with the introduction of such pedagogical tools as film, radio and television in school during the 20th century. in spite of the problems experienced with these tools, by teachers at the time, later policies for the introduction of ict did not take these previous experiences into consideration (cuban, 1986). this seems to be a universal phenomenon. experiences of the first two campaigns were almost totally neglected by actors involved in the last two campaigns. everyone has to make and learn from his own mistakes, not from others’. an adoption of ict means changes in the schools everyday life. not only will the school organization change but also the role of teachers and students and their ways of working when technological artefacts are implemented and used in the classrooms. fullan (1992) relates the concept of implementation not just to the innovation itself but also “to learning to do and learning to understand something new” (p. 22). when new technology enters the school, teachers and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 6 students are expected to learn how to use it and also to realise that teaching and learning are expected to change. for teachers the implementation of computers contains possibilities, challenges and threats according to their own interest in educational change. teachers have to decide to support or reject the innovation. their choice deals with intuitive attraction and great uncertainty, excitement and hardship, enthusiasm and exhaustion; visibility and high public interest combined with unknown results. since the mid 80’s all these reaction are found among teachers as related to the introduction of computers in school (riis, 1987, 1991; jedeskog, 2002). the involvement of teachers is a key factor for the effective use and survival of an innovation. to a great extent innovations are introduced without taking this into consideration. fullan & hargreaves (1991) state that administrators and politicians often drive school development a top down perspective at a macro level. decision-makers often ignore teachers’ needs and thereby disregard years of school life experience. staff development initiative “takes the form of something that is done to teachers rather than with them, still less by them” (p. 28). teacher attitudes and willingness are the essential basis for school development to become successful. teachers might also be regarded as the link between decision-makers and students, and between the rhetorical and the practical level. once again the complexity of the school and the role of the teacher have to be taken into consideration. there are two divergent pictures of how teachers respond to change. on the one hand the optimum teacher may be regarded as a spider with a complicated web or network, both within and outside the school, effectively coping in his or her complex situation (jedeskog, 2000). this is a description of a teacher playing an active and central role as a gatekeeper, trying to handle diverse interests. on the other hand, the teacher can be a kind of victim in the interaction with members of the web or network, depressed by a bureaucratic environment. most teachers are found between these two pictures, sometimes listened to, sometimes not. to develop the practice in school, with or without ict, it is not only dialogue with mere feedback in all directions that is necessary, but also an elaborated collaboration between actors at all levels macro, meso and micro (olson, 2002). findings, especially from the fourth campaign, reveal tendencies towards the first teacher we pictured as being well established in a complex setting. teacher’s involvement in school development with the use of ict is increasing. conclusions a school is an institution that is based on a belief in the future and the need to further societies long-term growth. ict is considered to play a key role in creating the school of tomorrow. the swedish experiences of the four campaigns, dealt with in this article, would be regarded as rather favourable for the future use of ict in school. there is a stock of useful knowledge for the future. a question mark however hovers over the possibility and need for financial support. glancing in the rear-view mirror suggests: • there is a shift from a technological to a political and cultural perspective on ict innovations, • there is a shift from technology to pedagogy, • there is a shift from initiation to implementation and, to some extent, to institutionalization, according to the use of ict in school; • and there is a shift from programming to the use of the internet. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 7 the four campaigns have supported the implementation of computers and ict in swedish schools to different degrees and there have been some important changes directly connected to the development of technology and to the development of the use of modern technology in schools. most of the changes involve a shift in patterns of schoolwork. the role of the school is constantly modified. participation in decision making for principals, teachers and students has meant increasing responsibility and influence during this twenty years period. a bottom up approach to change has successively replaced the top down perspective (house, 1981; house & mcquillan, 1998). furthermore, human aspects are increasingly more important than the technology in school activities. teachers and students are in focus instead of the technology. the conditions for a successful innovation grow when decision-makers listen to teachers (cuban, 2000). the attraction of ict has changed from learning to program to learning other applications like word processing and the use of the internet. attempts to produce pedagogical software have failed and the use of more general software dominates. the requests of many teachers, who have been involved with the use of ict in schools, represent a force for a greater focus on the process of teaching and learning with and about ict, and the use of ict from students’ perspectives. another issue raised in the last two campaigns deals with a view that ict is looked upon as a threat to the school’s institutional role. new technologies enable learning to stretch far beyond the physical space of the school. what will happen when more students prefer working at home equipped with a computer and a telephone line to their teachers, instead of being in school (jedeskog & nissen, 2004)? the monopoly of schools on learning as well as the legitimacy of school will be challenged. lastly, an overall political intention at the beginning of the 21st century is for teachers to create a good learning environment, which includes ict, for the autonomous learner. the conditions may already be present as a new campaign currently is starting. however, this campaign, again initiated by actors outside the school, is directed towards supporting ict in teacher education: will it, once again, strengthen teacher competence with ict? a full version of this paper jedeskog, g. (2005) ch@nging school. implementation of ict in swedish school, campaigns and experiences 1984–2004 can be found at http://www2.ibv.liu.se/pius/personal/gunilla_jedeskog. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 8 references becker, h. j. (1998) running to catch a moving train: schools and information technologies. theory into practice, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 20-30. chaib, m. & tebelius, u (2004). itis satsningen 1999-2002. sammanfattning av den nationella utvärderingen. [the itis -campaign 1999-2002. summary of a national evaluation]. university college of jönköping, university college of halmstad. cuban, l. (1986) teachers and machines. the classroom use of technology since 1920. n.y: teacher college press. cuban, l. (2000) oversold and underused: computers in the classroom. harvard university press. cambridge, ma. fullan, m. g. (1992) successful school improvement. buckingham, philadelphia: open university press. fullan, m. g. (2001) leading in a culture of change. san francisco: jossey-bass. fullan, m. g. & hargreaves, a. (1991) what’s worth fighting for? working together for your school. ontario public school teachers’ federation. hargreaves, a. (2003) teaching in the knowledge society. education in the age of insecurity. maidenhead; philadelphia: open university. house, e. r. (1981) three perspectives of innovation: technological, political and cultural. in: lehming, r. & kane, m. (eds) improving schools. using what we know. london: sage publications. house, e. r. & mcquillan, p. j. (1998) three perspectives on school reform. in: hargreaves, a. (ed) international handbook of educational change. pp. 198213. itis (1998) tools for learning. a national programme for ict in schools. stockholm: ministry of education and science. itis, delegation for ict in schools. jedeskog, g. (1996) lärare vid datorn. sju högstadielärares undervisning med datorer 1984 1994. [teachers at the computer. computer-aided instruction by seven teachers at the swedish lower secondary school 1984-1994]. linköping university, skapande vetande. jedeskog, g. (2000) teachers and computers. teachers' computer usage and the relationship between computers and the role of the teacher, as described in international research. uppsala university, department of education. jedeskog, g. (2002) ”maila mig sen!”: lärarintentioner och förändrade gränser för elevers arbete [“send me an e-mail!” teachers intentions and changed boundaries for pupils’ work]. liu-pek-r-226. linköping university, department of behavioural sciences. jedeskog, g. (2005) ch@nging school. implementation of ict in swedish school, campaigns and experiences 1984 –2004. uppsala university: department of education. (http://www2.ibv.liu.se/pius/personal/gunilla_jedeskog) jedeskog, g. & nissen, j. (2004). ict in the classroom: is doing more important than knowing? education and information technologies 9:1, p. 37 – 45. the netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. kozma, r. b. (ed) (2003) technology, innovation and educational change. a global perspective. iea. a report of the second information technology in education study. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 9 ministry of education and science in sweden and national agency for education (2001) curriculum for the compulsory school system, the pre-school class and the leisure-time centre, lpo 94. nissen, j. (red.) (2002). "säg it det räcker". att utveckla skolan med några lysande it-projekt. [“say ict that’s enough”. developing school by some shining ict projects]. stockholm: kc foundation. olson, j. (2002) systematic chang/teacher tradition: legends of reform continue. in: journal of curriculum studies.34.2. taylor & francis ltd. pelgrum, w. j. & anderson, r. e. (eds.) (1999) ict and the emerging paradigm for life-long learning. amsterdam: iea. riis, u. (1987) datalära på grundskolans högstadium – utvärdering av en treårssatsning. [computer science education in the swedish lower secondary school. evaluation of a three years’ campaign]. tema t. arbetsnotat 36, linköping university. riis, u. (1991) skolan och datorn. satsningen datorn som pedagogiskt hjälpmedel 1988-1991. [the school and the computer. the campaign the computer as a pedagogical tool 1988-1991]. tema t rapport 24, linköping university. riis, u. jedeskog, g. axelsson, b. bergman, m. edström, r. fahlén, l. nissen, j. pedersen, j. & samuelsson, j. (1997) pedagogik, teknik eller ekonomi? en baslinjebestämning av kk-stiftelsens kommunbaserade skolutvecklingsprojekt. [pedagogy, technology or economy?]. uppsala university, department of education. riis, u. holmstrand, l. & jedeskog, g. (2000) visionär entusiasm och realistisk eftertänksamhet.[visionary enthusiasm and matter-of-fact contemplation.] uppsala university, department of education. robitaille, d. f. (ed.) (1997) national contexts for mathematics and science education. an encyclopedia of the education systems participating in timss. canada, vancouver: pacific educational press. 1 the author of this article has been involved as an evaluator in the first three campaigns. borghuis, de graaf & hermes digital storytelling in sex education.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 234 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 digital storytelling in sex education. avoiding the pitfalls of building a ‘haram’ website. pauline borghuis ir., research fellow media, culture and citizenship inholland university email: pauline.borghuis@inholland.nl christa de graaf research fellow media, culture and citizenship inholland university email: christa.degraaf@inholland.nl joke hermes professor of media, culture and citizenship inholland university email: joke.hermes@inholland.nl research group media, culture and citizenship domain of communication, media and music inholland university abstract this article discusses a participant design research project. the project aimed to provide information about sex and sexuality to groups considered to be vulnerable due to lack of knowledge and cultural barriers. the researchers worked with their students (from highly diverse cultural background) to gather interview material that in turn was used by these students to write ‘life stories’. although not digital storytelling as it is usually defined, the group for whom the website was built did not author their own stories directly, participant design can be understood as a form of ‘digital storytelling light’. in regard of presenting information about sexuality in an acceptable manner, this combined design and research method worked well. the article provides examples from the interview material, the life stories and reactions posted on the websites that were built on internet for a for moroccan and turkish-dutch youngsters, the intended audience. keywords: participant design, digital storytelling ‘light’, sex education. the project and digital storytelling in this paper we will discuss how we used digital storytelling as a tool in sex education. we had been asked to contribute to the construction of a website seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 235 about sex education with an attractive q&a (question and answer) module, consisting of over 350 questions and answers and 8 life stories about relationships, partner choice, sexuality, the male-and female body, sexuality beyond accepted boundaries, sexual problems and islam, and sexuality generally, specifically aimed at turkish and moroccan youngsters in the age of 15-25 in the netherlands. (www.marokko.geentaboes.nl and www.geentaboes.hababam.nl.) our partners in building the website were the rng (rutergs nisso group, dutch centre for sexual education), marokko media (moroccan ethno marketing bureau and publisher of www. marokko.nl) and students of the university of inholland. based on information gathered in 50 interviews with target group members conducted by students of the university of inholland amsterdam, the same students wrote 8 authentic and credible life stories with turkish and moroccan characters dealing with difficulties, dilemmas and choices about being in love, what partner they would like to choose, homosexuality, sexual abuse, getting pregnant, getting an std (sexually transmitted disease), adultery and so on. in the life stories the characters show how they experience events around these topics, what their doubts are, what dilemmas they face, what choices they make. the stories have an open ending, so as to elicit reactions of the website visitors target group. links are put in the stories in order to direct youngsters to reliable information about specific topics themselves and to invite them to discuss sexuality with each other in a forum. in addition, a total of 17 turkish-dutch and moroccan-dutch young people were recruited via the university of inholland and marokko media (publisher of the websites and an ‘ethno’ marketing bureau) to participate in the project as a feedback-, communication advisoryand editorial team. to construct this (sub) website we used a form of digital storytelling in which our student investigators acted as cultural mediators between the site and the target group. once the life stories were placed on the internet, the web site users, all community members, took over, and then a more direct form of digital storytelling came into being. relationship between sex education and islam at the start of our project a number of sex education websites for moroccan and turkish youngsters were available online in the netherlands.i however, none of these sites specifically addressed islam and sex. we learned later (via the student interviews) that turkish and moroccan teenagers feel little addressed by these sites. they hardly ever visit them. they feel their voice is not heard; they cannot identify with the sites but rather feel repulsion and rejection.ii we wanted to be sure not to make the same mistakes. by involving community members and giving them space to discuss with each other in order to find their own questions and answers and by ‘facilitating’ instead of educating we tried to do it differently. the target group was given the means to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 236 direct and partially control what subjects were addressed and how. digital storytelling was our tool. public debate, lack of education the combination of sexuality and islam is a delicate subject in dutch society. it is more than just an awkward issue in public debate (women’s oppression and islam, homophobia, virginal membrane correction, and xenophobia); iii it is also a real, material social problem. according to the research bureau for policy (scp) on behalf of the ministry of health, dutch teenagers of moroccan and turkish descent have less knowledge about sexuality and sexual health and experience more problems with sexuality, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease and so on. sex education in compulsory high schools is not appropriate to (religious) migrant groups: muslim girls put their hands over their eyes; iv turkish and moroccan boys make jokes and walk out of the classroom. in their home situation, talking about sex is taboo. mothers do talk about this issue with their children but fathers are not involved out of respect for their fatherly authority and possible loss of that authority by discussing not just private but ‘haram’ subjects.v earlier research by the rutgers nisso group, a foundation for sex education, and the ‘soa aids netherlands’ foundation also shows that migrants are overrepresented in the numbers of young people with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.vi they are more often offenders and victims of sexual violence than other groups. the state secretary of health, jet bussemaker, made money available in 2008 especially to educate boys as they specifically know less about relations and sex. they receive less sex education at home than girls do. apart from money for more sex education in schools, the state secretary felt the internet would be a useful forum to achieve her goals for increased sexual health and well-being.vii our project received a grant out of the funding she made available; we collaborated with the rutgers nisso group and marokko media (publisher of the two sites that were used). aims of emancipation as public intellectuals working as teachers and researchers with a mixed university population (over 60% students with more than one cultural background) we feel it is our responsibility to contribute to the emancipation of muslim youngsters. as teachers we feel that respect is of paramount importance. we want to be sensitive to other cultural backgrounds while insisting on mutual respect for all cultural values — definitely a mission that is more often preached than practiced. as researchers, we feel equally strongly that emancipation is a crucial right for everybody, whether a woman or a man, gay, or of lower class-background. the integrity of the human body is sacrosanct to us; religion cannot stand before culture. we all have the right to decide about what happens to and with our bodies. obviously this project forced us to see how we too prioritize parts of our backgrounds and convictions. so be it. a second danger in this project would be to either act or be perceived as ‘voyeurs’, hoping to exoticize ‘oriental others’ (cf. edward said, 1978). but this project has nothing to do with either voyeurism or colonialism. if anything, it is an old-fashioned feminist project. we want to make it possible for young dutch muslims to find ways to talk about and experience sex in terms of respect and dignity, in ways that are respectful and sensitive to how young people themselves experience their cultural and religious heritage in a multicultural society. we wanted the two websites to be a place where they can have their own voice, where they can feel truly ‘heard’ and where there is room for the diversity we know exists within these two groups. sex is private, but there should be places for everybody seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 237 where experiences can be exchanged, where – in true dialogue – views can be amended and real choices can be made. while we want sex to remain private, reflection on sexual practice, possibilities and identities is definitely a public issue. as we made clear above, we take a feminist position. such a position, for us, includes defining gender and sexuality as social constructions. while gender and sexuality have become semi-‘natural’ categories, fixed by biology, we choose to question such categories and the type of power effect they have (cf flax, 1982). as we see it, openness to sexual autonomy and choice is now blocked by binary, biologized definitions. as we will show below, discussion of homosexuality is as far as it goes and this is definitely dangerous territory. other sexual options, such as bisexuality or transsexuality, fall far beyond the boundaries of youngsters raised in religious milieus, whether islamic, fundamentalist protestant or conservative catholic. more examples doubtlessly can be given but, in their turn, fall beyond our cultural knowledge. why the existing sites are not used by the target group we believe that credibility, identification and acceptance by the target group can only be achieved by involving them directly. before building sites like these, you need to carefully investigate the intended user groups, preferably in a participative format. open interviews, at the start of the project, made clear that existing web sites are deemed especially awful because they use direct language and closed narratives. words such as ‘prick’, ’cunt’, ‘fuck’ and so on are better avoided. this is not how dutch muslim youth talk about sex. a penis you call a ‘thing’. genital organs are never named, “down there” will do fine. in life stories a blow job is described as follows: “he put his ‘thing’ in my mouth and made me … you know what i mean.”viii a description of having sex ends with: “i was thinking about what… you know, what we were ‘doing’ …, d’y understand?”ix likewise, street language, spelling mistakes, moroccan and turkish words are used throughout the life story texts, as they were in the interviews and on www.marokko.nl, the ‘mother’ community website. during the process of building the site—the technical part of which was in the hands of marokko media, the sites’ publishers—a respectful and sensitive contact with the target group was maintained. coming from a position of friendliness and respect it is possible to find ways to check constantly if the translation of your knowledge (or interpretation of knowledge and values) of the intended audience, their beliefs and cultural sensitivity is correct. contrary to how the existing websites were built, we chose a form of cooperation with the target group: participative design. the young turkish and moroccandutch people we wanted to reach had to become more than a target group who provide necessary information. they needed to become a partner and eventually a co-owner. the building of this sex education website became a bottom-up activity, close to ‘user-generated’ media practice. as hartley (2009, chapter 11 in lundby) claims, the form of digital storytelling we used has democratic potential in that the basis was laid by amateurs and not by media professionals. participative design in combination with digital storytelling we hoped would provide for authenticity, recognition and identification. research technique: how we approached the building of the site formally in participative design prospective users can be consulted at any stage of development. ideally, they are a partner in a project right from the start. while we needed to find young turkish and moroccan dutch representatives to be our partners, we decided that we would not probably seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 238 have the best means to access these groups directly, three middle-aged white women that we are. we do have access to our students, whom we decided to involve and, via marokko media again, there is a group that we could ask to help us. in this way we organized a team of interviewers (inholland students, both white and of mixed backgrounds, all familiar with functioning in multicultural groups), and an editorial team (consisting of active marokko.nl members, the community that is the ‘mother’ website and host to the sex education ‘sub’ site). our students interviewed over 50 turkish and moroccan youngsters about issues to do with sex. the life stories on the web site are based on analysis of these interviews. the students were grouped around a ‘head writer’ who shared either the turkish or the moroccan background needed for the particular sub web site. we hoped in this way to create more support and acceptance amongst the intended group of users. as a group the students learned about understanding and translating cultural knowledge. they became ‘cultural mediators’, able to transform potentially sensitive information and issues into acceptable language and narratives. they learned to tell the stories of the groups they had interviewed. while this is perhaps a more manipulative form of digital storytelling and one that is slightly farther removed from direct self-representation than in other examples, we feel that the overlap in age and life experience between our students and their interviewees forged a bond. as in other digital storytelling projects, especially ones that recount the history of a specific region or place, there should be room for a storyteller to create a ‘stronger’ or ‘better’ version of real life. given that the life stories were critically looked at and edited by the editorial committee, consisting entirely of marokko.nl community members, we can vouch for the method used as truly participative and ‘true’ to how the young people the site was built for understand their lives. below we will add a last layer to the process of validation of the project. that is, the life stories were open to comments by the web community, a possibility that was much used. as stories unfolded over a series of installments, these comments were a valuable means to fine tune content. so, who were these students? we decided to ask students in a teaching module called images and audiences to do the interviews amongst the prospective users of the website. all 31 are third and fourth year students at inholland. they were trained in qualitative interview techniques and in creative writing techniques in a web-context. the central issue of the interviews was sexuality. first the students had interview training in the classroom supervised by a trainer. talking about sex in a classroom was definitely something new. some discovered they didn’t want to openly talk about sex and found out later this was somehow similar to the target group’s attitude. we discussed whether there were other ways to get the information we needed, in a possibly more respectful way. one solution was to ask respondents about their sister’s or brother’s attitude towards sex, which proved to work well. the students were close to the groups we wanted the websites to reach. many of them have moroccan and turkish friends and acquaintances in their networks. they interviewed 41 moroccan and 21 turkish young men and women, aged 15–25, about their thoughts, opinions and experiences to do with sex and sex education. it became clear that in practice a lot of them are sexually active, even though decisions were not always taken consciously. they experienced a range of conflicting feelings and emotions, especially in relation to religion. the focus of the interviews was on the dilemmas they experience and the choices they made when looking for information in relation to important choices such as whether or not to have sex before marriage. all this real life seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 239 information about sex, sexual advice and education and islam was used in building the sex-education sub-websites of the internet community’s marokko.nl and hababam.nl, mostly visited by moroccan and turkish people aged 15-25. ‘no taboos’ became their name: www.geentaboes.marokko.nl and www.geentaboes.hababam.nl.x interestingly, there are quite a few taboos in these web pages, as the interviews had made clear that direct language was a clear no-no. an example from an interview: informant: well, you can’t just discuss sexuality with moroccan or turkish people. not as an outsider. you have to be careful, understand? you can talk with me about this but i am not saying that much. just, you have to be careful with what you say. what it’s all about. it’s best to circle a bit. of course you can pose a normal question but step by step, you understand. small steps will get you in the right direction. life stories based on the outcome of the interviews, students adapted the information and wrote 8 authentic and credible life stories with turkish and moroccan characters about their difficulties, dilemmas and choices about being in love, what partner they would like to choose, homosexuality, sexual abuse, getting pregnant, getting an std, adultery and so on. this reflects the range of sexuality-related topics referred to in the interviews. incest, sadomasochism, transsexuality are part of a nether world of unmentionables. we have no indication whether these issues are simply unnamable or entirely part of a different world. given the intention to develop the sex education websites in participatory design, we did not pressure the student-interviewers to move even further out of their own or their informants’ comfort zones. in the life stories the characters recount how they experience events around difficult but namable topics, what their doubts are, what dilemmas they face, what choices they make. the stories have open endings, in order to elicit reactions from the website visitors (whom we hoped would coincide with our intended audience). links are put in the stories to encourage users to gather information about specific topics themselves on specialized sites and to get them to discuss with each other in a forum. again, the technical work was done by marokko.nl. link options were provided by the rutgers nisso group. what kind of material did the student-narrators have, after transcribing and analyzing the interview material? a few particularly apt and exemplary excerpts from the interview transcripts that were adapted into the life stories follow below. xi in the life story entitled ‘my forgotten past’ the protagonist rayan (a woman) discusses sex and pregnancy before marriage. quotations from the interviews adapted in the story: ‘my forgotten past’: interview with miriam: my brother is 25 years old and they feel like it should all be left to school. the lessons they get in school. in biology and all that. but, for example, menstruation and things like that; they have been explained to us. that is what every mother should do for her daughter but sex talk ….. no, that is unthinkable. that doesn’t happen with us. not in our family, that is really a taboo (laughs). interview with miriam: being in love doesn’t automatically mean that you will have sex! there are moroccan girls that do … but … it is really how you are raised, at home… because, really, sex before marriage is strictly forbidden in islam …. with us. interview with adha: you are not…, you are a muslim… well, not very actively, but sex before marriage, how do you think about that? adha: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 240 well, it’s a good thing for girls but for boys less so. boys have their needs and, just suppose, this boy meets a moroccan girl and he wants to make love with her and she says: i can’t, i have to stick to the rules. won’t that boy go and leave her? she is not going to like that. interview with miryam, amina and naomi: is it worse in the moroccan community to get a divorce or to have sex before you are married? miryam: sex before marriage is worse. amina: hmmmm, enough already! (laughs). we had a girl in our class, she was called naomi. she was fifteen at that point, i think, and when she was sixteen she had a baby. that was something. like: how could that happen?! and she knew, we talked about it. she knows she can get pregnant and still it happens. too tempting. this person you are seeing, that is also important. that might have been a factor. to experience all of this up close, well, it makes you think twice. makes you think: better be careful. you don’t want to become someone like that, you know. in the life story entitled ‘a different existence’ the protagonist omar (a man) discusses homosexuality. quotations that have been used for creating this life story: merihban: no, i don’t think you are born like that, come on. no one is born gay. it is a choice you make, no? interviewer: that’s the question, is it really a choice? merihban: nah i think it is. interviewer: so women accept it, but your brothers, your father? merihban: my father and my brothers they think it is really, well, death penalty really. warda: well, it immediately puts an entire family to shame. like: you have a homo in your family, you know. ibrahim: look, if my son turned out to be gay, i would consider that an immense shame to myself. and i would want to say to him: get out of here. i wouldn’t want to see him ever again. it’s because of respect, i guess. bayram: it is to do with sex parts (laughter). sex parts, yes. god made us into a man and a woman, a girl and a boy. why would we want to be with someone who has the same sex parts, rather than have sex with someone who has the opposite part that was specially made for us? (but…) yes, what it has been made for especially. we are equal you know but this, you have to respect it. in the life story entitled ‘torn apart by love’ the protagonist samira, a woman, discusses being a lesbian in a muslim community. quotations used from the interview material mostly concern the lack of sound knowledge about sexuality, the reliance on female family members and prejudiced concerns. it must be quite difficult to arrive at a sexuality that is your own under those circumstances. we were given to understand that topics such as homosexuality cannot be tied directly to our main characters. that is definitely too delicate a matter and a taboo in moroccan and turkish culture. no one, our informants said, would dare to read about a homosexual’s experiences. these are hot issues though. we found out that we could write about this subject by removing the ‘problem’ one step from the protagonist. the character does not tell his or her own story but the story of a homosexual school mate or friend. this was an acceptable choice and allowed for homosexuality to be debatable. ‘torn apart’ uses this technique and was based on the following interview excerpts, among others. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 241 miryam: i don’t know. i don’t like the pill. i am always afraid, i think it will damage my uterus or something. i am simply afraid that i will never be able to have children. so that’s why i don’t take it. anonymous: i am not going to say i’ll never have a relationship. but i would really prefer to do it the islamic way, however difficult that may sound. but that is what i am going to try. anis: i think they’ll explain in such a way that it falls within the bounds of islam, that it’s respectful, that it isn’t harmful to the faith. and that people will be able to read those texts and when they do, when they hear them, that is will be done in the right way. no cursing or swear words, you understand. there are plenty ways to make clear what you mean. it doesn’t always have to do: fucking is forbidden, having sex is not allowed. you can turn it into a story. what they say in islam: fitna. fitna means ‘to do bad things’. that’s a good way to make things clear. there are plenty of ways to make things clear; it just needs the right intentions. if a site just launches music and the newest songs aekon, ali b, then i don’t think you’ll make much progress in reaching young people when it comes to islam. esma: yeah, i knew it of course and i did have sex with my boy friend without a condom, but i didn’t … i knew we should have, but he did not have it with him and neither had i. and we wanted really to do it. so it happened. we were lucky i guess, because i am not on the pill. if i were to come home with that…, no that is out of the question. chahida: no… i never had any sex education. but i do have older sisters, fortunately. my eldest sister is 40. so, if there is something that i want to know about or…. we just talk about it. warda: lots of girls don’t use tampons. they are afraid it will deflower them. everybody knows that the hymen is just this tiny ridge but they continue to think it is a real web, like skin, that has to be broken through. after you get engaged, you get married and then in your wedding night you bring a white piece of cloth and it has to bleed when you have sex. but if you happen to have a bigger one, it won’t bleed (laughs). so what girls do is stick themselves in their finger or cheek in order to have blood on their piece of cloth. learning a new ‘cultural language’ the end result of interviewing, writing and editing stories, and offering them to the web community amounts to what marcus and fisher (1983) called a polylogue. neither the voice of the researcher/author nor the voice of the interviewer/students is allowed to dominate in the final product. there is, moreover, hardly a ‘final’ product. the websites continue to draw visitors who, among themselves, discuss how gross or exciting it is that sex is talked about in a new register. the editorial team too continues to advise marokko media, publisher of the websites, on how and whether to moderate discussions, remove or add new stories. as a storytelling project should, the website project moves beyond monologue and dialogue. it was able to do so because we learned to speak a new language and develop narrative strategies we normally would not choose to use. being in constant negotiation with the target group we developed a ‘new’ narrative strategy: creating credibility adapting themes from the interviews, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 242 using a special tone of voice , the use of veiled languages, and by constantly asking feedback from the redaction team we learned a whole new ‘cultural language’. we learned that direct address is not done and feels offensive to the turkish and moroccan dutch communities. language moreover has to be veiled. narratives need to circle round their actual topic, and body parts, especially sexual parts, need to be described as ‘thing’ or at most ‘down there’. there is a third thing we learned. both the ethnic communities we wanted to invite to the sex education websites prefer melodrama to realism. we chose to instruct our student-writers to aim for ‘emotional realism’ (the term is borrowed from ien ang’s soap opera study, 1985). stories need to be open to identification, story lines use triumph over tragedy or just the misery of tragedy to make their point. this allows for the ‘tragic choice’ as a device, which is highly useful in talking about sex and religion. martha nussbaum (1987) suggests that greek drama provides the best examples of making impossible choices. its power as a performance art is surely due to giving full rein to outing these conflicting emotions and the sense that there is no way to win. while at the outset we would have felt very uncomfortable allowing for distancing and veiled language and modes of address, we can see that this, at the very least, is an effective strategy in that it does not alienate those we want to visit and use the websites. the choice of topics and the hyperlinks provided in the stories assuage a feminist sense that naming things as they are is the more effective political strategy. useless here, as it turned out, but hidden away in the structure of the participative designed project. participative design and the options open in digital fora meant that there was ample room for authorship from both communities and a sense of ownership that otherwise would have been difficult to realize. from the names of characters to the expressions used, the sites can be used as familiar, easy conversation and surroundings. while this may be unduly self-congratulatory, we feel that it is the use of the right tone of voice, as well as the look and feel of the sites, that has made this sense of co-ownership possible, which in turn is now extending further and further into co-creation of a safe and honest space for sex education. all in all, this is hardly sex education. to educate can be a formal and patronizing process, involving an overload of morals (possibly of the wrong kind). the no-taboo websites are informative, though. while they avoid moralization and a patronizing tone, they do offer a light touch, sometimes a little humor and overall a range of options and possibilities for those who want to know more about things they feel they cannot even name outright. analyzing the material, we chose to understand the cultural repertoires that organize knowledge of the world for our two groups of young people. we mapped sensitivities and reproduced interpretive frames offered by informants in the interviews. we looked for authenticity and credibility, but did we succeed? not only is the editorial team still active, we also had a student do a follow up evaluation study of how the no-taboo websites are actually used. we were happy to learn that some of the visitors commenting on the stories liked them: merhaba, it is as if you have experienced it yourself (man commenting on story, marokko.nl). damn, really typical turkish (woman, hababam.nl). the use of relevant and cultural semantics of the target audience was very important to gain credibility. again on hababam (for the turkish-dutch) community this was managed successfully, mostly. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 243 it’s my feeling that the story has a sort of sarcastic double layer (which i will not discuss here). curious about the rest ps: i hardly ever read stories on hababam, but this one‘s really got something. my compliments (female, hababam.nl). this is really well-written. compared with most of the stories here, the use of language is also very good ( and not half turkish street language and then half dutch street language (female, hababam.nl). benefits and disadvantages of the method used one of the greatest benefits of participative design is that the target group gained a voice. through participative design, we managed to build credibility, offer support and gain acceptance amongst those we wanted to reach. there are disadvantages too. it is a time-intensive method, and the quality of negotiation always depends on the negotiators. we were lucky to have our multicultural aware students at hand. without them, it would have been far more difficult to achieve the current level of authenticity in the stories. the life stories were well received. they are posted in installments in order to get web site users to return to the site. visitors could offer their views on these installments as they appeared. most of the reactions were positive, and came from women. female: beautiful story go onnnn!!! female: my dearest, you really have to go on… female: super story, devamini beklyorum. this suggests that digital storytelling in this regard may have been a stronger communication tool to use for young women than for young men. then again, we know from the interview material that young women talk more easily about sex, e.g. with family members. we also chose to have the live stories presented as written by female avatars called zonnetje87 (sunny87, moroccan) and denizje (turkish woman’s name). their cover identity suggests they wrote these stories for the website as part of a school assignment. the assignment included interviews. they were of course written by our students (in that respect we stayed fairly close to the actual truth). regardless of the cover story and repeated reminders, the stories are experienced as real stories. repeatedly ‘sunny87’ and ‘denizje” remind the website users of the fact that the stories although based on real life, are fictional and not about them themselves: hi there everybody, as i explained earlier to my other stories, the reason why my stories are toppers is because i wrote them for a site that gives sex education to people with our background. this site, http://www.geentaboes.marokko.nl is actually put up by us youngsters, and i also have based my stories on real interviews with moroccan girls and boys. so, once again, these stories are not about my own life. this story is quite intense, when i interviewed this boy, that was really difficult.xii obviously, mediterranean narrative culture, to use an impossibly broad generalization, leans towards the tragic and the dramatic. such stories, as we noted above, lend themselves particularly well to ‘emotional realism’. that is to say, even though readers realize that this is fiction, they perceive these stories as ‘true’ in an emotional sense. the life stories do offer emotional seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 244 realism, but the reader needs to have a melodramatic imagination at one’s disposal (ang 1985). the readers allow the fiction to speak to real life situations they have experienced or that they imagine they could find themselves in. again, it is women who master the art of emotional learning through exaggerated fictional examples much better than men. conclusion and discussion after the soft launch in june 2009 it very soon became clear that the site provided much needed real life examples and information. within one week these sites were visited over 2000 times, while more than 22 500 pages were consulted. the average visiting time was 7 minutes, in which the themes of virginity, islam, sexuality, relationships and the female body were viewed most frequently. the life stories are also popular. visitors want to know what happens next. after the official start of the campaign, end of september 2009, the sites had 800 visitors per day. so far, reactions are mainly positive to very positive, quite a feat given that technically the sites certainly had a number of irritating technical glitches. some of these have since been rectified. after the sub-websites were launched we asked one of our students to monitor the reactions and to investigate how the combined site (geentaboes.nl) works. her results show that its young users feel that important issues are foregrounded in the right way. the lack of continuity and interaction around the life stories they feel is a shame. regretfully we do not have the means to have students write new installments. another conclusion of the evaluation was that some visitors feel free to use rude language because one can remain anonymous when visiting the site. while the target group feels free to write openly about sexuality, it is striking how much aggressive and discriminating language is also used (final dissertation diane visser, page 4-5). it strengthens us in our belief that both young women and young men use the site, be it in rather different communicative modes. turkish-dutch and moroccan-dutch youngsters tend to be very active on dutch-language turkish and moroccan forum sites (cf. nijntjes, w, 2006, ‘the meaning of virtual forum discussions to the identity forming of moroccandutch youngsters’, page 2) . on these discussion sites geentaboes.nl was received well, especially the life stories. attractive parts of the life stories were copied and linked back to geentaboes.nl. here too we find mostly positive comments: female: beautiful story go onnnn!!! female: my dearest, you really have to go on. female: super story, devamini beklyorum. male: bonggg this is really good… it keeps on being exciting.. please go on x   again, women react far more often than men. as far as we can tell, men do visit the site, but they only read and do not contribute. when they do react it is mostly in a negative vein: male: if only you could stop. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 245 male: a3lian, kuffar, beautiful sex stories… please keep on going fast, because we love kuffars that talk openly about sex. see you in hell…. which is not to say that all reactions from women are positive: female: these stories are all made up and don’t come telling me that it’s not true. female: excuse me, but i start to get sick of these typical stories, it’s homo, or it’s lesbo, or deflowering, bladibla… while clearly a success, there are a number of issues that require further reflection and investigation. how to reach and actively make young men commit to a project such as this is one of them. for ourselves we feel that we have learned to take up a different role as investigators/educators. while also involving our analytic skills, we mainly needed to learn how to facilitate. again, that is a position that requires the giving up of control. especially here that was not always easy to do. strong moral beliefs on either side of the divide between us older women and ‘them’ ethnic minority group youngsters require far more negotiation than we had room for here. while we have seen that respect is not just a moral prerequisite but also a practical necessity, we draw the line at bowing to discrimination, racial and other slurs. digital storytelling offers great possibilities. but they will be difficult and occasionally painful to realize. we wanted to know: ‘how can we build a sex education website that fits better than the available websites with the needs and the experiences of moroccan and turkish-dutch youngsters aged 15 – 25?’ according to the visitor numbers (traffic) and activity on both sub-websites, we succeeded in doing so by making the life worlds of these young people our central concern. moreover, we ceded control of the content and allowed (other) young people to act as mediators and storytellers. the intended audience was represented in an editorial team that had veto power over story lines and characters. reactions during the test phase were taken very seriously. we allowed our own outspoken views about sexuality and sex education to remain in the background, while veiled and indirect language, as decreed by our informants, was used. we made room for an authentic religion-friendly space to learn about and discuss sex. while we feel that we used (a version of) digital storytelling, this is debatable. perhaps we should think of this partially mediated form, as ‘digital storytelling light’. without our students, acting as cultural mediators, we would have been nowhere. we thank them for their work, their courage and their creativity. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 246 references ang, i. (1985). watching dallas. soap opera and the melodramatic imagination. london: methuen. feenberg, a. & barney, d. (2004). community in the digital age, philosophy and practice, bowman & littlefield 2004. flax, j. (1987). "postmodernism and gender relations in feminist theory," signs 12,4 (summer 1987). gauntlett, david (2007). creative explorations. new approaches to identities and audiences. london: routledge. hartley, john (2008). “problems of expertise and scalability in self-made media”. in: lundby, knut (ed.): digital storytelling, mediatized stories: selfrepresentations in new media. digital formations, 52. peter lang, new york, pp. 197-211. johnson, g. & ambrose, p. (2006). neo-tribes: the power and potential of online communities in health care. in communications of the acm vol. 49(1), pp. 107113. . lambert, j. (2002). digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community. berkeley, ca: digital diner press. lundby, knut (ed.) digital storytelling, mediatized stories, self-representation in new media. peter lang, new york. marcus, g. e. & fischer, m. j. m. (1996). anthropology as cultural critique. an experimental moment in the human sciences. 2d edition. chicago: university of chicago press. mcwilliams, k. & hartley, j. (2009). story circle. digital storytelling around the world. wiley-blackwell, malden, ma. nijntjes , w, (2006). ‘the meaning of virtual forum discussions to the identity forming of moroccan-dutch youngsters’. unpublished master’s thesis, vu university, amsterdam, the netherlands. noble, a. & c. robinson (2000). ’for the love of the people: participatory design in a community context’, in proceeding of co designing, 2000, springer: london. nussbaum, martha (1986). the fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in greek tragedy and philosophy. cambridge, ma: cambridge university press. said, edward (2003). orientalism. londen (etc.): penguin books, originally published in 1978. schuler, d. & a. namioka (eds.) (1993). participatory design. principles and practices. lawrence erlbaum associates, inc., publishers: hillsdale, new jersey. strauss, a. & corbin, j. (1998). basics of qualitative research. techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. newbury park: sage. visser, diane (2010). geentaboes.nl, final ba dissertation, school of communication, inholland university, amsterdam/diemen. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 247 websites http://seksuele_vorming.yurls.net http://www.ggdgezondheidsinfo.nl/dossiers.asp?regioid=7&dossierid=230 http://www.studieinfo.nl/sexuelevoorlichting/index.html www.allesovergay.nl www.hababam.nl www.kitatin.com (antilian) www.lokum.nl (turkish) www.maroc.nl (moroccan) www.marokko.nl www.safesex.nl www.youxme.nl (turkish and moroccan) i www.youxme.nl; turkish and moroccan; lokum.nl (turkish); maroc.nl (moroccan); hulpmix.nl (different cultural backgrounds). consulted on 17 december 2009. ii final dissertation diana visser, page 12. consulted on 23 january 2010. iii nrc handelsblad, 19 january 2010; volkskrant 18 january 2010, 2009; elsevier 14 august 2007, consulted on 22 january 2010. iv http://www.volkskrant.nl article 1078620.ece/ talking about sex under migrants still taboo, consulted on december19, 2009. v dami a. (2003) “couscous met appelmoes”, dialogue with moroccans, page 62. vi nrchandelsblad february 12, 2009, consulted online january 22, 2010. vii nrchandelsblad february 12, 2009, consulted online january 22, 2010. viii life story rajan, www.geentaboes.marokko.nl ix life story umit www.geentaboes.hababam.nl x ‘geen taboes’ means: no taboos. xi life stories at www.geentaboes.marokko.nl, www.geentaboes.hababam.nl and transcriptions of interviews, digital database lecturer. retrieved january 20, 2010. xii retrieved from http://www.geentaboes.marokko.nl/index.php?nav=verhalen&verhaal=2828 906 microsoft word oltedal using competence meetings.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 using competence meetings as a practical reflective method siv oltedal1 associate professor bodø university college email: siv.oltedal@hibo.no abstract a competence meeting is an arena for shared knowledge production. this approach does not offer supervision, teaching or decision-making, but rather an arena for reflection. students are required to use their everyday knowledge when they reflect on theory and practice, and the interconnection between these two. competence meetings, usually lasting for one hour, include both digital and traditional classroom-based learning activities. this article discusses the use of competence meetings within educational programmes. attached to this article is an example of a competence meeting2: an interview with professor tom andersen and a follow-up discussion between professors and practitioners in iceland, south africa and norway. keywords: blended learning, dialogue, social system, reflecting upon practices, cooperative learning, videotaped meeting introduction practical reflective methods may help students to use their practice experiences. using competence meetings is one way of bridging the gap between theory and practice. there is a need to develop tools that strengthen the students’ abilities to analyse and create a critical perspective based on everyday knowledge (schutz 1972/2005). questions and new thoughts are more important than answers when students are asked to draw on their experiences to illuminate theory, or when they embark on reflective processes regarding their own or others’ practice experiences. the reflective approach recognises that theory is often implicit in the way professionals act and may or may not be congruent with the theory they believe themselves to be acting upon. this type of theory, or perhaps “practice wisdom”, is developed directly from practice experience – a “bottom-up” type of process. (fook 2002:39) social work has its origin in practice, and competence meetings mainly rely on the students’ own practice. sometimes other practitioners, who are not a part of the study programme, also contribute to these meetings. since the beginning in 2003, the flexibly delivered master’s degree in social work at bodø university college has had compulsory parts to it such as international http://seminar.net/files/vol5-2/competencemeeting/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 2 work requirements, book reviews and competence meetings in addition to ordinary examinations (oltedal 2006). a competence meeting is an arena in which people can participate in the production of knowledge by describing contextual practices. the concept developed as a negation, and was neither supervision, teaching, nor decisionmaking, but rather an arena for reflection. another aspect of the creation of competence meetings was an interest in validating practice, and this approach could be an alternative strategy to the emphasis on theory in the social sciences. for students to receive credits for a competence meeting, it is a requirement that they are evaluated and receive feedback from other participants. this puts the students in a new practice situation that is quite unusual for ordinary work life. they need to reflect upon and communicate their own reflections about what has occurred. the aim of this article is twofold: • to describe a competence meeting as part of a flexible, delivered study programme. • to engage in a theoretical discussion on what a competence meeting is. the importance of reflecting upon practices a competence meeting can be characterized as blended learning. littlejohn and pegler (2007) define this type of learning as a blend between “real” and “virtual” domains, between onand off-campus activity, between online tasks and between face-to-face learning activities. e-learning allows us to also blend different spaces and work across time zones and geographical spaces in real and asynchronous time. in a south african context, the implementation of blended learning activities within a social work programme follows a policy shift from teaching to an active learner-centred pedagogy (bozalek 2007). this approach creates considerable opportunities for participation and collaboration among students. they were challenged to explore their preconceived thoughts when working with tasks that had no right or wrong answer. an emphasis was put on reflection and how to account for different statements, as in this case, when they explored ethics within social work (ibid). internet access is generally good among norwegian students, and the use of ict in norwegian flexible education depends on the study model and the students’ study context (rønning and grepperud 2006). e-mail is the most common channel of contact between students and teachers, and digital communication is an important supplement for the flexible student (ibid). it is a challenge to develop more contact among students and a competence meeting, as i am discussing in this article, is one way of creating such contact. within such meetings, students need to meet face-to-face in “real” or “virtual” rooms and document an online meeting in writing. as an example, it is a challenge in theoretical studies within social work to help students to identify life experiences that help them to transfer theoretical concepts from one context to another. on the other hand, theories help students to be able to identify and express knowledge from everyday life. in problem-based learning approaches, students learn how to learn (bjørke 1996). knowledge becomes more grounded and is easier to transfer to new situations, since the students have been active learners both in the integration of theory with their own practice and/or when they have been drawing on practical experiences in developing new perspectives. in a competence meeting, it is important to create a reflective process, and students need to draw on their own experiences while studying a subject like seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 3 social work. discussing articles can be one way of creating a group process in a competence meeting. the teacher or leader of the competence meeting needs to choose an article which triggers discussion and perhaps helps to explore contested issues. the following is an example of a task in which bachelor students in social work were asked to reflect upon links between theory and practice. the students read an article where the main finding concerned the advantages of working in groups without having a teacher as a group leader (innjord 2006). after the students read the article, each of them, either individually or as part of a group, was instructed to write a paper consisting of two parts. their task3 was as follows: “after reading the actual article, write a paper consisting of the two following parts: 1) write a résumé of the text with the author’s main perspective as the point of departure. try to write in such a way that it can be understood by a person who has not read the original text. to take the author’s perspective is not just to write a short version of the text with the author’s own words and expressions. on the contrary, you have to try to convey the author’s message and give arguments based on the premises of the author. you choose the form of presentation yourself. for example, you can write a letter to somebody you know well or you can dramatize a situation with different role players, where the author has one role and presents arguments for his/her message. 2) this part consists of your own reflections initiated by the former text and former presentations of this text. you are expected to provide more than common statements like “this is an interesting text“, “the author is biased” or “this is an incomplete analysis”. you need to account for your arguments and reasoning. this can only be done by delving into the author’s reasoning and taking it seriously. it is also valuable if your own reflections raise questions and reflections regarding your profession, or future everyday work. it is useful to try and draw parallels to something else you have read, written or participated in.” the last sentence is especially important to highlight in that students are challenged to draw on their own experiences from something they have participated in. this will change the discussion from a question of the right or wrong way of how to interpret the author’s purpose for writing a text, towards a discussion on their own interpretations and associations. one of the aims of the competence meetings is to create a subject-to-subject relationship in which something is being explored. it is not of great importance to reach a conclusion at the end of the meeting. when students from various contexts are comparing perspectives, it is possible to illuminate how the same phenomenon is represented in different ways within each context, thereby challenging the doxa of what is taken for granted. the above task helps students to cross the learning context between practice and theory, where first, they must explore another person’s (the author’s) premise and second, interpret and make relevant those phenomena and concepts within their own context. some examples of competence meetings within a master’s programme from a studio in durban, south africa, a professor of social work and leader of an international standards committee regarding programmes in social work seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 4 gave a presentation of this type of work. simultaneously, in bodø, norwegian and international students were gathered in a room, while the student who facilitated the meeting communicated by telephone from his home on senja, an island north of bodø. the teacher present in the room helped to coordinate the meeting and discussion among participants who were located in three different places. another example is from a student who conducted an informational meeting on childcare as part of her work in a local municipality. in her report, published in the learning platform fronter, she documented her experience of talking with a local nurse and the headmaster at the primary school in regard to issues related to interdisciplinary collaboration. a third example is from a student who reflected on how to deal with and document fervent issues from his practice as a social worker, and who invited colleagues to be part of the meeting. thus, a compulsory part of a master’s programme can have consequences for the practice field, thereby making an impact. a student who wished to discuss an intense case about how a professional social worker deals with suicidal patients had invited a minister from a hospital and a cooperative partner, in addition to fellow students, to a competence meeting. all these participants drew on their experiences as laypeople and professionals. in this way, the competence meeting provided quite a bit of input from the practice field. figure 1: a competence meeting. what type of input did the meeting receive from the university college? it is possible that the most important input came from a platform opened by the university college to help validate the knowledge production of the competence meeting, in order to accredit it as a necessary part of the master’s diploma programme in social work. social work is mainly invisible work (pithouse et al. 1998), as social workers meet with clients without being observed by colleagues. the result of a social worker’s intervention is uncertain and ambiguous, and practitioners are not usually held accountable for the helpful or restrictive processes in which they are involved. one way of opening up the practice of social work is to account for assessments and decision making in tense situations in which circumstances, contexts and personal histories require reflection. when social workers visit clients’ homes, for example, the analytical focus must transcend the division between life and system worlds, and contain an authoritative practice based on negotiations in local places, such as with the family (sagatun 2008). complexity in such everyday life creates a self-contradictory knowledge, disconnected from strict plans and only partially made clear (schutz 2005). in issues regarding tense situations, a social worker cannot rely on instructions, but instead needs to use practical wisdom. since the meetings are recorded and stored through a video conferencing system, the reflective process of social work can be studied more in-depth by thoughtful consideration as the participants go back and study the accounting process in the discussion of specific competence meetings. let us have a look at how a competence meeting is defined and structured as presented in the study plan for this compulsory part of the master’s programme: university /college practice practice practice competence meeting (common area) sound/ picture/text online video video-conference/on-line samarbeid seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 5 goals for competence meetings: • to provide a forum that may develop advanced professional practice; • to create areas of contact between theory and practice (education and places of practice); • to develop places for improving practices. to offer master’s students a forum for reflection, and develop theory based on practice experience or in connection with a master’s thesis; • to contribute to the international development of practice and education; • to utilize and develop competence linked to multimedia activity. content: the subject will be given an opportunity for systematic reflection on professional daily life and professional knowledge in welfare work through practice and different study situations. to be a professional concerns knowing the possibilities and limitations of one’s competence, and to be able to face that level of competence in practice. it is in relation to others through experience with concrete situations that an individual can acknowledge his or her professionalism. the goal is for students, by participating in a competence meeting, to gain an increased understanding of the dynamics between theory and practice, by studying professional daily life in regard to welfare work. the focus is on critical and ethical reflective work with experiences from practice and the contemporary challenges of society. form: the one who is responsible for the master’s programme will arrange a series of competence meetings in which each master’s student may present a particular case for discussion. practitioners from a multitude of professional backgrounds will participate and provide a mechanism for development in the advanced practice of social work, thereby promoting a closer association among national and international students, and the local professional practice. a competence meeting is an encounter within a group of people who decide to reflect upon an actual theme or aspect of their work and/or practice experiences. one person takes responsibility for presenting an introduction and leading the discussion. some are responsible for actively participating, while others evaluate the process afterwards together with the leader of the meeting. documentation: for a meeting to be accredited, a student needs to document the learning process with the following: 1. a statement of when and where the competence meeting is held. 2. a description of how many participants are involved in the meeting and which institutions are represented. 3. a presentation of the agenda for the meeting. 4. an evaluation of the meeting by two of its participants (either orally or in writing). 5. an evaluation of the three phases of preparation, meeting and reflection after the meeting. masterforum is a communications room for fronter, an ict platform for teachers and master’s students in social work at bodø university college. on seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 6 december 13th 2007, a total of 104 master’s students were registered and 25 published a documentation of the competence meeting in masterforum. when categorizing the content and theme of these meetings, the following six different groups appeared: theme: reflection on a previously videotaped lecture reflection on a theme from the master’s thesis reflection on the student’s written essay reflection on the student’s contribution at the conference reflection and description of a theme from the student’s workplace reflection on the supervision among colleagues on the student’s lecture number of students: 8 3 5 2 6 1 table 1: content of master’s students’ competence meeting. as we can see from the table, the themes varied. eight students presented an introduction to discussion by using a videotaped lecture such as “symbolic interactionism” or “relational ethics”. these videotaped lectures were available in fronter for all master’s students. six students used the opportunity to arrange a meeting with colleagues and collaborative partners to discuss a work-related issue. one student, who was working at a university college, used the competence meeting as part of a compulsory student evaluation of her own lecture. five students presented an essay that was an exam paper on a social work theory course in the master’s programme. these essays were personal accounts that inspired further discussion among the students. nine such student essays from the master’s programmes in social work and practical knowledge are published in the book, “a glance at practice” (blikk på praksis), in which social workers narrate their work experiences (olsen and oltedal, eds. 2007). the number of participants in the meetings varied. on one occasion, there was only one student, the teacher and one of the technical staff in the room, while three students were logged onto the streamlined video conference and one was logged onto a chat channel. students who presented issues from conferences, or described an issue from their work situation, usually had many more people who attended their presentations (between 10 to 60 people). the flexibly delivered master’s programme has many off-campus students, and as a result, there is a need to enhance even more interactive activity and to develop educational forms that increase contact between students living in different locations. a competence meeting among reykjavik, cape town and bodø in the following, i will present a competence meeting between professors and practitioners in three countries. this meeting was arranged in connection with the publication of this article, and is available as a video link attached to this article. it consists of an interview that the leader of this meeting, thorhildur g. egilsdottir of iceland, had with professor tom andersen on october 10th 2006 and of a virtual meeting on may 13 2009 between participants in bodø, reykjavik and cape town. the leader of the meeting has written the following documentation: an online competence meeting between iceland, norway and south africa on may 13th 2009. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 7 participants: from reykjavik: thorhildur egilsdottir, bjarney kristjansdottir and dr. sigrun juliusdottir. from bodø: pål grav, reidun ulvin and sigurd schultz. from cape town: dr. vivienne bozalek and dr. tamara shefer. the purpose of the meeting was to reflect on an interview with the world renowned family therapist tom anderson. thorhildur egilsdottir, the leader of the meeting, interviewed him while he attended the 15th world family therapy congress of the international family therapy association (ifta) held in reykjavik, iceland on october 10 2006. in the interview, he was asked to reflect on three different realities: a) the nonmoving and the visible, b) the moving and the visible, and c) the moving and the invisible. the link with this part of the interview was sent to all the participants two weeks in advance of the meeting. the preparation the idea of this particular competence meeting came from dr. siv oltedal. the interview was presented at a competence meeting in the fall of 2006 at the university college of bodø. dr. siv oltedal provided e-mail addresses for one of the african participants and one of the norwegian participants. they were then asked to invite participants from their country and i also invited two icelandic colleagues. although the term “competence meeting” was a new concept for most of us, this was no hindrance to participation. finding a suitable date when everyone was available was a challenge. several options were checked before we finally found the perfect match for everyone. due to different time zones, we agreed to start as early as possible, i.e. at 8 am in iceland and 10 am in norway and south africa. preferably, we should have watched the interview together, but technically, this was a rather difficult task. i therefore decided to have the interview available through an internet link that was sent to all participants two weeks in advance. thus, they could watch the video at their own convenience. the meeting the meeting took place online, but we were sitting in three different countries in three different studios. there were eight participants: thorhildur egilsdottir, social worker in reykjavík; bjarney kristjansdottir, social worker in reykjavik; dr. sigrun juliusdottir, professor of social work at the university of iceland; pål grav, social worker in probation office in bodø; reidun ulvin, social worker in probation office, mid-norway; sigurd schultz, social worker and head of open prison in bodø; dr. vivienne bozalek, professor of social work, university of western cape town; dr. tamara shefer, professor of gender studies, university of western cape town. there were also three technicians: grettir sigurjónsson, university of iceland; jørgen karlsen, university college of bodø, and graham julies, university of western cape town. the meeting lasted for approximately one hour. though we had not met previously, we immediately established a good atmosphere while reflecting on tom´s reflections. we related tom´s reflections to our practice as social workers in addition to being teachers and researchers. we managed to meet and understand each other across countries and contexts. all the participants agreed that attending the event was a good experience. the aftermath it was enjoyable to arrange the meeting and experience the impact this method had on the participants. thinking back to the meeting and the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 8 ideas expressed there, i somehow feel my thoughts/ideas/opinions are not the same as before. sharing practical experiences across different countries and cultures is a knowledge-building process geared to breaking down preconceived ideas. the joy and the laughter at the meeting was the best part of the process and tells us a lot about the possibilities that the internet may hold for teaching and developing social work in the future. reykjavík, may 24th 2009 thorhildur egilsdottir the inspiration to develop a competence meeting as a practical reflective method can also be traced back to thoughts about the reflective process and reflective team (andersen 1994). the book “innovations in the reflecting process” (anderson and jensen, eds. 2007) honours tom andersen’s courageous, creative and committed contributions. the book demonstrates how his ideas have created worldwide development in the field of family therapy. in the preface of the book, the editors write: “some have made footprints that will last for a long time. one of these is tom andersen. from a position as a professor of social psychiatry in northern norway, he has moved around the world participating with other professionals in their efforts to develop their work and seek wider horizons” (ibid). tom andersen died on may 15th 2007 and michaelsen4 writes the following memorial describing andersen’s perspective: “in meetings and conversations, we find our hope. when we are listening, seeking words and describing ourselves, we inform ourselves and others. thus, we can see what we see, hear what we are hearing and move forward in life. (...) listen and see what is being said. here are the answers and the questions.” “we have to respond to what people say and not to what we think they are saying” says tom andersen in the attached videotaped interview. he wants to explore what is reality and how people meet each other on the surface. it is important to see and to listen. participants in the competence meeting from norway and iceland had all met tom andersen in real life. sigrun juliusdottir says that before she delivered a speech at the above mentioned conference in iceland, she told tom andersen that she was very nervous. he then he replied: “i do not think so much.” we can interpret this answer to be in accordance with his general perspective in which he focuses upon seeing and hearing. although the participants from south africa were not familiar with the thoughts of tom andersen, they say that it resonates with their experience that language shapes meaning. an important question is: how do we really listen to people coming from different realities? however, as one person from south africa says: social workers are going to help people to think about what they can do, although it is perhaps naive to think that voices in themselves will do anything. to be able to create knowledge and understand this new information, it must contain a suitable difference in regard to what people are already familiar with; the new information must not be too common or too different from what the audience already knows (andersen 1994). in a competence meeting, a norwegian participant used the metaphor about how social workers should act as troublemakers within their workplaces. the challenge is to then find the right distance between what you and others think, thus enabling one to be able to contribute to development. in a competence meeting, the person who presents the introduction shares something that he/she has struggled with, or explores the connection between theory and practice. interactions and reflection should be given time so that participants may experience both an inner and an outer conversation (ibid). this method is more about spreading a great deal of seeds and creating a difference that makes a difference (bateson 1972). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 9 participants were very excited about the possibility of using video conferencing, and for some of them it was their first video meeting. what follows are some more comments from the participants at the end of the meeting: • it felt like a very good experience. i was grateful to be able to participate in a competence meeting and be involved in discussions across contexts. it was demonstrated for the participants that language is a tool as well as a hindrance. the description of the possibilities created by technology and internationalization was wonderful (iceland). • one wondered about where such a meeting would take the participants. his reply was: maybe it is about human beings meeting other human beings? (norway). • a participant found the conversation interesting because it speaks to her research and theoretical interests. she says it was good to see an image, knowing that the person is there. she was quite inspired to see what the visual adds to the conversation (south africa). it was a rather comprehensive job to set up the meeting by adjusting in the technical equipment. the technician in bodø used equipment that was splitting the video signal from the decoder, using a device which transforms encoded signals into their original form; thus, one was directed toward the monitor and another toward the recorder. the same splitting procedure had to be done with the sound signals. he made two simultaneous recordings. one was stored in the server, and was sent directly in real time to the participants at the meeting. the other recording, which was of higher quality, started earlier than the other one. it is the last one that thorhildur, the leader of the meeting, was editing for the final version of this competence meeting. teacher and student opinions about competence meetings the flexible master’s programme in bodø draws its candidates from all over norway and, in some cases, from other nordic countries. the curriculum has a flexible form, and makes comprehensive use of streaming for lectures. this makes it possible to complete the master’s programme as an off-campus student. in december 2007, an invitation to participate in reflections upon competence meetings was first posted in the masterforum information area. thereafter, informants who had participated in several meetings received an additional mail. i received few replies. in spite of this, i decided not to send new reminders because i had received replies representing the following three categories: teachers, on-campus students and off-campus students. the aim of this assessment was to get a qualitative, explorative overview of this method, rather than a generalized opinion based on a quantitative approach representing all the participants. using a qualitative approach, it is sufficient to get one answer from each of the three informant categories. different answers from these three informants are presented and discussed. it is reasonable to suppose that the chosen informants represent some of the most engaged participants involved in the competence meetings. the informants mailed me answers on the following questions: • how would you describe a competence meeting? • what are the benefits and challenges provided by this kind of educational practice? • how may competence meetings be improved? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 10 when our informants were asked to describe a competence meeting, they all emphasized that students involved in such meetings play a more active role than they do in other parts of the master’s study programme. the leader of the master’s programme focuses on the fact that such a meeting is an arena for students to take the lead in presentations and reflections on the subject under consideration, while the teachers play a more passive role. the on-campus student describes it as a lecture held by a student with an audience of other master’s students, aimed at mediating theoretical knowledge and knowledge developed in practice. “to share creates a feeling of being part of a context, and such meetings are inclusive.” this was the immediate reflection shared by an off-campus student when she was asked to describe her experiences from competence meetings at bodø university college. she also wrote: “what makes a competence meeting different from other meetings is that it has a more open structure, thus creating new perspectives and challenging prejudiced opinions. open processes that take place in the gathering are crucial within a competence meeting.” this off-campus student also emphasized that the process of preparing, implementing and reflecting on the meeting does more than build knowledge; it creates a feeling of coping and connecting with other students as well. her opinion is that such processes are very difficult to produce in other ways within a distance-education programme. on the other hand, she says that it is not fruitful for further discussion when students repeat lectures that are taped and already available to all students. a prerequisite for a competence meeting is that a group of people participate. in this way, the off-campus student highlights the importance of recruiting participants to take part in competence meetings. if there are too few students, the person who gives the introduction becomes too important, and many questions are directed to this person. as a result, it almost becomes like a traditional lecture in which the teacher is the expert. according to the offcampus student, the necessary dynamic in a competence meeting then disappears. when the on-campus student expresses what is positive, she underscores the new experiences and learning that result from presenting an introduction that can contribute to reflections regarding practice. it is a new and exciting form of education. she says it is a good way of learning because you can also learn from what fellow students consider to be important. however, on the down side, there were often too few students participating, so the dialogue did not always take off. in a situation where the video conferencing system was not functioning, the leader of the competence meeting communicated by telephone. the distance between onand off-campus became evident, and the on-campus informant highlights the fact that it is necessary to ensure technical equipment which creates a common communication room in real time. the leader of the course emphasizes that it is a positive that students take a more active approach to this subject. he says that it is especially important that students who are presenting at the meeting accept the fact that the teacher does not take responsibility for creating discussions. however, the leader agrees that there are too few participants on the internet, and therefore the meetings depend on the four to five students present in the classroom. seen from the off-campus student’s perspective, a competence meeting breaks the isolation of the individual student. isolation is the main disadvantage of being a distance-education student. competence meetings create an opportunity to develop an internet milieu, with the possibility of using a web camera to make direct contact with fellow students and teachers. she says it feels like being on campus when this type of communication is occurring in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 11 real time. in her opinion, the biggest challenge the lack of community could be dealt with by developing a competence meeting as a better reflective practical method: “students may carry out the meetings alone or together with other students. this is possible to do in different ways, like creating a net connection between different parts of the country, having a conversation with a relevant, skilled person/professional followed by a reflection upon this conversation, or by taping a discussion among students followed by a reflection on this discussion. in this way, you get reflections upon reflections and you will break up the two-way communication between presenter and audience. circular processes are important in education because the individual will be involved in a way that creates attachment and gives the student a feeling of belonging to a community. creating these processes is the biggest challenge for the future of distanceeducation.” “more focus on practical experiences”, the on-campus student said when she was asked to comment on how competence meetings can be improved. the leader of the master’s programme and the off-campus student both underscored different ways of creating more collective processes by challenging students to work together in groups. for example, in 2007, oncampus students took responsibility for four different meetings, and inspired each other by switching the role as leader, evaluator or audience member in the meeting. according to the teacher and the off-campus student, the teacher does not necessarily need to be part of the meetings. cooperative learning within a student network learning theories can be individual, collaborative or cooperative. regarding the first, education is conducted alone, while the second depends on a group, and the third takes place in a network (paulsen 2008). individual learning dominates traditional online distance-education, and the cornerstone for the development of cooperative learning is voluntary but attractive learning communities, while traditional faceto-face institutions favour collaborative learning in which individual flexibility needs to be limited and students learn to sink or swim together (ibid). the theory of cooperative freedom claims that adult students often seek individual flexibility and freedom. therefore, there is tension between the urge for individual independence and the necessity to contribute in a collective learning community. morten flate paulsen (2007) has based his theory on the following three pillars: 1. voluntary, but attractive participation. 2. means promoting individual flexibility. 3. means promoting affinity to a learning community. does a competence meeting fulfil these three pillars? if you register for a study programme, it is not possible for everything within it to be voluntary if you are to receive credits at the end of it. however, what does voluntary mean? if we take the case of a competence meeting, one of the requirements is that every master’s student in the programme conducts such a meeting. on the other hand, the amount of effort they put into this part of the programme is voluntary. in any case, they have fulfilled the study-related requirements, and do not receive grades. the assessment is based on whether or not the competence meeting is accepted or not accepted. the description of the competence meeting is included as part of the master’s thesis course. they need to have it completed before their master’s thesis is submitted for grading. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 12 one could say it is voluntary whether one learns a great deal or almost nothing at all from conducting such a meeting. the attraction of using this method is that the student can fill these meetings with the content he/she is interested in, while the university requirements are almost exclusively on a more formal level. another attractive aspect is that they can combine a study activity with something they need or ought to do as part of their ordinary work. they may take initiatives that would otherwise be difficult to take if it were not a study programme requirement. one such example is the interview thorhildur g. egilsdottir did with professor tom andersen while he was attending an international conference. by itself, such a private interview would not have been regarded as a legitimate use of a key speaker’s leisure time. (see the interview in the link) in ordinary face-to-face education on campus, a collaborative learning strategy requires students to participate in learning communities. the individual freedom for each student may create tension and appear as problematic for the entire group’s learning process. by referring to the learning process we get from a collaborative activity, we are emphasizing the needs of the group over those of the individual. in the end, participating in these groups will be rewarded with new knowledge. a collective orientation is often stressed throughout the entire process. the off-campus student noted that competence meetings provide good possibilities for creating online communities among distance-education students. however, the meetings may need to be more organized, e.g. by creating a system of learning partners. a learning partner service is a system that helps a student to find suitable fellow students with whom he/she may build a learning community. the possibility of individual freedom is often a motive for embarking on flexibly-delivered studies. competence meetings take place in a network that is part of a cooperative learning community. i agree with paulsen (2008) that cooperation with others should be attractive and appealing. in the context of social work and the importance of developing communication within social systems, i think it is preferable however to also have an obligatory component within a cooperative learning approach. students that do not contribute to a learning community cannot be perceived as a learning resource for others. competence meetings as a social system a competence meeting is an interactive system. according to luhmann, societies are divided into different systems, and the function of the educational system is to steer people in the direction of definite goals (qvortrup 2005). this system divides members into teachable (resource) and risk (threat) pupils/students. students must learn to handle knowledge and no-knowledge and understand the distinction between them (ibid). students can be identified in two types of systems: social systems that are maintained by communication and psychic systems that are maintained by conscious processes. a system can also be defined as interaction and communication within borders. there is more communication going on within the borders of a system than crossing borders between a system and its surroundings. each system creates its own surroundings and its own context. people, as represented by psychic systems, are parts of the context when social systems within a society are created. for that reason, students who participate in a competence meeting are both inside and outside this social system. with his identification of psychic systems, luhmann (1993) rescues people from being totally defined by society, and they get a place where they can develop their own thoughts and feelings. social systems develop in order to cope with external complexity. the reflective teams that tom andersen developed to facilitate reflections upon reflections (andersen 1994) can also be regarded as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 13 social systems. both andersen (ibid) and luhmann (1993) have as their premise that we are not able to instruct systems, that an input to a system can only “irritate” it, and that the output will be a result of interaction with the systems’ own internal logic. tom andersen had close contact with the usbased galveston institute in texas, which published an article entitled “problem determined systems” (anderson, goolishian & winderman 1986), and the connection here towards luhmann can also be identified. problems are maintained in language by a problem-determined system and are subsequently dissolved through conversation (ibid). language can basically be conceptualized in two ways: as system and structure, or as practice and communication. it is necessary to take context into account in order to be able to understand the communicated meanings and functions of what is said by actors in specific situations (linell 1998: 3). according to social constructivism (berger and luckmann 1966), reality is constructed through a dialectic process between social relations and social structures, and symbolic interpretations play a very relevant role in the social construction of reality. when practitioners are talking about what they do, they sometimes need to develop new expressions or metaphors to grasp the local and contextual interpretations, e.g. by using narratives, which have such a flexible or elastic form that enables them to contribute to the comprehension of small nuances that complement theoretical knowledge (erstad 2005). when we communicate, we do not know for sure if various participants have a similar interpretation of a phenomenon. we can only explore differences, misunderstandings and miscommunications (rommetveit 2001). “poststructuralists insist that words and texts have no fixed or intrinsic meanings, that there is no transparent or self-evident relationship between them and either ideas or things, no basic or ultimate correspondence between language and the world” (scott 2003: 273). we will never be able to confirm what was actually meant or be able to explore the full complexities of the interpretations of the people involved. in the attached interview, tom andersen talks about the third reality as “the moving and invisible” one. here, people communicate through metaphors. in luhmann’s (1993, 2002) system of theoretical perspective, he tells us that subjects cannot communicate with each other, and only communication can communicate. we can interpret this to mean, for example, communication through metaphors. a competence meeting is a concrete arena where different participants meet to present, reflect on and discuss issues relevant to an academic institution and the workplace. theory is the most dominant aspect at universities, while a focus on practice is more characteristic of the workplace. as blended learning, competence meetings include both digital and traditional classroom-based learning activities for mediating dialogues between theory and practice. a competence meeting is a social system that functions to create knowledge (resource) and avoid the risk (threat) that it is felt as you are wasting your time. it has its boundaries regarding the limitation of time and the need for face-to-face meetings (virtual or in the same location). the leader of the meeting is responsible for the preparation phase, the introduction, to lead the discussion and to document the meeting in writing. the last part must occur if the student is going to receive credit within the educational system. what is it to create knowledge? the challenge is to look for ways to facilitate reflections upon reflections. one needs to create a connection towards others in the discussion. the focus should be on what is said – what is there – and not on what you think was said. when engaging in dialogical communication, a person will find resonance with others, although not look for agreement or disagreement with others. what is the risk? in this context, a monologue that does not connect with other participants’ experiences is not regarded as knowledge. this is because seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 14 somebody imposes ready-made interpretations about right and wrong answers, and dialogue is not triggered. if someone is not touched or moved in one way or another in a competence meeting context, we can then frame it as not-knowledge. concluding remarks where does this bring us? in the conclusion, i will highlight three aspects for the implementation of competence meetings which will be of value for further exploration. a culture of sharing develops when you use an internet-supported means for lecturing, discussing and holding competence meetings, etc., and you have less control over the audience. in this new ict area, it is much more difficult to privatize what is occurring. this may create ethical considerations in relation to exploring a new and challenging theme on the internet in terms of not knowing who is in the audience. although this is a closed net within the master’s study programme, one will never gain control over who may observe the meetings on the internet together with the enrolled students. if an interesting competence meeting is conducted, a student can even invite friends and colleagues to look at the videotaped meeting once again. students who do not participate in a competence meeting in real time can participate in an inner conversation with what they see and hear. in this way, they will gain knowledge through a flexibly-delivered study. however, students need to listen carefully and take the time to get in touch with an inner conversation that connects their own everyday knowledge and practice to an already produced competence meeting. in the reflexive process, students must change from just being spectators to becoming participants who involve themselves in dialogues. to be a partner in a learning community, the student also needs to embark on external conversations with partner students. how can we strengthen an active learner-centred pedagogy by appraising public exposure and a sharing culture in the production of knowledge? exploring practices and processes in social work can challenge the contemporary focus on results and evidence. in social work, there is a debate regarding evidence-based practice, which focuses on more general guidelines, and looks for the effects produced in social work (eskelinen, olesen & caswell 2008). a more social constructivist approach with an interpretive and linguistic turn will focus on developing practice from within through critical reflection (ibid). discussions and deliberations can be documented in a competence meeting as a way of safeguarding practices. such a documentation process can open up new ideas in how to cope with difficult life situations and create empowering experiences for the participants. reflective processes can provide a critical stance towards unified descriptions by also emphasizing oppositions and contradictions. a feeling of community is an important component of participation in a competence meeting. it is a challenge to create a learning activity so that both on-campus and distance-education students get the feeling of belonging to a community. face-to-face interaction is of great value to the students. off campus students have reported that it feels as if they are actually on campus when the communication is happening in real time. since the main challenge for many students is that they cannot travel to the campus for various reasons, a competence meeting will need to use a video-conferencing system. the pedagogical challenge is to provide academic content, examples and situations that demonstrate how combining the aims of both freedom and social unity can yield optimal individual freedom within online learning communities. flexible studies, meaning both onand off-campus studies, should emphasize developing different reflective, practical methods that create a dialogue among participants, thus reducing the monologue approach to education. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 2 – 2009 15 references andersen, t. 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(eds) (1998). family support and family centre services: issues, research and evaluation in the uk, usa and hong kong. aldershot: asgate. qvortrup, l. (2005). society`s educational system. in seminar.net media, technology & lifelong learning. vol.1, issue 1, 2005. rommetveit, r. (2001). (interview) in e. maagerø and e.s. tønnesen: samtalar om tekst, språk og kultur. landslaget for norskundervisning. oslo: cappelen akademiske forlag. rønning, w.m., & grepperud, g. (2006). the everyday use of ict in norwegian flexible education. in seminar.net media, technology & lifelong learning. vol.2, issue 1, 2006. sagatun, s. (2008). kjønn i sosialt arbeid med ungdommer og foreldre. universitetsforlaget, oslo. schutz, a.. (2005). hverdagslivets sociologi. hans reitzels forlag (english edition 1972). scott, j.w. (2003). “deconstructing equality-versus-difference: or, the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism.” in c.r. mccann, & k. seungkyung(eds.) feminst theory reader, routledge, new york and london. 1 siv oltedal has been a leader of the norwegian open university project on “competence meetings” (2005 – 2006) and leader of the “flexibly delivered master’s degree in social work”, bodø university college, in 2003 and 2004. 2 thanks to thorhildur egilsdottir for interviewing tom andersen on october 10 2006 and for leading a competence meeting on may 13 2009. thanks as well to the other participants and technicians from reykjavik, cape town and bodø. link to the interview: http://seminar.net/files/vol5-2/competencemeeting/ 3 this task is developed by åsa mäkitalo, associate professor in education and codirector of lincs: the linnaeus centre for research on learning, interaction & mediated communication in contemporary society, gøteborg, sweden. 4 michaelsen’s memorial to tom andersen is translated into english by the author. digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4701 ©2022 (lotte vermeire, wendy van den broeck, leo van audenhove & ilse mariën) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 lotte vermeire imec-smit vrije universiteit brussel email: lotte.vermeire@vub.be, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6334-9248 wendy van den broeck imec-smit vrije universiteit brussel leo van audenhove imec-smit vrije universiteit brussel university of the western cape ilse mariën imec-smit vrije universiteit brussel abstract the pandemic had a considerable impact on flemish youth work, as many face-to-face activities had to shift online. for many organizations, this was their first encounter with digital youth work, either online or blended. despite this recent boom, the concept is not new. it was mentioned in the 2017 conclusions on smart youth work1 by the council of the european union. digital youth work is defined as using and discussing digital 1 “smart youth work enables young people and youth workers to, based on existing experiences and seeking new connections and means, create innovative solutions (including digital solutions) for coping with both current problems and new challenges. smart youth work activities are based on the needs of young people and youth workers, and take into account developments in society and technology” (schlümmer, 2018). https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4701 mailto:lotte.vermeire@vub.be https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6334-9248 digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 media/technology in different types of youth work, whilst still adhering to its objectives (council of the european union, 2019). this paper examines the effects of covid-19 on flemish youth work and explores the challenges and opportunities, using the quick-scanmethod to map practices. identified opportunities are strengthening participants’ and youth workers’ digital competences, combating social isolation, increasing accessibility and space to experiment and blended teaching methods to strengthen youth work. barriers are the limited know-how amongst youth workers, digital exclusion, high cost of hardand software, and the importance of the correct working method for the desired goals. keywords: digital youth work, flanders, covid-19, practices, challenges and opportunities introduction: context and concern the pandemic has had a considerable impact on youth work in flanders. the covid-19 lockdown forced many youth work organizations to set up digital activities as an alternative to reach their target group during this period of social restrictions. during the belgian covid-19 lockdown (march 18th, 2020 july 1st, 2020), all public activities were closed down and schools and companies had to function remotely, making use of online tools. activities were limited to essential services, such as grocery shopping (maerevoet et al., 2020). it immediately became clear that several individuals and groups were being digitally cut off from work, school, family, friends, social and public services due to a lack of digital material, internet access, digital skills and/or required help. schools worked hard to ensure that all children were included in the remote teaching (van den broeck & de bonte, 2021), but also youth work organizations did their best to organize alternative activities for their members. for many youth work organizations, this was their first experience with digital youth work. covid-19 can thus be seen as a trigger for initiating digital youth work activities on a bigger scale in flanders. in this paper we will focus on the impact of covid-19 and how this has influenced the flemish digital youth work landscape. our main goal is to investigate how covid-19 and digitalization in general challenges daily practices and digital literacy among youth workers and how this has impacted the implementation of flemish digital youth work. our study also looks at how the sector and youth workers interpret and understand their own practices and roles related to our increasingly digitized society. thus, the research questions are: 1. what are the characteristics (presence, frequency, accessibility, intensity 2) of 2abovementioned characteristics are defined in this study as 1. what is the typology of flemish digital youth work (presence), 2. how frequently is digital youth work being organized and how sustainable are these practices (frequency), 3. how digitally inclusive and accessible are the flemish digital youth work practices (accessibility) and 4. how many digital activities or activities related to digital digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 flemish digital youth work? 2. what was the influence of covid-19 on the presence of flemish digital youth work? 3. what are the challenges and opportunities for flemish digital youth work? this is also relevant at policy level. to date, the flemish government has not yet developed a fully-fledged strategy for digital youth work, and as a result, the current youth work regulations are still mostly geared towards physical activities. however, in an increasingly digitized world in which being able to work with digital media has become indispensable, we can no longer see digital youth work as an exception. lauha and nõlvak (2019: 16), experts on digital and smart youth work, formulated this as follows: “[t]he digitization of youth work is an absolute requirement to keep up with the times, and it is no longer appropriate to distinguish digital youth work from face-to-face activities or treat it as a separate method or branch of youth work”. many flemish youth workers see digital youth work as a purely online activity, yet it is much more than that. in this context, the flemish youth department wanted to map the current practices and challenges, to substantiate policy choices regarding digital youth work. our research, commissioned by the flemish government, extensively maps flemish digital youth work practices by making an inventory and an in-depth analysis of these practices. based on our research, we’ve developed concrete policy recommendations on how to provide a policy framework for flemish digital youth work. this is the first study to analyze digital youth work in flanders, and it is important to properly document a field that receives increasing attention. a quick-scan-method, based on deskresearch, a survey and follow-up interviews, was applied to map the different digital practices of flemish youth work. this paper is structured as follows: in section 1, we discuss the state of the art of digital youth work. section 2 discusses the methodological approach. in section 3 we take a closer look at the results, followed by a discussion and a conclusion with concrete policy recommendations. conceptualization of digital youth work digitalization, or the “restructuring of our society around digital media and technology” (brennen & kreiss, 2016: 1) is not a new phenomenon. it impacts various aspects of our everyday lives, including work and education. digitalization impacts formal learning, but also informal learning, of which youth work is an example. in the necessity of informal learning, coffield (2000) addresses the importance of informal learning. learning is media and technology are organized (intensity)?2 digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 presented as an iceberg, of which formal education is merely the distinguishable surface. most of this iceberg is submerged and this part stands for all types of informal learning, e.g., work-related, recreational activities, etc. coffield (2000: 8) states that “[i]nformal learning should no longer be regarded as an inferior form of learning […]; it needs to be seen as fundamental, necessary, and valuable in its own right”. coffield (2008) claims that policy makers recognize informal learning’s importance (coffield, 2008), but do not actually take it into account when developing policies. this also relates to our work on digital youth work. it is important that policy makers acknowledge and support youth work as an informal learning setting in which youth workers guide and train youngsters to safely navigate the digital world. an important related concept is that of digital literacy: “[a] person needs to understand: (i) how to use modern digital technologies to access information, (ii) how to maneuver through the complex web of information made available by digital technologies, (iii) how to “read” and understand the messages on digital media, and (iv) how he or she can contribute to the digital information economy by using digital technology” (baron, 2019: 1). in an increasingly digitized society, access and being able to handle digital media has become indispensable. this not only refers to using digital media, but also to understanding digital media (seymoens et al., 2020). this is also important in the context of digital youth work. when a digital component is introduced, both the youth worker and the participating youth require the necessary skills. but also access to the necessary hard and software is sometimes an issue. digital literacy in this study therefore relates to the accessibility and inclusion of digital youth work practices and to the youth workers’ competences when introducing digital media/technology into their practices. not everyone in society has the same level of digital literacy. youngsters are often referred to as ‘digital natives’, first mentioned by prensky in digital natives, digital immigrants. prensky (2001: 1) states that they are “native speakers of the digital language”. despite the fact that we often talk about a generation of ‘digital natives’, not every young person is necessarily digitally literate. this relates to the concept of e-inclusion, which “refers to actions and solutions needed to prevent digital exclusion, so that everyone can fully participate in the digital society” (mediawijs, 2020). this remains an important point of attention when designing activities and is situated at the level of access as well as skills and support. flemish youth work aims to be inclusive, which means that not every participant can be expected to have the necessary devices, internet access or skills (mariën & brotcorne, 2020), a critique also focused on in thomas’ deconstructing digital natives (2011). this is important to realize for the youth work sector, which typically targets all youngsters in an inclusive way. in 2016 the european commission (ec) set up the expert group ‘risks, opportunities and implications of digitalization for youth, youth work and youth policy’ under the european union work plan for youth 2016-2018. the outcome was a clear definition of digital youth digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 work, as well as policy recommendations on “mutual understanding of digital youth work; strategic development of digital youth work; youth participation and youth rights; knowledge and evidence” (expert group on digitalisation and youth, 2019: 7). in the report, digital youth work was defined as follows: “digital youth work means proactively using or addressing digital media and technology in youth work. digital media and technology can be either a tool, an activity or a content in youth work. digital youth work is not a youth work method. digital youth work can be included in any youth work setting and it has the same goals as youth work in general. digital youth work can happen in face-to-face situations as well as in online environments, or in a mixture of the two. digital youth work is underpinned by the same ethics, values and principles as youth work.” (expert group on digitalisation and youth, 2019). in short, digital youth work stands for the use and discussion of digital media and technology in different types of youth work contexts, e.g. online, physical or blended and in diverse ways, i.e., as an instrument, an activity, or as content. it also pursues the same objectives as regular youth work. based on the decree of 20 january 2012 containing a renewed youth and children's rights policy, the flemish government recognizes and subsidizes various youth work organizations. in the decree, youth work is defined as: “social-cultural work based on non-commercial goals for or by young people aged three to thirty, in their spare time, under educational guidance and to promote general and integral development of young people who participate therein on a voluntary basis” (vlaamse regering, 2012). digital youth work can be included in this definition, and as indicated above, it can be seen as a subdivision of general youth work. digital youth work across europe digital youth work in flanders is still in its infancy, but there are already some good practices across europe. erasmus+ set up the digital youth work-project (2017-2019). the project had four main objectives: (1) offering good practices of digital youth work, (2) capacity building of youth workers, (3) raising awareness among youth workers and policy makers, and (4) improving planning and strategies (erasmus+, 2019). the project shared 36 good practices, developed digital youth work guidelines and training materials for youth workers, and shared tips on how to set up quality online youth work. (erasmus+, 2019). the guidelines offer a clear description of digital youth work, and relate this to outcomes, such as “more accessible and relevant” youth work, “including reaching those who may be geographically and socially isolated” or youngsters' ability to “manage personal, social and formal relationships in the digital era” (erasmus+, 2019). another relevant project is the skill it for youth-project, which wants to “increase the quality of youth work, combining higher levels of excellence and attractiveness in services, digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 obtained through the digitalisation of youth work [...] [and] to equip youth workers with digital tools and skills to enhance young people’s futures in the 21st century” (skill it, 2021). the study had three goals: (1) mapping digital skills in both education and youth work in ireland, norway, poland, and romania, (2) identifying youth ngos role in developing youngsters’ digital skills, and (3) identifying youth workers’ and organizations’ needs to cultivate projects for young people and their digital skills (skill it, 2021). interesting findings are youth organizations perspectives towards developing youngsters' competences concerning digital media and technology: these organizations are often “well placed in society to support young people to access information and to develop new skills” (skill it, 2018: 30). youth workers see their organizations as “facilitators or actors that provide complementary services to the digital education programs that the public education system should provide” and agree that they “could fill the gap between the formal education system’s learning outcomes and the labor market’s demands” (skill it, 2018: 31). the study indicated that the youth work field needs to know more clearly what their position is concerning enhancing youngsters’ competences related to digital media and technology (e.g., the digital literacies) (skill it, 2018). concrete issues that were identified are: “a lack of public digital learning policy and digital strategy; […] poor […] ict infrastructure including broadband and publicly accessible devices; formal education overloaded and unable to keep up with digital advances; lack of funding or, in the better funded countries: excessively restricted funding stifling innovation; many of the staff or volunteers who work with young people lack confidence, feel inadequately equipped to use digital technology with them” (skill it, 2020: 5) in 2020 the council of europe youth partnership and the european commission published social inclusion, digitalization and young people, with a focus on the link between social inor exclusion of young people and an increasingly digital society. the study mentions the impact of digitalization on youth work and the need for more smart youth work (see footnote 1) and claims that “[t]he fast pace of digitalization and technological changes [...] are quickly reshaping youth work, and also demand development of new skills and competences of both young people and youth workers” (șerban et al., 2020: 51). the work concludes that digital media and technology form an opportunity to socially include youngsters who are often marginalized or experience disadvantages, however they note the need for policies, strategies, platforms, and tools addressing e-inclusion and digitalization, such as support of access/connectivity and internet safety, digital skills and competence development, involvement of youth in the co-creation of new tools and platforms (șerban et al., 2020). the finnish organization verke published digitalisation & youth work (2019) together with the estonian youth work centre. 23 experts in the field focus on topics including the need for digital and smart youth work, the competences that come with this evolution of society, the possibility of (e-)participation, and the opportunities and challenges digital youth work can provide an answer to (lauha & nõlvak, 2019). according to the digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 publication, digitalization has impacted the skills youngsters need to participate in society, thus youth work needs to give attention to digital media/technology in their activities and not differentiate between digital and regular youth work. this supports the need for digital literacy amongst young people, as well as applying e-participation and taking inclusion into account. the editors believe it is youth workers’ obligation to adapt to the evolutions in youngsters’ world, which includes digital media/technology. youth workers do not need to be technological experts to support youngsters' skills nor do all youngsters need to become experts, but it is important to provide them with a solid basis, encourage critical competences as well as curiousness and willingness to independently research and train their skills, and give them opportunities to use and think about digital media. this positively influences digital inclusion, by offering more vulnerable youngsters' access to tools, platforms, etc. it is important to “take equality, accessibility and usability into account in the planning and design of digital services and activities for young people” (lauha & nõlvak, 2019: 91). we will evaluate how these recommendations are relevant in the specific context of the flemish youth work sector. in the next section we will first discuss the methodology we applied, followed by concrete results and recommendations. methodology the aim of this research is to comprehensively map digital youth work practices; to identify challenges and opportunities organizations face and to understand the influence of covid-19 on flemish youth work. we applied a quick-scan-methodology based on comparative case study research. the quick-scan is a method in which information is collected about existing practices in a structured and uniform manner and then presented schematically in a predefined matrix. the method is particularly useful for research topics that are new or insufficiently documented in scientific and other publications and a cross-case analysis of a large number of cases can lead to the identification of the order of magnitude of similarities and differences between these cases (gerring, 2016; van audenhove, baelden & mariën, 2022). this is also the case for flemish youth work. our research concerns the youth work organizations that the flemish government recognizes and subsidizes. in addition, the flemish experimental projects and the film educational organizations are also involved. the scope concerns organizations that already use digital youth work to achieve their objectives, organizations that only use digital youth work to a limited extent and those who did not yet use digital media/technology in their youth work. in total 190 youth work organizations were included in the research. analyzed practices focused both on youngsters as on youth workers, for example related to training opportunities. digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 concretely, our research consisted of an initial inventory and rapid assessment of digital youth work practices, based on deskresearch, followed by an online survey, and supplemented with online interviews for more complex cases that required additional information. materials analyzed via deskresearch include the official websites and social media of 190 organizations, as well as newspaper articles, press-related interviews, and other online documents, such as statements. the survey consisted of four parts: 1. the general information of the organization, such as type of youth work, target group, amount of (digital) activities per year, et cetera; 2. the digital youth work activities set up, questions focusing on the type of digital youth work (see above), the focus and theme, the duration, platforms/tools used, the use of internet/hard-/software; 3. the competence level of youth workers and youth, such as the competence level needed to partake in an activity, digital training provided for youth workers, digital competences occurring in the activity (e.g., producing, analyzing, presenting, …); 4. the effects of the covid-19 measures on the organization. the follow-up interviews were non-exhaustive semi-structured interviews based on a topic list including ‘interpretation of digital youth work’, ‘experience with digital youth work’ and ‘internal and external policy related to digital youth work’ (harvey-jordan & long, 2001; longhurst, 2003). the survey and interviews are purely organizational and practicerelated. no personal data of the respondents was required. of the 190 youth work organizations contacted to participate in the survey, 74 (39%) of them filled in the survey. 33 (44.6%) follow-up interviews were executed between june and july 2021, with representatives from the organizations that also completed the survey. this provides us with a clear picture of the state of the art of flemish digital youth work. results and discussion the following discussion is structured based on our three research questions. first, we will look into the presence, intensity, frequency, and accessibility of flemish digital youth work. next, we will discuss the influence of covid-19 followed by the challenges and opportunities for digital youth work. presence, intensity, frequency, and accessibility of digital youth work the first part of our research consists of an inventory and analysis of digital youth work practices. the quick-scan maps the presence, frequency, intensity, and accessibility of digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 digital youth work in the flemish youth sector. the following discussion will be organized according to these concepts. we will also reflect on the covid-19 crisis and its effects on our results. presence 1. based on our research, we were able to distinguish four types of digital youth work: 1. online synchronous, (50% of digital youth work activities); 2. online asynchronous (14% of digital youth work activities); 3. blended (19% of digital youth work activities); 4. physical practices involving digital media/technology (17% of digital youth work activities). the majority of activities mentioned in the survey are online (64%), specifically online synchronous (50%), where participants and supervisors are present online at the same time, for example in an online instructor training or to play a game. this is a logical consequence of covid-19, where most organizations switched their face-to-face activities to an online alternative. a concrete example is the online training for instructors. pre-covid-19 most digital youth work activities were physical or blended. 19% were blended activities. blended practices are hybrid, where activities have both an online and an offline part, like preparing online and meeting physically to discuss or an online activity with real-time chat, such as organization karavaans’ travel preparations drawn up by the supervisor and then discussed online. for the physical practices involving digital media/technology, three variants can be distinguished, in which participants (a) make use of digital media, (b) create digital media/technology themselves, or (c) take a critical look at digital media and focus on understanding it. these focused mainly on the use of digital media/technology. activities ‘using digital media’ mainly focus on basic ict-skills, followed by social media and computational thinking. when ‘creating digital media’, the emphasis is on digital storytelling and film and editing. ‘understanding and critically reflecting on digital media’ is rarely mentioned. when mentioned, it invariably focuses on the following themes: information literacy, privacy, personal data, and personalization. an example is the card game ‘mediaklap’ on media literacy from organization chirojeugd vlaanderen. the survey focused on the practices organized in 2020. hence, data also includes practices organized before the first lockdown in march, when physical activities were not restricted by covidmeasures. online asynchronous is mentioned the least, and focuses on non-live forms, where participants and supervisors are not online at the same time. these are often diy assignments, videos, and forums. digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 overall, our results support the view that most organizations see digital youth work as online youth work. this is confirmed several times in the survey's open questions, where participants were asked to share their view on digital youth work and where they indicated that the use of hardware and the internet is required for digital youth work. digital youth work is almost always interpreted as ‘online’ youth work. although organizations may have other forms of digital youth work, they do not define it as such. an important finding is therefore that youth organizations tend to interpret the concept of digital youth work as 'online' youth work. even organizations that offer other types of offline digital youth work (e.g., social media camps) do not always define it as such. this may be related to the pandemic, where youth workers used online youth work as an alternative to their physical youth work activities. it is however an important finding, as it indicates that clear communication about the definition, formats and opportunities of digital youth work is required. intensity and frequency the narrow definition of digital youth work by flemish youth workers is also reflected in the response to the survey question on the number of digital activities in the total offer of activities ('how many activities are digital or include a digital component?’). fewer than five activities per year is the most common answer with 23%, 13,5% says between five and ten activities, and 16% mentions more than 50. in contrast to these digital activities, 60% of the organizations generally set up more than 50 non-digital activities per year. based on our deskresearch, 61 of the 190 (32%) involved organizations do not offer any form of digital youth work, 68% do offer a form of digital youth work, even though they do not necessarily define it as such. we also wanted to analyze the frequency by which these activities were organized, thus respondents were asked to classify their activities as: (1) organized once, (2) organized several times and (3) permanent part of their official list of activities. we can therefore distinguish more sustainable (part of the ‘permanent’ activities list), as well as one-time ad hoc activities. the survey results showed that the majority of the activities (49%) had already been organized several times. these activities often have a strong focus on the online aspect and were set up during the pandemic. 17% are mere one-off activities and 34% are part of the organization's permanent offer. organizations where digital youth work is part of their permanent offer are organizations that strongly focus on digital media/technology in their operation and/or work on e-inclusion, for example a youth editorial and medialab or workshops on digital media and digitalization. accessibility questions related to the accessibility of youth work, focused on the platforms, tools, hard and software and internet access used during a practice, as well as who had to provide the digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 hard-, software and internet (participants, organization). the most common platforms are zoom (55%), instagram (19%), youtube (15%) and facebook live (12%). frequently used tools are kahoot (21%), mentimeter (19%) and miro and padlet (both at 15%). in addition, the majority of organizations work with hardware, with an emphasis on laptops (85%), smartphones (59,6%) and tablets (39,5%). before covid-19 restrictions, hardware (and software) was almost always provided by the organizations themselves, but online practices assume that the participants have the necessary skills and equipment, and therefore do not take e-inclusion into account. a few organizations did provide their youngsters with the necessary material. for example, by taking part in a laptop collection campaign. organizations that provided their youngsters with hardware and/or internet were most often committed to supporting young people in vulnerable situations. physical digital youth work activities never expect participants to provide their own material, which emphasizes the fact that this barrier is due to the pandemic. however, the majority of the respondents mentioned the importance of e-inclusion during the follow-up interviews. youth workers are aware of this obstacle, but often do not have sufficient resources to provide their youth with the necessary support and infrastructure. it is clear that the pandemic has had a major effect on the accessibility of (digital) youth work, which normally has fewer barriers, as equipment was provided by organizations. but besides the fact that the participants usually have to provide their own equipment, there is another barrier, not just related to the pandemic. hardware, such as laptops, smartphones, tablets etc., is expensive. apart from the access to the hardware and tools, also the digital skill level of both youth workers and participating youth is an important factor. our research indicated that for many youth workers, the level of digital literacy is not sufficient to confidently set-up and execute digital youth work activities. for example, we asked organizations whether they provided youth work training related to digital skills. only 45% of activities were accompanied by training for the supervisors, 81% of these focused on digital skill training, but mainly looked into the technical skills needed to organize an online practice, and not into information skills. when we asked organizations about the expected digital competence level of supervisors, 63% answered ‘advanced’, compared to 23% ‘starter’ and 36% ‘intermediate’. however, when asked what these advanced competences entailed, most organizations cited know-how about using tools/platforms (such as zoom, office outlook) and providing technical support during online activities. this means that the main focus is on using rather than understanding digital media, which is only one dimension of digital literacy. nonetheless, during the pandemic many youth workers actively taught themselves the necessary digital competences to organize online activities. they were able to set up activities via platforms like zoom or jitsi and use tools like kahoot or padlet. there is however need for a more structured training of youth workers. this implies there should not only be attention to funding of material, but also attention for the digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 education of youth workers, to enhance their digital skills. only this way they can support youngsters in their learning process, something lauha and nõlvak (2019) also state in their report. youth workers need not be digital experts but have to be digitally literate and knowledgeable enough to support and possibly even train youngsters (lauha & nõlvak, 2019). the impact of covid-19 on flemish digital youth work the research shows that covid-19 has functioned as a ‘lever’ for digital youth work. various online activities were organized because of covid-19, as an alternative to regular youth work. the results of our survey show that for many organizations this was their first introduction to digital youth work (35%). for others, covid-19 expanded their existing digital youth work, without necessarily classifying their pre-covid activities as digital youth work, such as a youth camp about vlogging. the results of the survey therefore point to the predominant role of online activities organized during the pandemic. a large part of the flemish youth work organizations is not (yet) familiar with 'digital youth work' in the broad sense of the word. some organizations already have a notion of what it entails or can entail. however, flanders does not reach the levels of digital youth work present in countries such as finland and estland where digital youth work is fully integrated in youth work (lauha & nõlvak, 2019; verke, 2021). however, great strides have been made because of the pandemic. youth work organizations also indicate this in the survey: “before the corona crisis, almost everything happened physically.” many new practices emerged during covid-19, such as virtual youth centers, online training for youth workers, online art expositions, etc. what these practices have in common is the online aspect, as most organizations define digital youth work as online youth work, as mentioned above. for example, the formaat-organization has a social media trajectory for youth centers but does not mention this in the survey. organization krunsj has a ready player one camp, but only mentions online activities. several organizations say they have gained new insights, learned a lot, and wished to continue to focus on this (40,5%). they noticed the advantages, such as the large reach, anonymity, or the opportunity for children to experiment and learn whilst using new digital media and technologies. youth workers also experimented during the pandemic, figuring out the best way to reach their target group, and creating new innovative practices in the process, like an anonymous online trajectory offering guidance to youth with a gaming addiction. there are however also disadvantages, including the fact that it is more difficult to achieve connection, interaction and even playfulness in online activities. organizations do see a possibility for physical or blended activities, as they realize the digital world is inherently part of youngsters’ lives and that their competences are not digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 always as good as first assumed. youth workers have realized the importance of being digitally literate, both for themselves and the young people that join their activities, as covid-19 has put greater attention on the digital part of our society. issues that have also been noted by lauha and nõlvak (2019) and the skill-it project (2021), as youth workers themselves need to be digitally literate to support participants. these results are in line with recommendations made by other research projects focusing on digitalization and youth work. the 2020 report on social inclusion, digitalization and young people in romania, croatia, and the united kingdom, addressed this issue thoroughly in other european countries, stating that not only youth workers need new skills (21st century skills), there also need to be more options to support young people in socially vulnerable situations, not only noting the need for policies, but also youth work practices focusing on e-inclusion. this is also stated in the skill-it report (2021), which focuses on ireland, norway, poland, and romania, that also notes a lack of funding, access, proper infrastructure. thus, these are evolutions not only national but also european youth work needs to entertain. challenges and opportunities from the abovementioned results, different challenges and opportunities were uncovered. we will discuss four main opportunities and four main challenges for the flemish digital youth work sector. as a first opportunity, online youth work can combat isolation amongst youngsters. they can visit online youth care organizations or can join online activities if they are unable to participate in physical activities for certain reasons. in some ways, it is also 'more accessible' as it is a straightforward way to bridge distance or to set up a spontaneous chat. in this way, digital media can be a tool to connect, or it can create an extra dimension for activities, i.e., organize blended activities that involve both the physical and virtual world. in addition, digital media offers possibilities of experimentation to allow youngsters to play with media and technology, while learning about the techniques through gamification or via maker spaces and media labs. this relates to coffield’s (2000) informal learning theory, that most learning takes place outside of formal training and that it is important to acknowledge its opportunities. furthermore, digital youth work offers the opportunity to involve youngsters in the creation of activities, tools, platforms, etc. the virtual world is an inherent part of youngsters’ daily lives. digital media also offers the possibility of e-participation, which may be perceived as more accessible for young people. a first identified challenge is the limited presence of the required expertise and digital competences among supervisors. in many organizations we see a clear need for proper digital youth work training. a possible solution for this is to set up a network in the field of digital youth work. this way beneficial partnerships can be set up, expertise and knowledge can be shared, and youth workers are able to participate in training opportunities. a second challenge is the possibility of digital exclusion. youngsters do not digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 always have the access, skills, knowledge, or attitude to use digital media and technology properly. even though we often talk about a generation of digital natives, not every young person is digitally literate. the third challenge concerns organizations’ access to hardware, software, and the internet. as these tools cost money, the organization needs access to a certain budget to purchase the necessary material and subscriptions. but a budget for training is also required to develop the competences to guide youngsters in using digital media. a fourth challenge is properly working out the digital component of an activity. not every form of digital youth work is the right working method for a certain practice or goal. it is important that this is considered when drawing up a digital youth work policy plan, so flemish youth work organizations have sufficient input regarding the meaning and type of digital youth work. it is important to monitor the quality of digital youth work. both the policy makers and the youth work sector agree that digital competences and the virtual world should be given attention within youth work. however, organizations need to carefully consider why and how they want to implement digital youth work, whereas policy makers must provide a clear framework with guidelines on implementing digital youth work. conclusions the pandemic has had a positive influence on the use of flemish digital youth work. as a result of the first belgian lockdown, many youth work organizations have organized online activities as an alternative to their 'normal' practices. youth workers adopted an inventive attitude, taught themselves certain digital competences and made themselves familiar with online tools such as zoom, jitsi, and so on. this way, organizations were still able to organize activities and reach their target group virtually. organizations that were already committed to digital youth work maintained their digital youth work or expanded it further, for example by creating an online version of an activity. many digital youth work organizations started experimenting, leading to innovative practices and input of youngsters. whereas youth workers showed themselves resilient in the face of the pandemic, certain evolutions were notable. not every organization uses the same definition for digital youth work. organizations that started focusing on digital youth work during the first lockdown, see this as purely an online operation, regardless of the theme, activity, or target group. organizations that have been focusing on digital youth work for some time, often have a clear focus and idea that digital youth work is used to strengthen ‘regular’ youth work or that it gives an additional dimension to it. however, the bulk of digital youth work organized these past two years is online synchronous – live – youth work. secondly, blended – mixed method – activities occur, followed by physical digital youth work, and finally various asynchronous – non-live – activities were set up. digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 despite a difference in interpretation of digital youth work, this resilient sector has gained a lot of knowledge during the pandemic. this has expedited the amount of flemish digital youth work practices. the proposed definition by the council of the eu offers the opportunity to set up these activities in a way that fits the working method or focus of an organization. for example, the definition indicates that digital media and technology may be used as an instrument, an activity, or a subject, by a method and setting of your choosing, if it meets the values and standards of ‘regular’ youth work (council of the european union, 2019). the knowledge youth workers have acquired throughout the pandemic can be summarized by the following: • knowledge about online platforms and tools; • the possibility of setting up blended activities and use of tools/platforms to increase (online) interactivity; • the possibility of combating isolation and positive aspects anonymous youth welfare practices, as it has a lower threshold to seek help/guidance; • the possibility of reaching a more widespread audience via online activities; • the shortcomings of online activities other than the need for inclusion, i.e., more difficult to have interaction or playfulness • the need for attention relating to e-inclusion and competences and the intertwining of the virtual and physical world in young people’s lives; • the need for attention related to media and information literacy (e.g., fake news); • the importance of your own digital competences and the role they can play related to supporting youth’s digital competences. another effect of the pandemic is the awareness about digital competences and einclusion, mentioned in digitalisation & youth work (lauha & nõlvak, 2019) and in the șerban et al. research study (2020) on e-inclusion of youngsters. youth organizations are mindful of the digitalization of our society and the importance of digital literacy. the sector was already aware of this evolution, but the pandemic made it more imperative and urgent. it is impossible to ignore the fact that digital media and technology are an inherent part of young people’s lives and that their future professions will more than likely require 21st century digital skills such as handling digital tools, problem-solving and critical thinking (soffel, 2016). nevertheless, youngsters do not always possess the competences or opportunities to use digital media and technology properly, for example in families that cannot afford an internet connection. it is therefore crucial that every youngster has the opportunity to develop these competences during their free time, via playful and nonformal education, which will prepare them better for their future. the focus of youth work is on the development of youngsters, by stimulating and digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 strengthening them. as a result, youth work can contribute to the digital competences of young people in a playful and meaningful way, as also referred to in the skill it study (2018). however, right now most organizations have insufficient knowledge on this topic. it is therefore critical that clear guidelines are created, (financial) support is provided, knowledge is shared, youth workers are adequately trained and that a network of partnerships for setting up digital youth work practices is created. based on our research, concrete policy recommendations include: 1. strengthen flemish digital youth work, as digital skills are a key competence for participating in a digitalized society. however due to the lack of a widespread definition of ‘digital youth work’, it remains unclear to organizations what does and does not belong to this concept. 2. strengthen communication about digital youth work, as clearer communication is needed about the actual meaning of digital youth work and what place it has within youth work. 3. reinforce the focus on e-inclusion in digital youth work, extra reflection on digital inequalities is necessary. 4. strengthen knowledge sharing and partnerships in digital youth work with networkstrengthening activities, such as intervisions, a range of flexible external training options, and so on. 5. strengthen the sustainability of flemish digital youth work by integrating monitoring and impact measurement, financial options for experimental projects with e-participation platforms and an annual evaluation. however, the limitations of this study must also be considered. firstly, as there has been no previous research relating to flemish digital youth work and the research took place during the pandemic, results could not be compared to the status of digital youth work before the pandemic. secondly, our research focused on official, subsidized flemish youth work organizations. we did not take into account nationally funded organizations, nor did we analyze organizations not funded by the government, as this was out of scope. also, not all organizations participated in the survey. nevertheless, we were able to provide a clear picture of the current status of flemish digital youth work, together with its challenges and opportunities. as this paper mainly focuses on the link between digital youth work and the effects of covid-19, i.e. e-inclusion, it also adds another layer to the european youth work projects. by analyzing current practices and challenges, we were able to formulate concrete policy recommendations to the government on how to support flemish digital youth work, considering the actual needs of the sector. digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 references baron, r. j. 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(2021). hoe pakten onze scholen het afstandsleren aan? kenniscentrum mediawijs. https://e-inclusie.be/dossiers/dossier-digitaleinclusie/hoe-pakten-onze-scholenafstandsleren?fbclid=iwar3jj5jkign_uewarema3w_hvsd50boqeve0wlrd2dp6 coih1u-3r8h9ljo verke. (2021). digitalisation of municipal youth work in 2021. https://www.verke.org/uploads/2021/12/dc70bd96-digitalisation-of-municipalyouth-work-2021.pdf vlaamse regering. (2012, january 20). decreet houdende een vernieuwd jeugden kinderrechtenbeleid. belgisch staatsblad. http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/eli/decreet/2012/01/20/2012035198/justel https://e-inclusie.be/dossiers/dossier-digitale-inclusie/hoe-pakten-onze-scholen-afstandsleren?fbclid=iwar3jj5jkign_uewarema3w_hvsd50boqeve0wlrd2dp6coih1u-3r8h9ljo https://e-inclusie.be/dossiers/dossier-digitale-inclusie/hoe-pakten-onze-scholen-afstandsleren?fbclid=iwar3jj5jkign_uewarema3w_hvsd50boqeve0wlrd2dp6coih1u-3r8h9ljo https://e-inclusie.be/dossiers/dossier-digitale-inclusie/hoe-pakten-onze-scholen-afstandsleren?fbclid=iwar3jj5jkign_uewarema3w_hvsd50boqeve0wlrd2dp6coih1u-3r8h9ljo https://e-inclusie.be/dossiers/dossier-digitale-inclusie/hoe-pakten-onze-scholen-afstandsleren?fbclid=iwar3jj5jkign_uewarema3w_hvsd50boqeve0wlrd2dp6coih1u-3r8h9ljo https://www.verke.org/uploads/2021/12/dc70bd96-digitalisation-of-municipal-youth-work-2021.pdf https://www.verke.org/uploads/2021/12/dc70bd96-digitalisation-of-municipal-youth-work-2021.pdf http://www.ejustice.just.fgov.be/eli/decreet/2012/01/20/2012035198/justel digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 abstract introduction: context and concern conceptualization of digital youth work digital youth work across europe methodology results and discussion presence, intensity, frequency, and accessibility of digital youth work presence intensity and frequency accessibility the impact of covid-19 on flemish digital youth work challenges and opportunities conclusions references jamissen & skou poetic reflection.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 177 vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 poetic reflection through digital storytelling – a methodology to foster professional health worker identity in students grete jamissen centre for educational research and development oslo university college email: grete.jamissen@hio.no goro skou faculty of health sciences oslo university college email: goro.skou@hf.hio.no abstract in the field of digital storytelling research there is a focus on personal narratives, multimedia and the creative process in developing identity and voice. the project introduced in this paper has identified contexts in higher education where digital storytelling may be used as a promising tool to support students’ learning, assisting them to combine theory and practical experience in their field of study. students in the health professions need to develop a professional identity based on both social and technical competencies. technical competencies concord with what students expect to be taught in a university college. the development of social competence and professional identity, however, requires a different approach, involving students reflecting on their experiences from working in health institutions. we suggest that a particular mode of reflection, a poetic mode, exemplified by digital storytelling, may serve as a tool for students in this process of learning from practice. three characteristics of digital storytelling are discussed: the narrative approach, multimodality and creativity, all in search of defining characteristics of a personal professional story. a model is described through a three cycle development project, illustrated by the terms pioneers and pathfinders for the first two cohorts of students and digital storytellers for the changes planned for the third cohort in the light of our experiences. keywords: digital storytelling, professional identity, reflection, narrative, multimodality, creativity, experience-based learning background this article tells the story of our joint learning journey as we seek to integrate digital storytelling in the learning processes of students in a one year unit of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 178 “public health issues” in the bachelor’s degree course “sport, outdoor activities and health” (idrett, friluftsliv og helse) at oslo university college (ouc). our partners in this project are students who may occupy future positions as health and training therapists or general public health workers. in this paper we will refer to their future career path more generally as ‘health workers’. the professional identity of a health worker is based on social and technical competency: the artistry and science (willard & spackman, 2003). the art of a profession’s practice, like most art, is a process of making connections, evoking responses and finding shared meaning (schmid, 2005). benner (1984) emphasises the importance of the shared world between the health worker and their clients in clinical work. in describing the term ‘mentalizing’i, allen et al. (2008) claim that collaboration with clients, their next of kin and colleagues requires preconscious imaginative mental activity, namely perceiving and interpreting human behaviour in terms of needs, desires, feelings, goals, purposes and reasons. the interaction between mental state and behaviour is crucial and the two are inseparably conjoined (ibid.). within pre-service preparation, periods of practical studies are the primary opportunities where students experience and learn the ‘art’ of the health worker profession. nevertheless, students’ reports and assignments in the practical studies are often descriptive and factual, emphasising rational and analytic thinking and reflecting the technical or science dimension of practice (kaufmann, 2006). as the art component is most often missing in teaching and assessment processes in higher education this is not unexpected but it still represents a challenge in developing professional identity in students. our implementation of digital storytelling is an attempt to develop tools to support the art dimension of health work and to foster reflection and personal learning amongst students. we believe that recognition of emotional aspects of learning, in addition to cognitive processes, is a necessity in developing health workers’ personal identity and thus also the social and art dimensions of a professional identity. recognising the value of narratives is not new to health professionals, nor is the reporting of incidents and experiences as a point of departure for reflections from practice. valuing the narrative also implies recognition of practice as a way of knowing, and emotion as a relevant dimension in learning (eikeland, 1997, hardy, 2007). through stories, professionals have the opportunity to reflect on both feelings and technical aspects in clinical situations. gauntlett (2007) describes the sense of self-identity as a construction: something we like to believe in to make life more tolerable and comprehensible, and giddens (1991) claims that the stories we tell about ourselves are crucially important to identity. the personal professional digital story as tool for reflection our project was motivated by the above described need for more adequate tools for reflective learning and our experiences from various digital storytelling workshops (jamissen, 2009) where we have observed what joe lambert describes as a “transformative experience that tends to be personal and emotional”ii. what constitutes this transformative experience may vary from one person to another. lambert emphasises the magic of the story circle and the experience of being listened to: “when you gather people in a room, and listen, deeply listen to what they are saying, and also, by example alone, encourage others to listen, magic happens”(lambert, 2009, p.86). we see the story circle as part of a larger creative process where participants are assisted seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 179 through phases of working with their experiences in search of key events, interpretations and meaning. both process and products in our work with the students may differ from the original approach of center of digital storytelling’s (cds), exemplified by their seven elementsiii (lambert 2006), later modified into seven steps (lambert 2009, p.29)iv. we are in search of characteristics of the personal professional story as a tool for learning from practice and a process design for an adapted workshop to support students in this learning process. one key question is if and how the above mentioned science dimension may be integrated in the story by relating personal experience to relevant theory. other questions concern didactical issues such as developing tasks that scaffold both the learning process and the development of a good story. potential criteria for the personal professional story at the outset may be described in terms of i) involving students’ personal engagement, ii) including references to facts and theoretical aspects and iii) using digital storytelling tools such as dramaturgy and multimodal effects. v before describing the cycles of our learning journey we will briefly discuss the three core concepts of narrative, multimodality and creativity which we see as corner stones of poetic reflection. it is not our ambition to contribute to new knowledge or new perspectives within any of these areas of research but rather to explore how the combination of perspectives can contribute to a better understanding and better workshops helping students build on personal experience in professional development. the narrative approach we believe negotiating meaning is one of the most important aspects of reflection and learning from practice and that a narrative reconstruction is instrumental in this respect. bruner (1986) claims that “a good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds” (p.11). while a logical argument seeks the truth, aims at explaining how things are and analysing causal relations, the story is more preoccupied with what things mean and how they can be understood or interpreted. while the argument seeks clarity and rules out ambiguity the story makes allusions and introduces layers of meaning, convincing through credibility. as bruner describes it, a narrative approach to a text allows the reader to “read the text for its meanings… not to prove or disprove a theory, but to explore the world of a particular literary work” (ibid., p. 12). the poet and the storyteller share a preoccupation with the broader question of how we come to endow experience with meaning. a narrative is characterised by a conscious dramaturgy which is different from the elaboration of the logical argument. even without complying strictly with a classical dramaturgic curve the composition of a story has a beginning, middle and an end, a plot is introduced and finds a solution. another dimension is transition, or turning point, as a story describes how something becomes something else, often through a conflict of values (larsen, 2003). a narrative is also a reconstruction after the event, as illustrated by southafrican author andrè brink: “you only live twice. you live first of all in the experienced life and then you live in your interpretation of your experiences”. (brink, 2009). dewey (1997) reminds us that realising potential learning opportunities in experience depends on a conscious reflection in what he calls a continuous reconstruction to gain insight into the complexity of the situation. the value of experience in an educational setting depends on the quality of this reconstruction. connections, relations and meaning in a lived experience are made explicit through reflection and analysis, and thus new knowledge and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 180 new understandings emerge. jansen (2008) calls the story a fixation on an event in retrospect. her concern is that the person constructing the narrative owns knowledge different from that of the person (who is) taking part in the experience, and that there is a difference between what’s lived and what’s told. in her words the reconstruction or configuration implies a narrative analysis which seeks to understand the meaning and how to communicate the event to others. the construction of our life story is a continuous process and we constantly renegotiate and reinterpret our narrative identity (ricoeur, 1991, p. 32). multimodal texts a digital story is an example of a multimodal text where various semiotic resources and modalities (kress, 2003, løvland, 2007, liestøl, fagerjord & hannemyr, 2009) create meaning and involve our senses in various ways, and we believe the combination strengthens students’ learning processes. written text and images affect our visual sense; spoken language, music and sound affect the auditive sense; images and music affect our feelings, separately and in combination. we are “touched”, and in a digital storytelling context this engagement involves the producer, the peers taking part in the process and the audience of the finished product. multimodal texts can be found in both new and old media, but digital media have brought opportunities to work with stories in new ways. new technologies make new semiotic resources available and influence our ability to express and interpret meaning through multimodal interaction (løvland, 2007). according to løvland (ibid) interaction between modalities can be characterised either as multimodal redundancy, where the various modalities in a text communicate the same information, or functional specialisation where the various modalities have specialised purposes and tasks. lambert (2009, 43) describes a digital story as layers of multimodal effects that can be conceived as redundant, complementary, juxtaposing or disjunctive. creativity creativity is more than the generation of novel ideas (gauntlett, 2007). rather, at a basic level, it is about everyday ideas, writing, self-presentation, a creative speech or thought. it is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. creativity often takes place when one perspective meets another and new perspectives, skills and challenges are developed (csikszentmyhalyi, 1997). in many cultures creativity is linked to a spiritual dimension and selfdevelopment (schmid, 2005). creative activities may stimulate the learning process and development of professional identity. csikszentmihalyi (1997) introduces the concept of flow experienced in situations where the level of stress is high enough to release necessary extra energy to obtain success but not so high as to create helplessness. in his view this feeling of flow or mastery is a prerequisite for developing new perspectives, skills and challenges and he emphasises a curious approach in daily life as a ground for development of creative abilities. we believe creativity, to some extent, can be learnt and that there are techniques we can apply to help students adopt a creative approach. gauntlett (2007) sees creative activity as something that “simmers below the threshold of the consciousness” to surface in the work and it is our aim to assist in this release of creative energy. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 181 our learning journey with an explorative approach, and through actively designing, conducting and observing the students’ processes, we have experienced an exciting learning journey. the data underpinning our reflections are based on participatory observations and in some cases recording of students’ dialogue in story circles. we have not conducted systematic text or film analysis and the stories included as examples are chosen through purposeful sampling (johansen et. al, 2006) to illustrate themes we want to highlight. the main focus of our analysis has been the criteria for the personal professional story described above: i) students’ personal engagement, ii) evaluating references to theory and iii) the use of digital storytelling tools and multimodal effects. the public health unit of “idrett, friluftsliv og helse” represents a cooperative venture between the faculty of health sciences and the faculty of education and international studies at oslo university college. the first two years of the bachelor programme are mainly devoted to the development of the students’ athletic skills, and for most participating students this reflects their primary interest. in the third year, however, they have the opportunity to choose between qualifying as a teacher in sports and gymnastics and qualifying as a health worker. the students choosing the public health unit meet professional challenges that are different in many ways from what they are used to. not only do they need to modify their personal identity from that of a qualified athlete to that of a therapist, which implies involving themselves personally in their work. they also need to realise the importance of being aware of situations where it is vital that they show a professional identity, including listening actively and being aware of their own feelings and reactions. as agents of health promotion, which is different from care, understanding their own learning processes is key to understanding that of their future clients. the number of students varies from one year to another: fifteen in the first cycle described below and eight in the second. nine students will attend the third cycle. the second author is responsible for organising and teaching the unit and the first author, as project leader for digital storytelling at oslo university college (ouc), is active participant in the processes described and discussed below. using a digital storytelling approach to learning inevitably raises the issue of process vs product. we see a close relation between the two dimensions. in the first phase, where students reflect, extract and produce their story, the main focus is on conducting a productive process. in the next phase the stories, as products, are shared with fellow students and teachers as triggers for discussions in a new knowledge creating process. the quality of the products, therefore, influences this second process. in addition, without claiming to be able to prove this, we believe that the realisation that a product is expected and will be shared influences the production process in a positive way and motivates the students to seek to understand the meaning and implication of their experiences. in the following sections we describe and discuss two cycles of this learning journey and how a more systematic approach to the third group of students has emerged from these experiences. for each cycle we will describe the process employed and the students’ products before providing some reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 182 cycle 1 (2007/08): the pioneers process: in a pre-practice lecture on reflection and experiential learning students were introduced to kolb’s model which discusses four steps in a learning process based on experience: 1) experience 2) reflective observation 3) abstraction/generalisation 3) active experimenting (kolb, 1984). students were asked, during their work practice, to pick an experience with potential for learning and prepare a digital story, including taking pictures. building on mcdrury & altero (2002) we developed a set of criteria to guide the students in their selection of learning experiences, namely that it might be something that: i) puzzled them and challenged their pre-comprehension; ii) they wanted to find out more about; and iii) they could find relevant theoretical references to in the curriculum to support the emergence of new perspectives. in the same pre-practice workshop the students were shown examples of digital stories and introduced to some basic principles of using images. after the practice period, returning with pictures and a draft story they attended a production workshop where they developed their stories through peer feedback. in this workshop they were also guided by two experienced media students in their multimodal production process. as an attempt at presenting them with some alternative dramaturgic guidelines we stressed the steps in kolb’s circle. as an alternative to the classical critical question or conflict we introduced the concept of a “pivotal question” and reminded them of the need for a clear message and awareness of their target audience. in this context their target audience was fellow students and teachers, but stressing this point was also meant as a general tool to help them identify the message and develop a story with a purpose. products: ten stories were produced with varied themes and quality. we provide a link to cecilia’s story (with her permission). she has secured permission from participants pictured in her story to publish it. note that english subtitles have been added by us. link to story cecilia’s story: http://home.hio.no/dighist/filmer_engelsk/engfinnerud.wmv cecilia’s story describes her practice in an activity centre where various groups, in her case two groups of elderly people, spend a day taking part in a training and social programme. cecilia shares a personal learning experience which seems to be a turning point for her. she describes how she developed a new and more balanced view on becoming old. she was surprised by the diversity in the elderly population, and by realising that old people may be a resource in a community and not only a burden. through cecilia’s meeting with two different groups of seniors the story also points to general issues concerning the elderly in society and implies a change of attitude and reflection about her professional role. through her realisation that working with people was more meaningful than she previously thought, these reflections form an important contribution to cecilia’s professional identity. among the multimodal effects used in the story we see a conscious use of contrast in text and images. she uses her own colour photos from one group, showing smiling resourceful elderly people taking part in outand indoors activities, while the group of less healthy are represented by her own drawings. in addition to the contrasting effect the lack of pictures from this group also reveals a conscious ethical choice. through opening pictures from beautiful winter scenarios accompanied by tranquil flute and guitar music she communicates a positive atmosphere, the lively conversation and laughter in the background illustrates the positive mood in the healthy group. the quality in her voice and the inclusion of images of herself in the story re-emphasises seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 183 her personal presence. cecilia thus becomes participator through voice and images, even though she is spectator in the text. critical reflections on cycle 1: without having conducted a systematic evaluation process we did observe that most students expressed satisfaction with the experience. we found the narrative approach and the production process promising enough to want to develop it further with the next cycle of students. the importance of the process of writing, sharing, feedback and rewriting as success factor that we had previously observed was confirmed. in addition, through the introduction of kolb, we stressed the connection to formal knowledge and theory, but the students only sporadically included this dimension in their products. the technical challenges were smaller than we might have expected, but it also became obvious that the quality of sound, both in reading the text and adding sound effects, is not a trivial factor. we have chosen the term “pioneers” in describing this first cycle to emphasise that the students and ourselves felt we were pioneering new ground. this was reflected also in the lack of detail (as we now see it) in terms of the task guidelines and marking criteria. we introduced the term personal professional story without a clear description of what this implied apart from stressing the reference to theory, and, lacking relevant examples, we showed them stories based on personal life experiences. assessment criteria were vague to the degree that the only real measure was that a story was produced. thus, in reflecting on our experiences in cycle one, the priorities for changes in cycle two were the need for i) clearer task guidelines, ii) assessment criteria and iii) guidance on dramaturgic effects. elements continued from cycle 1 were the writing process with peer feedback and the inclusion of references to theory. cycle 2 (2008/2009): the pathfinders process: the students in 2008/09 were introduced to digital storytelling and narrative writing early in the year and they produced two digital stories. in the autumn term, as a training task, they produced a story based on a one-day observation visit to a centre for elderly people and a one-day visit to groups working with lifestyle redesigning and gymnastic exercise. instead of a production workshop led by media students the students in this cycle, for practical reasons, were given a two hour lesson introducing the technical use of windows moviemaker, without any focus on multimodal texts or poetic expression. based on these experiences the students were involved in planning the production process related to their main four week practice in the spring term, and this included their involvement in developing assessment criteria. in reply to their expressed wish, support and feedback were constrained to text development. they claimed the challenge was to express their message in a short narrative, and not on “technical things”. for practical reasons only three of the eight students took part in a half-day workshop after their practice period, which included writing and giving each other feedback. in this workshop we used free flow writing as a creative technique. the students not attending the workshop were given a “cookbook” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 184 from the second author describing a process of free flow writing, mutual feedback and rewriting. as a result of the first cycle of our learning journey the concept “professional identity” had emerged as an important dimension in the personal professional story. building on our experience from the pioneers we wanted to clarify the task more closely and make sure it was reflected in the assessment criteria. the refined task description consisted of the following points: i) describe the institution, its ideology and the specific tasks you were involved in; ii) choose one specific incident and describe what happened and how it made you feel; iii) relate this incident to how the underlying theme is discussed in your textbooks; and iv) share the implications for your professional identity as a future health worker. the text should consist of 300-400 words. images should be associated with the text and/or strengthen the effect of the text, be of good quality and give a holistic impression. sound should consist of a clear voice-over in a quiet tempo, and other sound effects should be suited to images and voice-over. products: eight stories were produced after the main practice, one from each student, and we provide a link to mona’s story (with her permission). mona’s story was an important catalyst in our own learning process. she was one of the students we followed closely in the writing process. she arrived at the writing workshop without having decided what event to focus on. during the process of free flow writing, reading and feedback from her peers and us, she decided to describe and reflect on an incident that she initially felt embarrassed about. it included a client who had an “accident” in the lavatory and turned up for weighing accompanied by an unpleasant smell that in other circumstances would have made her react strongly. link to mona’s story: http://home.hio.no/dighist/filmer/minne_for_livet_mona.wmv link to an english translation of mona’s text: http://home.hio.no/dighist/filmer_engelsk/memory_for_life_mona.pdf mona’s story describes her four weeks practical studies in a health and nutrition clinic called “4m: meals, movement, medicine, mastery”. the patients suffer from obesity, and her job was to weigh patients and motivate them for regular exercise. true to the task given by us she describes both the clinic and her functions there before describing the “memory for life” which is the title of her story. after our involvement in mona’s learning process we were somewhat surprised that her reflective work was only vaguely mirrored in the finished product, apart from the fact that she chose this instead of other, less painful, incidents for her story. we observe that the turning point in the story, her struggle with her reflexes in confrontation with the smell is almost drowned in facts and her reflections on professionalism are not elaborated. in hindsight it is easy to see how this is a result of her being loyal to our expectations and the assessment criteria. critical reflections on cycle 2: we observed that the free flow writing and feedback session helped the students both choose a focus and develop their reflections. for instance mona remarked that the term “professional” had not carried any meaning for her earlier. students also indicated that the text developing process including peer collaboration was exciting, and one of them, referring to the perceived support and interest of her peers in the feedback process and the value of learning to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 185 express herself accurately, said: “i would have loved it if all our writing assignments could be done this way”. the final results, however, demonstrate that there is still a challenge in stimulating students to provide more in-depth reflections. in addition, our overambitious agenda regarding the content and a lack of attention to multimodal dimensions resulted in the production of a number of “reports” rather than stories. in hindsight we also find that we probably too easily accepted the students’ dismissal of the need for production support and advice on the use of multimodal effects. in spite of their perceived confidence in handling windows moviemaker and digital cameras most students would have benefitted from guidance in the conscious use of multimodal effects in expression of personal reflections. moving into cycle 3 – digital storytellers? as we now design tasks and frames for the students in cycle three we want to make a more explicit move from reporting to reflecting. figure 1 represents our learning journey through two cycles and the planning of a third cycle. it summarises the aspects of the personal professional story: the task given to trigger the reflective process, the relationship to the science dimension and the approach to multimodality in the process. fig. 1 three cycles in our learning journey rather than encouraging students to capture the whole story of the practice period, including description of the institution and reference to theory, we will use creative techniques to help students select the experience with the greatest potential to make a difference in developing their professional identity. we will encourage students to look for a climax or turning point but will also be open to continuous reflection throughout the practice period as in the case of cecilia’s story. in both cases the experience may be recognised by a perception of a turning point or a conflict of values or understanding. it will probably also include an experience of challenge combined with successful coping, described as flow, or a situation of unsolved conflict. in response to theories of mentalizing discussed above we ask students to choose incidents where their own actions play an active part in the plot. most importantly we have realised that the strength of a digital story for exploring professional identity lies in the focus on personal learning and emotions, and accordingly task: share an experience that made a difference; a turning point in your professional identity and/or reflection throughout the practice period no draft. creative process to choose incident before free flow writing reference to theory? no demand multimodality? multimodal effects an explicit issue included production in feedback and support task: describe the institution, its ideology and your tasks in practice. describe one important incident and how it made you feel. how will it influence your future work? no draft. free flow writing reference to theory? relate reflections to general knowledge in the textbook multimodality? support and feedback confined to development of story as text task: an experience that puzzled or challenged your precomprehension and that you wanted to find out more about. bring draft story to workshop reference to theory? link experience to curriculum multimodality? some feedback and support on multimodal effects in addition to text pioneers digital storytellers? pathfinders seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 186 there will be no demand for theoretical references in the stories. references to theory and more general issues related to each story are instead a part of the process where stories are shared and discussed with peers and teachers. as discussed above we believe the learning experience both on behalf of the student producing the story and the peers in the discussion following the sharing of stories benefit from good quality stories. process writing and story circles take time, and as we believe this time is justified to engage personal reflections we need to include enough time. given that the power of a digital story, both as product and process, lies in the combination of personal voice, narrative and multimodality we also need to strengthen the focus on development of storyboards and the conscious use of artistic effects. our reflections: themes, issues and dilemmas. through two cycles of scaffolding students’ production of practice stories as a tool for reflective learning we have gradually developed a better foundation for what we have called a personal professional story: moving away from including references to theory and back to building on the values of the personal narrative. above all we believe there is a need to use radically new methods to lift students’ learning and reflection beyond a rational and scientific mindset and to scaffold students in engaging other dimensions of the learning process. in our reflections below we draw on the totality of our experiences, including examples of stories not demonstrated above. the poetic qualities of digital storytelling in reflective learning a personal digital story is an example of what bjerknes & bjørk (1994, p. 109), building on britton et al. (1975), calls poetic writing. based on studies of writing in schools these authors describe the functions of reflective writing on a continuum (ibid., p. 81) all starting from the expressive dimension which is an utterance that “stays close to the speaker”. as these authors continue, expressive writing should remain as free as possible from outside demands, either that of a task or of an audience. when we, for different purposes, want to communicate thoughts and ideas to our surroundings we move away from the personal, expressive function and the authors describe this move in two directions: towards transactional writing which is the “language to get things done: to inform, to advise, persuade or instruct” and towards poetic writing which uses language as “an art medium; a verbal construct, an ’object‘ made out of language” (ibid., p. 90). there are several reasons that the notion of a poetic approach appeals to us in our search for tools for reflection. it alludes to arts and literature in a broader sense and thus contributes by widening the frames for what kind of knowledge and knowledge representations are relevant in education. literature provides a language to express personal reflections and emotional dimensions in the learning processes. in addition, poetry represents a particular style of fiction writing, often concise and rich in metaphor that in many ways resembles a digital story. we see the three dimensions described above, a creative process towards a multimodal narrative, as a way to concretise the notion of poetic reflection. communication research has long recognised storytelling as important in the construction of identities, relationships and communities (polkinghorne, 1988, mcewan & egan, 1995, hull, 2006). katriel (2008) suggests that storytelling may serve as an important meaning-making mechanism … serving to integrate the self by creating a life story that is embedded within the culturally shared understanding of what constitutes continuous, reasonable, proper, and worthwhile life trajectories (ibid.). in our seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 187 understanding, our students’ shift in personal and professional identity from that of athlete to health worker is an example of a transition in their life trajectories discussed through working on the narrative. as described earlier we also see creativity as a quality that can be learned and prompted by the conscious use of tools and processes. working in a creative mode and a poetic form may bring out reflections and associations that are not relevant in an analytic-rationalistic mode (kaufmann, 2006). there is also a dimension of energy involved in creative work as described by the concept of flow (csikszentmihalyi, 1997). mona’s story is an example of this as her strong emotional engagement in the incident, both as challenge and success, contributed to her “discovery” of the concept of professional in relation to herself. identity and voice – aspects of mentalizing we have described the challenges facing the students in developing a health worker identity and how we believe digital storytelling may be a useful tool in this process of identifying and investigating the stories that are most vital in constructing a professional role. after four weeks of practical work and production of a digital story about her experiences one of the students said: “at the end of the practice i felt mature and professional. now i am ready to work with health issues and people!” her new way of understanding laid the groundwork for behaving as a health worker, and the development of selfand professional identity. as observed in mona’s story her personal narrative, both in the finished product and even more so in the process of developing the story, was instrumental in building her professional identity. the realisation that professional, among other things, means doing what is required in the situation to help preserve the dignity and self respect of a client and suppressing immediate personal impulses, grew out of her discussion of possible meanings and implications of her experience in a group of her peers. a powerful dimension in the stories we tell about ourselves is the personal voice, both the physical voice, recording the story, and the more abstract notion of voice as in having something important to say. hardy (2005) claims that “a story with the sense of value taken out would simply be a list of events”, and according to elbow (1981) a text which doesn’t “want” anything lacks voice. one aspect of giving voice to identity, personal and/or professional, is the discussion of possible interpretations of the meaning and implications of experiences. this meaning making process is institutionalised in the story circle (lambert, 2009, p. 86). mona’s story exemplifies mentalizing in the way she distinguishes between the personal self and the professional self and we believe her reflection contributes to her development of professional identity. the capacity to reflect on the various meanings of mental states depends on the health worker’s sense of sincerity. in the writing and feedback session she said: “earlier i would have thrown up from the stench, but now i understood i had to behave professionally. i put my personal reactions aside and focused on the professionalism of my behaviour.” written or multimodal text – artistic effects we can see how we were happy to comply with the students’ wish to focus on developing the written text at the expense of working with images and other artistic effects, and we still think working with the story in words is an important part of the learning process. on the other hand one of the most important learning outcomes of our own learning journey is that we may have seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 188 underestimated the value of multimodality, not only in the communicational qualities of the finished product but also as tools of expression that enrich the process for the learner. a poetic expression implies trying to communicate the pieces that are not so easily expressed in words, written or oral, the feelings and atmosphere (jamissen, 2009), and what better way to do so than by the use of images and music in addition to a conscious focus on words and rhythm in a spoken text. in addition “text and images … complement each other. image may concretize parts of the text or a text may give more precise information. … text and image may also tell separate stories which then may be read as comments on each other” (tønnesen, 2007, p. 84). the multimodal is like a woven fabric with different threads. development of a systematic approach to working with multimodal effects and picture quality, therefore, is an important area of improvement in designing a conceptual frame and a process for the personal professional story and a challenge that raises instructional issues with students who are not primarily media students. both pioneers and pathfinders were insufficiently briefed in the use of semiotic resources and modalities and how to integrate these in making and communicating meaning. we find frequent incidents of redundancy (løvland 2007), for instance where mona shows a random flight of stairs as she speaks the word stairs. we also see frequent use of symbols like “smilies” accompanying statements like “i felt good” and big question marks accompanying “i was uncertain what to do”. according to løvland (2010:3), citing bergstöm (2004:263), a strong redundancy often entails “overcommunication” and the multimodal interaction may be experienced, at least among adults, as irritating, uninteresting and pacifying. in contrast a digital story with a high degree of functional specialisation (løvland 2007) of images, voice, sound and music, intentionally building the multimodal layers (lambert 2009), is often experienced as rich in terms of content and open for interpretations by the viewer. for instance cecilia never expresses in words that the scenery was beautiful or that the elderly people were in a good mood. another quality in cecilia’s story is her conscious use of personal pictures and sketches. we have encouraged both pioneers and pathfinders to avoid downloading thematic images from the internet as we find that these images often come through as clichés and the stories are experienced as lacking in coherence. quality in process or in product – or both? nilsson (2008) introduces a dichotomy between the digital storytelling process and the products that come out of it. in our experience both dimensions are important. in addition to the sharing of stories as triggers for discussion described above we have also observed the students’ pride in their products in other contexts. we have for instance observed students giving an introductory speech to new students sharing their digital stories with pride, and seen how the stories worked well for the audience. the issue of product quality has become increasingly compelling to us. on the one hand there is the recurring experience that the quality of the process is not reflected in the quality of the product, not only as a multimodal production but also as a reflective text. in addition we want to investigate if greater emphasis on the artistic quality of the products may contribute to more in-depth reflection in the process and thus to more conscious professional identities in students. issues that need to be considered include when and how to introduce digital storytelling, how to design assignments, what level and type of support is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 189 required and how to assess digital stories. in addition to the focus on quality and effect of multimodal texts, producing and sharing digital stories raise both legal and ethical issues concerning copyright and permission to publish. the biggest issue has been negotiating time. in addition to being a technical issue involving schedules and colleagues’ time it also reflects differences in acceptance of alternative ways of knowing and learning differing from the traditional scientific approach. to make the most of the potential of digital storytelling for personal learning we need to accept that creative processes not only take time but also involve conscious use of creative techniques. tasks like free-flow writing encourage students to work in a different way: writing without censorship, reflection in and reflection after the experience, reconstructing the written piece and letting peers assess (mc drury & altero, 2002). conclusion – from rational analytic reporters to digital storytellers we have experienced that digital storytelling has the potential to scaffold students’ reflection on experience from practice towards developing professional identity. students have expressed satisfaction with the opportunity to share their experiences in a reflective narrative rather than a rational-analytic report. peer support and feedback during writing seems to be an important part of the learning process. stories are developed in interaction between the owner of the experience and his or her peers through listening and feedback over several iterations. the stories are elaborated in a process where both storyteller and listeners are involved in interpretations and construction of meaning. what we have experienced is that the magic in the story circle works both ways, and we believe this accounts for some of the potential for learning. i create a story and share it with my fellow students and in doing so i become involved in both the content and the social relationship. as educators we are still on a learning path. in our search for the personalprofessional story we will continue to build on the magic of the story circle and return to focus on the personal learning experience. we have seen that the ambition to combine the art and science dimension, by including a demand for reference to theory in the personal story, probably was a wrong track. we find the main characteristics of a personal professional story do not differ substantially from those of a traditional personal story and our workshop design will build on the seven steps described by lambert (2009, p. 29-47). “poetic reflection”, concretised by the terms narrative and creative approach to a multimodal text, forms a promising framework for working with the art dimension of a professional identity. acknowledgment we are very grateful to renata phelps, southern cross university, for valuable feedback and for assistance with improving the english language in this article. many thanks also to colleagues carsten ohlman and inger marie søyland for feedback in developing the reflections in our learning journey. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 6 – issue 2 – 2010 190 references allen, j. g., fonagy, p et bateman, a.w. (2008). mentalizing in clinical practice. washington dc: american psychiatric publishing. bjerknes. m.s. og bjørk, i.t. (1994). praktiske studier: perspektiver på refleksjon og læring. oslo: tano. brink, a (2009): you only live twice, aftenposten, november 15 , oslo. britton, j. et al. (1975). the development of writing abilities (11-18): a report from the schools council project on written language of 11-18 year olds, based at the university of london institute of education, 1966-71. basingstoke: macmillan. bruner, j. (1986). actual minds, possible worlds. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. csikzentmihalyi, m. (1997). creativity – flow and psychology of discovery and invention. new york, harper perennial. dewey, j. (1997 [1916]). experience and thinking. i: democracy and education. an introduction to the philosophy of education. new york: the free press ,139-151. eikeland, o. 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(2006). digital storytelling: capturing lives, creating community. (second ed.). berkeley, california: digital diner press. lambert, j. (2009). digital storytelling, capturing lives, creating community (third ed.). berkeley, california: digital diner press. larsen, p.h. (2003). de levende billeders dramaturgi, 1. fiktionsfilm. københavn, danmarks radio 2003. liestøl, g. , fagerjord, a. et hannemyr, g. (2009). sammensatte tekster. arbeid med digital kompetanse i skolen. oslo: cappelen akademiske forlag. løvland, a. (2007). på mange måtar: samansette tekstar i skolen. bergen, fagbokforlaget. mcdrury, j. & altero, m. (2002). learning through storytelling in higher education. london: kogan page. mcewan, h., & egan, k. (1995). narrative in teaching, learning, and research. new york: teachers college press. nilsson, m. (2008). digital storytelling: a multidimensional tool in education. in t. hansson (ed.). handbook of digital information technologies: innovations, methods and ethical issues. idea group publishing. ricoeur, p. (1991). life in quest of narrative. in d. wood (ed.), on paul ricoeur narrative and interpretation. london and new york: routledge. schmid, t (2005). promoting health through activity for professionals in health, art and education. london and philadelphia: whurr publishers. tønnesen, e. s. (2009). mangfoldige uttrykk i nye medier. sammensatte tekster og nye kompetanser. i [tilt], nr. 1, 2009. oslo: landslaget for medieundervisning. willard & spackman (2003). occupational therapy. pennsylvania: lippincott, williams & wilkins. i throughout the article we will use the american spelling of this concept ii presentation given at oslo university college on february 11th 2010 iii the seven principles outlined by the cds are: i) a point of view, ii) a dramatic question, iii) emotional content iv) the gift of your voice, v) the power of the soundtrack, vi) economy, vii) pacing iv i) owning your insights, ii) owning your emotions, iii) finding the moment, iv) seeing your story, v) hearing your story, vi) assembling your story, vii) sharing your story v in this article we discuss the value of multimodal effects in the students’ narratives as opposed to narrative as written text. we use the term effects here as in “artistic effects” referring not to outcome but to multimodal means of meaning making and expression. artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4281 ©2021 (xavier giró gràcia and juana m. sancho-gil). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism xavier giró gràcia university of barcelona xaviergiro@ub.edu juana sancho-gil university of barcelona jmsancho@ub.edu abstract the use of digital technology is constantly permeating and transforming all social systems, and education is not an exception. in the last decade, the development of artificial intelligence has given a new push to the hope of providing educational systems with ‘effective’ and more personalized solutions for teaching and learning. educators, educational researchers, and policymakers, in general, lack the knowledge and expertise to understand the underlying logic of these new systems, and there is insufficient researchbased evidence to fully understand the consequences for learners’ development of both the extensive use of screens and the increasing reliance on algorithms in educational settings. this article, geared towards educators, academics in the field of education, and policymakers, first introduces the concepts of ‘big data’, artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms and how they are presented and deployed as ‘black boxes’, and the possible impact on education these new software solutions can have. then, it focuses on the underlying educational discourses that historically have seen information and communication technologies as a panacea for solving educational problems, pointing out the need to analyse not only their advantages, but also their possible negative effects. it finishes with a short exploration of possible future scenarios and conclusions. https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4281 artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 keywords: technology-enhanced learning, artificial intelligence, learning analytics, persuasive technologies, educational contexts. introduction we construct our technologies, and our technologies construct us and our times. our times make us, we make our machines, our machines make our times. we become the object we look upon but they become what we make of them (turkle 1995, p. 46). the history of education cannot be disentangled from the development of information and communication technologies. according to mcclintock (1993) the use of printed texts had a dramatic impact on the way formal education was conceived and implemented in the modern age. the paperback revolution was touted as a way of freeing teachers and students from textbooks, lectures, and recitation (cohen, 1988). cinema, radio, television, computers, and an ever-growing collection of digital devices have periodically been announced as the new panacea for solving educational problems (cuban, 1986; saettler, 1990; papert, 1993; perelman, 1992; gates, 1996; sancho, 1998; sancho-gil, 2020; sancho-gil et al., 2020). disregarding the fact that these technologies have not been intended or developed in or for the educational context (noble, 1991), schools and universities have been trying for decades to implement and use new information and communication tools in the teaching and learning processes, with the explicit aim of finding simpler, cheaper, and less timeconsuming ways of communicating, transferring, or delivering knowledge. alfred north whitehead’s idea that “the best education is to be found in gaining the utmost information from the simplest apparatus” (cuban 1986, p. 3) seems more alive than ever, in spite of all the evidence challenging it, and the growing concerns around “the folly of technological solutionism” (morozov, 2013). moreover, for many practitioners and scholars, the hidden agenda behind the adoption of new technologies lies in the urge of industry to find new customers ready to adopt the last version of their new gadget and keep the idea of ‘endless progress’ alive (macdonald, 1993). the dawn of the third decade of the 21st century is witnessing the unstoppable influence of large digital corporations in education. an area that has become for them an endless pool of data and money, and therefore power. power to shape and mould the notions of knowledge, teaching and learning, and the roles of teachers and learners. more and more educators are becoming aware of the key social role played by a few non-elected people and the power they exercise through algorithms and big data (lupton & williamson, 2017, williamson, 2017). a tendency that led buchanan and mcpherson (2019, para. 2) to argue that “australia may be heading towards an educational future designed by silicon valley not by educators and school communities”. artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 this article, geared towards educators, academics in the field of education, and policymakers, aims to shed light on the many aspects of artificial intelligence that are not widely known. presented in two main parts, it first introduces the notions behind what big data means in contemporary society, how data is fuelling the use of algorithms in all areas of our lives, and specifically in the field of artificial intelligence, and the concept of ‘black boxes’. then it focuses on the educational discourse underlying the idea that technology is the panacea for solving persistent problems in education and finishes with a short exploration of possible future scenarios and conclusions. the era of big data human societies have relied on data gathering for thousands of years. the first census we have evidence of was taken by the babylonians in 3800 bce and it counted the number of people, and livestock, as well as quantities of butter, honey, milk, wool, and vegetables available (lennon, 2016). human beings have always used data to try to better understand the world around them, and to develop models that allow them to make predictions about the future. will we have enough food stored to survive the winter? how many hospitals do we need in a county, or a big city? are people able to live comfortably with the jobs and salaries available? but, around the turn of the millennium, the way we look at data changed greatly. the evolution of computer systems, both in terms of raw processing power and data storage, together with the exponential growth in the use of digital technologies, created the perfect storm that coalesced in what we now call big data. data is now produced, processed, stored, and transformed at rates never seen before (hilbert & lópez, 2011), and that is transforming our lives. the invention of the internet, and its pairing with the widespread use of traditional computers first, and mobile technologies later, have not only revolutionized the ways we access information, with their political, economic, and cultural consequences (castells, 1996), but the way data is collected and exploited in massive quantities. we are now surrounded by computer agents, as predicted by negroponte in the nineties (negroponte, 1995) —siri, alexa, google, the most well-known, and a myriad others— and, in order for these digital agents to work, to adapt, and to offer us the best answer to our queries, they need to know everything about us; our appointments, our musical preferences, where we live, how we commute, what we like to do in our free time… but the massive use of data is not only contributing to changing our relationship with information and the way we process it; it is also at the root of a new economic paradigm, in which the currency is our digital footprint, the breadcrumb trail of small interactions we leave behind every time we use a digital device (muhammad, et al., 2018). social networks, search engines, or branded apps use all this data to build our bespoke digital profiles, that then are repurposed, transformed, and sold to marketers for advertisement, sometimes with little regard for privacy or ethics, as seen in cases like the cambridge analytics and facebook scandal (isaak & hanna, 2018). if you artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 are a google user, you only have to visit your profile and look at the ‘ad settings’ page1 to see (if you have not manually turned ‘ad personalization’ off) how much google knows about you: age, gender, children, education, employer, or interests, to name a few. google offers, like other big data gatherers, the option to opt out of some or most of the tracking they do, but the burden is always on the user, and some of the tracking is considered integral to the way the services work, and thus cannot be avoided. learning analytics and artificial intelligence when it comes to education, data analytics have been used regularly to assess the wellbeing of educational systems, as exemplified by the oecd’s programme for international student assessment, commonly known as pisa2. but the data gathered in this kind of studies is geared towards giving a global and, at the same time, limited view of educational systems as big monolithic institutions, and one that contains inherent unsolved issues (goldstein, 2018). inspired by the explosion of big data, the new fields of learning analytics and educational data mining try to take advantage of our new capabilities of gathering data to create new models to foster student learning. through algorithmic (software based) processes (prediction, clustering, relationship mining, distillation of data for human judgement, social network analysis, among others), these methodologies take advantage of the vast amount of data that can be collected in online e-learning platforms like canvas, moodle, sakai, or blackboard. “in addition to student’s background and performance data, each action carried out (reading files, participating in forums, sending messages, or visiting recommended links, for example) leaves a digital fingerprint” (calvet liñán & juan pérez, 2015). as more schools adopt e-learning platforms and the use of mobile technologies in their everyday teaching, this digital footprint can be harvested and processed to build individualized learning profiles for every student (just like google does), and these profiles can be used to predict student performance, offer personalized learning content, and assess students’ learning (ray & saeed, 2018). and to effectively process all the data and create the models that can drive this personalization, the proposed solution is artificial intelligence, which is already being used in many other sectors, from finance to justice. the field of artificial intelligence (ai) goes back to the origins of computer science. the english mathematician alan turing, famous for his work on deciphering the enigma machine used by the nazis to encode their messages during world war ii, is regarded as one of its fathers. he proposed the turing test as a replacement for the question “can machines think?” in his 1950 article ‘computing machinery and intelligence’ (saygin et al., 2000). the term is rooted in cybernetics and the belief of humans, and the universe itself, 1 https://adssettings.google.com/ 2 http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ https://adssettings.google.com/ http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 being what finn (2017) calls ‘effectively computable’ in which “cognitive faculties could be abstracted from the supporting physical operations of the brain” (dick, 2019, nip.). contemporary computer science however regards ai as a field that encompasses multiple disciplines related to developing machines with human-like abilities: machine learning, computer vision, image recognition, self-driving cars, natural language processing and generation, etc. ai relies on algorithms that can recognize patterns, which is an essential characteristic of the human brain. while traditionally the approaches to ai relied on the construction of very complex algorithms that could imitate rational processes, like weizenbaum’s eliza (weizenbaum, 1966), modern approaches rely on machine learning, which is the process by which the algorithm imitates a network of neurons, and by trial and error, through repeated generations of results based on training datasets, reaches a state where it is capable of producing human-like (correct) results for any arbitrary input. when you reach a very complex set of artificial neurons that model a multitude of layers of thinking and are capable of self-assessing their assumptions and adapting them accordingly, computer scientists use the term deep learning (dickson, 2021). these deep learning algorithms are at the heart of automatic image classification, voice to text transcription or stock price prediction. machine learning systems have been penetrating businesses around the world during the last decade and are seen as a big catalyst of growth in many industries, from retail to manufacturing and everything in between. they have also started making inroads in the public sector, being applied in the justice system to determine sentence duration, or in the education system to process college admissions (o’neil, 2016). these systems are presented as objective and neutral, since the models are developed by machines with limited human input, and as sophisticated tools that are too complex to be explained to the general population, so they can’t be challenged (o’neil, 2016). black box algorithms when you have an algorithm that is too complex to understand by a human being, but you trust that, given a certain input, it will produce a correct answer, that is called a black box. as cathy o’neil states in her book weapons of math destruction, “verdicts from wmds land like dictates from the algorithmic gods. the model itself is a black box, its contents a fiercely guarded corporate secret.” (o’neil, 2016, p. 8). you know what goes in, and what comes out, but not what the process of converting the input to the output entails. and even when we analyse what we could agree are successful models of black box algorithms, like google search, netflix suggestions, or apple’s siri, what we might find is that, at least in part, the algorithm is an illusion that requires constant human intervention to keep it working. ian bogost describes it as: once you adopt scepticism toward the algorithmicand the data-divine, you can no longer construe any computational system as merely algorithmic. think about artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 google maps, for example. it’s not just mapping software running via computer—it also involves geographical information systems, geolocation satellites and transponders, human-driven auto mobiles, roof-mounted panoramic optical recording systems, international recording and privacy law, physicaland datanetwork routing systems, and web/mobile presentational apparatuses. that’s not algorithmic culture—it’s just, well, culture. (2015, n.p.). a good example of this is youtube’s content id system, which is described in the report how google fights piracy as such: “with advancements in machine learning, content id can now detect copyrighted melodies, video, and audio, helping identify cover performances, remixes, or reuploads they may want to claim, track, or remove from youtube” (google, 2018, p. 27). built to appease the big media conglomerates and keep google (or alphabet) out of legal trouble, the system requires content creators to register their creations, and to enter them into a database of copyrighted material. drawing from this ever-growing database, content id determines automatically if a video uploaded by a user contains copyrighted content and flags the video. this flagging can lead, depending on the copyright holder’s wishes, to the video being blocked, or monetization being redirected to the claimant3. solomon describes the results of the algorithm like this: content id is a great system for youtube and for copyright holders, but it is not so great for youtube users because it not only fails to protect them, but also effectively deprives them of their rights under copyright law. the system is incapable of recognizing fair use, which means that a lot of videos are flagged as infringing even when they are not. furthermore, when these videos are flagged, most users fail to dispute the claims made against them. (2015, p. 255) one could argue that the algorithm is very successful in fulfilling the role that google has devised for it. it quickly and quite accurately (according to google) identifies copyrighted content in user uploaded videos. but it also can be argued that being youtube the dominant platform to distribute video online, the algorithm has an immense power to decide what can be published and how, even though it cannot understand the laws that govern copyright, and fair use (or fair dealing, or its equivalents in different countries) is not part of its concerns. also, the algorithm can be used as an indirect weapon to silence unwanted critique or analysis, since they might require showing the original material in the process, as pointed out by the electronic frontier foundation (trendacosta, 2020). when dealing with machine learning algorithms, we must keep in mind that data is, despite what it may seem, never objective or complete. datasets used to train these algorithms are created on the basis of available data and the expected outcomes, which 3 google maintains a help center page about content id, how it works, and frequently asked questions at https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370 artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 partially reproduce ‘reality’, with its biases and dysfunctions. these datasets may fail to include relevant information that is crucial to produce what a human being would accept as correct results, or they can rely on historical information that reproduces undesirable socio-economic trends. as o’neil puts it: “the question, however, is whether we’ve eliminated human bias or simply camouflaged it with technology. the new recidivism models are complicated and mathematical. but embedded within these models are a host of assumptions, some of them prejudicial” (2016, p. 25).the impact of the use of black box algorithms in education is still limited, but they are already in use in teacher performance assessment (e.g., the impact programme in washington, dc’s public schools started in 2009, that used machine learning and ai to measure teachers’ performance) (o’neil, 2016) and a growing number of voices are pushing for the introduction of learning analytics and data mining models, smart assistants, and recommendation engines in the classroom, especially in e-learning settings. we have to therefore ask ourselves what role can ai have in education, what problems can it provide solutions for, and what are the underlying imaginaries on educational discourses pushing for the use of these technologies. the need to meeting students’ learning needs the idea of going beyond the uniform way of approaching institutional teaching and learning builds somehow on two contradictory perspectives, one progressive, and one technological. at the beginning of the 20th century, john dewey, the progressive education (in the usa) and the new school (in europe) argued the need to consider children and young people not as empty vessels to be filled with books and teachers’ knowledge. it was proclaimed that students, regardless of their biological, socio-economic, and cultural background, came to school with their backpack of experience, knowledge, and their ability to learn. they were an essential part of the teaching and learning process that should consider their peculiarities. however, in 1970, basil bernstein was still pointing out that many dropped out children and young people did not feel recognised, respected, or valued by schools. fifty years later, the “persistence of inequitable education” (pigot et al., 2021, p. vii) remains the greatest educational, social, and political challenge to meet students’ needs. on the other hand, in the 1950s, the need to improve learning outputs and an increasing interest in technology, led behaviourist psychologist burroughs frederic skinner to build a machine that would automatically apply his principles of learning to teaching. for him, new advances in the experimental analysis of behaviour suggested that for the first time it was possible to develop a true technology of education. this technology, in the form of a teaching machine, following the practice of the experimental laboratory, would use instrumentation to equip learners with extensive repertoires of verbal and non-verbal behaviours. moreover, the equipment would be able to create enthusiasm for further study (skinner, 1961). artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 these two views seem to coexist in the current interest for personalising learning (oecdceri, 2006) and the push for introducing learning systems based on persuasive technologies, algorithms, and big data into formal education. persuasive technologies were developed by fogg at stanford university to design machines to change what people think and do (fogg, 2003; 2009). “he talked about helping people stay fit, quit smoking, manage their finances and study for exams. two decades later, his methods are worldfamous for generating billions of dollars for several dozen companies, but not for helping anyone quit” (peirano, 2019, p. 28). as made evident by different studies (alter, 2017; desmurget, 2020; williams, 2018) among others. nevertheless, as it has been the case with successive waves of technological developments, artificial intelligence has raised new expectations as a ‘solution’ to educational problems. for international organizations such as unesco (chakroun, et al., 2019), “ai offers a diverse range of solutions, apps and techniques for use by the education sector to enhance teaching and learning” (p. 7). they seem particularly enthusiastic about how “big data can be leveraged to track book performance and automate processes to build predictive machine-learning models” (p. 12), to enhance readers’ engagement analysis in projects such as world reader, aimed to help people to “achieve better educational success, improve their earning potential, and lead healthier, happier lives”4. they also believe that: increasingly, service and application providers collect, save and utilize large amounts of people’s data. algorithms, produced on the basis of these data, effectively reinforce human biases and propagate ‘filter bubbles’ – states of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses information that a user would like to see, based on the user’s own information, such as location and past click behaviour. (p. 52) even if they do not disregard that “historical prejudice can also be amplified by ai when its development is based on historical datasets. these considerations must be taken into account in any discussion around the use of big data” (p. 59). all these statements come for the discussions at 2019’s mobile learning week (mlw) centred on the challenges of reducing barriers to education, improving learning outcomes for all, and the possibilities afforded by ai, which was supported by unesco. the economic power of mlw is well known, as it is the unesco’s power to create discourses and guide educational policies in many countries. hence the importance of pointing out the lack of complexity in its analyses and the inordinate enthusiasm, in this case, for ai as a solution to education problems. however, discourses and ‘solutions’ to teaching and learning in formal contexts based on the almost ‘miraculous’ role of technology systematically ignore the complexity involved in any social systems. 4 https://www.worldreader.org/ https://www.worldreader.org/ artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 reductionist solutions to wicked problems for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. (h. l. mencken, 1880-1956) as suggested earlier, the idea of reducing the complexity of education and learning to effective ways of processing pre-packed information has a long history with its more important roots in the united states in the 1950s (saettler, 1990). as discussed in previous writings (sancho, 1995; sancho, 2020), education and learning are one of the best examples of what rittel and webber (1984) coined as ‘wicked problems’. according to sancho (2020), this kind of problems are: [...] poorly formulated. the information needed to understand them depends on the ideas of those trying to solve them. require a comprehensive inventory of all possible solutions previously proposed. it is practically impossible to understand the problem without knowing its context, nor to search for information without looking at the possible solution. they are not considered solved for reasons inherent to the logic of the problem (true-false), but because of what those who try to solve them find an adequate degree of “satisfaction”. any intervention in a “wicked” problem has consequences, leaving traces that cannot be erased by a “reparative” action of its unwanted effects, which in turn will generate other problems. they have specific characteristics that make them “unique” and act as symptoms of other issues (buchanan, 1992; rittel & webber, 1984) (p. 198). one of the main problems of converting education to information processes for designers, machines and learners is the ontological reductionism involved. for searle (1992, p. 15), ontological reduction consists in “the way in which objects of certain kinds are shown to consist of nothing but objects of another kind”. for example, if learning is only about ‘retaining information’, all aspects of intentionality, context, meaning making... disappear or are rejected as not ‘objectionable’ or measurable. so, they are converted into their approximate substitute values, something that can be particularly controversial, even dangerous, when modelling students’ learning (o’neil,2018). as searle (1992, p. 15) points out, “in general in the history of science, successful causal reductions tend to entail ontological reductions”. discussions related to the role of algorithms and big data to improve education and learning cannot be abstracted from contexts. we cannot disregard that: learning is a phenomenon that involves real people who live in real, complex social contexts from which they cannot be abstracted in any meaningful way. […] learners are contextualized. they do have a gender, a sexual orientation, a socioeconomic status, an ethnicity, a home culture; they have interests—and things that bore them; they have or have not consumed breakfast; and they live in neighbourhoods with or without frequent gun violence or earthquakes, they are attracted by (or clash with) artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the personality of their teacher, and so on. (phillips, 2014, p. 10). human beings are lifelong, life-wide, and life-deep learners (banks et al, 2007), even in moments and contexts where they are not explicitly taught. this feature of learning is what makes the process of teaching and learning so intricate, so ‘wicked’. we must be aware of what we mean by teaching and learning. today it seems crucial to enlarge and complexify the notion of teaching, to go beyond the idea that “teaching is telling [by a teacher or an algorithm], learning is listening [or following algorithm’s directions] and knowledge is what is in books [or a digital application]” (cuban, 1993, p. 27 — our additions in brackets). but not only that. we need to consider how people make sense of information, of situations they go through, of the world that surrounds them, that can be restricted or amplified by different means (social and cultural capital, access to digital technologies). this means we need to consider all learning processes in social settings (school, family, community) or in artificially created ones. in the age of surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019), any corporation can have access to massive volumes of data about practically all students, particularly those who use digital platforms the most, both in and out of school. this is one of the most powerful arguments for using big data in education today, but this data is loosely contextualized, and is often gathered without considering its collateral effects. nevertheless, these arguments are confronted with several significant issues. first, the increasing identification of children goes against children’s digital rights. “an issue that has begun to intersect with existing children’s rights instruments such as the united nations convention on the rights of the child (un crc) (1989)” (lupton, & williamson, 2017, p. 782). as these authors argue: the data generated by these technologies are often used for dataveillance, or the monitoring and evaluation of children by themselves or others that may include recording and assessing details of their appearance, growth, development, health, social relationships, moods, behaviour, educational achievements and other features” (p. 781). the second relates to the ways of converting this data into algorithms to guide students’ learning. thomas popkewitz (2018) warns of the perverse effects that educational research can have, especially for vulnerable children and youth, when they are confronted with labels such as lack of motivation, attention deficit, lack of concentration, health problems, etc. as it has been discussed, algorithms developed and trained by human beings are not ‘objective’ and unbiased. besides, most people do not possess the expertise needed to understand them as they work as black boxes. we can identify the ideological positioning and interests of an educational bill, a curriculum, a school, a university planning, or a textbook or a ‘simple’ educational app. however, most of us can hardly understand the artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 underlying views that algorithms hold about teaching, learning, knowledge, learners, and teachers, beyond the marketing discourse of the corporation selling them. the third has to do with the ongoing transformation of education by the frenzied data collection activity taking place in many countries. for buchanan and mcpherson (2019): australia may be heading towards an educational future designed by silicon valley not by educators and school communities. the developers of educational technologies have a growing influence in our classrooms, and we are witnessing a shift of public education from a democratic controlled system to one designed and run by corporations (n.p.) for them, replacing the teacher’s expertise with the pattern detection abilities of learning analytics algorithms can reduce students’ opportunities by the assumptions encoded in algorithmic logic. a situation that opens many intricate and related issues, the discussion of which would require a separate article. apparently, this can be said of many other countries. people’s progression, not only in institutional settings, can be tracked along with actions such as physical activity, use of digital devices, participation in social media, etc. information that can be matched with data provided by students and teachers through learning platforms and personalised learning apps used in classrooms or at home (thompson, 2017), most of them designed with persuasive technologies driven by algorithms based on student data to foster progression and motivation, as well as surveillance (knox et al., 2020; warzel, 2019). without disregarding the fact that educational algorithms can directly influence the practices of educational agents and determine students’ learning. these are important aspects to consider since, as it has been pointed out earlier, their development incurs in cognitive and cultural biases, and issues related to users’ abilities (hartong & förschler, 2019). only learning or education? all these considerations raise fundamental questions about the present and future of education. we must decide what we mean by education. is education only about teaching and learning at school, information transmission, and filling learners with facts, concepts, procedures to solve already solved problems, or skills to respond in exams to what is expected from them? or is it about learning to know, learning to do (in formal and informal settings), learning to live together, learning to live with others, discovering others (not only virtually, but also face to face), working towards common objectives, learning to be, and learning through life? (delors, 1998). we cannot disregard the development of children and young people in all their dimensions. that not only ‘the brain’ needs to be trained. that the whole body needs all artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 kinds of experiences (intellectual, affective, physical, tactile, olfactory, visual, auditory, gustatory). that an excessive use of screens, that systematically trump physical exercise and many fundamental human experiences, can definitively damage people’s harmonic development. we cannot deny the importance of acquiring digital skills nowadays. however, according to neuroscientist desmurget (2020, p. 231), we should not confuse “learning about ‘the’ digital with learning ‘through’ the digital”. several studies have found that “the more we leave an important part of our cognitive activities in the hands of the machine, the less material our neurons find to structure, organise and connect themselves” (ibid, 232). probably for this reason, the promoters and main beneficiaries of these technological applications try to preserve their children from their influence by sending them to schools with little or no use of digital devices, but with experiences of nature, art, and philosophy (lahitou, 2018; weller, 2018). to this regard, we must consider that different studies are showing that despite the huge investment in digital technologies in educational systems, learning results are terribly disappointing, giving the impression that the expenditure may not only have been futile, but even harmful (desmurget, 2020, p. 145). the oecd (2015) study about the use of computers and pisa results highlighted that “despite considerable investments in computers, internet connections and software for educational use, there is little solid evidence that greater computer use among students leads to better scores in mathematics and reading” (p. 145). and even more: “pisa data show that for a given level of per capita gdp and after accounting for initial levels of performance, countries that have invested less in introducing computers in school have improved faster, on average, than countries that have invested more” (p. 149). these results point out the need to decentralise the focus of learning from a single device, to develop comprehensive teaching projects capable of taking advantage of all available technology and to improve both the conditions of learning environments and teacher training. all the above discussions have led us to two main reflections. (a) whether all this expenditure in digital technology would not have been more effective if it had been invested in the many shortcomings of education systems. (b) what is the role and responsibility of teachers, school principals, counsellors, inspectors, researchers, and policymakers in deciding where and how to invest scarce resources in education? future scenarios and conclusions artificial intelligence has been recognized as a key asset for future growth by most developed countries. the oecd’s principles on artificial intelligence, that state that “ai systems should be designed in a way that respects the rule of law, human rights, democratic values and diversity, and they should include appropriate safeguards –for artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 example, enabling human intervention where necessary– to ensure a fair and just society” (oecd, 2019, the oecd ai principles), have been adopted by 42 countries. the european commission has recently published their regulatory framework proposal on artificial intelligence where it has classified the use of ai in “educational or vocational training, that may determine the access to education and professional course of someone’s life (e.g. scoring of exams)” as high-risk, which requires that ai “systems will be subject to strict obligations before they can be put on the market” (ec, 2021, a risk-based approach). the growing amount of political and social scrutiny in the use of ai-based technologies, especially when it concerns basic human rights, indicate that new regulations will probably be adopted in the short or medium term, and the lead of the european union could be a big factor in defining the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not around the world, since international companies have to abide to european law if they want to operate in europe. how these regulations will affect the use of ai in education remains to be seen since it is still very limited, but a strict policy framework could have a big impact in the feasibility of certain practices, and make some uses, like delegating learning assessment to ai, forbidden or requiring human supervision. the main promise of embracing big data and artificial intelligence in education is that they will provide us with insights that will help us personalize education for every learner, so they can be better served in schools and be more engaged with their educational voyage. the old model of learning analytics (subject marks being the most salient) are limited in scope and fall short in telling us what the learner is struggling with, so they only serve as a coarse way of classifying students into achievers or failures. the promise of a new model that solves all these problems is greatly appealing. however, educational systems have proven very refractory to big sweeping changes, and even if new policies regarding the use of ai may take time to be put in place, the widespread adoption of ai decision systems, especially in public schools, seems unlikely, and the impact of this adoption may be very limited. ai algorithms are becoming ubiquitous in our modern society, but they are often offered as black boxes, too complex to comprehend, or as trade secrets, intellectual property of big corporations, too valuable to openly discuss. also, the models that govern them are often based on biased assumptions, and datasets gathered from a ‘reality’ that is far from ideal. ai can be useful, especially to complement human instruction or in situations where human contact is limited, like on e-learning environments. however, the use of algorithms in education requires supervision, informed teachers that understand what the limits of the algorithms are, and transparency in their implementation and the data they collect. it also hinges on a high level of maturity from both the learner and the teacher, to critically approach the assessments, predictions, or materials that the algorithm offers. teachers cannot abdicate from their role, and the results of the algorithms must be challenged when they are flawed. artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 there are also important ethical questions surrounding the gathering of student data and the creation of models around it. data is a very valuable currency nowadays, and it is essential to acquire students’ consent and treat data properly, in terms of acquisition, storage, sharing, anonymization, and destruction. legislation will have to catch up with the data economy to protect users’ privacy, and to put limits in what algorithm developers can acquire from us, and what they can do with it, and that will also impact their use in education. smartphones, computers, and the internet are an integral part of our lives in the 21st century, and algorithms are a part of this reality. we live our lives in an online/offline duality, where it is not always obvious where one ends and the other begins. educators cannot be oblivious to that fact and must be aware of the advantages and pitfalls that the algorithmic era presents. policymakers, educators, and educational researchers not only have to find the best use of these technologies in education, maximizing their effects for the benefit of all individuals and social groups, and avoiding their pitfalls, but they also must educate students in what algorithms are and the impact they can have in our lives. finally, we cannot forget the physical, intellectual, and emotional development of students and must be aware that spending too much time in front of screens could be to the detriment of vital experiences for the growth of human beings. we urgently need a broad and in-depth interdisciplinary research initiative that can provide a clear picture of the benefits and harms of the development and use of newer digital technologies in education. references alter, 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(2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power: barack obama's books of 2019. profile books. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1158640 https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online https://www.eff.org/wp/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-discourages-fair-use-and-dictates-what-we-see-online https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/opinion/surveillance-state-schools.html https://doi.org/10.1145/365153.365168 https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-parents-raising-their-kids-tech-free-red-flag-2018-2 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529714920 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108453004 artificial intelligence in education: big data, black boxes, and technological solutionism abstract introduction the era of big data learning analytics and artificial intelligence black box algorithms the need to meeting students’ learning needs reductionist solutions to wicked problems only learning or education? future scenarios and conclusions references “back to the future”: socio-technical imaginaries in 50 years of school digitalization curriculum reforms issn: 1504-4831 vol 16, no 2 (2020), e4048 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4048 ©2020 (annika bergviken rensfeldt/catarina player-koro). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. “back to the future”: socio-technical imaginaries in 50 years of school digitalization curriculum reforms annika bergviken rensfeldt1 university of gothenburg email: annika.bergviken-rensfeldt@gu.se catarina player-koro university of gothenburg email: catarina.player-koro@gu.se abstract this paper examines major swedish school digitalization curriculum reforms over the past 50 years by analyzing similarities and differences between the late 1960s, mid-1990s, and early 2010s curricular reforms. by drawing on jasanoff’s (2015) socio-technical imaginary concept, we examine how digitalization reforms are constituted discursively and materially in struggles over curricular knowledge content, preferred citizenship roles, and infrastructural investments and especially by relating curricular reforms to governance transformations. one recurrent strategy of reform is what we call the back to the future argument, where curricula address an ideal citizenship of future societies, politically used to support change. we suggest that in the more than 50 years of school digitalization issues, it has been surrounded by strong and shifting struggles over the curriculum content and governance transformations. this pendulum movement (englund, 2012) has taken place partly through central, state-led or new monopolized technology governance and infrastructures and partly through decentralized forms of governing (e.g., in municipal contexts and via it-supported networks). 1 corresponding author https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4048 socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 keywords: school digitalization; curriculum reform; governance transformation; sociotechnical imaginary; infrastructure; school computers; it networks; learning platforms –i felt it was very positive that we could see what was happening around us, as we in sweden had a slightly different approach to it compared to many other countries. commonly, others started by introducing computers in more specialized ways and only for some groups, while from the very beginning we said that this should be fully integrated. and we started with upper secondary school of course, and then “data knowledge” [in swedish, datalära, implemented in the 1980 curriculum lgr80, and initiated in the 1970s] was introduced into primary school too. –after all, we were facing a huge task. the whole body of teachers in both primary and upper secondary school were to receive some continuing education in data knowledge . . . and later in the 1980s it turned out that . . . programming, instead of [the new curriculum] data knowledge had taken over. perhaps, this [data knowledge] project was a little too far ahead in time. (nilsson, 2008) an important goal of the strategy [the national school digitalization strategy by the ministry of education, 2017] is that teachers, students, preschool children, principals, and local school management continuously should develop their digital competence. for teachers for example this means having enough knowledge to “choose and use digital tools in education” according to the strategy. this concerns being able to use computers, smart pads, mobiles, digital study materials, programming etc. in teaching to improve students’ results. –one strategy is not enough, rather it is required that both the government and local school management invest in and prioritize the digital school, says the chair of the teacher union. (teacher union magazine, 2017-10-20) introduction in sweden, it has been well over 50 years since the first political and curricular initiatives on digital technologies in schools similar to the ones that exist today were introduced. two major curriculum reforms, in 1980 and 2017, are exemplified in the introductory quotations and point to some recurrent features of the reforms. one is the struggle over the knowledge content and what the relevant technologies are considered to be for a future society and citizen, in terms coined by the changes in terminology and actual technologies. digitalization is the more recent term, but it has been preceded by the terms and technologies of different eras, like computerization and data knowledge in the 1960s and information and communication technology (ict) based learning in the 1990s. another reform feature is what purposes and outcomes school digitalization curricula should have, including when and how it should be introduced. the first quotation above, from an early socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 “pioneer” in the field, illustrates some of these tensions and ongoing attempts to introduce digital technologies, as well as the early exchanges and borrowing of ideas on school digitalization between different countries. arguments for introducing new school digitalization curricula over time can provide examples of how and what the discursive struggles are or have been. the 50 years of digitalization reforms therefore raise questions of what the reemerging ideas of the reforms have been and especially how certain desirable knowledges and technologies for an imagined society and future play an important part in the construction of school digitalization curricula. as our title, “back to the future” suggests, such social and performative discourses, together with digital technologies, constitute certain desirable future characteristics, for example, being at the forefront of technological advances as a nation by setting the stage for the future society through education reform and infrastructure investments. desirable concepts like “modernization,” “innovation,” and “disruption” have commonly been used for the purpose of motivating digitalization reform and expectations. therefore, such discursive work is performative and represents a political will to break with the past to shape futures (popkewitz, 2008), and they function as strategies to motivate curricular reform. we also used the back to the future argument to refer to how such dominant knowledge arguments for the future society, like programming competence and learning to code, also referred to in the introductory quotations, are repeated during the time period in focus here. school digitalization reforms and investments in technology have always taken place in parallel with developments of digital technologies and scientific knowledge in society, and reforms often involved high expectations of digitalization powers to change, renew, and improve education. education technologies formed an important part of school curriculum and education reforms early on, in the decades after the second world war, for example, by introducing the needs of digitalization for a science-based future society and competent citizen. hence, the reconstructions of nation-states’ public education and societies included investments in early education technology, and in comparison to many other nordic countries, sweden, having avoided the war, is considered to have been early with investing in a strong, equality-oriented public sector (hallsén & nordin, 2020). however, since the 1990s, similarly to other countries, sweden has conducted a fast dismantling of public sector education to privatize large parts of the education system through market reforms (e.g., ball & youdell, 2007; englund, 2018; verger et al., 2017), thereby moving from state to more decentralized governance. such governance transformations provide democratic challenges. in the second quotation at the start of this paper, the teacher union chair references such democratic and economic challenges by addressing the local responsibility for investment and expected competence improvements. equality-oriented reform ambitions and equal technological accessibility and opportunity throughout the education system could be harder to achieve when school governance is decentralized to local and municipal governments or outsourced to private sector companies. socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 aim, questions and approach swedish school digitalization curriculum reforms make up the case in this article. the aim is to explore the configurations of major digitalization reforms from 1969 to 2019, raising two questions: how are different school digitalization curriculum reforms constituted regarding imaginaries of future societies, knowledge content, and digital technologies? following this, how are the different reforms converging or diverging over time and in relation to governance transformations? the approach used here to critically examine curricular digitalization reform draws on jasanoff’s (2015, p. 19) conceptualization of socio-technical imaginaries as part of political reforms and advances in science and technology. socio-technical imaginaries are formed through socially and publicly performed discourses of desirable future societies, as well as through inscriptions and the materiality of technology. hence, socio-technical imaginaries include both the discursively and materially intertwined and negotiated formations of digitalization curricula—discourses of futures and future citizens, knowledge content, and the materiality of digital technologies, devices, infrastructures, and investments. this approach suggests that digital “things” are considered co-produced by imagined visions of digitalized futures. digitalization curricula, covering both discourse and materiality, is one of the most powerful arenas for translations and uptakes of socio-technical imaginaries, and as such, they need to be critically examined. other studies have defined school curricula as historically and contingently constituting what are considered the relevant knowledge contents for education in dynamic relation to political processes and reforms (popkewitz, 2008). in that sense, school curricula are part of political government, nation-state ambitions, and ideals of citizenry competences (englund, 2012, 2018). curricular reforms can also be seen as the results of scientific and political struggles, prompting the prioritization of certain educational content and strategies (bernstein, 2000). therefore, curricula are not to be considered neutral but rather the result of complex negotiations between different social groups and interests (lundgren, 1983) along with digital technologies and computers in schools (selwyn, 2002). jasanoff’s approach allows for analytical sensitivity toward new circumstances and challenges with understanding how socio-technical imaginaries are circulated and adopted. this can include different local, national, or international curricular contexts (e.g., verger et al., 2017; wahlström & sundberg, 2017). therefore, even if curricular aspects of education reforms operate across national and global contexts, they will always be adapted and adjusted in relation to the specific needs and traditions of that country, region, or setting. thus, there is no unidirectional transfer of curricular reform from one site to another; they are best described as multidirectional and contingent. examples from education technology research using jasanoff’s concept to explore aspects of school digitalization include williamson (2017) and tafdrup (2019). other critically socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 oriented research is seen in uk studies on earlier reforms (mcgarr & johnston, 2019; selwyn, 2002) and in nordic case studies (e.g., hallsén & nordin, 2020; hanell, 2018; haugsbakk, 2013; mcbride, 2019; nivala, 2009; saari & säntti, 2018). there is also an emerging related field of study on how education reforms increasingly make use of digital technology for accountability politics, digital governance, and predictions of educational outcomes (e.g., grek et al., forthcoming; gulson & sellar, 2019; williamson, 2017). materials and analysis the materials used for this study are mainly publicly available official documents, including archived interviews, newspaper articles, syllabi, and education policies, including government strategies, evaluations (e.g., jedeskog, 2005; riis, 1987), and investments in digital infrastructures. two quotations introduced the case. the first is from an open archive of testimonial interviews conducted with digitalization pioneers in 2008 for the research project “from mathematical machine to information technology” (emanuel, 2009). it includes 10 interviews about school digitalization with “once-powerful education actors” (selwyn, 2013), allowing for secondary use of personal but also retrospective opinions of what was at stake. six of these transcribed interviews from 2008 (boström, broman & bäck, nilsson, nilsson & loftrup, nydahl, and riis) have been repurposed in our analysis. the second quotation is from a database search in the swedish media archive covering the school digitalization reform launched in the autumn of 2017 (see also williamson et al., 2019). because the reform documentation and curricula covering 1969 to 2019 revolve around imagined futures, knowledge, and digital technology, jasanoff’s concept was relevant. an analytical aim was to pay attention to discursive and material content, meaning political and curricular arguments, as well as investments in devices and infrastructures and regarding technology as co-produced by discursive powers. due to the extensive 50-year period being examined, the overall struggles and main reform elements are primarily represented, making details, local circumstances, and other voices less visible. the long period also made us explore divergences and convergences of the political struggle over time. the time frames were borrowed from englund’s (2012) education reform conceptualization of how educational citizenship equality is addressed and operating via pendulum movements of reform and curricular politics, suggesting a centralistic government in the 1960s, and renewed in 2010 with a clear break of decentralized governance in the 1990s (englund, 2018). next, our analysis is presented chronologically as it resulted in three main reforms, one in the late 1960s, the second in the mid-1990s, and most recently in the late 2010s, each displaying certain socio-technical imaginaries at play. socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 programming and school computers in 1960s centralized curriculum reform curricular ideas on computers and digital technologies were officially introduced in the swedish parliament in the late 1960s, and in 1971, the national board for education (nbe) prepared a new school subject, “data knowledge” (datalära, introduced earlier). textbooks supporting the new school subject, produced by pioneers (nilsson & loftrup, 2008), like computers on our terms in 1976, and a programmed future in 1979, say something about the orientation of the subject toward student perspectives and future socio-technical imaginaries. in the 1970s and 80s, a series of government-funded computer technology initiatives (e.g., the dos and dis projects) aimed at developing both hardware and software, and pedagogical methods followed. a government delegation was already sent to the united states in 1966 by the ministry of education and ecclesiastical affairs to investigate the early generations of education technology, called computer-aided instruction, cai (karlsohn, 2009). however, it was not until 1984, 13 years after the commission instantiated, that the first integrated data knowledge curriculum for all school years started. it included 80 hours of teaching in secondary school, with the aim of critically fostering knowledge on computerization in society. the struggles of the reform were thus a characteristic feature of the digitization curriculum. according to riis (2008), two main conclusions had been drawn from the earlier projects and recommended to influence the new overall syllabus in the early 1980s, lgr80 (nbe, 1980a). riis added that “this is how she remembers it” now, based on her later evaluations. one was that computers should only be introduced in vocational upper secondary school, and another was that the new curriculum should prevent “the mistake from earlier education technology reform,” echoing the us and cai-inspired modularized curricula, so that “drill” and “automatization” would be rejected in favor of students’ use and self-control (riis, 2008). sweden, known for its close science and state (party politics), as well as its social and science education ties, epitomized by the state’s step-by-step “social engineering,” was considered as having advantages compared to other countries in terms of engineering public reform. according to riis (2008), “sweden has been about 10 years ahead of almost all other countries in europe that were involved in the second world war when it comes to school reform,” adding that a strong future imaginary and tactic had regulated that government: thus, one has a vision of a different and better society . . . then one has to place that vision quite far into the future . . . so far into the future that it is possible to achieve real decision-making power, on top of or alongside yesterday’s old decision. (riis, 2008) socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 influential state governmental connections during these years also included the domestic industry sector, exemplified in the main vision of the first major initiative, dis, introducing computers in 1974 to 1980: knowledge is required to increase the individual’s influence over computer use. knowledge of computers and the use of computers is also needed to preserve our country’s role as industrial nation (nbe, 1980b, p. 1) the future imaginary presented is a computerized and industrial society, secured by the knowledgeable individual via schooling and the nation’s industrial labor and made governable through social engineering and a strong future imaginary (jasanoff, 2015). in retrospect, broman & bäck (2008) refers to the shared understanding of digitalization as a “social drama” that influential pioneers used based on the argumentative logic that “a major societal revolution is happening,” and “this is what we must do,” as “sweden has to keep our place in the world.” this self-reflection mirrors not only the social and argumentative powers of digitalization reform but also how digital technologies are interrelated with the nationally competitive computer-based societal imaginary. interestingly, similar to the reform in the 2010s (nea, 2017), there was also a basic form of programming included in early computer mathematics curriculum. locally, basic programming was often introduced via self-organized science teachers using invested school computers (nilsson, 2008, see introductory quotation). a critical evaluation followed the implementation, conducted by riis (1987), who stated that students had not received the required teaching hours and the results in mathematics had dropped, considered to have been caused by the time-consuming programming in mathematics. according to nilsson (2008), “software and programming” characterized the period, but “nothing much else happened,” as most projects and initiatives were stopped. in 1987, data knowledge was also excluded from the curriculum. major curricular struggles involving teacher unions also emerged and interrupted the process, and the broad implementation, time, and resources allocated to the new curriculum were debated, despite the fact that state government had prescribed protection of teachers’ workloads (broman & bäck, 2008). the alternative curricula also spread as many teachers preferred applied programming (nilsson, 2008; also introductory quotation). these long curricular struggles and strong trade union resistance protracted establishing the curriculum, which is typical for strong state-centered government and the era’s ideal of politically anchoring reform (englund, 2012). the exchange with other countries also made influential actors suggest a swedish school computer infrastructure, something frequently echoed in the interviews. one pioneer referred to how comparisons pushed the idea forward: “denmark had pickoline, finland mikro-mikro, and england the bbc computer. norway had joined the swedish project” (nydahl, 2008). during the mid-1980s, the swedish government and municipalities cosocio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 financed secondary school computer infrastructure (sek 60 million 1984–1987) in parallel with the prolonged implementation of the new subject. the development of relevant software for the assigned computers brought problems, however. in the mid-1980s, the swedish ministry of education (moe) initiated a school software project and a nordic expert group to exchange software. although severe usability and interoperability problems occurred (characteristic for micro-computers then), these nordic-produced state-financed programs later “turned into popular market products.” because “all these software programs were freely accessible as the organization ended” (nydahl, 2008), the commercial sector could make a profit from them. one of the interviewees stated that the software projects were also outmaneuvered by new types of operating systems, microsoft office packages, and new focus on information search and process writing in schools. two different interviews included similar retrospective comments: we probably had our doubts that it was a dead-end project from the beginning, to make a swedish blue-and-yellow computer. (nilsson, 2008) a swedish school computer named compis [computer in school, procured in 1982], which one now, a few years after and with the facts at hand, regards as one of the biggest flops in swedish technology development history. that computer was completely impossible to use. (boström, 2008) hence, a swedish-profiled school computer brand, similar to other countries, and schools and students having an automated teaching machine were considered ideal by government and industry at the time, and while the output can be considered limited in retrospect, the materialization of this strong imaginary was pervasive. the national agency of education (nae, the public agency after nbe) called the 1980s investments “almost textbook examples of technological push; computers were pushed onto schools and teachers that never asked for it” (nea, 1999, p. 24). taken together, state-initiated reforms and industry-oriented curriculum characterize this first digitalization reform period. this includes extensive power struggles over knowledge content on computerization and programming, where materialization of school computers gained important impact through the imaginary of swedish society. icts, networks, and it—billions in the 1990s decentralized curriculum the 1990s, particularly 1994, comprised several major reforms in swedish politics and curricula. the period before had been characterized by power struggles over interests and investments, but is often described as a time of undecided matters for school digitalization (jedeskog, 1996). a major education and public sector reform had begun in the 1980s, the decentralization and deregulation reform (englund, 2012, 2018). with it, the responsibility for schools was regionally transferred to municipalities, including allocation of funds, socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 which affected the school digitalization issues in the mid-1990s and onward. the overall curriculum was reduced to goal-oriented strategies to be operationalized by local schools and teachers. local schools were also to provide for strategies and infrastructure, which according to one pioneer, made regional technological capacity better but more unevenly distributed. in 1994, when the second major reform of digitalization took off, due to decentralization, the municipalities were entrusted with responsibility for implementation, while the state-controlled nea was responsible for coordination. the new terminology was information technologies (it). the curriculum prescribed students’ ability to use it as a “tool for knowledge seeking and learning” (moe, 1994). according to the new primary school curriculum, lpo94 (moe, 1994), in line with imagined future needs, students should be “able to orient themselves in a complex reality, with a large flow of information and a rapid rate of change.” these represent a will to reform connected to the back to the future argument. education was to foster an it-savvy citizen who contributed to the skills and knowledge of the information society, and it was also used to substantiate such competence. the difference this time was the technologysaturated future economy imagined. in 1994, the white paper “wings for human ability” (it commission, 1994) epitomized the far-flung technology-positive ideas from the mid-1990s. persuasive visions of school use of it or ict added to these ideas. the internet and web had been introduced, and the information superhighway was a common socio-technical imaginary at the time. arguments around global connectedness and investments in lifelong learning through individuals’ digital skills became linked to economic competitiveness agendas (moe, 2001), echoing the transand supra-national 21st century skills curriculum discourse in the united states, the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd), european commission, and more. a new economic sector and strong national confidence had emerged with it businesses establishing in sweden, in a short-lived it boom, and it in schools gained new momentum (karlsohn, 2009). for it and education businesses, schools were increasingly seen as market investments, or “a gateway for future sales to companies,” as one interviewee put it (boström, 2008), in the belief that “students would prefer the computers they had used before” when they entered work life. hence, the sociotechnical imaginary here draws on new forms of incentives for the desired future and schools as marketplaces. as part of this, networking became a renewed political tactic, and the public sector formed networks with private it and education businesses. the nea was commissioned to coordinate information networks, such as the national school data network, the resource-sharing platform multimedia department, and the nordic odin network. networking also became part of the new curriculum by communicating the need to network humans and digital resources to support teaching and school development. social and digital networks also characterized how major investment was motivated in the 1990s. important financial initiatives and efforts to digitize schools came from the socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 knowledge and skills development foundation, the kk foundation (sek 1 billion), based on employee funds set up by the former left-wing government, now liquidated by the rightwing government. during a political hearing (it commission, 1998) comments were made about investments of the lighthouse project, set up to be a role model in 1995: the one billion already is a lot of money, add to this the extraordinarily large sums that swedish municipalities also spend, estimated to be another three billion from 1996 to the turn of the millennium (it commission, 1998, p. 21) added to these billions, teacher professionals who had made extra contributions to school development and renewal were issued an extra sek 6 billion during the contract period, debatably referred to as forced reform adaptation for teachers. other tensions included only 28 municipalities (out of over 280 then) having access to kk foundation funding; the remainder had to make their own investments. as many municipalities refrained from investing in digitalization, the dissemination of results and experiences became more difficult, and the opportunities to reform were unevenly distributed economically and nationally. a follow-up to the kk initiative was another large initiative (sek 1.7 billion), “tools for learning, national program for it in schools (itis)” (moe, 1998). the idea was to improve schools’ internet access, support teacher work teams with learning resources, and school development, also by appointing teacher education institutions. students’ learning was highlighted and set against traditional teaching, and the schools and teachers were guided to redefine their work on such grounds. all municipalities participated, but the investment did not take place generally and flexibly, meaning large investments in teacher pcs (sek 700 million) was unevenly distributed. even if funding provided a basic digital infrastructure in more schools, it also forced many municipalities into infrastructure agreements where technology providers got major influence over political decisions (national audit office, 2002). similar to earlier initiatives, itis was criticized for neglecting earlier reforms and results and for being too quickly and sub-standardly prepared relative to the decentralized municipalities. it even started before the earlier kk foundation project was ended and evaluated. one interviewee argued that the era’s political initiatives had continual “government problems, [as] project after project followed but without interconnection” and said, “it would have been better if the state and municipalities had had a better collaboration,” as “these changes are not made quickly” (nydahl, 2008). often depicted is the lack of national coordination but also the wait for local power distribution, given that decentralized municipalities were expected to strategically expand ict into schools through their own large economic investments. one major municipality initiative became the local uptake of the global one-laptop-per-child movement in the early 2000s, connecting municipal schools with major technology providers like apple. the purchases were supported by regional stakeholders (e.g., the swedish association of local authorities and regions, 2019) and philanthropic nonsocio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 governmental organizations, often processed by private broker companies, made possible via public procurement. education and it businesses now got new opportunities to sell hardware, software, and training directly to schools. in a sense, the curriculum was thereby changed as how and why digitalization was introduced in schools was substantiated by private interests (c.f. picciano & spring, 2013; williamson et al., 2019). compared to the early 1960s and 1970s curricula, the ambition in the 1990s (and continuing in the 2010s) was greater and centered around accelerating sweden’s economic position in a global knowledge society and returning to the demand for current and future competitive citizen knowledge. the earliest reforms were more cautious and explored whether digital technology, mainly computers and computerization, came with issues that should be regarded in the curriculum. a more self-assured and internationally extended curriculum was established with the 1990s’ alternative societal imaginary, which came to symbolize a society and citizen ideal with strong technology-deterministic faith (jasanoff, 2015), confidently relying on individuals’ abilities to process and exchange information. it, or ict, in combination with decentralized municipal education governance, shaped the subsequent curriculum, which also created further differentiation in terms of individualization and the distribution of infrastructure and education resources. a growing dependence on private-sector initiatives was also established, which resurfaced in the 2010s’ major school digitalization reform, presented next. adequate competences, coding and platforms in monopolized centralist reform during the 2010s, the term “digitalization” gained wide curricular impact, often described as more than digitizing information and, again, with a new terminology of ideals of an emerging digital future, a socio-technical imaginary, used to regulate the current curriculum. in the swedish upper secondary school syllabus, gy11 (nae, 2011), digitalization is described in terms of students being able to “orient and to act in a complex reality with a large flow of information, increased digitalization, and rapid pace of change,” and that students should “develop a critical and responsible approach to digital technology, to be able to see opportunities and understand risks and to value information.” the more critical approach to information, in comparison to 1990s curricula, was developed then, but mainly, the citizenship expressed is the individuals’ adaptability to an already present and changeable future society different from the 1960s ideal of a more stable, industrially prosperous society constituted by computers and scientifically informed knowledge. major digitalization reform came in 2017, represented by the national strategy (moe, 2017), the overall aim of which was to increase equivalent (not equal) technological accessibility nationally. modernization and a fundamental change of work methods, socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 teaching, and leadership, as well as improved school cost effectiveness, were expressed. it is also said that with overall digitalization reform, “sweden continually should be a leader in digitalization and be digitally competent” (moe, 2017, p. 3–4). as shown here, digital competence could be used to address students and the nation-state, framed as actionable elements that form part of a global society and economy imaginary. the new agency, school inspection, controlling juridical matters and quality (englund, 2018), suggested teachers have an “open approach to new technology, rather than any specific technical competences” and that the desired effects of school digitalization included providing “increased student motivation, skills, and independency and support group work” (school inspection, 2011, p. 8–9). a strong governance feature of the school digitalization curriculum was how it addressed behavioral attitudes, for both students and teachers, as part of being competent. as the nea (2019) introduced the revised syllabi for digitalization, it was clear that the term “digital competence” was borrowed from influential actors like the oecd (2005), which had promoted an economy-based understanding of how global workforces and digital markets secure digitally competent citizens and students. a particular attribution to digital competence was introduced in the swedish curriculum (moe, 2017), stating it should be “adequate,” a term for pointing out context adaptability and knowledge relevance. in line with wahlström and sundberg (2017), this suggests that the widespread competence concept from the mid-2000s was multidirectional and “domesticated” as it was transformed over time into particular situations, along with the swedish context, and in line with globalized discourses. programming was formally reintroduced in the digitalization curriculum (moe, 2017), based on several new knowledge formulations, integrated in all school years and different subject areas, similar to the late 1960s and 1970s reforms. similar to earlier initiatives, programming knowledge and learning to code were referred to as desirable but now, however, fully oriented toward individuals’ knowledge needs and future careers, as stated by a representative of nae in 2018: everyone needs basic knowledge in programming to be able to understand how society functions and to then being able to use it in one’s work life. that is why schools need to take this content into consideration so that every student will be taught this. there is an idea of progress in the programming curriculum from preschool class to upper secondary school, starting with the concrete step-wise instruction to being able to apply this programming for problem-solving in upper secondary school. (nae, 2018-01-09) socio-technical imaginaries are part of how programming is positioned in society, framed as work knowledge and categorized into curricular knowledge of school levels and content areas. even so, it is posted on nae:s own youtube channel as a sign of how a public agency today pictured the imagined world. somewhat similar to the 1970s’ curricular ideas of digital technology, programming knowledge is seen as an important aspect of a future socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 emerging society. the late 2010s ambition is, however, wider than the 1970s version and suggests more experimental initiatives; programming is now framed through aspects like contribution to a digitally-based economy. in many ways, programming and learning to code as digital competences draw on the language of computer science and the conception of programming as a problem-solving skill. a possible reason for this is how the curriculum process was politically governed. nae was appointed to operationalize the curriculum and distribute an important part of the project, triple helix—national coalition for school digitalization. this was initiated by swedsoft (2017), a large software interest organization of academics and industry people, where schools, industry, and universities were invited to participate in different workshops. this exemplifies a new form of education reform where public and private actors, based on different interests and during short and fragmented time contributions, had a large impact on major curricular decisions and technology-use, similar to other countries (williamson et al., 2019). in sweden, these processes replaced earlier, more publicly visible curriculum-making, which were slow processes, as exemplified in the late 1960s reform. the 2010s’ state-led government decreased and transferred control to audits and inspections. these changes in sweden and elsewhere exemplify a form of recentralization (englund, 2012) of the curriculum in the 2010s. however, this recentralization is now supported via supraand transnational organizations such as the oecd and other interest groups (wahlström & sundberg, 2017) rather than being limited to the nation-state and public government. in that sense, there are impacts and similarities in the curricular focus as well as differences between the forms of centralism that took place in the 1960s and 2010s reforms to follow englund (2012). this transformation makes the possibilities of democratic influence and criticism of rapidly upcoming political proposals more difficult. the competence feature of the curriculum was paired with certain understandings of technology. since the 1990s, swedish school curriculum has commonly described digital technologies as tools for learning and work processes, a means of achieving other goals. the school regulation (moe, 2010), for example, suggested “that schools apart from books, also should use other learning tools needed for an up-to-date education.” similar expressions were used in 2017’s national digitalization strategy, but now teachers’ digital competence and their ability to choose and use digital tools (also referenced by the teacher union chair in the introductory quote) was more in focus. the tool metaphor used here to describe a preferred technology-based curricular repertoire that teachers should be able to choose from risks neutralizing the difference of digital technologies, software, hardware, and so on and how they are always inscribed and circumstanced with powers that make it hard to criticize or act upon the curricular repertoire. even so, it presupposes a choice, preferably based on pedagogical (not solely economic) considerations. this stands in contrast to the establishment of a highly influential infrastructure, with learning platforms or learning management systems as a dominating technology (nae, 2016). at first, these socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 platform infrastructures had served more local settings and internal school networks, but now they evolved as ideas of standardizing administrative and pedagogical processes in schools, and they were built into the platform used in school systems. now a new form of global platform infrastructure, digital systems of hardware, software, and administration services in one package, has entered the growing competitive school market, mainly provided by major internet providers like google or microsoft. major marketization reforms had opened the public education sector for commercial interests, including an independent profit-making school sector (englund, 2018). the commercial logic of platform capitalism is that the “currency” and volume of data (srnicek, 2017) generated by everyday school use of digital platform technologies and the infrastructures already in place make the price of the infrastructure affordable or “free” for schools in a costly public education sector (williamson, 2017). often, these private interests argue a philanthropic perspective that they contribute to the public good by, for example, monitoring data activity and student learning. in that sense, they impact considerably in imagining a digitalized education system as part of a society with a well-performing and well-managed digital economy. in sweden, the media debate around this has concerned teacher workload costs and efforts and the disciplining assessment culture as the backside of standardized platform use (swedish teacher union, 2019). more seldom questioned is how this “infrastructuralization” and data currency growing out of platform markets is changing power relations. the global platforms and school data practices instantiated and operating via private–public networks could now extract, assess, and compare local, national, or international performances (hillman, bergviken rensfeldt & ivarsson, 2020), working as part of a new global monopolization and centralized power (englund, 2018). conclusion two main results appear from our analysis of similarities and differences in major swedish school digitalization curriculum reforms over the past 50 years. one recurrent configuration is the back to the future argument, where curricula address ideal citizenships of emerging future societies and by such argumentative power give fuel to reform—starting with the industrial and welfare prosperity of the 1960s, to a break in 1990s and 2010s societies with internationally oriented information and latest knowledge economy versions. the discursive figure is strongly intertwined with inscriptions of and investments in digital technologies through school computers, digital information networks, and learning platforms, often co-constituted by international digitalization discourses and networks. such socio-technical imaginaries “naturalize ways of thinking about possible worlds” (jasanoff, 2015, p. 24). the alternative and implicit imaginary produced is a value-laden counternarrative of a sweden lagging behind others, having uninformed citizens, and poor societal and educational conditions and infrastructures for knowledge production and prosperity. even if digitalization reforms are aligned with such socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 political tensions, interruptions, and resistance, we argue that there are converging visions over the 50 year period of meeting democratic and economic challenges by digital means in education. the other is that major divergences in digitalization curriculum formations are strongly related to governance transformations that had differentiating consequences for opportunity and equal accessibility around digitalization. these significant political and curricular transformations add to englund’s analyses (2012, 2018) of the democratic role and purpose of education curricula. the pendulum movement between centralized and decentralized powers inherent in digitalization politics have been evident, in the 1960s by strongly state-led government and nation-oriented curricula, then followed by more locally distributed municipal power centers and curricular reform, and again re-centralized via more monopolized powers via supra-state and private actors influencing the curricular reform. hence, one general insight is that the digitalization curriculum, often internationally oriented toward the economic aspirations of nation-states, such as competitiveness and human capital, in recent times is more challenged by and exposed to private interests (picciano & spring, 2013, p. 173). in the governance break around 1990, in particular, changes in political–administrative processes affected curricular processes, strongly consistent with (international or supra-based) contexts and a global market reform orientation and “generally favourable to decreasing the role of the state in direct provision of public services” (verger et al., 2017, p. 328). social networks and infrastructurally converging models, however, seem to have been internationally multidirectional since the early international exchanges around digitalization. as the 1990 break opens up for private and commercial interests, these also gain influence over school infrastructures. together, state and privatized initiatives have, over time, created a strong infrastructure base for swedish schools, a development not without complications, however. inequality issues and related democratic challenges of school digitization have appeared. several of englund’s analyses (e.g., 2012, p. 21; 2018) exemplify how the swedish curriculum orientation from 1960 to the mid-1980s was driven by strong education reforms aimed at counterbalancing student inequalities, followed by the radical break around mid-1980s (englund, 2018), with free school choice, for-profit schools, and more. even if equal access to technology has similarly been a constant struggle in digitalization reform since the early 1960s, beginning in the 2010s, a new take on equivalent technology access has been used in strategies (e.g. moe, 2017), allowing for differences and unresolved problems of interoperability, standardization, and accessibility of digital technologies. the main guarantees provided are market offers of digital competence resources and public procurement of global platform infrastructures where digitalization is considered a powerful instrument for improving, democratizing, and making different aspects of schooling more efficient and streamlined. implicit in socio-technical imaginary is how the opportunity and capacity of technology for learning and competence socio-technical imaginaries in curriculum reforms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 16 – issue 2 – 2020 development is addressed toward students, schools, nations, and the future at the same time as the technologies are inscribed with certain uses and standards that counteract such concerns. in the actual implementation of school digitalization over time, the detailed regulation of instituting reform seems to decrease, while performativity and assessment regimes increase, especially the 2010s’ reform, which allows for different types of data introspection and exploitation from private and commercial interests. this includes the insertion of commercially provided platform technologies into public education, who can now profit from school-generated data activities and get direct access to public education sector performativity in different ways. similarly, the latest decade’s fast and decentralized curricular transformations differ from the earlier, more slow-paced education reforms, where curricula and investments in, for example, school computers were commonly publicly discussed via official organizations of unions and employers. this shift in power struggles over curricula makes it important to include new, more ephemeral empirical material from private sector actors and ‘actants’ like infrastructures and platforms. the education system and the schools may need to develop knowledge on these new forms of curricular changes and an approach to safeguard the interests of the public education sector and the values at stake, such as issues of equality, openness, personal integrity, and the utilization of schools’ digital work on platforms (williamson, 2017; hillman et al., 2020). references ball, s., & youdell, d. 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(2008). cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: science, education and making society by making the child. routledge. riis, u. (1987). datalära på grundskolans högstadium – utvärdering av en treårssatsning. [computer science education in the swedish lower secondary school: evaluation of a three years’ campaign]. linköping university. riis, u. 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[schooldigiplan. national action program for the digitalization of schools]. sveriges kommuner och landsting. swedsoft (2017). trippel helix: nationell samling för skolans digitalisering. [triple helix: national collaboration on school digitalization]. https://www.swedsoft.se/ tafdrup. o. (2019). sociotechnical imaginaries in the digital age of education. aarhus university diss. https://pure.au.dk/portal/files/145560253/afhandling_olivertafdrup.pdf teacher union magazine (2017-10-20). den nya digitaliseringsstragin. [the new digitalization strategy]. lärarnas tidning. teacher union (2019). störeller stödfunktion: en rapport om lärplattformar. [interference or support: report on learning platforms]. lärarförbundet. verger, a., steiner-khamsi, g. & lubienski, c. (2017). the emerging global education industry: analysing market-making in education through market sociology. globalisation, societies and education, 15(3), 325-340. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.1330141 wahlström, n., & sundberg, d. (2017). discursive institutionalism: towards a framework for analysing the relation between policy and curriculum. journal of education policy, 33(1), 163-183. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2017.1344879 williamson, b. (2017). big data in education: the digital future of learning, policy and practice. sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529714920 williamson, b., bergviken rensfeldt, a., player-koro, c., & selwyn, n. (2019). education recoded: policy mobilities in the international ‘learning to code’ agenda. journal of education policy, 34(5), 705-725. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1476735 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1474904117721373 https://doi.org/10.1080/0142569022000015454 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.728630 https://pure.au.dk/portal/files/145560253/afhandling_olivertafdrup.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.1330141 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2017.1344879 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529714920 https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1476735 “back to the future”: socio-technical imaginaries in 50 years of school digitalization curriculum reforms abstract introduction aim, questions and approach materials and analysis programming and school computers in 1960s centralized curriculum reform icts, networks, and it—billions in the 1990s decentralized curriculum adequate competences, coding and platforms in monopolized centralist reform conclusion references microsoft word löfström and nevgi university teaching staff as learners.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 university teaching staff as learners of the pedagogical use of ict erika löfström associate professor, tallinn university post-doc researcher at the centre for research and development of higher education at the university of helsinki email: erika.lofstrom@helsinki.fi anne nevgi senior researcher at the centre for research and development of higher education at the university of helsinki abstract the aim of the article is to increase the understanding of how university teachers think about pedagogy in web-based teaching. the orientation to pedagogy that teachers have in their instruction is evident from their thoughts about student learning. the focus of this study is on the pedagogy that the teachers displayed in their collegial interaction during a web-based staff training course. the objective of this course was to enhance the teachers’ pedagogical skills in their web-based teaching. the qualitative data consisting of the teachers’ web-based discussions provides insight into their conceptions of what constitutes good teaching and learning. these conceptions can be understood in light of the theoretical model of meaningful learning (jonassen, 1995). furthermore, deepening a teacher’s understanding by taking the learner’s position appears to be a powerful tool in understanding the prerequisites for the successful use of information and communication technology (ict) in teaching. the results show that teachers were more focused on how to facilitate student collaboration in their webbased teaching and less on how to contextualise the content or how to facilitate the transferability of the content taught into other contexts and situations. the teachers’ own experiences of what it means to be a learner in a web-based environment may be an essential learning experience through which they realise that when teaching in web-based environments, it is necessary that every choice they make be justifiable in terms of pedagogy. introduction the aim of this article is to increase our understanding of how university teachers are conscious and integrate pedagogy into their web-based teaching, and how they themselves experience web-based environments as learning contexts. teachers’ experiences of being learners in web-based environments are likely to influence their own teaching in these environments. for instance, entwistle and his colleagues (2000) show that the teachers’ perceptions about seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 2 teaching are strongly influenced by their own previous experiences as students (entwistle, skinner, entwistle & orr, 2000). in our article, the focus is on the pedagogy that the teachers display in collegial interaction, namely web discussions, since the teachers participating in this study were learning to use information and communication technology (ict) in their teaching. we are interested in how the teachers display awareness of their pedagogical choices and the impact of these choices on learning while they themselves learned ict usage and developed their teaching. the use of ict in teaching is rapidly advancing the view that web-based teaching is increasingly being incorporated into everyday teaching and instruction. this change also has an impact on the teacher’s role, which in the web-based learning environment requires different skills to facilitate students’ learning than in a face-to-face classroom environment (harasim, hiltz, teles & turoff, 1995; motschnig-pitrik & holzinger, 2002). since the first days of the internet, an expansive body of research has addressed the development of web-based courses in higher education (e.g. harasim, 2000; yazon, mayer-smith & redfield, 2002). the focus has been mainly on the students’ learning experiences, new modes of learning (e.g. dillenbourg, 1999) or on pedagogical and technological solutions (e.g. brooks, nolan & gallagher, 2001; oliver & herrington, 2003). however, very little research has focussed on the teachers’ pedagogical thinking and pedagogical skills to plan and develop their web-based teaching. this means that there is a need for the knowledge on how teachers justify and how they base their pedagogical solutions when developing their courses to be offered as fully or partly online. for example, a survey conducted by woods and his colleagues (2004) revealed that teachers do not fully apply the pedagogical potential of web-based learning environments. in that study, the learning platforms were mainly used for delivering information and learning materials and the instructional and interactive features were used only occasionally. (woods, baker & hopper, 2004.) to support teachers’ skills to pedagogically develop their web-based teaching, the educational development services at one of the campuses of the university of helsinki offered a web-based course to university teachers and to the ict support staff. this course was designed to help those who wished to develop their courses using web-based learning environments either as the only learning environment or as a supplement to face-to-face teaching. the ict support staff participating in the course worked directly with university teachers, and their expertise may also have been utilised during the actual course. we have explored how teachers express their pedagogical intentions and ideas while learning to use ict in their teaching through collaborative methods in a web-based course. we explore the ways in which teachers express such elements as those outlined in the model of meaningful learning in their collegial discussions in a web-based learning environment. the model of meaningful learning (ausubel, 1968; novak, 1988; jonassen, 1995; jonassen, howland, moore & marra, 2000) provides a framework for understanding teacher views and thoughts on web-based learning. this model provides a framework for analysing what teachers regard as being essential for student learning and as being important in their teaching. the constructivist meaningful learning model views learning as a dynamic process in which the learner engages actively to construct meaning rather than to reproduce the memorised facts (jonassen & reeves, 1996). jonassen (1995) developed a model for designing social constructivist learning environments and suggested that the learning experience should be the following: active, constructive, collaborative, intentional, conversational, contextualised, and reflective. the data consisted of the reflective discussions the teachers had with their colleagues and course mates. some of the data were actually “provoked” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 3 through provocative statements, in order to get teachers to reflect directly upon student activity, intentionality, collaboration, constructivity, reflection, contextuality, transfer of knowledge, and interactivity. the teachers’ experiences of what it means to be a learner in a web-based environment may be an essential learning experience through which the teachers realise the implications of their pedagogy. we have previously conducted research on the teacher and student experiences concerning the meaningfulness of learning in their web-based courses at the same university by administering a survey questionnaire (nevgi & löfström 2005; löfström & nevgi, 2007a). this survey revealed that the teachers generally had a more positive view about the meaningfulness of learning in their courses than the students themselves did. this is clearly a challenge for pedagogy, and this finding gave rise to the idea to explore what happens in terms of pedagogical thinking (as viewed through the model of meaningful learning) when the teachers engage in learning to use ict. for this reason, the qualitative study was conducted in order to obtain another perspective on the teachers’ views about teaching and learning. making learning meaningful – a theoretical perspective teachers need computer literacy and technical skills to be able to utilise ict in educational settings. but the basis for this literacy and these skills is the teacher’s pedagogical skills and understanding of the learning process, if not in terms of theoretical constructs, at least in terms of practical applications and their implications. teachers also need knowledge about how to use the tools available in pedagogically meaningful ways. a number of studies have explored whether teachers have sufficient ict skills (oliver & herrington, 2003; woods, baker & hopper, 2004; derntl & motschnig-pitrik, 2005). however, it is argued here that besides acquiring ict skills, the teachers also need to understand the learning process in the web-based environment from the perspective of the student, for this may help teachers gain insight into what it actually means to be a learner, and what kind of cognitive and affective attributes that may go with the learning process in a new environment. jonassen (1994; 1995), based on ausubel’s (1968) subsumption theory, has proposed guidelines for designing learning processes in web-based environments. jonassen’s model applies situated learning theory from a social constructivist perspective, and proposes that the following ideas be addressed: a) the focus should be on knowledge construction, not knowledge reproduction, b) learning tasks should be authentic, and realistic case-based learning environments should be provided, c) reflective practice should be fostered, d) content and context dependent knowledge construction should be enabled, and e) the collaborative construction of knowledge should be supported through social negotiation rather than competition. the usability of this model in higher education contexts has been assessed in tirri and nevgi (1999) and nevgi and tirri (2003), who have also developed a survey instrument for investigating the meaningfulness of learning in higher education. a further modification of that instrument in the english language can be found in löfström, kanerva, tuuttila, lehtinen and nevgi (2006). core elements of the meaningful learning model as applied in the context of web-based learning includes activity, intentionality, constructivism, collaboration, dialogue, reflection and contextuality. first, activity implies that the point of departure for any learning process is that the student engages in the mindful processing of information and acknowledges his or her responsibility for learning (jonassen & al., 2000). second, the criterion of activity implies that interactivity is facilitated in a web-based learning environment. this means that an activity in a web-based environment may be seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 4 increased through elements which encourage students to utilise search tools, analyse data, and create (shareable) personal working files. third, learning is intentional when learners actively and purposefully set cognitive objectives and work toward their achievement. web-based learning environments consequently need to have the tools for the design, follow-up and evaluation of learning, both for individuals and groups, in order to support intentionality. (jonassen, 1995; jonassen & al. 2000.) the next core element of the meaningful learning model is constructivity which, as described in the model, implies that knowledge is constructed into structures of increasingly greater definition and sophistication by adapting new pieces of knowledge to previous knowledge structures in order to create meaning, reconcile discrepancy or satisfy curiosity (jonassen, 1995; jonassen & al., 2000). key features of constructivist learning environments therefore include active learning, authentic instructional tasks, collaborative activities, and diverse learning formats (cunningham, duffy & knuth, 1993; duffy & cunningham, 1996). besides collaboration, in a web-based learning environment, the new ideas to be presented may be enhanced by previous knowledge using hypertext structures, the promotion of dialogue through discussion platforms for the exchange of thoughts and impressions, as well as by having a curriculum built taking that prior knowledge into account. furthermore, learning tasks need to be situated in a relevant real-world context. this contextualisation may be supported through simulation, video clips or through problem-based learning. (jonassen, 1995; jonassen & al. 2000.) learning is collaborative when students engage in knowledge-building communities and share their knowledge and skills with other members of the community. a recent study in which students’ learning experiences and learning outcomes were compared in two different virtual learning environments revealed that students achieve better learning outcomes when the learning environment supports collaborative learning and when the students are provided with specially designed collaborative learning tools (romanov & nevgi, 2006). learning thereby takes place through dialogue in which learners benefit from engagement in knowledge-building communities. collaborative learning and dialogue can be supported by offering synchronous and asynchronous discussion platforms and shared file management spaces. dialogue not only provides information about students’ learning, but is also an important means for a teacher to gain instant feedback about how students learn. (jonassen, 1995; jonassen & al. 2000.) finally, meaningful learning is also reflective. this is when students learn to identify their learning processes and reflect upon these as well as their implications (jonassen, 1995). in web-based learning environments, reflective learning can be supported by offering cognitive tools for the self-evaluation of the student’s individual learning (niemi, nevgi, & virtanen, 2003), or by facilitating the use of discussion platforms for interaction, role-play and peer assessment (rovai, 2004). further, ruokamo and pohjolainen (1999) and tirri and nevgi (2000) have also supplemented this meaningful learning model by adding the criterion of transfer. they argue that learning is situational, implying that learning content does not necessarily transfer from one context to another, reducing the student’s experience of relevance. this transfer can be facilitated through hypertext, data banks and problem-solving tasks. (tirri & nevgi, 2000.) as jonassen (2000) points out, the role of technology in learning is that of an intellectual tool which helps the learners to articulate what they know, reflect on what they have learned, support the internal negotiation of meaningmaking, construct personal representations of meaning, and support intentional, mindful thinking. these characteristics are interrelated, interactive and interdependent. for instance, theoretical content can be seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 5 combined with multimedia applications, animation and simulation to support different aims of learning, such as understanding, exploring, applying, and producing new knowledge (laurillard, 2002). partlow and gibbs (2003) have identified categories of constructivist-compatible teaching principles and instructional practices and these include project-based tasks, cooperative group work, direct instruction, tasks requiring higher order thinking, interactivity among learners and the teacher, and learner choice. the application of constructivist principles in web-based learning also increases the students’ experience of the effectiveness of learning (bangert, 2004). method objective and data the aim of the article is to increase understanding of how the university teachers think about pedagogy in their web-based teaching, and how they learn to use new technology in order to facilitate student learning. the research question addressed was: what kind of pedagogical conceptions do university teachers display in the process of learning to use ict? the informants (n = 13) were teachers and ict-support staff (hereon referred to as teachers) who participated in a web-based course on web-based pedagogy during the spring term 2005. this course was intended for teaching staff as well as the pedagogical and technological support staff, and it was arranged by the educational development services at one of the university campuses. this one-semester course included both face-to-face and web-based learning, with a strong emphasis on instructional methods. in other words, the teachers were developing their teaching using ict while simultaneously participating in a course to improve their ict skills. the participants mainly had quite limited hands-on experience of teaching in web-based environments or if they had experience of using these environments, the objective to participate may have been to increase their pedagogical knowledge. the data consisted of web-based discussions and written essays produced through the technique of conscious provocation. the web discussions generated by thirteen teachers (four of whom were male) on three different occasions during the course provided part of the data. in addition, the course participants were presented with a set of provocative statements about learning in web-based courses. six participants individually reflected upon these provocative statements by providing written accounts. the idea of conscious provocation as a data collection technique is based on de bono’s (1990) concepts of lateral thinking and provocation. according to this concept, lateral thinking, which is connected to creative thinking, involves the creation of novel, unanticipated thoughts and ideas that allow a creative way to use one’s senses. the leaps in thinking caused by disturbances justify the provocation, which may be caused through coincidence or conscious organisation (de bono 1968; 1990). a similar approach has been used by entwistle, skinner, entwistle and orr (2000), who presented their informants with contrasting views of good teaching. their most complex accounts were those in which the informants argued for and against the presented perspectives, integrating the arguments into their own reasoned conclusions about the topic. inspired by these ideas, we collected data using the following six open-ended questions designed to provoke the respondents: it is said that web-based learning enhances the activity and independent knowledge-seeking behaviour of the student. what do you think? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 6 while studying in a web-based environment, the learner strives more consciously to set goals for his or her own learning than while studying in a traditional way. what is your view? while studying in a web-based learning environment, the learner becomes aware of his or her own thinking and learning processes. what is your experience? while studying in a web-based environment, the learner is able to integrate novel and prior knowledge into meaningful structures. how well do you think this idea is realised through web-based studying? it is considered that the web-based learning environment inspires learners to share their knowledge with others and actively discuss it. students are eager to create shared learning experiences through conversation in web-based learning environments. do you think this claim holds true? web-based learning environments enable learners to gain authentic experiences of the content to be learned that are analogous to real life. this is why the contents learned through web-based studying are generally easily applicable in different learning situations. what do you think about these statements? data analysis all written materials (web discussions and the responses to the statements of conscious provocation) were content analysed. content analysis produces categories or concepts that describe the phenomena, and it is suitable for analysing unstructured, qualitative data, for instance diaries, narratives, and reports in which the researcher’s intention is to describe phenomena in a condensed and more general or applicable form. (weber, 1985.) the analytical procedure employed in the present research can be described as deductive content analysis (tesch, 1990; miles & huberman, 1994) in which data are analysed against an existing model. the model of meaningful learning was used as an analytical device in extracting categories. the teachers’ awareness of pedagogy was analysed by how they expressed the facilitation of student learning. these expressions were viewed against the categories of the meaningful learning model in order to provide structure for the analyses. the web-based discussions touched upon the issue of web-based teaching more broadly, but also included elements from the meaningful learning model. the provocative statements were based on the model of meaningful learning, and thus the themes brought up in these statements were the same as in the model. responding to the provocative statements, teachers had the opportunity to express how they thought that web-based environments could facilitate learning. the question tags added at the end of each provocation were intended as encouragement for teachers to explore their personal views. validity to increase face validity, the two researchers analysed the data independently. the categories, i.e. the elements presented in the meaningful learning model, were agreed upon in advance. for those categorisations on which the researchers disagreed, negotiation was pursued until consensus was reached. the researchers were neither associated with the unit arranging the course nor were they involved in planning, teaching or evaluating the course. instead, they cooperated with the course leader, through whom they also informed the participants about the research. the course was arranged as an optional staff development course with no sanctions for not participating. apart from the credits that the participants received after completion of the course, there were seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 7 no direct awards for participating. the teachers who take part in this type of extra staff training are usually highly motivated and interested in developing their teaching. it is also possible that these teachers also displayed an exceptionally positive attitude towards research, which aims at developing university teaching and teaching practice. in addition to the course reported in the present research, the researchers also studied another course with similar objectives during the 2005 spring semester. the findings of that study are reported in löfström and nevgi (2007b). both courses studied by the researchers were arranged by different units at the university, and the researchers were not associated with these units. the authors’ main objective was to gain a broader understanding of the teachers learning to use ict as a means to facilitate a pedagogical instructional approach to teaching. short-term courses on specific toolor environmentrelated topics were also available for research purposes during that period, but these were not studied, as their focus was primarily in the development of technical skills and not so much on developing pedagogical awareness. the course had already commenced when the participants were asked for permission to use their discussions for research purposes. it is therefore possible that after this point, the participants may have become more selfconscious and aware of their writing. it is also possible that the teachers, if perceiving the provocative statements as describing the ideal situation, may have responded particularly favourably in order to please the researchers. this phenomenon of social desirability is well documented in the literature (morgeson & campion, 1997). using question tags in connection to the provocative statements, the teachers were invited to reflect upon the meaningful learning elements rather than to merely accept them as they were. in this way, the researchers hoped to get the teachers’ individual views about the model itself. in the present study, the provocative statements were presented as an optional task for the teachers by providing them with an opportunity to reflect more deeply on certain aspects of their teaching and their students’ learning in web-based environments. finally, considering the nature of the research and the small number of respondent results, this study is to be interpreted as describing the situation in a particular university in a particular type of context (i.e. that of voluntary staff training) not able to be generalised across samples and contexts. however, this study shows that the teachers’ experiences about pedagogy and student learning can be analysed and interpreted using the meaningful learning model as a conceptual tool. results: changing perspectives teachers as learners in a web-based course responses to the provocative statements the provocative statements on learning in web-based environments yielded responses in which the respondents were encouraged to argue for or against the presented statements. both perspectives are synthesised in a summary presented below of the responses to each statement. the provocative statement on activity yielded responses related to the prerequisites of facilitating student activity in the learning process and the conditions of activity as a prerequisite for studying in a web-based environment. the prerequisites of facilitating student activity mentioned in the learning process included challenging learning tasks, sufficient time to gather the necessary information, well-functioning learning environments and platforms, and easily accessible knowledge. these items were experienced as facilitating student activity. student activity was regarded as being vital in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 8 web-based environments, but studying in a web-based environment was not in itself regarded as a prerequisite for learner activity. in a face-to-face classroom situation individual students may get away with being passive, but according to the teachers, this behaviour was not considered to be an option in the webbased environments. moreover, the teachers acknowledged that while a student may appear to be passive, in fact he or she may be engaged in substantial thinking processes. in the web-based environment, this thinking activity becomes documented in the form of written accounts, and thus becomes apparent to the teacher. the teachers guessed that the main reason for students dropping out of the web-based courses was the teachers’ lack of means to truly support active participation. web-based environments were considered to have the properties necessary to support the learners’ intentionality and goal setting. the teachers distinguished between different types of goals, i.e. those set by the teacher and based on the curriculum, and the students’ own learning objectives. studying in a web-based environment was regarded as being strenuous enough, and without personal goals, the teachers thought that the students would not have the perseverance to complete the course. the teachers implied that dropping out is easier when the students remain anonymous in the learning environment. the role of the teacher in helping the students to set their personal learning objectives was regarded as being crucial in order to facilitate student self-regulation. however, web-based learning per se was not regarded as guaranteeing that the students would display intentionality in their studying. the teachers related reflectivity to the properties of web-based environments that support an increasing awareness of thinking and learning processes. the teachers emphasised that learning is by nature a process. the teachers appreciated that they were able to trace the learning process in the web-based environment, as this may provide students with an opportunity to return to previous phases, identify development and learning, and pinpoint the junctures where their thinking changed. the level of the students’ awareness of meta-cognitive processes also depends on the quality of the guidance and tutoring in that reflective practice, and the degree to which the guidance is individualised. the teachers felt that substantial encouragement is usually needed and that study skills also play an important role. the teachers experienced that knowledge construction can be promoted in web-based learning environments by providing the students sufficient time to think and to formulate their thoughts in writing. they acknowledged the role of the group as a support to the individual learner, but the teachers felt that the relevance of the groups’ contribution, however, was not always unambiguously assessable. identifying the free riders was felt to be more difficult in web-based environments. yet these environments may potentially activate students to collaborate, since students often have the need to receive feedback on their work. due to the absence or limited availability of face-toface contact, the net discussions and chats were seen as serving the students’ need for feedback about their learning. the teachers felt that the lack of social cues may even have further strengthened the student’s need for response from their peers, but the difficulty of creating a shared social consciousness in the web-based environment was regarded as being a possible threat to enduring discussions and sharing. the role of web-based learning environments in providing context and facilitating transfer was not well perceived by the teachers. instead, they found actual hands-on practice to be much more useful for contextualising the subject matter. either the teachers were not familiar with the use of simulations, or the games were not available in their specific content area. furthermore, the teachers did not mention assignments or trigger materials related to problem-based learning as a means of increasing contextualisation seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 9 and the transfer of knowledge, although these are a relatively easy means of increasing contextuality when simulations and other advanced multimedia applications are not available. the teachers’ web discussions two ways of reflecting on the criteria of successful web-based teaching and learning emerged in the web discussions: teachers expressed their views about successful web-based teaching based either on their own experiences of studying and learning in a web-based environment or on their own teaching experience. both these types of expressions were mixed in the data, and are presented through the excerpts from the teachers’ written accounts presented below. implicitly, the teachers provided cues about how their pedagogical knowledge had developed as a result of a personal and authentic learning experience. the central themes for successful web-based teaching and learning were related to course design, collaboration in groups and pairs, peer feedback, knowledge building, student activity and intentionality, and challenges such as the lack of social cues. on the basis of their own learning experiences, the teachers emphasised a number of issues related to course design, including the course structure, teaching and learning methods and their materials as the centre of focus. the teachers were aware that students should plan their studies in relation to course objectives and instructions, and the objectives should form the basis for motivating students. one female teacher in the social sciences expressed how she gained a deeper understanding of the importance of course design: during this course, i have realised that it is important to be aware of the possibilities offered by the environment for course design, yet without jumping in at the deep end. by this i mean that it is not wise to try to implement everything there is available in every single course. when designing a course, the focus should be much more on how the course is structured and what kind of methods and materials support the learning of the content. course design should not, however, be only the teacher’s duty. the teachers pointed out that students should have opportunities to take responsibility for course planning in order to enhance student activity, motivation and commitment. the teachers’ own learning experiences also brought out the importance of the teacher’s ability to identify with the student role in order to assess the workload properly. particularly in web-based environments and in teaching new courses, the teachers found it difficult to evaluate the workload of students, and they were careful with their choices of assignments and discussion tasks. in addition, the necessity for explicit objectives and clear, accessible instructions were emphasised. one group experienced confusion and a teacher in that group described the experience as follows: there was a lack of clarity in the instructions about how to bring the results of the pair work to the discussion platform. the purpose became clear only at that stage when we were supposed to evaluate each others’ work. i realised how insufficient our reporting had been. (female teacher, social sciences) however, the same teacher later noted: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 10 i had not read the instructions well enough and because of that i had not prepared myself properly for the assignment. (female teacher, social sciences) the teachers agreed that the group composition, including group division and group size, needs to be considered in advance. this would also help the students orientate towards their group discussion. the teachers strongly agreed that group sizes should remain relatively small if group work is used as a method. this was because initiating discussion was felt to be easier in small groups. the larger groups rarely had enough time to deal with shared issues. in addition, for a course to be successful, the students’ personal commitments and schedules must be taken into consideration. towards this end, the teachers thought that well-structured yet flexible course schedules would help students with their time management. in addition, the teachers preferred to schedule courses so that all participants have the opportunity to read each others’ work. yet the teachers expressed concern for the students’ overall workload. for example, one teacher was willing to make substantial adjustments in her courses: for my future courses, it was useful to acknowledge the scheduling problem. i am going to stretch the schedule and give students at least one week to complete each assignment so that they could genuinely have the option of doing the homework when it is convenient for them. this is particularly important for students who work or have other demanding courses simultaneously. (female teacher, veterinary sciences) the teachers reflected on their changing role in web-based environments. their emphasis appeared to be shifting from lecturing content to the initiation of the course, the provision of focus, and the facilitation and guidance through the learning process. the teachers were also keen on developing interactive participation, and much of it was felt to depend upon the teacher’s initial actions and introduction of the course, not the features of the web-based environment per se. the teachers distinguished between spontaneous and planned interaction, and emphasised the importance of creating positive dependence among the participants in web-based courses. peer feedback and pair work were found to be useful methods for activating students and creating positive dependence. two teachers described the role of a facilitator in different ways. one stated the following: i think that the teacher should stay in the background when the discussion is progressing well. if important content areas get less attention, or the discussion gets sidetracked, the teacher needs to get involved. (female teacher, veterinary sciences) yet another teacher expressed these concerns: it is difficult to determine whether web-discussions should be voluntary or compulsory. it would be ideal if the discussion is experienced to be personally useful and that participation in it would be of value in itself. but how can positive dependence be encouraged? (male teacher, natural sciences) the teachers preferred to use authentic material in learning assignments rather than invented examples and cases. the use of authentic assignments directs the learning process and may facilitate a student’s ability to apply what has been learned later in other contexts. the following quote by a female teacher in the social sciences illustrates her realisation about how important it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 11 is that the assignment be authentic to motivate her and to be able to contextualise the topic: in our course, those who planned a real web-based course were prepared to use more time for the assignment in which we were to plan the process. for me, planning an artificial course that would not be executed did not motivate me very much. an atmosphere that allows incompleteness and different points of view and likewise supports an inquiring dialogue is advantageous for learning. the teachers experienced how learning through becoming acquainted with other’s work could provide refreshing perspectives and enhance one’s own work. for example, a female teacher in the social sciences observed, “realising the variety of points of view or how things can be seen differently is in itself worthwhile learning”. another female teacher in pharmacy stated, “seeing other course participants’ plans gave me ideas about how to design and teach courses myself.” the teachers also pointed out problems that potentially occur in learning situations where collaboration is required. these problems were free riding, the incompatibility of the group’s working methods, and a lack of understanding for what supporting one another’s learning means. one teacher described a situation in which the group found itself struggling after a promising start: after the face-to-face meeting, the spark went out and our group was unable to get the work done. maybe we did not make a clear enough agreement about working methods at the beginning, but we left it open to be decided upon during the web-discussions. consequently, there was little web-discussion. (female teacher, social sciences) another problem pointed out by the teachers was the students’ work load. simultaneous web-based courses all requiring discussions may, instead of increasing motivation, work the opposite way. a rapidly progressing discussion may be difficult to keep up with and students may ultimately drop out. some teachers experienced the work load themselves and began to reflect upon what the depth and duration of an optimal web-discussion might be. for example, a female teacher of pharmacy commented as follows: even for a first-timer, it was easy to participate in the discussion, although i sometimes felt almost despair over all the numerous messages. i wonder whether web-discussions would inspire those students who are participating simultaneously in several discussions. another female teacher of pharmacy expressed her concerns over her own participation: i would have liked to participate more in the discussion but i was not active enough. i only had time to read the new messages, nothing else. when i later had time to concentrate on the discussion it was too late. the discussion had already moved on. the teachers also described the problems that prevented knowledge from being related to one’s own context. some of the respondents found that if assignments and instructions provided by the teacher were too structured, the learner would be prevented from making content personally relevant. one teacher, however, explained that having the assignment provided by the teacher would have helped him complete the course work. one positive point seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 12 made was that the fast-paced discussions made it difficult to crystallise one’s own ideas. communicating in writing was also felt to be a possible source of misunderstanding, and the lack of social cues was characterised as a defining feature of web-based interaction. owing to this lack of social cues, the teachers estimated that planning a web-based course and the related communicative activities required more attention than planning group tasks for face-to-face teaching. one female teacher in the humanities offered the following explanation: it (interaction in a web-based environment) leaves one with a somewhat more disconnected feeling than face-to-face oral communication. it is not easy to internalise all the knowledge when everything is in written form and everything depends on whether i am able to and feel like reading the messages and instructions and learning from them. one male teacher in the natural sciences had this observation: according to my own experiences, the best discussions were those that were a bit assertive and which involved a personal aspect. there is, however, a place for caution here. one must be careful not to take the discussion to a level that is personal in an intimidating sense. written communication may create wrong images and messages that are much harder to rectify afterwards. the teachers’ views about what makes web-based teaching and learning successful are summarised in table 1 along with exemplary samples from the teachers’ web discussions. in addition, these prerequisites for successful webbased teaching and learning are related to the components of the meaningful learning model in the table. where challenges were emphasised, they have been related to the component of the model which the particular aspect challenges. prerequisite meaningful learning element course design utilisation of the possibilities of the environment responsibility for course design shared with students the teachers’ ability to emphasise with the role of the student and their ability to assess work load prior knowledge explicit objectives and clear instructions teachers’ pedagogical and technical proficiencies flexibility challenges: numerous, simultaneous web, discussions, overload constructivity activity, intentionality teacher reflection constructivity intentionality teacher reflection * intentionality and activity activity, collaboration seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 13 motivation and relevance authenticity of assignments utilisation of video clips and problem-based learning type activities challenges: assignments that do not help students to relate content to their own, relevant context contextuality transfer contextuality collaborative learning as a method and the application of constructivist principles group work utilised to enhance learning facilitation of the exchange of ideas through small groups (large groups require more time for processing shared issues) constructive peer feedback learning advanced through pair work interaction the possibility of learning from others’ work different viewpoints taken into consideration allowances for incompleteness and inquiring dialog challenges: the incompatibility of a group’s working methods a lack of understanding the meaning of supporting others a lack of cues in the written text, making interpretation difficult and increasing possibilities of misunderstandings the difficulty of expressing oneself in writing rapidity or a lack of spontaneous discussion collaboration interactivity and collaboration interactivity interactivity, collaboration collaboration interactivity, critical thinking interactivity, reflectivity collaboration collaboration interactivity interactivity interactivity, collaboration learner activity and intentionality independence and creativity as a requirement for understanding context and relevance challenges: free riders activity, critical thinking activity, intentionality, interaction, collaboration table 1: prerequisites for successful web-based teaching and learning as expressed by teachers seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 14 discussion the essence of good teaching lies in the teacher’s ability to assume the role of a learner focussing on the learner experience (marton & booth 1997; ramsden 1992). the responses to the statements of conscious provocation indicated that teachers experienced students’ activity, intentionality, and collaboration to be the main benefits of web-based learning environments. issues such as contextualisation and the transfer of knowledge were, however, not elaborated on. this may have been because the teachers use examples in their teaching that they themselves easily can connect to a real life or practical context, but they fail to actually pinpoint these connections for the students (see also nevgi & löfström, 2005; löfström & nevgi, 2007a). further, the transferability of knowledge is difficult to evaluate as it truly comes to light only after the course or learning event is over, perhaps years later. more visible features in the learning process, and thus much more readily assessable, are activity and collaboration. adopting the learner role appears to be a powerful tool in understanding the prerequisites for what issues a teacher must address in his or her own teaching. the teachers’ experiences were particularly related to realisations about course design, workload, the management of possible obstacles to collaboration, and students’ lack of intentionality and activity. adopting a student role increased the teachers’ awareness of learning in a web-based environment. interestingly enough, the teachers came to behave much like their students. for instance, some accused themselves of being guilty of free riding, while some expressed annoyance with free riders, a heavy work load, and strict time limits. these experiences may help the teachers to reflect upon their own learning experience and seek a deeper understanding for the studying and learning of their students. the teachers had the opportunity to re-experience being students. in fact, there is evidence of an increasing conceptual change student-focused approach (prosser & trigwell, 1999; also ramsden, 2000) among the teachers in the course. the emphasis appeared to be shifting from lecturing content to the initiation of the course, the provision of focus, and to facilitation and guidance through the learning process. in a conceptual change studentfocused approach, the focus of attention changes from content to the identification of ways to actively involve the students and engage them in exploring the discipline from a broader perspective (see also entwistle & walker, 2000). as noted, the teachers displayed increased understanding about course design, collaboration, and the importance of the learner’s intentionality and activity. teachers do need support, and the experience is that the support provided has corresponded well to the teachers’ training needs (löfström & nevgi, 2007a). this means that both technical and pedagogical support is needed. with an increased understanding of how these new media are adopted and taken into use in daily teaching, it is possible to develop training programmes that address the teachers’ learning needs, and take into account their perceptions of learning to use the media. the present study showed that the teachers who participated in the course were keen to develop their teaching, but they had reservations about adopting the use of ict. instead, they appeared to carefully consider the implications of ict for learning. this was particularly evident in the responses to the provocative statements. the technique of conscious provocation gave rise to the idea of exploring the possibilities of using this technique more broadly in training courses for university teachers. in addition, entwistle and walker (2000) suggest the use of alternative perspectives in order to facilitate reflection in staff development in higher education. more research is needed on how these teachers’ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 15 reflections have an impact on their teaching, and how this change is then experienced by the students. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank med sanna-marja heinimo and ba virve pekkarinen for their valuable contributions in the study, and ma kathleen moore for ensuring the correct use of the english language in our article. references ausubel, d. p. 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(2004). hybrid structures: faculty use and perception of web-based courseware as a supplement to face-to-face instruction. the internet and higher education, 7, 281-297. yazon, j. m. o., mayer-smith, j. a., & redfield, r. j. (2002). does the medium change the message? the impact of a web-based genetics course on university students' perspectives on learning and teaching. computers & education, 38(1-3), 267285. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 18 notes on authors including institutional information and correspondence details erika löfström is associate professor (educational psychology) at tallinn university, and post-doc researcher at the centre for research and development of higher education at the university of helsinki. she holds a ph.d. in adult education from the university of helsinki. her research interests include teaching and learning in higher education, web-based instruction and learning, and cognitive styles. anne nevgi is senior researcher at the centre for research and development of higher education at the university of helsinki. she is docent of education and holds a ph.d. in adult education from the same university. she is specialised in university teachers’ pedagogical training and in research on web-based instruction and learning in higher education. address for correspondence: erika löfström, centre for research and development of higher education, department of education, university of helsinki. p.o. box 9, fin-00014 university of helsinki. tel: +358 9 19120623; fax: +358 9 19120561; email: erika.lofstrom(at)helsinki.fi university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a well-being theory issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4669 ©2022 (chan ko wai, satu uusiautti). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a well-being theory chan ko wai faculty of education, university of lapland, finland e-mail: kchan@ulapland.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3189-5447 satu uusiautti faculty of education, university of lapland, finland e-mail: satu.uusiautti@ulapland.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2409-6460 abstract autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) is an atypical and multisensory phenomenon in which specific audio-visual stimuli elicit a pleasurable, head-oriented tingling sensation and feelings of relaxation. the purpose of this research was to analyze the asmr experiences of university students in the light of well-being theory. two-phased, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with three finnish university students who identified themselves as asmr experiencers. data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. coding was guided by the domains of well-being in the perma model: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. the objective was to explore the effect of students’ asmr experiences on their well-being. the findings show that asmr videos enhanced the well-being of the participants through a mindfulness-like experience. the potential of asmr videos to promote psychosocial wellbeing is intriguing, and this research provides a new understanding about asmr experiences and their meaning. keywords: asmr, interpretative phenomenological analysis (ipa), mindfulness, perma, psychosocial wellbeing https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4669 mailto:kchan@ulapland.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3189-5447 mailto:satu.uusiautti@ulapland.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2409-6460 university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 introduction university studies are demanding. for example, in finland, a third of all students experience study-related stress and worries (kunttu et al., 2017). at the same time, new ways of dealing with stress and of enhancing well-being are being found and tested, including autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr), which has been found to bring temporary relief to those suffering from depression (barratt & davis, 2015; fredborg et al., 2018). thus, this research uses theoretical analysis to focus on university students’ use of asmr experiences for well-being. asmr is a multi-sensory phenomenon typically characterized by dynamic tingling sensation spreading across the scalp, moving downwards along the line of the spinal cord, and then propagating to the arms and legs (cash et al., 2018). in this context, autonomous refers to the personal ability to facilitate or produce the sensation at will. sensory is defined as the sense organs transmitting nerve impulses to the brain or senses themselves in response to an external trigger. meridian refers to the highest point or apex, symbolized a sense of euphoria —in eastern tradition, the meridian is used to illustrate the pathways taken by the qi, or life energy, as it flows through the human body (stefanov et al., 2013). response refers to how an individual reacts to a triggering stimulus or thought (del campo & kehle, 2016). asmr is not only triggered by different types of external stimuli, but also by some internal stimuli, such as focusing attention, recalling the memory of a previous asmr, meditating, or altering one’s state of mind (tihanyi et al., 2018). asmr is rarely elicited by random external stimuli, but rather requires particular types of stimuli that are often specific to the individual. a survey study by barratt and davis (2015) found that whispering, low-pitched repetitive noises (e.g., tapping sounds), close-up attention, and videos depicting slow and socially intimate situations (e.g., hair-brushing) were commonly cited as eliciting tingling sensations during asmr engagement (barratt & davis, 2015; barratt et al., 2017; fredborg et al., 2017). most individuals like to watch asmr before bed, in quiet and relaxed environments, and with binaural headphones (kovacevich & huron, 2019). a remarkable characteristic of asmr is that not everybody experiences it (valtakari et al., 2019), implying that there are innate differences between people who experience asmr and those who do not (mcerlean & osborne-ford, 2020). fredborg et al., (2017) utilized the big five personality inventory and found that asmr experiencers obtained higher scores on neuroticism and openness-to-experience. similarly, the perspective—first or third-person— from which the stimulus is presented may also differentially affect one's asmr experience (fredborg et al., 2017). mcerlean and osborne-ford (2020) considered whether asmr is related to the personality traits of absorption. the findings showed that asmr experiencers scored higher in absorption when compared to age and gender control groups. this suggests that asmr experiencers have a greater inclination for experiential university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 involvement and the ability to fully engage in current experience (jamieson, 2005; tellegen, 1981). moreover, greater absorption has been linked to an elevated openness-toexperience (glisky et al., 1991; weibel et al., 2010), which has been found to be also enhanced among asmr experiencers (fredborg et al., 2017; mcerlean & banissy, 2017). thus, the combination of increased absorption and openness-to-experience may contribute to the individual’s likelihood of experiencing asmr (mcerlean & osborneford, 2020). in order to investigate a phenomenon such as asmr, it is necessary to determine and differentiate the characteristics of asmr experience from other examples of atypical sensory associations such as synesthesia, frisson, and misophonia (smith et al., 2019). synesthesia is defined as the union or blending of the senses in which one stimulus, such as a number or letter, automatically initiates a secondary sensation, such as seeing a color (photism) (smith et al., 2019b). the same cognitive or perceptual stimuli can automatically trigger the same atypical sensory response (e.g., synesthetic photisms or asmr tingles) in both asmr and synesthesia. barratt and davis (2015) found that 5.9 % of asmr experiencers also have synesthetic experiences, and the two phenomena have been found to overlap (fredborg et al., 2017). frisson refers to the chills that happen during an emotional response to music (del campo & kehle, 2016). asmr and frisson both involve an affective constituent, and both experiences are related to substantial individual differences in stimuli (del campo & kehle, 2016; smith et al., 2019). some studies have sought connections between misophonia and asmr; in a large-scale misophonia study, half of the participants reported having asmr experiences (rouw & erfanian, 2018), while a similar study found that asmr experiencers are more likely to have misophonia (mcerlean & banissy, 2018). those with misophonia have automatic and negative emotional reactions to a particular sound, which is the opposite reactions to specific audio stimuli experienced in asmr. additionally, the triggering sounds for both misophonia and asmr originate from human movements and behaviors, suggesting that asmr and misophonia may be two ends of the same spectrum of synesthesia-like emotional responses (barratt & davis, 2015). in a study by del campo and kehle (2016) on the relationship between asmr and aesthetic chills, the authors concluded that the two phenomena share several similarities, as mentioned above, suggesting that mindfulness is an essential component in both and that both may promote facets of happiness or subjective well-being. theoretical framework the purpose of this research was to analyze asmr experiences from a theoretical perspective of well-being. well-being can be defined in numerous ways and this study takes a positive psychological approach. university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 there are two research traditions within the psychological literature on this subject: the hedonic and eudaemonic perspectives (huta & waterman, 2014). hedonic refers to someone’s perceived experience of pleasure or happiness (umucu et al., 2019) and conceptualizes wellbeing in terms of positive affect combined with high life satisfaction levels (diener et al., 1999). the eudaemonic research tradition, or psychological wellbeing, refers to the belief that well-being comes from the fulfillment of one’s true nature (umucu et al., 2019) and conceptualizes well-being in connection with personal growth, the fulfillment of intrinsic needs, and meaningful life experiences (huta & waterman, 2014). traditionally, media effects research has been dominated by a hedonic perspective on well-being and has treated media as a root of mood enhancement (zillmann, 1988); however, some recent research has focused on media use and its effects on eudaemonic well-being (oliver & bartsch, 2011). in the current study, the wellbeing theory or perma (positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment) model (seligman, 2012) is used to explore how short-term asmr experiences contribute to psychosocial well-being. seligman’s wellbeing theory integrates the hedonic and eudaemonic views of well-being, defining optimal wellbeing as occurring when these two components exist within an individual at the same time (seligman, 2012; umucu et al., 2019). the use of this theory allows for the measurement of each element using both objective and subjective approaches (forgeard et al., 2011). in seligman's original authentic happiness theory (2002), he posited that happiness could be defined in terms of three domains: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning (tansey et al., 2018). his revised theory is called the perma model and consists of five core elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (tansey et al., 2018). he concluded that the well-being theory enhances flourishing by encouraging the five pathways or core elements (hidayat et al., 2018). the elements of perma and asmr-related research are presented in the next section. positive emotions positive emotions are the feelings of happiness, joy, cheer, and other descriptors of good feelings (jones et al., 2014) and could include feelings of deep pleasure (hidayat et al., 2018). positive emotions can enhance attention, help generate creative and flexible ideas, and broaden the self-concept to include others more readily (kok et al., 2008). they have also been associated with greater self-regulation (tice et al., 2007), task persistence, and goal adoption (fishbach & labroo., 2007). in other words, college students’ feelings of strong positive emotions are likely to enhance their absorption in learning, resulting in better academic achievement (hidayat et al., 2018). rising public acknowledgment of asmr media suggests that people are upsurge using university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 asmr videos as therapeutic tools for a variety of issues, including for the treatment of sleep and mood disorders (poerio et al., 2018). asmr also provide temporary relief to individuals with depression, stress, and chronic pain, as found in a study by barratt and davis (2015) in which 50% of participants said their mood improved even in sessions where no tingling sensation was produced, and 30% said that achieving the sensation was vital to mood improvement (barratt & davis, 2015). in the same study, 69% of those who scored moderate to severe on the beck depression inventory claimed that using asmr relieved their depressive symptoms and were aware of the more elevating effects of using asmr than those without depression (barratt & davis, 2015). in 2018, a large-scale online experiment was conducted where participants viewed a set of three videos —two asmr and one control— and then reported if they had experienced tingles and their affective response (poerio et al., 2018). after watching both asmr videos, asmr-experiencing participants felt significantly more excited, calmer, and less stressed compared to non-asmr-experiencing participants (poerio et al., 2018), and results that were consistent with those in barratt and davis (2015). thus, it can be inferred that watching an asmr video with inaudible or unintelligible whispering forces the listener to focus and concentrate on the sound and voice itself, reducing extraneous impressions from the surroundings and promoting positive emotions (klausen, 2019). engagement engagement refers to the connection one feels to the activity one is doing or the feelings of being absorbed in and focusing on an activity (seligman, 2012). a high level of engagement in an activity is also referred to as ‘flow’ (csikszentmihalyi, 1990), or a feeling of being ‘in the zone’ (tansey et al., 2018). fully mindful absorption entails being lost in the moment, and a subjective flow state is fully realized in retrospect activities (nakamura & csikszentmihalyi, 2014). mindfulness is often connected with engagement and is defined as intentionally focusing one’s awareness on the present-moment experience in an accepting way (baer & krietemeyer, 2006). in one study, body awareness was defined by the participants as experiencing oneself through being aware of the body from within and empowering one’s identity (gyllensten et al., 2010). barratt and davis (2015) refer to asmr as a ‘flow-like’ phenomenon obtained by viewing a state of intense focus performed by others followed by a diminished awareness of the passage of time. anecdotal reports of asmr describe a state of focus, or of a more substantial ‘presence’ and relaxation, that is similar to the non-active aspects of flow (barratt & davis, 2015). this passive feature is notably resonant in asmr experiences, and both states —asmr and flow— encompassing the sensation of deep relaxation and wellbeing, although the passive feature of flow is task-directed, while asmr seems to involve university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 entire passivity from the experiencer (barratt et al., 2017). jackson and marsh (1996) utilized a modified version of the flow state scale that taps into the passive aspects of flow. the findings showed that participants with greater susceptibility to flow reported a higher number of asmr triggers, highlighting a link between the two phenomena. this suggests that flow may be necessary to achieve sensations associated with asmr (barratt & davis, 2015). intriguingly, some of the most popular asmr triggers, such as the hand movements of specialists, in immensely focused states (e.g., carrying out medical exams) or engaged in repetitive tasks (e.g., folding towels), are typical examples of being in a state of flow (mcerlean & banissy, 2017). thus, asmr is induced by obtaining a flow-like state that is facilitated by observing others in a similar state; this transference of a state from performers to audience has been examined in studies on the role of mirror neurons (barratt & davis, 2015). additionally, participants prefer content that is happy, inviting, relaxed, and lacks danger, which suggests that popular asmr videos centering on the manipulation of objects may induce an effortless, flow-like feel to content that is conducive to asmr induction (barratt et al., 2017). relationship a positive relationship is understood as the feeling of being cared about by others, being socially integrated, and supported and involves a sense of connectedness, love, and shared emotions (tansey et al., 2018). previous research has found that having good relationships with friends is positively related to self-esteem, and that an increase in the perception of friendship quality is associated with the elevation of well-being (bagwell et al., 2005). furthermore, college students who socialize more frequently and have more romantic and social relationships have a tendency to be happier than students without these relationships (diener & seligman, 2002). poerio et al. (2018) investigated whether asmr videos produced feelings of connectedness. the results revealed that spoken word asmr videos made asmr participants feel more socially connected than non-asmr participants, a result that did not occur when watching asmr videos with sound but no spoken word (poerio et al., 2018). this suggests that increased connectedness may be an additional benefit of asmr because of the social and interpersonal context of the asmr trigger. one possible explanation is that asmr simulates a form of social grooming, such as being calmed and comforted by another through the tactile-like tingling sensations induced by asmr triggers. this grooming simulation enhances well-being and interpersonal bonding through diminutions in heart rate and the circulation of endorphins (poerio et al., 2018). asmr videos create a form of embodied and technologically mediated presence, tactile sensations, and distant intimacy or closeness through sonically binaural qualities as well as through narratives supported by sound in the form of asmr role-play videos, vibrations, and images. thus, asmr can be characterized as a form of ‘social audio-grooming,’ as university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 asmr videos provide first-person-like social attention and care in the form of technologically mediated grooming (klausen, 2019). meaning and sense of purpose meaning is a feeling of doing something meaningful and connected to something bigger. people need meaning in life to give them a sense of fulfillment and makes life worthwhile. a higher perception of meaning has been reported to have a positive association with life satisfaction and academic achievement in students (hidayat et al., 2018). a student’s sense of purpose is usually closely related to their sense of meaning in life and frequently involves a pro-social or altruistic intent such as the commitment to helping others or improving the world (noble & mcgrath, 2015). accomplishment and sense of achievement accomplishment refers to an individual’s perception of making progress toward goals and having a sense of achievement in one’s life (seligman, 2012). accomplishment is described by seligman (2012) as the desire to achieve something (e.g., having a persevering attitude) the achievements themselves (tansey et al., 2018). interestingly, accomplishment has a strong association with meaning because someone who accomplishes something is likely to derive intense feelings of meaning from the experience (hidayat et al., 2018). method the purpose of this study was to determine how university students’ experiences of asmr illustrate the elements of well-being. the following research question was set: how do the elements of perma appear in university students’ asmr experiences? in asmr, experiencers perceive both emotional and technologically mediated experiences. the current study used the phenomenological approach to explore and find the meaning of both types of asmr experiences (langdridge, 2007). of the different phenomenological approaches, interpretative phenomenological analysis (ipa) was chosen for this exploration of asmr experience in relation to psychosocial wellbeing. the data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted over four months (from december 2019 to march 2020) with university students from the university of lapland. a total of three participants were interviewed, aged 26 and 27; two were studying for a master’s degree, and one was pursuing a bachelor’s degree. all of them were finnish (two males and one female). the identity of each interviewee has been kept anonymous and hereafter labeled as a, b, and c. informed consent was required before completion of a demographic questionnaire. the design of the informed consent followed the ethical principles of research with human participants provided by the finnish national broad on research integrity as committed to university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 by the university of lapland. as such, informed consent for the current study included ensuring that the participants were informed of the nature of the research, the potential benefits, and the risks of their participation. the participants were informed that they had the right to confidentiality and to withdraw from the study at any time (kohonen et al, 2019). the data collection method involved a qualitative phenomenological inquiry that consisted of two phases. in the first phase, the participants answered ten semi-structured in-depth questions by email. the email interview was followed by a supplementary interview phase done using skype. in the first phase, the three students received the interview questions through email, and they were sent reminders one week before the deadline in case of no reply. the supplementary interviews were conducted based on listed points requiring clarification based on the email interview data. the follow-up questions sought clarifications, explanations, or elaborations of the university students’ asmr experiences. an email interview was chosen for the first phase because it allowed the participants time to reflect on their answers to the questions without pressure (beck, 2005). the email interviews began with a few structured questions regarding demographics, then asked semi-structured questions about interviewees’ feelings toward their asmr experiences concerning day-to-day activities and behavior. the interview questions are shown in figure 1, such as “what and how do you feel contented, joyful, and positive?” and “have you been feeling loved? how?”. the open-ended interview questions allowed participants to develop their narrative by exploring their experiences of asmr as they focused on the details of asmr experience and the meaning in relation to well-being and involved indepth discussion of the details of the participant’s experience of psychosocial well-being after asmr exposures. the data analysis followed standard ipa methods (smith et al., 2009) involving several readings and re-readings of the initial transcript to identify significant quotes and areas of interest for asmr-related responses and the five perma domains. then, concise phrases representing units of meaning were coded; the process was repeated for each transcript to identify emergent themes. subsequently, conceptual connections were made between subthemes, and these were condensed into clusters. the transcripts were individually analyzed before the identified themes were considered together to form a group analysis, and the codes were organized into interconnected hierarchies (i.e., themes, subthemes, and categories). figure 1 shows how the subthemes emerged from the narratives of the corresponding interview questions and gave rise to four topic areas: emotional reaction, the immersion of asmr experience, description of relationships experience, and personal meaning of the experience. the subthemes were then applied to the similar themes of the perma model. the coding scheme was based on the five dimensions of the perma model. all transcripts were coded qualitatively into categories, so that the coder first read university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 each transcript and marked details, then observations and notes were written, and the final data was entered into a spreadsheet. the coding stage was guided by the five domains of wellbeing that form the perma framework with the exact words of the interviewees being compared to the dimensions associated with perma. the most frequent and significant codes were identified and categorized into themes (mirehie & gibson, 2020). figure1 flow process of the emergent subthemes and subsequent application to the themes of the perma model, identified through ipa. adapted and modified from yerbury and boyd (2019) results positive emotional experiences the first subtheme related to the perma framework is positive emotions. in the data of this research, asmr was described using a range of emotions that included relaxation, calmness, excitement, and joy. feelings of relaxation and calmness when engaging with asmr were the most common. for example, participant b used asmr to seek relaxed and calm feelings and to relieve a worried mind. participant b: “i noticed that specific videos relaxed my mind after a busy day… it certainly calms me down and makes me more balanced after running around or university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 worrying too much the whole day.” for participant c, asmr videos helped him relax and made him feel calm. this was beneficial to him because he felt it reduced stress and promoted better sleep. he also felt his mind became more focused, as busy thoughts did not occupy him during asmr experiences. in addition, he described frequent feelings of joy and excitement in response to asmr videos. participant c: “i get more ‘headspace’ in my brain with these via calming, soothing, and relaxing sensations. asmr experiences … joy and positiveness … also feel super-excited.” as evident in the interviewees’ statements, asmr videos generate a range of positive emotions that comprise one facet of wellbeing in the perma framework (seligman, 2012). some of these emotions were described as joy or excitement, which are associated with pleasure. other emotions were implied from the participant’s descriptions about the relaxation and calmness of expanding ‘headspace’ via the repetitive sound in asmr videos. the participants’ descriptions of their experiences showed that asmr videos release body and mind tension through relaxation, leading to a psychophysiological state of decreased arousal that opposes that of the stress response and is experienced as a calming state and improved quality of sleep. engagement experiences in the current study, engagement manifested as mindfulness and full immersion (absorption and flow) in the asmr videos and activities. the participants described feeling as if time was passing quickly and noted that time during asmr engagement is different from real-world time and can lead to time loss or a lack of awareness of time passing. they described the experience as feeling like a connection of the mind, body, and sound. participant a focused their attention on the body, breath and sensations, as well as an awareness of what arises in each moment. the natural repetitive walking sounds in asmr videos decreased his physiological arousal (heartbeat rate), turned his awareness to the present-moment, and stopped his mind from wandering. participant c reported that asmr triggered a tingling sensation and the ‘headspace’ needed to stop repetitive and spiraling rumination. participant a: “asmr video help me to focus on breathing deeper and feel a presence… feel how heart rate drops … forget all the stress and worries.” participant c: “asmr gives me more headspace… tingling sensation helps me have an awareness of my body and the surroundings … mindfulness meditation.” moreover, experiencing asmr made participant c more aware of the present-moment. he university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 even noticed that the experience enhanced his love for his girlfriend. participant c: “when i watch an asmr video with my girlfriend next to me, i’m watching the video and get the body feels more present.” the participants also expressed feeling that asmr videos helped them to engage in their studies. participant a reported that his asmr experiences allowed him to reach deep “immersive” and “flow” states of consciousness and provided him with relaxation as well as satisfying, meaningful experiences of his schoolwork. likewise, participant b listened to non-talking sound asmr videos when in a noisy working environment and found she became absorbed in the task, experienced time loss, and worked longer than intended. participant a: “when i feel excited and interested in things … my schoolwork … focused on what i do … flow mode… listening to asmr videos might help me to relax and concentrate better to do my schoolwork.” participant b: “i listened to long, triggering sound videos while working … helped me to concentrate on my work better… no-talk asmr videos that had helped me to lose track of time… putting me in flow … do some longer writing work or thinking work.” participant c felt that time went by quickly. he mentioned that asmr engagement time is different from real-world time and can lead to not noticing real-world time and experiencing time loss. he identified a connection of mind, body, and sound. participant c: “it feels as if my body and mind… become one… sometimes happens during asmr videos.” the above in-depth immersion reflected a state of flow that seligman (2012) regarded as one domain of wellbeing in the perma framework. indeed, in describing flow, csikszentmihalyi (1990) posits that this state of mind/body, which necessitates an optimal balance between challenge and skill, results in happiness (mirehie & gibson, 2020). relationships and connectedness experiences the third sub-theme associated with perma is relationships that emerged from participants mentioning the importance of asmr in shaping their digital-intimacy experiences. numerous statements described the presence of others in the interaction of asmr videos as generating a sense of self-in-relationship to others, prosocial behavior, and digital intimacy relationships. participant b noticed that she was more sensitive to the love of others after watching asmr affirmation and kindness videos. the soft and kind words of asmr videos changed her prior self-negative thoughts, enhanced her self-compassion, and increased her feelings university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 of acceptance, resulting in an awareness that everyone has challenging life experiences and makes mistakes (common humanity) and actions of kindness and understanding for herself (self-kindness). participant b: “i often feel loved by my friends and family…the affirmations and kind words make me think positive and gentle thoughts about myself, and they help me not be so hard on myself.” when it came to prosocial behaviors, participant b noted that the non-speaking and affirmation asmr videos increased her acceptance and tolerance of difference in her peers. in stressful situations, such as business meetings and group work, she could see more clearly, understand what was happening and accept others more quickly, which seemed to help her move forward with the task. thus, watching asmr videos decreased her reactivity and increased her response to cognitive flexibility in group working environments. participant b: “listening to asmr videos calmed me down and made me feel less irritated … at work in the group … so i have listened to asmr videos to calm myself down before meetings.” participant c described prosocial changes in his behaviors as an increased awareness of others’ feelings and experiences. asmr videos with slow painting movements enhanced his ability to sense others’ inner experiences and to be more present to their feelings. furthermore, the specific discussion contents of asmr videos enhanced participant c’s ability to have present-focused awareness, understand others’ perspectives and identify how to help them. these types of asmr videos also increased his acceptance of help from others for his university studies. participant c: “when i watched the asmr video with my girlfriend next to me … watching ross painter’s asmr video with some friends at the same time… sharing the sensation of asmr made it more powerful.” participant c: “some of the ideas, discussions, and subjects of the asmr videos enhance the ideas for helping others … get help from my friends when i need some help … of thoughts or feelings.” these types of asmr videos also induced the participants’ awareness of how to connect with others and the world. the digital intimacy enhanced through the asmr videos affected real life, as virtual stimulating triggers with simple and slow movements created new forms of closeness. experiences related to meaning the fourth sub-theme associated with perma is meaning, and this sub-theme was present university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 in the experiences of all the interviewees, though with some variations in how explicitly they were described. participant c had a more in-depth understanding and stronger emotional attachment, engagement, and relationship to asmr videos and to his environment and activities, all of which created meaning for him. seligman (2012) suggests that a central part of the meaning domain is a feeling that you are doing something meaningful and are part of something bigger (mirehie & gibson, 2020). participant c saw asmr videos as a platform that allowed him to connect with others and the world in a meaningful way, giving him a sense of being a part of something bigger than himself. meaning was essential not just to him, friends, and family, but rather to a much larger group, such as the whole human race. also, he expressed that the slow and repetitive hand movements in the videos triggered him to connect with the asmr community. participant c: “maybe these “unintentional asmr” … his delicate hand movements, and a sense of something larger happening … help me to connect to the world … a platform for a meaningful life.” participant c actively engaged in asmr videos to extend his curiosity and exploration of a meaningful life. he also described the repetitive and mundane movements as the primary trigger of this effect. participant c: “as a child, i was very shy and didn’t meet new people very much…so i try to know people’s true meanings in life … in offices, the sound of paper, typing, and intense focus gives me shivers and good feelings… as with the asmr videos.” as noted above, this theme was more prominent in the experiences of the high-level asmr participant c. for him, asmr videos and experiences were a central part of life, and the associated activities provided him with meaning, which is consistent with seligman’s (2012) conception of the meaning domain. experiences related to accomplishment the fifth subtheme related to perma is accomplishment, and this subtheme emerged from the participants’ descriptions of the sense of achievement achieved through asmr. asmr experiences related to enhancing self-identity, memory and decision-making, and self-confidence were associated with a sense of achievement. in addition, asmr helped the students to accomplish study tasks by enhancing focus and concentration. this was described by all participants. participant a: “when i feel excited and interested in things … my schoolwork … focused on what i do … flow mode… listening to asmr videos might help me to relax and concentrate better to do my schoolwork.” participant b listened to non-talking sound asmr videos while in noisy working university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 environments. doing so helped her to become absorbed in the task, resulting in experience of time loss and working longer than intended. participant b: “i listened to long trigger sound videos while working, and those helped me to concentrate. i was much more restless while working when i was not listening to asmr videos. i felt better about myself after having been able to concentrate on my work better. listening to no-talk asmr videos that had consistent sounds helped me to lose track of time. the videos put me in flow when i had to do some longer writing work or thinking work.” participant c said asmr videos gave him the coping skills needed to deal with different tasks in the university, such as examinations, playing music, and other social activities. participant c: “i feel that some videos help me create a student identity… asmr helps me be aware of the daily tasks in school or gives me more ideas about social life…everything is connected.” asmr videos enhanced participant c’s ability to remember something by creating a psychological link between his past experiences and current memory, extending the new ideas into his future meaningful life, music, and the world. asmr videos also helped him focus on the present-moment, make decisions, and solve problems. participant c: “asmr is something can calm you down and relax you … helps me to concentrate. asmr gives me more headspace… reminding me… affect my goals as well.” in sum, the asmr experiencers described asmr as contributing to their accomplishments in many ways, such as by increasing focus, concentration, and self-confidence in a way that allowed them to, for example, study more effectively. they also used asmr videos to promote their achievements and accomplish tasks. discussion summary of findings through an analysis of the participants’ recollections and expressions of asmr experiences, this study gives insight into the phenomenon of asmr engagement on multiple dimensions of well-being. seligman’s first perma element, positive emotions appeared as joy, excitement, relaxation, and calmness experienced from watching asmr videos. these findings are consistent with earlier work on asmr in which experiencers reported frequent tingling, increased levels of excitement and calmness, and decreased levels of stress after watching a range of asmr videos associated with complex emotional asmr experiences (poerio et al., 2018). the present findings suggest that spoken voices and repetitive hand movements are responsible for these complex emotional responses. university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 these results are consistent with previous research that found both spoken and sound-only asmr videos triggered significantly more excitement, instilled a sense of calm, and decreased stress (poerio et al., 2018). engagement, the second pillar of perma, emerged in the asmr experiences in the form of mindfulness, full absorption, and a flow-like mental state. the present findings suggest that asmr experiences can cause time loss and absorb the experiencer in an activity. this result aligns with barratt and davis’s (2015) finding that the passive component of flow is associated with the asmr experience and concur with a study in which increased absorption was seen when asmr experiencers engaged in music or concentrated on a work-related task, which are typical examples of flow-inducing activities (mcerlean & osborne-ford, 2020). the interviews also indicated that the participants used asmr videos to alleviate negative feelings by enhancing both self-regulation of attention and non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. the participants also stated that asmr videos made them more aware and accepting of the present-moment, including their inner emotions and body sensations, and distracted them from repetitive or spiraling thoughts. these findings are consistent with the results of previous studies on increased mindfulness in asmr (fredborg et al., 2018). relationship is the third perma domain considered in this study. strengthening existing intimate relationships and the development of altruistic behaviors after watching asmr videos were found to be essential aspects expressed by the participants. sound-only (e.g., slow, repetitive painting movement) asmr videos enhanced participants’ sense of love towards others. on the other hand, spoken-only (e.g., with affirmations and positive discussions) asmr videos strengthened their awareness of others and made them more prone to help. this finding aligns with previous studies on asmr research in which the spoken-only asmr videos made participants feel more socially connected (poerio et al., 2018) and in studies noting the importance of social interactions (mcerlean & banissy, 2017). lochte et al. (2018) suggested that the attention-receiving contents of many asmr videos were similar to being cared for by someone, and this aligns with the current study. also, some soft-spoken asmr videos showing kindness seem to enhance participants’ compassion towards themselves, allowing them to change their negative thoughts and accept others’ love. davis et al. (2011) noted that self-compassion mediates the relationship between empathy and mindfulness; hence, the results of this study suggest that spokenonly asmr videos improve self-acceptance and interpersonal relationships. when it comes to meaning, the participants spoke of finding meaning and a sense of purpose through the asmr video community as a platform with which to connect with others, and they linked this personal growth perspective with better wellbeing. the meaningfulness experience was also associated with the development of character, such as a curiosity about others and the ability to focus on the present moment. participants also university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 expressed moving towards the acceptance of self and reframing situations to find meaning and promote positive emotions. these findings align with previous research suggesting that mindful awareness allows for finding the purpose in life and enhances mental health (crego et al., 2020). the fifth perma element is accomplishments and having a sense of achievement (seligman, 2012). participants seemed to gain a sense of accomplishment through watching asmr, as the videos helped them utilize mindful awareness, put them in the headspace for self-identity, helped them recall memories, and broaden their connections with others. confidence in their abilities empowered a sense of meaning and purpose in the participants’ lives. grégoire et al. (2012) suggested that individuals who are more attentive and aware tend to be autonomously motivated and foster their own wellbeing (grégoire et al., 2012). moreover, listening to positive content in an asmr video can enhance short-term memory (kim et al., 2019). therefore, the present study’s findings agree with the description of asmr videos as fostering meaning, skills, and goal setting through enhancing an awareness of self and the retrieval of memories. limitations some limitations should be considered when evaluating the findings of this study. first, as asmr is still a relatively new research subject, it was necessary to do an extensive literature review to see how asmr is viewed from the perspective of well-being in earlier research; doing so allowed us to find support for the use of ipa (yardley, 2000). in addition, numerous verbatim extracts and quotations were presented to allow the reader to confirm the interpretations (smith et al., 2009). this study was also limited by the low number of participants. the purposive sampling of university students with significant asmr experiences resulted in only three participants whose experiences were obtained with an in-depth interview method in two phases. however, the aim was not to obtain generalizable data but to understand and describe the connection between asmr videos and various elements of well-being in the lives of asmr experiencers. from this perspective, the data is relevant and provides unique information about asmr experiences in the light of well-being. conclusion this study has opened a discussion about how asmr experiences can be studied using the perma framework. the analysis showed that the participants were able to identify various elements of well-being in their asmr experiences, resulting in remarkable new findings. the findings suggest that the mindfulness practice experienced from asmr videos can result in the elevation of positive emotions and other facets of wellbeing. as such, the findings provide support for the connection between asmr and well-being through mindfulness. as noted by fredborg et al. (2018) and del campo and kehle (2016), asmr university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a wellbeing theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 experiences linked to mindfulness can be used to improve issues of psychological wellbeing, similar to the effect of mindfulness-based treatment programs. in conclusion, this study suggests that university students’ engagement with asmr may contribute to enhanced well-being by increasing feelings of happiness, elevating concentration, improving sleep quality, preventing rumination, increasing self-confidence, and motivating altruistic behavior. this has societal implications for the pursuit of achieving well-being goals at-university or at-home. although more research is needed to show the connection between asmr experiences and well-being, this study contributes some promising findings on the positive nature of asmr experiences. references baer, r. a., & krietemeyer, j. 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(1988). mood management through communication choices. american behavioral scientist, 31(3), 327-340. https://doi.org/10.1177/000276488031003005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jams.2013.10.001 https://doi.org/10.1177/0034355217702136 https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.110.2.217 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2006.05.007 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.10.015 https://doi.org/10.1080/07448481.2018.1546182 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0226692 https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2009.0171 https://doi.org/10.1080/08870440008400302 https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2019.0016 https://doi.org/10.1177/000276488031003005 university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a well-being theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 22 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 appendix table a1 accessible table representation of the perma model in figure 1 flow process of the emergent subthemes and subsequent application to the themes of the perma model, identified through ipa. adapted and modified from yerbury and boyd (2019) topic areas emotional reaction immersion of asmr experience description of relationship experience personal meaning of asmr experience interview questions describe your emotional response to what happened 1. what and how do you feel contended, joyful, and positive? 2. what and how do you feel excited and interested in things (e.g., schoolwork and tasks)? 3. how do you lose track of time while doing something you enjoy and become absorbed in what you are doing? 4. what and how you feel to get help and support from others when you need it? 5. how fulfilled and satisfied are you with your relationships (prompt: parent, peer, and teacher-student)? 6. have you been feeling loved? 7. how do you feel leading a purposeful and meaningful school life (e.g., learning task)? 8. what and how do you feel you have a sense of direction in your school life? 9. can you tell me about any times, if any, you feel that asmr experiences has influenced or been a part of your schoolwork or activities in any way? prompts: within the university, working with peers. 10. how do you feel you are making progress towards accomplishing your goals in the university? university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a well-being theory seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 23 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 topic areas emotional reaction immersion of asmr experience description of relationship experience personal meaning of asmr experience themes and emergent subthemes positive emotion: • relaxation • calmness • excited • joy engagement: • absorption • flow • mindfulness relationship: • self-in-relationship • prosocial behaviour • digital intimacy meaning: • being a part of something bigger. • a sense of curiosity accomplishments: • self-identity • memory & decision-making • self-confidence university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a well-being theory abstract introduction theoretical framework positive emotions engagement relationship meaning and sense of purpose accomplishment and sense of achievement method results positive emotional experiences relationships and connectedness experiences discussion summary of findings limitations conclusion references appendix teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4075 ©2022 (susanna rivinena, päivi rasi-heikkinnen, hanna vuojärvic, sirpa purtilo-nieminend). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized susanna rivinen university of lapland, rovaniemi, finland email: susanna.rivinen@ulapland.fi päivi rasi-heikkinnen university of lapland, rovaniemi, finland email: paivi.rasi-heikkinen@ulapland.fi hanna vuojärvic university of lapland, rovaniemi, finland email: hanna.vuojarvic@ulapland.fi sirpa purtilo-nieminen university of lapland, rovaniemi, finland email: sirpa.purtilo-nieminen@ulapland.fi abstract this qualitative and deductive study develops finnish teacher education by exploring the perspectives of teacher students on older people’s media education in order to equip teacher students to better support older people’s media literacies. to achieve this goal, student teams designed media literacy interventions in the context of a course, “older people, media education, and facilitation of learning,” which had been developed as part of a previously completed design-based research (dbr) project and was being offered for the first time in separated teacher pedagogical studies at one finnish university during the academic year 2019‒2020. research participants included 22 teacher students from the piloted course and 15 stakeholders (older people and professionals working with older https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4075 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:susanna.rivinen@ulapland.fi mailto:paivi.rasi-heikkinen@ulapland.fi mailto:hanna.vuojarvic@ulapland.fi mailto:sirpa.purtilo-nieminen@ulapland.fi teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 people), who only participated in the evaluation workshop organized at the end of the course. the research data, collected during the course, consisted of students’ designs and presentations on how media education should be implemented for older people, as well as written and oral feedback from stakeholders based on the student presentations. the findings indicate that creative and need-based pedagogies should be emphasized and course development should be continued in light of the results. keywords: older people, media literacy, media education, teacher education introduction people over 60 are the largest of all age groups globally (national institute on aging & world health organization, 2011); however, in the present mediatized and digitalized information environment, this group faces challenges that may arise due to a lack of necessary media literacy to support their learning, well-being, everyday life, and participation in society (see also rasi et al., 2016). the demographic transformation also presents challenges to media education policies, research, and practices. media literacy in this article refers to the ability to access and use, understand, critically analyze, and create various media texts and content (aufderheide, 1993; ofcom, 2020). media literacy is the main goal of media education (e.g., buckingham, 2003), and developing media literacy is a lifelong learning process. media education should promote media literacies across the life course and life span (brites et al., 2018; rasi et al., 2019), and in accordance with lifelong learning, it should acknowledge that “each site of human activity is a place of learning” (jarvis, 2011, p. 3). the council of the european union (2018) has updated key competences for lifelong learning, including media literacy, which are “essential in terms of an individual’s self-expression, health, employability and social inclusion” (salomaa & palsa, 2019, p. 45). thus, media education is not only a privilege of the younger generations but also a right and an opportunity for everyone, regardless of age (petranova, 2013; rasi et al., 2019). in a previous study, we conducted a systematic literature review (rasi et al., 2021) to find out which dimensions of media literacy (use, understand, create) practical media literacy interventions targeted at older people focus on, what kinds of pedagogical approaches have been used to foster media literacy in older people, and what kinds of media literacy intervention outcomes and practical implications for media education have been reported. for the review, we analyzed 40 scientific journal articles published between 2005 and 2019. the results indicated that the majority of interventions targeted older people’s competencies in using digital devices, technologies, and media, for example, for news, health, learning, social interactions, and entertainment (e.g., abad alcalá, 2019). the media literacy dimensions of understanding and creating media content received less attention. the pedagogical approaches applied in the interventions were typically based on participants’ needs (e.g., vroman et al., 2015), with strong social support aiming to foster teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 older people’s self-efficacy as users of digital technologies and media (e.g., lam & lee, 2007). also, peer-to-peer teaching and intergenerational approaches (e.g., brown & strommen, 2018) seem to have particular affordances for older people’s media literacy interventions. the outcomes of media literacy interventions were categorized according to the key areas to which media literacy contributes: 1) democracy, participation, and active citizenship; 2) choice, competitiveness, and the knowledge economy; and 3) lifelong learning, cultural expression, and personal fulfilment (livingstone et al., 2005). most of the media literacy interventions reported outcomes related to the third category, such as changes in attitudes, increased ict skills and e-health literacy, changes in everyday life, as well as reduced loneliness and social isolation. outcomes related to democracy, participation, and active citizenship were only rarely reported in the studied interventions, and outcomes related to choice, competitiveness, and the knowledge economy were not reported at all. regarding future older people’s media literacy education, the studies included in the systematic literature review suggested that the interventions should be offered more widely among heterogeneous groups of older people and targeted, for example, at seniors with health problems (xie, 2011), the oldest-old (over 76 years of age), and minority populations (bertera, 2014). the present covid-19 pandemic has also highlighted the media literacy needs of homebound seniors, who are at risk of social isolation (lee & kim, 2018). the interventions should cover all three dimensions of media literacy (use, understand, create) and make use of various kinds of pedagogical approaches, such as peer-to-peer teaching (castilla et al., 2018); intergenerational approaches (gall, 2014; tambaum, 2017); the use of compassionate and experienced teachers (vacek & rybenská, 2016); collaborative and informal learning environments (sayago et al., 2013); a supportive, friendly, and respectful learning atmosphere (chiu et al., 2016; kim & merriam, 2010); and holistic teaching approaches tailored to the needs and lives of older people (berkowsky et al., 2013; gagliardi et al., 2008). the aim of our study was to explore teacher students’ perspectives on how older people’s media education should be implemented and to develop finnish teacher education so that it better equips students to support the media literacies of older people. at present, finnish teacher education does not fully correspond to the ideal of continuous and lifelong learning and development (ministry of education and culture, 2019). nationally, teacher education is mainly focused on younger generations and adults, with little or no content on the learning and teaching of older people (aged 65+) (lee et al., 2018; ofcom, 2019a). for example, at one finnish university, which served as the context for this study, older people’s teaching and learning were not part of the 60 european credit transfer system (ects) separated teacher pedagogical studies before the year 2019. in that year, a new course on older people’s media education was added to the curriculum of the adult teacher education program as part of the design-based research (dbr) initiative, of which the teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 study presented here is a part. theoretical framework older people’s media literacy and media education our study was based on an understanding of media literacy as competence in accessing and using media and creating various media texts and content, as well as understanding and being able to critically evaluate them (aufderheide, 1993; ofcom, 2020). media literacy is also considered the main aim of media education, which “is concerned with teaching and learning about the media” (buckingham, 2003, p. 4) and is seen as a lifelong process (brites et al., 2018; rasi et al., 2019). older people were defined in our study as being chronologically 65 years of age or older (e.g., lee et al., 2018; ofcom, 2020). however, following a gerontological understanding, older people were assumed to be a diverse, heterogeneous, and socially differentiated group of people with different life roles, needs, and interests (edmonson & scharf, 2015; rasi et al., 2019; vidovićová, 2018). older people’s levels of media literacy vary and are often inadequate (see ofcom, 2019a, 2019b; 2020; rasi et al., 2021; rasi & kilpeläinen, 2015). previous studies also appear to have largely focused on older people’s use of digital media and icts, such as the internet (vroman et al., 2015). research on older people’s media literacies is thus insufficient, especially when viewed from the perspective of dimensions of media literacy other than use or when comparing it, for example, with the number of studies targeting younger generations (petranova, 2013; rasi et al., 2016). however, it can be stated that the amount of research regarding older people is growing, and these studies also pay attention to media literacy in other dimensions beyond the use of icts and digital media (see eronen et al., 2019; guess et al., 2019). several previous studies have shown the importance of a needs-based approach in supporting older people’s media literacies (see castro rojas et al., 2018; gall, 2014; sayago et al, 2013; vroman et al., 2015). hence, each educational situation is individual and is substantially affected by, for example, an individual’s personality, life history, emotions, devices used, and interests (gall, 2014; kim & merriam, 2010; petranova, 2013). in addition to the individual and learner-centered approaches, previous studies also emphasized formal and teacher-centered pedagogical approaches (see brown & strommen, 2018; gall, 2014; rasi et al., 2021; xie, 2011). for example, collaboration and support between peers, younger generations, family, and experts have been considered significant (brown & strommen, 2018; castro rojas et al., 2018; gall 2014; kim & merriam, 2010; livingstone et al., 2005; rasi & kilpeläinen, 2015). teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 learning about older people’s media education through design and stakeholder collaboration during the dbr project, a new course titled “older people, media education and facilitation of learning” (two ects credits) was designed. the design of the course was informed by a systematic literature review of older people’s media literacy interventions (rasi et al., 2021) and workshops for older people and stakeholders (rivinen, 2020). the learning objectives were in line with the revised bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (anderson & krathwohl, 2001), where “creating” represents the highest level of the cognitive process and can be realized through generating, planning, and producing. therefore, teacher students were expected to design and “construct an original product” (anderson & krathwohl, 2001, pp. 84‒85), that is, a media literacy intervention for older people. interventions could include courses or short training or tutoring sessions. the key pedagogical rationale for the course was that designing media literacy interventions for older people required teacher students to engage in a rich variety of cognitive processes: remembering, understanding, analyzing, applying, evaluating, and creating. the pedagogical approach also represents an “authentic pedagogy” that is “true to whatpractically-needs-to-be-known in the world, rather than the abstract facts of didactic pedagogy, its academic discipline for discipline’s sake” (cope & kalantzis, 2015, p. 10). the cognitive processes involved in designing are beneficial for learning (edelson, 2002; erickson & lehrer, 1998). erickson and lehrer (1998) argued that design problems are typically ill-defined and complex and therefore have the potential to foster higher-order thinking. the teacher students participating in our study needed to begin with a problem analysis and a description of the goals they wanted their design to achieve. this involved reflecting on the challenges, constraints, and opportunities, which potentially fosters higher-order thinking (erickson & lehrer, 1998). both the teacher education program and the new course followed a blended learning pedagogical design (boelens et al., 2017; graham, 2006), which means that the course combined phases of face-to-face and online activities. the course implementation followed the constructive alignment perspective (biggs & tang, 2007). a pre-course assignment asked students to describe their preconceptions of older people and the media education targeted at them and set their learning tasks for the course (see vuojärvi et al., 2021). for their in-course work, the students attended six hours of face-to-face instruction, during which they were briefed on the course topics in detail and presented a design challenge. students were instructed to design media literacy interventions for older people in teams of three or four students. teams prepared a written design that described a media literacy intervention and provided theoretical justifications for their choices of pedagogy and content. the teams returned the first version of their design for peer review. finally, for their post-course assignment, the students reflected on and self-assessed their learning teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 process. the authenticity of learning (cope & kalantzis, 2015) was further promoted through involving stakeholders in the evaluation of the students’ designs. this is also in line with the ongoing discussion of the need for higher education teachers and students to collaborate with multiple stakeholders from outside academia (e.g., kek & huijser, 2017). the evaluation phase was carried out as a workshop that was attended by the teacher students, the authors of this article, and 15 stakeholders (four older people aged 74‒77 and 11 professionals who work with them). some of the stakeholders had been participants in previous activities of the project this study was a part of (see rivinen, 2020). the group of professionals represented two community colleges, two non-governmental organizations, a local library, and a project focused on promoting older people’s digital skills. in the evaluation workshop, the participants formed six groups, each including two or three older people or professionals and three or four students. student teams were given 15 minutes to present their design, and after each presentation, the evaluation groups spent 10 minutes assessing it and writing key points on a flip chart. after that, the evaluation groups shared their feedback with the other participants. methods general design, research questions, and data collection our study was part of a larger dbr project aimed at developing teacher education through designing and piloting a course focusing on older people’s media education (see rasi et al., 2021; rivinen, 2020). it examined how the novel course could be further developed. in line with the principles of dbr, older people and other stakeholders participated in the process of developing the course (castro rojas et al., 2018; lindsay et al., 2012; tullo et al., 2016; wang & hannafin, 2005). the study sought to answer the following research questions: 1) on what dimension of media literacy did teacher students’ designs focus? 2) what kind of pedagogical approaches were used in the students’ designs to support the media education of the older people? 3) what should media literacy interventions be like, according to stakeholders’ feedback? the context of the study was described previously. the participants included 22 teacher students (17 females, 5 males), and data were also collected from 15 stakeholders in the evaluation workshop. the dataset consisted of data from four separate research elements, the first of which was nine media literacy interventions designed by the nine student teams and presented in written format (11,226 words). the second element included written feedback (3,008 words) on student presentations from six evaluation groups consisting of stakeholders and also teacher students. the third element was oral feedback from the teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 evaluation groups, which was recorded and transcribed (4,288 words) with the participants’ informed consent. the fourth element comprised the students’ presentations (powerpoint, prezi, videos) of their interventions. however, not all student presentations were included in the study because presentations were requested only after the evaluation workshop, and not all students could be reached again. a total of seven presentations (out of nine) were received. overall, the study included research data from a variety of sources, which is typical of a dbr project (collins et al., 2004). data analysis our study followed a deductive approach in which the three dimensions of media literacy (use, understanding, and creation of media content) (aufderheide, 1993; ofcom, 2020), served as the analytical framework (see also, rasi et al., 2021; rivinen, 2020). content analysis was used to categorize the common and relevant themes related to the research questions (dinçer, 2018). the first author performed the technical analysis of the data, after which the initial codings were reviewed with the other authors during an online workshop to increase reliability. based on the analysis, a discussion was held, and modifications were requested and made. to answer the first research question, all the students’ media literacy interventions were exported to nvivo (version 12) analysis software and coded into three dimensions of media literacy. to answer the second research question, the interventions were coded for pedagogical approaches and divided into four upper-level categories: individual and learner-centered, formal and teacher-centered, creative, and blended and online pedagogy. for the last research question, answers were sought from stakeholders’ written feedback, which was coded based on the target group of the interventions, providers, pedagogical approaches, and dimensions of media literacy. finally, the codings were checked against student presentations and the transcriptions of the evaluation groups’ oral feedback. it is worth noting here that a unit of analysis could be a sentence or a longer unit. each unit of analysis could be coded into more than one category. findings dimensions of older people’s media literacy in teacher students’ media literacy interventions six of the media literacy interventions focused mainly on the creative production of media content. some of the interventions were also coded in other categories, but the emphasis was on the creative process and production. coded interventions included self-expression and creative media content production in a variety of forms (e.g., blogs, vlogs, photobooks). depending on the intervention, creative outcomes could be related to older people’s own lives, interests, or, for example, the revival of the sámi language, as in one teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 intervention. whereas the primary goal of the seventh nvivo-coded intervention was to understand security and privacy issues better, because a secondary goal was to produce a presentation during the course, for example, through powerpoint or other means, it was also coded in the creative production category. in all, this category was coded in a total of seven interventions. seven interventions were also coded in the “use” category. two interventions focused mainly on supporting older people in using devices, applications, and/or digital media, whereas in the rest of the interventions, the use of the device was associated with another primary goal. one of these two interventions focused fully on developing skills for the use of social media, but the other also involved features from the “understand” dimension. the other five interventions included features of the “use” dimension to a lesser extent. these interventions provided support for, among other things, using different devices (e.g., tablets, slr cameras, recording devices) with the goal of producing, for example, a photobook or content on facebook. only one intervention focused mainly on the “understand” dimension, although a total of seven designs were coded in this category. the intervention aimed primarily to increase understanding of privacy and security issues and was called “‘privacy and phishing’—learn about the dangers of the internet.” its goal was to teach older people to better understand, for example, how to use the internet safely, where their information is used, and what rights they have regarding their information. other interventions coded in this category contained only brief references to the “understand” dimension. however, it was significant that most of the interventions (five out of nine) were interested in security and privacy issues. pedagogical approaches to support older people’s media education in teacher students’ media literacy interventions several pedagogical approaches emerged from the media literacy interventions, which were coded into four upper-level categories: individual and learner-centered, formal and teacher-centered, creative, and blended and online pedagogy (see table 1). teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 table 1 pedagogical approaches based on code classification pedagogical approach (n = number of designs) clustered category need-based (n = 9) individual instruction (n = 9) peer-to-peer teaching (n = 8) intergenerational learning (n = 5) experiential learning (n = 3) self-directed (n = 3) critical-emancipatory learning (n = 1) individual and learnercentered pedagogy direct instruction (n = 9) collaborative learning (n = 9) task-based learning (n = 6) learning-by-doing (n = 6) observational learning (n = 1) project-based learning (n = 1) formal and teacher-centered pedagogy multimedia production (n = 7) biographical production (n = 2) empowering film pedagogy (n = 1) creative pedagogy blended learning (n = 1) blended and online pedagogy individual and learner-centered pedagogy interventions most often followed individual and learner-centered approaches. such interventions coded into this category were somewhat responsive to older people’s needs, interests, experiences, devices used, or goals. the older people were also seen as a heterogeneous group, which is why teaching included features of individual instruction. however, it is also noteworthy that only one of the interventions contained truly one-onone tutoring, where the support was extended to the home of the older people. as one student team explained: the digital bus customer could choose the content themes on which the home visits would focus (e.g., six home visits related to online appointment booking). initially, several instructors would be involved in home visits, after which it would be assessed whether one instructor was sufficient to be responsible for the client’s digital teaching. (st1) teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 otherwise, the interventions had, to a lesser extent, features related to individual instruction. nonetheless, features such as receiving personal feedback, identification of individual skill levels and their consideration in teaching, use of the person’s own devices, or, for example, emphasis on the learner’s own role in learning were coded as individual instruction. eight interventions reported peer-to-peer teaching, which was provided, for example, through discussions, information sharing, peer review, and small group work involving different skill levels. in one intervention, elderly volunteers were used as teachers; otherwise, peer support was received from other participants who took part in the course. in addition, the younger generations could also act as teachers. the following comments reflect how this worked: the digital bus also employs students in the field who receive credits for the volunteering.(st1) we are responsible for teaching the course ourselves. (st7) relatives of the participants can also act as support persons for the older people during the project; if there are devices and people who are well acquainted with the application in the vicinity, they can act as support and inspire communication through the application as well. (st3) in two other interventions, intergenerational learning emerged in the sense that participants were themselves perceived to be of different generations of older people, and the definition of “older people” was understood in a broad sense. also, interventions in which one of the aims was to share information with future generations through social media were coded in this category. one student team wrote: the idea is that an older person could become emancipated and find a suitable way to use social media and share the valuable knowledge and skills they possess with posterity or people interested in the same things. (st4) only a few references to experiential learning, self-directed, and critical-emancipatory learning were found. experiential learning was understood in our study to be based on the participant’s own experience and ability to evaluate and develop their experiences. in addition, self-directed learning emerged, for example, when support was provided in the older person’s home according to his or her own needs and goals. only one intervention used the critical-emancipatory learning approach, which aimed to encourage participants to believe in their own abilities and to inspire them to share their knowledge and skills or engage in, for example, social discussion on the internet. formal and teacher-centered pedagogy this category included interventions in which the course was organized, for example, by one or more experienced teachers (e.g., teacher of liberal education, teacher with experience in teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 media and adult education), courses were of a fixed-length (e.g., six sessions, one to two hours at a time), or teaching that resembled classroom-like settings (e.g., classroom with internet access and video projector, lectures). in addition, a total of seven interventions reported cooperative learning approaches, but at the end of the analysis, all the interventions were included in the collaborative learning category. six interventions had features of learning-by-doing and task-based learning (e.g., homework, group assignments). as stated in the two interventions, doing is an important part of concretizing learning and teaching. in addition, teaching was usually implemented in small groups (e.g., three to five), and only one intervention explicitly mentioned the possibility of one-on-one tutoring. however, even in that situation, it was possible to take part in group work and have discussions with other participants on a digital bus. observational and project-based learning were named only once as pedagogical approaches. creative pedagogy the third category included interventions with features of the creative process or production. a total of seven interventions reported on multimedia production that used vlogs, blogs, videos, photos, social media, narratives, powerpoints, other forms of presentation, movies, photobooks, or other recordings. two of these focused mainly on depicting the participants’ own life histories and experiences. two of the student teams explained: the course teaches you to share possible content about your own life, the history of life from your own perspective in the form of pictures, stories or other recordings, hobbies, current affairs, or other personal interests and opinions on the internet. (st4) as a final output, older people compiled their own picture book from old photographs, through which they opened to other members of the group the different stages of their life course and looked at the past as part of the age stage. (st8) in addition, one of the interventions was based on an empowering film pedagogy. the goal was to develop an audiovisual production, alone, or together with others, about something that was meaningful to the participant. at the end of the one-year course, the productions would be viewed and certificates distributed. blended and online pedagogy only one intervention was coded in this category. it utilized the rhythm of the blended learning approach that combines face-to-face and distance work (boelens et al., 2017). the coded intervention combined two contact teaching days (a total of eight hours) with a week of independent work on a social media platform. during the week, participants could keep teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 in touch with participants and teachers via facebook. what should media literacy interventions be like according to stakeholder feedback? attention was meant to be paid to, for example, expanding the target group, although the interventions were generally perceived to be good and feasible. three of the feedback comments considered that interventions could be extended to people of all ages, two to other languages, and two to other groups in general. in addition, the following groups received one feedback comment: people who provide support for older people; those who do not like writing; those in formal higher education (e.g., university, the university of applied sciences); grandchildren; those with certain skill levels; those of all skill levels; and those who are retiring, are outside the target group delimitation, are disabled, or are lonely. in addition, in light of the feedback, the number of parties that provide support should be increased, and cooperation between different parties should be further emphasized. for example, based on three feedback comments, support could also be provided on behalf of libraries, projects, and traditional training organizations, and two feedback comments were concerned with concrete places (e.g., digital points). the following providers were mentioned only once in the feedback: family, support persons, organizations, and another service bus, for example, a social services bus. individual and learner-centered pedagogy received feedback mainly from need-based and individual approaches, which were coded 16–17 times in the feedback. intergenerational learning was mentioned in the feedback a total of eight times, and peer-to-peer teaching was mentioned three times. self-directed and one-on-one approaches received only one feedback comment. these results further suggested the need to emphasize the individuality and needs of older people even more. two evaluation groups offered the following suggestions: the course should be conducted with your own devices because the use of new or other devices is difficult to learn again and again. (eg4)  studying in a group may be a little distracting, more individual support [is necessary]. (eg6) the following approaches were coded into formal and teacher-centered pedagogy: direct instruction, community, feedback and evaluation, task-based, learning-by-doing, workshops, scaffolding, and panel discussion. overall, direct instruction received the most feedback, followed by community, as well as feedback and evaluation. other approaches were mentioned only once or twice. the majority of the comments focused on the duration of the intervention; in most of the interventions, the schedules could be condensed and teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 divided into, for example, several course implementations. in addition, creative pedagogy was coded in a total of seven feedback comments related to multimedia production. only one comment, concerning the implementation of the online course, was coded into blended and online pedagogy. other important issues were also highlighted in the feedback, such as feelings (eight feedback comments), as well as material and devices (six feedback comments). for example, feelings mostly referred to the emergence of fears and the importance of addressing them. moreover, five comments were concerned with the themes of “one thing at a time” and “context.” according to the results, attention should also be paid to the learning environment (e.g., ergonomics) and the pace of the teaching. continuity, concreteness, hobby-like, and ease of use of programs received four or fewer comments. finally, according to the feedback, older people mostly needed support in using social media and devices and in creatively producing media content. ten feedback comments were concerned with the “understand” dimension. based on feedback, interventions could be, for example, combined or divided into separate entities or have certain features added to them. one evaluation group wrote: it would also be important to teach you where to find vlogs or blogs if filming your own life isn’t inspiring. (eg4) discussion and conclusions our research, especially from the perspective of teacher students, has provided information for future development of the piloted course. the results indicate that the media literacy interventions designed by teacher students focused on training and support with regard to all dimensions of media literacy (aufderheide, 1993; ofcom, 2020); however, the “create” dimension was clearly emphasized more than the others. a total of six interventions out of nine focused mainly on supporting older people’s creative production. as the difference from other dimensions was so significant, it can be argued that the introductory parts of the course and the supplementary materials should place more emphasis on “creative production” rather than on the “use” and “understand” dimensions, and for this reason, future course implementations should pay more attention to these dimensions and add additional materials. future course implementations could also consider whether it would make sense for students to predetermine the dimensions of media literacy on which the course design should focus. in the implementation of the piloted course, students were free to choose the media literacy dimension with which the course design was mainly related. interventions emphasized mostly individual and learner-centered as well as formal and teacher-centered pedagogies (see gall, 2014; rasi et al., 2021; xie, 2011). in the teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 interventions, the older people were perceived as a heterogeneous group, whose own interests, needs, goals, devices used, and skill levels, for example, should be taken into account when designing and implementing media education (gall, 2014; patrício & osório, 2016; sayago et al., 2013; vroman et al., 2015). instructors were usually one or more knowledgeable teachers, but support was also obtained from peers (see kim & merriam, 2010; sayago et al., 2013). the importance of peer support was emphasized in almost all interventions. the interventions also reflected the pedagogy of creative production, as well as blended and online pedagogy, but to a lesser extent. for example, teaching that took place entirely online was not found, and approaches of blended learning were used in only one intervention. in addition, pedagogical approaches drawing on playfulness and gamebased learning, for example, were missing (see charlier et al., 2012; kangas, 2010). it is also noteworthy that one-on-one tutoring was used in only one intervention (see gall, 2014). the above considerations are important for the implementation of the next course and should be taken into account when planning course content. involving stakeholders in course implementation through an evaluation workshop was relevant for the course and the research, as it brought it closer to the authentic world (cope & kalantzis, 2015; kek & huijser, 2017; wang & hannafin, 2005). the evaluation workshop enabled information sharing, networking, and feedback from stakeholders. based on the feedback, stakeholders understood older people as a diverse group to whom the course should also respond. older people should be understood as people who may also have various cognitive and physical difficulties as they age (lee et al., 2018) and whose interests can change (rasi et al., 2019). in addition, they may play several roles in society, such as retirees, parents, and consumers (vidovićová, 2018).  in the future, it would be ideal to continue this approach and possibly consider extending it. for example, if it were possible for students to carry out an internship with the older people on the basis of their media literacy interventions, it would add even more value to the topic and the course. however, putting the students’ interventions into practice would require further development of the curriculum. also, if students consulted older people before designing their interventions, the design might be more suitable. in spite of everything, more course development and research on the topic are needed in order for them to be properly embedded in teacher education. limitations the number of older people in the study could have been higher, and interviews with students and stakeholders could have been considered more thoroughly. it should also be noted that stakeholders provided feedback based on student presentations and had not seen the written design. in addition, not all students returned their presentations, and therefore, additional inspections could not be carried out for all works. teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. references abad alcalá, l. 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(2011). older adults, e-health literacy, and collaborative learning: an experimental study. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 62(5), 933–946. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21507 https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21507 https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21507 teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized abstract introduction theoretical framework older people’s media literacy and media education learning about older people’s media education through design and stakeholder collaboration methods general design, research questions, and data collection data analysis findings dimensions of older people’s media literacy in teacher students’ media literacy interventions pedagogical approaches to support older people’s media education in teacher students’ media literacy interventions individual and learner-centered pedagogy formal and teacher-centered pedagogy creative pedagogy blended and online pedagogy what should media literacy interventions be like according to stakeholder feedback? discussion and conclusions limitations disclosure statement references synopsis: media education in autumn colors issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4983 ©2022 (heli ruokamo and yngve nordkvelle). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. synopsis heli ruokamo university of lapland e-mail: heli.ruokamo@ulapland.fi yngve nordkvelle inland norway university of applied sciences e-mail: yngve.nordkvelle@inn.no media education in autumn colors authors thowing autumn leaves in the air. photo: ville rinne, university of lapland https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4983 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:heli.ruokamo@ulapland.fi mailto:yngve.nordkvelle@inn.no synopsis: media education in autumn colors 2 the 2021 media education conference (mec 2021 [ulapland.fi]) took place on top of ounasvaara hill in rovaniemi from september 28–october 1, 2021. mec (formerly nbe) is an informal and friendly conference that participants attend to exchange ideas and information dealing with media education, educational use of icts, and learning environments. mec 2021 was organized by the media education hub at the university of lapland. the theme of mec 2021 was “media education in autumn colors.” mec 2021 also celebrated the 20th birthday of the media education hub. mec 2021 participants were invited to submit paper proposals to be published in this special issue of seminar.net. participants of the ninth mec conference. photo: ville rinne, university of lapland the themes and topics of the ninth mec conference dealt with a) media, digital, and information literacies; b) digital media in teaching and learning; c) playful learning; and d) media education, participation, and well-being. heli ruokamo (guest editor) and yngve nordkvelle (chief editor) the articles learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review in the first article, antti lähtevänoja of the university of helsinki, mikko vesisenaho and kati vasalampi of the university of jyväskylä, jani holopainen of the university of eastern finland, and päivi häkkinen of the university of jyväskylä present the results of a https://www.ulapland.fi/en/events-university-of-lapland/mec-2021 https://www.ulapland.fi/en/units/media-education-hub https://journals.oslomet.no/index.php/seminar/ synopsis: media education in autumn colors 3 literature review dealing with learning outcomes and learning motivation regarding the use of head-mounted displays in the field of immersive virtual reality (hmd-vr). based on their review, the authors argue that hmd-based vr learning environments may not be better than other technologies at enhancing direct learning, but they indicate that hmdvr may result in increased learning motivation and engagement. assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review the second article is a literature review written by katri koivuneva and heli ruokamo of the university of lapland. they assessed university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments. their research results indicate that some studies have focused on the dimensions of study-related burnout, but students’ wellbeing in digital learning environments has been less studied. digital assessments of students’ academic well-being are mostly formative assessments and are moving toward incorporating artificial intelligence and game-based assessments. university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a well-being theory chan ko wai and satu uusiautti of the university of lapland explored university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences through a positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (perma) model. they found that asmr videos may enhance participants’ well-being by providing a mindfulness-like experience. their research provided new knowledge of asmr experiences and their meaning. students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar erkko sointu of the university of eastern finland, hanna vuojärvi of the university of lapland, and aino äikäs of the university of eastern finland examined university students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom (fc) approach in a master’s thesis seminar. their research results show that the students were satisfied with the fc approach and corresponding guidance. in fact, the fc was well-suited to and preferred by the students. the approach was also seen as functional, goal-oriented, and flexible. students experienced the team spirit and supervisor’s presence as positive aspects of the fc experience, although some negative aspects were also identified, such as time usage and opportunities for peer feedback. synopsis: media education in autumn colors 4 learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods erkko sointu, teemu valtonen, susanne hallberg, jenni kankaanpää, sanna väisänen, lasse heikkinen, mohammed saqr, ville tuominen, and laura hirsto of the university of eastern finland studied the use of flipped learning and learning analytics in online teaching to support preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods. they found that preservice teachers’ time management skills improved and that their task avoidance, anxiety, and boredom toward quantitative methods decreased. teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized susanna rivinen, päivi rasi-heikkinen, hanna vuojärvi, and sirpa purtilo-nieminen of the university of lapland studied teacher students’ designing of media education for older people. they focused on students’ designs and presentations regarding how media education should be implemented for older people and on stakeholders’ written and oral feedback in response to the students’ presentations. their findings emphasize the need for creative and need-based pedagogies and the further development of courses. fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education siling tekoniemi of the university of lapland, sirkku kotilainen of tampere university, and mari maasilta and kirsti lempiäinen of lapland university studied fact checking as digital media literacy in a higher education context. they identified a need to develop factchecking teaching as digital media literacy while integrating pragmatic and critical approaches (e.g. digital design and other hands-on educational practices) with culturebased contextualization. the study suggests that the contents of digital media literacy need updating with fact-checking and algorithm-based communication for the recognition of technology as a counterpart in the development of information disorders. teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education marjo joshi and mauri kantola of the turku university of applied sciences examined teachers’ experiences and roles during the process of designing online degree programs in higher education. their results show the teachers’ positive and negative experiences related to the importance of management support, collegial collaboration, and different teaching environments. design principles are presented based on the teachers’ experiences at various organizational, pedagogical, and online degree program levels. synopsis: media education in autumn colors 5 digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 lotte vermeire, wendy van den broeck, leo van audenhove, and ilse mariën of vrije universiteit brussel studied digital youth work in flanders from the perspectives of practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19. they identified opportunities that improved participants’ and youth workers’ digital competences, combated social isolation, increased accessibility and room to experiment, and blended teaching methods to strengthen youth work. they also identified barriers, such as limited know-how among youth workers, digital exclusion, high cost of hardware and software, and the importance of using the correct working method to achieve the desired goals. young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder guna spurava and sirkku kotilainen of tampere university explored the use of young people as empirical experts in participatory research in the age of information disorders. they used the results of the youth consultations in their study to provide recommendations to researchers. information on young people’s lack of understanding of algorithm-based communication and commercialization on social media was seen as particularly useful. their findings suggest that young people may serve as empirical experts and advisors, particularly during the planning stages of research. pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom sanna väisänen, susanne hallberg, teemu valtonen, ida-auroora tervo, jenni kankaanpää, erkko sointu, and laura hirsto of the university of eastern finland examined pupils’ experiences with using learning analytics visualizations to support self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom. their research results show that pupils’ experience of self-regulated learning and learning analytics was positive; the learning analytics were functional and motivating for the students and helped advance their learning. pupils’ self-directedness also increased, although many pupils found goal setting and pursuing their goals to be difficult. synopsis media education in autumn colors the articles learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review university students’ autonomous sensory meridian response (asmr) experiences in the light of a well-being theory students’ perspectives on the functionality of the flipped classroom approach in a master’s thesis seminar learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods teacher students’ designing of media education for older people: creative and need-based pedagogies emphasized fact-checking as digital media literacy in higher education teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education digital youth work in flanders: practices, challenges, and the impact of covid-19 young people as empirical experts of participatory research in the age of information disorder pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 facebook as an actor a case of students negotiating their social presence in an online course monica johannesen oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences, faculty of education and international studies email: monica.johannesen@hioa.no leikny øgrim oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences, faculty of education and international studies email: leikny.ogrim@hioa.no ole smørdal faculty of educational sciences email: ole.smordal@uv.uio.no abstract this article reports on a study of a higher education online course based on asynchronous communication. the selection of technology for online discussions aimed at creating a sense of togetherness among the teachers and the students. this choice proved to be a source of insights into the differences of agency of a virtual learning environment (vle) compared to social media when it comes to social presence. we discuss the agency of fronter, our formal vle, and facebook, when it comes to their effect on the relevant social networks at hand. important issues identified are related to the quality and nature of the professional and social relations between teachers and students as well as their technology practices in the online course. the discussions are based on the concepts of immediacy and intimacy, as these issues kept appearing in the interviews with the students. the article suggests that the differences of materiality between vles and social media, exemplified here by fronter and facebook, matter in several respects: how social relations are established and sustained, the agency of the technology in respect to social presence and control and how the technologies affect the quality of dialogic pedagogy. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ mailto:monica.johannesen@hioa.no mailto:leikny.ogrim@hioa.no mailto:ole.smordal@uv.uio.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 37 keywords: educational dialogues, socio-material perspectives, social presence, virtual learning environments, facebook introduction choosing and adapting technology for use in an online course in higher education entails developing learning and teaching practices where the interplay between technology, students, teachers and academic content needs to be considered. this article reports on a study of experiences from a specific online master’s course. within the sociocultural perspective, which this online course draws on, the dialogic conversation is regarded as a decisive factor in creating insight, understanding and critical reflection (dysthe, 2013, p. 78). dialogic pedagogy aims to foster learner agency, in the sense that understanding is based on collaboration that searches for and tests ideas and values against other ideas and values (flitton & warwick, 2013; matusov & miyazaki, 2014). all forms of education can function dialogically, with the teachers facilitating reflection and multidisciplinary thinking (dysthe, 2012, p. 46). student-active forms of learning, projects, group work and formative evaluation are important ways of learning, both in primary school and in higher education (imsen, 2014). in the online course of this study, the students were not physically present, but separated in time and space, requiring all the participants to use digital technologies. the focus in this article is how different technologies can influence conditions for dialogic pedagogy. to illuminate this matter, the conversations and meaning making in the online course were studied, and the students and the teachers were interviewed. the preliminary analysis showed that the students had strong feelings about the different technologies, in particular regarding the importance of using the technology for establishing a social presence, i.e. an adequate degree of presence of the other in an interaction and the consequent appreciation of an interpersonal relationship (short, williams, & christie, 1976, p. 65). there is a substantial amount of research on facebook and vles showing that social media mostly works as an arena for social interaction and peer to peer feedback (see for example madge, meek, wellens, & hooley, 2009; maleko, nandi, hamilton, d’souza, & harland, 2013; petrovic, jeremic, cirovic, radojicic, & milenkovic, 2013; selwyn, 2009; aaen & dalsgaard, 2016). facebook attract more students (maleko et al., 2013), and is mainly used for exchange of logistical and factual information among students (selwyn, 2009). it seems like facebook works like a third space where students blend their personal and social life with academic work (aaen & dalsgaard, 2016). on the contrary, vles are better for studying (petrovic et al., 2013) and are viewed as authoritative and valid media of course material (maleko et al., 2013). however, these studies do not fully address the social awareness of students in online learning. consequently, we argue that investigating social presence is of outmost importance in researching dialogical learning environments. two different technologies were used in the online course, a vle, fronter, and facebook. the experiences of using these systems are compared and contrasted, building an understanding of the relation between technology enabling social presence in online courses and aspects of dialogic pedagogy. in particular, the understanding of how technology can influence students’ social presence in dialogic conversations is analysed. thus, the questions raised are: • how is social presence established and sustained in the online course? • how is social presence affected by the different digital technologies used? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 38 • how can the relations between social presence and dialogic learning in the online course be characterised? the article is structured as follows: first, the theoretical framework is presented, being a socio-material approach to understanding situated social presence and dialogic learning, both mediated and affected by digital technologies. then the important lessons learnt regarding agency are identified, both from a learning and teaching point of view. finally, the concepts of immediacy and intimacy are discussed in relation to various conceptions of agency related to dialogic pedagogy. theoretical framework within the pedagogical context, there is a common understanding of the term ‘actor’ as a subject with intentions (nordahl, 2013, p. 102). however, in this article, the role of non-human actors (see for example latour, 1987) is discussed, such as computers and digital artefacts, and their role in learning dialogues. the relation between digital technology, education and learning is emphasised in a number of studies (erstad & hauge, 2011; krumsvik, 2007). this article is based on a socio-material perspective on learning and social interaction (fenwick, edwards, & sawchuk, 2011; sørensen, 2009), which means that phenomena are understood as entanglements of material and social entities, and that phenomena are situated and results of performative enactments and doings. in such a perspective, the effects of networks of interactions between human and non-human actors are seen as the most interesting part to study. the concrete practice is thereby understood as an effect of the interplay between material and social elements (fenwick et al., 2011; johannesen, 2013). hence, in this article, both human actors – such as students and teachers – and non-human actors – such as communication technology and didactics – are studied, in addition to how they mutually affect each other and, thereby, the learning conversation. dysthe (2012) has presented dialogue-based teaching as closely tied to the concept of learning conversations. both the notion of conversation and that of dialogue are often used in colloquial language to describe an everyday conversation between two or more individuals, while dialogue is often understood as containing a deeper contextual purpose (dysthe, 2012, p. 51). flitton and warwick (2013) argue that a dialogic approach to teaching and learning would shift the emphasis of lesson communication from the teacher to students, because a dialogic stance aims to foster learner agency, whereby students collaborate with others in seeking understanding, building from their own ideas and allowing other ideas and opinions to mediate and modify their thinking. traditionally, a dialogue assumes the physical presence of the actors involved. technology has changed this and created new opportunities for dialogue. online learning environments bring about new forms of dialogue, allowing for asynchronous communication as well as peer learning environments. however, new challenges, such as a lack of rapport among teachers and students, may arise. therefore, the conditions for dialogic pedagogy in an online course are discussed through the introduction of the concept of social presence. social presence gunavardena and zittle (1997) discuss social presence in relation to digital learning environments. in that context, they define social presence as the degree to which the participants in digital learning environments create a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 39 sense of other participants being physically present or ‘real’. this article seeks to contribute an increased understanding to the field of dialogical pedagogy by discussing social presence as a prerequisite for dialogue, where people intend to explore and develop meaning. this article discusses situations where the participants are not physically present and technology is seen as a significant factor for the experience of the participants in the dialogue. several studies show that rich media such as second life i support the feeling of engagement and immersion, while simpler media such as chat provide better task orientation (bente, rüggenberg, krämer, & eschenburg, 2008; tan, sutanto, & phang, 2012; yamada & akahori, 2007). furthermore, many studies show that social presence is improved when it is facilitated for increased activity (fang-wu & yi-shin, 2006; kim, kwon, & cho, 2011). schrum, english and galizio (2012) emphasise the purpose of authentic and clear roles in online-based communication. moreover, baker (2004) points out the immediate proximity of the teacher or the ability to respond quickly to the students, while borup, west and graham (2012) claim that an explicit teacher role is especially important for the students to experience social presence in the use of video lectures. several studies have suggested a set of factors that are needed to establish social presence in a digital learning environment (chih-hsiung, cherng-jyh, blocher, & junn-yih, 2012; dow, 2008; sherblom, 2010; sung & mayer, 2012). these studies focus first and foremost on mechanisms to improve the students’ communication, activity, productivity and fulfilment of studies in a digital educational setting. this article looks more closely at aspects within the communication itself and especially how digital learning environments influence the dialogue between teachers and students and between students. tu and mcisaac (2002) suggest a conceptual framework that can be used to understand the relation between social presence and online interaction. two components are seen as important for communication in online learning environments: intimacy and immediacy. ‘intimacy’ describes such factors as eye contact, physical proximity and the topic of conversation (argyle & dean, 1965). body language and mimicry are examples of what can contribute to intimacy. both too much and too little intimacy will influence the dialogue, and the participants will adjust their behaviour to reach a balanced form of intimacy (short et al., 1976), e.g. the ability to share content only with appropriate audiences within certain areas of life (ozenc & farnham, 2011). ‘immediacy’ is about the psychological distance between those who communicate (mehrabian & wiener, 1968). the experience of immediacy within communication can be improved through the way of speaking and also through nonverbal signs and signals. there are similarities in the understanding of the two components, intimacy and immediacy. in this article, the components of intimacy and immediacy are regarded as a good starting point to describe and understand the agency of various technologies in the negotiation of mounting social presence in learning. research design this study has a case-based design, where experiences from both students and teachers participating in a master programme in ict-supported learning, utilise various technologies and pedagogical designs in an online educational setting. some parts of the programme are designed as online courses, while others are facilitated for campus presence. additional experiences from this programme are presented in (johannesen & øgrim, 2015. pp. 141-165). the case studied here is taken from systematic experiences from the implementation of one of these courses. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 40 case description the empirical data were gathered in 2013 and 2014 from a course that is completely asynchronous and text basedii and where the language of instruction was english. in this course, the students presented each other with texts from the curriculum, and the presentations formed a starting point for online discussions among the students. to ensure active discussions, every student had to comment on at least two presentations from their peers. follow-up discussions between the participants were conducted in the asynchronous discussion forum in the vle or online communities such as facebook. the course was conducted completely online, and the participants never met physically. in addition, the dialogue in the course was always asynchronous; thus, the participants were never online simultaneously. finally, the language of instruction and dialogue was english, a setting that created an additional challenge for the students that were not necessarily well trained in a foreign language. fronter was initially prepared as the main channel for the communication and dialogue of the course because it is suitable for an asynchronous approach and because the presentations and corresponding discussions threads are easily found by teachers and students. however, the course description allowed for the students, in cooperation with the teachers, to suggest an alternative technology. despite the course being based on the idea of asynchronous dialogues, a first synchronous video lecture was arranged. among the ten students participating in the first cohort, six chose to follow the lecture together in a physical classroom setting on campus. the teachers were not present in the classroom, but were engaged in the video lecture from their respective offices. during the lecture, one of the students created a group on facebook aimed at the participants in the course. the teachers were invited into this group. immediately after the lecture, the students present on campus expressed a wish to replace fronter with facebook as a technology for discussion. the teachers accepted this. however, a few hours later, they reneged on their decision and informed the students both through the official channels of email and fronter and through the facebook group that the original choice of using fronter as the main technology for dialogue should remain. a description of why the teachers accepted the students’ wishes and why the teachers reneged will be described below. data collection and analysis research on learning and education can be characterised in terms of a complex reality that must be understood (fenwick & edwards, 2010). in this case, there is a need to go beyond traditional ethnographic studies in education and look into a hybridity of classrooms, cultures and online communities. when ict enters learning and education, new challenges emerge that cannot be addressed simply by saying it is just another tool (hetland & mørch, this issue). instead, the entanglements need to be unpacked and the relations between the actors understood. the case described here is characterised by actors that are both onsite and online. hine (2015) distinguishes ethnography for, of, in and through the internet. in line with hine, we adopt an ethnography for the internet, i.e. blended (virtual and physical) worlds, focusing on the embedded, embodied and everyday. hence, a triangulated data collection is applied in this study, including group interviews with two teachers and five students from two cohorts, supplemented by analyses of the course-specific online discussions both in the vle and on facebook. we decided to include data from both 2013 and 2014, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 41 as there was an atypical situation in the first year related to the teachers’ indecisive conclusion on the choice of technology. by this, a richer set of data is available, where both students involved in the dispute and those who were not form the basis for the analysis. claiming that all research is ‘performative’ and produces realities, law (2004) argues for methods that can mirror that which is complex and unclear to a greater degree. in a socio-material approach, the researcher will choose to focus by following a given network and investigate effects for the different actors’ matter of concern (latour, 1987). two of the authors of this article are also the educators of the online course in question. how the experimental lessons are transformed into policy and practice by the participatory ethnographers is often unanswered (hetland & mørch, this issue). we recognise our agency in the case, both in terms of the indecisive conclusion regarding the choice of technology, which is the core of the article, and our matter of concerns in this respect. hence, we have separated the analysis to resolve this issue. furthermore, the two teachers interviewed are also two of the authors of this article. to obtain distance from the data, the interviews of the involved teachers were conducted by the third author. the interview unfolded the teachers’ description of the learning situation and pinpointed the negotiation of technology between the teachers and students. based on this interview, the theme of the student interviews was set. all the authors participated in the student interviews. five students from two cohorts were interviewed. they were asked about the general use and selection of technology in the master’s programme and specifically on their use of fronter and facebook, respectively. all the interviews were recorded and transcribed for further analysis. findings the description of the data from the study was organised according to the matter of concern of the two main groups of human actors, namely teachers and students. teachers’ point of view in 2013, the teachers perceived the discussion in the classroom after the lecture as a strong argument from a consistent group of students. the students argued that they wanted to use a technology they were familiar with from their everyday life, that fronter is old fashioned and that they themselves would never have argued if their own students had suggested a technology different from what teachers had decided on. the students present claimed that a unified group of students agreed on using facebook. when the teachers questioned the person-oriented organisation of discussion threads on facebook, the students replied that ‘it will work out with discipline’. they argued that if only the participants agreed on the rules of conversational structures and followed these, it would not be a problem. however, two observations formed the basis for the teachers to revert to the original decision accepting fronter as a discussion arena: first, the structure of facebook is fundamentally person oriented. it is not – as far as the teachers knew – possible to structure discussions by topic. second, not all students were members of that group, and individuals not enrolled as students of the master programme were invited as members. the teachers noticed that they had little control of the technology in use and consequently overturned the decision. the teachers claimed that the verbal immediacy of the teachers, in particular the process of taking notice of and commenting on every single student, can be better on fronter than on facebook, since the discussions on fronter are organised hierarchically by subject. it is, therefore, easier for the teachers to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 42 ensure that the students are participating. accordingly, it is more likely that the students get teachers’ comments on their contributions. in that way, the teachers’ opportunity for social presence is better on fronter than on facebook. in hindsight, the teachers expressed that they had exercised poor judgement in this situation. they should have evaluated the two discussion forums beforehand based on the intention of the course design and should not have accepted the students’ pressure to make a hasty decision. in addition, the teachers had not investigated whether all students agreed to the change in technology before they decided on doing so, something that turned out not to be the case. later in the course period, the teachers experienced that the discussions on fronter, which took place in english, were brief and formal in this course period. the students submitted their mandatory presentations and comments, while more lively discussions took place in the facebook group in the norwegian language. the discussions on fronter were noticeably scarcer and very formal, compared to online discussions in previous years. this was the fact the following year too, when the students again created their own group on facebook. the teachers’ matters of concern were tied to their need for having an overview of the progress of the students. this was mainly about monitoring and knowing when to do interventions in their professional development, e.g. assessing their understanding and use of central concepts, and how they managed to connect their group assignments and cases with the learning goals and literature in the course. the teachers found the formal virtual learning environment, fronter, to support and sustain this matter of concern over time. they found it useful that the discussions are first organised by topic, and then by time. in that way it is straightforward to assess how far and how deep the discussions have been. it is also clear for both teachers and students where to find the task assignments, where to submit the reports, be aware of the deadlines etc. they argued that from an institutional perspective, issues of authentication and authorisation are also important. students’ viewpoint students are supposed to learn different technologies during their studies. in general, the students of the master program use many types of technology, which in most cases are chosen by themselves. in recent times, they have tended to choose facebook, as this is where they are most active, and everyone is familiar with its basic functions. whatever the choice of technology, the students said that they used facebook as a common meeting place outside of their studies. they said that a ‘background conversation’ took place, even though some courses may have required the use of certain technologies such as wikis and etherpad.iii ‘facebook always lies beneath’, one student pointed out, and continued: ‘this does something to the use of the other technologies too’. the students argued that they need a synchronous dialogue that they did not get through technologies such as wikis. ‘on facebook i always receive a response after 5–10 min. i do not have the patience to wait for half a day, which i need to do in a wiki’, one student said. they stated that they have high demands for immediate gratification. because of such a perspective, many other technologies became secondary for them. despite the teachers’ arguments about fronter being well-suited for factual discussions, the students chose facebook as their primary discussion arena. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 43 some students stated that, when posts were presented on fronter, the topic had already been discussed on facebook; only the worked-through results were posted on fronter. the students regarded fronter as mostly formal and experienced the threshold for posting there as high: ‘i must be factual and professional, must show that i am well-informed’, one student opined. the informants all agreed that this was not related to whether the language for discussion was norwegian or english. on the contrary, the english language was seen as valuable in a sense, as one informants claimed: ‘it influences the way we think. we can be liberated from many emotions and be scholars. it becomes in a more formal manner. and facebook becomes something informal on the side’. nevertheless, some students did not want to use facebook as the main technology for the discussions in the course. they regarded their facebook account as private and wished to keep it that way. ‘i don’t want everyone to know that i had a great time at a party yesterday’, one of the informants expressed. the students’ matters of concern were diverse. for the purpose of the discussion in this article, we focus on matters that are related to students’ social need for interaction with peer students, matters of expectations about opportunities to self-organise their group work and matters of how they wanted to integrate the online course with their everyday media practices. the students preferred and insisted on using facebook in the online course. the use of facebook built a sense of intimacy and immediacy in respect to the other students, so the students were aware of the online presence of others, and they got immediate feedback to their online posts from peers. such immediacy included short comments and likes, an informal way to create intimacy and togetherness in the course. supplementary data from the observation of online dialogues the online dialogues studied showed that most students were engaged in the facebook discussions. however, there was a discrepancy in the amount of posts within the groups. during the first cohort, most of the posts were published by one person, and in the second cohort, approximately half of the students were in the most active group. the content of the posts was mostly about organising the time schedule for individual contributions and collaborative work. there were significantly fewer posts aiming at discussing particular topics of the course. yet, the sharing of relevant articles and publications was to be found. when studying posts and discussions published on fronter, these entail only submissions and task-required peer feedback. emotional expressions were more frequently used in the facebook discussions compared to the fronter discussions. ‘likes’ and ‘smilies’ were often used on facebook, while on fronter, such emoticons were only used a couple of times. social presence on fronter vs. facebook – a question of formality and intimacy? in the beginning of this article, we asked three questions related to social presence, the agency of the technology and the conditions for dialogic pedagogy. from the analysis of data, two emerging themes were identified. we will now address the initial questions according to these themes. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 44 a matter of control despite the course being delivered as fully online, some of the students of the 2013 cohort chose to meet physically for the first and only lecture in real time. according to tu and mcisaac (2002), this physical closeness might create intimacy between them, which provided an anchor and a certain group strength when trying to change the teachers’ choice of technology. when the teachers were called to the physical classroom, however, the videoconference was completed, and as a result, the online students were not part of the continuing discussion and were left out of any social attendance. when the students present on campus claimed that the whole group of students stood behind the facebook proposal, they made the impression of excessive psychological immediacy within the group, through the consensus in case. consequently, the student group acted with a strong negotiating power, claiming that there was one unified matter of concern amongst the students, which later appeared not to be true. in addition, the students’ group exposed their strong ties to facebook as a technology for interaction and dialogue. when one student alone created a facebook group, this could be interpreted either as a measure to increase the psychological immediacy within the group or as an attempt to strengthen the control of the course at the expense of the teachers. a protected facebook group for the students could contribute to strengthening the social presence of the students through intimacy and immediacy. at the same time, the teachers lost some of their control and authority by not having the ownership of the facebook group and not being able to decide who could become a member. the fact that people not enrolled in the course were invited into the group impaired the professional foundation and thereby reduced both immediacy and intimacy within the group. this could eventually have negative consequences for the relation between the students and teachers. in this setting, we can see that the students use facebook as a non-human allied in forming an arena for instant social interaction as well as a place for continuing discussion of the dispute. on the other hand, fronter was a non-human allied in designing a system for the control of deliveries and feedback. the engagement shown by some of the students present can be understood as a wish to strengthen the physical immediacy within the student group. the teachers’ decision to stay with the technology chosen initially could also be seen as a rejection of the students’ choice, something that could negatively influence the foundation of social presence necessary for the dialogues in the course. simultaneously, the teachers’ decision could consolidate the student view of the teachers as ‘the common enemy’, something that could have a positive influence on the internal intimacy of the student group and maybe also the social and academic dialogues between the students. the perspectives reported here show an increasing conflict among engaged actors strengthened by emerging social technologies. the interview data revealed that the negotiation of technology was not settled at the beginning of the course. quite to the contrary, the negotiations continued throughout the course period, and in addition to teachers and students, the technologies of fronter and facebook were actors with strong matters of concern. this finding is also present in the analysis of the dialogues on facebook, where the debate continued and hints regarding the dispute were given whenever possible. ‘being on fb’ generally, the language on facebook is informal, and the dialogue is characterised by quick answers and comments on questions and suggestions. several interviewed students expressed that they used facebook very often and that the notion of ‘being on facebook’ had associations of social presence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 45 through an almost physical, and at least psychological, immediacy. formal and professional conversations could often be spiced up with more personal approaches, the students claimed. in that sense, the students’ expectations of the possibilities of social technology make facebook a strong actor in the network. most of the interviewed students expressed that facebook was a common meeting point outside of their studies. facebook discussions may thus strengthen the intimacy part of the relations between the students. as dialogues on facebook can be characterised by short response times, this can manufacture the feeling of physical immediacy. the use of emoticons also contributes to immediacy, and several students said that the threshold to express themselves was lower on facebook than on fronter. nevertheless, there was no common agreement among the interviewed students to utilise facebook as the official technology for the course. some of them experienced facebook as mainly private, creating too much intimacy, something that according to short et al. (1976) can create a lack of balanced intimacy and, thereby, disturb the experience of social presence. hence, the students’ matters of concern are diverse and should be considered. an online course limits the participants from experiencing the body language of the involved others, which can contribute to the understanding of reactions and emotions. this can, to a certain degree, be replaced by so-called emoticons. such emotional expressions can be considered to be replacement phenomena for physical presence, and as such, it is not surprising that the students are more present in the more private and intimate facebook setting than in the more formal and substantive fronter. such findings have support in dysthe (2012, p. 53) who refers to løvlie and habermas’ argumentation for a factual understanding of dialogue, where substantive argumentation takes precedence over an emotionally oriented argumentation. such an understanding has a breakthrough in pedagogy, dysthe claims. this can explain the fact that students did not wish to present unfinished arguments and opinions in the formal discussion forum of the course. conversely, they wished to work through their arguments in an intimate context before these arguments were presented in the formal forum of fronter. concluding remarks based on the analysis of empirical data, this article has identified the relation between social presence and dialogic pedagogy as particularly interesting and discussed how and why matters of concern differ for teachers and students. there are specific effects of the two software systems that we used in the online course. these are associated with social presence, such as intimacy and immediacy, which in turn went well with students’ media practices on facebook and the way facebook met their social needs. the use of facebook was in conflict with other effects associated with teachers’ need for monitoring and control. the students, when using facebook, experienced social presence in an online community to a considerable extent. however, the analyses show that some students dominated, and most students were merely audiences for, the dialogue. facebook dialogues could also have the disadvantage of becoming too intimate, significantly private, informal and unclear. based on this, not all students wished for such technology to be the official technology in their studies. vles as official channels for a discussion forum, however, facilitate a more formal factual learning conversation. the learning language in the current course being english strengthened this. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 46 the discussion on facebook was lively, informal and in the norwegian language. even so, not everyone participated eagerly. as insight into the online dialogues has shown, the discussions were dominated by a few students. maybe the teachers’ rejection worked as a consolidation for the students’ social presence in their own student-driven discussion forum. simultaneously, the dialogue on fronter was in english and nearly absent. fronter worked mostly as a place to formally submit assignments. nevertheless, the formal requirements for everyone to contribute on fronter led to all students being equally visible. no single person dominated, as in the facebook discussions. the agency of facebook cannot be properly explained through the notion of dialogue as presented by dysthe (2012) and flitton and warwick (2013), as these approaches do not discuss technology as an actor that plays a role in pedagogical dialogues. rather, an understanding is needed of the entanglement of technology and dialogic pedagogy and how this in turn creates new forms of online teaching and learning. the case studied in this article points out the necessity of technologies that facilitate informal learning conversations between the students and thereby build social presence. however, the quality and nature of these conversations need to be considered. therefore, it is of interest to further investigate what specific features of technology are more suitable for dialogic pedagogy. it will also be interesting to investigate the relationship between technology, pedagogical design and social presence more closely. more than ten years after norway’s quality reform, there are still great expectations for the potential of technology to offer better-quality education (fossland, ramberg, & gjerdrum, 2013; nou 2014:5). however, studentactive learning is anticipated to be implemented in higher education, while the resources remain the same. it is, therefore, interesting to explore new and effective methods for student-active learning where digitally supported communication and dialogue constitute the backbone. references argyle, m., & dean, j. 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(2012). an empirical assessment of second life vis-à-vis chatroom on media perceptual assessment and actual task performance. ieee transactions on engineering management, 59(3), 379390. doi: 10.1109/tem.2010.2089798 tu, c.-h., & mcisaac, m. (2002). the relationship of social presence and interaction in online classes. the american journal of distance education, 16(3), 131-150. yamada, m., & akahori, k. (2007). social presence in synchronous cmc-based language learning: how does it affect the productive performance and consciousness of learning objectives? computer assisted language learning, 20(1), 37-65. doi: 10.1080/09588220601118503 aaen, j., & dalsgaard, c. (2016). student facebook groups as a third space: between social life and schoolwork. learning, media and technology, 41(1), 160-186. i second life is an internet-based virtual 3d world. ii understood as multimodal texts, including websites, video, sound and images. iii etherpad is a technology for co-writing. http://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979022 facebook as an actor a case of students negotiating their social presence in an online course monica johannesen leikny øgrim ole smørdal abstract introduction theoretical framework social presence research design case description data collection and analysis findings teachers’ point of view students’ viewpoint supplementary data from the observation of online dialogues social presence on fronter vs. facebook – a question of formality and intimacy? a matter of control ‘being on fb’ concluding remarks references microsoft word philipsen constraints in film making processes.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 constraints in film making processes offer an exercise to the imagination a pleading based on experiences from denmark heidi philipsen ph.d., assistant professor university of southern denmark email: heidij@litcul.sdu.dk abstract what does the use of constraints offer filmmakers? a screenwriter from the national film school of denmark suggests: “i love constraints [..]. i think that’s a great relief, because it offers an exercise to your imagination” (philipsen 2005: 211). this article hopes to illuminate methods for fostering creativity based on two case studies from the national film school of denmark and the video clip cup 2007. in scrutinising these studies i intend to describe what seems to best facilitate flow experiences in film making, and i reflect upon what "individual, team, and institutional scaffolding" can offer a creative film making process as educational techniques. i will outline elements essential to getting into the flow of the film process through the help of constraints and collaboration. moreover, i focus on the consequences of authorial action. and finally my findings are applied to the work of two professional danish film makers, lars von trier and jørgen leth. keywords: media, creativity, learning, scaffolding, national film school of denmark introduction i would like filmmakers interested in thinking "outside the box" to recognize that they can benefit from being placed "inside a box." in others words, to work with the help of the didactic tool "scaffolding," which in short is defined as support through constraints applied at different levels (wood, bruner and ross 1976). the scaffolding employed at the national film school of denmark helps the students to cope with the pressure of creating film, find inspiration, and attain a flow experience (csikszentmihaly 1996). both the participants in the video clip cup and the students at the film school describe, according to my research, a so-called "positive stress feeling" or simplification. these feelings help them maintain their focus and in flow during a creative process. i consider this an important component in explaining why constraints can facilitate creativity in the film making process in an efficient manner. concluding the study of both cases, we learn that the film making process is neither (any more) tacit knowledge from instructors or screenwriters who like to be seen as solo players, nor is it something magical or mystical which happens without anyone being able to explain it (the romantic approach). on seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 2 the contrary, modern filmmaking is often a collaborative effort, a common language, and the use of both unavoidable and placed constraints. a production analysis gap i find that production analysis is an overlooked field of film studies. traditionally, film research focuses not on the production, but on the texts. educational theory has been primarily concerned with the processes rather than the results of learning. in media research, at least in a danish context, there is no tradition for focusing primarily on the sender of a film and the production of it. the reason for this gap is probably that media science relies mainly on theories borrowed from literature and linguistic fields, which are dominated by aesthetic and semiotic concerns. yet in the case of network television, more convincing research has been undertaken (for instance helland and sand, 1998, bruun and frandsen, 2007). however, we still find that in production analysis concerning film we can still encounter a lacuna. the books in this field dwell primarily on the subject of the director's spectacular role.1 although some of these publications are interesting, an important question still remains: in what way do constraints and collaboration influence the filmmaking processes? recent research has begun to flush out this lacuna in danish media research (for instance strandvad, 2008, and redvall, 2008). in a european context, work done by the director of research ian w. macdonald focuses on the creative processes among screenwriters.2 so now researchers are beginning to consider filmmaking processes as a possible focal point where notions of negotiation and constraints interact in the development of the film. however, more work still needs to be undertaken on production analysis. in my own work (philipsen 2005) i studied the filmmakers behind the productions and the conditions under which they are trained at the national film school of denmark. i compared our national film school in denmark (located in copenhagen) with the one in norway (located in lillehammer). i researched the underlying organisational structure and the pedagogical methods especially at the danish school, and i investigated which part they played in the so-called "new wave in danish film" (starting in the mid nineties). in this present article, i am primarily concerned with how creativity can be fostered by constraints and collaboration in film production processes are my focal point here as well as in my thesis. i further elaborate on the ways in which one might induce flow experiences. based on my prior research this article discusses why the didactic term "scaffolding" can be regarded a kind of approach used in both the video clip cup and in the educational programs at the film school. through studying "scaffolding" we can enhance our understanding of the ways in which filmmakers realize a more manageable and fun filmmaking process with the use of restrictions. my perspective draws greatly on the research of mihaly csikszentmihalyi. he states that: “it is important [...] to understand better what enjoyment consists of and how creativity can produce it” (csikszentmihalyi 1996: 110). my research to this date has shown that clearer rules for filmmakers often help to make the film process more fun to be in and easier to manage. scaffolding and categories creativity and constraints in my search for new ways to describe the creative filmmaking process, i "appropriate" some terms from the field of educational theory.3 my research has illustrated that the terms "scaffolding" (wood, bruner & ross, 1976) and "the zone of proximal development" (vygotsky, 1935) are extremely useful in explaining, for instance, the didactic methods used at the film school. "scaffolding," in short, means to support a person in the appropriate way in a learning process. while "the zone of proximal development" refers to the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 3 knowledge that a person in a learning process needs to be challenged in a suitable way in order to be motivated and actually strive to learn something new. however, these terms originate with research based on learning processes among children, and i would like to emphasize the need for a theory which can describe the filmmaking process among filmmakers. the authorities on learning theory, wood, bruner, and ross (1976), outline six levels of scaffolding, which they categorize as follows: 1) recruitment, 2) reduction in the degrees of freedom, 3) direction maintenance, 4) marking critical features, 5) frustration control, and 6) demonstration. in my thesis i analyzed these levels or kinds of scaffolding in the light of the film school. later, i also developed this idea to further distinguish the levels of scaffolding. in examining the ways to "scaffold" filmmakers' creativity, it is useful to employ three more inclusive categories of scaffolding: 1) institutional scaffolding, describing when an institution such as the danish film institute or the national film school of denmark, define conditions for film production, 2) team scaffolding, explaining when members of film teams guide each other in film productions, and 3) individual scaffolding, describing when filmmakers define their own rules for a film process and product. after briefly defining creativity, i will seek to locate these categories in my analysis of learning processes in film. as mentioned earlier, creativity is often defined as a talent to be able to think "outside the box."4 i would like to stress that in order to be able to think outside the box, it actually helps to have a metaphorical box (constraints). this perspective on creativity is not a new one; it has been described for instance by the american psychologist, artist, and writer, patricia stokes, who defines creativity this way: “creativity happens when someone does something new that is also useful or generative or influential” (stokes 2006: 2). from this perspective, creativity results from something that resolves a problem for someone in a broad sense (useful). it should also suggest new ways and engender new ideas to compliment the old one (generative). moreover, it should change the ways in which some people think about or deal with this thing. stokes cites cubism as an example of creativity (stokes 2006: 3). however, the way she fosters creativity could be criticized, i would argue, and we should not be constrained by her definition. for this reason i will draw on schön (1983, 2001), and csikzentmihalyi (1990, 1996) in trying to expand the creativity field.5 several different traditions concerning creativity (for instance cognitive, neurological, and psychological traditions) represent various points of view concerning the phenomenon. my own approach is to consider creativity not only as a psychological and individual phenomenon, but also as an organizationally influenced phenomenon. therefore, i am in agreement with csikzentmihalyi. based on his theory, creativity blossoms under the influence of three components: 1) a domain, 2) the experts, and 3) the individual skills. in this formulation a creative person changes a domain into something new or develops a new domain. based on this assumption, creativity is not an innate quality which is impossible to improve or describe: [..] an idea or product that deserves the label “creative” arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person. it is easier to enchance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people to think more creatively. and a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work (csikzentmihalyi, 1996: 1) donald schön, an american authority on urban planning and pedagogy, can be regarded as an exponent of this approach to creativity. from his perspective, creativity is not a sudden and indescribable insight, and often original and useful ideas rise from concepts that are already there, but could be used or combined in different ways. based on these few definitions,6 the concept of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 4 dogma 95 and the outcome of it (films like the party 1998 and the idiots 1999) could be regarded as creative. i would also argue that the way in which scaffolding is used at the national film school of denmark has been excellent; it has fostered so many remarkable film makers that other film education institutions would say: “why didn’t we think of it?” this is yet another element of creativity: originality is one of the hallmarks of creative thinking. if asked to come up with names for a baby, or ways to use a paper clips, or things to do at a party, a creative person is likely to give answers that are different from the answers of the majority. but these answers won’t be bizarre. once people hear them, they are likely to say, “of course! why didn’t i think of it myself?” (csikzentmihalyi, 1996: 369) according to stokes constraints facilitate creativity in an efficient way within a number of different fields. in her research (2006), examples are drawn from the fields of music, architecture, branding etc. one could raise the objection, that these case studies are too far removed from one another – and too briefly described by stokes – to actually illustrate why constraints work. creativity is linked to being original, as csikzentmihalyi stressed above, and this perspective seems more important when reflecting upon the creativity of film makers or musicians than an advertising professional. a stressful position when students are admitted to the national film school of denmark they often feel both privileged and lucky, but, at the same time, they also feel very stressed. only 30 new students are accepted every second year for film education. it is therefore difficult to secure a position and the expectations, especially for those accepted, are enormous. the film school is a highly respected institution established in 1966 by the danish director theodor christensen who defined its educational philosophy. christensen had faith in constraints and founded the school on certain principles, which i dealt with in greater detail in my thesis (philipsen 2005: 32-55). then in the 1970s, students fought authorities and constraints which resulted in a reduction of the role of the leader and more responsibility given to the students themselves. by the mid-1980s, henning camre, along with screenwriter and teacher, mogens rukov, reestablished the principles laid down by christensen in a way. from my research on the film school,7 it became clear that this renaissance for constraints was one of the reasons for the success if danish film in the 1990s. rukov has been a teacher at the film school since 1975, and he has developed the school’s own unique kind of so-called “pen tests” (penneprøver), which can be compared with the dogma rules in dogma 95. lars von trier and thomas vinterberg (both students from the film school) should be considered the ones who have made the dogma rules visible, branded them, and applied them to danish film. however, i have stated, that these rules actually stem from the teaching methods at the film school, which i intend to illustrate in the next section. constraints offer an exercise to your imagination based on my research, the respondents from the film school all agree that working within both unavoidable and placed constraints can be a very useful and inspirational dimension of the filmmaking process.8 during the four years of their course, they normally take eight pen tests. one of the directors in my research explained that initially he found it very frustrating to be forced to work within constraints, such as in the pen tests. he sought to revolutionize stylistic devices, and thereby to create original films. he would become furious if forced to make a scene with a specific theme, within a specific deadline, and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 5 with specific kinds of other conditions concerning the use of camera, actors etc. (this would be a typical example of a pen test). but, in retrospect, he, along with all the other respondents, was grateful that he had learned to work within constraints. they made him feel secure, inspired, and focused; they also made him experiment, because he wished to make his own personal film and not the same kind of film as the other students working under exactly the same conditions. my study of different results from pen tests, confirm this opinion; the films are very different. so in retrospect, the scaffolding these pen tests offer, helps the students mitigate pressure, get started, and create films with a personal signature. as the respondent stated, it would have been much more difficult to make a film without constraints, where he actually had the opportunity to revolutionize his method with experimental stylistic devices. to work with no conditions would have added much anxiety to the process. that is why he argued: director: how lucky i was, not to get an exercise that said: bloody hell, you came to this place, because you wanted to add something new to the film language, then add something new to the film language (philipsen 2005: 211) another respondent, a screenwriter, was quick to appreciate the constraints at the film school. he stressed: screenwriter: i love constraints. i might be a masochist or something. [..] but i just think that then a lot of things you don’t have to decide. if i know, it has to be five pages long, and there are two persons, and the alliance switches between those three, and god knows what.., then it’s fantastic, then [..] some things are decided already, and i think that’s a great relief, because it offers an exercise to your imagination (philipsen 2005: 211) this screenwriter argued that the use of constraints in a writing process actually produces a feeling of relief because he has been partly relieved of the responsibility, which apparently frees up energy enabling him to use his imagination in new ways. both the screenwriter and the director quoted above, along with most of the other respondents, agree that the so-called “natural story” (den naturlige historie) was also a positive outcome of the film programme. in short, the point in using natural stories for creating scenes is that it offers the filmmaker some dramaturgic conditions within which to work. we, as an audience, are aware of the norms inherent to natural stories like: making coffee, going to the toilet, or driving a car. so in watching a character undertake these actions the audience can feel “at home”; they recognise the mechanism of what is happening and they are surprised when the mechanism is interrupted. this is a remarkable dramaturgic “tool” in the filmmaking process because it is an impressive way to capture and then surprise the audience. it is also a significant “tool” for the simple reason that it adds something to the tabula rasa; it gets you started. if some conditions are predefined, then the filmmakers do not have to work everything out from scratch. some of the respondents called the knowledge about the natural story they receive from the film school: “a magic formula,” “a trump card,” or “a gift” (philipsen 2005: 205). they also stated that this kind of knowledge was something that had been very useful for them as filmmakers in the film and television business. teamwork are regarded supportive moreover, the subjects of my research stressed that their studies provided them with a rich social network. as one of the respondents, an editor, stated: “i probably think it was the social network that was the most rewarding. to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 6 meet these people here [at the school] and people from the film business” (philipsen 2005: 187).9 respondents also seemed to agree that the film language, absorbed while at the school, constituted another important outcome of the training. an editor puts it this way: “i find the language we are given at the school of crucial importance” (philipsen 2005: 189). during the programs almost all the pupils from the different courses share lessons and these lessons seem to provide them with the vocabulary essential for understanding and respecting one another as filmmakers. furthermore, they argued that in the film business it is easier to work with alumni from the school than others. one of the producers in my research even characterised the film school “a language school” (philipsen 2005: 207) another case study of the film making process, undertaken by a doctoral student eva novrup redvall, points out that a common language and respect for one another's fields also played an important role in the making of the feature film little soldier (2008). in an article redvall analyses the collaboration between the danish director annette k. olesen and screenwriter kim fupz aakeson and focuses on the way in which reality takes part in the research process (redvall 2008). her study is based on a qualitative case study of their development of an initial idea into a finished feature film. both filmmakers attended the film school; they emphasise the importance of communication, common language, collaboration, and constraints. olesen and aakeson have also created their own set of rules every time that they have made a film together. such rule-making is evident in shaping the characters in minor mishaps (2004), which was inspired by the so called "mike leigh method" (a kind of method acting), and the realism in little soldier (2008), which posed certain constraints and thereby challenges for the filmmakers.10 levels of scaffolding facilitated by the national film school of denmark in the context of my own research, most of the respondents from the film school argued that institution scaffolding (rules ordered by the leader or teachers) and team scaffolding (the use of collaboration) were important to them during their studies. if we consult the six levels of scaffolding from wood, bruner, and ross, we find that respondents described level number 2) reduction in the degrees of freedom, and 3) direction maintenance, as the most helpful. this kind of scaffolding is very often employed in pen tests and natural stories. according to my research, it seems that the clearer the rules are for the students, the more fun and manageable learning the film making process becomes for them. the film school may be described as an exponent of educational techniques based on firm rules. if there were no rules and no scaffolding from the outset of training, students might be placed outside the zone referred to by vygotsky as "the zone of proximal development." consequently there would be little or no possibility of learning. constraints at the film school consist of many kinds of scaffolding at different levels: the team work, the pen tests, the common language, and the natural stories. these help the students to generate a new network, flow experiences, and creative ideas. scaffolding in the video clip cup in denmark several film festivals challenge filmmakers to create films within a strict deadline. the video clip cup at odense film festival is one such opportunity, and this challenge is popular among amateurs because it gives them the opportunity to improve, to experiment, and perhaps to find a way into the film and television business. i will now discuss the way in which scaffolding is employed at the video clip cup.11 every year in august filmmakers can participate in a competition that is a part of the film festival seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 7 in odense. in order to compete, they must adhere to certain rules while producing their film. at the opening of each festival, the annual theme for entries will be announced. in the year 2007, the theme was "it’s noisy." i believe that this theme could be described as a kind of scaffolding no. 2) reduction in degrees of freedom. furthermore, the term "seeing-as" (schön 1983) can be applied to this part of the festival because theme restriction seems to motivate the participants in the video clip cup. schön stresses, that in situations where practitioners must develop something new, they often begin with something well-known. he calls this process "seeing-as" and, based on his research, he concludes: faced with unexpected and puzzling phenomena, the inquires made initial descriptions which guided their further investigations. where do such descriptions come from? they are, at least on some occasions, outcomes of reflections on a perceived similarity, a process which in the previous chapter i called seeing-as (schön 1983: 182) reflections and research on "seeing-as" describe one approach to studying and explaining processes which would otherwise be mystified or belittled with terms such as intuition or a special gift/talent for creativity (schön 1983: 187). moreover, this is supported by my research on the film school, where theme restrictions are considered to be a source of inspirational as well. two days after receiving the theme in the video clip cup, the filmmakers must hand in a short film. the length should be a maximum of four minutes, and everything in the film had to be produced only by the filmmakers. the first day is used for recording the film and the second day is used for editing the film (they are offered technical support if necessary on this day).12 the support can be regarded as another kinds of scaffolding, mainly no. 3) direction of maintenance, and 5) frustration control (wood, bruner and ross, 1976). then the official jury assesses the films. the results are posted on the film festival web site and the winners are rewarded and celebrated at an awards ceremony along with the winners of all the other prizes. the rewards can be either money or a grant to make another short film. the short fiction film distortion (2007) was awarded as no. three at the odense film festival 2007, video clip cup. the film may be viewed here. remember, when watching it, that this entire film is developed, recorded, edited and released within only two days.13 link to distortion: http://seminar.net/files/vol5-1/distortion/ irrespective of whether distortion is a creative film (in terms of being generative, useful, and changing/supplying a domain), i find it too early to make a final judgment. still, the end of the film presents something new to the genre of comedy. this is not a traditional feel-good comedy. furthermore, the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 8 distortion of noise is employed as a kind of sound track expressing both physical and mental noise in this film. feeling motivation and flow competitions like the video clip cup are obviously instructive illustrations of educational techniques in film making that are facilitated by scaffolding. do these kinds of scaffolding also create flow and fun in the film making process, and what do they teach us about the use of constraints in mediated learning processes? i asked ursula lundgren (u) and trine lai (t), the directors of distortion (2007), whether it would be a disappointment to them if they had not managed to make a film within two days. ursula replied: “i just think we felt like that we didn’t have any expectations of ourselves.” when i followed up by asking, whether it mattered what the other film makers in the competition were doing and thinking, she responded: “we simply didn’t have time to think about it.” what i’m trying to locate in my interview is at what level – if any – these participants felt anxiety or pressure in the process of performing and achieving success. when i wanted to know whether they focused on creating a remarkable result, they answered that in retrospect it was important to produce something good. still, they were simply too busy to even think about this aspect because they were engrossed in the actual production of the film. trine (as well as ursala) concluded: “and we were simply so surprised that it ended up like what we had in mind.” based on the study of creativity, carried out by csikszentmihalyi, most creative workers are dedicated to their craft irrespective of the consequences or payoff. they love the process more than they love what it produces and the reason for this is: “because it’s fun” (csikszentmihalyi 1996: 107). this was obviously also at stake for trine and ursula. in my interview, they were concerned with the creative process as a possibility for personal growth and enjoyment rather than the prospect that they might win the competition. when they realized that distortion was awarded third place, they were surprised and seemed grateful. during my interview with the women, i asked them to (try to) reconstruct the film making process, beginning with the night the theme was released. they were eager to answer this question and much of the dialogue proceeded as follows: t: we had agreed in advance that when they told us the theme, we would leave. u: yes. t: [..] we were talking all the time. as soon we came out we started: it’s noisy, it’s noisy, it’s noisy… like that was the theme – we talked about that as we were walking. down the escalator and all along something like came. we started thinking in pictures and, you know, psychic noise. and then we came up with some suggestions about which frames we could use. we didn’t have a story. [..] t: then you said [snaps the fingers] psychological stress, that’s noisy. u: yes… [talking both at once] t: and then you said… u: like something.., because in the car i realised that this thing about transporting yourself sometimes can be really stressful… just to transport yourself from one place to another t: then you said: someone who’s late for work. u: yes. someone who is sitting in the car and .gets stuck in a queue or something. well, like anything really. t: no, but then you said work, and then we said: ah, it’s not that bad to be late for work. and then we stopped at a service station to buy beer and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 9 candy and crisps, and then we drove on to ursula’s house. and then just when i was going to park out there, i said to myself: wedding! u: yes! t: you can’t be late for that! u: no … t: and then we just screamed: yeahhh. and then it was just we had reached our goal. the significant point here is that the women get extremely involved when taking about their brainstorming. they supplement each other and are smiling and gesticulating when recalling the process. one could argue that they (re)experience what csikszentmihalyi describes as flow in a creative process. if practitioners feel a qualitative experience when engrossed in an activity, this is what he defines as getting into flow. this optimal experience is what i have called flow, because many of the respondents described the feeling when things were going well as an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness (csikszentmihalyi 1996: 110) based on my observations in the editing room on the second day, all participants (not only trine and ursula) seemed motivated by this flow feeling while editing. they focused on the display units and immediate decisions instead of surroundings or conflicts. based on my research, i would argue that the video clip cup is an illustration of the way in which constraints (like theme, deadline, one day for recording, one day for editing, and a maximum length of four minutes) can help filmmakers attain a flow feeling. csikszentmihaly points out some elements that were often mentioned by his own respondents when describing an enjoyable experience: there are clear goals every step of the way. [..] there is immediate feedback to one’s actions. [..] distractions are excluded from consciousness. [..] there is no worry of failure. [..] the sense of time becomes distorted. [..] the activity becomes autotelic (csikszentmihalyi 1996: 111-113) these parameters enhanced what ursula and trine also regarded as helpful when they created distortion: clear goals, concentration, and feedback from one another seem to be important conditions in a filmmaker’s learning process. moreover, it is worth noting that in these parameters csikszentmihalyi’s model increases what his respondents described as the feeling of being in flow, i.e. not getting there. i am sure that we all recognize the feeling when in the process of writing an article everything suddenly goes smoothly and the words almost write themselves as if we had transcended time and space. we recognize this feeling irrespective of a crisis in writing. but the question still remains: how did we get there? how did we manage to create the flow feeling? according to my research, many of the feelings that are described in creativity as inherent to a flow experience may also be described as predefined conditions for gaining the flow experience. getting into flow in a filmmaking process is the difficult part because many expectations and much anxiety is associated with filmmakers (or any other kind of artists) because they are expected to make something interesting and possibly even original. learning the best ways to cope with this pressure and complexity through the experiences with scaffolding in a film education or a challenge like the video clip cup, represent two ways to help filmmakers enhance their creativity. one could critically ask, whether, for instance, ursula and trine are actually particularly creative and/or gifted persons, who could have made an interesting film under any conditions. i asked them how they thought it would seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 10 have worked out if some of the predefined constraints had been missing in the video clip cup, such as no predetermined theme. i: would you have made the same film then? t & u: no! t: we simply couldn’t do anything before we got the theme. [..] no, we couldn’t do that at all. u: absolutely not. t: that’s the cool part. that you get a theme, we all get a theme, and it’s the same theme we all get, that’s the fun part. because what.. u: what is each person going to come up with? ursula and trine stressed that without the theme they would have made a completely different film because of the different process. they also emphasize that working within the same restrictions as other filmmakers does not mean they all wind up by producing the same kind of film. they actually put much effort into producing a unique film which, as the respondents from the film school pointed out, is also an important component in creativity. reduction of complexity and stress an interesting sentence, used by ursula during the interview, was that she felt “stress in a good way.” she means that in the production of distortion she experienced positive stress rather than negative stress. in stress research, the same distinction is often made. coaches, like hardy and thomsen (2005), argue that positive stress can be likened to the kind of stress an actor experiences just before going on stage to perform. s/he gets an adrenaline kick which helps his/her brain stay focused. therefore, positive stress is good for one’s mental health and is a physically hormone-based reaction. this might be what ursula and trine experienced in the making of their film. according to psychologists and coaches, negative stress usually occurs in those situations where you feel stressed over a long period of time and gradually become unable to navigate complex situations. as a natural response to this scenario, the brain’s production of stress hormones (like adrenaline) does not cease (hardy and thomsen, 2005: 6, 7). based on this natural response, the body will be impacted in a negative way by the stress hormones and become susceptible to stress-related sickness. in order to avoid such complex and stressful situations, constraints can help manage potential stressors. in accordance with arguments of another stress coach, the american psychologist, barry schwartz, it can be efficient and helpful not only to filmmakers, but for people in general, to adhere to certain rules and accept their choices within the contexts of those rules or constraints. he labels people who are not good at making choices “maximizers,” and calls those people adept at making decisions ”satisficers.” he points out: “we all know people who do their choosing quickly and decisively and people for whom almost every decision is a major project” (schwartz 2005: 79). persons who seek and accept only the best are, based on his research, “maximizers,” and vulnerable to self-induced stress. as a decision strategy, maximizing creates a daunting task, which becomes all the more daunting as the number of options increases. the alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. to satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. [..] i believe that the goal of maximizing is a source of great dissatisfaction, that it can make people miserable – especially in a world that insists on providing an overwhelming number of choices, both trivial and not so trivial (schwartz 2005: 78, 79). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 11 the participants in the video clip cup for the most part can be characterized (by the help of institutional and team scaffolding) as “satisficers.” this position produces the positive stress feeling that helps them stay focused and in flow for two days and then gives them a break. based on my research, one could consider pen tests at the national film school of denmark to be an equivalent phenomenon; this perspective might be one important answer as to why constraints are sometimes able to facilitate creativity in learning processes within filmmaking. the norwegian film school (den norske filmskolen at lillehammer university college), which is in many ways comparable to the national film school of denmark, even though it is younger (founded in 1997),14 provides additional evidence to support this point. in the beginning of the history of the school, some students felt dissatisfied with the firm restrictions placed on them. therefore, the school decided to give them an exercise with no restrictions (but a deadline). “surprisingly”, no students completed their film and the experiment came to a screeching halt in lillehammer (philipsen 2005: 108). sometimes constraints can produce more constraints to sum up, educational techniques in filmmaking carried out by scaffolding like in the video clip cup seem to present filmmakers a set of conditions that make a flow experience occur very fast. moreover, these conditions allow the participants to experience positive stress and fun while they devote their energies to film production. this way they seem to benefit from the institutional scaffolding created by the odense film festival (theme, deadline, maximum length four minutes, one day for recording, one day for editing, and presentation and awards at the ending of the festival). moreover, some of my respondents, like ursula and trine, added their own team scaffolding to the learning process; they agreed that when the theme had been released that they would immediately leave the room (“we had agreed in advance that when they say the theme we would leave”). they intentionally contrived this rule to ensure that they would choose a seat way up front in the editing room (“because then you couldn’t see all the other display units”). the women made the creation of the screenplay a priority and a shooting list to structure the process on day one. indeed they managed to structure this only a few hours after the theme had been released. i find it interesting and instructive to notice that these filmmakers, working within predefined constraints, actually added more constraints to the project than given to them by the institution instead of complaining about the rules they were already obligated to fulfill. the conditions for the video clip cup foster an enjoyable filmmaking process and allow the competitors to think in creative ways within the limits. as ursula points out, the girls agreed to: “just think totally outside the box.” my research suggests that in order to help filmmakers in learning processes to think outside the box and get into flow, they (and their films) can profit from being placed “inside a box,” to work with the help of scaffolding at different levels. this is also what is at stake at the national film school of denmark, where constraints, both unavoidable and placed ones, consist of many kinds of scaffolding at different levels. this present article has not focused on the institutional level.15 however, the leader of the school, poul nesgaard, recognizes that giving both the teachers and students restrictions within which to work and to trust them within the confines of these restrictions. thereby they understand his expectations of him and their responsibilities as students. the film school, i would argue, could be considered an institution that has developed and practiced a certain kind of culture based on a mix on trust and restrictions. the team scaffolding has been very helpful to ursula and trine as well as to my respondents from the film school in their studies. presumably, the women would have been unable to make distortion without each other. moreover, the students at the film school mention the network as significant seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 12 to the outcome of the courses. one could add that the fact that the teams are actually predefined by the teachers at the film school and therefore a significant way of using scaffolding. this can be described as either an institutional scaffolding (the restrictions that the school imposes on the students) or team scaffolding (the members of the teams know: these are the people i have to cooperate with and they each know what role they are to play: the director, the producer, etc.). the third level, individual scaffolding, i defined as the level at which the filmmaker dictates his/her own rules for the film process. here, the use of the “natural story” seems to be important to the filmmakers in my research both at the film school and afterwards. the natural story helps (for instance the screenwriter) to be inspired. it offers him/her a set of rules supportive of inner creativity and personal expression. auteurism revisited based on both my cases, one can conclude that learning processes in filmmaking are neither a form of tacit knowledge from filmmakers and students who like to be considered solo players, nor are they something magical or mystical that happen without anyone being able to explain it. on the contrary, modern filmmaking processes are often based on teamwork, on a common language, and on constraints. as csikzentmihalyi states: “an idea or product that deserves the label “creative” arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person. it is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people to think more creatively” (csikzentmihalyi 1996: 1). the national film school of denmark is a highly instructive and remarkable example of an institution with conditions that facilitate creativity within filmmaking in a successful way. the way they employ scaffolding (for instance in the pen tests) as learning processes, has furthermore inspired professional filmmakers to develop and work within constraints such as dogma 95, one could argue. moreover, the film school has helped initiate a certain team-spirit in the creative film making processes at the school and in the film business. rather than speaking of an phasing out the notion of the auteur, one could think of it as an enhancement of the auteur notion where the film school has sought to train people to work within film teams where everyone leaves a personal imprint on the film (philipsen 2005: 351). this does not necessarily entail downsizing the role of the director. it establishes the role of other filmmakers as co-decision makers, but the director has the final say on the film’s “voice” and/or its atmosphere. the team has to speak with a unified voice without simply taking orders from the director. this yields a film with several signatures produced by a joint effort. presumably, this team spirit has dominated danish film for the last decade, and one could argue that instead of only talking of auteurs, one could also talk of “writeurs,” “editeurs,” etc.16 contemporary film creation can be described as a highly collaborative process that involves many different contributors. research carried out by ian macdonald (2008) deals with the screenwriter’s and the negotiation processes that take place between the screenwriter and the rest of the film production team. instead of focusing on the screenwriter as a lonely genius (a point of view expressed in books on screenwriting for instance by syd fields), macdonald describes the screenwriter’s position as a part of a creative negotiation process within a flexible work group which forms the screenplay and thereby the film in collaboration. similarly, research by redvall (2008) also stresses that we have abandoned the idea of the lonely genius in screenwriting; and, i would add, in the filmmaking processes in general. looking at my own research within this perspective, neither the screenwriter nor the director (nor other participants of the film team) have a monopoly of the film’s idea. this is a collaborative process which is often difficult, but seems to be more manageable, once members of the group have learned to appreciate obstructions and negotiate and communicate, as i would argue, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 13 they do in the courses at the film school. so perhaps the concept of auteurism ought to be revisited. according to macdonald, “collaboration does not deny the auteur.”17 presumably, we are dealing with a kind of auteurism revisited – one based on collaboration and constraints. when filmmakers want to create something original (which is the hallmark of creativity) it seems to be an obstacle if they are working within a free concept like: “create something original and do it alone.” this notion is rather vague and provides no constructive guidance. in order to reduce pressure and to provide negative stress, filmmakers often benefit from the concepts of constraints and collaboration, which help them concentrate on something else than originality and thereby actually create films which are sometimes creative. further perspectives playing with trier although my research is based on learning processes for students and non professional filmmakers, i find that the danish director lars von trier’s work puts my points into perspective and demonstrates that outside institutional scaffolding (like educations) other kinds of scaffolding can also be helpful to make sure that filmmakers continue to improve the art of film production. professionals experience stress and anxiety in their film making processes as well as amateurs, and need strategies to cope with these situations. lars von trier was also as a director at the national film school of denmark (19791983). this does not necessarily mean that he would have been a less successful director without this training. however, there are several interesting parallels between the way in which trier relies on restrictions and the way in which our national film school utilizes them. trier is a true master of inventing new rules for every film he directs, in order to drive his own creative process and to the rest of the crew as well. the idea of making trilogies, the use of the dogma manifest, and the idea of drawing lines on the floor (dogville 2001 and manderlay 2003), are to be considered as rules of filmmaking which have made the film process more fun and contributed to innovative danish films.18 using lines on the floor in films like manderlay and dogville helped actors to concentrate and be creative inside the frames according to swedish actor stallan skarsgaard.19 when actors and filmmakers are fully aware of the conditions within which they are working and consider this to be a game to play or a fun challenge, one could argue that scaffolding is put into professional practice, and that new conditions for filmmaking probably create new original expressions in the films. director jørgen leth and lars von trier in collaboration created the film the five obstructions (2003). in this trier offers leth five obstructions on his way to reinstruct leths own short film from 1967: the perfect human being [det perfekte menneske]. one could regard this reinstruction of a certain film a kind of inspiration with the help from “seeing as” (schön). although the creative process illuminated in the five obstructions obviously was edited for the purpose of the film, it is still instructive to observe and discuss. in an interview leth stresses that: “both lars and i like the idea of a game with rules – and we respect the rules. [..] it is important to understand that our shared assumption is that making films should be fun and exciting, preferably difficult, and never boring” (hjort 2008: 144). in the five obstructions we can see the way in which the two filmmakers inspire and support each other in new ways through scaffolding. the filmmaking process that leth undergoes is both difficult and an eye opener to himself as well as fun and exciting. in this film the creative processes of film making are, as in my own research, described with the aid of rules rather than explained away by “intuition.” leth calls the rules given to him “a gift” from trier. he manage to create remarkable results based on these rules, and in the case where leth is punished by trier with no constraints (obstruction no. 3, the free-style film), he finds it a very painful and stressful position to be in. based on this, leth can seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 14 be regarded a “maximizer” forced into a “satisficer” position (schwartz) by the five helpful obstructions expressed in this film.20 creative results? when students at the national film school of denmark have finished their learning processes at the school, they can choose to produce their own set of rules in their professional filmmaking, as trier, vinterberg and leth have done (individual scaffolding). i find that the study on trier and leth supports my research point on why constraints seem to foster less stressful filmmaking processes: it helps filmmakers to reduce conflict in complex and stressful situations, to gain inspiration and flow, and to stay focused and thereby make a more manageable process. but can it be recognized in the films? do they actually create better films? even though i based this study on the filmmaking processes for award-winning films,21 this question is still difficult and yet to be fully answered.22 in spite of the fact that the five obstructions is not a traditional documentary, it nonetheless won the award for that genre; it is possible to describe it as a creative film which adds something new, generative, and perhaps useful to the domain of documentary. it is therefore, i would argue, an example of a creative film based on a filmmaking process facilitated by scaffolding. not all films made with help from scaffolding should be automatically considered to be creative. still, more systematic research on creativity in filmmaking is required. the better we understand the mechanisms in these processes, the better we can become at facilitating them in ways that might result in greater creativity in future films to come. as a short epilogue i would like to add, that the director from the film school, which i quoted earlier in my article, today is working within a creative crossmediated concept.23 i kept on following some of the respondents from my research on the film school (2001-2004), and asked them if they still use the scaffolding offered to them when educated. i believe this director’s remarks to be an appropriate conclusion for the article: director: now after eight years, i find it harder to pinpoint one thing as being the one thing that i really carry with me in my work as a director. it has become on solid foundation from which i draw instinctively. of course the concept “den naturlige historie” [the natural story] is a key element, but it has become so integrated into my workflow that i don’t need to think about it a specific tool. having said that, i find that the film school really has taught me the joy of using rules or limitations as a creative tool. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 15 references csikszentmihalyi, m. (1996/97). creativity – flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. new york: harper perennial. frandsen, k. & bruun, h. (2007). tv-produktion – nye vilkår. københavn: samfundslitteratur. hansen, j. t. & nielsen, k. (1999). stilladsering: en pædagogisk metafor. københavn: forlaget klim. hardy, p. & thomsen, k. (2005). vind over din stress. københavn: libris. helland, k. & sand, g. (1998). bak tv-nyheterne: produksjon og presentasjon i nrk og tv2. bergen:fagbokforlaget. hjort, m. (2008) (ed.). dekalog – on the five obstructions. london: wallflower. hjort, m. & bondebjerg, i. (2002). instruktørens blik: en interviewbog om danske film. københavn: rosinante. list, h. (2003). kameraet i hovedet: fear x og nicolas winding refn. københavn: people’s press. macdonald, i. m. (2008). “‘it’s not surprising i’m neurotic’: the screenwriter and the screen idea working group”. paper at the seminar: “behind the scenes of cultural production”, 26/9/08, copenhagen: university of copenhagen. philipsen, h. (2005) dansk films nye bølge, afsæt og aftryk fra den danske filmskole [the new wave of danish film – influences and imprints from the national film school of denmark]. odense: syddansk universitet. philipsen, h. (2007) “autenticitetsstrategier i triers trilogier: om at skabe affekt via effekt” in mediekultur nr 42/43. (ed. by u. from & h. philipsen) philipsen, h. (2007); “en rammefast filmskolekultur – om dogmer på den danske filmskole”. k&k 104, 2007, århus: medusa. philipsen, h. & qvortrup, l. (2007) (eds.). moving media studies – remediation revisited. københavn: samfundslitteratur. philipsen, h. (2008) ”en leg med etik og æstetik i de fem benspænd”. k&k, 106, 2008. århus: medusa. redvall, e. n. (2008). virkeligheden som råstof og modstand for fiktionen om research, readings og improvisationer som redskaber for virkeligheds-drevne filmmanuskripter. kosmorama, vinter 08. rukov, m. & christensen, c. (2002) festen og andre skandaler. københavn: lindhardt & ringhof. schwartz, b. (2004). valgfrihedens tyranni. om at overleve i en verden med ubegrænsede muligheder. helsinge: boedal. schwartz, barry (2005); the paradox of choise – how the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction, harpercollins publishers, usa. schön, d. a. (1983). the reflective practitioner. new york: basic books. stokes, p. (2006). creativity from constraints the psychology of breakthrough, london: springer publishing. strandvad, s. m. (2008). inspirations for a new sociology of art: a socio material study of development processes in the danish film industry. ph.d. thesis. copenhagen: copenhagen business school. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 16 vygotsky, l. (1935/1978). “interaction between learning and development”. mind society. cambridge: harvard university press. wood, d., bruner, j. & ross, g. (1976). "the role of tutoring in problem solving". journal of child psychology and psychiatry and allied disciplines, vol. 17. oxford: blackwell publishers. 1 as in kameraet i hovedet: fear x og nicolas winding refn (list 2003) [the camera in the head: fear x and og nicolas winding refn]; or hjort and bondebjerg’s instruktørens blik: en interviewbog om danske film (2002) [the view of the director: a book with interviews on danish film]. 2 ian w. macdonald has not yet published his research on screenwriters, but his paper: “‘it’s not surprising i’m neurotic’: the screenwriter and the screen idea working group”, was performed as a speech at the seminar: “behind the scenes of cultural production”, 26/9/08, university of copenhagen. 3 fields of learning theory and creativity theory do have much in common, but the main difference between them is that creativity is defined by the consistence of something new, generative and useful. 4 this is based on the famous exercise that henry ernest dudeneys created, where the challenge was to connect nine dots with four lines without lifting the pencil. to award the challenge you have to draw outside the frame made by the dots. that’s why creativity it is called "outside the box." 5 there are similarities and differences in their approach to the phenomenon. my approach though, is not to debate creativity definitions, but to be able to describe what best facilitates creativity in filmmaking according to my case studies. 6 more definitions could be mentioned based on research: frank barron (1969), teresa amabile (1988, 1998), or chris bilton (2007). however, i am not concerned with debating the different criteria for creativity or theories on the phenomenon. 7 i have made observations and interviews with teachers and students at the national film school of denmark (in the period 2001-2004). 8 unavoidable constraint could be letting the students work in teams, due to the fact that film making processes are team work and could not be carried out by a single person not in a learning process, nor in real life. however, placed constraints are for instance illustrated in the fact, that the teachers of film school define which students should be in which groups, in stead of making this a choice of their own. both kinds of constraint can be considered helpful based on my research. 9 however, this point of view depends on which course they are enrolled. producers seem very fond of the relations to the business established at the school. in contrast, the rest of the students stress the importance of the social network inside the walls of the school. these inside connections were (for some of the respondents) people with whom they would have preferred to work after completing their studies. 10 aakeson and olesen have worked together on four films: minor mishaps 2002 [små ulykker], in your hands 2004, [forbrydelser], 1:1 2006, and latest litte soldier 2008 [lille soldat] 11 i made observations and interviews during and after the video clip cup 2007. 12 in 2007 they used the program ‘avid xpress pro’ on computers at the university of southern denmark. 13 normally, it would probably take two days to even find a church as a location and a priest who wants to participate in a fiction film. but the women, ursula and trine, told me, that they didn’t even have the time to consider, whether it would be inappropriate to call a priest and ask for this favour. thus, instead of regarding this, a stressful and problematic situation, they called several priests right away, and it didn’t take them long to actually find one who volunteered. 14 the national film school of denmark was founded in 1966. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 5 – issue 1 – 2009 17 15 thus, in my article “en rammefast filmskolekultur – om dogmer på den danske filmskole”, in kultur & klasse 104, 2007, i elaborate on exactly this aspect. 16 research by redvall (2008) illustrates, that the feature film little soldier (2008) was based on a filmmaking process where screenwriter, kim fupz aakeson, played an important part together with the director, annette k. olesen. if one studies the films where aakeson has been a co-decision maker, it is obvious that he definitely added his own signature to the films as a kind of a “writeur.” 17 this is a quote from the speech and paper of ian w. macdonald: “’it’s not surprising i’m neurotic’: the screenwriter and the screen idea working group” performed at the seminar: “behind the scenes of cultural production.” 18 this perspective is elaborated in my thesis (philipsen 2005). 19 interview with skarsgaard offered as extra material along with the dvd dogville. this i elaborate on in philipsen and qvortrup 2007: 69. 20 i elaborate on this perspective in an article on the five obstructions in k&k no. 106, 2008. 21 the films made by my respondents from the film school, were also awarded at different festivals. you can read about this in my thesis (2005), whereas in this article i prefer to keep the respondents and their films anonymous. awards do not validate a film’s creativity, but they give a stamp of quality and provide criteria, or “constraint,” for my own research. although it is of course interesting, to what extent the films are creative, in this article i am not able to focus on all the films which are the results of the processes. 22 this is the case when respondents from the film school presented, and also the five obstructions and the short fiction film distortion (lundgren and lai, 2007). the five obstructions was awarded at: durban international festival 2004: best documentary, guldlok 2004: gold dok of the year, odense film festival 2004: grand prix, zagreb motovun film festival 2004: fipresci jury prize (hjort 2008: xxiii). 23 i elaborate on this creative concept in a chapter for a future publication: designing new mediated learning, communication and innovation, which it is planned to be published in january 2010 by academica. title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 ethnography for investigating the internet per hetland department of education university of oslo email: per.hetland@iped.uio.no anders i. mørch department of education university of oslo email: anders.morch@iped.uio.no abstract several concepts are used to describe ethnographic approaches for investigating the internet; competing concepts include virtual ethnography, netnography, digital ethnography, web-ethnography, online ethnography, and e-ethnography. however, as the field matures, several writers simply call their approach "ethnography" and specify new fields of practice. in this paper, we will explore the content of ethnographic approach for investigating the internet and the direction in which this new field of ethnography is moving, that is, whether it is the study of blended worlds or online worlds. we start by introducing the emerging field sites or fields of practice. then, we describe how participant observation and other data collection techniques are carried out. next, we describe how ethnographic practice is understood within the emerging field. finally, we discuss some possible changes in the ethnographic landscape: unobtrusive methods, the communal-commercial relationship, and team-ethnography. keywords: virtual ethnography, communities online, online communities, internet research introduction ethnographic approaches for the investigation of the internet have moved from an emerging activity to an established practice. this is illustrated by the title of christine hine's two books, virtual ethnography (2000) and ethnography for the internet (2015). based on these two and other related textbooks aimed at higher education, two important directions are identified: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ mailto:per.hetland@iped.uio.no mailto:anders.morch@iped.uio.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 2 ethnography as the study of blended worlds vs. ethnography as the study of online worlds. one of the first researchers to use the term "virtual ethnography" was bruce mason (1996), and it was later picked up and addressed as a research topic by hine (2000, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2015). she understands virtual ethnography as a topic for investigation rather than a location to visit; thus, she aims for ethnography for the internet. this is especially apparent in her latest textbook ethnography for the internet (2015), where she presents an overview of the different challenges ethnographers face when they wish to understand activities that involve the internet. robert kozinets (2010) develops his own version of virtual ethnography, calling it "netnography", for researching online communities and cultures. netnography is an application of virtual ethnography deriving from marketing and consumer research, which is an “interdisciplinary field that is open to the rapid development and adoption of new techniques” (p. 2). finally, boellstorff, nardi, pearce, and taylor (2012) focus on online virtual worlds as the sites for ethnographic research, and they are less concerned with the interplay of online and offline worlds. in hine's (2015) terminology, they are developing the ethnography of the internet. combined, the three books define the collage of the emerging field of virtual ethnography. on the one hand, it is an ethnography that emphasizes blended worlds as the interaction between social worlds offline and online (hine, 2015; horst & miller, 2012; underberg & zorn, 2013); on the other hand, it is a direction that focuses on social life in virtual worlds (boellstorff, nardi, pearce, & taylor, 2012; kozinets, 2010). in between the investigation of blended vs. online worlds, several interdisciplinary fields are active. among them, marketing and consumer research have found virtual ethnography to be surprisingly useful (poynter, 2010), and teaching and learning is an emerging field of virtual ethnography (guribye & wasson, 2002; iloh & tierney, 2014; warburton, 2009). however, this article is not a review of the three aforementioned books; it is a comparative review of the emerging field. a field we found especially relevant when designing the new master programme “communication, design and learning” fostering the collaboration with the master programme “ict supported learning” at oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences. the criteria for comparing books may vary (augedal et al., 2004; christensen et al., 1998). we have organized this article in the following way. we start by introducing the various intellectual and substantive contexts of ethnographic work, i.e., the emerging field sites. then, we describe how participant observation and other data collection techniques are carried out compared to "traditional" ethnography. next, we describe how ethnographic practice is understood within the emerging field. across these three topics, we will compare and contrast different approaches and illustrate them with examples, some from our own research. finally, we discuss some possible changes in the ethnographic landscape. emerging field sites in traditional ethnographic studies, the field sites were often described as a group of households, neighborhoods, local communities, tribes, cultures, and types of societies (barth, 1969; boissevain, 1974; steward, 1955). when information and communication technology (ict) enter these organizational settings, new challenges emerge that cannot be addressed simply by saying it is just another tool. inspired by escobar (1994), hetland (1996) introduced the concept of the "hybrid community," which is composed of elements that originate in different domains with permeable boundaries: the organic, the technical (or techno economic), and the textual (or cultural) (hetland, 1996, p. 6). while human beings and all other living systems certainly have a biological seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 3 basis, they are increasingly connected with technology, and this interaction is always mediated by scientific narratives (or "discourses" of biology, technology, etc.) and by culture in general (escobar, 1994, p. 217). on this premise, escobar suggested that the cyberspace is a unique place to study interactions of humans and technology and thus opens a new territory for ethnographic field work. however, by emphasizing hybridization, we do not intend to prioritize it over non-hybridization (hazan, 2015). consequently, ethnographers should venture into the border zones where hybrids and nonhybrids meet to do more empirical research. in modern society, these border zones are usually a study of a field of practice (czarniawska, 2007). technologies are in themselves brittle but do possess (to a lesser or greater extent) interpretative flexibility. how this is understood by different relevant social groups is worked out in a process of negotiations, interpretations, and enrolment (pinch & bijker, 1984). many scholars treat technology as text (grint & woolgar, 1992) and understand it as text in shifting contexts. for hine (2000, p. 39), the internet "can be seen as textual twice over: as a discursively performed culture and as a cultural artefact, the technology text." however, while the metaphor "technology as text" was central in her first book, in her most recent book, she uses the metaphor of e3 internet, explained as follows: for development of an ethnographic strategy for the internet, it has seemed particularly significant that it is embedded in various contextualizing frameworks, institutions, and devices, that the experience of using it is embodied and hence highly personal and that it is everyday, often treated as an unremarkable and mundane infrastructure rather than something that people talk about in itself unless something significant goes wrong. (hine, 2015, p. 32) consequently, she aims at ethnography for the internet rather than ethnography of the internet. she then asks: what are the field sites for the embedded internet? ethnography for the internet is not bound by a single site, but follows phenomena across multiple sites, tracing networks (physical and online), and identifying social worlds. when attempting to understand online culture, kozinets (2010) takes as a starting point mcluhan and fiore's (1967) famous prediction that the new media would "retribalize" human society into clusters of affiliation. thus, kozinets aims to understand the ethnography of online groups, and his point of departure is that "three decades of research have revealed that online gatherings follow many of the same basic rules as groups that gather in person" (2010, p. 25). the assumptions that online social life might be corrosive to the existing patterns of social life have been contradicted. actually, the opposite may well be true. new media might as well be useful for developing and maintaining "weak ties" (granovetter, 1973). relationship development in an online community is one in which taskoriented and goal-directed knowledge is developed in concert with social relationships and cultural knowledge (kozinets, 2010). kozinets describes a progression of participation in online communities. building on several earlier studies, he suggests several types of online community participation and several types of online community interaction. however, ready-made categories or prototypes might also black box complex social relationships that the ethnographer should try to open. boellstorff et al. (2012) claim that one does not always find precisely bounded geographies or communities in virtual worlds. following marcus (1995), to engage in such ethnographic work one should "follow the people," "follow the metaphor," and "follow the artifact." this turn, from boundaries to networks of people, metaphors, and artefacts has many similarities with hine's (2015) approach. boellstorff et al. (2012) claim that "multi-sited ethnography may thus be useful for capturing a holistic picture of the life of a community or seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 4 activity, and the scope of the field site may itself be emergent" (p. 60). this aim for a holistic picture will in some cases lead the researcher into offline contexts because virtual and physical worlds often intertwine. even if we are not aiming for a "holistic picture," we find the idea of multi-sited ethnography very useful. collaborative technologies may be used to shape hybrid spaces (virtual and physical) with heterogeneous actors and agendas, and collaborative activities may be facilitated by the development of boundary objects and boundary infrastructures (bowker & star, 1999). some years ago, the first author did an evaluation of the university museums' work in digitalizing their collection (hetland & borgen, 2005). during this work, we discovered emergent citizen science activities that were establishing digital databases where professionals and amateurs were collaborating. when the norwegian biodiversity information centre established the artsobservasjoner.no (species observation) in may 2008 in an effort to increase public participation in biodiversity mapping, this became an interesting activity to study. one of the research problems was formulated as follows: what characterizes participation in knowledge production and collaboration in systematic biology and biodiversity in internet-based hybrid spaces? (hetland, 2011a). to pursue this and other questions, we choose to follow: • networks that connected the different digital databases • different academic institutions and their scientists • different management levels from local municipalities to the global biodiversity information facility introduced by the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd) megascience forum working group • different amateurs and their organizations • collaborative activities within this new digital infrastructure our field-study was multi-sited and was described as an actor-network that we explored through document studies, interviews, participation, and observation by building on the rules of method put forward by latour (1987, p. 258). in summary, we followed the controversies, all the transformations that facts and technology underwent, how the controversies were debated and settled, the enrolment of human and non-human resources, the size of the network being built, and how inscriptions were gathered, combined, and tied together. the hybrid community emerged from the new boundary infrastructure, connecting extremely diverse groups of actors. the fieldwork made it very clear that building new boundary infrastructures always implies connecting multiple sites, tracing networks, and identifying emerging social worlds. this field study illustrates the multiplexity of the e3 internet by following actors across multiple sites, tracing networks, and identifying how different social worlds are interconnected. focusing on boundary infrastructures consequently favour studies of blended worlds, since boundary infrastructures serves multiple communities of practice both online and offline. participant observation and other data collection techniques hine's (2015) methodology of ethnography is illustrated in three case studies. the first case study is an auto-ethnographic approach to understanding online/offline connections in online gifting networks. she uses the example to raise some points for reflection, including ethical implications, the recruitment of interviewees, the role of a survey study, and the ethnographer's ethical responsibilities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 5 the second case study is an "insider" study of the emerging field of bioinformatics. she developed the notion of "dance of initiatives" (hine, 2008, p. 187) to describe the ever-shifting array of initiatives that participants face. she uses the case study to raise some points for reflection (2015, pp. 155–156), such as: • what advantages would there be for the ethnographer to have some insider knowledge or status in the field being studied? • what are the dangers of using search engines to access and visualize data? • does it help the ethnographer if he/she can master the material predecessors of the new (online) approach? • should an ethnographer read what is being said about the field in policy documents and public mass media? the third case study explores unobtrusive methods while studying the television series called the antiques roadshow. the term "unobtrusive method" was first coined by webb, campbell, and schwartz in 1966 and describes methods that do not involve direct interaction with the research subjects (webb, campbell, schwartz, & sechrest, 2000). hine studies fan forums, online discussions, amateur videos on youtube and uses the case study to raise additional points for reflection (2015, pp. 178–179), such as to what extent can web searching be treated as a form of fieldwork? how far can an ethnographer interpret observational data without interacting with participants? kozinets' (2010) methodology includes general methods for researching online and the specific method of netnography. in the first chapter, he presents surveys, interviews, journals, focus groups, structural network analysis, and ethnography. when contrasting ethnography with netnography, kozinets highlights the following contrasts: netnography is far less time consuming and resource intensive, and netnography is less obtrusive. kozinets claims that ethnography is based on adaptation or bricolage, while netnography "is participant-observational research based in online fieldwork" (p. 60). kozinets contrasts netnography with virtual ethnography as hine (2000) describes. hine claims that virtual ethnography is necessarily partial and a full description is impossible to achieve. kozinets (2010) claims that "there is no really real ethnography, no de facto perfect ethnography that would satisfy every methodological purist" (p. 62). consequently, the method of netnography might not differ that much from ethnography when it comes to "reality," "authenticity," practicality, and even "adequacy" and "holism" (p. 62). however, there is one important distinction, kozinets claims, between researching online communities and communities online. the former studies some phenomenon directly relating to online communities and online culture itself, while the latter examines social phenomena whose social life extends beyond the internet and online interactions. consequently, research into online communities will have a netnographic focus, whereas netnography plays only a supporting or secondary role when researching communities online. with this distinction, kozinets introduces blended ethnography/netnography with "pure" ethnography on the one hand and netnography for studying computer-mediated fieldwork within online communities on the other. kozinets contrasts netnography with ethnography and identifies the following differences (2010, p. 68): 1. alteration, the nature of interaction is altered 2. anonymity, giving a new sense of identity flexibility 3. accessibility, online social interaction is a unique public-private hybrid 4. archiving, with instant archiving of social communication activities seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 6 these four differences contrast netnography with conventional (face-to-face) ethnography. kozinets defines netnography as an adaptation of "participant-observational ethnographic procedures" and offers a set of guidelines for how to organize the fieldwork from beginning to end, starting with the research focus, the research questions, and finding the research site. the prospective researcher is advised by kozinets to look for online communities that are relevant, active, interactive, substantial, heterogeneous, and data-rich (2010). he outlines how potential forms of learning and doing evolve when time and commitment increase. online data collection and storage involve both the traditional "penand-paper" technique and online data capture. practical advice for how to combine the different techniques in specific research designs is described in kozinets' book, albeit somewhat simplified. boellstorff et al. (2012) discusses five issues for effective participant observation. 1. the researcher must be prepared so that the physical setting for his or her work, the technological issues for optimal entering the field site, or the ethnographic self-including language and technical proficiency needed to not overly burden informants with the ethnographers’ inexperience. at the same time the "newbie" experience "is pivotal for ethnographers, and we should not sidestep the value we gain from watching ourselves go through that process" (p. 74). furthermore, doing fieldwork in a social world, such as, second life (sl), a 3d virtual immersive environment, also includes embodiment as an avatar and similar types of presence, and these embodiments and presences carry with them various social meanings. all these preparations also signal commitment. 2. relationships with informants need to be initiated. the authors recommend that the ethnographer should be upfront from the outset, "explaining in clear language the goals of the research, what we want to do and for how long" (p. 77) and that ethnographers simply should not conduct research on people who do not wish to be studied. 3. participant observation also implies making mistakes. learning from mistakes and breakdowns allows the setting to be described because "if everything runs smoothly, even the very distinction between prescription and what the actor subscribes to is invisible because there is no gap, hence no crisis and no possible description" (akrich & latour, 1992, p. 261). therefore, mistakes, crises, and problems are our most important sources for understanding what is happening, according to boellstorff et al. (2012). 4. take extensive field notes, even if the meaning or significance is not known in advance. audio, video, chat logs, blogs, and screenshots do not substitute for field notes, but they are important additional data. 5. keep data organized. in these five issues, it is also important to have an experimental attitude toward the data, engaging with different forms of self-presentation, testing, and trying out ideas in conversation with informants (boellstorff et al., 2012). whereas boellstorff et al. (2012) emphasize participant observation as the cornerstone of ethnographic methods, they also discuss interviews and other data collection techniques. three specific ways interviewing makes sense for investigating online communities are: 1. interviews, which "provide opportunities to learn about people's elicited narratives and representations of their social world" (2012, pp. 92–93). 2. informants who "can sometimes be eloquent commentators about their cultures" (2012, p. 93). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 7 3. interviews also provide an opportunity for private discussions that can reveal beliefs and opinions difficult to access otherwise (2012, p. 93) and of course biographical data and life history narratives. the importance of privacy also underlines the difference between front-stage, middle-stage, and back-stage settings (goffman, 1959; meyrowitz, 1985). group interviews extend this and may prompt conversations that are not possible with one-to-one interviews. the authors also describe additional data collection techniques, such as chat logs, screenshots, video, and audio. furthermore the authors underline the possibilities for historical and archival data to bring additional information to bear on the analysis of the present situation, including studying the virtual artefacts themselves. offline interviews and quantitative data may be useful in some ethnographic research projects, especially when parts of the community meet offline. the second author has done virtual ethnography in the virtual world second life. sl was used as the educational platform in a teacher preparation program at a research university in the united states. it was incorporated into undergraduate, campus-based courses for role-play simulation in interpersonal problem solving. since the first semester in 2011 when the use of sl was piloted, 716 students used sl in their teacher preparation courses (mørch, hartley, ludlow, caruso, & thomassen, 2014). thirty-four students took part in seven one-hour class sessions, which were held after working hours and divided into interactive lectures of theoretical concepts, individual activities, small group activities in separate rooms, and role-play activities. the students were novice sl users before starting. using 3d virtual immersive environments offers users the feeling of being together in a real setting. everyone interacts during live time, while viewing a visual representation of one another as an avatar. a virtual ethnography approach was employed to collect data on how pre-service teachers engaged with the virtual world, specifically how sl made collaboration and role-play meaningful (caruso, mørch, thomassen, hartley, & ludlow, 2014). before the data collection started the participants were informed that researchers from our university would be observers in the virtual environment, and filled out a consent form to agree it, thus addressing boellstorff et al. (2012) issue 2 (“relationships with informants need to be initiated”) to effective participant observation. data collection techniques were video-recorded observations and interviews. all sessions were observed at a distance in the virtual world and videorecorded with screen capture software. figure 1 is a screen image of the video data showing one group of students collaborating to create a role-play scenario; an observer sits in the background observing the event (in the same virtual room but silently present, taking notes from his own location). during both the group activities and role-play activities, students practiced the interpersonal problem solving skills that are required for educating special education teachers (i.e., conflict resolution and negotiation). afterward, some interviews were conducted with student volunteers and the teacher, using chat and voice (headset), according to the interviewees' preferences. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 8 figure 1: small group collaboration in the virtual world to create a role-play scenario. an observer who sits on the sofa in the background is listening and taking notes. all data was captured on video by screen capture software and later transcribed and analyzed. at the outset, our research design took a mixed-method approach (tashakkori & teddlie, 2010), taking into account multiple sources of data: spoken utterances and chat logs, automated screen capture in mp3 or avi formats, questionnaires, and interviews, all online. questionnaires were sent to the participating students through a web-based survey after the course ended. the quantitative data served as a background to help us zoom in on the qualitative data (online interactions and interviews), which became the focus of the study. in order to collect and manage the qualitative data (spoken utterances, chat logs, and interviews), each session and interview was stored in a separate file. we thematically categorized the data, according to an open coding (datadriven) iterative classification process, partly informed (top-down) by our research questions, which were again informed by our theoretical perspectives of role-playing and interpersonal problem solving. this way of organizing data is consistent with issue 5 in boellstorff et al. (2012) recommendations for effective participant observation. the data was later transcribed in its entirety using linguistic conventions inspired by interaction analysis (jordan & hederson, 1995). interaction analysis was chosen because it is concerned with understanding how conversation works, especially verbal communication (textual or oral), as well as how it interacts with nonverbal communication, such as intonation, gestures, and non-verbal symbols used in chat (smileys, etc.). however, we excluded non-verbal communication from our data, since avatars in sl have limited ability to express non-verbal signals of relevance to our study. this is the big challenge when studying online communities and virtual worlds are not exempt from this. in many ways virtual worlds provide the acid test for spearheading of the development of new technology for application of ethnographic methods to the online social world. ethnographic practice ethics is an important part of ethnography. hine (2015) has integrated her ethical considerations in three case studies taking on board marcus's (1998) warnings that one cannot predict an appropriate ethical stance in advance but must instead adapt to the situations while moving through the field. "ethics becomes a constant reflexive process rather than a prior stance to be laid out seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 9 in advance" (hine, 2015, p. 188). she also highlights some practicalities and challenges in ethnography for the internet. one solution to moving across media and sites may be team ethnography (erickson & stull, 1998). team ethnography allows for a scaling up of ethnographic interest, multiplying the capacities of a single ethnographer, and allowing the team to develop reflexive, embodied understandings of multiple aspects of a phenomena (hine, 2015, pp. 189-190). when doing netnography, "we are conducting a type of outreach during which we have the opportunity to enlighten, to offend, and even to do harm" (kozinets, 2012, p. 136). ethics is an important and complex topic and requires the researcher to handle dilemmas and discrepancies, such as the public vs. private fallacy, informed consent, concerns of privacy and confidentiality, the question of naming, and legal considerations. kozinets (2010, p. 163) presents hine (2000) as a role model who manages to "balance these tensions within the text." corporations are the important actors for kozinets, "creating and maintaining online communities" and belonging in these communities come at a price, i.e., consumers are under surveillance and commercially targeted by marketers. this is exemplified by sl, myspace, and facebook. kozinets asks: "how is online community structured by corporations in ways different from how it is structured by grassroots participants?" (2010, p. 177). boellstorff et al. (2012) identify eight fundamental areas in which ethnographers should consider the ethics of the impacts of their research on informants: "informed consent, mitigation of institutional risk, anonymity, deception, sex and intimacy, compensation, taking leave, and accurate portrayal" (2012, pp. 130–131). when it comes to informed consent, the ethnographer has to handle the risk that private information could be made public, and it is thus important to proceed with consent and informed participation about the ongoing research. furthermore, it is necessary to mitigate institutional risk even if the risk is limited. this also includes the different contracts that govern commercial virtual worlds. ethnographers may also find themselves participating in secret ceremonies, observing illegal or questionable activity, or learning about politically sensitive or even perilous issues (2012, p. 136). upholding the confidentiality and anonymity of participants is thus important, including thinking about internal anonymity and participants' "deductive disclosure." when it comes to sex and intimacy, the principle of care should be the touchstone. sex and intimacy may also be an indicator that the ethnographer is risking going native, a problematic issue in ethnographic methodology. compensation has been a much-debated issue in applied research; however, an ethnographer should be careful with gifts and strong involvement. leaving is also an important issue, as fieldwork is seldom a lifelong endeavor. finally, an accurate portrayal is imperative; one way to leave might be to write in the most accessible manner possible. the norwegian national research ethics committees are now developing norwegian guidelines for ethical internet researchi. one interesting concept here is "contextual integrity," which was developed by nissenbaum (2004). the researcher has a specific responsibility for taking into consideration the context that actors communicate within. procedures for ethical evaluation of research is thus important (elgesem, 2002; livingstone, ólafsson, & staksrud, 2013; staksrud, 2015). one chapter from boellstorff et al. (2012) is a discussion about data analysis, how to move from data to analysis, how to systematize the data, and how to move back-and-forth between data and theory. they also discuss the relationship between emic and etic and that the "unique affordance of ethnographic methods is that they allow us to compare what people do with what they say about what they do" (2012, p. 170). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 10 it is necessary to add one important caveat when it comes to ethics. many ethnographic studies are framed as applied ethnography with the aim of informing policymakers, organizations, and institutions to take action. two traditions are critical ethnography (madison, 2012) and participatory action research (chevalier & buckles, 2013). our own experience with applied ethnography is from the ethnography of social experiments. the ethnography of social experiments has identified a paradox—even if users are paramount for performing the experiments, their contributions are often "black boxed" and not taken into account by designers (hetland, 2011b; pinch, 1993; woolgar, 1991). carroll and rosson (1987) identified two similar paradoxes from the designers viewpoint: that users focus on end products at the expense of prerequisite learning and that users apply prior knowledge even when it does not apply. in the early 1990s, brown (1992) and collins (1992) introduced "design experiments" as a new approach to studying learning phenomena. in spite of this very important turn in the ethnography of social experiments, the user paradox is still unresolved as is how ethnographers take responsibility for their own agency. the crucial question of how the experimental lessons are transformed into policy and practice is often unanswered. this question is important, since if anything like a national schoolyard should exist, it would be littered with experiments that never found resolution and closure. in this respect, it is important to remember that experiments are often transient hybrid communities, and it is important to include the different participants in transformation processes from the experimental phase to policy and practice. rich (1997) argues that utilization "is a process—a series of events which may or may not lead to a specific action by a particular actor at a given point in time" (rich, 1997, p. 17). utilization is therefore viewed as a process rather than an outcome. "use," however, has several connotations as rich outlined as follows (rich, 1997, p. 15). 1. use (information has been received and read) 2. utility (some user's judgment that information could be relevant or of value for some purpose) 3. influence (information has contributed to a decision, an action, or a way of thinking) 4. impact (information was used and it led directly to a decision or to action) these distinctions are of course significant when thinking of utilization as a process rather than an outcome. the experimental activity is therefore best understood as a translation process of building networks. how the responsible ethnographer facilitates durability and extension of those networks is essential for the success or failure of an experiment and the subsequent dissemination process. even if the study is done purely online, the application involve actors both online and offline. consequently design experiments are also trading zones with consequences in real life (h. collins, evans, & gorman, 2010). in summary, applied ethnography involves the ethnographer both in the research process as well as the activities that follow. this also underlines the importance of treating ethics, according to hine (2015), as a constant reflexive process rather than a prior stance to be laid out in advance. ethnography and beyond in this paper, we aimed to map the territory of ethnography for investigating the internet. three books have been our point of departure: boellstorff et al. (2012), hine (2015), and kozinets (2010). table 1 outlines some crucial questions that distinguish two main approaches: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 11 topic blended worlds online worlds field sites how to follow the activities both online and offline? how to follow activities in online communities? methodology how to develop an ethnographic strategy for the e3 internet? how to conduct participant-observational research online? ethnographic practice how to develop an agile and adaptive ethnography? how to develop an ethnographic practice that handles alteration, anonymity, accessibility, and archiving? table 1: comparing ethnography for investigating the internet, blended worlds and online worlds. hine (2015) distinguishes ethnography for, of, in, and through the internet. she is an advocate of ethnography for the internet, i.e., blended (virtual and physical) worlds, focusing on the embedded, embodied, and everyday. this does not imply that we do not find online cultures and communities in her work, but these cultures and communities are seldom constrained by the internet. hine therefore underlines hybridity. both kozinets (2010) and boellstorff et al. (2012) delimit their approach mainly to online worlds. they, too, also recognize that activities happen in offline contexts; however, this is not their major concern. we started out by stating that virtual ethnography is about following phenomena across multiple sites, tracing networks (physical and online), and identifying social worlds. table 1 summarises the two main approaches. however, one may also claim that what distinguishes the two approaches is how far they trace networks. do they follow the networks to the “bitter end” (blended worlds), or do they only follow network builders in the digital environments (online worlds)? if these are the recommendations to be drawn from the two approaches, one may alternatively claim that the two approaches define the endpoints of a continuum. new research will position itself along the continuum primarily based on the research questions one seeks to address and not based on the pre-selection of a specific methodological approach. all the three books try to foresee changes in the ethnographic landscape. hine turns somewhat paradoxically to unobtrusive methods. rogers (2013) made one important attempt. he aims to present an unobtrusive methodological outlook for research on the internet to perform cultural and societal diagnostics. unobtrusive methods raise some important ethical questions; however, it may both be useful in itself and as an important element in triangulation. of course, unobtrusive methods may also be crucial to avoid "survey fatigue" and similar responses. kozinets turns, not surprisingly, to the commercialization processes and the tensions that these "communalcommercial relations" imply. as kozinets underlines, participation in online communities often come at an important price, as the users are surveilled and commercially targeted. this topic is quite likely understudied when it comes to both communities online and online communities. boellstorff et al. (2012) demonstrate through their joint effort that team-ethnography may represent an important development in the future. because the field is often multi-sited, the different sites may require different social science skills. we think that unobtrusive methods, communal-commercial relations, and team ethnography represent important steps for the future of the ethnography of the internet. at the same time, we can expect that a more traditional and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 12 holistic approach to ethnography will be replaced by ethnographic studies of particular topics of interest within emerging fields of practice. acknowledgements we are grateful for the funding from norgesuniversitetet. we are also grateful for colleagues in the research group mediate at the department of education, university of oslo, especially ole smørdal provided constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper, and colleagues at department of teacher education and international studies, oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences for their comments in earlier discussions. finally, we are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments. references akrich, m., & latour, b. 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(1991). configuring the user: the case of usability trials. in j. law (ed.), a sociology of monsters. essays on power, technology and domination (pp. 5799). london: routledge. idownloaded from the web 30.06.2015 https://www.etikkom.no/globalassets/documents/publikasjoner-sompdf/forskningsetiske-retningslinjer-for-forskning-pa-internett.pdf https://www.etikkom.no/globalassets/documents/publikasjoner-som-pdf/forskningsetiske-retningslinjer-for-forskning-pa-internett.pdf https://www.etikkom.no/globalassets/documents/publikasjoner-som-pdf/forskningsetiske-retningslinjer-for-forskning-pa-internett.pdf ethnography for investigating the internet per hetland anders i. mørch abstract introduction emerging field sites participant observation and other data collection techniques ethnographic practice ethnography and beyond acknowledgements references learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4692 ©2022 (antti lähtevänoja, mikko vesisenaho, kati vasalampi, jani holopainen, päivi häkkinen). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review antti lähtevänoja university of helsinki antti.lahtevanoja@helsinki.fi mikko vesisenaho university of helsinki mikko.vesisenaho@jyu.fi kati vasalampi university of jyväskylä kati.vasalampi@jyu.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1249-7566 jani holopainen university of eastern finland jani.holopainen@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1609-8204 päivi häkkinen university of jyväskylä paivi.m.hakkinen@jyu.fi abstract while educational technology has developed to the point that extended reality (xr), including immersive virtual reality (vr), can be used in education, the overall learning outcomes of these technologies are still unknown. this literature review takes a comprehensive look at the field of immersive vr and explores the points at which the learning outcomes of head-mounted display (hmd) vr stand out and how these outcomes https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4692 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:antti.lahtevanoja@helsinki.fi mailto:mikko.vesisenaho@jyu.fi mailto:kati.vasalampi@jyu.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1249-7566 mailto:jani.holopainen@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1609-8204 mailto:paivi.m.hakkinen@jyu.fi learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 compare to those of other technologies and methods. learning outcomes can be either direct learning outcomes (e.g., test results) or indirect learning outcomes which affect learning, such as learning motivation and engagement. the main result of this paper is that while hmd-based vr learning environments may not be superior to other technologies, such as desktop-based vr environments, regarding direct learning outcomes, there is a clear indication of increased learning motivation and engagement. keywords: virtual reality, learning outcomes, learning, learning motivation, learning engagement, head-mounted displays, immersive introduction educational technology has experienced such remarkable development that extended reality (xr) technologies, such as augmented reality (ar), augmented virtuality (av) and virtual reality (vr), can now be used in educational settings. furthermore, the development of affordable head-mounted displays (hmds) allows vr technologies to be used in educational contexts (freina & ott 2015; freina et al., 2016). hmds allow students to become immersed in virtual learning environments (vrles), enabling them to conduct different learning activities in these environments. this study is focused on hmd-vr i.e., a vr-based environment experienced through head-mounted-displays (hmds) and particularly hmd-based vrle i.e., a virtual learning environment experienced through head-mounted-displays.  the primary aim of this literature review is to investigate the effects of vrles in terms of learning outcomes. in other words, what are the direct or indirect learning outcomes of hmd-based vrles? in order to make evidence-based decisions about whether to use vr in education, there is a need for knowledge on the learning outcomes of vrles. it is important to remember that it is possible to undertake learning assignments with vr, which cannot be conducted in real life; however, it is not likely that vrles could be used as a substitute for all conventional assignments (sathe et al., 2017). nevertheless, this makes comparing hmd-vr to other technologies difficult as it is not always possible to conduct the same learning tasks using other technologies. investigating the kinds of direct learning outcomes (e.g., improved knowledge, practical skills) for which hmd-vr would be most effective would be beneficial both for academia and the use of vrles in the field. in addition, it is important to study whether hmd-based vrles have any effect on indirect learning outcomes such as learning motivation and engagement. a higher learning motivation can influence direct learning outcomes in a positive manner (e.g., triarisanti & purnawarman 2019). for example, previous research has shown that high learning motivation and engagement can keep students coming back to learn more (kuo, 2007), facilitate positive emotions in learning situations (vasalampi et al., 2021), and they have a significant positive influence on deep learning (everaert et al., 2017). learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 figure 1 reality continuum reality can be thought of as a continuum (figure 1, based on mann et al., 2018). a continuum starts from the real environment where there are no virtual objects. when computer-generated material is added to the real environment, for example, a 3d model through ar glasses or a mobile phone, the state is called ar (mann, 2018). after ar, the environment changes from real to virtual. in the virtual environment, the first phase is av, which, although based on a virtual environment, has real components, such as tangible objects (neges et al., 2018). an example is a green screen capture of a human being. finally, vr is a fully computer-generated simulation with no real components. it can be defined as a computer-generated artificial environment, which can be interactive (guttentag, 2010). vr can be fully immersive when viewed through hmds or semiimmersive when used through cave systems (vr environment projection) or via two-dimensional screens, such as computers or tablets. immersion leads to presence, an important feature of vr that can be explained as the feeling of ‘being there’ (ijsselsteijn & riva, 2003). according to pollard et al. (2020), immersion and the usage of immersive technology exemplify an ‘enhanced training component’ and can keep learners focused, help them maintain interest and motivate them to invest sufficient time on a task. hmds can fully immerse learners into the virtual environment and allow user involvement (vesisenaho et al., 2019). in addition, the immersion of vr-hmd can trigger emotionally significant learning situations and induce learners’ engagement in learning activities (bosse et al., 2014; hanson & shelton, 2008). this allows learners to be engaged in a deeper cognitive processing of the learning material (huang et al., 2010). however, to make broad and effective use of these technologies in educational institutions or workplace training settings, their effects regarding learning outcomes need to be explored (holopainen et al., 2020; vesisenaho et al., 2019). for example, it is crucial to explore whether hmd-based vrles lead to better learning outcomes over more traditional technologies or learning methods, such as desktop-based vr applications or normal classroom teaching. hmd-vr is also faced with challenges, limiting its adoption to the educational field, in particular; while the hardware is developing, the current equipment still has an entertainment purpose (jensen & kondradsen, 2018). in addition, the development and content production for hmd-vr are also learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 expensive (carretero et al., 2021; jensen & konradsen, 2018). in this study, we focused on hmdbased vr systems, and therefore, only studies involving vr environments with hmd displays were included. this paper will proceed as follows: first, some previous literature reviews on the topic are presented and discussed, followed by the research aims and questions. after that, the research methodology partly applying the categories of earlier study by radianti et al. (2020) is presented. lastly, we present the results of the literature review and discuss the importance of the findings. previous literature reviews some hmd-vr-based literature reviews (e.g., feng et al., 2018; hamilton et al., 2020; jensen & konradsen, 2018; radianti et al., 2020) have been conducted, which have taken a more explorative approach to the previous research by listing the targeted learning outcomes. as stated before, in order to make evidence-based decisions about whether to use vr in education, there is a need for knowledge on the learning outcomes of vrles. some literature reviews have focused on learning outcomes, but in a limited context, e.g., in a certain educational level such as high school. hamilton et al. (2020) conducted a systematic review of quantitative learning outcomes (e.g., test score, completion time, knowledge retention) and experimental design. the primary finding regarding learning outcomes was that around half of the 29 studies examined had a positive effect on learning when hmd-vr was used compared to less immersive methods. they restricted their review to high school, higher education and adult education students and included only studies with comparable hmd-vr groups which underwent other educational methods such as non-immersive technologies (e.g., laptop or desktop pc screen). queiroz et al. (2018) conducted a review of the use of hmdvr-based vrles in the context of primary school/k12 education. noteworthy, they also included 360-degree video-based solutions, which are not regarded as vrles in the present article. they found that the papers under study had three learning outcomes: knowledge-based, abilities-based and skills-based. most of these studies reported an improvement in learning outcomes. in addition, for the abilities-based studies, the vr groups were found to have more task motivation and engagement than the groups using other technologies or methods. jensen and konradsen (2018) conducted a review of the use of hmd-vr in education and training. they identified some key situations where hmd-vr was useful for skills acquisition: cognitive skills related to remembering and understanding spatial and visual information and knowledge, psychomotor skills related to head-movement, and affective skills related to controlling one’s emotional response. outside these situations, hmd-vr had no advantage over other less immersive technologies. feng et al. (2018) conducted a systematic review of vr-based serious games for evacuation training. they included fifteen studies, five of which adopted a pedagogical approach. using these studies, feng et al. investigated key elements regarding the development and learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 implementation of the games and proposed a conceptual framework for integrating and connecting these elements. radianti et al. (2020) conducted a systematic review of immersive vr applications for higher education. they examined the vr technologies, application domains, learning content and design elements of the 38 articles in their analysis. learning outcomes were not their focus in the review, but they identified 18 application domains for vrles and pointed to some unexplored regions of the vrle design, thereby motivating future work in the field. bradley and newbutt (2018) conducted a systematic literature review on the use of hmd-vr with autism. as vr technology can provide authentic, real-world conditions and can be used to train social and life skills in a safe and controlled environment (bradley & newbutt, 2018). this review did not focus on the learning outcomes of hmd-vr. they also found out that not much studies regarding the use of hmd-vr in autism have been conducted. summarising these previous reviews, it can be concluded that overviews of the learning outcomes of vrles have not resulted in increased clarity. it seems that in some situations (jensen & konradsen, 2018) and for some learning outcomes, such as those of a knowledge-based nature (queiroz et al., 2018), hmd-based vrles can be beneficial. however, more data are needed to explore the learning outcomes of hmd-vr-based vrles. moreover, only the review by queiroz et al. (2018) included learning motivation and engagement as learning outcome variables. their review indicated positive effect of hmd-vr-based vrles for motivation and engagement, but more evidence is needed before generalization of the results. in addition, previous literature reviews have had quite strict inclusion criteria regarding the educational levels examined (e.g., only high school). this review aims to present a more comprehensive overview of the field as a whole and explore the points at which the learning outcomes of hmd-vr stands out and how these learning outcomes compare to those of other technologies and teaching methods. in addition, the studies under review are not limited to a specific educational level or even to educational studies in general. the results of this literature review present therefore an overall picture of the effects of vrles across different educational levels and contexts. aims and research questions in this study, the primary aim is to investigate the learning outcomes of vrles, both from the viewpoint of direct learning outcomes (directly measurable outcomes, e.g., test results) and indirect learning outcomes (e.g., learning motivation and engagement, which will indirectly affect learning and cannot easily be measured using traditional preand posttests). in this study, direct learning outcomes are categorised according to different learning goals based on primary learning outcomes (e.g., procedural-practical knowledge or learning a language). learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 this literature review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the field and answer the following primary research question:   1. what research evidence is available regarding the relationship between hmd-based vrles and their learning outcomes? 1.1. what kinds of learning outcomes do hmd-based vrles offer in terms of different learning goals? 1.2. what kinds of outcomes do hmd-based vrles offer in terms of learning motivation and engagement? research methodology in order to answer the research questions, a systematic literature review was conducted. the process was started by following the guidelines for systematic literature reviews (boell & cecez-kecmanovic, 2015; webster & watson, 2002), and the first stage of the present review was to conduct a keyword search. the main keyword search was focused on one database (scopus) to ensure that the search procedure was rigorous, replicable and transparent due to the differences in the search functions and algorithms (morschheuser et al., 2017). in addition, initial searches showed that database-based searches work better than journal searches as studies are published in many fields and journals, not just in the educational field. thus, scopus was chosen as the starting point of the keyword search as it indexes the relevant publication platforms on this field of study (e.g., computers & education, educational technology & society). the main research focus was to find studies conducted using hmds in the context of learning. initial searches revealed that, in some studies, the term ‘training’ was used as a substitute for ‘learning’. therefore, both search terms were included in the search using boolean search operators. in order to include all variants of the search words (e.g., learn, learning, train, training), an asterisk was used. for the term ‘head mounted display’, both the abbreviation ‘hmd’ and the unabbreviated term were included. the final search term with boolean operators was as follows: ‘title-abs-key (virtual reality and (train* or learn*)) and (hmd or head mounted display)’). the search was conducted in october 2021 and resulted in 1,086 hits. no time frame was used in the search process as no literature review on this specific topic had been conducted before. article inclusion and exclusion criteria during the second stage, screening was executed based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, which were as follows: 1) the study needs to be empirical in nature (no software reviews or literature reviews) 2) the study needs to be scientific in nature (at least 10 references)  3) the study needs to be in english  learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 4) studies addressing only the ‘learning curves’ of a specific vr hardware or software are excluded as they do not consider learning outcomes in vr 5) studies that do not include vr with hmd (e.g., contains only ar, mixed reality or 360degree video technologies), are excluded.  6) studies concerning only navigation or spatial learning in vrles are excluded. spatial learning is ‘learning’ in the sense that users learn to navigate better in virtual environments or real-life spaces with the help of vr training. however, as the focus of this literature review were mainly on exact learning outcomes, spatial learning was excluded. following the eligibility screening, the inclusion and exclusion criteria were revisited to assess the coded full texts. finally of 1,086 studies, 37 were selected for further analysis. all articles were coded according to the following information: bibliometric information, research context and participants, methods, research setting and results regarding learning outcomes. the framework presented by radianti et al. (2020) was used to categorise the different learning outcomes. in their literature review, they used four learning content types from previous literature: 1) analytical and problem-solving, 2) communication, collaboration and soft skills, 3) procedural–practical knowledge and 4) declarative knowledge. they also added four more during the coding process: 5) learning a language, 6) behavioural impacts, 7) others and 8) not specified. the categories ‘others’ and ‘not specified’ used by radianti et al. (2020) were removed from this article as one of the inclusion criteria was the requirement of articulated learning outcomes. furthermore, the category ‘behavioural impacts’ was removed from this analysis due to a clear focus on learning outcomes on this article, and the category ‘analytical and problem-solving’ was not found in the articles included on the analysis. the learning goals framework is presented in table 1. table 1 modified framework of learning goals (originally presented in radianti et al., 2020) categories used in this paper description declarative knowledge vr is used to memorise factual knowledge, e.g., learning history procedural–practical knowledge vr is used to assist students with internalising procedures, e.g., driving a car learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 categories used in this paper description communication, collaboration, and soft skills vr is used to improve students’ ability to work in a team or improve their communication skills or soft skills learning a language vr is used to improve foreign language capabilities, e.g., to speak a foreign language once the search process was completed, a table (appendix 1) was constructed from the review studies. the table contained the following information from every study:  1. bibliographic information (author(s) and year of publication) 2. participants (including their education level and/or context and age, if specified on the article)  3. learning goals 4. research setting. each study is categorised under one condition: (1) only vr, (2) vr and other technology and (3) vr and other method. in the ‘only vr’ group, the study only had one hmd-vr group or only hmd-vr groups. in the ‘vr and other technology’ group, the studies included an hmd-vr group or groups and at least one other group which used a different technology, for example, desktop-based vr. in the ‘vr and other method’ group, the studies included a vr group and at least one other group which used a different method for teaching and/or learning. 5. results on learning outcomes. learning outcomes were separated ‘between time points’ and ‘between groups’. if the study measured overall learning outcomes between two time points (e.g., pre-intervention and post-intervention), the result was shown in the ‘between time points’ column. if the study did not measure or report the learning outcome change between time points, the column was marked with n/a. the ‘between groups’ column showed whether there was a significant difference between the groups in terms of learning outcomes. 6. results on learning motivation/engagement. findings this section presents the results of the review and focuses on the learning outcomes of vrles, both in terms of direct and indirect (learning motivation/engagement) learning outcomes. furthermore, the direct learning outcomes were categorised according to different learning goals (declarative knowledge, procedural-practical knowledge, learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 communication, collaboration and soft skills, learning a language) modified based on radianti et al. (2020) (table 1). in addition, studies including the learning motivation and engagement -measures are presented as one category. a summary is presented to conclude the findings of 37 studies included in the review. (table 2). a complete list of the included studies can be found in the appendix 1. table 2 summary from the analysis (n = 37) description number of studies (studies under a theme/total number of studies) studies which compared vr group and another technology/method/control group 31/37 (from total studies) the hmd-vr group yielded better results than the technology/method/control group 7/31 (from studies with hmd-group and technology/method/control group) the technology/method/control group yielded better results than the hmd-vr group 3/31 (from studies with hmd-group and technology/method/control group) studies which only compared vr group(s), a significant change between two time points or groups was found 5/8 (from studies which only compared vr group(s)) studies categorised by different learning goals studies with the goal of declarative knowledge learning 22/37 (from total studies) studies with the goal of procedural–practical knowledge learning 13/37 (from total studies) studies with the goal of language learning 2/37 (from total studies) studies which measured learning motivation and/or engagement. all of them found a statistically significant difference favouring the vr group 8/8 (from studies measuring learning motivation and/or engagement.). learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 learning goals declarative knowledge a total of 22 articles focused on declarative knowledge, where the primary learning goal was to memorise factual knowledge, such as biologyor history-related facts. fifteen of them examined differences between vr methods and other technologies or methods. in five of them, the vr group was found to have statistically significantly higher learning outcomes compared to other groups. freitas et al. (2020) studied learning about computer memory management and allocation techniques within two groups: hmd vr and traditional teaching. the vr group had significantly higher learning outcomes that the traditional teaching group. differences regarding the learning outcomes between the time points were not reported. liu et al. (2020) studied learning about science knowledge on three topics: leverage, animals, and plants. they compared the hmd-vr and traditional teaching groups. the former had significantly higher learning outcomes. differences regarding the learning outcomes between the time points were not reported. lui et al. (2020) compared learning about microbiology among three groups: hmd-vr in a standing position, hmd-vr in a sitting position and a control group (desktop vr). the sitting-position hmd-vr group had significantly higher learning outcomes than the control group and the standing-position hmd-vr group. differences between time points were not reported. ou et al. (2021) compared learning about a taipei tree frog between hmd-vr and desktop-vr groups. there was a significant difference in learning outcomes between time points; in the post-test, learning outcomes were significantly higher in the hmd-vr group. parmar et al. (2016) studied learning about electrical measurement devices between hmd-vr and desktop-vr groups. there was a significant difference in learning outcomes between the time points; in the post-test, learning outcomes were significantly higher in the vr group. seven studies included only a vr group(s), five of which reported a significantly improved learning outcome change between the time points: bhargava et al. (2018) examined the study of metrology-related concepts; chowdhury and quarles (2021) analysed learning about multiple sclerosis; kwon (2019) studied the learning of differences between the moon and earth; rudolph et al. (2020) examined geoscience learning about grand canyon rocks; and teranishi and yamagishi (2018) studied learning about the names and positions of the parts in a pc assembly. in moreno and mayer’s (2004) study about how to design a plant’s roots, stem and leaves to enable survival in five environments, the desktop-vr group had statistically significantly better results than the vr group. differences regarding learning outcomes between time points were not reported. two studies found a significant difference between time points, but not between groups (bertrand, 2017; bhowmick et al., 2018; dengel, 2020). the remaining eight articles did not find statistically significant differences/changes learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 between the groups and/or time points (chen et al., 2019; chowdhury et al., 2019; hadjipanayi & michael-grigoriou, 2021; klingenberg et al., 2020; moesgaard et al., 2015; moreno et al., 2002; stepan et al., 2017; taylor & barnett, 2010). procedural–practical knowledge there was a total of 12 articles in which procedural–practical knowledge (e.g., learning triage skills) was considered the main learning goal, two of which found that the vr group had significantly better learning outcomes than the comparison group (agrawal et al., 2018; gutierrez et al., 2007). agrawal et al. 2018 studied learning about hazard anticipation and mitigation skills in driving between two desktop-vr groups and an hmdvr group. changes between the time points were not reported, but on the post-test, the vr group recorded significantly better results. gutierrez et al. (2007) studied learning about how to conduct a physical exam and found a significant difference between the time points. furthermore, post-test comparisons between the hmd-vr and desktop-vr groups revealed that the vr group had significantly better results. in two studies, the desktop-vr group had statistically significantly better results than the vr group (lai et al., 2021; makransky et al., 2019). lai et al. (2021) studied learning about how to conduct different types of chemical reactions and the making of a galvanic cell, while makransky et al. (2019), examined learning about developing an understanding of mammalian transient protein expression. lai et al. (2021) found a significant difference between the time points, but difference between the time points was not reported in makransky et al. (2019). two studies found a significant difference between time points, but not between groups (jung & ahn, 2018; osti et al., 2020). the remaining six studies found no statistically significant differences/changes between the groups and/or time points, or they were not reported (buttussi & chittaro, 2017; grassini et al., 2020; lerner et al., 2020; nystad, 2006; sportillo et al., 2018; yu et al., 2021). communication, collaboration and soft skills one study (an et al., 2018), which was categorised under communication, collaboration and soft skills, examined the development of cross-cultural competence skills. the authors found no statistically significant between-group differences, and changes between the time points were not reported. learning a language two studies focused on learning a language as a primary learning outcome. ebert et al. (2016) studied the learning of swedish language vocabulary, with the results indicating that while the traditional methods resulted in significantly better memory immediately learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 after the training, the vr group had a statistically significant better record on word retention after a week. nicolaidou et al. (2021) studied the learning of greek words by comparing hmd-vr and mobile application groups. while they found a significant difference in learning outcomes between the time points, no between-group differences were found. learning motivation and engagement in addition, we explored how hmd-vr affected students’ indirect learning outcomes. learning motivation and/or engagement were considered in eight articles (buttusi et. al, 2017; bhowmick et al., 2018; klingenberg et al., 2020; stepan et al., 2017; lerner et al., 2020; liu et al., 2020; nicolaidou et al., 2020; taylor & barnett, 2010). taylor and barnett (2010) studied the learning of procedural tasks concerning military movements and found that the control group experienced significantly less engagement and interests/enjoyment than the hmd-vr and desktop-vr groups. there was no difference between the hmd-vr and desktop-vr groups in learning outcomes concerning training retention. stepan et al. (2017) studied the learning of clinical anatomy among university students. compared to the textbook group, learning in the hmd-vr group was significantly more engaging, enjoyable, useful and motivating. there was no difference between the groups in terms of learning outcomes regarding clinical anatomy knowledge. engagement was measured in buttusi et al. (2017), where knowledge about flight safety was studied among three groups: highand low-fidelity hmd-vr and desktop-vr groups. the high-fidelity group reported significantly higher engagement than the desktop-vr group, but there was no statistically significant difference between the high-fidelity and low-fidelity hmd-vr groups. there were no significant differences between the groups in knowledge acquisition about flight safety. bhowmick et al. (2018) studied engagement relating to the learning of the midwifery process. the hmd-vr group reported significantly more engagement than the 2d-video group, but there were no significant differences between the groups in learning outcomes. klingenberg et al. (2020) studied the effects of teaching as a generative learning strategy in biochemistry using the desktop and immersive vr. regarding intrinsic motivation, there was no significant difference between the groups after one intervention, but when the students experienced both conditions, there was a statistically significant difference that favoured immersive vr. lerner et al. (2021) studied emergency simulation training in hmd-vr and found that the vr training significantly increased the intrinsic motivation of the participants. liu et al. (2020) studied the effects of an hmd-vr-based classroom in the context of science lessons. their results showed that students who took the science lessons using hmd-vr had better behavioural, cognitive, emotional and social engagement compared to the group which took traditional teaching lessons. however, it is worth noting that as the primary focus of this literature review was direct learning outcomes in vr, only studies using some kind of measurement for direct learning outcomes were included. therefore, we suggest that future research further investigate the learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 indirect components of learning (learning motivation and engagement) outcomes. summary in summary, seven of the 31 studies comparing a vr group and another technology/method/control group included significant differences/changes that favoured the hmd-vr group (agrawal et al., 2018; freitas et al., 2020; gutierrez et al., 2007; liu et al., 2020; lui et al., 2020; ou et al., 2021; parmar et al., 2016). in three studies, the technology/method/control group yielded better results than the hmd-vr group (lai et al. 2021; makransky et al., 2019; moreno & mayer, 2004). the remaining studies found no statistically significant between-group differences (see also table 2).  for the studies comprising only a vr group(s), five of them recorded a significantly improved change in learning outcomes between the two time points or between groups (bhargava et al., 2018; chowdhury & quarles, 2021; kwon, 2019; rudolph et al., 2020; teranishi & yamagishi, 2018). regarding the learning goals, the declarative knowledge goal recorded the biggest group (22 studies), followed by procedural–practical knowledge (12 studies), learning a language (2 studies) and communication, collaboration and soft skills (1 study). between the different learning goals, there were no clear differences in the number of studies with significant differences between the groups or time points. furthermore, all eight studies measuring learning motivation and/or engagement had a statistically significant difference that favoured the vr group. one anomaly was removed from the summarised figures. in ebert et al. (2016), the immediate post-test scores revealed that the traditional method was significantly better, but the vr group scored significantly higher on the retention test. this suggests a significant difference favouring both the hmd-vr and traditional methods groups. based on these results, it seems that hmd-vr provides generally higher engagement and motivation, though not necessarily higher learning outcomes (e.g., knowledge acquisition). however, more research is needed to have more reliable results. here, the differences were not always statistically significant.  discussion the main goal of this systematic literature review was to explore the evidence in previous research regarding learning outcomes in the context of hmd-vr use in all subject areas and educational levels. the purpose was to fill the gap from previous literature reviews on the topic. a total of 37 studies were analysed. from the general trend of the results, we can conclude that there were no notable differences between the technologies (hmd-vr, desktop vr, cave)—only 23% of the studies comparing vr to another technology/method/control condition had better learning outcomes than the comparison group. this suggests that the exclusive use of hmd-vr does not generally yield better learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 outcomes. however, the results regarding learning motivation and engagement suggest that hmd-vr brings more engagement and motivation to the learning process, likely influencing learning outcomes in the long run. regarding the learning goals, there were no clear differences in the number of studies recording a significant difference between the groups or time points. in other words, no specific learning goal was found to be more suitable for hmd-vr than another method. furthermore, more longitudinal research is needed to determine learning outcomes in the long term. longitudinal research could also help reduce one very important limitation, that, is the motivation caused by the vr technology itself, not the content of the hmd-vr. in total, 26 of the studies were published in journals, while the remaining 11 studies were published in conference proceedings. in addition, as the time scope of the studies was so wide, we could not tell whether the improved learning outcomes from vr use were caused by the superiority of vr or improvements in the vr technology over the years – most studies concluding that hmd-vr yields better outcomes than comparison groups are published in recent years (agrawal et al., 2018; freitas et al., 2020; gutierrez et al., 2007; liu et al., 2020; lui et al., 2020; ou et al., 2021; parmar et al., 2016). one implication is that as the vr technology is further developed, we may see corresponding improvements in learning outcomes. therefore, it would be beneficial to reproduce this literature review in the future to ascertain whether the trend regarding the evidence has changed. based on the publication years of the studies, we can see that there will be a growing number of studies on this topic, including in the context of 2021.  future research avenues include the wider pedagogical framework within the use of vrles as a part of the learning path. for example, when and how vrles should be used in the learning path to support learning? furthermore, it is important to investigate the purpose of vrles and how they could be integrated with other learning methods and technologies (lähtevänoja et al., 2020). it would also be fruitful to do a deeper dive into the different learning goals of hmd-vr. in this study, no differences regarding learning outcomes were found between the different learning goals. it might also be important for future research to consider the pedagogical design of vrles. based on the results of this literature review, it seems that using only the hmd-vr technology does not yield better learning outcomes. perhaps a different pedagogical design/approach to vrles should be considered. future research should, therefore, study the right pedagogical design for each technology. direct and indirect learning outcomes the main finding of this research is that while hmd-based vrles may not be superior to other technologies (such as desktop vr) regarding direct learning outcomes, a clear indication towards improved indirect learning outcomes (learning motivation, learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 engagement) was detected. based on the results of this literature review, it seems that hmd-vr-based vrles are more supportive of learning motivation and engagement than more traditional desktop-vr-based learning environments. this result is in line with a previous literature review on the topic (queiroz et al., 2018), which also found that vr groups have more task motivation and engagement than groups deploying other technologies or methods. limitations it is important to take the exclusion criteria of this literature review into consideration when making comparisons with other literature reviews. for example, the strict definition of hmd-vr used in this article implies that all studies using 360-degree videos and no computer-generated graphics were excluded. in addition, the search terms may have excluded some studies on learning motivation and engagement as they were not usually labelled as ‘learning outcomes’ in the articles. therefore, future research should conduct a literature review based only on learning motivation and engagement in vrles. in addition, it needs to be noted that studies that did not have a clear educational focus were still included as long as they had proper learning outcomes. these studies included papers that primarily examined the usability and feasibility of a certain vrle; however, they still provided a subject matter to be taught to the participants and looked at learning outcome measures in order to investigate the possible learning effects of the environment. in these studies, the primary focus was not on learning. acknowledgements this study has been partly conducted by the funding of university of jyväskylä, department of teacher education. references an, b., matteo, f., epstein, m., & brown, d. 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(2010, september). training effectiveness of wearable and desktop simulator interfaces. in proceedings of the human factors and ergonomics society annual meeting, 54(27), 2267–2271. sage.  https://doi.org/10.1177/154193121005402710 teranishi, s., & yamagishi, y. (2018). educational effects of a virtual reality simulation system for constructing self-built pcs. journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia, 27(3), 411–423.  triarisanti, r., & purnawarman, p. (2019). the influence of interest and motivation on college students’language and art appreciation learning outcomes. international journal of education, 11(2), 130-135. https://doi.org/10.17509/ije.v11i2.14745 vasalampi, k., muotka, j., malmberg, l. e., aunola, k., & lerkkanen, m. k. (2021). intra‐ individual dynamics of lesson‐specific engagement: lagged and cross‐lagged effects from one lesson to the next. british journal of educational psychology, 91(3), 9971014. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12404 vesisenaho, m, juntunen, m., häkkinen, p, pöysä-tarhonen, j., miakush, i., fagerlund, j. & parviainen, t. (2019). virtual reality in education: focus on the role of emotions and physiological reactivity. journal of virtual worlds research, 12(1), 1– 15. https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v12i1.7329 webster, j., & watson, r. t. (2002). analyzing the past to prepare for the future: writing a literature review. mis quarterly, 26(2), xiii–xxiii. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132319 yu, m., yang, m., ku, b., & mann, j. s. (2021). effects of virtual reality simulation program regarding high-risk neonatal infection control on nursing students. asian nursing research, 15(3), 189-196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anr.2021.03.002 https://doi.org/10.1177/154193121005402710 https://doi.org/10.17509/ije.v11i2.14745 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12404 https://doi.org/10.4101/jvwr.v12i1.7329 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132319 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anr.2021.03.002 learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 23 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 appendix appendix 1 studies included in the analysis author(s) and year  participants (education level/context, age)  learning goals method research setting in addition to vr results between time points between groups learning motivation/engagement agrawal et al. (2018)  36 participants: young drivers, 18–25 years  procedural–practical knowledge. learning young drivers’ latent hazard anticipation and mitiga tion skills related to driving with vr  post-test driving simulator assessment. in-game data other technology n/a vr group had significantly higher results  an et al. (2018)  11 reserve officer students and 10 nonmilitary affiliated personnel, mean age 20.58  communication, collaboration, soft skills. teaching cross cultural competence pre-and posttest, situational judgement test, observation other technology n/a no significant difference between the groups (vr performed worse), males outperformed females  bertrand (2017)  41 participants: students from computing and engineering classes, 18–38 years  declarative knowledge. learning how to operate metrology instruments preand posttest cognition questionnaires other technology significant difference between time points no significant differences in learning outcomes between groups  bhargava et al. (2018)  65 participants: students from computing and engineering classes, 18–38 years  declarative knowledge. learning metrologyrelated concepts, e.g. how to take a measurement preand posttest cognition questionnaires only vr significant difference between time points different levels of interaction fidelity did not have significant effect on learning outcomes  bhowmick et al. (2018)  57 participants, 27–51 years  declarative knowledge. learning midwifery process regarding childbirth preand posttest cognition questionnaires administered orally other technology significant difference between time points no significant differences on learning outcomes between groups  hmd vr caused significantly more engagement than the 2dvideo group. learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 24 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 author(s) and year  participants (education level/context, age)  learning goals method research setting in addition to vr results between time points between groups learning motivation/engagement buttussi & chittaro (2017)  96 participants: volunteers, mean age 18.36  procedural–practical knowledge. learning flight safety procedures pre-, postand retention knowledge test administered orally other technology significant difference between time points no significant differences in learning outcomes between groups  high-fidelity hmd vr had higher engagement than the desktop vr chen et al. (2019) 20 participants, years 21–27 declarative knowledge. learning history and meteorology with notetaking feature post-test questionnaire other method no significant difference between time points no significant differences in learning outcomes between groups  chowdhury et al. (2019) 71 participants: undergraduate students, median age 20.3 years declarative knowledge. learning about multiple sclerosis post-test knowledge multi-choice test other technology n/a no significant differences in learning outcomes between groups (vr performed better) chowdhury & quarles (2021) 40 participants: undergraduate students, median age 23.6 years declarative knowledge. learning about multiple sclerosis post-test knowledge multi-choice test only vr n/a significant differences in learning outcomes between groups dengel (2020) 78 participants: 13–16 years declarative knowledge. learning about the components of a computer, asymmetric encryption/decryption and finite state machines preand posttest questionnaire other technology significant difference between time points no significant differences in learning outcomes between groups  learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 25 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 author(s) and year  participants (education level/context, age)  learning goals method research setting in addition to vr results between time points between groups learning motivation/engagement ebert et al. (2016)  19 participants: student volunteers  learning a language. learning 10 swedish language words prepostand retention language test (writing, pronunciation) other method n/a on the immediate posttest scores, the traditional method was significantly better. on the later post-test (one week later) scores, there was no significant differences between the groups. on the retention test, vr scored significantly higher freitas et al. (2020) 80 participants: 16–53 years declarative knowledge. learning computer memory management and allocation techniques pre-test (baseline test only) and posttest knowledge test other method n/a vr group had significantly higher learning outcomes compared to the traditional teaching group gutierrez et al. (2007)  25 participants: firstyear medical students  procedural–practical knowledge. learning how to conduct a physical exam preand posttest knowledge test other technology significant difference between time points vr group had significantly higher learning outcomes grassini et al. (2020) 29 participants: university students procedural–practical knowledge. learning how to build a small airplane model performance metrics: product quality, errors made during assembly, speed of assembly other technology n/a no significant difference between the groups on performance metrics hadjipanayi & michaelgrigoriou (2021) 30 participants: over 18 years declarative knowledge. learning about mdd symptoms preand posttest knowledge test only vr no significant difference between time points no significant difference between groups learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 26 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 author(s) and year  participants (education level/context, age)  learning goals method research setting in addition to vr results between time points between groups learning motivation/engagement jung & ahn (2018)  64 participants: students in maritime safety training institute, 23–35 years  procedural–practical knowledge. learning how to launch a lifeboat from a boat preand posttest questionnaire, observation (describing the process) other technology and other method significant difference between time points no significant difference between groups klingenberg et al. (2020) 89 participants: university students, 19– 36 years declarative knowledge. learning about the electron transport chain post-test transfer and retention test other technology n/a no significant difference between groups  no difference between groups on intrinsic motivation in post-test 1, but in post-test 2, there was a significant difference favouring the vr group kwon (2019)  42 participants: 11 years  declarative knowledge. learning the differences between moon and earth survey only vr n/a hmd vr with freedom to walk and hand tracker performed significantly higher  lai et al. (2021) 66 participants: 9th graders (high school) procedural–practical knowledge. learning to do different types of chemical reactions and making a galvanic cell preand posttest knowledge test other technology significant difference between time points desktop vr group had significantly higher learning outcomes lerner et al. (2020) 18 participants: active emergency physicians procedural–practical knowledge. learning how to conduct an emergency scenario, including assessment and procedures preand posttest knowledge test only vr no significant change in knowledge between preand post-test no significant change in knowledge between preand post-test intrinsic motivation increased significantly between preand post-test liu et al. (2020) 90 participants: sixthgrade students, mean age 11 years declarative knowledge. learning science knowledge (leverage, animals, plants) preand posttest knowledge test other method n/a hmd vr group had significantly higher learning outcomes hmd vr group had significantly better engagement than traditional teaching method lui et al. (2020) 234 participants: university students declarative knowledge. learning microbiology (complex gene regulation system) pre and posttest knowledge test other technology n/a hmd vr had significantly higher learning outcomes learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 27 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 author(s) and year  participants (education level/context, age)  learning goals method research setting in addition to vr results between time points between groups learning motivation/engagement makransky et al. (2019)  52 participants: university students, 19– 42 years  procedural–practical knowledge. learning to develop an understanding of mammalian transient protein expression post-test knowledge test, mobile sensing (eeg) other technology n/a desktop vr had significantly higher learning outcomes moesgaard et al. (2015)  40 participants: 19–31 years  declarative knowledge. learning what happened in mosede fort, denmark, during world war i post-test knowledge test only vr n/a no significant differences between groups  moreno et al. (2002)  experiment 1: 89 participants: college students experiment 2: 75 participants: college students declarative knowledge exp1: learning concepts about plants exp2: learning how to design a plant post-test memory test and problemsolving test both experiments: other technology n/a no significant differences between groups  moreno & mayer (2004)  48 participants: college students, mean age 19.54  declarative knowledge. learning how to design plant roots, stem and leaves in order to survive in five different environments post-test memory test and problemsolving test other technology n/a desktop vr had significantly higher results on some learning outcomes (retention, not transfer)  nicolaidou et al. (2021) 40 participants: undergraduate students learning a language. learning greek words preand posttest vocabulary test other technology significant difference between time points no significant differences between groups  no significant differences between groups on engagement osti et al. (2020) 20 participants: university students procedural–practical knowledge. learning wooden wall construction pre-test (baseline), realworld wall construction test other technology significant difference between time points no statistically significant difference between groups learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 28 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 author(s) and year  participants (education level/context, age)  learning goals method research setting in addition to vr results between time points between groups learning motivation/engagement ou et al. (2021) 80 university students declarative knowledge. learning about the taipei tree frog preand posttest multichoice achievement test other technology significant difference between time points. learning outcomes were significantly higher for the vr group parmar et al. (2016)  24 participants: college students, 19–30 years  declarative knowledge. learning about electrical measurement instruments preand posttest cognition questionnaire, real-world skill test other technology significant difference between time points learning outcomes were significantly higher for the vr group rudolph et al. (2020) 30 participants: 19–51 years declarative knowledge. learning geoscience— the rocks in the grand canyon preand posttest knowledge test only vr significant difference between time points significant difference in high-fidelity and medium fidelity groups but not in low-fidelity group sebok & nystad (2006)  24 participants: employees of a reactor project, 25–61 years  procedural–practical knowledge. learning industrial training skills related to nuclear reactors post-test knowledge test, observation other technology no significant difference between time points no significant differences between groups  sportillo et al. (2018)  60 participants: volunteers with driver’s license, 22–71 years  procedural–practical knowledge. learning driving with automated cars in different situations: manual mode, automated mode, and take-over request post-test driving simulator test drive (in-game data) other technology n/a no significant differences between groups  stepan et al. (2017)  66 participants: university medical students  declarative knowledge. learning brain anatomy preand posttest cognition questionnaire other method no significant difference between time points no significant changes in learning outcomes  hmd vr group had significantly higher engagement and motivation levels taylor & barnett (2010)  98 participants: university students, mean age 18.9 years  declarative knowledge. learning tactical movement, selecting fighting positions in an urban environment and the use of hand grenades post-test video test (choose the correct option) other technology n/a no significant difference  hmd vr had higher engagement and interests/enjoyment than other groups learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 29 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 author(s) and year  participants (education level/context, age)  learning goals method research setting in addition to vr results between time points between groups learning motivation/engagement teranishi & yamagishi (2018)  6 participants: university students  declarative knowledge. learning pc assembly: names and correct positions of the parts preand posttest knowledge questionnaires only vr significant change in learning outcomes regarding the positions of the parts but not in terms of the names of the parts significant change in learning outcomes regarding the positions of the parts but not in terms of the names of the parts yu et al. (2021) 25 participants: nursing students procedural-practical knowledge. learning basic nursing situations (e.g., feeding management) pre-and posttest knowledge questionnaire other method n/a no significant changes between groups learning outcomes and learning motivation in hmd-vr: a literature review abstract introduction previous literature reviews aims and research questions research methodology article inclusion and exclusion criteria findings learning goals declarative knowledge procedural–practical knowledge communication, collaboration and soft skills learning a language learning motivation and engagement summary discussion direct and indirect learning outcomes limitations acknowledgements references appendix title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 using mobile tools to support meaningful workbased learning in vocational education hanna vuojärvi faculty of education/centre for media pedagogy university of lapland, rovaniemi, finland email: hanna.vuojarvi@ulapland.fi miikka eriksson school of applied educational science and teacher education university of eastern finland email: miikka.eriksson@uef.fi abstract this case study focused on meaningful work-based learning (wbl) and the pedagogical use of mobile information and communication technologies (icts) in vocational tourism education. the aim was to reveal how teaching/tutoring and learning are realized and how the use of smartphones supports the realization of meaningful learning characteristics during wbl periods in highly versatile environments. within a design-based research framework, the data was collected through learning journals written by students and qualitative interviews. the results of thematic analysis were used to develop a practice-oriented pedagogical model for meaningful wbl. the model visualizes the roles of students, teachers, and companies involved in wbl, the meaningful learning characteristics that can be amplified through the use of mobile icts, and the outcomes for each stakeholder. the model suggests structuring wbl through four negotiations involving a student, a teacher, and a company to assure that each student has clearly formulated learning goals and possibilities to pursue those goals regardless of the mobility of their work or facilities during their wbl period. keywords: work-based learning, mobile learning, pedagogical models, design-based research, vocational education introduction lately, vocational education and training (vet) in finland has strived to strengthen student centeredness and connections with working life, enhancing the role of work-based learning (wbl) (finnish national board of education, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 125 2016). within the legislative structures, vocational institutions are free to determine the practicalities of the education they provide. the vocational college of eastern lapland (vcel) conducted a decentralization experiment where the tourism education program was physically moved from the main campus to a ski resort about 40 km away from the main institution, which fits well the 120 ects-wide educational program. it provides future tourism professionals with an authentic learning environment and tightens their collaboration with local tourism companies. living at the ski resort every day allows students to participate in organizing local events, strengthen their understanding of local tourism business, and begin building professional networks. pedagogically, the focus of the developmental work was on wbl periods that are an inseparable part of vet and cover at least 30 ects of educational programmes. school-based learning cannot substitute for the experiences students gain through learning while working full-time at a company for a few weeks at a time; becoming a professional requires learning how to learn at, for, and through work (evans, 2011). during wbl, work-related contents studied at school are used in a practical setting. the college needed a pedagogical model that would support the organization of the wbl periods, enhance the meaningfulness of wbl, and afford mobile learning practices during wbl. here, mobility in mobile learning is understood as a phenomenon characterized through five aspects: physical, technological, social, conceptual, and temporal (sharples, arnedillo-sanchéz, milrad, & vavoula, 2009). learning for tourism students, in vcel and during wbl, is often scattered as they may shift places and spaces (physical mobility) several times a day from a classroom/office to a hiking trail. during the first cycle of this design-based research (dbr) project, for some students, the location of their wbl was such that they had difficulties in completing their school assignments due to the lack of internet connections (vuojärvi, eriksson, & ruokamo, 2012). neither did any of the students have a smartphone of their own, which could have at least partly resolved this problem. therefore, the mobility of technology allows flexibility for students in terms of when and where they study, bridging contexts and contents. students also encounter different kinds of people (customers, entrepreneurs, etc.) requiring different styles of interaction (social mobility) and various kinds of knowledge to manage in these situations (mobility in conceptual space). in vuojärvi et al. (2012), students also indicated that their workdays included a significant amount of idle time that could be used for school related work if equipped with suitable mobile tools. therefore, mobility of technology may also help to disperse learning in time (sharples et al., 2009). overall, students had very positive expectations regarding the use of educational technologies (eriksson, 2012), which was a positive starting point for the next research cycle with smartphones. affording students the possibility of engaging in mobile learning during wbl was considered important as mobility is highlighted in the context of tourism work in lapland. tourism jobs are usually based in small companies where one person is often responsible for a wide array of tasks, from marketing to taking customers on rafting trips. simultaneously, they are required to follow the trends in the tourism industry and continuously update their knowledge and skills. during wbl periods, tourism students face both the conceptual and the practical understanding of mobility. therefore, the desire of the college to develop its wbl pedagogy and explore possibilities for mobile learning seemed justified. this article presents a qualitative case study conducted at the vcel. the aim was to reveal students’ perspectives regarding how mobile icts—in this case, smartphones—can support meaningful wbl. a meaningful learning framework rooted in the works of ausubel (1968) and ausubel, novak, and hanesian, (1978) understands learning as a process during which new information is integrated into what the learner already knows. it views seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 126 learning through a set of characteristics that have evolved over time from cognitive to more socio-constructivist (jonassen, 1995) and socio-cultural directions, embracing also the cultural, social, and historical contexts of teaching and learning. the framework was considered to be dynamic and broad enough to thoroughly describe wbl while enabling the consideration of the various settings in which students work and learn. research literature reports diverse compositions of meaningful learning characteristics applied in various ict-rich educational contexts in which studies aim to find out, for example, the weight of each characteristic and/or students’ expectations and perceptions of meaningful learning in certain pedagogical contexts (jonassen, 1995; poikela & vuojärvi, 2016; ruokamo, tuovinen, tella, vahtivuori, & tissari, 2002). the meaningful learning framework has also served as the basis for practice-oriented pedagogical models for various educational purposes (e.g., hakkarainen & vapalahti, 2011; keskitalo, 2015). similar characterizations of learning in the vet context can be found in the study by de bruijn and leeman (2011), who designed a model of powerful learning environments to combine authentic and self-directed learning in vet to support the development of students’ vocational identities. this model was, however, not designed for wbl, but for finding ways to make the contents and practices of school-based vet more oriented towards working-life. the data for this study was gathered through students’ blogs and interviews, and the information gained through qualitative thematic analysis (gray, 2004) was used to develop a pedagogical model for meaningful wbl. designing a research-based pedagogical model was considered important because pedagogical models can diminish contextual differences between students and help in assuring that students have similar support and opportunities for wbl (tynjälä. 2013). this study was a part of the design-based research (dbr) activities of the traved research project (brown, 1992; design-based research collective, 2003). the initial pedagogical model was published earlier in an article by vuojärvi et al. (2012). its design was based on results gained from two pilots of the first dbr cycle of design, implementation and analysis (figure 1). figure 1. development of the pedagogical model through cycles of dbr this paper continues the dbr process with another cycle that focuses on the use of mobile icts to support meaningful wbl in vocational education. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 127 following sections present the pedagogical underpinnings, data collection and analysis, and the results of the study. developing the pedagogical model pedagogical premises research literature provides some examples of pedagogical models for vet and wbl. raelin (1997) conceptualizes a model of wbl that combines explicit and tacit forms of knowledge with theory and practice modes of learning. the significance of the students’ own reflections is emphasized in the model, and it is considered important to articulate the tacit knowledge that many workplace practices are based on, but that are rarely expressed or negotiated. eraut (2004) provides an analytical framework that focuses on factors that affect learning in the workplace. he identified both learning factors (confidence, support, and challenge) and context factors (allocation of work, relationships at work, and expectations of performance); the significance of these factors and the ways they interact differ greatly from one context to another. what is found problematic in both frameworks is that they leave the role of a workplace instructor somewhat vague with plenty of variety in instructors’ duties and how deeply they work with students. eraut (2004) addresses this same issue and recommends educating company managers for the role of facilitating learning at the workplace. in a later work by virtanen, tynjälä, and eteläpelto (2014), integration between school learning and workplace learning is considered crucial. collaboration between teachers and workplace instructors can result in increased learning outcomes and strengthened vocational identity for students (virtanen, tynjälä, & stenström, 2008). promoting active roles for students in the workplace is suggested as is paying attention in the design of wbl periods in terms of integrating classroombased learning and wbl. recently, the affordances of the pedagogical use of mobile icts have been explored to address these issues in wbl contexts. mobile phones and eportfolios have been used, for example, to construct narratives of the development of students’ vocational identities (chan, 2011) and to negotiate the knowledge between students and institutions (wallace, 2011). however, technologies alone will not explain students’ wbl outcomes; the key factors seem to be systematic goal setting, guidance, and assessment. also, social and structural features of the workplace, educational practices, and student-related individual factors are crucial (virtanen et al., 2014). even though students are at the heart of wbl practices, the roles of teachers and workplace instructors are equally important. we believe that the role of teachers and workplace instructors could be enhanced through envisioning the outcomes of wbl from their perspective. learning outcomes for students are usually portrayed, but a proper visualization of all the outcomes, including all stakeholders, could help to motivate the pedagogical practices and change the view, too common in smallmedium size companies, of students as nothing more than free labour for the companies (see, e.g., cornford & gunn, 1998 and references therein). we identified a need for a practice-oriented pedagogical model that would provide guidelines for how the wbl period should be carried out. the structure of our pedagogical model follows the work of joyce and weil (1980), considering the pedagogical model as a general pedagogical plan that can be used to develop curriculums, design instructional material, and guide teachers and workplace instructors in their work before, during, and after students’ wbl periods. reflective elements were included to connect school learning and workplace learning and to develop students’ boundary crossing skills, such seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 128 as the ability to work and apply knowledge in changing contexts (guile & griffiths, 2001; virtanen et al., 2014). pedagogical development through design-based research the development of the pedagogical model for meaningful wbl has followed the guidelines set by the principles of dbr aiming to develop both educational practices and theoretical constructs through repeated cycles of design, implementation, and analysis (brown, 1992; dbr collective, 2003). dbr’s intrinsic character is the tight connection between theory and practice, which can be seen in that all activities in dbr studies are based on tight collaboration between researchers and practitioners (barab & squire, 2004; cobb, confrey, disessa, lehrer, & schauble, 2003; wang & hannafin, 2005). in our case, teachers and tourism students worked closely with us providing essential information and sharing experiences from their daily lives. the tight connection between research and practice reflects the dual goal of dbr. first, it aims to produce new theories, artefacts, and practices that may have an impact on learning (collins, joseph, & bielaczyc, 2004; edelson, 2002). second, it unfolds theories for assessment and examines the changes they suggest on a local level. in our study, this meant considering how students saw mobile icts supporting meaningful wbl, how their learning processes were realized, and how our initial pedagogical model should be developed on the basis of students’ perceptions. students participated in the process as co-designers by making their thoughts and perceptions explicit through blogs and interviews. the role of the student has been significant in the development of the pedagogical model. this dual goal brings dbr very close to the kind of learning that takes place in real-life, naturalistic settings (barab & squire, 2004), such as the tourism companies in this study. the first dbr cycle yielded an initial pedagogical model for meaningful wbl (vuojärvi et al., 2012) in which wbl is described through nine meaningful learning characteristics that covered the context of decentralized tourism education. these characteristics are: (1) active and self-directed, (2) constructive, (3) individual and goal-oriented, (4) collaborative and conversational, (5) contextual, situated, and multiple-perspective oriented, (6) experiential and authentic, (7) reflective and critical, (8) creative, and (9) emotionally involved. the first dbr cycle indicated that students might benefit from using smartphones during wbl as they would provide the missing internet connections for their laptops and a tool to engage in learning activities during their sporadic free time. smartphones would also enable students to use a variety of media to gather material for the learning diaries that they were expected to keep during wbl periods and promote communication and collaboration in and across ever-changing contexts (vuojärvi et al., 2012). overall, the use of smartphones could support the perceived meaningfulness of wbl. our presumptions were supported by a case study conducted by douch, savillsmith, parker, and attewell (2010) that reported several benefits of implementing mobile icts into wbl. pimmer and pachler (2014, p. 193) conclude that mobile devices enable users to “connect and span different situations and forms of learning and, accordingly, support learners across various contexts and phases of their career trajectories”. in the best case scenario, mobile icts engage students with learning, allow for greater flexibility and personalization, provide access to learning resources, enable fluent communication and collaboration, strengthen their sense of belonging to a learning community, and even support learner retention and achievement. during this dbr cycle, our aims were twofold. first, we wanted to find out how the use of smartphones during wbl would affect the realization of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 129 meaningful learning characteristics. the second objective was to develop the pedagogical model further so that it would better describe the processes involved and provide more detailed instructions for the implementation of wbl periods for each stakeholder. the research questions of this study were: 1) how were teaching/tutoring and learning realized during the wbl period according to the participating tourism students? 2) how did the use of smartphones support the realization of meaningful learning characteristics during wbl periods according to the students? 3) what implications do the students´ perceptions have on the pedagogical model for meaningful wbl that is developed during dbr cycles of this study? research design the data were collected throughout a 15-month period beginning in march 2011 and continuing until may 2012 and included two wbl periods. students were provided with smartphones and user training before their wbl started. training covered the basics of the particular smartphone, time management, communication, and social media applications use (e.g., calendar, email, twitter, wordpress). they were also free to use their own smartphone instead. textual data consists of students’ online learning diaries (n=14) written during wbl periods on wordpress blogs. students were asked to describe their tasks and duties at work and reflect on their learning and whether they had succeeded in achieving their learning goals. through the blogs, the teacher was able to keep track of their work and development, comment on their reflections, give guidance, and otherwise communicate with individual students. based on an assumption that limited access and familiar readers would encourage the more cautious students to share their thoughts, experiences, and emotions, the students were first advised to keep their blogs private so that only the teacher and the two researchers would have access to them. later, however, we suggested that students provide access to their workplace instructors, but only one student made this change. students were interviewed twice (n=9 and 12) during the data collection period. the interviews took place at pyhä ski resort in a quiet negotiation room in the hotel. researchers met the students after their wbl periods had ended and they had returned to school. the interviews were conducted individually using a prepared list of common themes to be covered in the interview (i.e., students’ experiences during wbl and their experiences and perceptions of using smartphones during learning and free time). interviews were recorded and lasted for 20-40 minutes each. students were asked for informed consent for the researchers to read their diaries, conduct interviews, and use the collected material as research data. the data was analysed using qualitative thematic analysis (gray, 2014). we worked theory-driven and aimed to identify and analyse notions of meaningful learning characteristics and students’ perceptions of their learning processes during wbl in our data. we aimed to strengthen the reliability of the analysis through tight collaboration and interaction during analysis. in practice, we first transcribed the interviews into textual form. this was followed by focused reading of the interviews and blogs and coding the data. codes were amended through repeated readings and collated into themes that described how mobile tools supported meaningful wbl and how students’ learning was realized. these themes were used in re-designing the pedagogical model for meaningful wbl supported by mobile icts. the results and the model are presented in detail in following section. results students’ perceptions of teaching and learning on wbl period teaching and tutoring seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 130 students seem to have a very practice-oriented view of learning during the wbl period. we identified a few critical aspects that should be considered when organizing wbl with companies. first, students’ preparation practices for wbl were not uniform. some were well familiarized with their work places beforehand. for instance, one student said, “after the visit i feel that i am going there to learn, not as free workforce. that’s really nice, because before i have felt more as workforce [in the past]” (student 4). in most cases, however, students began their wbl periods simultaneously during the busiest tourism season. this resulted in inadequate tutoring and facing authentic work tasks with customers without even knowing their work mates or the practices of the workplace. in some cases, inadequate tutoring resulted in poor customer service and negative feedback from customers: i was totally lost and it was “great” [terrible] to start at the new place in such a hurry. luckily [student 8] worked at the same place and was my personal guide. . . i don’t mean that she wasn’t able to guide and advise me, but i felt that it wasn’t her job, but that someone who actually worked there should have briefed me about the practicalities. (student 2) second, the data indicates that not all companies providing wbl positions were up to date with their instructional responsibilities. this is evident as almost all students, at some point in their wbl periods, indicated that they were not learning anything new. these problems arose partly because students worked in the same companies period after period. the selection of workplace instructors should also be considered carefully. not all workplace instructors worked with students. as one student said, “i haven’t learned anything new, and i haven’t seen [the workplace instructor] so i haven’t been able to discuss any additional projects” (student 13). some individual cases yielded useful development ideas for the pedagogical model. for example, one student had a development discussion with his workplace instructor at the end of a wbl period, and in that discussion, they identified some learning goals for future wbl periods. studying. national qualification for vet in finland requires students to set learning goals for each wbl period (finnish national board of education, 2016). in our case, students were also expected to write a learning blog where the learning goals were stated and reflected upon during and after the wbl periods. overall, the students considered wbl periods as the most important experiences in their learning, and it is, therefore, interesting that they perceived setting learning goals for themselves so difficult. during wbl periods in the spring 2011, only half of the students actually defined their learning goals, and those who did, presented them in a very general nature. their reasons for not setting their goals were, for example, that they were not sure what kind of tasks they would do during wbl or whether they were going to work at the same place as the previous period and, therefore, perceived it unnecessary to set new goals. when asked if goals had been set, one student replied, “no not really—all of the apprenticeship periods were so alike. i didn’t have any [goals] for these last [wbl periods]” (student 11). ignoring or not setting learning goals seemed to be common, particularly to those students who perceived writing a learning journal to be a meaningless task. students, who were able to see the connection between different pedagogical elements of their wbl periods (i.e., setting learning goals, writing a learning journal, receiving and giving feedback, and assessing their own learning) seemed to be most competent in acknowledging their previous skills and knowledge, setting their learning goals in relation to them, and reflecting on their progression. one student commented, “[the wbl period made it possible to reach my learning goals] very well as i got to take care of those more responsible tasks and got to do things more by myself” (student 14). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 131 an interesting detail was that students who were unsuccessful in setting their learning goals did not feel that they would have needed more guidance from the teacher either. it may be that they did not quite understand the idea of a wbl as a learning period with certain learning goals and considered it merely as a period of time spent working at a tourism company. supporting meaningful learning characteristics with smartphones for the initial pedagogical model (vuojärvi et al., 2012), we formulated nine meaningful learning characteristics of a wbl. in this study, our interest was to determine how the use of smartphones supported the realization of these characteristics during wbl from the student’s perspective. in the analysis, we identified six characteristics on which the use of smartphones seemed to have an impact (see table 1), and we also adjusted the composition of some characteristics. in the initial model “collaborative and conversational”, “experiential and authentic”, and “reflective and critical” were grouped into individual characteristics, but here we had to split them again into separate characteristics; “conversational”, “experiential”, and “reflective” appeared in the data, but “collaborative”, “authentic”, and “critical” did not. table 1 shows the results. each characteristic is explained briefly and accompanied by an example from the data. characteristic definition example from data active and selfdirected students actively engage in planning, implementing, and evaluating their learning processes utilizing a variety of tools (e.g., jonassen, 1995; ruokamo, et al., 2002). i was wondering if i could do something extra along with my work, a little project or something…(student 13). […] i was able to draft some ideas [in the blog] and re-write them in the evening (student 4). individual and goaloriented learners have individual learning strategies and the choices they make regarding goal-setting, learning, and working are affected by their prior knowledge, conceptions, interests, and motivation (e.g., ruokamo et al., 2002). mostly i gained from wbl periods, as i reflected on my own learning (blog, although a bit rarely at times) and planned my learning goals (student 14). conversational learning is dialogical, entailing both internal and social negotiations (e.g., jonassen, 1995). things were quite clear there, so if there was something unclear it was just easy to phone. i guess i talked a lot on the phone during that week in particular (student 10). experiential learning is based on students’ practical experiences, which they can use throughout their learning process. “experiences” are understood here as students’ prior practical knowledge and as the aim of learning (e.g., kolb, 2015). here are some pictures from my wbl period [pictures displaying a table setting]. i got to do the table setting all by myself twice. […] it was a busy day, i remember it clearly (student 7). reflective learning is a process where students express what they have learned and contemplate their thinking processes involved in learning situations (e.g., jonassen, 1995). through my blog i realized i achieved one of my goals […] i was learning the whole time, but didn’t really think about it. now as i started to write after that week, i realized how much i had learned (student 5). creative creativity emerges in the ways students manage unpredictable working as a guide, i used a dictionary [through smartphone] quite a lot and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 132 situations, find ways to improve their performance, or make connections between concepts previously regarded as unrelated or even contradictory (e.g., novak, 1998). then one could show pictures [from the internet] if someone had, for example, found some animal tracks— then i could show a picture of the animal—what it looks like and so on (student 14). table 1: the use of smartphones supporting meaningful learning characteristics during wbl in general, students were active learners during their wbl; however, the weight was more on evaluating ways of doing things than evaluating information or the ways it was applied in practice, which reflects the practiceoriented nature of vet. being active and self-directed seems to be intertwined with the characteristics of goal-oriented and reflective. the mobility of devices is not a necessity to implement active and self-directed learning, but it seems to make it easier to handle different situations, get down to study when there is an opportunity, and follow the plans and timetables set by the learner. these results are supported by those of vogel, kennedy and kwok (2009), who claimed that to engage and sustain students to apply mobile devices in learning, they should have an appreciation of deep learning as well as time management skills. students had their own priorities and higher-level goals that they aimed for, and they approached wbl accordingly. the goal of some students was to start their own businesses in the future, and some used this vet as a starting point for future studies. these factors affected students’ motivations, and consequently, their activities both at work and, for example, in reflecting on their learning during and after the wbl periods. the same seems to apply to using mobile devices during wbl. smartphones provided a tool for students to reflect on their learning when on the move, during short breaks, and even when outdoors if their workplace allowed them to use their smartphones during work hours. students accessed their blogs either by smartphone, desktop, or a laptop, depending on the possibility of using smartphones at work, the availability of network connections, and whether they were working inside or outside. especially students who worked outdoors found some innovative ways to use their smartphones. creativity in tourism work seems to be related to finding ways to manage different, and often unpredictable, situations with customers. smartphones may help to find information or solutions needed to manage these situations even in the wilderness. a creative person can use mobile icts to provide services for customers that would not otherwise, with reasonable effort, be possible. some students found blogging natural, and it was easy for them to write about their activities, thoughts, and reflections. however, some of them had problems motivating themselves to give thought to their learning, and it took much effort for them to get started. one student completely ignored writing a learning journal regardless of the personal advice and tutoring she received by email and face-to-face. one reason for difficulty in writing a learning journal was that students reported working long hours, which is typical for tourism industry during high seasons (vuojärvi et al., 2012). long working days were not perceived as a negative experience—quite the contrary—but students reported that they were so tired after the long work days that they did not have the energy to update their blogs. the meaningful learning characteristics that were not present in students’ descriptions of using smartphones during wbl were (a) constructive, (b) contextual, situational, and multiple-perspectives oriented, (c) authentic, (d) emotionally involved, (e) critical, and (f) collaborative. it seems logical that smartphones did not support collaborative learning during wbl, as students are novices in tourism. in the novice phase, wbl is quite individual in nature, and the focus is on the completion of tasks (virtanen et al., 2014). also, being a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 133 trainee in a working community, it may be that other members of the community do not share the same kind of learning orientation along with work. therefore, the practices in the workplace do not support collaborative learning (dillenbourg, 1999). “critical” means being critical towards theoretical knowledge (cottrell, 2005), which is perhaps not that relevant in wbl and consequently, does not appear in the data. the characteristics of “contextual, situational, and multiple-perspectives oriented” and “authentic” are such in nature that it seems hard to enhance them through the use of mobile icts. smartphones might help the implementation of many tasks, but they will not make any of the tasks “more authentic”. it would be possible, however, to make wbl more “emotionally involved” and “constructive”. more frequent blogging and systematic reflection upon one’s own learning might help students in developing metacognitive skills and setting learning goals (burleson, 2005). learning improvements may be difficult for students who are unaware of their shortcomings (kao, lin, & sun, 2008). visualizing learning processes through various media in a blog could also bring about feelings of joy and achievement. implications on the pedagogical model our results indicate that the implementation of wbl could be developed further by structuring interaction between the stakeholders before, during, and after wbl periods into negotiation cycles, following the idea of development discussions that are carried out annually in real-world working life. this would sharpen students’ active roles in learning, strengthen their experiences of being responsible of their learning, and help focus all teaching, tutoring, and learning activities on pursuing students’ learning goals. the pedagogical model for meaningful wbl is presented in figure 2. figure 2. the pedagogical model for meaningful wbl supported by mobile icts. first cycle. the negotiation process during the wbl period takes place in the four cycles identified in figure 2 by dashed line and numbers 1−4. before each wbl period, students are required to define learning goals, which depend on the main theme of the period and the personal objectives they consider important. students negotiate regarding goals with their teachers to reach a mutual understanding of the theme of the wbl period, skills, and knowledge seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 134 the student aims to learn, and possible companies where those goals could be pursued. this is part of constructing common grounds, since actions (working) cannot be interpreted without referring to students’ learning goals, and reciprocally, goal discrepancies are often revealed through disagreements on action (baker, hansen, joiner, & traum, 1999). without mutual understanding of the student’s learning goals and tasks during wbl, learning results will be sporadic or even non-existent. our study supports the understanding that goal-setting must be systematic (virtanen et al., 2014); otherwise, the student just might or might not learn something valuable for their development as a tourism professional. second cycle. next, a student negotiates with a workplace instructor regarding a job description that would help in pursuing the learning goals. this reflects earlier empirical knowledge of the importance of having strong connections between school and workplace to support students’ learning (virtanen et al., 2008, 2014). agreeing about working hours and breaks during a workday would provide possibilities to study even during the high season when trainees’ workdays may last up to thirteen hours. although it is important that students confront the authentic everyday life at the company they are working for, the work should enable students to complete assigned learning tasks. we also suggest that students and their workplace instructors reserve time for an orientation period to discuss ongoing duties and to get acquainted with their instructors, work mates, work culture, and the physical working environment. students’ reflections in their learning diaries indicate that lowpaced orientation would provide students with positive experiences of the workplace right from the start. third cycle. the third negotiation includes an interactive re-evaluation of learning goals and the restructuring of the student’s job description for the rest of the wbl period if needed. this supports the development of the student’s skills and knowledge throughout the training period and helps the instructor challenge students at work. fourth cycle. the final cycle is feedback. an official assessment of wbl is carried out during wbl periods and is based entirely on competence-based qualifications defined by a set of skills and knowledge that a student should master and present to pass the wbl. this evaluation is, however, onedirectional, and we suggest that additionally, the student, the teacher, and the workplace instructor participate in a feedback discussion. students get feedback about how they worked and thrived in the realization of their learning goals. the teacher, company, and the workplace instructor get feedback about guidance and a possibility to develop their practices before, during, and after wbl periods. it is important that students also reflect on their learning goals by themselves and evaluate how their own activity played a role in achieving them. mobile icts and digital tools in wbl this qualitative case study revealed that mobile icts can amplify some meaningful learning characteristics during wbl (figure 1). the pedagogical use of mobile icts can provide support for combining school learning with wbl periods, but taking advantage of mobile icts in learning requires selfregulated and motivated students who are willing to put some effort into their learning. pimmer and pachler (2014) show the diverse possibilities mobile tools provide for the connection of situated, socio-cognitive, cultural, multimodal, and constructivist learning perspectives in wbl. in their view, mobility of devices “enable cross-contextual learning by bridging and connecting” pimmer & seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 135 pachler, 2014, p. 199). mobile devices provide tools for fluent creation and sharing of digital materials as it is easy to, e.g., capture videos to document one’s learning experiences (e.g., brandt, hillgren, & björgvinsson, 2005), reflect on them in a blog post, and later discuss these pictures and reflections in formal settings like classrooms with teacher and peers, bridging learning in formal and informal settings (pimmer & pachler, 2014). mobile devices are ideal for just-in-time learning that usually takes place at work by being immediately relevant for learners (harris, willis, simons, & collins, 2001). in the tourism context, this is essential when tackling immediate work challenges, for example, while acquiring information for customers outdoors. mobile devices naturally enable communication through several channels, but also individual and social forms of learning such as social networking and creation of work-related professional networks becomes easily available (pimmer & pachler, 2014). face-to-face negotiations before and during the wbl period are important and should not be overlooked, but for students, it is also very important to have time to consider, re-evaluate, and revise their learning goals as well as to reflect on their learning experience and digest the received feedback in peace. time in face-to-face negotiations is usually limited, finding common time suitable for all the participants can be hard, and if the companies providing the wbl environments are geographically distributed, which often is the case, then the distance can also be challenging. using digital media together with mobile icts to deal with the negotiation cycles is a way to bring both flexibility and efficiency to the process. blogs are functional for sharing thoughts, reflections, and feedback (cycles 3 and 4; e.g., comas-quinn, mardomingo, & valentine, 2009). instead, discussion-forum kinds of media might be applicable for the period of time when students present their learning goals and try to find the most suitable company to provide the best environment and work tasks that help to realize those goals (cycles 1 and 2). grace and o’neil (2014) introduced one example of an online tool to help with getting ready for work-based learning in health education. the tool, for example, provides students a forum to get to know one another, helps students to set their learning goals, and negotiate learning contracts among students, supervisors, and clinical placement coordinators. outcomes for students, teachers, and companies following the original idea of a pedagogical model (joyce & weil, 1980), students are expected to gain domain-specific and generic knowledge and skills. in this study, domain-specific knowledge included local knowledge of the tourist destinations, customer-service skills, the production of tourism services, and knowledge about different kinds of equipment needed at work. working at a ski rental shop, for example, requires knowledge about skiing, skis, and snowboards and their maintenance as well as knowledge about selecting the right kind of gear for various customers. students also reported that they learned about what kinds of tourists would come to a specific destination. transferable and generic knowledge and skills included, for example, language and ict skills. there are also outcomes for the teacher and the company providing the wbl environment. for the teacher, these include a better understanding of students’ personal goals, motivations, and abilities to reflect on their skills and knowledge (especially cycle 1). the possibility of following the realization of the learning goals, both through blog posts and participation in cycles three and four, allows the teacher to follow how companies are able to meet students’ learning goals, to create professional networks, to stay up to date with the industry and, lastly, to be able to control the quality of the whole wbl process. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 136 for the company, the outcomes include having a motivated and well-prepared student for the wbl period, a true involvement in the wbl process, and a clearer picture of the responsibilities and expectations for the company and the workplace instructor through the wbl period. these outcomes are highly dependent on the success of cycles two and three. ideally, the feedback for the company, both from the student and the teacher, provides the company with new insights and perspectives into developing their services and products. conclusions this study aimed to develop a pedagogical model for meaningful wbl supported by mobile icts. the model consists of four cycles of negotiation that would strengthen students’ active roles in and responsibility for their own learning and help focus all teaching, tutoring, and learning activities on pursuing students’ learning goals. our study revealed that mobile icts can amplify some meaningful learning characteristics during wbl (figure 2). however, to take full advantage of these mobile devices requires self-regulated and motivated students who are willing to put some effort into their learning. pimmer and pachler (2014, p. 199) indicate that mobility of devices enable cross-contextual learning by bridging and connecting as mobile devices provide tools for creation and sharing of digital materials, enable just-in-time learning at and for work, may bridge learning in formal and informal environments, and enable several communication channels as well as ease social networking and the creation of professional networks. finally, work and studying in tourism is in many cases highly mobile and mobile tools have the potential to provide both flexibility and efficiency to everyday work tasks as well as to wbl periods including the four negotiation cycles presented in this paper. in this study, wbl in tourism education was approached through dbr, as it provides both structured process and openness to versatile research designs in real world settings and aims to develop both theory and practice. our data consisted of students’ online learning diaries and qualitative interviews, which reflect students’ agency and activity in their learning. the data provided us with information that could be used in the development of the pedagogical model for meaningful wbl supported by mobile icts. as a qualitative case study, the aim was not to obtain generalizable results, but to focus on assessing and developing teaching and learning practices in wbl on a more local level. in future dbr cycles, it would be justified to focus on workplace instructors’ and company managers’ views and perceived additional value from their perspective. although, the context of this study is 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(2009). does using mobile device applications lead to learning? journal of interactive learning research, 20(4), 469−485. vuojärvi, h., eriksson m. j., & ruokamo, h. (2012). designing pedagogical models for tourism education: focus on work-based mobile learning. international journal of mobile and blended learning, 4(3), 53–67. wallace, r. (2011). the affordances of mobile learning that can engage disenfranchised learner identities in formal education. in n. pachler, c. pimmer, & j. seipold (eds.), work-based mobile learning: concepts and cases (pp. 117−143). oxford: peter lang. authors’ biographies hanna vuojärvi received her phd from the university of lapland, finland, in 2013. her doctoral thesis focused on conceptualizing personal and mobile learning environments in higher education from university students’ point of view. her current research is focused on learning environments, decentralized simulations in healthcare education, crisis resource management, and the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 139 pedagogical use of mobile icts. she works as a university lecturer in pedagogy of adult education and a postdoctoral researcher at the university of lapland’s faculty of education/centre for media pedagogy. for further information, please visit: http://hannavuojarvi.wordpress.com. miikka eriksson received his phd from the university of joensuu, finland, in 2007. his doctoral thesis focused on forest ecology, but since then he has conducted research into mobile icts in teaching and learning both in vocational and higher education. his research interests include primary and higher education pedagogy, especially the pedagogy of science education, and the use of mobile icts in teaching and learning. currently he is a university lecturer in biology and geography in the university of eastern finland’s philosophical faculty, school of applied educational science and teacher education. abstract pedagogical development through design-based research mobile icts and digital tools in wbl outcomes for students, teachers, and companies conclusions acknowledgments references towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures. a technogenetic analysis of the experience api issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4232 ©2021 (christoph richter, lars raffel & heidrun allert). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures. a technogenetic analysis of the experience api christoph richter1 kiel university email: richter@paedagogik.uni-kiel.de lars raffel1 kiel university email: lars.raffel@email.uni-kiel.de heidrun allert1 kiel university email: allert@paedagogik.uni-kiel.de abstract in recent years, scholars in the field of critical data studies have turned attention to the infrastructures through which educational data is produced, processed, circulated, and consumed. while respective studies have rightly emphasized the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that are shaping these infrastructures, the technical dimension of these developments has remained largely unexplored. as a consequence, analyses are easily deemed irrelevant by technologists and designers engaged in educational datamining and learning analytics. this paper therefore aims to broaden the analytic scope 1 this research has received partial funding from the federal ministry of education and research under grant agreement n° 16dhb2119. we have no conflicts of interest to disclose. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to christoph richter. https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4232 towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 of critical data studies in education and to engage more closely with the technical dimension of the emerging educational data infrastructures. towards this end, the paper outlines a technogenetic account of (digital) infrastructures and standards, and provides a case study to illustrate how this account can be leveraged to unravel assumptions and perspectives implied in an educational technology standard such as the experience api. the results of the case study indicate that while the experience api is of highly abstract and generic nature, it promotes a rather restricted idea of learning and education. keywords: critical data studies, technogenesis, infrastructure, standards, xapi towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures the focus of this paper lies on the digital infrastructures that undergird the current digitization and datafication of educational processes, and especially the technical standards and protocols on which current advancements in educational datamining and learning analytics are based. with the more recent proliferation of critical data studies in education, there has also emerged an increased interest in the infrastructures through which educational data is produced, processed, circulated, and consumed (e.g. sellar, 2015; selwyn, 2015; hartong, 2018; williamson, 2019). drawing on conceptual models developed in the field of science and technology studies, respective studies have shown that educational data infrastructures and analytic technologies that are hooked into these infrastructures are not mere technical devices but are intimately bound with social, cultural, political, and economic processes. yet, while critical data studies in education have rightly drawn attention to the practices, believes, and interests that shape and are shaped by these infrastructures, the distinct role of technology as such has remained quite shallow. in trying to reconstruct data infrastructures as relational “networks of objects (the data itself, hardand software, but also policy ‘fragments’, such as educational standards or funding formulas) and subjects (technicians, administrators, school actors, intermediary agents, etc.)” (hartong, 2018, p. 135), the inherently technical dimension of these infrastructures, the pipes and joints, remained in the background and escaped closer analysis. as a consequence, proponents of critical data studies in education have been charged of not being able to provide “a more essentialist argument that data/analytics/ai infrastructures necessarily entail reductionist commitments” (buckingham shum, 2019, p. 8 in response to selwyn, 2019). we therefore believe that there is a strong need for conceptual models of digital technologies and infrastructures that allows us to analyze them as historically and culturally contingent entities, as entities, which are neither fully accounted for by their designers’ intentions nor by their practical utilizations. against this background, the overall intent of this paper is to broaden the analytic scope of critical data studies in education and to engage more closely with the technical dimension of the emerging educational data infrastructures. towards this end, the aim of this paper is both to outline a technogenetic account of (digital) infrastructures and to show how such an account can be applied to the critical analysis of a standard in the field of educational technology. combining a relational perspective on infrastructures with a genetic understanding of technical objects, we will identify technical standards as pivotal for a critical understanding of the processes of digitalization and datafication, as it is only through these standards that data can be effectively generated, passed, and processed. in particular, we will argue that from a technogenetic perspective, technical standards can ensure interoperability and scalability only to the extent that they reduce complexity and towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 limit diversity, which in turn implies that respective choices have to be made and socially legitimized. to illustrate that a technogenetic account is not only of theoretical interest but also opens up new empirical strands for critical data studies in education, the main share of this paper is devoted to a case study on the experience application programming interface, or xapi for short. xapi is a specification that has been devised, quite generally speaking, to support the recording, exchange, and retrieval of data on learning processes across digital platforms. in providing a common format for the recording of respective events and interactions, xapi can be understood as a technical standard for the description of educational processes. consequently, xapi has an impact on the kind of information that is rendered available and in turn can be used for the analysis, monitoring, and control of an educational environment. we have chosen xapi as an example here because it constitutes one of the most recent steps in a longer chain of standardization efforts in the field of educational technology and is also key to many current efforts in educational data mining and learning analytics. additionally, we, as a research team, were also directly engaged in the utilization of xapi as part of an ongoing r&d-project, providing us with first-hand experiences of the challenges that come along with its implementation. we will use this case study to show that technical standards, regardless of how abstract or generic they appear to be, are culturally and historically contingent and hence necessarily imply socially and culturally impregnated understandings of the domains they are supposed to model. on infrastructures and standards – a technogenetic perspective to be able to trace the cultural and historical contingencies of (technical) standards in the processes of digitization and datafication in education, we combine a relational understanding of infrastructures and standards (e.g. star & ruhleder, 1996; karasti et al., 2010; mongili & pellegrino, 2014) with a genetic perspective on the evolution of technical objects (e.g. simondon, 2011; rieder, 2020)2. a relational understanding: we start from the premise that infrastructures cannot be reduced to static networks of interconnected technical objects, but that they form complex and constantly evolving assemblages of devices, resources and human actors, that are deeply entwined with organized practices, habits of thought, subjectivities, and values (cf. star & ruhleder, 1996; mongili & pellegrino, 2014; sellar, 2015; shove, 2017). rather than being “a thing with pre-given attributes frozen in time” (star & ruhleder, 1996, p. 112), infrastructures are fundamentally relational in that they “[emerge] for people in practice, 2 while the terms digitization and datafication have been used to denote a historically formed array of social practices and linked to broader issues of epistemology, power, and inequality (e.g. pangrazio & sefton-green, 2020; d’ignazio & klein, 2020; daly et al., 2019), our focus in this paper is on the more mundane technical necessities, the bits, pieces, and procedures it actually takes to produce and use digital data. towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 connected to activities and structures” (ibid.). the relational nature of infrastructure thereby entails both the “convergence [of infrastructures] with human behavior and social practices” as well as the “embodiment of standards” (mongili & pellegrino, 2014, p. xxiv). accordingly, standards are key to the formation of any kind of infrastructure, as they provide common and legitimized schemes and protocols that enable the interconnection and interoperation of heterogeneous components within an assemblage, and hence “allow the growth and cultivation of shared iis [information infrastructures] and collaborative platforms” (ibid., p. xxvi). the capacity of standards to scale an infrastructure and allow for “the articulation of ‘the same’ technology elsewhere” (ibid., p. xxvii), thereby essentially hinges on their capability “to screen out unlimited diversity”. their productive qualities hence depend on the extent to which they can effectively reduce complexity in a particular field of action. as a consequence, standards cannot be neutral, as due to their reductive nature, they inevitably “codify, embody, or prescribe ethics and values” (ibid, p. 5). as infrastructures are not selfentailed entities, but themselves relationally embedded in other assemblages, standards also do not exist in isolation but are nested, linked, and integrated with one another (ibid. p. 5 ff.). due to the relational nature of infrastructures, standards are also not static entities, but temporally stabilized “points in a process of standardization” (mongili & pellegrino, 2014, p. xxvii). even though their successful implementation adds to an infrastructure’s ‘interia’, they are also under constant pressure caused by the ongoing utilization and transformation of the infrastructure itself. in this sense, standards can be understood as ‘technical objects’, that have an identity of their own while their relevance and meaning is simultaneously bound to the existence of a corresponding sociotechnical milieu (cf. y. hui, 2012; rieder, 2020). a technogenetic approach: the technogenesis of a standard is therefore recursively coupled both with the development of (technical) devices, in which the standard is embodied, as well as the practices that in turn make use of and give rise to the development of these devices. based on such a relational perspective, the technogenesis of standards can be traced along (a) their evolution as distinct technical objects, (b) the processes by which standards are embodied in particular (technical) devices, as well as (c) the practical uptake and utilization of these devices. from this point of view, standards, devices, and educational practices are constitutively entangled. entry-points for critical analysis the conceptual model of standards as technical objects – as sketched in the previous section – not only opens up an analytic but also a critical take on processes through which digital data is produced. while the model posits that standardization is essential to the formation of infrastructures and hence constitutes a prerequisite for any kind of organized and networked social practice, it also points to the fact that any standard necessarily towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 entails a reductive moment in that it ‘screens out’ certain aspects of life’s flourishing diversity. consequently, any standardized scheme, form, or protocol implies a normative commitment, that favors certain construals of the world and marginalizes other choices. these choices are seldomly made explicit, but are usually legitimized with an implicit reference to what susan star and martha lampland have described as a “master narrative, […] a single voice that does not problematize diversity” (star & lampland, 2009, p. 22), and what andrew feenberg has called a “technical code” that defines “the object in strictly technical terms in accordance with the social meaning it has acquired” (feenberg, 1999, p. 88). as these master narratives are integral to a community’s tacit understandings of the world, they usually appear self-evident and remain unthematic. a core aim for the critical analysis of standards therefore would be to uncover their underlying narratives. however, as from a relational perspective “there is no position of exteriority from which to perform a critical analysis” (piattoeva & saari, 2020, p. 1), a critical analysis cannot provide an objective or even conclusive account of these narratives. this is the case not least because any such narrative is an illusionary entity that is enacted in manifold and changing ways. rather, what a critical analysis can do is to show that in the processes of standardization choices are made constantly. these choices are historically, culturally, and technologically contingent and therefore could also be taken differently. to get a hold of the narratives that govern a standard, such as the experience api, it therefore seems advisable to trace the implicated choices. in line with the relational perspective on standards, respective choices can be located in relation (a) to the evolution of the standard as distinct technical object, (b) to the design of a particular (technical) device, or (c) to the processes in which the usage of these technologies converges with social practices. in the remainder of this paper, we will use xapi as an example to illustrate how a critical analysis could proceed along these three lines of inquiry and how these might add up to a more integrative understanding of the aspects and options rendered (in)visible by a standard. in particular, we will trace the (pre-)history of xapi as a learning technology standard, delineate the steps of ‘translation’ (vinck & jeantet, 1995) required in the technical implementation of xapi, and outline the educational scenarios that are informed by these technologies. the experience api and its history as already briefly outlined in the introduction, the experience api essentially provides a shared format for the description of events that might occur in the course of both formal and informal learning activities. respective records, so-called xapi activity statements, can be provided by any digital technology a learner is directly or indirectly interacting with and can be aggregated in learning record stores. from these, the records can be accessed for further processing. in a nutshell, xapi is supposed to support (a) the collection of data on learning activities independent of a particular device or platform, (b) the recording of ‘any towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 learning experience’ irrespective of whether it takes place in a formal or informal setting, (c) the exchange and storage of these records independent from the platforms on which these records have been produced, as well as (d) the creation of analytic tools that operate on these data for monitoring as well as predictive purposes (cf. rustici software, n.d.-d). to be compliant with xapi, all activity statements that are recorded and shared have to be “expressed in the form of ‘actor verb object’” (rustici software, n.d.-e). each activity statement hence essentially has to provide a description of a person or group who did something (actor), of what actually has been done (verb), as well as the entity the activity was directed at (object). a statement that follows this format would be for example: ‘anne (actor) viewed (verb) the tutorial video (object)’. if needed, an xapi activity statement can also include information on the context in which an activity took place as well as its results. furthermore, activity statements might include information on when an event occurred, when the record has been stored, and an authority asserting the correctness of the record (adl, 2016). while xapi specifies a generic format for the structured recording of activities, it does not provide any particular vocabulary, but deliberately leaves it up to its users to define the detailed information required by an activity statement as well as respective vocabularies. these supplementary specifications, which are required for the practical utilization of xapi are called ‘recipes’ (cf. bakharia et al., 2016). as such, xapi hence is a very versatile specification, that, according to its authors, is capable “to collect data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline)” (rustici software, n.d.c). even though the experience api is one of the more recent efforts in the field of educational technology standards (cf. griffiths, 2020), its origins date back to at least 2008, when a call for whitepapers for the advancement of the sharable content object reference model (scorm) was issued by the international federation for learning, education, and training systems interoperability (letsi) (rustici software, n.d.-a). following up on the submitted whitepapers, the advanced distributed learning (adl) initiative, a government program of the us department of defense (dod), started to explore into the possibilities of “standardized experience tracking” in 2010 and contracted rustici software to devise first drafts of xapi. the outcomes of this effort, called project tin can, where then taken up by a working group of the adl, resulting in a first stable release of xapi in 2013 (adl, n.d.-a). xapi has been approved as an internal standard by the dod in 2017 and forms part of its emerging “total learning architecture” (cf. adl, n.d.-b). xapi is currently also in the process of formal standardization by the institute of electrical and electronics engineers (ieee ltsc, 2020). yet, the history of the xapi is not only made up of a sequence of consecutive events but is also itself situated in an evolving sociotechnical milieu. in the following, we will sketch some of the paths of development that are intersecting in the advancement of xapi. for the towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 sake of simplicity, we will focus on those paths of development that are explicitly mentioned by the authors of xapi themselves. first of all, the work towards xapi took place against the background of substantial changes in the ways educational technologies were envisaged, created and used. while previous learning technology standards had been designed with a strong focus on reusable contents and courses to be administered in learning management systems, xapi accounts for the diversification of educational technologies that emerged throughout the last two decades. these include, for example, the spread of collaborative, mobile, cloud-based, blended, and personal learning environments, which are often also used in combination rather than in isolation (cf. rustici software, n.d.d; griffiths, 2020). consequently, there has been an interest to think of educational technologies not as solitary entities, but as elements of an encompassing “learning services ecosystem” (adl, n.d.-b). concurrently, there also have been noteworthy shifts in educational policies that started to affect educational practices in countries across the globe (cf. biesta, 2006). in particular, learning has increasingly been framed as an ubiquitous and lifelong process, dissolving the boundaries between formal, non-formal and informal learning, between profit and nonprofit institutions, as well as between teachers and students (e.g. tuschling & engemann, 2006; loeckx, 2016). these shifts clearly resonate with xapi’s ambition to “record any learning experience, including informal learning” (rustici software, n.d.d), and its prospect that learning is something that could potentially occur everywhere and as a result of various forms of interaction. along these lines, the development of xapi is also shaped by the more recent proliferation of learning analytics and data driven education, a development that itself follows up on the idea of evidence-based education and is backed up by both educational policies as well as technical advancements in fields such as educational data mining, adaptive systems, as well as machine learning (cf. ferguson et al., 2016). towards this end, xapi provides an important means for the collection and aggregation of data from various sources, making them available for respective analytic technologies. in doing so, xapi is supposed to allow for the tracking and guidance of individual learning processes, as well as the monitoring and assessment of respective programs (rustici software, n.d.d). furthermore, xapi also builds on and implements other technical standards. in particular, xapi follows the principles of representational state transfer (rest) to allow for the orchestration of distributed web services and adopts the javascript object notation (json) as a generic means for the encoding and exchange of data. additionally, the general xapi data format, i.e. the description of activities in the form of ‘actor verb object’, is directly based on the wc3 activity streams specification (w3c, 2017), which had been devised for syndication of activities in social web applications. to better suit the purposes of xapi, the data format of the activity streams specification has been extended to cover towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 also information on results and context of a learning activity (bowe, 2013). these paths of development of course neither exist in isolation nor did they directly enforce the actual formation of xapi in any strong sense. they rather form parts of the sociotechnical milieu that mutually shapes and is shaped by xapi. translations required in the implementation of xapi as such xapi defines a structure of statements and certain datatypes to be used in these, but neither the content nor the details needed to implement it into an application. during the implementation, decisions have to be made on different levels, which partly build on one another. each of these decisions implies choices that are contingent on the sociotechnical milieu in which the implementation and instantiation of xapi is taking place. in a first step it is mandatory to define the vocabulary to be used. while xapi’s structure requires, for example, the use of a ‘verb’ to describe a certain activity by a certain user, it does not provide a vocabulary on the verbs to be used. as outlined above, it is rather intended that communities of practice define their own vocabularies for their particular use case. these extensions of the standard are also referred to as ‘recipes’ (bakharia et al., 2016). while xapi provides the syntactic structure, the vocabularies can essentially be understood as a set of names and descriptions of the activities, which might occur while using an application. the verb ‘viewed’ might be defined as “indicates that the actor has viewed the object”, as for example in the already mentioned tin can vocabulary. the vocabularies used might extend or implement a subset of existing vocabularies or be developed from scratch. while the definition of a vocabulary by a community of practice is intended, it might also be defined by a project team working on a specific application in an ad hoc manner, for instance because of constraints like development deadlines and production or customer needs. during this step, those events that are deemed relevant for educational purposes in a particular context, have to be translated into a set of defined activities. these definitions are in turn used as operational accounts of the envisaged learning processes in a given environment. conversely, all activities that are not explicitly defined in advance are hence necessarily excluded from data collection. xapi will therefore only be able to represent the defined activities, whereas all other forms of interaction with a platform – including other learning activities, which will inevitably take place (cf. blewett & hugo, 2016) – will be non-existing in the produced data and will not be reconstructable during data analysis. as a consequence, all those interactions that are not foreseen or predefined are rendered invisible. this coincides with the notion of learning as a totally plannable and controllable process. towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 while not required by xapi itself, the vocabulary has to be translated further and formalized into technical definitions, to serve as requirements and technical designs for the actual software development process (ieee computer society, 1990, p. 67). requirements have to be defined as conditions that must and therefore can be met by a software. this might lead into the pitfalls of attempts to make human constructs amenable to computers (cf. friedman & nissenbaum, 1996). to illustrate this using our previous example, the verb ‘viewed’ might be further translated into the formal definition “the object has been on the screen of the actor for 5 seconds“. even if we consider 5 seconds instead of 3 or 10 the perfect timing, this translation remains ambiguous: without eyetracking it is fundamentally unknown if an actor in a certain interaction with a computer actively looks at an object even if it is on their screen. during the implementation, requirements and technical designs have to be translated into source code to be compiled or interpreted. as requirements as such do not provide exhaustive details and might be met by different solutions (cf. zamudio et al., 2017), granular decisions have to be made, which will shape the final product. decisions during implementation tend to be implicit and might be more technically than educationally informed. for example, they might be shaped by the use of specific programming languages, tools and frameworks (cf. schmidt 2008). for instance, to fulfill the requirements of the verb ‘viewed’, an application might have to check if (a) a certain part of a website is in the focus area of a web-browser, if (b) the browser has view-focus, if (c) the browser has mouse-focus and if (d) no other application overlaps the area for 5 seconds. as the final product usually has to meet a variety of requirements, different implementation decisions might interfere and cause unintended side effects which affect the data that are produced. for example, in an early production version of the tool developed in our r&d-project, students were provided with an overview of changes made to a section of their working document and enabled to revert to a prior version if needed. to prevent changes to the document while it might be reverted, the developers decided to place this function inside the edit-mode which had to be left afterwards. this implementation decision led to a condition where each ‘view-log’ event in the produced data was framed by a ‘started-edit’ and a ‘canceled-edit’ event. as a consequence, an unexpectedly high number of ‘canceled-edit’ events in the dataset caused speculations about students’ behaviors until we realized the implementation details. architectural decisions might also affect the data produced, for example if the emitting of xapi-calls is assigned to a web client javascript code, it might be modified or blocked by adblockers. as virtually every software does (cf. rodríguez-pérez et al., 2020), the final product will inevitably contain bugs, which might as well affect the data produced. the already mentioned platform, developed in our r&d project, contained a bug in the client code, which under certain conditions caused a loop of video-related play and pause events without any user interaction. as the bug got conspicuous due to an enormous amount of towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 produced events, an investigation showed that this bug had, on a smaller scale, previously already interfered on a number of occasions. without this one obviously conspicuous event, the flawed data would have never been identified. during processing of the produced and aggregated data, further steps of translation have to be undertaken. because of the potentially massive datasets which are produced due to the statement logic of xapi, data processing requires complex tool chains to transform data to be able to answer more specific questions or address specific issues. inherently, these translations bear the same limitations as outlined for the implementation. (some) current applications of xapi while xapi so far is only actively used by a minority of practitioners that are making use of educational technologies (torrance, 2019), and while it is also taken up rather slowly even in the field of learning analytics (e.g. muslim et al., 2020), the specification has already been integrated into a broad variety of technical systems, applications and services (cf. rustici software, n.d.b). besides its adoption by commercial vendors and service providers, xapi is also used by a growing range of r&d projects and strategic initiatives in the field of learning analytics. as a comprehensive survey of all these efforts is beyond the scope of this paper, we can only roughly outline the spectrum of current endeavors. to do so, we will focus on some of the ways in which xapi has been appropriated, the actors involved, and the educational scenarios envisaged. as xapi depends on technical means for the provision of activity statements, e-learning authoring tools constitute a key element for its adoption, as they allow for the integration of xapi into the processes of educational content production. the basic idea here is to augment interactive digital contents, such as slides, videos, quizzes, test, etc., with the capability to directly record users’ interactions and feed the resulting activity statements into a learning record store. the possibility to generate xapi activity statements has already been integrated into quite a few common authoring tools (cf. rustici software, n.d.b), providing both professional content creators and educators with the technical means for the collection of data on users’ interactions. the authoring tools, however, differ in the extent to which they support xapi. while authoring tools that support xapi usually provide a set of predefined activity statements, for example on whether a particular resource has been launched, a test has been passed, an activity completed or if a question has been answered (in-)correctly; several tools also allow for the creation and use of customized xapi statements (cf. schneider & penn, 2019). in doing so, the tools enable content creators and teaching staff to create digital resources that can generate finegrained traces of learners’ interactions, for example, in that they not only record the submitted answer to a multiple-choice question but also the options selected before a final choice has been made. towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 at the same time, several r&d projects have set out to tap into data sources beyond those generated by traditional learning management systems or e-learning resources, and to instead devise new approaches to learning analytics that make use of and integrate multiple data sources. for example, the ›connected learning analytics toolkit‹ allows to track interactions across a variety of social media platforms such as youtube, facebook, google+, google drive, twitter, stackexchange, and wordpress, and to map the recorded events into a uniform format of xapi activity statements (kitto et al., 2015). in a similar manner, xapi has been used as a common data format to integrate and analyze data from a variety of sources in the learning pulse project (di mitri et al., 2017). data sources in this case included biosensors providing heart rate and step count, automated recordings of the digital tools used by the participants, information on weather conditions obtained from an online service as well as students’ self-reports recorded via a web app. to make these scenarios work, these projects also engaged in the systematic development or extension of existing xapi recipes. at the other end of the data processing chain, there is also a growing number of tools aimed at the analysis and utilization of the recorded activity statements. many standalone learning record stores also include a data analytics engine, allowing its users, for example, to query, filter, aggregate and visualize the collected data (cf. berking, 2016). the outcomes of these analyses can in turn be used for the creation of dashboards and reports. to make these tools more accessible not only for specialists but also for educational designers, administrators and teaching staff, vendors of these analytics engines are trying to ease the creation of charts and queries and/or provide users with predefined reporting templates. other tools even go a step further and use the outcomes of these analyses to trigger further actions. for example, the ontask tool makes it possible for instructors to define rules that trigger so called ‘personalized learning support actions’ (pardo et al., 2018), based on the outcomes of the preceding analysis of the recorded data. even though the analytic tools are technically indifferent to the data that is provided, meaningful results nevertheless require intimate knowledge of the data sources used. yet, to the extent that the choices made in the implementation of the recording procedures often remain tacit and in-transparent, this knowledge is often missing, and decisions might be erroneous. finally, there are also initiatives and projects that have drawn on xapi to deliberately build educational data infrastructures on a larger scale. an example of such an effort is the joint information systems committee’s (jisc) initiative for the creation of an open learning analytics architecture (sclater et al., 2015). this architecture is intended to allow universities and further education institutions in the uk to collect and analyze data about their students in a common format. besides the overall architecture and the provision of a learning record warehouse, jisc has also developed tools to make the recorded data accessible for strategic decision making, the teaching staff as well as the students themselves (cf. jisc, n.d.). for this purpose, the jisc has also specified its own xapi recipes (jisc, 2021). towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 while this overview is rather eclectic, it gives some idea of the multifarious assemblage of educational technologies, services, and scenarios that are already making use of xapi. as indicated, the utilization of xapi is not limited to particular stakeholders or settings but covers a broad range of educational and analytic scenarios. xapi and its implied conceptions of learning and education in outlining the evolution of xapi as a technical object, in pinpointing the translations required for its implementation, and in sketching the ways in which it has been adopted, we have tried to depict the multiple ways in which xapi is entangled in ongoing processes of standardization and infrastructuring in the fields of educational technology and learning analytics. drawing on the relational conception of standards that we are proposing in this paper, our discussion will not focus on any particular instantiation of xapi, but on the underlying master narrative and how this favors certain construals of learning and education while marginalizing other conceptions. to unravel the underlying master narrative, we will scrutinize the implied ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments. while xapi essentially suggests that the ‘actor verb object’ format would allow for a generic and unbiased description of all kinds of learning experiences, the format itself implies a strong commitment to a substantialist ontology. xapi hence builds on the idea “that human beings and things [or in xapi terms: actors and objects] – the social and the material – exist as separate and self-contained entities that interact and affect each other” (cecez-kecmanovic et al., 2014, p. 809). even though the descriptive format might appear intuitively reasonable as it apparently follows the english syntax (cf. kevan & ryan, 2016), it is highly problematic as it presupposes that all relevant activities are essentially transitive in nature, i.e. that they can be properly described in terms of an identifiable subject that is acting upon a distinct object. as a consequence, the format marginalizes all those educational accounts that build on a relational ontology and which assume education and learning processes to be essentially intransitive in nature as actors and objects only come into being in relational transactions (e.g. emirbayer, 1997; fenwick & edwards, 2013; jornet & roth, 2018). as argued by baker (2000), formats such as xapi are ill-suited to capture educational processes in which the proper unit of analysis is an exchange or relation rather than an individual action. typical examples include processes of joint meaning making, negotiation and creative collaboration. apart from its ontological commitment, xapi also implies that learning experiences can be described independently of their performative enactment. towards this end, xapi draws on a representational epistemology as it assumes that what essentially matters to processes of learning and education can effectively be encoded in a representational format. this towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 idea has been articulated most succinctly by aaron silvers, a core advocate of xapi, who argued that “[a]n activity is an abstraction of something that can be done (performed) by an individual” (silvers, 2011). this claim is essential to xapi as without such abstractions there would be no chance to record activity statements in a discrete and decontextualized manner. furthermore, to set up respective systems, relevant descriptors need to be specified and implemented in advance, i.e. before some learning or educational activity is taking place. or to put it differently, xapi assumes that the conception, design, and analysis of an educational technology or setting, can be epistemically decoupled from the actual learning processes. however, such an epistemic account is limiting in at least two ways. firstly, it privileges descriptive accounts of educational technologies and settings over their concrete realization and therefore tends to ignore the productive translations that are required to make them practically operative (e.g. vinck & jeantet, 1995; mackenzie, 2005). secondly, such an account is highly reductive as it limits learning and education to processes that operate in the realm of the already known and hence conceptually accessible. as a consequence, xapi is not suitable to account for processes that are aimed not only at acquiring given knowledge or skills, but which are performative in that they reflexively challenge the adequacy of respective bodies of knowledge (e.g. trede & mcewen, 2012) and approach learning itself as a formative and re/presentational practice (e.g. osberg et al., 2008; fenwick & edwards, 2013). finally, from an axiological perspective, xapi construes educational processes as goaloriented activities. educational processes are accordingly understood as means or steps towards a more or less clearly defined end. again, silvers puts this quite clearly when stating that “[g]oals are essential for motivation of the performance of any activity and when the goals are for the attainment of new knowledge then it is easy to see how activities become learning activities” (silvers, 2011). due to the fact that learning activities are assumed to be something that can deliberately be designed, this position assumes that the goals learning processes are oriented at, can or even are to be predefined as well. accordingly, xapi implies a largely instrumental and telic understanding of education, and therefore suggests an idea of learning and education as processes that are accessible to measures of regulation and optimization. this inclination towards a regulatory stance, that aims to attune learning to the attainment of extrinsic goals, is most evident in the ambitions to apply xapi for predictive purposes (cf. rustici software, n.d.d). while such a regulatory agenda fits both reproductive and transformative pedagogies that derive their educational aims either from the status quo or a purported ideal state (cf. ylimaki & uljens, 2017), it cannot account for an ‘a-telic’ (röttgers, 2015) or ‘non-affirmative’ (benner, 1982) conception of education, which holds that respective processes are not a means towards an end, but that these are the processes in which new relations, orientations and ambitions are essentially formed. towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 in summary, xapi nicely aligns with a broad spectrum of approaches and models both in education and industry. in particular, it suits approaches, which focus on the individual learner, assume that the most relevant knowledge can be represented effectively and adopt a regulatory agenda. by the same token, xapi marginalizes all those approaches that construe learning as a deeply relational, performative and highly political process in itself. accordingly, there is a touch of irony to the fact that while silvers (2011) as well as kevan and ryan (2016) have argued that xapi has been heavily inspired by activity theory, engeström (2008, p. 258) insisted that “if activity theory is stripped of its historical analysis of contradictions of capitalism, the theory becomes either another management toolkit or another psychological approach without potential for radical transformations”. conclusions our intent in this paper has been to add to the current discussion in the field of critical data studies and educational science and draw attention to the ways in which standards are key to the formation of infrastructures on which educational technologies are operating. using the experience api as an example, we have aimed to show that despite standards being openly accessible and generic in nature, they are necessarily biased as they have to screen out certain perspectives and ideas on how the world could be understood and organized. we also do not think that the biases we have spotted in relation to xapi are arbitrary. in fact, we believe that the master narrative that undergirds the most widely used educational technology standards has remained fairly stable throughout the last two decades (e.g. allert et al., 2002; wiley, 2003; friesen, 2004). however, the aspirations of standardization initiatives became even stronger. rather than ‘simply’ managing and exchanging contents, the declared ambition became to record all learning activities – whether occurring in formal or informal contexts – and to draw an even more comprehensive picture of what learners are actually doing. even though educational technology standards might appear to be a boring or strange subject, we believe that they are an essential ingredient in the ongoing processes of digitization and datafication. as, from an infrastructural perspective, standardization is unavoidable, its analysis therefore might introduce us to “’[o]ther’ ways of knowing”, which in turn “can become important bridges that reflect back on ‘our’ ways of knowing” (star & lampland, 2009, p. 21). neither the designs of educational technologies, nor the data structures and schemata these technologies are operating on, are normally defined from scratch, but implemented based on already existing frameworks and standards. thus, the design of educational data infrastructures and platforms is intimately shaped by already existing educational standards such as xapi. yet, even though learners, teachers, and researchers are usually unaware not only of the standards as such but also the sociotechnical processes from which they emerge, they effectively impact the technologies we are using and the ideas of education we are pursuing. as such, educational technology standards are of high relevance for education and educational research. towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 references adl. 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(2017). a requirements engineering techniques review in agile software development methods. in o. gervasi, b. murgante, s. misra, g. borruso, c. m. torre, a. m. a. c. rocha, d. taniar, b. o. apduhan, e. stankova, & a. cuzzocrea (eds.), computational science and its applications – iccsa 2017 (vol. 10408, pp. 683–698). springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62404-4_50 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2006.00204.x https://www.w3.org/tr/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/tr/activitystreams-core/ http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/lo_do.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12849 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62404-4_50 towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures. a technogenetic analysis of the experience api abstract towards a closer look at the pipes and joints of educational data infrastructures on infrastructures and standards – a technogenetic perspective entry-points for critical analysis the experience api and its history translations required in the implementation of xapi (some) current applications of xapi xapi and its implied conceptions of learning and education conclusions references title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 immigrant women's reasoning and use of information and communications technology in lifelong learning david hallberg department of health in global transitions the swedish red cross university college and department of computer and systems sciences stockholm university email: david.hallberg@rkh.se (corresponding author) henrik hansson department of computer and systems sciences stockholm university email: hhansson@dsv.su.se anders g. nilsson department of computer and systems sciences stockholm university email: agn@dsv.su.se abstract this paper explores the reasoning and use of information and communications technology (ict) in lifelong learning by immigrant women. data were collected from semi-structured and unstructured interviews. the study was carried out primarily in a school environment, which also makes it possible to draw conclusions about the connection between learning in and outside school environments. most participants experienced major differences in the use of and access to ict after moving to their new country. most women use and access ict, even if not of their own volition. providing a summary of some of the benefits and barriers that emerged, our study has shown that it is important to distinguish the way someone reasons about ict and their actual use of it. no account was taken of cultural differences between the participants’ countries of origin. this study made it possible for the immigrant women to voice their experiences, knowledge, and feelings about their situations in school and in everyday life. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ mailto:david.hallberg@rkh.se mailto:hhansson@dsv.su.se mailto:agn@dsv.su.se seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 67 keywords: information and communications technology, lifelong learning, immigrant women, integration, swedish tuition for immigrants introduction using qualitative data, partly supported by an interview guide, this paper explores the reasoning and use of information and communications technology (ict) in lifelong learning by immigrant women. icts have the potential to change one’s economic and social status (itu, 2003). by means of ict, immigration can result in liberating processes, strengthening the individual by increasing their influence in decision-making processes (vanclay, 2002), but it can also result in exclusion. an individual may lack the necessary digital skills (ec, 2007) or may be excluded due to socio-political circumstances (winner, 1986; bleed, 1997). as a consequence it may be necessary to take account of technical and social choices that influence people’s interactions (ren, kraut, & kiesler, 2007; steyn, 2011), as well as the perception of ict as gendered (aaltojärvi, 2012). motivation of the study a focus on women and girls can have a major impact on a country’s overall development (mbarika, payton, kvasny, & amadi, 2006). there is a strong connection between the literacy and education of mothers and their engagement in the development their children (sticht & mcdonald, 1990; weigel, martin, & bennett, 2006). these findings have important implications for economic growth and lifelong learning from an intergenerational perspective (world bank, 2003). ict when applied is gender specific and this has a detrimental impact mainly on women (brady aschauer, 1999; terry & gomez, 2010). as a consequence, an illiterate immigrant woman without any previous ict culture and without school attainment is likely to be slow to enrol in education in an oecd country, which is largely built on one’s ability to master ict. the process of integration may differ according to gender because of the different experiences of opportunities among men and women in working life, formal learning, or everyday life (williams, 2009; aaltojärvi, 2012). immigrants may also be given different opportunities based on their status. for instance, taking courses tends not to have direct influence on employment opportunities, which in most cases benefits males in countries such as israel, the uk, and the usa (hartman & hartman, 1981), whilst in other countries, such as sweden, these policies are regulated on the basis of a residence permit: municipalities are required to offer swedish language instruction to all adult immigrants who lack basic swedish language skills…immigrants must be given the opportunity to develop their ability to communicate in swedish…in everyday situations…swedish for immigrants must also prepare learners for further studies (regeringskansliet, 2013). scant attention has been paid to the use of ict by immigrants. as a consequence, little is known about the benefits of and barriers to ict for immigrants (caidi, longford, allard, & dechief, 2007). studies that have focused on the take up and use of ict by immigrant women in their everyday lives suggest that further studies are needed (atlestam, brunnström, & myhre, 2011; caidi, longford, allard, & dechief, 2007; elias & lemish, 2009). this study explores the reasoning around ict and use of it in lifelong learning by immigrant women whose educational qualifications are below secondary level. more specifically, the research question addressed is: what are the major (a) benefits of and (b) barriers to ict in lifelong learning according to the immigrant women selected? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 68 lifelong learning in this paper, the concept of lifelong learning refers to all types and settings of learning, education, training, and self-development activities for individuals which would equip them to cope with the challenges of economic, social, demographic, and technological changes (hodgson & kambouri, 1999, p. 176). for a country’s competitiveness in the global knowledge economy, it is essential to create opportunities for lifelong learning (world bank, 2003). in lifelong learning, special attention needs to be paid to the knowledge of languages, digital competence, learning to learn,1 social and civic competences, and cultural awareness and expression (ec, 2007). lifelong learning is part of everyday life. learning must be understood as a way of living in order to capture how it affects knowledge practices in work organisations (antonacopoulou, jarvis, andersen, elkjaer, & høyrup, 2005) and in other contexts of life, such as personal life (oecd, 1999; óhidy, 2008). studies that focus on lifelong learning should therefore endeavour to study people’s everyday lives and perspectives on life, for instance, their priorities or issues affecting their opportunities as they navigate life. ict in lifelong learning ict can support lifelong learning (gokcearslan & ozcan, 2011; baris & tosun, 2011; camacho, minelli, & grosseck, 2012). educational participation may become a personal project partly driven by technology (selwyn, 2005). it is therefore essential to consider briefly some of the applications that may be used in lifelong learning using ict, and how these affect women’s learning. gokcearslan and ozcan (2011) set up their literature study to reveal the potential for change being brought about by wiki applications. their viewpoint is that wiki is a social interaction software tool that enables users to work either alone or in collaboration with others, developing, editing, and sharing pages. this makes wikis suitable in a wide range of areas: business, academia, and people’s everyday lives. wane (2001) provides a comprehensive picture of the everyday life experiences of rural women in kenya, referred to by the author as the indigenous knowledge of embu rural women. wane’s findings show a male-dominated society. she states that if ict is to assist lifelong learning it has to be designed so as to take into account how these women live their everyday lives to ensure that no citizens are excluded. hawkey (2002) argues that learning with ict has much in common with learning in informal environments. his own experiences from kenya show that language is a major issue in all learning settings. teachers must be aware of how to support the pupil or student in order for them to develop a desire for lifelong learning (wanzare, 2002). this proved to be a challenge during the implementation of ict in schools (lindh, 1997). if lifelong learning for all is to become a reality, such opportunities must be catered for throughout the life cycle (oecd, 1999), “from cradle to grave” (óhidy, 2008, p. 48). the challenge is “how teachers can inculcate good lifelong learning habits in their students” (oecd, 2000, p. 23). barriers to lifelong learning community resource centres (crcs) or ict in general have not always proven to be successful in providing “the have-nots” with ict (steyn, 2011). such challenges as a poor literacy rate, language barriers, discrimination against women, a lack of ict skills, financial constraints, poor infrastructure, and a lack of coordinated government initiatives have all hindered the successful use of ict (islam & hasan, 2009). according to chapman et al. (2006), barriers to lifelong learning can be categorised as personal and societal ones, barriers seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 69 encountered by the agencies which provide, and those encountered by the sector as a whole (2006, p. 155). personal barriers can be related to how a person lives or has lived their life. a person’s life story may affect how this person interprets everything around them. these barriers are not necessarily negative. a person may be satisfied with what they have achieved and the opportunities available. in contrast, a person may not be aware of how to tackle the challenges facing their community. this view of barriers is closely related to the ontological notation of experiences suggested by kaipayil (1995; 2002). these barriers, however, are not one-dimensional…they often interact with one another to create complexly interlocked patterns…redressing the situation may require changing people’s attitudes towards themselves and their fellow citizens… (chapman, mcgilp, cartwright, de souza, & toomey, 2006, p. 156). digital competence digital competence, as suggested by ec (2007), involves basic skills in ict: the use of computers to retrieve, assess, store, produce, present, and exchange information and to communicate and participate in collaborative networks via the internet. this definition parallels lankshear and knobel’s (2006) third definition of digital literacy, namely as a set of skills or “master competency” needed in life (2006, p. 15). in addition, ferrari (2012) understands digital competence as set of “knowledge, skills, attitudes, abilities, strategies, and awareness that are required when using ict and digital media to perform tasks…communicate and collaborate…for work, leisure, participation, learning, and socialising” (2012, p. 30). ferrari (2013) proposes a digital competence framework comprising five areas, of which we only give a summary due to the overall length (table 1). its overall aim contributes to the better understanding and development of digital competence in europe. in the first stage, foundation, the person in question has basic skills in using digital resources and online resources to identify, retrieve, store, and so on, information. when the person reaches the intermediate level they master some of those skills in a more mature way. they also master different tools that may perform the same task. the person can also work online more often, adopting the adequate netiquette or moral behaviour, too. advanced skills suggests that the person is now able to master a wide range of tools in a mature way and has a deep understanding of the difference between a set of tools, including understanding the code behind certain programs. table 1 summary of ferrari’s digital competence framework a – foundation b – intermediate c – advanced information identify, locate, retrieve, store, organise, and analyse digital information, judging its relevance and purpose communication communicate in digital environments, share resources through online tools, link with others and collaborate through digital tools, interact with and participate in communities and networks, cross-cultural awareness content creation create and edit new content (from word processing to images and video); integrate and re-elaborate previous knowledge and content; produce creative expressions, media outputs, and programming; deal with and apply intellectual property rights and licences seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 70 safety personal protection, data protection, digital identity protection, security measures, safe and sustainable use problem solving identify digital needs and resources, make informed decisions as to which are the most appropriate digital tools according to the purpose or need, solve conceptual problems through digital means, creatively use technologies, solve technical problems, update one's own and others' competences material and methods settings this study was carried out in sweden in 2013, which is considered an oecd country (wto and oecd, 2009). digital literacy is considered important in most situations in sweden, including lifelong learning (scb, 2013). the participants were interviewed and spoken with in public libraries, youth recreation centres, and public schools. the participants in the study chiefly consisted of those in two schools under the adult education programme of swedish tuition for immigrants (sfi): komvux sfi, s:t olofsskolan, norrköping and sfi lernia, jönköping. at the time of the study, the schools had a total of 1160 students and about 68 employees, including technical and administrative personnel, of whom 54 were teachers and one teacher was just nearing completion of his/her teacher training. data collection and analysis expert sampling and snowballing (patton, 2002) were used to find participants and to consider ethical issues. all immigrant women studied had been living in sweden for between 6 months and 19 years and in their countries of origin for between 18 and 60 years. the education level of the participants ranged from no education to secondary education. in order to ensure that the same basic lines of questioning were put to each person interviewed, and in order to interview these people systematically, and to allow individual perspectives and experiences to emerge, an interview guide with topics formulated beforehand based on previous research was developed (patton, 2002). even though the topics had been chosen in advance, those topics were further explored to lessen the possibility of omitting important or salient topics or issues which had not been anticipated beforehand (patton, 2002). interviewing and life-story interviewing were performed in swedish, english, portuguese, and spanish. a limitation, therefore, is that not all participants were able to communicate using their native language. some of the questions had to be put to participants twice. for this reason it is possible that the meaning of some of the questions may have partially eluded participants. interviews were either recorded or written down with pen and paper. when using the life-story interview, also referred to as story-telling, there is a risk that the teller may present a fabricated story. gubrium and holstein (2001) suggest that this does not necessarily represent a disadvantage, however, but rather an opportunity for the interviewer, who could include an interpretation of the purpose served by the fabricated story for the storyteller. whether an opportunity or not, a major concern is how the interviewer will know or understand whether, or to what extent, the story is fabricated. using the life-story interview, we tried to be prepared for “unexpected” telling (as per definition all answers or stories are unexpected) and for the impact the respondent’s story might have on the interviewer (gubrium & holstein, 2001). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 71 using the life-story interview, 1) we tried to seek the personal relevance of the story, and 2) we regarded the life story as a text like any other document. in total, 16 immigrant women born in bolivia (n = 1), brazil (n = 1), burundi (n = 1), cameroon (n = 1), eritrea (n = 1), ethiopia (n = 1), kenya (n = 1), uganda (n = 1), sierra leone (n = 1), sri lanka (n = 1), thailand (n = 1), and somalia (n = 5) were interviewed. the data were selectively transcribed with nvivo. in doing so we came to the same conclusion as welsh (2002): a combination of electronic and manual methods is fruitful for the process of the analysis. this may be a result of a dearth of large recorded data (welsh, 2002). data were noted without delay. to describe and summarise the data we use illustrative excerpts (nilsen, 2013; cohen, manion, & morrison, 2007). in this paper, we describe excerpts with regard to four settings of lifelong learning: social relations (excerpt 1), everyday life (2), working life (3), and formal learning (4). whilst interviews were the primary method, observations complemented these interviews (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2007). observations were conducted by following two different classes in their lessons during two weeks in total and also outside the classroom in both schools. in this way we were able to gain a better understanding of what was said during the interviews. ethical considerations before interviewing women individually or in groups we informed not only the women but also the employees, principals or teachers, and representatives from churches of what we intended to do. we told all participants that we would get back to them before publishing any results to enable them to double-check their contributions (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2007). results providing a summary of benefits and barriers that emerged (table 2), our study has shown that it is important to distinguish the way in which someone reasons about ict and the use of the same. to support this conclusion, we highlight excerpts from four settings of lifelong learning that emerged, namely ict in social relations, everyday life, working life, and formal learning. table 2 major benefits and barriers to ict in lifelong learning settings of ict in lifelong learning benefits barriers in social relations sns, telecommunication, email with friends; maintaining contact with family members far away; not being alone sns causes trouble with friends in everyday life entertainment; “you cannot live without a computer” difficult for learners with lack of digital literacy to learn alone in working life job seeking; receiving information from employer; executing duties on the move lack of knowledge about how to set up or use email account seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 72 in formal learning tablet computers increase motivation to learn, in particular for illiterate learners; digital solutions for learners with special educational needs; informal learning difficulty working on desktop computers and text-based applications sns=social networking site excerpt 1: ict in social relations participant (p) 1: in fact, i don’t chat. i write at the most, on facebook, for instance. when i arrive home, maybe i write i have met with someone and what we did and so on. sure, i usually read and comment to my friends … computers are useful in order to communicate, so, i use facebook a lot. p2: i have a computer at home. but i don’t use facebook. i only use the [website] digital track, practising swedish. p3: i don’t like facebook because i ran into trouble with my friends back home. i opened an account but closed it. but now i write to my friends using sms on my mobile instead. author (a): why did you run into trouble? p2: my friends, they just “bla bla bla”. also i have little patience with facebook: “hi! bla bla bla …” [imitating her “friends” on facebook]. sometimes i forget to answer and my friends go: “why don’t you answer me? why, why?” i go: “i'm sorry, i'm sorry.” i’ve all the household chores like children, cleaning, my husband, etc., etc. i have a lot to do. p3: your husband works in sweden? p2: yes, he lives in sweden but he doesn't work. he doesn't do very much; soon he will retire. he used to work for many years. he hasn’t worked for two years. most participants who use the internet apart from in formal learning use it for social activities, and mainly for social networking sites (snss) like facebook. nonetheless, the excerpt shows barriers to snss in lifelong learning. it illustrates why snss can compromise moral behaviour among friends. it also shows that the time factor is one reason why such technologies are not used: housework occupies too much time. excerpt 2: ict in everyday life p1: it doesn't matter if i have a bad hair day and it’s 15 degrees below zero, because i go out anyway. i am very strong. i feel safe and secure here. everyone respects one another. p2: yes, sweden is calm and peaceful. p3: in sweden i believe you cannot live without a computer. i use my computer every day, always. there [the country of origin] you don’t need it to manage your life, but here [in sweden] you cannot live without it. even when i don’t have time i use it. we asked how the participants feel and reason about security when using or accessing computers and the internet in public locations. as participant 1 explains, she feels that she can go out and use a computer in a public setting seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 73 no matter what. all participants in sweden agree that the security is much better in sweden than in their country of origin. most women who had been in school for at least one semester recounted that in their countries of origin they seldom or never used computers or the internet, whereas in sweden they use them often and regularly, even to the point of feeling that they cannot live without a computer in sweden, as shown by the third participant in the excerpt. excerpt 3: ict in working life the participants who were aware of computers and the internet felt that in sweden the use of email is essential, whereas in their countries of origin, people may create email accounts without using them for sending and retrieving messages. since the participants, according to their own accounts, were advised by the national job-search agency to acquire an electronic address in order to communicate on employment issues, we discussed the women’s reasoning around this: p1: [the national job-seeking agency] sends messages via the internet, email, to which i am to respond, which i also do. so i check my mails on a regular basis …. i use the internet everywhere. if i’m not at home … i carry my ipad. i don’t know much about computers so i mainly use it for job issues and facebook. p2: i don’t think of any particular job …. i looked for many job opportunities among various companies last year but it didn't feel good in my heart. they say “welcome, nice” but when they see me they look at my clothes, smile, and say “i'm sorry.” that’s the reality for all muslim women: skirt and [covering the] hair. that is not so good here in sweden. p3: i was very hopeful when i came to sweden. i’ve turned to [the national job-search agency] and they were to assist me in finding a job and i’ve found many jobs and i’ve no problem with working anywhere …. in my heart, i feel i want to have a certain job, but i have no problem with whatever kind of work they are giving to me. p4: no, i haven’t searched for any jobs. i remain at home. i leave my children at the day-care centre. i cannot be on the computer 'cos then i return home to do my homework, clean, cook. i have a lot of commitments. the top job-search channel on the internet among the participants is the national job-search agency’s own website. all women stressed that they found jobs advertised on the internet but, as the excerpts illustrate, they were not taken on. they attributed this largely to their cultural and religious origins. as excerpt 1 illustrates, one reason for not being on the computer is, again, a lack of time because of owing to housework. it is worth noting that not all women claimed to be seeking jobs. some of them explained that they needed a better command of swedish and/or lacked primary education from their countries of origin. excerpt 4: ict in formal learning in order to help the students, s:t olofsskolan has set up a resource centre called the meeting place. during most hours, members of staff are available to help with the equipment, which includes, for example, computers, a television, copier, and projector. there are spaces for the students to use computers alone or together with others. during our visits, the meeting place was also used for remedial education for some students: a: what is your general opinion about the meeting place? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 74 p: the meeting place is good since i can be on the computer reading and translating new words. sometimes i speak with the other students. sometimes it is not so good 'cos many students speak their own language, making it hard to concentrate and understand, like arabic, somali, and english. the problem is, i do the same sometimes when i meet with someone from my own country. women felt confident in the help and support they are given at sfi and the services offered, for instance the meeting place, as excerpt 4 highlights. a barrier, however, is that the set-up may make it difficult to concentrate. apart from the meeting place, the participants also valued the public library, which was considered to be an extension of formal learning in school. observations before the concluding discussion, we shall highlight some observations made which complement the interviews. the observations enhance the understanding of ict in lifelong learning in general and in connection with formal settings in particular. the schools visited were well-equipped and the teachers committed. at s:t olofsskolan, teachers download applications on tablet computers, try them out, discuss them with each other, and then individualise the learning on the basis of each student’s ability. another example is the digital solution for visually impaired learners at lernia. using this computer, students with impaired sight can read books or work on the computer more easily. s:t olofsskolan uses a plan that it developed itself called “digital competence – a guide”, which indicates digital skills that a student has to master after the four steps (table 3). the competence guide resembles ferrari’s framework but in a greatly reduced and simplified form. its starting point is also that the person in question has no digital skills whatsoever. the guide is also connected with the currently available sfi courses, where courses a–d indicate the corresponding sfi courses. step 1 indicates basic skills and step 4 indicates the most advanced skills. using the guide, the participants in our study ranged from step 1 to step 3, being found on sfi courses a and b, although they usually lacked the necessary skill to search independently for more detailed information. another common lack was that some women had electronic addresses or even internet at home but were not necessarily clear on the use of either of them. table 3: digital competence – a guide course a (step 1) course b (step 2) course c (step 3) course d (step 4) know digital tools for learning and communication and be able to use a computer with guidance. be able to use digital tools for learning and communication and to use a computer with guidance be able to use digital tools for learning, communication, and information seeking more independently be able to use digital tools for learning, communication, and informationseeking independently concluding discussion the excerpts and observations illustrate benefits of and barriers to ict. no strong opposition from the participants regarding reasons for using ict was found. the barriers uncovered are rather the result of a lack of familiarity with ict in everyday-life situations. if someone has lived “a whole life” without seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 75 even knowing about the existence of computers and is suddenly compelled to use one, this may make even the most enthusiastic woman to feel uncomfortable. assuming that the use of computers, including access to the internet, is an integral part of learning in everyday life, or that, as one woman suggested, “you cannot live without a computer”, we must set our sights on mitigating the external barriers that an illiterate woman with no previous ict culture or school attainment may encounter. the participants claim that having an email account is not tantamount to using it or even understanding how to use it. it is important for authorities to know about such reasoning, where it might otherwise be perceived that the person in question is digitally competent and understands how to use a computer. it is important that authorities should be aware of this reasoning to obviate the risk of their interpreting that the person in question is digitally competent and understands how to use a computer. a majority of the participants did not clearly distinguish between the uses of ict in various settings of lifelong learning. this suggests that icts are embedded in the social lives of people (aaltojärvi, 2012). according to the participants’ reasoning, they use ict not only because they want to but also because they feel that society exerts pressure on an individual to use ict on a routine basis. for instance, it would otherwise be difficult to find or maintain a job. in other words, the use of ict is sometimes perceived as forced. selwyn (2005) explores the roles information technologies (its) may play in supporting adults’ reflexive judgements about, and reflexive engagements with, education and learning. the trends to be found in selwyn’s study do not differ greatly from our own. for instance, he suggests that information technologies mainly helped those who were already reflexive to continue being so. our study has shown that authorities take it for granted that people have acquired digital literacy skills, hence immigrants with no previous ict culture are at risk of stagnation compared to those who have already adapted to this culture. thus, the use of ict in society may disempower certain groups (selwyn, 2005). winner (1986) has reached the same conclusion with regard to technologies in general. the ever-increasing stream of new pages on the internet means we can be constantly socially up to date (henderson, 2001). it is therefore also appropriate to highlight instances of where social compulsion is seen as a barrier to lifelong learning. one of the participants said that she felt under pressure to be digitally available to her friends regularly. this is a paradox as researchers are preoccupied with the question as to whether ict-based lifelong leaning can reduce social exclusion (webb, 2006). webb reflects on whether “there is a social price to pay for the benefits of globalisation and the growth of knowledge-based societies” (webb, 2006, p. 481), the price being increased inequalities between the “haves” and “have-nots”. our study to some degree is at odds with webb’s reflections by uncovering aspects of involuntary socialisation because of the use of ict in a society that demands such technologies in lifelong learning. since women felt confident in the help and support they are given at sfi and in the services offered and the teachers appeared to spend extra time supporting students in their learning and integration, it is paramount for more resources to be allocated or reallocated to the teachers to continue or even strengthen such support. exchange students coming to sweden often have a mentor or family to whom they can turn for support. a similar system could be introduced for newly arrived immigrants to serve as a natural entry point to the new society. this would allow them to put into practice more easily the knowledge gained from sfi, inducing language, cultural, or ict matters. this study has shown that in order to understand the whole person greater collaboration between the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 76 organisations and authorities responsible for integrating immigrants is a sine qua non. another suggestion for further research is to investigate how applications for tablet pcs may be better suited for different groups of immigrants. most applications require learners to already be able to read and write or to already have a good command of any of the major world languages was not the case in the majority of the participants in our study. perhaps we need a fresh viewpoint, as hess (2007) suggests, from which to study those aspects of integration and lifelong learning that this study has highlighted, regardless of whether ict is the ultimate way for lifelong learning including social relations, work, learning, and everyday life. hess suggests that our established ideas of the world sometimes need to be revised. there is a need to delve further into the differences between factors of educational and ict background, culture, and personality characteristics of the women, which this study has not done. since it has been suggested that gender can be understood as being mediated by intersections of race, class, and geography (vigdor, 2011), this study was limited by a lack of exploration into the cultural differences among the participants or their countries of origin. ---------------------- 1 the ability to pursue and persist in learning, to organise one's own learning, including through effective management of time and information, both individually and in groups. 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(2011). a techno-passion that is not one: rethinking marginality, exclusion, and difference. international journal of gender, science and technology, 3(1), 4-32. williams, n. (2009). education, gender, and migration in the context of social change. social science research, 38(4), 883-896. winner, l. (1986). do artefacts have politics? in l. winner, the whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology (pp. 1-12 [19-39]). university of chicago press. world bank. (2003). lifelong learning in the global knowledge economy: challenges for developing countries. washington, dc. retrieved from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intll/resources/lifelong-learning-inthe-global-knowledge-economy/lifelonglearning_gke.pdf wto and oecd. (2009). aid for trade at glance 2009 maintaining momentum. oecd 6 wto. immigrant women's reasoning and use of information and communications technology in lifelong learning david hallberg abstract introduction motivation of the study lifelong learning ict in lifelong learning barriers to lifelong learning digital competence material and methods settings data collection and analysis ethical considerations results excerpt 1: ict in social relations excerpt 2: ict in everyday life excerpt 3: ict in working life excerpt 4: ict in formal learning observations concluding discussion references title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 first do no harm: developing an ethical process of consent and release for digital storytelling in healthcare pip hardy co-founder of the patient voices programme phd candidate manchester metropolitan university email: pip@pilgrimprojects.co.uk abstract opportunities to disseminate the stories of patients and those who care for them via the internet create new dilemmas with respect to ethical processes of consent and release. the possibility of utilising images as well as words further complicates this issue. balancing the need to protect the safety and security of those who share their stories with their own desire for their stories to be widely heard presents a complex blend of ethical issues. the patient voices programme has been helping people create and share digital stories of healthcare since 2003. during that time, careful thought has been given to the development of a respectful process that both empowers and protects storytellers, affording time at every stage of the process to reflect and make informed decisions about consent, sharing and dissemination. this paper describes how that process has been developed and explores the issues that it was designed to address. keywords: digital storytelling, healthcare, ethics, informed consent, respect, reflection. introduction and context ‘primum non nocerum. (first do no harm.)’ hippocrates – greek physician and founder of the hippocratic school of medicine digital storytelling was developed in california in the mid-1990s by what became the center for digital storytelling (cds), and is now (as of 2015) storycenter, as a means of enabling ordinary people to utilise multi-media tools in order to share stories about their lives (lambert, 2002). early use of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 162 the methodology in america was primarily in the field of community development, and came to the uk initially via bbc’s capture wales project. gradually the method took root in education, youth work, public health, the environment, domestic violence, immigration, research, museum work and, more recently, marketing, advertising, journalism and many other contexts. indeed, the term ‘digital storytelling’ has become somewhat ubiquitous. when used in this paper, it refers to the participatory workshop approach first developed by cds that builds on the emancipatory ideals of paulo freire (freire, 1973), promoting social justice by giving ordinary people the opportunity for their voices to be heard. through the provision and creation of what illich referred to as ‘convivial tools’ (illich, 1973), people are able to represent their lives through voice, image and music and convey them via digital media. the result is a short, multi-media tapestry imbued with authenticity and rich with emotion, offering viewers an opportunity to walk in the storyteller’s shoes for just a few moments. the growing popularity and acknowledgement of digital storytelling as a genre in its own right has led to increasing attention being given to ethical considerations in relation to digital storytelling. the issues are complex and multi-faceted, ranging from storyteller consent through to use of other people’s images and music and the particular sensitivities of using personal pictures that might reveal identity when this could prove to be dangerous. a set of ethical guidelines for use in digital storytelling has been developed by storycenter (gubrium, hill & harding, 2012) and addresses issues including: storytellers’ rights; consent, approval and release; confidentiality, anonymity vs having a voice; informed consent; editing and editorial control; support (for storytellers). these guidelines have developed into a code of practice and storytellers’ bill of rights and inform the practice of many digital storytelling facilitators around the world (cds, 2013). subsequent work by hill, harding and flicker has delved more deeply into the increasing complexity of issues in relation to digital storytelling in the field of public health and has developed in parallel to the work of the patient voices programme particularly in relation to an ethical, staged release process and sensitivities around release of highly personal stories to a worldwide audience (gubrium, hill & flicker, 2014). digital storytelling in healthcare was pioneered by the patient voices programme, with the first stories created in 2003 for the uk national health service’s modernisation agency. with these first patient voices stories arose some important ethical issues, and a number of questions presented themselves: • when does protection become stifling? when does anonymity become lack of acknowledgement? • how can people share their stories in ways that are both respectful and safe? what are the implications of sharing a story via the internet? • what would storytellers receive in return for sharing their stories? would they be paid? • how would the stories be used? who would see them? who would benefit from them? would the stories be sold for profit? common to all ethical processes is the protection of participants in any activity that might be deemed to be potentially harmful, as is the case in much biomedical research. the challenges of how best to protect people who are willing to contribute to the improvement of healthcare have been addressed by many, but the work of beauchamp and childress has been particularly useful in the field of biomedical ethics. in keeping with most codes of research practice that are underpinned by principles of respect, justice and beneficence, their four principles are: respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice, plus concern for the scope of application (beauchamp & childress, 2009). their work has made a significant contribution to what has been seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 163 referred to as ‘procedural’ ethics (guillemin & gillam, 2004), that is, the need for codes of ethics, research ethics committees, informed consent, etc. however necessary these research processes are in the design and conduct of research, they are not sufficient when it comes to addressing those everyday challenges and dilemmas facing researchers for which there are rarely simple solutions. for these, it is also necessary to have what guillemin and gillam refer to as ‘practice ethics’ (2004). this notion of practice ethics relies on reflexivity and ‘ethical mindfulness’ (guillemin & heggen, 2009). ethical mindfulness seems to be an expansion of the conventional notion of reflexivity, relying on vigilant attention to: ethically important moments; understanding and acknowledging the ethical importance of feelings (such as a sense of discomfort); the ability to articulate what is ethically important; the ability to be reflexive; and, finally, courage, particularly in relation to thinking about ethics in new ways and being willing to stand up to established structures if these seem inappropriate (guillemin & heggen, 2009). these ‘practice ethics’ and especially ethical mindfulness, are characteristic of the way we have approached ethical issues arising in our patient voices work. the first dilemma: anonymity, confidentiality or acknowledgement? although anonymity does not appear in beauchamp and childress’ principles, conventional ethics approaches assume and assure both anonymity and confidentiality. however, not everyone wants to be anonymised; or, as one eloquent patient put it ‘i wanted to matter’ (tilby, 2007). it was no surprise, therefore, when the first patient voices storytellers made it clear that they wanted to be acknowledged for their stories. it was essential to the values and the success of the patient voices programme that participants felt safe, valued and cared for and that a rigorous ethical approach should underpin the programme’s activities. in addition to the more obvious considerations highlighted above, and in view of the particularly difficult content inherent in many patient stories, consideration has also been given to the potential for digital storytelling to be therapeutic and the consequent need for supervision for facilitators (hardy, 2012). while these are important factors to consider in relation the safety of storytellers, they are outside the scope of this paper. nevertheless, although our work was not medical in nature, we wished to adhere to the hippocratic principle of ‘doing no harm’, either to our participant/storytellers or ourselves. the rest of this paper looks at how these issues were addressed, focusing on the experience of developing an ethical process that would be suitable for digital storytelling in healthcare: a process of trial and error, reflection and reflexivity, care and carefulness, learning from experience, mindfulness, and, always, striving to respect and protect everyone involved in the digital storytelling process. background the serendipitous discovery of a digital story by the author of this paper led to the decision to adapt the methodology for use in healthcare. initially, the intention was to incorporate this visual media into the united kingdom health education partnership (ukhep) e-learning programme as a means of prompting reflection and consideration of the ‘why’ of healthcare rather than simply the ‘how’. at a time when the importance of involving patients, carers and service users in the design and delivery of healthcare was just beginning to be acknowledged, we also believed that digital stories created by service users and carers would offer a uniquely affective way to help nhs board teams understand patients and carers’ experiences of healthcare. (p hardy & t sumner, 2014). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 164 thus, in 2003, the patient voices programme was founded. it was one of the earliest digital storytelling projects in the uk (bbc’s capture wales was established in 2001) and the first digital storytelling project in the world to focus specifically on healthcare. without knowing of the existence of cds, the patient voices journey began with little guidance but a great deal of passion and a determination to uphold values and principles honed during many years spent in adult education, quality control, counselling and facilitation and, more recently, healthcare service improvement. in consideration of the best way to ensure safety and protection as well as acknowledging and valuing the contribution of people who have been willing to share their experiences in the form of stories, the patient voices programme has adhered, as far as possible, to the four ethical principles outlined above. indeed, these principles lie at the heart of the patient voices ethical process (beauchamp & childress, 2009; hardy & sumner, 2008). the use of patient stories in healthcare education and service improvement is a relatively recent phenomenon. in the early years of the 21st century, stories, if they were mentioned at all, were consigned to the bottom of the hierarchy of acceptable evidence (evans, 2003). this phenomenon is readily understandable when set against the backdrop of the drive towards evidence based medicine (ebm) in the 1990s: excellent research and evidence, such as that conveyed via cochrane reviews (www.cochrane.org), were necessary in order to ensure the most effective and appropriate clinical decisions. however, what was lacking was the evidence of experience. in an attempt to provide some balance for evidence-based medicine, a small group of clinicians-cumacademics developed what they termed ‘narrative based medicine’ (charon & montello, 2002; greenhalgh, 1999; hurwitz, greenhalgh & skultans, 2004), highlighting the use of literature and patient stories to illuminate the subjective, human experience of those receiving healthcare. despite this intention to foreground the patient experience, somewhat paradoxically, patient stories, (often referred to as ‘anecdotes’), were considered to be fair game for cutting up and placing in categories, themes and sub-themes for analysis (tilley, 1995), in much the same way as researchers might work with responses from a research questionnaire. while this is not an unknown phenomenon in qualitative research, it can change the meaning of a story according to the interpretation and needs of the researcher. indeed, hawkins and lindsay (hawkins & lindsay, 2006) refer to this process as ‘dismemberment’, suggesting that ‘to treat stories in this way is to fail to respect the tellers of these stories. it is to make the assumption that our interpretation of the patient’s experience is more valid than their telling of it.’ this approach risks demeaning both stories and storytellers and represents a significant ethical hurdle. one possible response to this problem is to work closely with the people who are telling their stories to consider carefully exactly what they want to say, and how they want to say it, as is the practice in many digital storytelling projects, including patient voices. debate about whether to use the word ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ presents another hurdle to the world of healthcare education and research. the term ‘narrative’ tends to be more widely used in academic circles, while ‘story’ has attracted a somewhat pejorative association with a less serious account, even a fabrication. narrative is often regarded as a factual account, while story can be thought of as more ‘reflective, creative and value-laden, usually revealing something important about the human condition’(haigh & hardy, 2011). another entrenched assumption in the world of healthcare education and research was that all patients (and others) willing to share their experiences and stories wished to remain anonymous and, therefore, unacknowledged. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 165 while affording protection and, in some cases, safety, and therefore enshrined in any respectable ethical process, this assumption does not allow for those who wish to be connected with their stories. it must be acknowledged here that ethical guidelines for medical and healthcare research were, by and large, developed for use in clinical trials where anonymity and confidentiality might be more desirable, but the fact remains that, should an individual wish to be acknowledged, it could be difficult for his or her desire to be fulfilled. greenhalgh, an early proponent of patient stories, does shift her position over time from one in which stories are referred to as ‘narratives’ and considered within the context of research, and therefore subject to conventional research ethics guidelines (t. greenhalgh & hurwitz, 1999), to a position where she acknowledges the importance of ‘story’ and even goes so far as to suggest that different forms of ethical approval might usefully be considered in situations where patients are sharing their stories (trisha greenhalgh, 2006). in 2002, the uk department of health published shifting the balance of power, expressing the aspiration that patients and carers should be at the very heart of healthcare and, furthermore, that they should have ‘choice, voice and control’ over what happened to them (dh, 2002). within a year of that report, the uk health education partnership (ukhep) had commissioned the development of an innovative e-learning programme clinical governance and challenged pilgrim projects, a small, bespoke education consultancy specialising in healthcare quality improvement, to incorporate ‘the patient voice’. at about the same time, a research project into the strategic leadership of clinical governance revealed that nhs board teams were lacking an understanding of the patient experience (stanton, 2004). methods ‘i am tired of telling my story to researchers and others who take my story, use only the bits that are helpful to them and leave the rest. they get their publications and their phds and i remain unacknowledged, anonymous and living on benefits.’ ‘i don’t want to be anonymous. i don’t want my story to be “dismembered” taking only the bits that someone else considers useful. if i share my story, i want to be acknowledged and i want it to be told in my own words.’ ‘why should other people profit from my story? these were the words of the first two people who shared their stories with the newly-formed patient voices programme, referring to their past experiences with researchers and others interested in their stories. in 2003, digital storytelling itself was still relatively young, if not quite in its infancy. it was unheard of in healthcare. it was a stroke of great good fortune that the first two patient voices storytellers were both lawyers. ian kramer was an ‘expert’ patient called, who was hiv positive and also had a bipolar disorder; monica clarke was an ‘expert’ carer who had cared for her husband for 11 years following a severe stroke that left him permanently incapacitated. both were involved in the expert patient programme (epp). funding from the uk nhs modernisation agency’s clinical governance support team made it possible for monica and ian to develop stories with the patient voices programme. their stories were intended to reveal their felt experiences of the values of clinical governance, that is: trust, equity, justice and respect (stanton, 2004). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 166 the prompt for those early stories were those very values identified above: ‘tell us a story’, we encouraged, ‘about trust. or respect. or justice.’ and so they did. their stories are a testament to their courage and remain among the most popular stories still shown in schools of healthcare and medicine around the world. they can be seen at www.patientvoices.org.uk/ikramer.htm and www.patientvoices.org.uk/mclarke.htm from the very beginning, it was important to ensure that both storytellers and their stories were safe. there was a strong sense that, if people were going to entrust their precious stories to the patient voices programme, it was necessary to acknowledge the role of ‘guardians’ of the stories. monica clarke told us, in her inimitable way, that she was tired of other people ‘taking’ her story, sometimes misquoting it, sometimes taking things out of context, and using her story to further their own careers in research or education or quality improvement, gaining masters degrees and phds on the back of her story, always careful to guard her anonymity. ‘i don’t want to be anonymous anymore’, she said. these are my stories. i want to be heard and i want to be acknowledged’ (hardy & sumner, 2014) having listened to monica’s concerns, one of the first principles of the patient voices programme was not to presume that storytellers wished to remain anonymous. they would be acknowledged if they so wished. with their permission, storytellers’ names would appear on their stories. another key principle was that, once approved by the storyteller, the story would not be changed. working closely with storytellers to ensure that the story is really what they want to say (and not simply what we want to hear) offers rewarding opportunities for co-production and understanding. although our process has changed somewhat since those early days, it is still underpinned by the same principles and the intention of any changes has been to make the process more robust. in addition, there is every reason to believe that involving storytellers at every stage of the development of their stories, seeking their advice, guidance and approval before moving on, were successful in empowering storytellers and giving them as much control as possible over their finished stories. informed consent from the earliest days of the patient voices programme, there was a commitment to ensuring that every storyteller understood what the process of creating a digital story involved so that informed decisions could be made as to whether or not to participate in a digital storytelling workshop. with the help of ian and monica, the two lawyer-storytellers, a simple, one-page protocol and consent form was created, highlighting the values of respect, equity, trust and justice. this form set out the rights of storytellers, in terms of what they could expect from the patient voices programme. storytellers were assured that, once they had completed and approved a story, it would not be changed, thus preserving the integrity of the story and validating their own judgement as to how the story should be told and when it was deemed to be finished. the protocol also explained that pilgrim projects would hold the copyright to their stories, so that the stories could be given away rather than sold. finally, it was made clear that the intention of the patient voices programme was that the stories should be used for the purposes of healthcare education and quality improvement. these early agreements were tested with the first storytellers. ian and monica had much to teach the programme about assumptions. not everyone can read well, not everyone can see well; not everyone can understand well. not wishing to intimidate storytellers, nor to increase paperwork and bureaucracy unnecessarily, every attempt was made to minimise legal (and other!) jargon, to keep the forms as short and simple as possible, while still providing protection for everyone concerned, but primarily storytellers. consent forms http://www.patientvoices.org.uk/ikramer.htm http://www.patientvoices.org.uk/mclarke.htm seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 167 were also made available in large print format and, in acknowledgement of those who find reading difficult, a member of the patient voices team always explains the content and intention of the forms before asking storytellers to sign. in the early days of the programme, most of the video production work was carried out by patient voices staff, once storytellers had recorded their story and selected images. realising that our editorial judgements might not be those of the storytellers, it did not seem appropriate for their initial consent to cover release of their stories without a further opportunity for them to be involved. in an attempt to mitigate this situation and to ensure that storytellers had as much say as possible over their final digital story, they were invited to review and comment at each editing stage. only when they were completely happy with every aspect of the story would it be released. over the first few years of the programme, this protocol and consent form was refined, although it is still very recognisable. gradually it grew into a two-stage consent and release process. the first stage was simply to consent to participate in a patient voices workshop. the second stage was to approve release of the story, once post-production work had been carried out. as our process was itself refined and with the benefit of training in digital storytelling facilitation by the center for digital storytelling, storytellers were encouraged to take over as much of the production process as they wished. in time, the two-stage process became a three-stage process, with the introduction of an ‘interim release form’. this second stage took place after a draft of the story had been produced by the storyteller, and allowed time for review and reflection after the excitement of a digital storytelling workshop before agreeing to a final release. the interim release form allowed for several different levels of release so that storytellers could determine what beauchamp and childress referred to as ‘the scope of influence’ of their work (beauchamp & childress, 2009). the levels of release can be seen in figure 1. the interim release form also allowed patient voices staff to carry out postproduction work on the stories. storytellers were encouraged to watch and reflect on the story and show it to others; patient voices staff undertook to make any reasonable changes. only when the storyteller was happy that the story accurately reflected their wishes and intentions were they invited to sign a final release form, triggering release of their story to the patient voices website under a creative commons (non-commercial, attribution, no derivatives licence), thus making it publicly viewable. the opportunity for reflection and the lack of pressure to release a story has been an important part of the process. validation for the process, and the thought that has gone into it, has come from a number of places, including several universities, who have asked to use our forms, the royal college of nursing, the bbc and the national audit office. as the years have passed, this process of informed consent has developed to include face-to-face and video briefing sessions, pre-workshop mailings and, where possible and practicable, pre-workshop phone calls. ‘veteran’ storytellers are always invited to participate in these events, so that they can share their experiences with others. the patient voices consent and release forms are appended to this paper. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 168 figure 1: patient voices interim release form creative commons around the same time as the creation of the first patient voices stories, creative commons licensing came into being, initially in the united states. there are a number of difference licences but one covered our needs precisely, that is cc attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives. this licence ensured that both storytellers and the patient voices programme would be acknowledged; it prohibited the sale of the stories and it ensured that no changes would be made to the story. it must be remembered that the patient voices programme began before the advent of youtube, facebook, twitter and other social media and sharing sites. limitations in bandwidth meant that video sharing was rare. however, the programme’s intention was to preserve these precious stories and save them from the fate that had befallen many other learning programmes when the organisation who had commissioned the work was subject to a merger or worse, dissolution and/or extinction. such was the fate of the clinical governance support team: if the patient voices stories had been hosted there, they would no longer be available for public use. creative commons licences have changed and developed since their introduction in 2002, to reflect the growth of video and image sharing sites as well as the changing culture that promotes open access to much information in a range of formats and media. ownership, intellectual property rights (ipr) and copyright since the earliest days of the patient voices programme, issues of ownership have been near the forefront of our minds. our desire to protect storytellers and their work was one of the founding principles of the programme and one seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 169 that was fraught with challenges and paradoxes. although it is outside the scope of this paper to enter into the complexities of intellectual property, it is important to have a general understanding of the principles. intellectual property relates to a unique creation, such as a book, a photograph, a movie or a digital story. intellectual property rights vary from legal jurisdiction to legal jurisdiction. within the united kingdom, intellectual property is regarded as being of the following types: • copyright • patent • design • trademark. more information may be found here: https://www.gov.uk/intellectualproperty-an-overview in the early days of the patient voices programme, it was not uncommon for sponsoring organisations to want to have control over the stories that were being created, to ensure that ‘their’ stories were conveying messages that were acceptable to the organisation. since this directly contradicted the intention of the patient voices programme, which was to reveal the lived experiences of healthcare precisely so that important lessons could be learned, some lively discussions ensued. following some of these early discussions that focused on control, copyright, ownership, use of logos and, importantly, who was to approve release of the stories, we engaged a lawyer who assured us that our process and forms were acceptable and watertight. we held firm on the approval process (insisting that it was the storyteller and only the storyteller who could approve release of the story) and developed an agreement with sponsoring organisations that, while it was not always possible to control the stories that would emerge, it was possible to ensure that that no stories were libellous by gently guiding storytellers away from potentially contentious accusations or unwanted identification, either in words or pictures. in addition, as part of the initial consent process, storytellers are asked to confirm that they have permission from anyone identifiable in their photos. issues of ownership are taken very seriously, with one of the guiding principles of the programme being not to ‘take that which is not freely given’ with respect to images and music, just as with stories (hardy & sumner, 2008). in an attempt to protect both storytellers and the programme, storytellers are steered away from google images and free music websites, whose licences are as punitive for misuse as they are lengthy and impenetrable. thus an extensive library of royalty-free images has grown over the years, with the purchase of licences to use images from image libraries, which is used to augment storytellers’ own collections of pictures. insistence on the use of music with no copyright restrictions has resulted in the commissioning of a number of royalty-free pieces and the purchase of licences to use existing royalty-free music. this process has altered little in the past few years and there remains an uncompromising adherence to these principles: that no storyteller should use an image or a poem or a piece of music that is someone else’s copyright (unless permission can be obtained to do so); that the stories will not be sold; that storytellers who wish it will be fully acknowledged; that anyone else who contributes to the story (including musicians and sponsoring institutions) will also be acknowledged. a short summary of copyright and intellectual property rights we have attempted to represent the complex flow of copyright and ownership in figure 1, with an accompanying explanation. https://www.gov.uk/intellectual-property-an-overview https://www.gov.uk/intellectual-property-an-overview seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 170 figure 2: resource and intellectual flows in the patient voices digital storytelling process the story itself is the creation, and hence intellectual property, of the storyteller. it is protected by copyright law. many of the images or video clips used in the story belong to the storyteller. some images may belong to pilgrim projects limited, while still others are stock images licensed from photo libraries such as istock. soundtrack files, such as music, sound effects, etc. are either selected by the storyteller from a library of music licensed by pilgrim projects from a variety of sources; music may also commission pieces to be composed and recorded specifically for a particular story. approved stories are released into the patient voices programme under a creative commons licence, with the copyright retained by pilgrim projects. the decision not to put patient voices stories on youtube (when it came along in 2005) has been a carefully considered one that has almost certainly been at the programme’s expense. the licensing conditions imposed by youtube (youtube, 2010) conflict with the licence under which patient voices stories are released, as well as our agreement with storytellers, that is, that their stories would not be changed or sold and that they would be appropriately attributed. ongoing commitment to storytellers even with the best of intentions, the most thorough of briefings, the most careful explanations, the most earnest attempts to ensure that storytellers are happy with their stories, circumstances change and it has been necessary to respond appropriately to these changes. two short case studies serve to illustrate some of the complexities support the decision for consent to be viewed as a process rather than an event. the first case study illustrates the softening effect that time may have on a storyteller’s decision about whether or not to release a story. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 171 the value of time to reflect c made a more personal story than she had planned or anticipated. with the support of the others in her workshop group, she was encouraged to find a more meaningful story and, in this process, she also gained some insight into the impact of some childhood experiences on her later life. prominent in her field, c decided, at interim release stage, not to let her story go any further. it was duly archived. a conversation some years later resulted in a different decision. realising that others might benefit from seeing her story, and from the recognition that, unless people in positions such as hers are prepared to share their stories, it is likely to be difficult for others to do so, she decided to sign a final release form and release her story publicly. had the process consisted of only one, or even two, stages, this change of heart would not have been possible. the second case study illustrates another important aspect of the three-stage consent and release process, i.e. that it is possible to withdraw (either consent or participation) from the process at any time. safeguarding storytellers several women who had taken part in a local health promotion programme all made stories that focused on domestic abuse. they understood the aims of the workshop and the intention of the patient voices programme and signed initial consent forms. discussions in the workshop considered the use of imagery that would ensure the storytellers’ anonymity. it was essential that their identity not be revealed in the stories for fear of further abuse but they wanted to describe their learning from the programme they had participated in, and talk about the courage they had gained and the skills they acquired to look after themselves. post-production work concentrated on finding metaphorical images (clouds, skies, plants, etc.) to accompany their voiceovers about the details of the abuse they had suffered. no names were to be used in the stories; these stories would definitely be anonymous. the draft stories were shown to the storytellers but, in each case, they decided that it was too risky to release the stories. the stories have never been released. in the above case, the stories were never released. although it is rare, once released, for a story to be removed from the website, there have been two or three requests in the past 12 years for stories to be removed. usually the reason given is in relation to a divorce. naturally, these requests are always met. conclusion the development of an ethical consent and release process that does as little harm as possible is complex and multi-faceted, especially when balanced with the attempt to ensure that voices that are often silenced can be heard so that important lessons can be learned. the potential for good that is afforded by making personal stories of healthcare widely available via the internet must be seen alongside the potential for harm to storytellers and their families. careful consideration must be given as to how best to protect everyone involved in the digital storytelling process while also honouring the voices of those who would be heard. this explanation of how the patient voices programme has striven to develop such a process also offers some insight into the challenges of working within seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 172 an ethical context that extends beyond the digital storytelling workshop and reveals an understanding of consent as a process rather than an event, protecting and respecting all those who generously share their stories to improve the world of healthcare. references beauchamp, t. l., & childress, j. f. (2009). principles of biomedical ethics (6th ed. ed.). new york ; oxford: oxford university press. cds. (2013). ethical practice in digital storytelling. retrieved from http://storycenter.org/ethical-practice/ charon, r., & montello, m. (2002). stories matter: the role of narrative in medical ethics (reflective bioethics): routledge. dh. (2002). shifting the balance of power : the next streps. london: department of health, great britain, . evans, d. (2003). hierarchy of evidence: a framework for ranking evidence evaluating healthcare interventions. journal of clinical nursing, 12(1), 77-84. freire, p. (1973). education for critical consciousness (vol. 1): continuum. greenhalgh, t. (1999). narrative based medicine: narrative based medicine in an evidence based world. bmj, 318(7179), 323-325. retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9924065 greenhalgh, t. (2006). what seems to be the trouble?: stories in illness and healthcare (1 ed.): radcliffe publishing. greenhalgh, t., & hurwitz, b. (1999). narrative based medicine: why study narrative? bmj, 318(7175), 48-50. retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9872892 gubrium, a., hill, a. l., & harding, l. (2012). digital storytelling guidelines for ethical practice, including digital storyteller's bill of rights. retrieved from https://www.storycenter.org/s/ethics.pdf gubrium, a. c., hill, a. l., & flicker, s. (2014). a situated practice of ethics for participatory visual and digital methods in public health research and practice: a focus on digital storytelling. american journal of public health, e1-e9. doi:10.2105/ajph.2013.301310 guillemin, m., & gillam, l. (2004). ethics, reflexivity, and “ethically important moments” in research. qualitative inquiry, 10(2), 261-280. guillemin, m., & heggen, k. (2009). rapport and respect: negotiating ethical relations between researcher and participant. medicine, health care and philosophy, 12(3), 291-299. haigh, c., & hardy, p. (2011). tell me a story—a conceptual exploration of storytelling in healthcare education. nurse education today, 31(4), 408-411. hardy, p. (2012). using stories: making the big picture personal: a presentation to alberta health services. cambridge: pilgrim projects. hardy, p., & sumner, t. (2008). digital storytelling in health and social care: touching hearts and bridging the emotional, physical and digital divide. lapidus journal(june 2008). hardy, p., & sumner, t. (2014). cultivating compassion: how digital storytelling is transforming healthcare. chichester: kingsham press. hardy, p., & sumner, t. (2014). the journey begins. in p. hardy & t. sumner (eds.), cultivating compassion: how digital storytelling is transforming healthcare. chichester: kingsham press. hawkins, j., & lindsay, e. (2006). we listen but do we hear? the importance of patient stories. wound care, 11(9), s6-14. hurwitz, b., greenhalgh, t., & skultans, v. (2004). narrative research in health and illness. malden, mass. ; oxford: bmj books. illich, i. (1973). tools for conviviality. lambert, j. (2002). digital storytelling : capturing lives, creating community (1st ed.). berkeley, ca: digital diner press. stanton, p. (2004). the strategic leadership of clinical governance in pcts: nhs modernisation agency. tilby, a. (writer). (2007). thought for the day [radio broadcast], thought for the day. uk: bbc. tilley, s. (1995). accounts, accounting and accountability in psychiatric nursing. in w. r (ed.), accountability in nursing practice. london: chapman hall. youtube. (2010). terms of service. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/t/terms http://storycenter.org/ethical-practice/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9924065 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9872892 https://www.storycenter.org/s/ethics.pdf https://www.youtube.com/t/terms seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 173 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 174 appendix i: original patient voices protocol for storytellers respect storytellers and their stories will be treated with respect at all times. we will try to interpret accurately the intentions of the storyteller and to preserve the integrity of the story. we will always try to be flexible and sensitive to the needs of storytellers with regard to the place and pace of recording. consent we will not record a story unless we have prior informed and valid written consent from storytellers; we will provide whatever information is necessary about the process and the existing stories to enable such consent to be given. storytellers will be asked to sign consent form agreeing to the use of the final version of the story as an educational and learning resource intended to improve the quality and responsiveness of services for patients and carers. copyright final control over what is included in the digital story will rest with the storyteller. a ‘first cut’ will be sent for comment and a ‘final version’ will be sent for the storyteller’s approval before the story is used elsewhere. copyright will rest with the national health service (but consent will not be withheld for reasonable use of the stories by the storyteller). support storytellers will be offered emotional support during and after telling their stories. many storytellers have commented on the therapeutic benefits of telling their stories in this way. reimbursement storytellers will be repaid for expenses incurred in the recording of their story (including, where appropriate, reimbursement for respite care for people for whom they normally care). © 2004 pilgrim projects limited seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 175 appendix 2: patient voices protocol for storytellers 2012 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 176 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 177 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 178 appendix 3: patient voices interim consent form appendix 4: patient voices final release approval seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 179 first do no harm: developing an ethical process of consent and release for digital storytelling in healthcare pip hardy abstract introduction and context respect consent copyright support reimbursement refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4268 ©2021 (jeremy knox). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education jeremy knox university of edinburgh email: jeremy.knox@ed.ac.uk abstract this paper examines the concept of the ‘division of learning’ (zuboff 2019), and the broader thesis of ‘surveillance capitalism’ within which it is situated, in terms of its relevance to education. it begins with defining the term, before suggesting two key ways in which aligning the ‘division of learning’ with perspectives from educational research provides productive insights. the first considers the impact of increasing ‘datafication’ in education, where platform technologies are proliferating as powerful actors that both mediate and shape educational activity. here the ‘division of learning’ offers useful insights concerning the disparities resulting from learning in and learning from educational platforms. the second explores the extent to which education theory might offer ways to develop the concept of the ‘division of learning’, through critique of the term ‘learning’ itself, as well as the foregrounding of questions about educational ‘purpose’. here the ‘division of learning’ is suggested to maintain, rather than challenge, the dominant practices of data exploitation, for which further engagement with a purposive, political, and emancipatory form of ‘data science’ is suggested. keywords: ‘division of learning’; ‘surveillance capitalism’; datafication; platformisation; learnification; education https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4268 refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 introduction this paper begins with a definition of the concept of the ‘division of learning’ (zuboff 2019), before suggesting two key ways in which the concept might be relevant to the discussion of education and its increasing relations with a data-fuelled technology industry. concerning the first, the ‘division of learning’ will be suggested to highlight important issues of privacy, inequality, and authority where data-driven platform software is increasingly subjecting educational activity to the same kinds of datafication practices that are more usually identified in wider society. an important separation, and contrast, will be highlighted here between the ‘learning’ undertaken by students within platform software, and the ‘learning’ undertaken by machines and their private owners, deriving from the resulting student data. this student data can be understood as behavioural data, in the sense that it is predominantly derived from the ways students interact with platform software, and analysed using theories of behavioural learning (knox et al. 2020). the concept of the ‘division of learning’ will be proposed, therefore, as a valuable means of identifying potentially significant inequalities emerging directly from the activities of public education, particularly where private companies have intensified their interests in educational activity as a result of the recent covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of schools, colleges, and universities in some countries. in the second, ideas from educational theory will be suggested to offer critical perspectives on the concept of the ‘division of learning’. while zuboff’s (2019) work is critical of the power and influence accrued by private companies, it doesn’t necessarily challenge some of the problematic ways in which ‘learning’ itself is defined. here, the ‘division of learning’ will be examined for the extent to which it focuses exclusively on the narrow idea of ‘training’ in the technical skills required to benefit from datafication, rather than on the broader socially-oriented arrangement of formal education. drawing on the work of biesta (2009; 2013; 2015), this section draws a distinction between discursive representations of ‘learning’ as individualised, self-directed and ‘life-long’ in duration, and ‘education’ as public, institutionalised, and fundamentally concerned with collective purposes. making connections with work in ‘critical data literacy’ (sander 2020), this analysis will suggest, not only more critical ways of understanding ‘learning’ in the datafied society, but also the need for better recognition of the role that formal education can play in addressing the associated issues of power and inequality. this paper therefore aims to emphasise educational concerns within the broader discourses around data-driven technologies. firstly, by highlighting how prominent ideas, such ‘surveillance capitalism’, are specifically relevant to the practice of education. and secondly, how perspectives from education can critically develop wider public discourse about the relationships between technology and learning. refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 defining the division of learning zuboff’s (2019) concept of ‘the division of learning’ is grounded in a wider thesis of ‘surveillance capitalism’, which has emerged as a key term in a field of critique focused on the relationships between powerful ‘big tech’ companies and wider society, and the ways such associations are increasingly mediated through data-driven systems and their attendant technologies of machine learning and analytics. zuboff suggests that ‘just about everything we now do is mediated by computers that record and codify the details of our daily lives’ (p182), and it is this codification that has become central to a new form of datafuelled capitalism. the concept of the ‘division of learning’ is the notion that there is a barrier between the ability to access, understand, and benefit from this data, and the practice of simply producing it. in this way zuboff posits a significant rupture between ‘big tech’ companies and the wider population, where the former are able to gain unprecedented advantages through fine-grained analyses of societal behaviours, accelerating their ability to dominate markets and accumulate wealth, in ways that manifest a stark contrast between those with knowledge of data-driven systems and those without. google in particular are singled out for their aggressive corporate approach to the exploitation of data, through which zuboff suggests that they have ‘amassed world-historic concentrations of knowledge and power’ (2019, p179). the phrase ‘division of learning’ is proposed as a revision of the concept of the ‘division of labour’1, and as such is suggested to form a foundational theory and definitive way of understanding the ordering principles of data-capitalism. the ‘division of learning’ is, for zuboff, ‘the axial principle of social order in an information civilisation’ (2019, p179), and the ‘ascendant principle of social ordering in our time’ (2019, p181). here zuboff (2019) reveals the centrality of this concept within her broader critique, but also a primary interest in the notion of an ‘information age’ and its accessibility, a position which will be examined further in subsequent sections. as a route to resolving the suggested dilemmas of ‘knowledge, authority, and power’ surfaced by the ‘division of learning’, zuboff poses three key questions: ‘who knows?’; ‘who decides?’; and ‘who decides who decides?’ (2019, p180). the first question concerns the accessibility of knowledge, and ‘whether one is included or excluded from the opportunity to learn’, for which zuboff’s answer is an ‘elite cadre able to wield the analytic tools to trouble shoot and extract value from information’ (2019, p180). this, as will be elaborated below, appears to be zuboff’s (2019) primary concern, directed towards the privatised realm of the ‘big tech’ companies. the second and third questions concern authority and power respectively, through which zuboff suggests both an exclusory system that maintains control of who is allowed to engage in ‘learning’ 1 zuboff (2019) draws specifically from durkheim’s work on the ‘division of labour’ (1964), and the proposition that such organisation and specialisation constituted a kind of ‘natural law’ of developing societies (and organic life more generally, although zuboff focuses specifically on society). the division of learning thus ‘follows the same migratory path from the economic to the social domain’ (zuboff 2019, p184) refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 from data, as well as an underlying driving force of ‘financial capital bound to the disciplines of shareholder-value maximisation’ (2019, p181). these questions appear to add a critical depth to the concept of the ‘division of learning’, however the final section of this paper will return to the themes of authority and power in order to assess whether they are carried through in zuboff’s (2019) work. one of the central ideas in the concept of the ‘division of learning’ is what zuboff defines as the ‘shadow text’. this is developed from her earlier work on the notion of a ‘new electronic text’ (zuboff 2019, p182), produced primarily in workplace settings and taking the form of data about manufacturing processes and associated labour. given the great proliferation of data collection practices in more recent times, zuboff suggests that ‘the dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power’ that were intrinsic to the production and use of this electronic text ‘have burst through the walls of the workplace to overwhelm our daily lives’ (2019, p181). for this reason, zuboff extends this idea into two texts: a ‘public-facing text’, comprised of the participatory and information-rich spaces of the web, much of which is produced by ‘us’, and a second ‘shadow text’, for which the first text ‘functions as the supply operation’ (2019, p185). in essence, the ‘shadow text’ is composed of the surplus extracted from the first text, rendered into ‘raw material to be accumulated and analysed as means to others’ market ends’ (zuboff 2019, p185). for zuboff, ‘surveillance capitalism’ has ultimate control over both texts, the ‘shadow text’ hidden from view and used to extract value from our behavioural data, as well as the public text of the web, which is manipulated into forms that best serve the ‘shadow text’ beneath it. in this sense ‘surveillance capitalists’ hold ‘asymmetrical power that enables them to bend the division of learning to their interests’ (zuboff 2019, p187). in this sense, the distinction between the ‘public-facing’ and ‘shadow’ texts constitutes the ‘division of learning’, where the ultimate benefit comes from the ability to access, comprehend, and derive value from the hidden side of the partition. the ‘division of learning’ and education as noted by williamson (2019), zuboff’s work on ‘surveillance capitalism’, including the specific proposition of the ‘division of learning’, makes no explicit reference to education. instead, as we have seen above, zuboff (2019) centres on the term ‘learning’, which is framed as the practice of extracting, understanding, and deriving value from data, and suggested to be undertaken by a small and elite group of knowledgeable experts and their sophisticated learning machines. in this sense, we might understand concepts such as the ‘division of learning’, despite the critique of technology, as fundamentally aligned with a sector that has long called for the disruption of traditional education through technological intervention (christensen et al. 2008). without any consideration of formal education, two central questions become relevant. firstly, what useful insights can educationalists derive from the concept, given that zuboff (2019) provides no examples of ‘surveillance refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 capitalism’ in the context of education? and secondly, how might the concept of the ‘division of learning’ itself be (re)considered in the light of perspectives from education? in answer to the first question, given the increasing prevalence of data-driven platforms in education (decuypere et al. 2021), the ‘division of learning’ may provide a useful conceptual framework through which to examine the impact on educational activity. in this sense, research from outside of education, and specifically that concerning the relationships between technology, capitalism, and society, can strengthen the ways we might develop understanding about the changing structures, pedagogies, and subjectivities of increasingly datafied institutions and classrooms. even before the covid-19 pandemic drastically altered the ability of institutions around the world to conduct educational activities, a commercial ‘ed tech’ industry was a significant and growing sector that had been promising to disrupt education for decades (selwyn 2013), as well as exerting considerable influence over teaching practices and student experiences through increasingly powerful data-driven software. however, as emerging scholarship is highlighting (see williamson and hogan 2020), the covid-19 pandemic is ushering in unprecedented relations between public education systems and private education companies, often with little apparent government oversight or in-depth engagement with the far-reaching consequences. the ‘big tech’ companies examined by zuboff (2019), such as google, have now moved, with all their infrastructural might, into mainstream educational spaces, situating their convenient software tools at the very core of teaching and learning functions. zuboff’s (2019) critique of ‘big tech’ is therefore now as relevant to education as it has been to wider debates about social media. given that the pandemic has intensified concerted efforts by a range of commercial ‘ed tech’ actors to further privatise the future of education systems (williamson and hogan 2020), education research would do well to engage with ideas such as the ‘division of learning’, which emphasise the key issues of privacy and inequality that characterise such developments. in answer to the second question, foregrounding educational theory offers an important route to developing the ways ‘learning’ itself is theorised in relation to ‘surveillance capitalism’. broader considerations of education can suggest ways, to not only move beyond the rather narrow visions of technical training and data analysis assumed by zuboff (2019), but also to problematise the underlying assumptions about behaviour that appear to ground both sides of the ‘division of learning’. as knox et al. (2020) suggest, particular behaviouristic understandings of ‘learning’ are becoming entrenched in the era of data-driven technologies, both in terms of the human learning supposedly enhanced through educational analytics, as well as in the sense of the learning undertaken by machines, often derived from psychological theories such as ‘reinforcement learning’ (see sutton & bardo 2018). in other words, the idea of ‘learning’ itself needs better theorisation in order to contend with the significant issues of privacy and inequality that the concept of the ‘division of learning’ suggests, for which educational theory offers productive insights. zuboff suggests of the ‘division of learning’ that it ‘reflects the primacy of learning, refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 information, and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life’ (2019, p184-5), seeming to underscore a general conviction in the autodidactism of the internet age. however, it is precisely this idea of the ‘primacy of learning’ that has undergone considerable critique in the field education, encapsulated most directly in biesta’s concept of ‘learnification’ (2005; 2009; 2013), which surfaces the inherent politics of ‘self-direction’ and an all-too-easy alignment with neoliberal ideology. further, better recognition of specific theories of learning helps to identify a range of contested assumptions about the human condition embedded within the data-driven technologies that zuboff (2019) examines in such detail. this understanding, as will be suggested below, supports a much deeper form of critique and resistance to ‘big tech’ corporate practices than merely ‘upskilling’ in the very same techniques of data exploitation that remain inaccessible through the ‘division of learning’. the ‘division of learning’ in education platforms the ‘datafication’ of education has emerged as a central concern in the field of educational research, as powerful data-driven systems are increasingly being integrated in policy and governance (williamson 2017), as well as deployed in everyday teaching and learning practices (see brown 2020; bulger 2016). this deployment usually occurs through the establishment of a software ‘platform’, designed with functions to supposedly facilitate teaching and learning activities, as well as a range of administrative functions. the concept of ‘platformisation’ (van dijck et al. 2018; poell et al. 2019) which concerns the processes through which platform software and its associated practices become involved in the transformation of markets, institutions, governance, and cultural practices – is therefore now highly relevant to the study of education (decuypere et al. (2021). writing before the covid-19 pandemic, selwyn et al. predict a movement towards ‘classrooms on platforms rather than platforms in classrooms’ (2020, p2), which appears now to be a prescient encapsulation of the ‘the expansion and embedding of digital technologies and media in education systems, institutions and practices across the world’ (williamson et al. 2020, p107) as a consequence of school, college, and university closures in some countries. however, ‘platformisation’ has been a longer trend in education, where software has been developed for: the provision of online learning, the management of learning in blended settings, home learning and early childhood education, the promotion of classroom engagement, language learning, test-preparation, the design of innovative schools, school administration and learning analytics (grimaldi and ball 2021, p115) given that for every aspect of education ‘there seems to exist a corresponding digital platform used within (and often especially made for) the educational field’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p1), there is a pressing need for conceptual tools with which to analyse the impact of this platformisation. however, as decuypere et al. stress, the specificities of education platforms need to be acknowledged: refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 the educational sphere is at once characterized by its adoption of a huge variety of global platforms entering education ‘from the outside’ and by the circulation and adoption of various locally produced platforms that have been programmed and designed with the educational sector exclusively in mind. (decuypere et al. 2021, p3) education is therefore impacted by the wider reorganisational logics of platformisation at the societal level, while at the same time rearticulating the form of the platform itself according to particular visions of productive teaching, learning, and educational management. this is one of the key tensions into which the concept of the ‘division of learning’ might be applied. motivated by the question of what kind of learning happens in such educational platforms, three interrelated forms might be identified: firstly, the learning undertaken by students through their involvement with the software platform as part of their formal educational activity; secondly, the learning about students undertaken by teachers and institutions through their use of the analytic tools provided by the platform; and thirdly, the learning about ‘users’ (in this case students, teachers, and institutional administrators) undertaken by the owners of the platform software. as perrotta et al. (2021) suggest in the case of ‘big tech’ companies such as google, this third form of learning might also extend into a broader ecosystem of applications on the web, either directly owned by google or linked to its extensive infrastructure. all of these kinds of learning are co-constitutive of one another, in the sense that teachers are supposed to make pedagogical decisions based on the insights from data analytics in order to intervene in student behaviours (van barneveld et al. 2012), while the platform software in turn often adapts to individual student responses, particularly in the case of so-called ‘personalised’ systems (bulger 2016). first and foremost, the concept of the ‘division of learning’ helps to articulate concerns related to the form of learning about users, where private companies appear to extract value from the conduct of teachers and students engaged in public education. one of the central functions of the platform is to extract value from the data traces that are produced from those using the software (srnicek 2017), and this, of course, underpins the educational use of such systems, where the activities of teachers and learners are ‘rendered as observable and measurable behavior’ and ‘turned into transactional data’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p6). it is important to see this, not as a by-product of the platform’s involvement in educational activity, but a core function. perrotta suggests ‘digital platforms turn data into intangible assets, channelling them along financial circuits and subjecting them to capitalisation’ (perrotta et al. 2021, p107), identifying value-extraction as a guiding rationale for the ways such systems work. this doesn’t mean that the other forms of learning in educational platforms are necessarily superficial or insincere, but rather that the driving force of the platform design appears to be for the benefit of the learning refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 undertaken by platform owners. as perrotta et al. further contend in an examination of the functioning of the google classroom platform, ‘google’s extractive tendencies in education acquire a mission-critical purpose’ (perrotta et al. 2021, p107). thus the ‘division of learning’ might be seen as an important indicator of which form of learning is most privileged in relation to educational platforms, and where concerns about inequality might be situated. this precise division is identified in the functioning of google classroom, with, on the one hand a ‘façade’ comprised of a ‘readable and actionable interface engineered to facilitate a particular form of coded pedagogy’, and on the other, an ‘underlying text of algorithmic surveillance, which is hidden from view and accessible only to google’s epistemic elites’ (perrotta et al. 2021, p107). the ‘division of learning’ (zuboff 2019) suggests that the benefits of this hidden form of privileged learning are considerable. however, the question remains whether students also benefit from this relationship, for which there is ample empirical research attempting to link platform use to ‘learning outcomes’ (see passey & higgins 2011). however, it is worth emphasising that any sense of an ‘enhanced learning’ facilitated by data-driven systems is highly contested, precisely because of the ways platforms work to restructure education in profound ways. educational platforms ‘make specific forms of education visible, knowable, thinkable, and, ultimately, actionable, in ways that reformat, redo, restructure, and reconceive what education is or could be about’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p7). one example of this tendency is the rise in a culture of surveillance and performativity in education (for example, see manolev et al. 2019), where platform software, rather than serving as a neutral conduit for connecting students, teachers, and resources, acts to discipline and control users towards particular kinds of behaviours. referring to the same educational platform as manolev et al. (2019), williamson suggests ‘classdojo amply illustrates the combination of behavioural data extraction, behaviourist psychology and monetization strategies that underpin surveillance capitalism’ (2019). in reference to the concept of the ‘division of learning’ specifically, williamson further contends that ‘[t]he prospect of smart machines as educational engines of social reproduction should be the subject of serious future interrogation.’ (williamson 2019). the supposed neutrality of platforms, therefore, needs to be questioned: [r]ather than simply hosting content, activity and interactions, platforms set the stage for how all this can come about, and which specific sorts of content, activities and interactions are possible and permissible (and which not). (decuypere et al. 2021, p5) perrotta et al. identify this influence in google classroom specifically as a ‘bidirectional algorithmic pedagogy’ (2021, p109), where the technology is not only structured in ways that enable machines to learn from extracted behavioural data, but designed to manage and automate the conduct of teachers and students. that this managed behaviour is then itself datafied and used to extract value, warrants, for perrotta et al., the acknowledgement refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 of a ‘shadow labour’ (2021, p106) undertaken by students and teachers for the benefit of platform owners. focusing usefully on the student experience in educational software platforms, grimaldi and ball (2021) suggest paradoxical notions of value. on the one hand ‘the value of achievement, of competence and realisation, and of the capacity to address a task and an assignment’ becomes possible, but on the other ‘a relative and analytical value that depends on the positioning of datafied performance within a hierarchical order’ conditions the experience (grimaldi and ball 2021, p123). thus, ‘[o]n one side, the learner is invited to be active and enterprising’ while [o]n the other side, this involves continuous work on and the policing and solicitation of an online self through the datafied visualisation of its value’ (grimaldi and ball 2021, p123-4). the result of this is a paradoxical state of learner subjectivity, where students are ‘invited to be different’ at the same time as ‘continuously “normalised” through performance data’ (grimaldi and ball 2021, p125). in these ways one might see the ‘division of learning’ as resonating particularly well with the rise of datafication in education, where, not only are platform owners imbued with substantial advantages through the extraction of data, but students and teachers are left with impoverished, laborious, and contradictory educational experiences, as teaching and learning becomes increasingly managed by platform software. however, while there may well be an extreme ‘division of learning’ between the epistemic elites who own the platforms and the users who merely undertake activities teaching and learning through them, understanding the specific character of this learning would be essential to any attempt to address the supposed inequality. refocusing the ‘division of learning’ on education examining zuboff’s (2019) discussion of the ‘division of learning’ in detail reveals a tendency to focus on the perceived inequality resulting from the division, rather than on the nature of the learning presumed to be taking place. as appears to be de rigueur for discussions of the influence of the internet on society and its knowledge, zuboff draws comparison with the gutenberg press, suggesting that through the ‘division of learning’ society ‘reverts to a pre-gutenberg order’ where learning is ‘captured by a narrow priesthood of privately employed computational specialists, their privately owned machines, and the economic interests for whose sake they learn’ (p189). following the analogy that moveable type printing supposedly dismantled barriers to elite and exclusionist centres of power, zuboff’s (2019) argument here appears to be that the ‘shadow text’, and the abilities to understand, process, and benefit from its contents, need to be distributed more fairly in society. the solution is therefore not one which seems necessarily concerned with the practices of data exploitation itself, rather only with the ways it is excluded from the wider population. refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 this appears to overlook, not only a more thorough interrogation of the forms of ‘learning’ undertaken by the ‘surveillance capitalists’, but also the question of whether such practices are indeed desirable for wider society. indeed, it is the lack of public access to the techniques of ‘data science’ that seems to be zuboff’s primary concern, particularly in the suggestion that an: unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatisation of the division of learning in society. (zuboff 2019, p191, emphasis original) ultimately, zuboff’s (2019) discussion of the ‘division of learning’ appears to distil a critical perspective into a struggle for privacy and the ownership of data, rather than a more profound consideration of how data-driven approaches are entrenching problematic views of society and how individuals learn within it. this ends up endorsing the power of datafuelled behaviourism by assuming that it is indeed a new and authoritative way of knowing and shaping society. in terms of proffering solutions for the overcoming of the ‘division of learning’, at times zuboff appears fatalistic: ‘every attempt at understanding, predicting, regulating or prohibiting the activities of surveillance capitalists will fall short’ (2019 p193). however, such an impasse may result, at least in part, from a lack of attention to the forms of learning assumed to take place across the ‘division of learning’. zuboff labels the knowledge elites ‘the new priesthood’ (2019, p186): ‘the 10,000 or so professionals on the planet who know how to wield the technologies of machine intelligence to coax knowledge from an otherwise cacophonous data continent’ (zuboff 2019, p188). however, rather than probe the substance or efficacy of this knowledge, the main contention seems to be that there are not enough of experts: ‘[t]he huge salaries of the tech firms have lured so many professionals that there is no one left to teach the next generation of students’ (zuboff 2019, p188). at the same time as condemning the inequalities created through the ‘division of learning’, this appears to end up valorising the specialist expertise employed by the ‘surveillance capitalists’, rather than seeking to challenge it. zuboff certainly poses pertinent critical questions, for example: ‘which people, institutions, or processes determine who is included in learning, what they are able to learn, and how they are able to act on their knowledge’ (zuboff 2019, p180). however, democratising the ability to gain skills in ‘data science’, and therefore to understand and extract value from the ‘shadow text’ of behavioural data, would seem likely to create new frontiers and barriers, complicating the ‘division of learning’ rather than dispelling it. turning to education theory may be one way to better theorise the forms of learning assumed in concepts such as the ‘division of learning’, and suggest more robust ways of challenging the assumptions about human behaviour that underpin the rise of data-driven capitalism. firstly, the concept of ‘learnification’ (biesta 2005; 2009; 2013; 2015) provides refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 a useful critique of the dominance of ‘the language of learning’ (biesta 2005, p54), particularly over notions of formal teaching and expertise in general. primarily directed at the field of education, ‘learnification’ refers to a wholesale reorientation of institutional and pedagogical arrangements around the idea of a centralised, self-directing, and individual ‘learner’ (biesta 2005; 2009; 2013; 2015). however, to borrow a phrase from zuboff (2019) quoted earlier, we might say that the language of learning has ‘burst through the walls of the classroom to overwhelm our daily lives’. not only are there calls for a ‘learning society’, in which the figure of the ‘lifelong learner’ (yang and valdés-cotera 2001) is required to constantly update their expertise in order to remain relevant and employable in a swiftly shifting marketplace (and the ability to analyse data clearly figures centrally in this vision), but machines are now also ‘learning’ in supposedly powerful new ways that society needs to pay increasing attention to (domingos 2017; alpaydin 2016). the ‘division of learning’ might be seen as part of this wider trend in the way that it positions expert data-analytic ‘learning’ as the privileged practice of our times, and a desirable condition to which wider populations should aspire. the problem here is that such a focus on learning, as biesta (2005; 2009; 2013; 2015) warns, tends to be blind to questions about how aspirations are negotiated and established, and what kind of power underlies such processes. further, if we consider a straightforward application of the ‘division of learning’ in educational contexts, as explored above, one might see ‘learning’ as constituting both sides of the divide; students ‘learning’ (often in ‘personalised’ and selfdirected ways) through platforms on one side, and the owners of the platforms ‘learning’ from user-data on the other. despite the notion that the latter is a much more privileged and beneficial form of learning, it is also worth recognising the entrenchment of particular behaviouristic ideas about learning across both sides of the divide. radical behaviourist ideas are being reintroduced into educational practices through the use of data-driven platforms (also see knox et al. 2020), while at the same time underpinning the techniques of data extraction undertaken by the platform owners. secondly, in order to move beyond the limited purview of ‘learning’, biesta differentiates ‘education’ as a practice that is defined by purpose: ‘when we are engaged in decision making about the direction of education we are always and necessarily engaged in value judgements – judgements about what is educationally desirable’ (biesta 2009, p35). learning is further distinguished from education by suggesting that the former is ‘basically a process term’ denoting ‘processes and activities but is open – if not empty – with regard to content and direction’ (biesta 2009, p39), while the latter ‘always raises the question of its purpose’ (biesta 2015, p84). it is this idea of education that might usefully develop the concept of the ‘division of learning’, by suggesting a route to overcoming data-driven inequality, not through simply widening access to the behaviourist techniques of machine learning, but rather through concerted ongoing efforts to define collective purposes for working with data. biesta distinguishes between three domains of educational purpose: qualification, the domain of skills acquisition; socialisation, the ways individuals become refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 part of society; and subjectification, which concerns how individuals become autonomous (2013; 2015). while one might see the ‘division of learning’ as straightforwardly concerned with the domain of qualification, and the important questions of how accessible those qualifications are, and who gets to define them, there is little to discern in the way of engagement with a social or subjective purpose to becoming skilled in the techniques of data analytics and machine learning. for all of zuboff’s detailed examination of the inequality, discrimination, and injustice produced through datafication, there is little to suggest a clear social objective or rationale for democratising access to the ‘shadow text’, other than to reclaim ‘the larger promise of an information capitalism aligned with a flourishing third modernity’ (2019, p194)2. engaging with the domain of socialisation would require considerations of collective purposes for the mass deployment of data-driven technologies. as has already been noted, recent years have seen the proliferation of opportunities to undergo technical training in machine learning and other analytic techniques, often in the form of open-access, selfdirected online courses, justified through discourses of impending technological unemployment, and accompanied by criticisms of formal schooling as antiquated in comparison (knox 2019). however, there appears to be little in this drive for technical training beyond the idea of future-proofed employment. addressing the social purpose of datafication might be achieved through more recognition of the inherent politics of data (bigo et al. 2019) and the agonistic and contested ways in which its attendant technologies are developed (crawford 2016), rather than its assumed objectivity or neutrality. an educational approach, as opposed to straightforward technical training, might therefore frame the emerging discipline of ‘data science’, for example, as ‘a form of political action’ (green 2019, p7). green further suggests: ‘[d]ata scientists must recognize themselves as political actors engaged in normative constructions of society and, as befits political work, evaluate their work according to its downstream material impacts on people's lives’ (green 2019, p7). such an approach would seem to direct attention towards forging tangible connections with society, as opposed to merely extracting data from it. in a similar way, calls for greater ‘big data literacy’ (d’ignazio and bhargava 2015), ‘personal data literacies’ (pangrazio & selwyn 2019), or ‘critical data literacy’ (sander 2020) have made the case for widening public understanding of the social impacts of datafication. related to this work, a range of accessible tools and strategies have been developed to promote broader civic awareness of issues such as privacy, surveillance, inequality, and discrimination as they relate to the use of data-driven technologies (for examples see yates et al. 2020 and sander 2020). while the suggestions in this paper align with much of this work in terms of its interest in 2 this commitment to capitalism, albeit a more inclusion form, is suggested elsewhere too: ‘[l]et it be an insistence that raw surveillance capitalism is as much a threat to society as it is to capitalism itself’ (zuboff 2019, p193), and criticised in detail by morozov (2019). refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 developing the critical understanding of datafication, there remain important questions about how collective purposes for the development of ‘data science’ might be achieved. in developing a useful typology for the plethora of online tools and resources that have been developed in recent years, sander (2020) found not only a diverse range of forms, but also categorical differences to the kinds of criticality such materials presented. further, and surprisingly for sander, ‘the sample did not include any resources from governmental or public service institutions, nor from traditional educational avenues and only very few efforts on the part of academia’ (2020, p9), most being produced by non-government organisations. given the central role of formal public education in society, such an institution would seem to be the ideal place to consider collective (social) purposes for the development of ‘data science’. however, as raffaghelli et al. (2020) discuss in the context of higher education, there are often underlying tensions between the institutional desire to produce functional benefits through the deployment of data-driven technologies, and a concern for ‘ethical’ and ‘fair’ data cultures. biesta’s final domain of subjectification, perhaps being the most profound, emphasises transformation and liberation as a fundamental purpose of education: subjectification has an orientation towards emancipation – that is, towards ways of doing and being that do not simply accept the given order, but have an orientation towards the change of the existing order so that different ways of doing and being become possible. (biesta 2013, p6) while the concept of the ‘division of learning’ appears committed to democratising, and therefore disseminating and replicating the existing techniques of ‘big data’ analysis, there appears to be little opportunity for the kind of weighty individual emancipation referred to here, or the prospect of overcoming the established orders of data exploitation. as discussed above, the public pedagogy of ‘critical data literacy’ (sander 2020) suggests tangible routes through which individuals might re-think their relationships with data, and perhaps emerge as critically-minded citizens in the era of datafication. however, significant questions remain about, not only the diversity and fragmentation of the online resources produced for this purpose, but also the capacity for formal educational institutions to take up greater responsibility in providing the kind of education that can provide an alternative to the dominant rationales of ‘data-skills’ acquisition. conclusions while zuboff’s (2019) ‘surveillance capitalism’ is undoubtedly a seminal text in the emerging understanding of the societal impacts of datafication, the question of how educationalists might relate to this work is less clear. this paper has attempted to suggest two possible responses. firstly, where data-driven platforms ‘are in the process of significantly transforming the educational sector’ (decuypere et al. 2021, p2), this paper refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 has suggested the ‘division of learning’ to be a productive concept through which to examine concerns about increasing privatisation and inequality in education. here the methods through which private companies derive commercial benefits from platform data, and the labour of the students, teachers, and administrators that produce it, appears to far outweigh the benefits students experience from ‘learning’ with the use of data-driven platforms. critical attention to issues of accountability are therefore needed, echoing perrotta et al’s recent concerns in relation to google’s expansion as a provider of mainstream education: the role of google (and other platform owners operating in a similar capacity) as a mere data operator needs to be challenged and, ideally, replaced by its unequivocal categorisation as an educational actor with considerably higher responsibilities. (perrotta et al. 2021, p109) secondly, this paper has argued that, for all of zuboff’s criticism of ‘surveillance capitalism’ as operating ‘by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behaviour’ (2019, p189), the emphasis often appears to be on widening access to such methods, rather than questioning data-driven behaviour-manipulation itself. in order to challenge this view, this paper has suggested the need for perspectives from educational research that emphasise collective purposes to the project of education, as opposed to a narrow and individualistic idea of learning as ‘training’ in data skills. drawing from an already flourishing domain of public pedagogy around ‘critical data literacy’, formal institutional education might therefore adopt a more central role in developing a ‘data science’ with social and emancipatory purpose; one that is foundationally engaged in collective justificatory practices about how and why particular technologies and techniques should be developed, as well as attentive to the kind of individual citizen-subjects produced through such methods. references alpaydin, e. 2016. machine learning: the new ai. cambridge: mit press.
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(2019). the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: profile books https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xeudvgwguuv1-ccumazhjlej2c7aafwy/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xeudvgwguuv1-ccumazhjlej2c7aafwy/view https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/learning-from-surveillance-capitalism/ https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/learning-from-surveillance-capitalism/ https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation?fr=szdjkyje1oda2mtq https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641 https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/research/heroimages/me-and-my-big-data-report-1.pdf https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/research/heroimages/me-and-my-big-data-report-1.pdf refocusing zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on education abstract introduction defining the division of learning the ‘division of learning’ and education the ‘division of learning’ in education platforms refocusing the ‘division of learning’ on education conclusions references title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 technology and ethnography – will it blend? technological possibilities for fieldwork on transformations of teacher knowledge with videography and video diaries clemens wieser department of educational research university of graz, austria; email: clemens.wieser@uni-graz.at abstract knowledge transformation drives changes in teaching practice. it takes place when a teacher mobilises personal knowledge for teaching. technology can inform research on how knowledge transforms in practices of distancing from classroom teaching, and how a teacher draws on them to engage with a class. the paper introduces three fieldwork approaches that blend ethnographic fieldwork with technological possibilities: (1) videographies of classroom interaction document practical educational knowledge of teachers and the orientations they use in classroom interaction. (2) stimulated recall allows teachers to re-view classroom interaction. in talking about what has happened, teachers can present rationalisations of classroom events and explain how they addressed these events. stimulated recalls also allow teachers to construct narratives in which they detail lived teaching experiences. both stimulated recall and narratives document personal educational knowledge of teachers. (3) video diaries allow teachers to tell stories from places outside of school, places in which they think about teaching and prepare for classes. there, teachers operate with selftechnologies that scaffold the transformation of personal knowledge into practical knowledge. a conclusion outlines how data from these three technology-enhanced fields can be integrally analysed. keywords: educational technology, ethnography, videographies, transformative practices transformations in between practical knowledge and personal knowledge knowledge transformation is what drives change in teaching practice. a teacher transforms her knowledge to perform in a specific classroom, to interact with a specific group of students, and within a specific school environment. knowledge transformation is “a journey with stages and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 224 milestones for coming closer [and] maintaining a distance to the context” (borgnakke, 2015, p.6), and results in teaching that remains adaptive to a specific situated context. this adaptiveness relies not only on personal educational knowledge, but also on practical educational knowledge of teachers. both modes of knowledge consequently should reflect in fieldwork on knowledge transformation. outlines of both personal and practical educational knowledge strengthen the focus of fieldwork strategies and enable us to determine how personal technologies can enhance classic ethnographic fieldwork. practical educational knowledge is situated. it is a mode of knowledge in which a teacher does not need to solve problems or make decisions because “he knew what he was then doing, not in the sense that he had to dilute his consideration of his premises with other acts of considering his consideration of them” (ryle, 2009, p.158). practical educational knowledge thus informs a teacher to perform in class. situated classroom performances of an experienced teacher strike us because we are able to observe a professional who virtuously handles a complex situation. a teacher handles this complex situation in order to create a context that facilitates learning, to constrain activities that divert the focus from learning, and to shield learners “against the chaos and inflexible demands of ‘reality’” (saugstad, 2005, p.359). in teaching, a teacher immerses in skillful activity, sees immediately how to achieve a goal, and is able to make subtle and refined situational discriminations. through discrimination, in the original sense of the word discriminatio (foucault, 2005, p.131), a teacher separates the content of an event from subjective orientations on which she would habitually rely to create order classroom interaction. these discriminations enable a teacher to mark a “division between that which does not depend on us and that which does (foucault, 1986, p.64), and distinguish situations that require one reaction from those that demand another. in order to perform, teachers rely on a set of orientations that guides their attention while teaching. these orientation patterns shape not only through continuous teaching practice. teaching also draws on personal educational knowledge, knowledge that is likely mobilised by a teacher to maintain performance, to interpret classroom events, and to react to them. even though we can observe virtuous teacher performances immediately, it remains difficult to pinpoint the personal educational knowledge a teacher draws on. personal educational knowledge resides in cognitive structures, forms subjective theories, and enables a teacher to reflect upon classroom interaction and events. these reflections modify both how a teacher conceives teaching, as well as the orientations for teaching themselves. personal educational knowledge consequently incorporates strategies for teaching as well as strategies for reflection. how personal educational knowledge of teachers is structured and used in and out of teaching has been an ongoing topic of educational research. however, empirical research yet struggles to illustrate patterns in which personal educational knowledge is mobilised for teaching. an illustration of such patterns requires fieldwork to focus on practices of distancing from classroom interaction, and see how teachers relate to teaching in reflection and in planning. thus, orientations for teaching continually transform by moving in and out of teaching to adapt to a specific class context. empirical fieldwork can trace these transformations. fieldwork on classroom interaction may employ videography to enable us to systematically review and analyse situated practice and reconstruct practical orientations. fieldwork that follows personal practices in which a teacher distances herself from classroom and thinks about events may reach out to personal technologies, and these technologies can support fieldwork and enable us to make sense of how a teacher scaffolds teaching in reflection. the distinction of personal and practical educational knowledge outlined here puts two kinds of practices into the focus of fieldwork on knowledge seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 225 transformation: on the one side, fieldwork should attend to practices of involvement of teachers and practical educational knowledge in classroom interaction. on the other side, fieldwork should attend to practices of detachment and reflective educational knowing embedded in teacher narratives. both fieldwork domains document figurations of knowledge transformation. the subsequent main body of this article gives an outline of these domains and explores technological possibilities for fieldwork on knowledge transformations. technological possibilities for fieldwork on knowledge transformation of teachers the fieldwork domains outlined could result in fields expanded through classical ethnographic fieldwork. classical ethnographic fieldwork can be characterised by direct involvement and long-term engagement of a researcher in the field, continual long-term data collection and strong reliance on participant observation, and participation in the everyday life of people (hammersley & atkinson, 2007). ethnographic fieldwork deliberately “involves some degree of direct participation and observation”, and constitutes a distinctive way of situated understanding of social activity (atkinson, 2015, p.4). direct participation and observation are personal technologies used by a researcher to develop situated understandings. however, direct participation and subsequent field notes and considerations entail situated attention and discrimination and might lead to unwanted bias. this is one reason to use technological tools into fieldwork strategies: technology allows video and audio recordings, which were largely unavailable during the initial development of ethnographic fieldwork strategies. audio and video recording tools enrich the construction of a data set, and one data set may now include field notes as well as audio and video recordings and transcripts. technological possibilities complement classical ethnographic fieldwork and provide an augmented focus on practices of involved teaching and practices of detached reflection on teaching: practices of involved teaching are what we can observe in class, and we can accompany observations with videographies to augment the situated attention of the researcher with video recordings that document teacher actions, statements and attentions. practices of detached reflection on teaching become the focus in interviews in which we can involve with teachers who may then elaborate on their teaching. videographies allow us to recall events together with teachers and enable them to revisit what happened. fieldwork can also include video diaries, as video diaries can provide a bridge between the sphere of working at school and the sphere of working at home. while fieldwork on practices of involvement discretely link to the stage of classroom interactions, fieldwork that focuses on practices of detachment may encompass a broader array of stages. each of these stages may provide different reflections in which teachers elaborate on their teaching and introduce orientations they draw on. the following sections explore possible stages of fieldwork, reflect on the fields established through them, point out knowledge documented within them, and locate it in the process of knowledge transformation. videographies document orientations in involved teaching involved teaching in class relies on situated performance. practical educational knowledge maintains this performance, and teachers draw on this practical knowledge continually to act in respect to the situation, events and student actions. a teacher cannot predict events due to the contingency of classroom interaction and the contexts in which this interaction takes place. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 226 consequently, teachers learn to deal with insecurity and unpredictability and to act flexibly. their ordering of interaction relies on practical educational knowledge, knowledge that schön (1983; 1987) has called knowing and reflecting in action to highlight the procedural quality in which this knowledge operates in order to confront knowledge from previous experiences with a current context of action. the conception of practical knowledge developed by schön hints to qualities of events we can look out for when doing participant observation in class: knowing in action refers to the non-reflective mode in which professionals act when not confronted with unusual challenges. reflection in action is vital when teachers manage teaching in challenging classroom situations that require more than intuitive acting: “by reflecting on the way we are performing it we may seek to establish rules for our own guidance in this act” (polanyi, 1998, p.30). reflection in action is characterised as episodic step back from the natural state of knowing because the situation requires additional attention. it takes place when routine patterns seem inappropriate to achieve a goal. an attempt to project order onto a situation leads to unexpected results, the situation “talks back” (schön 1987, p.157) to the teacher and the teacher listens to the situation to restructure action. the process of reflection in action starts with an experience of surprise and confusion in respect to a tacit aspect of a situation and gives attention to situational peculiarities in order to comprehend this aspect and handle it. in the process of reflection in action, teacher do not separate aims and ways for teaching but set them up reciprocally to define a tacit aspect. when reflecting in action, a teacher does not resolve a situation by searching a rule appropriate for the situation and applying it: “the application of the criterion of appropriateness [of a rule] does not entail the occurrence of a process of considering this criterion“ (ryle, 2009, p.20). explicative assessment of an action as appropriate would require a teacher to reflect how to act professionally, which requires her to reflect the mode of reflection and enter regress. reflection in action is immune to regress because it accommodates the singularity of a situated event and integrates subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness in order to experiment within in a situation. this awareness is directly fed back into action without interrupting the primary process of action, which indicates that reflection in action is not a process separate from action, but part of it “to free possible futures” (geerinck, masschelein & simons, 2010, p.388). reflection in action establishes a tentative framing of the situation and openness for situated responses. this post-critical perspective locates professionalism in the ability of a teacher to act within a personal framing, to break out of this framing, and to reframe the situation. similarly, bourdieu has emphasised that practical educational knowledge is a “kind of practical sense for what is to be done in a given situation” (1998, p.25) which scaffolds teacher practice because it allows teachers to handle classroom situations based on habitual acting. expressions of that practical sense can be found in authentic classroom interactions that document situational attention and discriminations of teachers. participant observation enables a researcher to co-experience events and become sensitive to the implications of situated attention and action, and field notes enable researchers to document these observations. classical ethnography argues that observations provide an entry point to comprehend “cultural formation and maintenance” (walford, 2009, p.272) of teaching as a context for learning. they provide a resource for initial comprehension of educational knowing through “entering a classroom culture” (putney & frank, 2008, p.217). thus, the effort to enter classroom culture by attendance and observation allows sensitisation to the emergence of orientations and shifts between knowing in action and reflecting in action. initial comprehension and sensitisation will furthermore guide interviews to give credit for the “interdependence of various forms of knowledge transmission” and “transcend traditional boundaries” in data collection (walford, 2007, p.153) in order to provide perspectives that stimulate teacher narratives on educational knowing. however, orientations for teaching tacitly guide attention, and these seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 227 orientations are fundamentally distinct from practical educational knowledge. these orientations are documented in action, and videography can provide the means to revisit review and reconstruct orientations for teaching. ethnographers originally intended “collecting naturally occurring discourse” and actions, which was “accomplished traditionally by listening and then later recalling in writing what was said, when, and to whom” (markham, 2013, p.439). being in the field, listening to participants, and experiencing events and interaction provide first-person experiences of forces within a field. these forces in a field are impossible to reconstruct from documents, as illustrated by dreyfus, who gives an example of mastery in chess. mastery itself can be read as a conception of practical knowledge: “to find out we need to learn more about the way the skill domain is experienced by a master involved in the game. in this connection, we can learn from [chess grandmaster] vladimir nabokov. as nabokov spells out brilliantly in the defense, a chess master does not see the board as a propositional structure no matter how specific and contextual. when involved in the game, and only while involved, he sees ‘lines of force’” (dreyfus 2007, p.106). this example illustrates the necessity of experience in the field, an argument backed by a conceptual consideration of polanyi (1998, p.279): “we must accredit our own judgment as the paramount arbiter of all our intellectual performances”, as critical reasoning or ex-post data analysis underdetermines practice. practitioners evidently believe more than they can prove, and know more than they can say. when we endorse this statement, we need to take a fiduciary approach to research: an experienced teacher can be trusted because she tacitly knows what she is doing, and similarly an ethnographer can be trusted because she knows what to look out for when doing participant observation. however, ethnographers can use videography to revisit and reread data of naturally occurring discourse, and reconstruct tacit orientations of teachers embedded in their action. fig. 1: camcorder positions for two-perspective videography (dinkelaker & herrle 2009, p.25) videography provides data of authentic classroom interaction, conveys the synchronicity of actions and sequences of talk. data collection with two camcorders set up at opposing corners of a classroom creates two perspectives on the classroom as a public sphere: one camcorder takes a frontal perspective on classroom interaction. this perspective is similar to the acting teacher seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 228 perspective and documents student actions in class. a second camcorder at the back of the classroom records teacher actions (cf. fig. 1). camcorders can be set up before the start of a lesson to sustain a regular order of events, and furthermore include initial interactions in the recording. intrusion into the field can be minimised when both camcorders are set up stationary, and when they are set up before the start of a lesson. camcorders and researchers might generate situated bias and influence the teacher and student interaction, which is why researchers should attend classes over a longer period of time to familiarise participants with a setting of “seeing and being seen” (mohn 2009, p.174). videographies can also be a resource for stimulated recalls to re-view classroom events together with teachers. stimulated recalls and narratives document orientations detached reflection on teaching reflects in stimulated recalls and narrative interviewing with teachers. stimulated recall and interviewing both focus on the personal orientation framework for teaching, a framework that enables situated judgements of events in class. these personal orientations are documented in narrative attempts to order experience, and complement pragmatic attempts to order experience through practical orientation (messmer 2015, p.8-9). bruner (1986, p.11) also noted this complementarity in his elaboration on modes of thought, where he distinguished a narrative mode from a pragmatic mode: "there are (…) two modes of thought, each provides distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. the two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another". personal orientations for teaching are cultivated in detached reflection on teaching – this may include thinking about previous classroom events, discussing events and perspectives with others, or reading about teaching, i.e. an academic article on teaching and learning. while teacher orientations used tacitly in classroom interaction can be analysed with data from videographies, classroom interaction itself does not allow a teacher to comment on her actions and introduce reflections in which she perceives classroom events. interviewing explores perceptions of events, since it provides communicative opportunity for a teacher to reflect on classroom events and actions. such reflections provide time for a teacher to elaborate her understanding of an event, to reveal how she personally embeds an event within her horizon of orientations for teaching, and to explain how she delineates similarity and difference of events and experience in order to find an orientation appropriate for a specific classroom context. a teacher can articulate perceptions as a narration on classroom events that introduces plausible ex-post explanations of situated knowing, and these explanations introduce personal orientations that also point to situated practical orientations. ex-post explications document the educational horizon in which a teacher reflects and the analytical skills that scaffold classroom practice. narrative interviews on classroom events elicit personal educational knowledge because narrations oblige a teacher to complete, condense and detail lived experiences. these obligations make narrative interviews “particularly relevant to studies of everyday information behavior” that aim to conceptualise and theorise everyday knowledge in practice (bates, 2004, p.17). narrative approaches to interviewing are based on the presupposition that stories reveal the perspective of the interviewee, because an interviewee will use personal spontaneous language in the narration of events in order to “reconstruct social events from the perspective of informants as directly as possible” (jovchelovitch & bauer, 2000, p.59). narrations in personal spontaneous language preserve form and syntax native to the personal culture of teaching in which teaching practice takes place. these narrations also reflect personal patterns of knowledge, as well as acquired cultural norms of communication on teaching. teachers narrate previously lived experiences that “enable us to make sense of the present“ (watson, 2009, p.469), and refer seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 229 to personal educational orientations for teaching. narrations help us to overcome barriers that can arise in data collection on tacit practical as well as personal knowledge, because a narrative approach levels the communicative field and creates shared meanings between the researcher and participant who may have difficulty to respond to more formal and rigid questioning. narrations provide a plot that reveals moral orientations, perceptions and motives for action in relation to classroom events, and thus are no mere lists of events, but an attempt to link events in time and meaning, perform ordering, and provide context for events, actions, and goals. with respect to the transformation of educational knowledge, narrative interviews provide the opportunity to ask teachers to recount unusual situations and events. these unusual situations and events are likely to induce a switch between knowing and reflecting in action, and elicit narrations of experiences in which a teacher switched one orientation for another one. however, narrative interviewing needs to provide flexibility to accommodate new aspects of events that may emerge in a teacher narrative and connect them to an actual event in class. stimulated recall supports this connection. stimulated recall provides the possibility to revisit classroom events, look at videographies collected in class, and talk about them with the teacher. recalling classroom events allows teachers to explore these events again, describe aspects that they found relevant with respect to this situation, and elaborate on them. stimulated recall provides teachers with an „opportunity to discuss their strategies for interaction while they are directly confronted with recorded examples of themselves engaging in interactions“ (dempsey, 2010, p.350). in stimulated recall, teachers may also revisit and discuss aspects that became relevant for the researcher in observations. such a recall will, with respect to the conceptual difference of personal knowledge and practical knowledge, not result in an explication of the situated judgement that a teacher relies on in teaching, but much rather generate retrospections. such retrospective narrations on situated perceptions and reflections do not reflect “objective social mechanisms” of events (bourdieu 1998, p.97), but ex-post explanations of teacher perception and reflection. retrospections provide differentiated descriptions of personal comprehension in situations, especially in professional fields that demand reflection on personal actions. such ex-post explanations document personal knowledge of a teacher with respect to the process in which she compares experiences and events, considers relevant contexts, and eliminates alternatives in order to find a suitable orientation for a specific situation. the relevance of narrations in stimulated recall highlighted here underlines that a narrative approach to fieldwork may sensibly embed stimulated recall. such narrative approaches explicitly abstain from prompts in questioning to prevent overly structured guidance in an interview, because too much guidance “may invite the subject [teacher] to match this with a restructured account”, which could result in the researcher missing relevant personal orientations (lyle, 2003, p.873). a narrative approach allows teachers to participate in selection and control of additional resources to recall events, and this cooperative approach reinforces the explanatory structuring of teachers as interview partners, which will itself point to personal orientations for teaching. so, without a stimulated recall, interviews with teachers would only encompass events and strategies in the way that the teacher wants to talk about it. a review of events, actions and verbatim statements in class would be excluded, which would result in a retrospection with strong focus on the subjectivity of the teacher. without embedding it in an elaborate narrative fieldwork strategy, stimulated recalls are in risk of strong structuring. this would jeopardise an opportunity for teachers to disclose personal knowledge, elaborate on contexts of interaction they consider as relevant, and outline strategies in which they performed ordering in a situation. in this respect, technology may support, but cannot replace, classical strategies for ethnographic fieldwork. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 230 video diaries and technologies of the self reflection on teaching takes place in spaces within schools, and these reflections happen rather soon after teaching in a class – during a coffee break, in a chat with a colleague, or during a break in teaching. interviews in schools capture teacher reflections soon after teaching, and provide an opportunity to sit down with a teacher and talk about their experience. interviews offer a field that allows discussion of these experiences. however, teachers do not limit their reflection to interviews. teacher reflection reaches far beyond their work in school, for example when working at home to follow up the previous lesson and prepare for the next one. fieldwork can address teacher reflection out of school by opening up another field, and diaries are one opportunity to do so. the areas of fieldwork outlined this far are temporally and spatially restricted to the classroom and to school, where researchers conventionally do their recording and interviewing. fieldwork in school provides data on involved performance. it also provides data on detached practice and reflection on action – but this data is limited, as reflection does not necessarily take place in schools. reflection on classroom events and actions regularly take place when teachers are out of class and school, for instance when they are at home or at other places that provide an environment appropriate for reflection from a teacher perspective. video diaries give access to personal reflections that take place out of school. they shift attention to personal places of work and professional reflection, which allows for a new area of fieldwork. researchers with experience in using video diaries report, “fieldwork was no longer restricted by the time and space in which the researcher naturally could observe and interview”; they also report that video diaries gave participants “a chance to define what to disclose to the researcher – and when and where to do it” (noer, 2014, p.86). murray (2009, p.475) points to a potential benefit of using video diaries instead of traditional written diaries, since “the video contextualises in time and space”, and thus includes more context than a traditional written diary conveys. video diaries permit participants to make their private practice public, which always includes acts of explanation and self-representation. participants reveal how they manage and present their identity, and draw on their identity and self to reflect on and prepare for their teaching (holliday, 2004, p.51). participants also control how much they want to reveal, and the possibility of selfregulation provides benefits similar to that of narrative interviewing: it empowers the participant to frame experiences in a way that she finds relevant, and thus convey the personal orientations she draw on for practice. similar to narrative interviewing, performances on video convey personal spontaneous language, and this personal spontaneous language reflects the personal knowledge and concepts of a teacher. video diaries document reflection on action itself as situated practice, that is, technology allows us to record aspects of time and space in which teachers re-produce and alter their personal orientations for teaching. video diaries thus indicate how a teacher shapes her personal knowledge in preparation for teaching, and reflects a part of the process of knowledge transformation. knowledge transformation reflects subjective reference acts to the context of classroom interaction and schooling, and both contexts lead to the “putting into place of a subject” (butler, 1997, p.90). this conceptual framing of knowledge transformation points to some issues we can look out for in fieldwork: the teacher as a subject resists inconclusive threats for teaching that may arise from these contexts by drawing on both private experiences and public experiences. teachers manage this resistance through “technologies of the self” (foucault, 1988; 2005) that corrode dissociative interference and reject transformation of culture into commodity. such “technologies of the self” maintain and order the orientations necessary to perform teaching. they also enable a teacher to align practice with personal educational aims. educational aims point to the moral dimension of schooling, a morality that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 231 sets an ideal of effects personal educational practice should have. these educational aims of a teacher provide orientations for educational practice. a teacher accommodates such personal educational aims in reflection on action and aligns them with her situated action in class, a horizon that makes morality ubiquitous in the interactions between teachers and students. from a personal knowledge perspective, teachers do not incorporate morality and critical rationality in terms of abstract theoretical criticism, because practice cannot live up to “systematic forms of criticism” that can be employed in explicit reflection (polanyi, 1998, p.278). much rather, researchers may look for strategies in which teachers negotiate personal educational aims with their educational practice. video diaries may contain traces of these strategies and may be analysed jointly with data from other areas of fieldwork to trace and illustrate the process of knowledge transformation. from fieldwork to analysis: towards an account on knowledge transformation for teaching each area of fieldwork outlined above provides a unique field that documents a link between involved teaching and detached reflection. orientations of teachers reflect in involved teaching, are maintained and transformed in detached reflection, and are organised in patterns that refer to specific challenges in teaching. an account of these orientation patterns may reveal three fundaments teachers draw on: (1) resources that teachers use to perform teaching; (2) strategies in which teachers maintain their teaching; and (3) how teaching takes place as dynamic adaption that is rooted in the teacher self that provides a personal horizon for teaching. orientation patterns of teachers build coherence between the areas of fieldwork and allow for integrative analysis. however, drawing connections between fieldwork areas remains a challenge for research, and this is where ethnographic strategies can provide a key link. ethnographic data analysis may employ documentary method strategies to reconstruct orientation patterns for teaching. the documentary method was introduced to ethnomethodology by garfinkel and mannheim and enhances analytical possibilities of ethnomethodology because it focuses analysis on “implicit knowledge that underlies everyday practice” and allows to reconstruct social structures and orientation patterns in everyday practice (bohnsack, pfaff & weller, 2010, p.20). methodological concepts from documentary method align with a topical focus on knowledge transformation because they explicitly point to the difference of tacit and explicit knowledge. documentary method data analysis reinforces ethnographic analysis methodologically because of its “focus of analysis moves back and forth between the levels of (a) personal sense and (b) principles of fabricating social practices” (przyborski & slunecko, 2009, p.143). this dual focus aligns analysis of personal orientations and social structure documented in practical orientations. it also methodologically addresses the criticism that analysis neglects social structure. social structure as reflected in natural speech and action documents in video and audio data, which is why this data is transcribed for analysis. analysis of these documents follows documentary method strategies for interpretation and focuses on how teachers maintain and transform their orientations. documentary method provides strategies to reconstruct orientation patterns in situated and reflective practice. these strategies reflect in several methodical stages: formulating interpretation focuses on what is said, the immanent and literal meaning of data, to document issues and topics narrated and described by a participant. reflective interpretation focuses on how these topics and issues appear in teaching, and respectively how teachers introduce them in narratives, stimulated recalls, and video diaries. interpretation of orientation patterns takes place through sequential analysis to follow the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 232 synchronicity in which teachers introduce their orientations. sequential interpretation methodically excludes the context of an individual act in a first step and consequently contrasts potential subsequent acts with the actual subsequence realised. sequential analysis is vital to denote orientation patterns of a teacher within a sequence of classroom interaction. additionally, narrative interviews, stimulated recalls and video diaries document narratives that embed personal educational knowledge and resulting orientations. this presumption reflects in the narratological axiom that narration and experience are closely connected. documentary method analysis was extended to analyse narrative structures and distinguish between different text genres (nohl, 2010, p.205). text genres enable analysis to distinguish between (a) descriptive parts of a teacher narration that give account on situated educational knowing and (b) argumentative or evaluative parts that reflect motives behind the action. this distinction segments teacher narrations into parts that address orientation frameworks, orientation schemes, and transformative processes. transformative processes depend on continual experience of new situations, and perceived discrepancy between planning and practice and consequently provoke changes within these orientation patterns. in reflecting interpretation, the conceptual framework previously outlined acts as a comparative horizon for analysis and draws attention to probable characteristics of transformation of personal educational knowledge, e.g. how teachers experience the classroom as a propositional structure in which they act. comparative horizons are key elements of comparative analysis and substantiate the validity of empirically reconstructed orientation patterns in a single case, that is, how one teacher performs knowledge transformation. multiple cases enable comparative analysis across cases, which contrast how teachers maintain and transform their orientation patterns for teaching. some conclusive remarks on the use of technology in ethnography the technological possibilities for fieldwork on transformations of teacher knowledge illustrated here enable us to go beyond retrospections. a multisited ethnographic approach combines several fields, and the fields outlined connect retrospective personal narrations teaching practice. this connection establishes in fieldwork, and videography and video diaries are the technological starting points to trace knowledge transformation from ethnographic fieldwork to documentary method analysis. this combination enables us to trace how teachers mobilise their personal educational knowledge and transform it for teaching. while classical ethnographic fieldwork relies on participation and the personal fieldnotes created by an ethnographer, new technologies enable us create data that incorporates actions as they took place and verbatim statements of persons in a field. however, such data does not convey the meanings in which a person perceived events. this perception relies on the personal horizon of a teacher. technology may help us to revisit the reality of an event and invite a teacher to recall how she perceived an event. when talking about an event, this recall becomes part of a narration, and this narration includes associations with previous experience, with memory and professional frames the teacher draws on. technology as a tool for ethnographic fieldwork may act as a bridge between the objectivity of an event and the subjectivity in which this event was perceived, as both perspectives scaffold the construction of an account on processes of knowledge transformation. references atkinson, p. 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(2009). the concept of mind. new york: routledge. saugstad, t. (2005). aristotle’s contribution to scholastic and non-scholastic learning theories. pedagogy, culture and society, 13(3), 347-366. schön, d. (1983). the reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. new york: basic books. schön, d. (1987). educating the reflective practitioner. toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. san francisco: jossey-bass. walford, g. (2007). classification and framing of interviews in ethnographic interviewing. ethnography and education, 2(2), 145-157. walford, g. (2009). the practice of writing ethnographic fieldnotes. ethnography and education, 4(2), 117-130. watson, c. (2009). ‘teachers are meant to be orthodox’: narrative and counter narrative in the discursive construction of ‘identity’ in teaching. international journal of qualitative studies in education, 22(4), 469483. abstract transformations in between practical knowledge and personal knowledge technological possibilities for fieldwork on knowledge transformation of teachers videographies document orientations in involved teaching stimulated recalls and narratives document orientations video diaries and technologies of the self from fieldwork to analysis: towards an account on knowledge transformation for teaching some conclusive remarks on the use of technology in ethnography references microsoft word alisoncarr-chellman-stealingoursmarts.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 stealing our smarts: indigenous knowledge in online learning alison a. carr-chellman associate professor the pennsylvania state university email: aac3@apsu.edu abstract tell me what you know… knowledge and knowing can be a very tricky thing. reflect on what you are fairly certain that you know. self-certainty in human knowledge is a function of metacognition primarily. this paper addresses how we know what we know about the most primal and fundamental functions in our everyday lives, and equates the ways in which technology has invaded such spaces as romance to the ways in which technology has begun to infiltrate our own understandings of learning. through an examination of indigenous knowledge, also thought of as folk knowledge, but meaning that knowledge which is resident within the learner themselves, this paper asserts that we need to move to more of a user-design (carr, 1997) approach to online learning design and development. introduction the notion of indigenous knowledge as i am using it, is that knowing or understanding that is resident within all of us, and particularly the sort of fundamental knowings that we think of as primitive, ordinary, or folk. the title of this paper is intentionally evocative, asking you to reflect on the ways that the postmodern society has created insecurity, instability, and even condemnation of your and others’ indigenous knowledge. if we recognize that those in power wish to maintain power and that indigenous knowledge, or even more the true trusting and confidence in one’s own indigenous knowledge undercuts that power, we will then understand that the powerful within a culture can steal the smarts of the weaker. technology has offered the perfect vehicle for that theft by opening a new source of insecurity in those of us with limited knowledge of any technology. i hope i am able to argue this thesis effectively by pointing to many cases in which we see a clear undercutting of indigenous knowledge what is unshakable for you? faith? religion? spirituality? science? technology? maybe it’s technology that you’re sure of. they say you can always spot the educational technologists by the stars in their eyes you know…we have faith in technology. and science isn’t far behind. we believe in the numbers, in the science, statistics are compelling. an unreasonable faith in science becomes like a religion; we call it scientism. our unquestioning faith in these things robs us of the value of intuition, instinct, personal perceptions, insight. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 2 but let’s go back to what you know. perhaps you feel comfortable saying you truly know a few more mundane things, like how to use a microwave, how to cast a ballot in an election, or how to locate information on the web. do you know those things? are you confident that you know how to use a microwave? all microwaves? without the aid of a user’s manual? do you have a certain intuition that guides you through the process of finding something on the web? do you gather tips from friends, do you have a book entitled “google for dummies?” do you know something even more basic, how to talk to people, how to communicate, how to build relationships? do you know how to woo a mate? how to date? how to find your perfect match—your soulmate? the perfect woman? “the stepford wives”, a movie made popular by its star nicole kidman, illustrates the ways in which technology can be used to fix the most common of problems in our everyday relationships. stepford wives are created when men place their wives in a special machine to make them not only more beautiful physically, but more importantly to implant a few nanochips into their brains to help them overcome their tendencies to be unhappy, disgruntled, and demanding. now obviously hollywood usa does a good job of trying to make this situation seem impossible, ridiculous, but it raises a serious question. to what extent do we look, in our everyday lives, to technology to solve our problems? in “the stepford wives”, direct brain manipulation is involved—it’s one of hollywood’s favorite themes as we’ll see later. learning is reduced to simple brain manipulation in learning how to be a proper wife. this “re-education” is a total brain transformation, avoiding all that messy hard work on habits, psychology, interpersonal relationships and so forth. it may amuse us, but does it suggest again that technology, science and the experts at microsoft, disney and aol can solve our real world everyday life problems? well, outside of hollywood experts do have solutions for many of our life problems if we choose to accept their help. there is a website, e-harmony.com that helps you find your soulmate. for some reason the old-fashioned process of dating doesn’t jibe with high tech postmodern social needs. while some communities have relied on matchmakers for generations, the good ones were part of the community and knew all the people and their families in a given community quite well. but e-harmony promises to find you a mate through “scientifically proven compatibility matching.” their website tells us all we need to know, “surprisingly,” writes founder dr. neil clark warren, ”surprisingly, a good match is more science than art. dr. neil clark warren (by the way that dr. title is important) has shown that the compatibility of romantic partners can be measured. our compatibility matching system matches you taking into account the 29 key dimensions that help predict compatibility and the potential for relationship success.” there are some very important key indicators of an overreliance on science here. first, we ask the dr., we go to the higher authority. anyone who has a doctorate must be most qualified and most expert in the topic and therefore entitled to advise us. this overreliance on science and expertism has led to massive increases in specialization because it is through narrow expertise that power is gained. our global society has become increasingly fragmented in the face of disciplinary specialization. complex systems theories and the international society of systems sciences are examples of the opposite force— attempts at unifying principles and broad connecting systems theories. however, these movements are not surprisingly relatively small and to this point have proved powerless against the raging specialization present in most of our universities and other social systems. the tendency in our institutions all over the world today is continuing toward narrow disciplinary focus. professor john c. doyle (2004) remarked during his international plenary lecture to the sice annual conference, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 3 “modern fields of science and engineering have evolved remarkably high degrees of specialization. the present division of intellectual labor is structured by the assumption that complex systems can be "vertically" decomposed into layers of materials and devices versus the systems they compose. a further assumption is that each layer is further "horizontally" decomposed …. a central cause of the fragmentation of complex systems into isolated subdisciplines has traditionally been the inherent intractability of problems that require integration of, say, communications, computation, and control. an increasingly troublesome side-effect is a growing intellectual tower of babel where experts within one subdiscipline can rarely have meaningful contact with experts from other subdisciplines, and may even be largely unaware of their existence.” i think this is a very apt description of our problems at the moment. we have a difficult time making significant organizational changes because of the fragmentation inherent in our current institutions. and to sacrifice our fragmentation would be to sacrifice both individually and corporately our identities. we have increasingly become “that person who studies a specific bug from the amazon.” however, our problems are intractable in the face of this fragmentation. it is only through some form of dynamic, complex, linking science such as systems sciences as understood as a unifying science from von bertalanffy, that we can seriously approach difficult whole problem solutions. these are life’s “wicked” problems. and they are informed, still, more by experts than by indigenous knowledges. hollingsworth (1984) agrees. he writes in ‘the snare of specialization’, published in bulletin of the atomic scientists: “indeed, the disciplinary fragmentation of the modern university is a major barrier to the theoretical advancement of the study of institutions and innovations as well as most other hybrid fields of research. and it will be only as a result of effective communication across diverse fields of knowledge that our study of institutions and innovativeness will be effectively advanced.” (p. 37). so this fragmentation has led us to feel that there are experts in absolutely everything from the narrowest of our problems, to wider problems, to personal problems, where we probably should be relying on our own ideas, thoughts, intentions, and intuitions. because there are experts on average walnut tree wood production, and canine corneal dystrophy, we believe that there should certainly be experts who can help us with our broader problems as well. so we look to the good dr. to help us find a compatible spouse. you’ll note, also, in the e-harmony example that there is a science of compatibility. really, a science of compatibility? are they serious? it sounds too frighteningly close to stepford for comfort. why would we need to rely on a science for something that we can easily figure out when we choose our friends. we know when we like someone, and when the lower stakes of friendship are on the line, we generally don’t ask others for a science of friendship compatibility to help line us up with our 24 friendship typologies ensuring trouble-free friendships. we accept, in our friendships, that sometimes we have good friends, friends we find for ourselves, that we are compatible with. we can also accept that sometimes friendships fall apart, and it hurts, just as it hurts when relationships of any sort don’t work out. but we can’t wrap ourselves in science and protect ourselves from hurt, or can we? this science of compatibility that e-harmony.com extols has two key features, it’s a system and it’s measurable. i don’t know if you’ve noticed it or not, but as a systems theorist, i’ve been stunned by the proliferation of systems in our world. did you know there is a dental flossing system, picture framing systems abound, and we are all painfully aware of phone payment information systems. so a system, for most people, and apparently for all marketers, is simply seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 4 something that has more than one piece, part, or component. in hard systems language, we do expect that there is a fairly strict reliance on the input, process, output model of a system. the definition, then, of a system is something that has several components which work together to process some input and create some output. examples of systems of this sort are everywhere. a car is a system, a camera is a system, even our bodies are systems. but these systems are mechanical systems. like clocks we understand these kinds of systems as relatively straightforward mechanisms. in general, if you know what you’re doing—there is that call to expertise again—you can take out an ill-functioning part of a mechanical system like a motorcycle, and repair or replace it and the system will run again. however, we have seen that this works well in the mechanical world and have erroneously assumed that this same model will work in the other systems in our lives…the social systems, the more chaotic physical systems such as our bodies (capra, 1982). we have decided that the body, for example, is a mechanical system like a clock, but because the system is complex and dynamic we discover that the expert advice isn’t always more sound than holistic forms of medicine. thus, our years of schooling are rarely a true match to the generations of indigenous knowledge shared among communities about healing. but marketers know that we’ll fall for the scientism of systems every time, and they use it to their advertising advantage as often as possible. at the same moment, we understand measurement to be a critical part of any scientific system. what’s interesting is how many of us already know that measurement doesn’t work the way that scientists want us to believe it does, and yet we continue to rely on numbers as if they were significantly superior to stories, feelings, intuitions, anything that is personal as opposed to objective. most recently, us president, george bush has cut the funding entirely for a program called “evenstart.” this program benefits low income non-english speakers with a learn with your child approach to literacy. but three studies showed that evenstart doesn’t work, according to the bush administration. what is hidden in this rhetoric is an understanding that the bush administration has defined science in a particular way, which tends to benefit conservative causes. science is not an unbiased energy in our world, it can easily be manipulated. some of us debate the extent to which even numbers themselves are in any way objective, we’ve all heard “numbers don’t lie” and we’ve also all heard, “you can make the numbers say whatever you want.” actually both are probably true, the numbers do not lie, it’s the way that people manipulate them that can create misleading or downright disingenuous results and consequent conclusions. the recent us election was so incredibly tight that numbers were flying around like mad just days before the election. did you know that the outcome of the election year redskins nfl football game has foretold the outcome of the election since the 1930’s? they came out in favor of kerry, meanwhile, the scholastic publishers children’s vote has also accurately predicted the outcome with their vote for decades and they came out in favor of bush. when skirt hems go up, democrats are elected, when the stock market goes down the democrats are elected, and when more halloween masks of a certain political candidate are sold, that candidate, in this case bush, wins the election. most minivan drivers vote bush, sedan drivers vote kerry. all of these statistics--i have to wonder who is keeping track of them, and why. but given our layers of disciplinary specialization, there is probably an academic somewhere in the world who’s job it is to track and study bizarre election statistics through the use of a bizarre election prediction system. measurement is ultimately meant to be about accountability. at the very least it is about accountability when numbers are applied to education and learning in particular. we have accepted as a society standardized test scores over stories seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 5 of learner progress as reported by teachers and parents. teachers and parents who actually know the learner are not trusted, instead we accept that statistics and the standardization of examinations is more objective, and therefore worth more. we can rely on these numbers for decision-making and to assess the teacher’s ability to do his job. i was amused a few years back by an article i reviewed for a journal in which the independent variable was “learning per second.” how precisely that was measured was not entirely clear. but it is what held the software program being examined accountable for effective learning. measurement and systems are part of the over reliance on expertism in our educational landscape. and online learning is certainly no exception. in fact, we rely on expertise so much more than we even begin to realize. we have been very slowly lulled into a position where we rely less and less on our own smarts, our own feelings or beliefs about how the world works, and increasingly more, every day, on the statements of experts. the statistics overwhelm us on 24hr. news, or in self-help books. all this science may not lead us down the right road. my friend, dr. ian baptiste , a professor of adult education would say that our indigenous knowledge, that is our intuitions and internal smarts are not being stolen, but rather that they are structurally given away. but i’m afraid i disagree with ian. in fact, while in some cases we are lulled into accepting science where our own sensibilities already tell us perfectly acceptable answers, in many other cases it is ripped from us. “the god’s must be crazy?” is a rather amusing south african film which has a bit of a cult following. the premise of the movie is that the god’s were crazy for sending a tribe only one coke bottle, which fell from the skies (in this case out of a low-flying, single-engine airplane). the movie does a fantastic job of describing two very different cultures closely co-located—an indigenous tribe with little outside contact, and modern industrial or post-modern man. the movie highlights, for example, the ways in which each “tribe” has adapted or not adapted and the results of these approaches. because the tribal approach to rearing children is never to speak harshly or punish a child, their games are inventive and they are well-behaved. their world is relatively easy to negotiate and understand and so they learn what they need to from their elders without much fuss. industrial man on the other hand has so completely complicated his world that dynamic systems of discipline are necessary to keep up with children’s boundary needs and they are “sentenced to 10-12 years of schooling to learn how to live in the dangerous world” their elders have created. these contrasting images, are, of course, romanticizing tribal life, but they also make an important point about postmodern existence and the ways in which the world has become a complicated place that forces us into a position of needing experts on many components of our very existence. indigenous knowledge can be an extremely powerful antidote to the postmodern life. and the stark differences between tribal life and modern life highlighted in such a contrast as is illustrated in “the god’s must be crazy” bring into sharp relief the counter-intuitive constraints we’ve placed on ourselves. biopiracy is the theft of indigenous knowledge and it is related to systems and measurements and highly specialized fields of study. biopiracy is the placing of patents on plants, processes, and ways of life that have informed indigenous cultures for generations so that even they have to buy their own inventions back from large corporations. dei, hall & rosenberg 2000) have edited a book, indigenous knowledges in global contexts: multiple readings of our world, in which they offer us an anti-colonial (not post colonial) call to reclaiming the indigenous knowledge that is being stolen from us. and in the preface to this text, shiva writes, “the phenomenon of ‘biopiracy’ and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 6 ‘intellectual piracy’ whereby western commercial interests claim products and innovations derived from indigenous traditions as their ‘intellectual property’ (through protections such as patents), have emerged because indigenous knowledge systems have been devalued and (it follows) have not been afforded protection. this lack of protection reflects the reductionist approach that the west imposes on indigenous knowledge systems. …indigenous knowledge is thus at the heart of the global issues of our times. the future of indigenous knowledges will not simply determine whether the diverse cultures of the world evolve in freedom or are colonized; it will also determine whether humanity and diverse species survive.” (p. iv) patents have been placed on biological materials such as genes, animals, and even human beings. this has elicited unanticipated outrage on the part of affected indigenous populations— outrage toward the large corporations who patent living things and profit from them. we should then ask ourselves is if we are either abdicating or having stolen from us by learning pirates our innate knowledge about learning—how learning happens, when good learning is happening, what online learning environments might look like—do we abdicate that understanding to experts? can we accept the involvement of front-line users in the creation of online learning environments? what would that look like? lawnmower man is a science fiction film that illustrates what happens when we move into technologically assisted learning via virtual reality. here we see that expert science has led to direct brain manipulation again, in order to overcome learning deficits in a mentally challenged learner—the man who mows grass for a living—the lawnmower man. of course, this violent learning approach leads to further violence and the learner’s eventual demise. obviously this is a cautionary sci fi tale warning of the dangers of manipulative learning sciences. but it also shows us that it is possible to imagine futures of learning that are actually destructive. if we understand human learning as something that needs to be expertised and scientized, we lose a significant focus on the learner and begin to become those educational technologists with those stars in their eyes again. we lose sight, blinded as we are by science, expertism, and technology, of the human being learning, and the fact that learning has been something we have done for millennia in ways that few, including brain scientists, really understand fully. and yet we each know when we’ve learned something, many of us know how we learn best through metacognition and reflection on our own learning processes. but this knowledge is not scalable, it isn’t sexy, and it doesn’t sell well. if we can return to an indigenous understanding of what learning is about, and respect the learner in the process of the creation of online learning environments, we are probably one step closer to more democratic forms of online learning. in my book (carr-chellman 2005), i looked at the international status of online learning or e-learning and its relationship to advancing democracy globally. not surprisingly the cases, 14 in all, across six continents found that in general, the rhetoric of democracy is definitely not met with the reality of how e-learning is being implemented. while politicians would like us to accept public expenditures for the purposes of e-learning that will reach to the most disenfranchised poverty-striken populations, the reality is that e-learning mostly serves middle class families who are able to earn primarily vocational degrees online. certainly it is a noble effort to serve these populations, although they do already have sufficient resources to afford technology and internet services, however, it is not the noble democratic cause that our politicians would have us believe. political speeches are full of “helping the least of our bretheren” and “opening the ivory gates” to democratize the university so all can attend. online learning designers believe they have the knowledge, it’s a matter of simply transferring knowledge from one place to another, from the expert’s head into the novices’, for example. this is what most of the texts on knowledge management are all about. but dei, hall & seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 7 rosenberg, (2000) in their own chapter in indigenous knowledges in global contexts, remind us that, “ “no individual, group, community, or nation can justifiably claim ownership of all knowledge.” indeed this is contested terrain. “unfortunately, far too many educators privilege certain ways of knowing and interpreting the world over other ways.” they tell us, “to a great extent, we are witnessing a ‘crisis of knowledge.’ in large part this crisis can be attributed to globalization which has intensified the processes of commodifying knowledge.” (3) thus, politics and systemic issues are certainly central to the advancement of democratic online learning environments. however, these issues are at the highest levels. to more concretely focus on the ways in which we can engage learners in the creation of their own systems of human learning for online environments is what i’d like to devote the remainder of this paper to. understanding the role of democracy and critical theory in the creation of online learning environments is wrapped around the importance that is placed on those understandings which reside within users of advanced learning environments—their indigenous knowledge. i am deeply moved to more completely understand the ways in which technology itself may be robbing us, socially, of the values previously placed in indigenous knowledge and replacing that value with a scientism or religious faith in expert knowledge. if we look to the scandinavian foundations of user-design or participatory design we can at least begin to get a glimpse of what might lie ahead in the land of online learning when driven by indigenous knowledge. a respect for learner intuitions means that we afford a certain amount of power to learners. because the open marketplace of ideas has allowed learners to choose whatever they want to study based on their ability to pay, we have already started to see a certain amount of learner control and choice seeping into all curricula at the post secondary level. i would anticipate a spiraling of this level of choice, and an intensification of it. i would expect an increase in online learning options available in the k-12 curricula as well. allowing students first to choose what they are interested in and really want to learn about is the beginning of a truly democratic and user-design oriented system. however, it may also be problematic. that is, if everyone is trained to be a shakespearean scholar, who will drive the taxis, or mow the grass? the industrial model of learning works, in part, because the system funnels people into job-oriented or vocational training. the fear may be that if we allow students to truly choose to learn whatever interests them and whatever they want to learn about, will we have enough learners who are interested in either difficult things like chemistry, or mundane things like data entry. this fear is actually relatively easily quelled within any capitalist economy by looking at past trends. generally, whenever a serious shortage of workers exists, groups of disenfranchised or underprivileged populations are happy to step into the void if salaries are sufficiently rewarding. this, however, can exacerbate a tendency for certain areas, medicine, law, academe to remain the purview of privilege. in addition, my husband’s work in adult education (carr-chellman, in progress) reminds us that if we can understand education as more than mere technical or vocational training for work, but also understand it as selffulfillment and realize that this self-actualization leads to better taxi drivers and lawn mower men, then we’ve taken a step toward more democratic online learning options. assuming that we can accept and adjust to the learners determining their own interests and needs for curriculum design, we can look more narrowly into how the actual environment is created to be a user-design space. in the past, we have understood user-design to mean user-input. we do focus groups, ask people what they want to have different in a website or learning environment, and we try to meet their expectations within the limitations of the technology and our skills as designers and programmers. this, while noble and admirable seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 8 is not true user-design. central to the meaning of user-design is a clear shift in power…to put the tools of design into the hands of the users. thus, what needs to happen is the creation of learning environments, which allow learners to create their own environments. we know a good deal about learner differences, for example, and we can create systems that allow a learner to first figure out what kinds of learning work best for them and then design a space that is most comfortable for them. in the same way that learners can design an office space with appropriate desk, chair, lights, books, computer, file cabinets and so forth at their finger tips, ergonomically comfortable, and supportive—we should be able to create online learning spaces that are infinitely more adaptable to learner preferences than we currently have. this is particularly the case when we consider the use of learning objects wiley, (2000) as a source of innovation in online learning through user-designed learning spaces. if we can allow learners to first select their content and then customize their space, we have taken significant steps toward a more democratic, respectful system that comes closer to the true meaning of user-design. it’s not going all the way yet, but it’s a big leap forward. i think that in trying to imagine a new system of userdesigned learning, i’ll rely on education & ecstacy—a book george leonard (1968) first released with this image in 1968. the chapter is, oddly enough, titled “visiting day 2001” and it offers us a significantly different image of user-designed electronic learning spaces than most of us would have imagined 50 years ago. no matter how many times you visit the basics dome, its initial effect is literally stunning. it takes a while for the nervous system to begin processing; first, you have to surrender to the overwhelming sensory bombardment that comes from every side. there are, around us, forty learning consoles, at each of which is seated a child between the ages of three and seven, facing outward toward the learning displays. each child sits at a keyboard, essentially less complex than that of an old-fashioned typewriter, but fitted with a number of shifts so that almost every symbol known to human cultures can be produced. the child’s learning display, about ten feet square, is reflected from the hologram-conversion screen that runs all the way around the inner surface of the dome. the image appears to stand out from the screen in sometimes startling colors and dimensions. the screen that runs all the way around the inner surface of the dome. the screen is slightly elevated above the child’s horizontal eye level so that everyone in the dome, by turning all the way around can view all of the learning displays. each display joins the one on either side of it, so that the total effect is panoramic. and each has its own set of stereo speakers, joining in a panorama of sound….when a child takes the chair to begin learning, another radio receiver senses his presence through his electronic id and signals the central learning computer to plug in that particular child’s learning history. the child puts on his combination earphones and brain-wave sensors, so that ongoing brainwave analysis (not manipulation) can become an element in the dialogue….once the computer picks up the child’s ongoing brain-waves, it immediately begins reiterating (in drastically foreshortened form) his last learning session. the child watches his most recent lesson reeling by on his display. if he wants to continue where he left off last time, he holds down his “yes” key until the reiteration is finished. if not, he presses “no” and the computer begins searching for other material appropriate to the child’s level of learning, material which is flashed onto the display until the child presses “yes.” the “select” process generally takes less than two minutes. the dialogue then begins. (147-149) we need equally fantastic images for visiting day 2100 and we need to stretch our minds and imaginations to figure out ways to create online learning environments, which respect learners, advance democracy, and rely on user knowledge rather than science, technology, and expertism. as we consider the future of education, and the role that online learning plays in that future, we seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 9 have to consider the indigenous knowledge and the learner power in the system. dei, hall & rosenberg (2000) tell us, “the task of social and educational change requires a recognition that indigenous peoples have knowledge systems for theorizing and conceptualizing their social and natural worlds. local communities are not simply the source of raw data for academic theorizing elsewhere. local peoples must be seen as key players in the construction of knowledge about their societies.” (p. 16) i challenge each of you reading this paper, right now, today to try to move into a space where your expertise is second to the intuitions of those you work to serve. as i believe banathy (1991) would say, imagine worlds of learning that have never been, and make those worlds come true through collaborative design. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 10 references banathy, b.h. (1991). systems design of education: a journey to create the future. englewood cliffs, n.j.: educational technology publications. capra, f. (1982). the turning point: science, society and the rising culture. new york; simon & schuster. carr, a.a. (1997). user-design in the creation of human learning systems. educational technology research and development, 45 (3), 5-22. carr-chellman, a.a. (ed.). (2005). international e-learning: rhetoric and reality. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. carr-chellman, d.d. (submitted). learning transfer and the ethics of adult education. submitted to the international journal of lifelong learning. dei, g.j.s., hall, b.l., rosenberg,d.g.(eds.) (2000). indigenous knowledges in global contexts: multiple readings of our world. toronto: university of toronto press. doyle, j.c. (2004). managing complexity and uncertainty. international plenary lecture ii sice annual conference, august 6, california institute of technology hollingsworth, j. r., (1984) ‘the snare of specialization’, bulletin of the atomic scientists 40: 34–7. hollingsworth, j. r. and hollingsworth, e. j. (2000) ‘major discoveries and biomedical research organizations: perspectives on interdisciplinarity, nurturing leadership, and integrated structure and cultures’, in peter weingart and nico stehr (eds) practising interdisciplinarity , toronto: university of toronto press, pp. 215–44. leonard, g. (1968). education and ecstacy. delacorte press. wiley, d. (200) (ed.) the instructional use of learning objects. bloomington, in: aect. available online at http://reusability.org/read/ introducing virtual reality technologies to design education ©2018 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. introducing virtual reality technologies to design education jonna häkkilä, ashley colley, jani väyrynen & antti-jussi yliharju faculty of art and design, university of lapland rovaniemi, finland email: jonna.hakkila@ulapland.fi abstract in this paper, we address the introduction of virtual reality (vr) tools to the education of industrial design (id) university students. we present three cases of how we have introduced vr technology in different courses of the industrial design curriculum at the university of lapland, finland. as the first example (case i), we introduced a vr simulation as an empathetic design tool to simulate visual disabilities. the second example (case ii) is reported from a course where students created concepts for a head mounted display (hmd) ar application in smart buildings, and tried out interaction with a hmd vr application. in the third example (case iii), vr was used as a display environment to exhibit students’ 3d industrial design concept models. we report our experiences and lessons learnt, as well as recorded student feedback from the trials. as salient findings, we report the general positive feedback, successful integration with the taught themes especially when connected to physical 3d models, as well as suggested improvements. hindering the adoption of the technology from the teaching point of view, we report on the lack of infrastructure for multi-user groups in classrooms, the additional effort required to set up the technical system, and limited features supporting multimodality. keywords: design education, virtual reality, augmented reality, headmounted displays, technology in teaching, media education, field studies. introduction technology is continuously developing at a fast pace, and new application areas that are emerging can potentially change the landscape of how we explore and interact with the world. this constantly developing technology also impacts to education and classroom practices. one of the technologies that is rapidly moving towards mainstream adoption is virtual reality (vr). in virtual reality, a three-dimensional, computer generated environment is created, which can be explored and interacted with by a user. the user is immersed within the digital 3d world and is able to manipulate objects or perform actions within it. one way to access virtual reality is through a normal computer monitor screen, with early examples being the first-person shooter game, quake and the second life virtual world. rather than viewing vr on a fixed screen, a higher level of immersion can be achieved by using a head mounted display (hmd), which seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 2 allows the wearer to look around the virtual environment with natural head movement. in addition to the visual sense, virtual reality may be enhanced through other senses such as touch (haptics) and smell. virtual and augmented reality technologies have come a long way since their early steps in the beginning of 2000’s, when they involved heavy computing devices carried in the user’s rucksack and bulky head-mounted display screens, e.g. as used by cheok et al. (2004) in their human pacman game. today, vr setups utilize head mounted displays (hmds) that are lightweight and affordable to large audiences. these are being adopted especially by the entertainment and gaming industries. research has investigated the use of vr in different domains, including e.g. architecture and museums, and new application areas are appearing. the use of vr in education is an interesting application domain. integrating interactive technologies into education already has an extensive history over the past few decades. the first steps in trialing any new technology in education typically occurs through research pilots, but as technologies mature and become commonplace, their adoption becomes easier. this development process can be seen with laptops, mobile phones and tablets, which are today commonplace in schools, realizing the future visions that were trialed e.g. in the classroom 2000 project two decades ago (abowd, 1999). these technologies are now common consumer electronics, and their use in education has already been widely investigated. in particular, the use of mobile phones has been extensively researched, ranging from learning to read with inclassroom games (sanchez et al., 2011) to mobile phone usage as a general classroom learning tool in developing countries (valderrama et al., 2012). whereas smartphones are today a mainstream mobile technology, vr still represents a technology of which most students, as well as education professionals, have little or no experience with in practice. smartphones and tablets can also function as a platform for augmented reality (ar) and vr applications, and thus they offer a gateway to introduce new technology approaches on a familiar device. augmented reality, where digital information is overlaid on top of the physical world view, has become a wellknown phenomenon to the youth through the pokemongo application published in 2016 (colley et al., 2017). mobile ar applications have been frequently demonstrated in the context of education, for instance to motivate children to learn about nature on field trips (chiang et al., 2014; alakärppä et al., 2017). with virtual reality applications, the user interacts with a digital world which is not visibly linked to the surrounding physical world. whereas conventional mobile devices, i.e. smartphones and tablets, can be used to access the 3d virtual world, a higher level of immersion is achieved with head mounted displays (hmds). hmds have become the de facto user interface technology for vr, but are still rare enough that the majority of both students and teachers are unfamiliar with their use. the use of hmd vr in education is an underexplored topic, and research investigating its use across different fields of education is lacking. since vr technologies are rapidly emerging, it is relevant to study their potential in this domain. in this paper, we address the use of vr, especially hmd based vr, in the area seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 3 of design education. designers, who create artifacts, applications, and service concepts, for a wide range of end users, have potential to utilize vr technologies for many different purposes. in the following, we first introduce selected related work on the use of vr in education, and then present three case studies, where vr was applied in university level industrial design courses. literature review there is a body of meta review papers addressing different aspects of ar & vr use in education e.g. bacca et al. (2014), freina and ott (2015), merchant et al. (2014) and radu (2014). prior work of specific relevance to our topic falls into the areas of motivation and approach, evaluation of learning outcomes and vr as a student creativity tool. motivation and approach merchant et al. (2014) present a meta review of works applying ar & vr to education in the k12 age group, concluding that most work on ar and vr in education has focused on different approaches to providing information, e.g. learning capital cities. further, they report that game-based approaches have yielded better results than those based on simulations or virtual world representations. considering effectiveness of the mode of use, merchant et al. (2014) report than individual use outperforms group use, and that in general learning gains deteriorate with repetition, i.e. there is a novelty factor. the effectiveness of vr simulations as an educational resource is based on their ability to provide: immersion, interaction, and user involvement with the environment and narrative (freina and ott, 2015). with a focus on simulation, freina and ott (2015) report on the different approaches that have been utilised in educational vr research. four main motivations are identified, visiting inaccessible locations, time travel, experiencing dangerous situations (e.g. firefighter training) and overcoming ethical limitations (e.g. surgery practice) (freina and ott, 2015). further, current applications of vr in education have primarily been applied to adult training or for university students, with relatively little work addressing vr use with younger children (freina and ott, 2015). evaluation of learning outcomes focusing on augmented reality, radu (2014) summarizes benefits that have been identified as improvements in, content understanding, long-term memory retention, physical task performance, student collaboration and student motivation. on the negative side, attention tunneling, usability problems, ineffective integration in the classroom and accommodating learner differences, are reported as challenges to be addressed (radu, 2014). based on these findings, a heuristic questionnaire, which may be utilised during the design of educational ar approaches is presented (radu, 2014). in their meta review of 32 ar education papers, bacca et al. (2014) summarize that ar has been effective for improving learning performance, learning motivation, student engagement and positive attitudes. on the negative side, limitations of ar are seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 4 reported as: technical performance (e.g. problems locking to markers), learners paying too much attention to virtual information and ar becoming intrusive (bacca et al., 2014). vr as a student creativity tool few works have examined the use of vr as a creative tool by students. kaufmann and dünser (2007), report on general motivational benefits and ease of use of most ar systems can reduce cognitive load and encourage student exploration and creativity. the use of a collaborative virtual environment by school children is evaluated by arhippainen et al. (2011), reporting that students were motivated to edit existing content as well as creating new content to the virtual space. here, also student wishes for private as well as shared space in the virtual world is noted (arhippainen et al., 2011). bower et al. (2014), report on a project where students designed ar experiences to augment existing physical sculpture-type artworks, e.g. adding their visual or textual interpretation. case study i – vr simulation as an empathetic design tool to simulate visual disabilities introduction when approaching a design task, designers aim to “put themselves in the user’s shoes”, e.g. by conducting end-user research, creating user personas or acting out scenarios in bodystorming sessions. however, in many cases, design is based on recollections of a second person, rather than being experienced firsthand by the designer. this is particularly relevant in the case of disabilities, where it may be difficult for the designer to fully appreciate the issues experienced by disabled users. focusing on visual impairments, we explored the use of a hmd to enable architects and service designers to gain better end user understanding during architectural and space design processes. prior work has shown hmd based visualization provides the most realistic experience during the design phase of buildings, when compared to screen and cave formats (colley et al., 2015). several works have studied digitally simulated visual impairments in architectural contexts (ai et al., 2000; ates et al., 2015; lewis et al., 2011). ates et al. (2015) presented an ar hmd solution, where real-world images from a camera were filtered to simulate visual disabilities. vr based solutions, focusing on the visual field loss caused by glaucoma have been presented by ai et al. (2000) and jin et al. (2005) in the context of a virtual apartment environment. simulating visual disabilities to explore the potential of hmd based vr as an educational tool for architects and space designers, we created a 3d virtual environment which designers could navigate via an interface which simulated visual disabilities. our virtual environment was based on an urban street environment at night, as prior work indicates night vision is particularly problematic for the visually impaired (klein, 1991). the implementation utilized an oculus rift hmd, with an xbox 360 hand controller used to move around the virtual environment. four visual seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 5 disabilities were simulated, macular degeneration, cataract, myopia, and glaucoma (see figure 1). the central symptom of myopia is blurriness, making it difficult to see objects clearly at a distance. glaucoma often leads to severe loss of sight, and is characterized by tunnel vision. cataracts result in a clouding of the eye’s lens and vision problems are particularly notable in the presence of bright lights. the vision loss caused by macular degeneration is often only partial, and focused on the central area of vision. details of the implementation of the visual disability filters can be found in väyrynen et al. (2016). evaluation participants were first shown one image the simulated vision of each of the 4 disabilities, which were taken from screenshots of the virtual environment. the participants then put on the hmd and were able to move around the virtual environment using the hand controller. rather than simply letting the designers to wander through the virtual environment with each visual disability filter active, we devised a navigation task for the test subjects. the subjects were required to navigate along a marked route to checkpoints, where they then had to look around and locate a numeric marker in the scene. the created test software logged the time that it took for the participants to navigate between each checkpoint. test participants completed the test with normal eyesight and each of the disability filters, the position of the numeric markers being changed between each test case. we evaluated the test set up with 14 design students (8 female), with a mean age of 30 years (sd = 8). participants were encouraged to think aloud during the study. at the end of the test, participants rated both the paper and hmd visualizations’ ability to help them better empathize with the visually impaired and value as a design tool, on a 7-point scale. figure 1. screenshots from the vr simulation. top row: macular degeneration, cataract. bottom row: myopia, glaucoma. note, brightness of the images has been enhanced for clarity in print. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 6 findings compared to the paper visualizations of the visual disabilities, participants considered the hmd vr approach to help them better empathize with the vision impaired (rating 6.3/7 vs. 5.5/7) and to better help design for accessibility (6.0/7 vs. 5.4/7). for example, participants commented, “this is a very illustrative way to identify with visual disabilities. the test was interesting and it was fun to get to try out the head mounted display.” (#3) and “the demo really showed that it is much harder to get around if you have limited vision.” (#1) no significant differences were found between the times it took participants to complete the test tasks in each condition, however, there were large differences between individual participants. in all the visual disability conditions the participants reported it was more difficult to complete the tasks than in the normal eyesight condition, e.g., “the black spot forced me to move my head in some directions in order to find the labels.” (#12, macular degeneration) and “i can say that when you get closer to signs, especially on a street you cannot really read them, even if you go closer” (#12, myopia). although participants gave positive feedback related to the tool’s ability to provide insight to the challenges faced by the visually impaired, the unfamiliar controls of the tool provoked negative comments. our findings highlight potential issues of unfamiliarity and novelty effects when using vr technology, which need to be overcome before the long-term value of the approach can be identified. we recognize that simulating disabilities cannot replace the inclusion of disabled users as part of the design process, as noted by lewis et al. (2011). however, we believe our approach is beneficial in creating empathy with the disabled, and providing designers with some idea of the potential difficulties caused by visual disabilities. case studies ii and iii – vr for concept design and exhibition for smart buildings design tasks case studies ii and iii were integrated to a concept design process, where design students developed new product and application concepts. virtual and augmented reality technologies were utilized in different phases of the process, and for different purposes in two courses. at the end of both courses a written survey (n=22, n=11) was conducted to collect feedback from the students on their experiences with the technology as part of the learning process. for case iii, the student feedback was complemented with an online survey, to gain deeper insights. the role of virtual and augmented reality technologies in the cases was as follows: • trying out a vr hmd to gain an understanding of the technology and to get hands-on experience with it (cases ii and iii) • creation of a concept design and a low fidelity prototype of a hmd ar application (case ii) • creation and modelling of a 3d product design concept, and an exhibit of it in 3d virtual world (case iii) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 7 case study ii was conducted as part of the course ‘participatory design and interactive prototypes’ at the university of lapland, finland, during spring 2017. the course participants (n=22) consisted of bachelor and master’s level students from the industrial design and art & design study programs. the design task addressed the domain of smart buildings, with the specific application area chosen by the students themselves. for example, students could develop an ar application concept for building maintenance, site electrician, or office worker. the application was to be used with an ar hmd user interface, which the students were asked to demonstrate with a low fidelity prototype (figure 2.). low-fi prototypes are non-functional concept prototypes created by using cardboard, paper-cut images and similar materials, as demonstrated e.g. in de sa & churchill, (2012) and pakanen et al., (2014), and is an often used technique when creating early concept designs of interactive applications. when the same course was run the previous year, the design task had focused on smartphone application concepts. the introduction of hmd vr and ar provided a more futuristic and visionary design challenge for the students. figure 2. left: a student trying out a hmd in a classroom setting. right: students demonstrating a lo-fi prototype of a head mounted display augmented reality application during a lesson. case study iii was conducted as part of the course ‘introduction to concept design’ in spring 2017, where first year bachelor’s students studying industrial design get their first hands-on touch to product design and the industrial design process. the design task focused on creating an industrial design for a next generation consumer robot, with the specific application area chosen by the student. in addition to the robot’s form factor, the students were asked to create a concept and to define the key use cases, use context, and to explore the design from the human-robot interaction point of view. during the course, the software packages blender and google tilt brush were used for 3d modelling and visualization tasks. the created concept designs were then 3d printed, to create physical models and the virtual models were imported to the unity 3d software environment to create a virtual exhibition space. at the end of the course, a public exhibition was organized. here, the virtual 3d design models were exhibited together with the physical models, design posters, and packaging designs (figure 3). during the exhibition, the virtual world presentation could be viewed through a hmd, as well as with a laptop computer. in previous years, the course had focused on common everyday life objects. now, the students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 8 were encouraged to create visionary product designs concepts and also consider the required support material for brand development, new markets and emerging technologies. the use of vr aligned well with these targets. figure 3. left: exhibition of students’ 3d printed physical concepts, packaging concepts and posters. right: the students’ designs in a virtual reality exhibition space viewed with a laptop computer. student feedback the feedback from students on the use of virtual reality techniques and hmds fell into two different categories, hedonic and utilitarian. firstly, the use of the technologies was perceived with hedonic aspects, i.e. inspiring, delightful, fun, and providing novel and exciting experiences. secondly, the approach was seen as having utilitarian benefits in improving the understanding the design challenges as well as, in the case of 3d models, the students seeing their own designs from alternative standpoints. in case study iii, when the students explored their own 3d modelled designs in a virtual world through a hmd, the feedback received focused on three themes: scale, realism, and impressive presentation. also, seeing one’s own design in a virtual world, after looking at it for a long time on paper, was commented as a motivating experience, bringing new motivation, perspective and excitement to the design task. using a hmd helped students to better understand the scale and physical dimensions of their designs, as illustrated in the following comments: “[it was important to view the models with a hmd] as it helped to understand the measures and perspectives, i feel i improved all the time” (student #1), “it gave me a better perspective about the size of my design. it was a great experience” (#6). the hmd was seen as a valuable tool when presenting one’s design, e.g. “the presentation and viewing experience crowns the design work.” (#5). the level of immersion was also mentioned adding to the experience with the design: “with virtual glasses, i could immerse into the environment much better and the experience was much more impressive” (#9). generally, in both case ii and iii, using vr and hmd was seen as the way of the future, and using them as part of the design process was seen as a motivating experience. “[i felt] it took my work to an entirely new level. this is the future” (case iii, student #2). in both design tasks, it was perceived as motivating to get an introduction to using future technology. using vr and hmds were appreciated as new tools that added to the student’s skill set. in case study ii, the vr and ar exercises were seen to provide insight to different methods of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 9 prototyping and participatory design, and in applying low-fi prototyping to different domains. discussion and conclusions in this paper, we have presented three case studies, where virtual and augmented reality technologies have been integrated into the university level education of industrial design students. the case studies have covered the use of vr as an empathetic design tool, as well as using the technology in different parts of the design process: in concept creation, in the prototyping phase, and for exhibiting a final design. virtual reality and the use of head-mounted displays were found to offer both inspiring and motivating experiences, as well as to function as a utilitarian tool in the design process. as all our participants were first time vr users, the novelty effect should be considered when evaluating the findings. thus, it is not apparent if the tools would be as motivating in repeated use. prior works such as merchant et al. (2014) and bacca et al. (2014) have noted that the novelty effect is strong with vr solutions. the three case studies resulted in generally very positive feedback from students about integrating vr technologies as part of the courses. enthusiasm for the stimulating experiences were clearly observed, and also expressed in written feedback from the students. the experience rich approach of setting the design task (case ii), in gaining end-user insight (case i), and in viewing one’s own designs (case iii) were appreciated. as reported by bower et al. (2014), our case iii demonstrates the potential to introduce vr as an extension to conventional learning tasks. our experiences in the case studies also provided insight about factors that are hindering the adaptation of the technology from the teaching point of view. the lack of infrastructure for multi-user groups in classrooms sets limits for the practicality of the tasks, as for instance in our case, the whole student group was using only one set of vr equipment. here, our findings echo those of merchant et al. (2014), who report that vr solutions generally suit individual use. in this respect, rather than each student being in their own individual virtual world, we believe solutions should aim towards a common virtual environment, such as that demonstrated by greenwald et al. (2017). also, and again in line with merchant et al. (2014), we note the effort required to set up the technical system required extra time when preparing the lessons, and this may limit the technology use in classroom teaching. however, such factors can be expected to reduce in the future as the technology becomes more commonplace, similarly to issues associated with the introduction of language laboratories to schools in the 1970s. finally we note the limited features supporting multimodality affect to the possibilities when concepting and prototyping vr applications, as well as creating and experiencing a virtual design exhibitions. altogether, there is still much to develop in creating easy and flexible tools for vr in design education. however, with our case studies we can conclude that vr technologies can already be successfully integrated to industrial design education, where they offer interesting and useful possibilities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 10 acknowledgements this work was funded by business finland as part of the varpu project and by the european social fund in the design or die project. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 11 references abowd, g. d. 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(2014). squeezy bracelet: designing a wearable communication device for tactile interaction. in proceedings of the 8th nordic conference on human-computer interaction: fun, fast, foundational (pp. 305-314). acm. de sá, m., & churchill, e. (2012). mobile augmented reality: exploring design and prototyping techniques. in proceedings of the 14th international conference on human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services (pp. 221-230). acm. merchant, z., goetz, e. t., cifuentes, l., keeney-kennicutt, w., & davis, t. j. (2014). effectiveness of virtual reality-based instruction on students’ learning outcomes in k-12 and higher education: a meta-analysis. computers & education, 70, 2940. radu, i (2014). augmented reality in education: a meta-review and cross-media analysis. personal and ubiquitous computing, 18(6), 1533–1543. sánchez, i., cortés, m., riekki, j., & oja, m. (2011, june). nfc-based interactive learning environments for children. in proceedings of the 10th international conference on interaction design and children (pp. 205-208). acm. valderrama bahamóndez, e., häkkilä ,j., & schmidt, a. (2012). towards better uis for mobile learning: experiences in using mobile phones as multimedia tools at schools in rural panama. in proceedings of the 11th international conference on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia (p. 39). acm. väyrynen, j., colley, a., & häkkilä, j. (2016). head mounted display design tool for simulating visual disabilities. in proceedings of the 15th international conference on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia (pp. 69-73). acm. introducing virtual reality technologies to design education abstract introduction literature review motivation and approach evaluation of learning outcomes vr as a student creativity tool case study i – vr simulation as an empathetic design tool to simulate visual disabilities introduction simulating visual disabilities evaluation findings case studies ii and iii – vr for concept design and exhibition for smart buildings design tasks student feedback discussion and conclusions acknowledgements references microsoft word marianne aars developing professional competence.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue – 2008 developing professional competence by internetbased reflection marianne aars associate professor, physiotherapist, cand. polit tromsø university college, 9293 tromsø, norway email: marianne.aars@hitos.no abstract this article aims at giving an example of how practical, clinical knowledge can be explored by the use of a tailor-made information and communication technology (ict)-tool: physio-net. in constructing content to this particular internetbased resource used for bachelor students at tromsø university college, a clinician expert physiotherapist contributed with a detailed analysis of her own practice and its underpinning rationale, displayed by film and text simultaneously. the clinician was interviewed about how the work had affected later practice and why, and her experiences are discussed in terms of reflective practice. internalised ways of thinking and acting were changed; she became more aware of the importance of taking the patient’s perspective, of the interaction in the situation, and made more careful conclusions in the clinical reasoning process. time, observation, writing and guidance were important clues to this learning process and outcome. it is concluded that looking into one’s own practice amongst “critical friends”, mediated in a transparent mode as the internet tool provides, constitutes a valuable learning potential for the individual and might contribute towards making professional practice more open and easier to discuss and develop. keywords: reflection, documentation of practice, action learning, information and communication technology (ict), professional development introduction as health care professionals physiotherapists need to update and develop their knowledge to be able to perform “best possible practice” for the benefit of their patients. today there is an increasing demand for research to document the effects of physiotherapy in the medical, scientific tradition with clinical controlled trials (ekeli, 2002; thornquist, 2003). while this is much needed, we also have to investigate clinical practice– as it is practised – and its underpinning rationale. how can we make the practical professional knowledge of physiotherapists accessible? and how can we make it the object of scientific investigation? these are important questions to raise for the development of physiotherapy as a profession. in her book: "generation of knowledge in physiotherapy” from 1988, eline thornquist says: ”one prerequisite for preserving and imparting the undisclosed knowledge of a professional field the legacy of knowledge based on practical experience is first and foremost to acknowledge its central seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 2 role, and secondly to define its terms and systematize it as far as possible” (p. 24)1 (thornquist, 1988). this entails the physiotherapist's exposition, substantiation and investigation of his or her practice, and the necessity to make practical experience and clinical knowledge accessible in all dimensions. in this article, i will discuss the results from a study, conducted in collaboration with an experienced clinician, which took place in connection to producing content to a tailor-made internet resource, for a particular bachelor program in physiotherapy at tromsø university college. in constructing this internet resource, physio-net2, one of the important aims was to conceptualize practical experience-based knowledge for the students to learn from in various ways. the experienced clinician, “bente” documented her knowledge in assessing a particular patient with shoulder problems. she video-recorded the assessment, and described, analyzed and underpinned the rationale for her actions in a specific manner. the video, with accompanying text, became a product; a guided analysis, within “physio-net”. bente found the work interesting and satisfying. she also found that it contributed to changing ways of thinking and acting in later clinical situations, particularly in relation to the conceptualising and interpretation of the lived experiences and symptoms of the patients. i found this so interesting that i investigated her learning experiences further in an interview. the research question i address is: how does an internet-based reflective analysis of one’s clinical practice stimulate professional development and what is required? by using bente’s experiences as empirical data and discussing them in theoretical perspectives concerning the development of reflective clinicians and lifelong learning, i want to make a contribution to how one can develop professional competence from within practice itself. background: development of an internetbased resource in a decentralized curriculum at tromsø university college we developed a decentralized, part-time bachelor program in physiotherapy in 20033. the program was established as a response to the university college's desire to offer flexible courses of study that were suitable for students with family obligations or who for other reasons wanted to extend the period of time for completion of their studies. the curriculum outlines a study programme lasting four years, instead of three, and combining plenary seminars on campus, periods of practice and intermediate periods of independent study. the independent study intervals include self-study and group work, as well as skills training with a physiotherapist in the practical field. the database physio-net was developed as a reference support for the students' learning process. it was made in close cooperation with britt kroepelien, professor in art history4. many internetbased learning supports today deal with the exchange of information and communication and operate as learning management systems (lms), rather than with the content of a program such as content management systems (cms) (garrison et al., 2003). when we constructed physio-net we particularly wanted to emphasise the content aspects, and especially focused on documenting practical, clinical knowledge in the profession. this was due to the medium’s potential for doing this by using different modes such as film and text simultaneously, and because theoretical knowledge is far more accessible in books and articles. the content of physio-net today consists of lectures, photos, concepts, videos with or without expert comments, and students’ own work as analysed videos. it serves both as a repository of knowledge where students can search through the database with help of keywords, and as a portfolio for learning assignments. it is used for working with specific tasks as well as an independent source, from which to get inspiration and information. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 3 the basis for how physiotherapy is presented throughout physio-net rests on an understanding of physiotherapy as a mutual interaction between the physiotherapist and the patient within a given context (engelsrud, 1992). this is illustrated on the web site by means of the following displays: ill. 1: displayed images on some introduction sites in physio-net through these illustrations, it is acknowledged that both the physiotherapist and the patient bring with them a form of competence to the encounter: the physiotherapist with professional specific skills and knowledge and personal knowledge, and the patient with lived experiences, goals/intentions and expectations for treatment. the encounter between the physiotherapist and the patient is influenced by their composite experience respectively, and by what is created in the encounter between them, there and then (thornquist, 1998). in the part of physio-net which is called guided analyses, which was used in this particular study, real-life situations are presented in which the physiotherapist examines and/or treats specific patients. through video clips and texts, the situations are analysed step by step. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 4 ill 2. from another guided analysis, showing some of the commentary regarding examination of balance each film is divided into 40-50 sequences. first there is a brief description of the situation. following this there is a commentary that incorporates the three-dimensional perspective: "physiotherapist", "patient" and the "encounter". by making a guided analysis you define important knowledge based on practical experience, knowledge that would otherwise remain more or less undisclosed. in short you are engaged in reflecting upon what you are doing, which leads up to the theoretical perspectives applied. theoretical perspective: the "reflective clinician" the idea that reflection contributes to better practice can be traced back to philosophers such as dewey and schön. both emphasize the significance that reflection in – and reflection onpractice has for the acquisition of knowledge and the development of the expert clinician (dewey, 1933, 1938; schön, 1995). an expert automatically reflects on his or her own practice and regards development of knowledge as a lifelong learning process (kolb, 1984). he or she is in continual professional development (eraut, 1994) and has an independent motivation that propels the process. within the field of physiotherapy, reflection is seen as an imported and integrated aspect of developing competence in different arenas. jensen et al. (2000) has contributed with research regarding the development of clinicians from novice to expert, while hayward (2000) has done similar research on the development of physiotherapists as clinical supervisors, and clouder (2000; clouder et al., 2004)on the development of physiotherapists as teachers. during recent years the term "clinical reasoning" has been applied to illustrate and explore how health care workers reason in clinical situations (higgs et al., 2000; higgs et al., 2004). the ways in which researchers use the terms "reflection" and "reasoning" show that they may be understood as overlapping but not concurrent terms. both reflection and reasoning entail that thinking and acting are connected, and that the clinician engages in ongoing processes of evaluating and acting within a given situation. clinical reasoning, however, has a somewhat more restricted meaning and focus than does reflection. the purpose of clinical reasoning is to promote expedient problem-solving and effective decision-making processes based on proper and extensive "data gathering" on the patient, and focuses on cognitive dimensions. reflection, on the other hand, opens for a greater degree of critical focus on various aspects of treatment, in addition to those associated with general reasoning about a patient's problem. focus is directed to a greater extent on the experiences that are the basis for thinking and reflection, and makes the therapist’s feelings in a situation, and ethical issues, for instance, relevant. in order to critically reflect seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 5 upon one's own practice, it must be described and made explicit, but must also meet resistance of some kind. while reflecting, there is a risk of merely justifying what you do or did (thornquist, 2003), and therefore it is necessary to challenge the clinicians’ reflections and/or make clinicians’ practice the object of theoretical analysis. only then can one speak of reflection as a contribution to professional development in the true sense of the term. data and methods the involvement in producing content for physio-net, and the investigation of how that involvement affected the clinician’s clinical work, can be seen as different phases in the research project and are presented in the following account. the research strategy is described in terms of action learning and action research. collaboration in producing content for physio-net when we started our new study program we held a seminar for all 14 partners and clinical supervisors who were connected to the new program, to inform them of the differences between the programs and their role in stimulating the students’ learning in the decentralised curriculum. everyone was invited to contribute professional material for the production of the physio-net web site. because of the workload involved, only one felt she had time and opportunity; bente. she agreed to produce a guided analysis on one of her own patients. she had more than twenty years of experience from private clinics and had cooperated closely with surgeons and physiotherapists in a hospital with extensive competence in shoulder rehabilitation. she seemed to be an experienced physiotherapist who had developed special competence with shoulder patients. the parameters for bente's work were that she was to describe, analyse and evaluate what she saw and heard in the assessment of one of her own shoulder patients. this should be done in a manner that took into account the tripartite perspective: physiotherapist, patient, encounter, and in consultation with me. we had two lengthy meetings during which we watched and discussed the film and the structure for the written presentation. during the course of the project, she sent draft texts to me on eight occasions, received comments in return, and we subsequently discussed her work over the telephone especially in the early and finishing phases of the analysing of the film, she wanted – and got-feedback. she spent 130 hours working on the analysis over a period of five months and produced the guided analysis “bente, 39 years”. the analysis consists of 50 min. of film, made into 44 sequences, where 10 regard patient history, 32 functional assessments and tests and 2 regard the conclusion. each of the film sequences are accompanied by a detailed written analysis of what is going on, and the underpinning rationale from the tripartite perspective. the research project when our collaboration was over, i met bente for a one-hour informal conversation. on her own initiative she told me how instructive the work had been and how it had contributed to changing her own practice. this inspired me to investigate her experiences further. she agreed to be interviewed and gave her written consent. the interview was held two weeks later by telephone and lasted 50 minutes. the interview focused on bente's motivation for agreeing to the work, what she had gained from it, and what had contributed to any changes in practice. i took notes from the interview during our conversation and made a report of four pages, summing up the essence. this was sent to bente immediately, for reviewing and comment. she responded shortly afterwards supporting the content of my report, and gave two pages of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 6 supplementary comments and reflections to elaborate on the learning outcome of her work. she was invited to join as a co-author of the article, but felt the workload and commitment was too much at the time. an earlier draft of this article was sent her for review and comments, which she responded to with interest and support. she felt the article expanded her experiences in an interesting and non-conflicting way. research strategy: action learning and action research while working with the guided analysis bente reflected upon her previous assessment with one patient in a certain way. from the results the reader will learn that this stimulated a learning process which had consequences for her practice with later patients. she was engaged in a process in collaboration with me, which has similarities to that of an action learning process, that is: “a continuous process of learning and reflection that happens with the support of a group or ‘set’ of colleagues, working with real problems with the aim of getting things done” (mcgill et al., 2001)5. our collaboration could also be classified as action research in terms of this definition: “it is a collaborative, critical and self-critical inquiry by practitioners into a major problem or issue or concern in their own practice” (p.3) (zuber-skerritt, 1996). the concepts action learning and action research seem to overlap, and what separates them can be disputed . from the literature it seems that action research focuses more clearly on the researcher having a responsibility for documenting and analysing the process in a systematic way and bringing in theory to open up for new understanding (reason et al., 2001; tiller, 1999), and that the role of the researcher is to be a critical friend (aagaard nielsen et al., 2006). in action learning there is less emphasis on the documentation process and the roles of the actors involved are less defined. even though the premises for the collaboration between bente and me were not her professional development, or research, the process and the results have similarities to that of action learning and research. bente gained new insight into her practice while working with the guided analysis, and she adjusted her conceptions and treatment in her encounters with other patients. my role was to support and guide bente’s analytical work and introduce her to the tripartite structure in physio-net. this might not qualify as being a critical friend in the strong sense of the word, but nevertheless the structure especially, which is shown in the results that follow, contributed strongly to bente's focusing on specific and new dimensions in the assessment situations and to her learning process. preferably, if living up to a full action research approach, bente should have been involved in analysing her own learning, but she didn’t have the time to involve herself more than she did. therefore the final stages of the project were done by me, analysing bente's experiences in the light of the theoretical perspectives applied. i have chosen to present the results and the discussion of them in separate sections in order to provide the clinician with a clear voice. during the analytical process in presenting the results i looked for what bente learned professionally and why, and chose categories to distinguish important learning outcomes. for the discussion i interpreted the findings and analysed the material in order to illuminate key issues in what it takes to learn from reflection upon practice. hopefully this will contribute to a deeper understanding of some important aspects of reflection and how the transparency in new technology can stimulate the processes of reflection. results what has bente learned and why? to answer these questions i have chosen to quote rather long excerpts of text6. the chosen categories capture four dimensions of professional development; regarding patient, interaction, interpretation and the connection to personal development, and one category seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 7 which addresses the project’s significance in the learning process. my comments are brief and made close to the text itself. the patient emerges more clearly what bente stresses as the most important lesson learnt from describing and justifying her own practice is associated with the manner in which she views the patient. ”i think, looking back, that maybe the most important thing i got out of this is seeing and listening to the patient. who is she? what kind of life has she led what kind of life is she living now and what are her hopes, dreams and desires for her life in the future? these are elements of significant importance for treatment and the outcome of treatment. it is easy to miss the overall picture during a busy workday. for example, in terms of p's comment that playing the piano is impossible/difficult, i might have hastily thought "abduction is problematical". but when i take the time to "absorb it", it is a paradox that even a moderate activity such as playing the piano is difficult and here we are talking about a girl who has had a high degree of self-realization and a great need to be active and functional. it feels necessary to make priorities and put out a lot of effort including interdisciplinary for patients like her. what are her expectations of life; what is required in order to meet her expectations? what is the most urgent in order to get started? how much of an effort shall we make? some patients i have to slow down a little. others i can challenge: in order to reach this or that goal: what are you willing to contribute yourself? how will you do this? i challenge patients more directly than before.” her work with the film of one consultation of a patient has resulted in bente's seeing patients' lives with deeper insight. she ascribes importance to such insight in her professional choices, and she feels that she has acquired perspectives that can make physiotherapy more meaningful both for herself and for the patients. in the prioritizing of patients as well as for the use of resources, she seems to have added some new dimensions where the patient’s expectations and own efforts are taken more into account. interaction seems more important bente has become more conscious of the interaction between herself and the patients. ”i have done a good deal of thinking about and critical appraisal of my own role. for example: how did it affect me that p was so unwilling to open up, that she was despondent and tended to be curt when answering questions? i can still feel my desire to push her to get started and open up was i trying to make it easier for myself?! especially in the physical part of the examination, i think that i have become more conscious of the interaction. the placement of my hands, eye contact, physical contacts, and not least of all observation of the patient beyond what the test in question can provide in terms of information.”. i have become more aware of breathing, of body language. i have noticed these things before, but they haven't been seen as important aspects until now. here bente illustrates that the encounter with the patient entails experiences of both an emotional and physical nature. she has become more aware of the relational dimension of the physiotherapist, and of the importance that both seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 8 the patients’ and her own behaviour and manner of treatment have for what is generated in the situation. the experiences with doing the analysis have obviously been significant for reflection upon her own practice, and for the changes she has made. interpretations are made more carefully bente is interested in conducting examinations that contribute to identifying the structures involved in the presentation of the patient’s problem. but she interprets her findings more critically. when i examine patients, i still do many of the same things as i did before. i haven't really changed that. but i have changed the explanatory models a little, and i am more critical of them. i have discovered that i sometimes make hasty decisions, or i interpret too quickly based on what i examine in the given situation. can i be certain that things are as i see them? i see what i see, but the reason why things are as they are is not necessarily as self-evident as it might seem. i am now more humble in relation to what i think i know. my explanatory models are more open. i am more curious and investigative. bente has held on to her usual examination routines. she masters them well and thinks they give her important information, but the information is evaluated more critically. she has opened up for an understanding of physical complaints that makes her even more aware of complexities and circumstances involved in every clinical problem. professional and personal development a motivation to develop herself is one trait that characterizes bente. she thinks that contact with students contributes to professional development. the motivation was that i wanted to get involved with this kind of work in order to develop myself professionally for my own sake. it was only later that my motivation also included using this for students. when i started work on the video, i thought of it as a gift. being able to watch oneself. i thought: what a tool! and then i began to think that it was a gift for students as well. ”to dare to make a professional contribution is part of one's own development. i have become more sure of myself, but at the same time more humble. i have presented my way of thinking. when i talk about "my way", do i place more value on it, perhaps? at the same time, i am open to the idea that there are other ways of doing things." i often think about the film/project. in that way, there was a kind of platform constructed, from which to continue to develop. there is a continual re-working and maturation process. i try to translate some of this into practice in order to see what happens next..." bente was motivated to being observed by others for the sake of her own professional development. she experienced that observing herself on film, over and over again, made her even more aware of herself. it may appear that she has developed greater self-confidence? by working with the underpinning rationale for her work, and at the same time she has become more humble. this has affected her professionally as well as personally. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 9 the significance of making a guided analysis for professional development through the textual excerpts above, bente emerges as a more inquisitive and self-critical physiotherapist than she felt she had been previously. she is now more conscious of the influence that relationships with patients have in the treatment situation, and she has changed in part her way of thinking and acting in terms of her own practice. what has contributed to this change? first and foremost, it is having spent so much time looking at one's own practice and writing about it. when a person simply observes and says nothing about what one observes, one will be less critical than when one writes down what is observed. what was it that i observed? it requires one to be more accurate, to take into account what one observes and what one's observations are based upon. it has become important to set aside whole days at a time for this. the best days have been when i spent as many as 8-9 hours. and then structure was important. very informative. i hadn't thought so before. if i didn't have to think about this structure, i would not have learned as much. it made me visualize the person and the physiotherapist's place in this person's life. ”part of me protested against this. eventually it became more and more interesting. it was a question of clarifying something that one never says anything about." here we see first and foremost that setting aside time for observation and selfevaluation was of great importance. the use of video in this process was very valuable. in addition, the documentation process in itself was an extremely powerful instrument of learning. the innovative aspect in this particular project seems to be due to the fact that observation and documentation are combined in new ways, and that the medium and structure in physio-net challenged bente to use the three-dimensional perspective in a clinical situation. although she seems to have found this perspective rather strange in the beginning, she had sufficient "staying power" to use it throughout. in the end she found that the structure actually contributed especially to focusing on dimensions of physiotherapy which easily slip the attention, like the information patients give without uttering words, and related to the quality of the interaction between herself and the patient. discussion bente's account is an example showing that thorough reflection about one’s own practice, from an isolated patient situation, can function as a motivator for change in practice. reflection is thus one important aspect of professional development. many will perhaps contend that these changes were not radical, but i consider them nonetheless to be important. it would appear that bente has gained an insight that permits her to assess a patient's problems and her own role in the treatment process in new ways. she seems to meet patients with increased inquisitiveness and with a renewed sense of security. this may in turn be interpreted as bente having acquired tools that promote reflection within and upon her practice, which characterises processes denoted as "lifelong learning” (kolb, 1984) and ”continual professional development” (eraut, 1994). in such processes, it is a question not only of making changes, but also of corroborating what already functions well. in the following i highlight important issues in developing professional competence through reflection. firstly i address general issues regarding the significance of different kinds of questions, and then i discuss some aspects of what it takes to learn from reflection. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 10 reflection in general an important dimension in professional development is the ability to constantly question oneself. certain types of questions may be more suitable than others to promote reflection (dewey, 1938; eraut, 1994). bente posed both "what” and “how" questions of the type: what am i actually observing? how do i understand what i see? and "why" questions: why did i act in that manner? it is the “what” and “how” questions that contribute to reflection about the assumptions that underlie one’s own ideas and actions, and that provide the basis in particular for considering alternative ways of thinking and acting (eraut, 1994). the "why" question will open to a greater extent for justification of one's own practice, which again can reduce the risk of adjusting and changing current practice (eraut, 1994; thornquist, 2003). in physiotherapy we need all types of questions. it is necessary to investigate, document and further develop one's clinical knowledge based on experience using "what" and "how" queries so that it will be less "tacit" and open to change and adjustment (thornquist, 1988, 2003). it is also important to justify one's practice based on "why" and to remain open to the possibility that justifications need to be renewed. learning: a relationship between routines and reflection research shows that a skilled clinician is characterized by the fact that certain actions appear automatic and can be performed intuitively (dreyfus et al., 1999; jensen, gwyer, shepard, & hack, 2000; jensen et al., 1990). it is a qualitative criterion that many ways of thinking and acting are internalized and comprise a form of confidence. what is the relationship between routines and reflection? what is the relationship between the knowledge that is worth preserving and that which is perhaps ready for change? i will elaborate on this in the following. bente has subjected many aspects of her own practice to scrutiny; some aspects have been preserved, others have been changed. the examination routines she uses for patients with shoulder problems comprise some of the knowledge she continues to apply. her clinical reasoning associated with what she observes, hears and does, however, has been changed: she has opened for a wider and more careful interpretation of her own findings, and she takes more seriously the patient's life situation and allows it to have a greater bearing on her choice of action and treatment measures.7 through examining her own practice again and again and in a different light, bente was able both to observe her experiences in the given situation, and to gain new experiences of a cognitive, emotional and bodily character. she has reflected over much of what she normally takes for granted, or the "tacit” dimension in her knowledge based on experience (polanyi, 1983). it is most likely that outside observers would have noticed other dimensions in bente’s practice, worthwhile investigating. from the perspective of learning as an individual, lifelong process of construction, however, it is pointed out that what is learned has its origins in the experiences of the learner (kolb, 1984). continual professional development is not necessarily stimulated if more and more is treated as problematic, while less and less is taken for granted (eraut, 1994). eraut points out that the process of reflection and self-adjustment takes time and may be experienced as tiring. the process entails both re-learning and risk-taking. if absolutely everything concerning one's own practice is questioned, this may quickly lead to an overdose (eraut, 1994). skilled clinicians therefore, develop through a balance between consolidation of routine tasks, increased readiness to act and reflection about what one normally takes for granted. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 11 learning through demanding and structured reflection bente's learning process shows how important it is with structural conditions that contribute to stimulating learning processes in practice. the most important ones in this case are linked with the disposition of time, use of video, writing and structure in the physio-net web site. time in itself is important both for gaining access to and for enabling a certain distance from the object under investigation. use of the video makes possible the recall of sensory impressions, feelings and thoughts that were present in the situation, as well as opening for new ones. video, in other words, is a highly suitable medium for developing an analytical perspective, and as a source for new experiences (engebretsen, 2006). writing, in turn, is suitable not only for putting one's experiences into words, but to experience anew and to think further (bolton, 2005). the alternation between observation text writing and reflection appears to have been fruitful in bente's learning process. the basis for reflection lies in the linguistic, i.e. language has a constitutive role in consciousness (hammarén, 2005). writing and processing a text are particularly important tools for in-depth reflection, she says, because as you develop your capability to be in dialogue with language, the reflection will be developed further (hammarén, 2005). bente is of the opinion that writing made her more critical and reflective, and it is reasonable to assume that the processing of language in itself contributed to her perception of professional development. moreover, it appears significant that writing was structured in the tripartite perspective: the physiotherapist, the patient and the encounter. all action research stresses the important fact that learning must be stimulated by the introduction of theory and definitions, which is the responsibility of the researcher(s) (reason & bradbury, 2001; tiller, 2004; aagaard nielsen & svensson, 2006). in learning from the participants’ experiences it is necessary to analyse them in theoretical perspectives that will add to the meaning and the understanding of them. the experiences need to be challenged and elaborated. the categories "physiotherapist", "patient" and "encounter" are very general terms closely associated with practice, but which all the same proved to be challenging enough for bente to discover new aspects of herself and her practice. what was easiest to put into words was associated with the "physiotherapist", and to those elements of her professional activity that fall under the category of "clinical reasoning". the increased focus on the patient and the perspective of interaction were more unfamiliar, but were also the elements, triggered by experiences of initial resistance which she reflected upon, that opened for new discoveries and changes of practice. learning as a risky undertaking in order to develop oneself as a professional practitioner, it is a question of both reflecting over oneself and subsequently making those reflections accessible for others. displaying one's practice through video recordings and texts is a risky undertaking that requires boldness. bente addresses this issue. she was very aware of the fact that what she was doing entailed taking a stand for her professionalism both in terms of herself and others. she put her professional integrity at stake. in itself this can promote both professional and personal development (hammarén, 2005). the process of developing oneself as a professional practitioner illustrates, first of all, the dynamics and the strength that is inherent in the relationship between being made visible to others and to oneself. the other aspect that emerges is the importance of encountering professional challenge in an atmosphere of recognition and respect. in action research traditions such a dimension is stressed in the research process and for the relationship between the "researcher" and the "practitioner" (reason & bradbury, 2001; aagaard nielsen & svensson, 2006). i maintain that my relationship to bente expressed recognition for her work, while the structure in physio-net, as well as my seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 12 guidance of it, offered her some challenge. in order to grow out of the experience of being exposed to the critical scrutiny of others, it appears to be entirely necessary to be "reasonably challenged" and to be received in an appreciative manner (eraut, 1994; reason & bradbury, 2001). conclusion in this article i have discussed findings from a project investigating the effects of a clinician reflecting upon her practice by means of an internet-mediated tool, in collaboration with myself as an educator/researcher. since the findings are based on one case only, they are tentative, but can still point to important attributes of professional development. to display and investigate experiencebased practical knowledge on internet may appear to be a contradiction in terms. the project described here has demonstrated that it is possible. an information and communication technology-medium like physio-net, with its visual properties, is particularly well suited to highlight and illustrate experiential knowledge, so that it emerges in new ways. the work in describing one's knowledge and the underpinning rationale for one’s actions seems to have great potential for stimulating professional development. bente's story is an illustration of the importance of standing face to face with one's own practice and revealing it to others, as well as the power for professional development that is inherent in doing so. the internet medium which combines the use of film, production of texts and suggestions for reflection represents one possible path to individual professional development for the clinician. the strategy of action learning and action research invites researchers and clinicians to constructive collaboration whereby the researcher acts as a "critical friend", rather than one who "knows best". the processes of change that occur in the individual take place in a climate that is characterized by concurrent recognition and criticism. the question remains to be answered as to whether individual learning processes also can contribute to the development of physiotherapy as a profession and a discipline, and what does it take? is the profession served by developing individual clinicians to become more reflective clinicians? is there enough critical investigation? these are important questions that cannot be answered simplistically, but that must be discussed. future research needs to focus on how the forming of constructive communities to explore one’s practice in a transparent mode may stimulate reflection and promote “best practice” – both from a professional perspective and from the patient’s perspective. in my view it is important to develop a culture for reflection and professional discussion based on actual practice. to do this, obviously, requires good structural conditions, but the opportunities are evident both for investigation and critical exploration of one's own practice and for creation of constructive communities of clinicians, as well as fostering a partnership between clinicians and researchers by the use of for instance ict-media. while this may appear easy, it is at the same time a challenging way to go. it entails exposing our practices and beginning the discussions there. do we dare? acknowledgements heartfelt thanks to physiotherapist bente for a good, instructive cooperative effort and to doctoral fellowship holder britt-vigdis ekeli for constructive suggestions in the preparation of this article. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 13 references bolton, g. (2005). reflective practice : writing and professional development (2nd ed.). london: sage publ. clouder, l. (2000). reflective practice in physiotherapy education: a critical conversation. studies in higher education, 25, 211-223. clouder, l., & sellars, j. (2004). reflective practice and clinical supervision: an interprofessional perspective. journal of advanced nursing, 46, 262-269. dewey, j. (1933). how we think: a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. chicago: dc health and co. dewey, j. (1938). experience and education. new york: collier books. dreyfus, h., & dreyfus, s. (1999). mesterlære og eksperters læring. i k. nielsen & s. kvale (eds.), mesterlære. læring som sosial praksis (s. 52-69). københavn: ad notam gyldendal. ekeli, b.-v. (2002). evidensbasert praksis. snublestein i arbeidet for bedre kvalitet i helsetjenesten? (vol. 2): eureka forlag, høgskolen i tromsø. engebretsen, m. (2006). making sense with multimedia. a text theoretical study of digital format integrating writing and video [electronic version]. seminar.netinternational journal of media, technology and lifelong learning, 2, 18. engelsrud, g. (1992). innhold og interaksjon i fysioterapi. fysioterapeuten, 59, 15-22. eraut, m. (1994). developing professional knowledge and competence. london: falmer press. garrison, d. r., & anderson, t. (2003). e-learning in the 21st century : a framework for research and practice. london: routledgefalmer. hammarén, m. (2005). skriva : en metod för reflektion. stockholm: santérus förlag. hayward, l. m. (2000). becoming a self-reflective teacher: a meaningful research process. journal of physiotherapy education, 14, 21-30. higgs, j., & jones, m. (2000). clinical reasoning in the health professions (2nd ed.). oxford: butterworth-heinemann. higgs, j., richardson, b., & abrandt dahlgren, m. (2004). developing practice knowledge for health professionals. edinburgh: butterworth-heinemann. jensen, g. m., gwyer, j., shepard, k. f., & hack, l. m. (2000). expert practice in physical therapy. physical therapy, 80, 28-43. jensen, g. m., shepard, k. f., & hack, l. (1990). the novice versus the experienced clinician: insights into the work of the physical therapist. physical therapy, 70, 314-323. kolb, d. a. (1984). experiential learning : experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, n.j.: prentice-hall. mcgill, i., & beaty, l. (2001). action learning : a guide for professional, management & educational development (2nd ed.). london: kogan page. polanyi, m. (1983). the tacit dimension. glouchester, mass.: peter smith. reason, p., & bradbury, h. (2001). handbook of action research. participative inquiry and practice: sage publications. sandstrak, g. (2003). bruk av aksjonslæring i design/utvikling av bedriftstilpassede kurs over internett. norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, trondheim. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 14 schön, d. a. (1995). the reflective practitioner : how professionals think in action. aldershot: arena. thornquist, e. (1988). fagutvikling i fysioterapi. oslo: gyldendal. thornquist, e. (1998). klinikk, kommunikasjon, informasjon. oslo: ad notam gyldendal. thornquist, e. (2003). vitenskapsfilosofi og vitenskapsteori : for helsefag. [bergen]: fagbokforl. tiller, t. (1999). aksjonslæring : forskende partnerskap i skolen. kristiansand: høyskoleforl. tiller, t. (2004). aksjonsforskning i skole og utdanning. kristiansand: høyskoleforlaget. zuber-skerritt, o. (1996). new directions in action research. london: falmer press. aagaard nielsen, k., & svensson, l. (eds.). (2006). action and interactive research. beyond practice and theory. maastricht: shaker publishing. 1 my translation 2 in norwegian physio-net is called fysio-nett 3 15 students were admitted in 2003 and qualified in june 2007. the part time, decentralised program in physiotherapy will take another 15 students from nov. 2008, and then be established on a more regular basis. 4 britt kroepelien developed art history as a distance course, mediated by internet, at the university of bergen and was granted the idunn prize for her outstanding work in 2001. she was a great inspirer and contributor to physio-net, and sadly passed away in 2007. 5 referred to in: (sandstrak, 2003), p. 35, but original text has been impossible to retrieve. 6 bente's written account is reprinted in quotation marks; her oral account, transcribed for my text, is reproduced without quotation marks. 7 from the 1st to the 2nd edition of higgs: clinical reasoning, it is precisely the significance of the patient-perspective that is more emphasized in the clinical reasoning process. microsoft word hyttinen og hakkala 2 080320_sisteversjon.docx ©2020 (mikko hyttinen/ olli hatakka). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies mikko hyttinen department of business economics karelia university of applied sciences email: mikko.hyttinen@karelia.fi olli hatakka department of business economics karelia university of applied sciences email: olli.hatakka@karelia.fi abstract novel technologies can offer many benefits for learning and teaching and employ different learning theories and pedagogical methods. 360-degree video technology allows the students to monitor the whole learning environment and using online video streaming students can follow teaching remotely. when 360-degree video technology is used in teaching it may also pose a didactical and pedagogical challenges and lead to the rejection of otherwise usable technologies. in this case study, we explore the challenges and opportunities that are associated with using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing. 360-degree video technology was tested with business students in higher education settings and student’s opinions about the technology was inquired. in addition, the teacher’s experiences were used in analysis. the findings seem to indicate that comparing 360-degree video to the normal video stream the sense of presence was felt more comprehensive. this help students to focus more on instructions and it may lead to a better learning experience and outcomes. the most didactical and pedagogical challenges were the teacher’s cognitive overload and problems with technology such as the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 connection failure during lecturing. keywords: 360 video technology, pedagogy, didactics, educational technology, computer supported learning introduction educational technology is playing an increasingly important role in higher education. particularly interesting right now is to use the novel technologies in learning to achieve better learning outcomes and experiences. 360-degree video technology is one cuttingedge technology that can have an impact on teaching and learning (reyna, 2018). 360-degree video technology provides a better and richer approach compared to a traditional static camera stream. 360-degree video provides a wider perspective to the learning environment and the possibility to active learning by observing others increases. this technology offers a possibility to focus on students engaged in lecture or to focus on teacher activity (roche & gal-petitfaux, 2017). because of the situational aspect of this technology the student’s cognitive growth (bandura, 2002) may enhance. 360-degree video is evaluated higher in terms of presence, enjoyment and credibility among viewers. there have not been any negative effects on recognition and understanding (vettehen et al., 2019). recorded 360 videos has been a good way to improve students’ presentation skills. 360 videos give the possibility to study interactions between the presenter and audio, and to view audience reactions (yamashita et al., 2016). viewer can explore all the different aspects of the situation and have the feeling to get totally immersed in the situation, but 360-degree video is not explicit enough to give an understanding of the whole teaching situation and 360 video should be used with wide angle or pov (point of view) to understand the depth of the situation (roche & gal-petitfaux, 2017). technology enhanced learning environment can facilitate meaningful learning by creating a genuine understanding of the learning phenomena. different technological solutions can help students promote and reflect their own learning. the learning motivation can increase if diverse learning opportunities are offered. 360-degree video technology can provide an opportunity to implement pedagogical solutions in which the negotiation of meanings and epistemic cognitive conflicts will be central (kolb, 1974; piaget, 1970) and the conditions for exploratory learning in various contexts (hakkarainen, lonka and lipponen, 2004) might be improved. learning environment that is enhanced with 360-degree videos is supposed to employ learner’s critical reasoning skills development as well as to engage the learner with an influential and context-oriented situation (vygotsky, 1978; dewey, 1910; piaget, 1980). the learners have to take more active self-responsibility of their own learning process (bonk & the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 graham, 2004). to help learning we can provide scaffolded and situated environment with learning tools that promote discovery and problem solving with other students. this provokes the student to be an active learner (brown & palincsar, 1980; bruner, 1947; scardamalia & bereiter, 2006). technological challenges are related to the reliability of the technology or the lack of user interfaces required by the teaching situations, such as bandwidth, synchronous and asynchronous experience (chakraborty & victor, 2004; stewart et al., 2011). when using 360-degree videos for online lecturing or creating 360 educational videos, technical challenges such as video quality, positioning the camera, directing the viewer’s attention and the lack of editing options for 360 videos may arise (kavanagh et al., 2016). according to feurstein (2018) adequate technical integration is needed in order to expand the use of 360-degree videos in education. feustein (2018) has identified three main challenges related to using the 360 cameras. these challenges are related to control, position and stitching two 360 videos into one format. the learning scenarios that the 360-degree video is suitable for are video analysis, group work and mobile lecture recording (feurstein, 2018). didactics search for an answer to the question of what is good teaching. in didactics, the object of the study is not the actual teaching process or learning but teaching in general and it is defined as a theory of teaching (hellström, 2008; hirsjärvi, 1982). pedagogy is “the study of the methods and activities of teaching” (cambridge dictionary, 2019) and can be seen as the art of teaching (marriam webster dictionary, 2019). pedagogy is about how knowledge and skills are transferred in different learning environments (hellström, 2008). in this study, the didactical challenges are related to the teacher’s skills and knowledge of how to use the technologies effectively and pedagogical challenges are related to problems on how to arrange teaching that desired meanings are conveyed to students. pedagogical and didactical challenges such as the instructor’s cognitive load can be due to the specialization required by the technological environment and the division of learning situations in remote and near-methods (online, f2f) and their effective integration into the same learning environment (bower et al., 2015). learning with new technologies can also affect the student’s cognitive load. on the other hand, cognitive load is part of the student’s learning process and eventually leads to student’s deeper understanding, construction of meanings and fosters the problem-solving skills (vygotsky, 1978; sweller, 1988). methodology the methodology used was a case study approach (hirsjärvi, remes, sajavaara, 2010; yin, 2009). the objective of this study was to test 360-degree video technology for online video the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 lecturing in business studies to address the didactical and pedagogical challenges and opportunities related. after the test the purpose was to find out the students' opinions about the use of the 360-video technology in teaching. the research question is the following: what are the challenges and opportunities students and teachers experience when using 360-degree video in online lecturing in higher education and how remote students experience the sense of presence? this study consists of two cases in different courses. the courses were selected randomly without any previous expectations. common to both courses was that the students were business students in higher education. the cases were implemented in spring 2018. the research material was collected through a structured questionnaire sent to the students. in addition, the interpretation of results was enriched with teachers’ reflections about the opportunities and challenges related to the implementations of 360 video lectures. in the results and analysis of the research it must be therefore taken into consideration that the researchers have also been involved in the case studies and acted as lecturers during the courses. the qualitative data from the surveyed questionnaires is analyzed by grouping the students’ opinions under challenges and opportunities. the data from both queries are combined and analyzed as one. this is because we are seeking the opportunities and challenges associated with the use of this technology and it is not necessary to specify the answers between the different groups. altogether there were 17 answers. we will discuss the research setting, the main results and provide a suggestion of how to meet the challenges and how to take advantage of the opportunities. we will also give a detailed description of the case process that can help other teachers to set up their own 360 video learning environment. case-study: the implementation of online 360degree video lecture typically, our lectures have taken place only in the classroom or the lectures have been broadcasted though traditional online video stream or shared as recordings to the learners. the didactical problems are related to the use of the online video conferencing tools. teachers’ skills to use the video conferencing tools vary according to their own interest. in turn, the lack in technological skills has an effect on how diversely pedagogical models and techniques are used in lecturing. the broadcasted and recorded video lectures have met the problem that the sense of presence in the learning situation is not so genuine compared to physical classroom. in the recordings the problem is also how to activate the students. the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 the case was to broadcast the lecture to online students through youtube with 360-degree video live stream. students were let to decide whether to participate online or participate in the classroom. the first group of students were finnish second year business administration students (n=62) and the second group was second year international business students (n=40) studying in karelia university of applied sciences. the studying course for the business administration students was ebusiness (4 credits) and the subject of the lecture was digital marketing communication and social media marketing. the course for the international business students was leadership skills (5 credits) and the subject was leadership communication and delegation. from first group 13 students participated online and from second group 21 participated online. both lectures included teaching and during lecture small group assignments. (figure 1.) figure 1. lecture in the classroom (business administration students, ebusiness course). for 360 video we used samsung gear 360 camera (figure 2). this camera enables 4k video quality, which is delivered with 360 degrees. it is also possible to use full hd (1080p) video quality. for transmission of the video, we used mobile phone with 5g network enabled. the transmission to youtube was possible with mobile phones running operating systems (os) ios and android. both were tested and for this experiment, we decided to use samsung galaxy a5 with android. figure 2. the camera used in the experiments (samsung gear 360). the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 both courses were run on virtual leaning environment (vle) moodlerooms, which is commonly used for managing the course and the course materials. for the online students the link to the youtube video stream was shared though moodlerooms news. moodlerooms news component sent the messages via email to all students that are enrolled to the course. the youtube video was also embedded to the moodlerooms (figure 3) and for watching the lecture students only needed to sign into the moodlerooms or go to youtube from the link provided with email. if the students were watching the video from moodlerooms, they were actually viewing the video from youtube. from moodlerooms the students were able to click full screen mode or open the video on youtube and start chat conversation. before the online lecture, there were sign up for the student who wanted to follow online. sign up for online students was implemented using moodle's selection tool where students just chose if they wanted to participate remotely. to make it easier to find, the 360-degree video from moodlerooms it was embedded to the same place where the sign up to online lecture was. figure 3. access to embedded 360-degree video lecture from moodlerooms. students got the opportunity to choose the device for watching the lecture. the lecturing slides were made available for students before the lecture. for later use the 360-degree video was recorded and the permanent link to the recording was shared through moodlerooms. the broadcasting process is presented in figure 4. the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 figure 4. the broadcasting process. using 360-degree video technology in teaching will require some additional preparations from the instructor. the instructor must have a google account to use the youtube channel for transmitting the lecture. for conveying the 360-degree video to online requires also a fast internet connection. the arrangements in the classroom contains placing the camera, setting the connection from camera to mobile phone and to youtube (internet connection) and testing the used technologies needed in the lecture. during the lecture, the instructor can check the connectivity to 360-degree camera from mobile phone (figure 5). figure 5. instructor checking the connection during the lecture. results students used a variety of technologies, but the result showed that the most used devices were mobile phones and computers. the mobile phones were the most used device. some of the students also used both computer and smartphone at the same time. (figure 6) the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 figure 6. the devices students used to watch lecture. the following table summarizes the key challenges and opportunities that were identified in this study (table 1). table 1. challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology. opportunities challenges ● learning is free from physical limitations ● better sense of presence ● own peace and privacy ● possibility to follow the activities of other people and teacher ● use of own familiar devices ● pleasant learning environment ● better concentration on the issue ● disruption of the transmission and sound ● image quality ● delay ● following the lecture notes same time with the lecture ● participation to small group works within lecture ● synchronous communication ● privacy and information security ● instructors cognitive load challenges according to the survey, the main technical challenges were disruption and delay of transmission and the poor video image quality. it worked well until the broadcast was interrupted sometimes there were technical problems, pauses video quality was low, but not really relevant for the lecture. the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 the lag and also the low quality of the video due to the slow internet image quality is poor + strain break… the video crashed half an hour after the beginning. the picture hailed a little, but the voice sounded good, the picture stayed well and the following was easy… the graininess of the image. while testing the camera we found that it consumes lot of battery energy and the connection consumes battery energy from mobile phones connected to network. over one hour lectures the solution is to keep the devices in the continuous power supply to avoid loss of connection or unwanted booting. a challenge for students was that the lecture slides had to be opened to another screen to follow them at same time with the lecture. if the students were watching the lecturer it took the students’ view off the slides. some of the students resolved this issue by using another computer or screen at the same time. the suggestion is that the presentation slides should be embedded on the same screen (pip). this way the slides can be seen on the screen with the lecture. following was problematic as the slides were barely visible from the stream …following succeeded particularly well if the slides were opened to own computer. …slides had to watch from moodle with another device, as they were unclear in the video. …powerpoint should be closer to the shared screen or something like. …however, it is better to put camera behind the teacher that you can see also the slides when testing the connection, we found that there is approximately three (3) seconds delay caused by the network buffering. based on students’ answers, the delay was noticed in one comment but it didn’t much bother online asynchronous lecturing. despite the delay, students were able to use the youtube chat as a communication and feedback channel. if there is need for synchronous interaction then this might cause a problem. the delay problem will be resolved as technology and connections advance in the near future, but there are also other options such as social media tools to use for establishing synchronous communication. another challenge was that to use youtube chat students need to register. this might lead to the refusal of using the chat option. for some students to find and use the chat might be difficult. participation in small group work during the lecture might also prove difficult if there is not proper communication channel with online students. the synchronous communication is the main issue to be developed in the future. sometime the connection when bad and the teaching got delayed for few seconds there is no chat possibility. it is impossible to tell to teacher about technical problem, if he doesn't answer the phone. there should definitely be some kind of way to get in touch with teacher during class, if needed. the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 …youtube chat is tricky because it can't be used without your own youtube channel. in the first online lecture session we placed the camera in the middle of the class and from the video recordings we found that the microphone repeats the voice much louder and clearer when it is placed near speaker. the microphone picked up the unnecessary noise and it disturbed the following of the online lecturing. the placement of the camera in the classroom should be considered carefully and the solution is to set the camera on stand near the instructor. this way the focus can be more on the instructor. on the other hand, the students realized that their ‘off-topic’ conversations were heard online. this lead to students’ better concentration to the lecture and the students seemed to be more focused on the relevant issues instead of messing around and talking to the classmates. you can see how people focus on the lesson. and thanks to the 360 camera, the students concentrate more to the lecture and do not mess around or talk to a friend as usual. i think, that the camera should be placed in front of the desk, so that people who are watching, could have a feeling, that they sit in the classroom and they could see the teacher's face and also to screen. place of camera in corner is not good, you feel like outsider. based on the lecturers’ reflections the biggest pedagogical challenge was the lecturer’s increased cognitive load. when the second online lecture was started with the different teacher, there was an unexpected system halt. this raised the level of anxiety and distress of the instructor. fortunately, the technical support was rapidly available and the situation was resolved. managing the group work activities within the lecture between remote and other students is difficult to conduct and needs more concentration and preparations from the instructors. this causes significant raise of the cognitive load of the instructor and it could be solved if an institution could provide an assistant (bower et al., 2015; white et al., 2010). additionally, the meticulous advance planning of actions and technical testing could also reduce the cognitive load of instructor. in the best case, the instructor could only concentrate on the subject matters. there are also other challenges that instructor might face using the 360-degree video technology in online lecturing, and one important challenge that emerged from teachers’ reflections was the various aspects of student’s privacy and information security issues, such as the tighter european security legislation (gdpr 2018). 360-degree video technology gives the possibility for students to view closely the whole learning environment and the other students and what they are doing. if the lecture is broadcasted publicly everyone can view the lecture and see the participants. the legislation set the frame for the use of the technology in terms of privacy, which requires for the instructor to sort out the necessary legislation and take necessary actions, such as acquiring privacy contracts or permits before lecture. the main challenges related to 360 video learning environments is presented in figure 8. the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 figure 7. challenges of 360-degree video learning environment. opportunities students are able to participate online if they do not have the opportunity to be present at the classroom, for example if students live far from the school or they have suddenly taken ill. there is no need to travel just for a couple of hours and the students can stay on course with the subject in matter. in online lecturing the learning is not tied to a specific place. facilitates long-distance learning. there is no compulsion to stay behind if you are ill or in a trip when the lecture can follow from where it is at that moment. it was comfortable and convenient, as it is accessible from any place, hence not tied to any location. much better than traditional video, but still quite unclear picture. the face of students are not seen if they sit far away. i could follow this lecture, that i otherwise would have skipped for practical reasons. 360-degree video lecture was found better compared to a traditional video. the students were more aware of the learning environment and they felt they can learn easier. although it can be more distracting if the students’ focus shifts from the lecture. much better than traditional video, but still quite unclear picture. the face of students are not seen if they sit far away. well in this one you are at least more aware by the class and learn easier. traditional video depends more on the angle of the camera man while 360 video is less likely to tie to that. more distracting, found myself viewing the other way a few times. the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 it was good that there was an opportunity that you can see the whole class… the voice of the instructor was heard clearly and it was easy to follow the lecture. many students were pleased that they were able to use their own equipment (computer, tablet, headphones, etc.) in peace and in a pleasant environment. some students felt that they can concentrate more on lecture at home. your own hardware and peace will help you focus. you can focus more on teaching at home. you can look at the materials better and be in a pleasant environment. you can concentrate more on teaching at home… one of the findings was that the 360-degree video technology works well for conveying a sense of presence for most of the remote students. one of the reasons described was that the 360-degree video technology allows the whole learning space to be viewed. the students were able to concentrate better to the core substance when following the lecture. they could follow the teacher more precisely, watch the powerpoint presentation and follow all actions in the classroom. however, for some students the 360-degree video may not give more impressive feeling of presence. it was easier to follow what happened in the classroom or in the screen. the feeling of presence was more impressive. yes, the lesson was passed sufficiently well and the teacher was even better to listen than usual :) the 360 camera allows for full space viewing, so well. little lacking but still felt involved. the feeling that you are more 'present'. it was comfortable and convenient, as it is accessible from any place, hence not tie to any location. didn't really feel present. the students felt that the 360-degree video technology is suitable for lecturing. mostly for all kinds of lectures, apart from the lecturing that contain small group works or participation in discussions. lectures, when there is not much discussion. lecturing. when there's not enough room in class (seminars for instance). the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 theory teaching, orbservation of theories and practical trainings, those with less direct contact between teachers and students. lectures, not lectures including intermittent group work, etc… for the future insights, the students were hoping that this kind of technology will be used more commonly and they could see its benefits to online lecturing. although 360-degree video lecturing is not the best way to learn for everybody. hopefully this kind of teaching increases. problems are already known, so when they are resolved satisfactory, i will definitely like to follow the next lessons in the same way. distance teaching is certainly good for some, and maybe even occasionally for me. worth of developing further. in some cases this could be a real help for students, if there would be possibility to participate class also this way. discussion the 360-degree video is a good alternative for traditional video lecturing. it is best used for lecturing. when using group work or synchronous communication during the lecture, the used communication tools should be selected and tested carefully. the technical management of the devices and applications can be difficult for some students and teachers. using devices and applications that are already familiar to users makes it easier to focus on essential. successfully implementing the lectures with 360-degree video technology requires that not only the technological issues are resolved, but also the pedagogical and didactical challenges are considered. most of the technological challenges such as delay and slow network will be solved as technology evolves. from instructors’ point of view, the management of the devices requires advance review of the technology functionalities. the biggest pedagogical challenge can be the increased cognitive load that is a result of learning and managing the new technology. the fear of technology inactivity and lack of expertise if technology problems occur during lecturing can make instructors more nervous. the lack of teacher’s skills with 360-degree video technology poses a didactical challenge of how to arrange good teaching. these challenges might cause lecturers not to integrate and take advantage of the 360-degree video in their courses. students are willing to participate 360-degree enhanced video lectures in the future and the remote students can have a stronger feeling of presence when using this this the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video technology in online lecturing: a case study in higher education business studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 technology. this article has gathered the main challenges and opportunities of using 360degree video technology in lecturing and proposed solutions about how to handle the challenges. these opportunities and experiences may help the future instructors to meet their challenges and to plan their practices of this technology. for future studies interesting will be the reuse usage of recorded 360-degree videos. it enables the development of new kinds of pedagogical practices for example learning assignments related to the learning environment and participants' observation. interesting would also be to consider this technology as acquisition of research material as a method. references bandura, a. 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(author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 digital learning aids for nynorsk pupils in school: a politically sensitive area or a question of a deeper scientific understanding of learning? rune johan krumsvik department of education faculty of psychology university of bergen, norway email: rune.johan.krumsvik@uib.no lise øen jones department of biological and medical psychology faculty of psychology university of bergen, norway email: lise.jones@uib.no abstract this position paper focuses on nynorsk in the digital era and the need for research-based knowledge about it in school settings in norway. the norwegian language situation is exceptional because norway has two written standards, bokmål (majority variety) and nynorsk (minority variety), and both the education act and the norwegian directorate of education require that publishers provide parallel editions of all paperbased and digital learning aids for pupils. however, a national report by skjær, eiksund, fretland, holen & netteland (2008) revealed that few publishers have developed and offered digital learning aids in nynorsk. in 2015 the situation appears to be largely unchanged, even though the authorities, language organisations and “leadings lights” have taken several initiatives to encourage compliance with the education act; however, what is needed is further research into the situation of parallel editions of digital learning aids. this is of particular interest today since the pupils in the county with the highest rate (97%) of nynorsk-pupils has consistently been at the top of the list as one of the best performing counties in norway in national tests since 2006 (directorate of education 2015). in addition, vangsnes, söderlund & blekesaune (2015) find that municipalities in norway with more than 50% nynorsk-pupils achieve better in national tests when compared to bokmål municipalities. the main message in our position paper is that the digital revolution might have changed some underlying premises for how we understand and use language and dialects, and the need for parallel editions of digital learning aids in bokmål and nynorsk is no longer http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:rune.johan.krumsvik@uib.no mailto:lise.jones@uib.no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 195 a question of economics or of political statements for or against nynorsk, etc., but is instead a question of a more nuanced scientific understanding of learning and achievement in today’s digitized school. the achievements of nynorsk pupils in national tests is one indicator of school performance, but to understand what causes this relationship further research is required and several indicators should be developed. in this case, it concerns nynorsk pupils, but in a broader sense, it concerns pupils in general, and how they learn in school. keywords: nynorsk, digital learning aids, the nynorsk effect, digital divide; ict introduction in the report, “the norwegian language in the digital age”, it is clearly stated that some of our languages in europe are in danger (de smedt, lyse, müller, gjesdal & losnegaard, 2013), especially the minority languages are threatened by the digital revolution. the exceptional situation in norway is that the norwegian language is a minority language in the global context, while at the same time having two written standards, bokmål (majority variety) and nynorsk (minority variety). this position paper concentrates on the digital learning conditions for nynorsk pupils in schools, and the need for researchbased knowledge about this in norway. the background for this focus is that the norwegian education act (the ministry of education 2010) and the norwegian directorate of education require that the schools offer pupils digital learning aids in parallel editions –in bokmål and in nynorsk. this means that the educational act underlines that it is an individual right for the pupil to have access to the digital learning aids in their own primary language variant (directorate of education 2010). consequently, all digital learning aids should be offered to the pupils in parallel editions from the publishers, and the school owners (the counties and municipalities) have the main responsibility for securing this. despite this, a national report from skjær et al. (2008) i revealed that too few publishers develop and offer digital learning aids in nynorsk in all subjects at all grade levels. in addition, official webpages, digital learning portals and digital learning platforms used in schools seldom have full language versions in nynorsk. this means that pupils with nynorsk as their first language have limited access to digital learning aids related to the curriculum and competence aims in their own primary language variant (skjær et al. 2008). even if several initiatives by the authorities ii and others iii have been carried out since 2008, for example by the ivar aasen center, the national centre for education in norwegian nynorsk, nordfjordregionen, et al., this is good initiatives but not enough. as far as the responsibility of publishers to offer parallel editions of digital learning aids in conjunction with school curricula and competence aims is concerned, there is some evidence to corroborate the claim that the situation in 2015 has remained largely unchanged over the past seven years. this is also partly confirmed in the report, “evaluation of grants for teaching aids” (rambøll 2009), the report “linguistic quality in teaching aids” (the national language council 2013) and the report “education directorate long -term plan for teaching aid work 2013–2016”, in which nynorsk seems to be especially neglected by the publishers in the area of digital learning aids (directorate of education 2013). and ministry of educations state that their impression is also that the digital learning aids in nynorsk is not satisfactory (proba research 2014; ministry of education 2008). however, we need to examine this properly and benefit from updated research knowledge about the current situation (in 2015). this is of paramount importance since there is high density of pcs in the norwegian schools (oecd 2015). in addition, the use of digital learning aids by all pupils in all subjects is compulsory; schools and teachers use digital learning platforms in all subjects; in 2012 a new definition of reading was introduced which includes digital readingiv; the national tests in schools are digital; the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 196 pisa-test is digital v; the use of digital tools has become the fifth key competence in the national curriculum (norwegian ministry of education 2006), and recent studies reveal a very considerable amount of time spent on facebook (skog 2009; skog 2013; rotevatn 2014; krumsvik, ludvigsen & urke, 2011) as well as on screen time in general among pupils in and out of school (krumsvik, egelandsdal, sarastuen, jones & eikeland, 2013). it goes without saying that excessive use of digital learning resources has sociolinguistic ramifications. the significance of the digital revolutions impact on the underlying premises for how we understand and use language and dialects, and the possible lack of nynorsk learning aids for nynorsk pupils in terms of how “teachers teach and learners learn” in digitized schools, should be monitored. this matter also merits investigation in light of the fact that the county with the highest rate of nynorsk-pupils continuously rank in the top percentage in terms of achievement in national tests and grades when they complete elementary school (tenth grade) (directorate of education 20062015; statistics norway 2006-2015). therefore a pertinent question to ask is how the possible lack of nynorsk digital learning aids in the future will influence this performance rate in the years to come when all learning aids are digital and online. will achievement increase, remain stable, or decline if the lack of nynorsk digital learning aids continues? however, such potential scenarios need to be assessed thoroughly and systematically by means of research studies that combine both quantitative and qualitative research designs. the research questions for this article are: 1. why is there an urgent need for research on the consequences of the digital revolution’s impact on the underlying premises for how we understand and use a language variety as nynorsk and dialects in norway? a. what kind of challenges arise from the lack of digital learning aids in nynorsk in the digitized school? b. which nynorsk areas particularly need more research-based knowledge, and how can this research be carried out? background it is estimated that 600 000 of the norwegian population, and 12, 5 per cent of norwegian pupils have nynorsk as their mother tongue vi and main language of instruction used in schools (grepstad 2012; ministry of education 2008; store norske leksikon 2013). however, this situation is changing, and we find that whereas 50% of pupils in møre og romsdal county uses nynorsk as their primary language variant when they complete elementary school (tenth grade), 28% uses nynorsk at the end of upper secondary school as their primary variant (thirteenth grades) (proba research 2014). the same tendencies are found in hordaland county and rogaland county, but in sogn og fjordane county the situation is quite stable from lowerto upper secondary school. in the white paper mål og meining it is estimated, on the national level, that almost half of the nynorsk pupils will switch to bokmål later during their schooling (ministry of education 2008). the reasons for this development are complex, but internationally we find that: “… meta-net, a network of excellence funded by the european commission, has conducted an analysis of current language resources and technologies in this eu-white paper series. the analysis focused on the official european languages as well as other important national and regional languages in europe. the results of this analysis suggest that there are tremendous deficits in technology support and significant research gaps for each language” (de smedt et al. 2013, p. iii). it is reasonable to say that the current situation for nynorsk in norway is similar to these findings – especially concerning technology support for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 197 nynorsk pupils in school and research gaps related to nynorsk digital learning aids. what makes this focus especially relevant for nynorsk is that in the county of sogn and fjordane, 97 per cent of the pupils in elementary school have nynorsk as their primary variety (statistics norway 2012). since 2006, the pupils in this county have continuously scored high in national tests as well as in grades at the end of elementary school (directorate of education 2015; statistics norway 2006-2015). furthermore, vangsnes et al. (2015) find in their norwegian sample of 240 000 pupils that nynorsk municipalities in norway achieve better when compared to bokmål municipalities in national tests. they refer to the “nynorsk effect”: “the results … suggest that growing up with the nynorsk standard variety of norwegian is a significant predictor for good school achievements in norway. indeed, pupils who receive their schooling in nynorsk perform better than expected by their parents’ socioeconomic background” (vangsnes et al. 2015, p. 10). what accounts for this? vangsnes et al. (2015) continue: “our hypothesis from the outset has been that effects can be seen in the light of the positive developmental effects of bilingualism, for which there is massive support in the literature, and the conclusion would then be that the better school performance by nynorsk pupils is an effect of their more varied linguistic upbringing which in turn boosts their cognitive development” (p. 10). in other words, the exposure of nynorsk pupils to bokmål is so extensive – due to their upbringing, both inside and outside kindergarten and in school settings (through play, children’s tv, cartoons, educational technology, media, social media, authorities, etc.), that they learn this at the same time as they learn nynorsk. based on research (yttri 2015) (and some anecdotalvii evidence) this effect might also be related to the strong status of teachers and nynorsk identity in elementary schools in sogn og fjordane viii, where teachers continuously motivate pupils to speak and write nynorsk (or nynorsk dialects) in their teaching and interaction with them. and concerning identity, kleggetveit’s (2013) found that language was more important for youngsters own identity among those which had chosen to retain nynorsk than it was among those who had switched to bokmål. the switching to bokmål might also be related to the fact that among fictional books for children and youngsters is just one of ten releases in nynorsk, and of 74 non-fictional books that was published for children and youngsters in 2013 was only 6 in nynorsk (proba research 2014). moreover, in the absence of parallel editions of learning aids in nynorsk, teachers in sogn og fjordane county often make their own compendia, learning materials or “handouts” in nynorsk.ix as a result, nynorsk pupils seem to have been “bathing” in both oral and written nynorsk in this county for decades in kindergarten and school settings. in addition, this situation seems to have been complemented and expanded, especially during the past 20 years; adolescent pupils (digital natives and millennials x) have been hugely influenced by bokmål, in both oral and written form, because of the digital revolution with the advent of the internet, web 2.0 and social media. this was not the case prior to the digital revolution around 1995, when young people did not have access to the internet. also at this period of time the prevailing influence of media in rural parts of norway — such as this county — was the state tv/radio channel nrk and tv2. some of this technological development and ict impact might be related to the findings of vangsnes et al. (2015) pertaining to the bidialectal effect, but it is extremely difficult to pinpoint an individual factor that constitutes a causal effect in this area – and it may in any case be unrelated to access to technology. in fact, the increased use of digital tools, digital platforms and digital learning aids in nynorsk counties today may “threaten” this “nynorsk effect” on achievement in many ways, not least because these seem to be developed mainly in bokmål, and this will result in an increased use of bokmål and, conversely, a decrease in the use of nynorsk in the schools and counties in question. it is therefore legitimate to ask whether the effect of bidialectal literacy on school achievement might decrease seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 198 as a consequence of less nynorsk in school, even in nynorsk counties such as sogn og fjordane (if this is in fact the cause or one of the causes of their high academic achievement). from the foregoing, it is evident that the need for parallel editions of bokmål and nynorsk is no longer a question of economics or resistance against two language varieties, but rather a question of a more nuanced understanding of learning and achievement among nynorsk pupils in today’s digitized school. since this is a preliminary hypothesis based on some research in a rather “under researched area”, it should be emphasised that these are still preliminary positions. nonetheless, from our vantage point these are important positions concerning an interesting languageand learning phenomenon that requires our urgent attention and research-based knowledge. against this backdrop, this particular field of research and the associated issues need to be studied systematically through research (e.g. psychometrics, learning analytics, randomized controlled trials, neuroscience with the use of fmrixi) to reveal whether the “nynorsk effect” is based on a cognitive component (e.g. similar to the cognitive advantages costa, hernandez, costafaidella & sebastian-galles (2009) found in their study of catalan-spanish bilinguals). in addition, other possible explanations for the high performance of nynorsk pupils in national tests and elementary school grades (tenth grade) also have to be evaluated, as well as the significance for pupils in general of the possible absence of digital learning aids in nynorsk, and what this means in the light of the findings by vangsnes et al. (2015) and vangsnes & söderlund (2015) concerning the “nynorsk effect”. we will elaborate on this further from different perspectives in the following sections. some tendencies and paradoxes one of the goals of this position paper is to raise awareness about the lack of research in nynorsk as a minority variety of norwegian in the digital era, a matter that deserves our attention and further research. of course, we do have some knowledge about this development, but it seems that research in general may have overlooked (or ignored) the absence of digital learning aids in the nynorsk area, and the consequences and side effects of this. this is especially relevant in light of the education act and recent research findings from typical nynorsk counties and municipalities. on one hand, we know that municipalities with a high nynorsk rate xii (more than 50 per cent) do better in national tests than bokmål municipalities (vangsnes et al. 2015)xiii. on the other hand, there is some evidence that nynorsk experiences language shift to bokmål after secondary school, or a tendency towards “digital death” of nynorsk in formal school settings. a report from proba research (2014) reveals this tendency and the researchers state that: “we find that pupils largely pointing at the massive bokmål impact as a primary reason for switching language form” (proba research 2014, p. 10). this report also finds that schools do too little to prevent nynorsk pupils from switching to bokmål: “neither teachers, school management or parents seem to have affected the change of language form. at the same time we find that the school has not taken steps to strengthen nynorsk or prevent language exchange” (proba research 2014, p. 10). proba research have also studied how teacher education handles this: “the analysis shows that assessment methods in nynorsk in teacher education for primary and secondary education are rarely equivalent to the assessment methods in bokmål. in most cases teacher educational institutions have a summative assessment system which does not ensure that the final grades are documenting expertise in both the norwegian written languages in the same way” (proba research 2014, p. 10). these results from proba research indicate that our educational system reflects some of the attitudes in the norwegian population in general where there appears to be a relatively strong opposition xiv to having two written language seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 199 varieties of norwegian. from this it is worth considering whether school owners, schools and teacher educational institutions should evaluate their own positions in the area of having two written standards, bokmål and nynorsk in light of the educational act in the years to come to avoid side effects (e.g. increased language exchange and “digital death” of minority varieties). in addition, we have some qualitative insight regarding tendencies of the pupils’ positions in this area; what emerges from our own studies is that pupils in upper secondary schools often feel quite strongly about the matter even though their thoughts may be expressed at an anecdotal level — regarding the change from nynorsk to bokmål as their main school language after elementary school. in our general field dialogue with pupils (fieldwork xv) in the smil-study and the rogaland study (krumsvik et al. 2013, krumsvik et al. 2011), pupils said that english had become the “global language” in digital communication across cultural and country borders. thus they feel that minority languages are becoming increasingly rare as languages of digital communication. these pupils indicated that we can see the same tendencies inside – that similar tendencies are visible in norway, where the majority variety bokmål seems to be becoming even more predominant gaining the upper hand compared to nynorsk because of the extensive digitization of school and society in norway. it has also become increasingly mainstream and socially acceptable to use the written variety bokmål rather than nynorsk among nynorsk-youngsters. they also asserted that they switch to bokmål as their main written variant because bokmål constantly surrounds them – whether in society, in the media, in tv, in school, in digital learning aids, in social media, at the cinema, in advertisements, or in cartoons, etc. nynorsk pupils seem to join the majority variety (bokmål) after finishing lower secondary school as a result of this huge influence exerted by their surroundings. in this development, their digital lifestyle appears to be especially important (krumsvik et al. 2013). however, there are still several paradoxes in this area; while nynorsk pupils increasingly shift from nynorsk to bokmål as their main written variety after elementary school, current trends indicate an excessive use of dialects among norwegian children, youngsters and adults in social media, such as facebook, blogs, snapchat, instagram, sms, etc. in a norwegian study undertaken in 2013 based on high school pupils aged 18–20 (n=142), from the west coast of norway (in the four counties møre og romsdal, sogn og fjordane, hordaland and rogaland), the majority of the informants (70%) in this study were pupils with nynorsk as their main variety (so this was not a representative sample). the study found that three out of four high schools pupils on the west coast of norway use dialect when they write on facebook (rotevatn 2014, p. 84). the study also showed that: “pupils explains the use of dialect with "that's how i talk" and because "it is informal” (rotevatn 2014, p. 85). another study from skog (2008) examined norwegians in the age between 18-30 years use of facebook and found that 80 % of the 15 years old pupils wrote in dialects on facebook (skog 2009). skog concludes with this statement: an important point is that although facebook is an english-language online community, norwegian dominates in the messages and greetings conveyed. another key finding is the strong dialect element that characterizes communication on facebook. this reflects interesting feature of norwegian language development. here the focus has mainly been on the influence of english. the widespread use of dialect in written language in new digital media has received far less attention (skog 2009, p. 25). in another study from skog (2013) where 655 persons (from 13 and younger to 39 year an upwards) participated, she found that 77 per cent answered that they “write in dialect” when using facebook. while these tendencies are interesting, they portray a rather blurred and mixed picture of what we know about shifts in these varieties. however, the increasing use of dialects among pupils and youngsters when they write on seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 200 facebook seems to be an interesting tendency in light of the extensive use of this kind of social media in their digital lifestyle (krumsvik et al. 2011). nevertheless, future large-scale research needs to examine if the use of social media gives new sociolinguistic ramifications and how this affects teaching and learning in school. the importance of monitoring the development in order to acquire more research-based knowledge about nynorsk in the digital era we have to operationalize and understand why digital learning aids in general are important for teaching and learning. with the progressive shift from paper-based to digital learning aids in schools, it is essential to understand how the relationship between intended learning outcomes (competence aims) and objective learning outcomes (summative assessment) are influenced by digital learning aids (or the lack of it among nynorsk pupils). more specifically, we can define instructional technology as “educational technologies teachers and others employ to support learning” (spector, merrill, elen & bishop, 2014, p. 959) where digital learning aids are an important part of this instructional technology. in the report “education directorate long-term plan for teaching aid work 2013–2016”, digital learning aids are defined as “… a learning resource where the content includes different types of media like text, pictures, video, animations and simulations. the different types of media have been selected and integrated in a pedagogical way (directorate of education 2013, p. 10, our translation). however, from a critical point of view the importance of digital learning aids can be questioned. nynorsk pupils seem to handle the situation quite well judging by performance in national tests, etc., so it is perhaps valid to ask what the problem is (aside from their individual rights under the mandates in the education act). it should be taken into account that the use of nynorsk in schools may decline if almost all digital learning aids in school are in bokmål in the coming years and this might influence the “nynorsk effect” (as mentioned above). especially is this important to monitor in light of the high technology density in norwegian schools and homes, where 73% of norwegian pupils have access to laptop at school, 90 % have access to internet at school and 99% have access to laptop and internet at home (oecd, 2015). the first digital divide (access to technology) seems to be less a problem in norway, but does this also reduce the second digital divide (attewel 2001) (which deals with how socio-economic status impacts on pupils can use the digital technology for learning purposes)? to handle the digital technology for learning purposes the pupils digital reading skills are required to handle digital learning aids properly. in the recent published pisa 2012-study the importance of digital reading skills is underlined: in contrast to typical print documents, however, typical online documents are characterised by multi-modality (the combination of text, static images, animations, embedded videos including sound, etc.) and by the presence of hyper-links that create non-sequential page structures. thus, not only are certain text-processing skills particularly important when reading on line, readers must also navigate through and among different texts (oecd, 2015, p. 108). despite high technology density in norway, both the pisa 2009 (frønes & narvhus, 2012) and pisa 2012 (oecd) shows that the digital reading skills among norwegian pupils (15 years old) have clear weaknesses and are close to the oecd-average. one important finding is that the first digital divide (access to technology) seems not to reduce the second digital divide (socio economic impact), and norwegian pupils digital reading achievement is still clearly related to parents socio economic status xvi (oecd 2015). one interpretation of these rather poor results might be the ignorance of this area in school and the “google-effect” (sparrow, liu & wegner, 2011) which seems to be quite common among pupils in their digital lifestyle of today. these pisa-studies seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 201 have no results especially for bokmål -and nynorsk pupils, but it is stated in the latest pisa-report that “while some similar skills are required to read both online and printed documents, online texts often pose greater challenges to readers than printed texts” (oecd 2015, p.108). in light of this one can ask how the lack of digital learning aids in nynorsk affects nynorsk pupils digital reading skills in general, but also how they perform on digital reading tests in pisa when they have to “prepare and train” as well as take the test in a another variety (bokmål). nevertheless, frønes, narvhus & aasebø, (2013) have examined digital reading in norway and the nordic countries on the basis of pisa 2009 and find a clear potential of improvement: “the findings (…) send a warning that the school system faces challenges related to provision of relevant training in a number of other types of texts (…) there also seems to be a need for systemic approaches in both teacher and school leadership educations to meet the challenges in school of digital technology in rapidly changing and transforming the literacy practices needed for modern citizenship (frønes et al. 2013, p. 29). from this we can recognize that not enough is known about how digital reading is handled among nynorsk pupils today and the effects, or side effects, of not having proper access to such digital learning aids in nynorsk. another element in this context that has sociolinguistic consequences is the fact that research on learning outcomes from digital learning aids shows that it is not irrelevant if the pupils only have access to paper based-learning aids. experimental research by richard mayer and his colleagues into multimedia and multimodal digital learning aids seems to be of certain relevance in this context and below we present some of the research findings from three meta analysis (mayer, 2014; mayer & fiorella, 2014; mayer & pilegard, 2014) which take the above mentioned digital reading a step further: *according to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (ctml) and the multimedia principle, pupils learn better from words and pictures rather than words alone (d xviiixvii=1,39) * according to the coherence principle, pupils learn better when unnecessary words, pictures or sounds are excluded rather than included (d=0.86). xix *according to the modality principle, pupils learn better from animation and speech, than from animation and screen texts (d=0.75).xx *according to the personalization principle, pupils learn better when the digital learning aids are adapted to their individual needs and learning context (d=0.79) xxi. as can be seen, these studies by richard mayer and colleagues have large effect sizes (in other words they have considerable effect on learning) and clearly show that multimodal digital learning aids can contribute to good learning outcomes in experimental studies. mayer and colleagues show that paper-based learning aids have their limitations and that digital learning aids can (under certain conditions) have a very good impact on learning. however, remarkably little is known to date about how this research, these principles and digital learning aids are related to bokmål versus nynorsk and how this research can influence the learning outcomes of nynorsk pupils. will such research reveal an increase or decrease in the “nynorsk-effect” over time? vangsnes et al. (2015) underlines that the key issue seems to be simultaneously writing both bokmål and nynorsk and that oral use alone does not appear to have the same effect. does this affect the multimediaor personalization principles of mayer et al. or do these research findings play no role in the “nynorsk effect” in digital learning contexts? in any events, in order to understand learning in the digital age, there is an urgent need to undertake systematic explorations of the relationship between multimodal digital learning aids in nynorsk (based on mayer’s et al. principles) and learning outcomes in digital learning environments in schools. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 202 in the above-mentioned report from the directorate for education and training, it is stated that “there is a large range of digital resources that can be used in learning activities, but a more systematic overview of these is lacking (…) many publishers want to enhance their competence in developing digital teaching aids” (directorate of education 2013, p. 12, our translation). from our point of view research-based knowledge recently carried out by mayer (2014) and his colleagues could inform and enhance publishers’ competence in developing digital learning aids in schools. the same report concludes: “results from monitor 2011 and 2012 show that there is still a great need for digital teaching aids” (directorate of education 2013, p. 15, our translation). and the white paper “mål og meining” suggests several initiatives to increase the number of digital learning aids in nynorsk (ministry of education 2008). however, in some subjects it seems like the situation is improving: “asked if digital learning aids are available in nynorsk, the majority [of teachers] answered that it was available in the norwegian subject, but that they were unsure whether there were in other subjects” (proba research 2014, p. 50). we maintain that there are still many issues that need to be addressed, and while the directorate of education’s announcement of funding (as part of this plan) is of course a positive step, if we are to meet all these challenges it is reasonable to expect publishers and school owners to take responsibility. this is even more necessary especially if we look closer at the requirements specified in the education act. thus it is possible to claim that we have limited knowledge about whether the dearth of digital learning aids affects the learning outcome of nynorsk pupils in the subject of norwegian, or other subjects, as well as how this influences (or not) the “nynorsk effect” (vangsnes et al. 2015). however, it is worth considering how greater knowledge in this area might be gained. based on our previous smil-study (krumsvik et al. 2013), which represents the largest ict-study in norway (n= 20089), we will suggest that a first step towards achieving more knowledge in this area may be to develop indicators in the digital area in schools. an indicator can be defined as: “an indication of something that is not directly observable” (pelgrum, 2009, p. 58). national tests and elementary school grades (tenth grade) represent two indicators for school achievement, but the relationship between nynorsk pupils and achievement in national tests and elementary school grades (tenth grade) needs to be examined in greater depth in order to reveal what factors underpin this relationship. on the basis of the theme of this article it is possible to assert that the report by skjær et al. (2008), which revealed a lack of parallel editions of digital learning aids in bokmål and nynorsk, represents a certain indicator of a discrepancy between the demands in the education act and reality in the schools. furthermore, the previously mentioned reports confirm that in recent years this situation does not seem to have improved. although research shows that norway has a very high technology density in homes and schools (frønes narvhus & jetne, 2011; oecd 2015), we cannot assume that this in itself is enough for improving the learning outcomes of pupils (krumsvik et al. 2013). the smil-study showed that it is necessary to make a distinction between primary indicators for technology in education (computer density, infrastructure, ict-use per week at school, access to digital learning aids, etc.) and secondary indicators (digital competence, subject use of ict, quality of teaching, e-assessment, etc.) (krumsvik et al. 2013). this smil-study allowed us to establish primary indicators, such as infrastructure and access to computers in upper secondary school were very good (1:1 and possibly the best in europe). however, at the same time, the secondary indicators, such as teachers’ digital competence and class management varied greatly within the teachers’ collegium from classroom to classroom. this means that access to technology is not a reliable indicator of teaching quality and learning outcomes for the pupils, and thus secondary indicators are of particular interest to researchers studying today’s digitized school, both nationally and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 203 internationally – as well as in the research area of “digital death” of minority languages and varieties. the report titled “assessing the effects of ict” by scheuermann & pedro (2009) underlines the need for a greater focus on indicators: “despite the fact that education systems have been heavily investing in technology since the early 1980s, international indicators on technology uptake and use in education are missing” (scheuermann & pedro 2009, p. 5). and “… policymakers and researchers cannot be in a position to monitor what is truly going on in schools unless critical indicators about intensity, purpose and context of use of technology in education are available” (scheuermann & pedro 2009, p. 6). this means that there is a need to examine, first, whether there is still a discrepancy between section 9-4 in the educational act and the reality in schools with regard to nynorsk digital learning aids; and second, how the lack of digital nynorsk learning aids might influence primary indicators (e.g. textbooks and digital learning aids) and secondary indicators (e.g. the quality of teaching and learning) for learning outcomes for nynorsk pupils in different subjects. gaining knowledge about this may well be of high importance, since the use of digital tools has become the fifth key competence in the national curriculum (ministry of education 2006), and while bokmål pupils seem to have access to a wide range of digital learning aids in bokmål, nynorsk pupils seem to have very limited access to nynorsk digital learning aids (attached to the curriculum) in school settings. this might create a situation where a primary indicator for learning outcomes is in place for bokmål pupils, but not for nynorsk pupils. this might also influence secondary indicators for learning outcomes for nynorsk pupils (and potentially the “nynorsk effect”), and it is therefore important to obtain more research-based knowledge on this topic and move away from mere speculation to systematic and large scale research findings. this appears particularly important in light of the clear demands in the meta net reports (de smedt et al. 2013). implications as we have seen in the meta-net report (de smedt et al. 2013), and in scheuermann & pedro’s (2009) report, it is important to develop reliable indicators in the area of instructional technology in education. pelgrum (2009) asserts clearly that this ict-area needs attention in research and national monitors, and states that one of the main focuses should be towards: “… whether inequities exist between sub-populations of students and how these are changing over time” (pelgrum, 2009, p. 47). nynorsk-pupils can be defined as sub-populations and might be vulnerable for digital inequalities and the first digital divide (attewell 2001) when we talk about access to digital learning aids. will this impact the second digital divide in any way? nevertheless, for the rapid implementation of ict in norwegian schools, there is an urgent need to monitor this development in relation to nynorsk pupils. we suggest that such monitoring and research studies should be carried out in line with the recommendations from the pelgrum (2009), and should cover at least three core areas, namely: 1. intended learning outcomes; 2. opportunities to learn (otl); 3. competencies/attitudes of students (pelgrum, 2009, p. 46). these definitions of intended outcomes appear in the national curriculum as competence aims in the subjects; these are needed for steering educational processes that result in otl. we have to examine how the availability or the absence of digital learning aids to nynorsk pupils is related to otl. this is important because otl are supposed to influence the competencies and attitudes of nynorsk pupils, and we need research-based knowledge to examine whether digital inequalities, related to both the first and second digital divide (attewell 2001) occur as a consequence of the lack of otl in subpopulations among pupils or if this is unproblematic for the nynorsk pupils. we need more knowledge about otl “to be able to construct tests for measuring the extent to which the intentions are realized” (pelgrum 2009, p. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 204 47). thus we avoid this area from being a “black box” and can over time monitor how school performance increases or decreases. this seems particularly important in examining if the intentions in the educational act are realized in school for the nynorsk pupils, and if digital learning aids in nynorsk are available. this is of course of great interest in relation to examining the “nynorsk-effect” (vangsnes et al. 2015) in greater depth, and in light of the influence of digital learning aids on nynorsk pupils’ achievement in school in the future. based on such monitoring and research, we may be able to develop indicators for the use of instructional technology in teaching and learning for nynorsk pupils and their influence on school achievement in the best performing counties in norway. it is necessary here to make a distinction between primary indicators for technology use among nynorsk pupils (access to nynorsk digital learning aids) and secondary indicators (teachers’ digital competence, subject use of ict, teaching quality, and class management). moreover, a central aim of such research should be to carry out monitoring and examinations of indicators to obtain both an international perspective and also a specific national and regional perspective (nynorsk regions), which will allow nynorsk schools in the municipalities and in the counties to carry out many of these interventions by themselves in collaboration with researchers: it should be noted that interventions do not necessarily need to be top-down: if schools in a country could see how they perform on the primary indicators (by means of school monitoring) and make inferences about the existence of potential weaknesses and their likely causes, these initiatives might be designed and generated at school level (pelgrum 2009, p. 46). to sum up, the research questions for the article was: 1 why is there an urgent need for research on the consequences of the digital revolution’s impact on the underlying premises for how we understand and use a language variety as nynorsk and dialects in norway? a. what kind of challenges arise from the lack of digital learning aids in nynorsk in the digitized school? b. which nynorsk areas particularly need more research-based knowledge, and how can this research be carried out? we have attempted to answer these research questions throughout the paper and the one-line summary, and the main message from our position is that the need for parallel editions of digital learning aids in bokmål and nynorsk is no longer a question of economics or political statements for or against nynorsk, etc. – it is rather a question of a deeper scientific understanding of learning and achievement in today’s digitized school. in this case, it concerns nynorsk pupils, but in a broader sense, it concerns pupils in general and how they learn in school. our position paper has raised several preliminary hypotheses based on both anecdotal evidence and research. it should be emphasised that these are still preliminary positions – but from our point of view – they represent important positional insights regarding a quite an interesting and relatively underexplored learning phenomenon, the “nynorsk effect” in the digitized school, a subject certainly meriting further attention and research. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 205 references attewell, p. 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(2015). the effect of bidialectal literacy on school achievement. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2015.1051507 vangsnes, ø. & söderlund, g. (2015). språk og læring: finst det nynorske tospråkfordelar? in g. langfeldt (ed.), skolens kvalitet skapes lokalt. presentasjon av funn frå forskningsprosjektet «lærende regioner». bergen: fagbokforlaget yttri, g. (2015). læraren som bygdehøvding. in g. langfeldt (ed.), skolens kvalitet skapes lokalt. presentasjon av funn frå forskningsprosjektet «lærende regioner». bergen: fagbokforlaget i this report did not examine the quality of the digital learning aids (see, e.g. here for more information about this: http://iktsenteret.no/ressurser/kvalitetskriterierdigitale-laeringsressurser). ii for example, the directorate for education and training has recently announced that in the case of parallel editions of digital learning aids, and organizations, etc. can apply for funding if they want to develop such parallel editions: http://www.udir.no/utvikling/laremidler/tilskudd-til-smale-fag/ http://www.udir.no/globalassets/upload/forskning/2010/5/tilskudd_laremidler.pdf http://www.udir.no/globalassets/upload/forskning/2010/5/tilskudd_laremidler.pdf http://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/149557 http://www.sprakradet.no/vi-og-vart/publikasjoner/spraaknytt/arkivet/spraknytt-2009/spraknytt-12009/spraket-pa-facebook/ http://www.sprakradet.no/vi-og-vart/publikasjoner/spraaknytt/arkivet/spraknytt-2009/spraknytt-12009/spraket-pa-facebook/ http://www.sprakradet.no/vi-og-vart/publikasjoner/spraaknytt/arkivet/spraknytt-2009/spraknytt-12009/spraket-pa-facebook/ http://forskning.no/content/dialekt-i-sosiale-medier https://www.ssb.no/utdanning https://www.ssb.no/utdanning/statistikker/utgrs/aar/2010-04-28 https://snl.no/spr%c3%a5k_i_norge http://www.sprakradet.no/upload/spr%c3%a5kr%c3%a5dets%20skrifter/spr%c3%a5klig%20kvalitet%20i%20l%c3%a6remidler.pdf http://www.sprakradet.no/upload/spr%c3%a5kr%c3%a5dets%20skrifter/spr%c3%a5klig%20kvalitet%20i%20l%c3%a6remidler.pdf http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2015.1051507 http://iktsenteret.no/ressurser/kvalitetskriterier-digitale-laeringsressurser http://iktsenteret.no/ressurser/kvalitetskriterier-digitale-laeringsressurser http://www.udir.no/utvikling/laremidler/tilskudd-til-smale-fag/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 207 iii these initiatives have resulted in the development of several webpages; www.sophusportalen.no, www.allkunne.no, http://www.nynorsksenteret.no/nyn/ressursbase-for-skulen/ iv see the directorate of education 2012, p. 10. norwegian pupils are performing rather poor on the digital reading assessment in pisa (2009) and pisa (2012), but we don’t know how the lack of digital learning aids in nynorsk affects this situation. v the pisa-test has been increasingly digital since 2006 and from 2015 it will only a digital version will appear. vi also called first language, primary language variant or native language. vii this is based on the many guest lectures one of the authors has given to teachers in schools in this county in the period 2007–2015, as well as collaboration with the consortium “nordfjordregionen”, where we applied to the norwegian research council for funding in 2012. we also had a meeting with the secretary of education, ministry of education on 29 october 2012 regarding our concerns about digital learning aids in nynorsk. one of the authors has taught in the county of sogn og fjordane (1987–1989). viii 1/6 of the nynorsk pupils i norway lives in sogn og fjordane. vangsnes et. al (2015) examined the whole norwegian population (240 000 pupils) – not only sogn og fjordane. ix for example, sophusportalen is a consequence of the engagement of teachers in this county to create their own digital learning aids in nynorsk (www.sophusportalen.no). however, one cannot expect such good initiatives and “dugnad” (voluntary work) to cover all subjects at all grade levels (1–13) in our elementary schools, and thus there is an urgent need for publishers to comply with the education act’s superfluous mandates and regulations. x millennials: ”people born in or after 1982 (approximately) who are members of the first generation who were born after the advent of digital media and who have grown up with these media; also called digital natives”. (spector et al. 2014, p. 960). xi fmri: “functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is a neuroimaging technique that uses the change in magnetization between oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor cerebral blood as its basic measure of brain activity” (spector et al. 2014, p. 957). xii in norway pupils from the first through seventh grade must use the school’s main language variant (which depends on what area of norway the school is located in); but from the eighth through the thirteenth grade, the pupils can choose between nynorsk and bokmål as their primary language variant. xiii from a critical point of view it is not a big surprise to find significantly results in a large sample of 240 000 pupils and such results must be interpreted with a certain carefulness. further research is therefore needed to examine such correlations with other types of research design. xiv however, 48% of norwegians favour the co-existence of bokmål and nynorsk (grepstad 2015). xv this was not the research focus in these studies, but was brought up in relation to discussions around ndla (national digital learning arena), regarding whether it was necessary to have this digital teaching aid in both bokmål and nynorsk (see more about ndla here: https://ndla.no/). xvi in light of the relatively low socio economic status in sogn og fjordane county (compared to other high performing counties in norway) and pupils high performance on national tests and elementary school grades (tenth grade), this second digital divide http://www.sophusportalen.no/ http://www.allkunne.no/ http://www.nynorsksenteret.no/nyn/ressursbase-for-skulen/ http://www.sophusportalen.no/ https://ndla.no/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 208 should be explored in more detail to reveal if the same tendencies occur in digital reading skills in this county. or if the lack of digital learning aids in nynorsk makes any impact on this issue. xvii d means effect size xviii this is an average effect size based on 11 experimental studies xix these results are confirmed in 22 of 23 experimental studies xx these results are confirmed in 13 out of 16 experimental studies xxi these results are confirmed in 14 out of 17 experimental studies digital learning aids for nynorsk pupils in school: a politically sensitive area or a question of a deeper scientific understanding of learning? rune johan krumsvik abstract introduction references technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence in a norwegian context issn: 1504-4831 vol 17, no 2 (2021) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4303 ©2021 (geir haugsbakk). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence in a norwegian context geir haugsbakk innland norway university of applied sciences geir.haugsbakk@inn.no abstract the article looks at the debate regarding the influence of the technology giants on educational policy. what strategies have existed on the part of the technology giants? who have been the major actors within education? what kind of relations and networks have been established? the first part of the article focuses on relevant research internationally showing that the technology giants have taken the lead and that their objectives are to develop new long-term policy agendas. the development has been significantly intensified and to some extent changed during the pandemic. this has resulted in the emergence of new multisector coalitions and more complex networks which have potentially profound pedagogical implications. the second part accounts for a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence in a norwegian context. despite the differences between countries, political and educational systems, traditions and values, there are a number of the similarities in the field of educational technology. these include on a general level how the use of new technology is valued as a way of improving teaching and learning, but also how networks and relations are developed and function. the project that precedes the article is based on literature studies and inspired by network ethnographic approaches. keywords: technology giants, educational policy, channels of influence, norwegian context https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4303 technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 introduction classrooms are being filled up with tablets, computers and associated apps and software from global technology companies. the school market has proved to be highly profitable, and the technology companies have for the last three decades attempted to influence educational policy (picciano & spring, 2013). the pressure intensified through out 2020 due to the pandemic and school closures (williamson & hogan, 2020). the situation is challenging as the technology giants are now the world’s largest companies by market capitalization and are getting bigger (global finance, 2020), and they are making huge profits running global businesses beyond national control. digital media and technology, which are at the heart of the global economy, have been referred to as digital capitalism “catalyzing an epochal political-economic transition” (schiller, 1999). in recent years, this has been characterized as surveillance capitalism (zuboff, 2019) based on the assumption that human experience is the raw material and the fact that the leading actors know “everything” about us. throughout 2020 the edtech industry, more so than was previously the case, has delivered the promise of personalised learning as an appropriate response to the current situation, but also as a vision of education in the 21st century (colclough, 2020). thus their objectives are not just to be regarded in the short term. they are developing new long-term policy agendas for how education systems globally should be organized after the pandemic (williamson, 2020). this might partly be regarded as a new kind development, but may also be seen as a prolongation of a development over the last 30 years. the above-adumbrated situation provides the starting point and framework for examining the channels of influence. what strategies have existed on the part of the technology giants? who have been the major actors within education? what kind of relations and networks have been established? the first part of the article focuses on relevant research internationally. this part also provides the academic and theoretical framework for the article. the second part goes on to offer accounts for a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence in a norwegian context. methodological considerations the first part of this project is to a large extent based on literature studies. several interesting contributions have been made in international research regarding the largest technology companies and their influence. the major edtech companies, the networks surrounding them, how they have collaborated or competed and their potential influence on educational policy, have received less attention in norway and have not been analysed systematically. therefore, the mapping of actors and their relations and influence which form the basis of this article, is somewhat preliminary in character. the main approach in this regard has been to search for websites containing key information and media technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 coverage, but also consulting magazines, journals and newspapers and following debates in various media. there are many challenges when it comes to obtaining relevant information on these issues. information available on the activities in question is often limited. many of the activities are undocumented and based on informal contacts. some relevant information have been disseminated via websites that have been updated later on or removed for various reasons. moreover, web pages may have been removed due to reorganizations. several websites are through the article referred to in footnotes. these are used as examples to illustrate the patterns of activities by actors and networks detected thorugh the analysis. as most of the current websites have norwegian language, the texts used in the article are translated by the author. at the start of his work mapping out the actors who have emerged as influential through the pandemic in connection with educational technology, williamson (2020) underlined the need for “a descriptive, first-draft sketch” of current policy developments. then much more sustained analytical work remains to be done. that’s also the case for the analysis of the situation in norway. it constitutes a first step trying to get an overview and to detect some main patterns of activities. however, a lot more systematic work is needed. the analysis of the norwegian actors in the field of educational technology has been inspired by network analysis, a kind of network ethnography, which goes into the flexible networks replacing the hierarchical structures of the past and opening up for new actors. these networks include a variety of relationships and rather “complicated issues of purpose, ownership and control” (ball & junemann, 2012, p. 36). on a broad basis, network ethnography might include internet searches, interviews and the construction of network diagrams (hogan, sellar & lingard, 2016a). the project presented in this article is thus based on a limited approach. it does not include interviews, and the diagrams have been replaced by more general presentations of actors and networks. the analyses also take their cue from discourse analytic approaches. these concern the way meaning is created through language aiming at revealing patterns of meaning-making (wetherell et al., 2001). they are about the importance of key concepts to perceive the world (koselleck, 2004), and how they connect to ideas and arguments and form discourses searching for hegemony (laclau & mouffe, 2001). contradictory, complex and changing discursive constructions the mapping of actors, activities, relationships and influence in the field of educational technology is not a straightforward task. the perception of the field, the technology and its leading actors can be seen as a discursive construction characterized by contradictions, technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 complexity and changes. the field is inherently contradictory inasmuch as educational technology has always been a mix of rather naive optimism and critical voices. the representatives of the big technology companies were for a long time mainly regarded as “the good guys, helping everyone optimize digital opportunities'' (andriole, 2019). there has always been some criticism, but as a consequence of the scandal of cambridge analytica the technology giants have by many been put on the list of “the most disrespected companies!” (andriole, 2019). claims have been made in academic literature that “big business is taking over public schools” (hogan, 2015a), and that “public-private partnerships” are primarily business oriented (hogan, 2015b). however, the optimism in the field and the strong position of the tech companies to a small extent have been challenged. an important part of this development is the great and increasing complexity and the rapid changes going on all the time, making it difficult for everyone involved, including researchers. through globalization intergovernmental relationships are being replaced by less visible interactions between non-state actors (picciano & spring, 2013). the same goes for the privatization of government services and the increasingly large group of actors leaning on the technology providers and sharing a “pro-technology-agenda” (selwyn, 2011). a prolongation of developments from the 1990s onwards the growth of the edtech industry accelerated during 2020 and the actors, their networks and attempts to influence educational policies worldwide have become increasingly more visible. however, the early stages of the developments can be seen from the 1990s onwards through the establishment of the “great american education-industrial complex” (picciano & spring, 2013) and the emergence of the global education industry (verger, lubienski & steiner-khamsi, 2016). in 1994 picciano described what he defined as the beginning of an “educational-industrial complex”. for picciano, the reason was obvious: selling technology to schools had become “big business”, and he identified close relations between business, politics and large and growing networks with common interests related to technology in education (picciano, 1994). a fully developed educational-industrial complex has gradually been developed. this complex comprises networks of government agencies, foundations, venture philanthropies, think tanks, media companies, and education technology providers who seek to promote their own beliefs, products and services. they have reached a position which enables them to influence policy making (picciano & spring, 2013, p. 2). the gates foundation is presented as one of the key actors investing billions of dollars in technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 school “reform” initiatives, funding large research projects, and being a part of a network of foundations, ict companies and government agencies” (p. 31). the important roles of the so-called “flexians” are underlined, persons moving back and forth between the big companies and the u.s. department of education. they are creating new forms of governance where decisions are made and discussions take place outside of established government channels. the development described regarding educational technology corresponds to a large extent with notions of the rise of the global education industry (verger et al., 2016). this industry is based on the idea of education “as a sector for investment and profit making, where organizations, practices and networks engaged in these endeavors take on an increasingly global scale” (p. 3). the world’s largest edu-business, pearson pl., was quick to recognise the potential value of this market of education as “the biggest growth industry of the 21st century” (pearson plc, 2012, p. 8). pearson has also been highly influential with policy makers and politicians, and international organizations have embraced the company’s presence. this is also the case for oecd which made pearson a partner in developing the pisa tests (hogan, sellar & lingard, 2016b, p. 107). the companies at the forefront have taken advantage of the uncertainty surrounding the “new“ world. the unique characteristics of today’s society have been almost invisible to most of us. when we encounter something “unprecedented”, we automatically interpret it through the lens of familiar categories, like the notion of the “horseless carriage” confronted with the automobile. the unique characteristics are obscured by turning the unprecedented into an extension of the past. this is how shoshana zuboff (2019) explains the challenges in seeing through surveillance capitalism, the invention by google that quickly spread to facebook (p. 12). a pandemic shock extended and more powerful networks the attention given to the networks in the field of educational technology has been increasing in the research literature over the last decade, and the potential consequences have been put at the forefront. the main actors in the edtech industry and their partners of highly different kinds are presented as “complex, entangled interrelationships that have affected the content and delivery of education at all levels” (regan & khwaja, 2019). one of the points to emerge is how education is “increasingly targeted by intermediary organizations representing particular kinds of agendas and are able to translate interests across the commercial, civil society and governmental sectors projects” (williamson, 2016). in 2020 some of the key actors significantly intensified their efforts, privatisation and commercialisation of education increased and new networks, coalitions and alliances were technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 established. williamson and hogan (2020) have concluded that the 2020 pandemic led to a “huge effort to create multisector coalitions, public-private partnerships and networks in which commercial actors play a key part, and we have seen the development of a range of interdependencies between various organisational types'' (p. 66). perrotta (2020) highlights how digital infrastructures are coming together in higher education as “a nuanced socio-technical process involving multiple actors and influences: technological tools and frameworks, gifted ‘nerdy’ developers, ‘caring’ educational researchers, managers/administrators, corporate interests and so forth”. this tendency is illustrated by the partnership between new york state represented by governor andrew cuomo and the bill and melinda gates foundation agreeing on an ambition to create “a smarter education system” making a lot of buildings and classrooms redundant (klein, 2020). concern has been expressed that a post-pandemic future might entail partnerships between the largest technology companies and the elite universities allowing universities “to expand enrollment dramatically by offering hybrid online-offline degrees” (walsh, 2020). large international organisations have been actively involved as important parts of new coalitions and collaborative initiatives. these include unesco, unicef, the world bank and oecd. in a press release issued in march 2020 unesco announced that a whole range of partners had joined their global education coalition to scale up distance learning practices in order to deal with the challenge of the world’s student population which was affected by covid-19 school closures. multilateral partners were presented such as the international labour organization, unicef, the world health organization, the world bank, the world food programme and the international telecommunication union and oecd. private companies like microsoft, google and facebook were made partners (unesco, 2020). in april 2020 unicef and microsoft announced that they had launched “a global learning platform to help address covid-19 education crisis” (unicef, 2020). the unicef executive director declared that along with “long-term partners like microsoft”, they were able to “swiftly deploy innovative, scalable solutions for children and youth”. the world bank has been actively working with ministries of education in several countries with a view to developing remote learning opportunities. the oecd has characterised the huge edtech response during the pandemic as “a great moment”, adding that real change happens during crisis. the result is that the big technology companies have been intervening education systems in ways that suggest “new forms of power and influence over education and its future” as they offer easily accessible technological solutions to solve complex policy problems (williamson, 2020). technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 educational influence and pedagogical implications the new coalitions involving the large technology companies might make sense in the short term and on grounds of efficiency, according to williamson and hogan (2020), but the shift in authority from the state to private actors is challenging as far as democratic control and professional autonomy are concerned. the position of teachers is reduced. based on a survey, education international, the world’s largest federation of unions across the globe, concludes that there is also a lack of union consultation by education authorities with regards to the introduction of new digital technologies (colclough, 2020, p. 56). knox, williamson & bayne (2020) introduce the concept “machine behaviourism” to characterise personalised learning where behaviours and actions are increasingly understood to be both “machine-readable by learning algorithms and modifiable by digital hypernudge platforms''. the learner is now seen as a “rational and emotional subject”, and this marks a “(re)turn to the influence of behaviourist psychology on educational practice, and appears to usher in new powerful regimes of centralised control” (knox, williamson & bayne, 2020). this is clearly opposed to gert biesta's perception of “learnification” and the new language of learning that entails a market-driven educational system where the learners’ perspectives and constructivist pedagogies were placed at the centre (biesta, 2004). perrotta, gulson, williamson & witzenberger (2021) have examined google classroom as an exemplar of platformized infrastructure representing a specific form of pedagogic participation. they conclude their analyses of platform pedagogy by referring to the concept of a “doubly articulated pedagogy”. the first articulation is “the off-loading of aspects of educational practice onto apps and other platforms”. this implies the fragmentation and automation of participation shaped by the infrastructure offered by google, and the possible exclusion of educators. the second articulation is “the algorithmic learning from data” where “the learning flows from the users to the platform, which continuously gazes back upon them”. the pedagogical implications could be far-reaching. such analyses have also provided a basis for reflections on a new critical media education. according to selwyn (2020) it is important “to push the counternarrative that the re-imagining of public education is not a tech issue”. the conversations should be directed towards “the heart of the matter – i.e. education as a social concern”. he goes on to add that inspiration might be drawn from reasoning and sense-making by critical education scholars over the past 30 years. an important part of this new development is the need to address changes taking place in contemporary childhood. young people are particularly vulnerable as far as personal data collection is concerned, and they need help “to understand the realities of living in a datafied society” (pangrazio & selwyn, 2020). the opportunities to track children is on the technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 increase, including the use of “new, screen-less platforms such as wearables, virtual assistants and connected toys” (holloway, 2019). this might be an interesting starting point for a critical media education. norway another context similar trends teaching and learning is not uniform worldwide due to different contexts. the differences between norway and, for example the usa, are large. in norway a well funded public school system allows less scope for private schools and organizations. foundations play a minor role and the headquarters of the technology giants and the large international institutions are at a safe distance, physically at least. nevertheless, the same kinds of concepts and arguments for introducing new technology have been used to a large extent in norway. curricula contain the same vast ambitions of integrating the latest technological solutions. but who are the major actors in norway? what kind of networks exist? what about the representatives of the large technology companies, their relations to the authorities, politicians, schools, municipalities and research institutions? it is uncontested that large amounts of equipment from the big companies fill the schools, also in norway, having a significant impact on school development. the two technology giants, apple and google, occupy dominant positions and have been greeted with considerable enthusiasm. they have met limited resistance and scepticism. the two companies have in various ways collaborated with and received support from national actors. based on the analyses, the main actors have been categorized as follows: norwegian government and the governmental actors who are suppliers of premises and responsible for implementing the government's policy, commercial actors as consultants in educational technology and salesmen of equipment and software, the representatives of the global technology giants, the norwegian edtech industry, national and international conference organizers, academics and the media. intensified digitization processes due to the pandemic teaching in norwegian schools were digitized at record speed in 2020 as in other countries around the world. it has been commented that changes that could otherwise have taken 10-15 years to develop were now happening in a couple weeks. all students were for a period offered digital education at home.1 a common perception was that education probably was changed forever.2 activities in higher education via zoom, the most used video service, increased from around 150 meetings and somewhere between 500 and 2000 participants daily, to well over 5,000 meetings and 55,000 participants.3 the prime 1 2020 https://www.ikt-norge.no/kommentar/ikt-bransjen-leverte-som-best-nar-den-trengtes-som-mest/ 2 2020 https://www.forskerforum.no/hva-har-vi-laert/ 3 2020 https://khrono.no/universitetene-og-hogskolene-omstiller-seg-i-rekordfart/473754 https://www.ikt-norge.no/kommentar/ikt-bransjen-leverte-som-best-nar-den-trengtes-som-mest/ https://www.forskerforum.no/hva-har-vi-laert/ https://khrono.no/universitetene-og-hogskolene-omstiller-seg-i-rekordfart/473754 technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 minister could conclude that the pandemic had given norway a new digital everyday life.4 on the other hand, compared with the situation described in the first part of the article, there have so far been few signs in norway that this intensified digitization has led to the introduction of new actors, partnerships, increased privatization and commercialization involving new forms of influence on educational policy. when it comes to privatization and commercialization, it has traditionally been limited due to a well-funded public school. another reason for quite few changes in norway in terms of actors and networks during the pandemic may have been the large investment in ict in schools in the years before 2020. this had brought norwegian classrooms up among the best in the world when it comes to equipment. it was not the lack of computers or tablets that was the main problem when the pandemic broke out, but rather how to use them in the best possible way. this is reflected in the action plan for digitization in primary and secondary education 2020-2021 presented by the ministry of education during the pandemic. based on a survey conducted after the schools closed, the main conclusions are that digitization has gained a new meaning, that there is a need for more competence, but that the situation with regard to infrastructure has been perceived as generally good.5 this is confirmed by representatives of the norwegian ict industry. they stated that the reason why norway managed to move all students to digital education at home so easily was the efforts from the industry in previous years.6 however, it should also be mentioned that the intensified digitization processes made people feel worried about the new challenges in society and the school, which they also expressed.7 furthermore, cyber security and increased risk of digital attacks and online fraud were topics addressed.8 there were public debates on these topics, and books were published by commentators who thematized the challenges associated with the new "techno powers" (hareide, 2020) and living in the "time of algorithms" (stenvik, 2020). nevertheless, none of this seems to have made any impact on the dominant norwegian policy in educational technology. when it comes to the activities of the dominant actors, the relationships between them and the development of the networks over time, there seem to be many similarities with what has been the situation internationally as it is presented in the first part of the article. 4 2020 https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/korona-pandemien-har-gitt-norge-en-ny-digital-hverdag/id2828489/ 5 2020 https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/44b8b3234a124bb28f0a5a22e2ac197a/handlingsplan-fordigitalisering-i-grunnopplaringen-2020-2021.pdf 6 2020 https://www.ikt-norge.no/kommentar/ikt-bransjen-leverte-som-best-nar-den-trengtes-som-mest/ 7 2https://www.forskerforum.no/hva-har-vi-laert/020 8 2020 https://www.finansnorge.no/aktuelt/nyheter/2020/korona/ikt-sikkerhet-og-okt-risiko-for-digitale-angrep-ogbedrageri-pa-nettet/ https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/korona-pandemien-har-gitt-norge-en-ny-digital-hverdag/id2828489/ https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/44b8b3234a124bb28f0a5a22e2ac197a/handlingsplan-for-digitalisering-i-grunnopplaringen-2020-2021.pdf https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/44b8b3234a124bb28f0a5a22e2ac197a/handlingsplan-for-digitalisering-i-grunnopplaringen-2020-2021.pdf https://www.ikt-norge.no/kommentar/ikt-bransjen-leverte-som-best-nar-den-trengtes-som-mest/ https://www.forskerforum.no/hva-har-vi-laert/ https://www.finansnorge.no/aktuelt/nyheter/2020/korona/ikt-sikkerhet-og-okt-risiko-for-digitale-angrep-og-bedrageri-pa-nettet/ https://www.finansnorge.no/aktuelt/nyheter/2020/korona/ikt-sikkerhet-og-okt-risiko-for-digitale-angrep-og-bedrageri-pa-nettet/ technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 governmental actors and a profound technology optimism the norwegian government and the leading political parties have acted in keeping with the european union and oecd in terms of the need to implement new technology in education. a profound technology optimism has affected the entire public administration from the government level and to the various municipalities (haugsbakk, 2011). the action plans have been overburdened with expectations of improved learning and visions of “the digital school”.this relates to notions of an “e-norway” in which the digitally competent “ecitizens” find all they require through fully digitalized, 24-hour available, public services. the norwegian centre for ict in education, falling under the authority of the norwegian ministry of education and research, has been a key actor in this respect. the center’s mission has been to provide the government with the necessary premises in which to make its strategic decisions and to implement government policy within the area. this means the use of ict for “improving the quality of education and improving learning outcomes and learning”.9 in 2018 the center was merged with the directorate for education and training, which is the executive agency for the ministry of education and research. the center has nurtured a relationship with many of those who have supported the official, politically adopted strategy in the field of educational technology. it has distributed research and development funds, conducted seminars and conferences and have been responsible for important international contacts in the field in relation to the eu. for a number of years the centre also hosted nordic@bett, an official part of the bett show in london, together with nordic partners. to some extent this arrangement can be considered on a par with the presentation of the norwegian edtech industry at bett within the pavilion of the norwegian classroom.10 in 2006 the centre of ict in education also initiated a peer-reviewed open access scholarly journal, the nordic journal of digital literacy. analyses of the journal have revealed a clear distinction between the articles and the editorials, the latter of which are clearly linked to the dominant political arguments and the mandate of the center and based largely on governmental plans, oecd and eu documents. critical perspectives on the development within the field of educational technology are lacking (haugsbakk & nordkvelle, 2020). 9 https://iktsenteret.no/english this website is no longer accessible, but may be accessed on web.archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20180116094430/https://iktsenteret.no/english 10 see more about the bett show in the following. https://iktsenteret.no/english https://web.archive.org/web/20180116094430/https:/iktsenteret.no/english technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 nmc – a partner linked to the global edtech industry the partnership between the centre for ict in education and the new media consortium (nmc) is interesting since the nmc can be seen as a governmental partner with obvious links to the global edtech industry.11 the nmc defined itself as “an international community of experts in educational technology” whose aim was to assist institutions worldwide to “stay at the leading edge of emerging technology”.12 the organisation was founded in 1993 by a group of hardware manufacturers, software developers and publishers. they realised that “the ultimate success of their multimedia-capable products depended upon their widespread acceptance by the higher education community in a way that had never been achieved before”. 13 thus the nmc’s “raison d’être” has been to “sell us stuff” (grussendorf, 2018). adobe, apple, hewlett-packard, intel. and pearson have been among its strategic partners. the center's partnership with nmc has apparently never been problematized. moreover, the nmc’s most significant contributions, the horizon reports predicting future technology trends in educational settings, have become a mainstay resource and have influenced educational technology purchasing decisions (ibid.). few questions, if any, have been raised about the panel of experts. the panel has been reserved for those who are members of nmc, including several global technology companies and some members from institutions like the center of ict in education. nmc’s delphi method has also avoided critical comments. the method is designed for the building of consensus, a potential challenge taken into consideration the group of technology corporations being their founders and their proclaimed intentions. the nmc reports have been regarded as neutral reference works in large parts of the world. such is also the case in norway. when the norwegian national broadcasting (nrk) presented the report on technological outlook for norwegian schools 2013–2018, the title was: “soon ready for the digital school”. nrk obtained a statement from the minister of education agreeing that the future prospects looked very exciting. the centre confirmed the report findings stating further that a shift to better and more effective learning would occur once digital tools had been introduced.14 a similar presentation of the report was made by the largest online news service covering norwegian and international research in the nordic countries, forskning.no, initiated by the research council of norway.15 their main angle was that the new technology would 11 nmc partners: https://web.archive.org/web/20171219142221/https://www.nmc.org/member-type/partners/ 12 http://web.archive.org/web/20150908060814/http://www.nmc.org/about/nmc-history/ 13 the same website. 14 2013 https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/ny-teknologi-i-skolen-1.11362391 15 2011 https://forskning.no/om-forskningno/about-forskningno/990987 https://web.archive.org/web/20171219142221/https:/www.nmc.org/member-type/partners/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150908060814/http:/www.nmc.org/about/nmc-history/ https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/ny-teknologi-i-skolen-1.11362391 https://forskning.no/om-forskningno/about-forskningno/990987 technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 turn the classroom upside down and would pose a major challenge for teachers who taught in the old-fashioned way. the findings were not commented on in any way, and no questions were raised about the research project, the way it had been carried out or the responsible researchers, the “experts” as they were called.16 commercial actors advisors and salesmen rikt (resources for ict) and atea have been selected as important representatives of commercial actors in the field of educational technology in norway. both have been advisors to a number of schools and municipalities as to their strategic choices and the purchase of equipment. at the same time, they have been resellers of equipment from the major technology companies. the technology giants themselves have to varying degrees been visible as actors. rikt – apple’s faithful partner rikt has been a very important partner for norwegian schools and municipalities during the last decade. many of its activities are relatively well documented through posts on its website and through a number of news articles and press releases in local newspapers. these sources include some transparency regarding business partners, consulting practices, the use of conferences, seminars and various other types of meeting places. rikt presents itself as the competence partner that helps kindergartens, primary schools and upper secondary schools to achieve increased learning on digital platforms. over a 10year period it has grown to about 40 employees and has concluded that it has probably become “europe's largest competence partner in the field”. rikt has been involved in schools and kindergartens in more than 130 municipalities and county municipalities throughout norway.17 they regard themselves as “a bunch of enthusiasts who are passionate about seeing change in school”.18 however, they have had a dual function as a competence partner and advisor on the one hand, and as a marketer and reseller of technical equipment on the other. they are authorized resellers of apple products19, and the implementation of ipads in schools has been a “primary target” since 2011.20 the marketing aspect seems to have been most evident in the early years of the company's history, but it provides a good illustration of an active salesman. the ipad is marketed quite heavily through their websites using all the well-known slogans. it has been 16 2013 https://forskning.no/data-informasjonsteknologi-skole-og-utdanning/vil-snu-opp-ned-paklasserommet/599050 17 2021 https://rikt.net/change2020/ 18 2021 https://rikt.net/#om-oss 19 2021 https://rikt.net/drift/ 20 https://ischolengroep.org/2012/09/better-learning-the-ultimate-target-for-modern-schools-keynotemacscholendag-door-erling-gronlund/ keynote macscholendag – ischolengroep not accessible any longer https://forskning.no/data-informasjonsteknologi-skole-og-utdanning/vil-snu-opp-ned-pa-klasserommet/599050 https://forskning.no/data-informasjonsteknologi-skole-og-utdanning/vil-snu-opp-ned-pa-klasserommet/599050 https://rikt.net/change2020/ https://rikt.net/#om-oss https://rikt.net/drift/ https://ischolengroep.org/2012/09/better-learning-the-ultimate-target-for-modern-schools-keynote-macscholendag-door-erling-gronlund/ https://ischolengroep.org/2012/09/better-learning-the-ultimate-target-for-modern-schools-keynote-macscholendag-door-erling-gronlund/ technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 described as a “fantastic personal learning tool”21 causing “increased production, increased motivation, increased learning and increased mastery in the classroom”.22 it has been referred to as representing “an explosion in learning” and “a new spring”.23 the promise of “increased learning outcome” occurs frequently. blog posts on their web pages contain several success stories about what is achieved through their efforts to assist schools and municipalities to implement new technology. rikt has marketed apple's conferences24 and “leadership tours”.25 moreover, the company was the first in norway to gain certification in such courses as “apple professional development”.26 however, rikt is also authorized reseller of showbie27 and became 2016 a partner with interactive norway importing smart board.28 rikt has developed an extensive network containing public institutions, schools, municipalities, business actors, educational researchers and school leaders. central to this network have been well-established meeting places and conferences. the most significant is the bett show in london where rikt for many years conducted its own sub-conference for customers and other participants recruited from norway. in the norwegian context, the nkul conference (national conference on the use of ict in education and learning) seems to have performed some of the same functions. nkul is norway's largest conference for those interested in this field.29 it proved to be an important conference for rikt, both as a meeting place and for presenting their projects and marketing their products and services. rikt’s school leader network has held meetings at the nkul as well as at bett.30 atea – larger, different and addressing “all” global companies atea presents itself as the market leader in it infrastructure for businesses and publicsector organizations in europe’s nordic and baltic regions with more than 7000 employees located in 84 offices across seven countries.31 this is a much larger organization than rikt and different in structure. atea offers a wide range of hardware and software, as well as teams of specialists prepared “to design, implement and operate solutions for even the most complex it requirements”. their technology partners are leading international it companies, including microsoft, cisco, hp inc., hewlett packard, apple, ibm, dell emc, 21 2012 https://rikt.net/ipad-et-personlig-laeringsverktoy/ 22 2013 https://rikt.net/motivasjon-mestring-og-mye-moro/ 23 2014 https://rikt.net/en-ny-var-pa-saltveit-skole/ 24 2011 https://rikt.net/apple-inviterer-til-konferanse-ipad-i-skolen/ 25 2013 https://rikt.net/apple-leadership-tour-besoker-oslo-12-13-feb/ 26 2011 https://rikt.net/fantastisk-mye-moro-i-aret-som-gikk/ 27 2020 showbie resellers https://www.showbie.com/resellers/#norway 28 2016 https://rikt.net/rikt-oker-tempoet/ 29 see more about nkul in the following. 30 2016 https://rikt.net/skoleledernettverk/ 31 2021 https://www.atea.com/about-atea/ https://rikt.net/ipad-et-personlig-laeringsverktoy/ https://rikt.net/motivasjon-mestring-og-mye-moro/ https://rikt.net/en-ny-var-pa-saltveit-skole/ https://rikt.net/apple-inviterer-til-konferanse-ipad-i-skolen/ https://rikt.net/apple-leadership-tour-besoker-oslo-12-13-feb/ https://rikt.net/fantastisk-mye-moro-i-aret-som-gikk/ https://www.showbie.com/resellers/#norway https://rikt.net/rikt-oker-tempoet/ https://rikt.net/skoleledernettverk/ https://www.atea.com/about-atea/ technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 lenovo and citrix. atea was founded in 1968 under the name merkantildata, as a pioneer within the emerging market for information technology within norway.32 educational technology is one of five focus areas for atea. the others are welfare technology, smart building, aquaculture and oil and gas.33 with respect to educational technology atea presents itself as a partner for the school's digital journey in the field of strategy development, technology selection and teacher training. atea will help to identify technical and educational software best suited to the school in question. one of the main reasons why schools opt atea as a partner, they argue, is that the company is “local and close”, and that it employs advisers with a solid school background and competence.34 atea is an apple partner and an authorized apple reseller. their aim is to take apple into “the corporate, educational and public markets”.35 in 2017 over one million ipads had been delivered by atea to schools in scandinavia. atea has developed their own apple school team and thousands of teachers have completed courses in the use of ipads in the classroom.36 they have organised projects in several norwegian schools and municipalities thereby contributing to the development of visions and strategies while also reselling several thousands ipads, licenses and other accessories.37 atea has also entered into contracts with municipalities given their partnership with leading companies in personal computers.38 they have been serving the largest urban municipalities in norway, oslo, bergen and trondheim, covering many of their administrative needs. in 2018 they signed a contract with the trondheim municipality potentially worth around nok 400 million. the contract included the responsibility for about 34,000 of the municipality's pcs, mobile phones and tablets. an important part of this was providing google’s chromebooks for all schools.39 atea's commitment to the education sector includes monitoring google's products and services as well as conducting courses based on google g suite for education.40 atea has been conducting school projects in programming and algorithmic thinking.41 32 2021 https://www.atea.com/about-atea/history/ 33 2021 https://www.atea.no/ 34 2021 https://www.atea.no/skole/ 35 2021 https://www.atea.no/partnere/ 36 2017 https://www.atea.no/fokus/2017/apple-i-skolen/mer-om-atea-og-skole/ (not accessible any more) 37 2018: rana municipality: https://www.ranablad.no/rana/skole/kultur/kommunen-inngar-leasingavtale-for-3-600nettbrett-avtalen-er-verdt-10-millioner-kroner-over-tre-ar/s/5-42-385101 2020: furuset primary school: https://www.atea.no/kundereferanser/furuset-skole/ 38 2016: upper secondary hedmark. https://www.hamar-dagblad.no/hamar/skole/okonomi-og-naringsliv/loverrobuste-skole-pcer/s/5-80-27512 39 2018: trondheim https://www.adressa.no/pluss/okonomi/2018/02/02/sikret-it-kontrakt-potensielt-verdt-rundt400-millioner-16010533.ece?rs3578801613556432243&t=1 40 2019: stavanger https://www.minskole.no/dynamiccontent//documents/38-madlamark-handlingsplan-for-ikt-istavangerskolen--ccc027b3-4c5e.pdf 2020: showbie and socrative and integration with google for education https://www.showbie.com/showbie-og-socrative-webinar-for-norske-laerere-og-skoleledere/ 41 2020 https://www.atea.no/siste-nytt/hvordan-ruster-vi-barna-for-livets-mysterier https://www.atea.com/about-atea/history/ https://www.atea.no/ https://www.atea.no/skole/ https://www.atea.no/partnere/ https://www.atea.no/fokus/2017/apple-i-skolen/mer-om-atea-og-skole/ https://www.ranablad.no/rana/skole/kultur/kommunen-inngar-leasingavtale-for-3-600-nettbrett-avtalen-er-verdt-10-millioner-kroner-over-tre-ar/s/5-42-385101 https://www.ranablad.no/rana/skole/kultur/kommunen-inngar-leasingavtale-for-3-600-nettbrett-avtalen-er-verdt-10-millioner-kroner-over-tre-ar/s/5-42-385101 https://www.atea.no/kundereferanser/furuset-skole/ https://www.hamar-dagblad.no/hamar/skole/okonomi-og-naringsliv/lover-robuste-skole-pcer/s/5-80-27512 https://www.hamar-dagblad.no/hamar/skole/okonomi-og-naringsliv/lover-robuste-skole-pcer/s/5-80-27512 https://www.adressa.no/pluss/okonomi/2018/02/02/sikret-it-kontrakt-potensielt-verdt-rundt-400-millioner-16010533.ece?rs3578801613556432243&t=1 https://www.adressa.no/pluss/okonomi/2018/02/02/sikret-it-kontrakt-potensielt-verdt-rundt-400-millioner-16010533.ece?rs3578801613556432243&t=1 https://www.minskole.no/dynamiccontent/documents/38-madlamark-handlingsplan-for-ikt-i-stavangerskolen--ccc027b3-4c5e.pdf https://www.minskole.no/dynamiccontent/documents/38-madlamark-handlingsplan-for-ikt-i-stavangerskolen--ccc027b3-4c5e.pdf https://www.showbie.com/showbie-og-socrative-webinar-for-norske-laerere-og-skoleledere/ https://www.atea.no/siste-nytt/hvordan-ruster-vi-barna-for-livets-mysterier/ technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 they have also been responsible for training teachers in coding.42 they have offered different kinds of school leader seminars, including atea school leadership seminar in connection with bett.43 the bett show has been an important part of atea’s activities, and with respect to the 2017 show they were able to proudly announce that they were part of the apple solution expert village for the second time.44 they have also been given high priority to the nkul conference. the technology giants increasingly more google many norwegians have become addicted to google's services on a daily basis and regard this as a positive contribution to dealing with challenges in their lives. while accusations of extensive surveillance and the misuse of data have had some impact, these do not appear to have significantly weakened the company's position or the support among leading politicians and the general public. google has experienced strong growth in the education market both globally and in norway. together with microsoft, apple for some years enjoyed a solid position in schools in norway. the presentation of rikt above illustrates apple’s success based on ipads, but google has gradually taken the lead. the cost of their machines is low and the software is either free or affordable. the google classroom was introduced in norway in 2014 with the aim of replacing existing learning platforms. another objective was to introduce students to the google universe and to sell their own laptops, the chromebooks (haugen, 2014). google also appears to have practised another approach than apple in relation to their customers and business partners. an important part of this is having their own country director norway as in other countries. a high profile leader has given several portrait interviews in norwegian newspapers and taken part in debates on technology and social development.45 google has assumed responsibility for a more comprehensive chain of services for schools and municipalities than is the case with apple, and the contact they have established with their customers is more direct and takes place to a lesser extent via partners. google norway has visited schools, 46 hosted school visits47 and introduced innovation camps for students.48 great interest was shown in google's chromebooks ahead of the time they were launched in norway in 2014, but also in the following years.49 school leaders throughout the 42 2020: larvik https://www.larvik.kommune.no/skole-og-utdanning/aktuelt/naa-har-vi-egne-kodepedagoger/ 43 2019 https://www.atea.no/arrangementer/2019/ateas-skolelederkonferanse-i-london/atea-skole-lederseminar/ (not accessible any longer) 44 2017 https://www.atea.no/siste-nytt/trender-fra-bett-show-2017/ 45 2015 https://regenerativemonks.com/2015/11/15/den-norske-google-sjefen-om-fremtiden/ 46 2016: larvik https://www.larvikt.no/google-besoker-larvik/ and december 5, 2019 bogstad https://bogstad.osloskolen.no/nyhetsarkiv/google-besok/ 47 https://www.itera.no/no/nyhetsrom/blogg/2018/sommerstudenter-hos-google/ 48 2019: rjukan upper secondary school https://www.rablad.no/innovasjonscamp-pa-rjukanhuset/s/5-90-72047 49 2014 https://www.tu.no/artikler/stor-interesse-for-chromebook/225550 https://www.larvik.kommune.no/skole-og-utdanning/aktuelt/naa-har-vi-egne-kodepedagoger/ https://www.atea.no/arrangementer/2019/ateas-skolelederkonferanse-i-london/atea-skole-lederseminar/%20(not https://www.atea.no/arrangementer/2019/ateas-skolelederkonferanse-i-london/atea-skole-lederseminar/%20(not https://www.atea.no/siste-nytt/trender-fra-bett-show-2017/ https://regenerativemonks.com/2015/11/15/den-norske-google-sjefen-om-fremtiden/ https://www.larvikt.no/google-besoker-larvik/ https://bogstad.osloskolen.no/nyhetsarkiv/google-besok/ https://www.itera.no/no/nyhetsrom/blogg/2018/sommerstudenter-hos-google/ https://www.rablad.no/innovasjonscamp-pa-rjukanhuset/s/5-90-72047 https://www.tu.no/artikler/stor-interesse-for-chromebook/225550 technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 country, including in norway's second and third largest cities, bergen and trondheim, decided to go for google classroom together with google's chromebooks, trondheim in 201650 and bergen in 2019.51 parents and commentators have expressed concern about the risk posed by google’s practice of abusing private information, and the norwegian data protection authority as early as in 2012 as the country's first municipality switched to google’s e-mail system for all employees.52 as a consequence, the center for ict in education on behalf of the ministry produced a guide for municipalities and schools. rather than putting forward criticism of the companies, the guide included advice to the municipalities to read the terms carefully and ask the right questions.53 the behaviour of the global technology giants has received limited critical comments by norwegian researchers. moreover, it is the positive and enthusiastic comments that have been more visible. such observations include the reluctance to demonise google for acting in an open market along with others. google, facebook, microsoft and apple are integrated parts of our daily lives, whether we like it or not.54 for a number of years a prominent academic published rather favourable comments about several aspects of google’s activities. this included how he had incorporated google for teaching purposes.55 further, he argued that the positive effects of obtaining the data offered by google significantly outweighed for most people any possible threats56 and that google was unlikely to abuse its position given that it depends on the customer's trust.57 the government and the leading political parties have up til now largely regarded google's activities as very positive. much attention has been given to the company's plans to establish huge data centres in norway. indeed, in 2019, the minister of digitization described the purchase of an extensive area near to a norwegian city, as very good news, and the mayor claimed that there would be celebrations.58 similar plans elsewhere in norway have been met with the same kind of enthusiasm. the bett show – where all meet bett has been the most important event for several of the key actors in norway, as mentioned above. the bett show (formerly known as the british educational training and 50 2021: trondheim https://www.trondheim.kommune.no/skole/ikt/ 51 2021: bergen https://www.bergen.kommune.no/innbyggerhjelpen/skole/grunnskole/grunnskoleopplaring/digitaleverktoy-i-skolen 52 2012 https://www.d bogstad igi.no/artikler/derfor-ble-det-nei-til-google/198431 53 2012 https://www.digi.no/artikler/skyinteressen-enorm-i-norsk-skole/293865 54 2016 https://www.utdanningsnytt.no/digital-kompetanse-skole-teknologi/google-skolen-digitale-gratislosningertar-over-i-skolene/167955 55 2015 https://www.krokan.com/arne/2015/01/16/google-pavirker-maten-vi-tenker-pa/ 56 2014 https://www.krokan.com/arne/2014/11/26/hva-har-ladygaga-og-google-til-felles/ 57 2014 https://www.krokan.com/arne/2014/11/14/vil-du-vite-mer-om-google/ 58 2019 https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/nabdam/google-har-kjoept-giganttomt-i-skien https://www.trondheim.kommune.no/skole/ikt/ https://www.bergen.kommune.no/innbyggerhjelpen/skole/grunnskole/grunnskoleopplaring/digitale-verktoy-i-skolen https://www.bergen.kommune.no/innbyggerhjelpen/skole/grunnskole/grunnskoleopplaring/digitale-verktoy-i-skolen https://www.digi.no/artikler/derfor-ble-det-nei-til-google/198431 https://www.digi.no/artikler/skyinteressen-enorm-i-norsk-skole/293865 https://www.utdanningsnytt.no/digital-kompetanse-skole-teknologi/google-skolen-digitale-gratislosninger-tar-over-i-skolene/167955 https://www.utdanningsnytt.no/digital-kompetanse-skole-teknologi/google-skolen-digitale-gratislosninger-tar-over-i-skolene/167955 https://www.krokan.com/arne/2015/01/16/google-pavirker-maten-vi-tenker-pa/ https://www.krokan.com/arne/2014/11/26/hva-har-ladygaga-og-google-til-felles/ https://www.krokan.com/arne/2014/11/14/vil-du-vite-mer-om-google/ https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/nabdam/google-har-kjoept-giganttomt-i-skien technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 technology show) is a global series of education shows with its main site being in london. the first bett show was held in that city in 1985 and has since become an annual four-day event that attracts some 700-800 exhibitors and around 35,000 participants. bett's own understanding is that it “celebrates education and inspires future discussions as together we discover how technology and innovation enable educators and learners to thrive”.59 however, david buckingham has described the bett show as “a prime example of what might be called the educational-technological complex in action” as it represents “a powerful alliance between public and private interest” including marketers, commercial actors, government departments, educationalists, researchers and journalists (buckingham, 2007, p. 12). bett has also been criticised for marginalising teachers due to its increasingly commercial nature (davitt, 2008), and trade shows like bett are regarded as problematic because “teacher agency is shaped and controlled by the discursive, material and affective dimensions of such events” (player-koro, rensfeldt & selwyn, 2018, p. 700). for several years the centre for ict in education hosted nordic@bett as an official part of the bett show in london. bett has also been the site of joint efforts on the part of the norwegian edtech industry to present itself within its own pavilion, "the norwegian classroom", coordinated by ict norway. rikt has hosted sub-conferences in london for its participants recruited from norway, and some of atea’s school leadership seminars are held in london and include visits to bett. the significance of bett from the norwegian perspective is made quite clear by the fact that the crown prince of norway performed the official opening of the norwegian classroom in 2017.60 some of the most prestigious norwegian projects and actors have been presented at nordic@bett, for instance the horizon report 2015 including the technology outlook for scandinavian schools. nkul – norway’s key meeting place for the use of edtech nkul (the national conference on the use of ict in education and learning) is norway's largest meeting place of the sort. the main organizer responsible is ntnu, norwegian university of science and technology, with a main profile in science and technology.61 the target group for the conference is teachers, school leaders, teacher educators and participants from the education sector in general.62 nkul has been held every year since 59 2021 https://www.bettshow.com/about-bett 60 2017 http://osloedtech.no/2017/01/the-norwegian-classroom-bett-2017/ 61 2021 https://www.ntnu.edu/about 62 2021 https://www.nkul.no/om-nkul/ https://www.bettshow.com/about-bett http://osloedtech.no/2017/01/the-norwegian-classroom-bett-2017/ https://www.ntnu.edu/about https://www.nkul.no/om-nkul/ technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 18 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 1995.63 in the norwegian context, the nkul conference seems to have attracted almost the same kinds of participants from norway as bett. the key actors present their plans, projects, experiences, products and services, and the conference plays an important role as a meeting place. a sizeable group of co-organizers and partners contribute professionally and financially to the conference. the norwegian directorate for education and training is an important coorganiszer, and among the partners is also utdanningsforbundet, a norwegian trade union for educators. other partners are publishing houses as well as a number of software and hardware developers as epson, google, itslearning, learnlab, microsoft and visma.64 the norwegian centre for ict in education has presented their innovation awards at nkul as they have done at bett,65 likewise the horizon reports developed by the center and nmc.66 both rikt and atea have actively recruited participants for the conference. ict norway and the norwegian edtech industry ict norway is an important actor in the field of educational technology since it represents the interest group for the norwegian ict industry. their main ambitions are to enlarge the market, remove obstacles to their members, increase value for the industry and provide assistance with internationalization and capitalization.67 since the the main focus of the article is on the global technology giants, the norwegian technology actors may appear to be small and insignificant. they do not have the same kind of influence, but they are nevertheless important for the development of the dominant attitudes towards technology in norwegian society. ict norway seems to have enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the government and the leading political parties, as well as with the other key actors in educational technology. one of the chief reasons is probably that they have supported many of the basic views on ict development in society. they have arranged joint seminars with the conservatives, currently the leading government party in norway, about ict in education.68 however, in this respect, the conservatives and the labour party agree on the main issues while representatives of these parties endorse full support to ict norway's view that the norwegian edtech companies must have improved conditions and easier access to norwegian schools.69 63 2021 https://www.nkul.no/historikk/ 64 2021 https://www.nkul.no/samarbeidspartnere/ 65 2015 https://rikt.net/innovasjonsprisen-2016-til-jong-skole/ 66 2013 https://rikt.net/hvorfor-byod-neppe-er-bra-for-skolene/ 67 2021 https://www.ikt-norge.no/english/ 68 2012 https://www.ikt-norge.no/nyheter/miniseminar-ikt-og-utdanning/ 69 2015 https://www.utdanningsnytt.no/pedagogikk-skoleutvikling/jakten-pa-framtidseleven/168391 https://www.nkul.no/historikk/ https://www.nkul.no/samarbeidspartnere/ https://rikt.net/innovasjonsprisen-2016-til-jong-skole/ https://rikt.net/hvorfor-byod-neppe-er-bra-for-skolene/ https://www.ikt-norge.no/english/ https://www.ikt-norge.no/nyheter/miniseminar-ikt-og-utdanning/ https://www.utdanningsnytt.no/pedagogikk-skoleutvikling/jakten-pa-framtidseleven/168391 technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 by representing developers and sellers of new technology, ict norway wants teachers and schools to become more active users. they emphasize that norwegian edtech companies have over 300 million users, but too few among norwegian teachers.70 ict norway underlines that edtech has become a mature industry – one based as much on pedagogy as on technology. a good indication that ict norway works well with the other key actors in norway is their contribution to the bett show. nordic@ bett hosted by the center of ict in education and the norwegian classroom by ict norway have been regarded as two almost parallel ways of representing norway abroad. the norwegian edtech industry is not devoid of great success stories, but they might also serve to illustrate the influence of big global business. the pioneers and the largest norwegian edtech companies, the learning platforms fronter and itslearning, were founded in 1998 and 1999. following prolonged success, fronter was sold to the international giant pearson in 2008, but was then acquired by itslearning in 2015. in 2018 itslearning and google announced that they had agreed to collaborate.71 this probably came as a surprise to a lot of people as the director of itslearning had one year before warned against letting google into norwegian schools. he believed children's privacy could be harmed.72 this may be an indication of how business is being done in this field. the arguments become more parts of a business oriented tactical play than enlightening for ordinary users. discussion and concluding remarks the article has looked at the international debates on the influence of the technology giants on educational policy. the company’s objectives include the development of new long-term policy agendas. in part this can be seen as a prolongation of developments from the 1990s onwards, but has been significantly intensified and has to some extent changed character since the onset of the pandemic. this has given rise to new multisector coalitions and increasingly complex networks where the large international organisations and technology giants are partners. the pedagogical implications might be profound, but require further examination. as outlined in the introduction of the article, the project presented is just a first step trying to identify and analyse the roles of the main actors in the field. a lot more systematic work is needed. it is challenging to give a comprehensive picture of the different approaches that the various companies have followed and the networks they have established. together these conditions constitute important limitations of the project so 70 2019 https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/zgqavo/norske-edtech-selskaper-har-over-300-millioner-brukere-mennorske-l 71 2018 https://itslearning.com/en/news/itslearning-og-google/ 72 2017 https://arkiv.klassekampen.no/article/20170419/article/170419980 https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/zgqavo/norske-edtech-selskaper-har-over-300-millioner-brukere-men-norske-l https://www.aftenposten.no/norge/i/zgqavo/norske-edtech-selskaper-har-over-300-millioner-brukere-men-norske-l https://itslearning.com/en/news/itslearning-og-google/ https://arkiv.klassekampen.no/article/20170419/article/170419980 technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 20 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 far. however, the preliminary mapping of actors and channels of influence in a norwegian context reveals that there are many similarities in the field of educational technology, despite differences between countries, their political and educational systems, traditions and values. these similarities include how the use of new technology is valued as a way of improving teaching and learning. it is not possible to gain accurate insight into what is being done and on what grounds, how the various actors relate to each other, what influence they have, and what this ultimately means for the development of education policy. on the other hand, based on the analysis some patterns seem to emerge. this includes how teaching in schools was digitized at a record speed in 2020. however, to a smaller extent than in some other countries in norway this does not seem to have led to obvious changes regarding partnerships and networks in the field of educational technology and their ability to influence educational policy. one part of the explanation might be that a well-funded public school has left less room for privatization and commercialization. another part might be that the large investment in ict in schools the years before the pandemic had brought norwegian classrooms up among the most wellequipment in the world. this might also have limited the possibilities for new initiatives during the pandemic. nevertheless, it is the similarities that are most striking when it comes to defining the trends in the norwegian material, and these can be understood largely as extensions of developments that have taking place since the 1990s. one major trend seems to be an acceptance of key commercial actors in the field of educational technology combining the roles of advisors and salesmen. an interesting question is to what extent this may be related to the fact that technology is largely perceived as a neutral field independent of values, ideology and political perspectives. another important trend is that there are close links between education and the edtech industry. this can be seen as an extension of the preceding point. another instance of this trend is for instance the partnership between the center for ict in education and the new media consortium that might be regarded as a direct link between government and industry. there is also a close link between the government and ict norway representing the norwegian edtech industry. although meeting places for the edtech industry and the government in the field of education are valuable, it is challenging if they are not combined with a certain distance and critical reflection. finally, it appears that also in norway there is a common pro-technology agenda that unites government actors, various commercial actors, industry, some of the major conference organizers, the most visible academics and the media. as the analyzed material from the norwegian context illustrates, the main actors are connected in different ways and have got meeting places and networks of various kinds to develop and shape their agendas. the role of the media has not been discussed in technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 21 vol. 17 – issue 2 – 2021 detail in the article, but more indirectly in the way news in the edtech field has been communicated. overall, the analyses based on the norwegian context reveal a type of network rather close to the ones picciano (1994) described emerging in the early 1990s. they included near relations between business, politics and a large and growing number of actors with common interests related to technology in education. the networks have been based on perceptions of educational technology presented as true and self-evident, and they can be seen as parts of hegemonic meaning constructions to a small extent opening up for alternative perspectives (laclau & mouffe, 2001). gradually, more critical questions have been raised about what is going on in education technology and why, but there is a need for more systematic approaches that go into the whole range of interesting questions related to the technology giants and their influence on education policy. doubt and uncertainty must be made parts of these reflections. furthermore, it is important to direct the conversations towards 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https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/scott-galloway-future-of-college.html http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2015.1052003 https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/new-pandemic-edtech-power-networks/ https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/new-pandemic-edtech-power-networks/ https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation https://issuu.com/educationinternational/docs/2020_eiresearch_gr_commercialisation_privatisation technology giants, educational policy and a preliminary mapping of networks and channels of influence in a norwegian context abstract introduction methodological considerations contradictory, complex and changing discursive constructions a prolongation of developments from the 1990s onwards a pandemic shock extended and more powerful networks educational influence and pedagogical implications norway another context similar trends intensified digitization processes due to the pandemic governmental actors and a profound technology optimism nmc – a partner linked to the global edtech industry commercial actors advisors and salesmen rikt – apple’s faithful partner atea – larger, different and addressing “all” global companies the technology giants increasingly more google the bett show – where all meet nkul – norway’s key meeting place for the use of edtech ict norway and the norwegian edtech industry discussion and concluding remarks references enhancing engagement, enjoyment and learning experiences through gamification on an english course for health care students ©2018 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. enhancing engagement, enjoyment and learning experiences through gamification on an english course for health care students kirsi korkealehto faculty of education university of oulu email: kirsi.korkealehto@kamk.fi pirkko siklander faculty of education university of oulu email: pirkko.siklander@oulu.fi abstract student engagement in traditional learning environments has been in decline, leading to decreased learning results. gamification offers one option to trigger interest and enhance engagement in learning activities. the aim of this study was to investigate the potential of gamified course design in language learning from students’ perspectives. particularly, we explored how students experience engagement, enjoyability and language learning. the theoretical framework comprises processes of interest and engagement, and gamification in language learning. language learning is understood through socio-cultural and ecological approaches. the research was conducted during a three-credit, field-specific english course. the participants (n = 23) were first-year health care students conducting their studies with a blended-learning approach. the applications seppo, kahoot, padlet and quizlet were used. the collected data included students’ learning diaries and a post-course online questionnaire. content analysis was used to examine the diaries and the answers to the questionnaire’s open questions. the results suggest that gamified course design and related applications can enhance student engagement, foster language learning and offer positive learning experiences. however, there are differences among gamified applications. supporting collaboration and creating a positive atmosphere are important to cultivating the gamified learning process. implications for teachers also are discussed. keywords: gamification, language learning, student interest and engagement, higher education, blended learning seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 14 introduction student engagement in traditional learning environments has been in decline, leading to substandard learning results and lack of engagement. teachers and educators try to motivate and engage students in learning activities (e.g., hidi & harackiewicz, 2000; kangas, siklander, randolph & ruokamo, 2017). when students are described as disengaged, it signals that educational experiences do not trigger their interest. triggering interest can enhance students’ learning and increase the joy of learning, fuelling motivation and engagement (hidi & renninger, 2006; roberts & ousey, 2004; renninger & bachrach, 2015; siklander, kangas, ruhalahti & korva, 2017). a recent study suggests that one way to help engage disengaged students is to let them make greater use of sociodigital technologies in their studies (salmela-aro, muotka, alho, hakkarainen & lonka, 2016). active learning methods promote positive learning experiences and achievement, compared with lectures and other more traditional methods (freeman, eddy, mcdonough, smith, okoroafor, jordt & wenderoth, 2014). when learning online, successful interaction and collaboration should be emphasised to trigger students positively. interaction and collaboration are manifested as feelings of belonging, cooperation and joint knowledge construction (siklander, kangas, ruhalahti & korva, 2017). negative learning experiences typically are prominent in less-ideal learning environments, and by improving the learning environment, students are likely to become enthusiastic and engaged with learning activities (shernoff, csikszentmihalyi, schneider & shernoff, 2003; freeman et al., 2014) other reasons for disengagement include boredom, alienation and disconnection from real-life expertise and learning activities (shernoff et al., 2003). gamification has been used in education beneficially (caponetto, earp & ott, 2014; de sousa borges, durelli, reis & isotani, 2014; dicheva, dichev, agre & angelova, 2015; hamari, koivisto & sarsa, 2014). the reason for implementing gamification in learning is its ability to elicit engagement the same way digital video games do. besides engagement, gamification can increase students’ satisfaction, effectiveness and efficiency in a blended-learning course in higher education (urh, vukovic, jereb & pintar, 2015). sociocultural theory (vygotsky, 1978; lantolf & thorne, 2006) approaches language learning as an interaction in which learners mediate and internalise physical and cultural tools and practices. in the ecological language-learning approach, learners’ social activity, interaction with others and the environment, and how they perceive and use learning opportunities are central (hyvönen, 2008; lantolf & thorne, 2006; van lier, 2010). this research adds to the discussion on gamification in language learning in higher education and especially its engaging characteristics. the aim of this research is to investigate the potential of gamified course design in language learning from students’ perspectives. particularly, we explore how students experience engagement, enjoyability and language learning. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 15 theoretical framework as theoretical background, we consider gamification to be a trigger for engagement, enjoyment and learning. triggering interest and enhancing engagement interest, motivation and engagement form a process in which triggers play a key role because they can awaken and maintain students’ interest. the process is not straightforward and can even change directions. a trigger can be an object, event, person, task or idea. it can be something that is novel for students, as well as a problem or challenge (järvelä & renninger, 2015; renninger & bachrach, 2015; robers & oysey, 2004). in addition, technologies and games can trigger students’ interest and increase motivation, e.g., to learn a language (zarzyskapiskorz, 2016). in this study, gamification is viewed as a context that can trigger students’ interest toward engagement, enjoyment and learning. triggers can be categorised many ways, e.g., they can be cognitive, emotional, social or playful. in addition, reflective triggers (veerporten, westera & specht, 2012; verhagen, feldberg, van den hoof, meents & merikivi, 2012), individual progress, group progress and contextual triggers (määttä, järvenoja & järvelä, 2012) have been identified. recent studies in higher education reveal that collaboration in online learning contexts is an effective trigger that creates a positive emotional, cognitive and social cycle that, in turn, can keep students motivated and engaged (siklander et al., 2017). the four-phase model of interest and engagement introduced by hidi and renninger (2006) sheds light on understanding the entire process, from interest to engagement. first, students feel triggered by situational interest, which, in this case, can be the course design or gamification elements. the second phase refers to maintained situational interest, in which students focus their attention and persistence over time. in our study context, students, for instance, find the course design and related activities to be meaningful. in the third phase, individual interest emerges. students feel positive, and their curiosity is generated, i.e., emergent individual interest typically is selfgenerated, but also supported by other students or teachers. the fourth condition is well-developed individual interest. each phase is characterised as a psychological state of interest that may or may not elicit the next motivation and engagement level. students’ engagement is manifested in various ways. behavioural engagement can be observed easily, in which students are active and persistent, looking for knowledge and seeking help when needed. however, behavioural engagement does not reveal whether students are really learning. emotional engagement, particularly the activation of positive feelings, is connected to engagement. for instance, joy can increase vigilance and engagement. however, some feelings, such as relief, can decrease engagement (sinatra, heddy & lombardi, 2015). therefore, it is important to consider students’ emotions and expectations toward course design and tasks. cognitive engagement tells us how much effort and time students are investing in understanding tasks at hand, how eagerly they exceed their limits, and how they adapt as they choose and solve seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 16 problems. cognitive engagement increases motivation and predicts successful learning results. an additional form of engagement is agentic engagement, in which students are proactive in their learning. they take part in and help shape course design, teaching, learning environments and interaction because they want to understand more deeply. they enrich, personalise, modify and request instructions for better learning (montenegro, 2017; sinatra et al., 2015). for best results, all four forms of engagement should be reached. gamification in language learning the notion of gamification commonly refers to the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals (deterding, dixon, khaled & nacke, 2011; kapp, 2012). the difference between educational games and gamified learning is that educational games refer to proper, full-fledged games for non-entertainment purposes, whereas in gamification, certain aspects are used in a non-game context. in education, gamification is a didactic method, especially regarding its ability to engage students in learning activities (kapp, 2012). gamification is a process that incorporates engaging aspects of games into a traditional teaching environment, adding extra value or new experiences to existing ones. it modifies a task, providing a variety of experiences to participants and offering them more tempting opportunities to participate, collaborate and interact (kapp, 2012). interaction, especially oral interaction, is a vital aspect of contemporary language learning in higher education (juurakko-paavola, 2005). recent studies (kiili, de freitas, arnab & lainema, 2012; kapp, 2012; perry, 2015; francisco & flores, 2015; urh et al., 2015; martí-parreño, seguí-mas & seguí-mas, 2016) provide teachers with suggestions for designing gamified learning. the first basic aspect is feedback. instant feedback benefits students since the more frequent and targeted the feedback, the more effective the learning. positive and personalised feedback makes an impact on students’ emotions, and it motivates and engages students to proceed and complete more assignments. by being immediately rewarded upon completing tasks, students gain a feeling of performing well, which, in turn, empowers them to continue playing and studying (kiili et al., 2015). furthermore, narrative is an essential aspect in gamified tasks, as it tends to make a positive impact on learning through engagement (kapp, 2012). the narrative enables learning tasks in authentic settings, which increases student engagement. clear goals, immediate feedback, a sense of control and appropriate cognitive load contribute to a successful gamified assignment or a whole course. methodology aim and research questions the aim of this research is to investigate the potential of gamified course design in language learning from students ’perspectives. particularly, we explore how students experience engagement, enjoyability and language learning during the english language course. the following research questions were addressed: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 17 how do health care students evaluate and value the use of gamified applications: 1. for triggering interest and enhancing engagement? 2. for enhancing enjoyment? 3. for enhancing language learning? participants health care students (n=23) at a university of applied sciences who were following a blended-learning study programme took part in this research. the students’ ages ranged from 19 to 51, and their educational background was heterogeneous. the students possessed or exceeded skill level b1 in the european framework, which equals the level of an independent language learner. at this stage, student autonomy and self-regulation in learning emerge. description of the study context the context of the study is a three-credit, field-specific english course for firstyear health care students at a university of applied sciences. the course’s duration was 10 weeks, including five face-to-face sessions. the course aims to teach students how to communicate in multi-professional and intercultural situations within the health care sector. the learning platform fronter was used for sharing information and students’ projects by embedding each student pair’s padlet with it. in fronter, the study model was divided according to the topics: 1) activity environments in the health care sector; 2) typical health care cases; 3) instructing the patient, nursing procedures and self-care instructions; 4) first aid and anatomy; and 5) patient interviews. for the whole course, a working life-simulation background story was created in a hospital setting. the principal gamified platform was an application called seppo. the incorporated assignments were pair tasks conducted in class with the teacher in control. other applications used were kahoot, padlet and quizlet. seppo is a learning platform for creating educational games in which the teacher designs assignments and grades creative tasks, while answers to multiple-choice questions are graded automatically. students can submit content in the form of photos, videos, text or links. there is also a scoreboard showing the game’s progress in real time. padlet is an interactive, virtual wall on which links, photos, videos, documents and powerpoint presentations can be shared. padlet, as such, is not a gamified tool, but during this course, its purpose was to create social pressure when student pairs uploaded and shared their own material on it. the students’ created material formed part of the course material; the idea was to exploit students’ own experiences and knowledge. quizlet lets students create vocabulary study sets and offers multiple exercises seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 18 and games for practicing vocabulary. during the course, students created bilingual (english-finnish) vocabularies on their chosen topics and shared them on their padlets. kahoot is a game-based platform in which quizzes can be created. the platform displays a leader board after each question and the final score after each game. the course’s gamified tasks were as follows: 1. the students formed working pairs (except for one group that comprised three students). for the first seppo assignment, student pairs were instructed to find suitable terminology for the presented hospital setting and name other health-sector workplaces in english. with the topic of the first lesson being activity environments in the health care sector, the student pairs chose their own environments and created powerpoint presentations on their topics with a quizlet vocabulary, embedded in the pairs’ padlets. 2. the second lesson began with a kahoot quiz based on the vocabulary that the student pairs created on their quizlets. the students wrote about their chosen typical health care cases and uploaded their texts onto their padlet with quizlet vocabularies. the students then used seppo to present their content by recording videos for the supervisor during their practical training. 3. the third lesson began with a kahoot quiz that revised the previous lesson’s vocabulary. two further tasks were conducted on seppo: a task using online dictionaries to gather information and a task to find solutions to health care cases using evidence-based searches on databases. 4. kahoot was used to learn new vocabulary on one topic (first aid and anatomy), and the lesson was devoted to conducting three assignments with seppo. 5. anatomy vocabulary was practiced with kahoot. data the study’s data consisted of students’ reflective journals and responses to a post-course questionnaire. the data-collection method, quantity and time are shown in table 1. table 1. data collection data collection time frame size of corpus students’ reflective diaries during the entire time of investigation 23 diaries (29.234words) post-questionnaire end of the course 23 filled-in questionnaires the students kept reflective learning diaries during the course, in which they seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 19 elaborated and reflected on the learning content that, in turn, led to them revising the learning material and learning more in the process. learning diaries can facilitate and improve students’ self-regulation (zimmermann & paulsen, 1995). googleforms was used to create the questionnaire (see appendix i), which was sent to the students after the course. the questionnaire included 30 questions on students’ experiences concerning the benefits of the applications used. a likert scale from 1 to 5 (from strongly disagree [1] to strongly agree [5]) was used. the participants filled in the online questionnaire either before or after the written and oral exams. analysis the learning diaries were analysed qualitatively through inductive content analysis (kyngäs & vanhanen, 1994), which uses stages: simplifying the data, categorising and abstraction. content analysis also utilises the following steps:  1. reading the learning diaries, 2. searching for simplified expressions and highlighting them, 3. listing simplified expressions, 4. searching for similarities and differences in the simplified expressions, 5. combining the simplified expressions to create subcategories, 6. combining the subcategories to create major categories and 7. combining the major categories to create the concept. in our study, the major categories were engagement, enjoyment and learning, which, together with collaboration and course atmosphere, formed the concept for a fruitful and balanced learning environment. the learning diaries were analysed anonymously, with students’ names coded according to their gender: f1, f2 and so forth for female students and m1, m2, etc., for male students. results the effects of the gamified learning activities were evaluated according to three dimensions: engagement, enjoyment and learning language skills. for each dimension, participants indicated their agreement or disagreement on a fivepoint likert scale. the applications used were assessed separately. furthermore, the course atmosphere and pair work were estimated. the data indicated that the students were engaged in the english course and that the used applications and learning methods fostered students’ communication. in addition, the students found that gamification made their learning experiences more fun. the results will be described in accordance with figure (1) below. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 20 figure 1. categories used in this study. figure 1 illustrates how the four applications used impacted engagement, enjoyment and learning. furthermore, the course design emphasised collaboration and a positive, tolerant and emotionally safe atmosphere (eteläpelto & lahti, 2008) that, in turn, fosters engagement, enjoyment and learning. all these factors are connected with each other, offering students opportunities to be active learners in a meaningful and fruitful learning environment. how do health care students evaluate and value the use of gamified applications for triggering interest and enhancing engagement? the application that the students considered the most useful for fostering engagement was the game platform seppo. figure 2. applications fostering engagement 17 14 14 11 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 seppo kahoot quizlet padlet fostering engagement seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 21 as shown in figure 2, 17 participants (n=23) agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘seppo fostered my engagement to the course’. the application’s easiness of use raised interest initially, with interest maintained as students valued the multiple ways in which assignments could be conducted. the following excerpts reveal that students inherently found learning opportunities to be engaging: only writing can improve writing, and transferable connections between study materials and working tasks are important. ‘the assignments in seppo were educational because we had to write in english again’. ‘it is nice that the assignments in seppo are related to the study material we had just studied’. other factors that stimulated interest and enhanced engagement include individual, collaborative and flexible work methods, which seppo enables. students can concentrate better when they find a peaceful place to discuss and complete assignments while working within their pairs. contextualised assignments were considered essential since the aim of the course was to improve students’ professional language skills. the second-best applications, from an engagement perspective, were kahoot and quizlet. kahoot’s engaging elements were praised, along with its ability to create a positive, relaxing atmosphere. as seen in figure 2, 14 students agreed, from moderately to strongly, that kahoot is engaging. kahoot enabled students to challenge themselves, visualised their progress and offered positive reinforcement. ‘kahoot was a fun and engaging game! it created a relaxed atmosphere in the class’. ‘we could have played kahoot every time!’ the same number of students (14) estimated that quizlet enhanced engagement (agreed moderately, agreed or strongly agreed). padlet received controversial feedback: over half the students said it had only a minor effect on engagement (disagreed or strongly disagreed), but the other half considered it engaging (figure 2). nevertheless, padlet was viewed as beneficial, as it allowed students to learn from each other. how do health care students evaluate and value the use of gamified applications for enhancing enjoyment? gamification should create a game-like feel within the study material and learning activities, which have a tendency to increase time spent on studying and improve actual learning. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 22 figure 3. applications that foster enjoyment learning with the application seppo was viewed as fun by 17 out of 23 students (see figure 3). the following excerpts describe how enjoying the task is connected with learnability and collaboration. ‘our task was to describe a room and work tasks there; it was fun and developed my vocabulary’. ‘it was great that we could work independently with the pair; we could concentrate better and manage our own time consumption’. learning with padlet was viewed as fun by 13 students (n= 23), whereas the rest felt that the virtual wall did not offer enjoyable learning experiences. students were discouraged and frustrated by the errors and typos they discovered in other students’ projects that were embedded in the padlets. furthermore, padlet was considered complicated to use. ‘at first, i was thrilled by padlet, but as i realised others’ material consisted of typos and grammatical mistakes, i was frustrated’. as illustrated in figure 3, all the students rated kahoot as a fun learning tool. even if they made mistakes, they found kahoot to be fun and educational. kahoot sessions enhanced feelings of togetherness and offered opportunities to laugh together. ‘the kahoot game was great fun, an easy way to learn words, and you could claim you made a mistake because you wanted to be as fast as possible’. ‘playing kahoot created a great feeling of belonging; we were all laughing when somebody pushed the wrong button because of over-excitement’. only 13 students enjoyed quizlet (figure 3). these students appreciated the versatile games quizlet provides for rehearsing vocabulary. 23 17 13 13 0 5 10 15 20 25 kahoot seppo quizlet padlet fostering enjoyment seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 23 ‘i was surprised at how efficient and fun it is to learn new words with quizlet. i am going to use it after the course as well’. how do health care students evaluate and value the use of gamified applications for enhancing learning? for this study, the effect on learning was the most important of the three evaluated dimensions. the participants were asked whether the gamified assignments fostered their oral and written language learning. figure 4. applications that fostered oral and written language skills assignments conducted in seppo enhanced oral language skills, according to 12 students, and enhanced written skills, according to 16 (n=23) (see figure 4). the students found the assignments in seppo to be authentic and strongly contextualised, which increased learning. the tasks were found to be demanding enough so that the students felt challenged, improving their input. furthermore, autonomy and authenticity were viewed as catalysts for students’ efforts and academic achievement. ‘seppo was the best application in this course; the assignments were relevant, and they were easy to implement’. kahoot seemed to foster oral skills, according to nine students, but as many as 15 said it improved written language skills as well (see figure 4). students can see the word only written in the quiz; thus, it is recommended that the teacher say the word in question aloud to offer a model for students’ pronunciation. ‘an awesome tool to revise vocabulary. it was nice that the teacher pronounced the words aloud, and i could repeat them after her’. students said quizlet fostered both oral and written language skills. the students appreciated the opportunity to create their own study sets and practice vocabulary that their peers had collected. autonomous and authentic learning was promoted by the real-life-driven study sets. 0 5 10 15 20 seppo kahoot quizlet padlet applications fostering oral and written language skills oral written seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 24 ‘it is nice that i can collect (relevant) vocabulary at the same place, but i did not use it as much as i should have’. ‘i did not use other students’ quizlets at all, since i prefer to look up the words myself. anyway, i was not sure if the words were spelled correctly in quizlets, or if the words were in relevant context’. most students said they did not find that padlet fostered oral language skills; 12 students rated its ability to enhance oral skills as poor, but 15 said it improved written skills. collaboration and atmosphere based on empirical data analysis, we have shown the meaning of gamified applications for engagement, enjoyment and learning. furthermore, our aim was to explore other factors that are crucial for engaging students in the course. an important effect of gamification is that it engages students, which can lead to improved learning. figure 5. pair work fostered engagement, enjoyment and learning as visualised in figure 5, when it comes to engagement, the most beneficial element in the course was pair work; 96% of participants consider pair work to be fostering engagement. the students said pair work enhanced engagement since they were responsible for themselves and for their pairs, which also is the case with real-life workplace teams. furthermore, the working method was viewed as educational because the pairs supported each other, eliciting better achievement. collaborative work with a pair enhanced oral and written skills. to create an ideal learning environment in pair work, it is essential for students to be at the same skill level, and in this case, pair work created a fruitful basis for the whole course. the fact that the students were grouped in the same pairs throughout the whole course fostered learning in general, and their collaborations were creative and enjoyable. no 4 % yes 96 % pair work fostered engagement, enjoyment and learning no yes seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 25 figure 6. course atmosphere fostered engagement, enjoyment and learning in addition, 83% of the students considered the course’s overall atmosphere to be fruitful, engaging and enjoyable from a learning perspective; thus, they appreciated the course’s tolerant and positive atmosphere (see figure 6). discussion our data indicate that gamification added extra value to the course, fostering engagement, enjoyment and learning. the application seppo was seen as a versatile tool to foster engagement and learning and was widely viewed as fun. the students found it fruitful to concentrate on given field-specific topics in pairs and receive immediate feedback. in addition, they appreciated when their achievements were shown and discussed in class afterward. seppo also was seen as helpful for practicing oral and written language skills. kahoot’s engaging and fun elements were praised, as well as its ability to create a positive, relaxing atmosphere. furthermore, it especially fostered learning of written language skills. kahoot provided successful vocabulary tasks and made learning fun among the pairs. the participants seemed to be excited and eager to learn, and performing well was desirable after each question enhanced competition. however, network failure caused frustration for some students, and they wanted to stop playing because they noticed that they could not have won. nevertheless, immediate feedback in the form of correct answers in the game was appreciated. kahoot was suitable as a vocabulary test, as well as for revising. padlet was not viewed as engaging, but it enabled practicing of written skills. the students appreciated the creative work shared by fellow students and the opportunity to re-watch each other’s videos, texts, links and vocabulary study sets, regardless of place or time. with quizlet, the students created study sets and played others ’sets. it was beneficial to search for terms on the chosen field-specific topic and chart keywords independently, which contributed to both self-regulated and selfpaced learning, as well as collaboration. quizlet was viewed as fun and engaging to some extent, and it fostered learning both written and oral skills. yes 83 % no 17 % course atmosphere fostered engagement, enjoyment and learning yes no seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 26 when it comes to general feedback, the gamified elements were considered positive and fun, and versatile methods brought diversity to learning. some participants viewed the gamified elements as non-academic, while others changed their minds when they reflected upon learning. the new ways to learn languages surprised and challenged a few adult learners, as the learning environment differed from their prior experiences with language learning. the use of educational technology challenged some students when too many new tools distracted them from learning the language. otherwise, the new digital skills learned during the study module were appreciated, and the students were provided with technological and collaborative tools and learning skills to be applied in other studies and later in their work lives. when designing gamified elements for learning processes, teachers’ competencies are important to note. teachers should have knowledge of both gamified applications and applicable knowledge about interest and engagement. in addition, they need pedagogical knowledge about learning, particularly how to foster collaborative learning in the gamified learning process and create an atmosphere that cultivates successful learning experiences. based on the results, raising interest and enhancing engagement play an essential role in course design. in terms of the four phases of interest (hidi & renninger, 2006; montenegro, 2017, the first three -1) triggering through situational interest, 2) maintaining situational interest and 3) emerging individual interest -were apparent. however, perceiving the fourth phase, well-developed interest, was not possible. the students assessed their engagement, but their understanding of engagement remains unclear. based on their responses, we could perceive behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement to some degree, but agentic engagement did not show up (sinatra et al., 2015). future research should focus more precisely on describing and analysing the entire process of interest development and, simultaneously, the four forms of engagement in the context of gamified teaching and learning. not only students’ engagement, but also teachers’ engagement is crucial when predicting students’ satisfaction and enjoyment in learning. if the teacher is not engaged and inspired, the students are not expected to be satisfied and inspired either (kangas et al., 2017). for the teacher, gamification provides tools to consider the instructions from the engaging aspects, and for students, it offers engaging learning experiences. furthermore, the learner can view learning objectives as challenges to be accomplished to progress in the gamified activity. the student learns while moving from one stage to another; thus, playing becomes part of learning outcomes (francisco & flores, 2015). this study confirms the earlier notion of the effectiveness of collaboration as a trigger in online learning (siklander et al., 2017). learning is a social, interactive process, although individual learning is also necessary. collaborative learning involves cognitive-linguistic processes of co-elaborating the issues at hand. by collaboratively elaborating on the problems, students interact and produce their learning outcomes (baker, 2015). language learning, particularly the benefits of linguistic ability, e.g., applications and designs, should afford and encourage students to work together. fostering collaborative learning requires demanding-enough tasks and learning goals for students to gain from seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 27 interactions with each other. then students invest less cognitive effort, compared with working alone, because they can divide information processing across a larger reservoir of capacity (kirschner, kirschner & janssen, 2014). as seen from the results, gamified elements afforded alternative conditions, situations and practices for students to distribute and use knowledge (e.g., hyvönen, 2008; lantolf & thorne, 2006; van lier, 2010). working collaboratively increased interest, which is situated to and connected with engagement (levine & resnick, 1993). every dimension highlighted the importance of atmosphere, which is in line with earlier studies (eteläpelto & lahti, 2008; siklander et al., 2017). when designing gamified courses, teachers should find ways to create emotionally safe, equal and supportive atmospheres where students feel free to express themselves. supportive atmospheres nurture creativity, spur curiosity and encourage giving, as well as tolerating mistakes and failures. teachers are expected to allocate time for the course’s orientation phase, when factors such as a supportive atmosphere can be discussed with students. conclusion this research enabled focusing on promoting educational technological and pedagogical possibilities to support efficient blended learning and to experiment on the use of gamified tools that suit language learning in higher education. gamified elements support student interaction, enabling integration of field-specific topics in language teaching. the course design used contributed to versatility in assignments, and in accordance, it supported contextualised professional language learning, collaboration, authenticity and self-regulated learning. the aspects that need to be developed further include intensifying peer and selfassessment, as well as teacher feedback degree in quantity and quality. the gamified elements could be deepened by allowing students to be responsible for time consumption and offering extra levels or mystery tasks for students who perform well. there are some limitations to this study that should be noted. the main limitation is that results are based on self-reported data. when exploring experiences, self-reporting is important, but in further studies, we will focus on other types of data. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 28 references baker, m. j. 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(1978). mind in society. the development of higher psychological processes (eds. m. cole, v. john-steiner, s. scribner, & e. souberman). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. zarzyska-piskorz, e. (2016). kahoot it or not? can games be motivating in learning grammar? teaching english with technology, 16(3), 17–36. zimmerman, b. j., & paulsen, a. s. (1995). self-monitoring during collegiate studying: an invaluable tool for academic self-regulation. in p. r. pintrich (ed.), understanding self-regulated learning—new directions for teaching and learning (pp. 13–28). san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2015.1107542 https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2014.1002924 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 30 appendix i the post-course questionnaire in googleforms https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1faipqlsfi2mu_crwr2r-q7onvi4fvk8rsrbfahqx-mk_d86hyxssbzg/viewform?usp=sf_link enhancing engagement, enjoyment and learning experiences through gamification on an english course for health care students abstract introduction theoretical framework triggering interest and enhancing engagement gamification in language learning methodology aim and research questions participants description of the study context data analysis results how do health care students evaluate and value the use of gamified applications for triggering interest and enhancing engagement? how do health care students evaluate and value the use of gamified applications for enhancing enjoyment? how do health care students evaluate and value the use of gamified applications for enhancing learning? collaboration and atmosphere discussion conclusion references appendix i pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4690 ©2022 (sanna väisänen, susanne hallberg, teemu valtonen, ida-auroora tervo, jenni kankaanpää, erkko sointu, laura hirsto). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom sanna väisänen school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland email: sanna.m.vaisanen@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2981-912x susanne hallberg school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland email: susanne.hallberg@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8868-7673 teemu valtonen school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland email: teemu.valtonen@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1803-9865 ida-auroora tervo school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland email: idau.tervo@gmail.com jenni kankaanpää school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland email: jenni.kankaanpaa@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-9041 erkko sointu school of educational sciences and psychology, university of eastern finland email: erkko.sointu@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4001-7264 laura hirsto school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland email: laura.hirsto@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8963-3036 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4690 mailto:sanna.m.vaisanen@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2981-912x mailto:susanne.hallberg@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8868-7673 mailto:teemu.valtonen@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1803-9865 mailto:idau.tervo@gmail.com mailto:jenni.kankaanpaa@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-9041 mailto:erkko.sointu@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4001-7264 mailto:laura.hirsto@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8963-3036 pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 abstract research on the utilization of learning analytics in elementary school classrooms has been scarce. as different technologies have changed physical and digital learning environments, technology provides possibilities for novel ways to support and enhance learning. the aim of this study was to investigate the perspectives of elementary school pupils on learning analytics and self-regulated learning during a phenomenon-based learning module in a blended learning environment. a total of 89 pupils participated in the learning module and were observed. furthermore, 10 pupils were interviewed after completing a learning module. a qualitative content analysis was conducted. the results revealed that, overall, pupils’ experience of self-regulated learning and learning analytics was positive and learning analytics was perceived as functional and motivating and to have helped their learning. pupils also became increasingly self-directed during the study module. however, setting goals, and managing to pursue them, appeared to be quite difficult for many pupils. the findings of this study provide new perspectives for the role of learning analytics as an important additional level of support for pupils’ self-regulated learning. altogether, the results indicate a need for further developing pedagogical approaches to using learning analytics within the context of the elementary level classroom. keywords: self-regulated learning, learning analytics, elementary school pupils introduction in recent decades the role of self-regulated learning (srl) in teaching and learning has grown in importance. according to murdoch-eaton and whittle (2012), learners should acquire skills for lifelong learning and the ability to self-regulate and adapt to changing environments. srl can be regarded as part of 21st century skills, of which there are several definitions (voogt & roblin, 2012). typically, these skills focus on readiness to use technology, critical and creative thinking, and, most of all, learning skills, i.e., the readiness and ability to learn in order to deal with new and changing situations. these global descriptions of 21st century skills can be seen on a more local level. in finland, the core curriculum for elementary schools contains so-called transversal competences, which focus, for example, on well-being competence, interaction competence, multiliteracy and creativity, societal competence, ethical and environmental competence, and global and cultural competence (edufi, 2014). the aim in the core curriculum is that learning these competences is facilitated across different school subjects. the finnish national agency for education (edufi) (2014) also requires schools to design and conduct multidisciplinary modules or phenomenon-based learning modules at least once a year. in the phenomenonbased learning approach, a phenomenon is explored through multiple perspectives or school subjects (e.g., kangas & rasi, 2021), often utilizing group work and project-based learning. in this learning process, students’ self-regulated learning skills become pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 necessary. however, srl should also be considered a target of learning, and the pedagogical approaches used should be designed in such a way that supports the development of students’ srl skills. along with self-regulation skills, different technologies play an important role in today's education. the development of educational technology has long traditions (reiser, 2001) providing various tools and approaches for supporting students’ learning. one of the development approaches has been identifying ways of developing technologies that provide students with personalized tasks and support. one of the first phases of this approach was so-called intelligent tutoring systems (its), designed to provide students with personalized support and learning activities (corbett et al., 1997). since itss were introduced, their development has continued rapidly with several overlapping research fields. currently, learning analytics (la) appears to be gaining a key position in this field (valtonen et al., 2022). la is typically defined as follows: “the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for the purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs” (lak, 2011). the methods and technologies designed in the field of la provide various ways and opportunities for understanding learning processes and developing ways to utilize this understanding for different ways of supporting teaching and learning processes. combination of srl and la is an interesting but challenging area, particularly from the perspective of elementary level education. the role of srl is strongly emphasized in today's schools. however, the skills needed for srl should not be taken for granted and require ways to provide students with support (dignath, & büttner, 2018). for this purpose, the personalized support provided by la is crucial. based on the la literature, the integration of la is often considered challenging at the elementary school level, and research in this area is scarce (phillips & ozogul, 2020). the elementary school level context differs from the general la research context because la is used in a blended context, as the learning management system (lms) is used in a pedagogical design in which pupils work in a physical classroom. with recent technological developments, such as one-to-one computing (see, lei & zhao, 2008), cloud computing (see gonzálezmartínez et al., 2015) and other related and more personal platforms, the possibilities of la are now also available to elementary schools. this paper focuses on this theme by exploring how elementary school pupils perceive the use of learning analytics and selfregulated learning. self-regulated learning in an elementary school learning environment theoretically, self-regulation refers to students’ active participation in their learning process metacognitively, motivationally and behaviorally (zimmerman, 2011), which pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 induces a student to become a strategic learner (hadwin & oshige, 2011). self-regulated learning (srl) can be defined as “self-regulated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adopted to the attainment of personal goals” (zimmerman, 2000). the cyclical process includes the forethought phase, performance phase and self-reflection phase. according to zimmermann (2000, 2002), the forethought phase includes task analysis (goal setting and strategic planning) and self-motivation beliefs (e.g., self-efficacy and intrinsic motivation), whereas the performance phase is divided into self-control (e.g., help seeking) and self-observation. students may, for example, have task strategies and use self-instruction. the self-reflection phase is further divided into self-judgement and selfreaction (zimmerman, 2000). panadero et al.’s (2017) meta-analysis has shown that selfassessment is positively related to self-regulated learning strategies. on the other hand, novices may fail to set specific goals for their learning in order to systematically monitor their own learning (zimmerman, 2002). self-regulated learning is based on the assumption that learners play an important role in monitoring their own learning consciously (winne & hadwin, 2008). this highlights the students’ metacognitive process for setting their own goals for learning and selfmonitoring their own processes, how their learning processes proceed, and how the selected ways of learning work. according to dignath et al. (2008), it is important to provide students with support for their self-regulated learning processes, which is vital for their learning outcomes, strategy use and motivation. zimmerman (2002) emphasizes the significance of encouraging students to set goals for their learning and to self-evaluate their learning success. for this purpose, focus should be directed at materials that raise their awareness (e.g., nussbaumer et al., 2015). furthermore, students should be encouraged to focus on time management, i.e., they should be capable of organizing their work and managing their use of time effectively (zimmerman, 2002). according to nussbaumer et al. (2015), in order to support reflection on learning processes, peers can be seen as an important part of the learning situation, which leads to communication and sharing of learning experiences. students with well-developed self-regulation strategies appear to use various approaches for supporting their learning, for example, seeking assistance, minimizing distractions and using the available resources (alvi & gillies, 2021). furthermore, students may utilize coregulation, which is seen as a dynamic process in which learning is regulated with others (e.g., hadwin et al., 2011), for example, between a student and a more capable other, i.e. a peer or a teacher (hadwin & oshige, 2011). however, some students appear to use their own cognitive strategies, such as re-visiting or searching for information and metacognitive strategies (e.g., planning and self-evaluation) (alvi & gillies, 2021). nevertheless, according to dignath et al. (2008), self-regulated learning training programs appear to be effective, even at elementary school level. pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 learning environments with learning analytics learning environments can be defined in different ways. carvalho and goodyear (2014) show that learning environments contain physical elements, such as tools and spaces; epistemic elements, such as tasks; and social elements, such as roles and division of work. manninen et al. (2007) added the technological dimension, including digital spaces as part of the learning environments, i.e., platforms and applications that are mediated by ict devices. it should be noted that none of these elements alone generate learning, and learning activities always emerge in actual ongoing practices (carvalho et al., 2020). nevertheless, learning environments play an important role in teachers’ pedagogical choices and students’ learning activities. tools afforded by the learning environment are used to generate activities, yet activities emerge when tools and resources are available (hinton et al., 2014). boekaerts (1999) suggested that there is a two-way relationship between self-regulated learning and learning environments, meaning that learning environments may enhance the acquisition of self-regulatory skills, whereas self-regulatory skills are relevant facilitators of learning and of using the resources available in learning environments. in this sense, the digital space with learning analytics provides interesting opportunities for understanding learning processes, making them more visible to students and teachers (siemens, 2013). in order to take advantage of la, learning environments need to contain technologies that allow data to be collected on the students’ different learning activities. according to romero et al. (2019), the collected data can be used for understanding the interaction between different actors, navigation behavior, use of different learning activities and materials, etc. furthermore, this data can be used for various purposes such as visualizing learning processes, identifying students with difficulties, students at risk of dropping out, etc. (romero et al., 2019). within the context of elementary education and srl, la can provide valuable help, particularly for students’ metacognitive thinking, by providing different recommendations for students based on their learning activities and making the learning process more visible. overall, la provides effective ways of supporting pedagogical practices that emphasize students' self-regulation and metacognitive thinking (ifenthaler & schumacher, 2016). viberg et al. (2020) argue that la research has started to understand the kind of research and development that is needed in the field of srl. learning analytics uses learnergenerated data to provide students with more personalized support and feedback (ifenthaler & widanapathirana, 2014; schumacher & ifenthaler, 2018). learning environments that use la allow learners to develop their skills to manage their own learning process (mcloughling & lee, 2010). according to schumacher and ifenthaler (2018), students prefer la systems that help them analyze and plan their learning in advance, monitor their progress towards achieving their learning goals, and provide them pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 with opportunities to self-assess and receive just-in-time feedback. the challenge is that research and development for la is typically targeted at higher education instead of lower education (phillips & ozogul, 2020). nevertheless, based on developments in the technologies used in elementary school level learning environments (freeman et al., 2017), the opportunities for la are now also better suited to elementary education. with more personal technologies and learning environments being actively used as part of the learning process, it is possible to collect the data needed to make the learning process more visible for teachers and students. aim of the study the aim of the study was to investigate the perspectives of 5th–6th grade pupils (age 11– 13) on learning analytics and self-regulated learning during a phenomenon-based learning module in a learning environment in which the pupils studied online learning materials provided to them via a lms, while also working in the same physical space. the learning module was designed with principles of self-regulated learning. accordingly, the following research questions were addressed: 1. what classroom activities emerged in a blended learning environment (physical, digital, social) using a lms with visualized learning analytics? 2. what were the pupils’ perceptions of their experiences of a learning environment that utilized la and supported self-regulated learning? methods research context and participants the research was part of a project studying the use of la for supporting pupils’ selfregulated learning. in this study, we use the term pupil (younger children in the classroom context) when referring to the target group, however, in the context of the theoretical background we use the term student to refer learners in general. this study targeted an elementary school phenomenon-based study module on the subject of outer space (hereafter ‘space’). the study took place at a teacher training school in which technology is actively used. the learning environment was a large, flexible classroom in which pupils from grades five and six studied at their own pace using personal tablet computers. the classroom was a standard classroom at the teacher training school in which the case-study was conducted, and was designed to be flexible and adaptable and to support interaction. the study module comprised ready-made learning materials divided into five themes, two hours per theme (tables 1 and 2). pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 table 1 structure of the space study module page function home front page including the structure of the module theme 1: the structure of the earth theme 2: the earth rotates, and the moon orbits the earth theme 3: the earth orbits the sun theme 4: universe theme 5: the earth’s gravity each theme included the following “chapters”: goal setting: “write down your goals for this lesson? what are you interested in finding out?” content: including various amounts of theory (text, pictures); video-material; tasks, e.g., quizzes and short writing tasks; learning reflection tasks; instructions reflection: “how did you achieve your goals? what was easy? what was difficult” some themes also included assignments: theme 3 group assignment: “demonstrate how the earth, moon and sun orbit each other” theme 4 drawing assignment: “draw our solar system” theme 5 final assignment own progress page for following own progress questionnaires reflective questionnaires to facilitate reflection on own learning table 2 frequencies of chapters and their contents per lesson theme chapters distribution of chapter page types per theme goal setting contents reflection theory video tasks instruction & summary reflection tasks total pages theme 1 1 3 1 2 1 16 10 4 33 theme 2 1 6 1 14 4 12 12 7 49 theme 3 1 3 1 3 2 19 12 4 40 theme 4 1 5 1 11 22 13 5 51 theme 5 1 6 1 12 4 22 12 5 53 during the lessons pupils were working in a physical learning environment using their personal tablet computers and a learning management system (lms) designed for this case study. while working with the topics, pupils were able to talk with and ask advice pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 from their peers and from teachers. the lms was designed in accordance with the principles and key phases of the self-regulated learning process (see zimmerman, 2002, 2000; panadero, 2017). learning materials instructed the pupils to actively set goals for their learning at the start of each lesson and monitor their own progress. furthermore, pupils evaluated the extent to which they were achieving the set goals and reflected on their own learning after the lesson and throughout the entire phenomenon study. the learning module included questionnaires designed to support pupils’ active reflection on their own learning from various perspectives. the lms allowed the teachers to provide the pupils with various kinds of learning materials. pupils had easy access to them and opportunities to carry out tasks, navigate through activities, read materials, etc. (figure 1) figure 1 preview of theme 1 in the lms, including (a) site navigation, (b) objectives, (c) chapters, and (d) completion statuses and percentages. along with assignments and materials, the lms contained elements of la. the lms was designed to collect all the behavioral data from the pupils’ learning activities (see park & jo, 2015). the aim was that this data would be used for providing pupils with information about their learning process and completed assignments during the space study module. for this purpose, pupils were provided with an “own progress” page (figure 2), containing information such as the completion percentage and completion status of assignments. in addition, pupils could monitor their progress on theme pages (figure 1) and within individual chapters (figure 3). from the pedagogical perspective, the aim was to offer teachers ways to follow the progress of individual pupils using visualizations and to identify pupils with challenges in their learning processes. altogether, the combination of pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 classroom learning activities and personal tablet computers with lms and la was aimed to provide pupils and teachers with information about the processes of learning. instead of mere performance measuring, the aim was to make learning processes visible in order to design a pedagogically sound classroom learning environment for the elementary level with benefits from la. figure 2 example pupil’s own progress page, including: (a) themes of the learning module, (b & c) completion status (uncompleted, completed, not started) and completion percentage of each theme, and (d) list of completed and uncompleted chapters and assignments per theme. pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 figure 3 preview of a task page in a content chapter, including: (a) progress marks indicating completed pages of a chapter and (b) feedback on the task. a total of 89 fifth and sixth grade pupils (age 11–13) in a finnish elementary school participated in the study. the sample sufficiently represented the entire pupil population of a particular school in terms of gender. the pupils and their parents/guardians had been sent a briefing and a video about the nature of the study and gave their informed consent to participate in the various stages of the study. furthermore, the pupils had the opportunity to withdraw from the study at any time if they wanted to. the committee for research ethics granted approval for the design of the study. data collection and analysis the data were collected using classroom observations and pupil interviews during spring 2021. the observation and interview framework were created collaboratively by the researchers. the observations (n=89) were carried out over ten lessons, i.e., classroom activities were observed during classroom learning in order to outline the pedagogical design of the blended learning environment, and the characteristics of the self-regulated learning using la (e.g., see griffee, 2005; perry et al., 2002). two researchers observed each lesson and wrote down what happened chronologically during the lesson. one of the researchers paid special attention to the activities of the pupils, and the other to the teachers. semi-structured interviews were conducted with the pupils on a voluntary basis (n=10) after they had completed the phenomenon-based learning module. the pupils were pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 interviewed face-to-face individually. they were asked to bring their own tablet computer, which enabled them to view material supporting the interview. the semi-structured interviews explored the pupils’ views and experiences of learning analytics and selfregulated learning. more specifically, the questions included themes on how the pupils felt about learning during the module and how a learning environment using learning analytics supported the pupils’ self-regulated learning. the interviews lasted for an average of 30– 40 minutes. they were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim into text files. the analysis was conducted using qualitative, theory-led content analysis (e.g., macfarlane & o’reilly-de brún, 2011). the theoretical starting point for the self-regulated learning was based on zimmerman`s theory of self-regulated learning (2000). this theory also served as a basis for data collection and analysis. the analysis of the both data started by reading through all the material in order to gain an overall understanding. first, the observation framework for the study was based on three dimensions of classroom activities; 1) climate, 2) management, and 3) instruction (e.g., stipek & byler, 2004; lerkkanen et al., 2016). the observation data were used to answer the first research question. particular attention was paid to what kinds of classroom activities emerged in a blended learning environment to get an overall picture of what happened in the lessons in relation to classroom activities and the use of the lms platform. after that, observation perspectives guided the analysis of the interview data, i.e., analysis was conducted aligned with deductive approach (elo & kyngäs, 2008). the data were categorized as 1) self-regulated learning and self-regulation, 2) guidance and support, and 3) learning environment and learning analytics. results what classroom activities emerged in a blended learning environment (physical, digital, social) using a lms with visualized learning analytics? this first results section is based on observations conducted during the lessons. based on the observations, the pupils mainly focused on studying, and were accustomed to working independently, as well as using their personal tablet computers. based on the observations, the climate during all the lessons appeared to be positive and safe, providing optimal conditions for the pupils’ self-regulated learning. the pupils mainly worked on their own in the classrooms, using their tablet computers, reading and studying through the materials and tasks in the lms. the pupils’ opportunities to influence their own learning was considered in the learning processes. the pupils were able to choose the order of the tasks to be completed during the lesson. also, the large, flexible learning environment allowed the pupils to choose their own place to work in the physical space. the structure of the ten lessons followed a fairly similar pattern pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 in each lesson. the teacher started the lesson by introducing the theme and then instructed the pupils to work independently. based on the observations, it seemed that the pupils were quite capable of studying at their own pace using the materials provided for them. as the module progressed, the work became more fluent, the pupils collected their tablets on their own and mainly knew what tasks they needed to continue working on. the results showed variation among the pupils regarding how well they proceeded with their study process and how much support they appeared to need. most of the pupils were able to work on their own. they took responsibility for their work and they appeared to be comfortable with this. however, at times, the focus of some of the pupils appeared to shift away from the tasks and they became somewhat inactive. during the process, there were a number of pupils who did not understand the instructions and needed more individualized advice. these pupils appeared to need support, particularly with practical issues, how to work on different tasks and assignments, as well as how to use certain technologies. together with these issues, instructions and help were typically needed in the transition phases from one theme or task to another. the pupils needed support in progressing from one area to another, indicating challenges in their metacognitive readiness. based on the observations, four levels of support and guidance were identified: 1) written instructions and tasks provided by the lms platform, 2) teachers’ spoken guidance and feedback, 3) pupils’ peer support and co-regulation and 4) learning analytics visualizations provided by the platform. first, the instructions and tasks provided in the lms offered the pupils guidance on how to study and proceed, even though they had opportunities to choose their own progress strategy. second, the teachers provided constructive feedback about the pupils’ behavior and they also advised the pupils to check their tasks. the pupils received encouraging spoken feedback from their teachers both individually and on a group level several times during the space study module. it was also noted how teachers offered assurances to pupils regarding their ability to perform the task at hand. some pupils received less attention, and the teachers only advised pupils when necessary. it was clear that the teachers primarily supported pupils who appeared to have challenges with learning or self-regulation. even though the study module was designed for individual studying, a third level of support emerged, which highlighted the importance of coregulation and peer-support. the pupils advised each other, and even instructed other pupils to listen or change their behavior on some occasions. when a pupil went to collect a set of headphones or some paper, other pupils appeared to follow that model and behave in a similar way. thus, the learning platform clearly appeared to guide the pupils and the importance of peer support still appeared to be evident. however, also a fourth level of support, learning analytics as part of the lms, seemed to guide the pupils’ independent work. the ‘own progress’ page in the lms enabled the pupils to monitor their own learning process, visualize the completed themes, and consider the next stages of the process. regarding the ways of learning and working within the modules, the pupils pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 became accustomed to studying and working on their own and the need for support from teachers and other students during the module decreased. what were the pupils’ perceptions of their experiences of the learning environment that utilized la and supported selfregulated learning? the interviews showed that pupils had difficulties in setting goals for their learning. in particular, the interviews with 5th graders highlighted the challenge of setting goals, whereas the 6th graders appeared to be somewhat more accustomed to setting goals. some pupils even expressed their frustration with the constant setting of personal goals. one pupil stated how they knew that goals were important but still found them frustrating. another pupil stated that they were unable to set goals at all. most pupils did not have high expectations or goals for this module of phenomenon-based study. the pupils stated that they wanted to learn as much as possible, but many of them had difficulties setting clear contextualized goals for their own learning. however, according to the interviews, the pupils appeared to be able to set goals for their learning if the teachers specifically instructed them to do so. also, most pupils were able to understand what they were supposed to learn during the phenomenon-based learning module. however, some pupils only listed the general lesson themes of the module as goals. this implies that the pupils only developed self-regulatory skills, such as setting goals for their own learning. almost all the pupils expressed their satisfaction and sense of success during the module, particularly at the end. most of them found the tasks quite easy, but some tasks, such as content related to newton’s law, they found more difficult. most of the pupils talked about themselves in a neutral and positive manner. some of the pupils also skillfully reflected on their own metacognition, mentioning how they reflected on their own thinking about learning and setting goals. for these pupils, self-regulated learning appeared to be a positive experience, according to the interviews. contextual clarifications added by the authors are marked by brackets. i: “so ... did you set any goals for learning? p: well, i [was thinking that i] have to practice this thing, that’s how it goes, but i still have to train more so that it stays in my memory.” some pupils talked about their self-confidence, for example, one of the pupils appeared very capable of identifying the factors that affected her own self-confidence and selfefficacy: i: “in what things did you think you were succeeding? pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 p: a little bit in everything!” p: “i feel like i did quite well in those tasks because everything [all the task points] went almost to one hundred percent and only a few [task points] went to ninety, and right away for the first time. i: so you checked how much you got right and..? p: yeah, i checked it from here [i.e. under the lesson page].” thus, based on the interviews, it can be seen that at least some of the pupils felt that the learning analytics supported their learning processes and being guided independently. one pupil described how they tried to do a task over and over again so that the completion bar no longer looked like an incomplete entry. furthermore, the pieces of text included in the lms were also perceived by the pupils as functional, as they were able to return to them to re-examine the issues. a couple of pupils specifically pointed out how they returned to these texts if they did not understand the issue in question. this implies that the digital learning environment and learning analytics have good potential to support pupils’ selfregulated learning. “... when i did those tasks, i never asked for help. i understood everything that i had to do there [on the lms], and i was able to answer them [tasks and quizzes]. and if i wasn’t able to do them [compete the tasks], i tried over and over again...” during the performance phase, reflection on task strategies often took place on a subconscious level. almost all the pupils stated that they had completed tasks for each lesson in the suggested order, even if they had an opportunity to choose. most pupils said they had focused on the assigned tasks and not on the other activities. many pupils wanted to try to understand the issue for themselves for as long as possible, rather than seek help from peers or teachers. “i tried to figure them [tasks] out myself, but in a few tasks, for example, i asked [advice from] a few group members. from the teacher, i didn’t ask [about tasks] much. as i [usually] thought that i would get it [a task] done, and if i didn’t get it [a task] done, i would ask a friend. however, if i hadn’t been able to work it [a task] out, i would have probably asked the teacher.” the interviews showed that some pupils had problems reflecting on their own learning. however, most pupils were able to reflect on their own learning, particularly when they achieved something. some pupils were even able to assess what might have disrupted their learning and what supported their learning. the pupils reported how important guidance and support were for their studying and learning and, furthermore, that they had helped their peers or asked for help if needed. the pupils perceived that they were able to control their feelings and behavior with the help of other pupils. conversations with peers were perceived as helpful and exhilarating. pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 this implies that even if the study module was constructed for individual learning via a lms, pupils also saw the significance of co-regulation for their learning. most of the interviewees found the digital platform inspiring and supportive of learning. also, the digital learning environment was perceived as a different kind of experience compared to previous learning experiences. the importance of texts, images and videos was highlighted. the pupils reported, for example, that they had returned to the texts if they did not remember something. also, they were able to read instructions from the platform at any point. however, some pupils could not assess whether the platform had helped, but still felt that the space module lessons were quite enjoyable. “i’ll say straight away that it was really great --and it was great to learn there.” “this was easy. the tasks were easy to access and there weren’t many technical problems.” according to the results, the pupils appeared to take advantage, at least to a certain extent, of the opportunities provided by learning analytics to track their own learning and task performance. for example, one pupil stated that it was exciting that they could get to see so many things through the learning analytics visualizations. thus, in this context, learning analytics, at its best, motivated the pupils and guided them to independently follow their own progress and identify successes and challenges in their learning. the interviews showed that the pupils took responsibility for their own learning. however, they did not appear to regulate their own learning as much as was expected by following the ‘own progress’ page, which included all la visualizations. less than half of the pupils interviewed reported using this page. however, the completion rate (%) of the tasks, which could be seen from the learning material pages, motivated some pupils and guided them to learn and to try again. “but i had to do some of the tasks again. if one of the tasks went wrong, i got annoyed that i didn’t get a hundred percent and then i had to do it again.” discussion this study aimed to explore the learning activities in a face-to-face classroom learning environment, equipped with a lms containing la visualizations. the findings of the study bring novel perspectives for using learning analytics within elementary level classroom teaching, targeting pupils’ self-regulated learning. the results show that, in terms of the forethought phase of self-regulated learning (see zimmerman, 2000), setting learning goals and following them is still a challenging area for some pupils towards the end of elementary school education, although the utilized lms was also built to support this process. the findings suggest that pupils do not generally set goals for their learning. it is pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 16 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 therefore important to consciously guide pupils to set goals and to investigate more how digital learning environments could support pupils with this issue. support in the classroom context appeared to be needed, particularly for the transition phases, e.g., from one task to another. these factors can be regarded as key issues when considering the regulation of learning activities for achieving personal learning goals. zimmerman (2002) highlights the significance of encouraging students to set goals for their learning and to self-evaluate their learning success. we assume that the pedagogical approaches of using lms with la visualizations, as used in this study, can function as facilitating processes, so that conscious and continuing goalsetting practices become pupils’ normal learning activity. the results show that pupils gained support from various directions, from the structure built into the lms as well as from teachers, peers and the learning analytics. however, the results also revealed a decrease in the level of pupils’ help-seeking activities from teachers and peers during the performance phase of study period and module. the pupils advised each other, and even instructed other pupils to listen or change their behavior, and some of them appeared to use the behavior of others as a role model. this implies that even though the digital platform was based on individual learning, the importance of seeking help (zimmerman, 2000) and co-regulative learning also emerged (see hadwin et al., 2011; hadwin & oshige, 2011). also, according to zimmerman’s (2000) self-reflection phase, pupils’ perceptions of reflecting on their own learning were explored. the results suggest that, in general, pupils were able to reflect on their own learning in terms of what they had learned and what had disturbed their learning. however, some pupils found reflective thinking challenging. this may be related to difficulties in setting goals for their own learning, which should be researched further in the future. according to phillips and ozogul (2020), the elementary school level context has played a minor role in learning analytics research. this study provides a new research perspective to meet this shortcoming, with insights into using la in an elementary level classroom context. results showed that pupils take advantage of the opportunities provided by learning analytics, such as viewing visualizations of completed themes for tracking and monitoring their own learning process and performance. the results provide us with phenomena for further research and development work, i.e. the possibilities of learning analytics as a fourth element of support in the classroom context. also, we see this area as a potential and important target area for further la research. new technologies capable of collecting data from learning processes can provide pupils with support and personalized learning opportunities, including in face-to-face lessons. in order to do this, pedagogical practices in the use of la need to be further developed. pedagogical practices need to be designed in such a way that different activities “leave log tracks”; pupils need to be encouraged to “leave log tracks”. thus, the key elements of pedagogy of la in elementary level classrooms should be further developed. we argue that these kinds of activities can pupils’ experiences of learning analytics visualizations in supporting self-regulated learning in an elementary school classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 17 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 help pupils to learn about their own learning and support their metacognitive thinking, and that these log tracks can also be used as la data to provide pupils with personalized support and learning opportunities. the activities presented in this paper are important for achieving this goal, guiding pupils to understand the core ideas of srl, and providing them with opportunities to familiarize themselves with how to benefit from la in their own learning. there are some limitations that should be taken into account. the potential limitations of the transferability of the results should be noted. the study was conducted in a specific school context that provides a technology-enhanced learning environment for all pupils, and the pupils were familiar with using technology in their daily learning activities. further research is needed to examine pupils’ perspectives on the effectiveness of learning analytics in supporting their self-regulated learning processes. the results could be further elaborated using quantitative questionnaire data, as well as in relation to the actual la log data, through which we could further understand pupils’ behavior in a lms in this kind of classroom setting. moreover, the complexity of pupils’ self-regulated learning and the support of technology in this process should be further studied using learning analytics. conclusion based on the classroom activities that emerged in the blended learning environment, pupils were quite capable of studying at their own pace using the materials provided for them, and furthermore, the work became more fluent as the module progressed. also, they took responsibility for their work. several pupils did not understand the instructions and needed more individualized advice as well as support to move forward in their working. peer support was also received, for example, in the form of advice. learning analytics as a part of the lms guided pupils in working individually. pupils’ experiences of self-regulated learning and learning analytics were mainly positive. the digital learning environment and learning analytics were perceived as functional and motivating, and some 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environment that utilized la and supported self-regulated learning? discussion conclusion acknowledgements references (microsoft word trine ungermann fredskild distance learning students in \205) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 distance learning students in “communities of practice” an analysis of nursing education offered in three different learning programmes. trine ungermann fredskild senior lecturer, ph.d., cand. cur. university college syd, nursing education email: tuf@ucsyd.dk abstract the purpose of this study was to understand the impact of the distance learning programme on learning processes in nursing education. it was the purpose to highlight the differences and similarities in the traditional nursing programme vs. the distance learning programme. empirically, the article builds on a comparative study of two danish nursing schools and three different nursing classes, including one based on the distance learning programme. the three different nursing classes cover the ways of studying in nursing education in denmark. observations were conducted with the classes as a whole. interviews were conducted with 7 students from the distance learning programme, 6 from the traditional programme and 5 from the credit transfer class. the interpretative approach was selected to form the background of this study. the observation, as well as the interview guide was formed on the basis of etienne wengers theory: “learning in communities of practice”. the analysis was based on concepts from the same theoretical background, as the observations and interviews. findings from the study show that the distance-learning students have a selective and targeted way of engaging in communities of practice. findings in relation to age, to being well prepared and feeling responsible for own learning, in relation to doing a self study and to knowledge forms, seem to have precise relevance for the differences between the ways of studying in nursing education. keywords: distance learning, learning processes, online learning, nursing education background distance learning is applied within many study programmes today, in order to offer flexible forms of education. the increased tendency to replace traditional classroom teaching with online studies is due to the desire of educational institutions to increase recruitment, as well as to meet student demands and wishes for more flexible programmes, reduced transport time, together with a desire for easy and convenient access to information. the demand for learning interactively and asynchronously has increased over recent years, and the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 2 demand for additional flexible and asynchronous ways of studying can be expected to grow in the coming years. the distance learning programme is also gaining a presence in nursing education all over the world and since 2001 also in denmark. the nursing education programme in denmark is characterised by the fact that in order to become technically competent in this field, it is necessary to acquire both academic and practical competences. besides the academic and practical competences, in relation to nursing education, there must also be focus upon the development of personal and human qualities. offering nursing education as distance learning therefore involves a clear break with the traditions of face-to-face teaching in nursing education and its many associated elements of apprenticeship. the distance learning programme in nursing education has therefore put on test the nursing education’s tradition of educating nurses in classrooms and demonstration laboratories. that is why the new programme has given rise to many considerations, questions and challenges in relation to the impact on learning processes in nursing education. the basis for this study has emerged from these considerations, questions and challenges and from the assumption that the change in the programme might lead to changes in relation to learning processes, competence development and communication. a brief outline of the whole study the empirical area of this study is the education of nurses, and the overriding focus is an analysis of the nursing education (2001 uddannelsen) offered within three different frameworks: in the traditional programme, via distance learning and as a credit transfer programme. the main emphasis is placed upon the analysis of the distance learning programme as seen in relation to the other programmes. the research methodology encompasses observation and interview, and, as a theoretical framework and analytical perspective for the research, etienne wenger’s theory of learning in communities of practice is applied. the study comprises three different classes, and two different nursing schools. the three different nursing classes cover the ways of studying in nursing education in denmark, and thereby the entire range of programmes in danish nursing education is represented in the research. the study as a whole encompasses the theoretical as well as the clinical part of the nursing education programme, focusing on learning processes, competence development and communication. the research questions are: 1. how are learning processes affected by the fact that nursing students are taught and learn via the distance learning programme, rather than via the traditional learning programme? 2. how are the development of basic clinical nursing skills, interaction with patients, and cooperative and problem-solving competences affected by the fact that students have received their theoretical teaching via the distance learning programme, rather than via the traditional programme? 3. how is the development of communicative relations and competences during interaction with fellow students, teachers and patients, as well as the development of a technical language, affected by the fact that the students have received their theoretical teaching via the distance learning programme, rather than via the traditional seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 3 programme? the aim of the research is to be able to contribute with further illumination and clarification of the significance of the introduction of the distance learning programme for the students’ learning in relation to the profession. it has thus been the aim of the research to draw attention to the particular challenges that the distance learning programme creates. over a time period (1st and 2nd semesters) different types of data were collected. observation in the classrooms has encompassed the classes as a whole, and the extent was of 1-2 weeks of, on the average of 20 hours per class in the classroom. in the distance learning programme the seminars were attended for observation. observations has been non-participating, systematized observations from the back of the classroom, from a position where it has been possible, to hear and see students and teachers. during the observation periods, 5-7 students per class have been selected based on pre-defined criteria (for example age, previous education, occupation and other social factors). the selected students were interviewed after the observation period. and the same students were observed and interviewed in the clinical part of the programme. the students in the study have an age distribution ranging from 20 to 51 years old, where the average age is, respectively, 32.3 for the distance learning students, 31.6 for the transfer students and 24.5 for the traditional students. the students from the distance learning programme and from the traditional programme have commenced the education in february 2005. they have been observed and interviewed through the theoretical and clinical part of the programme in the 1st and 2nd semester. the credit transfer class commenced the education in september 2004 and has been observed through the theoretical and clinical part of the programme at the beginning of the 2nd semester. regarding the clinical part of the study, results has been published in: “optimizing the learning potential for the distance learning students. focusing on the tension between experience and competence” (fredskild 2008). regarding the theoretical part of the study results will be discussed in this paper. the research question that forms the background of this paper is: how are learning processes affected by the fact that nursing students are taught and learn via the distance learning programme rather than via the traditional learning programme? a description of the programmes included in the investigation the danish nursing education have an official duration of 3½ year full-time study, equivalent to 210 ects credit points. the education is a combination of theoretical teaching, equivalent to 120 ects points, and clinical training, equivalent to 90 ects points. the nursing education shall entitle the graduate to employ the title of bachelor in nursing. the english title is bachelor degree in nursing (b.n.) (undervisningsministeriet 2001). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 4 the distance learning programme the distance learning programme in this investigation is characterised by the entire theoretical part of the education being carried out as distance learning. the distance learning programme is covered by the same ministerial order as the traditional programme. that is to say content, textbooks, assignments, tasks, test, examinations, etc., correspond completely with the traditional education programme. as to the clinical part of the distance learning programme it corresponds completely with the traditional programme in terms of both content and scope. it is therefore only the theoretical part of the nursing education programme that is offered as distance learning. the learning management platform (lms), used in the distance learning programme, is blackboard. the lms platform is applied as an aid to the dissemination of information, teaching materials, videos, and for interaction and communication in support of the learning process. the distance learning programme is combined with face-to-face teaching in the form of seminars approximately once every four weeks, during the entire theoretical part of the education. the seminars are at the average of 3 days and approximately 20 hours pr. seminar. the combination of face – to – face seminars and distance learning could also entitle the distance learning programme to be called “blended learning”, which is a programme that combines face-to-face and distance learning forms (gynther 2007). however, the term distance learning is retained, as the term covers the fact that the students study at a distance in the main part of their education. the part of theoretical teaching that is disseminated as distance learning, is corresponding to the traditional programme with a rate of conversion on approximately 0,3. where the students in the traditional programme for example have scheduled 97 hours of anatomy and physiology, the distance learning students have only scheduled approximately 30 hours. if one looks at the part of the theoretical teaching, where the students practice clinical skills in the demonstration laboratory the distance learning students have scheduled 7 hours, and the students in the traditional programme have scheduled 27 hours. many of the working and teaching methods from the traditional programme have been transferred to the distance learning programme, but a redesign and redefining of teaching methods on some areas has also been necessary. redesign has for example been necessary when the students practice clinical skills in the demonstration laboratory. they practice their clinical skills as a preparation before entering the clinical part of the education. as the hours scheduled here are remarkably reduced videos has been produced, showing the clinical skills that the students shall practice. by watching the videos from the lms platform they can make preparations and reflections prior to the lessons scheduled. the traditional programme nursing education has, until the distance learning programme became a possibility, been characterised by the traditional programme where students are taught according to traditional teaching methods in nursing education. the traditional programme takes place in classrooms, demonstration laboratories and by the patient’s bedside. teaching methods and working forms in the programme have transfer value in relation to the competences that the work of nurses demands. the principles of the teaching methods and working forms are many, and they challenge the student’s senses, feelings, intellect, skills, courage and creativity, at the same time as the social competences of the student are trained and strengthened with a view to successful interaction with other people. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 5 the same lms platform (blackboard) is used in the traditional programme, but in this programme it is only used to disseminate information about the study and to disseminate teaching materials, lecture lists and timetables. credit transfer programme the credit transfer programme is an educational opportunity for those who are already educated as social and healthcare workers (dk-socialog sundhedsassistenter). the credit transfer students can via their previous education and their practical experience acquire the nursing qualifications in 2½ years. they are educated via the traditional programme. the justification for including credit transfer students in this study is first, that the study then covers all the ways of studying in nursing education in denmark. secondly, that the credit transfer students have an age and educational background, as well as certain social characteristics, that allow central conditions and aspects of the nursing education to be illustrated, with due regard taken to age differences, educational background, familiar obligations and former job experience. a lms platform (fronter) is also used in the credit transfer class, but in this programme it is, as in the traditional programme, only used to disseminate information about the study and to disseminate teaching materials, lecture lists and timetables. literature review the literature on distance learning programmes in nursing education represents articles on issues related to online teaching, course development and a variety of approaches that is similar with distance education. it represents articles from the nursing education programme as well as from inservice course, and supplementary courses. in the following section, a short account is provided of some of the findings in relation to the currently published research on this field. this research account is presented focusing only on the distance learning programme related to nursing education, as this education is the focus of the research. several studies have shown student satisfaction with the distance learning programme. something that students most frequently emphasise as an advantage is the flexibility of the programme. there is thus general agreement that one of the greatest advantages of studying under this programme is the flexibility. to be able to work at one’s own tempo and in one’s own environment is regarded as a positive aspect, and, furthermore, the students believe that they achieve a greater degree of responsibility for their own learning, and they learn to learn independently (barbera 2004;cooper, taft, & thelen 2004;frith & kee 2003;halstead & coudret 2000;hyde & murray 2005;jonassen & kwon 2001;kenny 2002;robley et al. 2004;sit et al. 2005;thiele 2003). studies have shown that the students become more independent and selfdisciplined. they learn to believe in their own power of judgement, they become better at taking responsibility for their own learning and immersing themselves in their subjects more than with the traditional programme (barbera 2004;frith & kee 2003;halstead & coudret 2000;jonassen & kwon 2001;kenny 2002;thiele 2003). meanwhile, the greatest problem in relation to distance learning appears to be the lack of interaction and the isolation many experience under this programme (ayer & smith 1998;buckley 2003;cooper, taft, & thelen 2004;hyde & murray 2005;reinert & frybach 1997). with regard to the earlier mentioned tradition of face-to-face teaching in nursing education, studies show that one of the great challenges of adopting the distance learning programme is precisely that of increasing the opportunity for human interaction. research show that there is no substitute for face-toseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 6 face contact with teachers and fellow students (atack 2003;atack & rankin 2002;sit, chung, chow, & wong 2005). it is, therefore, a challenge to establish an environment that supports being together with other students as well as develops an academic dialogue and the socialisation of the students (atack 2003;atack & rankin 2002;sit, chung, chow, & wong 2005). another challenge with this new programme is how online asynchronous communication and discussion is a big change from the traditional classroom discussion. the students express the necessity of choosing their words carefully because of the absence of human expression and body language (chaffin & maddux 2004). it requires a radical change in the way we think about learning, and many teachers incorporate computer assisted learning, but continue to teach as they always have taught. research show that it is important to be aware that computer assisted learning requires teacher training in relation to redefining and redesigning their teaching (adams 2004;chaffin & maddux 2004). researchers evaluate, that the interaction perspective is one of the main areas needing attention in relation to the distance learning programme (atack 2003;atack & rankin 2002;sit, chung, chow, & wong 2005). another area needing attention is the quality of teaching methodologies and an increased understanding of what the change in the way of studying in nursing education means for the learning outcome (robley, farnsworth, flynn, & horne 2004). in terms of being able to comment on the quality of that which is learned, the part of the study described in this paper focuses on learning processes in the different nursing education programmes. one can say that even though the distance learning programme in nursing education has been extensively studied in recent years, clearly missing from the literature is a comparison of the learning processes within the different nursing education programmes. this study focuses on differences and similarities between the traditional learning programme and the distance learning programme in nursing education in terms of the previously mentioned aspect. the comparative study, thereby, contributes with a supplement to the already existing knowledge in the field. method ethical issues it is important to differ between the observations in the classes and the observations and interviews that were carried out in relation to the chosen informants. an overall informed consent was given by the school managements’, by the respective classes, and by the informants. the students were informed about the study and they had the opportunity to ask questions regarding the study. the students were told that the purpose of the study was to highlight differences and similarities in the traditional programme vs. the distance learning programme, focusing on the ways the students in the different education programs learn and develop competences. from the beginning it was evident, that there would be some problems in keeping full anonymity, caused by the programme descriptions in the study. the problem was especially characteristic for the male students in the study. the informants were informed of this problem, and they accepted the conditions. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 7 the knowledge gained in this study about students as well as about teachers has been treated professionally and with confidence. method verification in the project, methodological triangulation is exercised. methodological triangulation involves using more than one method and may also consist of using multiple data sources (for example multiple informants). besides that, triangulation may consist of within-method and between-method strategies (bogdan and biklen 2007;gilchrist and williams 1999;hansen 2004;hansen 2005). the concept triangulation is widely used in qualitative research, and often used in such an imprecise way that it has become difficult to understand what is meant by it. therefore it is of importance to describe exactly which methods were used in the research and how they were used (bogdan and biklen 2007). in this study, using both interview and observation implies using more than one method, and is thereby part of the triangulation. furthermore, the methodologies observation and interview have been applied in three different contexts. thereby the use of multiple data sources was part of the triangulation. by making comparisons, the selected students as well as the classes as a whole, were reviewed both within and between interviews and observations. this represents the aspect of within-method and betweenmethod strategies, and is thereby also part of the triangulation. analysing method just as well as the researcher has to construct an overall research design, an analytic strategy must be developed (crabtree and miller 1999). in this study a combination of research methods was used, and the result was big amounts of text to be analyzed. for this purpose the researcher can use one or more organizing models or analytic strategies. one of the possible models is the template organizing model. the template organising model helps the researcher sorting out big amounts of text in themes or segments that look similar. the template organizing model is more focused than other analyzing methods because it helps the researcher to focus on specific parts in the text (crabtree and miller 1999;schmidt and dyhr 2004). as this investigation encompasses a comparison of three different groups of students and two different nursing schools, it has been important that the analysis has been systematic and carried out in the same way for all observations and interviews (kvale 1997). it has therefore been important, that the same theoretical framework which controlled the observations and interviews also made the structure and controlled the analysis. in relation to this study, etienne wengers theory about learning in communities of practice made the frame in relation to observations as well as interviews (fig.1) and the same frame was used as an analysis template. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 8 observation guide: interview guide: theoretical knowledge & guidance responsibility for own learning teacher/student roles, including working methods/ didactic design questions in relation to teacher/student roles, including individual understanding of learning, plus working methods creating relationships communities of practice, including forms of participation, cooperation, modes of belonging, network questions in relation to communities of practice, including own understanding of forms of participation, cooperation, modes of belonging, network negotiation of meaning, including the interplay between participation and reification in relation to academic and social production of meaning. questions in relation to negotiation of meaning, including individual understanding of the interplay between participation and reification in relation to academic and social production of meaning communication & developing a technical language application of blackboard, including groupings, communication, forms of application questions in relation to application of blackboard, including groupings, communication, forms of application communication, including forms of participation and types of communication questions in relation to communication, including forms of participation and types of communication competence development basic nursing skills, including dealings with patients, forms of conduct in practice, work forms and methodology questions in relation to basic nursing skills, including dealings with patients, forms of conduct in practice, work forms and methodology outside of category observations outside the categories questions in relation to observations outside the categories figure 1: categories for observation and interview (observation and interview guide). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 9 one can say, that the theoretical frame, which was the background for observationsand interviews, steered the concepts and phenomenon that was looked for. the same theoretical frame made the background for the analysis, and the theoretical frame, from which the findings origin is systematically used through the entire analysis. findings if one looks at some of the findings that emerged from the data, findings show that the distance learning students have a selective and targeted way of engaging in communities of practice. findings in relation to age, to being well prepared, feeling responsible for own learning, doing a self-study and in relation to knowledge forms also seem to be of importance and to have precise relevance for the differences between the ways of studying in nursing education. as the focus of this study is on analysing the distance learning programme in relation to the other learning programmes, findings will in the following be presented focusing on the distance learning programme. the findings will therefore be presented using primarily quotations from the distance learning students. student types and learning processes oblinger (2003 & 2005) claims that understanding the learners is something that can make ”learning easier”. every generation of students is defined by different life experience and, therefore, the students are marked by different learning styles and by different ways of communicating. they are also, each of them, marked by different desires and needs in terms of study methods (full time, part time, flexible programme) (oblinger 2003;oblinger 2005). today’s students are at different places in their lives when they commence their studies and, according to my study, there is also a wide variation in the age of the students in the different classes, which also appears to have great influence on the students’ study activities. in relation to the distance learning programme, it might have been expected that the young it-skilled students who use computers, mobile phones, etc., every day when they communicate were the ones who applied to the distance learning programme, but this is not the case. in the interviews, the young students, from the traditional programme say that the reason why they don’t apply to the distance learning programme is because of its flexibility, as they do not believe that they have a strong enough character to work so independently. as one student from the traditional programme expresses, “i would not be motivated enough to have the self-discipline.... and say to myself ’now you just sit yourself down, and stay seated’. i have to meet up, as then you know that you are obliged to come.”(teo,te, 20 years) another student from the same programme said, ”i have never been the type that does very much homework or reads a lot or that kind of thing. i think about having self-discipline enough, they must sit and read a lot. i don’t know if i could.”(tco, te, 24 years) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 10 the students in the distance learning programme are older students, often with another educational background, family, children, and social obligations and in need for a flexible way of studying.according to the interviews and the question why they apply to the distance learning programme, it is characteristic that they do not apply because they want to use the technology that the programme offers, in their everyday life and in their study. they apply because they seek the flexibility. with the help of wenger’s description of engaging in communities of practice, this can be further elaborated (wenger 1998). wenger defines a community of practice as “ groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (wenger 2006). according to wenger, three characteristics, or three characteristic dimensions – mutual engagement a joint enterprise and a shared repertoire – must be fulfilled in order to be able to call something a community of practice (wenger 1998). the mutual engagement is defined by wenger in relation to an area of common interest. the mutual engagement refers to the central subject or area and the members’ identification with it. membership requires an obligation towards the area of common interest and, therefore, there must be a minimum of knowledge about and relation to the area, or a shared competence that ”differentiates” members from other people. members of a community of practice employ themselves with common activities and discussions, help each other and share information. in pursuing their interest, members engage themselves in joint activities and discussions. they build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. in the joint enterprise members interact and learn together. unless they interact and learn together they do not form a community of practice. a joint enterprise does not mean that everybody does the same thing or agrees about everything. wenger describes it as: “an enterprise is part of practice in the same way that rhythm is part of music”(wenger 2006). interaction and learning are thus decisive in order to call something a community of practice. members of a community of practice develop a shared repertoire of resources. this can be experiences, stories, tools, and ways of talking about things or, put in another way, a shared practice. to develop a shared practice takes time and demands continuous interaction (wenger 1998). practice is, according to wenger, about meaning as an experience of everyday life (wenger 1998). meaning is located in a process that he calls negotiation of meaning. negotiation of meaning involves the interaction of two constituent processes: participation and reification. they form a duality that is fundamental for the human experience of meaning and thus to the nature of practice (wenger 1998). participation refers to the process of taking part and also to the relations with others that reflect this process. participation is both personal and social and it reflects both a process and a relation. participation is an active process. what characterizes participation is the possibility of mutual recognition. participation can be connected with several forms of relations and participation in communities of practice forms our experience, but it also forms the community (wenger 1998). reification means giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into “thingness”, as for example forms, points of focus, instruments, monuments, documents etc. as seen in relation to education reification can be theories, models, terms i.e. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 11 in their interplay, participation and reification are both distinct and complementary. they are a fundamental duality. they are two dimensions that interact, they imply each other, they do not substitute for each other (wenger 1998). in relation to the distance learning students choosing the distance learning programme because of its flexibility one can say, that the distance learning students are members of many communities of practice in their everyday life (job, family, education etc.). the distance learning students, as mentioned previously, apply to the distance learning programme because of its flexibility. they do engage in the community of practice that the distance learning programme offers, but they are very selective in their way of engaging in the community. they have an area of common interest and the distance learning students have an obligation towards the area of common interest. but more than focusing on their need to engage themselves in joint activities and discussions, the distance learning students focus on the flexibility that the programme offers. the following findings will show, that the distance learning students are selective and targeted in their way of choosing between participation and reification in relation to the community. responsibility for own learning and preparation studies have already shown the distance learning students do show a greater responsibility for their own learning (barbera 2004;frith & kee 2003;halstead & coudret 2000;jonassen & kwon 2001;kenny 2002;thiele 2003). this study confirms this. according to observations and interviews in relation to the distance learning programme, it is obvious that the distance learning students have (almost) always done their homework. as a distance learning student say in the interview, ”… it’s because i’m a distance learning student, so it’s pointless if i meet up and i’m not prepared, isn’t it? that’s how i see it anyway. because it’s the least i can do, when i come so rarely, don’t you think?” (tef, de, 50 years) the distance learning students are characterized by the fact that they are almost always well prepared for the lessons; they are engaged in their subjects; and they have done their assignments. with wenger one can say that they have a mutual engagement in the programme. their focus on the area of common interest that the community of practice offers is especially drawn towards the knowledge they have to achieve according to the curriculum. their attention is drawn against gaining a shared repertoire of resources. the distance learning students have to work on their curriculum and their tasks at home by themselves, and they only have a small number of lessons at the seminars where they can try to get help with the parts of the subjects they do not understand. that forces them to work with the subject matters and to take responsibility. the responsibility lies with the students, because they have to ask if there is something they don’t understand. this has the effect of drawing their engagement and their attention towards learning in the lessons at the seminars. when asked the question of whether they feel responsible for their own learning, a distance learning students says, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 12 ”i am absolutely sure of that. i think more so than on the standard course. here, we get nothing served on a plate; we have to help ourselves, just as we have to keep ourselves aware of everything else. there is no one that will do it for us, so that’s my opinion for sure.” (tgf, de, 28 years). “so you think there is greater responsibility for your own learning here than with the learning programme you were on before?” “of course, it was also up to us even though we came to the lessons, but, how can i put it, the teachers kept a bit more of an eye on us”, (states a student who has been on the traditional programme before coming to the distance learning programme),(tgf, de, 28 years). another distance learning student says, ”yes here, yes of course.....you have to be committed; you have to find your own time to put aside each day and say that you will get as far as this and that, because if you don’t do these things, well, then you won’t have managed to do your homework by the next seminar”, (tbf, de, 32 years). ” …i think that it demands more of you to be a distance learner, i mean you have to be.... you must have more self-discipline to read every day...that is when you don’t go to the lessons every day…...”, (tbf, de, 32 years). the distance learning programme makes the students way of engaging in communities of practice very deliberate (wenger 1998). on the seminars they engage themselves in joint activities and discussions. they are very focused and selective in relation to the specific knowledge, the shared repertoire they have to gain in relation to the curriculum. they are selective and targeted. the distance learning programme is a self – study between the seminars, and the students develop a special way of economizing with ways of participation and reification. the distance learning students are very well prepared. they seem structured and ”ready”, when they come to the lessons. that is supported by the observation of their working method in the lessons and by interviews concerning their working method. they are committed and they are asking questions in relation to the presentations made. they ask a lot of questions, they listen, take notes, and they want to discuss. they work very seriously with things. the lessons are of importance to them; this is their only possibility to clarify the things that they don’t understand when they sit at home and read. one can say that the seminars are used to check if they are part of the community as well as it is used to check if they are up to date with the curriculum. a distance learning student expresses it this way, ”… when i sit down for a lesson and get some information that is to say, the way we study on the distance learning course – then i really need, how can i put it, to get a run-through of the material, i think, really concrete and precisely when you come here, because you sit and fumble around so much alone at home, don’t you think? yes, and therefore i think that a good run-through of things (read: at the seminar) and then i seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 13 have it! that is, i think it has been good teaching when i leave here and think that i understand it....” (tcf, de, 39 years). distance learning as a self-study wherever a distance learning programme is available on the web, teachers wonder why the students aren’t active in the discussion forums in the learning platforms, or on the internet. in that connection lots of initiatives have been taken, and many of them without any success. it remains silent in those virtual discussion forums. in relation to this study, the same phenomenon has been observed. discussion board (db) is a forum in blackboard (bb), where the students can discuss (among themselves and/or with the teachers), where they can deliver their answers to subject exercises and where they can get help to find the answers to different subject exercises. however, there is not much activity here, and the teachers wonder why the students aren’t more active concerning questions and exercises, and concerning contributions to discussions in db. during the observation period, the distance learning students several times expresses their desire to avoid using db. the students express that they want to read and immerse themselves in their subjects, but they won’t use their time to read, relate to and discuss what fellow students have written. they state, that they choose not to use db because the distance learning programme is an independent or private way of studying, and they will decide for themselves on what and when to use their time. they say that there is a clear potential for using too much time on discussions in db instead of time on immersing themselves in their subjects. as wenger states, members of a community of practice employ themselves with common interest and discussions, help each other and share information. the distance learning students however are selective and targeted in their way of joining the communities of practice. they will employ themselves with common interests and discussions when they attend the seminars, but in between the seminars they don't engage themselves in joint activities and discussions. in relation to the statements in the interviews about not using db and bb, an explanation to the lack of activity is because it takes too long before the answer arrives. a distance learning student says, ”....because it doesn’t give me the same (read: to get an answer via db), and also because so many days go by before you get an answer. i can’t be bothered to sit and wait...” (tef, de, 50 years). “what do you do then if you’re sitting with a question at home which you can’t figure out? well, then i look for another book.” ”and the reason for not asking the question in bb, what’s that?” ”well, it is that i think it takes too long before i get an answer” (tef, de, 50 years). the distance learning student only ask questions via bb, if there is absolutely no other possibility, and that’s why they give the impression they are inactive, and why there is silence in db and bb. they explore a lot of other opportunities before asking the teacher. this is confirmed by the interviews, but also by the observations at the seminars. at the seminars, they seem very active in asking questions in relation to clarifying their homework and their assignments. questions they couldn’t manage to find answers to or understand seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 14 by themselves. one can say that they need the seminars to check their understanding, their knowledge and to check if they are up to date according to the curriculum. there are more than one explanation why the teachers think they are inactive on db and bb. one explanation is that the students think it takes too long before they get an answer; another is that they want to find the answers by themselves and not just get it from a teacher. in the interviews, the students express that they only ask questions via bb if absolutely necessary. it is only if they can’t find the answers, by themselves, that they ask questions through bb. the students express in the interviews that they really try many other ways to find the answers to their questions, before they ask the teacher. they also say that it is not good enough for them to get the answer to the question, they also want to know where and how they find the answer. the distance learning student say, "i try to find the information myself, as far as possible”.(tef,de, 50 years) ”i think i would make a bigger effort to figure it out on my own at first, the first time in any case, and if i really couldn’t figure it out, then i’d ask about .” (tgf, de, 28 years) ”yes, but it gives me greater satisfaction to figure it out myself”, (tgf, de, 28 years) ”no, then i would find another way to learn it, another reference, book or...” (tdf,de, 22 years). they want to find the answers themselves, or as a distance learning student expressed it in the interview, ”….because i don’t learn anything through people telling me the answer, that is i only learn if i do it myself (read: find the answer)......or you end up still sitting with the question: well how did he work that out?..... and i don’t really think there is anything constructive in that....just to give the answer to the questions.” (tff, de, 29 years). knowledge and forms of knowledge knowledge is not only knowledge, but also a much more differentiated and complex dimension. according to scharmer (2001, 2007), the different knowledge forms is described as explicit, tacit and self – transcending knowledge. described in a more simple way, knowledge can also be described as the following four kinds of knowledge: know-why; know–what; know-who; and know-how. and the point is that all four of these must play together to gain optimal learning conditions. “know-why” is a theoretical form of knowledge, which makes us able to argue, make decisions and draw conclusions. “know-what” is formalized knowledge, which focuses on objective theoretical knowledge. ”know-who” focuses on understanding other people and on the values we have in communities. it is practical knowledge, which, in technical terms often stands for “silent knowledge”, and the term contains a common social understanding. finally, “know-how” is described as “learning-by-doing”, and the term has a practically oriented slant, just as “know-who” has. “know-how” is gained through practice seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 15 (hemmingsen 2000; scharmer 2001; scharmer 2001; scharmer 2007;thomsen 2001). according to the observations and interviews in this study, one more form of knowledge can be added to the above four. this knowledge form is also necessary for learning to take place, and is called ”know-where”. the distancelearning student's express that objective theoretical knowledge, “know-what”, which they can read by themselves, ask questions about and get answers in relation to, isn’t enough. they also want to know why it is like that (“knowwhy”), so that they can reason about it, extract and draw conclusions, and they want to know where to find the answers (“know-where”). the distance learning students, as mentioned earlier, not only want to get the answers to their questions, but they want the possibilities and help to find the answers by themselves. they want to know more than the answers; they want to be able to find out, how to find the answers. they want to do this by themselves, and they want to find the information they need for this, also by themselves e.g. by seeking new or other literature. in relation to the research question on how the learning processes is affected by the fact that nursing students learn via the distance learning programme one answer is that the distance learning programme attracts another type of students than the traditional programme does. as stated earlier there is a wide variation in the age of the students in the different classes, which also appears to have great influence on the students’ study activities. the distance learning programme, which is also concluded in a number of other studies, increases student independence and responsibility. the distance learning students learn to take responsibility and to seek knowledge. this study show, as oblinger also stated (2005), that beyond the four knowledge forms (know what, know-why, know-who og know-how), one more can be added, in relation to the distance learning programme. it is the knowledge form ”know-where”, that is necessary in relation to learning under this programme (oblinger 2005). the fact, that the distance learning students are on their own in between the seminars forces them to seek knowledge on their own. they need to know where to find answers to their questions and they need to be able to do it on their own because they only attend the seminars every fourth week. conclusion the distance learning programme forces the students to meet up for their seminars well prepared, so that the seminars can be used constructively to get the answers to the elements and questions that they cannot understand or manage to find answers to on their own. they need the seminars to check their understanding, and their knowledge. in relation to the interaction perspective mentioned in the review, the distance learning students are very selective and targeted when they attend the seminars. it seems that they do not primarily attend the seminars because of the interaction perspective but because of the knowledge perspective. their purpose on the seminars is clearly to get answers to the problems that they didn’t manage to solve on their own. the fact that the distance learning students are members of multiple communities of practice (job, family etc.) do, that they selective and targeted choose when to work alone and when to cooperate in communities of practice in the programme (wenger 1998). they seem structured and ready when they attend the seminars. with wenger one can say, that the distance learning programme makes their way of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 16 engaging in communities of practice very deliberate (wenger 1998). they have to be selective and targeted. the distance learning programme becomes a self – study between the seminars, and the students develop a special way of economizing with ways of participation – and reification. one can say that the distance learning student's selective and targeted way of engaging in communities of practice can be of importance in relation to the nursing profession. it is an area that needs attention as they, when they engage the profession, as educated nurses, cannot keep up the selective and targeted way of engaging in communities of practice. as a professional nurse they have to join many communities of practice, and to engage in joint activities and discussions both interdisciplinary and in relation to the nursing profession. the programme is of importance for the students’ ability to plan and structure their study. the distance learning programme sets the scene for the students to take responsibility for their own learning and for them to seek knowledge by themselves. the distance-learning students become independent students, and the study becomes an independent study in between the seminars. in relation to the interaction perspective, only the seminars force them to interact and this they, as mentioned, do very targeted and selective. the interaction in the communities of practice does not reach beyond the seminars (wenger 1998). acknowledgements this is a chapter in a phd 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(2006). communities of practicea brief introduction, retrieved february 2006, from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4686 ©2022 (erkko sointu, teemu valtonen, susanne hallberg, jenni kankaanpää, sanna väjsänen & lasse hejkkinen). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods erkko sointu university of eastern finland erkko.sointu@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4001-7264 teemu valtonen university of eastern finland teemu.valtonen@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1803-9865 susanne hallberg university of eastern finland susanne.hallberg@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8868-7673 jenni kankaanpää university of eastern finland jenni.kankaanpaa@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-9041 sanna väisänen university of eastern finland sanna.m.vaisanen@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2981-912x lasse heikkinen university of eastern finland lasse.heikkinen@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1645-0271 mohammed saqr https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4686 mailto:erkko.sointu@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4001-7264 mailto:teemu.valtonen@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1803-9865 mailto:susanne.hallberg@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8868-7673 mailto:jenni.kankaanpaa@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-9041 mailto:sanna.m.vaisanen@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2981-912x mailto:lasse.heikkinen@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1645-0271 learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 university of eastern finland mohammed.saqr@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5881-3109 ville tuominen valamis, university of eastern finland ville.tuominen@valamis.com laura hirsto university of eastern finland laura.hirsto@uef.fi, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8963-3036 abstract research methods, including those of a quantitative nature, are an important part of preservice teacher training in finland. however, quantitative research methods are considered challenging, often feared, and even hated among preservice teachers. this may be due to previous negative experiences and emotions associated with their use, which also influence other aspects of learning such as self-regulation, self-efficacy, and orientations. given such circumstances, new ways to teach and support the learning of quantitative methods are needed. here, we investigate the self-regulation, self-efficacy, orientations, and emotions of preservice teachers (n = 38) enrolled in a quantitative methods online course incorporating learning analytics and a flipped learning approach. dispositional learning analytics data from five measurement points were used, and data were analyzed via descriptive statistics, internal consistency (cronbach alpha), bootstrapped paired sample t-test (between first and final measurement point), and profiles based on mean. the results demonstrate that in this teaching context, preservice teachers’ time management skills can be improved, and task avoidance, anxiety, and boredom towards quantitative methods decreased. the meaning of these results from the teaching context perspective are also examined, as are the limitations and implications of this study. keywords: research methods, quantitative methods, preservice teacher, learning analytics, flipped learning, online teaching introduction preservice teacher training (e.g., as a special education teacher or classroom teacher) takes approximately five years in finland. generally, teaching as a profession is highly valued among young finnish people; in the year 2021, 26.1% of applicants received a placement to study teacher education at university of eastern finland, with a focus on special and classroom teacher education (vakava, 2021). in finnish teacher training, research methods (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods) are an important part of the mailto:mohammed.saqr@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5881-3109 mailto:ville.tuominen@valamis.com mailto:laura.hirsto@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8963-3036 learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 curriculum, and the training provided can be characterized as scientifically based and research intensive. however, research studies are not the most-favored courses among preservice teachers, and quantitative research methods courses are perhaps the mosthated ones in general. these courses are experienced as being boring, difficult, and even frightening, causing anxiety among preservice teachers (e.g., devaney, 2010; väisänen & pitkäniemi, 2008; väisänen & ylönen, 2004). thus, based on the challenges in teaching quantitative research, it is critical to develop novel ways of thinking about and approaching the instruction of this important subject matter. the aim of this article is to study evolvement of preservice teachers’ self-regulation, self-efficacy, orientation for learning, and emotions during a quantitative research method online course. use of these constructs were founded on the previous research. the course was designed alingin with the flipped learning approach supported with learning analytics. online teaching, flipped learning, and learning analytics over the past decade, the pace of development of various online video conferencing systems (e.g., teams, zoom) and cloud services (e.g., google workplace, office 365) has been swift. during this time, new environments and tools have been provided for supporting different pedagogical aims and needs. within the specific context of teacher training, these technologies are not only used for teachers’ pedagogical purposes, but also to provide those at the preservice level with examples in how to use technology in pedagogically meaningful ways (e.g., as future teachers)—in other words, these experiences are important for developing facility in using technological skills as teachers (tondeur et al., 2012). particularly, teacher trainers can be seen as gatekeepers of technology integration for preparing preservice teachers for their future teaching practices (tondeur et al., 2019). further, digital learning environments provide various tools that can be used to support collaborative learning activities (e.g., koschmann, 2012); serve as platforms to create possibilities for students and teachers to discuss, share their knowledge, and understanding; build shared understanding; and ask questions. one possible approach for considering technology (e.g., conferencing systems, cloud services, electronic environments, and tools) in collaborative learning is the flipped learning (fl) approach (e.g., weller, 2020). according to o’flaherty et al. (2015), no clear model exists of how to implement the fl approach or its pre-stage flipped classroom. while flipped classroom and fl can both be considered pedagogical approaches, one major difference is that flipped classroom is more teacher-driven than fl (e.g., toivola & silfverberg, 2014). in other words, using fl without the necessary learning skills or experiences of online teaching and technology may be challenging for students. thus, it is suggested that starting from the more teacherdirected flipped classroom may be more effective than directly using fl (väisänen & hirsto, 2020). both negative and positive results have been identified in previous studies learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 (e.g., akçayır & akçayır, 2018; o’flaherty et al., 2015). from the negative perspective, since these approaches require self-regulation and time management skills (e.g., boevé et al., 2017; hyppönen et al., 2019), they may influence students who are unfamiliar with them to fall behind in their studies (e.g., chen et al., 2014). from the positive perspective, it has been suggested that the flipped classroom and fl approaches enhance positive learning experiences (sointu et al., 2022; awidi & paynter, 2019); improve students’ learning outcomes (tusa et al., 2018), self-regulation (lai & hwang, 2016), and orientation (strayer, 2012); and, with instructor availability, enhance the possibility of deeper learning (gilboy et al., 2015). additionally, recent study of sointu and colleagues (2019) found that students perceive their teachers as better content experts, instructors, and technology users with the flipped classroom approach. the general idea of flipped classroom (and fl) is that digital materials (e.g., digital handouts or videos) replace the traditional teacher-led lecturing. these materials are provided to the students before or, as is particularly the case with fl, during face-to-face meetings. the time in face-to-face meetings is devoted to more student-centered and collaborative activities; in addition, the teacher’s role becomes more the pedagogical expert who guides the student-centered learning activities and collaborations. in the fl teaching approach, where sequencing and materials are provided to the students during the class meetings, the teacher can provide more group or individualized support for their students based on their particular needs. such specialization can be implemented using various learning management systems and conference tools in online teaching, and learniong analytics may also offer tools for this type of approach. along with the creation of environments and platforms that can facilitate collaboration, there has been active development of technologies that could provide students with more personal and timely support and learning activities. one of these approaches is learning analytics (la), defined as the “measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for the purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs” (lak, 2011). in order to succeed, the learning environments and technologies should be able to capture the various learning activities by the students. different online environments have the capability to capture such data (e.g., clicks, views of online materials, submission and time). with this data and la, it is possible to better understand different learning processes and to better optimize learning activities. even though there are considerable promises and expectations related to la, several challenges exist. a major challenge is, how pedagogical practices can fully take advantage of la and how it can be integrated into teachers’ work (kuhl et al., 2019). the rich data itself as its sources does not easily transform into meaningful information that can be used for supporting teaching and learning processes (e.g., greller & drachsler, 2012); thus, more research in this field is needed. learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 aspects influencing the learning of quantitative research methods various aspects influence learning, particularly the learning of quantitative research methods. in this research, these aspects are theorized as self-regulation, self-efficacy, orientations for learning, and emotions (e.g., broadbent & poon, 2015; pekrun, 2019; pintrich, 2004; vermunt & vermetten, 2004). in addition to general understanding of learning, the selction of these aspect were guided by previous research of quantitative methods learning (devaney, 2010; rautopuro, & väisänen, 2004; väisänen, & ylönen, 2004; väisänen, & pitkäniemi, 2008). self-regulation can be viewed from several different perspectives such as learning process and result, lack of regulation (nurmi et al., 2003; vermunt & vermetten, 2004), and time management (schunk, 2005). self-efficacy is seen as the capability to judge and execute certain types of performance in various circumstances (e.g., bandura, 1997), and students with higher self-efficacy may better succeed in studies when faced with challenges (e.g., schunk & ertmer, 2005). orientations for learning refer to students’ intentions in diverse learning activities. these can be divided into intrinsic (i.e., one’s own will to master the task) and extrinsic (i.e., external need to achieve better) goal orientations, mastery orientation (i.e., interest in the content for learning in general), professional orientation (i.e., relatedness of the content to a future profession), and avoidance orientation (i.e., finding something else to do when facing obstacles) (e.g., broadbent & poon, 2015; nurmi et al. 2003; pintrich, 2004; vermunt & vermetten, 2004). emotions are important considerations in learning processes (e.g., pekrun, 2019), particularly with challenging content. one approach to viewing emotions is the control-value theory (e.g., pekrun et al., 2007, 2017), which can be used to investigate the effects and preconditions of emotions (pekrun, 2006). according to pekrun et al. (2007), anxiety, frustration, and anger are unpleasant or activating negative emotions. anxiety is related to the focus of the learning outcome, and frustration and anger to the learning activity. boredom is related more to the outcomes (e.g., sadness or disappointment), and enjoyment is an activating positive emotion (pekrun et al., 2007). generally, if students’ experiences of control over their learning situations is low, this leads more to negative emotions such as anxiety, frustration, and boredom, whereas high feelings of control can lead to enjoyment (pekrun et al., 2007). based on control-value theory, some emotions can lead students to work more and harder in learning situations and their studies (pekrun, 2006; pekrun et al., 2007, 2017). these factors affecting learning are highly interwoven. from the self-regulation perspective, it is important to recognize the resource management capabilities (i.e., motivational and emotional regulation strategies as well as social resource usage) of students (dresel et al., 2015). moreover, hyppönen et al. (2019) found that low selfregulation, in combination with high task-avoidance, creates a risk to learning during studies in the flipped classroom approach. as self-regulation is considered to be a cyclical learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 process (zimmerman, 2002), it is important to consider the role of emotions, as emotions are found to be important in preservice teacher education quantitatime methods studies (e.g., ylönen & väisänen, 2005). these emotions and experiences are typically based on preservice teachers’ previous challenges and experiences of quantitative methods learning or in mathematics (e.g., väisänen & ylönen, 2004), perhaps as a result of an incorrect understanding of the content area or gossip from the older preservice teachers (rautapuro & väisänen, 2004). the novel instructional methods of fl have also been found to promote students’ learning regulation and collaborative skills (blau & shamir-inbal, 2017), as well as self-efficacy for learning (lai & hwang, 2016). generally, la are suggested to support learners’ self-regulated learning and to increase motivation (ifenthaler & schumacher, 2016), and can be one way to support the learning of challenging contents in preservice teacher education. with these important goals in mind, the purpose of this study was thus to investigate how la with an fl approach supports preservice teachers’ self-regulation, self-efficacy, orientation for learning, and emotions in a quantitative research methods online course over time. methods participants and procedures an eight-week quantitative research methods 2 course was arranged in october– december 2020, and 40 preservice teachers. multiple online questionnaires in the learning management system – i.e. dispositional learning analytics – was collected with five measurement points (m = 11,8-day interval) from all participants. additionally, la data (not reported here) were collected. the majority of the preservice teachers (n = 38; response rate = 95%; mage = 26.03 sdage = 4.55; nfemale = 33, 86.6 %) were in their fourth year of studies and responded to the whole dispositional learning analytics data collection. university of eastern finland institutional review board (decision, 11/2020) approved the research design, and the research strictly followed national ethical principles of research with human participants (kohonen et al., 2019), eu gdpr (2016/679), and the national data protection act (1050/2018). research context the fl approach was used in a fully online teaching setting. in the learning management system, the learning materials were sequenced in 1½-week intervals for preservice teachers to study. following the fl approach, learning management system was built for delivering materials, including videos, handouts, and tasks (i.e., fl materials) in online class meetings. these materials helped participants to familiarize themselves with the content of the topic, learn the subject matter, and complete the designated assignments on the class meeting. during the sessions, fl materials cave students freedom to use these materials as they wish, but also other materials found from library or from the web. learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 following the fl approach, both short theoretical and tutorial videos of the content, tasks, and quizzes (self-correcting with answers) based on tasks were constructed to scaffold preservice teachers’ learning in the learning management system. additionally, participants were encouraged to collaborate with their peers. generally, the use of fl materials, conducting tasks and quizzes were monitored from the learning management system la tools for supporting their learning. the course was constructed in such a way that it could have been carried out as a self-study. still, as the content of quantitative methods is challenging, the majority of the preservice teachers participated in the online class meetings (rate of participation = 84%). the tandem use of zoom and teams was conducted in discussions with participants online. as zoom was used for general discussions with the students, teams was implemented for more personalized or smallgroup support. follwing the fl approach, in situations of needed guidance or help, students could ask in zoom chat or contact the teacher in teams for a call. this type of tandem use was done particularly to support the self-regulation, self-efficacy, orientations, and emotions of the participants. in this way, the role of the teacher was to support and motivate students whenever they needed it. moreover, this made more-individualized support for participants possible. in cases of several participants struggling with the same challenge, the teacher was also able to form groups in teams for peer support. for individual and group support, the teacher was able to use the learning management system la data in order to understand what content was easier or more challenging for participants. additionally, course teacher used dispositional learning analytics data to consider students’ regulation and emotions for the their studies. finally, preservice teachers were well-guided in the beginning about the learning approach, expectations, objectives, and how to use the analytics in the learning management system for monitoring own learning. measures and data analysis we collected dispositional learning analytics data using several questionnaires and their subscales: (1) self-regulation was measured with subscales of (1.1) self-regulation of learning processes and results, (1.2) lack of regulation from the inventory of learning styles (vermunt, 1994), and (1.3) time management from motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mslq; pintrich, 1991). (2.1) self-efficacy was measured with a subscale from mslq (pintrich, 1991). (3) orientation was measured with subscales of (3.1) avoidance orientation from the strategy attribution questionnaire (nurmi et al., 1995), (3.2) extrinsic and (3.3) intrinsic goal orientation from mslq (pintrich, 1991), and (3.4) professional and (3.5) mastery orientation designed and pilot-tested for the research project. (4) measures for emotions were measured with subscales of (4.1) anxiety (väisänen & ylönen, 2004), and (4.2) boredom and (4.3) enjoyment towards quantitative research methods (pekrun et al., 2011). participants responded to the measures 1.1 (e.g., when i have difficulty grasping a particular piece of subject matter, i try to analyze why it learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 is difficult for me) and 1.2 (e.g., i notice that i have trouble processing a large amount of subject matter) with a five-point likert-type scale (1 = i do this seldom or never, 5 = i do this almost always). participants responded to the remaining measures with a six-point likert-type scale: 1.3 (e.g., i make good use of my study time), 2.1 (e.g., i expect to do well in my studies), 3.1 (e.g., i often find other things to do when i have a difficult task ahead of me), 3.2 (e.g., my main concern is to get good grades in my studies), 3.3 (e.g., i prefer to study matters which are challenging and i can learn new things from), 3.4 (e.g., this course is very important for my future professional skills), 3.4 (e.g., i am really interested in the study contents of this course), 4.1 (e.g., i feel anxious in studying quantitative methods), 4.2 (e.g., studying quantitative methods is so boring that it is difficult to stay awake), and 4.3 (e.g., i really look forward to studying quantitative methods). previous studies indicate adequate internal consistency of the selected measures. data were analyzed, first, by investigating the internal consistency (cronbach alpha [α]) for reliability of the used measures. we used criteria (α > 0.7) for the indicator of adequate reliability (nunnally & berstein, 1994). second, based on the adequate α score, we calculated mean composite (i.e., sum) scores for interpreting the mean (m) and standard deviation (sd) based on the original metric of measures. third, we ran paired sample ttests (with bootstrap) for the first measurement point (t1) and last measurement point (t5) to investigate possible statistically significant differences between t1 and t5. bootstrap was used, as the sample size was small and some subscales violated the data normality assumptions. fourth, cohen’s d (d) effect size (es) was calculated to investigate the magnitude of possible differences. we used cohen (1988) criteria for d es < 0.1 no, 0.1–0.5 small, 0.5–0.8 intermediate, and > 0.8 large effect. finally, based on the m, profiles of each measurement point were constructed to represent the change over time of statistically significant subscales. results the reliability of subscales, descriptive statistics (m, sd), and the results of paired sample t-tests (p, d) are presented in table 1. based on the results, internal consistency of all subscales was adequate (α > 0.7). base on the statistically significant differences between the first (t1) and final (t5) measurement points, preservice teachers had better (1.3) time management, with small effect size (es); less (3.1) task avoidance, with es approaching large; and less (4.1.) anxiety as well as (4.3) boredom towards quantitative research methods learning, with intermediate es at the end of the course. on the other hand, preservice teachers’ (3.3) intrinsic goal orientations and (3.4) professional orientations for quantitative research methods decreased during the course, with small es. learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 table 1 reliability, descriptive statistics, and paired sample t-tests results of measured areas t1 t5 paired sample t-test t1, t5 α m (sd) m (sd) p d (1.1) self-regulation of learning processes and results .80 2.32 (0.85) 2.38 (0.89) n.s. – (1.2) lack of regulation .82 2.38 (0.76) 2.51 (0.98) n.s. – (1.3) time management .71 3.79 (1.03) 4.03 (1.07) <0.05 0.38 (2.1) self-efficacy for learning .80 3.35 (0.92) 3.49 (0.98) n.s. – (3.1) task avoidance .84 3.15 (1.14) 2.62 (1.22) <0.01 0.71 (3.2) extrinsic goal orientation .72 2.96 (0.94) 2.84 (1.21) n.s. – (3.3) intrinsic goal orientation .74 3.52 (0.78) 3.27 (0.94) <0.01 0.32 (3.4) professional orientation .95 2.60 (1.10) 2.25 (1.09) <0.05 0.34 (3.5) mastery orientation .82 3.08 (1.02) 3.01 (1.06) n.s. – (4.1) anxiety towards qrm .92 3.99 (1.35) 3.26 (1.48) <0.01 0.64 (4.2) boredom towards qrm .83 3.00 (1.05) 2.63 (1.21) <0.01 0.51 (4.3) enjoyment towards qrm .88 2.59 (0.97) 2.80 (0.93) n.s. – note: t1 first and t5 final measurement points, qrm quantitative research methods, α cronbach alpha, m mean, sd standard deviation, p significance of paired sample t-tests between t1 and t5 measurement points, d cohen d effect size, n.s. non-significant. the results of significant paired t-tests between t1–t5 are presented as mean-based profiles in figure 1. these profiles indicate that the (1.3) time management (tim; grey line) improved between t1–t3, decreased for t4, but improved almost to the highest level for t5. (3.1) task avoidance (avo; dark blue line), on the other hand, increased from t1 to t2, but dropped dramatically for t3 and remained at that level until t5. (4.1) anxiety towards quantitative research methods (anx; dark magenta line) was the highest in t1 of all learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 measured constructs, but steadily decreased towards the end of the course (i.e., t5). (4.3) boredom towards quantitative research methods (bor; green line) decreased from t1 to t3, but slightly increased for t4 and remained there in t5. (3.3) intrinsic goal orientation (int; brown line) steadily decreased from t1 to t4, but made a slight positive change for t5, still remaining lower that in t1. (3.4) professional orientation (prof) was the lowest of all measured constructs in t1, as it decreased to t3 and remained at that level until the end of the course (t5). figure 1 t1–t5 student profiles during quantitative research methods course note: avo task avoidance, int intrinsic goal orientation, tim time management, prof professional orientation, anx anxiety, and bor boredom towards quantitative research methods. only statistically significant results between the first (t1) and fifth (t5) are presented in the figure. f learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 discussion the purpose of this study was to investigate preservice teachers’ self-regulation, selfefficacy, orientation for learning, and emotions in a quantitative research method online course over time. the course used learning analytics (la) and the flipped learning (fl) approach. based on the results of the study, time management (self-regulation) improved, while task avoidance (orientation), anxiety, and boredom (negative emotions) for quantitative research methods decreased during the course, as did intrinsic goal orientation and professional orientation. time management was the only subscale of self-regulation that changed in a statistically significant manner. still, this is an important aspect, as time management is part of the self-regulation process, namely as recourse management (schunk, 2005). it may be that the fl approach with la supports the structuring of scheduling preservice teachers’ learning, thus supporting their understanding of scheduling and how to plan, control, and manage their own learning actions (cf. zimmerman, 2008). moreover, the clear structure of fl, with the support of la, may bolster the metacognitive monitoring (see zimmerman, 2002) of preservice teachers, which in turn supports their time management. regardless, the general assumption that la supports learners’ self-regulated learning (ifenthaler & schumacher, 2016) was not confirmed in any of the aspects used in this study. it may be that the content itself (i.e., quantitative research methods) requires even stronger support for self-regulation, as the beliefs from history and previous emotions strongly influence the learning of this content. task avoidance was the measured area that changed most strongly during the course. based on the previous finding by hyppönen and colleagues (2019), task avoidance with low self-regulation is a major risk for challenges during the studies in the flipped classroom context. moreover, task avoidance can lead to a lack of effort and, ultimately, study failure (nurmi et al., 2003). in light of this, the result that task avoidance can be decreased with an effect size approaching large is quite promising. nurmi et al. (2003) also consider that low levels of regulation lead to higher task avoidance. task avoidance is also a challenge observed by higher education teachers because the responsibility of keeping up with studies and course competition is the responsibility of the student (i.e., preservice teachers, in this case) (hyppönen et al., 2019). in such a situation, la offers an option for tackling this challenge, and the decreasing level of task avoidance may be one clear indicator of how la can support student learning. time management can have an influence on this, likewise the decreasing change of negative emotions. the negative emotions (i.e., anxiety and boredom) also decreased significantly with intermediate effect size during the course. this is an interesting result, as previous research has found quantitative research methods studies to be frightening, boring, and learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 difficult (e.g., devaney, 2010; väisänen & pitkäniemi, 2008; ylönen & väisänen, 2004). the decreasing negative emotions may be seen as more activating emotions for learning (i.e., preservice teachers observe that this is not that difficult or frightening). in particular, the decrease of anxiety that is related to the learning outcome, decreasing boredom, and less deactivating negative emotions (cf. pekrun et al., 2007) support this. as the control of learning improves, this should lead to enjoyment or at least to less anxiety and boredom (cf. pekrun et al., 2017). the fl approach might also help students to understand the content better, which may in turn lead to less negative emotions as concerns the challenging content. interestingly, however, intrinsic goal orientation and professional orientation during this quantitative research methods course decreased. it may be that the content has so large a stigma among the preservice teachers that positive change or even no change at all for intrinsic orientation is difficult to achieve. the result of no change in student enjoyment may support this notion, as no positive emotion change occurred, even though the negative emotions decreased. thus, changing this stigma cannot be achieved during one course, and this should be considered for the entire preservice teacher training level. moreover, students participating in the course are most likely future teachers, not researchers. it may be that preservice teachers do not, at this stage, find the research methods training important for their future work. still, research methods studies have been found to be important for the quality of finnish teacher training. the profiles from the first (t1) to last (t5) measurement points indicated some fluctuations in time management, task avoidance, orientations, and emotions during the course. several factors may influence this, such as teacher effect, challenges in the lms, and students’ individual characteristics and situations. for example, with regard to the final set, students may have started to feel exhausted as the academic year proceeded and the end of the semester approached. additionally, the contents became more challenging during the course. nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that these differences were not tested with statistical methods in all measurement points (only between t1 and t5), and more research on this matter is warranted. from the overall view of this study, the on-time support of course teachers for preservice teachers via la, along with the possibility of making one’s own observations of progress via la (cf. barthakur et al., 2021), can have a positive influence on increased time management and decreased task avoidance, anxiety, and boredom. in addition, la can support students’ understanding of themselves as learners as well as their learning skills and metacognitive thinking (durall et al., 2014; marzouk et al., 2016), which is partially seen in our study results. in this sense, perhaps the fl approach offers a clearer structure for teachers using lms and technology. for the teacher of this type of course, the fl approach can offer a meaningful pedagogical way to take advantage of la as a valuable learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 support mechanism. in this way, the rich data itself and its sources, can be more easily transformed into meaningful information for supporting teaching and learning processes (cf., greller & drachsler, 2012). clear pedagogical practices are needed to take advantage of la and to display how teachers can integrate la into their teaching practices (kuhl et al., 2019), which is seen in turn as a clearer structure to the students as well. the clear sequencing structure of the fl approach, with its on-time materials as a learning aid for preservice teachers to use, improves students’ time management and decreases their task avoidance as well as negative emotions. moreover, possibility for general support (e.g., in zoom) and more individualized support (e.g., in teams) resonates also with the positive results of this research. not only these conferencing systems, but also cloud services and functional learning systems stitched together with learning analytics and meaningful pedagogy (i.e., flipped learning approach, in this case), can enhance the learning of challenging content associated with research studies, namely, quantitative research methods. limitations and future research there are limitations to this research, which tie in with our suggestions for future studies. first, even though the sample represented well the whole course, it is rather small. in the future, larger data sets should be obtained, and stronger analyses should be used with larger sample sizes, including measurement and structure equation modeling. second, the research did not yet use or merge the la data. in the future, the results should be investigated with la data to obtain a more comprehensive understanding. further, the use of qualitative data would improve the understanding of the learning analytics used in this type of setting. third, as no (quasi-)experimental designs were used in the research, the results should be investigated with these types of designs to obtain stronger results. this would also include the possibility of controlling for various aspects, such as teacher effect. implications this paper offers one example of using learning analytics in a combination flipped learning approach and online teaching modality to provide instruction in a higher education research methods course. considering these elements helps us to understand how to support learning with meaningful pedagogy and learning analytics. also, the tandem use of conference tools with learning analytics can offer additional insight for supporting learning in the online teaching context. moreover, higher education can involve a variety of challenging content material and important aspects for learning (e.g., time management, task avoidance, and emotions) that should be considered in course instruction and learning. finally, this paper can be used to understand the role of research method teaching in finland and internationally. learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 acknowledgements we would like to sincerely than all students for participating in research. the writing of this article was supported by funding from business finland through the european regional development fund (erdf) project “utilization of learning analytics in the various educational levels for supporting self-regulated learning (oahot)” (grant no 5145/31/2019). we would like to thank our funder. references akçayır, g., & akçayır, m. 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(2020). 25 years of ed tech. athabasca university press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01 ylönen, s., & väisänen, p. (2005). tilastolliset menetelmät opettajankoulutuksessa – oppimisen x, y, z [statistical method in teacher education, x, y, z of learning]. in j. enkenberg, e. savolainen, & p. väisänen (eds.), tutkija opettajankoulutus – taitava opettaja (research-based teacher education – skillfull teacher). sokl verkkokirjoja. http://sokl.uef.fi/verkkojulkaisut/tutkivaope/index.htm zimmerman, b. j. (2002). becoming a self-regulated learner: an overview. theory into practice, 41, 64–79. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 zimmerman, b. j. (2008). investigation self-regulation and motivation: historical background, methodological developments, and future prospects. american educational research journal, 45(1), 166–183. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831207312909 bios erkko sointu (phd, education) works as a professor of special education at the school of educational sciences and psychology, university of eastern finland. his current research efforts focus on research studies of higher education students, teacher education, learning analytics, as well as students’ behavioral and emotional challenges and strengths. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci10120366 https://www2.helsinki.fi/fi/verkostot/kasvatusalan-valintayhteistyoverkosto/hakeminen/tilastoja https://www2.helsinki.fi/fi/verkostot/kasvatusalan-valintayhteistyoverkosto/hakeminen/tilastoja https://doi.org/10.1037/t14424-000 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-004-0005-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-004-0005-y https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01 http://sokl.uef.fi/verkkojulkaisut/tutkivaope/index.htm https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2 https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831207312909 learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 19 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4001-7264 teemu valtonen (phd, education) works as a professor at the school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland. his research interests lie in the use of information and communication technology (ict) in education, targeting especially on pre-service teachers’ skills and readiness to use ict in education, mainly within technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) and theory of planned behavior (tpb) frameworks. orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1803-9865 susanne hallberg (m. a., ed.) is a project researcher and a doctoral student at the school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland. susanne’s research interests comprise pedagogical usability aspects of innovative physical and digital learning environments, and educational technology. orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8868-7673 jenni kankaanpää (m. a., ed.) is a project researcher and a doctoral student at the school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland. her research interests lie in higher education teachers’ pedagogical development work, flipped and blended learning, and learning analytics. orcid http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-9041 sanna väisänen (phd, education) works as a postdoctoral researcher at the school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland. her research interests are in learning analytics, self-regulated learning, and well-being. orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2981-912x lasse heikkinen (phd) is a university lecturer at the department of applied physics, university of eastern finland. his research background is in computational physics and especially in inverse problems. since 2010, he has been teaching-focused position by teaching physics courses. he has introduced a flipped classroom model in his own courses in 2015 and developed courses specifically for learning assessment and student guidance. orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1645-0271 mohammed saqr (phd, learning analytics) works as a senior researcher at the school of computing, university of eastern finland. his research interested focus on and big data in education, network science and science of science. his research in learning analytics focuses on social and temporal networks, machine learning, processand sequence mining as well as temporal processes in general. orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5881-3109 ville tuominen (msc) works as principal learning consultant at valamis group and https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4001-7264 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1803-9865 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8868-7673 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6753-9041 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2981-912x https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1645-0271 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5881-3109 learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 20 vol. 18 – issue 1 – 2022 project researcher at the school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland (uef). his background is in vocational distance learning. he also has long career on many different educational institutes and levels. focus areas are the development of learning design, learning and development in a corporate context, and measuring and analyzing the learning as a business key indicator. orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0412-4775 laura hirsto (phd, education) is a professor of educational science at the school of applied educational science and teacher education, university of eastern finland. her research has focused on the contextual research-based development of teaching, the contextual learning and motivational processes of university students. her current research focuses on contextualized teaching-learning processes and self-regulated learning supported by learning analytics in various contexts from primary level to higher education. she is the leader of the learning analytics oahot project. orcid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8963-3036 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0412-4775 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8963-3036 learning analytics and flipped learning in online teaching for supporting preservice teachers’ learning of quantitative research methods abstract introduction online teaching, flipped learning, and learning analytics aspects influencing the learning of quantitative research methods methods participants and procedures research context measures and data analysis results discussion limitations and future research implications acknowledgements references bios teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators in leading and guiding students’ learning in digital storytelling (dst) | journal article skip to abstract teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators in leading and guiding students’ learning in digital storytelling (dst) jenny niu and hannele niemi faculty of educational sciences university of helsinki e-mail: jenny.niu@helsinki.fi and hannele.niemi@helsinki.fi ©2019 (author name/s), cc-by-4.0 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by-4.0), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. abstract the aim of this study is to find out how the teachers act as mediators to lead and guide students’ learning in digital storytelling (dst). the research framework is based on vygotsky’s mediation theory. the research project was carried out in the 2016-2017 school year. four classes at grade 5 from china and two classes at grade 4 and grade 5 from finland participated in the study. we mainly focus on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews of teachers, researchers’ classroom observations, group discussions, and teachers’ course-planning documents. the main findings are that in dst, the main activities in teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators are facilitating, coaching, and scaffolding when they are doing pedagogical decisions. this study illustrates what teachers did in a dst project and how they have led and guided students’ learning when using the dst pedagogical method. keywords: teachers’ pedagogical role digital storytelling (dst) student-centered knowledge creation mediation theory introduction in the twenty-first century, there have been enormous changes in technology and society. the fast development in information and communication technology (ict) has created a lot of new opportunities as well as new demands in education. throughout the world, countries are setting twenty-first-century competences as the aims of schools (kennedy, 2008), which also places new requirements on the teacher’s pedagogical role. lee and tan (2018) describes that a twenty-first-century teacher is interactive with the students, who are also interactive among students themselves. they propose (mcwilliam, 2009; lee and tan, 2018) that because of the contextual change of learning, the teacher’s role has gradually changed from “sage-on-the-stage” to “guide-on-the-side” and “meddler-in-the middle.” teachers are gradually taking up the role of facilitators. instead of being traditionally didactic for the transmission of knowledge in the class, teachers in the new learning context gradually become knowledge brokers and weave the bits and pieces of knowledge generated by students in the classroom during the learning activities. in our study, we applied digital storytelling (dst) as a pedagogical method that supports both students’ collaboration and their active knowledge creation with digital competences. the major task of our study is to investigate how teachers see their role in this student-centered learning approach. theoretical framework and concepts digital storytelling (dst) as a pedagogical method dst can be defined from several different perspectives. it can describe the practices of everyday people who use digital tools to tell their stories. ohler (2008) defined dst as a creative process in which traditional storytelling is combined with modern digital technology. from an educational perspective, dst is often defined as a reflective learning activity (nelson & hull, 2008) and as a self-representation of its creators (kulla-abbott & polman, 2008). according to robin (2008), dst is a process of creating short stories that allows students and educators to enhance their information gathering; it cultivates students’ higher-order thinking, such as problem-solving skills and critical thinking, and it also facilitate their ability to work in collaborative teams. according to jenkins et al. (2009), dst is a twenty-first century learning mode. stewart and ivala (2017) found that a dst praxis can lead to both reflective and critical engagement with one’s own writing practices, and it can strengthen the synergy between the spoken word, process-based writing and digital formats for composing. dst is student-centered learning approach; it aims to give students a chance to create knowledge from their own starting points about the topic under discussion (lambert, 2013; mcgee, 2015; robin, 2008; rossiter & garcia, 2010). there is evidence suggesting that the method encourages active participation as well as shared learning and creativity (lambert, 2013; mcgee, 2015; niemi et al., 2014; sadik, 2008; shelby-caffey, úbéda, & jenkins, 2014; sukovic, 2014; woodhouse, 2008). niemi et al. (2014) and niemi & multisilta (2016) applied dst in three countries in order to promote twenty-first century competences focusing on collaboration, active participation, and shared learning. they found that dst greatly affects student engagement. many of the above-mentioned dst studies focus on students’ actions or learning processes. research (vivitsou et al. 2017) has also focused on the teachers’ practices in supporting student work in dst. the teachers’ practices in their project (vivitsou et al. 2017) covered four areas – digital literacy, knowledge and skill creation, collaboration and networking – as part of a global sharing pedagogy (niemi & multisilta, 2016). teachers structured and problematized the learning process in order to allow the students to learn in a freer way and helped them to draw connections with reality. in this way, the students actively engaged in informal (natural and technological) environments for knowledge creation and skill development. in our study, we want to find out more about how teachers mediate students’ learning when using dst. dst is like a project-based learning; it can be done in groups or individually. in our research design, we applied the dst pedagogical method to be carried out in groups so that the students could also learn how to work with others in order to develop their communication and collaboration skills. a theory of mediation from a vygotskian perspective in dst according to vygotsky (1978), learning is a mediated activity using tools, symbols, and social interaction, and he strongly emphasizes the role of sociocultural mediation in human development. mediation takes place via three major classes of mediators: material tools, psychological tools, and other human beings (vygotsky, 1978; vygotsky & luria, 1994, pp. 99–174; kozulin, 1990, pp. 111–121; kozulin, 1997, pp. 62–64). the importance of mediation in learning is evidenced in many research studies. feuerstein (1991) suggests that a child’s learning is shaped by the intervention of significant adults, which are referred to as mediators. in the mediated learning situation, adults, or more competent peers, place themselves between the environment and the learner, thus radically changing the conditions for learning. the mediator selects, changes, amplifies, and interprets objects and processes for the child (kozulin & presseisen, 1995). in our study, we applied mediated learning with dst in a social-cultural framework. teachers act as mediators in students’ learning. when teachers set the learning objectives of the dst project and when they guide the students during the working process, they mediate the students’ learning through making pedagogical decisions concerning the learning activities, tasks, tools, and processes. from a vygotskian perspective, teachers apply mediational practices between themselves and the students to scaffold the students within the zone of proximal development (zpd) (vygotsky, 1978). in a dst project, the teacher initiates and designs the learning tools and activities, and the students interact with learning material and other resources and work in groups to create their digital story products together. during the learning process, the teacher guides and leads the learning through facilitating many activities, providing supports, and creating learning opportunities with pedagogical interventions. the teacher’s role in dst is different than in traditional instruction, as it shifts from knowledge transmission to the mediation of the students’ active learning. teachers become mediators who support the students’ work. research question we wanted to find out what kinds of pedagogical decisions and actions teachers carried out in the process of dst and how they supported students in different phases of dst when students played a central role in exploring and building knowledge as creators, producers, and discussants rather than as mere passive listeners. in our study, we focused on what teachers did before the dst project, in the beginning of the project, during the project, and at the end of the project; we used that data to identify the teachers’ pedagogical role in leading and guiding the students’ learning in dst. in this study, the following research question (rq) is proposed: research question: what are the teachers’ roles in leading and guiding students’ learning through mediation with digital storytelling (dst) as a pedagogical method? research method and data gathering participants this study design was based on qualitative research methods. four classes in china in beijing and two classes in finland in helsinki participated in this study. in finland, each class had one primary school class teacher. at that time, four student teachers were doing their teaching practice in those two classes. in china, there were five teachers who were involved in the project: two math teachers, two classroom teachers, and one computer teacher. the participants in this study are presented in table 1. table 1. participants in the study public school number of classes student ages number of dst sessions number of participating teachers experience using dst finnish school in helsinki 2 (about 23 students each class) 10–11 8 (learning geometry shapes) 2 class teachers + 4 student teachers first time using dst, have used designed based learning and project-based learning method before chinese school in beijing 4 (about 40 students each class) 10–11 10–12 (learning geometry area size calculation) 2 math teachers + 2 head teachers + 1 computer teacher first time using dst, have not used other student-centered approach before data collection the data of this study were collected through interviews with teachers, classroom observations by researchers, teachers’ course-planning notes and documentation, and discussion notes among researchers and teachers. table 2 describes the data collection process in this study. we analyzed the data to find out how teachers mediated the students’ learning based on what teachers did before the dst, and at the beginning, middle, and end of the projects. our aim was to identify how the teachers mediated the students’ learning and what roles they played in the dst math learning project. the researchers had several discussions and meetings with the participating teachers before the projects began. we discussed these questions together: what is dst? what are the benefits of using dst? what are the differences in dst compared to project–based learning? what are the processes and steps of dst? what are the learning outcomes? what are the learning contents? what kind of learning environments can be used to support the learning in dst? how can assessments be carried out? those discussions helped teachers in their project planning and implementation. the finnish teachers felt more confident about this method, since they were familiar with a student-centered approach. the chinese teachers and students, in contrast, were used to a teacher-centered approach. table 2. data collection in the study public school interviews classroom observation course planning notes, documents discussion notes between teachers and researchers dst videos finnish school in helsinki 2 separate classroom teacher interviews (90 minutes per each and recorded) 1 group student teachers interview (120 minutes and recorded) 6 times with notes, pictures, videos teaching course materials, slides e-mails, shared google documents 12 videos chinese school in beijing 2 group interviews (about 120 minutes) and recorded 10 times with notes, pictures, videos teaching course materials, slides e-mails, word documents, wechat messages (a chinese social media platform) 20 videos we did semi-structured group interviews for student teachers in finland and a semi-structured group interview in china with all teachers. semi-structured interviews allow researchers to develop in-depth accounts of experiences and perceptions with individuals (cousin, 2009). researchers can use group interviews as a more efficient use of resources and as a means of adding valuable insight to the interpretation of a social or behavioral event (frey & fontana 1991). before the interview, we developed an interview guide. some example of the teacher interview questions are as follows. what is your overall experience with the dst method? how does dst change teachers’ pedagogy? how does dst support students’ learning? what did you do and how did you support the students’ learning in this dst project? what are your roles as a teacher in using dst method? do you plan to use dst method in your future teaching? we used the list of questions and topics that needed to be covered during the interview in a particular order. we followed the guide, and we allowed additional discussions around the topics where appropriate. this provided additional information and data besides what we planned to have. we noticed in our group interview that one person’s answer could stimulate another person’s thoughts, and then we saw additional perspectives. we also received immediate feedback if all the participants discussed the topic with one another. it also saved us a lot of time. but we were cautious not to allow one person to dominate the conversation; we led the conversation so that everyone had the chance to participate and contribute. analysis in this study, we used content analysis. when using content analysis, the aim is to build a model to describe the phenomenon in a conceptual form. both inductive and deductive analysis processes are represented as three main phases: the preparation, organizing, and reporting of the research material (elo & kyngäs, 2007). content analysis is a research method for making valid inferences from data to their context; the purpose is to provide knowledge, new insights, a representation of facts, and a practical guide for action (krippendorff, 1980). the challenge can be that each researcher interprets the data according to her or his subjective perspective (sandelowski, 1995). each inquiry is distinctive, and the results depend on the skills, insights, analytic abilities, and style of the investigator (hoskins & mariano, 2004). in this study, the researchers discussed their observations and interview data to ensure their interpretations would be valid. creswell (2007) says that qualitative researchers approach their topic with a specific worldview, which contains a set of beliefs or assumptions. in this study, we had finnish-, chinese-, and english-speaking researchers, and we wanted to be aware of our cultural backgrounds while we aimed to understand what happened in finnish and chinese classrooms. as van manen (1990, p. 33) notes, qualitative research asks “what is it?” levitt (2015) argues that qualitative research requires one to adopt an interpretative rather than a procedure-driven way of working. qualitative research relies on the identification of the “subjective interpretation of data,” which enables meaningful data interpretation (levitt, 2015). table 3 gives the process of the data analysis, in which three main concepts are identified. table 3. the process of qualitative analysis in the study extracted data examples(activities, tasks, tools, processes etc. through pedagogical decisions) code category theme planning and designing learning environments/space,dividing groups,roleplay…camera, iphone, ipad, paperboard, imoive software, digital story example, real-life examples of different geometry shapes…what do you try to achieve?what do you need?how do you do it?can you explain it to me?what have you learned?you did so well; how did you do it?i like the way you discuss and agree in your group… scaffolding the learning tools and social interactions have an important role in learning facilitating the learning coaching the learning mediators stimulatelearning activities mediating the learning the importance of sociocultural role in human development planinitiateorganize supportusing toolsexplainingillustratingdemonstrating ask good questionsprovoke thinkingencouraging in the model, here represented as a table, there are relationships between the text in the cells in the same row. extracted data examples colum is related to code column. code column is related to extracted data examples column and category column. further: mediating the learning is related to "facilitating the learning", "scaffolding the learning" and "coaching the learning." extracted data examples (activities, tasks, tools, processes etc. through pedagogical decisions) code category theme planning and designing learning environments/space, dividing groups, roleplay… plan initiate organize facilitating the learning mediators stimulate learning activities camera, iphone, ipad, paperboard, imoive software, digital story example, real-life examples of different geometry shapes… support using tools explaining illustrating demonstrating scaffolding the learning mediating the learning what do you try to achieve? what do you need? how do you do it? can you explain it to me? what have you learned? you did so well; how did you do it? i like the way you discuss and agree in your group… ask good questions provoke thinking encouraging coaching the learning the importance of sociocultural role in human development research results how teachers prepared students’ learning before the dst project first, based on the research data, we describe what teachers did before the dst project. both finnish and chinese teachers decided to use dst in students’ math learning. the teachers decided geometry instruction would be used in the dst project. in the finnish classes, the teachers decided that the students would learn geometry shapes, the associated math concepts, and how those geometry shapes are used in real-life situations. in the chinese classrooms, the teachers wanted students to learn how to calculate the area size of different geometry shapes and to apply their learning in real-life situations. the teachers planned time for the project and made sure to have resources, such as ipads and computers, to create the digital stories. even though dst is student-centered knowledge creation, the teachers made many arrangements to ensure students’ learning. the teachers’ planning work was demonstrated in the discussion notes slides, and documents. in the teachers’ interviews, one teacher said the following: “we also organize how many courses for the projects, how much time is needed, and what is to be covered in each lesson.” “teachers play important roles in selecting the topics.” another teacher had this to say: “we also felt that it is important for teachers to do the pedagogical course planning—how much time is needed and what needs to be carried out in each lesson.” from these descriptions of what teachers did before the dst project and even though the project gave students much freedom to design their own stories, the teachers needed to make many pedagogical decisions (e.g., how the project would fit within the school curriculum). the teachers also facilitated the project through preparation. these two educational systems have different curriculums as well as different teaching and learning traditions; however, both countries strive to prepare students to work independently in their groups. how teachers mediated students’ learning in the beginning of the dst project in the beginning of the project, the teachers explained to the students what the dst project was about, the process and the steps, and how many lesson hours in this math learning project with dst. when introducing math learning with dst to students, the chinese and finnish teachers had different approaches. the chinese teachers provided students structured guidance. for example, they showed a digital story video to the students to demonstrate what kinds of digital stories can be created. the video shows how students work in groups to discover and learn about the structural design of a bridge through activities, such as reading books, search information from internet, asking experts, discussing among the students, demonstrating it with paper boards and other objects. then, the teachers explained to the students what they planned to do, the expected learning outcomes, and how the final assessment would be carried out. the finnish classes were more open and were less formal with the final assessment. in one class, the student teachers used roleplay to introduce a real-life problem and asked students to solve it by using geometry concepts. in the roleplay, the student teachers explained that a company had just developed a wonderful new product, but the old product package was outdated, so the company needed to design a sophisticated new product package. the student teachers asked the students to design a product package for their chosen product (e.g., mobile phone, ipad). the students could choose the product and design the product package using their knowledge of geometry. in the finnish school, the teachers divided students into groups. there were fewer students (i.e., about twenty-three students) in the finnish class, and the groups each included three to five students. in the chinese school, the teachers let the students form groups of five to six students. the chinese students were excited, but there were problems. six boys wanted to be in one group; however, the teachers preferred each group to have both boys and girls. also, many high-achieving students gathered in one group. the teachers negotiated with the students to balance the group by gender and skill levels. in the chinese teachers’ group interview, one teacher said the following: we introduced and explained to the students what the dst method is, and how we planned to use it in our math studying. we showed one example. then we helped and participated in forming the groups. we also suggested that each group needs to define the roles of each group member. in an interview, one finnish teacher commented as follows: we [the teacher and student teachers] first selected four topics. then we asked the students to select which topic they were interested in. we formed the groups based on the students’ interests. if too many students were interested in one topic, then we had to decide and negotiate with the students. in the beginning, we had eight small groups; each group had about three students. we noticed that in one small group, one person was very active, and the other two students were not so active. it was difficult for the one active student to make the other two passive students join in the group work. then we combined the small groups to the bigger group (five or six students together). even in bigger group, there were only two students who were very active; these two students were able to motivate others to do things together. we can see that at the beginning of the project, the teachers mediated the students’ learning in many ways. the teachers facilitated learning by introducing the method and theme. then, pedagogical decisions were made by the teachers on how to introduce the dst project and to determine the themes. the formation of student groups was organized by the teachers, and they made pedagogical decisions about how the groups would be formed. how teachers mediated students’ learning during the dst project after the teachers provided the information needed to start the projects, the teachers stepped aside, and the students were in the center of the stage while they made plans, divided responsibilities, searched for information, recorded the learning artifacts, discussed different alternatives, and synthesized and created their digital stories. the teachers, however, still played an active backstage role. the teachers ensured that every child was participating in the learning. in china, the teachers had to find additional learning space for students (e.g., corridors) because the classroom was too small for so many groups engaged in active learning, and it was quite noisy when the students made video clips. the teachers also had to provide some new tools and resources (e.g., ipads, computers). the teachers asked for support from the it teacher, and they facilitated the students’ learning by providing help and support whenever needed. in the teachers’ group interview, one teacher said the following: “through this project, we paid more attention to individual students’ different capability levels. we can give more support to the students who need [it].” “and [we can] ensure all the students actively participate in the learning process and activities.” another teacher added the following: “we asked the it teacher to provide some training for students about how to use digital tools and how to create videos. we provide support to students when they ask for help.” teachers paid attention to the students’ progress and asked questions—an important coaching strategy to create awareness among the students about their progress at a given time. the teachers used a praising strategy in their coaching by drawing attention to the students’ progress, their creative ideas, and their effort, which increased their confidence and motivation. the teachers often did not give direct answers and suggestions to the students; instead, the teachers asked good questions to help the students’ awareness of the situation and to help them move forward. through coaching, the teachers tried to help students improve their work and learning. the teachers also used scaffolding strategies, such as providing a checklist (i.e., the digital story assessment form showing how a good digital story looks) for students to use when they made their own stories. to scaffold the students’ learning, the teachers also used visual and tangible objects (e.g., toothpick sticks and candies to form different shapes) to illustrate geometry concepts. the teachers reminded students of previous learning related to geometry, which students then applied to the current problem. in the self-assessment and peer-assessment, the students were asked to give a grade to each question—five (extremely well), four (very well), three (well), two (moderately), and one (not really at all)—and to give suggestions for improvement. here is the list of questions: how are the important concepts, terms, and information, such as the triangle, square, and surface area, displayed in the video? how well is the story of the video structured? consider the introduction, the interchange between the pictures, the events, and the ending. how well does the story give explanations and reasoning for such thing as why a certain shape is a triangle? how does the video make the material that is supposed to be learned understandable for the viewer? consider the conversations, pictures, animations, etc. how does the subtitling help the viewers understand the most important mathematical terms as well as the material that is supposed to be learned? how does the video keep the viewer engaged? consider the music, the viewing angles, and the close and remote shooting. what is your overall opinion of the video? the assessment questionnaire was given to students before they started to make their digital story videos so that they could see what the important elements in good digital stories were. in the interviews, we asked the teachers directly, “what are your roles as a teacher in using dst method?” one teacher gave very clear description in response: “we are organizers for the project. we provide inspiration and guidance for the students. we are also coordinators when there are conflicts and difficulties. we are helpers and supporters during the process, as scaffolding to our students.” one teacher stated the following, with which several other teachers agreed: “one challenge for me as teacher in doing dst is that it takes longer than the usual way we teach. we notice that dst has many good sides. students are very excited and engaged in what they are doing, and they learn many things besides math. sometimes it takes longer for the students to carry out the activities than we expected. i feel that we need more time to plan for next dst project.” another teacher commented: “this digital storytelling method needs many skills from children. as a teacher, i can observe what skills children already have and what they are good at and what skills need further development.” the interview data clearly showed that the teachers mediate the students’ learning by facilitating, coaching, and scaffolding. this also showed the teachers’ professional competence in identifying the students’ needs and developing their potential. what teachers did to mediate students’ learning at the end of the dst project at the end of the project, each group presented their digital story to the whole class. after each group presentation, the teacher asked the group to self-assess their digital story and then asked other students to give a peer assessment; the teacher then provided their assessment. the assessment was designed for students’ improvement. the teacher asked the students to assess their digital story, based on the criteria in the assessment form, by asking two main questions: (a) what were the good elements in this digital story; (b) if you would have more time, how would you like to make the digital story better? in addition, the finnish teachers asked their students questions to check students’ learning and understanding of the geometry shapes and concepts. the chinese teachers asked students to solve three math problems related to calculating the area of geometry shapes. in summary, at the end of the dst project, the teachers made pedagogical decisions on how the assessment would be used to achieve improvement-led assessment. the teachers facilitated the assessment by leading and guiding the assessment questions; they also used scaffolding to check if the students understood the math and geometrical concepts. during one classroom observation, after one group of students made their digital story presentation, one finnish teacher asked the other students the following: “can someone tell us what good things in this digital story were? if there were more time, how could they improve their digital stories?” later, in one interview with a student from that class, the researcher asked her: “what have you learned from this dst project?” the student said, “i learned…and i also learned how to give comments to others nicely.” this demonstrates that the teacher scaffolded the students in how to give feedback to others nicely. in this dst project, the improvement-based assessment was used for learning and to help students to see what went well; their achievement made them feel proud of themselves and also increased their confidence in learning. at the same time, the assessment helped students see how they could develop further with suggestions. additionally, we included learning reflection by asking good questions to the students after they finished their dst presentations. in the teachers’ interview, we also asked this question: “what are the biggest changes for teachers in doing this dst project? the following are the teachers’ collective answers: “with the traditional method, we teach the students, then the students do the exercise, and then we check whether they have done it correctly. now with the digital storytelling method, the students need to find out how to solve the math problems.” “the teachers step from the front of the stage to the back of the stage.” “with the traditional method, students are more passive during studying. with dst, students are more engaged and more active.” this [dst] method is totally different compared to traditional teaching methods. compared to the traditional method, in which teachers are at center stage and teach knowledge to their students, the dst method is a student-centered approach. in this new method, we did not teach the students. it was the students who learn the knowledge by themselves. in this method, the key point is that the teachers step out from the center of the classroom. the evidence indicates that dst can bring students to the center of the learning stage. teachers had moved to the side of the classroom to have a more supportive role. when we looked through all the students’ dst videos, we noticed that they demonstrated the objectives the teachers had set before the projects. the finnish students’ videos show how they proposed a real-life problem and how they used math concepts of geometry shapes to solve the problem and how they designed real product packages. the chinese students’ videos show them learning how to calculate the area size of different geometry shapes and how to use their learning in real-life problems. it is interesting to see that the finnish students’ videos have more creativity elements in terms the diversity of the products. the chinese students’ videos have more common elements and were more knowledge focused. in both the chinese and finnish students’ videos, we can see that students have used other skills besides the math elements, such as language, music, ict, and story logic structure. based on the research data of classroom observation, discussion with teachers, and the dst videos, we also noticed that the finnish teachers used more coaching strategies than the chinese ones in mediating students learning. the finnish teachers asked more questions to provoke students’ learning. they paid more attention to students’ skills and competence development beyond simply math knowledge, such as communication skills. chinese teachers focused more on students’ knowledge learning during the projects. summary of the findings in this study, we focused on the teachers’ roles as mediators in leading and guiding students’ learning. the data described what the teachers did in the process of a dst project and demonstrated that the teachers made many pedagogical decisions based on the students’ needs and classroom situations. as mediators, they had the three main roles are (1) facilitating; (2) coaching; and (3) scaffolding the students’ learning: the teachers facilitated the dst project to enable students to actively engage in student-centered learning. facilitating the students’ learning consists of important aspects in the process of teachers’ pedagogical decisions, which were related to managing the whole dst project. these aspects included the following: introducing the method and theme; creating a learning community; being responsible for the project’s process; providing needed information as well as a learning space; and creating an interactive and collaborative learning atmosphere. the teachers used coaching tactics to inspire and lead the students in learning through roleplaying, asking good questions, praising the students’ progress, and giving positive and constructive feedback. teachers’ coaching of the students’ learning includes aspects that help students to improve their work, which included the following: inspiring the students; uncovering the students’ potential, talents, and goals; clarifying and helping the students breaking down tasks; and motivating and empowering the students by praising their progress and emphasizing their strengths. scaffolding strategies were used by teachers to demonstrate the learning outcome product through an existing digital story; they also used visual and tangible objects (e.g., paper board, toothpick sticks) to illustrate the geometry shapes. scaffolding includes teachers’ pedagogical decisions that provide structural or mental tools to support students’ learning and can include the following: demonstrating and modelling what the students need to do; providing checklists for the students’ expected outcome product; using visual and tangible objects to illustrate the geometry shapes; and checking for understanding. the focus of this research was to find how teachers led and guided students’ learning, which reflects the teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators. figure 1 illustrates the teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators in facilitating, coaching, and scaffolding through pedagogical decision making for the students’ learning in dst. figure 1. summary of the teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators in dst discussion the aim of this study was to discover the teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators (vygotsky, 1978) in leading and guiding the students’ learning with dst. the teacher’s role is changing from knowledge transmission at the center of the classroom stage to a supportive role from the side of the classroom, which enables the students’ active knowledge construction. as mcwilliam (2009, p. 281–293) stated, teachers’ pedagogical identity shifted from “sage-on-the stage” to “guide-on-the-side.” we identified the three main functions of facilitating, coaching and scaffolding, which the teachers did as mediators through pedagogical decision making in the dst project. facilitation is a common term in education. a facilitator helps a group of people to understand their common objectives and helps them to plan how to achieve these objectives (bens, 2012). this requires that the facilitator design and run the group activity smoothly so to achieve the objectives. facilitating enables groups to work more effectively to collaborate and achieve their goals (kaner et al. 2007). the facilitator’s job is to support everyone to do their best thinking and working. to do this, the facilitator encourages full participation, promotes mutual understanding, and cultivates shared responsibility (kaner et al. 2007). in education, facilitating works with the goal of having students take as much responsibility for their own learning as possible (metz, 2013). teachers may shift to a facilitative role to increase student ownership of the learning process (underhill 1999). one main characteristic of the dst method is the student-centered knowledge creation approach. the students are at the center of the learning stage; however, this will not happen without teachers facilitating the learning process. facilitating means planning, guiding, and managing the group activity by creating a flourishing learning process and environment; this ensures everyone’s participation and success in meeting the objectives of the group activity. facilitation was very visible in this dst project. as gu (2018) has pointed out, teachers are the organizers of the learning process, designers of the learning environment, and helpers of the students’ learning experience. in this dst project, teachers facilitated the students’ learning by (a) introducing the method and theme, (b) creating learning community, (c) being responsible for the learning process, (d) providing needed information and a supportive learning environment, and (e) supporting interactions within the collaborative learning process. the concept of coaching is often used in sport or in goal-oriented learning processes. it is a form of development in which a person (i.e., coach) supports a learner or client in achieving a specific goal by providing training and guidance (passmore, 2016). coaching is the process of aiming for improved performance. in this dst study, coaching was often associated with asking good questions to discover the right direction, to build motivation, and to define concrete actions. through the teachers’ questions, the students became aware of the learning outcomes; they uncovered their potential and built their inner strength, confidence, and motivation. additionally, the teachers encouraged the students even when there were difficulties; they praised the students’ progress, built students’ strength and motivation, and led the students to concrete actions. the teachers, therefore, played an extremely important role in coaching students in the right direction and providing motivation to achieve better performance. scaffolding is a structure of “support points” for performing an action to develop the children’s zone of proximal development (zpd) (vygotsky, 1978; obukhova & korepanova, 2009). at school, in classroom practice, teachers can use various scaffolding strategies to support the students’ development in their zone of proximal development (zpd). in vivitsou et al.’s (2017) study, teachers used scaffolding techniques in dst. in this dst project, to support student-centered learning, the teachers scaffolded the students by showing them a good digital story and then by encouraging them to use paper board to cut different geometry shapes. the teachers provided a checklist for assessing the digital stories. visual and tangible objects were used to illustrate the geometry shapes. scaffolding is the support given during the learning process, which is tailored to the needs of the students; the intention is to help the students achieve their learning goals (sawyer, 2013). some scaffolding means (van de pol et al. 2010) are modeling, explaining, demonstrating, and giving feedbacks and handouts. these three concepts identified in the teachers’ work in the dst project are widely used in educational settings, not only in the context of dst. we can conclude that findings suggest the teachers’ pedagogical role as mediators is in dst is very essential. the teachers made concrete and realistic pedagogical planning, and made decisions to react and adjust to the learning situation and on the students’ needs and capacities in order to develop the students’ active learning and to achieve the desired learning outcomes. limitations and further study in this study, the main topic of learning with dst was related to geometry for tenand eleven-year-old students. also, this study studies the teacher’s role only in one subject matter and only in two schools and with students at a specific age level. it is important to expand the study to other subject matters, such as language, ict, and music. the project could also be more inter-disciplinary in using dst in learning. it would be important to find out whether teacher’s role would change if the students were younger or older or if the learning concepts were more abstract and difficult. in this study, the teachers led and guided the students’ learning in groups, and the study did not provide detailed information about how teachers supported for weaker students in an individualized manner. further studies could focus more on how teachers support individualized learning in the student-centered learning method. this study was carried out in finland and in china, which have very different education systems and different cultural backgrounds. additional studies could be done in other countries. additionally, it is also important to find out how teachers integrate their teaching with their national curriculum over a longer period of time. even though these research findings were discovered using dst, it would be interesting to find out if the same results could be found and tested in other student-centered pedagogical methods or approaches with a different emphasis. future studies can pursue research in project-based or problem-based learning, or in phenomenon-based learning. we suggest that more research should be carried out to help teachers who use student-centered pedagogical methods and approaches. acknowledgements authors want to thank the advanced innovation center for future education (aicfe), beijing normal university, and university of helsinki for financing the project. authors express thanks to their co-researchers: baoping li from beijing normal university and marianna vivitsou from the university of helsinki for project implementation and data collection. references bens, i. 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(2008). storytelling: a telling approach in healthcare education. paper presented at the narrative practitioner conference, wrexham, england. a long way? introducing digitized historical newspapers in school, a case study from finland ©2018 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. a long way? introducing digitized historical newspapers in school, a case study from finland author inés matres garcía del pino faculty of arts / department of philosophy, history, culture and art studies university of helsinki email: ines.matres@helsinki.fi address: sörnäisten rantatie 8, 00530 helsinki, finland abstract newspapers help teachers to connect their classes with the real world. their role in education is widely researched, but the use of historical newspapers has attracted little attention. using social practice theory, this article examines the practices they enable, and how such practices relate to the skills and knowledge upper-secondary students are expected to acquire in school. these questions are pertinent today, as the digitization of newspaper heritage is generalizing access to materials traditionally considered for scholarly research. my approach is ethnographic, involving in-depth interviews, focusgroup discussion, and participant observation. the teachers’ accounts motivated me to consider the tradition of using newspapers in school. the class projects demonstrated that historical newspapers reflect attributes that make present-day newspapers popular. closer examination of students’ work demonstrated that the digital library that houses historical newspapers facilitated and constrained the students’ freedom and capacity to go deep when conducting research. the main finding is that historical documents can support the students’ digital skills. by considering digitization and preservation processes of media heritage, the scope of media education can be widened from its focus on production and consumption. in practice, a better understanding of these materials, will help educators give adequate guidelines to their students. keywords: newspapers in education, historical newspapers, digital libraries, upper-secondary school, case study. introduction “carrying out a practice very often means using particular things in a certain way. it might sound trivial to stress that to play football, we need a ball and goals as indispensable ‘resources’. maybe it is less trivial to point out […] that writing, printing and electronic media ‘mould’ social practices, or, better, they enable and limit certain bodily and mental activities, certain knowledge and understanding as elements of practices.” (reckwitz, 2002, pp. 252–253) my research is concerned with uncovering the significance of digital cultural heritage to the school community, in the interests of both teachers and students. mailto:ines.matres@helsinki.fi seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 44 significance in this article refers to the understanding and knowledge that emerge in school through the use of digitized historical sources. digital cultural heritage, in turn, is understood both as a product of the digitization of collections undertaken by institutions such as libraries, archives and museums; and as the forms of presentation and access to these materials. the concept of ‘practice’, as formulated by andreas reckwitz in his cultural theory of social practice, fosters an understanding of historical objects in the context of their current use. to illustrate this practical significance of historical materials in the setting of a school classroom, i present a case study that examines how teachers and students at an upper-secondary school in eastern finland made use of historical newspapers contained in the digital collections of the national library of finland. faced with the fact that the idea of using historical newspapers was new to most of the teachers in this school, my initial concern was to find out if such materials, and especially those preserved in the digital collections of the national library, could be of use to this community. in order to answer to this question, this article examines digitized historical newspapers in relation to the concept of practice. on a more concrete level, this article aims to uncover how the practices enabled by historical newspapers relate to the habits of teachers, and to the activities that students undertake for their assignments. following reckwitz’s understanding of practices and how they are molded by the things we use, i also relate my main findings to the concept of literacy, that is, the knowledge and skills that students are expected to acquire from these materials. the lack of experience with these historical materials among teachers contrasts with their frequent use of newspapers in their teaching. in the first part of this article i consider the similarities and differences in today’s and historical newspapers as school material. this comparative approach surfaced during interviews in which teachers described how they prepared and carried out activities related to contemporary and historical phenomena. seven of the eight teachers i interviewed mentioned newspapers as a tool for dealing with contemporary phenomena. this supports existing research about the extensive use of newspapers in finnish schools (gröhn, 1981; hankala, 2011; puro, 2014). according to the teachers’ first reactions to historical newspapers, i observed that the class activities they describe using contemporary newspapers, could provide a framework within which to develop activities using their historical equivalents. to find out how these historical materials shaped activities in the school classroom, i observed three course sessions in which students used the digital newspaper collection of the national library, and presented their projects. the content of the students’ projects ranged from advertisements and celebrities to the finnish winter war, and other significant events in history. their presentations showed how the students related them to their personal, school and even professional interests. in the second part of the paper i examine more closely how these historical documents facilitate and constrain activities in which students regularly engage, affecting the way they learn. these affections, have been researched within the field of history teaching (friedman, 2006; lévesque, 2006; nygren & vikström, 2013). in this context, digital primary sources have been designated suitable for teaching students in “following the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 45 footsteps of a contemporary historian” (nygren & vikström, 2013, p. 67). however, this case study presents a media project organized by a language and literature teacher, which provides a new perspective that calls for the recognition of other potential uses such materials might have. the last section of this paper opens a dialogue to consider the contribution of media heritage and its preservation to media education, which is concerned with teaching and learning with and about media industries, messages, audiences and effects (buckingham, 2003; martens, 2010; hankala, 2011; vesterinen, 2011). this is a dialogue that concerns many teacher groups, as it resonates with multidisciplinary transformations in the school curriculum (opetushallitus, 2015, p. 220 and ff.). at the same time, this case study should encourage institutions such as national libraries that are actively involved worldwide in digitizing and generalizing access to historical newspapers, to promote alternative uses of materials that have traditionally been considered suitable for academic research (brake, 2012; gooding, 2017; hölttä, 2016). constructing fieldwork with participants and digital resources to correctly approach the question of practice, or the use of things that ‘mold’ activities, understanding and knowledge, i relied on ethnographic methods. in other words, i focused on a real classroom situation, and developed the research questions with the help of the people involved in it, mainly, upper-secondaryschool teachers and students. to begin with, i conducted eight personal, semi-structured interviews with teachers in different parts of southern finland. this group was selected through a chain referral process in three municipalities in and outside of helsinki. all teachers were teaching in secondary schools at the time of the interviews. they were of different ages (28 to 60 years-old), had different levels of professional experience, and taught different humanities subjects (three taught language and literature, two history and social sciences, one art, one philosophy and one music). the interviews focused on their practices, perceptions of cultural heritage, and the resources that help them in communicating with their students about the past and cultural phenomena. later on, i organized a focus group with fifteen teachers in a school that had access to the historical newspapers in question. one of the teachers collaborated more closely in allowing me to observe one of her classes in which 25 pupils aged 16-17 were engaged in a two-week project researching different topics under the theme “changing newspapers in a changing world” (in finnish: muuttuvat lehtitekstit muuttuvassa maailmassa). the classroom observation was organized following collaborative ethnographic activities with the participants (holmes & marcus, 2008, p. 84). here i relied on the teacher, who assumed an important role as my partner in ethnography. she asked her own students about their motivation for choosing their topics, research process, and their opinions about the materials. i analyzed qualitatively fieldnotes and interview transcripts from these activities making use of atlas.ti. additionally, two digital resources contributed in revealing more information about the students’ use of materials. at the same time as students were working, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 46 i collected the clippings they were doing for their projects, which automatically became available in the public scrapbook collection of the digital library. at a later stage of research, having the students’ accounts, their clippings, and the presentation material from two projects, i decided to investigate further how the digital library of newspapers affected their work process. for doing this, i requested the national library staff to provide me a list of search expressions, more commonly known as “search logs”. finally, to gain more information about the status of digitization and access to historical newspapers, i interviewed two newspaper editors and corresponded with staff from three national libraries (finland, germany and australia). these research activities were conducted between april 2016 and may 2017 and were facilitated in collaboration with the national library of finland. the collaboration was set up in a project that made available newspapers affected by copyright restrictions, that is, published after 1910. access to these materials was given in 2016/17 to several institutions in a municipality in eastern finland. newspapers in finnish schools: a brief history of a lasting relationship in their respective works terttu gröhn (1981), mari hankala (2011), and pirjoriita puro (2014) explore the uses of newspapers in school and their role in the development of media education in finland. the relationship between the two sectors in finland was established in the 1960s, through seminars organized for teachers by the newspaper association (sanomalehtien liitto), which is an association of publishing companies, distributors, and other stakeholders that still exists today to safeguard the interests of the media industry. the main motivation for introducing newspapers as teaching material was the need for school materials covering two subjects introduced in secondary school after 1964: social studies and economics (puro, 2014, p. 11). after a period of collaboration with history teachers, who were responsible for social studies, language and art teachers also joined these seminars. as gröhn reports in her national study of 1978, around 89 percent of school teachers in these four subjects used newspapers in their classes (gröhn, 1981, pp. 22–23), although she admits that this might reflect too positive an image given that a quarter of schools did not participate in this study (idem 1981, p. 14). each group of teachers reported different preferences about newspapers: articles were used in social studies and language classes, whereas visual material such as comic strips and advertisements were preferred by art teachers. the teachers also had different priorities in terms of focus: the use of language in newspapers interested in language and literature, while reports on government regulations for social studies (gröhn, 1981, pp. 6–10). the aim of the newspaper association in these early years was to ensure that established subjects allocated time for what was then called mass media education (in finnish: joukkotiedotuskasvatus). another reason for establishing ties with the newspaper community was the lack of consensus on what media education meant. two things happened to enhance understanding of media education in finland. first, the newspaper association made it a priority to turn newspapers into everyday working materials in schools. their plan was initially to teach seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 47 elementary-school students about the structure and significance of newspapers, and then to generalize their use in secondary education (puro, 2014, p. 61). second, schools were given free newspaper subscriptions. according to a study conducted in 1971, 40 percent of schools reported subscribing to a newspaper, and not having enough newspapers was one reason teachers would not use them in the classroom (gröhn, 1981, pp. 23, 36). in 1981, erkki aho from the national board of education demanded monthly newspaper subscriptions for schools. by 1983 many schools had a free subscription covering around nine months of the year (puro, 2014, p. 59). today, when the media has diversified and technically evolved since newspapers were prioritized in schools, it is pertinent to ask what is understood under media education. david buckingham’s definition of media education remains valid, because it focuses on the processes of producing and consuming media rather than on concentrating on one medium: “media education, is concerned with teaching and learning about media. this should not be confused with teaching ‘through’ or ‘with’ the media for example, the use of television or computers as a means of teaching science or history. […] the aim of media education, is not to merely enable children to ‘read’ make sense of media text or ‘write’ their own. it has to enable them to reflect systematically in the processes of reading and writing, to understand and to analyse their own experience as readers and writers”. (2003, pp. 4, 141). despite buckingham’s reticence to include teaching through or with media in the concept of media education, in finland, this is considered under the concept of “educational media” (kupiainen et al. 2008, p. 6; vesterinen, 2011, p. 7; puro, 2014, p. 234). media literacy, on the other hand, concerns more concrete skills and knowledge about the media, including the various industries involved, messages, audiences and effects (buckingham, 2003, p. 4; martens, 2010, p. 3). since the introduction of newspapers up to the present day, media literacy has been shaped by later mediatic forms such as film, tv, radio, computer games and, finally, the internet. internationally, newspapers seem to have been given the role of democracy literacy, as studies on younger audiences connect active newspaper reading with civic engagement in practices such as voting, volunteering, and donating (the newspaper association of america foundation, 2007, p. 3). the following section shows how eight teachers redefined the significance of newspapers in a series of interviews i conducted during the fall/winter of 2016 in diverse schools in southern finland. teachers’ practice with newspapers: connecting the class with the real world although my initial inquiry concerned historical newspapers, during the interviews i realized that there was very little awareness of the historical press, but the teachers spoke with fondness of current newspapers. in fact, seven of the eight teachers i interviewed could give at least one example of a class activity involving newspapers. in a later focus group with fifteen teachers, some could think of situations in which historical newspapers might be interesting material. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 48 during the research process, only one reported using a newspaper archive actively in her class. this motivated me to find out about the similarities and differences of historical and present-day newspapers. marja is a language and literature teacher at an upper-secondary school in a town in eastern finland. she, like other colleagues, takes advantage of a school subscription to helsingin sanomat, the largest newspaper in finland in terms of circulation. research shows that after fiction novels, poems and handouts, 75 to 92 percent of language and literature teachers make use of newspapers and magazines (luukka, 2008, pp. 91–93). in fact, newspapers, along with literature, constitute a more attractive and popular alternative to text-books for finnish language teachers (tainio et al. 2012, p. 158). according to previous studies, what motivates language teachers to use newspapers is that they make it possible to use up-to-date texts and renew course content every year (hankala, 1998, p. 59; tainio et.al. 2012, p. 158). an example among the teachers i interviewed illustrates this: maria, an in-training teacher from helsinki, explains how students in her class wrote critical articles about a recently published novel. the sources they used included excerpts from the novel, a recent newspaper review, and the author’s response to this review on his public facebook profile. although much emphasis is placed on the role of these materials in language education, in finnish schools, language teachers are not the only users of newspapers. hanna, teaching government studies, asks students to read and compare news reports in local and national newspapers of “the most important topics of the week, for example if some big decisions in health care have been made during that week, we try to open the difficult concepts”. in her media classes, pirkko asks her students to collect advertisements from any newspapers at home, and to identify their targets and how they sell products. a teacher of religion discussing islam with his students, brought to class a recent article about the debate the building of a new mosque had generated. he added: “i feel obliged that if something important has happened related to the courses i am doing i try to bring it up (…) at high-school level, that is one of the main things teachers should be doing”. this feeling of obligation sums up the motivation that is implicit in the activities teachers initiate with newspapers, in other words a wish to establish a connection between the classroom and the students’ world. figure 1 news on topical phenomena used by teachers in class (from left) “bullying moves from the school yard to the net –now bullies follow home”, “algeria raises the world’s largest mosque –‘shield against radicalisms’. source: helsingin sanomat seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 49 in the interviews the teachers described how, when they read newspapers at home, they thought of ways in which they could use them in class. as they talked about this, some described their collecting habits: always having scissors to hand when reading the newspaper, searching online for links to articles they had read previously, or saving articles as pdf files on their personal computers. these collecting habits also explain the popularity of newspapers among teachers: even if they are reading the newspaper privately to keep themselves informed, some teachers are simultaneously thinking of ways of using them in their classes: “of course, this is not very good if i’m trying to relax, and i’m in bed, and then aha, work... but that is what i do” −admits maria. these habits exemplify what previous studies suggest about media: they are “embedded in pre-existing domestic routines”, and in this context, their use deviates from their intended purpose (morley, 2002, p. 86; pink & leder mackley, 2013, p. 680). these few activities were described by teachers during interviews when asked if and how they used newspapers in their classes. having analyzed the teachers’ accounts, i have extracted the following categories that illustrate the significance in the practice with such materials in the context of school:  topical: since the 1960s, the prime motivation for teachers to use newspapers has been that they handle matters of current interest, and this is still the case.  versatile: not having been created as school material, newspaper content is diverse enough to cover different subjects and kinds of activity.  familiar: newspaper reading is among the domestic habits of teachers and, at times, students.  symbolic: articles and other content are not necessarily subject matter, but newspaper content illustrates phenomena and concepts that teachers wish their students to explore. the categories above reflect the expectations that any teacher has about newspapers. in the next section i consider how these aspects are reflected in the projects the students undertook using historical newspapers. the students’ activities illustrate how historical newspapers are equally topical, versatile, symbolic and familiar, but in different ways than their younger equivalents. students using historical newspapers: a comparison other than different levels of awareness about the existence and what comprised the national library’s digital collections, none of the teachers in the school where i undertook research had previously used these materials for school work. in the following i combine some ideas for these materials the teachers came up with spontaneously in interviews or during the focus group, along with field notes from the two-week class-project i observed. the aim in this section is to establish similarities and differences between teachers’ experiences using contemporary newspapers, and the students’ projects based on historical newspapers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 50 in a brainstorm activity organized with fifteen teachers, they showed interest in the historical newspapers. the language teachers were particularly speedy in coming up with ideas for using them in their lessons: literature reviews of classical works that their students had read, or more interestingly, learning about the social context of these classics. helja refers to a case that exemplifies the teachers’ interest in introducing a connection with today’s world: “[t]hey can compare the text of minna canth, if she is writing about child labor or the status of women. then i have some text where they can compare how it is today, and how people write about it today”. marja had consulted historical newspapers visiting the national library during her university studies. she was also used to collecting articles for her classes, and decided to include these historical materials in her next cultural literacy and writing course (in finnish: kulttuurinen lukutaito ja kirjoittaminen). this course ran over a nine-week period in which the students developed their reading-comprehension and essay-writing skills within different literary genres. this is usually one of the last compulsory language and literature courses that students take before their matriculation examination. towards the end of it, the teacher organized a two-week media project during which the students would delve, in groups or individually, into the last-century world of newspapers, a corpus of material restricted by copyright but made available to this school through the digital collections of the national library of finland (karppinen, 2016). despite the lack of current events, and their absence in teachers’ everyday routines, topicality, versatility, familiarity and symbolism are all reflected in historical newspapers. in the following, digitized historical newspapers are examined through projects realized by this class of upper-secondary students. students’ interests and the topicality of historical newspapers the class of 25 students that participated in this media project had access to a local and a national newspaper, without restrictions, from the first edition (1916/17) until the present day. the students were free to choose, alone or in groups, from a list of suggested topics, or they could produce their own topic. when she was preparing this course marja recycled popular themes from previous courses. her goal was for students to read and reflect on changes in the newspaper, in the news making, or in the image of finland and finns portrayed in the media. the choice of topic, what to focus on, and the form of presentation was for the students to decide. this is what marja referred to as “co-creating a course with students”. this tends to happen when teachers do not hand-pick the materials used in class, or when students decide the format of the outcome. most groups investigated topics suggested by the teacher. among the twelve projects, five examined advertisements in newspapers, three looked at how newspapers reported on tragedies, two groups chose wartime propaganda, and the last two groups pursued their own topic: “cosmetics from 1920 until today” and “celebrities from 1950 until today”. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 51 to avoid possible restraint among students in front of a stranger, it was marja who asked some questions after each group had presented their topic. what was the motivation for choosing the topic? what were their search methods? what was one thing they found good or bad about the digital library? their motivations reveal how these students explored their personal interests via these materials. two girls thought at first that they would research one of the subjects their teacher suggested, the representation of women in the media. they eventually decided to pursue their shared interest in make-up and explored the history of the cosmetics industry, thus producing their own topic. figure 2 clippings collected by students (from top left): advertisement for farming equipment, maaseudun tulevaisuus, 1980; propaganda cartoon, maaseudun tulevauisuus, 1940; diana spencer, länsi-savo, 1998; soap advertisement, länsi-savo, 1951; war headlines, maaseudun tulevaisuus, 1942; wtc terrorist attack, länsi-savo, 2001. figure 3 clippings from project “beauty and cosmetics from 1920 until today” (from left): tax on perfume and other “beauty products” (1920), feminine. face lightening (1962), sales of cosmetics grow when the economy goes downhill (2011). photos: länsi-savo. the topicality of these historical newspapers is certainly not evident in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 52 content per se, but can be observed in the connections the students made spontaneously with their own interests. the point about using historical newspapers to explore a concept or a phenomenon in which the students were interested is that they could explore its historical background. versatile materials establishing interdisciplinary connections until very recently, research about newspaper use in education focused on the content and its relevance to many subjects teachers, from history to the natural sciences (hankala, 1998, pp. 40–47; hujanen, 2000, p. 11). whereas nowadays, there is an interest in phenomena-based teaching, meaning combining subjects and called teemaopinnot in finnish (opetushallitus, 2015, p. 220 and ff.). some teachers mentioned in our interviews that their school favored an interdisciplinary approach to teaching in principle, but did not regularly adopt it. one teacher pointed out that the main reason was because employment contracts are usually connected to a subject, and sometimes to specific lesson hours, which prevents teachers from coordinating classes with colleagues. collaboration among teachers from different disciplines is the most common approach to teemaopinnot, but as i observed in this project, it is not the only one. for this and previous projects, marja encouraged her students to connect their assignments with what they were learning in other classes. this opportunity was seized by two groups of students, one that had learned something about propaganda in a previous history lesson, and one that was interested to see if there was a link between this concept and populism. these groups decided to focus on the propaganda messages that were published in newspapers in wartime. as one student reflected: “i did not know what propaganda was like in the war. and it was surprising to see how much of it there was after all”. this group collected examples of messages that were repeated systematically in newspapers, establishing four categories: the greatness of finland, stubborn finns, a united finland, and reports about the enemy (in finnish: mahtipontinen suomi, sisukkaat suomalaiset, yhtenäinen suomi, vihollisesta sanottua). they approached propaganda from the perspective of language use, in line with the objective of this course. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 53 figure 4 clippings from project “propaganda in newspapers in time of war”, illustrating a message conveyed in war-time newspapers: stubborn finns (“sisukkaat suomalaiset”). photos: maaseudun tulevaisuus 1939-1942 regardless of whether the newspapers are contemporary or historical, their current relevance lies not so much in what they offer to different teacher groups, but in how they allow students to establish connections between subjects themselves. remediating familiar things and practices in the digital library there is something familiar about historical newspapers, and the closer one gets to the present, the more familiar they are. structural elements of newspapers from 1917 up to the present include a front page introducing the main news, articles distributed in columns, headlines, pictures, thematic sections, and advertisements. from the activities accounted in the interviews, and having seen the popularity of newspapers in school, upper-secondary students do not need to be told what historical newspapers are or how to read them. however, the digital library in which these materials were presented revealed another aspect to their familiarity. the digital library i refer to here is the digital newspaper collection of the national library. the concept of digital libraries has been defined more widely as: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 54 “[a]n organized collection of information, a focused collection of digital objects [from books, to manuscripts, photos or sound and video recordings], along with methods for access and retrieval, and for selection, organization and maintenance of the collection” (witten & bainbridge, 2003, p. 6). when students were introduced to this digital library full of historical newspapers they did not require further explanation, even though they had not known it existed. i offered to help them find materials in the first session, but they had no questions and started working with it instantly. the concept of remediation, meaning how digital technologies reframe older media, could explain this apparent instant familiarity. when paul levinson coined this term he was describing how any new medium does not replace previous media, but tackles the inadequacies, such as adding color to black and white photography (levinson, 1997, pp. 104–105). updating this concept shortly afterwards, bolter and grusin emphasized the reformative nature of new media, and felt that remediation fell short in its meaning at the dawn of digital technology. they understood remediation to include the negative effects of the new media, and that the process of reform was mutual rather than unidirectional from old to new (bolter & grusin, 1999, p. 59). all three aspects of remediation were present in this exercise. a sense of improvement resonates with the way marja reflected on her experiences 15 years previously with microfilmed newspapers, and on how much easier it was for the students to use the digital library. a negative aspect of the newspapers remediated in the digital library was mentioned by several students researching material published after the 1980s. even though most newspapers had introduced color by then, the newspapers were digitized in black and white. finally, having interviewed their teachers, i was aware that these students were actively using internet browsers and news sites for their assignments. they drew from this experience in their approach to older newspapers. the fact that students are acquainted with newspapers, but also use browsers and news sites, reinforces their familiarity with digitized historical sources such as these newspapers. symbolic motivations for using historical newspapers the aim of the media project was to explore how changes in media text, news making, or the image of finland and finns are represented in the media. when she was preparing this course marja found two aspects of the materials particularly attractive, that turned historical newspapers into symbolic artefacts. first, the digital library is furnished with a search interface, a clipping tool and a personal scrapbook, allowing students very quickly to skim through vast amounts of content, select articles that illustrate their research topic, share clippings among group members, and repurpose them for their own presentations. second, it was a change from usual sources such as google and the newspaper to which the school subscribed. in conclusion, the symbolic character the teacher attributed to these materials was that students gained practice in managing and making sense of this ‘mass’ of ‘raw materials’, as she seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 55 often referred to digital content. to sum up this comparison between present-day and historical newspapers, one could say that there are similarities to all four aspects of newspapers. their topicality and versatility, is facilitated mainly by the content of historical newspapers. however, their familiar and symbolic character is attributed by the digital library that contains them. in the following, i examine closer three issues that were raised during this course, in an attempt to establish whether the digital library affected the way students pursued their topics. digital libraries: going deep, verbalizing interests, and having free hands this section discusses the affordances of the digital library. william gaver describes technology affordances as: “possibilities (with strengths and weaknesses) technology and interfaces offer to the people who use them” (gaver, 1991, p. 79). in other words, i consider how the digital library enabled and constrained the way the students worked. to facilitate this task, i reviewed comments from the teacher in a follow-up interview evaluating the activity, my field notes containing both descriptions of students’ first working session, and students’ accounts presented orally at the end of the activity. later, the anonymous logs of the search expressions facilitated by the staff of the national library provided information about the freedom of students in choosing their research topics . this exercise was not part of the course evaluation, but it did involve some degree of evaluation. marja remarked that some projects remained “at a very superficial stage”. a common feature of these projects was that they covered extensive periods of time. by way of contrast, she also mentioned some projects that went “more deep”. one of them focused on a shorter timeframe, as students followed up news reporting on the sinking of a cruise ship in the baltic in 1994. in addition to describing the event in their analysis, they pointed out characteristic aspects of journalistic text when catastrophes happen: how facts are scarce at the beginning, then there is a turn towards human stories. this group was also praised for having provided a context for each clipping, identifying the date and the source. according to a previous study comparing how students work with traditional versus digital archives, those using digital archives tend follow a quantitative approach, which could be considered more superficial, focusing on aspects such as change and statistical evidence (nygren, 2015, pp. 97–98). similarly, from the twelve projects in marja’s class, eight consisted in a comparison by decades, the aim being to show change or evolution in how products or people are portrayed by newspapers. four of these projects went deeper, however, focusing on one concept, product or historical event. the implication here is that the digital nature of the materials alone does not explain this tendency, and that other factors should be considered. the teacher’s formulation of the activity “changing newspapers in a changing world”, may have inspired some students to attempt to illustrate this change over the years. moreover, the time dedicated to planning the project was managed differently by different groups, as a result of which some groups may have been able to go deeper than others. at the end of the first working session, some groups had spent more time brainstorming seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 56 and doing preliminary reading on their topics whereas others had already started inserting clippings in their presentations, and a couple of students used this time to get acquainted with the portal and conducting searches on topics that were not covered in their final projects. a second notable aspect of the projects was that half of them focused on advertisements. in an attempt to understand this, after the course was over i asked the teacher what she made of it: “it showed me that they are very much oriented to studying pictures (…) when they choose commercials, and one of them had a nice project about caricatures and propaganda. so, i think it kind of reflects the way young people see the world today, they are drawn to pictures”. if the students had used print newspapers, one reason for concentrating mainly on images could be that, although journalistic photography only dates back to the 1930s, newspapers have been using illustrations for product and business advertising since the mid-1800s, distinguishing it visually from other content. however, to find content in the digital library the students had to use the search interface that responds to textual queries. unsurprisingly, during their presentations, all the groups reported using keywords as their main method for finding materials. “distant reading” is a concept that refers to the need for digital methods enabling researchers to encompass bigger and bigger quantities of literature (burdick et.al. 2012, p. 39; moretti, 2000, pp. 56–57). by searching and skimming through lists of results, the students were involved in this form of distant reading, although, to a degree, closer reading of single articles or images was necessary for selecting material. when the students were asked why they chose each subject, some replied that they were interested in a certain product, others mentioned marketing and business, others were vaguer. in conclusion, given the lack of metadata in the image materials and the way the search system is built, the digital library mainly supports a textual approach to the materials, so that students had to verbalize their interest in a few words. having considered how these materials challenged students to go deep, and demanded them to verbalize their interest, i turn to one last affordance related to the students’ freedom. the way this activity was organized gave students free hands in using the materials. the only guidelines consisted of a list of suggested topics. they were free to choose another topic entirely, to focus on what they wished, and to present the topic how they liked. the different groups used this freedom differently. two created their own topics, whereas ten chose topics suggested by the teacher. however, the search logs of the three working sessions, reviewed at a later stage, included concepts that did not appear in the final projects: gender equality (tasa-arvo, naisten asema), nature protection (luonnonsuojelu), and independence (itsenäsyys) among others. this raises the question if the final topics could have been others or more varied. the answer might hint at the raw state of these materials if compared with web browsers and digital news sites. in these, webpages and articles are connected to predefined subject categories. by contrast, other than what is written on the page, digitized historical newspapers have little or no metadata. they lack awareness of contemporary issues and expressions, and the students were not given specific advice on what vocabulary to use. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 57 recollecting that our practices, understanding and knowledge are ‘molded’ by the things we use, the affordances in this digital library challenged the students’ capacity to go deep, required students to verbalize their research interests and may have limited their freedom to pursue diverse topics. these aspects should be addressed by teachers in some form of guidance when they introduce such materials. a long way? historical newspapers and everyday practices in school the aim in this paper was to find out whether facilitating and fostering the use of historical newspapers in schools would find wider resonance within the school community beyond this isolated case. to this end, i analysed how these materials relate to the existing habits of teachers, or the skills and knowledge that students are supposed to acquire in this stage of education. supporting the idea of introducing digital historical newspapers as school material, i showed in the first part of the paper how newspapers are already part of everyday life in schools, and that in terms of the practices they enable, there are many connections between historical and contemporary newspapers. a review of the historical role of newspapers in education, and of how this handful of teachers use them, confirms their strong significance at least in uppersecondary school. newspapers do not require a role, nor to be specifically tied to a specific subject. the freshness of their content (topicality), the fact that they cover topics relevant to art, language, social issues or philosophy (versatility), illustrate abstract concepts (symbolism), and belong to teachers and students’ everyday lives (familiarity), make newspapers more than an materials for media education or instruments for democracy building (puro, 2014, p. 232; the newspaper association of america foundation, 2007). however, a reason why these materials are as popular as they are nowadays is the exhaustive work of the finnish newspaper association since the 1960s, advocating more access to newspapers and developing a common understanding of media education. the second part of the paper sheds light on the potential contributions historical newspapers and the digital library that contains them can make to uppersecondary education with and about media. let us consider the specific skills and knowledge to be derived from media literacy. the most remarkable contribution these time machines can offer young students can be summarized in the affordances analyzed in the previous section: exploring the historical background of current phenomena or students’ interests; tracing change across time; requiring students to verbalize their research ideas in a concrete manner; and training their capacity to manage large amounts of digital content by means of distant and close reading. recognizing, on the other hand, the constraints in the materials and digital libraries (here, lack of image metadata or awareness of historical language) can support teachers in finding a balance between giving guidelines and freedom to their students, and students in delving deeply with the help of these materials. let us consider, again, buckingham’s formulation of education about media, which should encourage students to reflect on processes of media production and consumption. it is pertinent to ask how digitized historical newspapers contribute to this concept. the media heritage that, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 58 through digitization, is being preserved and progressively made accessible to future generations, could foster in students a sense of awareness of and reflection on processes of media preservation. the fact that historical newspapers were commonly considered materials to be used exclusively for historical, scholarly research (gooding, 2017, pp. 62–63) falls short today, as digital libraries are gradually making more and more material available in public online spaces. digitization and remote access already allow institutions such as national libraries to diversify their audiences by sharing resources with public libraries, or even directly with schools. however, digitization and access might not be enough. the advocacy and mediation carried out by schools, the newspaper association and government officials between 1960-1980, should be considered and possibly imitated before the school community incorporates these materials into their every-day practices. still, access remains an important factor, and copyright represents a significant obstacle. according to finnish law there is a 70-year protective gap during which copyright owners can profit financially from published material (finland: copyright act, 2015 sec. 16a). national libraries, observant of this law, are under pressure to open up their holdings, even though the publishing houses own the copyright, not the libraries (willems & grant, 2015, p. 8). however, there have been cases in which newspaper publishers have, under similar copyright laws, allowed free access to materials that would normally still be in copyright. in these cases, national libraries have been the institutions facilitating these materials. this happened in the case of the canberra times, which is available in the national library of australia’s trove, and three newspapers from the former gdr available in the berlin state library’s zefys. such initiatives could be emulated in finding a way for schools to discover and introduce these historical documents in their every-day practices. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 59 references bolter, j. d., & grusin, r. a. (1999). remediation: understanding new media. cambridge, mass: mit press. brake, l. (2012). half full and half empty. journal of victorian culture, 17(2), 222–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2012.683149 buckingham, d. (2003). media education : literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. polity press. burdick, a., drucker, j., lunenfeld, p., presner, t., & schnapp, j. (2012). digital_humanities. mit press. retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities finland: copyright act (404/1961, amendments up to 608/2015) (2015). retrieved from http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/details.jsp?id=15992 friedman, a. m. (2006). world history teachers’ use of digital primary sources: the effect of training. theory & research in social education, 34(1), 124–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2006.10473300 gaver, w. w. 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(2015). students writing history using traditional and digital archives. human it, 12(3), 78–116. retrieved from https://humanit.hb.se/article/view/476 nygren, t., & vikström, l. (2013). treading old paths in new ways: upper secondary students using a digital tool of the professional historian. education sciences, 3(1), 50–73. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci3010050 opetushallitus. (2015). lukion opetussuunnitelman perusteet 2015 : nuorille tarkoitetun lukiokoulutuksen opetussuunnitelman perusteet. opetushallitus. retrieved from http://www.oph.fi/download/172124_lukion_opetussuunnitelman_perusteet_ 2015.pdf pink, s., & leder mackley, k. (2013). saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life. media, culture & society, 35(6), 677–691. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443713491298 puro, p.-r. (2014). sanomalehdet koulutiellä : 50 vuotta sanomalehtien ja koulujen yhteistyötä. bod – books on demand. reckwitz, a. (2002). toward a theory of social practices: a development in culturalist theorizing. european journal of social theory, 5(2), 243–263. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310222225432 the newspaper association of america foundation. (2007). youth media dna. in search of lifelong readers. virginia, usa: american press institute. vesterinen, o. (2011, april 29). media education in the finnish school system : a conceptual analysis of the subject didactic dimension of media education. university of helsinki, helsinki. retrieved from https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/26051 willems, m., & grant, f. (2015). roadmap for improving access to digitised newspapers. association of european research libraries (liber). retrieved from http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu/public-materials/deliverables/ witten, i. h., & bainbridge, d. (2003). how to build a digital library. san francisco, ca: morgan kaufmann publishers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 61 author’s vita i have a degree in audio-visual communication from the university complutense of madrid (2006) and a m.a. in media studies from the university of potsdam (2010). since 2006, i have worked in a university library, a tvarchive and several museums, in projects dealing with documentation, digitization of collections, and visitor studies. since 2016 i am undertaking doctoral studies on european ethnology at the university of helsinki, under the title “cultural heritage goes to school: redefining sites of memory in the digital age”. this is the first of four articles that comprise my doctoral dissertation. a long way? introducing digitized historical newspapers in school, a case study from finland abstract introduction constructing fieldwork with participants and digital resources newspapers in finnish schools: a brief history of a lasting relationship teachers’ practice with newspapers: connecting the class with the real world students using historical newspapers: a comparison students’ interests and the topicality of historical newspapers versatile materials establishing interdisciplinary connections remediating familiar things and practices in the digital library symbolic motivations for using historical newspapers digital libraries: going deep, verbalizing interests, and having free hands a long way? historical newspapers and everyday practices in school references author’s vita title ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. trends in the digitalization of k-12 schools: the australian perspective jennifer masters school of education university of tasmania e-mail: jennifer.masters@utas.edu.au abstract although australian children have plenty of access to digital technologies in school, a common perception is that this hasn't made a difference to the quality of education in australia. in fact, it is widely considered that educational standards are in decline and schools are failing to teach children the skills that they will need for the future. the australian government, however, do recognize that the road to digitalization is long and they have invested in a new digital technologies curriculum and the provision of equipment and teacher professional development to support this goal. while this is a positive move and exciting projects are being implemented in schools, there is less focus on educational research in this area. this is a missed opportunity because research outcomes can provide an additional level of credibility that is required to justify why ‘new literacies’ are essential in a contemporary school curriculum. keywords: digital technologies, curriculum, digitalization introduction this paper is derived from a keynote address at the “recent trends in the digitalization of the nordic k-12 schools” symposium. it is a position paper that reflects on trends of digitalization of schools from an australian perspective. it is informed from document analysis (bowen, 2009) of relevant policy documents, websites, project reports, media releases and research relating to the topic. there are a number of challenges relating to the digitalization of schools and it seems that global issues also are evident in australia, despite the remote location. in general, it seems that education is not in a comfortable space and is subject to pressure and twist, as children emerge from school in a very different place to the one that was occupied by their parents (hatch, 2009). these children are sometimes labeled ‘the digital generation’ as they were born in a time when digital technologies were considered to be pervasive across society but this doesn’t mean that these technologies are necessarily adopted and commonplace in their school (cinque & brown, 2015). australia has a technocentric society and so it is not surprising that australian schools are well resourced with computers and other digital tools. the oecd seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 121 (2015) identified that computers are more prevalent in australian schools than other countries. the oecd reported that the 2012 pisa results revealed that in australia, every 15-year-old had individual access to a computer at school and 93.7% of students used computers for their school work (p. 20). this skew might suggest that australia should be leading in the use of computers for learning but does the provision of equipment necessarily lead to innovate use and better outcomes? this paper reports on the use of digital technologies in australian education and reflects on the implications. schooling in australia the population of australia is nudging 25 million. four million of these are children and just under 300,000 are teachers, from almost 9,500 schools (abs, 2017). most children have access to non-compulsory early years education before the age of 5, attend formal schooling between the age of 5 or 6 until 15 0r 16 and then senior high school or college until 17 or 18, with 13 years of schooling in total (det, 2017a). australia is divided into six states and two territories and up until recent times each state or territory government largely managed the funding and curriculum structures for their own schools. this meant that there were eight different systems with varied starting and leaving ages and often quite different curriculum guidelines. this has been changing over the last decade, as the federal government become progressively more involved with the education of the nation’s children. in 2009, the national early years learning framework (eylf) (deewr, 2009) commenced for the preschool years (0-5) and then a nationwide curriculum for primary and secondary schools (5-16 years old) called ‘the australian curriculum’ was introduced in 2014 (acara, 2017a). this curriculum is currently being rolled out by subject areas and will largely replace the state curriculums by 2019. the federal government has also been responsible for introducing measures perceived to lift quality in education. in 2008, a testing regime called the national assessment program – literacy and numeracy (naplan) commenced (acara, 2017b). the naplan has a series of tests focused on core literacies and is administered at years 3, 5, 7 and 9. a new phonics screening test is also planned for year 1 children (6-7 years old). the school results from the naplan tests are published on the my school website (acara, 2017c). this website provides families and the general public with demographic information and performance data from all schools in australia. challenges in education in australia while the australian education system has developed progressively since the turn of the century, the rhetoric about outcomes is not particularly positive. there are a number of issues that cause discontent and there are two that are particularly damning. these are that: 1. educational standards are falling and the performance outcomes of students are in decline. 2. the education system is failing to teach children the skills that they will need for the future these two concerns weigh heavily on educators in australia and impact significantly on decisions made with regards to policy and practice. they also have implications for how digital technologies can be used to extend and innovate curriculum and pedagogy. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 122 standards in decline a key source that is referred to when discussing the decline of standards is the programme for international student assessment (pisa). pisa tests have been conducted by the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd) since 2000. the tests are administered to a sample of 15 years olds in 59 countries and measure performance in reading, mathematics and science. a search on australia from the “compare your country” website (oecd, 2017) provides some seemingly condemning evidence (see figure 1). figure 1: average pisa performance of australian students (oecd, 2017) the scores of students in australia in science, mathematics and reading have dropped in every pisa data collection (apart from a small upward trend in reading in 2006). overall, the average pisa score for an australian student dropped from 527 to 510 between 2006 and 2015 (thomson, de bortoli & underwood, 2016). although many countries have seen similar declines, a few countries, such as singapore, have avoided this trend and have managed to improve their scores on all tests. consequently, australia has slipped in the world rankings, dropping from 13 to 16 in reading and from 19 to 24 in mathematics (thomson et al, 2016). further investigation of this website reveals that the news is not all bad. australia’s world ranking for science has actually improved slightly, from 16 in 2012 to 14 in 2015 and australia is still above oecd averages in all three categories. this, however, is largely ignored by the popular press and headlines such as “australia’s ‘tolerance of failure’ behind declining pisa results” (singhal, 2017) and “australian schools are in ‘absolute decline’ globally” (hunjan & bloomer, 2016) paint a gloomy picture of the capacity of australian children and the failure of the australian education system. another reason for dissatisfaction with the australian education system is the outcomes from the naplan testing cycle. the introduction of naplan in 2008 was largely justified as a mechanism to address declining literacy and numeracy standards in australia. however, despite extensive funding and a large proportion of time being allocated for test preparation and testing, results have shown no significant improvements (dodd, 2017). this type of stagnation is ominous for educators. typically, teachers get blamed for any drop in standards and through association, teacher education providers are criticized for the inadequate preparation of teachers. this implication is evident in a report from the teacher education minister advisory group (temag) called “action now: classroom ready teachers” (temag, 2015). the temag report offered a number of externally imposed measures to address perceived shortfalls in teacher education. this includes the literacy and numeracy test for initial teacher education (lantite) (acer, 2017), a hurdle required for students to graduate and the teacher performance assessment (tpa), an extended written submission completed in the final year of study in order to demonstrate the application of the 37 australian professional standards for teachers (aitsl, 2017) at the graduate level. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 123 when an education system, either at a school or a university level, is subject to mandates such as these, a common response is to ‘teach to the test’. this means that any peripheral or extended activity is cut from the curriculum, in a ‘back to basics’ approach. while there is some evidence that schools and universities in australia may have considered this approach (polesel, rice & dulfer, 2014) the second challenge, ‘preparing learners for the future’, means that simply returning to old ways isn’t an option (riddle, 2015). the ever-expanding influence of technology means that learners need engage with new content and this requires educators to offer something more than the traditional curriculum. skills for the future the second challenge for educators is the perception that much of the content taught in classrooms is outdated and that children are not being prepared for work and life in the future. as governments and the commercial sector look towards perceived requirements, it seems evident that not enough australian school leavers are choosing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) as career options to sustain development (chapman & vivian, 2017). as an indicator, in 2016, 18% of university graduates were from stem fields in comparison to 35% from singapore and 47% in china (segal, 2016). while the reasons for this are likely to be complex, a simple attribution is that schools in australia do not do enough to engage children with stem concepts (prinsley & johnston, 2015). further, it is anticipated that digital technologies will play an ever-increasing role in any future scenario and so schools need to do more to teach children about how use technologies in stem learning (littlejohn & hunter, 2016). this renewed focus on using technologies for authentic purposes is welcomed by educators who are promoting the digitalization of schools. it is interesting, however, that the drive for an increased emphasis on technologies in education from a business perspective may concentrate on narrow, employable skills in the industry rather than a broader, problem solving based approach. in particular, there is a call to teach computer programming or ‘coding’ to all children from an early age (brewster, 2015). while computer coding is a very important part of the technological transformation, it certainly isn’t the only skill that will be required to advance digital technologies in the future (scott, 2015). it is important to recognize that a wide range of skills are required and we need people with different expertise in order to work in teams to implement digital solutions. improving literacies although the two issues outlined here might be seen to be in direct competition in terms of school priorities, they can actually be closely aligned under the banner of literacy. traditional literacy encompasses aspects of reading and writing, as addressed in the naplan and pisa, but contemporary definitions of literacy are broader. the ‘new’ literacies (lankshear & knoebel, 2011; knoebel & kalman, 2016) incorporate digital literacies and the use of technology for a wide range of purposes. reading and writing is not redundant in this context but they need to be applied in contemporary ways. this means that schools need to deliberately teach children to be literate in contexts where they can apply these skills for current and future purposes. digital technologies in the australian curriculum prior to the australian curriculum, teaching with and about digital technologies was overlaid in other curriculum areas. the australian curriculum offers digital technologies as a subject within a curriculum area in its own right (acara, 2017a). the technologies curriculum area was endorsed in 2015 and was seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 124 optional for implementation in 2016/17. in 2018, technologies will be a required area for children from foundation (5/6 years) until year 8 (13/14 years). schools will then decide what and how technologies subjects will be offered for the remaining years. the technologies area is divided into two subjects, design and technology and digital technologies. while these are distinct, they are closely related and are drawn together by concepts such as computational thinking, project design and management and creative problemsolving (see figure 2). figure 2: map of the key ideas in the australian curriculum technologies area (acara, 2017a) the digital technologies subject is particularly relevant when considering the digitalization of schools and the development of digital technologies skills. the curriculum content of this subject is divided in to two strands: knowledge and understanding; processes and production skills. these strands cover a broad spectrum of relevant content, including digital system components, representation of data, managing data and creating digital solutions. coding, of course, is covered thoroughly, however, the subject is not limited only to coding as it embraces a much wider perspective of the application of digital technology in society. in addition to the curriculum areas, the australian curriculum offers a number “general capabilities”. a general capability encompasses skills, knowledge and attitudes required across all curriculum areas. one of these capabilities is information and communication technologies (ict) and it is specified that students “learn to use ict effectively and appropriately to access, create and communicate information and ideas, solve problems and work collaboratively in all learning areas” (acara, 2017a: np). this means that teachers are required to embed ict across classes into all curriculum areas. the key ideas from the ict capability are shown in figure 3. figure 3: key ideas from the australian curriculum ict capability (acara, 2017a) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 125 another important trend that incorporates digital technologies is stem education. stem incorporates material from the four stem areas (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) but it is actually more than simply teaching this content. stem requires the conjunction of these ideas, where learners find solutions to ‘wicked’ problems and these solutions are enacted in practical projects (finger, 2018). the interest in stem is worldwide and in australia the national stem school education strategy (education council, 2015) outlines the national approach for 2016-2026. in anticipation of this, the stem connections project (acara, 2016) provided illustrations of practice to show how the australian curriculum could be enacted with a stem approach for years 9 and 10. advocates for the use digital technologies in schools are delighted by this progressive development in the school curriculum in australia (speranza, 2015). computers and associated devices have been used by innovative teachers since the 1980s and it is affirming that now, after 30 years, the curriculum clearly incorporates digital technologies as both a learning area and an essential capability across the curriculum. the challenge is now to ensure that this advancement is enacted and that children learn to use digital technologies in deep and meaningful ways. funding and resourcing digitalization it is unlikely that any new initiative will be implemented successfully unless it is properly resourced and funded. fortunately, there appears to be quite a bit of funding available to support australian schools with digital technologies innovation at present (prinsley & johnston, 2015). the federal government funds a number of initiatives under a program called the national innovation and science agenda (nisa). this includes the digital literacies school grant (dlsg), available across 2016-2018, and designed to encourage new ways of implementing digital technologies across the australia curriculum (det, 2017b). this type of funding has enabled schools to buy technological equipment previously beyond their reach. schools are certainly trying new things and the popular press reports on a flurry of projects focused on high-end equipment including robotics, drones and 3d printers. of course, just because teachers have access to fancy equipment, it doesn’t mean that they will then be able to use it in meaningful ways to enhance teaching and learning (knoebel & kalman, 2016). fortunately, there has been recognition of this in the funding provision, and teacher development has been incorporated. the dlsg specifies professional development for school leaders and teachers as a key priority. additionally, the federal government have funded the digital technologies hub (education services australia, 2017), an extensive support site, to help teachers to implement the australian curriculum digital technologies curriculum. further, the computer science education research (cser) group based at the university of adelaide provide the digital technologies education program (cser, 2017). this program is funded collaboratively by google australia and the nisa and provides several teacher support initiatives. the flagship of this program is a series of free online mooc courses designed to support teachers across australia with the implementation of the australian digital technologies curriculum. opportunities for research the stated aim of the dslg is to develop best practice models of implementation and to provide demonstration projects that can be used by other schools (det, 2017b). this means that these projects generate implementation reports, exemplars and even teaching and learning resources. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 126 there is, however, little targeted provision in this funding for educational research. while the australian government do fund educational research in schools, the funding opportunities have been declining over the last few years and consequently any research grants for educational research have become fiercely competitive (crossley, 2016). further, the focus on digital technologies implementation doesn’t seem to have filtered through to research funding, so projects relating to this field compete with other applied research areas. despite this though, this is an optimal time for research into the use of digital technologies in education and researchers are always seeking ways to explore innovative practice and new ways to support learning and teaching. some of the potential topics for research in this area are mapped in a word cloud displayed in figure 4. figure 4: potential topics for digital technologies in educational research examples of funded projects while applied digital technologies research isn’t especially privileged in educational research in australia, there are a number of examples where research in to the use of digital technologies in schools have been conducted. several recent examples are shared here. an innovative project was the humanoid robotics research project (keane, chalmers, william & boden, 2016). the research team partnered with the association of independent schools of south australia’s (aissa) centre for excellence & innovation in teaching & learning to implement a three-year multiple case study using two nao humanoid robots in school settings. schools were invited to apply to ‘host’ the robot for a curriculum purpose of their choice. the researchers then worked with the various schools as they implemented the projects, ranging from 8 weeks to 6 months. data was collected through teacher questionnaires, interviews and journal/video records from the educators. one of the cases in this project was a rural school that used the robot over a sixmonth period to engage children with a local indigenous language. the children at the school learnt about coding and computational thinking but also about the narungga language through the process of teaching the robot how to speak it. this research stressed the role of curiosity to spark interest in a real-world challenge. the processes of collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creative thinking were then engaged to solve complex challenges and problems. the king island digital stories project (masters, 2017) used digital storytelling with 21 children in a year 4/5 class on a remote australian island to extend their literacies and use digital technologies to communicate their sense of place. this study was funded through a tasmanian community fund grant and applied an ethnographic method where two researchers worked with children in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 127 classroom as active participant-observers (johnson, avenarius & weatherford, 2006). the children each produced a short digital story in imovie about their life on king island and used a combination of still images, transitions, narration, video, green screen, animation and/or music to create their resource. these stories were published on a website and were publicly available on the internet. the research found that the extended time given to this project enabled the children to immerse in the activity and embrace the genre for wider purposes. further, it was evident that children’s literacies had developed considerably to include aspects such as image manipulation and audio production and concepts such as copyright and cyber safety. a third australian example explored the implications of using digital technologies in teaching for classroom teachers (selwyn, nemorin & johnson, 2017). this study was funded through an australian research council (arc) grant and used a case study approach at two australian high schools. the researchers conducted in-depth individual interviews with 66 teachers and investigated how technologies were used for communication, administration, timetabling, assessment and reporting as well as teaching. while most teachers recognized the advantages that technologies provided, a key finding was that the use of digital technologies intensified the workload. teachers also found that the distinction between work and personal time became blurred as the work orientated technologies became pervasive in their lives. discussion the digitalization of k-12 schools in australia is in an interesting state of flux. as described earlier in this paper, there is pressure to return to core literacies and reinforce standards in teaching and yet at the same time there is a significant push to modernize and be innovative and new. it is not a simple matter of choosing one of these directions, educators need to look at the needs of current learners, not those from the past or those in the future. it is essential that any decisions about teaching and learning is informed by careful consideration and reflective practice. a change in student literacies has been detected by testing systems such as pisa and naplan but without thorough investigation, this shift can only be observed, rather than used for judgement or a measure of the quality of education. perhaps it simply means that the skills being tested are becoming less relevant for learners as they grapple with new ideas and circumstances? it is evident that some countries such as singapore have improved on the pisa tests in the recent cycle but does this mean their students are better equipped for contemporary life? in the 2015 tests, the pisa added a dimension relating to student wellbeing to the test (oecd, 2017). the students in singapore actually scored quite low on the scale for ‘sense of belonging at school’ and rated the highest of all surveyed countries for ‘school related anxiety’. this might indicate that high achievements in traditional areas come at the expense of skills and capacities, such as resilience, that could be more important in the long term. it is evident that australia invested in technology for education relatively early (oecd, 2015), and they did so with the assumption that this would advantage australian children. critics point out that these expectations have not been met so far and there is little evidence to show that the investment in computers and other devices has led to any significant improvements. the australian government, however, remain committed to promoting the use of technologies in education and this is demonstrated by the current funding provided for stem related projects (det, 2017b). the extra funds in this area means that schools can now invest in equipment and professional development in order to implement the new technologies curriculum in a meaningful way. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 128 unfortunately, research into the use of digital technologies in education isn’t particularly advantaged by this initiative. while there is a lot of exciting activity happening in schools, there is very little provision to include a research component in the projects. while it is still possible to obtain grants for this type of educational research, the cumbersome process of applying for research funding can hinder the process. the grant application process at a university is necessarily rigorous and can take several months. then, if an application is successful, obtaining ethics will take longer, often with a number of levels of permissions and forms. ironically, at one time, schools would have been prepared to participate in classroom based research projects in order to receive extra equipment and support to help them try out innovative ideas. however, when innovation funding is provided directly to schools it is often quicker and easier for them to go ahead and implement ideas in the classroom without the fuss of being involved in educational research. there is no doubt that the stem curriculum projects being implemented in australian schools are encouraging teachers to explore the technologies curriculum and think about how they might teach the concepts in their own class. it is important though, that this activity is also carefully documented and reflected on in order to evaluate the merit of this activity and how learning can be enhanced and extended through the use of digital technologies. in particular, this component is essential to justify the expense and the commitment to digitalization. it is inevitable that future commentators of educational policy will look back on the strategies and practices of today and it is important that there are clear validations for the path taken. conclusion while there are no crystal balls to see the future, it is obvious that digital technologies will be increasingly important in society. it is more imperative than ever that children need to be literate and informed, but this has to be in the context of the ‘technology of their time’ and not based on old technologies or past benchmarks. the introduction of digital technologies into the australian curriculum is indeed a long-awaited advancement and this means that children will now have an endorsed opportunity to learn about and with technology. the teachers of these children, however, will need significant support to implement the curriculum and this includes helping them to develop their own digital literacies and learn about ‘computational thinking’ in order to unpack the requirements. the popular mandate to introduce computer coding for all learners has merit but this is only one dimension to a much larger picture. learning to write computer code builds computational thinking but this can also be developed through a range of digital technologies projects where logic, persistence and creativity are required. further, a digital project needs much more than code to be realized. digital development involves a spectrum of skills and talents and more focus on collaborative partnerships and differentiated roles would enhance children’s preparation for real-world skills. in conclusion, the proliferation of digital technologies/stem projects in australian schools is welcomed and acknowledged as a positive initiative to support new learning. it needs to be recognized, however, that educational research aligned with these projects might add a component of reflection and rigor that is currently missing. this layer of understanding is highly desirable in order to support informed decisions about digital technologies in curriculum, teaching and education. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 129 references australian bureau of 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(2018). digital technologies and junior secondary: learning with and about digital technologies. in r. jorgensen, & k. larkin (eds.) stem education in the junior secondary (pp. 197-219). singapore: springer. hatch, t. (2009). managing to change: how schools can survive (and sometimes thrive) in turbulent times. new york, ny: teachers college press. hunjan, r., & bloomer, c. (2016, december 7). australian schools are in ‘absolute decline’ globally. abc news. retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/201612-06/australian-school-performance-in-absolute-decline-globally/8098028 johnson, j., avenarius, c., & weatherford, j. (2006). the active participant-observer: applying social role analysis to participant observation. field methods, 182, 111134. keane, t., chalmers, c., williams, m., & boden, m. (2016). the impact of humanoid robots on students’ computational thinking. in australian council for computers in education conference 2016, 29 september 2 october 2016. brisbane, qld. knobel, m., & kalman, j. (2016). teacher learning, digital technologies and new literacies. in m. knobel, & j. kalman (eds.) new literacies and teacher learning: professional development and the digital turn (pp. 1-20). new york: peter lang. lankshear, c., & knobel, m. (2011). new literacies: everyday practices and social learning. new york: peter lang. littlejohn, c., & hunter, j. (2016). messy or not: the role of education institutions in leading successful applications of digital technology in teaching and learning. australian educational leader, 38(3), 62-65. masters, j. (2017). the king island digital stories (kids) project: telling stories for tomorrow’s learning. paper presented at the world conference for computers in education 2017 (wcce 2017). dublin, ireland. organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd) (2015). students, computers and learning: making the connection. pisa, oecd publishing. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264239555-en organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd) (2017). compare your country. retrieved from https://www.compareyourcountry.org/ polesel, j., rice, s., & dulfer, n. (2014). the impact of high-stakes testing on curriculum and pedagogy: a teacher perspective from australia. journal of education policy, 29(5), 640-657. prinsley, r., & johnston, e. (2015). transforming stem teaching in australian primary schools: everybody's business – position paper. canberra: australia: office of the chief scientist. riddle, s. (2015). the robots are coming for your job! why digital literacy is so important for the jobs of the future. the conversation (online). retrieved from http://theconversation.com/the-robots-are-coming-for-your-job-why-digitalliteracy-is-so-important-for-the-jobs-of-the-future-46730 scott, c. (2015). the futures of learning 3: what kind of pedagogies for the 21st century? education research and foresight: working papers. unesco. retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002431/243126e.pdf http://www.educationcouncil.edu.au/ec-reports-and-publications.aspx https://www.digitaltechnologieshub.edu.au/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-06/australian-school-performance-in-absolute-decline-globally/8098028 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-06/australian-school-performance-in-absolute-decline-globally/8098028 http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264239555-en https://www.compareyourcountry.org/ http://theconversation.com/the-robots-are-coming-for-your-job-why-digital-literacy-is-so-important-for-the-jobs-of-the-future-46730 http://theconversation.com/the-robots-are-coming-for-your-job-why-digital-literacy-is-so-important-for-the-jobs-of-the-future-46730 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002431/243126e.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 131 segal, j. (2016, august 10). australian universities are not producing enough stem graduates. financial review. retrieved from http://www.afr.com/opinion/australian-universities-are-not-producingenough-stem-graduates-20160810-gqp1oj selwyn, n., nemorin, s., & johnson, n. (2017). high-tech, hard work: an investigation of teachers’ work in the digital age, learning, media and technology, 42(4), 390405. singhal, p. (2017, september 28). australia’s ‘tolerance of failure’ behind declining pisa results. the sydney morning herald. retrieved from http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/australias-tolerance-of-failurebehind-declining-pisa-results-says-test-coordinator-20170928-gyqlh2.html speranza, a. (2015). embracing the new technologies curriculum. educational technology solutions. retrieved from https://www.educationtechnologysolutions.com.au/2015/06/embracing-thenew-technologies-curriculum/ teacher education ministerial advisory group (temag) (2015). action now: classroom ready teachers. canberra, australia: commonwealth of australia. thomson, s., de bortoli, l., & underwood, c. (2016). pisa 2015: reporting australia’s results. australian council for educational research. http://www.afr.com/opinion/australian-universities-are-not-producing-enough-stem-graduates-20160810-gqp1oj http://www.afr.com/opinion/australian-universities-are-not-producing-enough-stem-graduates-20160810-gqp1oj http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/australias-tolerance-of-failure-behind-declining-pisa-results-says-test-coordinator-20170928-gyqlh2.html http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/australias-tolerance-of-failure-behind-declining-pisa-results-says-test-coordinator-20170928-gyqlh2.html https://www.educationtechnologysolutions.com.au/2015/06/embracing-the-new-technologies-curriculum/ https://www.educationtechnologysolutions.com.au/2015/06/embracing-the-new-technologies-curriculum/ trends in the digitalization of k-12 schools: the australian perspective jennifer masters abstract introduction schooling in australia challenges in education in australia standards in decline skills for the future improving literacies digital technologies in the australian curriculum funding and resourcing digitalization opportunities for research examples of funded projects discussion conclusion references microsoft word kristensnyderdigitaculturecommunication.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 the digital culture and communication: more than just classroom learning kristen snyder associate professor mid sweden university email: kristen.snyder@miun.se abstract this paper presents a conceptual model of the digital culture that reflects the multi-dimensionality of ict in education: pedagogy, communication, technology and organizational systems. the model grew out of a three-year study of an online professional development program for educators in seven countries. the focus of the paper is to explore the relationship between human dynamics and technological systems for advancing the school as an organization. considering the digital culture of schools from an organizational communication culture perspective awakens us to the importance of looking at the subculture that emerges through human exchange reflecting core values and beliefs. when we consider the digital world in which students already live, and match it against the challenge of schools for human citizen development, we begin to see that a digital culture is more than technological. it is organizational, it is communicative, and it is cultural. through the creation of cultural webs, motivated by humans, and assisted by technology, online communication has the possibility to shape a collective space for cross cultural connections that support a shared democracy. introduction educators today are working hard to develop capacities to integrate technology and learning, which emphasize areas including technology, pedagogy, human communication, and teaching strategies. such efforts are now opening doors beyond the classroom to create virtual communities for life long learning and professional development. we see this in a variety of projects and programs that provide such things as online discussion groups and cross-cultural school development. one of the growing challenges with this expanded use of ict is the emerging dimensionality of integrating technology into the daily fabric of life long learning. we are no longer talking just about course development to serve individual learning. today, ict is being used to connect people and organizations across cultures to promote, among other things, democracy through professional and educational development. this shift from the classroom to open learning spaces adds new dimensions to the development, use and integration of technology in education and professional development. the research on ict and education has highlighted exemplary courses, as well as the challenges of developing online learning. many pedagogical researchers espouse the importance of more community-oriented theories of teaching and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 2 learning (harasim, 1989; sorensen and takle, 2002), while the methodologists focus on ways to structure online learning activities (paloff and pratt, 1999; salmon 2000, simpson, 1999). while these studies have helped to advance the development of technology and learning, most examine a single dimension in relation to online classroom learning, for example, pedagogy, teaching methods, or the technical use of communication tools. fewer focus on the multi-dimensionality of online communities and the challenges for development and organizational change that accompany this growing life long learning environment. this paper focuses on the development of a model that reflects the multidimensionality of ict in education today, integrating pedagogy, technology, communication and organizational culture. the initial model, presented in figure 1 grew out of a research study on professional development online. subsequent to the studies completion, the world of ict continued to develop, influencing our daily organizational culture and work routines, as well as the delivery of professional development and life long learning programs. figure 2 presents a developed version of the initial model reflecting an emerging digital culture in which we now live, work and grow. the study site included 60 educators from seven countries, and an initial teacher-leadership staff of 12 persons from three countries, and two universities (snyder and acker-hocevar, 2004; snyder and wagenius 2002). the professional development program provided training in global school and leadership development to principals and school staff. the early stages of program development focused on several dimensions including, program content, learning community organization, and instructional design. following this, pedagogical theory and models for group structure and facilitation were added. the second and third years were spent developing the online communication and social community. each phase of the development emerged in response to the needs of the participants, program leaders, and project goals. the building blocks of these years of virtual living provided a platform to examine and explore the multi-dimensionality of online connections and communication; a powerful tool to open learning beyond the classroom. framing thoughts behind the model for a number of years my research was influenced heavily by an organizational culture perspective (bantz, 1993; eisenberg and goodhall, 1993; stohl, 1995), focusing on how groups organized, communicated and interacted within schools to facilitate work and development toward the educational goals. such research was grounded in physical place, studying the symbols and language that people used to give meaning to their work, to change, which in turn created a work culture. using the methods, tools, and analytic frames of narrative study, symbolic interaction, and social constructivism, the studies related much to interpersonal communication and the sociology of organizing. in late 1999 i was invited to lead a research team to study leadership and school development among educators who participated in a virtually based program, called the international school connection. my initial approaches to the study were strongly driven by my “physical placement” study orientation, which i had developed for quite some time and felt stable in. near the end of the first year of study, i was rudely, and appropriately awakened to the fact that studying “life online” is unique and requires a different way of looking at people, communication, organization, and outcomes. the model that is presented in this paper has emerged from a four-year journey moving from a bounded system of study orientation to seeing the world as a boundary-less set of networks, each providing their own unique combinations of culture and interaction. simultaneously, the institutional life seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 3 around me (my own university) was developing in an era of technology and digital life, causing all of us to rethink systems of management, the delivery of courses and programs, and the day to day maintenance and engagement with email and chat as our new dominant forms of communication. the model presented in this paper reflects the journey from physical to virtual and back again, representing the circle of human dynamics and organizational development. what was once considered another field of study and dimension of working (information communication technology) is now integrating with the traditions of organizational culture, creating a digital culture for human and organizational life. creating a context: technology and the age of networks technology has opened doors that are transforming our daily rituals with rapid speed. in the mid 1990s castells (1996) wrote about the network society, which through technology, would stimulate changes in production, experience, power and culture. he argued that people would have new access to resources, and that the connections between political, social and economic structures would create a new kind of relationship between people and nations. since that time, we have witnessed the growth of our societies and the unfolding of a digital culture, which is becoming more and more complex, reflecting in many ways the true nature of networks: complex systems. what we are in need of, as a global race, is to understand this complexity and grab hold of it, for if we don’t we fail to achieve the benefits of networks posed by castells: highly dynamic social structures, which have the ability to innovate without causing imbalance to the system. during the past 10 years or more, innovation in technology has taken place in almost all branches of society from the micro to the macro. in education, emphasis has grown from initial thoughts of using technology in the classroom to building a digital culture for learning and living, that includes among other things “digital literacy” (european union decision no 2318/2003). the elearning action plan, along with the lisbon council (march 2000) and other european union initiatives for education, reflect a desire to open avenues for knowledge acquisition, provide greater access to education for all, enhance creativity through changes in the learning environment, and create an avenue to entrepreneurship, life long learning and network living. by year 2006, the e-learning plan strives to meet four primary goals: 1) promoting digital literacy, 2) building european virtual campus, 3) e-twinning of schools in europe and promotion of teacher training, and 4) transversal actions for the promotion of e-learning in europe. this action plan, along with others such as the bologna process (1999) is calling for fundamental shifts in the organization and delivery of education from compulsory to professional development and life long learning. at the school level, such initiatives are emerging that focus on the use of technology as a communication tool between home and school (nilsson and sefyrin, 2005); new models of high schools are developing through virtual campuses, such as nätverksgymnasiet in sweden for example; and regional learning centers are providing support to compulsory, university, and life long learning. many universities in sweden are now preparing to restructure the teacher training program to prepare becoming teachers with a digital competence befitting the needs of students and schools today (kk stiftelsen, 2005). moreover the success of distance education at the university level has led to the sustainability and growth of virtual universities, as well as raising the bar on what it takes to stay competitive in the distance education game of higher education. these examples alone reflect a complex array of factors that are transforming not only pedagogical models but also educational infrastructures. for the past seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 4 decade or more we as global citizens have witnessed the downsizing of companies in big industry, which resulted, in large part, from the technologization of the workplace. fewer people were needed for jobs, and instead replaced by automated processes. this shift led to the demise of the production worker and the rise of the knowledge worker. a similar shift of its own kind is now being witnessed in education as the “digital culture” is now changing the ways in which teachers and students connect, whole programs of study are offered, classroom are constructed and placed, and information is accessed. however, to stop at the pedagogical level, which is how most of these changes have been classified for years, would be to sell us short of understanding the true implications of the digital culture. we need to see that the discussion on ict once reserved for teachers, is no longer a special subject: it is our collective life of living and working. it is a multi-dimensional culture, which includes technology, pedagogy, communication, and organizational life. in the next few pages, i will present the development of a model that reflects dimensions of the digital culture, which i hope will contribute to a growing discussion about the field of it, shifting from the narrow focus on technology or instructional design, to include organizational life. moving to a digital culture two figures are presented below that represent the conceptual development of a digital culture, moving from a linear orientation, focused on pedagogy, to a systemic orientation focused on the interdependence of technology, pedagogy, communication, and organizational systems. together these elements shape and are shaped by one another, resulting in a dynamic digital culture. the first model was conceptualized at the end of the figure 1: elements found in investigating ict and professional development seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 5 research study presented above. the second model was developed a year later after conducting further research on human communication and culture online from an organizational theory perspective, as well as participating in the further development of network organizations, and the use of technology in a university-based teacher training program. figure one depicts a polarized view of ict in educational institutions, suggesting that there are two sides to the coin: pedagogical and organizational. in the pedagogical side, focus is given predominantly to creating online learning environments that support the acquisition of knowledge. while there are different pedagogical approaches and theories about online learning and instructional design, the primary focus remains the environment and its ability to facilitate learning. the human dimension (on the pedagogical side) is reflected mostly in online discussion groups, which are orchestrated around predetermined tasks that relate to course assignments and outcomes. over time, the pedagogical advancements in ict have moved from a technical focus (incorporating the computer in the classroom) to building online learning communities that support collaborative learning (lave and wenger, 1991; sorensen and tackle, 2002). it is this dimension of online learning that has opened doors to the other side of the coin: organizational. the organizational dimension of ict or online learning has been less articulated in the literature. while there is much discussion about “online learning communities”, the orientation is primarily pedagogical. in the above model, “organization” implies the use of online learning communities to create new organizational forms, giving structure and meaning to the network society. in this sense ict is used to develop collaborative spaces for interacting, organizing, disseminating information, and working. the virtual space, by necessity, has an infrastructure that is maintained and developed by an organizing entity. leadership, whether predetermined or emergent, is present, and people come together around a common purpose, given meaning (sense making), vision and goals to their work. communication is a central ingredient to the success of the communities, and requires that people take time to form communication patterns that are meaningful and rewarding (snyder, 2005; wagenius and snyder, 2002). because organizational networks are sustained, time provides for the emergence of an online culture that is characterized by role, relationships, identity, rhetoric, and symbols of meaning. through the communication culture, the network continues to form taking on new meaning overtime in the form of a social network (snyder snyder and acker-hocevar, 2004). such social networks provide support in the form of resources, professional development, emotional connections and community identity. while the online organization has all the elements of the pedagogical dimension of the model, most participants and leaders of such a virtual organization do not approach the online culture pedagogically. rather, they approach it organizationally, considering how the technological space can facilitate connections. at other times, many people don’t even consider the organizational space, but rather focus on the human connection and work at hand. more and more network organizations are developing within countries and across national borders, advancing professional development and life long learning opportunities. moreover, these networks are impacting the ways in which work is conducted in our daily institutions, through the common use of teleconferencing, chat forms, and the like. the advancement of ict through pedagogy into organizational theory is creating an interesting social cultural phenomenon, which transforms human dynamics, and expands the role of online communication beyond the classroom. no longer are we living in an era where “online communication” is a separate phenomenon from our daily lives. it now permeates our organizational walls and human systems to create a digital culture, which is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 6 reflected by the integration of technology into everyday life such that our human systems of interaction and work transpire in a physical and virtual space interchangeably. a digital culture requires that we see the organization as a central player in the interactive exchange between human dynamics and technical systems. the organization is a human device that is facilitated by technology in order to carry out its mission. on the one hand the organization shapes the technology, giving need and use to advancement. on the other hand, it is shaped by technology since the mechanical advances happen at a more rapid rate than growth in human systems. it is the interplay between the roles of shaper and shaped that a new organizational culture emerges, which i suggest to be the digital culture. by this i do not mean to suggest a purely technological space for living and working, but rather a space in which living with and through technology gives rise to new symbols, actions, rhetoric, and systems of work that are supported and carried out through communication patterns. such a culture transforms our daily ways of connecting, and creates spaces for organizational learning to take place on a multi-dimensional plain between the virtual and physical. figure 2 below is a systems view of the digital culture, comprised of pedagogy, technology, communication, and organizational theories. figure 2: digital culture implications for education the growth of the digital culture is quite natural when we consider the notion of the network society. it is further conceivable when we consider the transformation of human systems over time. what is perhaps most difficult is to understand the rate at which the culture is emerging with such depth and complexity, and that it is no longer adults alone who are in the driver’s seat. today, youth are giving cues to adults as to how to embrace and integrate technology into the fabric of educational institutions. yet, while the use of pp h y s i c a lh y s i c a l vv i r t u a li r t u a l seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 7 technology is promising it also brings with it a moral challenge to schools develop the use of technology within a collective culture based on shared values and human rights. schools are pressed today (not yet governed) to serve as a primary mechanism for promoting lifelong learning, active citizenship, and networking among its youth to stimulate healthy community development in future generations (cresson, 2002). the commission on international education states that “while education is an ongoing process of improving knowledge and skills, it is also—perhaps primarily—and exceptional means of bringing about personal development and building relationships among individual groups and nations (delors, 1996; p. 14). through education, we as a global community have the opportunity to work with people of all cultures to insure that as we move to a market oriented focus on life, we do not lose a sense of connection to community and cultural heritage, nor lose our moral, social and family values. for the children of the future, it is essential to keep these core components of life at the forefront of their human development. failure to do so will result in a future lacking in humanitarian value and sense of community connectedness. as organizations schools need to move beyond ict for classroom learning to build a culture that supports learning with and through technology; that is reflected in the very fabric and culture of life inside the school. bantz (1993) writes about a view of organizations from a communication culture perspective. he argues that by focusing on communication culture “we are looking at a specific genre of interdependent social activity: organizing” (p. 18). through the organizing of people around a common purpose, creation, maintenance and transformation of meanings and expectations develop through communication. this is necessarily a collective process that results in behaviors and messages that give rise to culture. embedded in the culture, are among other things a set of values and symbols. considering the digital culture of schools from an organizational communication culture perspective awakens us to the importance of looking at the subculture that emerges through human exchange reflecting core values and beliefs. when we consider the digital world in which students already live, and match it against the challenge of schools for human citizen development, we begin to see that a digital culture is more than technological. it is organizational, it is communicative, and it is cultural. through the creation of cultural webs (geertz, 1973), motivated by humans, and assisted by technology, online communication has the possibility to shape a collective space for cross cultural connections that support a shared democracy. as schools begin to consider their role in the development of the future, they need to understand the implications of technology as more than just classroom learning. it is a strand in the web of life that gives shape to our connections and communication, through which we create shared meaning globally and locally. creating a digital culture takes time, awareness, and care to embrace and shape the interaction between technology and human systems. our need as a society has arrived to recognize that educational institutions and their workers need to understand living in a digital culture. this requires seeing the complexity of the global age, as well as the interconnectedness of life through technology, which is built on communication, technology, pedagogy, and organizational systems. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 8 references bantz, c. r. (1993) understanding organizations: interpreting organizational communication cultures. columbia, sc: university of south carolina press bologna process declaration (1999) joint declaration of the european ministers of education (www document) http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna_en.htm l castells, m. (1996) the rise of the network society. oxford: blackwell publishers cresson, e. (2002) learning for active citizenship. a report to the european commission on education. 2002-02-08 (www document) www.europea.eu.int/comm/education/citizen/citizen.html delors, et al. (1996). learning the treasure within: report to unesco of the international commission for education in the 21st century. paris: unesco publishing. e learning programme (2003) decision no 2318/2003/ec of the european parliament and of the council of 5 december 2003 adopting a multiannual programme (2004 to 2006) for the effective integration of information and communication technologies (ict) in education and training systems in europe (elearning programme). (www document) http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/programmes/elearning/programme_en. html eisenberg, e. m., goodhall, h. l. (1993) organizational communication: balancing the creativity and constraint. new york: st. martin’s press. geertz, c. (1973) the interpretation of cultures. basic books: a division of harpercollins publishers. harasim, l. (1989) "online education: a new domain", in mason, r., & kaye, a. (eds), mindweave: communication, computers and distance education. oxford, pergamon press. kk stiftelsen (2005) it i lärarutbildningen (www document) http://www.kollegiet.com/default.asp/pid=142896/typ=87/docid=169678/pre viouspid=142896/skola.htm lave and wenger, 1991 situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. nilsson, o., and sefyrin, j. (2005) vardagskommunkation skola-hem: delrapport1: föräldrars uppfattningar-nuläge och vision. rapport 2005:2 sundsvall, sweden: sundsvalls kommun barn-och utbildning. paloff, r. m., and pratt, k. (1999) building learning communities in cyberspace: effective strategies for the online classroom. san francisco: jossey-bass. salmon, g. (2000) emoderating: the key to teaching and learning online. london: kogan-page. simpson, o. (1999) supporting students in online, open and distance learning. london: kogan-page. snyder, k. m. (in press) stimulating dialogue online in cross cultural learning communities, in f. kochran, j. pascelli (eds), technological aspects of mentoring. greenwhich, ct: infomage press. snyder, k. m., acker-hocevar, m. (2004) building international cultures of synergy through online social networks. in f. kochran, j. pascelli (eds), global perspectives on mentoring: transforming contexts, communities, and cultures. greenwhich, ct: infomage press snyder, k. m., wagenius, m. (2002) international connections through ict: expanding the training and development of teachers. in j. perhoff (ed) internationalization in a shrinking world. eisenstadt, germany: stiftung pädagoische akademie. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 9 sorensen, e. k. & takle, e. s. (2002): "collaborative knowledge building in web-based learning: assessing the quality of dialogue". in: the international journal on e-learning (ijel). vol. 1, issue: 1, 2002 sthol, c. (1995) organizational communication: connectedness in action. thousand oaks: sage publication. wagenius, m. , snyder, k. m. (2002) building international education networks with ict: possibilities and challenges. in j. perhoff (ed) internationalization in a shrinking world. eisenstadt, germany: stiftung pädagoische akademie. microsoft word krumsvik situated learning in the network society.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 (commentary) situated learning in the network society rune krumsvik university of bergen email: rune.krumsvik@iuh.uib.no abstract there is a need to develop a broader view of knowledge for dealing with the way in which new digital trends influence the underlying conditions for schools, pedagogy and subjects. this short commentary article, based on my paper at the nvu-conference 2008, will therefore highlight whether a broader view of knowledge situated learning, digital literacy and the digital revolution can generate new ways of how we perceive pedagogy within the new educational reform in norway in particular and the digitized school in general. the focus is particularly angled towards the implications this may have for developing new practises for teachers and students. keywords: ict, digital literacy, situated learning, digital epistemology, new practises introduction the main thread through the annual nvu-conference this year was collaboration, sharing and feedback, and if we see an emerging new practise among teachers and students in the norwegian educational system. the different papers highlighted these issues from different angles, but at the same time shared a common consensus that the norwegian educational system faces a number of challenges in regard to handle the digitization of society, universities and school. one of the main reason for this situation is that the digital revolution and the ever increasing digitalisation of school life have altered some of the conditions under which our educational system operate compared to before the digital revolution in the beginning of the 1990’s (krumsvik 2006). several of the papers at the nvu-conference highlighted this situation and the need to reconsider what the terms knowledge, knowing and know-how are in 2008. therefore several of the papers claimed that there is a need to develop a digital epistemology which can capture a broader view of knowledge to encapsulate the impact of the latest digital trends on the underlying conditions applicable to our universities, schools, pedagogy and subjects. my own paper at the conference, situated learning in the network society, set out to discuss whether – and if so, how – a wider view of knowledge, situated learning (lave & wenger 1991) and digital literacy can create new approaches to how we view and assess knowledge in the digital age and in relation to the norwegian government’s knowledge promotion reform (kd 2006). ict and digital literacy occupy a prominent position in this new reform package, and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 (commentary) 2 enshrining these two areas so clearly in the curriculum puts norway in a unique position internationally. meanwhile there is little doubt that the digital revolution has provided pupils with good access to technology in and outside school, giving them a sense of self-confidence in relation to digital media (knobel 1999; krumsvik 2006, 2007). the result is that formal and informal learning arenas are blending together in both physical and virtual learning spaces. a focal point in my paper was the question of what distinctive marks we can find within situated learning in the network society which occurs as a consequence of the blending of formal –and informal learning arenas. however, teachers still lack the necessary digital literacy to manage ict and the new learning spaces central to the knowledge promotion reform (arnseth, h. c, hatlevik, o., kløvstad, v., kristiansen, t. & ottestad, g., 2007). this makes for a situation in which digital trends, new learning spaces and k06 (kd 2006) are paving the way for new educational approaches and assessment forms, while a number of apparent obstacles prevent these approaches from becoming a reality. the digitization of society and school my paper highlighted that the digital revolution has produced radical changes in the norwegian society since the mid-1990s, and the school system too has been affected by these developments. a british study, personalisation and digital technologies (green, facer, rudd, dillon & humphreys 2006), provides an insight into the extent of this digital revolution. the study forecasts that today’s average british school-age child will, by the age of 21, have spent 15,000 hours in formal education, 20,000 hours watching television and 50,000 hours in front of a computer screen. although this is merely a prediction, it nevertheless provides an indication of the extent to which today’s “screenagers” (rushkoff 1996) use the media. much of this media use is entertainment-focused (which makes it difficult to distinguish between entertainment and learning), but more and more observers are asking themselves whether any of it might be relevant to school activities. the basis of this notion is that pupils are acquiring digital self-confidence through frequent ict-use, which implies transcontextual aspects (learning that takes place in and between multiple contexts, lave & wenger 2003). “digitized”, situated learning may represent a new form of knowledge building that may be relevant in a school context, both as a theoretical lens to understand this digitization of society and school and for developing a new, broader digital epistemology which have to reflect this new digitized, knowledge building. if we look more closely at the situation in norway there is little doubt that the digital revolution has made its mark both in society and in the school system to an even greater extent than in other countries. in recent years norway has been one of the highest-ranking nations in respect of technology penetration in society (castells 2001; oecd 2001, 2003; vaage 2005; vaage, 2007, 2008; utdanningsdirektoratet, 2007). according to the report “broadband coverage analysis 2007” (fad 2007) 98, 3% of norwegians today have the possibility to be connected to broadband and 60% of norwegian households are connected to broadband in 2007. other societal streams in norway make it reasonable to say that within 2009 over 90% of the households will be connected. a recent european study ranked norway highest in terms of digital skills among the population – and lowest in terms of those lacking digital skills (eurostat 2005). in upper secondary school we find that it is 1,7 pupil pr pc and for the first time in norwegian history the majority of the pupils who started in their upper secondary education in 2007 got their own laptop free of charge by the government (utdanningsdirektoratet 2007). 41% of these pupils are using five hours or more every day in front of a screen (pc or tv) in their leisure time outside school (vaage 2007). for the elementary pupils (9–16 age group) the tendency are the same and digital learning resources are increasingly replacing textbooks for homework (saft 2006). 88% of 10-years old kids and 99,4% of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 (commentary) 3 16-years old youngsters got their own mobile telephone (telenor 2007). and in school digital literacy have enjoyed a historic rise in their academic status, becoming the fifth core competence to be incorporated in all subjects at all age levels under the knowledge promotion reform. as a result of this norway has a particularly good starting point, which presents opportunities, challenges and dilemmas in the running of schools. the question that arises is to what extent this has any impact on young people’s learning, and whether we really know enough about what constitutes knowledge accumulation among young people (screenagers) today. a number of previous studies showed that ict had had little demonstrable effect on young people’s learning, so there is reason to be sceptical of simple conclusions in this regard (cuban 2001). at the same time we are seeing the digital revolution and the massive transcontextual use of media by young people paving the way for different, indirect approaches to learning than under the previous curriculum (the 10-year comprehensive education curriculum) (l97) (kuf 1996). although we can identify only a vague outline of what this might imply, the british report mentions that schools must show “[…] an awareness that many learners today are already creating personalised environments for themselves outside school using digital resources” (green et al. 2006:4). looking at this in the context of the previous curriculum (l97, kuf 1996), we have to consider the extent to which schools should take more account of the digital world inhabited by today’s “screenagers” outside of school. in contrast to 1997, pupils in 2008 move in digital fields comprising a number of digital and multimodal learning resources, networks, a user-friendly web 2.0, online communities, new forms of communication, etc. that did not exist when the previous curriculum was introduced (l97, kuf 1996). as a consequence of this (and the digitization of society in general), participation in the network society in 2008 means that the majority of norwegian citizens are able to obtain almost all the services from public authorities through the net (e.g. www.norge.no, www.minside.no, www.skatteetaten.no), communicate in new ways through the net (skype, chat, sms, e-mail, etc.), has access to enormous sources of information and knowledge through the net (e.g. www.wikipedia.org, www.naturfag.no, www.skolenettet.no, www.utdanning.no, www.viten.no) and at the same can present themselves through the net (e.g. www.facebook.com, www.twitter.com,), have a “voice” in the public room through the net (e.g. internet blogs, discussion forums) and participate in net societies (www.myspace.com, www.youtube.com). this establishes a lot of possibilities that we never have seen before and the majority of the screenagers have already constituted this on-line existence in this digital landscape as part of their bildung-journey (krumsvik & støbakk 2007). this might also have impact on how these screenagers learn and therefore i claimed at the conference that never before the norwegian society has been so prepared for a “digitized” situated learning than in 2008. with a swarm of digital learning resources, digital communities and people a “mouse click” away this constitutes a very good starting point to capture the informal learning that occurs for screenagers, even if we not today value it as “knowledge” defined from a traditional perception of knowledge. however, the question one has to ask is if the rapid digitization of society and school will establish a gap between the majority of digital natives (the “haves”, screenagers) and digital immigrants (the “have-not’s”) , and if so, how do this influence human development for the digital illiterates, as well as teaching and learning in our contemporary society? previous studies from the us showed that implementation of ict in the usa has created an unexpected side-effect: ”(…) the creation of a technological underclass in america’s public schools” (cuban & tyack, 1998, p. 125).this digital diversity followed traditional socioeconomic and cultural “trails” and created new problems for already vulnerable schools and pupil-groups. another study from the us “computer and internet use by students in 2003” revealed the same tendency as before and found that digital divides was closely tied to socioeconomic status of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 (commentary) 4 pupils parents, their family income and by ethnicity (debell & chapman 2006). in a report from the organisation for economic co-operation and development [oecd], understanding the digital divide (2001), the same dilemma is highlighted for european conditions, where “falling through the net” threatens certain groups. as a consequence of this we can ask if access and participation has become so important ground pillars in our norwegian society, that the citizens and pupils who do not have necessary access to technology at home, at school and in spare time, actually experiences that they are digital illiterates and in many ways are segregated from the mainstream society. as a consequence of this they are also hindered to participate in the “digitized” situated learning which occurs “anytime, anywhere and with anyone” because of the digitization of society and school, as well as peoples in general on-line existence. in norway this situation is difficult to grasp, but we can observe some emerging digital inequality among minority pupils in school (frønes, 2002) and parents and youngsters from lower socioeconomic family status (vaage 2008). several teacher educators and teachers state that the mathew effect (merton 1973) is already possible to observe among pupils even if this digitized society is only “ten years old”: pupils who are doing well in school in general are using the technology to more subject-related activities; pupils who achieves rather bad in school are using the technology more to entertainment. this might be the “back side of the medallion” of the digitization of society and school and needs to be considered seriously if we mean something with the ground pillars in the norwegian unitarian school: inclusion and adapted education. therefore we see that our schools need to be aware of how that they can equalise some of the digital divides. they might use a strategy of increasing the subject-use of ict in the subjects, relate adapted education to such issues and give access to school computers after school time for vulnerable pupil groups. as a summary of my paper at the nvu-conference this indicates that we face a number of possibilities, challenges and dilemmas in this new digital educational landscape in norway and where both the need for a digital epistemology, increased digital literacy among teachers and awareness for digital divides has to be considered in light of the digital revolution. if one considers these issues more seriously, we might be able to realize the main topic for the conference: establish new practices for teachers and students based on collaboration, sharing and feedback across formal – and informal learning spaces. in that case situated learning becomes more than good intentions – it might be a useful lens to understand “how teachers teach and learners learn” in a digitized society. references arnseth, h. c, hatlevik, o., kløvstad, v., kristiansen, t. & ottestad, g.(2007). itu monitor 2007 skolens digitale tilstand 2007 [itu monitor the digital conditions in school 2007; in norwegian]. oslo: forskningsog kompetansenettverk for it i utdanning. castells, m. (2001). the internet galaxy. new york: oxford university press. cuban, l. (2001). oversold and underused. computers in the classroom. cambridge: harvard university press. cuban, l., & tyack d. (1998). tinkering toward utopia. cambridge: harvard university press. debell, m., and chapman, c. (2006). computer and internet use by students in 200 3 (nces 2006–065). u.s. department of education. washington, dc: national center for education statistics. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 (commentary) 5 eurostat (2005). the digital divide in europe. report 38/2005. luxembourg: eurostat. fad (2007) (fornyingsog adminsitrasjonsdepartementet) [ministry of government administration and reform]. bredbånd. dekningsanalyse 2007. [broadband. coverage analysis 2007]. oslo: teleplan frønes, i. (2002). digitale skiller. bergen: fagbokforlaget. green, h., facer, k., rudd, t., dillon, p. & humphreys, p. (2006). personalisation and digital technologies. london: futurelab. kd (ministry of education and research) (2006). prinsipper for opplæringen [the quality framework]. oslo: government administration services. knobel, m. (1999). everyday literacies. new york: peter lang. krumsvik, r. (2006). ict-initiated school development in lower secondary school. doctoral thesis, dr.philos. the university of bergen. bergen: allkopi. krumsvik, r. (2007). skulen og den digitale læringsrevolusjonen. oslo: universitetsforlaget krumsvik, r. & støbakk, å. (2007). digital danning. i r. krumsvik (ed.), skulen og den digitale læringsrevolusjon. oslo: universitetsforlaget. kuf (ministry of education and research) (1996). læreplanverket for den 10-årige grunnskolen. oslo: nasjonalt læremiddelsenter. lave, j., & wenger, e. (1991). situated learning. legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lave, j. & wenger, e. (2003). situeret læring. copenhagen: hans reitzels forlag. merton, r. k. (1973). the sociology of science: theoretical and empirical investigations. chicago, il: university of chicago press. oecd (organisation for economic co-operation and development) (2001). understanding the digital divide. access date: 20.02.2003, http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/38/57/1888451.pdf oecd (organisation for economic co-operation and development) (2003). education at a glance 2003. access date: 01.08.03, http://www.oecd.org/document/52/0,2340,en_2649_34515_13634484_1_1_1_1, 00.html rushkoff, d. (1996). playing the future: what we can learn from digital kids – children of chaos in the uk. new york: riverhead books. saft (safety, awareness, facts and tools) (2006). saft barneundersøkelse 2006. oslo: saft. access date: 25.05.06, http://www.saftonline.no/vedlegg/2875/sammendrag%20resultater%20saft%2 0barneunders?kelse%202006.pdf synovate mmi (2006). barns medievaner. oslo: synovate mmi. access date: 28.06.06, http://www.synovate.no telenor (2007). mobile-tv usage customer insights. r&i r 27/2007. oslo: telenor. utdanningsdirektoratet (2007) [norwegian directorate for education and training]. utstyrsog driftssituasjonen i grunnopplæringen 2006–2007. oslo: norwegian directorate for education and training. access date: 10.04.07, http://www.utdanningsdirektoratet.no/templates/udir/tm_artikkel.aspx?id=2610 vaage, o.f. (2005). norsk mediebarometer 2004 [norwegian media monitor 2004] oslo: statistisk sentralbyrå. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 (commentary) 6 vaage, o.f. (2007). stadig mer tid foran skjermen [continuous more time in front of the screen]. samfunnspeilet, 4. vaage, o.f. (2008). norsk mediebarometer 2007. oslo: statistisk sentralbyrå. microsoft word neilselwyn-reflexityandtechnology.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 reflexivity and technology in adult learning neil selwyn associate professor cardiff university, uk email: selwynnc@cardiff.ac.uk abstract it is argued by influential commentators such as ulrich beck and scott lash that we now live in a ‘reflexively modern' age. people are seen to now be free of the structures of modern society and driven instead by individualised opportunities to reflexively engage with their fast-changing social worlds and identities. taking the notion of reflexive modernisation as its starting point, this paper explores the roles that information technologies (its) may play in supporting adults' reflexive judgements about, and reflexive engagements with, education and learning. through an analysis of interview data with 100 adults in the uk the paper finds that whilst a minority of interviewees were using its to support and inform reflexive engagement with learning, the majority of individuals relayed little sign of technologysupported reflexivity when it came to their (non)engagement with education. for most people its were found, at best, to reinforce pre-established tendencies to ‘drift' through the formal education system. the paper concludes by considering the implications of these findings for ongoing efforts in developed countries to establish technology-supported ‘learning societies'. introduction reflexivity is now recognised as a prominent way in which people, organisations and even nations can find a foothold in a ‘runaway world’ which is increasingly individualised, intensified and accelerated (giddens 2002). correspondingly there is a long tradition of debating ‘reflexivity’ and the ‘reflexive subject’ in euro-american social science. authors from jurgen habermas to anthony giddens have spent time elaborating upon immanuel kant’s discussion of ‘reflective judgement’ and the move away from applying given universals to particulars (guyer 2004). this theoretical concern with reflexivity in contemporary society has culminated recently in the individual and collaborative works of, among others, scott lash, ulrich beck, john urry and bruno latour. over the last fifteen years these authors have documented an epochal shift from a ‘simple modernity’ to a ‘reflexive modernity’ as individuals have begun to be freed from the structures of society and driven instead through opportunities to reflect both upon their selves and social worlds. although there are clear differences between these individual writers’ conceptualisation of ‘reflexivity’ (see beck 1999), they are in broad agreement that thriving, rather than merely surviving, in contemporary society involves more than being determined by the predetermined structures within which one finds oneself. instead, successful actors develop a capacity for constant seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 2 self-evaluation and self-awareness in the face of an ever-changing and challenging social world. as beck and colleagues (2003) are at pains to point out, the concept of reflexivity is concerned not just with the self-referential quality of modern life but with the fundamental transformation of key institutions and principles of modern society. this is seen if we contrast the reflexive modernity with the first ‘simple’ modernity. society in the first modernity can be characterised as highly structured and ordered around institutions such as the nation, the state and the nuclear family. although individuals may reflect on and react to the inherent structuation of society, any action remains determined primarily by these structures. in the first modernity, therefore, any reflexivity is more “a matter of reflection” (lash 2003, p.49), where the subject developed an understanding of their place within the structures which bound their lives. beck and colleagues’ account of the second reflexive modernity, on the other hand, acknowledges a shift away from this linear, structured and predictable logic of society. they describe instead a situation where the functions, operations and services of society have become decentred, destabilised, disintegrated and disorganised. in this way the second modernity approaches what beck would describe as a society characterised by risk rather than regulation. this disorganisation and de-structuration of the contemporary social world leaves the individual subject in a position where they have to negotiate their own role and respond to choices not necessarily faced by previous generations. thus the role of the reflexively modern subject is transformed from one of passively negotiating prescribed, determinate rules to being the active finder and re-configurer of the rules. this requires ‘reflexive judgements’ to be made which address questions of risk and uncertainty often on highly individualised and subjective grounds (lash 2000). in this way the ability to make reflexive judgements is an essential part of surviving and thriving in contemporary life. of course, reflexive modernity is not imagined as a social utopia where all individuals prosper. the outcomes of reflexive judgements are risky and uncertain and can often entail ‘unintended consequences’ and unforeseen side-effects. thus beck and others acknowledge that “a new distribution of possibilities is simultaneously a new distribution of impossibilities for someone else” (beck et al. 2003, p.25). for every empowered ‘reflexivity winner’ there are large populations of ‘reflexivity losers’ who remain disempowered and inert (kelly & kenway 2001). the successful subjects in the reflexive modernity are therefore those who are cosmopolitan and exhibit few of the older attachments to traditional institutions as shared communities of fate able instead to respond almost instantaneously to choices and lifechances (lash and urry 1994). in this sense, effective social action is a dynamic but often ad hoc activity: “we may wish to be reflective but we have neither the time nor the space to reflect. we are instead combinards. we put together networks, construct alliances, make deals. we must live, are forced to live, in an atmosphere of risk in which knowledge and life-chances are precarious” (lash 2003, p.51-52). reflexivity and adult learning this portrayal of a fast-changing world in flux has particular resonance with the field of adult education. although it is easy to exaggerate the pace of educational change, a significant restructuring of adult education systems has occurred of late. the provision and consumption of post-compulsory education around the world has become noticeably more decentred, dispersed and, many would argue, flexible. in fact adult education has undergone a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 3 pattern of reorganisation which mirrors the ‘flattening’ of hierarchies seen to characterise the reflexive modernity. for example, the last decade has seen the disaggregation and outsourcing of much work-related training and education across private and public sectors often on global rather than local lines and with an increasingly fluid emphasis on ‘just-in-time’ training and ‘on-the-job’ learning. traditional providers of education such as colleges and universities now compete with new sources of remote and flexible education offered by an array of actors – commercial and non-commercial, large and small, formal and informal. this ‘disorganisation’ of education has, at least in theory, led to an abundance of choices and challenges for the contemporary adult learner. no longer constrained by essentially localised structures of formal provision, individuals are faced with a dynamic but often uncertain ‘chaos’ of educational opportunities and choices – as giddens (1998, p.101) puts it, a significant ‘redistribution of possibilities’. this ongoing fragmentation of adult education has often been approached by governments, politicians and many educationalists in a rather optimistic, sanitised and decidedly non-reflexive manner. the diversification and ‘massification’ of adult education, for example, has been rationalised in political and economic discourse as providing a cornerstone for a coherent and unified ‘learning society’ founded upon full participation in lifelong learning (oecd 1996, coffield 1997). what social theorists would see as a disorganisation of education has subtly been recast within official channels as a neat reorganisation of education along the more convenient, democratic and effective lines of the ‘learning society’. yet the notion of the learning society is an aspirational rather than actual account of education in developed countries with most adults’ experiences being far removed from the linear, smooth progression through the life course that the notion of ‘lifelong learning’ implies. we know that adults often experience lifelong learning as a complex and volatile journey with many unintended and unforeseen consequences. in this way reflexive judgement, as described earlier, is likely to be crucial to the successful navigation through the ever-changing landscape of real-life adult education. as giddens (1994, p.7) speculates, “a world of intensified reflexivity is a world of clever people”. educational research is beginning to provide empirical support for this contention. as kelly and kenway’s (2001) study of australian youth demonstrated, transitions through the post-compulsory education system are now increasingly risky and no longer as straightforward as they once may have been for previous generations. the transitional phase from being a ‘nonlearner’ to becoming a ‘lifelong learner’ is not a straightforward matter of shedding old identities and adopting new ones as implied in the rhetoric of the learning society. instead kelly and kenway describe it as marking a period of risk, confusion and contradiction (see also brine and waller 2004). thus the exhortative notion of the learning society belies the ‘real-life’ situation where some individuals are better positioned and equipped than others to choose to participate in adult education and accrue the benefits which may result. how individuals may be encouraged to develop and refine their identities as learners is therefore a pressing concern for educators around the world. of particular significance – and the focus of the remainder of this paper – is the faith placed by growing numbers of educationalists in new media and technology as providing a ready means of stimulating the reflexivity needed to support the realisation of the learning society ideal. technology and the reflexive adult learner for many commentators “it goes without saying that information and communication technology plays a leading role in the increasing reflexivity of modern society” (van dijk 1999, p.21). information technologies (its) are widely seen to be invaluable means of informing and supporting reflexive seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 4 judgement and social action. if she exists at all, then the life of the reflexively modern individual is likely to be bound up with an array of technological affordances. much interaction with others takes place via mobile communication devices such as cell-phones and palm-held computers. for many people the internet has become a pervasive conduit for the sharing of all manner of information. as roger silverstone (1999, p.7) concludes, technology and new media “are central to th[e] reflective project … the world about us is displayed and performed: iteratively and interminably”. thus, whilst reflexivity continues to also be supported via traditional means, new technologies are at the heart of a new immediate quality of reflexivity in the second modernity. through this technologically-facilitated immanence, reflexivity is “no longer about distanciated decision-making [now] there is no distance at all between knowledge and action” (lash 2002, p.156). in these terms, its should be a ready means for reflexive individuals to successfully fulfil the ideal of becoming ‘lifelong learners’. new technologies like the computer and the internet are seen by many adult educators as the embodiment of ‘the technocratic dream’ where “knowledge can be transmitted, efficiently and without any problem” (nordkvelle 2004, p.428). in particular, there is growing credence within educational circles that it-based learning is the obvious means of extending educational opportunities to those adults who previously have not participated in formal or informal learning. the logic for such assumptions derives from the central role that its have been given by the educational establishment in the current diversification of adult education. from blended ‘e-learning’ to wholly online distance education, its are seen to be transforming the twenty-first century educational landscape. in terms of taking learning into people's homes, workplace and wider communities, its are providing new spaces for education and blurring the distinction between formal and informal episodes of learning. moreover its such as the internet are able to support flows of information relating to educational opportunities and thereby increase individuals’ educational choices. in short educationalists are hoping that these technological affordances will combine to facilitate the ideals of the fully participative and egalitarian learning society. r e s e a r c h q u e s t i o n s although compelling, many of these assumptions remain untested – especially with respect to the roles that its may play in supporting individuals’ reflexive judgements about, and reflexive engagements with, education and learning. we know little of how the reflexive potential of new media like computers, the internet and digital television is working out in practice. as such a range of questions arise in relation to exploring its and reflexivity in adult learning, in particular: 1. how are its being used by individuals to exercise reflexive judgement on learning and being a learner? how are its supporting people to locate adult learning within an ever-changing, unstable and disorganised system of co-ordinates? to what extent are people recognising a pluralisation of learning opportunities and what can be considered as learning through its? how are its leading to the broadening of educational boundaries and allowing people to construct their own boundaries, rules and decisions? to what extent are its being used to facilitate reflexive judgements on individuals’ self-identities as learners? 2. which individuals and which social groups are using its in these reflexive ways? who appears to be empowered by its and who is more powerless? who are the ‘reflexive winners’ and ‘reflexive losers’ when it comes to education and learning? what are the circumstances behind this? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 5 3. what outcomes are the reflexive use(s) of its leading to, and for whom? to what extent are new technologies allowing reflexive learning to take place i.e. individualised, flexible learning, ‘free’ from dominant structures and with increasing opportunities to reflect upon the self as a (non)learner? what unintended consequences are in evidence in current patterns of adult learning and what roles do its play in reaching them? m e t h o d s this paper now considers the evidence for adults’ reflexive engagement with technology and learning via an analysis of interview data collected for a recent large-scale research project on adult learning in the uk. in-depth interviews were conducted with a stratified sample of 100 adults selected from a survey sample of 1001 adults in the west of england and south wales (see selwyn et al. 2005). interviews focused on individuals’ educational, technological and employment ‘careers’ as well as their current technological and educational activities. each interview lasted between 45 minutes and two hours and covered a range of open-ended questions relating to educational participation and engagement with its. in this way the interviews approached a life-history or ‘life-story’ method (dhunpath 2000) which focused on eliciting individuals’ experiences through chronological autobiographies of education, work and technology use. one limitation to the use of this method of data collection to investigate reflexivity lies in the self-construction of interviewees’ accounts of educational participation and technological engagement. as lash (2003, p.51) points out, “in the second modernity we haven’t sufficient reflective distance on ourselves to construct linear and narrative biographies”. if individuals’ reflexivity is the complex and ‘messy’ affair described earlier then it is inevitably less straightforward than the sanitised narratives it was possible for us to elicit in an interview context (mcadams 1998). nevertheless, our interview data do allow for a detailed investigation of how people recounted the contexts and nature of their (non)reflexive engagements with education – providing insights into processes which would otherwise be difficult to empirically capture. with this caveat in mind the paper now goes onto discuss the research questions via an analysis of these interview data. r e s u l t s we present the interview data in two distinct sections: (i) those instances where individuals displayed reflexive engagement with learning and/or reflexive judgements not to engage in learning; and (ii) those instances where individuals were engaging with learning with little or no sign of reflexive judgement. the roles which its played in all these cases are now described and discussed in the following sections: (i) its and reflexive (non)learners only a few interviewees could be described as reflexively engaging with education with the support of it. one such individual was maria, a single woman in her late thirties, who had engaged in a wide variety of learning since leaving school. her career of lifelong learning, as with the handful of other interviewees in this category, was very much a ‘bricolage biography’ (hitzler 1988). after leaving school at seventeen she had engaged in a variety of jobs, from working in a warehouse to running her own internet services business. she described her post-school education as taking a similar ‘mix and match’ form, ranging from week-long residential courses to part-time higher degrees in subject areas from computers to art history. these bouts of learning took place either during “gaps [in employment] or for entertainment and leisure”. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 6 maria described how she aimed to strike a balance between learning for its own sake (“stuff that’s of no use to you whatsoever, but interesting”) and using education as a way of (re)positioning herself as a ‘portfolio’ worker in a buoyant and fluid labour market. technology had played a prominent role in most stages of this eclectic learning career. as maria described with regards to her current educational decisionmaking, technology offered a flexibility which fitted with her lifestyle: i looked at [an online distance learning degree] … even though i don’t need the qualification. and also there is a chance i might be going to work abroad for a while, so not knowing where i’m going to be means signing up for a [traditional] course isn’t practical. i could sign up for a course today, and then find out in a fortnight’s time i’ve got to move to aberdeen. so doing something that i can do at a distance, you know, at home, and that is a bit more flexible, suits me. here maria is using it to juggle between what tulloch and lupton (2003, p.4) describe as “the desire [in the reflexive modernity] for a self-directed and autonomous life with the need for … steady employment”. other interviewees also recounted how technology-based education provided a flexibility of opportunity which complemented their transient and uncertain careers. as this part-time translator recalled: i bummed around a bit and got myself a few part time jobs, i convinced myself i was going to write my masterpiece and other extremely clever things. for a period of several years i did nothing much apart from odd jobs in shops, after i began to work with my father as a head hunter working in the management consulting field and also got involved in odd projects like marketing intelligence projects. as a result of that i started to acquire some computer skills and did some [computer-based] courses and taught myself the basics of various other things. having been self employed i've spent my time doing other various odd things like building computer databases here and there, since then i decided to try my hand at web design when that seemed to be all the rage. (female, 33 years) the specific educational affordances of its for these individuals were often described in practical terms. for example, technology was described as supporting people’s preferences for an ad hoc, ‘just-in-time’ approach to learning in terms of time and place. as this graphic designer recounted on two separate occasions: the advantage [of e-learning] is that you can do it whenever you like, and i’m one of these people – you know, for me in the last course, two in the morning, i want to look for an electronic journal. that’s great. you can’t go to the college in two in the morning. ‘cos i run my own business [life] all merges into one anyway. weekends actually can be better some times, it can be quieter [at home], you can get on with things. (male, 32 years) yet the reflexive educational affordances of its were also described by these interviewees in more abstract terms. for maria, new technologies allowed her to retain an emotional distance from what she felt to be the socially uncomfortable aspects of ‘normal’ engagement with formal education. for example, she had deliberately chosen an mba course which used a ‘blended’ elearning approach and thereby allowed her to learn ‘at an arm’s length’ from the ‘student culture’ of british universities: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 7 i took voluntary redundancy and signed up to do a masters. i couldn’t stand the thought of learning with 18 to 22 year-olds. you know, i’m old enough to be their mum! that was really not part of the fun of it! so i signed up for the mba and thoroughly enjoyed it. technology was quite important. we used electronic resources quite a lot and being able to access them from home was – you know, you can have a cup of tea when you’re at home, you can’t when you’re in the library or in the class. it should be emphasised that for all these individuals, its were just as likely to be reported as leading them to not engage in education at all. indeed, its offered these learners just one option in their arsenal of educational options. that new technologies were not being unquestioningly being used at every opportunity is to be expected. as beck et al. (2003, p.16) argue, in the reflexively modern age there is an “erosion of the bases of certainty … space is opened up for alternative forms of knowledge to come into play … there is no longer ‘one best way’ to solve every problem, but rather several equally valid modes of justification that operate simultaneously”. thus in many cases itbased formal educational provision was rejected due to perceptions of its restrictive nature – either that it fitted a narrow employment-focussed agenda or was felt to be of little actual educational value. for example, the uk government’s high profile e-learning provision was rejected with a degree of scepticism by some of our reflexive learners who described it as “an electronic youth training scheme”, for those “who aren’t interested in learning” (maria) or “money for old rope” (male, 55 years). it was clear that these interviewees were using its to create and sustain situations where they could control what learning they engaged in, as well as when and where they learnt and on what terms. this use of technology to retain control extended to their patterns of informal learning, with many interviewees using its (in particular the internet) to foster personal networks of expertise and information. as maria describes in the following extended quotation, the accumulation of informal educational opportunities and sources of expertise was often although not exclusively supported by old and new media: [people] i’ve met through my course … there are people who i know through my previous job. it’s just knowing where to get the data from. and if it was something that i hadn’t done before, i’d probably look online. maybe newsgroups or look for a chat room. and i would ring someone. i would phone the local college and ask to speak to [someone]. i suppose it sounds weird, but there are pockets of expertise around. if i wanted to know something about driving around interviewing people about lifelong learning then i’d ring you! i’d say, ‘do you remember, you came to visit me and i’d really like to know where did you get started, how did that work?’ i think people are always frightened to ask. maria’s approach to seeking information and knowledge neatly mirrors the fluidity of boundaries seen to exist in the reflexively modern society where “there is not a limited array of already available options. instead the boundaries have to be created along with the decisions” (beck et al. 2003, p.20). of particular significance here is the use of it to learn independently of the official ‘learning society’ and formal education system. like many of our reflexive learners maria described how the worldwide web allowed her to experience the serendipity of ‘surfing’ an ever-growing wealth of knowledge (“you find yourself going off on a tangent … then you end up looking up at sites there and you end up finding out about [things] that you never knew”). thus for many of our reflexive learners, its were being used to construct their own rules of learning and information seeking – usually beyond what would be considered official channels of learning. for example, we found many instances of adults using the internet to challenge expert sources in a variety of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 8 domains of expertise from the medical profession through to other family members: we’ve got a pompous uncle in our family and he knows everything. i’ve never proved him wrong in front of his face, but – i know that he’s wrong on some things! and then i’ll find that information out using the internet. (male, 35 years) although such ‘self-education’ is often dismissed as trivial by the education profession, the use of it to challenge expert sources in this way is a prime example of reflexivity. as tulloch and lupton (2003, p.3) reason: “people are no longer accepting the judgements or advice of experts on face value but rather actively seek to invest their trust in them by assessing their worth and credibility. as a result there are a far greater number of uncertainties than ever previously existed. greater knowledge has led in turn to greater uncertainty and a subsequent turn to alternative expertise and knowledge claims”. of course there is a fine line between acquiring random snippets of information and bone fide learning and there were far more instances in our interview data of adults using its to seek specific information at specific times (e.g. holiday information or football results) rather than using technology to support sustained quests for knowledge. nevertheless, for our reflexive learners, its were often cited as mainstays of a fluid engagement with education. if we return again to maria, it allowed her to maintain a busy educational trajectory alongside work and domestic mobility (“there are always things… that you can go back to and you can say, ‘i’ll pick that up where i left off”) echoing the reflexively modern credo that “everything can be straightened out in the long run” (beck 2003, p.26). in highlighting these instances of reflexive learning it is crucial to acknowledge that these were all interviewees who could be considered to already be reflexive in other aspects of their lives. in this way, these individuals were merely using its to continue engaging reflexively with learning as they always had done. maria, for example, had been raised in a background of uncertainty and change. she described how her parents had “constantly moved” around the country renovating and then selling pubs and bars. as a result of this constant transition her “education went up and down”. she attributed her fluid approach to adult learning as stemming from these disjointed and uncertain early experiences of education. as a whole, these interviewees’ lives displayed much of the fluidity, mobility and connectedness which is associated with the cosmopolitan subject (kesselring & vogl 2004). their participation in technology-based education therefore followed the reflexive contours of their overall lives. for example, a freelance film producer described his current learning with the internet as allowing him to continue the ‘really satisfying’ learning and ‘developing as a person as a result of education’ which he had only begun to experience during the later stages of his university education: “there is a thrill about finding things out and the web encourages that wisdom. i enjoy finding a reference and looking that reference up” (male, 34 years). in this sense we would contend that its were being used by reflexive learners to repeat previous learning behaviours or reconnect with earlier learning habits. as with all our ‘reflexive’ respondents there was little evidence that technology had created a new-found desire for learning rather that these instances of itbased informal learning were building upon previous learning behaviours and dispositions. as a retired lorry driver reasoned: “i think it’s a lot of information that’s at the back of my mind. [the internet] is just bringing it all out” (male 63 years old). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 9 (ii) its and non-reflective (non)learners these instances aside, the majority of our interviewees could not be said to be reflexively engaging with education and learning. indeed, most interviewees who were participating in adult learning could be characterised as being driven by the social, economic and educational structures in their lives rather than driving themselves (kesselring & vogl 2004). in this respect, the stated motivations for using its and participating in e-learning were often ones of devolving responsibility and control away from themselves. as one respondent rather obliquely reasoned: “it was more to do with the fact that i liked the idea that science could help you learn, rather than relying on having the willpower to do it myself” (female, 38 years). one common occurrence was the appropriation of it as an easy and convenient ‘way in’ to formal education. in contrast to our reflexive learners, these interviewees tended to describe informal learning with it as simply a first stage in the pursuit of ‘legitimate’ formal learning opportunities rather than an end in itself. for example, at the time of interview one man was using the internet to trace his family tree, but was keen to stress that he had arranged to ‘take it further’ and ‘study it properly’ by joining an established society: “[in the summer] i’ll join the royal family history society, they do lots of courses in tracing your family tree and when i get the time it will be something i do” (male, 50 years). the most common instance of formal learning with technology evident in our data were those individuals who had chosen to take ‘information technology’ or ‘computer literacy’ as a subject in itself. many of these learners described an unreflexive linear progression through the formal structure of it qualifications available in the uk. we came across ‘serial takers’ of formal computer skills courses – individuals seemingly enrolling on courses for their own sake rather than through a desire to develop computer skills to use elsewhere. as one retired respondent explained: “i’ve been signing on for computer courses in marketown [since] they first started off in about, oh god, the early ‘90s … i’ve tried so many times … you just race through this disk and it’s all very nice, but you just get used to taking tests, you don’t actually learn what you’re doing” (female, 64 years). the unreflexive nature of this engagement is highlighted by another learner who had taken all the it courses on offer at their local college and then had to stop once having exhausted their options. in this case, it had not fostered an ability or desire to actively seek any learning beyond the formal courses: “like i say, i like waiting for an envelope to come through the front door and things like that … i did clait in 1992. when i'd done the ibt2 [integrated business and technology] following on from clait, there wasn't an ibt3. then it was like ‘what shall i do now?’ and there wasn't anything” (woman, 29 years) many learners in the interview sample appeared content with this nonreflexive style of engagement. one talked of enrolling in it courses in her local college to “just go along with the flow” of what courses were on offer (female, 38 years). others talked of their desire to be guided in the ‘correct’ ways to use computers to learn: “it’s hugely important to generate the correct uses and the correct services and applications on it” (male, 42 years). some described not feeling sufficiently motivated to use their computers for learning unless compelled to do so by the structure of the formal education system – “i’m not doing anything that makes me want to log onto the computer to find out information no one is setting me projects where i need to find out something” (female, 26 years). similarly, “i still need a nudge in the right direction. nudge me, persuade me to do it then i will – but not on my own back” (female, 46 years). thus, for the majority of interviewees, it would be seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 10 misleading to say that its were increasing their control over their learning – rather that its and e-learning were being used to detach the individual from the personal responsibility of engaging with learning. yet, at least these individuals were engaged in learning albeit in structured and confined ways. a significant proportion of our interviewees were not engaged with either formal or informal education. here its were, if anything, adding to the multiplicity of ways in which education was being bounded off for these non-participants through differing combinations of need, interest, access, expertise or constraints of time and finance. beyond the commonplace denials of interest or need (“i don’t think there is any way we can apply it to our lives to make such a vast difference. we are happy as we are” male, 67 years), it was clear that such non-engagement was often framed by social conditions which negated any reflexive potential of its. for some women the restrictive structures of the home and household were in stark evidence. one example was eva, a middle-aged mother who had left school with no qualifications (“i’ve got nothing academic”) but after buying a computer when her daughter was young found herself learning and retaining skills and other information quite easily; “if you’ve read it in a book, you forget … i don’t know what it is … i suppose on the computer i’ve remembered everything [that i have learnt]”. however, this new site of learning had been less used as her daughter had grown older and a spatial repositioning of the computer within the household had taken place: i use [the computer] very rarely now. i suppose because – it’s an excuse, i guess – it’s in [my daughter’s] bedroom. if it was in the living area, ‘cause i’ve got a small house and nowhere to put it – if it was in the living area i think i would go on and off it quite a bit. because it’s in her bedroom, i tend not to use it so much. and when she first had it, she wouldn’t use it all the time. she’d go on it occasionally and i would pop on it now and then. when she comes home from school she always seems to be up there or back and forth. and it’s in her room, so i tend not to use it so much. unfortunately, in this case, although it allowed eva to reflect on her learning (especially that she had learnt more effectively with a computer than with books) it had not led her into a sustained reflexive engagement with learning: now i don’t think i have it in me to study – i’ve got no qualifications at all basically. but i’m ok with that at the moment because i’ve always thought of myself now, at my age, that all i’ll do is shop work. as long as i have a job to keep my head above water. it’s too late for me to go for a career … i don’t think i’d be able to do anything now. i like to learn, but in my own time. i’ve never been one for being in a classroom and having to study. i’d rather just learn as i go along. although in stark contrast to the spirit of reflexive modernisation, such a ‘negative fatalism’ pervaded many of our interviews with non-learners. moreover, this sense of educational inertia was a predicament which it was seemingly unable to impact on even when it was readily available. people’s reasoning in this respect was often obtuse, from the granting of an excessive agency to the computer “it’s when it makes rules i don’t like it” (male, 56 years), to the argument that only having a good education allowed someone to use a computer, rather than using a computer being able to lead to an improved education. thus these non-learners remained profoundly bounded by their learning biographies and histories – in spite of technological affordances. unlike our earlier reflexive learners, there was scant evidence of these interviewees reaching the supposed stage of reflexive modernisation where “the past loses its power to determine the present” (beck 2000, p.214). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 11 d i s c u s s i o n in terms of the research questions posed at the beginning of this paper, we came across a number of individuals in our sample who were engaging reflexively with education and learning with the support of its. embodying the rhetoric of the learning society, we found some ‘cosmopolitan learners’ who were engaging with different forms of educational opportunities in a variety of intuitive and often instinctive ways. for these individuals, learning had been transformed from being a collective and institutionally bounded process towards becoming a fluid part of their everyday lives an integration which was often supported by technology-based flows of information and opportunities. these individuals were using its to find out about learning opportunities (via formal and informal flows of information), to learn on their own and with others in informal ways and, on occasion, engage in formal learning. in this way, educational participation had become a major personal project which was driven in part by technology. in particular, our data highlighted the important role that technology can play in allowing engagement with informal modes of learning, with new technologies providing these learners with an effective means with which to ‘work around’ the formal education system. conversely we also saw how some individuals were using its to support and inform reflexive judgements not to learn. there is a tendency in the educational literature to approach ‘reflexivity’ only in narrow terms of successful engagement with education. yet our data demonstrated how reflexivity refers to not only an increase of mastery and consciousness, but a heightened awareness that mastery is impossible, unnecessary or undesirable (latour 2003). thus we saw how its were hastening different forms of ‘reflexive non-engagement’ for some adults by offering alternatives to learning, or even highlighting the inadequacies of the learning opportunities on offer. although in all these instances its were supporting and facilitating reflexive judgement, we would not conclude that technology was causing reflexivity. instead its appeared to be helping already reflexive individuals to continue being reflexive. its could not be said to be propelling the reflexively modern (non)learner to be an active agent and constructor of her life narrative. more accurately its could be said to be simply reinforcing (or sometimes rekindling) these traits in those who already have them. these were individuals who already “imagine[d] themselves as those who influence the direction of their own moves” (kesselring & vogl 2004, p.10). it was noticeable that those individuals who did appear to work on their learning identities as a ‘reflexive project’ (giddens 1991) enjoyed conducive conditions in which to be secure enough to construct their self in this way. this is an important distinction to make with regards to the political expectation of new technologies widening engagement to those social groups who previously had not been learners. the majority of our interviewees displayed little sign of self-determination or reflexivity when it came to their (non)engagement with education. many participants appeared to have either ‘drifted’ into (or drifted past) learning since having concluded their compulsory education – driven by institutional structures and expectations rather than actively defining their own rules and boundaries. its were apparently doing little to alter this situation, often perpetuating the existing structures of education and the ways in which education was bounded off. belying the presumed current ‘disorganisation’ of adult education provision, the rigid structure of the uk’s formal education system continued to pervade interviewees’ (non)engagement with learning. for example, many people remained bounded by the cultural norm of linear progression through the formal education hierarchy with its credential milestones of school examinations, college degrees, post-graduate qualifications and so on. far from displaying reflexive, just-in-time decisionmaking many of our interviewees remained driven by the dominant structures of formal educational ‘achievement’, with its acting only to reinforce the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 12 ‘conveyor-belt’ approach to progressing through the education system. thus its were only capable, at best, of perpetuating a passive, phenomenological reflexivity where the individual was ‘witness’ rather than ‘judge’ of the learning choices that they made (lash 2002). this was especially evident with the ‘e-learners’ in our sample who were learning in it centres and colleges and through ‘official’ websites and internet resources. although in the reflexive modernity “planning and rationalisation in the conduct of life … is increasingly becoming the task of individuals” (beckgernsheim 1996, p.139) our data reflected a subtle appropriation of its by the state to plan learning for people – therefore decreasing the need for individual agency. we saw how its can easily become part of a restrictive re-organisation of an individual’s experience of education rather than an emanicipatory disorganisation. although authors may like to talk about the internet hastening the decoupling of education from official structures and facilitating public deliberateness and reflection over alternative choices (e.g. slavin 2000), in reality new technologies have been appropriated by official organisations in ways which reinforce the structuring of education. for example, many people’s uses of computers and the internet were located within a series of disempowering social contexts and structures (such as libraries, workplaces, homes, colleges and schools) running counter to argument that its hasten reflexive modernity’s “gradual freeing of agency from structure” (quicke 1997, p.141). only when it use was truly individualised, truly private and truly informal did anything approaching reflexive engagement appear to be taking place. similarly, much e-learning content could be seen as little more than an official attempt to “restore the authority of the old boundaries” of education (beck et al. 2003, p.20) rather than stimulate new and uncertain boundaries. it was notable how official learning organisations such as the bbc and open university dominated how many of our interviewees’ experienced and imagined the internet as a learning resource with these established institutions acting as authentic and reliable anchors in the otherwise unfamiliar and choppy seas of adult e-learning. although some individuals displayed signs of being self-determining, reflexively empowered non-learners our data suggest that for a sizable proportion of people one of the (side)effects of it-based lifelong learning was a less empowered disengagement and distancing from education. it was striking how many of our interviewees expressed a profound ambivalence and ambiguity when it came to education – with technology seeming to compound their existing ennui for education rather than (re)instilling an enthusiasm. although reflexivity is seen as a prerequisite to finding a ‘foothold’ in an increasingly pluralized and differentiated world, it seemed that many people had already established their ‘foothold’ as non-learners during their compulsory schooling forming rigid learning identities which contact with it in later life could do little to alter, tied up as technology was with the same structures and discourses of ‘official’ learning. thus its appeared to ‘flatten out’ any reflexivity which many individuals may have displayed away from deeper ontological judgements about learning and education and towards more immediate confirmations of selves as a ‘learner’ or ‘non-learner’. in this way technologies such as the computer and internet could be said to act more as reminders and reinforcers of pre-set learning identities rather than a means of reflexive change and action. it was clear that for many of our interviewees its were merely increasing the opportunity (and propensity) for lifelong learners to continue to participate in a rather nonquestioning and non-reflexive manner. conversely, its were providing yet another prompt for non-learners to ‘blame’ themselves for continuing not to learn. although reflexivity should be a matter of active ‘self-confrontation’ (beck 1994), in many cases its were merely leading to a passive ‘selfaffirmation’ of educational identities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 13 we would argue that the extent to which its contribute to the individual ‘freeing’ of educational engagement is linked to the general extent to which an individual tends to cede control of their actions to others in all aspects of life not specifically education. richard sennett (1998) provides a useful illustration of this point when categorising people’s reactions to the situation of flexible employment in terms of ‘surfers’ and ‘drifters’. whereas surfers accept the need for rapid change and uncertainty and adopt a contingent model of decision making and activity, sennett describes drifters as experiencing contingency and non-continuity of life as a threat and a loss. rather than seizing the opportunity to steer their lives through the different options available to them, these individuals therefore become “passive and mouldable objects of social restructuring” (ibid.). surfers, on the other hand, are able to deal with non-directionality and to move of their own volition despite lacking a clear destination (kesselring & vogl 2004). these categories of ‘drifter’ and ‘surfer’ can act as a crude but useful means of understanding the varying degrees of active and passive (non)engagement with adult learning evident in our sample. they also illustrate the roles which new technologies play in this, with its acting as ready vehicles to either surf or drift through the lifelong learning landscape depending on the nature of the individual concerned. the various labels of ‘drifter’ or ‘surfer’, ‘reflexive winner’ or ‘reflexive loser’ are indicative of the deep-rooted inequalities that appear to persist within the reflexively modern age. the stories told by interviewees contain a strong sense that the ability to be actively reflexive rather than passively reflective is unevenly distributed along the familiar ‘social fault lines’ of the first modernity such as socio-economic status, gender, age and educational background (golding 2000). although technology may well be “one of the major sources of public power in modern society” (feenberg 1992, p.1) we have gained a glimpse of how the distribution of this power remains entwined with the social, economic, cultural and political structures of society. as frank webster (2002a, p.39) contends, in contemporary late-capitalistic society the kind of individually directed and conceived reflexivity which is described in popular accounts of reflexive modernisation is untenable for all but “the most privileged elites”. our own data have shown how this is manifest in a variety of ways. for example, not all of our interviewees could afford to be autonomous and self-engrossed when it came to education, learning and technology. indeed, many individuals had more pressing concerns than deciding whether to engage with education or not. issues of illiteracy, unemployment and poverty mean that “talk of choice in a cybernetic society to the world’s majority is hollow” (webster 2002a, p.42) this reproductionist conclusion reflects the fact that the second reflexive modernity is as much a continuation with the first modernity as it is a clean break. as robins and webster (1999) observe, reflexive modernity is best seen as an intensified rather than wholly new period of reflexivity – an extension of long-term trends rather than a novel epoch. large swathes of modern society remain rooted in the highly structured first modernity. we must be careful therefore not to over-emphasise the revolutionary nature of the reflexive modernisation thesis, which in many ways is a matter of re-structuration and re-conceptualisation of society rather than the more post-modern notion of a de-structuration. indeed, bruno latour (2003) has recently contended that reflexive modernisation should more conveniently be seen as ‘remodernisation’. however, there remains a tendency amongst proponents of the reflexive modernisation thesis towards a ‘deep silence and refusal’ of the entrenched social antagonisms which persist despite the societal changes experienced over the past three decades (avis 2000). in this way we should be still tentatively feeling our way as to how society is being re-orientated (if at all) in the second modernity, rather than brazenly proclaiming the dawning of a radically ‘new’ age. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 14 c o n c l u s i o n the central premise of much commentary on educational technology is that the digital age “is throwing many of our educational practices and emphases and their underlying epistemological assumptions, beliefs, concepts and substantive theories into doubt” (lankshear & knobel 2003, p.20). yet our empirical exploration of the supposed reflexive potentials of new technologies such as computers and the internet points towards a less revolutionary situation. indeed, as with most empirical explorations of the social world, we found that many people live outside of our theoretical presumptions of ‘everyday’ life. most respondents in our study remained bounded by social circumstances and structures redolent of the first modernity, with its merely perpetuating the status quo. in this way we would side with webster’s (2002b, p.56) reflection that “life today is certainly more information intensive, but this is not sufficient to justify projections that it represents a new sort of society”. at best we would concur with beck et al.’s (2003, p.25) admission that in practice the reflexive modernity inevitably sees people being both “the prisoner of their own decisions [and] of the decisions of others” – albeit to varying degrees. of course, our evidence-base for this analysis is limited and more work certainly needs to be carried out on the different aspects of its, reflexivity and education. this paper has focused on the micro-level of the reflexively monitoring and self-monitoring subject, leaving a range of unanswered questions about the macro-level concerns of the reflexively modernised society and the meso-level concerns of the reflexive organisation. we should also remember that the reflexive modernisation thesis remains a “completely eurocentric” analysis (beck et al. 2003, p.7). whether or not the patterns of it-based learning outlined in this paper apply to other parts of the world needs to be explained. our main recommendation for policymakers and practitioners concerned with promoting reflexivity and technology in adult learning is largely one of caution. it would seem prudent for all those involved in developing and implementing it-based adult learning initiatives to readjust their expectations away from widening educational participation to those groups currently not participating to improving participation with those who already do. indeed, the uncertainty and imbalance inherent in the notion of reflexive modernity renders obsolete the idea of a full-participation learning society (as with a fullemployment society). the notion of technology as a ‘technical fix’ for educational woes should be similarly discouraged. in fact retaining a faith in the innovative and transformatory ‘power’ of technology is itself an especially non-reflexive position to adopt. instead we would urge policymakers and practitioners to concentrate their efforts on the social precedents of the inequalities which are all too apparent in reflexively modern society. if, as lash (2003, p.55) argues, “reflexivity in the second modernity is profoundly socio-technical” in this sense we must concentrate both on the technological and the social aspects of increasing inclusion and participation in reflexive adult learning. above all, in attempting to engineer such social improvement it must be borne in mind that linear change is not a ready feature of reflexive modernisation, and that unintended consequences (such as social inequalities, nonparticipation and increased disengagement from education) will almost certainly result from any intervention. as kesselring & vogl (2004, p.2) conclude, “social change in the light of reflexive modernisation theory does not result from rational planning and directional optimisation”. educators, politicians and all other stakeholders in the ‘e-learning society’ would do well to bear this limitation in mind. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 15 a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t this paper is based upon a project funded by the economic and social research council [r000239518]. the author would like to thank the other members of the ‘adults learning@home’ project (stephen gorard and john furlong) as well as the individuals who took part in the in-depth interviews. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 16 references avis, j. 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(2003) ‘risk and everyday life’ london, sage van dijk, j. (1999) ‘the network society’ london, sage webster, f. (2002a) ‘cybernetic life: limits to choice’ in armitage, j. and roberts, j. (eds) ‘living with cyberspace: technology and society in the 21st century’ london, continuum webster, f. (2002b) ‘theories of the information society’ (second edition) london, routledge title ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. power and control in the one-to-one computing classroom: students’ perspectives on teachers’ didactical design peter bergström department of educational science umeå university email: peter.bergstrom@umu.se eva mårell-olsson department of educational science umeå university email: eva.marell-olsson@umu.se abstract this paper reports on a research study that scrutinised the student perspective on teachers’ different didactical designs from lessons in the one-to-one computing classroom. specifically, the aim was to describe and understand three different clusters of didactical design in the one-to-one computing classroom from the student perspective. each of the three clusters represents different interactions between teachers and students. the research questions embrace how the teachers or students, through the didactical design, will have an advantage over the other. the empirical material was based on student focus groups interviews, enhanced through the method of stimulated recall where different photographs of teaching and learning situations from the oneto-one computing classroom were shown to the students. the results demonstrate three empirical themes: students’ learning in class, students’ learning outside class, and classroom assessment. from a theoretical lens of power and control, the students’ reasoning demonstrates approaches to how teachers regulate students and to how students can make decisions in their learning process. for handling students’ demands, specifically in pedagogical plans, the one-to-one computing classroom becomes one component for making students’ learning processes smoother regarding when to study and how to study. keywords: qualitative, one-to-one computing, power, control, didactics introduction information and communication technology (ict) in education is embedded in a discourse that highlights a terminology based on innovation and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 161 modernisation of schools (bocconi, kampylis, & punie, 2013). ict has been considered as a catalyst (brown, 2006) for changing schools and education. among those making this change, confidence in so-called one-to-one computing initiatives has been reported worldwide (islam & grönlund, 2016). however, the growing interest in one-to-one computing in compulsory schooling presents some major challenges. one challenge concerns the spatiality when the ict learning environment is changing from computer labs isolated from the classrooms to classrooms equipped with one device on each student’s desk, a wireless network (penuel, 2006), and cloud computing for sharing, retrieving, and storing information (gonzales-martinez, bote-lorenzo, gomez-sanches & cano-parra, 2015). another challenge concerns how the different subject traditions construct different preconditions regarding students’ possibilities to influence and control the content (hjelmér & rosvall, 2016; lindmark, 2013). for example, mathematics and the sciences are based on established content hierarchies where one area needs to be studied before the next. here, the teacher strongly monitors the content. in contrast, social studies and religion content can focus on contemporary issues in society, and students’ experiences can be considered as content. thus, independent of subject, a didactical design embraces both the design of the physical learning environment, including icts, and the design of the teaching practice regarding communication about content, pace, and assessment during teaching and learning (bergström, mårell-olsson, & jahnke, 2017). the swedish context in particular provides a large number of one-to-one computing initiatives with both laptops and tablets reported in almost all of the 290 swedish municipalities (becker & taawo, 2017). controversially, equipping classrooms with more devices is not per se the means for change (bocconi et al., 2013), and increased attention on meaningful didactical design is needed (ilomäki, paavola, lakkala, & kantosalo, 2016). regarding this issue, laurillard and derntl (2014) argue that one aspect of design concerns the extent to which students are allowed to take some control in the teaching and learning process. otherwise, they warn that the use of icts can simply replicate previous traditions for teaching and learning. further, in klein and kleinman’s (2002) perspective on the social construction of technology the enacted didactical design in the one-to-one computing classroom should be considered as a design process between teachers and students. in this process, power indicates the interaction between teachers and students, the rules that order the interactions, and how other things contribute to differences in their relationship. against this background, it was found that the student perspective on teachers’ didactical design in the one-to-one computing classroom was rarely examined in the literature. this paper aims to increase the understanding of three different clusters of didactical design in the one-to-one computing classroom through a student perspective. the following research questions were asked: how can variations within, as well as between, the three clusters be understood in terms of power and control? how can different orientations to meaning regulate and construct possibilities in students’ learning processes? a focus group interview study was conducted in order to better understand different didactical designs from the perspective of the students. before presenting the methodology and findings, an introduction to didactical design research and one-to-one computing is provided next. didactical design in this study, the concept of didactical design was used based on the german and european tradition of didaktik. regarding the first term, didactics, some confusion exists because for some readers it can carry negative connotations, especially through the english-language understanding of didactics as teachercentred and students’ passive learning (hamilton, 1999). when considering didactics from the german tradition of didaktik (e.g. klafki, 2000) as well as seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 162 the french tradition (sensevy, 2012), a humanistic philosophy (lund & hauge, 2011; bergström, 2012) seems to underpin the teacher–student–content triad. in addition, jahnke et al. (2017) argue that to break the negative connotations, “one central component of didaktik is the cultivation of social relationships” (jahnke et al, 2017, p.2). the next term, design, has strong connections to the different didactical elements teachers use when giving form to a lesson. the foundation of design in this paper follows simon’s definition of design as “everybody designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (simon, 1996, pp.4-5). these quotations regarding cultivation and change highlight how one social group is understood in relation to other groups. similarly, to be able to acknowledge change, one needs to consider different didactical designs in relation to each other. in what follows, we point to the wider perspective of didactical design in the one-to-one computing classroom and the rarely reported student perspective on teachers’ didactical design. didactical design and one-to-one computing the concept of didactical design has been used for about 10 years in the analysis of teachers’ teaching with ict specifically (hudson, 2008, 2011; rostvall & selander, 2008; selander & kress, 2010; jahnke et al, 2014; jahnke et al, 2017). other studies on didactics range from teachers’ working process of transforming curriculum content into a lesson (hopmann, 2007) to teachers’ enacted practice of teaching. a few nordic studies exist on teachers’ didactical design in the oneto-one computing classroom. kjällander’s (2011) study reported on increased unpredictability in students learning, while other studies examined how teachers’ didactical design varies (jahnke et al, 2014; jahnke et al, 2017; bergström et al, 2017). in the international literature on one-to-one computing, an extensive number of research reports have focused not explicitly on teachers’ didactical design, but implicitly on students through teachers’ efforts to teach in the one-to-one computing classroom (blikstad-balas, 2012; håkansson lindqvist, 2015; norqvist, 2016; pegrum, oakley, & faulkner, 2013; playerkoro & tallvid, 2015; saudelli & ciampa, 2014). these studies used the relationship between social groups, or objects, to understand the teaching practice based on different theoretical frameworks. further, policy studies highlight one-to-one computing as both an equity issue for avoiding the digital divide by increasing students’ technical competence and a technology issue for moving towards 21st-century skills (e.g. problem-solving skills) (zucker & light, 2009, voogt et al., 2013). regarding students’ learning, studies have focused on one-to-one computing for individual learning, collaborative learning, and cooperative learning (andersson, wiklund, & hatakka, 2016; håkansson lindqvist, 2013; zheng, arada, niiya, & warschauer, 2014). these studies report on great variations in the learning approaches in the studied schools. drawing on the student perspective that is missing in the one-to-one computing research, and findings of how teachers’ didactical designs vary, we decided to investigate students’ views about teachers’ didactical designs. methodology four different cohorts of students were selected with the aim to scrutinise three different clusters of didactical designs. the study of teachers’ didactical designs was part of a larger research project that studied swedish teacher’s didactical design in compulsory schooling with established one-to-one computing initiatives between the years 2014 and 2016. here, one didactical design represents one lesson. in total, 23 teachers’ didactical designs were documented through classroom observations based on written documentation, photographs, and audio recordings. these methods were applied in order to document both the design of the learning space and the design of the enacted practice. further, the use of different methods made triangulations of the data from photographs, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 163 audio recordings, and written documentation possible. thus, based on how the different classrooms were physically organised an attempt was made to map these in relation to interactions in the teacher-student relationship. these findings were reported as variations within, as well as between, the teachers’ 23 didactical designs. the findings report on three clusters of didactical designs in the one-to-one computing context: 1) practices described as rather traditional where the teachers make the decisions, 2) practices where students are involved to some extent in decisions, and 3) practices described as student-active where students to a great extent make decisions. these results are reported in another paper (bergström et al. 2017). by bringing the students’ perspective into the foreground, additional understanding about teachers’ didactical design is possible. selection process one reason for selecting the four lessons below was that in grade 2, 5, and 7 the principals advised us to visit the teachers because they were recognised as good examples of teachers who used one-to-one computing frequently during teaching and learning. the grade 8 lesson was based on some students’ advice about a teacher who, from their perspective, was good at using ict. for the first (1) and second (2) cluster of didactical designs, two cohorts of students in grade 2 and 5 were selected. for the third cluster (3), which were the most studentactive designs, two cohorts of students in grade 7 and 8 were selected. below, a brief contextual description is given of these didactical designs. lesson in grade 2 – traditional teaching the grade 2 lesson represented a traditional didactical design based upon a unidirectional teacher-student interaction from teacher to student. the students were organised in pairs with one tablet for two students. here, the students studied mathematics and the commutative rule for 60 minutes. from a list of three numbers – 2, 5, and 10 – students were asked to make an illustration, for example, of 2 × 5 and 5 × 2 by using different materials (e.g. piles of scissors or toy bears) and taking and writing the numbers in the software application (app) bookcreator. this instruction was given at the start of the lesson and then imitated during the lesson. when a task was completed, the students presented the assignment to another group of students and continued by doing the task in the same sequence again but selecting another combination of numbers from the three original numbers. lessons in grade 5 – toward students’ active learning the grade 5 lesson represents a practice in between the traditional approach to teaching and students’ active learning, where the teacher-student interaction involved some student decisions. during the first 20 minutes, the teacher probed the students’ individual skills with fractions by using the app traffic light for formative assessment. with this app, the student writes an answer on the tablet and presses either a green light for “no problems in understanding”, a yellow light for “some problems in understanding”, or a red light if “the problem was too difficult”. during the next 60 minutes, the students became more active through problem-solving activities for the whole class, supported by group discussions among students, and by allowing students to enter the stage in front of the whiteboard by explaining a solution for the class. as a starting point for discussion, the teacher used the mentimeter system “govote.at” for recording the students’ answers. lesson in grade 7 – student active the grade 7 lesson in sports is described as student active, where students’ decisions was visible in the teacher-student interaction. this activity took its starting point from the national curriculum and in students’ skills to conduct motion analysis in three lessons. the class worked in groups of two to four students and practiced four motions—two mandatory motions and two selected seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 164 by the students. the students decided in which sequence the motions should be practiced and analysed. the app hudl technique (designed to analyse and improve performance with slow motion video playback) was used to conduct the analysis in relation to the criteria. in hudl, the students and teachers explicitly analysed the motions (e.g. a cartwheel) based on the affordances of slow motion and by pointing, for example, to a particular angle in a motion as illustrated through the video. lesson in grade 8 – student active the grade 8 lesson in arts can be described as very student active based on significant students’ decisions in the teacher-student interaction. in this didactical design, students were involved in decisions regarding the selection of content and in what sequence the content should be studied. further, the students made decisions regarding pacing when they worked on a pedagogical plan with different tasks that needed to be accomplished during the semester. the students had to plan what area to start with and when the tasks associated with each area should be accomplished. the students worked in groups of four, with some collaborative work and some individual work. the teachers’ teaching was based on what students reported in google classroom. a number of software applications were used during the lesson, and in order to keep track of students’ work, the teacher and students frequently used google classroom, which included cloud computing and other google apps (e.g. google presentation and google drive). focus group interviews the teachers selected the students for the focus group interviews, keeping the group size between three and five students. the interviews were structured around two interview themes constructed from photographs of one-to-one computing practices. an initial analysis was made regarding the documented activities during these classroom observations. the first theme about teachers’ methods of teaching concerned questions regarding collaborative work and the teachers’ communication methods in the one-to-one computing classroom. the second theme, the students’ approach to learning, probed students’ awareness of what they should learn and how one-to-one computing could enhance their learning process. from our own previous experience of interviewing youth and children, we were familiar with the possible challenges in getting them to produce rich narratives. therefore, across these themes, the approach of stimulated recall (haglund, 2003) was used to probe students’ experiences of different didactical designs by showing them photographs of different one-toone computing practices, for example, student collaboration. before the interview started, the students were informed about the interview, that photographs would be used to give examples of situations, and ethics. depending on the students’ age, the focus group interviews lasted between 23 and 35 minutes. in total, 11 focus group interviews were held including 23 girls and 18 boys from age 8 to 14. ethics ethical considerations were brought up in this study, especially because children were the interviewees. before the research was conducted, the teachers distributed a statement of research ethics to the students’ parents or guardians. the statement informed them about the purpose of the research and about beneficence, non-malfeasance, informed consent, and confidentiality/anonymity (swedish research council, 2011). the responses from the parents were reviewed before the focus group interviews were conducted. by using such an approach, the teachers could identify any students who were not allowed to participate. thereafter it was the teacher who formed the student focus groups based on students who volunteered. when the interview started, we informed the students that our intention was to learn from seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 165 their unique experience, that they were the experts. here we informed the students that we accepted different degrees of participation, for example, what to do when someone did not want to discuss a question. further, at the schools we were directed to either a group room or a classroom. here we made an attempt to arrange the tables in a familiar way where we sat together with the students as one group. we also had to be the leader when some interviews got noisy and everybody wanted to speak. however, we cannot underestimate our power as adults in cases where students might have been reluctant to participate. thematic analysis thematic analysis is a process used for analysing qualitative data. this process is understood from the two perspectives of “seeing” and “seeing as” (boyatzis, 1998, p. s1-4). to see something means to find patterns in the data that begin with a coding procedure, while to see as focuses on the interpretation and the analysis of bringing parts together into themes. the process of seeing took its starting point in a data-driven coding procedure in the software application nvivo. through a process of reducing the raw information into outlines of each unit of text, six coded areas were found: teaching approaches, use of ict, order, evaluation, furniture, and simplicity. as a first step in making sense of these codes, meaning was searched for by looking for signs that included episodes, comparisons, and contrasting statements (coffey & atkinson, 1996) as well as what the interviewees explicitly or implicitly were saying in each unit. the perspective of seeing as was used in order to construct themes at a more abstract level. issues of inter-rater reliability were raised between the authors where critical situations in students’ narratives were highlighted, scrutinised, reconsidered, and rephrased. in summary, this process formed the three empirical themes of students’ learning in class, students’ learning outside class, and classroom assessment. in these themes, the differences in the students’ perspective, were then interpreted through the theoretical framework elaborated on further below. theoretical framework school environments, school subjects, teachers, students, and icts are all relays of symbolic power and control (bernstein, 1990, 2000). these concepts are used to inform us on how teachers or students can take advantage over others. this is operationalised through two key concepts – classification and framing. classification refers to power relationships between categories (e.g. teachers and students). depending on how specialised different categories are to each other, classification becomes either strong or weak. bernstein argues that any attempt to challenge or disturb an established relationship will reveal the power relationships on which the classification is based and reproduced (bernstein, 2000). moreover, the concept of framing is helpful for understanding “who controls what” in the teacher-student interaction (bernstein, 2000, p.12). bernstein describes the locus of control from selection, sequence, pacing, assessment, and control over hierarchies in the teacher-student and studentstudent relations. narratives that, for example, demonstrate a unidirectional communication from teacher to student indicate strong framing or teachers being in control, whereas signs of students’ interaction and reasoning with the teacher indicate weak framing or increased student control. further, when considering all power and control relations in the coded material, bernstein’s (1990) terminology of orientations to meanings (bernstein, 1990, p. 15) were applied. consider the shift from computer labs to one-to-one computing. the practice with desktop computers in labs is specialised to a practice for that specific context, while the one-to-one computing classroom blurs the relationship and become less specific. this is an example that demonstrate of how power positions are revealed between categories. the orientations to meaning in the former context is based on relations that was direct and specific, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 166 whereas relations in the latter context was indirect and less specific. in this paper, orientations to meanings are used to address possible contrasts within, as well as between, each of the three themes findings the results are structured according to the three empirical themes: (1) students’ learning in class, (2) students’ learning outside class, and (3) classroom assessment. these themes provide descriptions of the orientations to meanings from the students’ perspective. in order to illustrate the teacher-student interplay, in the next section the students’ voices are illustrated by typical excerpts from the discussions of the students. the quotations are often products from what the group has discussed together in the focus groups. students’ learning in class the students’ learning in class indicated a formal practice based on a schedule where a formal activity takes place organised by the teacher. in this theme, one subtheme was found about meanings based on the teacher’s power and control, while limited signs of meanings based on students’ power and control were indicated. meanings based on the teacher’s power and control one example of a didactical design based on the teacher’s strong control was indicated by the grade 2 students in the two framing categories that concern how content was selected and in which order content should be acquired: she used to say what we should do and show that to us. yesterday, when you visited us, she did it like that. other times, if, for example, we are using the textbook, she often shows us how. (grade 2 students) this quotation indicates a structure where the teacher shows the students what they shall accomplish on the tablet and afterwards the students imitate and repeat, practicing the teacher’s instruction. students in grades 5, 7, and 8 met didactical designs where symbolic power and control were distributed to them. however, our awareness about the teachers’ use of pedagogical plans helped us to find a difference when asking students about this issue. the plans were shared through the school’s cloud computing service. a pedagogical plan is here considered as a bridge between the national curriculum and teachers’ local planning (hopmann, 2007), as observed here in a focus group: as soon as we start to work with a new topic, the teachers produce a document that emphasises what we shall learn, what we shall work with, and how to do it. (grade 5 students) this quotation indicates teachers’ strong control regarding the selection of content and to some extent the criteria for assessment. the grade 7 and 8 students were awarded grades every semester. this fact was reflected in what students said in the focus group about the grade levels from the national curriculum, for example: they publish the knowledge requirements for a, c, and e [a matrix from the national curriculum]. then you get the documents in english language, social studies, swedish language … i mean in different subjects. there you are told what you need to know to receive a specific grade. then, you are aware of these and work to reach these requirements and develop further if you want a higher grade. (grade 7 students) the above quotation indicates increased control in the framing category “evaluation”, when students were informed about how they needed to perform seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 167 in relation to a specific grade. a practical example was outlined when the students reflected upon the observed lesson in sports. here, the tablet was integrated for conducting motion analysis with stated criteria. as they explained: you know we will use analysis. during the tuesday lesson, we recorded our performance in the app [hudl]. we got a document that says what it is you should study in the film. if i, for example, perform a cartwheel, then i should study from the video whether i had good balance. (grade 7 student) when comparing the above narratives about pedagogical plans with the narratives about pedagogical practice, we find that the teachers’ symbolic power was distributed to the students when they worked with the framing category of “evaluation”. in the motion analysis, it was the students who had the task to make the assessment regarding the quality of a motion. this indicates strong control from two perspectives because the criteria also become the content. here we mean that the teacher does not use a textbook to frame the content of study, and one could say that the textbook corresponds with the criteria. instead, in this case the teacher designed an activity that strictly was anchored in the teacher’s pedagogical plan that in turn was based on criteria in the national curriculum. students’ learning outside class the theme about students’ learning outside the classroom indicates an informal practice based on how students find a place, organise time, and decide how to perform a task. this theme is strongly related to the cloud computing software, so the grade 2 students were excluded from this activity. two subthemes were identified. meanings based on teacher’s power and control the use of cloud computing for storing, retrieving, and sharing of information in grades 5, 7, and 8 helped the students with the sharing of documents and resources with others as well as keeping track of the study material. as one group commented, you have everything on the ipad and can send it online. it is not necessary to bring papers home so there is no possibility of losing papers. (grade 5 students) this quotation indicates how teachers’ sharing of documents and access to schoolwork 24/7 tacitly increased teachers’ power and control. another group added how the lists of tasks online became the teachers’ tool for keeping track of the students’ accomplishment: in google classroom, you have control of the assignments that you label as accomplished. it is important to know how to do that because this is the way you make the teacher aware that you have done the work” (grade 8 students) these quotations about study structures indicate a rule to accomplish schoolwork on time. if that rule is broken, the opposite occurs, i.e. teachers lose symbolic power and control, which is addressed in the next subtheme. meanings based on distribution of power and control lists of tasks and criteria indicate subtle signs of a shift of pacing towards the students – when students get a list of assignments with deadlines, they have increased responsibility to meet these deadlines. tacitly, the “piecework” approach indicated increased student control because they had to decide when they needed to carry on with schoolwork from a place other than at school (e.g. at home). further, in the students’ narratives, this working process revealed the additional use of cloud computing through affordances of sharing, as a group of grade 8 students described: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 168 [focus group]: we used the tablet for everything, that is to say, searching for pictures and for information. we assembled the whole presentation and shared it with all members of the group. [interviewer]: so, you shared it with the group so it would be possible for any group member to look at it later, even if someone were sick? [focus group]: yes, and that makes the process flexible because you can create a document that you can share with others even if you are located in different places. if i want to add something, i can just write it in the shared document. … and so can anyone else, wherever they are. the above discussion indicates two aspects of power and control. first, the students emphasised the process of sharing through cloud computing. here, sharing indicates the purpose of bringing students together, an enhancement provided by the one-to-one computing environment. in this way, the power relations (classification) between students become weaker. second, based on the way that students described the process of working with content, for example, when they selected content from the internet and assembled the whole presentation, this indicated increased control in the framing category “selection”. also, because students decided in which sequence the content was to be acquired, this indicates increased control in the framing category “sequence”. thus, control was shifted towards the students. furthermore, the extract illustrates implications for the framing category “pacing” when students described how work could be organised both in school as well as out of school. the students’ work is not bound to a fixed timeslot in a schedule, which indicates increased student responsibility in pacing and increased control by students. classroom assessment this theme contains two subthemes where teachers’ power and control, from the students’ perspective, either was held by the teacher or distributed to the students. the students commented explicitly on the symbolic gesture of raising their hand in the classroom in the context of teachers’ use of formative assessment. meanings based on teachers’ power and control the grade 2 students reported on one approach of confirming the right answer: anyone who knows the answer has to raise their hand and then the teacher selects one of them to state the answer. if it is right, then she writes it [on the whiteboard]. it is right [emphasis] it goes on the whiteboard. (grade 2 students) first, this quotation indicates that it is the teacher who has the right to decide the approach for asking students questions and deciding who is to reply, and this indicates strong teacher power. the quotation indicates strong control by the teacher by asking for the explicit answer on a task in relation to a criterion. second, in the hierarchical student-to-student relationship, the approach indicates a hierarchy between those who know the answer and those who do not know. the grade 8 students’ narratives about the form of formative assessment communication demonstrated a shift where some teachers had abandoned the idea of raising one’s hand, as one group explained: you need to be alert. that is something the teachers started with now that we are in grade 8. yes, because before it was the one who held up their hand who answered. but now the teacher says, ‘you can just reply’ […] you don’t need to raise your hand [anymore]. (grade 8 student). this quotation indicates another aspect of a teacher’s strong symbolic power when changing the mode of probing the students’ knowledge randomly without asking them to raise their hand. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 169 meanings based on distribution of power and control in the context description of the four lessons, the grade 5 teacher demonstrated the use of ict-based formative assessment tools and teaching methods. to avoid students’ feelings about answering incorrectly in public, an online response system (govote.at) for formative assessment was used in the grade 5 lesson. such an approach transferred symbolic power to the students because the identity of the students responding was hidden but the performance of the whole group was explicit. one group reflected upon their feelings in relation to the online formative assessment approach: it is rather good because if the teacher says, ‘please raise your hand,’ and if everybody appears to agree, then it could be difficult to say what you really thought. you become the focus of attention and that can be rather hard. (grade 5 student) discussion this paper was introduced by highlighting the need for meaningful didactical designs (ilomäki et al., 2016). when considering a didactical design through the german tradition of didaktik based on cultivation of social relations (jahnke et al, 2017) and change (simon, 1996), bernstein’s (1990, 2000) conceptual tools of power and control gave points of reference between, as well as within, the three clusters of didactical design. further, in klein and kleinman’s (2002) epistemology of a design process, the student perspective becomes as equally important as the teacher perspective for fully understand a didactical design in the one-to-one computing classroom. by adopting this approach, this study aimed to increase the understanding of three clusters of didactical designs in the one-to-one computing classroom from a student perspective. regarding the first research question about variations between, as well as within, the didactical design, bernstein’s (2000) concepts of power and control inform us about the teacher-student relationship. the themes of students’ learning in class and students’ learning outside class illustrate two levels of power and control – an external level and a practical level. we argue, following bernstein (2000), that power and control is not a static phenomenon, but something more plastic that becomes “visible” by taking different perspectives. however, at an external level, where pedagogical plans and study structures in google classroom were provided, strong structures that regulate the students based on strong power and control could be found in the student’s narratives. according to bernstein (2000), this essentially means that the specialised context of the school is made visible for all students with regard to what is expected of them in the national curricula and syllabus. at the next level of practical examples from teaching and learning situations in the student’s narratives, we noticed that the didactical designs empowered the students to take some decisions, for example, regarding evaluations that became possible through the tablets when conducting motion analysis. similarly, but in another form, both grade 7 and 8 students reported increased empowerment when organising thematic studies. thus, what was made visual was an external level with less room for students’ empowerment while, at the level of practice, the teachers’ didactical design constructed an orientation to meaning that highlighted students’ empowerment in grades 5, 7, and 8. at the external level, power and control were kept by the teacher, while at the practical level power and control were distributed to the students. these two levels of the didactical designs demonstrate both signs of regulation and possibilities as well as students’ understanding of increased empowerment. the social structures in the didactical design in grade 7 and 8 demonstrate the greatest potential for unpredictability in students’ learning (kjällander, 2011). as shown in other studies (player-koro & tallvid, 2015), and in line with bernstein (2000), the assessment system is of great importance for teachers’ didactical designs regarding orientation to meanings. we conclude that by making goals and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 170 criteria visible in pedagogical plans, education became more equal for all students independent of background. in the second research question, the focus was on the orientation to meanings in students’ learning processes. when the three clusters of didactical design are compared with the three themes, the distribution of power and control shows the different extents to which students are fostered to take responsibility and to be involved in their learning process. again, the grade 5, 7 and 8 students’ narratives demonstrated a greater potential for unpredictability (kjällander, 2011) to take place in students’ learning because the students are no longer just imitating the teachers’ presentation (e.g. a model of how to solve something). how power and control are either kept or distributed illustrate different orientations to meaning in students’ learning processes. previous studies have shown varying approaches to learning (andersson, wiklund, & hatakka, 2016; håkansson lindqvist, 2013; zheng, arada, niiya, & warschauer, 2014), but not in relation to power and control. we assume that orientations to meaning can be discussed in terms of 21st-century skills (zucker & light, 2009; voogt et al., 2013) and whether students are fostered mainly through imitative teaching or through creative activities that affect them in more creative ways. in this study, the student perspective was brought into the foreground. when taking the student perspective on the findings further, the findings possibly serve to embody the social construction of the one-to-one computing classroom (klein & kleinman, 2002). the student perspective highlights both how teachers’ didactical design and the one-to-one computing classroom worked for the students from a theoretical lens of power and control. moreover, when students are considered as one factor in the didactical design, we argue that they construct their own meaning for the didactical design and one-to-one computing. limitations this paper contains some methodological limitations. much can take place when visiting a school and interviewing small children and youths. the schools were very helpful during the visits, but we also had to adapt to the daily practice. therefore, the same number of interviews was not conducted across the student groups even though that was our original intention. the selection process was not stringent, and during the research project we used the school principals in the selection of teachers. in informal student conversations, it came to our attention that one grade 8 teacher was particularly good with using one-to-one computing. based on our curiosity, we broke with our selection criteria and visited the grade 8 teacher and thus the students he taught. in hindsight, we think this was a good decision that benefited this study. another limitation concerns the background of classroom observations reported in the other paper. one consequence was that the classroom practice exists implicitly and without quotations from the teacher-student communication in the actual classroom situations as opposed to, or in addition to, the generalised comments in the student focus groups. such material might have supported and strengthened the interpretations conclusions from the students’ perspective, this study demonstrates how different power and control relationships in teachers’ didactical designs regulate and construct different possibilities in students’ learning processes. the results indicate the use of pedagogical plans and criteria for maintaining teachers’ power and control as well as for students’ empowerment through the use of one-to-one computing and especially cloud-computing affordances. when power and control were distributed to the students, the use of one-to-one computing was one essential component for making students learning processes smoother seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 171 regarding when to study and how to study. the four lessons with their unique power and control structures in the three didactical design clusters from the previous study (bergström et al, 2017) are to some extent both confirmed and extended by taking the student’s perspective. acknowledgements this work was supported by the swedish research council (vr) under grant 721-2013-774. references andersson, a., wiklund, m., & hatakka, m. 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(2013). challenges to learning and schooling in the digital networked world of the 21st century. journal of computer assisted learning, 29, 403-413. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12029 https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2006.10782463 https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2016.040608 https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.64 https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2006.10782463 https://doi.org/10.1080/1475939x.2014.979865 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-012-0305-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-012-0305-9 https://publikationer.vr.se/produkt/god-forsningssed/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1554480x.2014.955499 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1167705 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12029 power and control in the one-to-one computing classroom: students’ perspectives on teachers’ didactical design peter bergström eva mårell-olsson abstract introduction didactical design didactical design and one-to-one computing methodology selection process focus group interviews ethics thematic analysis theoretical framework findings students’ learning in class students’ learning outside class classroom assessment discussion limitations conclusions acknowledgements references digital relational competence: sensitivity and responsivity to needs of distance and co-located students ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. digital relational competence: sensitivity and responsivity to needs of distance and co-located students annika wiklund-engblom applied educational science umeå university email: annika.wiklund-engblom@umu.se abstract being relationally competent is an essential skill for teachers. this involves, for example, skills in social interaction, emotional communication, and human connection. two key factors for relational competence are teachers’ sensitivity and responsivity to learner needs. in a distance-learning environment this can be a challenge because of the technical barriers, which often entail a lack of nonverbal cues that can guide teachers in social interactions and the orchestration of relations. in this study, nine semi-structured interviews capture the experiences of teachers in upper secondary school, in order to explore how they describe their own digital didactical design for distance courses and how they perceive that it supports students’ learning. in the qualitative content analysis of the interview data, the emphasis was placed on teachers’ digital relational competence with regard to their sensitivity and responsivity. these two factors are scrutinized in relation to six categories of student needs: emotional, cognitive-epistemic, metareflective, self-regulatory, social, and practical-logistic needs. keywords: distance learning, digital relational competence, learner needs, sensitivity, responsivity, digital didactical design, teachers’ experiences introduction the recent trend framing this study is the attempt to include distance learning in upper secondary schools in the swedish-speaking parts of finland. there are limited resources for teaching all subjects at all schools because of the scarcity of students. the introduction of distance learning is an attempt to create more equal opportunities for students at small schools out in the periphery to study a wider range of subjects. needless to say, this trend is a balance between economic interests and democratic values of equality. however, there is a risk that, while catering for certain levels of equality, other quality levels might be compromised (rehn, maor & mcconney, 2016). because this introduction of distance learning is rather new, there is an obvious lack of research from the finland-swedish context; especially research aimed at seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 189 teachers’ perceptions of how they facilitate learning with their digital didactical1 design, i.e. the choices they make for designing for learning while implementing digital tools to assist the learning process. additionally, many teachers include both co-located and distance students using video conferencing options. prior research shows that this can lead to problems pertaining to how distance students experience being an equal member of the learning context (knipe & lee, 2002; rehn et al., 2016). such an outlook is detrimental to feelings of social presence (being part of a community of inquiry), which in turn is an important predictor for cognitive presence (being involved in a process of inquiry) (garrison & cleveland-innes, 2005). learning spaces in school contexts are “social products” for interaction and meaning making (leijon, 2016, 94). the interactions can differ and are divided by moore (1989), for example, into three types: teacher-learner, learner-learner, and learner-content interactions. the significance of social relations in educational settings cannot be overemphasized. when based on caring and dialogue, social relations are the most significant factor for growth, development, and learning (aspelin & persson, 2011; vygotsky, 1978). it is important that teachers get the tools for and understand how to maintain and design for authentic interaction and positive social relations in a digital learning space (garrison & cleveland-innes, 2005). however, knowing how to bridge the technological threshold and design for this social dimension is not necessarily intuitively transferable from traditional classroom culture. this is especially true because our relational competence is partly based on tacit knowledge developed from our interhuman co-existence (aspelin (2017b). prior research in a finland-swedish university context indicated that designing for social relations while combining co-located students and distance students was problematic due to unequal roles of students and a lack of nonverbal cues that guide teachers in responding to learners’ needs. this prior educational design research study aimed to improve distance learning through understanding both learner and teacher needs (wiklund-engblom, björkell, backa & wihersaari, 2016). the present study aims at deepening the understanding for how we can design for learning and enhance our ability for digital relational competence in an upper secondary school context – often combining co-located and distance students. the nine teacher interviews targeted how teachers described their own digital didactical design for distance courses and how they perceived that it allowed them to be sensitive and responsive to learner needs. theoretical background in order to frame this study theoretically, two perspectives are used: 1) learner needs framed by research on self-regulated learning (pintrich & mckeachie, 2000; winne & perry, 2005) and 2) teachers’ relational competence as to how a teacher is able to be sensitive and responsive to learners’ needs (aspelin & persson, 2011; rimm-kaufman, voorhees, snell & la paro, 2003). teachers designing for and implementing distance learning are confronted with the task of configuring and orchestrating tools, time, people, and space in new ways. digital didactical design for learning will always include both affordances and constraints based on the kind of technology that is selected and how it is being implemented. however, a general requirement is that the digital didactical design needs to be flexible enough to consider situation-based learner needs (goodyear & dimitriadis, 2013; peters, 2013), and teachers must to be able to promptly address these learner needs (zembylas, theodorou & pavlakis, 2008). according to anderson, rourke, garrison, and archer (2001, p. 5), a teacher’s competence for distance education involves teaching presence, which they 1 in this study the concept of didactical design is used based on the european tradition of didaktik (e.g., klafki, 2000). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 190 define as “the design, facilitation and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes”. learner needs and self-regulation from a needs perspective, to scaffold learners is to empower them to develop their own agency for learning – in any context. the needs of a digital learner can be divided into cognitive-epistemic needs, emotional needs, social needs, technological needs, and content interface-related needs (nokelainen, 2006; peters, 2013; wiklund-engblom, 2015). one dimension of needs pertains to the covert and subjective learning experience involving both cognition and affect, but also learners’ socio-emotional orientation (järvelä, lehtinen & salonen, 2000). the more objective and overt factors such as content and context involve the technological setup and the interface design of the content display, but also the social context per se. self-regulation pertains to learners’ agency for monitoring and managing learning – behaviorally, cognitively, and affectively – in relation to both context and content (pintrich & mckeachie, 2000; winne & perry, 2005; azevedo, 2007). hence, self-regulation is the dynamic process influenced by the reciprocal interaction of covert learning experiences and overt factors. for instance, how distance learning is organized affects learners’ emotions (zembylas et al., 2008), and inconsistency in how teachers use educational technology causes confusion (olofsson, lindberg & fransson, 2018). these are examples of how digital didactical design impacts learners’ self-regulatory agency. to scaffold self-regulation, we can adapt a metalearning perspective to visualize the learning as such (säljö, 2004, hattie, 2009). metalearning means learning about one’s own learning in order to become a more competent learner in relation to different internal and external affordances and constraints. it involves the learners’ awareness of variations and areas of regulation in relation to learning in a specific context. this can be described as their agency for designbased epistemic metareflection (wiklund-engblom, 2015), which is knowing how, why, and when to manipulate the content and context for maximum learning, being metacognitively aware of our learning process, and being aware of how emotions can be regulated to maintain volitional control, i.e. metamotivational monitoring (miele & scholer, 2018). säljö (2004, p. 493) suggests that metalearning in relation to educational technology is “one of the most important socializing practices of modern education” and is something that teachers have to prioritize in their digital didactical designs. part of this metalearning is our awareness and monitoring of social interactions for learning. however, social needs stand out as a problem area in distance learning (wiklund-engblom et al., 2016). digital orchestration of social interactions requires knowledge of new ways to engage, and these cannot be compared to traditional interactions for learning (delahunty, verenikina & jones, 2014). hence, relational competence becomes even more important while designing didactically for learning. teachers’ relational competence humans are born into co-existence, and this co-existence is where we are able to excel and aim for self-realization. the relational dimension of education is, therefore, an empowerment factor for learning (aspelin & persson, 2011). the relational space in itself has agency and provides potential for both productivity and creativity. research shows that the teacher-student relation has consequences for both academic achievement and behavioral adjustment (hughes, 2012; aspelin, 2015) and is of significance for the quality of education (aspelin, 2010; hatti, 2009). however, the teacher-student interaction has seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 191 reciprocal effects, and it also impacts on teachers’ wellbeing (split, koomen & thijs, 2011). also, peer-to-peer relations and dialogues enhance learning, which further highlights the importance of designing for interaction (howe, 2010; genlott & grönlund, 2016). aspelin (2017a) describes relational competence as teachers’ skills for social interaction, emotional communication, dialogue, personal development, and human connection, the latter involving the maintenance of both closeness and distance. rimm-kaufmann et al. (2003, p. 152) identified sensitivity and responsivity as keys to teachers’ relational competence. they describe a sensitive and responsive teacher to be “more likely to respond to children in a child-centered way rather than an adult-centered one, displaying his or her ability to take the child’s perspective.” this involves an empathic approach and awareness of how, for instance, tone of voice and nonverbal communication impacts on the interaction. listening, turn taking during communication, and being sensitive to how and when to give instructions are also components of relational competence, and the teacher has to know which needs to acknowledge, what actions to take, and how to take them by reading both the situation and the participants. the dialogue is key in teachers’ and students’ discernment of the other party’s level of understanding of a task or subject. aspelin and persson (2011) highlight this as a kind of “shared sustainable thinking” (ibid, p. 51; author’s translation). it is an empathic dialogue demanding trust. the student must feel safe enough to be able to express himself/herself and potentially expose misconceptions. in other words, the student must experience enough psychological safety in order to dare to fail. the teacher’s part of the social relation is to acknowledge and confirm the student, being the scaffold for his/her growth. an “asymmetric inter-subjective relationship” is the basis for an optimal pedagogical attitude (aspelin, 2014, p. 243). however, the pedagogical attitude that is adhered to influences how the teacher interprets students’ needs and circumstances as well as students’ thinking and experiences. aspelin (2017b) suggests that teachers’ relational competence can be defined according to a two-dimensional framework based on whether one takes an existential attitude of natural care for students or an attitude of ethical care. the first attitude is “an immanent phenomenon” based on teachers’ more or less innate and interhuman abilities to recognize and respond to situationbased learner needs. the latter attitude is “a transcendent phenomenon” based on socially constructed ways to manage relationships (ibid, 2017b, p. 39). the present study explores teachers’ application of relational competence in a digital context, here referred to as their digital relational competence. operationalizing digital relational competence when looking at computer-based conferencing for distance learning, garrison et al. (2000) found three levels of presence significant for creating a community of inquiry to support higher-order thinking. these are cognitive, social, and teaching presence. the latter is here referred to as teachers’ competence to design didactically with the use of digital tools for different didactical purposes, i.e. digital didactical design. didactical design entails the core of the teaching profession – knowing how, why, where, and when actions are to be taken for the purpose of making learning effective and efficient for various types of learners (jahnke, 2016). an essential part of this is to design for social presence, which is defined as “the ability of participants in a community of inquiry to project themselves socially and emotionally, as ‘real’ people (i.e., their full personality), through the medium of communication being used” (garrison et al., 2000, p. 94). research shows that how students perceive psychological and physical distance in distance learning influences their sense of community and comfort seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 192 (gunawardena & little, 1997), and it impacts on feelings of cognitive presence and learning outcomes (garrison et al., 2000). a teacher therefore needs to be able to design for social presence didactically in a distance-learning environment (andersson et al., 2001), i.e. they must have digital relational competence (cf. aspelin and persson, 2011). this entails a teacher’s ability to anticipate learner needs in a distance-learning situation and to design for these anticipated needs didactically. furthermore, it entails a teacher’s sensitivity to detecting immediate needs in the distance-learning situation, as well as the responsivity to take action to assist students in accordance with the needs that are identified (cf. rimm-kaufman et al., 2003). research aim and question the aim of this study is to identify how teachers’ reflections on their digital didactical designs reveal how they are able to be sensitive and responsive to learner needs in the new digital distance-learning context. research question: in what ways do distance-learning teachers perceive that their digital didactical design is supporting their ability to be sensitive and responsive to learner needs? methodology & methods design-based interviews were conducted with nine teachers targeting their experiences of their digital didactical designs for distance learning (cf. reigeluth, 1999, on design-based research). the teacher is viewed as a process designer (goodyear & dimitriadis, 2013), and the interviews were framed similarly to a coaching situation because the questions were targeted to expand the teachers’ reflections on their didactical choices and their impact on learning. from this perspective, teachers are viewed as continual learners regarding their agency in their own didactical design process. the coaching aspect is an influence of the “third wave” of research methods for self-regulated learning research, which emphasizes learner empowerment by producing reactivity and metacognitive monitoring (panadero, klug & järvelä, 2016). thus this study has followed a design-based research method on teachers’ agency in, and reactivity to, their digital didactical design processes. data collection the coordinators of the blended learning initiative for upper secondary schools provided names of teachers involved in the targeted distance-learning courses. these teachers were contacted by email and asked to name other teachers who were involved. the snowball strategy gave 29 names, of which nine teachers agreed to be interviewed. eight interviews were carried out face-to-face, and one was done using skype, for a total of 10.5 hours of audio recordings (ranging from 47 to 88 minutes for each interview). the interviewees received the instrument for metareflection on design for learning (imodel) one or two days before the interview. they were instructed to fill it out and thus reflect on their own didactical design of a specific distance course before the interview. they brought the imodel with them to the interview, which then served as the basis for the semi-structured interview. the imodel instrument consists of 23 statements to be rated on a likert scale of 1 to 7. furthermore, they were prompted to write qualitative explanations for each of these 23 ratings, encouraging them to think of the didactical design solution they had used in their course. the purpose of this was for them to think of specific examples in their own teaching practices and to relate them to different theoretically based factors that are important for learning. the imodel responses can be divided into themes pertaining to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 193 research on self-regulated learning (winne & perry, 2005; pintrich & mckeachie, 2000; azevedo, 2007; azevedo, & aleven, 2013), co-regulation and social regulation (järvelä, järvenoja, malmberg & hadwin, 2013), selfdetermination theory (deci & ryan, 2000), design-based epistemic metareflection (wiklund-engblom, 2015), metacognitive monitoring (järvelä et al., 2014), and learning technology design (peters, 2013). however, the themes as such were not mentioned to the participants. the themes target how the digital design is empowering learners to gain agency in their learning: 1. emotional agency: creating feelings of relatedness, creating feelings of autonomy, creating feelings of competence, facilitating motivation (wanting to learn), facilitating inspiration (awakening intrinsic interest), and facilitating engagement (maintaining interest) 2. cognitive-epistemic agency: reflecting on the task, connecting meaning to the task, providing an overview of the task, and facilitating critical thinking. 3. metareflective agency: reflecting on the learning process, documenting the learning process, and visualizing the learning process. 4. self-regulatory agency: taking personal responsibility for learning, planning and setting goals, creating personal learning paths, maintaining focus/concentration, and creating feelings of control. 5. social agency: collaborating, giving feedback, and discussing. 6. technical agency: being able to easily use the educational technology and facilitating active learning. the purpose of using the imodel was to start the teachers’ reflection process in relation to their course designs, rather than to be used as a formal structure during the interview. the interviewees were instead guided to talk freely about their course or courses and to focus both on their own needs and their perception of students’ needs. they were also prompted to describe their didactical design, which was generally discussed in relation to the themes of the imodel. each interview opened up new insights into potential problems, such as inequality, vulnerability, and anonymity, which then were included in the next interview. thus the interviews developed over time in order to expand the understanding of the phenomenon as much as possible. principles of analysis the audio files of the interviews were transcribed verbatim; eight were fully transcribed, while only the coded sections were transcribed in the last interview due to time constraints. a qualitative content analysis was carried out using qsr nvivo (11 pro). the interview data were coded in phases. the inductive, in vivo coding phase focused on keywords and themes the teachers were talking about, resulting in 332 coded excerpts divided into categories of both teachers’ and students’ needs. the deductive phase focused on teachers’ relational competence with regard to how they talked about being sensitive and responsive to learner needs. this resulted in 131 excerpts organized in accordance with the theme structure of the imodel instrument. the condensation phase focused on creating condensed meaning units for each excerpt. the following presentation of the results is based on these meaning condensations written in a narrative form. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 194 results emotional needs a teacher’s sensitivity to students’ emotional needs has to do with his/her ability to empathically sense the students’ feelings despite the technology barrier. most teachers tried to anticipate what would increase motivation while at the same time lower anxiety. for instance, teachers made an extra effort to develop interesting assignments aimed at problem solving in order to inspire, engage, and motivate distance learners in their independent work. they tried to create tasks that students could identify with and could relate to their own life circumstances. several teachers highlighted that emotional connection in a co-located class is guided by nonverbal indications and body language, but in a distance course, the teacher has to look for other signs. one teacher described that her intuition tells her that something might be wrong when there is a slight change in communication or activity from a specific student. this is an intuition for, and alertness to, patterns in digital communication. another example of an empathic attitude towards a student’s emotional needs in a one-to-one session was portrayed by a teacher who explained how she tried to get the student to relax by removing the picture of the student’s face on the screen and instead focused on the content and how it related to the student’s personal interests. anxiety is often present when students are required to do group work online. the teachers thought this may be due to fear of making a fool of oneself by asking stupid questions, or otherwise being shy about communicating with other people, who in this case were often strangers to them. teachers’ responsivity to this need was, for instance, to choose topics that were relevant to the students’ life situations, which would hopefully get them more personally involved. one teacher described how he had expressed his own feelings of anxiety when being exposed in new situations, and thus played down the tension in the situation. another way of lowering the anxiety associated with exposing oneself through new technological tools was to show examples and model the process. this was said to be necessary because distance students often did not even try new tools and seem rather to choose digital communication channels they are already used to. cognitive-epistemic needs the teachers tried to provide the same information and opportunities for learning the content to everyone, despite the location of the students. students’ cognitive-epistemic needs were supported by providing routines for feedback and having a thorough and easily recognizable structure of content, links, assignments, time planning, and deadlines. the learning platform was used for visualizing the learning progress in the course and to gather comments and feedback related to assignments. feedback was seen as the teachers’ tool for acknowledging and confirming the students’ learning, but it was also related to a more personal connection and support. one teacher noted that by cutting the amount of content in a course, there would be more opportunity for giving feedback during the process of a task, rather than only at the end of a task when the students would not have any opportunity to change the outcome of the task. in general, the teachers seemed to try to minimize the content to the bare necessities, to pose activating questions, and to create assignments with opportunities for reflection in the students’ independent work in order to compensate for the lack of opportunity for spontaneous reflection during class time. the latter was seen as a result of the lessons needing to be very structured, which made them more rigid and left limited opportunities for spontaneity. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 195 there were many thoughts about the suitability of various subjects to the distance course format, and the teachers reported both pros and cons related to teaching a specific subject as a distance course. several teachers noted that it is perhaps easier for students who already have basic knowledge in a subject because a lot of the work needs to be done on their own. teachers tried to compensate for the reduced number of lectures by providing extra information and links online, as well as by making short videos explaining the content or recording lectures so that students could access them online. feedback from some students suggested that they wanted the teacher to teach and explain more rather than having to find information themselves. scheduled private skype supervision was an option provided for students, but this did not seem to be very popular. the teachers experienced that there were often questions that were not being asked. to compensate for this, they tried to anticipate what these questions might be based on the students’ actions. the teachers also addressed answers to potential questions to everyone either based on a hunch that something was not clear to all of the students or because one of the students had asked something. the teachers differed in how they approached learning strategies. some said they found it difficult to transfer their ways of talking about learning strategies in relation to their subject because this was something that they were used to including ad hoc in their lectures. as mentioned above, the rigid structure of the distance courses did not provide a natural space for such spontaneity. metareflective needs students’ metareflective needs relate to their ability to see their own learning process and to reflect on their learning from various perspectives. this is a strategy to improve their learning and make it visible to themselves. here, teachers noted that students lose insight into their classmates’ learning process in distance courses because such courses are mostly based on independent work. the possibility to reflect on one’s own learning in relation to other’s processes is a great source of growing and learning because one is being exposed to a variety of perspectives. teachers’ suggestions for responsivity to such a need was to design for more collaboration where students solve problems together and have to explain the solutions to each other. however, all teachers interviewed claimed that collaborative learning was the most difficult thing to carry out in the distance courses. another suggestion to help students visualize their own learning was to have them evaluate their own learning through phases, which makes the learning process transparent to them. self-regulatory needs teachers’ sensitivity to students’ self-regulatory needs involved a constant follow-up and alertness regarding the balance between procrastination and activity. reminders can be made in various ways, and a positive option one teacher chose was to write a general thank you to all of the active students who handed in their assignments. this usually served as a subtle hint to the procrastinators to wake up without being called out. having a clear structure and time schedule helps students keep up and avoid misunderstandings. one teacher explained how he used a learning platform option where he could follow how students accessed course information. this served as an informal contract with the students because he could point to the fact that they had already read the information. other teachers solved this problem by making short videos on where to find information, how to write essays, etc. however, although students seemed to need this kind of information, few of them actually watched the videos, which left the teachers confused. teachers also found it problematic that many students do not reply to e-mails. hence, the teacher does not know if a student has received the information or feedback. some teachers chose other channels of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 196 communicating, trying to adhere to the channels students preferred, and this seemed to lower the threshold for communicating online. one teacher explained that he had to change the way he writes information keeping it as short as possible in the form of a bulleted list. teachers scheduled distance courses as regular classes according to the students’ time schedules. thus, the students could better plan their time. this also provided the teachers with an overview of the students’ workload, which was helpful when planning assignments and content. social needs teachers claimed that creating opportunities for collaborating and communicating was difficult, and how well it worked depended on the students’ level of cooperation and the group size. having large groups discuss synchronously make students become passive and quiet. a solution was to create smaller groups for discussions. one teacher used the function of the distance-learning platform that randomly assigned groups into teams, and suggested that this was the most similar to an in-class group discussion. teachers noted that they had to be alert to who was talking while orchestrating discussions, and asking people questions whenever someone had been quiet for a while was one strategy to keep everyone involved. another strategy for engagement was to provide discussion topics that were directly related to students’ everyday lives. this made students more prone to connect, discuss, and collaborate. one way of compensating for the lack of communication was to create assignments in which students could make their own audio presentations. but there was also a teacher who generally did not like discussions during lectures and thus chose not to create opportunities for discussions. the combination of co-located and distance students was problematic, especially for language teachers, because the students had unequal opportunities to participate in a collaborative dialogue. furthermore, the language teachers themselves felt inhibited in their own ability to communicate and give feedback during dialogue with the distance students. some teachers felt awkward being social through technology, and this was something they had to get used to. one teacher talked about the social reciprocity and affirmation through body language from students during lectures and how this is an integral part of the teacher’s identity an example of being responsive and creating new social norms of communicating was explained by one teacher who had to learn how to restrain himself while having to wait a bit longer for distance students to reply to his questions. it was uncomfortable, but necessary. one teacher experienced that it was more difficult to regain discipline in class when a student began to write irrelevant things in a group chat. in a normal situation, she would have reprimanded the student’s behavior with a nonverbal gesture. digitally, the incident had time to escalate before it was found out, the student was identified, and it could be properly dealt with. a few teachers organized introductions between the distance students so that they would feel more comfortable with each other, while others did not put much emphasis on this because they wanted to save precious time for teaching the content. different ways of responding to students’ social needs were to arrange a meeting in real life at some point during the course; to initially let everyone (both students in the classroom and online) use a laptop in order to experience this kind of communication and to be equal socially during the course; to display everyone’s face on the screen to create connection; and to gather the co-located students in front of a camera to introduce them to the distance students. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 197 practical-logistic needs this category is an expansion of the technical needs theme, as this was considered to be one part of a larger category of practical-logistic needs of the students. however, technical needs are important. whenever the digital tools did not work properly it stole valuable time and put an extra workload on the teacher, while at the same time hindering the student from progressing to his/her full potential. teachers had difficulty placing demands on the other schools to make sure the equipment was up to par, and schedules often overlapped between schools, which caused problems for both teachers and students. furthermore, some teachers took on the challenge of the extra orchestration of teaching both co-located students and distance students at the same time, while others rearranged the groups and had separate lectures in order to be able to respond to different groups’ needs properly. the teachers tried to be responsive to students’ needs by making the distance courses easier and more usable by creating structures that were practical and could be easily followed and flexible to fit into everyone’s schedule. this involved, for instance, fewer assignments, weekly packages of content, and spaced out deadlines. having a questionnaire both at the beginning and at the end of the course was a way for teachers to learn about students’ preferences and experiences of the course. this served as information for further improvements of the design of the next course. discussion anticipative, sensitive, and responsive teachers the ability to anticipate someone else’s needs requires an empathic understanding; the ability to place yourself in their shoes. for most teachers in this study, the inclusion of distance students was rather new. however, having taken distance courses themselves seemed to facilitate an empathic approach. prior experiences (good or bad) guided the teachers in making didactical choices. however, the teachers struggled in many ways to orchestrate the lessons, and they experimented with various options in order to improve their ability to be both sensitive and responsive to students’ needs in the distancelearning environment. this was not always successful, however, and this often left them frustrated, but it also portrays the iterative process of digital didactical design. in traditional classroom settings, students’ body language, tone of voice, etc., are a teacher’s toolbox for being sensitive to students’ needs (rimmkaufman et al., 2003). a small view of a face on the screen does not seem to be enough to replace these inherent tools for reading other people. the teachers in this study talked about becoming agile in interpreting digital dialogue and patterns of digital communication, both synchronous and asynchronous. this included being aware of their own emotional reactions as well as the students’. for instance, teachers being open about their own anxiety facilitated students in identifying and regulating their anxiety. the analysis showed that modeling of learning strategies needs to be planned thoroughly because the often rigid lesson structure of distance courses leaves little room for spontaneous discussions related to the learning process as such. knowing how to manage the social dimension in a distance course overall requires practice, especially when there are both distance and co-located students synchronously present. we all have different preferences for being social and how and when to connect to others. this fact became evident in how the teachers talked about socio-cultural aspects of learning in a distance course. the socializing part and learning from each other does not come naturally but has to be specifically designed for. for instance, teachers had to be the echo of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 198 questions so that everyone received the same information. furthermore, how to behave in a distance course did not seem to be something the teacher could take for granted that students knew, and rules of conduct need to be agreed upon. it is obvious that the ability to orchestrate people and social relations with the help of technological tools does not translate from what teachers are trained for in a traditional teaching situation, and it involves a trial and error process as a new learning culture is developed. bondi and colleagues (2016) suggest separate lectures to be arranged, in which learning and didactical design issues are given full prerogative. other researchers also emphasize the benefits of having an ongoing dialogue and reflection with students about the impact of technology in learning situations (genlott & grönlund, 2016), as well as discussions about awareness of learning overall (cook-sather, bovill & felten, 2014; dweck, 2006; hattie, 2009). these researchers suggest that the best way forward is to teach students to reflect on factors that impact learning, and säljö (2004) claims this to be even more important in a digital context. dangers of combining co-located and distance students the results of this study point to several dangers in combining distance and colocated students. the most alarming results being inequality and anonymity, which in this case gave rise to feelings of vulnerability. having both groups of students in the same class provided for inequality because of the two groups encountering differing affordances and constraints for communicating and interacting. the constraints of being located at a distance from the other group and the teacher caused anonymity and imbalances in relationships, making the distance students feel vulnerable in their position. this inhibited their interaction and communication. thus, there is a risk that learner vulnerability might impact on both relationships and learning (cf. garrison et al., 2000). the teacher’s attention and engagement became limited by the orchestration of the double roles of being both a distance and a co-located teacher. although the teachers in this study were advanced technology users, the orchestration of the digital learning space and the co-located learning space exhausted both time and resources. they were furthermore limited by factors concerning logistics, such as a shorter times for class because of difficulties in coordinating schedules across different schools. this in turn limited the time available to address socioemotional and metalearning issues. concluding and defining digital relational competence digital relational competence involves an empathic approach to learner needs in the context of digital didactical design; i.e. teachers’ ability to anticipate needs, as well as their ability to be sensitive and responsive to learner needs in the distance-learning situation. part of this competence is designing for psychological safety. being exposed in a digital context might cause anxiety, especially because students are continuously being assessed on their achievements. from a developmental perspective, teenagers are more sensitive and self-conscious than adults, and this needs to be accounted for when designing for social presence. a first-hand experience of this kind of digital exposure is perhaps the best way to develop an empathic approach as a digital didactical designer. we affirm each other through social interactions and relationships. this is an important process for how we develop our identities, both as students and as teachers. probably partly because of old social norms not being adequate while new norms have not yet been formed, the social orchestration of distance learning becomes a struggle. the findings in this study suggest that we have to create and agree upon new norms of socializing and affirming each other in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 199 context of distance 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(2008). the role of emotions in the experience of online learning: challenges and opportunities. educational media international, 45(2), 107117. https://umea-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=tn_tayfranc10.1080/00461520.2017.1371601&context=pc&vid=umub&lang=sv_se&search_scope=default_scope&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=default_tab_umub&query=any,contains,miele%20&%20scholer,%202017&sortby=rank&offset=0 https://umea-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=tn_tayfranc10.1080/00461520.2017.1371601&context=pc&vid=umub&lang=sv_se&search_scope=default_scope&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=default_tab_umub&query=any,contains,miele%20&%20scholer,%202017&sortby=rank&offset=0 digital relational competence: sensitivity and responsivity to needs of distance and co-located students annika wiklund-engblom abstract introduction theoretical background learner needs and self-regulation teachers’ relational competence operationalizing digital relational competence research aim and question methodology & methods data collection principles of analysis results emotional needs cognitive-epistemic needs metareflective needs self-regulatory needs social needs practical-logistic needs discussion anticipative, sensitive, and responsive teachers dangers of combining co-located and distance students concluding and defining digital relational competence references a comparison between digital competence in two nordic countries’ national curricula and an international framework: inspecting their readiness for 21st century education ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. a comparison between digital competence in two nordic countries’ national curricula and an international framework: inspecting their readiness for 21st century education fazilat siddiq nifu (nordic institute for studies in innovation, research and education) email: fazilat.siddiq@nifu.no abstract this study investigates the objectives and competence aims in the digital competence curricula of two nordic countries for compulsory education and an international framework, digcomp. the main aim of the study is to analyze the visions and main features of the norwegian and swedish national curricula, and inspect the extent to which they align with the digcomp framework. the results show that the underlying visions and objectives of the frameworks largely converge. however, there are large discrepancies between the national curricula and digcomp regarding the structure, the content covered (e.g., competence aims) and the instructional aspects. the findings and their implications for researchers, policy makers and curriculum developers are discussed. keywords: curriculum analysis, digital competence, compulsory education, 21st century skills, introduction technological advancements and the increased availability of ict resources affects young people in several ways, and has become an extensive part of their lives. moreover, ict plays a significant role in the economic, social and educational reforms, and has created changes in the teaching and learning environments. therefore, digital competence has achieved increased attention and is regarded as a crucial competence in 21st century education (griffin, mcgaw, & care, 2012). it is therefore important to help students master ict and develop digital competences to successfully participate in education, work, and society (griffin et al., 2012). accordingly, several international initiatives have developed frameworks which outline and detail the specific knowledge, competences, attitudes and skills that students need to become sufficiently digitally literate. in line with the international drives, several western countries have initiated curricular reforms, and formally integrated digital competence in the national curricula (balanskat, 2009; voogt & pelgrum, 2005). these changes have brought into play a compulsory dimension to teaching and learning with technology, and provide the schools with guidelines on what the national government expects from them regarding ict (vanderlinde, van seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 145 braak, & hermans, 2009), making it less dependent on the willingness and individual initiatives of teachers (aesaert, vanderlinde, tondeur, & van braak, 2013). nevertheless, the national digital competence curricula are diverse and differ in several ways. moreover, there is no consensus about the features of such technology related curricula (fraillon & ainley, 2010). this study compares the visions, aims and the content features of digital competence in the national curricula of two nordic countries; norway and sweden, and the international framework; digcomp (a framework for developing and understanding digital competence in europe; ferrari, 2013). the main aim of this study is to investigate how the international framework and the national curricula are organized and described, and the extent to which the digital competence curricula in norway and sweden are aligned with the international framework. given that the national curricula guide the ict use and integration, such knowledge seems crucial to identify whether and how the students are prepared for education in the 21st century. theoretical background digital competence in the research literature, a myriad of concepts (e.g., ict literacy, digital skills, computer literacy, ict fluency, technological literacy, internet skills, information literacy, media literacy) are used to describe knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to digital technology (ala-mutka, 2011; law, lee, & yuen, 2009). even broader concepts such as new literacies, generic skills, and 21st century skills are used to describe ict related competences. efforts have been made to clarify and distinguish between the concepts in order to identify similarities and differences (lankshear & knobel, 2008). yet, this seems to be a challenging task, and many researchers have concluded that most of the terms are used interchangeably and largely reflect the same content (law et al., 2009; søby, 2013). moreover, a comprehensive examination of the relevant concepts and their underlying meanings is out of scope for this paper. in this paper, the term digital competence is used for describing students’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to ict in formal education. the primary reason for this choice is the wide use of the concept internationally, and particularly in the educational systems in the european countries as the term is established in the educational policyand decision making, and research communities. moreover, competence in the nordic languages is understood in a similar way as the concept of literacy in the english language, and is broader than for instance skills. moreover, in the nordic languages it largely reflects the german term “bildung” which means to be literate (søby, 2003). note that even though digital competence is the dominant term in this paper, the terms ict literacy, ict competence and digital literacy are used synonymously as they are closely related and connote to a large degree comparable frameworks, include converging competences, and are extensively used in educational research (siddiq, hatlevik, throndsen, olsen, & scherer, 2016). definition of digital competence digital competence has been defined as “the interest, attitude, and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital technology and communication tools to access, manage, integrate, and evaluate information; construct new knowledge; and communicate with others in order to participate effectively in society” (lennon et al., 2003, p. 8). this definition is in line with several other definitions of digital competence and ict literacy (educational testing service, 2007; ferrari, 2013) which reflect the importance of confident and critical use seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 146 of ict for fully participating in the knowledge society. the definition of digital competence in the frameworks and curricula is vital as it may reflect the rationales for educational technology use. for instance, tondeur and colleagues (2007) described the four rationales underlying technology implementation as: an economic rationale, educational rationale, social rationale and the catalytic rationale. these four rationales drive national educational technology policies and are strongly related to the dominant rationales of curriculum development. hence, the definitions used in the frameworks will be studied and analysed with regard to these rationales. such knowledge could potentially illustrate the underlying visions and aims of the national curricula and the international frameworks, and support comparisons between them. moreover, differences between the underlying visions and aims of the frameworks may contribute to further differences in the content (i.e., learning goals or competence aims). digital competence frameworks like the large number of concepts reflecting ict competences in education, there are also a great number of frameworks aimed at outlining the expected knowledge, skills and attitudes in order to become digitally competent. while some digital competence frameworks have been developed as international initiatives and collaborations (e.g., binkley et al., 2012; fraillon, schulz, & ainley, 2013), others are founded in the national curriculum context. the international frameworks tend to have broader vision and aims, and are partly novel when introduced, while the national curricula tend to be inspired by the international drives in different ways and are founded in the believe that such competences should be part of students’ learning. in several studies, researchers have systematically compared international frameworks to investigate the commonalities and differences between these (voogt & roblin, 2012). there are also examples of comparisons between national educational technology curricula (aesaert et al., 2013). yet, such studies conducted comparisons on an overall level and not including the competencies within the frameworks or curricula. moreover, there is limited access to studies which have investigated the comparability between international digital competence frameworks and the national curricula, which could potentially reveal the strengths and deficiencies of each, the alignment between them, and to what extent the national contexts prepare their students for 21st century education. in the following section the reasons for selecting the digcomp framework, and the national curricula of norway and sweden in this study is provided. criteria for selecting the international framework and the national curricula digcomp: a framework for developing and understanding digital competence in europe the digcomp framework was selected as the key framework in this study for categorizing the competences in the remaining frameworks. digcomp was initially developed by the european commission (ferrari, 2013), and is based on (a) a review of 15 frameworks of digital competence; (b) a conceptual mapping (ala-mutka, 2011); (c) a collection and analysis of case studies (ferrari, 2012); and (d) a delphi study including opinions of relevant stakeholders and experts (janssen et al., 2013). note that the main purpose of the digcomp framework is to detail a conceptual understanding of digital competence for education. nevertheless, it has been applied to empirical studies, and for instance siddiq and colleagues (2016) proved that a slightly revised version of digcomp was sufficiently profound and broad for categorizing digital competence assessments. hence, the revised digcomp (appendix a, or for more details see siddiq et al., 2016) is utilized in this paper as a blueprint to perform comparisons with the national curricula. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 147 the norwegian and swedish national curricula in the norwegian national curriculum, digital competence is described as one of the five basic key literacies (along with reading, writing, oral skills, and numeracy) to be integrated with the competence aims of the school subjects in compulsory education (i.e., grade 1 – 13) (norwegian directorate for education and training, 2012). moreover, norway has received much attention as being one of the first countries to integrate digital competence formally in its curriculum in 2006 (balanskat & gertsch, 2010), and was therefore included in this study. on the other hand, the swedish national curriculum was recently (march 2017) revised, and digital competence has been integrated into the swedish national curriculum (lgr11, 2017) for the first time. thus, including the norwegian and swedish curricula might result in findings related to the time of inclusion, and the maturity of the field as digital competence (both the concept and the frameworks) have changed across time (erstad, 2010; martin, 2006). the curriculum model the curriculum model, which was built on the work of goodlad, klein, and tye (1979) distinguishes between the intended, the implemented, and the attained curriculum (van den akker, 2003). this conceptual framework of the curriculum model has often been applied as the domains of analysis in studies on general education (mullis, martin, ruddock, o’sullivan, & preuschoff, 2009), and ict in education (voogt & roblin, 2012). the intended curriculum level represents the learning goals intended for students to achieve and how the educational system should be organized to facilitate these. this typically include the rationale and goals for learning (e.g., competence aims). next, the implemented curriculum, represents what is actually taught in schools or classrooms, the characteristics of those teaching it, and how it is taught. the attained curriculum describes students’ outcomes and characteristics, and is typically related to assessment of the intended curriculum (i.e., learning goals, competence aims) and reflects the implemented curriculum (i.e., what has been taught). as illustrated, the three representations are interconnected. markauskaite (2006) emphasised that “in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of ict literacy policies and practices in specific contexts, all three domains should be investigated” (p. 6). however, a detailed analysis of all three curriculum representations is out of scope for this study. hence, while the primary focus is on the intended curriculum, the implemented and attained curriculum representations are included by investigations of whether the curricula contain or are accompanied with guidelines or requirements related to these. hence, the conceptual framework of the curriculum model is used as guiding principles in the process of developing a framework for analysis in this study. furthermore, the three curriculum representations align well with the three curriculum clusters or components: visions, competence aims/features, and instructional aspects derived from madaus and kellaghan’s (1992) six curriculum components. the three curriculum clusters have proved useful in previous studies on comparisons of different national educational technology curricula curricula (aesaert et al., 2013). hence, to facilitate the comparative analysis these three clusters will be applied to guide the analysis in this study. the present study given that few studies have compared the content features of national digital competence curricula and international frameworks in a systematic way, this study aims at contributing to this gap. first, the international framework; digcomp (ferrari, 2013) is described as it represents and provides information about what is emphasized by international authorities. second, the norwegian and swedish national digital competence curricula will be described and analyzed, and finally compared to the digcomp framework. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 148 more specifically, the following research question is addressed: rq1. which visions, competence aims and instructional aspects are described in the norwegian and swedish national curriculum and how do the frameworks align with the international framework? method as described in previous section, the three key clusters: visions, competence aims and instructional aspects were selected based on relevant curriculum models for guiding the comparative analysis. more specifically, a qualitative analysis of the textual documents has been carried out in three consecutive phases (wolcott, 1994). the first phase consisted of descriptive readings to establish what the key aims and purposes of each framework are, to identify the structure of the frameworks, and in particular, which features and aspects of digital competence are provided. in the second phase, one framework was selected as the key framework for carrying out the comparative analysis of the content of the remaining frameworks. the third phase consisted of comparisons between the international framework, and the norwegian and swedish curricula which serve as examples of operationalizations of digital competence in national educational context. analysis and results rq1. which visions, competence aims and instructional aspects are described in the norwegian and swedish national curriculum and how do the frameworks align with the international framework? the digcomp framework the digcomp framework has defined digital competence as “the confident, critical and creative use of ict to achieve goals related to work, employability, learning, leisure, inclusion and/or participation in society” (ferrari, 2013, p. 2). digcomp structures digital competence by specifying five levels with increasing conceptual resolution. as shown in table 1, the first level of the framework comprises six competence areas: information, communication, content creation, safety, problem solving, and technical operational skills. each competence area consists of a number of competences (level 2; table 1, e.g., 1.1 browsing, searching, and filtering information), which are further finegrained and descriptions of proficiency levels for each competence are outlined (level 3). the fourth level outlines examples of knowledge, skills, and attitudes applicable to each competence. the last and fifth level displays a contextual elaboration by providing examples of the applicability of the competence for different purposes (e.g., learning and employment). please note that the levels 3 to 5 are not shown in table 1 given the increased level of detail in each (see ferrari, 2013 for further descriptions of the competences, and the proficiency levels in the framework). comparisons among the digcomp and the two national frameworks the revised digcomp framework (siddiq et al., 2016) with the six competence areas and the competences within each is the starting point for a brief comparison, as shown in table 1. it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an exhaustive comparison of the frameworks with a full review and synthesis of every detail included. the following overview’s sole purpose is to provide enough detail in order to highlight the similarities and differences of specific relevance to allow for an overarching discussion of the findings in this study. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 149 table 1. a comparison among the revised digcomp framework, and the norwegian and swedish digital competence curriculum. the norwegian digital competence curriculum the definition of digital competence in the norwegian curriculum includes what is understood by digital competence and emphasizes that digital skills are “a prerequisite for further learning and for active participation in working life and a society in constant change” (norwegian directorate for education and training, 2012, p. 12). digital competence is described as a basic key literacy, and is based on the idea that the basic literacies contribute to the development of the subject competences while also being a part of them. hence, the norwegian national digital competence curriculum consists of a framework of digital competence, and is also described in the subject curricula (norwegian directorate for education and training, 2010). since the digital competence described in the subjects is derived from the framework, the main unit of analysis in this study is the framework. the digital competence framework is outlined in a grid and consists of four categories, namely: search and process, produce, communicate, and digital judgment. for each of these categories, descriptions of the progression through five levels are provided, and each competence category (i.e., the cells) in the grid digcomp norwegian curriculum swedish curriculum competence areas and competences categories competence aims 1. information 1.1 browsing, searching, and filtering information 1.2 evaluating information 1.3 storing and retrieving information search and process information 2. communication 2.1 interacting through digital technologies 2.2 sharing information and content 2.3 engaging in online citizenship 2.4 collaborating through digital technologies communicate communication 3. content creation 3.1 developing content 3.2 integrating and re-elaborating 3.3 copyright and licenses 3.4 programming produce developing content programming 4. safety 4.1 protecting devices 4.2 managing and protecting personal data 4.3 protecting health 4.4 protecting the environment 4.5 netiquette digital judgment 5. problem solving 5.1 solving problems with use of digital technology 5.2 collaborative problem solving 5.3 innovating and creatively using technology 5.4 identifying digital competence gaps 6. technical operational 6.1 solving technical problems 6.2 identifying needs and technological responses 6.3 basic technical skills seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 150 formulates performance standards at that level (appendix b). the framework continues by stating that “the requirements are general and serve as a basis and point of reference for developing subject and grade relevant competence aims” (norwegian directorate for education and training, 2012, p. 5). moreover, it is stated in the framework that each subject curriculum group needs to “make decisions on which grids, cells, and levels are relevant for their subject as well as for different age groups of students, and formulate competence aims based on these decisions” (norwegian directorate for education and training, 2012, p. 5). the instructional aspects (i.e., assessment, curriculum materials, transactions and processes) have not been described in the norwegian digital competence curriculum. comparisons between the revised digcomp framework and the norwegian digital competence curriculum a comparison between the revised digcomp framework and the norwegian digital competence curriculum as shown in table 1, indicates that the competence areas information, content creation, and safety in the digcomp framework are to some extent covered in the norwegian curriculum, whereas the competence areas communication and problem solving are to a great extent lacking. hence, the norwegian framework lacks descriptors related to the more generic 21st-century skills (e.g., communication, collaboration, problem solving, creativity; competence areas 4 and 5 in the revised digcomp framework). the largest difference between the two is that the norwegian curriculum is less detailed, and many of the single competences in digcomp are included in the level descriptions instead (see appendix b for an overview of the norwegian framework). for instance, the category search and process is described at level 1 as “can read hypertexts and simpler interactive information …,” whereas the description at level 2 is “can make simple digital searches, and read and interpret information from digital sources …” and at level 3 continues by stating “can choose and use search strategies and assess information from digital sources …”. similarly, levels 4 and 5 describe further ability expectations of students at these levels. while browsing, searching and filtering information (1.1) and evaluating information (1.2) are formulated as two separate competences in digcomp, they are regarded as levels of higher complexity under the content category search and process in the norwegian curriculum. this indicates that students at higher levels of digital competence are expected to manage evaluation of information and use proper search strategies, whereas students at lower levels are not expected to be able to search for or assess information. these findings point toward the insufficient structure of the norwegian framework, which challenges further comparisons. in particular, one categorisation level corresponding to competences in digcomp is missing (see table 1), which potentially could bridge the topical content (i.e., labelled as categories in the framework; see appendix b) and the ability level descriptors. moreover, the five level descriptors in each category in the norwegian digital competence framework do not correspond with the grades in the norwegian educational system (i.e., 13 years of compulsory education), and further explanations regarding this link are not provided (see norwegian directorate for education and training, 2012). it is stated in the norwegian digital competence framework that the ambitions specified in the framework are to be included and operationalized in the subject-specific curricula, and the task is primarily given to the subject expert groups. however, there are no explicit descriptions of what should be integrated into which subjects and during which year of schooling. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 151 the swedish digital competence curriculum digital competence has only recently been integrated into the swedish national curriculum. these changes aim at clarifying and reinforcing digital competence in the curriculum, syllabi and subject plans for elementary and secondary schools. moreover, the governmental body states that the main purpose is to emphasize the school's mission to strengthen students' digital competence. it has been highlighted that these changes will affect the duties of principals and teachers, the role of the school library and the teaching of individual subjects. although, emphasis has been put on digital competence in the swedish curriculum in general, the concept appears twice in the document, and a standalone section including further definitions and clarifications of how the concept should be understood is lacking. yet, in the note regarding the revisions (lgr11, 2017, p. 2) a short description of which sections have been revised is included. nevertheless, in a separate commentary from the educational authorities (skolverket, 2017), the background and conceptual understanding of digital competence has been described along with how the aspects of digital competence have been expressed. secondly, comments on the changes made in the subject syllabi are described, and examples of how the students will be given the prerequisites to develop the various aspects of digital competence are provided. it should be noted that the swedish curriculum lacks one distinct framework which outlines digital competence. therefore, the two official documents: the curriculum (lgr11, 2017) and the commentary (skolverket, 2017) were analysed in this study as they describe the digital competences included as part of the subject aims, and the background, the overarching aims and objectives of the digital competence curriculum. in the commentary, digital competence is described as a dynamic concept which changes across time. moreover, a short review of different contexts describing the concept of digital competence are provided, and in particular the descriptions of digital competence in the eus key competencies are emphasized. the swedish definition is based on these descriptions, and outlines which competence areas it includes and its importance for “understanding the transformation digitalization entails in society including the possibilities and risks, and to participate in the development of the society” (sou 2015:28, p. 8). the analysis of the competence aims was conducted by locating the digital competence descriptions in the subject syllabuses and compared to the level 1, 2 and 3 descriptions in the digcomp framework. consequently, the labelling in table 1 under the swedish curriculum is not identified from the curriculum, yet given by the researchers as they were matched. the instructional aspects (i.e., assessment, curriculum materials, transactions and processes) have not been described in the swedish digital competence curriculum. comparisons between the revised digcomp framework and the swedish digital competence curriculum the lack of a specific digital competence framework in the swedish curriculum challenges the comparisons with the digcomp framework. yet, the descriptions related to digital competence throughout the subject syllabuses (i.e., aims) were identified and compared to the digcomp framework. in the swedish curriculum, the competence areas problem solving and safety are lacking. this is also the case for the area technical operational skills, yet this may be covered in the subject teknik (lgr11, 2017; rasinen, 2003). also, the revised curriculum has included programming as part of mathematics, in which problem solving is described as an aspect – yet, problem solving in digital environments is not described directly or in other subjects (skolverket, 2017). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 152 discussion in the following sections, the overall findings of the study will be discussed related to the structure of the frameworks and the three clusters: visions and objectives, competence aims/features, and instructional aspects. structure of the frameworks the results show that the structure of the international frameworks and the norwegian and swedish digital competence curricula differ. while, the digcomp framework is developed across levels with increasing progress and level of difficulty, this is less visible in the norwegian curriculum, even though it contains level descriptions – yet, these do not describe levels, rather competences. the swedish curriculum seem to lack levels in the curriculum as no pattern of increasing progression within the competence areas could be identified. this may challenge the implementation of the framework and consequently the development of students’ digital competence. moreover, the level of detail in the descriptions of the competence aims in the two national curricula is kept superficial, which can potentially lead to a greater variation in how the curricula are interpreted by schools and teachers, and to what extent the digital competence aims are taught (aesaert et al., 2013). visions and objectives the three frameworks emphasize the importance of digital competence for coping with the transformation entailed by technology and to participate in the society. hence, the social rationale (tondeur et al., 2007) is the most prominent in these frameworks. yet, this focus is not unique as this has been highlighted in several national and international educational technology reforms (oecd, 2015). in addition, the pursuit of equity and educational reform is also recognisable in the argumentation of the importance of digital competence. even though the economic rationale is not mentioned explicitly in the swedish and norwegian curricula, the focus on the social and catalytic rationales are related to the underlying economicaland educational aspects as argued by aesaert and colleagues (2013). these results slightly expand the view that the educational and social rationales are mainly prominent in the introduction of digital competence in the school curricula (voogt, 2008). because this study is mainly concentrated around which competences the three frameworks promote that the learner should attain, the focus on the visions and objectives was kept lower. hence, comprehensive descriptions of the visions were not analysed in detail, yet the focus was kept on the definitions of digital competence. therefore, future research may further explore the rationales underlying the curricula and the alignment between these. competence aims the specific content of the digcomp framework and the national curricula vary. the national curricula and digcomp share the key competence areas information, content-creation and communication to some extent. for instance, not all the competences described under the competence area communication are covered in the norwegian and swedish curriculum. the national curricula cover communication briefly, and emphasizes the asynchronous communication which is typically operationalized as presenting a specific theme or topic to specific audience using suitable technology (lgr11, 2017; norwegian directorate for education and training, 2012). moreover, computer-supported synchronous communication, collaboration or collaborative problem solving is not mentioned in the curricula. the lack of such seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 153 competence might be challenging for students while entering work life, as collaborative problem solving among others is sees as a critical competence in the 21st century (care, scoular, & griffin, 2016). in the swedish curriculum, the competence area safety is lacking. this is surprising considering that digital technology is the preferred platform for communication between young people today, and we cannot anticipate that all young people are capable of learning how to behave appropriately and protect themselves in online environments. moreover, recently researchers have emphasized the importance of teaching media literacy (e.g., the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using different forms of communication) in schools for countering for instance “fake news” (bulger & davison, 2018). moreover, bulger & davison (2018) recommend the development of curricula for addressing the need to be able to address user behavior in addition to interpretation, and the importance of assessment to monitor and measure students’ competences within this competence area. even though, the digital competence aims in the norwegian and swedish curricula are cross-curricular, they are not always equally integrated into the subject-specific aims. for instance, whereas some of the goals clearly describe the digital competence and the subject content the students should acquire, others seem to pay less attention to the digital competence dimension. e.g., in the biology subject curriculum (lgr11, 2017), the competence aim “documentation of scientific studies with text, image and other forms of expression, both with and without digital tools”, is more relevant for the biology dimension than the digital competence. there are a number of such examples in both curricula, which may cause even larger variations in the teaching of digital competence. moreover, researchers have argued that clear and univocal definitions aid the implementation of a curriculum (virkus, 2003). instructional aspects assessment none of the studied countries have dedicated a separate part of its digital competence curriculum to instructional aspects. in contrast, the english curriculum contains an elaborated section ‘curriculum in action’ which translates the competence aims into real classroom activities (aesaert et al., 2013). moreover, while in some countries the assessment of digital competence has been a critical part of monitoring the extent to which the students are digitally literate by performance-based tests (siddiq et al., 2016), self-reporting (itu monitor, 2009) or participation in international comparative studies (such as the international computer and information literacy study (icils); fraillon, ainley, schulz, friedman, & gebhardt, 2014) there has, to my knowledge, not been conducted a such study in sweden. monitoring students’ digital competence is important from several perspectives. for instance, for investigating to what extent students’ have developed the sufficient levels of digital competence, to evaluate and revise the curriculum, and to plan efficient interventions directed towards teachers and/or students. however, this may be put in action in the coming years as digital competence has just recently been formally included in the swedish curriculum. transactions and processes with regard to transactions and processes, the curricula of norway and sweden do not provide teachers with any information on how to implement the curricular goals in their classroom activities. this is consistent with the features of politically determined decentralized education systems, which is applied in both these countries. such educational systems stress school autonomy and enables schools and teachers to organize their learning environments in their own way. this may lead to large between-school variation regarding the curriculum implementation (resh & benavot, 2009), and has already been seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 154 indicated for the implementation of digital competence curriculum in norway (nou 2014:7, 2014). an evaluation of the norwegian national curriculum revealed that how digital competence is understood varies across schools and classrooms, and the teachers perceive it as important only for students in the beginning of primary education, instead of skills that are continuously developed as part of their subject domain learning throughout their educational training (aasen et al., 2012). consequently, it seems that the formal responsibility for instructing students to attain the digital competence goals falls between different actors, and this lack of a clear-cut digital competence curriculum may also affect pre-service teachers and teacher training institutions, as the framework does not clearly put forward the requirements to the teachers (tømte, kårstein, & olsen, 2013). conclusion the results of this study have shown that the international frameworks have a larger degree of specificity and volume compared to the two national curricula. moreover, the national curricula lack sufficient structure and thus do not support a conceptual hierarchy with increasing specifications of the competence areas and competences across grade levels. moreover, a lack of descriptions related to the instructional aspects (e.g., assessment, teaching procedures and materials) may affect the integration of the curriculum. in conclusion, such knowledge can provide policy makers, researchers and educators relevant information about the alignment between the national operationalization of digital competence and the international drives. also, such knowledge can be crucial for curriculum developers, and it may well be helpful to plan relevant interventions that promote the empowerment of teachers to use ict for learning, and to develop their students’ digital competence. finally, as stressed by scheuermann and pedró (2009, p. 5): “certainly, knowledge economies and societies would greatly benefit from a broader set of internationally comparable indicators. these could monitor progress in ict uptake and unveil important information about use, ranging from issues such as frequency to purpose”, the divergences uncovered in this study might bring attention to the importance of comparable indicators across digital competence frameworks and curricula. references aasen, p., møller, j., rye, e., ottesen, e., prøitz, t. s., & hertzberg, f. 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(1994). transforming qualitative data: description, analysis, and interpretation. thousand oaks: sage. https://www.skolverket.se/publikationer?id=3783 http://www.regeringen.se/49bbaa/contentassets/e0acd9a7659d4c138c6666d2d5e21605/gor-sverige-i-framtiden--digital-kompetens-sou-201528 http://www.regeringen.se/49bbaa/contentassets/e0acd9a7659d4c138c6666d2d5e21605/gor-sverige-i-framtiden--digital-kompetens-sou-201528 https://www.idunn.no/file/pdf/62414156/#page=3 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 158 appendices appendix a. the revised digcomp framework (siddiq et al., 2016) competence areas (level 1) competences (level 2) 1. information 1.1 browsing, searching and filtering information 1.2 evaluating information 1.3 storing and retrieving information 2. communication 2.1 interacting through digital technologies 2.2 sharing information and content 2.3 engaging in online citizenship 2.4 collaborating through digital technologies *2.1.1 asynchronous communication *2.1.2 synchronous communication *2.4.1 asynchronous collaboration *2.4.2 synchronous collaboration 3. content-creation 3.1 developing content 3.2 integrating and re-elaborating 3.3 copyright and licenses 3.4 programming 4. safety 4.1 protecting devices 4.2 managing and protecting personal data 4.3 protecting health 4.4 protecting the environment 4.5 netiquette 5. problem solving 5.1 solving problems with use of digital technology 5.2 collaborative problem solving 5.3 innovating and creatively using technology 5.4 identifying digital competence gaps 6. technical operational 6.1 solving technical problems 6.2 identifying needs and technological responses 6.3 basic technical skills note. the competences in bold letters represent the revisions of the original digcomp framework. elements marked with an asterisk (*) refer to level 3 in digcomp. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 159 appendix b. norwegian directorate for education and training 2012—framework for basic skills digital skills as basic skills field of skills level 1 level 2 level 3 level 4 level 5 search and process can read hypertexts and simple interactive information. can use picture and icon-based navigation. can make simple digital searches and read and interpret information from digital sources. can use simple digital resources and tools for information processing and learning. can choose and use search strategies and assess information from digital sources. can use different digital tools and resources for information processing and learning. can filter, transform, and collate information from digital sources. can use relevant search tools and master search strategies in subject-related tasks. can find, organize, and update digital information. can use advanced search strategies and sources in subject-related work. produce can write simple texts on keyboard and produce simple composite texts. knows simple digital use of sources and copyright rules. can produce digital composite texts following simple formal requirements. can make simple use of digital sources, observing copyright rules, also in re-use and further development. can make digital composite texts with linked content. can understand and use digital formal requirements in one’s own texts. can refer to digital sources and apply copyright rules. can produce and edit complex digital texts. can refer to and assess digital sources in relevant subject-related situations. can choose and use targetgroup-relevant digital tools and digital formal requirements. can administer copyright rules to one’s own digital products and master digital source referencing. communication can use simple digital tools and media for presentation and communication. can use a selection of digital tools and media for presentation and communication. can make varied use of different digital tools and media to convey a message both in one-to-one and group communication. can use digital media and tools to convey a clear and detailed message for communication and documentation. can choose, assess, and apply digital communication tools according to different subject-related needs. digital judgment can follow basic rules for digital interaction. knows basic rules for protection of personal privacy on the internet. can apply basic netiquette and knows about rules for protection of personal integrity on the internet. can apply netiquette and follow rules for protection of personal integrity on the internet and in social media. can use the internet and social media efficiently and appropriately. can reflect ethically on and assess the internet and social media as communication and information channels. a comparison between digital competence in two nordic countries’ national curricula and an international framework: inspecting their readiness for 21st century education fazilat siddiq abstract introduction theoretical background digital competence definition of digital competence digital competence frameworks criteria for selecting the international framework and the national curricula the curriculum model the present study method analysis and results rq1. which visions, competence aims and instructional aspects are described in the norwegian and swedish national curriculum and how do the frameworks align with the international framework? discussion structure of the frameworks visions and objectives competence aims instructional aspects conclusion references appendices microsoft word larsqvortrup-societysedsystem.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 society’s educational system an introduction to niklas luhmann’s pedagogical theory lars qvortrup professor, university of southern denmark / director, knowledge lab dk email: larsq@litcul.sdu.dk abstracti in the spring of 2002, probably the last large manuscript of niklas luhmann, the german sociologist, who died in 1998 at the age of 70, was published. the manuscript is an almost completely developed analysis of the educational system of contemporary society. the book is entitled das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. despite the fact that the work is one of many analyses of the differentiated functional systems of contemporary society, it is not only one book in a series, but is also based on luhmann’s lifelong interest in educational questions, which, among others, is expressed in a series of books published in 1982, 1986, 1990, 1992 and 1996, which he edited together with karl eberhard schorr: zwischen technologie und selbstreferenz, zwischen intransparenz und verstehen, zwischen anfang und ende, zwischen absicht und person and zwischen system und umwelt. in addition, in 1997, he published a book with dieter lenzen entitled bildung und weiterbildung im erziehungssystem. in this article, das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft is introduced; it is put into the context of luhmann’s total oeuvre; and it is related to the situation and function of education in our modern, “hypercomplex“ society. background niklas luhmann was employed as a professor in 1969 at the then new bielefeld university. his previous university career had been short. it was not until 1967, at the age of 40, that he went to work at münster university. this was preceded by a career in the public sector. when starting to work at bielefeld, he had to fill out one of the employee evaluation forms that were new at the time, but which have become standard procedure today. it was, after all, necessary to define “result goals”, on which to base a measurement of future activities. his answers to three general questions were as follows: · ”forschungssprojekt? social theory.” · ”dauer? thirty years.” · ”kosten? nothing!” ii seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 2 during his first years of employment, luhmann outlined the project of developing a social theory, i.e. a general theory of society, and completed the preliminary work, being especially inspired by talcott parsons, the american functionalist sociologist. after several large monographs, he started on two series, for which he wrote all the contributions: soziologische aufklärung was his theoretical laboratory and grew into six large volumes. gesellschaftsstruktur und semantik was a collection of academic sociological studies about subjects such as: the self-definition of the european upper class during the 17th and 18th century, the concept of time, the comprehension of european culture, legal consciousness, ideas of education and upbringing, historical concepts of nature, changing definitions of the ruling class, politics, religion, ethics, etc. four volumes were published in this series and one book on the concept of love in europe starting in the 13th century, liebe als passion (luhmann, 1982). he already presented the motto of all these works – the program declaration for a system of critical theory – in his inaugural lecture in 1967, which to a great extent demonstrated an ironical attitude toward the type of critical theory that is based on normative standards, and which, in its social analysis, is focused more on what society is not and what ideals it does not correspond to than what society is and why it is this way: “more preaching and threatening is not necessary, neither is the spread of obedience and reasonableness, rather the dominant theme will be the exposure and discrediting of official facades, ruling moral concepts and common beliefs” (luhmann 1970, p. 69). suppression may also be socially relevant and not just the expression of “false consciousness”, he added as a sharp comment against critical theory. also notions of virtue and reasonableness are notions in the society, about which normative requirements are expressed in words, and therefore, these cannot simply be brought out into the open as universal normative expectation. also marxism, which claims to present the truth about society and to expose ideology and false beliefs, must know how to explain its claims to truth. also, it was not until 1984, when luhmann was 56, that the first work on social theory of his great research project concerning a theory of society appeared. the name of the book was soziale systeme. i remember how, in 1987 – or was it 1988 – i spent the whole summer deciphering incomprehensible expressions. the pages were filled with strange words like ”autopoiesis”, ”selfreference”, ”distinction” and ”interpenetration”. the author made a distinction between “psychic systems” and “social systems” and asserted that psychic systems do not comprise a society’s essence and building blocks but rather its surrounding world. society is not a sum total of human individuals. slowly i understood that this enables one to create a defensive barrier against the opinion that the will of the people is a certain type of essence, a total of individual wishes, which in turn, forms the basis for democracy. if society is not the sum total of single individuals, then the will of society is not the total of individual wills. in other words, luhmann thereby created an alternative to the fundamental question of how social order is possible. social order is not created when a prince with his princely power, the state with its state power or the people with its will binds the society’s atoms together into a whole. no, social order is established when the diversity of communicative systems creates an extremely complex and dynamic stability. society does not exist on the strength of the purity of social order but rather on the complex impurity of social structures. one of the book’s main ideas was that society is not longer divided into layers with one ruling center, but a so-called functionally differentiated society, and therefore, consists of a large number of functional systems, each of which justifies itself: an economic system, legal system, art system, political system, religious system, etc., etc. at the same time, these multiple functional systems are not in mutual harmony. quite the opposite, they constantly collide: they seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 3 influence each other, modify each other and attempt to achieve dominance over each other, at the same time, they are preconditions for each other and together form a whole that can be called society. it is no longer possible to refer to the one and only center of a society. society is polycentric, or “polycontextural” as characteristically expressed by luhmann, since in a polycentric society each functional system creates its own surroundings, its own context. several systems together, however, create a “semantic horizon”, which represents the boundaries of what we understand and what is accessible to us, as opposed to that which remains on the other side of the semantic horizon. this is not “meaningless” (since meaninglessness also possesses meaning – even if it is negative), but is just beyond meaning. during his entire career, luhmann emphasized that the fact that society is polycentric does not mean that social theory, critical system theory, is “postmodern”. this does not relax the requirement for truth. the statement that society is polycentric does not mean that many truths, and therefore none, exist. quite the opposite, it is necessary to toughen the requirement for truth: every observation, at least those that claim to be scientific, must not only prove that which it observes. it must also prove the correctness of its observation process, that is, it must include “autological” elements (cf. luhmann 1997, p. 16). no one has been more acute toward the lax post-modern viewpoint that ”anything goes”, and also toward truth and untruth, than luhmann. as a systematician, luhmann had no alternative: the theory on society had to include descriptions of the most important of the many functional systems. by his mid sixties, luhmann had published large monographs on the economic system, the scientific system, the legal system and the art system. a preparatory work on the analysis of society’s mass media, with the characteristically ambiguous title of die realität der massenmedien, the reality of mass media, was published in 1996. at the same time, he felt that his strength was waning. the tremendous workload had exhausted him. ”when i wake in the morning and feel pain in my body,” he said in an interview “i know that i am not dead yet.” therefore, although his project could be entered in the public accounting as ”keine kosten”, its cost was one life. just at that time, in the mid 1990’s, he therefore started his last project – the book that should complete his grand ouevre. his entire project, the goal of which was to work out a theory about society, contained three main components from the beginning: the theoretical basis of social systems, which was published in 1984, books about the functional systems of society, of which four had been published between 1988 and 1995, and the final work, a book about how society as a society is formed, when the person obaserving society does not accept a position on the other side of society, but is always as an observer in the center society that he/she describes. there is not such a thing as a position outside society. consequently, the title could not be ”die gesellschaft”, implying the existence of an external observer, but had to be die gesellschaft der gesellschaft: society observed from inside, i.e. society observed by itself. the resulting 1,200-page work that deals with society, which has already become a main work of contemporary sociology, was published before his death. at the same time, in spite of this colossal work, a large number of functionally differentiated systems were still not described. therefore, luhmann further increased his work load and worked simultaneously on the analysis of three other of society’s functional systems: a book about society’s religion, one on society’s politics and one on its educational system. and finally, he believed that it was necessary to write a book about that type of social systems that lies between society at large and the infinite number of small interaction systems. i.e. between sociology’s macro and the micro level, as it is normally phrased. this type of social system in between society and the many interaction systems is: organizations. the nearly completed book manuscripts on religions, politics and education, as well as the book on organization, organisation und seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 4 entscheidung, were handed over to a younger generation of luhmannians, and they have all been published to date. the last one, the book about society’s education system, was finished by luhmann’s young colleague, dieter lenzen, and it was published, as already mentioned, in the spring of 2002. functional differentiation: media, code, self-reference luhmann’s project was a colossal 30-year research project, and also when he wrote 350 pages on the economic system or 580 pages on the legal system, the goal was to prove a general hypothesis, that across the numerous different function systems certain formal similarities exist. as a result of the fact that any social system is based on communication and is self-referential, that is, operationally closed, it must observe the surrounding world through a specific media that the system in question has itself created. this media is based on a specific code. also, every single functionally differentiated system creates its own symbolic generalization. partly, the symbolically generalized medium raises the potential success level of a specific functional system’s communication. partly, however, by raising the potential success level the functional system also increases the risk that misinformation will be created by the communication. these concepts – medium, code, symbolic generalization – thus represented elements of the assumptions concerning the nature of these functionally differentiated social systems, and in order to prove his theory, luhmann must answer the question regarding what the specific media and code is for each individual functional system, and he must analyze the impacts concerning efficiency and risk of misinformation for each system. for example, the media for the economic system is money and the code is payment/non-payment. therefore purchasing at any discount supermarket is so effective. just put the merchandise on the checkout line, the cashier calculates the price and money – metal, paper or electronic bytes – changes ownership. no words are needed. however, if one wants to communicate other things than buying and selling commodities, it will most likely be misunderstood. try, for example, to declare love to the cashier. he or she will most likely misunderstand your communicative selections and call for the boss to help you out. similarly, the media of the political system is power and the code is power over non-power. some believe that our political world is based on the sum of rational choices of politicians and voters. in reality, this is only part of the truth. alliances are created in parties. rhetorical methods are used, threats and promises are made and agreements drawn up. one party leader is overthrown by the next and political positions are distributed according to power criteria (not so much according to professional relevance), and although more words are used than when making purchases at the discount supermarket, the logic is the same: the range of communicative variations is reduced, thus increasing efficiency, but also raising the risk of excluding relevant communicative selections. in simpler terms, we could say that everyone knows what, to a lesser or greater extent, is behind all the nice words – power! and this naturally means that certain things can only be expressed with difficulty, for instance beautiful and loveable messages. because one can assume that even in the case of the most loveable means of expression, the lust for power is hidden within. the fact that the functional systems are operationally closed, does not exclude that they possess certain functions in relation to the society as a whole and perform certain services in relation to individual occurrences in society. on the contrary: they are so effective because they are operationally closed. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 5 function of the economic system is the reduction of deficiencies. the service is to satisfy needs. and the fact that this system possesses this function and provides the specified service is not dependent on the fact that is directed by an external higher logic, deus ex machina or world soul. quite the opposite: the fact that the economic system is operationally closed, without taking others into consideration, contains the condition of its functionality. there are enough examples to demonstrate that the elimination of this operational isolation in favor of a political or scientific distribution does not reduce shortcomings, but rather increases them. another example is the mass media system. its code is +/information: what counts as news, what does not? its reflection system or form of self-description is journalistic criteria, etc. its function in society, i.e. to “irritate” society and to keep it awake, is based on the fact that it is functionally closed: it is not directed by any external power, but selects information, e.g. news, according to its own criteria. the same goes for its service, e.g. to create a transcendental illusion of a common world. these functions and services have not been created by a metaphysical authority (by which the mass media system is promoted as a “fifth state authority” and similar lyrical expressions). no, these are based on the autopoietic power and the resulting structural couplings. this does not mean that this complex of differentiated functional systems represents the best of all worlds. luhmann does not offer utopia, but a cynical description of society. the way in which these autopoietic systems work, that is “…the growth dynamic characteristic of contemporary society and the channeling of this growth through individual function systems, especially economics, science, education and politics”, is a constant source of social problems. “all these systems are structurally stipulated to deviate from planned results. they follow individual growth and improvement objectives. it is not possible to grasp the internal effects for society of these dynamics. the increase in regional differences combined, at the same time, with global interdependence is perhaps the most noticeable fact.” (luhmann 1988, p.169f) even more imposing are the ecological effects, luhmann pointed out as early as in 1988: “in our time, probably the most central problem of contemporary society is the feedback-results for society of the changes unleashed by it on the surrounding world. this does not apply only to the physical-chemical-organic environment; to the same extent this applies to the social system in relation to the physical surroundings. our social system is changing the living conditions on earth to an extent never before seen.” (luhmann 1988, p. 169) the characterization of luhmann as a “neo-conservative” as habermas has done on several occasions, is not fair. but luhmann’s goal wasn’t to moralize. there is no purpose in describing the world the way it isn’t, when there is such a great need to describe it as it actually functions. and this is the precondition for doing critical theory. true critical theory must be contra-intuitive, also in relation to that kind of emancipatory theory, which in its emancipatory beliefs defeats all competitors in conservatism. therefore, the majority of books dealing with functionally differentiated systems contain chapters on the “self-description” of the respective system. it is, therefore, not strange that the given functional system is on a communication level with itself. what is strange is that so many anachronistic social semanticists manage to survive. e.g. that it is still possible to view the mass media system as a “fifth state power”, that is, as a representative of higher metaphysics. no, when the mass media system irritates society, the reason is the self-logic of the system. that a political system can be viewed as an expression of the will of the people, or that an economic system can be viewed as an expression of work-capital dichotomy – such simplifications or naiveties are the worst enemies of critical, contra-intuitive social analysis. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 6 books about functional differentiated systems luhmann’s descriptions of social function systems, therefore, are based on a background that is, concurrently, strongly directed by theory and with a strong empirical orientation. he wants to describe social systems as they are, not as one would like that they should be and therefore are not, and this requires a strong empirical orientation. but he also wants to describe them in opposition to the assumptions caused by conventional wisdom, and this requires strong theory. on this basis, the books dealing with functionally differentiated systems provide two major scientific contributions: 1. they present contra-intuitive re-descriptions of individual functional systems, descriptions that, being strictly based on concepts, avoid all the traditional lyricism and ingrained assumptions. since they are based on concepts, they are not sentimental, but rather, as some have put it, almost cynical. 2. they present actualized re-descriptions of different functional systems, descriptions that are actualized since they are strictly based on the presumption that society is functionally differentiated and that a basic social challenge is contingency, that is, the multitude of possibilities for establishing communication within society. therefore, the basic presumption is not that society should be characterized by stratification. the basic presumption is also not that society should be characterized by divided into simple opposites – between good and evil, progressive and conservative, profane and sacred, or work and capital. no, a basic presumption is that social systems develop in order to cope with external complexities, and that they do so by increasing their internal complexity, which again provide increased external complexity for other differentiated functional systems. i would like to focus on these two contributions when i present the book, das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. however, a terminological problem must be mentioned: the german word “erziehung” includes both “upbringing” and “education”. the background for this is that “erziehungsfunktionen” were functionally differentiated in the 18th and 19th century respectively into upbringing and public education. among other things, luhmann’s book also analyzes this differentiation process, and consequently it deals with upbringing as well as education. in english, the title of the book should therefore be “the upbringing-and-education system of society”. in the following text, i have generally translated the concept of “erziehung” as “education”. das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft: educational system theory the need for an educational system theory generally what applies in the case of functional systems in society is that the more they are differentiated, the more they must base themselves on their own self-reasoning. the result is that the need for theories for these systems increases in step with their movement toward independence. economic theories grow out of “tableaux economiques” forms from the 17th century, that is, models and theories about the self-reproductive character of economic systems. these theories culminate, in some sense, in karl marx’s theory about the accumulation and circulation of capital, that is, capital as a autopoietic system (according to bob jessop), the effectiveness of which is increased according to how negligently – that is, self-indicatively – they function. political theories develop as an extension of machiavelli’s rationale of 16th seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 7 century politics as an independent decision-making system, again with the implication, that negligence and performance are downright proportional. the fact that these systems are autopoietic does not mean that they lack contact with the surrounding world. quite the opposite, it is the self-reference of a system that makes it possible for it to establish contact with its environment, while also preserving itself as a system. thereby, on the one hand, an interpenetrational relationship can be created between the system and the surrounding world, that is, the system can define the surrounding world as a resource for the maintenance of the system. on the other hand, a structural coupling relationship can be established between the system and the surrounding work, which means that the system can thematize the surrounding world as information or irritation in regard to the preservation of the system, and thereby examine the question as to uncertainty and adaptive self-preservation. similarly, a theory on the educational system as a system, which cannot be understood just as a residual of the modus operandi of other social systems, is strongly needed, cf. the attempts in the 1970’s to develop a theory about the “political economics of the educational sector”. the core of such a theory is a concept of education and study, that is, pedagogy. one such theory was articulated by rousseau, see his book “emile” on upbringing, and by kant in his posthumously published pedagogical writings. but to a certain extent, only after the proposal to treat educational systems as a differentiated, autopoietic functional system the theory of the education system can be raised to the same level as theories about other functional systems in society. in retrospect, it can be said that this was the aim of luhmann’s pedagogical writings in the 1980’s and 1990’s, which culminated in the work, das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft, in 2002. as the other functional systems the educational system also, on the one hand, creates an interpenetrational relationship between the system and its surrounding world, and a structural coupling relationship on the other hand. the educational system, on the one hand, observes the surrounding world – the political system, the economic system, current and future students – as a potential resource. this represents the interpenetrational relationship. on the other hand, the educational system creates a structural coupling relationship between the system and the environment. in this case the educational system views the surrounding world as a potential irritant: it registers threats of interference from political and economic systems, or threats to the problemfree preservation of the educational system from current or future students (ill-bred or poorly socialized ones). children are therefore always seen as students in the educational system, and these students are defined intermittently as teachable children (resource) and risk children (threat). preliminary work as already mentioned, in 1982, 1986, 1990, 1992 and 1996, luhmann, together with karl eberhard schorr, published a series of collections of articles about upbringing and education: zwischen technologie und selbstreferenz (between technology and selfreference), zwischen intransparenz und verstehen (between intransparency and understanding), zwischen anfang und ende (between beginning and end), zwischen absicht und person (between purpose and person) and zwischen system und umwelt (between system and environment). in addition, after the death of schorr, in 1997, he published a book together with dieter lenzen entitled bildung und weiterbildung im erziehungssystem (education and further education in the educational system). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 8 the starting point for all these books is the educational system, and each of them analyze a specific dilemma of the educational system: the book about technology3iii and self-reference deals with the dilemma, that teachers must, on the one hand, assume that he/she is capable of changing the children to be taught. in other words, the teacher acts in a systematic, teleological, manner that is technological. on the other hand, the teacher can never think that the person being taught is his/her handiwork: the teacher brings up and teaches a free being (a self-referential being) until its independence. the book about non-transparency and understanding deals with the dilemma of that the teacher and the student, on one hand, try to understand each other, to create that which habermas called mutual comprehension, while at the same time they are mutually non-transparent. the book about beginning and end deals, on the one hand, with the uncertainty of teaching – that which is located between two definite points, between the start and the finish – and, on the other hand, with being constantly between the starting point, which had a purpose, and the finish line, the result of which deviates from the initial purpose. thus, the book analyzes the basics of didactics, defining didactics as the art of structuring the time between beginning and end of a course or lecture. the book about purpose and person deals – again – with the intentionality of the relationship, that is, between the movement toward the goal and the unforeseen result, here expressed in the relationship that teaching brings out the individual as a person, that is as somebody who is capable of relating to him/herself as something other than him/herself. if it succeeds, education maintains and forms non-trivial psychic systems that are capable of making distinctions, and can view themselves as malleable, that is, as individuals. finally, the book about the relationship between system and environment deals with the fact that teaching means the surmounting of boundaries between the pupil as a psychic system and teaching as a communications system. again, we are dealing with a project that, on the one hand, constitutes the sine qua non of teaching, but on the other hand is impossible, because this boundary is insurmountable. the final volume, bildung und weiterbildung im erziehungssystem, which is a collection of articles from 1997, can be treated as a preliminary work to das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. the topics treated herein include lifelong learning, and luhmann modifies some of his earlier statements, for instance, about identifying the social construction of “the child” as the symbolically generalized medium of the educational system. instead, it is suggested that in a society characterized by lifelong learning the concept of “life process”, in german ”lebenslauf”, should replace “the child” as symbolic generalization. das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft as all other monographs about one function system, the book dealing with the educational system of the society includes, on the one hand, the characterization of the function system with the help of a collection of general concepts that for many at the first instance seem to be strange and even “queer”, but that because of their strangeness allow a series of acute and unsentimental observations about the function system in question. this represents a fundamental surplus of niklas luhmann’s scientific contribution: just the strangeness of the system theoretical concepts makes it possible to create new observations, since we naturally see the world differently through seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 9 newly polished optics than we do through the eyeglasses of habit and traditions. fundamental concepts what is the idea of an educational system? as already mentioned, earlier opticians have offered the idea that an educational system must maintain some definite instructional standard, to reproduce the “capital relationship” as it was called at one time, etc. but if we try to look beyond such statements, which are based on social semantics that is based on questionable general applicability, according to luhmann we reach the general conclusion that the function of the educational system is to change people in the direction of definite goals. “speaking about education (upbringing/education, lq), one primarily thinks about intentional activities that try to develop a person’s abilities and foster his/her ability for social communion” (p. 15). does this sound self-evident? if yes, luhmann adds a very quick objection: how is it possible “to change people”? seemingly, there is a clear causal relationship in this: the subject does something with the object so that the object changes. but at least three problems are hidden therein. how does one determine the goal of the educational system? who is the object of this change process? and how is this change process actually realized, i.e. which tools are available? the purpose of the educational system: cultivation as contingency formula firstly, we must ask who is the subject, who is acting and how does he/she know what the goal of the action is? is the family who is bringing up a child the subject of the upbringing and education? and to the extent that upbringing and education is a familial activity, it can be asked how does the family identify the goals? something similar also applies to the educational system. what must a child know at specific ages? can politicians determine this? or developmental psychologists? parents? teachers or educators?iv and how, despite the difficulty of the project, do they still arrive again and again at descriptions of the goals to which they attach applicability, calling them “definite goals”, “general cultivation” or “educational canons”? here luhmann persuasively argues that the concept of “cultivation” is that which he calls a “contingency formula” (i will return to this concept), namely society’s establishment of educational goals. as a contingency formula cultivation is a concept for something that cannot be generally defined, but for which a word is needed that signals a mutual understanding and agreement. therefore, cultivation, the contingency formula of the educational system corresponds to “god”, the contingency formula of religion, or to the well known phrase of researchers, that “further research is needed”, the contingency formula of science. all these concepts are a kind of communication tricks that allow communication to continue despite the lack of metaphysical security. the object of the educational system: a human being as a conglomerate of non-trivial systems secondly, we could ask, who is the object of the change process of education, this human being who is to be modeled in order to achieve some definite goal? maybe it is here that we can find the decisive non-self-evidence of upbringing and education. because what it is “a human being”? a human being is not a trivial machine. in other words, it is not some system that upon definite input through a specific function discharges some definite output. furthermore, a human being is not just a non-trivial system, but even a conglomerate of nontrivial systems, a highly complex system in which a constant reproduction of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 10 self-distinctions takes place, as luhmann says. luhmann characterizes such “machines” with uncommon ontological characteristics as follows: “they operate with the help of built-in reflection loops, which adapt all the input/output transformations to the actual condition of the machine; or more exactly: after such an actual historical condition into which the machine has brought itself. since this condition changes with each operation, these machines have at their disposal a practically limitless, at least uncalculated repertoire of reaction possibilities.” (p.77). these are therefore the conglomerates of non-trivial, unforeseen systems, which educators and teachers must change without clearly defined goals – using communication as the only resource. as it turns out, education as a field, namely to change human beings, is correctly understood as an extremely non-self-evident project. as luhmann writes on p. 82: “if we are to comprehend individual people as conglomerates of autopoietic, self-dynamic, non-trivial systems, this doesn’t prove any motive for the opinion that they can be brought up/cultivated.” the only existing resources are structural couplings between instruction as communications, on the one hand, and psychic systems, on the other hand. hereby luhmann cuts through simplifications which were brought forth by descriptions of behavioral causality (which do not see the autonomy of learning as a problem at all), but also through those fog clouds which have been brought forth by those learning theories, which have expanded learning to everything – even to that which would otherwise be described as teaching – and which, therefore, does not have concepts for identifying the necessary structural coupling between the communications system (teaching) and the psychic system (the learning system). as opposed to learning theory, which implicitly unites teachers and students into one and the same element of the learning process, luhmann’s concepts bring forth the asymmetric role of teaching: some teach, that is, communicate. others learn, that is, they couple themselves to the teaching communication. this specifically implies that marx’s famous expression that the educator is also educated may be further defined: the educator educates – and may therefore be socialized. taken specifically, this asymmetric communication means that “wahrnehmung des wahrgenommenswerden” is an essential aspect of the student’s role in the teaching communication. as a non-trivial system, every student learns to become aware of the observation of him/herself. and in the same way, the majority of teachers learn to observe students with the knowledge that they are aware of being observed. in his characteristically ironic side comments, luhmann asserts that the elimination of trivialization from the concept of teaching means that the problem of the trivialization of teaching need not be taken as seriously, as it is usually done: because “… what happens when non-trivial systems find themselves in situations where they participate in trivialization? they attune themselves for this through self-socialization. or in other words: they learn to handle it. they build a reflection loop within themselves, which makes clear to them the conditions under which it is advisable to act as a trivial system.”(p. 79). and this also has long-term beneficial prospects because ”…thereby, in set situations, non-trivial system learn to act as trivial ones, without identifying themselves with this possibility.” (p. 80). thereby one learns to imagine, that is, to develop a personal identity policy without identifying oneself with the situation with which one become attuned. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 11 educational system resource: communications thirdly, one could ask, what is the activity whereby some change others? the only way in which upbringing and teaching can take place is with the help of communication. socialization may take place as an activity that is copied. but the one who brings up and teaches is directed to communicate. as a rule, this communication takes place in interaction groups, regardless of whether the interaction is that of rousseau’s concept of a dialogue between the educator and emile, who is to be educated, or that which takes place in a school system’s classrooms. in any case, this communication takes place between reciprocally present people. therefore luhmann makes the following proposal, as he calls it, for a quasi-tautological definition of cultivation/education: “as education (cultivation/education, lq) all communications must apply which are actualized as interactions in order to educate.” (p. 54). if this definition is accepted, we feel that it implies, among other things, that elearning, e.g. distance education, is also interaction, that is, communication between those present. e-learning does use distribution media other than seeing and listening, that is the light and air as communication media in the classroom, but despite this, it can be described as interaction (with a shift in time and/or distance) between those present. otherwise, it would not be teaching. therefore it is not valid to identify e-learning as a communications type alongside classroom teaching as an interaction system. rather one should identify those special conditions that e-learning provides to teaching interaction. e-learning is teaching that uses other distribution media than the ordinary classroom to establish communicative relations between reciprocally present people. communications media of the educational system every communication or observation takes place though some media. when we observe someone – also some who is physically present – this takes places through media: through air, which facilities hearing, with the help of light, which makes seeing possible. according to luhmann, the function of communications media is to reduce the improbability of communications. generally speaking the success of communications is improbable. if this improbability is not as great as it usually should be, then this is the effect of the communications media. in its fundamental form, the communications of the educational system take place in the classroom as interaction between the students and teacher or teachers that are present. this communication is characterized, as is all other communications, by three improbabilities. the first improbability is that one will hear what the other is saying. the teacher tries, sometimes without results, to have a say and make the students direct their attention to what he/she is saying. the second improbability is that one understands what the other is saying. the teacher asks the students to pay attention and they do not understand what he/she means. the third and last improbability is that the communications achieves the strived-for effect. the students hear and maybe also understand, but do not change their behavior. in correspondence with these three improbabilities, luhmann identifies three types or aspects of communications media. the first type is distribution media: the teacher does not whisper but raises his/her voice. in order for the students to hear and see better, the teacher stands higher up and writes important words on the blackboard, uses an overhead project slides, powerpoint presentations or computer-based communication. in order to reach parents, letters and notices are sent home to the family. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 12 the second type is comprehension media. language is one of the fundamental comprehension media; a conceptual vocabulary and reference system is another. curriculum work and instruction planning consists of creating a purposeful development of comprehension media in the classroom. the third type is effect media. the function of this media is to achieve the intended effect. this is achieved with rhetorical resources, with the creation of togetherness in the classroom, with the teacher acting “authentically”, and fundamentally with having the students acquire the specialized communications media of the educational system, that is, the comprehension that the aim of education is the acquisition of knowledge, and that this knowledge will be tested with the help of tests and examinations. just as the educational system has developed reflection resources for itself as an educational system (didactic and pedagogical), it has also developed reflection resources for its communications media. this reflection system is called the theory of the means of instruction. its history reaches back at least to petrus ramus’s reflections on lectures as communications media and this achieved an early peak with comenius’s textbook and with the reflection of the textbook as a specialized communications media. these days, there is an accelerating theory on e-learning and also a theory on how digital media can reduce the improbability of teaching communication, again in three ways: by overcoming time and space barriers. by making comprehension more likely, for instance with repetitively programmed teaching or the help of simulation programs. and finally, by increasing the probability of changing behavior, for instance, with educational computer games and edutainment programs. the primary function of an educational system: making human beings persons according to luhmann, the fundamental function of an educational system is not to impart knowledge, to discipline, etc., but to minimize the improbability of social communication. an educational system achieves this through the function of making human beings persons, that is, by creating that distinction, for which the labeled side is the person and the unlabeled side is the human being. with the concept of “person”, luhmann indicates that empiric people can be generalized and thereby made communicative. just think if, in our everyday communication, we had to take into consideration the empiric multi-facets of other human beings! this would make communications impossible. no, the fact that it is possible to simplify, that is, to speak with one person as a seller, another as a teacher, a third as a schoolchild, and a fourth as a beloved, makes communication possible. on the contrary, the fact that we as human beings are capable of plugging ourselves into some form of person, allows us to participate in communications. “this form…” defines luhmann, “…which allows the system dynamics of individual human beings to be ignored in social communications, is indicated by the concept of ‘person’.” (p. 28). therefore the “human being” is the unlabeled side of the person as form, and it is not human beings but persons that make communication possible. the ability to communicate therefore does not assume, adds luhmann unsentimentally, that other human beings are observed in their total multifaceted complexity, but that things are simplified. the form person is the condition for the continuation of communication, it is an address, calculation point and often also an explanation for strange circumstances in the communication process. yes, the function of personal identities is a product of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 13 the communications system. persons are a communicative trick: products of and preconditions for communication. based on this, luhmann presents a hypothesis that the primary function of the upbringing and education communications system is the transformation of human beings into persons: persons for themselves and for others. “human beings are born. persons develop through socialization and upbringing/education. keeping this difference in mind, it is natural to set the education function into relation with the fact that human beings become persons. especially in complex societies, this cannot be left only to socialization. this does not function specifically enough and is too connected to the environment where this occurs. in both instances we are dealing with the process of becoming a personality. it is here that leeway exists that education can use in order, on the one hand, to correct the results of socialization, and on the other hand to amend them. but that interaction develops at all between socialization and education depends on whether both processes are related to becoming a person.” (p. 38). this naturally does not mean that the education does not have other functions. although these other functions are also connected to the formation of person, since the transformation of a child into a person increases the possibilities for the child of coupling to the social system. and this is what is achieved by bringing up and teaching a child to function as a homme, citoyen and bourgeois, that is, as a person, citizen and worker. these three categories have been the three dominating person types since the 18th century: a human being for other human beings, a citizen for the society and a competent worker in private and public institutions. the secondary function of an educational system: career selection more specifically, an educational system functions not only for upbringing and cultivation, but also for career selection. everyone does not have to do the same thing or fulfill the same function, and also this selection process is taken care of by the education system. ergo, the education system includes, no matter how much the participants protest, two functions: on the one hand, it functions to create and (to an increased degree in the form of lifelong education) to maintain the preconditions for human beings to function in society as persons. on the other hand, it functions to execute evaluations in order to realize career selection. naturally, both functions have to be fulfilled by the education system with the help of communications. as it is known, education systems have always had difficulties with its selection function because this is in conflict with the development of people’s social skills. one increases the social coupling possibilities. the other limits them, since that human being, which develops into a number of persons in society, should not be made into all types of persons. some selection needs to be made and therefore this selection impacts negatively and even as suppression. however, actually selection is not an antithesis to the development of person, but is the continuation of the project to make human beings more communicative. if we became “everything”, our chances for participating in social communications, especially if we speak of contemporary and highly differentiated society, would be smaller than if a functional specification of that human being had taken place. in addition, the career selection that takes place in a contemporary education system is decidedly different from the selection that takes place in traditional societies. the selection that takes place, for instance, in the form of examination, is not an effect of socialization, but of education. therefore, selection helps social integration based on the past (family tree, social seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 14 network, connections, traditions, etc.) to be replaced by social integration based on the future (that is, existing career potential) (cf. p. 69). at the same time, it is important to note that the highly formalized examination form familiar from contemporary education systems represents a “circular process”, which influences both the contribution and the evaluation (p. 66). the answers given in the examination room affect the evaluation. however, it also has a feedback effect to the teaching contribution preceding the examination. not only the student is evaluated, but also the teacher, and therefore the examination allows for, or even intensifies, reflections on teaching (p. 67). finally, it should be noted that career selection based on examinations is separated from the use of power (p. 69), especially if examinations are highly formalized. a censor, that is an external observer, participates in the examination and observes both the student and the teacher, and in order to prevent the use of power to an even greater degree, an appeal system has been developed. therefore it can be stated polemically that these highly formalized forms of examination are not harmful, but beneficial to students, if we leave aside that naturally they have a psychosocial effect, which may be irritating. the educational system code as already mentioned, every functionally differentiated system must have a symbolically generalized media and therefore a code for self-communication. naturally this does not mean that the entire communications in an education system, for instance, takes place only in the code of this system, but this code molds the communications and increases its potential for success. everyone knows what is being talked about and therefore does not need many words, as in the previously described example of discount supermarket communications. earlier, luhmann – inspired by philippe ariès’s famous work on the social semantics of the concept of childhood – has proposed that the symbolically generalized media of an education system is “the child” (see luhmann 1991). naturally this concept of “child” does not denote a concrete, empiric child, but represents the generalization of those concrete children in the educational system. since only on the basis of such a generalization and of a child as such (from time to time “weak”, from time to time “competent”) and with the constant characterization of his/her different phases of evolution (development psychology also tries with its phase-based specifications to offer generalizations) to carry out a generalization that makes the communication of the education system possible. what do teachers talk about among themselves? about children! what do teachers and parents talk about, not when they meet at the discount supermarket or at the election precinct, but at the parent-teacher meeting? about the child! while the contingency formula was a communication trick of the aim of communication, the code is the communication trick of the double contingency of communication. at the same time, the specific social semantic specification of the category child expresses the general function of the education system: to change people. at least in earlier times human beings – grown up human beings – were completed realities that were not possible to change. but children were and are just defined as that human being which can still be molded. faced by a challenge to do something intentional with the conglomerates of non-trivial systems (which is what empiric children are), this symbolic generalization “child” creates a hope: the individual child is not, after all, what he will be, and he does not simply learn that which he learns, because he conducts those selections of understanding that he is determined to do. no, observing the teaching object through the media of “the child”, teachers can “… understand the internal surplus production, the restlessness and movement and the selfseminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 15 transparency and self-created inconclusiveness that is created by their clients, as their own chance, since they treat children as a medium which make the creation of form possible. (…) the media “child” is thus not a specific child. it is a social construction that allows for the educator/teacher to believe that it is possible to educate and teach children.” (p.91). despite this, in the work das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft luhmann abandons this proposition. in a society that is ever more characterized by lifelong education, the category of “child” does not work as an education system media. rather, “human being” could be considered as media, if it is possible to identify some stabilized media in the changing phase of a society’s educational system, but “human being” with many of the social semantic characteristics that were previously assigned to “the child.” this “human being”, which forms a fundamental category in a society that holds lifelong learning to be an ideal, is an infantile human being, namely a human being, which allows for never-ending, continued molding. a human being becomes an adult – and acquires supplemental training. a person goes on pension – and has time to sit at a school bench again. since, however, the category of “human being” is already occupied, luhmann recommends, inspired by dieter lenzen (see lenzen/luhmann 1997) to use the category of “lebenslauf”, that is lifetime or life process (see p. 93). we can perceive that luhmann thereby wishes to bring forth the expressiveness and malleability that is not dependent on age, and which has become a livelong characteristic in our society. but this proposal still does not sound convincing. it is presented with a good purpose and well founded. but it is not seen in an educational system, the way money is seen in stores and supermarkets and power in the political system. the code that corresponds to the media of “lifetime”, according to luhmann is transmittable/non-transmittable. a positive value of an educational system is namely that some allow themselves to be transmitted and that something is transmittable. but still, although the proposal is presented with good reason, it is not very elegant. self-reflection of an educational system just as other function systems have reflection systems that have the purpose of reflecting what it is that gives the system a positive value (bookkeeping and budgets are used to ascertain how to make profits; the purpose of political programs is to identify measures that may create power; theories and methods are the preconditions of scientific systems to guarantee positive value in the code +/truth), the reflection system of an educational system is pedagogy. pedagogy – and more specifically related to the different subjects: didactics – allows for teachers to reflect on how their communicative selections in the interaction system of the classroom may increase the probability of successful transmission. thereby, one also promotes the chances of positive values of secondary coding: better/worse. this is measured in the examination room and results in the abovementioned career selection. generally the rule applies, as mentioned above, that the more the function systems are differentiated, the more they must base themselves on their selfgenerated self-justification. the result is that the education system from having been based on standards (that is, defined by others) increasingly becomes self-justified, that is on selfreflection. thus, pedagogy develops into a scientific discipline. “concurrently with the disappearance of the conviction, that an indisputable scholarly standard exists, on which the teacher’s authority could rest, unsolvable problems become visible. pedagogy tries to establish itself as a science and to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 16 acquire the respective verbiage.” (p. 192). earlier upbringing and education could take place on the basis of standards. upbringing and teaching were based on existing traditions and values. if, however, doubts occur about this basis, upbringing and teaching must be transferred to a reflexive basis, that is to a scientific one. why have teacher’s colleges been eliminated in denmark, as elsewhere, and a danish pedagogical university created? because upbringing and teaching have started to doubt their own basis and must therefore study this basis – to be based on science, not traditions. pedagogy has been transferred to university, because society has become contingent. more specifically, my proposal is that regarding the self-reflection of the education system one should differentiate between first order and second order self-reflection. the first order of self-reflection is the direct reflection of teaching practices, that which donald schön calls the reflexive practice of reflective practitioners. the systematization of first order of teaching reflection is called didactics. this is related either to the teaching of special subjects, and in that case is called subject didactics, or with teaching generally, and in that case is called general didactics. the second order of self-reflection is the indirect reflection of teaching practices, that is, the observation of the relationship between reflective relationship and the reflexive practitioner and his practice. this is the observation, in didactic form, of the observation relationship between teaching and acquisition, and observation. the second order of self-reflection is called pedagogy. das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft: the theory of society’s educational system the society in which we live is characterizes by an abundance of opportunities. we have more opportunities that we are capable of realizing or even pay attention to. this society is characterized by self-created uncertainty and insecurity. this basic characteristic expressed in professional sociological terminology is contingency: it creates the possibility for abundance. such a society can be described in at least two opposing ways: on the one hand, it creates the impression of a society where everything is possible. all the illusion masters are here: those who have coined society a “learning society”, and the so-called learning theoreticians, who wish to delete the concept of teaching, since teaching according to them creates limitations for the selffulfillment of individuals and is therefore suppressive. no, only the concept of “learning” is legitimate, and the teacher’s assignment is to stimulate this splendid learning, that is self-fulfillment and self-realization. on the other hand, such a society seems to be a society where nothing is assured. we have critics who speak about what heartbreaking and exhausting consequences are caused when no one ever says stop, no limits are set, and on the contrary, everyone can chase after their opportunities and this race never ends. this is treated by richard sennett’s the corrosion of character, as well as many, many other books on social criticism. however, my point is that the either-or position will not lead anywhere. instead it is much more interesting to ascertain what kind of society calls forth these two positions, that is, to remain a bystander in the either-or argument. how is a society, which is characterized by contingency, or the abundance of opportunities, constructed? and what are the consequences for a society that is constructed in this way? returning to an earlier mentioned concept, one can say that the fundamental function of such a society is to develop “contingency formulas”, that is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 17 formulas that make possible the relation of oneself to the abundance of opportunities and their handling. but these formulas have very special characteristics. they cannot simply reduce the number of opportunities, that is, to say that you cannot do or get this, just as you cannot use medication which denies or forbids the illness to be treated. what is the contingency formula of the society, if one can rashly say that society develops contingency formulas to describe itself? what concept does a society create about the insecurity that it generates itself? naturally there are many of these, and the typical trend has been a so-called “post”-trend. that one can no longer say about society that it “is” this and that, but on the contrary that it “is not” this or that. this is not modern, but rather postmodern. this is not industrial, but rather post-industrial. this is not capitalist, but post-capitalist. but with one other concept, which fulfills the same function, society can be called “a learning society”, because this concept defines the fact that today may be as it is, but tomorrow may easily be different. with this we have remained bystanders in the argument about whether it is this-or-that. we cannot satisfy the concept of a “learning society” with a “yes” or “no” answer, but we can explain where this concept comes from. this is not something that we like or don’t like, but rather a symptom of social conditions, and we can take a position regarding the consequences. but the specific functional systems of society must also develop contingency formulas. yes, because on the one hand, all function systems mold their specific surroundings, while on the other hand, they perceive the surroundings as unapproachable, that is, as contingencies, and therefore must develop contingency formulas, as expressed by luhmann, that is, formulas that allow for the abundance of opportunities to be handled. maybe the best known contingency formula is the concept of god in religion. on the face of it, the concept of “god” represents someone or something that knows everything and has created everything. in other words, the concept of “god” indicates that not everything is possible, but also that not everything is incidental; at the same time the concept of god indicates that the possibility to receive knowledge about these opportunities and limits is not available for ordinary people. “god” is therefore, according to luhmann, not a resource of certainty, but a resource of uncertainty. the background for this is the fact that the religion system is a functionally differentiated system, the special function of which is the observation of meaning. meaning is the starting point for media, for world observation and communications media. in other words, meaning is the distinction that separates concepts and the world. however, the function of religion is to make meaning observable, that is, to reestablish the distinction between concepts and world within in the concept of god. god is therefore that instance, which can observe meaning as – with hussler’s expression – the unobservable world horizon. as is recorded in the gospel according to st. john: “in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god and the word was god.” another contingency formula delivers modern art, since modern art not only helps to depict the world, but also to constantly define its own possibilities. twentieth century avant-garde does not deal with the question of what the world is like, but how and why something became art – if conditions could also have been different. in a society influenced by self-produced insecurity, art becomes self-defining to an extreme degree. the third contingency formula delivers science. what do we know for sure about today’s scientific propositions? not that this or that is such, but – “that further research is necessary.” what we know for sure is that we will never get a final answer, but rather that insecurity continues to rule. we know that we seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 18 don’t know what we don’t know. every research report therefore ends with a requirement for further research. the contingency formula for science is therefore a dispassionate concept, presented by luhmann: “limitationality” – that after the presentation of partial results, one must always indicate the limited and temporary character of these concepts. as to the educational system, the contingency formula is: cultivation – in german: bildung. “with the concept of cultivation, the educational system reacts to the loss of external (societal, role-based), binding points about what a human being is or should be.” (p. 186). as luhmann adds ironically: “the word ‘cultivation’ presents the educational system’s contingency formula with the use of a beautiful word package. it flows easily off the tongue.” (p. 187). as a result of the society’s contingency, the concept of cultivation at the same time has changed its character. ever more people doubt whether the concept of cultivation can be transformed into a standard of cultivation: that one must think this and that way, must have read this and that literature, etc. most certainly the cultivation concept has been constituted by the fact that “we” can be distinguished from “them”, although cultivation cannot be viewed from within, but must seen from the outside. yes, some adhere to standards – but does this as an expression of modesty, that is, thereby to receive means for handling contingency. but others – and clearly ever more people – see cultivation as a reflexive concept. a person can be cultivated only if he/she is able to put him/herself in the place of others, that is to imagine the cultivation of others. cultivation is therefore not anymore the distinction between, but the reflexive observation of the distinction between “we” and “them”. “therefore cultivation can be acquired only when it is considered what others mean by this.” (p. 191). in this version, scholarship is not a standard concept, but a reflexive concept. an individual is cultivated when he/she is capable of noticing what constitutes the difference between me and you, us and them. another consequence is that when teaching, the teachers stimulate students to handle their social contingency: instead of being helped simply to learn “something” students are helped to “learn to learn”. they may not, after all, limit themselves to assigned study materials, but should be capable of grasping more than is intended. they must, as luhmann has said, not only “learn knowledge”, but to “learn to handle non-knowledge” – for instance, by being able to make decisions. the concept of knowledge, used by the educational system, is not the same as used by the scientific system, where it is a form of knowledge, the possible untruth of which has been tested (p.98). no, the knowledge transmitted in the educational system is a form of knowledge that creates possibilities for giving the future life process a new direction. (p. 97). the direct extension of this mantra is “lifelong learning”. in other words, this project is not a project that we should preferably handle according to standards (whether we like it or not?), but which we must handle analytically. in a society that is characterized by self-generated uncertainty, it is not strange that lifelong learning becomes a prominent concept. “what will be found in the 20th century, regardless of whether the concept of cultivation is used or not, is the adaptation of the educational system’s contingency formula as a reaction to the loss of a well-founded “normative” guarantee.” (p. 194). luhmann names two phenomena that symbolize this adaptation process. one of these is lifelong learning, which according to luhmann primarily means that students that learn all their lives must possess the ability to learn. this expresses the insecurity of the educational system on an individual basis. the second phenomenon, which symbolizes the insecurity of the educational system, is the growing insecurity of the educational system regarding itself. the only thing that is known in the educational system is that it is unsure about its own validity and must therefore constantly change. it seems that the more conservative the government, the more important it is to change the educational system. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 19 but my recurrent theme is that the phenomenon of a “learning society” is too important for normative handling: some rejoice, some are angry. but there is no reason to rejoice over the fact that the society is becoming contingent, and there is as little reason to believe that contingency will disappear, although we express our dissatisfaction about it. no, today’s society is characterized – maybe more than anything else – by the opportunity for abundance, that is the insecurity generated by the society itself. we must handle this analytically, that is, try to understand it. and when we have understood it – or at least come closer to understanding it – we can delve operationally, well aware, that there is always the need for further research. keeping this in mind, luhmann’s book is, despite its incompleteness and terminological indistinctiveness, a good starting point. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 20 references andersen, niels åkerstrøm (1999), diskursive analysestrategier. foucault, koselleck, laclau, luhmann. nyt fra samfundsvidenskaberne, copenhagen. ariès, p (1982), barndommens historie. copenhagen. luhmann, niklas (1975), soziologische aufklärung 2. aufsätze zur theorie der gesellschaft. westdeutscher verlag, erlangen. luhmann, niklas (1982), liebe als passion. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (1984), soziale systeme. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (1988), das wirtschaft der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (1990), die wissenschaft der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (1991), ”das kind als medium der erziehung.” in: zeitschrift für pädagogik, no. 1. luhmann, niklas (1993), das recht der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (1995), die kunst der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (1995), soziologische aufklärung 6. die soziologie und der mensch. westdeutscher verlag, erlangen. luhmann, niklas (1996), die realität der massenmedien. 2. erweiterte auflage. westdeutscher verlag, erlangen. luhmann, niklas (1997), das gesellschaft der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (2000), die religion der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (2000), die politik der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas (2002), das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas and karl eberhard schorr (red.) (1982), zwischen technologie und selbstreferenz. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas and karl eberhard schorr (red.) (1986), zwischen intransparenz und verstehen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas and karl eberhard schorr (red.) (1990), zwischen anfang und ende. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas and karl eberhard schorr (red.) (1992), zwischen absicht und person. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas and karl eberhard schorr (red.) (1996), zwischen system und umwelt. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, niklas and dieter lenzen (red.) (1997), bildung und weiterbildung im erziehungssystem. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. qvortrup, lars (2003), the hypercomplex society. peter lang publishers, new york. qvortrup, lars (2004), det vidende samfund – mysteriet om viden, læring og dannelse (the knowing society). forlaget unge pædagoger, copenhagen. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 21 i the manuscript is based on lectures that i held at the danish pedagogical university in 2002, and at lillehammer university college in 2004. ii luhmann tells this story himself in the preface to the work die gesellschaft der gesellschaft, luhmann 1997, p.11. iii the concept of “technology“ is the concept for the causal relationships that are the basis of intentional activities and to which those actions must be aligned that are supposed to have practical effects. iv here and hereafter i use the concept of “pedagogue” in its etymological, initial meaning, that is, as an indication of a specialized group that deal with pedagogy, that is, the art (theory) of upbringing and teaching. title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 a user experience case study: two embodied cognition user interface solutions for a math learning game antero lindstedt tut game lab tampere university of technology, pori department email: antero.lindstedt@tut.fi kristian kiili tut game lab tampere university of technology, pori department email: kristian.kiili@tut.fi pauliina tuomi tut game lab tampere university of technology, pori department email: pauliina.tuomi@tut.fi arttu perttula tut game lab tampere university of technology, pori department email: arttu.perttula@tut.fi abstract game-based learning solutions provide possibilities to teach conceptual number knowledge in engaging ways. the evaluation of user experience and error-proneness of the user interface are crucial in the educational game development process and game-based assessment. in the present study, we investigated how two different user interfaces of the rational number game, semideus, influenced the game character controlling accuracy and user experience. two user interfaces varying in the intensity of physical activities needed for controlling the game character were compared. thirty-six university students played both semideus game versions for 20 minutes in randomized order. in order to compare the tilting (low physical intensity) and walking (high physical intensity) user interfaces we used stealth assessment as an objective measure of controlling accuracy as well as flow http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 141 experience and playability questionnaires as subjective measures of user experience. the results revealed that there was no significant difference in game controlling accuracy between the user interface solutions, suggesting that the intensity of the physical activities did not influence the errorproneness. however, the subjective measures indicated that students appreciated the tilting user interface significantly more than the walking user interface. implications of the findings for future research and further development of the semideus game are discussed. keywords: user experience, user interface, embodied cognition, math, fractions, game, learning, education 1 introduction a good sense of rational numbers creates the foundations for advanced mathematics. however, research in cognitive psychology and mathematics education has revealed that children and even educated adults struggle with understanding of rational numbers (van dooren, lehtinen, & verschaffel, 2015). there is a great deal of evidence that even after considerable mathematics instruction many learners fail to perform adequately even in simple fraction tasks (siegler et al., 2013; siegler et al., 2011; stafylidou & vosniadou, 2004). mathematics education researchers have admitted that most of the students’ difficulties with rational numbers can be attributed to inadequate instruction (vamvakoussi & vosniadou, 2010). the problem is that the recent advances in modelling numerical development have not been exploited to practices of teachers and the instruction tends to emphasize procedural instead of conceptual knowledge (bailey, siegler & geary, 2014). given the widespread difficulties that people face with fractions, traditional instructional methods should be reconsidered and complemented by new tools for fostering fraction knowledge. game-based learning solutions may provide possibilities to teach conceptual number knowledge in engaging way. in this article we consider the design of a semideus rational number game that is founded on recent advances in numerical development research (mcmullen et al., 2014; torbeyns et al., 2014; siegler et al., 2011; ni & zhou, 2005) and theories that provide an account for the use of manipulatives in digital learning materials (pouw, van gog & paas, 2014). the main aim of this article is to study the user experience of two different user interfaces of semideus game. both user interfaces are based on embedded embodied cognition, but the intensity of physical activities needed for controlling the game varies. the optimization of user experience is important because the previous research have shown that subjective playing experience is positively connected with playing performance and learning outcomes (kiili, perttula & arnab, 2014). we selected flow theory as a game quality measure because flow seems to have a positive influence on performance enhancement, learning, and engagement (e.g. csikszentmihalyi et al., 2005; engeser & rheinberg, 2008) and for example kiili et al. (2014) have successfully used flow for analyzing the quality of serious games. flow describes a state of complete absorption or engagement in a specific activity in which a person excludes all irrelevant emotions and thoughts (csikszentmihalyi, 1990; csikszentmihalyi, 2002). during the optimal seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 142 experience, a person is in a positive psychological state where he or she is so involved with the goal-driven activity that nothing else seems to matter. an activity that produces such experiences is so pleasant that the person may be willing to do something for its own sake, without being concerned with what he will get out of his action. this kind of intrinsic motivation is very important especially in serious games that usually require different cognitive or physical investments compared to entertainment games. in this article we will first shortly present the theoretical background of the semideus game following with a description of the game. second, we will report the results of a study in which the two different user interfaces of the semideus game were compared in terms of game character controlling accuracy and playing experience. third, we will consider the further development of the semideus game user interface according to the results of this comparison study. 2 theoretical background of the semideus game 2.1 development of rational number knowledge one approach used to explain children's difficulties in learning rational numbers is the whole number bias ni & zhou, 2005). whole number bias suggests that common misconceptions about rational numbers originate from the false belief that all properties of whole numbers can be applied to rational numbers. for example, when comparing fraction magnitudes, people sometimes think that the fraction that has larger whole numbers as parts is larger (e.g. one may think that 1/5 is larger than 1/3, because 5 is larger than 3. according to alibaliv and sidney (2015) the whole number bias has been observed in elementary school students, in high school students, in adults, and even in expert mathematicians. thus, the bias is evident also in people who are extensively familiar with rational numbers and everybody can benefit from numerical trainings. siegler et al. (2011) have argued that theories of numerical development have emphasized too much the whole number bias and how it interferes with fraction learning. to support this argument siegler et al. (2011) proposed an integrated theory of numerical development that emphasizes continuity between acquisition of understanding whole numbers and fractions. according to their theory significant conceptual change is required to understand that fractions, like whole numbers, represent magnitudes that can be located on number lines (siegler et al., 2011). in line with integrated theory of numerical development mcmullen et al., 2014) have shown that successful conceptual change with rational numbers is rare and hard to come by. in fact, the recent findings have suggested that instructional interventions that aim to support conceptual change should target learners’ interpretation of rational numbers as magnitudes by practicing them on number lines (torbeyns et al., 2014; bailey, siegler & geary, 2014; fuchs et al., 2013). these findings are in line with an integrated theory of numerical development and thus we have used the theory as a starting point to design our semideus game. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 143 2.2 embedded embodied cognition and learning manipulatives games provide an appropriate environment for implementing features of virtual manipulatives that rely on embedded embodied cognition approach proposed by pouw, van gog & paas (2014). according to moyer et al. (2002) virtual manipulatives are interactive web-based visual representations of dynamic objects that present opportunities for constructing mathematical knowledge. virtual manipulatives are argued to be effective in mathematics instruction because they can connect dynamic visual images with abstract symbols (reimer & moyer, 2005). for example, the results of (reimer & moyer, 2005) have indicated that the virtual fraction manipulatives can enhance students’ conceptual understanding of fractions and enjoyment in learning mathematics. the embedded embodied cognition draws together the research on embedded cognition (e.g. clark, 2008) and embodied cognition (e.g. barsalou, 2008) in order to guide the design of learning manipulatives. the embedded embodied cognition states that perceptual and interactive richness may provide opportunities for alleviating cognitive load and transfer of learning is not reliant on decontextualized knowledge but may draw on previous sensorimotor experiences stimulated by manipulatives. moeller et al. (2012) have argued that embodied representations of number (magnitude) exist, are not limited to finger-based representations, and influence on number processing in such a systematic and functional way that it can be used to foster the efficiency of numerical trainings. for example, cook et al. (2008) found that children who were encouraged to make gestures while learning a new arithmetic strategy benefited from gesturing with respect to retention of knowledge. in line with this, link et al. (2013) showed that embodied number line training with whole-body movements (kinect based ui) resulted in better learning outcomes than control training (mouse based ui). the results revealed that embodied training seems to be beneficial in particular for children with lower general cognitive ability and lower working memory capacity. in general, these findings are in line with evidence indicating that the processing of numbers and space are related (wood & fischer, 2008). the mental number line is assumed to be spatially oriented from left-to-right, which might account for the findings about a relationship between numbers and spatial information (link et al., 2013). for example, in motion math game the idea of spatially oriented mental number line is successfully applied by implementing tilting based controls to manipulate fraction magnitudes (riconscente, 2013). to conclude embedded embodied cognition approach assumes that seemingly abstract representations may be based on bodily experiences and movement may help children to understand abstract concepts better and the perceptual and interactive richness provides opportunities for alleviating cognitive load. 3 the design of the semideus game(s) the semideus game is based on a semideus research engine. while the base game is always the same, the engine offers numerous options to tweak the game to fit into the current research topic. most of the adjustments are related to the level design (like types of tasks, number of enemies, and available hints) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 144 but some are changes to the game mechanics such as the difference in the controlling methods used in this study. the semideus game is designed to support the development of rational number conceptual knowledge. in particular, semideus addresses the development of two sub-concepts necessary for a complete mathematical understanding of rational numbers, 1) representations of the magnitudes of rational numbers and 2) the density of rational numbers. the idea of the game is grounded on integrated theory of numerical development (siegler et al., 2011) while it steadily expands understanding of the connection between different number representations and their magnitudes. the understanding is gradually expanded from whole number magnitudes to magnitudes of fraction, decimal and percent numbers. in this article we focus on two main task types of the game: estimation and ordering tasks. we start with presenting the background story of the game following a description how rational numbers are mapped to the game mechanics and how the user interface is designed to support understanding of rational numbers. 3.1 the story of the game the thematic setting and graphical outlook relate to the mythology of ancient greece. in the story semideus, a son of zeus, is tasked to seek golden coins kobalos the goblin has stolen. kobalos has hidden the coins, as well as traps, to the trails of mount olympos. semideus however has found goblin’s notebook, which shows the locations of the coins and traps, encrypted in mathematical symbols, and must race the goblin to retrieve the coins. while collecting the coins, semideus climbs up the mountain platforms to reach the top where zeus is eagerly awaiting for his coins. 3.2 from whole number bias to game mechanics the recent research has suggested that instructional interventions should target learners’ interpretation of rational numbers as magnitudes by practicing them on number lines (torbeyns et al., 2014). thus, the gameplay of the semideus game is founded on tasks that require working with number lines implemented as walkable platforms of the mountain. in the basic version the player can face five different kinds of tasks: magnitude estimation, magnitude comparison, magnitude ordering, and density awareness. similar tasks are commonly used in rational number studies (siegler et al., 2011; mcmullen et al., 2014), but in semideus these tasks are embedded into the game mechanics. in magnitude estimation task semideus tries to locate a hidden chest on each platform. the values to estimate are shown as mathematical symbols (figure 1). semideus finds some coins if he estimates the location accurate enough – if not he loses energy. the estimation accuracy percent determines the amount of coins that semideus finds from the chest. if semideus does not manage to locate the correct spot (too low accuracy) he has to try again. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 145 figure 1. example of magnitude estimation task. the player has to find the value displayed in the left corner and avoid the value in the right corner in magnitude comparison task semideus faces two stone tablets on the platform accompanied with rational number symbols. the task of the player is to organize the tablets on the number line according to their magnitudes before the goblin steals all gold coins from upper platform. in the example (figure 2) the player has to decide whether value 3/5 is larger than value 5/9 and place the tablets to ascending order on the number line. the player can carry the tablets on the platform in order to perform the comparison. the exact places of the tablets on a number line are not relevant, only the order. if the magnitudes of the tablets are the same the player should pile up the tablets. this way the magnitude comparison task can address also the equivalency of rational numbers. basically the ordering task is the same task than comparison task, but there are more stone tablets involved (3-5). this task can be designed to support also understanding of density if magnitudes are selected accordingly (e.g. 1/4, 0.3, 1/2, 3/4). in both comparison and ordering tasks, with a correct answer, the player gains all the coins not yet stolen by the goblin. a wrong answer means the player loses some energy and has to try again. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 146 figure 2. comparison task 3.3 user interface solutions two different user interface solutions were developed for this study. both versions required some physical activity from the player. the first user interface solution (tilting ui) required only light gestures. the game character changed his facing direction when the tablet was tilted slightly to either left or right. further tilting caused the character to walk to the tilted direction. the movement speed was defined by the tilting angle. in the second user interface solution (walking ui) the facing of the character was controlled in the same way as in the first version. however, the movement of the character required the player to walk in place while holding the tablet in his or her hands. the character’s movement speed increased as the physical movement intensified. in terms of pouw, van gog & paas (2014), both user interface solutions utilize embedded embodied interactions and thus the solutions can alleviate cognitive load. in general, the character can be considered as a visual manipulative and the tilting gestures and walking on the number line goes beyond mental number line. the increased physical activity has the potential to be beneficial beyond the embedded embodied cognition. emerging research has shown that exergame interventions in schools can improve academic performance, reduce classroom absenteeism, tardiness, and negative classroom behaviors (lieberman, et al 2011). 4 method in this study a within-subjects design was used. each participant played both versions of the game: tilting user interface and walking user interface. the playing order was randomized. the tasks in the game were exactly the same in both versions. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 147 4.1 participants this study was executed as part of the tampere university of technology’s user-centered design course in the beginning of 2015. the course is a part of the master’s degree programme in information technology. overall 45 students participated in the user experience study in which the two user interface solutions were compared. from these 45 students 9 were left out as they did not play both games or filled in the user experience questionnaires inadequately. of the remaining 36 participants 12 were females and 24 males while the average age was 38.5 years. even though primary end users of the game are school children of age 11-14, this study was conducted with university students. this was intentional as they should master the mathematical content of the game and thus be able to focus on controlling the game character as accurately as possible and that way this study provides information about the quality of the user interface solutions emphasizing the accuracy of controlling the game character. moreover, the secondary end users are adults, teacher students and teachers in particular. 4.2 math items and measures there were three levels in the semideus game prototype that was used in this study. the first level included ten whole number estimation items (tasks) on the number line ranging from -50 to 50. the second level included 11 fraction estimation items on the number line ranging from 0 to 5. the third level included nine comparison and ordering items. the whole number tasks could be considered easy for university students and the answers should be pretty accurate. these were the primary tasks for studying the user interface differences as the participants’ mathematical skills should not be a decisive factor. the rational number tasks should provide a little more difficulty even for adults. this way the participants might get some more enjoyment out of the game as there is some challenge in it. the comparison and ordering tasks offered some variation to the game and were somewhere in the middle in terms of the difficulty. user experience was measured in terms of flow experience (csikszentmihalyi, 1990; engeser, 2012) and playability. flow experience was measured with a 9item questionnaire, developed by the authors. the items included were derived from flow scale used in kiili et al. (2014) study. the dimensions included were challenge-skill balance, clear goals, concentration, autotelic experience, loss of self-consciousness, sense of control, and action awareness merging. playability was measured with a 3-item questionnaire developed by the authors. the dimensions included were ease of use, intuitiveness of the user interface, and controlling accuracy of the user interface. with each dimension a 6-point likert-type response format was used. stealth assessment approach was utilized in collecting game performance data. stealth assessment is an evidence-based approach where assessment is well integrated to the gameplay and the assessment is carried out non-invasively (shute & kim, 2014; shute, 2011). in practice, the game continuously logged playing behavior in a secured server according to defined rational number competence model and from these log files estimation accuracy (error) and comparison performance (correctness) was retrieved. moreover, the appreciation of the both user interface solutions was studied with 6-point likert-scale statements (i liked the tilting user interface a lot / i liked the walking user interface a lot.) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 148 4.3 procedure the class started with a brief introduction and description of the semideus game. after that the students were divided into two groups; one group that controlled semideus by tilting the tablet and one group that controlled the game by walking in place. the game was played in groups of five students. in the beginning of each playing session brief instructions were given and after that the game was played. after each session, in both groups, the participants were asked to fill in a paper based user experience questionnaire (flow and playability items). when the students had played through both game versions they were instructed to evaluate the user interface solutions (appreciation of the user interfaces). 4.4 data analyses after the playing sessions, data collected with questionnaires and log files were shifted to spss and analyzed. flow construct (the mean of flow dimensions) and playability construct (the mean of playability dimensions) were computed. accuracy of number line estimation tasks was analysed according to percentage absolute error (pae) computed as 100 * abs(estimated value – correct value) / numerical range of the number line. pae gives values between 0-100% (0% refers to perfect accuracy in other words estimation error is zero). pae was computed for both tilting and walking user interface solutions. 5 results 5.1 playing performance the magnitude estimation tasks were based on two different number lines. a number line ranging from -50 to 50 contained whole number tasks while a number line from 0 to 5 contained fraction tasks. as shown in table 1, students’ estimates were more accurate on whole number tasks (tilting ui m = 3.54%, sd = 3.79%; walking ui m = 5.87%, sd = 8.87%) than on fraction tasks. a paired-samples t-test indicated that there was not a significant difference in the whole number estimation accuracy in tilting ui (m = 3.54%, sd = 3.79%) and in walking ui (m = 5.87%, sd = 8.87%) conditions, t(35)=1.624, p = .113. similarly, such a difference was not found either in the fraction estimation accuracy in tilting ui (m = 9.01%, sd = 6.53%) and in walking ui (m = 9.06%, sd = 6.05%) conditions, t(35)= -.265, p = 793. table 1. magnitude estimation accuracy (pae: percentage absolute error) in different ui versions and task types (n = 36) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 149 a paired-samples t-test was conducted to compare the comparison performance in tilting and in walking ui conditions. there was not a significant difference in the comparison performance in tilting ui (m = 75.59%, sd = 16.91%) and in walking ui (m = 74.38%, sd= 21.13%) conditions, t(35)=.347, p = .731. 5.2 user experience the evaluation of user experience is a crucial part of a game development process. the enjoyment level that an educational game offers is a key factor in determining whether a player will be engaged in the gameplay and achieves the desired objectives of the game. furthermore, controlling the game has to be accurate, so that the controlling of the game does not negatively influence on learning performance. in this study we measured user experience in terms of flow experience and playability (user interface satisfaction). the reliability analysis of the used flow questionnaire (n = 36) indicated that the flow construct was internally consistent (tilting ui: α = 0.82; walking ui: α = 0.83), which means that all nine dimensions measured the same phenomenon, flow construct. the internal consistency of playability construct (n = 36) was weaker (tilting ui: α = 0.62; walking ui: α = 0.77). the table 2 shows that players experienced significantly higher flow with tilting user interface (m = 4.30, sd = 0.76) than with walking user interface (m = 3.88, sd = 0.83), t(35) = 3.08, p = .004. the biggest differences were in sense of control t(35) = 2.89, p = .007, action awareness merging t(35) = 2.22, p = .033, and autotelic flow dimensions t(35) = 2.80, p = .008. table 2 also shows that the playability of tilting version was more appreciated (m = 4.23, sd = 0.81) than playability of walking version (m = 3.36, sd = 1.16), t(35) = 4.45 , p < .001. the biggest difference was in accuracy of game controls dimension. the correlation analysis indicated that there were statistically significant relationships between playability and experienced flow level with both user interfaces (tilting ui; r = 0.49, p = .002; walking ui: r = 0.54, p = .001). this means that the playability of the game influence remarkably on overall user experience and the game controls have to be optimized. when participants were asked to evaluate both user interfaces after the playing sessions they appreciated the tilting ui remarkably more (m = 4.47, sd = .76) than walking ui (m = 2.44, sd = 1.24), t(35) = 7.94, p = .000. the large standard deviation of walking ui shows how physically activating controlling mechanism is divisive. although the difference between user interfaces is large with this measure the result is in line with flow experience and playability findings. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 150 table 2. means and standard deviations of the user experience measures in tilting and walking user interfaces (n = 36) furthermore, the correlation analysis also indicated that magnitude estimation accuracy (pae) in walking condition correlated significantly with flow experience, r = -.37, p = .026. however, in tilting condition the correlation was not statistically significant, r = -.31, p = .068. in general, the results clearly show that the tilting user interface was better with all used measures. although, the difference in controlling accuracy (pae) was not large between the tested user interfaces, players experienced the walking user interface more inaccurate than it actually was. if we could facilitate the sense of control and action awareness merging in walking user interface, it could improve the overall user experience significantly. 5.3 observation notes of playing behavior the playing behavior was observed during the game playing session. overall appreciation of semideus game was positive and participants were eager to play the game. the adaptation of the idea of semideus was smooth and the playing continued seamlessly. especially, when playing the game with tilting controls participants got immersed and the controlling gestures did not interfere the overall playing experience. on the contrary, the walking user interface seemed to distract the players a bit mainly in the beginning when the participants were still learning how sensitive and precise the controlling by walking actually was. walking controls required more concentration from the participants and it influenced negatively on the playing experience from time to time. based on the question concerning which controlling mode the participants preferred, it can also be seen that the tilting mode was preferred more than the walking mode. it is also worth noting that, after playing the game for a while, most of the players of the walking version reverted to just shaking the device instead of walking in place. 6 discussion and conclusion seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 151 the results revealed that there was not significant difference in game controlling accuracy between the tilting and walking user interfaces, suggesting that the intensity of the physical activities did not influence the error-proneness of the user interface. despite of that the level of experienced flow and appreciation of the playability of the tilting user interface indicated that students appreciated the tilting user interface significantly more than the walking user interface. the study showed that walking in place as a controlling method for semideus game is problematic. it distracted players and caused them to feel less immersed in the game. at the same time however, the use of walking ui did not result in significantly worse answer accuracies. the tilting ui worked much better and the physical activity required to control the character felt natural. this would indicate that the physical controlling itself is not an issue if implemented properly. the development of semideus continues by adding more features to the game and by modifying existing features based on the findings from this study. the walking based ui has already been slightly redesigned based on the results of this study. the walking speed of the character was adjusted to be more consistent. originally the character would stop moving instantly when the player stops walking in place. now the character continues to move for a short moment with decaying speed even if the player is no longer walking. now the character moves smoothly also in cases when player’s walking is too subtle (i.e. device’s accelerometer misses some of the input). the downside to this change is that it is harder to stop at the exact point on the number line. to compensate this, the tilting of the device now moves the character similarly to the tilting based ui but it does that only at a snail’s pace. further speed is gained by walking in place. this makes it easier to fine tune the answer and in terms of flow experience it should facilitate the sense of control and action awareness merging. we are currently running a study with sixth graders in which this new walking user interface is tested. the fact that most of the players of the walking version of the game started to control the game by shaking the device instead of walking in place is an issue. it is difficult to prevent this technically as the movement is detected using the device’s accelerometers, which does not separate how the motion is generated. on the other hand, since the game contains onscreen buttons, the device must be held on hands. one possible way to prevent this conduction could be to add competitiveness between players by making a multiplayer version of the game. this might add some peer pressure to do things the correct way. during the testing it was observed that some of the users first tried to tilt the device in a different way than what was expected. they rotated the device similarly to car’s steering wheel. this could be an optional controlling method to add to the game, as it seemed logical to some. there are several limitations in this study. the sample size (36) was rather small and thus the results cannot be generalized. furthermore, the participants were not the primary end users and the results might not be fully alike with middle school aged children. adults may feel differently about physically moving during the game than children do and thus more research with primary end users are needed. the participants played each version of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 152 game for about 20 minutes. this was probably enough to form an opinion about the controlling methods, but still, longer sessions might reveal for example better familiarization or increased exhaustion that might affect the playing experience. the participants played the game only for a short time on a single session so the effects of different intensity physical activities to learning outcomes or player’s fitness level could not be studied. despite the negative opinions about the walking user interface there could still be potential in the more physical approach. if the revised version of the walking ui could bring the playability level closer to the tilting ui’s playability, there could be a case for further 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(2004). the development of students’ understanding of the numerical value of fractions. learning and instruction, 14(5), 503-518. torbeyns, j., schneider, m., xin, z., & siegler, r. s. (2015). bridging the gap: fraction understanding is central to mathematics achievement in students from three different continents. learning and instruction, 37, 5-13. van dooren, w., lehtinen, e., & verschaffel, l. (2015). unraveling the gap between natural and rational numbers. learning and instruction, 37, 1-4. vamvakoussi, x., & vosniadou, s. (2010). how many decimals are there between two fractions? aspects of secondary school students’ understanding of rational numbers and their notation. cognition and instruction, 28(2), 181-209. wood, g., & fischer, m. h. (2008). numbers, space, and action–from finger counting to the mental number line and beyond. cortex, 44(4), 353-358. abstract 1 introduction 2 theoretical background of the semideus game 2.1 development of rational number knowledge 2.2 embedded embodied cognition and learning manipulatives 3 the design of the semideus game(s) 3.1 the story of the game 3.2 from whole number bias to game mechanics 3.3 user interface solutions 4 method 4.1 participants 4.2 math items and measures 4.3 procedure 4.4 data analyses 5 results 5.1 playing performance 5.2 user experience 5.3 observation notes of playing behavior 6 discussion and conclusion references title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 when does the educational use of ict become a source of technostress for finnish teachers? antti syvänen tampere research center for information and media, school of information sciences university of tampere email: antti.syvanen@uta.fi jaana-piia mäkiniemi, the research and education centre synergos, school of management university of tampere email: jaana-piia.makiniemi@uta.fi sannu syrjä the research and education centre synergos, school of management university of tampere email: sannu.syrja@uta.fi kirsi heikkilä-tammi. the research and education centre synergos, school of management university of tampere email: kirsi.heikkila-tammi@uta.fi jarmo viteli tampere research center for information and media, school of information sciences university of tampere email: jarmo.viteli@uta.fi abstract the accelerating digitalization of society has resulted in a demand to speedup the implementation of ict in teaching, and changes in curriculum policies reflect this development. however, the demand to increase the educational use of ict may also cause stress. the aim of the current study was to explore how demographics are associated with technostress and which factors predict it in finnish school teachers. the data was collected with the opeka online self-evaluation questionnaire tool. the sample consisted of 2,741 teachers. the results indicated that subject teachers were more http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 96 “technostressed” than class teachers, female teachers were more stressed than males, and teachers with 16–30 years of working experience were more stressed than teachers with 0–15 years of experience. the key predictors of the technostress were ict competence, the concordance of the educational use of ict with the teaching style, school support, and attitudes to the educational use of ict. high ict competence, high concordance of ict with the teaching style, high levels of school support, and positive attitudes to ict were associated with low levels of technostress. the results are discussed in the light of previous findings, and the practical implications and the need for future studies are explored. keywords: teachers, technostress, educational use of ict, competence, teaching style introduction the constantly increasing use of ict at work has become emphasized in the ongoing reform of the preschool and comprehensive school curricula in finland. for instance, ict competence is mentioned as a one of the broadbased competencies, and a computer programming course has been introduced in a curriculum starting in 2016 (vahtivuori-hänninen, halinen, niemi, lavonen, & lipponen, 2014). the central aim of the curriculum reform is to develop the school culture and to promote instruction with an integrative approach – namely to support the development of pupils’ transversal competencies, such as: 1) “thinking and learning-to-learn”; 2) “cultural competence, interaction and expression”; 3) “taking care of oneself, managing daily life”; 4) “multiliteracy”; 5) “ict competence”; 6) “working life competence and entrepreneurship”; and 7) “participation, involvement and building a sustainable future” (finnish national board of education, 2016). the digitalization of education can also be stressful for teachers. there might be various reasons for such technostress. first of all, the digitalization of work often creates a demand to learn new things and adopt new technologies, which requires extra effort and may lead to higher workload and time pressures. thus, stress can also be seen as an indicator of learning. the digitalization of work might also force the teacher to change the way she or he works. (tarafdar, tu, ragu-nathan, & ragu-nathan, 2011; tarafdar, d’arcy, turel, & gupta, 2015.) furthermore, technostress might appear in situations where the teacher feels the compulsion to increase the educational use of ict even though it contradicts with her/his personal teaching preferences. for example, the teacher might feel that the bring-your-own-device culture places students in an unequal position according to their ownership of devices, since this is contrary to the core value of equality in the finnish school system. consequently, the teacher may feel a diminished sense of job control and agency. therefore, the aim of the study is to measure which factors are associated with perceived technostress among finnish teachers: 1. how are demographics; school type, teacher type (subject vs classroom), working years, and gender associated with experienced technostress? 2. how does ict competence, attitude towards the educational use of ict, the concordance of ict with the teaching style, frequency of educational use of ict, and school support predict perceived technostress after controlling for the effect of demographics? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 97 technostress technostress refers to stress experienced by individuals due to the use of technology. it arises, for example, in situations where the technology used is too complicated, changes rapidly, and/or involves the demand for multitasking (ragu-nathan, tarafdar, ragu-nathan, & tu, 2008). technostress appears as a negative psychological state or experience, and can manifest as feelings of anxiety, fatigue, scepticism, and inefficiency (hudiburg, 1989; salanova, llorens, & cifre, 2013). we consider teachers’ technostress a relevant topic due to the intensity of the integration of new technologies into teaching. furthermore, technostress seems to influence teachers’ intentions to use technology (joo, lim & kim, 2016), and, in general, high levels of technostress are found to be associated with lower job satisfaction and job performance, and even with intentions to quit (see tarafdar, pullins, & ragu-nathan, 2015 for review). in addition, stress symptoms may also appear at the interpersonal level – for example, as conflicts or aggression. thus, technostress symptoms may lead to a poorer quality of social interaction between the teacher and pupils, and consequently to poorer learning. moreover, there are only few studies focusing on teachers’ technostress (al-fudail & mellar, 2008; lim 2012; joo et al., 2016), since studies on technostress are primarily focused on knowledge workers. it has been pointed out that there is a need for studies focusing on specific contexts (tarafdar et al., 2015). in line with this, we assume that there can be special aspects associated with teachers’ technostress, because the levels and sources of work stress differ between professions (johnson, cooper, cartwright, donald, taylor, & millet, 2005). previous findings indicate that teachers are exhibiting technostress symptoms (lim, 2012), mainly due to usability problems, a lack of technological and social support, the need to train less skilled pupils, the extra time and effort needed to integrate technology, and a lack of training in the use of technologies (al-fudail & mellar, 2008). in addition, it has been shown that technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) (i.e. the teacher’s ability to combine content, pedagogy, and technology meaningfully in teaching) and school support are associated with teachers’ technostress: high tpack and a high level of school support are associated with lower levels of technostress (joo et al., 2016). there is demographic variation in the experience of technostress. for example, it is often intuitively assumed that older employees experience higher levels of technostress than younger ones, since it is assumed that younger employees are more familiar with novel technologies. however, some empirical findings suggest that older employees experience less technostress (e.g. ragu-nathan et al., 2008; tarafdar et al., 2011). older employees might be better able to handle work stress in general, and since they have faced more work-related changes, they are more able to cope with them (cf. tarafdar et al., 2011). usually, older employees are more experienced, and consequently have higher levels of know-how and better job control (i.e. competence), which are associated with well-being at work (bakker & demerouti, 2007). it has also been suggested that females experience more technostress. this is often justified by findings indicating that women tend to have higher computer anxiety (e.g. durndell & haag, 2002; ong & lai, 2006). however, there are findings that suggest males experience a higher level of technostress (e.g. ragu-nathan et al., 2008) and others that suggest gender has no effect on anxiety (shah, hassan, & embi, 2012). these findings might relate to the fact that job-related factors – such as work autonomy – may influence technostress more than demographics (cf. ragu-nathan et al., 2008; tarafdar et al., 2011). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 98 this is in line with the notions that job resources and demands have an influence on well-being at work (bakker & demerouti, 2007). in pareto and willermark’s study (2014), swedish primary school teachers stated that a fragmented work environment and high working-day tempo diminished their willingness to adopt technologies. in the current study, we explore how working years, gender, school type, and teacher type are related to technostress, since they are relevant factors in this context. for example, the latest finnish research report indicated that classroom teachers (who teach grades 1–6) were more competent in using digital learning materials, while subject teachers (who teach grades 7–12) were more competent in using learning environments for communication and using students’ personal mobile devices in curricula. classroom teachers also considered it less burdensome (i.e. stressful) to bring new technology into teaching than subject teachers (tanhua-piiroinen, viteli, syvänen, vuorio, hintikka, & sairanen, 2016). there are various factors associated with technostress. technostress inhibitors are those factors which decrease the amount of technostress, whereas creators increase it. for instance, technical support and training are key inhibitors, whereas multitasking is a creator of technostress. (tarafdar et al., 2011) below, we present five factors that might be associated with teachers’ technostress: ict competence, attitude to the educational use of ict, concordance of ict with the teaching style, level of school support, and frequency of ict educational. ict competence and technostress according to the job demands-resources (jd-r) model, every job contains demands (e.g. workload) that threaten employee well-being, as well as resources (e.g. autonomy) that enhance well-being (bakker & demerouti, 2007). for example, competence (e.g. variability in professional skills) is a job resource that has been shown to be able to maintain employee well-being (e.g. work engagement) in stressful work situations (hakanen, bakker, & demerouti, 2005; bakker & demerouti, 2007). thus, workers with good ict competence do not necessarily feel “technostressed” even though there is a high demand (e.g. reform) to adopt new technologies, since their competence acts as a protective resource. on the other hand, it is proposed in karasek’s (1979) demand-control model (dcm) that low job control is associated with stress, especially when high job demands occur simultaneously (see also van der doef & maes, 1999 for review). according to karasek (1979), the opportunity to make decisions and exercise judgement during the workday enhances the individual’s feelings of efficacy and coping. in line with these theories, high computer confidence is empirically shown to be associated with lower levels of technostress (tarafdar et al., 2011), and one reason for a reluctance to integrate technology into teaching is shown to be a lack of technical competence (ryan & deci, 2000; tallvid, 2014). teachers with the ability to integrate technology meaningfully into their teaching seem to cope better with technostress (joo et al., 2016). based on these findings, we suppose that high ict competence is associated with a lower level of technostress. attitude to the educational use of ict and technostress computer attitude scales incorporating items on computer anxiety (e.g. loyd & gressard, 1984) have been in extensive use in technology adoption research. the concept of computer anxiety shares similarities with the concept of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 99 technostrain: both involve experiences of anxiety and fatigue, for example (cf. salanova et al., 2013). in a study on computer anxiety and attitudes among secondary school teachers in malaysia, it was found that lower computer anxiety related to positive attitudes towards computers (hong & koh, 2002). based on these findings, we hypothesize that a positive attitude to ict is associated with a lower level of technostress. concordance of ict with the teaching style and technostress it is stated that the teacher’s beliefs can act as a “second-order” barrier to the integration of ict in teaching (ertmer, ottenbreit-leftwich, sadik, sendurur, & sendurur, 2012). the act of teaching is a moral one in that it is based on the mastery of subject matter knowledge, the curriculum, and pedagogical methods (see e.g. campbell, 2008), making the individual teacher’s beliefs, attitudes, and values significant aspects of the profession. it seems teachers are more likely to adopt (the kind of) practices with computers that reflect their beliefs about teaching (drenoyianni & selwood, 1998). to illustrate this point, those teachers who believe that technology can support collaboration teach projects in which technology is used for collaboration (ertmer et al., 2012). furthermore, tallvid (2014) found that if secondary school teachers did not think that integrating laptops into their classes enhanced the pedagogical element of their teaching, they were reluctant to use them, which is in line with the body of research suggesting that the perceived usefulness of ict is one of the key determinants of the actual use of ict in classroom (for a review, see scherer, siddiq, & teo, 2015). thus, previous findings support the idea that teaching beliefs are associated with the educational use of ict. there is a general lack of knowledge on how teaching beliefs and technostress are related, but joo et al. (2016) found high levels of tpack to be associated with lower levels of technostress. we suggest that there might be a connection between teaching style and technostress, since teachers may experience a conflict between the demand for the educational use of ict and their pedagogical knowledge, teaching style, and value-based didactic thinking. consequently, teachers do not necessarily think that integrating more ict is a good way to teach. this is in line with the notion that technostress is higher among those who do not consider the technological solution to be the best possible option when performing tasks (tarafdar et al., 2011). we therefore hypothesize that a higher concordance of ict with the teacher’s teaching style is negatively connected to technostress: the more one feels that ict fits one’s style of teaching, the less one experiences technostress. school support for ict and technostress empirical evidence suggests, for example, that help desks, end-user training, and user participation are good ways to reduce technostress in organizations (fuglseth & sørebø, 2014). in line with this, the lack of social support (e.g. from other teachers or it support) needed to use technology in teaching has been shown to be one creator of teachers’ technostress (al-fudail & mellar, 2008). it is worth noting that finnish schools differ remarkably from organizations that have separate it departments to enhance the adoption and use of technology at work. what local school support often means in practice is that one of the teachers takes the responsibility to maintain the school’s ict. based on previous findings, we hypothesize that low school support is associated with higher levels of technostress. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 100 frequency of educational use of ict it has been shown that technostress can influence the intention to use technology (joo et al., 2016), but evidently using technology is one of the key sources of technostress ( cf. lim, 2012). it seems that experiences of technostrain are characterized by excessive and compulsive use of ict (salanova et al., 2013), indicating that the way the technology is used might be stressful. moreover, adopting and using especially novel technologies often requires extra effort and increases work load. in addition, dividing one’s attention between the technology and interaction with students might be challenging, especially when technological problems occur simultaneously. this kind of extensive multitasking is shown to be associated with higher levels of technostress (cf. tarafdar et al., 2011). together, these findings suggest that using technology is a kind of prerequisite for technostress. however, the relationship between the frequency of the use of ict and technostress might be more complex and moderated by other factors, such as competence. potentially there are at least three associations between frequency of ict use, technostress, and competence. first of all, frequent user experience may support the development of ict competence, which in turn may decrease the feeling of technostress (cf. tarafdar et al., 2011). in this case, competence can protect from technostress (cf. bakker & demerouti, 2007; hakanen et al., 2005). secondly, high frequency of use may be related to higher levels of technostress, especially when combined with low ict competence due to diminished job control, for example (cf. karasek, 1979). in addition, when technology is used intensively, more stressful technological problems may occur, which is often related to technostress (cf. tarafdar et al., 2011). thirdly, we assume that in some cases, the high frequency of use may be negatively associated with technostress, even though the teacher’s competence is moderate or low. for instance, in the case of enthusiastic teachers who are less skilled but willing to integrate technology, their inspiration might act as a resource that protects them from technostress (cf. bakker & demerouti, 2007). based on the previous studies, we hypothesize that the frequency of ict use is associated with technostress, but it is not clear what kind of association there might be. methods data collection the data was collected with the opeka online self-evaluation questionnaire tool for ict usage in teaching. the respondents answered the questionnaire between 1 november 2015 and 30 january 2016. opeka is an online survey tool for teachers and principals; it gives the individual teacher immediate feedback on her/his use of ict in education, provides the principals and school communities with information on how their school is doing in terms of ict usage, and is useful for developers, decision-makers, and politicians at the town, municipal, or national level. the tool can become an integral part of the development cycle of the municipality or school (sairanen, vuorinen, & viteli, 2013). opeka is built around the idea of a learning technology ecosystem and it utilizes the theoretical foundation of the ecosystem metaphor as introduced by zhao and frank (2003). some parts of the opeka survey are adopted from pre-existing scales, such as tpack. various validation and testing processes are taken as described in more detailed in sairanen, vuorinen, and viteli (2013); sairanen, viteli, and vuorinen (2013); and viteli (2013). opeka has been used to study the basic usage of ict in finnish schools (sairanen et al., seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 101 2013), to investigate what kind of software and devices produce more usage in schools (viteli, 2013), and to determine the current status of national educational ict adoption in basic education (tanhua-piiroinen et al., 2016). participants a total of 1,103 subject teachers and 1,638 classroom teachers participated in the survey, consisting of 2,017 female and 677 male respondents. the median number of working years was 15 and the average age was 44.66 (sd = 9.49). measurements the opeka survey consists of a total of 106 items related to the digital learning culture, devices, and software and ict competence. only the items related to the topic of the current study – such as technostress, ict competence, attitude to ict, concordance of ict with the teaching style, school support for ict, and frequency of use – were integrated into the study. the demographic items were gender, working years, school type (primary, lower secondary, comprehensive), and teacher type (class, subject). technostress was measured with the item “constantly bringing new technology to teaching is burdensome/stressful.” the respondents were asked to indicate how strongly they agree with the statement. the range was from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. ict competence was measured with four items: “i know how to utilize digital teaching materials in my teaching”, “i know how to utilize students’ own mobile devices as a part of learning”, “utilizing information and communication technology (ict) according to the curriculum is difficult [reversed]”, and “i find good ways to utilize ict in various learning situations”. the respondents were asked to indicate how strongly they agree with the statements. the range was from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. attitude to ict was measured with the item “i would like to use ict more in my teaching”. the respondents were asked to indicate how strongly they agree with the statement. the range was from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. the concordance of ict with the teaching style was measured with the item “ict fits my style of teaching”. the respondents were asked to indicate how strongly they agree with the statement. the range was from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. school support for ict was measured with eight items: “my school supports me in taking part in ict training”, “i get sufficient technical support with sufficient speed for ict usage in my school”, “opportunities are arranged for sharing pedagogical tips on ict usage in our work community”, “i feel i am lonely when developing the pedagogical use of ict [reversed]”, “our school has a jointly agreed goal for utilizing ict in teaching”, “in my school, it is easy to start developing new procedures”, “i get support and tips from my colleagues on how to use ict in my teaching”, and “our work community atmosphere is positive towards trying new things in teaching”. the respondents were asked to indicate how strongly they agree with the statement. the range was from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. frequency of ict use was measured with one question: “how often do you use ict in your teaching?” the scale ranged from 1 = never to 5 = daily. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 102 statistical analysis the data was analysed with ibm spss 22. prior to the main analysis, an exploratory factor analysis using the maximum likelihood method with orthogonal varimax rotation was performed to measure the dimensionality of the ict competence and school support scales. the results of the factor analysis, as well as cronbach’s alphas (see table 1) supported the one-dimensional solutions. the mean scores were calculated. the independent samples t-test was used to detect differences in technostress between class and subject teachers and between males and females. the analysis of variance was used to detect differences in technostress between teachers who were divided into three different groups by their number of working years. hierarchical regression analysis was used to test which variables predict technostress after controlling for the effect of demographics. as an additional analysis, a simple slope method by aiken and west (1991) based on the moderated regression coefficient was performed to measure the interaction effect. results means, standard deviations, cronbach’s alphas, and correlations for all the main variables are presented in table 1. in relation to technostress, ict competence had the strongest correlation, followed by concordance of ict with the teaching style, frequency of ict use, school support for ict, and attitude to ict. more precisely, low ict competence, low concordance of ict with the teaching style, low frequency of ict use, poor school support for ict use, and negative attitudes towards ict were statistically significantly related to higher levels of technostress. variable range m sd α 1 2 3 4 5 1: technostress 1–5 3.19 1.1 2: ict competence 1–5 3.48 0.73 0.78 .43** 3: attitude to ict 1–5 3.96 0.86 -.16** .07** 4: concordance of ict with the teaching style 1–5 3.78 0.89 .39** .55** .38** 5: school support for ict 1–5 3.58 0.59 0.70 .20** .31** .03 .18** 6: frequency of ict use 1–5 4.11 0.82 .25** .45** .12** .45** .19** *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. table 1: means, standard deviations, and correlation coefficients of the main variables. teacher type there were statistically significant differences between class (m = 3.14, sd = 1.11) and subject teachers (m = 3.25, sd = 1.09) in the mean scores for technostress (t(2,697) = 2.518, p = .012). this means that subject teachers felt more technostress than class teachers. additional analysis indicated statistically significant differences in attitudes to ict (p <. 01; class teachers more positive), ict competence (p < .01; subject teachers were more competent), concordance of ict with the teaching style (p < .01; ict better fits class the teachers’ teaching style), school support for ict (p < .01, class teachers receive better support), and frequency of ict use (p < .01; class teachers used ict more frequently). school type seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 103 there were statistically significant differences in the mean levels of technostress between the teachers working in different types of schools (f(2, 2,696) = 4.186, p = .015). the tukey hsd post-hoc comparison indicated that teachers in primary schools (m = 3.15, sd = 1.11) experienced statistically significantly less technostress than teachers in lower secondary schools (m = 3.28, sd = 1.08, p = .017). this means that the primary school teachers, who are mostly class teachers, experienced less technostress than subject teachers in lower secondary schools – although not in comparison to the teachers in comprehensive schools with primary and lower secondary education. additional analysis indicated statistically significant differences in ict competence (p < .01; comprehensive school teachers more competent than primary and lower secondary school teachers), concordance of ict with the teaching style (p<.05; ict has a better fit with the teaching style of primary school teachers than lower secondary school teachers), attitude to ict (p < .01; primary school teachers have a more positive attitude to ict than lower secondary school teachers), and school support for ict (p < .01; primary school teachers have better school support for ict than lower secondary school teachers). there were no statistically significant differences in the frequency of ict use between teachers working in the different types of schools. working years there were statistically significant differences in the mean levels of technostress between the working experience groups (f(2, 2,685) = 6.767, p = .001). the tukey hsd post-hoc comparison indicated that teachers with 0–15 years of working experience (m = 3.11, sd = 1.10) experienced statistically significantly less technostress than teachers with 16–30 years of working experience (m = 3.26, sd = 1.08, p = . 003). this means that the youngest group of teachers experienced less technostress than more experienced teachers, although more in comparison to the most experienced group of teachers (31–45 years of working experience). additional analysis indicated statistically significant differences in ict competence (p < .01; younger teachers more competent), concordance of ict with the teaching style (p < .01; ict has a better fit with younger teachers’ teaching style), and frequency of ict use (p < .01; younger teachers use ict more frequently). there were no statistically significant differences between the working years groups in attitude to ict or school support for ict. gender there were statistically significant differences between male (m = 3.11, sd = 1.176) and female (m = 3.21, sd = 1.075) teachers in perceived technostress (t(1,057.805) = 2.032, p = .042). this means that the female teachers experienced less technostress than male teachers. additional analysis also indicated statistically significant differences in attitudes towards ict (p < .01; female teachers more positive) and ict competence (p < .01; male teachers more competent). there were no statistically significant differences between male and female teachers in concordance of ict with the teaching style, school support for ict, and frequency of ict use. predicting perceived technostress hierarchical regression analysis was used to assess the ability of the five main factors to predict perceived technostress after controlling for the effect of demographic variables (gender, school category, teacher type, working years). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 104 demographic variables were entered at step 1, but they explained only 1% of the variance in perceived technostress (see table 2). after the entry of the predictors at step 2, the total variance explained by the model as a whole was 23 % (f(9, 2,456) = 81.40, p < .001). so, the predictors explained an additional 22% of the variance in perceived technostress, after controlling for demographic variables (r2-change = .22, fchange (5, 2,456) = 140.31, p <. 001). attitude to ict, concordance of ict with the teaching style, school support for ict, and ict competence were statistically significant predictors in the final model. in other words, high levels of ict competence, high concordance of ict with the teaching style, high levels of school support, and positive attitudes were associated with low levels of technostress. variable b se b β r² step 1 gender -0.12 0.05 -.05* school type -0.03 0.04 -.02 teacher type -0.15 0.06 -.07** working years 0.13 0.04 .07*** .01*** step 2 gender -0.03 0.05 -.01 school type -0.01 0.04 .00 teacher type -0.07 0.05 -.03 working years -0.04 0.03 -.02 attitude to ict -0.08 0.03 -.06** concordance of ict with the teaching style -0.24 0.03 -.19*** frequency of ict use -0.01 0.03 -.01 school support for ict -0.13 0.04 -.07*** ict competence -0.45 0.04 -.30*** .23*** *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. table 2: summary of hierarchical regression analysis for variables predicting perceived technostress. since frequency of use was not associated with technostress, we conducted an additional analysis to measure whether there was an interaction effect between frequency of use and ict competence –namely, whether competence moderates the effect of frequency of use on technostress. frequency of use and ict competence were entered in the first step of the hierarchical regression analysis. in the second step, the interaction term between frequency of ict and ict competence was entered. the interaction terms explained a significant increase in variance in technostress (δr2 = .18, f(3, 3,237) = 245.13, p < .00). simple slopes (aiken & west, 1991) for the association between frequency of use and technostress were tested for low (-1 sd below the mean), moderate (mean), and high (+1 sd above the mean) ict competence. the simple slope tests revealed a significant negative association between frequency of use and technostress for higher ict competence (b = .12, seb = .03, β = -.09, p < .05) and moderate ict competence (b = -.04, seb = .02, β = -.14, p < .05). no significant association was found between frequency of use and technostress for lower ict competence. so, the frequency seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 105 of using ict in teaching was associated with lower levels of technostress when competence was high or moderate but not when competence was low. figure 1. simple slopes of frequency of use predicting technostress for 1 sd below the mean of ict competence, the mean of ict competence, and 1 sd above the mean of ict competence. discussion the aim of the current study was to explore how demographic factors are associated with and predict technostress among finnish teachers. based on the previous studies, it was suggested that low ict competence, negative attitudes to ict, low concordance of ict with the teaching style, and poor school support are associated with higher levels of technostress (e.g. al-fudail & mellar, 2008; hong & koh, 2000; joo et al., 2016). as assumed, based on the analysis of correlations, lower ict competence, lower concordance of ict with the teaching style, lower frequency of ict use, poor school support for ict use, and negative attitudes towards ict were statistically significantly related to higher levels of technostress. in line with the previous studies, our findings indicated a demographic variation in technostress. subject teachers experienced more technostress than class teachers, female teachers were more stressed than males, and teachers with 16–30 years of working experience were more stressed than teachers with 0–15 years of experience. there were no differences between school types. thus, our findings supported the view that there is demographic variation in technostress (e.g. tarafdar et al., 2011), and that females experience more technostress than males (durndell & haag, 2002; ong & lai, 2006). the results also indicated that teacher type is a relevant factor: the subject teachers experienced more technostress than class teachers. an identical pattern was found by tanhua-piiroinen et al. (2016) as well. the differences between the teacher types may relate to the somewhat different teaching context (7–12-year-old pupils for classroom teachers vs 12–15-year-old pupils for subject teachers) with different curricular requirements. however, it is not totally clear how different teaching contexts influence technostress. for instance, teenagers might be more challenging students, which makes work more stressful. the nature and length of pre-service education of classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 106 and subject teachers (five years vs one year of training, respectively) differ and may lead to different teaching beliefs and practices. however, it is worth noting that although there were some demographic variations in technostress, based on the hierarchical regression analysis, demographic variables explained only one per cent of the variance. this supports the notion that job-related factors may influence technostress more than demographics (cf. ragu-nathan et al., 2008; tarafdar et al., 2011), and that also “general” job-related factors, such as demands and resources, are associated with technostress. therefore, it would be wise to integrate more comprehensively those job factors that are shown to be related to employee well-being in general into technostress studies (cf. bakker & demerouti, 2007). to achieve this, the adoption of more holistic theoretical approaches to technostress would be useful (e.g. fischer & riedl, 2015). the results of the hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the key predictors of technostress were, in descending order of importance, ict competence, concordance of ict with the teaching style, school support, and attitude to ict. in practice, these findings suggest that those teachers who have good ict competence, a teaching style that in concord with the educational use of ict, a positive attitude to the educational use of ict, and who receive support have the lowest levels of technostress. the findings are in line with previous ones, indicating that school support (joo et al., 2016), ict competence (tarafdar et al., 2011), positive attitudes (hong & koh, 2002) and teaching style (joo et al., 2016) are key factors associated with technostress. in addition, our results support the previous findings suggesting that the most common sources of technostress among turkish teachers were lack of education (cf. competence) and lack of interest (cf. attitude; çoklar, efilti, sahin, & akçay, 2015). unexpectedly, the frequency of use of ict in teaching was not a significant predictor of technostress. therefore, we repeated the analysis with the competence*frequency-interaction term. the analysis indicated an interaction: the frequency of using ict in teaching decreased technostress when competence was high or moderate but not when competence was low. so, it seems that competence moderates the association between frequency of use and technostress, and competence can act as a resource that can protect against technostress (cf. bakker & demerouti, 2007; hakanen et al., 2005; tarafdar et al., 2011), as suggested. there are limitations within this study. the first limitation concerns the fact that although variety of measures were included in the analyses, there are likely other factors associated with teachers’ technostress. for example, technostress studies in general indicate, for example, that the opportunity to participate in the selection of technologies is associated with lower levels of technostress (e.g. tarafdar et al., 2011). the second limitation of the study relates to the fact that the items and scales were adopted from the opeka survey, which has not been developed for the purposes of scientific study. for example, there was only one item to measure technostress, concordance of ict with the teaching style, and attitude to ict. in practice, this means that some factors were operationalized and measured very narrowly, not necessarily covering all the aspects of the phenomenon. as an example, concordance of ict with the teaching style was measured with the one item (“ict fits my style of teaching”). evidently, this is not adequate to cover all the aspects of the teaching style, beliefs, values, or behaviours (cf. heimlich & norland, 2002). we suggest that the concept of concordance of ict with teaching style in particular could be operationalized more broadly, since it was clearly associated with technostress. previous studies also indicate that if teachers feel pressure to change their pedagogy and to use new technologies due to external requests, they are more likely to resist adopting the technology (ertmer, 2005; joo et al., 2016), whereas ict integration in schools is likely to succeed if the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 2 – 2016 107 ict policy reflects teachers’ beliefs, attitudes, and values (tondeur, van keer, van braak, & valcke, 2008). the feeling of discord (i.e. the feeling of ict not fitting one’s teaching approach) may appear when teachers’ personal preferences conflict with requirements. consequently, teachers may feel a diminished sense of agency and control over their work, which in turn may lead to technostress. this is in line with findings indicating that technostress is associated with increased role conflict, and the conflict may appear, for example, when professionals do not agree with the “best practices” offered by new technologies (tarafdar et al., 2011). furthermore, this discord might relate to a broader phenomenon, namely to professional identity. therefore, it could be useful to develop more advanced measures of teaching style, beliefs, and practices to detect their deeper connections to technostress. for example, beijaard, verloop, and vermunt’s (2000) categorization of teacher identities from professional knowledge and skills domain (subject, didactical, pedagogical) perspectives might provide suitable measures for future studies. we have arrived at some practical suggestions based on our findings. first of all, the findings suggest that ict competence is one of the key factors associated with technostress. in line with this notion, we assume that one effective way to decrease teachers’ technostress is to develop the ict competence of teachers further, for example, by education. moreover, our data suggest that sufficient school support – including, for example, arranged opportunities to share experiences and technical support – is associated with lower levels of technostress. together, these findings indicate that ict competences can be promoted most effectively in schools by utilizing, for example, peer teachers or mentors. in practice, more experienced teachers could teach together with less experienced teachers, or the teachers could share their know-how. this supports the notion that in addition to technical support, social support from peers, such as from colleague teachers, is necessary to reduce teachers’ technostress (joo et al., 2016), and the results suggest that the effective ways to develop work well-being require the active involvement of all workers (hassard, cox, murawski, de meyer, & muylaert, 2011). the school community should be considered as broadly as possible, including the pupils and students who can act as student agents to also teach the teachers. secondly, it was shown that perceived concordance of ict with the teaching style and the educational use of ict were associated with lower levels of technostress. it is worth noting that teachers might not be yet aware of all the possible uses of educational technology, and therefore might not be able to evaluate whether these technologies are in concordance with their teaching style. thus, one practical strategy could be to highlight the pedagogical enhancement related to different technologies when they are introduced to the potential users, since it shown that teachers consider pedagogical enhancement an important factor that influences the kinds of methods they use in their teaching (cf. tallvid, 2014). references aiken, l. s., & west, s. g. 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(2013). teachers and use of ict in education: pilot study and testing of the opeka system. in j. herrington, a. couros & v. irvine (eds.), proceedings of edmedia: world conference on educational media and technology 2013 (2326–2346). association for the advancement of computing in education (aace). zhao, y., & frank, k. a. (2003). factors affecting technology uses in schools: an ecological perspective. american educational research journal, 40(4), 807 –840. http://tietokayttoon.fi/julkaisu?pubid=11315 abstract introduction technostress ict competence and technostress attitude to the educational use of ict and technostress concordance of ict with the teaching style and technostress school support for ict and technostress frequency of educational use of ict methods data collection participants measurements statistical analysis results discussion references microsoft word rønning og grepperud the everyday use of ict-1.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 the everyday use of ict in norwegian flexible education wenche m. rønning, lifelong learning research centre the norwegian university of science and technology (ntnu) trondheim email: wenche.m.ronning@svt.ntnu.no gunnar grepperud centre for further and continuing education university of tromsø email: gunnar.grepperud@uvett.uit.no abstract much of what we have learned about the use of ict in teaching and other educational settings is based on limited case studies which primarily serve as examples. we know relatively little about how ict is used on an everyday basis, particularly in higher education. a comprehensive national survey of adult flexible students’ learning situation helps to throw light on some aspects of this. the survey was carried out in 2004-05. the database includes 1477 respondents from a total of 74 “classes”, all following flexible higher education courses of a duration from year to 4 years. the survey shows that internet access is generally good, but clear disparities are shown for example between different occupational groups. our results also show that in the course of the studies, simple basic functions are those primarily used by the students. internet plays a less dominant role than expected as a channel of communication between students, or between students and their teachers. ict in flexible education and everyday life since the late 1980’s the predominant model in flexible higher education in norway, as in the other nordic countries, has been a combination of extensive self-study (reading curriculum, writing essays etc.), plenary sessions and the use of ict. this is also described as “blended learning” (grepperud 2005). during this period ict has come to be integrated in flexible education. but until a few years ago, when advertising flexible studies at norwegian universities and colleges it was common to stress that ”access to pc/internet is a requirement”. today, this stipulation is rarely found, it being taken for granted that digital media are an integral part of flexible study programmes. two trends illustrate this change: i) ict is becoming an integral part of everyday life. the technology is now an essential requirement in relation to our work, competence development and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 2 leisure-time activities. it is also increasingly essential for using various public and private services. how, and to what extent, people make use of the pc and internet varies. national surveys show, for example, that men are more active users than women, younger people more active than their elders and that women are more strategic in their use. both scope and type of use are related to educational background and income level (ssb 2005; rønning et al 2005, tønseth et al 2006) ii) parallel to this development, norwegian higher education has given high priority to the use of ict, both on and off campus. this has brought about new ways of organizing teaching, while research and the use of ict have encouraged the academic staff to take an interest in flexible education (grepperud, støkken & toska 2000). what do we know about the use of ict among adults following flexible education programmes in norway? for some years, the implementation and use of ict in education at all levels has been a major priority of educational policy. a number of studies (erstad 2006, krumsvik 2006) reveal high expectations and ambitions in regard to the role of ict in future educational contexts. this has resulted in various research and development programmes at all levels of the educational system. our existing documentation on ict, teaching and learning stems primarily from such extraordinary initiatives, as evidenced for example through various reports published by norway opening universities1 (e.g. alexandersen et al 2002). although this provides us with essential facts about ict in teaching and learning, we know less about its ordinary, routine use, especially in higher education. our knowledge is sparse both concerning how educational institutions are organized in this respect, and how students utilize and experience ict as a tool. in other words, we know a great deal about the possibilities and limitations of ict, but relatively little about how, and to what extent, ict is integrated on an everyday basis in higher education. in other words, more research is required. our present base of knowledge is insufficient and is tainted by investigations that are lacking in rigour and methodological quality. for instance, a typical investigation of the digital status of higher education in norway is carried out by interviewing a few students on the matter (arneberg et al 2005). the empirical basis does not have the quality to allow generalisation. research project ”the adult flexible student”aims and method first, we shall briefly describe the aim of the research project ”the adult flexible student”. this study addresses the question of how education is integrated in modern life in general and investigates the extent to which parttime education is combinable with1 occupational duties and family life. the learning situation for adult flexible students is a phenomenon embracing more than the relationship between student and educational institution. this naturally applies to ordinary students as well, but ”flexible” students are distinguished by having limited contact with their campus and with the academic staff. it is obvious that off-campus arenas are highly significant in relation to how their learning situation is organized. the aim of the survey was to give some answers to what the implications are for the individual student and how and why their learning situations vary. how diverse is this student group and what is the impact of various family, work and leisure-time factors on their study situation? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 3 among adults following flexible studies in norwegian higher education in 2004, 1477 students answered a series of questions covering 5 thematic areas: • background information • work, home and leisure-time • course of study and study situation • learning strategies • learning styles the procedure for collecting data was rigorous and labour-intensive. including preparations, it took 1 year, but in return we succeeded in obtaining a response rate of 86%. in agreement with our selected academic institutions, the questionnaire was distributed at 74 plenary class sessions, including 40 different subject areas. about half the respondents were following professional training courses in health and social care or teaching (grepperud et al 2006, p. 6-9). the sampling procedure taken into account, it is fair to say that this sample of students is representative of the flexible student population in norwegian higher education (iversen 2004; grepperud 2005). the respondents consist of 78 % women and 22 % men. the average age is 39 years (range 20-67), 85 % are in full or part time employment. all the students have been following courses for more than one term, 90 % are half-way or more through their course programme, and 30 % are in their 3rd or 4th year of study. almost half the students are first-time students in higher education, and half of these in turn are “informal competence” students i.e. do not fill the ordinary requirements for access to higher education. this category is over-represented in our survey, as in fact was our intention. one particular section of the survey deals with how, and to what extent, adult students use ict in their studies. this is a smaller part of the study, but three important issues were raised: i. what is the status of access to pc/internet among flexible students in higher education? ii. how are pc/internet functions used in their education? iii. how is ict used in communication and contact between students and teachers, when they are off-campus? these questions were designed to give an overview of the frequency and patterns of access and use, and to investigate any possible variations. the answers to these questions are presented in this article. access to, and previous experience of, the internet in education access to computers/internet norway leads the world in the use of the internet (tns gallup 2005). 85 % of norwegian companies with 10 or more employees had internet access in 2002. the increase in the period 1998 – 2002 was 45 % (statistics norway (ssb) 2002). access to pc/internet is now a natural feature of most households: 7 out of 10 norwegians have a home pc and 63 % of norwegian households have internet access (ssb 2005). this corresponds to our own results. almost 95 % of students have access at home, 87 % at work and almost 70 % of those who answered this question also seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 4 have access elsewhere. in other words, we see that access to technology represents no barrier to pursuing flexible education. although access is high, our data indicate that there are some variations, for example in relation to employment status (table 1) and to age (table 1 app and 2 app). taking statistics norway’s occupational classification as our basis, we divided our students’ occupations into the categories “unskilled”, “skilled” and “professional/ managerial”. this classification is based on competence requirements for the type of occupation. as shown in table 1, there is a marked difference in internet access between the three occupational categories: those with the lowest educational level and qualifications have more limited access than those with a high level of education and qualifications. about 77% of those classified as unskilled have access, 82% in the skilled category have access and not surprisingly those in professional/managerial occupations have best access, with 93% stating that they have internet access in their own workplace. table 1: access to the internet in the personal workplace, by occupational category. percentage (n=1142) unskilled skilled professional /managerial total have access now 77.1 82.0 92.5 87.8 will have access soon 2.0 3.2 2.1 2.4 no access 20.9 14.7 5.4 9.8 total 100 (153) 100 (285) 100 (704) 100 (1142) p=.00 our data also show that there is a difference between full-time and part-time employees in regard to internet access at work. about 95 % of full-time employees have access, while 82 % of part-time employees have access (table 3, app). to sum up, it is the younger, unskilled, part-time employees in, as we have found, the municipal social services sector, who have least access to the internet at work. this is also an indication of their general conditions of work, meaning for example that these employees seldom have their own, private work station. previous experience of ict in education good access to pc/internet at home and at work implies that many people have experience in using computers. figures from statistics norway show that 80 % of us have used a pc in the last 3 months and 58 % of us use a pc every day (hansen møllerud et al 2005). most respondents have a positive opinion of their own knowledge and skills in relation to pcs and the internet. over 70 % say they have adequate competence in relation to their needs (rønning et al 2005: 4). many adults have also gained experience of computers/internet through previous education. two-thirds of our respondents confirm this. table 2 shows, however, that previous experience of computers/internet varies in relation to educational background, those with previous higher education being predominantly those with computer experience. 46 % of informal competence students had such experience, as opposed to 78.9 % of those with higher education. of respondents with previous higher education, it is those who have followed flexible courses who have most comprehensive experience. many of them have their entire experience of formal learning from this type of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 5 educational model. this is a category of students likely to increase in future years. table 2: previous experience of computers in education according to educational background. percentage. (n=1452) informal competence study competence higher education total have used computers before 46.6 57.1 78.9 66.5 have not used computers before 53.4 42.9 21.1 33.5 total 100 (358) 100 (294) 100 (800) 100 (1452) p=.00 experience of computers/internet in an educational context also varies in relation to age. as shown in table 3, there is a dividing line between those below and those over 30 years of age. those in the youngest group have mainly acquired their computer experience from full-time, traditional forms of education. for the three other age groups, their computer experience comes mainly from following flexible study programmes of varying length. table 3: previous experience of computers in education by age. percentage. (n= 1446) age < 30 30-39 40-49 > 50 total have used computers before 79.8 63.3 65.1 68.0 66.5 have not used computers before 20.2 36.7 34.9 32.0 33.5 total 100 (168) 100 (570) 100 (530) 100 (178) 100 (1446) p=.00 use of the internet in education – type and frequency the students were asked how they apply the internet in their studies. four basic functions came out clearly: reading course information, receiving/sending documents, searching for course material, e-mail (table 4). table 4: use of internet in flexible courses. type and frequency. percentage. (n) never occasionally quite often frequently total (n) e-mail 4.9 41.6 34.2 19.3 100 (1425) course-related discussion fora 47.8 38.5 10.0 3.6 100 (1346) reading course information 3.5 24.3 48.7 23.4 100 (1410) searching for course material 6.2 34.1 39.1 20.6 100 (1417) chatting 74.3 21.3 3.0 1.4 100 (1335) receiving/sending documents 4.8 32.4 39.4 23.4 100 (1412) our data show that the internet is now the most important channel for organizing different aspects of flexible courses. almost 75 % of our students use the internet actively to read course information and about 60 % receive/send documents. about 60 % of the students also use the internet to search for relevant course material. this partly involves material the educational institution puts out on the web itself, partly following up course instructors’ references and partly an active search for supplementary material on the students’ own initiative. it is students on the longest courses 2and female students3 who are most active in regard to using these functions. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 6 a little over half the students state that they are active e-mail users. this activity varies with age. among students aged below 30, 60.5 % say that they use e-mail quite often or frequently, while of those aged 50 or over 45.1 % say the same (table 4, app). at the same time we should note that the other half of our respondents relatively seldom (never /occasionally) use e-mail. this probably has more to do with the fact that students feel no need for extended communication than with any lack of skills on their part. our data analysis, however, shows a significant correlation between previous experience of computers in education and use of e-mail (table 5, app). the two most ”communicative” functions are those least used (discussion fora and chatting). 47.8 % have never used ”discussion fora”, 74.3 % have never chatted online. only 4.4 % are active chatters (table 4). communication and contact with fellow students and academic staff adult flexible students primarily carry out their studying and learning on a solitary basis. it is therefore an important challenge on the part of the institutions at some point to provide individual help, support and encouragement, and to offer some measure of academic and social integration (grepperud 2005 b). in the present situation this takes place primarily during the plenary sessions. in our survey, however, we have seen it as important to find out if, and to what extent, contact outside plenary sessions occurs. table 5 shows the fora used by the students and the extent of these contacts. the level of activity may be described as “less than medium” and is distributed more or less equally among the three arenas: telephone, internet/e-mail and physical (face-to-face) meetings. table 5: contact with fellow-students outside class sessions, by communication and meeting form. percentage. (n) telephone internet/e-mail physical meetings never 17.7 17.2 25.3 occasionally 52.6 56.6 47.1 quite often 22.3 21.9 20.7 frequently 7.4 4.2 7.0 total 100 (1311) 100 (1283) 100 (1337) do students prefer one type of contact to another, or is it the case that activity in one area breeds activity in another? a bivariat correlation analysis shows that there are weak but positive correlations between telephone and internet contacts (pearson corr. 0.264, p<.01), telephone contact and physical meetings (pearson corr. 0.233, p<.01) and between internet contact and physical meetings (pearson corr. 0.107, p<.01). since these correlations are weak, no great significance should be attached to them. in other words, we found no support for our assumption. students following professional training courses, primarily female first-time students, are the most active users of all three communication and meeting channels (table 6, 7 and 8, app). in regard to the telephone and physical meetings, they show significantly higher activity than the other student groups. in regard to telephone use, 43.2 % of these students state that they use it frequently while for example 10.5 % of the students following courses of shorter duration do the same. for physical meetings, 34.3 % of students on professional training courses show a high level of activity, while for example only 6 % of students on master’s degree courses do so. in terms of use of the internet as a communication channel, our survey shows that 30 % of students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 7 on professional training courses have a high level of activity versus 20 % of students following courses of shorter duration. our data also show that contact with teachers outside plenary sessions occurs seldom compared to contact between the students themselves. the most common response category was use of telephone and internet ”occasionally” (table 6). it is mainly those following the longest studies (professional training and master’s degree courses) who report that they have occasional telephone contact with their teachers (table 9, app). the internet/e-mail plays a more significant role in teacher contact than the other communication forms. almost 1/5 of the students state that they often or frequently contact their teachers in this way. use of the internet varies with age among the respondents. while 30 % of respondents under 30 use this channel, 11 % of those over 50 do the same (table 10, app). table. 6: contact with teachers outside group sessions, by communication and meeting form. percentage. (n) telephone internet/e-mail letter/fax physical meetings never 43.5 10.8 86.5 72.9 occasionally 53.5 71.0 12.7 25.5 quite often 2.6 14.6 0.8 2.2 frequently 0.5 3.6 0.3 total 100 (1279) 100 (1388) 100 (1185) 100 (1222) of the students report that they meet their teachers outside ordinary teaching periods and plenary sessions. two factors may offer an explanation for this: i) the students in question live in physical proximity to their campus, or ii) meetings with teachers are part of the actual study scheme. this may occur in connection with writing essays or during praxis periods. master’s degree course students (36.3 %) and professional training students (29.5 %) are those who most frequently state that they have meetings of this nature with their teachers (table 11, app). ict in everyday education – concluding reflections the results from this survey of ict use in flexible education in norway may be summed up in the following three conclusions: good access the main picture is that the respondents do have very good access to ict. however, there are variations, particularly visible in connection with occupational status. employees with low occupational status come out less favourably than the others. in this group we find a substantial number of students following professional studies, and they are employed as unskilled workers on a part-time basis within the health care and education sectors. the disparities in access to ict in the workplace, on the other hand, do not seem to have any negative impact on the overall study efforts in this sample. this can be explained by the fact that 86 % of the respondents claim that their study activities primarily take place at home (grepperud, rønning, støkken 2006 :47). there is no doubt that good access provides a solid basis for increasing the use of ict in flexible education. on the other hand, there is no obvious or linear correlation between access and use. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 8 for instance, it is a well known fact that there may be substantial competition between family members at home or colleagues at work to get the opportunity (time) to use the computer. in the swedish version of our questionnaire, we asked the following question: ”if you have access to a computer, can you use it whenever you want”? among 100 flexible students at gävle college, 76 % answered ”yes” and 24 % ”no” to this question (unpublished data). women in particular point to men’s power of definition in these contexts, although it is hardly perceived as an insurmountable problem. another obstacle to getting access to the full potential of ict is the different standards and variations in bandwidth installed in norwegian homes. this imposes limitations on what is possible to actually send or receive over the web. the situation today is that between 30 % and 50 % of norwegian households have access to high speed bandwidth (ssb 2006). the correlation between access and use is also influenced by the student’s own level of digital competence. for some students, the educational context provides their first encounter with ict. lack of experience and skills can easily turn out to be a source of annoyance and an extra burden. but competence deficiency is most likely a diminishing problem. a national survey investigating the population’s digital competence indicates that most people have come to acquire a fair amount of experience with computers on an everyday level (tønseth et al 2006). our survey supports this impression of the present situation, as 2/3 of the respondents reported having some experience with ict from earlier education. on the other hand it has been shown that some of the specially-designed computer and internet systems currently in use in educational contexts can lead to problems and frustrations. for example, different learning management systems (lms) are still a source of difficulties for many students (nyhus & nordkvelle 2003:146; grepperud & haugsbakk 2003). using basic functions in the prestudy for this survey, we concluded that adult, flexible students had a cautious but positive attitude to the use of ict in study programmes (grepperud et al 2004). the present survey goes far towards confirming this conclusion (grepperud et al 2006). internet use is not characterized by the advanced or spectacular, but by simple communication such as searching for information and sending/receiving textual material the communicative/interactive functions are used in an even more modest fashion. although there are examples of the opposite (dysthe 2001, nyhus & nordkvelle 2003), such limited communicative interaction is confirmed by a number of other studies as well. we also have evidence that internet use in itself may be described as being carried out at a low cognitive level (bullen 1998; løkensgard hoel 2003, nyhus & nordkvelle 2003, grepperud & haugsbakk 2003). a number of factors may shed some light on these priorities (bullen 1988). we would like to draw attention to three central points: i) characteristics particular to the adult, flexible student, ii) the students’ general computer habits and iii) educational institutions’ use of lms. in their busy daily routine, it is important for students in this category to spend their study time as effectively as possible. they are concerned to establish a satisfactory balance between the work they put into their studies and what they get in return. for that reason, many adult students say they are very pleased to be able to use simple basic functions because this makes their study routine easier (grepperud, rønning, støkken 2004). participation in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 9 discourse with fellow students on the internet demands an effort from the students that exceeds both the time they have at their disposal and the returns they get from it. our respondents seem to satisfy their need for academic discussions elsewhere, i.e. during plenary sessions (grepperud & haugsbakk 2003). students’ tendency to use simple basic functions must be seen in light of the predominant use of these functions in other contexts. studies of computer use in the norwegian population at large show, for example, that searching for information, the use of various services and e-mail communication are key functions (rønning et al 2005; tønseth et al 2006; hansen møllerud et al 2006) students’ internet activities also reflect how educational institutions themselves shape the pattern of use in flexible studies. the implementation of lms in higher education institutions in norway has played a significant role in determining that course organization and administration take place via the internet. this applies to both on-campus programmes and flexible studies. in teaching, however, little weight is attached to academic communication via the internet. serious professional discourse is still the exception rather than the rule (alexandersen 2001). this is usually mentioned as a possibility which is open to students to use if they wish. our survey also shows that female students and students on longer study programmes are the most active users of basic functions. this activity on the part of female students can be taken as an indication of a more general finding implying that they are more strategic ict users than men (rønning et al 2005). their level of activity also says something about female students’ study and learning strategies. perhaps they are also more dutiful than their male counterparts, and adhere faithfully to the official scheme designed by the educational institution? the differences in use connected to length of study are probably due to the fact that skill develops over time through continuous use. it is also likely that longer studies require a wider repertoire of use. communication and contact – need for improvement? the final conclusion that can be drawn from our study is that communication outside plenary sessions is not as extensive as might be expected. this concerns both contact between students and between students and teachers. we had expected to see a more extensive use of internet/e-mail, since e-mail is now generally widespread in the everyday context (table 5). in addition, we also found that there are minor differences between the different media of communication (telephone, physical meetings and internet/e-mail). the results also show that, despite low frequency of use, most respondents have one or other form of interaction with their fellow students and with their teachers as well. the results therefore indicate that digital communication has by no means replaced other media such as the telephone or physical meetings. in other words, the internet may be considered a supplement to the two more conventional types of student contact. just as interesting is the fact that almost one-third of the students state that they ”quite often” or ”frequently” meet face to face. but for physical meetings to take place, it is necessary for students to live close to each other. professional training courses and a number of continuing education programmes (single subjects of more/less than one year’s duration) tend to be available in particular regional areas and therefore recruit most of their students from there (grepperud 2004). master’s degree courses, on the other seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 10 hand, often draw their intake from a wider geographical area. this makes it difficult for students to meet outside the scheduled plenary sessions. there is also reason to emphasize that students on professional training courses, and hence most first-time students, are the most active in relation to maintaining contact with their fellow students. the survey shows that this group is also the most active in regard to obtaining support from their local environment (grepperud m. fl. 2006). in view of this, the degree of interaction and contact between sessions cannot only be explained in terms of the digital and non-digital arenas in which it takes place. it is also a matter of the student’s previous educational background and the scope of the course in question. contact with teachers takes place ”occasionally”, and primarily via the telephone and internet/e-mail. the most interesting point here is that the use of internet/e-mail is now the most common channel of communication between student and institution and teachers (table 6). other channels are considerably less used. although not expressly demonstrated in our survey, there is reason to assume that student communications addressed to teachers have grown in extent through the use of internet/e-mail. that the internet should assume such a prevalent position is quite natural, as a result of the following factors: • it can be difficult to get hold of teachers in any other way except by prior appointment. • contact is often linked to written work/texts. • internet/e-mail communication entails a ”state of mind” which makes it easier to contact teachers. for many adult students, not knowing the academic staff very well and perhaps out of (a rather exaggerated?) respect for academia can act as a barrier to direct contact (klingenberg 2005). the internet gives new and improved access to teaching staff in higher education. this has both positive and negative consequences. for teachers, increased access has led to more claims on their attention. they can shield themselves from students’ questions and queries to a lesser extent than previously. from the students’ point of view, an immediate response to their communications is expected. conclusion according to our survey, the pc/internet now appears to be an integral part of study programmes and adults’ everyday study contexts. all our respondents have in one way or another access to this medium. its use is primarily directed towards what may be characterized as basic functions, by which we mean functions such as producing written texts and searching for, receiving and sending information. the communicative functions (discussions, chatting etc) are considerably less in use. this reveals a more general trend in the use of ict in education, regardless of educational level. in the field of ict research, concern is often expressed over students’ limited use of communicative functions. for this reason, emphasis is also put on explaining why this is so, and various suggestions have been put forward for encouraging greater prevalence of digital discourse. nyhus & nordkvelle point to two problematic factors in these analyses: factors of an incompatible nature are often compared, and comparisons are made out of context (nyhus & nordkvelle 2003: 152-154). this means that the premises and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 11 recommendations presented do not adequately reflect the actual situation. such recommendations therefore tend to be too general to be helpful. we do not share this concern over the modest extent of digital communication. our survey gives no grounds either for asserting that educational institutions should put much greater effort into increasing such communication. an alternative interpretation of our data would therefore be that digital communication has found its natural level in the flexible study model and represents an important supplement in its present form. it thus actually serves an important function. researchers’ unease over the lack of digital academic discourse is not shared by the students themselves; partly because they find room for such discussions in other contexts, partly because these are highly self-directed students. since flexible students only exceptionally find themselves in an on-campus study environment, however, it remains a challenge for educational institutions to establish a situation in which students feel a sense of belonging and encouragement (tinto 1987). there are differing opinions on how far flexible students need this, but there is evidence that many adults students feel the need for some sense of inclusion despite their off-campus status (kember et al 2001, roos 2002, grepperud et al 2004). its importance has to do with creating structure, seeking support and maintaining motivation. women appear to attach greater weight to this than men, although the results here are not unambiguous (grepperud 2005 b). given all this, we might expect there to be a higher degree of communication and interaction in the intervals between plenary sessions and that the digital arenas would be frequently used to strengthen social and academic integration. since communication between students is not in fact extensive, this can be explained by the model itself and by the availability of a variety of arenas for interaction. we must also remember, however, that these students attach great importance to support and cooperation in other social arenas, primarily the home environment and from their own partner (grepperud et al 2006). summing up, we can say that students’ use of ict depends on a number of factors. the results of our survey highlight the importance of two key factors in flexible education: the study model itself and features particular to the study context of adult flexible students. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 12 bibliography alexandersen, j. m. fl (2001). nettbasert læring i høgre utdanning. rapport nr. 1. tromsø. norgesuniversitetet. arneberg, p., wilhelmsen, j. & støver, l.e. (2005). utredning om digital tilstand i høyere utdanning. rapport nr. 1. tromsø. norgesuniversitetet bullen, m. (1998). participation and critical thinking in online university and distance education. in journal of distance education, vol. 9, pp. 1-32. dysthe, o. (red.) (2001). dialog, samspel og læring. oslo. abstrakt forlag. erstad, o. (2003). dialogens vilkår i nettbasert læring. i arneberg, p. (red.): læring i dialog på nettet. soff-rapport 1/2003, tromsø. erstad, o. (2006). digital kompetanse i skolen – en innføring. oslo. universitetsforlaget grepperud, g., støkken, a. m., toska, j.a. (2000). skyggetilværelse og rampelys – utvikling av fjernundervisning i norsk høyere utdanning. i grepperud, g. & toska, j. a. (red.): mål, myter og marked. soff-rapport 1/2000. tromsø. grepperud, g., rønning, w.m., støkken, a.m. (2004). liv og læring – voksnes vilkår for fleksibel læring. trondheim. vox. grepperud, g. & haugsbakk, g. (2003). ikke helt som planlagt – en vurdering av nettbaserte aktiviteter i studiet ”skoleutvikling med vekt på pedagogisk utviklingsarbeid”. lillehammer. hil. grepperud, g. (2004). allmennlærer – og førskolelærerutdanning ved høgskolen i nesna som fleksibel utdanning 2000 – 2003. notat. upubl. grepperud, g. (2005 b): hverdagsliv og studieliv – hvilke forhold innvirker på frafall hos voksne fleksible studenter. i uniped, 3, s.15-21. grepperud, g., rønning, w.m., støkken, a.m. (2006). studier og hverdagsliv – voksne studenter i fleksibel læring. oslo. vox. haugsbakk, g. (2000). interaktivitet, teknologi og læring – en forstudie. itu-rapport 6, oslo. hoel, t. løkensgard (2003) dialogen i “fleksibel rettleiing”. i fritze, y., haugsbakk, g., nordkvelle, y.(red.): dialog og nærhet. ict og undervisning. kristiansand. høyskoleforlaget. kember, d., lee, k. & li, n. (2001). cultivating a sense of belonging in part-time students. in international journal of lifelong education, vol, 20, no. 4, pp.326341. klingenberg, e. (2005). hvordan går det? veiledning av voksne studenter. artikkel til u-vett-rapport. tromsø. universitetet i tromsø. under arbeid. krumsvik, r (2006). ict in the school. ict – initiated school development in the lower secondary school. dr.philos avhandling. universitetet i bergen møllerud-hanssen, m., kalvøy,a., pilskog, g.m. & sølverud, a-h. (2006): informasjonssamfunnet 2005. ssb notat nr. 13. http://www.ssb.no/emner/10/03/ikt/ nyhus, l. & nordkvelle, y. (2003). erfaringer, forskning og praktiske anvisninger. i fritze, y., haugsbakk, g., nordkvelle, y. (ed.) (2003). dialog og nærhet. ikt og undervisning. kristiansand. høyskoleforlaget. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 13 roos, g. (2002). nya studerande. studerande vid studiecentra i hälsingland studieåret 1997/98. rapport nr. 5. hälsingland. rønning, w.m., sølvberg, a. m., tønseth, c. (2005). digitale skillelinjer er der fremdeles. i samfunnsspeilet nr. 3. ssb. http://www.ssb.no/ssp/utg/200503/04 ssb (2002). bruk av ict i næringslivet 2001. nos c 734. http://www.ssb.no/emner/10/03/nos_c734/ ssb (2004). http://www.ssb.no/emner/10/03/ikthus/tab-2004-12-08-05.html http://www.ssb.no/emner/10/03/ikthus/tab-2004-12-08-01.html ssb (2005). norsk mediebarometer 2005. http//www/ssb.no/emner/07/02/30/medie ssb(2006). fleire og raskare breiband. http://www.ssb.no/inet/ tinto, v. (1987). leaving college: rethinking the cause and cures of student attrition. university of chicago press. tns gallup (2005). http://www.tnsgallup.no/index.asp?did=121473&argument=&title=norge +p%e5+verdenstoppen tønseth, c., finbak, l., rønning, w.m., sølvberg, a., (2006): digitale skillelinjer: voksnes bruk av pc og internett. all-undersøkelsen om ikt. under trykking. ntnu. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 14 appendix table 1, app. access to internet at home for adult flexible students, by age. percentage. (n=1442) age =>50 40 – 49 30–39 < 30 total have access now 96.1 96.0 93.5 88.5 94.2 expect access soon 0.6 2.3 3.9 5.5 3.1 no access 3.4 1.7 2.6 6.1 2.8 total 100 (178) 100 (529) 100 (570) 100 (165) 100 (1442) p<.05 table.2, app. access to internet at work for adult flexible students, by age. percentage. (n=1189) age =>50 40–49 30–39 < 30 total have access now 96.3 89.8 84.7 75.7 87.0 expect access soon 1.2 2.1 2.2 5.7 2.4 no access 2.5 8.0 13.1 18.6 10.5 total 100 (161) 100 (423) 100 (465) 100 (140) 100 (1189) p=.00 table 3, app. access to internet at work for adult flexible students, by employment status. percentage. (n=1172) full-time part-time leave of absence unemployed/r ehabilitation/ sick leave total have access now 94.6 81.4 71.0 52.7 87.0 expect access soon 1.6 2.7 6.5 6.8 2.4 no access 3.9 15.8 22.6 40.5 10.6 total 100 (699) 100 (366) 100 (31) 100 (76) 100 (1172) p=.00 table 4, app. use of e-mail, by age. percentage. (n= 1420) age =< 30 30-39 40-49 >50 total never 3.6 6.0 3.3 6.9 4.9 occasionally 35.9 39.1 44.1 48.0 41.6 quite often 32.9 33.7 36.7 29.7 34.2 frequently 27.5 21.1 15.9 15.4 19.3 total 100 (167) 100 (563) 100 (515) 100 (274) 100 (1420) p=.00 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 15 table 5, app. use of email, by previous experience of computers in education. percentage. (n=1407) previous computer use no previous computer use total never 4.4 5.8 4.8 occasionally 39.6 45.8 41.6 quite often 34.5 33.1 34.0 frequently 21.5 15.3 19.5 total 100 (942) 100 (465) 100 (1407) p<.05 table 6, app. contact with fellow students by telephone, by education category. percentage. (n=1318) professional education master single subject 1 year and more single subject less than 1 year total never 8.6 15.6 25.8 35.6 17.8 occasionally 48.1 67.5 57.7 53.9 52.6 quite often 31.3 13.0 14.7 8.2 22.3 frequently 11.9 3.9 1.8 2.3 7.4 total 100 (696) 100 (77) 100 (326) 100 (219) 100 (1318) p=.00 table 7, app. contact with fellow students via internet, by education category. percentage. (n=1289) professional education master single subject 1 year and more single subject less than 1 year total never 13.9 6.0 19.2 29.1 17.5 occasionally 55.7 68.7 59.4 50.0 56.5 quite often 25.6 21.7 17.3 17.8 21.9 frequently 4.7 3.6 4.0 3.0 4.2 total 100 (653) 100 (83) 100 (323) 100 (230) 100 (1289) p=.00 table 8, app. contact with fellow students through physical meetings, by education category. percentage. (n=1344) professional education master single subject 1 year and more single subject less than 1 year total never 16.5 31.3 33.4 37.0 25.1 occasionally 50.1 62.7 46.0 34.9 47.2 quite often 25.1 3.6 16.9 18.9 20.7 frequently 8.3 2.4 3.7 9.2 7.0 total 100 (697) 100 (83) 100 (326) 100 (238) 100 (1344) p=.00 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 16 table 9, app. contact with teachers via telephone, by education category. percentage. (n=1284) professional education master single subject 1 year and more single subject less than 1 year total never 38.0 28.6 51.6 54.6 43.6 occasionally 57.8 67.5 46.9 43.6 53.3 quite often 3.6 1.3 1.6 1.4 2.6 frequently 0.6 2.6 0.4 0.5 total 100 (669) 100 (77) 100 (320) 100 (218) 100 (1284) p=.00 table 10, app. contact with teachers via internet, by age. percentage. (n=1388) age = < 30 30-39 40-49 >50 total never 7.9 12.3 10.5 9.4 10.8 occasionally 62.2 68.6 73.8 79.4 71.0 quite often 20.7 15.4 12.9 10.6 14.6 frequently 9.1 3.6 2.8 0.6 3.6 total 100 (164) 100 (551) 100 (503) 100 (170) 100 (1388) table 11, app. contact with teachers via physical meetings, by education category. percentage. (n=1228) professional education master single subject 1 year and more single subject less than 1 year total never 70.6 63.2 76.1 78.5 72.9 occasionally 26.3 35.5 21.3 19.2 24.5 quite often 2.7 1.3 1.6 2.3 2.3 frequently 0.5 0.3 0.3 total 100 (632) 100 (76) 100 (306) 100 (214) 100 (1228) 1 nou is a national initiative for change and innovation in norwegian higher education. it was established in 2004 by the norwegian ministry of education and research. 2 difference between courses of study, all three functions (p=0.00). 3“read course information” and ”receive/send documentation”(p=0.00), for ”searching for course material” (p<0.01) microsoft word watten et al gender profiles.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 gender profiles of internet and mobile phone use among norwegian adolescents reidulf g. watten1, jo kleiven2, knut inge fostervold3, halvor fauske4 and frode volden5 1,2) department health and social science – psychology lillehammer university college, norway e-mail: reidulf.g.watten@hil.no e-mail: jo.kleiven@hil.no 3) institute of psychology.university of oslo and lillehammer university college, norway e-mail: knut.inge.fostervold@hil.no 4) department of health and social science lillehammer university college, norway e-mail: halvor.fauske@hil.no 5) institute of media design and communication, gjøvik university college and department of health and social science psychology lillehammer university college, norway e-mail: frode.volden@hig.no abstract the aim of this current project was to investigate gender profiles in the use of information and communication technology (ict), primarily the internet and mobile phones, and problems encountered in the use of these technologies. the sample survey consisted of teenagers, 4294 15-16 year olds (2067 females and 2227 males) from two counties in eastern norway, who had participated in a nationwide survey administered by the national institute of public health. the results showed that norwegian girls used the internet far more often social activities such as chatting and e-mail while boys preferred to use it for entertainment and computational activities, such as gaming, e-commerce, viewing multimedia, and for programming. girls used their mobile phones far more often for text messaging (short message service sms) than boys, who more frequently used their mobile phones for technical functions (alarm, gaming, internet, etc.). there was no gender gap in everyday phone usage. both genders experienced few of the problems associated with ict use. the most frequent problem encountered by both genders was increased economic costs. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 2 introduction in most european countries, there has been a marked increase in the use of ict over the past decade. this has also been the case in the norway (vaage, 2002), most notably among young people (e.g. torgersen, 2004; 2007; øia and fauske, 2005). consequently, a number of studies have been conducted in order to explore the consequences of greater ict usage, inclusive of gender (e.g. lie, 1997; volman et al. 2001; li and kirkup 2007). already in 1998 kraut et al. in a pioneering longitudinal investigation showed that frequent use of the internet could be linked to participants’ smaller social circles, poor communication with family, and loneliness and/or depression. six years later, however, bargh and mckenna (2004), in a comprehensive review on a number of internet-related issues reached more optimistic conclusions. although increased internet usage was found to have adverse consequences, the authors presented evidence that showed people “to be adapting pretty well to the brave new wired (and soon to become wireless) social world” (p. 586). however, the rising importance of ict in modern societies and developmental trends in gender-ict relationships suggest that more research should be devoted to male and female usage of ict. it not only seems that ict is gendered in terms of use and design, but also in the way in which males and females position themselves in relation to information technology. for instance kelan (2007) reported that men and women make different assumptions about technology in describing ict as “toys” and “tools”, respectively. crump et al. (2007) found that women described their gender identity as an important and integral part of ict, although the positions were different. men had a functional perspective on ict while women preferred its more human and softer side. however, griffiths et al. (2007) found the continued male domination of the ict workplace, the existence of informal gendered networks, and female ict professionals reporting a “long hours” and a “presenteeism” culture. in the case of mobile phones, most research has been done on possible health hazards posed by these devices to adult users; it focuses on topics such as social and psychological problems (bianchi and phillips, 2005), safety and accidents (pouysti et al. 2005), and radiation (blettner, 2000). other consequences such as bullying and economic problems have largely been neglected, especially among children and adolescents (brettingham, 2005). the gender aspects of ict usage need to be fleshed out because the above aforementioned findings suggest that a negative trend could threaten gender equality in an information and knowledge society. it is especially important to look at children and adolescents. the majority of studies on gender issues related to ict have been focused on adult populations and less research attention has concentrated on issues important to young people (livingstone and helsper, 2007). both gender attitudes and user profiles of ict are established in youth, but changes in user behaviour and attitudes are also probably easier to induce among teenagers rather than adults. the aim of this project was, therefore, to generate greater empirical knowledge of user profiles of ict and mobile phones among adolescents in a large representative sample. gender issues were approached to in terms of possible differences in usage and problems associated with internet and mobile phone use. the design also enabled us to look at the use of internet and mobile phones at the same time in the same sample, which is a methodological advantage when investigating ict behaviour. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 3 materials and methods subjects as part of nationwide survey undertaken by the national institute of public health in 2003 all 15-16 year old adolescents in two counties in eastern norway were invited to take part in a study of lifestyle factors and health. the study included questions about the use of modern communication, computer technology, and mobile phones.. after obtaining their parents’ informed consent, 4294 adolescents (2067 young females and 2227 males) were included in the sample. internet use internet use was assessed by self-report concerning the following domains: the subjects were asked if they used the internet for the following six purposes: 1) information purposes/”surfing,” 2) electronic mail, 3) e-commerce, 4) chatting, 5) gaming and 6) other activities (i.e. videos, films, software). the responses were measured as a dichotomous variable (yes/no). moreover, they were also asked to report if their internet use had negative consequences in these six life domains: 1) school, 2) family life, 3) friends, 4) social activities, 5) economy and 6) other activities. the responses were measured as a dichotomous variable (yes/no). there were no further specifications of potential problems. all valid respondents had access to the internet both at home and at school. mobile phone use the use of mobile phones was also assessed by self-report and the subjects were asked if they used a mobile phone for the following purposes: 1) verbal telephone calls, 2) text messaging (short message service sms), 3) playing games on the phone, 4) internet activities (wap), 5) sending and receiving fax, 6) watch (keep the time)/alarm purposes, and 7) memory aid (i.e. shopping lists, time tables etc.). the responses were measured as a dichotomous variable (yes/no). a large majority of the sample had their own mobile phones (92.8%). statistical analyses in addition to descriptive statistics, gender differences in internet and mobile phone use and problems associated with usage of the internet were tested by using mixed-design analyses of variance (anova). here, gender was treated as a between-subjects factor. the within-subjects factors in the three different analyses were: 1) the six forms of internet use, 2) the seven forms of mobile phone use and 3) the six categories of problems associated with internet use. dichotomous data (no use/problems = 0; use/problems =1) constituting a “dummy” type variable were used in these analyses. the sample was quite large and effect size statistics could be discussed instead of parametric statistics such as anova. however, since the testing of statistical interactions was important, neither effect size (d) nor chi-square was an appropriate approach here. ethics informed consent was obtained from the adolescents’ parents and the project was conducted in accordance with the norwegian research council’s standards of research ethics. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 4 results figure 1 depicts the results broken down for gender and the six domains of internet use. 0.00 0.20 0.40 0.60 0.80 1.00 inform ation c hatting * e -m ail * g am ing * o ther * e -shopping * m e a n s c o r e ( % u se ) boys girls figure 1. gender and the six domains of internet use. n=4294 adolescents (2067 females and 2227 males). asterisks mark the domains exhibiting significant gender differences when considered separately. the anova is summed up in table 1. clearly, both the two main effects and their interaction are statistically significant. source type iii ss df m. s. f sig. domains 985.30 5 197.06 1419.22 0.00 domains * gender 98.79 5 19.76 142.29 0.00 error (usage) 2979.73 21460 0.14 intercept 3918.27 1 3918.27 8076.89 0.00 gender 5.17 1 5.17 10.67 0.00 error 2082.14 4292 0.49 anova table 1. gender and the six domains of internet use. first, the significant domains effect shows the six forms of internet use to be employed to quite different degrees. irrespective of gender differences, there were marked differences in usage between the six domains. information acquisition, or “surfing,” was the most frequently used, and e-commerce was the least frequently used among the six domains. second, the significant gender effect indicates that boys in general used the internet more than girls. across all six domains, boys reported greater internet use than the girls do. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 5 most importantly, the significant interaction effect (domains * gender) shows that the two genders employed the six domains of use differently. there are marked gender differences in several domains of use. girls actually reported more use than boys in two of the domains while boys scored higher in three other domains. examining the data in more detail, no outstanding gender difference can be found in the internet use domain of information acquisition/“net surfing.” among both genders, about 64% of respondents use the internet to as reference tool. chatting and e–mail, however, were more used by the females. significantly more girls (1284 out of 2067, or 62.1%) than boys (1043 out of 2227, or 46.8%) used the internet for e-mail (chi-square = 100.89; df =1; p < 0.001). for chatting the corresponding percentages were 59.9 % and 50.7% (chi-square = 37.05; df = 1; p < 0.001). the three remaining forms of use were more popular with the boys. first, there was a considerable gender difference in e-commerce. among the boys, 19.9% had been using e-commerce, but only 4.7% of the girls (chi-square = 223.5; df = 1; p < .000). second, boys (36.3%) played games on the internet more frequently than with the girls (17.6%), and the difference was statistically significant (chi-square = 188.4; df = 1; p < 0.001). in so far as “other” use of the internet was concerned, the males were ahead (25.5%) of the females (17.0%), exhibiting yet another significant effect (chi-square = 45.9; df = 1; p < 0,001). figure 2 shows the internet related problem categories experienced by girls and boys. 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 e conom y school * social activities f am ily * o ther f riends m e a n s c o r e ( % w it h p r o b le m ) boys girls figure 2. gender and problems associated with internet use. n=4294 adolescents (2067 young females and 2227 males). asterisks mark the problem categories exhibiting significant gender differences when considered separately. variance analysis was applied to these results. in this case, both the main effects and the interaction effect were statistically significant. in sum, the six problem categories exhibited far greater differences between the boys and girls seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 6 than their ict usage patterns; boys generally reported more problems than girls and the prevalence of problems was very dependent on gender (see anova table 2). source type iii s.s. df m.s. f sig. problems 46.53 5 9.31 223.23 0.00 problems * gender 0.70 5 0.14 3.36 0.00 error (problems) 894.69 21460 0.04 intercept 68.97 1 68.97 909.38 0.00 gender 0.26 1 0.26 3.38 0.07 error 325.53 4292 0.08 anova table 2. however, if considered independently, most problem domains showed no significant gender differences. boys experienced more problems than girls only in school and in the home. while 170 out of 2227 boys (7.6%) reported school problems related to internet use, only 115 out of 2067 girls (5.6%) did so. this difference is statistically significant (chi-square = 7.4; df = 1; p < 0.001). family problems were also reported by a larger proportion of the boys (3.6%) than girls (1.9%)(chi-square = 10.8; df = 1; p = 0.001). there were no significant gender differences in the other domains. figure 3 shows the gender profiles for the seven domains of mobile phone use. 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 sm s * c alls c lock/alarm * g am es m em ory aid internet f ax * m e a n s c o r e ( % u se ) boys girls figure 3. gender and the seven domains of mobile phone use. n=3053 adolescents (1577 females and 1476 males). asterisks mark the domains yielding significant gender differences when considered separately. even here, an analysis of variance was useful. gender proved not to be a significant factor in this case. however, large differences could be found seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 7 among the seven domains of use. while sms were almost universally used, very few had used their mobile phones for fax services. the interaction effect was clearly significant (see anova table 3). source type iii s.s. df m.s. f sig. usage 2402.25 6 400.38 3598.67 0.00 usage * gender 5.26 6 0.88 7.88 0.00 error (usage) 2036.66 18306 0.11 intercept 7690.85 1 7690.85 34661.23 0.00 gender 0.30 1 0.30 1.34 0.25 error 676.98 3051 0.22 anova table 3. in this case, a closer examination of the data is still needed to understand the significant interaction effect. when the use domains were considered independently, no significant gender differences were found for ordinary phone calls, internet use, gaming or memory aid. however, 99.4% of the girls reported using the mobile phone for text messaging (sms), while 97.5% of the boys did so. this difference yields a significant chi value (chi-square = 18.1; df = 1; p < 0.001). girls also used their mobile phones as either watches or alarms more frequently than boys (81.9% vs. 75.9%; chi = 17.9; df =1; p < 0.001), but boys more frequently used their phone as a fax machine. while 6.1% of the boys had used their cellular phones for fax purposes, only 3.2% of the girls had done so (chi = 15.6; df = 1; p < 0.001). discussion the present study confirms that adolescents have easy access to the internet at home, school, or in an other locale. mobile phones also seem to be available to almost everyone and internet access from mobiles phones is also common, especially in the nordic countries. therefore, use of ict seems to be an everyday socio-cultural phenomenon for young norwegian adolescents, like most of other european adolescents. although both girls and boy frequently mobile phones and the internet, our results show marked gender differences in both ict areas. in the case of internet use, the three main purposes both girls and boys were information acquisition, chatting and electronic mail, while gaming, other purposes (such as software testing, viewing videos and films), and e-commerce were the three least frequent purposes. there were no significant gender differences for information acquisition, but the girls used the internet far more frequently for chatting and e-mail than boys. on the other hand, boys invested more time in gaming, e-commerce, and other purposes (videos, films, software). these gender differences were quite considerable. both genders used mobile phones mostly for text messaging and ordinary telephone calls and less frequently for other purposes such as keeping the time or for alarms (like a watch), for gaming, as memory aid, and, by far the rarest, as a fax. for most use domains, there were no gender differences. however, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 8 girls used text messaging and clock/alarm functions far more often than boys. only the fax function was more often used by boys than by girls. the gender differences found for both internet and mobile phone use were not unexpected. differences observed between men and women in everyday life have been shown to found in the ict usage as well. (cf., e.g., cotton and jelenewicz, 2006; odell et al. 2000). for both internet and mobile phone use, we see a female preponderance for activities which involve relational aspects of behaviour such as chatting, e-mail, and text messaging sms. it is common knowledge both from general psychology and social psychology that in social and group dynamics females are more competent, skilled, devote more time to, and exhibit greater engagement than men. the key issues here are creating, developing, and sustaining human relations (carlson, 2003; hogg and vaughan, 2005). moreover, the girls might have better psychomotor skills (aschcraft, 2006) than boys when using ict. likewise, the young males in the study exhibited the anticipated predisposition for technical, instrumental, and game-related ict behaviour, thus, exhibiting gender-typical behaviour already well documented in cognitive and developmental psychology. very early in life, boys seem to be more interested in mechanical toys, puzzles etc. than do girls; these differences might reveal gender specific differences in brain functions in addition to gender roles. moreover, boys also tend to be more risk-prone and adventurous than girls (aschcraft 2005; siegler et al. 2006). therefore, it is to be expected that boys are more frequently engaged in ict activities such as gaming, e-commerce, and other activities. the last category in our study is somewhat heterogenic, including both software installation and testing, viewing videos and films, i.e. technical and computational activities which consistently have been shown to favour boys (li and kirkup, 2007). the large gender difference in e-commerce could also explained as hobby related, since most products bought on-line are probably software, hardware, and peripheral equipment. although we have no data on which category of films and videos viewed by adolescent boys, findings from other countries with a comparable technological and educational level suggest that pornography could be one possibility. for instance, flood (2007) in a large-scale investigation of australian 16 and 17 year-olds, showed that males were more likely to both seek out and visit x-rated movies and pornographic websites than girls. norwegian young males are probably similar to australian males in this respect. we researched problems associated with ict usage in five important life domains and discovered very few negative consequences. economic problems were the most, frequently raised concern, probably reflecting the simple fact that it is rather expensive for young people to be “online.” they are at an age when they have no regular income and are dependent on their family for economic support (telephone bills, commodities, software, etc.). in the case of the other domains (school, social, family, friends, other), the inimical effects of ict usage were marginal, ranging between 6 and 2 % reported problems. we found gender differences in two domains; boys reported far more deleterious impact on their schoolwork and family life than did girls. there were no significant differences for the other life domains. all in all, a large majority of norwegian adolescents experience few negative side effects of their ict use. conclusion norwegian girls use the internet far more often for social activities such as chatting and e-mail while boys prefer other activities such as gaming, ecommerce, viewing videos/films, and programming. comparable results were found in mobile phone use: girls are more frequent users of text messaging than boys, who, on the other hand, use their mobile phones’ functions such as gaming, fax service, and e-commerce. there were no gender differences for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 9 ordinary telephone calls. both genders experience rather few problems associated with ict use. references aschcraft, m.h. (2006). cognition. n.j. usa: pearson education. bargh, j.a., mckenna, k.y.a. (2004). the internet and social life. annual review of psychology., 55, 573-590. bianchi, a., phillips, j.g. (2005) psychological predictors of mobile phone use. cyberpsychology and behavior 8, 39-51. blettner, m. (2000) are mobile phones harmful? acta oncologica, 39, 927-930. brettingham, m. (2005). parents should restrict children’s use of mobile phones. british medical journal, 330, 109. carlson, n.r., martin, g.n., buskist, w. (2003). psychology. london: prentice hall. cotton, s.r., jelenewicz, s.m. (2006). a disappearing digital divide among college students? peeling away the layers of the digital divide. social science computer review¸24, 497-506. crump, b.j., logan, k.a., mcilroy, a. (2007) does gender still matter? a study of the views of women in the ict industry in new zealand. gender, work & organization, 14, 349-370. flood, m. (2007). exposure to pornography among youth in australia. journal of sociology, 43, 45-60. griffiths, m., moore, k., richardson, h. (2007) celebrating heterogeneity? a survey of female ict professionals in england. information, communication, & society, 10, 338-357. hogg, m.a., vaughan, g.m. (2005). social psychology. harlow: prentice hall. kelan, e. (2007). tools and toys: communicating gendered positions towards technology. information, communication, & society, 10, 358-383. kraut, r., lundmark, v., patterson, m., kiesler, s., mukopadhyay, t., scherlis, w. (1998). internet paradox. a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being? american psychologist, 53, 1017-1031. li, n. and kirkup, g. (2007). gender and cultural differences in the internet use: a study of china and the uk. computers and education, 48, 301-317. lie, m. (1997) technology and gender versus technology and work: social work and computers. acta sociologica, 40, 123-141. ling, r., yttri, b (2003). kontroll, frigjøring og status. mobiltelefon og maktforhold i familier og ungdomsgrupper (in norwegian). in f. engelstad and g. ødegård (eds.) ungdom, makt og mening. oslo: gyldendal akademisk. livingstone, s. & helsper, e. (20079. gradations in digital inclusion: children, young people, and the digital divide. new media & society, 9, 671-696. odell, p.m., korgen, k.o., schumacher, ph., delucci, m. (2000). internet use among female and male college students. cyberpsychology and behavior, 3, 855-862. poysti, l., rajalin, s., summala, h. (2005). factors influencing the use of cellular (mobile) phone during driving and hazards while using it. accident analysis and prevention., 37: 47-51. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 10 siegler,r., deloache,j., eisenberg,n (2006). how children develop. n.y.: worth publishers. torgersen, l. (2004). ungdoms digitale hverdag. (in norwegian). oslo: report nr. 8/04, nova. torgersen, l. (2007). kjønnsforskjeller i ungdoms bruk av pc, tv-spill og mobiltelefon (in norwegian). tidskrift for ungdomsforskning, 7,103-112. vaage, o.f. (2002). norsk kulturbarometer (in norwegian). oslo: report. central bureau of statistics. øia, t., fauske, h. (2005) oppvekst i norge (in norwegian). oslo: abstrakt forlag a/s. assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4705 ©2022 (katri koivuneva, heli ruokamo). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. assessing university students’ studyrelated burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review katri koivuneva faculty of education, university of lapland katri.koivuneva@ulapland.fi heli ruokamo faculty of education, university of lapland heli.ruokamo@ulapland.fi abstract previous research suggested a strong connection between students’ experiences of traditional learning environments and study-related burnout (brown et al., 2012; chen et al., 2017; meriläinen, 2014; kuittinen & meriläinen, 2014). however, digital learning environments and how they can pedagogically support students’ well-being remain, in many respects, an unexplored area (ruokamo et al., 2016; lewin & lundie, 2016). moreover, pedagogical assessment, including how it can support students’ academic wellbeing, often lags behind the latest technological developments (spector, 2014; popenici & kerr, 2017; bates et al., 2020; holmes et al., 2019; luckin et al., 2016). this research systematically reviews the literature relevant to study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments. it is done by surveying articles published between 2012 and 2021. first, the findings suggest that there is a body of studies focusing on certain dimensions of study-related burnout. second, students’ well-being in digital learning environments is less studied and relies mostly on emotional achievement theory and research on academic emotions. finally, supporting students’ academic wellhttps://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4705 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:katri.koivuneva@ulapland.fi mailto:heli.ruokamo@ulapland.fi assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 2 being through digital assessment is mostly enabled through formative assessment, but it is moving toward artificial intelligence and game-based assessment. thus, more research is needed on the subject. keywords: digital learning environment, digital assessment, academic well-being, studyrelated burnout, systematic literature review introduction “constant change” has perhaps never better described the field of higher education and educational technology than in the current global situation. the worldwide pandemic and ecologically sustainable endeavors to bring about human interactions have created a demand for transforming most in-person education to online learning. both the oecd (2021) and united nations (2015) have defined individual and collective well-being and changing and equal learning environments as central to their strategies for the next decade. in an era of expanding technological possibilities, digital learning environments are part of the space of university education (e.g., väätäjä & ruokamo, 2021; thompson, 2013; luckin, 2018; bhagat & kim, 2020). as digitality and diverse digital learning environments have become an ever-expanding area in university pedagogy as well and the rates of experienced academic burnout are constantly rising, it is a necessity to identify how these phenomena have been previously studied and what factors should be considered in future research on digital university pedagogy. while university students’ well-being and study-related burnout in traditional learning environments is rather well studied (salmela-aro & upadaya; 2020, boada-grau et al., 2015; pekrun et al., 2010), it remains unclear as to how the rapid digitalization of university pedagogy is affecting students’ academic well-being in different digital learning environments and how digital assessment can support students’ well-being online. university students’ academic well-being as a topic has been approached by examining factors such as exhaustion, cynicism toward the meaning of studies, and a sense of inadequacy as means to measure their study-related burnout (salmela-aro et al., 2009; parpala et al., 2013; boada-grau et al., 2015). while the variations in different digital education platforms increase, it has yet to be examined how students perceive digital learning environments and how they are connected to students’ learning processes and academic well-being (parpala et al., 2021; luckin, 2017). in this context, study-related burnout remains a significant indicator of students’ study processes as well as academic drop-out and achievement (parpala & lindblom-ylänne, 2012; väisänen et al., 2018; asikainen et al., 2020). academic emotions and their role in supporting students’ wellbeing, and thus preventing academic burnout, have also been shown to play an important role in their academic endeavors (asikainen et al., 2020; pekrun et al., 2010). assessment of study-related burnout and academic well-being in traditional teachingassessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 3 learning settings is largely formative (e.g., herrmann et al., 2016, parpala & lindblomylänne, 2012; salmela-aro et al., 2009). however, it is often fragmented, and thus does not necessarily grasp the multifaceted processes in digital university pedagogy (e.g., luckin, 2017; parpala et al., 2013; hailikari et al., 2018). as there is very little previous research on assessing university students’ experienced study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments, it is useful to investigate the concept of digital learning environments per se in higher education as well as whether the assessment process or methods differ from that of traditional learning settings. as most assessment is already executed online while different types of applications for assessment continue to be integrated into curricula, it has become increasingly difficult to define digital assessment. the aim of the current research is to identify how university students experience studyrelated burnout or academic well-being in digital learning environments and how they are assessed online. further, these frameworks provide guidelines for assessing and supporting student’s well-being online by identifying the existing research on students’ experienced study-related burnout and other academic emotions in different digital learning environments. digital learning environments in universities a decades-long debate has been ongoing about whether digital pedagogy is actually a concept per se or a self-constructed phenomenon beyond the heideggerian philosophy of natural technology (lewin & lundie, 2016; davies, 2016). in this context, lewin and lundie (2016) suggested that it is imperative to understand the kind of meanings we assign to the technology used in digital education. digital learning environments can be understood as a multidimensional entity that is observed as a construction between the university student, teacher, and the digital learning environment (väätäjä & ruokamo, 2021; thompson, 2013; luckin, 2017; hofer, 2021). here, it is worth considering how pedagogical digital modalities affect students’ learning processes as well as on the other hand, how humans can harness technology for learning in a way that best supports students’ overall learning processes and well-being (e.g., thompson, 2013; luckin, 2017; väätäjä & ruokamo, 2021; parpala et al., 2021). in traditional learning environments, it has been suggested that concentrating on students’ perceptions of teaching-learning environments offers an adequate tool for measuring the quality of university pedagogy (entwistle et al., 2003; herrmann et al., 2016; parpala et al., 2010; harvey, 2003; richardson, 2005), including the interest and relevance of the study content, constructive feedback received during teaching, peer support, and alignment of aims and teaching methods (entwistle et al., 2003; herrmann et al., 2016. additionally, it is also known that there is high individual variation between students and how they evaluate the same study context (entwistle et al., 2002). however, it is important to assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 4 remember that the research, based on teaching-learning environments in traditional settings, is built on years of research on, for e.g., social, cultural, and political contexts in which university education has operated. therefore, the rapid integration of digitality in these environments is yet another dimension that should be considered as an implicit factor for students’ learning and well-being (kümmel et al., 2020). as different technologies rapidly emerge into the educational realms and their availability and readiness of use varies greatly, it may be fruitful to focus on the following: how students, overall, experience digital learning environments; and whether there are some aspects of the pedagogical processes that can be made more holistic using digital parallels in the educational context (rasi et al., 2019; parpala et al., 2021). there is a fairly large amount of research on different digital learning environments in education and their impact on academic success (thompson, 2013; väätäjä & ruokamo, 2021). here, students’ perceptions on digital learning environments have been suggested to indicate their academic achievement and used studying strategies, collaboration, and engagement (thompson, 2013; asikainen et al., 2020; väätäjä & ruokamo, 2021; rasi et al., 2019; cai et al., 2019, ellis & goodyear, 2013, parpala et al., 2021). however, the more profound observation of the digital learning environments and how they can support students’ overall academic well-being has not yet been undertaken. study-related burnout and academic well-being in universities although it is a relatively new research topic, study-related burnout has rapidly gained international attention, which speaks to its perceived relevance (salmela-aro & kunttu, 2010; salmela-aro & read, 2017; salmela-aro & upadyaya, 2017; fiorilli et al., 2017; seibert et al., 2016; yang & chen, 2016). in this context, study-related exhaustion refers to feelings of being burdened or exhausted resulting from overtaxing work, cynicism refers to a lack of interest and a cynical or indifferent attitude towards studying generally and in relation to others, and a lack of professional efficacy refers to feelings of incompetence and poor achievement in studying (salmela-aro et al., 2009; asikainen et al., 2020). all these aspects of study-related burnout have been found to affect students’ engagement, including their dedication to university studies (salmela-aro & read, 2017). recent research has also highlighted that exhaustion seems to be the core of study-related burnout and that emotional and cognitive impairments are the outcomes of burnout (schaufeli et al., 2020). however, even though research into study-related burnout has been undertaken, the relationship between study-related burnout and students’ experiences of digital learning environments has not yet been widely examined. moreover, students who experience more burnout symptoms have been shown to perceive their learning environment more negatively (meriläinen, 2014; meriläinen & kuittinen, 2020). thus, it is important to examine how students with different experiences of digital learning environments experience study-related burnout to better understand the connection and support students and their wellbeing in their university studies (salmela-aro & read, 2017; assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 5 väisänen et al., 2018; parpala et al., 2021). more specifically, parpala et al. (2021) found that the transition from traditional learning to online learning during covid-pandemic did seem to increase some students’ negative perceptions of learning environments and experienced exhaustion and cynicism in their studies. on the other hand, socio-emotional skills such as curiosity, grit, belongingness, apt cognitive load, and academic buoyancy have been shown to support students’ cognitive and social engagement in different learning environments and prevent study-related burnout (pekrun et al., 2010; salmela-aro & upadaya, 2020; kankaraš & suarez-alvarez, 2019). similarly, positive academic emotions that refer to emotions that arise in an academic context are directly linked to academic instructions and achievement, encourage, for e.g., students’ self-efficacy and self-regulated learning, and reduce boredom that may manifest as a lack of engagement (pekrun et al., 2010; mattsson et al., 2020). appraisal of positive academic emotions, the cognitive-motivational model of the achievement effects of emotions, and a control/value theory of their antecedents have also been shown to have a longitudinal impact on students’ learning processes, which highlights the importance of this study (pekrun et al., 2010). digital assessment of academic well-being in a pedagogical context when examining students’ well-being in a pedagogical context, the assessment should not only benefit students’ learning but function as a factor preventing students from experiencing more study-related burnout. assessment itself in the educational context has a crucial role in how students perceive their learning environment, and thus has the capacity to enhance their learning processes (entwistle, 2000; biggs, 2003; parpala et al., 2013; nieminen et al., 2021). when students’ learning processes are seen as a socioemotional pedagogical feature, it is understandable that their well-being affects their overall learning (postareff et al., 2017; kankaraš & suarez-alvarez, 2019). thus, to employ a holistic approach to university students’ teaching and learning, it becomes imperative to also assess their well-being as part of pedagogical modelling (kankaraš & suarez-alvarez, 2019; pekrun et al., 2010; parpala & lindclom-ylänne, 2012). moreover, students’ self-assessment in higher education is used to enhance their complex learning processes and ensure their engagement throughout the learning process (nieminen et al., 2021; panadero et al., 2016; tan, 2007). formative self-assessment is traditionally considered to enable a more holistic assessment approach to learning, thus making it possible to employ multifaceted pedagogical features in curricula (panadero et al., 2016). simultaneously, summative self-assessment is seen as a future-driven act that branches out from the campuses and supports skills needed outside the pedagogical context, which further emphasizes students’ agency in their own learning process (tan, 2007; 2009; boud & falchikov, 2006; nieminen & tuohilampi, 2020). furthermore, assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 6 nieminen et al. (2021) claim in their study that summative assessment supports students’ self-efficacy and is linked to more beneficial approaches to learning. these findings support the idea that not only does “why” something is measured matter in a pedagogical context but also “how.” meanwhile, digital assessment in higher education is often portrayed as technologyenhanced formative assessment (luckin, 2018; luckin et al., 2016; shen & ho, 2020; kankaraš & suarez-alvarez, 2019). however, ai has also been making its way forward—but not very fast—in the field of pedagogical assessment in the past three decades (luckin, 2017; luckin et al., 2016; zawacki-richter et al., 2019; popenici & kerr, 2017). additionally, to assess students’ well-being online also requires a more subtle approach than the assessment of academic achievement (sargent & lynch, 2021; mattsson et al., 2020). in this context, it should be noted that the digital environment itself causes very different academic emotions in different students and therefore needs to be examined accordingly (sargent & lynch, 2021; pekrun et al., 2010; heckel & ringeisen, 2019). specifically, students’ ability to embody emotions supporting (or interfering with) learning in digital learning environments may have many implications on how the assessment of these emotions should be undertaken. research questions the aim of this study is to identify how university students’ well-being is assessed online and how they experience study-related burnout and other academic emotions in different digital learning contexts. to this end, the following research questions are examined in particular: 1. how do university students experience study-related burnout in digital learning environments? 2. how do university students experience academic well-being in digital learning environments? 3. how is students’ academic well-being supported through online assessment? methodology the systematic literature review (slr) methodology was used in this study. when compared to a narrative literature review, an slr that employs a strict methodology in a documented and structured process results in a more reliable and validated conclusion (sawyer, 2017). further, it offers researcher a tool for deeper understanding of a research topic and the context in which it exists (hart, 1998, pp. 13, 26–27). however, while there is no single way to conduct an slr, many researchers agree that it essentially involves capturing, evaluating, and summarizing the existing literature (creswell, 2018, p. 29). assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 7 literature review the reviewed papers were first identified through keywords and phrases in referenced electronic databases in june 2021. the keywords were identified through preliminary readings. in the current article, eric (proquest), sciencedirect (elsevier), springerlink, sage journals, academic search elite (ebsco), abi/inform global (proquest), social science database (proquest), and acm digital library were used (see table 1). the literature searches in the sciencedirect database provided the largest number of articles, while those in ebsco provided the smallest number of articles. these online retrieval systems and databases were chosen because of their multidisciplinary ranges and their relevance to digital university pedagogy research. the keywords were a combination of the term “digital learning environment” paired with “higher education,” “assessment,” and finally “well-being/burnout” as these are close to the current article’s keywords in meaning. the search terms were adjusted as needed for the retrieval system. here, the boolean operator “and/or” was employed to combine the keywords. in the end, a total of 158 articles were found with these terms (see table 1). table 1 number of the retrieved articles from different databases online retrieval system database number of retrieved articles (n) selected articles (n) proquest eric, social science database, abi/inform global 13 2 springerlink 47 5 elsevier sciencedirect 70 5 sage journals 6 0 ebsco academic search elite 4 0 acm digital library 18 1 158 13 assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 8 inclusion and exclusion criteria inclusion and exclusion criteria were used to select appropriate and focused studies (boelens et al., 2017). the former were peer-reviewed, journal articles, published between 2012 and 2021, written in english, and presenting empirical or theoretical research and pedagogical assessment in the framework of students’ well-being. the exclusion criteria were short conference articles without clear descriptions, book or article reviews, as well as studies that focused on assessing academic achievement in the digital learning environment, exclusively on digital learning environments (not including well-being), and on a different level of education along with those in which well-being was not considered in a pedagogical context. the above criteria were defined based on the research aims and questions: to find information relating to the concept of “digital learning environments” and “higher education” and “students’ well-being” and/or “study-related burnout” and/or “assessment.” here, several articles were related to only approaching digital learning environments per se or academic achievements or did not consider well-being as a pedagogical feature or focused on a different level of education; these were excluded from the review. table 2 presents the inclusion and exclusion criteria used in this research. table 2 inclusion and exclusion criteria inclusion criteria exclusion criteria peer reviewed written in english published between 2012–2021 presents empirical or theoretical research papers found in authors’ institutional database assessment is considered in the scope of students’ well-being and study-related burnout in digital learning environments short conference articles book or article review focus on assessing academic achievement in digital learning environment well-being is not considered as a pedagogical feature focuses only on digital learning environments focuses on a different level of education assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 9 data extraction the data extraction process began with the identification of articles from the eight chosen databases. this was followed by the screening of the articles. literature searches in the eight selected databases identified a total of 158 articles. the 158 articles’ titles and abstracts were screened to exclude ineligible articles. here, the screening focused on finding the keywords and determining whether the context of the study was suitable for the scope of this research according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. in total, 26 articles were retained, at which point the full text of the articles was screened. in the end, 13 of the screened articles, published between 2012 and 2021, were included in the final literature review. the excluded studies did contain some keywords but did not correspond with the focus of the research. the process of article identification and the data extraction method is described in the figure 1. figure 1 method used for article identification and data extraction process selected articles and their contents the selected articles discussed students’ well-being and study-related burnout in digital learning environments in higher education. here, 11 of the 13 articles focused on the assessment of students’ online well-being or that of study-related burnout in digital learning environments. here, only papers found in the databases through the authors’ institutional libraries were included. table 3 presents the central topics discussed in each of the 13 chosen articles. assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 10 table 3 selected articles and their contents study digital learning environments and students’ wellbeing/study-related burnout assessment of students’ wellbeing/study-related burnout in digital learning environments arity and vesty (2020) cognitive load theory and flow state in digital learning environment combination of selfreport questionnaire data and ai (digital cognitive feedback) kim and rosenheck (2020) students’ sense of agency in digital learning environments collaborative gamified assessment; peerfeedback lajoie et al. (2020) achievement emotions in simulation settings; socially shared regulation technology self-report questionnaire data; visual feedback reisoğlu et al. (2017) cognitive and emotional achievement in 3d virtual learning environments   ryan (2020) students’ sense of agency in digital learning environment peer feedback and self-assessment schiff (2021) student differentiation and socioemotional support ai (intelligent tutoring systems and anthropomorphism in ai) srivastava et al. (2019) confidence and mental workload/difficulty during video lectures biometric signals subhash and academic emotions in gamified and   assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 11 study digital learning environments and students’ wellbeing/study-related burnout assessment of students’ wellbeing/study-related burnout in digital learning environments cudney (2018) game-based learning; slr tempelaar (2020) disposition of achievement emotions and engagement in hybrid learning environments ai (dispositional learning analytics) tempelaar et al. (2012) achievement emotions in online learning and blended learning self-report questionnaire data tzafilkou and economides (2021) learning emotions in a game-based learning environment self-report questionnaire data troussas et al. (2020) student-centered/individualized learning environments and collaboration using mobile gamebased learning intelligent mobile game-based application zheng et al. (2020) self-efficacy and perceived social support in an online learning environment self-report questionnaire data each of the selected articles addressed research questions that were relevant for constructing the understanding of the current research on university students’ studyrelated burnout and/or wellbeing in digital learning environments. most of the selected articles were also addressing digital assessment or how it can support students’ wellbeing in digital learning environments. results first, university students’ well-being in digital learning environments is less studied and relies mostly on research on the achievement emotions theory (lajoie et al., 2020; reisoğlu et al., 2017; tempelaar et al., 2012; tempelaar, 2020) and academic emotions assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 12 (subhash & cudney, 2018; tzafilkou & economides, 2021). however, there is a body of literature focusing on certain dimensions of university students’ study-related burnout (arity & vesty, 2020; srivastava, et al., 2019; troussas et al., 2020) and how they represent their agency and socio-emotional skills in digital learning contexts (ryan, 2020; schiff, 2021; troussas et al., 2020; zheng, 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020). second, the findings of the current study suggest that first the assessment of university students’ overall well-being in digital learning is a combination of the formative online selfassessment questionnaire (arity & vesty, 2020; lajoie et al., 2020; ryan, 2020; tempelaar et al., 2012; tzafilkou & economides, 2021; zheng, 2020), peer-feedback (ryan, 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020; troussas et al., 2020), and a rubric of different digital artefacts including ai (schiff, 2021; tempelaar, 2020; arity & vesty, 2020), augmented reality (lajoie et al., 2020), biometric feedback (srivastava, 2019), visual feedback (lajoie et al., 2020), and game-based or gamified assessment trajectories (troussas et al., 2020; tzafilkou & economides, 2021; kim & rosenheck, 2020), which are often perceived very positively by learners. thus, it is important to support students’ agency and positive academic emotions in digital learning environments (troussas et al., 2020; subhash & cudney, 2018; kim & rosenheck, 2020). students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments study-related burnout few studies described emotions directly associated with study-related burn-out in digital learning environments (arity & vesty, 2020; subhash & cudney, 2018; troussas et al., 2020; srivastava et al., 2019). arity and vesty (2020) as well as srivastava et al. (2019) found that using scaffolded digital design results in the correct cognitive load, which was in relation to students’ feeling less burdened by the task. additionally, some of the studies reported students increased experienced interest when using digital learning environments. troussas et al. (2020) found that when using a game-based learning environment, students experienced stable interest throughout the course as compared to a traditional learning environment. on the other hand, students’ distraction and frustration caused by inadequate instructions or skills to use the digital platforms also increased in these learning environments (subhash & cudney, 2018). the findings resulting in increased/decreased levels of the emotions contributing study-related burnout in digital learning environments are presented in figure 2. where increased levels of emotions contributing study-related burnout are marked with plus (+) and color green, are decreased levels marked with minus (-) and color red. assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 13 figure 2 study-related burnout in digital learning environments engagement various studies found an increase in students’ engagement in different digital learning environments (subhash & cudney, 2018; reisoğlu et al., 2017; lajoie et al., 2020; troussas et al., 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020). more specifically, lajoie et al. (2020) noted that students’ engagement can be improved using augmented reality in learning as it typically gives them more control over the learning situations and thus enhances their positive emotions through valuing engagement in a task. similarly, troussas et al. (2020) found that students’ engagement can be significantly improved by using intelligent gamebased assessment systems in education. further, in their study on the metarubric, kim and rosenheck (2020) showed that students’ engagement can be enhanced through playful assessments. self-efficacy some studies found that different digital learning environments may enhance students’ self-efficacy (reisoğlu, 2017; arity & vesty, 2020; tempelaar, 2020), which is a result of students’ sense of control over and value regarding the task at hand (reisoğlu, 2017; arity & vesty, 2020). additionally, tempelaar (2020) also found that students’ self-efficacy is related to their adaptive learning approach. on the other hand, contrary to some previous studies, zheng et al. (2020) showed that advanced digital self-efficacy is an insignificant mediator between proactive personality and acquired digital social capital. enjoyment various research has found that students experience more enjoyment and satisfaction in digital learning environments (tempelaar et al., 2012; reisoğlu et al., 2017; lajoie et al., 2020; subhash & cudney, 2018; kim & rosenheck, 2020). specifically, in their study, tempelaar et al. (2012) showed that students’ favorable academic emotions should be induced when the goal is enhancing students’ active participation in online learning. this clearly resulted in students who represented negative effort beliefs. moreover, lajoie et al. assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 14 (2020) found high levels of enjoyment using augmented reality in learning. in turn, subhash and cudney (2018) found that gamification and game-based learning has benefits for students’ well-being in digital learning environments. here, the most important findings, considering the current study, were students’ increased positive attitude and enjoyment. similarly, tempelaar (2020) found that students who use the adaptive learning approach experience more enjoyment and less negative achievement emotions in online learning. easiness many of the articles examined in the current review concluded that students experienced easiness in digital learning environments (troussas et al., 2020; tempelaar, 2020; reisoğlu, 2017; arity & vesty, 2020). although, here, it must be noted that many of the studies were specifically interested in whether students experienced easiness in using the digital learning environment itself and not in the whole learning process, which explains the studied subject. empathy and other socio-emotional skills it was also seen that different digital learning environments can increase students’ empathy and other socio-emotional skills in collaborative learning settings. lajoie et al. (2020) found that by using a socially shared regulation technique, students could share their emotions in a collaborative digital learning setting, thus identifying recurring “group emotions.” additionally, collaboration and communication skills were improved using digital learning environments (reisoğlu, 2017). further, zheng et al. (2020) found that acquiring digital social support significantly enhances the influence of students’ proactive personality on online interaction and self-efficacy. agency students were also found to have experienced more individualization and agency in digital learning environments. when they were given multiple choices by ai software on how to complete their task at hand, they achieved the same score despite the chosen method, while also experiencing less negative and more positive achievement emotions (tempelaar, 2020). meanwhile, troussas et al. (2020) showed that individualized cognitive advice, along with peer collaboration, is a key characteristic that can further foster more personalized and adaptive digital learning environments. ryan (2020) pointed out that effective learner-centered feedback processes enable students to make sense of the information they receive and experience beneficial impacts because of feedback information, thus gaining agency in the feedback process in digital learning environments using a range of different digital tools. additionally, kim & rosenheck’s (2020) research suggested similar benefits of gamified assessment methods, further supporting the theory of students’ agency through self-assessment. finally, schiff (2021) summed up the airelated trends, considering its important role in digital tutoring and the benefits for students’ differentiation in different digital learning environments. different socioassessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 15 emotional skills, achievement emotions, and academic emotions are grouped as academic well-being and presented in figure 3. figure 3 experiencing academic well-being in digital learning environments – the six es assessing students’ academic well-being in digital learning environments online self-report questionnaire the most used assessment method of digital learning environments in the papers reviewed in this review was the online self-report questionnaire. lajoie et al. (2020) aimed to identify authentic ways to identify different emotions in technology rich environments. they pointed out that with a well-adapted (for digital learning environments) self-report questionnaire, it is possible to capture the intensity of students’ emotions. thus, the measurement instruments need to be properly validated for each digital learning environment. similar observations were made using other self-report questionnaires (zheng et al., 2020; arity & vesty, 2020; lajoie et al., 2020; ryan, 2020; tempelaar, 2012; tzafilkou & economides, 2021). peer feedback in the current study, some of the examined articles considered peer feedback in the assessment of students’ well-being in digital learning environments (ryan, 2020; troussas et al., 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020). specifically, troussas et al. (2020) highlighted that by using mobile game-based assessment, peer-support can be encouraged in a critical moment in learning. further, ryan (2020) encouraged students to participate in informal or structured feedback dialogues with others by supporting private and individualized assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 16 task-related feedback interactions with peers in digital learning environments using various digital artefacts. ai many research papers have approached assessment by using ai. in particular, fast, continuous, and relevant feedback was considered an advantage when using ai in assessment (arity & vesty, 2020). additionally, e-tutoring through ai was seen to offer students’ different variations of the assessment methods, which resulted in equal academic achievements (tempelaar, 2020; schiff, 2021). game-based and gamified assessment some articles examined in this review considered game-based or gamified assessment in university students’ well-being. troussas et al. (2020) studied intelligent mobile gamebased application in assessment as a way to support university students’ learning process and noticed positive results using cognitive advising. meanwhile, kim and rosenheck (2020) pointed out that gamified assessment makes it possibly easier to integrate students in the assessment process, thus supporting students’ agency and authenticity. other digital artefacts: biometric feedback, augmented reality-based assessment, and multimedia modalities some of the explored articles considered a scaffolding of different kind of digital assessment tools that are specifically tailored to their respective concerned studies (srivastava et al., 2019; lajoie et al., 2020). most relevant to the current study, lajoie et al. (2020) found that by using visual feedback in a collaborative learning setting, students were not only able to identify but also regulate their group emotions (socially shared regulation). the different assessment methods of university students’ academic well-being are categorized and presented in figure 4. assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 17 figure 4 digital assessment of university students’ well-being discussion and conclusions this study has examined how university students experience study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments and how their well-being can be supported through digital assessment. the first research question inquired into how university students experience study-related burnout in digital learning environments. during the literature analysis, distinctive themes—considering study-related burnout— emerged from the reviewed articles. as there is very little previous research on the matter, the findings are of high importance when exploring the relevance and incidence of studyrelated burnout in digital learning environments. the findings of the current study showed that whereas students experience less exhaustion (arity & vesty, 2020) and cynicism (troussas et al., 2020) in digital learning environments, the feelings of professional inadequacy were increased due to the difficulties in using technology (subhash & cudney, 2018). also, contradicting results have been emerging during covid-19 pandemic (parpala et al., 2021). more specifically, study-related burnout is considered a three-dimensional phenomenon resulting in feelings of exhaustion, cynicism, and professional inadequacy (salmela-aro et al., 2009; asikainen et al., 2020). in relation to the second research question, students’ experienced academic well-being in digital learning environments could be divided into six different categories: engagement, self-efficacy, enjoyment, agency, easiness, and empathy. considering students’ experiences of study-related burnout and professional inadequacy in digital learning environments, the literature encouragingly showed that students experienced also more enjoyment, satisfaction, and easiness in digital learning environments (tempelaar et al., 2012; assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 18 reisoğlu, 2017; lajoie et al., 2020; subhash & cudney, 2018; kim & rosenheck, 2020; troussas et al., 2020; arity & vesty, 2020), which furthermore resulted in active online participation. moreover, in the current research, as shown in several of the examined articles, digital learning environments can also improve student engagement (reisoğlu et al., 2017; arity & vesty, 2020; subhash & cudney, 2018). students’ engagement is also enforced through experienced self-efficacy which, according to the current study, might furthermore, be enhanced through different digital learning environments (reisoğlu, 2017; arity & vesty, 2020; tempelaar, 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020). furthermore, other positive academic emotions that refer to emotions that arise in an academic context again support students’ self-efficacy and self-regulated learning as well as the reduction of boredom that may manifest as a lack of engagement (pekrun et al., 2010; mattsson et al., 2020). as students’ cognitive and social engagement have been shown to have multiple positive relations to their learning processes and to, for e.g., preventing study-related burnout (pekrun et al., 2010; salmela-aro & upadyaya, 2020; kankaraš & suarez-alvarez, 2019), it can be concluded that there is great potential in providing engaging digital learning environments to support students’ well-being in universities and prevent students experiencing study-related burnout. however, there must be emphasis on providing sufficient support for students’ using the digital learning environments as the inadequacy of using them could result, as stated before, in increase of study-related burnout (subhash & cudney, 2018). as previous studies have shown, students’ perceptions on digital learning environments indicate, for e.g., students’ academic achievement and their studying strategies and collaborations (thompson, 2013; asikainen et al., 2020; väätäjä & ruokamo, 2020; rasi et al., 2019; cai et al., 2019, ellis & goodyear, 2013, parpala et al., 2021). current research has strengthened these findings (reisoğlu, 2017) and found that collaborative digital learning environments can also increase students’ empathy and other socio-emotional skills (lajoie et al., 2020; zheng et al., 2020). as digital learning environments can often be seen as a barricade to emotional expression, this finding suggests that the opposite is true: in a well-designed collaborative digital learning environment, students can be more prone to express their emotions, proactive personalities, and e.g., empathy toward their peers (lajoie et al., 2020; zheng et al.,2020). further, students’ increased agency in digital learning environments was considered in many of the examined articles. a clear result was that students experienced more individualization when using ai in education (schiff, 2021. additionally, experiences of enforced academic agency were found in different digital learning environments (schiff, 2021; tempelaar, 2020, troussas et al., 2020; ryan, 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020). similar to earlier studies on students’ perceptions of leaning environments, ryan (2020) noted that digital learning environments enable effective learner-centered feedback processes, thus helping students to make sense of the information they receive and giving assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 19 them a sense of agency in the learning process. aforementioned findings have the potential to lessen the worry of ai overriding the human agency and individuality in digital learning contexts. all of these findings also encourage the idea that digital learning environments can support students’ holistic well-being and make digital learning individually and socially more meaningful and emotionally rewarding. students’ agency was also closely related to the third research question: how is students’ academic well-being supported through online assessment? in this context, research by troussas et al. (2020) and kim and rosenheck (2020) suggested benefits of summative gamified assessment methods in supporting students’ agency in digital learning environments, further supporting the theory that students gain agency through summative self-assessment in traditional learning environments (tan, 2007, 2009; boud & falchikov, 2006; nieminen & tuohilampi, 2020). the findings of current research also support previous studies that concluded that digital assessment in higher education is often portrayed as technology-enhanced formative assessment, but it is moving toward aiand game-based or gamified assessment. additionally, other, previously studied assessment method that emerged in the current study that is useful in supporting students’ academic well-being and individualized perceptions of digital learning environments was digital peer-feedback (ryan, 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020; entwistle et al., 2003; herrmann et al., 2016) and ai-based feedback (arity & vesty, 2020; tempelaar, 2020; schiff, 2021; luckin, 2017; luckin et al., 2016; zawacki-richter et al., 2019; popenici & kerr, 2017). these findings, together with the notion of digital learning environments providing socially engaging and empathy enforcing collaborative platforms, encourage further research on the potential of artificial intelligence, gamification and digital communities in learning processes. limitations this study does have some limitations. first, it was rather challenging to examine the concept “digital learning environments” as there is no clear consensus on how this is conceptualized in previous studies (luckin, 2018). however, this systematic review included all the articles examining the “digital learning environment,” and published during the last ten years, despite the used digital form, which might provide a good understanding of the topical and diverse research in the field of digital university pedagogy. however, along with the current study, future research still needs to understand how to approach different digital learning environments as it is clear that they differ in their capacity to, for e.g., provide meaningful learning experiences for students and thus support their academic well-being. to sum up, the present study thus suggests that it is important to consider digital learning environments as a completely new branch of educational transformation in higher education and examine the different pedagogical phenomena from philosophical to technological perspectives, using the understanding assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review 20 gained from centuries of studies on technology, educational psychology, and pedagogy in higher education. implications understanding university students’ study-related burnout and how academic well-being can be supported and assessed in digital learning environments provides important information for educators worldwide and makes holistic and equal education more accessible for everyone. the frameworks of the current study provide guidelines for assessing and supporting student’s digital well-being by identifying how they experience study-related burnout and academic well-being in different digital learning environments. this also provides the possibility of supporting students’ overall academic performance and the planning of ethically sustainable digital university pedagogy. the findings encourage the designing of the digital university pedagogy that includes easily accessible digital learning environments in the curricula, thus enforcing students’ positive academic emotions and well-being and perceptions of digital teaching learning environments (tempelaar et al., 2012; entwistle et al., 2003; herrmann et al., 2016 parpala et al., 2010; harvey, 2003; richardson, 2005; parpala et al., 2021; subhash & cudney, 2018). other, noteworthy finding, considering digital assessment, also encourages asking whether game-based or gamified summative assessment or ai-based summative assessment could be considered as further supporting students’ agency and self-efficacy in digital learning environments (troussas et al., 2020; kim & rosenheck, 2020; nieminen et al., 2021). as digitalization becomes an increasingly central part of people’s lives and as technology is constantly evolving, digital learning has become an ever-changing pedagogical phenomenon that creates links between leisure, study, and working life, thus affecting the overall well-being of technology users to an increasing extent (holmes et al., 2019). this also encourages the consideration of possible future research topics. moreover, as sustainable development goals continue to be at the center of future research in both higher education and working life, it is imperative to understand how digital university pedagogy should be planned in such manner so that it can provide more meaningful and empowering learning experiences and support the well-being, agency, and globally sustainable endeavors of academic future-makers. thus, due to the implications clarified above, more research is needed on the topic. references asikainen, h., salmela-aro, k., parpala, a., & katajavuori, n. 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(2019). systematic review of research on artificial intelligence applications in higher education–where are the educators? international journal of educational technology in higher education, 16(1), 39 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0171-0 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2020.105694 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0171-0 assessing university students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review abstract introduction digital learning environments in universities study-related burnout and academic well-being in universities digital assessment of academic well-being in a pedagogical context research questions methodology literature review inclusion and exclusion criteria data extraction selected articles and their contents results students’ study-related burnout and academic well-being in digital learning environments study-related burnout engagement self-efficacy enjoyment easiness empathy and other socio-emotional skills agency assessing students’ academic well-being in digital learning environments online self-report questionnaire peer feedback ai game-based and gamified assessment other digital artefacts: biometric feedback, augmented reality-based assessment, and multimedia modalities discussion and conclusions limitations implications references title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 problem-based learning in synchronous networked environments: comparing adobe connect and second life anders i. mørch department of education, university of oslo, norway email: anders.morch@iped.uio.no louise mifsud department of primary and secondary teacher education, oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences, norway email: louise.mifsud@hioa.no bård ketil engen department of primary and secondary teacher education, oslo and akershus university college of applied sciences, norway email: bard-ketil.engen@hioa.no abstract we describe our experiences with two networked learning environments: adobe connect (ac) and second life (sl) for supporting teaching and learning in distance education courses. we collected data in two separate case studies: one in norway (ac) and the other in the united states (sl), using different but comparable methods of data analysis (qualitative methods). we compare the two environments through the lens of problembased learning (pbl), using four application characteristics of pbl (learner activity, collaborative learning, feedback, and valuation of previous knowledge). ac’s strength is its easy-to-use interface and its high-quality audio and video streaming that support facial expression and gesturing in communication. the sl interface is more complicated to learn, but it allows for movement in virtual reality by an avatar and interaction with threedimensional (3d) objects. the avatar makes the users feel less apprehensive during communication. keywords: problem-based learning (pbl), pbl principles, qualitative analysis, multiple case studies, adobe connect, second life, synchronous networked learning environment http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 50 1 introduction in this article, we explore problem-based learning (pbl) in two synchronous networked environments (sme), a virtual world (second life, sl) and a video conferencing system (adobe connect). our aim is to compare the two learning environments according to key characteristics of pbl. in the outset, pbl and online learning may seem to be a good match because pbl provides for pedagogy (e.g. problem orientation, collaboration, scaffolding) that lends itself to synchronous online environments (e.g. modeling complex situations). however, authors have warned about the overoptimistic views of teaching pbl in such environments because of the simplification of complexity (savinbaden, 2006), and a lack of analytic studies compared to descriptive ones in previous research (good, howland & thackray, 2008). sl is a multi-user virtual environment (muve) configured as an online threedimensional (3d) world in which individuals interact as avatars with people and objects in 3d space. educators have used sl for online instruction in colleges and universities in a variety of manners, from teaching academic content to engaging in professional preparation (wang & burton, 2014). authentic learning activities are possible through collaboration, simulation and roleplay (mørch, hartley & caruso, 2015). by practicing working through difficult situations in a virtual environment to approximate aspects of a reallife situation that is impractical, expensive or risky to carry out in the real world, participants in virtual role-plays will get a semi-realistic preview of the equivalent real-life situations. role-play is used in many different application domains, including: health care, therapy, organisational change, crisis management, military training and education (farra, miller, timm & schafer, 2013; prasolova-forland, fominykh, darisiro & mørch, 2013) . a qualitative study of online tutors using virtual reality applications (keskitalo, 2011) found that some were moving toward using more student-centred and problem-based pedagogy, but others were trying to replicate classroom conditions in the online environment. cheong, yun and chollins (2009) used sl as an educational platform where 160 pre-service teachers were guided to practice teaching skills collaboratively. the findings showed that sl seems to be particularly well suited as an experimental teaching method compared with traditional classroom-based methods. wang and wang (2008) argued that the level of co-presence is an essential element that significantly affects the design processes in collaborative virtual worlds by increasing the sense of ‘being together’, supported by the possibility of being able to move avatars through space in real time and related to the non-verbal signals made by avatars (allmendinger, 2010). however, implementing non-verbal signals in virtual worlds is not an easy task for developers, and successful adoption varies across the virtual worlds available. ac is an online video-conferencing teaching environment where participants interact synchronously. within the ac framework, students and teachers interact using audio, video and text chat. schullo, hilbelink, venable and barron (2007) presented an analysis of two online synchronous learning environments, where ac was one of the tools they analysed. their study focused on the technology’s abilities to meet both technical and pedagogical needs in higher education. their findings suggested that the ease of communication between the tutor and the students, as well as among students, could play a big role in the successful adoption and use of synchronous seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 51 networked environments. they concluded that simple interfaces are an important feature. they also emphasised the importance of audio delivery. parker and martin (2010) compared the perceptions of undergraduate students who used a virtual classroom in a fully online and in a blended education course. students in the fully online course rated the virtual classroom features higher than did the students in the blended course. cappiccie and desroisiers (2011) studied the student and faculty use of ac in a master’s degree program in social work, comparing students’ and faculty’s perceptions of the environment. they found that, for the students, lecture time and students’ attention span should be considered and attuned when teaching through ac. furthermore, the students reported that ac can increase the interactions between students and tutors. both faculty and students addressed the issue of recording lectures. students were in favour, arguing for access to missed lectures, whereas faculty emphasised the ethical issues connected to recording and storing the lectures. karabulut and correia (2008) argued that ac offers more functionality to support learning than other web conferencing systems do because it has built-in support for interaction with learning contents in both text and multimedia formats. it is important to note that, although this study is almost a decade old, and although the technology today is more advanced, several of the issues that schullo et al. (2007) mentioned are still relevant in the version of ac we refer to in this article. in the work we present we compare ac and sl from the point of view of supporting problem-based learning. to the best of our knowledge, no work has yet compared the two environments with respect to the pbl characteristics they offer. our research question is formulated as: what pbl characteristics are supported and hindered in the two networked learning environments (ac and sl)? the paper is organised as follows. in section 2, we give an outline of the pbl pedagogy and highlight four pbl design and evaluation principles. in section 3, we describe our comparative case studies’ research design. the two case studies are described in depth in section 4, according to a common structure for comparison. in section 5, we generalise our finding and discuss the two environments according to the principles of pbl. at the end, we summarise our results. 2 problem-based learning: theory and practice the development of pbl has gone on for more than 40 years (christiansen, kuure, mørch & lindström, 2014). it is characterised as both collaborative and cooperative problem solving connected to real-life tasks and situations (lycke, strømsø & grøttum, 2006). a goal with pbl is to help students to develop an understanding of relevant theoretical perspectives based on a concrete situation (a problem or a case) so that they can later apply the knowledge in new practical situations. students achieve this by gaining skills in problem identification and problem solving, self-directed learning and effective collaboration (hmelo-silver, 2004). pbl is also related to basic skills in that pbl tasks should be formulated so as to foster the learning of basic knowledge and point out how disciplinary knowledge can be exercised in practice. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 52 the role of the tutor in pbl is not to teach a predefined curriculum but rather to facilitate learning by supporting, guiding and monitoring the learning of new knowledge by bringing in the curriculum ‘on demand’. pbl thus represents a paradigm shift in traditional pedagogy (hung, 2011), from a tutor-centred to a student-centred approach. the methods and concepts for teaching pbl differ from those of traditional classroom-based teaching, being more in line with case-based instruction in professional education and workplaces (schmidt, rotgans & yew, 2011). however, most of the research in pbl has been carried out in educational institutions (barrett & more, 2010), originating in medical schools and business colleges (boud & feletti 1991). survey studies of pbl have identified different ways of setting up and running problem-based learning courses using technology in a variety of ways (christiansen et al., 2014; savin-baden & wilke, 2006) as well as applying pbl across disciplines and countries. we give examples of one type of technology for pbl in this article: synchronous networked environments. collaboration across distance is one of the main advantages of online pbl, but it also poses some new challenges (savin-baden, 2006). these challenges include technical issues, such as bandwidth and awkward user interfaces, the learning curves of students and tutors, different expectations of what to teach and what to learn, and the oversimplification of the complexity of real-world problems. in their early attempts to facilitate online pbl, the first adopters had an instrumentalist and ‘naïve’ understanding of the relationship between technology and teaching (engen, 2005). today, there is a broader understanding of the demands of competent tutors in using technology to design and organise student activities (mørch et al., 2014; savin-baden & wilke, 2006). this is to a large extent the result of taking advantage of the complexity of organising pbl in an online context and by inventing new ways of teaching and learning. for example, the tutor has to be aware of the subtle balance of intervention in the student activity. students also need time to adapt to the pbl pedagogy, including how to organise their work and develop new communication strategies with the technological tools available. when students are asked to develop new knowledge in a subject area and are allowed to ground their learning in a specific problem situation, they are more likely to succeed in integrating new and prior knowledge. with pbl, the goal of problem solving is not a priori given but rather serendipitous, inspired by the setting and the participants’ evolving requirements and interests (i.e. pbl is not used for simple factual tasks). the tutor's role is to structure the learning process, which requires that the structure is ‘looser’ than the learning activities of traditional classroom-based instruction. we summarise online pbl by four characteristics (design principles and evaluation criteria) suggested for the usability evaluation of collaboration technologies by nokelainen (2006): learner activity, cooperative/collaborative learning, valuation of previous knowledge and feedback. • learner activity means to engage the learners in the learning task and to give them some ‘ownership’ of the problems identified at the beginning of the task and in the solutions proposed afterward. the learning material can affect the activity to the extent it is interesting to the students and is based on real-life situations. examples of such activities are those that give the students a certain amount of source material from which they seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 53 (individually or in groups) are given the freedom to construct their own conceptions of the topics to be learned. • cooperative and collaborative learning means to study with other learners to reach a common learning goal (nokelainen, 2006). it could be for the students to engage in a discussion about what the assignment means to them. it could also be to create new knowledge together (e.g. a document, a concept map, a tool), more than what the individuals could accomplish on their own. learning takes place in groups of students in which the members gather and structure information in various ways, with various tools to be used to communicate and negotiate different approaches to a problem. • valuation of previous knowledge: the learning material can presume previous knowledge from the learner, and it can also respect the learner’s prior knowledge (nokelainen, 2006). the former expects the learner to already possess prerequisite skills or knowledge, whereas the other takes into account individual differences and encourages learners to take advantage of these during activities (nokelainen, 2006). there will always be a combination of the two types of learning material, and good tutors are able to present learning material to strike a balance. • feedback from a human tutor during a learning task is the hallmark of good educational practice, as good feedback is adapted to the learners’ prior knowledge and will encourage them to continue to learn and to develop new knowledge. in pbl, feedback can come in one of two forms: from tutor and from peer. when feedback by a more capable peer is given within what vygotsky (1978) called the learner’s zone of proximal development (zpd), new knowledge can more easily integrate with prior knowledge. during collaboration with peers and tutors, feedback can be tuned to trigger discussions and independent thought. 3 research design 3.1 comparing two qualitative case studies we compare two separately conducted case studies inspired by aspects of meta-synthesis, a method for synthesising qualitative research findings (finfgeld, 2003; hoon, 2013). we argue we are able to construct a new and integrative understanding of the individual findings by this method. metasynthesis enables a joint interpretation that is more substantial than those resulting from individual investigations by themselves, thus allowing us to make a comparison of two synchronous online learning environments’ support of pbl pedagogy. hoon (2013) defined meta-synthesis as: an exploratory, inductive research design to synthesize primary qualitative case studies for the purpose of making contributions beyond those achieved in the original studies. a meta-synthesis constitutes an understanding of synthesis that is interpretive, aiming at synthesizing primary qualitative case studies that have not been intended as part of a unified multisite effect. (p. 523) the synthesis of qualitative findings following this approach is often aimed at more or less integrated interpretations of findings from previous studies and not necessarily on summing up results or re-coding original raw data. a potential shortcoming of meta-synthesis is that, when amalgamating qualitative findings from multiple case studies, the integrity of the individual projects weakens, and one might dilute the novel ‘thick descriptions’ (thorne, jensen, kearney, noblit & sandelowski, 2004). walsh and downe (2005) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 54 argued that the issue of framing the study is a fundamental constituent of the meta-analytic technique. we frame our study with the research question: what pbl characteristics are supported and hindered in the two networked learning environments (ac and sl)? we established the study with a well-defined thematic focus, and we limited the re-examination of the results to two cases. the individual cases provided the best opportunities we had to learn about the challenges and opportunities of pbl in two synchronous networked environments (ac and sl). we organised the description of each case according to the following structure, following in section 4: (a) the setting and participants, (b) the learning environment: technology and resources, (c) the research method and data collection and (d) the data and analysis. in section 5, we synthesise the results. 4 two synchronous networked environments 4.1 adobe connect 4.1.1 the setting and participants adobe connect is not specifically designed for pbl or collaborative learning. ac is a desktop video conferencing system used for synchronous communication, presentation, desktop sharing and providing access to educational resources (figure 1). a user can be a host, a presenter or a participant. a host can record sessions, configure the user interfaces, upload presentations and share slides and screens. a presenter has the right to upload presentations and automatically has video and audio rights, whereas a participant has to be given audio and video rights by the host. figure 1: adobe connect’s user interface shown as a recording from a teaching activity. the logged-in users are visible with their web cams displayed at the top of the main window (anonymised due to privacy issues.) on the right side starting from the top are the hosts of the conference, usually tutors. then follows the participants (students). the bottom right shows a chat window connected to the active session (names anonymised). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 55 ac has been one of several educational platforms used in the master’s in ict supported learning at oslo and akershus university college in norway. the second and third authors participated in this case study. we draw data from an online master’s course in distributed collaborative learning, taught in english during spring 2015. the course has run for five years, and each class has had between six and 14 students. ten students attended the course in the case we describe. they were geographically located all over norway, and none of them was a native speaker of english. they connected to ac from their workplaces or their homes. ac was used to distribute online lectures as well as student-driven group work. most of the students had bachelor’s degrees in education and practiced as teachers. 4.1.2 the learning environment: technology and resources one of the goals of the distributed collaborative learning course is that the students should learn about pbl by immersing themselves in the literature. therefore, two of the topics of the course are pbl and online pbl. for the students to experience online pbl, the course started by introducing the students to the topic through a theoretical lecture. at the end of the first pbl meeting, the students were given a case/problem to solve. in the following two sessions, the theory about pbl was taught by two hands-on pbl sessions. after two weeks of individual information seeking and knowledge building, the students came back for their second pbl session in ac, and they discussed different solutions to the problem based on their independent problem solving and knowledge acquisition. the class size of 10 made it possible to have all of the students in the same virtual space at the same time, which is an ideal group size for online pbl (engen, 2005), and we did not use separate breakout rooms (schullo et al., 2007). 4.1.3 research method and data collection the two pbl sessions were recorded with the built-in recording tool and made available to the students afterwards. students also gave their permission for the recorded sessions to be used for research purposes. to bypass possible ethical issues, as the tutors were also researchers, the study and the recordings were not used until after the students had finished the course. furthermore, students were asked to reflect on their learning experiences through a short, open-ended survey. other data collection techniques included chat logs and notebook. the majority of previous studies of online pbl have focused on text-based pbl sessions (lycke, strømsø & grøttum 2006). in the study presented here, we departed from this tradition and used video-based material. we have reconstructed online pbl by using ac and video moderation, both synchronously and asynchronously. in analysing our data, we content logged the videos (jordan & henderson, 1995), focusing on the students’ problemsolving talk and the different tools they made use of during the talk. 4.1.4 data and analysis organisation of teaching in the first session, the tutor ensured that all of the students had their video and microphone rights enabled. the first few minutes of the session focused seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 56 on administration, such as eliminating feedback, making sure that all of the students were ready to participate with audio and video. as much as five minutes of the session were devoted to organising and administering the startup process. ‘can you hear me’ was one of the recurring phrases at the beginning of the session. then, the two pbl assignments (the problems) were presented to the group. the first problem focused on creating a common understanding of digital literacy for a teacher who will be collaborating with an etwinning school (a online european school network): problem 1: the students in one of the groups we followed began the work by discussing how to approach the problem. they discussed whether or not the problem in the disagreement could be connected to what the school curricula say about digital literacy in their country. one student brought up the issue that the teachers involved might not have the same backgrounds. then, the discussion diverged in multiple directions. when the tutor found out that the students’ discussion was lacking, the tutor reminded them about focusing on the problem and understanding the cause of the possible misunderstandings. the following conversation began: tutor: how is digital literacy defined in the maltese curriculum do you think? student: and how can you find out? (..) student: look it up on the internet tutor: that last suggestion sounds like a good idea the excerpt shows that the tutor guided the students to resolve the disagreement. the tutor did not suggest what they should do but rather hinted as to what they could do. it is one of the students who suggested that relying on the internet might be a good idea. the tutor also guided the students in answering why looking into different strategies might be a good idea. the tutor pushed the students, and they came up with the suggestion of using literature on digital literacy, drawing on both norwegian and maltese research studies about digital literacy. finally, the tutor challenged the students' knowledge of digital literacy, which led them to discuss skills versus literacy, forcing them to look into and assess their prior, if latent, knowledge on the topic. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 57 students' use of the pod tools in ac the second problem dealt with digital judgment: problem 2: the students were given presenter rights to ac by the tutors. students started by using the audio and webcam facilities. the tutor suggested taking notes of the discussion by using the synchronous note pod, which the students did (figure 2). the students also used other built-in collaborative real-time editors to support their discussion and to draw attention to a specific technical or learning issue. even though the students were new to pbl, they had some experience with the use of ac-related technologies, such as using their webcam and audio and text-based chat. finally, the students made use of discussion notes to agree on common learning goals for the next meeting. figure 2: the synchronous pod, a real-time collaborative writing aid in ac. immersion while the students were familiar with video recording, the video situation in combination with the lack of familiarity with some of the pod tools hindered active participation. some students were not sure how to move the discussion notes away from the main area, without someone to steer the activity. in those situations, the students did not freely contribute to the discussion, which led the tutor to point this out explicitly, both orally and by writing a note. the tutor had to encourage the inactive students. he also ‘pushed’ the students to increase their participation in the written discussion. students commented on their lack of contribution in a survey as follows: student 1: but it does require true participation as in daring to speak seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 58 student 2: i think i've been very passive in public sessions. i find it unpleasant anyone else to see me on the screen and hear me speak english. here, we see that the students were aware of their own lack of contribution in the group problem solving activity, but they had valid reasons for doing so because they were self-conscious of their visible presences on the video stream much in the same way as in an f2f classroom. at the same time, the students’ lack of familiarity with controlling the ac tools hindered their immersion. 4.2 second life 4.2.1 the setting and participants sl was used as the educational platform in a teacher preparation program at a research university in the us. faculty members at the university have been teaching in sl for three years, and it has been the educational platform for six online graduate courses, at both the master’s and doctoral degree level. the case study presented here is an empirical study of one of the courses organised by the department of special education. researchers from the university of oslo (including the first author) were invited to participate as observers in the course for the purpose of data collection and analysis in 2013–2014 (mørch et al., 2014). thirty-four (n=34) preservice teacher students took part in seven one-hour class sessions in a course on interpersonal problem solving, divided into: interactive lectures of theoretical concepts (15 minutes), individual activities (five minutes), small group activities in separate rooms (30 minutes), and role-play activities (10 minutes). the students were novice sl users before starting. 4.2.2 the learning environment: technology and resources the learning environment was designed to maximise collaboration and student engagement. when envisioning the main classroom, the online instructors wanted a space where students could meet as a large group (n=3040) and engage in an interactive lecture. the tutor had visited other instructors’ classes in sl and thought that flipping through slides in sl while students sat in seats and watched was less engaging than students’ physically moving their avatars to participate. therefore, the decision was made to design the space so that students would walk from the display board to the display board within the virtual classroom (figure 3). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 59 figure 3: tutor lecturing and asking questions at each display board, walking through slides inside the main classroom hall. an observer in the lower right-hand side of the picture is collecting data. chat line to the left. the learning resources include buildings, tools and activities. the tutor built the buildings by creating multiple boxes and linking them together, using the box tool (a cubic-shaped 3d graphical object) as a basic building block (caruso et al., 2015). there were restrictions on the size of an individual object; therefore, multiple boxes were put together to create the size of the building that was needed. it was the intent to make the buildings look similar to the architectural design of the downtown campus in real life. in addition to the main classroom, it was necessary to build small group buildings for collaborative work. each group building included a small group table with chairs as well as a lounge area with a sofa and chairs. the group buildings were 60 (virtual) meters apart to avoid sound interference between groups while talking (caruso et al., 2015). see figure 4 for an example of group activity inside one of the smaller buildings. figure 4: conducting a role-play inside one of the group buildings. the person standing to the left is a student from another group, acting as facilitator of the roleplay. she and the tutor give feedback to the group in the chat line. 4.2.3 research method and data collection a qualitative research analysis was employed, combining a case study (yin, 2003) and virtual ethnography (hetland & mørch, this issue; hine, 2015). data collection techniques included video-recorded observation and interviews. all sessions were observed at a distance in the virtual world and video-recorded with screen capture software (in total, 15 hours of raw video data). to manage and classify the data material, each session and interview was stored in a separate file and transcribed in its entirety using linguistic conventions according to interaction analysis (jordan & henderson, 1995). when selecting the data excerpts, we focused on a common scenario where groups of students created and customised boxes in order to perform learning tasks, which included creating role-plays to simulate challenging teacherstudent-parent situations in special education classrooms (caruso et al., 2015). 4.2.4 data and analysis we provide a flavour of our qualitative data by presenting three interactiondata excerpts, followed by a brief summary of the findings from each, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 60 representing the thematic categories: organisation of teaching, customisation of the box tool and the immersive nature of sl. the transcript notation used in the excerpts includes these symbols: (..) short pause, ((text)) comment by researcher, [..] excluded (poorly audible) speech, and :: abruption of talk. organisation of teaching this excerpt illustrates how the sessions were organised, here from the point of view of role-playing. it is taken from an interview with the tutor. the interviewer asked how teaching in sl compares to face-to-face teaching. tutor: (..) when i taught it to undergraduates, face to face, (..) i tried to incorporate role-play, because i really like role-play and i find that it (..) that backs its effectiveness but, (..) when i taught it in the face to face, what i found was that for role-play, face-to-face, people aren't.. i mean, i can't generalize it to all people, but (..) were apprehensive about [..] as online, i feel like ((i see)) their face. the excerpt shows how the course was organised differently from a face-toface course that the tutor had taught before, and it shows that role-play became an important activity; it was less apprehensive for many of the students compared to their experiences of role-playing in conventional (f2f) settings, as they could hide their faces behind the masks of avatars. it became a stepping-stone to applying the theoretical concepts taught in the lectures. furthermore, the role-plays were created and played out by the students in collaborative activities (mørch et al., 2014) students’ modification of the box tool we follow the group consisting of heather, janet, mandy and stacy. after creating a scenario for the role-play activities, they needed to create notecards, intended as instructions for the actors, which were then put in the boxes. one of the groups was ready to make the box as shown in the following extract: stacy: ok, now we need somebody to make the box. heather: y’all go together and do that. i kind of… can we build it in here? stacy: i’m not sure if we can or not. heather: i think we can build it here ((wherever they are in sl)), we just have to put it in our inventory before we leave. i have one (…) started; i’ll try to get it so you can see it. janet: exactly. stacy: ok. heather: that’s a fancy box. is it changing:: the scenery on it or are you changing that? (..) mandy: yeah, can you see it? heather: yeah, i can ((laughs)) (..) ok, tell me when you… we get something that you like. in this instance, the group of learners attempted to collaboratively design an sl box, wishing to simultaneously perform the joint tasks. by creating and working on the same artifact, the learning experiences became more collaborative and artefact oriented than just communicating with peers. however, one of the students (stacy) was unsure if this was possible (‘i’m not sure if we can or not’). heather had already started to do it on her own and worked on a local version of the box to be shared by the others through the sl inventory (a repository for information sharing). stacy later modified the appearance of the box, which can be done in real time. to accomplish this, they used sl in both simultaneous and distributed modes, collaborating while seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 61 looking, talking and changing color patterns, and designing (creating the 3d box) as a local activity performed outside in a “sandbox” by heather, mediated by the sl inventory (caruso et al., 2015). immersive nature of second life this excerpt is part of the interview with the tutor at the end of the course. it addresses a question raised by the interviewer regarding getting her students engaged for the educational activities and how it compares to an f2f class. tutor: .. when i'm coming around in second life, and i'm flying around the buildings, the students are (..) actively engaged in what they're doing. they're not having side conversations, and i don't know i don't know why that is, but they're:: they're typically, like, engaged in the content the whole time. and sometimes, they don't even know i'm there, like i'll fly around the outside of the building, and not even come in (..) and so they don't know that i'm there, but they're actually talking about the content instead of having a side conversation about something else. when immersed in the virtual world, students performed their tasks in a realistic and focused manner. the students were deeply involved in the task all of the time and were less side tracked, which is different from the tutor’s faceto-face classroom experiences, where students often had side-conversations (caruso et al., 2015). 5 comparison and discussion previous work has implemented and studied pbl in synchronous networked environments, including sl (good, howland & thackray, 2008; savin-baden, 2006) and ac (karabulut, & correia, 2008; schullo et al., 2007), but to the best of our knowledge, no work has yet compared the two environments with respect to the pbl characteristics they offer. we discuss and compare the two learning environments by four pbl characteristics (learner activity, collaborative learning, valuation of previous knowledge and feedback) to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the two learning environments in supporting pbl. 5.1 learner activity learner activity is the key pbl characteristic, according to nokelainen (2006). it entails engaging the learners in the learning task and giving them some ownership of the problems identified at the beginning of the task and in the solutions proposed afterward. in the two online environments (ac and sl), the learning tasks need to be structured by the tutor upfront for students to be able to progress any further, as the coordination of the joint task would otherwise be difficult. once the students understand the task, they are able to work out the rest by themselves. in ac, this was accomplished by involving the entire group simultaneously, as in problem 1, or by allowing them to work with specialised internal collaboration tools, such as notecard pods and specialised external tools, such as google docs, facebook, wikispaces, google+ and dropbox in problem 2. in sl, the class was to split into smaller groups after a plenum lecture to work uninterrupted in separate discussion rooms in the virtual world. this was not pursued in ac due to the smaller class size, despite the option of using breakout rooms. the tutor in sl acted as a ‘guide on the side’ by flying around to each group building in a round robin or need-based fashion. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 62 5.2 collaborative learning cooperative and collaborative learning is to study with other learners to reach a common learning goal (nokelainen, 2006). it could be for the students to engage in a discussion about what the assignment means to them, e.g. to build a common understanding. it could also mean to create new knowledge that is more than the sum of what the students could create on their own. synchronous networked environments enable collaborative learning when participants are enabled to communicate with one another and work on a common problem together. with ac, it was the visual video-conferencing that kept the students focused on the task and maintained the other participants’ contributions toward it. the students created a new understanding of the concept of digital literacy in a group with different opinions, representing different cultures. however, the environment sometimes made the students uncomfortable, as they became self-aware of their own presences and unaware of their reaching a consensus during communication. this required various means of signalling that someone’s utterance had been understood. with a good bandwidth, this is easier to support, but a poor connection can hamper this communication. in the sl case, the teacher communicated the assignment to the students in two ways: in a lecture and on slides posted on the walls, and the students worked in smaller groups (4–5) to understand and solve it, which involved customising a box tool for information sharing. the environment helped the students to focus on the task with minimal side tracking; it permitted avatars to ‘act’ on their behalf, role-playing to engage the learners, and a seeded learning environment (the virtual rooms were filled with content-specific learning material). what hindered collaborative learning in some situations in sl was the lack of proper body language to supplement the spoken utterances, and a technical threshold prevented the least-prepared students to take full advantage of the setting. 5.3 valuation of previous knowledge how the environment and the tutor are supported to present learning material that is well adapted to the learner’s prior knowledge. the two environments do not support the adaptation of learning tasks to the students’ prior knowledge. however, ac takes advantage of users’ familiarity with desktop video conferencing, despite this, some of the tools can be challenging, as they provide interfaces with which some were not familiar, thus providing a technical barrier that needs to be overcome before engaging fully in the activity. the same goes for sl. it was the tutor who provided information adapted to the students’ prior knowledge to the best of her capabilities. there are also here, and arguable more for sl than for ac, tools that are not well aligned with students’ prior knowledge. on the other hand, the sl virtual world (building and rooms) can be seeded with ‘prior’ knowledge in the form of personal (e.g. family) photos of the participants on the inside of the building walls. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 63 5.4 feedback feedback is the hallmark of good educational practice when feedback is adapted to the learner’s prior knowledge and encourages him or her to continue to learn and to develop new knowledge. both ac and sl allow tutors and peers to give feedback through the default channels for communication (audio and chat). feedback is also supported by one-to-one (private) chat messages. in addition, role-playing in sl was followed by debrief sessions, which are another means of giving feedback modelled on human practice. neither ac nor sl provides automated feedback, but this suggests an area for future research. 6 summary and conclusions by comparing ac’s and sl’s strengths and weaknesses with respect to key pbl characteristics (learner activity, collaborative learning, valuation of previous knowledge, and feedback), we have found that the two synchronous networked environments share several strengths, such as synchronicity (real-time communication), support for social interaction, working together to identify and solve problems, and saving travel time and cost. the tutor organised the activities in ac to keep the students on track on the task, and the tutor also created topics for collaboration by challenging their prior knowledge. we found that the pods in ac act as the ‘regulator’ for pushing students to participate when tutor-centred lecturing is not activating the students to a sufficient degree. however, the video tools in ac also make the students visible and self-aware, not unlike an ordinary classroom presence, and possibly enhanced. an advantage of this is that the participants’ facial expressions can be communicated at the right time with a good bandwidth. however, we also note that students’ lack of familiarity with the different pod tools, such as chatting and note taking, interfered with the flow of communication. role-play is a preferred technique for organising teaching in sl, as role-plays fit for tasks that are difficult, tension-laden and expensive to carry out in the real world (e.g. simulating challenging situations for special education teachers). sl was less apprehensive to shy students because avatars allowed them to ‘hide’ aspects of first-life personality. when the participants created role-play scenarios, they used different sl tools for this purpose (e.g. the multipurpose box tool). the interactions in the 3d virtual world allowed for movement in a virtual space and this increased engagement in the activity, such as when the student modified 3d objects to accomplish their task. both peers and the tutor provided feedback. the tutor ‘flew’ her avatar between the different group buildings and gave feedback when she saw an opportunity to intervene with leading questions, constructive critique and praise. 7 acknowledgements we thank jan erik dahl and per hetland for their comments on an earlier version of this article. pål fugelli and leif lahn gave us ideas for how to compare the two case studies. we thank norgesuniversitetet (nuv) for funding the collaboration (mil project) that led to this insightful research. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 64 8 references allmendinger, k. 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(2008): mixed reality-mediated collaborative design system: concept, prototype, and experimentation. in: cooperative design, visualization, and engineering (pp. 117-124). springer, berlin heidelberg walsh, d. & downe, s. (2005). meta-synthesis method for qualitative research: a literature review. journal of advanced nursing, 50(2), 204-211. vygotsky, l. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. yin, r.k. (2003). case study research: design and methods. london, uk: sage publications. problem-based learning in synchronous networked environments: comparing adobe connect and second life anders i. mørch abstract title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 title one laptop on each desk: teaching methods in technology rich classrooms catarina player-koro department of pedagogical, curricular and professional studies university of gothenburg email: catarina.player-koro@gu.se martin tallvid division of learning, communication and it, university of gothenburg email: martin.tallvid@educ.goteborg.se abstract this article takes its point of departure from the main findings from research in four upper secondary schools in a 1:1 initiative (one laptop per student) and reports on a deeper analysis of four classrooms that are part of the empirical study. this study aims to investigate how teaching and learning in technology-rich classrooms are structured and thus contribute to the development of knowledge about the impact of technology on the structuring of teaching and learning in educational practices. bernstein’s theoretical concept of the pedagogic discourse is used to make visible how the main incentive for teaching methods is the evaluation system that recontextualises traditional discourses about teaching and learning. the conclusion is that fundamental transformations of education is less about technology and more about the changing of the structures and discourses concerning teaching, learning and education. keywords: educational technology, ict, one-to-one, 1:1 laptop initiative. introduction many swedish schools have in recent years undergone a radical digitization due to the one-laptop-per-student (1:1) initiatives and infrastructural school investments made by a majority of sweden’s municipalities. these investments have also become an everyday occurrence in schools all over the western world (fried, 2008; holcomb, 2009; lowther, ross, & morrison, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:catarina.player-koro@gu.se mailto:martin.tallvid@educ.goteborg.se seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 181 2003; oecd, 2010; warschauer, 2006; zucker & light, 2009). typically, these initiatives result from arguments that are similar, irrespective of geographical location, and can be divided into three categories. • rational arguments the ambient society is permeated with computers, and schools are forced to adapt to the development (hepp, hinostroza, laval, & rehbein, 2004). • egalitarian arguments in a technology-rich and globalized society, where knowledge is a fundamental asset, pressure is put on schools to prepare all students for a society where ict is a key technology (buente & robbin, 2008). • pedagogical arguments 1:1-initiatives are considered as change-agents in efforts to transform teaching, particularly when student-centred approaches are being considered (chen, 2010; mooij & smeets, 2001; sharma, 2011). often, these arguments are also interwoven with pre-conceived convictions in the discourse amongst politicians and policymakers that education is the key to future economic prosperity. in this debate, ict is often singled out as a key enabler for providing the fundamental changes, innovation and modernization of education and training that is needed and required for nations to remain competitive in the globalized economy (bocconi, kampylis, & punie, 2013; nivala, 2009; player-koro, 2012b; selwyn & facer, 2013). however, still there is lack of evidence of fundamental changes to education through the implementation of technology. neither more recent evaluations of 1:1 initiatives (balanskat, bannister, hertz, sigillò, & vuorikari, 2013; dunleavy, dexter, & heinecke, 2007; goodwin, 2011; larkin, 2011; shapley, sheehan, maloney, & caranikas-walker, 2011a; tallvid, 2010), nor about 40 years of study in the field of educational technology have been able to find a verifiable link between the transformation of education and the use of technology for teaching and learning (livingstone, 2011; skolverket, 2013; yuan-hsuan, waxman, jiun-yu, michko, & lin, 2013). nevertheless, every year huge resources are directed towards the exploration of how ict could be used for the transformation of education and the enhancement of the act of learning (selwyn & facer, 2013). common explanations of why these expectations of change due to educational technology have not been attained are sometimes made with reference to theories that describe the implementation of ict as a process of development, which, in turn, might imply that the initiative has not yet reached the expected phase of innovative change. bocconi et al. (2013) comes to the conclusion that ‘… the 1:1 learning initiative may turn into a high impact development if it allows for the development of more effective ways for people to teach and learn…’(p. 125). other explanations describe the lack of transformative changes as failures. however, these failures are seldom described as technological failures. instead, teachers, students and schools seen to be reductive, slow or having the wrong or an unconstructive attitude towards the use of technology in education (nivala, 2009; ottestad, 2010; skolverket, 2013). paradoxically, despite the lack of supporting evidence for the prerequisites for the use of ict in educational settings, positive predictions as to how ict is capable of transforming education has continuously been brought forward in the academic research field (khan, butt, & zaman baba, 2013; shapley, sheehan, maloney, & caranikas-walker, 2011b). in this article, we challenge and problematize the assumption about ict as a change-agent. this is done through a theoretical, informed analysis of video observations of four different classrooms (four lessons of approximately one hour each) that formed part of a bigger study that is described below. the theoretical framework used in the study describes activities inside the classrooms (the pedagogic discourse) as structured by many different and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 182 often competing discourses (bernstein, 2000). this framework facilitates an analysis of how a pedagogic discourse is structured, in conjunction with the infusion of intentionally transformative innovations such as 1:1 initiatives. it also facilitates an analysis to discover which discourses have the strongest impact on classroom activities. the intention of the article is to contribute to the development of knowledge of how and why ict is currently used in educational settings. the study four video observations of four different classrooms are chosen for an indepth analysis. these chosen classrooms are part of a rigorous two-year study in upper secondary schools in sweden that have invested in 1:1 initiatives. during these years, data was produced using several data collection formats (surveys, interviews, focus group interviews, and video observations in classrooms, in which digital technology is used for teaching and learning). these multiple data collection formats were used in order to provide a broader and more general picture, as well to foster a deeper understanding of how the teachers’ pedagogical work is influenced by the digitization of schools. moreover, the different data sources have also made it possible to analyse through triangulation, since the survey results have been considered in relation to the analysis of the interviews and observations. in this way, the various data sources have provided a rich picture of both the daily teaching and learning, as well as of the context of the teaching at the schools under study. the main results from the study show that ict is frequently used in core activities, such as teachers’ planning and organization, as well as their teaching and that these activities challenge existing classroom practice in many ways. on the other hand, there was no evidence that could be verified in the analysis of a specific transformation of the organization of teaching due to instructional use of digital technology. these findings are reported elsewhere (player-koro, björkenvall starrost, & lindström, 2013; player-koro, tallvid, & lindström, 2014). the video observations that were used (of four different classrooms for approximately one hour each) were primarily concerned with the effects of digital technology on the teaching process, and the analyses concentrated on the interaction between the students and teachers in the classroom. the observations were documented using video recorders and by taking field notes. one of the reasons for the selection of these particular classes is that the principal of each school recommended these classrooms. they were considered to be examples of particularly innovative teaching and learning practices and were thus considered to represent examples of the changing classroom practices. another important reason, as described above, was that the findings from the larger study, from the survey and from the focus group interviews indicated that teachers and students frequently used laptops in education, and that this had not changed the fundamental elements of teaching and learning in the schools under study. analytical framework the theoretical grounding for this study implies that schools and classrooms are not simply transmission systems of ´learning transfer´ of knowledge and skills. instead, what happens in teaching situations is considered to be the result of a process of struggle between different agents that are present both inside and outside the educational setting. this process is a complex, shifting seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 183 blend of the values, ideas and interpretations of discourses of legitimate knowledge and skills, together with the rules for their transmission and acquisition (ball, 2006; beach, 2005; bernstein, 2000). therefore, for this study, it is important to be aware of how local teaching practices are a part of, and is shaped by, actors both within and outside the educational institution. in this sense, teaching and learning are situated in a contextual practice that comprises the classrooms under study (beach, 2005). activities in these practices can be seen as the result of translations and interpretations of the different discourses stemming from traditions of how and what to teach in different subjects, and the educational policies shaped by political discussions. the activities in these classrooms are also derived from the public and media debate, from agents in the educational field (educators in schools, principals, etc.), and not least, from the it-industry (bernstein, 2000). in this research, bernstein’s concept of the pedagogic discourse is used as a conceptual framework for the analysis. the pedagogic discourse which could be viewed as the carrier of pedagogy is, as described above, formed by various discourses, through the embedding of two discourses: the instructional discourse, a discourse of transmission and acquisition of specific competences, skills and knowledge, within the underlying general regulative discourse, a discourse of social order, conduct and manner (ensor, 2004; hoadley, 2006). the organisation of classrooms activities, which is the prime concern in this study, is according to bernstein, the way in which the purpose of education is realised and made visible through communication between teachers and students inside the classroom (the realisation of the pedagogic discourse) (hoadley, 2006). the meaning and intentions of the teaching and learning activities in the classroom are in turn visualized through the method of evaluation of the students, (as for example different kinds of assessments of students work), that specifies the requirements for students learning. this means that the evaluative criteria have a central role in structuring and identifying of the pedagogic practices. this is especially important to note, because it means that evaluation is the key to the pedagogical practice, and that the examinations visualize the whole meaning of the educational process (bernstein, 2000). the pedagogic communication, or the realisation of the pedagogic discourse could be identified and described through the concepts of classification and framing, which refer, respectively, to power and control that are distinguished by the characteristic of their voice or pedagogic modality (bernstein, 2000; hoadley, 2006). classification expresses power relations and creates the degree of demarcation between agents (in this case between teachers and students), and between different school-subjects, and can either be defined as strong or weak. classification is expressed as strong where boundaries are explicit, or weak, where there is integration, or blurred boundaries. in terms of subjects it means that the different school-subjects are explicit and insulated from one another. with respect to agents in the pedagogic relationship it identifies how teachers and students pedagogic identities are demarcated (bernstein, 2000; hoadley, 2006). if classification concerns establishment of relations between categories, such as school-subjects and teachers and students, framing on the other hand refers to realisations and maintenance of categories within a specific context (in this case the classroom) and is underpinned by the principle of control. this means that framing supports or visualises classification through interaction; boundaries are defined, maintained and changed. at the classroom level, framing refers to the locus of control over the pedagogic communication. in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 184 general, the stronger the framing the stronger is teachers control over selection, sequencing, pacing and evaluation whereas students have limited ability to control the ‘relations within’, the instructional and regulative discourse. on the other hand where framing is weak the students have more ‘space’ or control over the social interaction, but at the same time there are rules of regulative and instructional discourse, as for example the requirements to pass exams, that are more implicit and largely unknown to the students (bernstein, 2000; hoadley, 2006). results this section aims to present the result of the theoretical analysis of video observations from four lessons in english language, civics, economics, and swedish language. as already mentioned, these four lessons are examples taken from teaching and learning in schools and classrooms equipped with ict and where these technologies are used frequently by both teachers and students during lessons and where most of the teachers have positive attitudes to technology and have found it useful for managing their professional work (player-koro et al., 2014).the aim of the analyses is to describe and make visible how teaching and learning in technology-rich classrooms are structured. analyses of classroom work where digital technology was used for teaching and learning. bernstein has in his study of pedagogy asserted the centrality of evaluative criteria in identifying a pedagogic practice. this was also evident in these classrooms, three of the four teachers said that the activities in the classroom were aimed at preparing students for the upcoming exam, as is illustrated by the citations below. ... today we are working with warehouse management and calculating optimal purchasing control ... yes, these calculations will be graded by means of a test in a couple of weeks (teacher of economics) … the intention is to learn to listen and grasp the meaning of the story … learn some new words … this is actually part of their national test … (teacher of english) … they (the students) work with a report of society's political development from a historical perspective. students choose a country they wish to study ... the written report should be handed in through our learning platform ... they'll also give an oral presentation of their report (teacher of civics) ‘examination’ was also evident in the swedish language classroom. the lesson we sat in on was actually part of their examination of an area called ‘verbal instruction’. the examination task that the students were supposed to carry out to pass the exam was not new, but this year the teacher had changed the way the task was evaluated. the task had previously been evaluated through an oral presentation to the class, but on this occasion, the task was to create an instructional video that was presented to the class. the teacher described the examination as: … this examination is part of actually creating better stories. the idea is that by creating an instruction and then recording an instructional video, the students will learn how to create the outline of a story … an introduction, the story, which, in this case, is an instruction, and an ending ... in addition, they learn how to make an oral presentation (teacher of swedish) drawing on the teachers´ description of the examinations it could be concluded that the test was a form of post-test, in which the student’s ability to answer questions or solve problems is evaluated. the lessons differed however seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 185 in how clearly the requirements for the examinations were expressed to the students. in the case of the english language and economics the teachers expressed the evaluative criteria for the students very clearly i.e. what they were supposed to do to pass the exam: teacher: open your books and do the these exercises … when you’ve finished, you can read and try to learn the words that will be used in the test on friday (from observation of the english language classroom, 2012-11-12) teacher: ... the exercises are available on the learning platform ... i have shown examples on the whiteboard … after that, just ‘do the task and you can ask me if you have any questions (from observation of the economics classroom, 2012-11-09) in the civics and swedish language classrooms, the examinations were given in the form of a project that was supposed to be submitted as a written report (in the case of the civics lesson) and in an instructional video (in the case of the swedish language lesson). the teacher described the work as follows: … i gave them a compendium with all the information about what was required from them to pass the exam. based on that, the students’ chose a country to work on … they have a deadline … it’s up to them to plan the work (teacher of civics) … the students had an instruction. they could choose anything that interested them, and then start with the movie production. (teacher of swedish language) these examinations were mainly based on student choices and meant that the requirements for the exam were more implicit for the students: teacher:... you have to include the country's economic and political development in the report if you want to pass the exam ... you can look for information online ... don’t forget to submit the report for assessment at week 48 (from observation of the civics classroom, 2012-11-12) teacher: today you have to show your instruction video to the class … you have the description of the examination criteria in the compendium… in a couple of weeks, you will get your grades marks for this work (from observation of the swedish language classroom, 201211-12) in other words the framing of the evaluative criteria is stronger in the case of the english language and the economics subjects. the different degree of framing was also evident in the teaching structure and the regulative part of the pedagogic discourse. this was observed during the classroom work. in the english language and economics classrooms, the lessons were aimed at preparing the students by extending their vocabulary and their ability to make economic calculations. figure 1 illustrates the social interactions, or the framing, in the economics and english language classrooms. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 186 figure 1. the framing in economic and english language classrooms strong framing means that students have relatively little control over selection of subject content, sequencing, and pacing. in other words the teacher has control over the subject content, and who is able to speak and when. this was evident in all parts of these lessons. these lessons started with an introduction. the introduction was aimed at presenting the topic for the day and was an activity that took place at the front of the classroom. in these two classrooms, it was not the teacher who introduced the topic; instead, the introduction was mediated through digital technology. the economics class was structured from a lesson film that students could access via the learning management system (lms). it was a video in which the teacher gave a lecture on the topic for in question. in the english language classroom, the teacher introduced a video that was part of the course literature. she also reminded the students of the words that should be learned before the next lesson (see figure 1). in the next phase of the lesson (teaching, see figure 1), the teachers introduced the tasks that students were supposed to work with during the lesson. … now check if you understood the film … if look in your books you will find some exercises … and we will look at these at the end of the lesson … also take a look at the vocabulary on page 166 (from the english language classroom, 2012-11-12) … the tasks are on the on the fronter (the lms system) … if you get stuck with solving the tasks, you can ask me or go back to the video clips available online (from the economics classroom, 2009-11-09) in both classrooms, these activities were concerned mainly with the transmission of knowledge, as defined by what was written in the course book or in the case of the economics lesson, copied from the book. when students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 187 were occupied with the tasks, the teacher walked around the classroom, tutoring individual students one at a time or in groups (see figure 2). figure 2. individual work in english language and economics classrooms a striking observation made during this part was that even if the students had laptops available on their desks, no one used them for solving the tasks. in the economics classroom, where the teacher had prompted the students to use material available online, it turned out that the students had printed these files and brought these the print-outs to the lesson. in the concluding part of the lessons, teaching was once again an activity that took place at the front of the classroom (see figure 1). in this phase, the teachers in both classrooms reviewed the exercises that the students had worked on. the english language teacher stood at the front of the classroom and read the questions from the book. teacher (in english language): ok … be quiet … we will finish today by going through the exercises … so the first one (reading from the book): what did the driver say when they reached the grand canyon? … john.. john (answers in swedish) … eh … i think i missed that one /*/ laugh teacher: aah … anders? anders: the weather is extremely bad. teacher: that’s right … write that on exercise one ... next … then i i’d like to finish by saying that next week you will have your assessment on this section. (from observations in the english language classroom, 2012-1112) during the concluding part of the economics lesson, the teachers solved the exercises on the whiteboard. the smartboard was used to project the task from the book (summing up, see figure 1). in this task, we are going to calculate the company's total cost … the cost of warehousing … then you'll know that if we're going to work out the average volume of the layer, we need to take the maximum plus the minimum and divide this by two …(from observations of the economics classroom, 2012-11-09) these concluding activities in both classrooms were obviously intended to answer the students' questions and to show how the tasks in the book were to be solved. however, during this phase, the students were quiet and the teacher showed them how to solve the tasks on the board. the exam was obviously the focus. the questions concerned the content of the exam and the skill needed to pass it. …and you know the test will be on the first ten chapters in the book … any questions? (from observations from the economics classroom, 201211-09) the social structure of the lessons clearly indicated that the pedagogic discourse was strongly framed. in addition, as can be seen in the citations above, the lessons also evidenced the strong classification. strong classification means, according to bernstein, that the subject content, in this case economics and english language, is made very explicit and that the demarcation between teachers and students is clear. this ‘demarcation’ is reflected in the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 188 requirements for the work that students are supposed to do, and is also made clear during teaching. strongly classified and framed pedagogic practices are often perceived as traditional ones (bernstein, 2000, 2003). based on these observations, it can be concluded that the regulative part of the pedagogical discourse, the part that shaped the form and structure of what actually went on in these classrooms, consisted of a discourse in which the classroom conversation and the use of space was similar to the most common way of organising teaching and learning in schools (hoadley, 2006; playerkoro, 2012a). the regulative effect of the examination on the instructional part of the pedagogic discourse can be seen in the selection of the content, and in the interactional patterns during lessons. there is no indication that the use of ict had any impact on the way the lessons were structured. instead, it appeared that the teachers were in control of the use of the technology. in the english language and economics lessons, the teacher was the only person that used the technology, and when it was used, it was as a tool for the presentation of the content of the subject. the examinations seemed to be the main structuring force of the pedagogic discourse in these two lessons, and this discourse can be characterized as strongly classified and framed. such a discourse also had clear influence on if and how technology was used during the lessons, and this is an important finding, not least in relation to the common rhetoric about ict as a catalyst for educational change. the framing of the evaluative criteria was weaker in the civics and the swedish language lessons. this was visible when observing the activities in these classrooms. in the civics classroom the students started their work with the report after a short introduction by the teacher. in this phase, all of the students used the laptops for seeking information, and also, for writing the report. the teacher circulated the classroom, tutoring individual students, one at a time or in groups (see figure 3). students were in control of the subject content and also of the use of the technology. a well-known problem with this kind of weakly classified and framed practice was also evident in this classroom: some of the students were occupied with youtube clips, facebook etc., rather than with the report they were supposed to be working on (see figure 3). this kind of pedagogic practice, where the rules for examination are more implicit, requires a higher degree of responsibility from the students, who have to be more self-directed in their learning attitude (bernstein, 2003). on the other hand, this is also problematic for some of the students, in particular, those from non-academic homes (bernstein, 2003; hoadley, 2006; whitty, 2001). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 189 figure 2. work with report in civics classroom these findings may imply that common educational problems of, for example, social exclusion are the same with or without technology use in educational settings (hoadley, 2006; whitty, 2001). in fact, it seems as if the use of technology raises the same problems in a new way. the teacher in civics also expressed this: … to have this free choice is hard for some of the students … in this case, the laptop is also problematic because it distracts them rather than helping them … (teacher of civics) the swedish language lesson was focussed on the examination of one area in the curriculum; ‘verbal instruction’. the structure of this lesson was simply that the student, or in some cases a group of students, walked to the front of the classroom, plugged in their computer, made a short presentation of their movie, starting it and returning to their desks (see figure 4). however, due to a very tight timetable, there was no time for discussion during this lesson. this may have occurred at a later date otherwise it would be interesting to follow up on, especially in relation to the assumption of efficiency gains when technology is implemented in schools. figure 3. presentation of instruction video in swedish language classroom seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 190 all of the students had made an instruction video using their mobile phones, and they had edited it with video-editing software. even though the form and structure of this student presentation was very much in line with the form of presentations that was common in schools before digital technology was used, the content of the presentations differed. according to the teacher, the reason for this was that she and the students had focused more on the content of the instruction during their discussions about how the film would be cut. she also felt that the students had become more motivated, and this meant that the content of the instruction was more diverse and more eventful than it had been before digital media was used. based on this difference in motivation, it appears that the pedagogical change in the form of examinations, in combination with use of new tools affected the way the students worked on their task. in other words, the digital tools used to accomplish this examination became a facilitator for the pedagogic discourse enacted during the lesson. in this case, however, the examination structure of the pedagogic discourse may imply that a change of examination procedure could be a way to bring about a change in educational practice in which the opportunities for using ict in teaching and learning are improved. nevertheless, the teacher was very proud and satisfied with the students’ work, even though she also mentioned that this way of working was hard for some of the students (see above), and that sometimes the laptops made it harder for some students to focus the task at hand. some conclusions can be drawn, based on these observations. • examinations were the main structuring force of the pedagogic discourse in the observed classrooms. • ict appeared to be a facilitator of the pedagogic discourse when it is used during the observed lessons, rather than an enabler for transforming the discourse. • ict did not solve educational problems of social exclusion. this study of how and why ict was used in classrooms provided evidence that the knowledge and skills that were selected and transformed into the pedagogic discourse, and that were observable in the activities in the classrooms, emanate from the traditional discourses of teaching, learning, and evaluation. this is clearly evident by the focus on examinations, which dictates both what the subject content would be (the instructional discourse) and how this content should be structured and taught (the regulative discourse) (bernstein, 2000). conclusion the main findings from the two years of study in 1:1 schools indicated the frequent use of technology in classrooms to support teaching and learning. the methods of use can be considered as mainly traditional. teachers are positive about the use of technology and find it useful for managing their professional work. the detailed description and analysis of on-going education undertaken in this study was aimed to delve deeper into how a pedagogic discourse is structured when ict is available in the classroom, and it was clearly evident that the pedagogic discourse is structured to focus on examinations. this has consequences for if and how ict was used. if the examination takes a traditional form, in which students are supposed to complete exercises from the course book, as was the case in the english language and the economic classrooms, the teachers were in control over how and if technology was used. on the other hand, in the swedish language and in the civics classroom, in which ict was more or less a tool for passing the examination, the students also used ict more frequently. based on these findings, it can be concluded seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 191 that ict, in this context, did not contribute to changing the pedagogic discourse; instead it seemed as though the use of technology actually functioned as a tool to facilitate the prevailing pedagogic discourse. another finding was that in english language, civics, and economics, in which the examinations could be defined as traditional forms of post-test examinations, the pedagogic discourse about how teaching and learning had to be done was constituted by traditional discourses about teaching and learning. the fourth lesson, the swedish language lesson, also confirms this, but at the same time, points towards a possible way to achieve change in both the educational practice and in the instructional use of ict, and also indicates that this change could be made through a change in how examinations are carried out. this study also points to the fact that many things have changed in classroom practice. the personal laptop with on-line access has changed the ways student and teachers communicate. this study has provided clear evidence that learning management systems and e-mail are now routine media for communication and information in education. ict also offered opportunities to work in new ways. the english language, economics, and civics lessons demonstrated how teaching was mediated, both asynchronously and in realtime communication, via ip-telephone/video. the swedish language lesson was an example of how the methods of evaluations were altered thereby making possible new ways of working with and presenting assignments. these changes however, may be yet another example showing that technology expands teachers’ teaching repertoire rather than changing them fundamentally (cuban, 1986). moreover, this study also sheds on the familiar problems, such as social exclusion, and these are critical factors in success or failure in education (bernstein, 2003; whitty, 2001). finally, it is also our hope that this study may serve as a contribution to the on-going discussion about the need for academic studies in education and technology in order to adopt a more critical approach to the study of relationships between ict and education and the effects of the use of ict in education (selwyn, 2012a, 2012b; selwyn & oliver, 2011). in particular, about the need for researchers in educational technology to distance them from research based on the assumptions that technology is a force causing impacts on education. references balanskat, a., bannister, d., hertz, b., sigillò, e., & vuorikari, r. (2013). overview and analyses of 1:1 learning initiatives in europe scientific and policy report by the research centre of the european commission. luxembourg: institute for prospective technological studies. ball, s. j. (2006). education policy and social class : the selected works of stephen j. ball. london: routledge. beach, d. (2005). the problem of how learning should be socially organised,. reflective practice, 6(4), 473-489. bernstein, b. (2000). pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: theory, research, critique. lanham, md.: rowman & littlefield publishers. bernstein, b. (2003). class and pedagogies: visible and invisible. in a. h. halsey (ed.), education: culture, economy and society: oxford university press. bocconi, s., kampylis, p., & punie, y. (2013). framing ict-enabled innovation for learning: the case of one-to-one learning initiatives in europe. european journal of education, 48(1), 113-130. doi: 10.1111/ejed.12021 buente, w., & robbin, a. (2008). trends in internet information behavior, 20002004. journal of the american society for information science and technology, 58(11), 1743 1760. chen, r. (2010). investigating models for preservice teachers’ use of technology to support student-centered learning. computers & education, 55(1), 32-42. cuban, l. (1986). teachers and machines : the classroom use of technology since 1920. new york: teachers college press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 192 dunleavy, m., dexter, s., & heinecke, w. f. (2007). what added value does a 1:1 student to laptop ratio bring to technology-supported teaching and learning? journal of computer assisted learning, 23(5), 440-452. doi: 10.1111/j.13652729.2007.00227.x ensor, p. (2004). towards a sociology of teacher education. in j. muller, b. davies & a. morais (eds.), reading bernstein, researching bernstein. london: routledge falmer. fried, c. (2008). in-class laptop use and its effect on student learning. computers and education, 50(3), 9. goodwin, b. (2011). one-to-one laptop programs are no silver bullet. educational leader, 68(5), 78-79. hepp, p., hinostroza, e., laval, e., & rehbein, l. (2004). technology in schools: education, ict and the knowledge society. washington dc: world bank. hoadley, u. (2006). analysing pedagogy: the problem of framing. journal of education (40), 15-34. holcomb, l. b. (2009). results & lessons learned from1:1 laptop initiatives: a collective review. tech trends, 53(6), 49-55. khan, s. m., butt, m. a., & zaman baba, m. (2013). ict: impacting teaching and learning. international journal of computer applications, 61(8), 7-10. larkin, k. (2011). informing one-to-one computing in primary schools: student use of netbooks. australasian journal of educational technology, 27(3), 514-530. livingstone, s. (2011). critical reflections on the benefits of ict in education. oxford review of education, 38(1), 9-24. doi: 10.1080/03054985.2011.577938 lowther, l., ross, s., m, & morrison, g., m. (2003). when each one has one: the influences on teaching strategies and student achievement of using laptops in the classroom. educational technology research and development, 51(3), 23-44. mooij, t., & smeets, e. (2001). modelling and supporting ict implementation in secondary schools. computers & education, 36(3), 265-281. nivala, m. (2009). simple answers for complex problems: education and ict in finnish information society strategies. media culture society, 31(3), 433-448. doi: 10.1177/0163443709102715 oecd (2010). are the new millennium learners making the grade? centre for educational research and innovation: oecd. ottestad, g. (2010). innovative pedagogical practice with ict in three nordic countries differences and similarities. journal of computer assisted learning, 26(6), 478-491. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00376.x player-koro, c. (2012a). hype, hope and ict in teacher education: a bernsteinian perspective. learning, media and technology, 38(1) 1-15. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.637503 player-koro, c. (2012b). reproducing traditional discourses of teaching and learning mathematics [elektronisk resurs] : studies of mathematics and ict in teaching and teacher education. göteborg: department of applied it, university of gothenburg ; chalmers university of technology. player-koro, c., björkenvall starrost, c., & lindström, b. (2013). utvärderingsstudie av jönköping kommuns satsning på informations, och kommunikationsteknik i de kommunala gymnasieskolorna för att utveckla elevers lärande. delrapport. [evaluation study of jönköping municipality's investment in information and communication technologies in the local high schools to develop pupils' learning. progress report]. player-koro, c., tallvid, m., & lindström, b. (2014). utvärderingsstudie av jönköping kommuns satsning på ikt för att utveckla elevers lärande i de kommunala gymnasieskolorna. preliminär slutrapport [evaluation study of jönköping municipality's investment in ict to develop pupils' learning in the municipal secondary schools. preliminary final study reports]. göteborg. selwyn, n. (2012a). bursting out of the 'ed-tech' bubble. learning, media and technology, 37(4), 331-334. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2012.680212 selwyn, n. (2012b). ten suggestions for improving academic research in education and technology. learning, media and technology, 37(3), 213-219. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2012.680213 selwyn, n., & facer, k. (2013). the politics of education and technology : conflicts, controversies, and connections. retrieved from http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137031983.000 5 selwyn, n., & oliver, m. (2011). learning, media and technology: looking backwards and moving forward. learning, media & technology, 36(1), 1-3. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.557916 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 193 shapley, k., sheehan, d., maloney, c., & caranikas-walker, f. (2011a). effects of technology immersion on middle school students learning opportunities and achievement. the journal of educational research, 104(5), 299-315. doi: 10.1080/00220671003767615 shapley, k., sheehan, d., maloney, c., & caranikas-walker, f. (2011b). effects of technology immersion on middle school students´ learning opportunities and achievement. the journal of educational research, 104(5), 299-315. doi: 10.1080/00220671003767615 sharma, k. (2011). the role of ict in higher education for the 21st century : ict as a change agent for education. vsrd international journal of cs & it, 1(6). skolverket. (2013). it-användning och it-kompetens i skolan. stockholm. tallvid, m. (2010). en-till-en : falkenbergs väg till framtiden? utvärdering av projektet en-till-en i två grundskolor i falkenbergs kommun. delrapport 3. falkenberg :: barnoch utbildningsförvaltningen, falkenbergs kommun ;. warschauer, m. (2006). laptops and literacy: learning in the wireless classroom. new york: teacher college press. whitty, g. (2001). education, social class and social exclusion. journal of education policy, 16(4), 287-295. doi: 10.1080/02680930110054308 yuan-hsuan, l., waxman, h., jiun-yu, w., michko, g., & lin, g. (2013). revisit the effect of teaching and learning with technology. journal of educational technology & society, 16(1), 133-n/a. zucker, a., & light, d. (2009). laptop programs for students. science magazine, 323(82 85). catarina player-koro abstract introduction the study analytical framework results analyses of classroom work where digital technology was used for teaching and learning. conclusion microsoft word engebretsen making sense with multimedia-270406.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 making sense with multimedia. a text theoretical study of a digital format integrating writing and video martin engebretsen associate professor, phd agder university college, norway email: martin.engebretsen@hia.no abstract digital text formats that allow a close interaction between writing and video represent new possibilities and challenges for the communication of educational content. what are the premises for functional and appropriate communication through web-based, multimedial text formats? this article explores the digital writing-video format from a structural, theoretical perspective. to begin with, the two media’s respective characteristics are discussed and compared as carriers of complex signs. thereafter, the focus is upon how writing and video elements can be accommodated to web media. finally, the article discusses the conditions for optimal co-ordination and interaction between the two media types within the framework of an integrated design. a design example is presented. keywords educational screen texts, multimedia, multimodality, text theory, web-design introduction digital media offer us the opportunity to describe the world and communicate with our surroundings in ways that have not previously existed. in particular have technologies connected with hyper linking and the mixing of media transformed the conditions for the creation of meaning. as broadband connection to the internet becomes standard in homes, schools and offices, new opportunities for dynamic and “rich” forms of expression will seriously influence the different text genres of our culture. a common denominator with many of these forms of expression is that media forms that earlier appeared in separate media channels, now meet, mix and at times merge into new, distinctive media forms. they converge. when written text, speech, photography, music, video and graphics are combined and integrated in digital texts, we are dealing not only with the convergence of media forms. on a more fundamental level it involves a convergence of semiotic systems, reading conventions and rhetorical patterns. a considerable challenge faced by contemporary media producers, is to develop text and genre forms that fulfil their rhetorical tasks within these frames. how will multimedia-readers be informed, touched, persuaded and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 2 activated?1 at the same time a new form of literacy will be required by recipients. and not the least, researchers will have to test and challenge both new and existing theories and methods in their exploration of new genres. this article is intended as a contribution from the field of text research.2 new rhetoric and educational potentials in the light of current broadband developments certain media formats are of particular interest, not the least the formats that combine writing and video.3 such formats have for a long time been explored experimentally, e.g. within the production of educational cd-roms. but general usage has only arrived in the wake of broadband, so that is has become possible to distribute sound and video over the internet, almost as swiftly as written text and images. it is, on the other hand, not merely the possibilities of distribution that make text-video formats interesting. from a text theoretical perspective it is interesting because it entails a new phase in the development of multimodal types of text, i.e. types of text where different semiotic resources (writing, images, graphics, speech…etc) are combined and integrated.4 from the perspective of rhetoric, text-video formats are of interest because they make it possible to undertake rhetorical tasks that are not possible with traditional media formats. they represent in other words a new rhetorical potential. it should be obvious that these formats also are of significant educational interest, as they imply that educational material can be presented and treated in new ways. when reading newspapers and magazines, we are rarely conscious of how interaction between words, images and graphical design influences our understanding of the issues presented. this form of multimodality is to a large extent conventionalised, and our ability to read such complex, but static media texts is so well developed that we read such texts more or less intuitively.5 these kinds of text have already been comprehensively discussed in the research literature. it is different with texts that combine writing with video.6 we lack the grammar and aesthetic tools to describe the rules and effects concerning the combination of their meaning-carrying units, such that the creators of texts can predict how the they will be read, interpreted and experienced. the goal of this article is to give a text theoretical presentation of the premises for the creation of meaning, when media types such as writing and video are applied to the web-medium. the discussion is based upon an analysis of the characteristics of writing and video as carriers of complex sign systems; i.e. their semiotic and user oriented affordances, and a description of the webmedium as a hosting medium.7 design of content in a digital perspective günther kress and theo van leeuwen’s book multimodal discourse offers a theoretical framework for the study of multimodal texts.8 following the ambitious goal of social semiotics to reveal the premises for the formation of meaning through media-based communication, kress and van leuween identify four dimensions, so-called "strata", in communicative acts: discourse, design, production and distribution. in the discussion about how and what one can represent and communicate in a text-video format, the concept of design proposed by kress & van leeuwen is particularly useful. design is presented in a broad manner as the planning – the sketching – of how the mediated message is to be constructed and given a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 3 shape, much in the same way as the architect plans the choice of materials, supporting structures and details of a building. an important component in the design of communication acts is to decide which semiotic resources, or modalities are to be used and how they are to be co-ordinated. in the design, discursive content, semiotic resources and communicative intentions are joined together. but the interaction between these parts cannot be understood as a successive process, where one first defines content and thereafter selects a suitable form. different semiotic modalities point towards different types of discursive content; different types of ”knowledge”. this means that the semiotic resources possessed by a particular media technology (and mastered by the designer of the text) decide the kind of content one might potentially deal with and thus the kinds of rhetorical and educational tasks that can be undertaken. to take an example; curriculum material about the national political system can be communicated through writing or by the spoken word alone, or through an integrated mixture of words, graphic, photography, sound, video and animation – all dependent on the possibilities offered by the production and distribution technologies applied. and within the framework of digital technology, the different media components can be co-ordinated through a complete, narrative overarching structure, or they can be presented as a more or less ordered group of links leading to short autonomous pieces of information. such variations in media and format will naturally also exert an influence on the discursive content of the genre, on its field of knowledge. what can be expressed about a topic, changes when new modalities and structural principles are applied. and thereby the social expectations and hermeneutic frameworks supporting the genre will also be transformed. media typological traits of writing and video how can media types such as writing and video complement each other in an integrated design? as a point of departure in attempting to answer this question, it is necessary to explore the different structural traits of the two types of media. in the presentation below, the following aspects of the two media will be explored: form of representation, basic unit of syntax, grammar, structuring principles and reception. form of representation writing and video represent the world in different ways. while writing refers to a (real or fictive) world, video seeks to show (a segment of) the world. with a re-casting of platonic concepts, it is possible to assert that writing is in principle a diegetic (narrating) medium, while video is a mimetic (imitating) medium.9 while writing requires considerable interpretative work, based among other things on advanced code and genre competence, the video clip is immediately experienced as "a piece of reality". also the concept of transparency can be used to illustrate basic differences in the manner of representation between the two media. video is a more transparent medium, in the sense that the interpreter’s attention is to a greater degree directed towards the mediated and to a lesser degree towards the medium.10 this means that video has the ability to bring forth an authentic emotional response.11 the proximity to the reality represented, means that the viewer of video is emotionally touched in a different and more immediate way than the reader of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 4 written text, who must carry out a quite different interpretational work before a subjectively relevant meaning can be established and an accompanying emotional response can be released. the emotional response includes among other things the experience of identification and sympathy – or antipathy – regarding the people and surroundings represented.12 this experience is connected to the medium’s ability to communicate eye and face; important elements in human communication.13 the video medium is, with its complex multimodality, the carrier of a ”rich” and intricate – also in the sense of manifold – semiotic content.14 the medium’s semiotic richness and dynamic progression also have a ”pasting” effect upon the viewer. the media expression is experienced as sense stimulating in a way that makes it more difficult to ”hop off” a video sequence than a written sequence.15 these differences are primarely connected with the fact that these two types of media communicate different types of signs, respectively signs that possess significance through likeness – as moving images and accompanying sound recordings – and signs that have significance through convention – as words and concepts. this means that the written medium can communicate a relatively precise content through a clearly defined expression. it can also mediate thoughts and emotions that are not reflected in the physical scenario – though only through the writer’s filtering formulation. while writing is a medium for semantic information, video is to a higher degree a medium for aesthetic information.16 semantic information is based upon a conventional relationship between expression and content, and can thus be translated from language to language and partly from medium to medium. it is different with aesthetic information, which lacks a denotative level, and which is very difficult to trans-mediate. aesthetic information deals more with atmospheres than with conceptual content, more with feelings than with ideas. how is it possible to translate atmospheres created by colours into a medium without colours? or the feelings connected with a piece of music into a medium without sound? the realism of video is understandably the result of its technological process of creation, it’s making through (digital) storage of optical and acoustic recordings. even though all forms of digital signal can be manipulated, it is more difficult to lie through video than through writing. this means that video is normally considered a stronger source of proof of an empirical case than writing (cf. the use of video recordings as evidence in criminal cases). basic unit of syntax in both writing and speech it is the word, or the concept, that is the basic building block – acting as the connecting link between a particular linguistic expression and a particular idea. the content of the idea can vary strongly on the level of abstraction, from the completely concrete, such as the idea of a sun-ripe orange, to the extremely abstract, like the idea of marxism as an ideology and way of life. this means that written language can be used for the communication of information both on a concrete level of detail and on an abstract and general level. with video it is different. it is not the concepts or the ideas that form the starting point for the syntax of videos, i.e. for its combinations of meaningful elements. rather, it is time and place, in other words the dimensions that help orientate us in physical time and space.17 the basic unit of syntax can be described as a limited film sequence with organic time in one spatial context. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 5 it is open to discussion how reasonable it is to regard each clipped sequence as a basic unit, irrespective of the use of zoom, panning etc., or if one should understand changes in visual focus and perspective as constituting new building blocks in the syntactic structure of the video film. differences between the two medias’ principles of representation and syntax mean that they are suited to mediate different aspects of the world. if one in an educational context wishes to communicate a political event, for example an important public meeting, video in a way different to writing will be able to reveal details in the actual scenario – physical aspects connected to who and where: what kinds of impressions are made by the participants? what does the place look like? writing (and speech) will be better able to provide a summary (what happened?) and describe the abstract aspects of the event: when and why did it happen? this means that the two media types will provide different kinds of context to the events and actions that are mediated. the strength of video is the way it can provide situational context, while writing can better provide historical and socio-cultural context. grammar writing has verbal language as its primary modality – a sign system with a highly developed and strongly conventional grammar. this means that the rules for how the basic units can be established and put together into larger and more complex units, is well-known and clear, and they can be discussed on an abstract, theoretical level. one can for example discuss the communicative effects of placing an adverb at the beginning of a sentence, or summarising a sentence with a so-called ”key sentence”. video has moving images and accompanying sound recording as its primary modalities; spoken language, as well as writing and music are secondary modalities. this means that video is based upon primary modalities with a weakly developed grammar. it is not correct to say that it totally lacks a grammar. both the language of images and that of graphical form have been described by kress & van leeuwen and jacques bertin, among others.18 the categories and syntagms of film have been described e.g. by christian metz and james monaco.19 but the descriptions are not, as with the grammar of verbal language, refined and elaborated through years of discussion and criticism. they have not therefore attained the same level of complexity and functionality. this means that it is difficult to discuss the appropriateness of specific structures, or their rhetoric effects, without using actual examples. collections of rhetoric examples – of metaphors, figures and forms – can hardly replace an abstract grammar as a basis for meta-discussions about the functionality of language and its development.20 the principle of signification though social convention, the rich lexicon and the well-developed grammar together make the verbal language the most precise and clear of all semiotic systems. and according to some, the most powerful.21 it can be discussed whether the precision of writing or the fascination of images occupy the most prominent position in contemporary media culture. structuring principles by structure is meant the planned combination of parts (components) into a whole (gestalt, form).22 the complexity of structure deals with the number of parts constituting the totality, the degree of likeness/contrast between the parts, as well as the principle of co-ordination (for example sequence, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 6 hierarchy or network). the structuring principles of writing and video are based upon semiotic and media technological premises. even though the content of the written text is presented in the form of a more or less linear chain of words, it is organised in a hierarchy of titles, paragraphs, sentences and phrases. this means that a competent reader will be able to distinguish central and over-ordinate content from more detailed content. a writer can quickly sum up a comprehensive text with the help of a shorter text, a resumé, such that only the ideas and assertions at the top of the content hierarchy are included. 23 in the video medium place and time constitute, as mentioned, the basal content dimensions of the syntactic foundation, and the over-ordinate structure deals with organising the spatial as much as the temporal substructures. the progression and development of the video film are based on planned changes in both dimensions.24 but for the film to be experienced as coherent, in the sense of its parts being logically inter-connected, there must also exist continuity in both dimensions. the temporal and spatial dimensions in a clip must have a clear relation to the temporal and spatial dimensions in the previous clip if one is to be able to guide the viewer from one point in time and a place in the total structure to another point in time and space. this tempo-spatial structure is readily called the image rhythm.25 the image rhythm in a video film has to a great extent the same ordering function as the paragraph structure has in written text. it assists in the integration of parts to a whole. in addition, the video film often has a verbal linguistic structure, which must be co-ordinated with the tempo-spatial structure if the videotext as a whole is to be experienced as coherent. in some cases the verbal linguistic structure will be over-ordinate. this happens for example when the video film shows a conversation or a monologue which is very little edited and which is filmed with small variations in visual perspective and focus. this also happens when the verbal text – for example in the form of a voice commentary, a so-called speak – joins together clips, which would otherwise have a broken and unconnected tempo-spatial structure.26 reception in media theory, as already indicated, it is possible to distinguish between static and dynamic media types.27 writing and photographs are examples of static media types, where the reader is invited to explore a fixed sign structure at their own tempo and (more or less) in the direction they choose. sound recordings and video sequences are examples of dynamic media types. the procession of signs, and thereby both the tempo and direction of the reception process, is primarily decided in advance by the producer. the fact that the reader of written text has to explore and interpret the sign structure on the basis of specialised code and genre competence, means that a certain mental effort is required in order for it to be experienced as meaningful. the imitation of reality experienced when a video sequence is viewed, does not place the same demands on semiotic competence. the mental effort which writing at the outset demands, can also mean that the process of interpretation taking place in the reading, reaches more deeply than is the case with video reception. this is presumably because one invests more effort in relating individual sequences to the over-arching topic and to one’s own life.28 both writing and video can be read in time as well as in space, but in different ways. the spatial dimension of writing, as it is realised through the depositing of coloured material on a flat surface, means that certain content factors can be realised through visual, non-verbal codes. typography and page lay-out signalise certain meta-linguistic relationships: ”this assertion is a title”, ”here seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 7 begins a new paragraph”, etc. however, the most important content will be readable even if the visual formatting breaks down, such as sometimes is experienced when text is transported between different computer systems. during video reception the dimensions of time and space are more equal. content is connected to the dynamic procession of signs: through the steady changes in visual and auditory sign structures, attention is continually demanded for a particular period of time. at the same time, content in the video’s two-dimensional picture frame is perceived according to the same principles as in photography. for example, the objects in the foreground and the ones in the background are represented simultaneously, they are perceived in parallel (even though they are usually not offered the same amount of attention). writing is thus a medium that is read in time more than in space, but where the reader, because of the media’s static expression, gains a significant influence over sequence and pace. video, on the other hand, is a medium that is read both in a linear and a spatial manner. however, the reader has little influence over sequence and pace because the signs are realised successively in a pre-determined manner. summary writing and video are media types organised according to different premises for both representation, organisation and communication, and they are therefore suited to different kinds of communicative and rhetorical tasks. through written text one can express relatively unambiguous assertions about the world and one can summarise a complex and detailed content with a sample of assertions at a high level of abstraction. writing is therefore particularly suited to rhetorical tasks which require precision and economy. writing is also suited to the expression of abstract, conceptually dependent aspects of actual events, for example connected to questions such as why, how and with what legitimacy? through video one can show details of a scenario which are difficult to communicate through writing, for example connected to the appearance of people and their personality. a discourse can be added aesthetic information of a kind that can hardly be trans-mediated: atmospheric sound, colour variations, body movements, etc. video also carries with it a sense of credibility, based on video’s realism and the fact that it is difficult to make video without having anything to film. the medium is therefore especially suitable for rhetoric tasks requiring evidence of proof, emotional response and sense-based fascination. the video is capable of accommodating all these things because of its semiotic richness and its reliance upon a dynamic procession of signs. adaptation to the web in an integrated, multimodal design, the use of the individual modalities must be adjusted to the medium that is to support the production and distribution of the total medial expression. if we talk of the web medium, design must be adjusted to the possibilities and limitations of the digital network’s technology, as well as the formats and user conventions associated with this medium. the most fundamental premises that can be connected to web-based communication and publishing, are most likely that it is based on fragmented and digitally stored units of content, and thus individualised and usercontrolled. just as the greatest change in the movement from spoken to written language was that the text could be stored – and thus preserved and transported – the greatest change in the movement from analogue to digital seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 8 media, is that storage and presentation are separated. the information is stored as nulls and ones in a ”concealed” storage unit while it is presented as understandable texts on the screen. the presentation format is significantly detached from the storage format. the stored units of content can be retrieved, combined and presented on the screen with a high degree of flexibility – and both the designer and the final user can be active in this process.29 in the analogue, written media the linearity of speech is to a large degree maintained. most of the established written genres are based upon sequential ”genre schemes”. content structures that to a high degree rely upon the logic of sequential progression, such as the narrative and the syllogism, therefore occupy a hegemonic position in our text culture.30 with digital media the technological premises are different. content units are stored in a ”flat” structure in the database, or hierarchally in a filing system. these storage media possess an almost infinite capacity, and the analogue format’s capacity problem has to a large extent been overcome. on the other hand, the computer screen as a presentation surface has a limited size and is relatively unpleasant to read. in combination with the possibilities of the linking technology, this creates new technological premises for text formats based upon a (large) number of shorter text units organised in non-linear structures. these are formats that are poorly suited to the hegemonic written forms. manovich in this connection believes that databases have developed into something more than a storage technology. he asserts that it can be understood as a cultural form, characterised by a rich selection of optional units. and as such it has taken up the struggle against the strictly organised, causal form of narrative: as a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. in contrast, a narrative creates a causeand-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world. 31 the premises for manovich’s conclusion can of course be discussed, both in terms of to what extent databases can be regarded as an independent cultural form, and to what extent the anti-structural character of the databases is of decisive significance, as long as the content units normally are connected and organised in the design of the inter-face.32 however, the database’s particular characteristics as a storage technology are a significant premise for the development of digital formats. manovich believes that the collage form, i.e. a spatial organisation of a number of content units, is for digital media a natural replacement for the sequential forms characteristic of analogue media. user studies appear to support this theory: the assumption that computer users expect opportunities of choice and control of interaction with media content is supported in the empirical findings by nielsen (2000), murray (1997) and engebretsen (2000). if it is maintained that choice is one of the web medium’s most important communicative principles, this means – in short – that any unit of content that requires the continual attention of the user over a longer period of time, must be regarded as media alien. units that can be absorbed in short time and in a form and content that are compatible with a series of other units, are correspondingly media adapted. a consequence of this is that the web medium cannot attain the same level of ”transparency” as for example television, even though it can apply sound and living images.33 criteria of choice presuppose a distanced overview of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 9 possibilities of choice and over the totality of content structure. this is in clear contrast with tv’s invitation to the viewer to allow themselves to be seduced by the illusion of reality. for this reason bolter and grusin use the term hypermediacy for digital, user-controlled media.34 while transparency means that the user tends to ”forget” that the content is technologically mediated, hypermediacy introduces a stronger focus on the mediating technology and active use of its possibilities. one is not seduced by an inter-face based upon menu lists and navigation windows. when writing and video are integrated in a medium where seduction is replaced by user-control as a strategic goal, this has consequences for how the respective media texts are edited and for how they are mixed in the design of a common inter-face. long, ”dense” verbal texts should be replaced by a (possibly large) number of shorter texts, made visually overviewable (scanable) with a frequent marking of paragraphs, in-between titles and summaries. longer video sequences with an independent dramaturgy should likewise be replaced by a number of shorter video clips that carry out particular, specialised tasks. these tasks could in particular be related to supporting the multimodal totality with immediacy, authenticity and dynamism. the inter-medial interaction how can elements of video and written text be co-ordinated in the design of a common, integrated inter-face in such a manner that the different content units complement and support each other in the most appropriate fashion? this is probably the most important – and difficult – question in the discussion about digital text-and-video formats. only when this question is answered can the detailed editing of the single text and video units be planned or evaluated. kress and van leeuwen point out that it is in the ”mix” of the different ”voices” that a jointly tuned interaction is created – in front of the computer screen, as in the music recording studio.35 the integration of text and video elements in a multimodal web format can be discussed from perspectives that focus upon respectively distribution of content, visual co-ordination and sequencing. the last mentioned might appear to be a contradiction in relation to the demand for optimal choice. however, optimal choice must always be balanced against the demand for coherence. and for the reader to discover the inner relations constituting the totality of a multimodal material, these relations must be made clear. in practice this means signals about recommended – or forced – reader sequence at certain points in the material. how strongly the reading path should be steered is a question that must be related to the target group’s presumed needs and the intention behind the communication. distribution of content what kind of content should be expressed through writing and what should be left to video? looking at the structural particularities of the two types of media provides some indications: writing is especially suited to general summaries, precise assertions and the presentation of certain abstract issues. video is especially suited to a more detailed description of people and situations, in addition to providing aesthetic information; with tableaus and atmospheres. beyond this, it must be added that video, as a carrier of verbal speech, is also highly suited to providing more detail on topics treated in more general terms in the written parts. if for example values connected with closeness to and identification with people are to be realized, the people acting on the video must preferably say something. to show a voice is just as important in human seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 10 communication as to show a face. and what they say, ought to stand in clear relation to what is expressed in the written text. furthermore, this means that use of speak to communicate general information, often has little point in such a context. such information should normally be placed in the written parts, while video’s verbal elements should be reserved for the people performing in the video image. in cases where there is no focus on individual actors in the video sequence, it will generally be more appropriate to use speak to anchor the visual information and/or supplement the over-ordinate written based information. if the two media types are to supplement each other in an optimal manner, content should be distributed in such a manner that each element of content is given a meaningful context by the remaining elements. it normally works well when the written elements provide an account of the video scene’s time and place, as well as indicate who is participating and which role they play in the totality of events portrayed. the over-arching topic, according to which the video sequence is to be interpreted, must in a similar manner be established in writing. the video elements for their part must provide a situational context to the written information, and thereby provide the reader with layers of meaning concerning identification and emotional experience. sequencing which medium should introduce a reading session? when should the reader change focus? for how long can one demand the reader’s attention in each unit of content, or in each modality? these are vital questions in the integration of the media types in a multimedial presentation. in the preceding paragraph we began to answer the question about what media element should introduce a presentation. the point of view expressed was that introductory writing is especially suited to giving the user a precise and well-focused introduction to the topic to be treated. at the same time, such an introduction provides a foundation for the interpreting of one or more following video sequences. it is on the other hand immediately obvious that the question of the introductory media type must be related both to topic, target group and context of use. in some situations the introductory video will undoubtedly function to motivate and awaken interest. at the same, one must keep in mind how web users tend to search for writing before images, also within genres where from the paper media users are accustomed to the opposite movement, images before writing. 36 the explanation is that web users are “restless” readers who search for an immediate indication that the page has sufficient value and relevance before devoting time to a more detailed examination of its content. and to gain a quick impression about what the web page can offer, attention is directed towards the opening text rather than the accompanying images (which are often relatively small and claim little attention). a short opening text sequence will therefor often constitute a good starting point for the reader’s further investigation of a material that consists of several units involving several modalities. normally, 2-5 sentences will be adequate when it comes to giving elements that follow both writing and video – the required thematic framework. when should a reader’s attention be turned from a text unit to a video unit? and should such a point be marked in the text? george landow maintains that there should be natural "points of departure" in content units that lead to other units.37 in the same way the unit to which one moves, ought to have a "point of arrival" – an entrance to the content which makes the transition feel natural independent of which unit one departed from. clear demarcation of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 11 the points of transition between text and video can most likely be of interest in certain contexts, while in others it will be experienced as excessive ”control” of the reader’s freedom. brackets around the word ”video” for example, can indicate where in the text the video will be experienced as most relevant; and at the same time, the reader will see that the verbal text also continues.38 additionally, video elements can be equipped with a verbal caption, which provides a kind of “arrival information” that will enhance the coherence. this provides the reader with an indication as to what the video sequence is about, as well as connecting the video explicitly to the topic in the verbal text. how long should a single content unit be in a multimodal web presentation? the answer depends of course on the genre and on the situation of the user. a literature student searching for material about contemporary authors will in all probability be open to longer written units and longer video clips than a secondary school pupil who has 20 minutes to disposition to write key words about the stone age. but some of the premises are stable. first, writing is presented in space, video primarily in time. this means that writing allows far greater user control than video. the demand for brevity conciseness and is therefore even more relevant in video than in writing. second, the earlier described distribution of content between writing and video, means that quite short video sequences will be adequate for completing the tasks to which it is most suited. the experience of truth, immediacy and movement is not necessarily enhanced if the video sequence is extended from 20 seconds to 2 minutes. besides, it is important to underline that the media’s recommendation for fragmentation and brevity does not necessarily lead to superficial and ”tabloid” presentations as a consequence. it is possible to attend to both breadth and depth when several, short content units around the same topic are made accessible in an integrated design. visual co-ordination if written elements and video elements are to be experienced as parts of a whole, the semantic integration must be signalled through a visual integration.39 in graphic design, gestalt psychology’s basic thesis is readily followed: visual totality is perceived through the visual values of proximity, likeness and continuity (and their inverse values distance, contrast and discontinuity). this means that units that are positioned close to each other, are similar to each other (with respect to form, colour, size or other visual variables) or are positioned on a common axis, are considered to be associated with each other. in many of today’s digital text-video presentations, the video sequence is visually separated from the text elements. this means that they are considered to be independent content units, such that considerable effort on the part of the users is required to see possible connections between the written and the video-based elements. by comparison, it is possible to imagine a textbook with all the images collected in a single section, at a distance from the text to which they belong. much of the book’s educational force would as a consequence be lost. furthermore, visual co-ordination is not meant to signal just totality, it should also signal a recommended starting point and possible crossroads in the material. to achieve this, the design should follow the ruling conventions for how web pages normally are constructed and read. there are many indications that conventions from newspapers and books to a large degree have been transferred to the net media.40 this means that within a given field, elements will be read from left to right, and from top to bottom. accordingly, an seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 12 established convention on net pages is that information on a macro level (menus of accessible sections and services) lies to the top and to the left of the screen, such that the screen’s central area, with an opening downwards and towards the right, becomes the field in focus when exploring a particular topic. the reader thereby seeks orientation on the basis of three organising conventions: left-right, upper-lower and centre-periphery. a second point that is relevant for those developing visually integrated textvideo formats, is the reader’s need for continuity.41 this need has both a diachronic and synchronic component. the diachronic component deals with the need to recognise the genre, as one is accustomed to seeing it in traditional formats. an educational text on the web must – at least in the introductory phase – have a certain likeness to textbooks, pupil notebooks etc. in a phase when a new, net-based text-video format is introduced in an educational context, it can be appropriate to adopt a textbook convention when it comes to the visual co-ordination of written elements (titles, indents, captions and body text) and visual elements (images and video clips). these are conventions developed over hundreds of years in order to achieve optimal interaction between written and visual elements on a flat surface, and there are few reasons to believe that they will not function in a screen based reading medium.42 the synchronic component in the need for continuity deals with the interaction between the different modalities realised on the screen. if the visual modality of writing is toned down, so the writing becomes ”dense and grey”, the transition to video will be experienced as disturbing. correspondingly, the video elements’ relation to the user-controlled and spatially realised elements of written text, will be strengthened if the video is ”spatialised” by being cut in short pieces, each presented with a still image (for example using the video’s opening image) in close proximity to relevant places in the text.43 such a presentation of video content will also raise the degree of user control. a design example web-pages that today combine writing and video in the communication of educational content, do so in quite different ways. occasionally, there is talk of so-called web-tv, i.e. web-based distribution of complete or fragmented tv programs, using topic based menu systems. on such occasions the written components are reduced to a form of navigational aid, and there exists little real interaction between the two media types. on other occasions, certain sequences of text are equipped with links to video elements, but without any video windows being integrated in the design of the page. when the links are activated, a video player opens in a new window on top of the original one. even though this solution might appear flexible because the readers can move the video window around the screen according to their own wishes, little integration and synergy is achieved between the different modalities. seen from the reader’s point of view the unattached window will conceal and create a distance to the text from which it originates. seen from the author’s and the designer’s points of view, such a solution will weaken the possibility of thinking holistically about the visual presentation of the multimodal content. in the stylised design model below, existing format solutions, which retain the idea of semantic and visual integration, are taken as the point of departure. traditional, paper-based article formats with titles, indents, captions and body text have for decades shown itself to be a well-functioning format with respect to multimodal interaction. if one or more image fields are replaced by a video field, this format presents itself as a good starting point in the development of new multimedial text formats within certain genres. this is a format with which both the creators of text and its readers are familiar; and even though seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 13 the mixing of media is new, many user conventions can be transferred from for example textbooks and printed newspapers. fig: example of a design model for an integrated text-video format, where well-known user conventions from paper media are adopted and developed. this design signals that the verbal and the video-based units of content belong to a common thematic superstructure, specified according to the content of the title and the indent. it is also possible to assume that the reader’s attention is divided between the two media types more or less in accordance with the division of content between the two. the video elements are scaled down to a size that makes it possible to physically integrate them in the text layout, and at the same they clearly occupy a subordinate position to introductory verbal elements. this means that the power of fascination that the video represents can be reduced to such an extent that it does not ”steal” all initial attention. it is important to underline that the sketch is only meant as an example, not as a genre independent standard. within genres where the visual experience is very significant, the video window should be larger, and perhaps not so strongly enclosed in the “world” of writing. the era of the semi-dynamic text? large parts of the coming generation have a more intimate and relaxed relationship to the dynamic text forms of television and computer games than to the more static types of text they meet in books and newspapers. at the same time, we see that the static types of texts possess characteristics that the dynamic ones lack; characteristics connected to important processes such as exploring, re-reading and scanning. in a time when text technology is becoming more and more flexible and the patterns of media use are in transition, there should be good reason to challenge established genre conventions with semi-dynamic text formats, i.e. formats that integrate title indent body text video << >> > = video << >> > = seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 14 elements of writing and image with elements of video and sound. if such format experiments shall achieve the intended communicative effect with a reasonable use of time and resources, different competences must necessarily be combined. technical competence has to go hand in hand with competences within text theory, genre and design. on this common arena of multimedial interest and new-orientation, it is probably true that specialists within text and genre have been the latest ones to arrive. when their team is fully equipped and ready to play, it may well be that we slowly move into the era of the semidynamic text. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 15 references barthes, r. (1993). mythologies. selected and translated from the french by annette lavers. london: vintage. berefelt, g. (1995). a b se: om billedpersepsjon. (a b c: image perception) oslo: altera. bergström, b. (2001). effektiv visuell kommunikation. (effective visual communication) stockholm: carlson bokförlag. bertin, j. (1983). semiology of graphics. madison, wisconsin: university of wisconsin press. bolter, j.d. & grusin, r. (1999). remediation: understanding new media. cambridge, mass: mit press. bostad, f. (1998). teknologiens uunværlige kontekst. et semiotisk perspektiv på meningsskaping i hypertekst. (technology’s unavoidable context. a semiotic perspective on the creaiton of meaning in hypertext) unpublished phd dissertation. norwegian science and technology university, trondheim, norway engebretsen, m. (2000). nettavisen og brukerne. en panelstudie med fokus på nettavislesernes vaner, preferanser og medieforståelse. (the net newspaper and its users. a panel study with a focus on net readers habits, preferences and understanding of media) kristiansand: ij-forlaget. engebretsen, m. (2001). nyheten som hypertekst. tekstuelle aspekter ved møtet mellom en gammel sjanger og ny teknologi. (the news and hypertext. textual aspects in the meeting between an old genre and new technology) ij-forlaget, kristiansand engebretsen, m. (2002). nye nyheter ny fordeling av fortellermakt? (new news – new distribution of narrative power?) in slaatta, t. (ed.) digital makt. (digital power) oslo: gyldendals akademisk. engebretsen, m. (2005). konvergens i tekst. en studie av et tekstformat som kombinerer skrift og video. (convergence in text. a study of a text format that combines writing and video) kristiansand: høyskoleforlaget gentikow; b. (1999). attracting attention in a competing media environment. a rhetorical perspective. paper presented at the 14 conference of scandinavian mass media research, kungälv, sweden, august 14-17, 1999. hillesund, t. (2002). many outputs — many inputs: xml for publishers and e-book designers. in journal of digital information (jodi) volume 3, issue 1. jensen, b. k. (1997). reflektioner fra en elektro-muse. om videoens produktions-, værk-, og receptionsæstetiske egenart. (reflections from an elector-muse. the characteristics of video production, work and reception) in juel, h. (ed.) multimedieteori: om de nye mediers teoriudfordringer (pp. 124-134). (multimedia theory: about the theoretical challenge of the new media) odense: odense universitetsforlag. kjeldsen, j.e. (2003). magten mellom billedet og øjet. (power between the image and the eye) in berge, k. l. et al. maktens tekster. (texts on power) oslo: gyldendal. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 16 kjeldsen, j.e. (2004). retorikk i vår tid. en innføring i moderne retorisk teori. (rhetoric in our time. an introduction to modern theories of rhetoric) oslo: spartacus. kress. g. & van leeuwen t. (1996). reading images. the grammar of visual design. new york: routledge. kress. g. & van leeuwen t. (2001). multimodal discourse. the modes and media of contemporary communication. london: arnold. landow, g.p. (1997). hypertext 2.0. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. liestøl, g. (1994). tekstkulturen og den multimediale utfordring. (text culture and the multimedial challenge) in schwebs, t. (ed.) skjermtekster (pp.73-84). (screen texts) oslo: universitetsforlaget. liestøl, g. (1999). essays in rhetorics of hypermedia design. phd-thesis. oslo: department of media & communication, university of oslo. manovich, l. 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(1980). an introduction to visual culture. london, new york: routledge. ong, w. j (1982). orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word. london: methuen. pettersson, r. (1997). verbo-visual communication: presentation of clear messages for information and learning. publications from valfrid; no. 9. phd-thesis, göteborg universitet. potter, w.j. (2001). media literacy. thousand oaks, california: sage. rogers, e. (1994). diffusion of innovations. new york, london, tokyo: the free press. salomon, g. (1984). television is "easy" and print is "tough": the differential investment of mental effort in learning as a function of perceptions and attributions. in journal of educational psychology 1984, vol 76, no 4, 647658. tønnesen, e. s. (2002). kommunikasjon og læring ved skjermen. rapport om en resepsjonsstudie av multimediesystemet migranorsk. (communication and learning on the screen. report on a reception study of multimedia system migranorsk) publication series nr. 87. kristiansand: agder university college., norway. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 17 wilden, a. (1987). the rules are no game: the strategy of communication. london: routledge & kegan paul. 1 i adopt a wide conceptual understanding of rhetoric in this article, as jens kjeldsen has formulated it, ’intentional and influential communication’ (kjeldsen 2004:23). 2 the essay builds upon an earlier work by the same author, konvergens i tekst (engebretsen 2005). 3 format in this context is understood as a wide, media and genre dependent form of presentation, constituting an overall framework for possible designs. (the concept of design will be discussed later in the article.) 4 a more detailed discussion of the relationship between the concepts multimodality and multimediality can be found in engebretsen 2005. it is noted that multimodality is a concept directed towards semiotic resources used in the act of communication, while multimediality correspondingly focuses upon the material, media technological resources used in the realization of modalities. this means for example that writing can be considered both as a semiotic modality and as a type of media. 5 cf. the concept media literacy, which refers to a culturally dependent understanding of the grammar, syntax and metaphor system of media texts (potter 2001). 6 i adopt a broad concept of text in this work. it will be evident from the context when the concept refers to written verbal texts and when it refers to presentations that draw upon other types of semiotic resources. 7 the concept affordance denotes the possibilities and limits offered to participants in a communicative act (see gibson 1986, norman 2002). such participants must attend to media technological, semiotic, cultural and situational factors, each representing particular sets of affordances. 8 kress & van leeuwen (2001). 9 plato wrote about mimesis and diegetics in his work the state, in book iii and x. 10 media transparency is discussed in kress & van leeuwen (1996) og bostad (1998). 11 bolter and grusin (1999). 12 tønnessen (2002). 13 gentikow (1999). 14 when anthony wilden (1987:299) writes that "video is rich in meaning, but low in precision", it is possible to reply in polemic fashion that the adversative "but" could favourably be replaced by the causal "and thereby". semiotic (multimodal) richness is not easily combined with a high level of precision. 15 a study of reception connected to the use of a multimedial program for language learning showed that all informants saw all of the video sequences in the program, while the degree of reading was much more variable when it came to the verbal text material (tønnessen 2002). 16 see berefelt (1995:57). 17 jensen (1997) and manovich (2001). 18 kress & van leeuwen (1996) and bertin (1983). 19 metz (1974) and monaco (2000). 20 kress & van leeuwen (2001). 21 liestøl (1994), kress & van leeuwen (2001). 22 berefelt (1995:28). 23 in linguistics such hierarchies of assertions (propositions) are called the macrostructure of the text. 24 manovich (2001). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 18 25 jensen (1997). 26 speak is one of several terms used to describe the commentating voice placed on top of the video image. 27 see among others liestøl (1994). 28 salomon (1984). 29 in xml-circuits the validity of the expression "one input, many outputs" is discussed – to what extent can a content (in a database) be presented through several forms of media expression (see hillesund 2002). in this discussion it is correct to distinguish between semiotics concept of content, which presumes an unbreakable connection relation between content and expression, and a concept of content that covers the stored units in a database. this data can undoubtedly be presented in different versions and combination – but each presentation will of course constitute a particular semiotic expression with an accompanying semiotic content. 30 ong (1982). 31 manovich (2001:255). 32 manovich does note that the database, prom a purely technological perspective, can support a narrative form of presentation – but he maintains that this form stands in opposition to the ”pure” form of the database. 33 bolter & grusin (1999). 34 bolter & grusin (1999:4). 35 kress & van leeuwen (2001:94). 36 see the report from the eyetracking project (http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm), undertaken between 1990 and 2003 in three phases, through a co-operation between stanford university and the poynter institute of journalism. the informants were asked to read news and features on web sites, while all eye movements were registered. 37 landow (1997). 38 in a user study only four of ten informants followed sequence indications in a precise manner. others passed the instructions with a few lines before starting the video. most were of the opinion that marking created a stronger sense of connection in the presentation (engebretsen 2005). 39 bergström (2001). 40 tønnessen (2002). 41 see for example rogers (1994) about the user’s need to experience continuity between the old and the new, when different types of innovation are dispersed in a society. 42 it is important to underline that we are talking about conventions for the visual design of a given number of written and image-based elements on a surface – and not the organisation of over-arching content structures. when it comes to the last mentioned, web media’s data base and link technology suggest other solutions than those found in textbooks. 43 liestøl (1999). teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education issn: 1504-4831 vol 18, no 1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4698 ©2022 (marjo joshi & mauri kantola). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education marjo joshi turku university of applied sciences marjo.joshi@turkuamk.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7583-1106 mauri kantola turku university of applied sciences mauri.kantola@turkuamk.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4174-4535 abstract background. the study was conducted in a higher education (he) organisation where online degree programmes (odp) were a new type of education. an initial model for the holistic design of odps was created in cycle 1 of the design-based research process from an organisational viewpoint to establish the basic infrastructure and support. objectives. this study examines the first odp teachers’ experiences in the he organisation to create design principles for the holistic design of odps. methods. this study presents the results of cycle 2 of the design-based research process. focus group interview and thematic analysis were used to gain the teachers’ experiences of the initial model. the results were compared with the elements from the initial model to create design principles. findings. the teachers’ positive and negative experiences include the importance of management support, collegial collaboration, and different teaching environments. design https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.4698 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:marjo.joshi@turkuamk.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7583-1106 mailto:mauri.kantola@turkuamk.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4174-4535 teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 2 principles based on the experiences are presented in three layers: organisational, pedagogical, and online degree programme. conclusions. the design principles may be of interest to managers, coordinators and educators in he organisations that aim to design and implement online degree programmes as a new type of education. the study also offers insights into the support needs of new odp teachers. keywords: online degree programme, teachers’ experiences, design-based research, higher education. introduction the digitalisation of education has been accelerated by the recent pandemic and there is an increasing trend to expand degree education from traditional to online modes (oecd, 2021). this has also created a need for further research in e-learning and online degrees in higher education (he) (ghanem, 2020). he organisations are finding new non-traditional, online and flexible teaching and learning methods to meet the demands of the future learners (naidu, 2019). in finland, he organisations are developing a learning ecosystem and national learner data portal in digivision 2030, a national program that aims to make finland as a model country for flexible learning and a global pioneer in higher education (digivisio2030). online degree programmes (odp) create possibilities for lifelong learning in national collaboration to support the sustainable development goals of the future (joshi, 2022). university education has been provided online for decades, and examples can be found especially in the field of distance education (peters, 2001) and virtual universities (d’antoni, 2006). various frameworks are available for evaluating online degree programmes (benson, 2003; rovai & downey, 2010; shelton, 2011; chipere, 2017). it is important for he organisations to create online degrees that are purposefully and pedagogically conceptualised and constructed (ragusa & crampton, 2017). however, much of the research has focused on instructional design and less so on holistic design (kumar, 2014). also, more research is needed in different geographical and cultural environments on the barriers faced by those teachers who are new to online teaching (kellen & kumar, 2021). in finland, parts of the he curriculum are offered online in varying degrees (murtonen et al., 2020). some he organisations have only recently started to develop entire degree programmes online. in 2016, there were eight bachelor level odps offered through the general application system in finland, which were all provided by universities of applied sciences (joshi, 2021). the purpose of this study is to focus on the design of online degree programmes in those he organisations that have not implemented odps before. the empirical case presents a he organisation in finland where odps are a new type of education. the data represents the viewpoint of those teachers who are teaching in the first teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 3 odps in the organisation and have no prior experience of odps. in finland, the universities of applied sciences (uas, former polytechnics) are careeroriented institutions that aim to improve working and economic life, encourage internationalisation and answer the growing needs that digitalisation poses on learning and teaching in the constantly changing world (arene, 2018). they provide higher education level education where students can obtain bachelor and master level degrees in applied sciences (ministry of education and culture, 2014). the studies in the applied higher education sector have a practical orientation (downing, 2017), which makes it important to consider how the practically oriented learning and teaching can be implemented in odps by means of technology and pedagogy. the empirical case is a university of applied sciences (uas) in finland where a strategic decision was made to start offering bachelor level degree education online in 2017 as a new type of educational service. due to this, there was a need to investigate how to create a model for designing odps in the applied higher education sector where the teaching traditionally has focused on hands-on, campus-based activities. moreover, since the he organisation follows a specific pedagogical strategy called innovation pedagogy (kettunen et al., 2013), it was important to integrate the pedagogical approach into the first odps. the pedagogical strategy of the organisation defines the basic requirements and cornerstones that are implemented in all the degree programmes, with the aim to create a good life for students in a sustainable future (konst & kairisto-mertanen, 2020). the initial model and design principles for the holistic design of odps were created in cycle 1 of the design-based research (dbr) process (joshi, 2021). the three-tiered model contains design principles on organisational, pedagogical and online degree programme level. several different stakeholders took part in the design process, including degree programme teams, odp coordinators, managers, and technical and pedagogical staff. the purpose of cycle 2, presented in this paper, is to collect data from the first odp teachers in the he organisation to gain an understanding of how they experienced the initial model. the odp teachers were selected because they represent the practitioners of the intended pedagogy in the first odps and their experiences can inform how the model should be further developed. the empirical data is used to create design principles that will complement the initial principles for the holistic design of odps. the results of this study may be useful to those he organisations where odps have not been implemented previously and are developed as a new type of degree education. managers may also find the results useful to gain a better understanding of the teachers’ support needs in their new role as odp teachers. the following section discusses previous research in terms of pedagogy in the holistic design of online degree programmes and teachers’ role in the design process. this is followed by a description of the research design. the teachers’ experiences and their role in teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 4 the design and implementation of the odps are presented in the results section. finally, the design principles for the holistic design of odps based on the teachers’ experiences are presented. previous research online and distance education has become as commonplace in he as traditional on-site, campus-based education (xiao, 2018). an online programme is such where all education and support services are provided fully online (sener, 2015). online degree programmes that have been developed with a focus on pedagogy can ensure the implementation of pedagogical strategy in the design and implementation of the degree. pedagogy is one of the critical success factors for online programmes (rovai & downey, 2010) and he pedagogy needs special focus when implemented online (green et al., 2010). many he organisations have a pedagogical strategy that is based on a commonly agreed approach (penttilä, 2016). this study presents the case of a he organisation where odps are implemented with the pedagogical strategy of the organisation for the first time. he organisations need to reconsider teaching and learning methods and experiences to create new open, flexible and technology-enhanced learning (naidu, 2019). frameworks and models for technology-enhanced learning designs vary in terms of pedagogy, among other features (bower, 2018). when using technology in education, ethical considerations in building a framework for strategy should be considered (jefferies et al., 2007; govers, 2014). offering pedagogical training for new teachers can support the development of a more supportive pedagogical culture in the he organisation (murtonen & vilppu, 2020), thus investigating new odp teachers’ experiences can have an organisation-wide impact. this study examines the teachers’ experiences of the initial model that was created from an organisational viewpoint and used as the framework for constructing the first odps. the change from traditional campus-based degree teaching to fully online degree teaching for the first time can be significant. shared design and organisation-wide practices in odps are needed, as they are important in ensuring the fidelity to the agreed approach (paniagua & istance, 2018). whole-of-institution approach in the design includes collaboration and co-design between various stakeholders (kek & hujser, 2017) and teachers’ experiences should be taken into account in the design of the degree (badia et al., 2019). academic staff should be actively engaged in the change process of a new university-wide approach (honkimäki et al., 2021) and the development process (baran et al., 2011). teachers’ involvement in the design process can have an impact on the implementation of the design (kali, 2015), so their views as practitioners can be considered relevant to the development of the odps. to design learning, teachers need subject-specific and pedagogical competence, but also research and design competence (kirschner, 2015). also, teachers need support in implementing new approaches and new designs (chie et al., 2018). integrating technology teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 5 into teacher design teams can only work if both team and institutional level conditions are observed (tondeur, 2018). teachers must be offered adequate continuing professional development and support (naidu, 2019) in the pedagogical use of technology for sustained online teaching and development of teachers’ agency in digital contexts (damşa et al., 2021). as new teachers in the odp, teachers are placed in a situation where they need to learn various new pedagogical, technical and design competence. therefore, finding out their support needs is relevant to their professional development and the further design of the odps. there is evidence of how teachers’ work identity is formed or supported by their professional development (murtonen & vilppu, 2020). teacher reflections can be used as part of their professional development (philipsen et al., 2019). there are many functions for teachers’ competence and role in online teaching (martin et al., 2021). the teachers need to be supported in their new role as odp teachers so that they can provide quality education to ensure students can proceed with their studies as planned (cober, 2015). teachers may face challenges when combining the new odp teacher identity to their previous professional identity when implementing odp as a new type of education. it is important to understand what barriers teachers new to online teaching may face (kellen & kumar, 2021). teachers may differ in their approaches and perceptions of their own development needs (tynjälä, 2017), and they may not be able to evaluate how to utilise technologies in accordance with their own teaching style (syvänen et al., 2016). reunanen and taatila (2021) found correlations between teachers’ felt justice and student satisfaction, indicating that teachers may transfer their satisfaction and emotions to the teaching they offer, thus their experiences of the design are important. investigating the teachers’ negative and positive experiences of the odp design may prevent the transmission of possible negative feelings to the students in the implemented odp education. research design this is a qualitative design-based research (dbr) study, which is part of a wider dbr process to create a model for holistic design of odps (figure 1). the dbr process consists of four cycles completed during the years 2017-2021 and focuses on how to organise the basis for and implementation of an odp that is offered in a he organisation where odps have not been implemented before and are thus a new type of educational service. teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 6 figure 1 cycle 2 of the design-based research process cycle 1 of the dbr process approached the design from an organisational and pedagogical viewpoint to establish the basic infrastructure and conditions for odps to be offered in a digitally competent he organisation as a new type of degree education. the initial model created as a result of cycle 1 comprises three levels: organisational, pedagogical and online degree programme, where each level contains several design principles to be included in the holistic design of odps (joshi, 2021). cycle 2 presented in this paper continues the dbr process by investigating the experiences of the first odp teachers in the he organisation. later studies develop the model further by examining the experiences of the odp students in an international and multicultural context (cycle 3), and by investigating odp elements in the design of odps for national cross-studies and integration of sustainable development (cycle 4). according to dbr, the researcher is an active part of the research process and the development work is done in a local context to develop pedagogical processes (collins et al., 2004). dbr can be used to address real-life situations and contexts together with practitioners (wang & hannafin, 2005). in this study, practitioners are teachers, whose experiences and role in the real-life context of the online degree programmes are examined (figure 2). teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 7 figure 2 stakeholders in cycles 1 and 2 of the dbr process. the focus of cycle 2 is how the odp teachers experienced the initial holistic design model at the beginning of the implementation phase in an organisation where online degree programmes have not been implemented before. the main research questions to be answered in this study with this empirical data are: 1. how do the odp teachers experience the elements of the initial model created in cycle 1? (phase 1) 2. how can their experiences be used to develop the model further? (phase 2) alghamdi and li (2013) suggest that design-based research can be used to bridge the gap between theoretical studies and practical solutions within educational research. dbr is considered suitable for the purposes of this study, as it uses theoretical studies combined with empirical data to create a practical solution, i.e. a model for creating odps in the practically-oriented he organisation where odps are a new type of degree education (cycle 1). also, it is further developed based on practitioners’ experiences, i.e., odp teachers (cycle 2, phase 1). the dbr research takes place at a local level, meaning that the participants in the process are also taking part in the design process, which makes the odp teachers an important informant for further development of the model. plomp (2007, 15) defines design research as something that is used “to design and develop an intervention as a solution to a complex educational problem as well as to advance our knowledge about the characteristics of these interventions and the processes to design and develop them” and uses the term ‘development study’ to describe a type of study where the goal is to develop a research-based intervention as a solution to a complex problem and create design principles as the outcomes of the study (cycle 2, phase 2). the dbr cycle 2 consisted of two phases (table 1). cle organisational approach for holistic design of odps organisation le el e g technical and pedagogical ser ices student ser ices li rar health ser ices stud counselling student union acult le el e g degree programme managers and leaders coordinators teacher tutors teachers and students online degree programme le el e g coordinators teacher tutors students cle experiences of odp teachers as focus group from cle teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 8 table 1 methods and focus of data collection in dbr cycle 2 dbr cycle 2 method data phase 1 focus group interview experiences of odp teachers categorised in three dimensions to reveal positive or negative experiences or new suggestions placed in the elements of odp design from cycle 1 phase 2 comparison comparing the interview results with the design principles from dbr cycle 1 to add new design principles to further develop the model the data in phase 1 was collected using the focus group interview method where “a small group of people engage in a collective discussion of a topic” and where the researcher moderates the discussion using a set of questions and a stimulus to provide a starting point for the discussion (edwards & holland, 2013, 37). the purpose of the focus group interview in this study was to “collect feedback on results or for assessment in an evaluation design” (edwards & holland, 2013, 38). the data was collected in two separate data collection sessions in the autumn of 2017, i.e., one month after the online degree programme implementations had started, thus enabling teachers to reflect on the design process that took place before the implementation. the two data collection sessions were held in a different language, finnish and english, as some of the participating staff was english-speaking. the interviews were conducted by the authors of this paper, where the main author was responsible for the pedagogical design of all new odps in addition to operational management of one of the odps in question. the second author represented the higher education research group and future learning design team, the latter being responsible for e.g., the development of teaching and learning related processes, the implementation of the pedagogical strategy and in-service training of teachers. the participants were informed of these roles at the beginning of the discussion. the interview group was formed to represent the three bachelor level odps that were under construction in the he organisation in 2017. more specifically, the discussions were held with those odp teachers who were involved in the design phase of the three odps of different study fields that each had a different profile: the international business degree programme had 49 students in the first cohort, with 11 teachers and instruction in english, whereas media production and social services degree programmes had 20 students in the first online cohort, with five teachers in each, and instruction in finnish. the estimated graduation time was 3.5 years for the international business and social services programmes, whereas it was only two years for the media production, as their students’ basic studies were accredited based on prior competence at the beginning of their degree studies. teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 9 the interviewees were invited to the discussion via email and informed that the purpose of the interview was to develop the design and implementation of odps in the organisation. they were also informed that the interview followed a structured format where both groups would be asked the same questions in the same order (edwards & holland, 2013), but in a different language. the interviews were recorded with the informed consent of the respondents to be transcribed for analysis. in total, nine teacher tutors and head teachers took part in the focus group discussion. in the he organisation in question, teacher tutors are responsible for tutoring and guiding a specific year group of students, which in this study referred to the first cohort of the respective odps. head teachers are responsible for the content of a specific curriculum or module of the programme, and in this case the head teachers were responsible for the first academic semester of implementation of the new odps. the teacher tutors and the head teachers were invited as they were involved in the design of the programme with the coordinators of the programme. the coordinators were not invited to the discussion as it was considered they were responsible for the design of their respective online degree programmes and their views may be more influenced by the design phase instead of the experiential data that could be gathered from the teachers. most of the participating teachers had some experience of teaching online or blended courses, but none of them had any experience of teaching in an odp and therefore taking part in the design of an odp was new to all of them. the atmosphere in the interviews was open and the participants were willing to share their views. the interviewers proceeded question by question and everyone was given a chance to share their views on each of the questions. further clarification and additional questions were presented in those parts where the participants wanted additional information to provide their answers. the interviewers showed the initial holistic design model at the beginning of the interview as a stimulus and explained that the structure of the interview would follow ten questions based on the model. as an example, the interviewees were asked how the design had supported their professional development as an odp teacher, how the strategy of the he organisation had supported creating the odps, and what had been their role in it as odp teachers. other questions concerned continuing professional development, the use of pedagogical frameworks, collaboration, the development of learning environments and support from management. the total length of the interview recordings was 2:08:39 minutes. the audio recordings of the interviews were first transcribed verbatim by each of the interviewers so that one interviewer transcribed the english interview and the other did the finnish interview. the transcripts were then uploaded onto a shared network folder maintained by the future learning design team for the authors’ collaborative process of thematic content analysis. the transcribed material was altogether 31 pages (14,767 words). teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 10 the interviewers then coded the data on the digital transcripts. the purpose of coding is to pattern, classify, and reorganise the collected and transcribed data into categories to analyse it further (saldana, 2011, 95). the transcribed data was coded using in vivo coding where the code is based in the actual verbatim language used by the interviewees and seems to be significant or stand out (saldana, 2011, 99). the unit of analysis varied between a word, a sentence and a longer passage. three dimensions were used as categories for the coding to reflect the experience of the teachers: negative, positive and new suggestion. the negative and positive experience was considered as something that the person felt and expressed as having experienced regarding that question. the new suggestion was considered as something that the person had not experienced but suggested being included or considered in future iterations of the design. the frequencies of the coded data were then placed in themes that represented the elements of the initial design for reflective analysis. after completing the individual analysis, the interviewers discussed the thoughts and coding sets in one data session. then, in phase 2, the results were compared with the elements of the initial holistic design model for odps created in dbr cycle 1. new design principles were formulated to reflect the teachers’ experiences to be included in the model. the following section presents the data and results, followed by an analysis with quotes for each theme to represent the experiences. finally, the new design principles based on the results are presented. results table 2 below shows the overall experience of the interviewees in the three categories of experiences when compared with the elements of the initial odp model created in cycle 1 of the dbr process. table 2 the frequency of the teachers’ experiences according to the elements of the initial odp model elements of online degree programme design from dbr cycle 1 experienced positively experienced negatively new suggestion 1. investigating he and institutional strategies for pedagogical choices 7 15 6 2. completing a quality framework selfassessment for implementation of online degree 0 0 0 3. developing a curriculum for online degree education 10 1 0 teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 11 elements of online degree programme design from dbr cycle 1 experienced positively experienced negatively new suggestion 4. offering continuing professional development for online degree teachers 9 13 12 5. collaborating with internal partners for consistency of standards 9 10 17 6. creating materials for marketing and communication of pedagogical choices 0 1 0 7. creating course and degree design templates for consistent implementation 9 4 1 8. setting up online and on-site teaching and learning environments 5 14 4 9. arranging continuous support for staff and students for implemented online degree education 4 1 8 10. creating a community and a sense of belonging for online degree staff and students 4 1 1 total 57 60 50 the positively experienced elements of the initial design model with the three highest frequencies were 1) developing a curriculum for online degree education (n=10); 2) offering continuing professional development for online degree teachers (n=9); collaborating with internal partners for consistency of standards(n=9); creating course and degree design templates for consistent implementation(n=9); and 3) investigating he and institutional strategies for pedagogical choices (n=7). the negatively experienced elements with the three highest frequencies were 1) investigating he and institutional strategies for pedagogical choices (n=15); 2) setting up online and on-site teaching and learning environments (n=14); and 3) offering continuing professional development for online degree teachers (n=13). the new suggestions with the three highest frequencies were 1) collaborating with internal partners for consistency of standards (n=17); 2) offering continuing professional development for online degree teachers (n=12); and 3) arranging continuous support for staff and students for implemented online degree education (n=8). rq1: how do the online degree teachers experience the elements of the design? element 1, institutional strategies, was the most negatively experienced. the negative experiences relating to institutional strategy were mostly related to lack of resources, lack of time, lack of infrastructure and lack of understanding or support from management. comments included being “short of time” and “how much resources do we have”. suggestions made included creating suitable infrastructure, increasing awareness of online teaching and including research elements into resourcing of teaching. surprisingly, the use of quality framework, element 2, did not receive any comments or teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 12 suggestions. element 3, curriculum development, was the most positively experienced element and received comments about the practical and concrete support it offered for designing online teaching, one comment being “the pedagogical curriculum model has really helped structure all the necessary parts that one has to design”. negative experiences relating to element 4, professional training, were mostly related to lack of technical training, but there were some mentions of lack of pedagogical training as well, including other pedagogical approaches than relating to online pedagogy. more than one teacher said they felt “overwhelmed with technology”. however, it can be seen as a positive aspect that professional development also received the most suggestions for new ideas, such as “getting more hands-on guidance” or “getting videos about how to use the online teaching studio”. element 5, collaborating with internal partners, received the highest number of new suggestions, relating to sharing of experiences, co-creating and co-teaching. for example, some suggestions made by the teachers were “sharing our experiences to learn from each other”. one interviewee stated that “exchanging ideas along the way” would be important and another one suggested “exchanging experiences purely online”. the negative aspects of internal collaboration concerned lack of information sharing, too much hierarchy and too much time spent on this aspect. one teacher mentioned “the process is separate from my own reality…and the model needs to be test-driven first” and another one stated “there were too many hierarchical levels to the online degree design process”. element 6, marketing materials, received only one comment relating to marketing not having been successful in communicating to students about the study methods and pedagogical approaches. element 7, course templates, was seen positive because of easing the workload, offering students a standardised approach on courses and saving time in planning and design phase of teaching. a good example of this was one teacher’s comment that “the templates make it more unified, easier for the students… and that it saves time”. in terms of element 8, online and onsite environments, the comments revolved mostly around the lack of access to onsite teaching environments, the usability of online environments on campus and off campus, as well as technical solutions and equipment provided. one teacher commented that they “were supposed to have received more training for teaching online” and other comments included “lacking access to all environments”. the teachers expressed in their answers that element 9, continuous support, is important in technical, pedagogical and collegial aspects and seemed to be lacking at the moment. for example, one teacher mentioned it would be important to have “it support for the first teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 13 sessions…or in the background”. element 10, creating a community, was experienced mostly positively. one teacher mentioned how being part of designing a new type of degree felt like being part of something important. collegial support was seen as important as well, with one teacher saying, “it helps if you are together with others outside of your comfort zone with somebody else”. there were some mixed experiences about the success in creating a community for students in the odp. rq2: how can their experiences be used to develop the odp design further? in phase 2, the empirical data was compared with the design principles from dbr cycle 1 to create new design principles to complement the initial model. those experiences or suggestions that had already been included in the initial design principles were left out, and those that had not yet been included were formulated into the new principles. the design principles are divided into three layers (organisational, pedagogical, online degree programme) according to the initial three-tiered model created in dbr cycle 1 (joshi, 2021). based on the odp teachers’ experiences, the design principles for the holistic design of new odps in he organisations are as follows: organisational layer • include organisational community, management support and future predictions and redesign the odp based on those • enable internal collaboration not only to create consistency but to create a link between the online and onsite degree communities • enable internal collaboration amongst the odp staff in different odps • make collaborative activities as well as co-creation and co-design central in the design process of a new odp • offer managerial support in implementing odp as a new type of education • allow discussions between various stakeholders of the organisation during the odp design process • create a sense of community and belonging for the odp to the entire organisation • give odp teachers opportunities to link their online teaching role to the onsite role pedagogical layer • offer possibilities for collegial support and sharing of experiences and solutions in terms of professional training, mentoring and collaborative design in the odp • give support for both the pedagogy and technology in the various environments of the odp, extending from campus to home and from online to onsite • inform future students of the pedagogical solutions in the online environments of the odp through marketing of the odp teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 14 online degree programme layer • facilitate the need to belong to both online and onsite degree community of the entire organisation for both students and staff • support their need to collaborate and be supported in the odp and as part of the organisation. • support their needs of the odp education and community in international and intercultural contexts • include online degree teaching staff and students as active participants in the codesign of an odp the teachers’ experiences revealed important points about their positive and negative experiences as well as their new suggestions. these will be used to further develop the holistic odp design model in future dbr cycles. the following sections discuss the results, followed by the limitations and possibilities for further research. discussion this qualitative design-based research (dbr) study presents the case of a he organisation in the field of applied sciences in finland where odps were implemented for the first time. the study investigated the experiences that the first online odp teachers in the organisation had of the holistic design of odps. their experiences will be used to develop the model further in the local context. according to xiao (2018), online and distance education have become an equally integral part of higher education as traditional campus-based has been. it was important for the he organisation to create a model for the first odps as a new type of education. the model could support the implementation of the organisation’s pedagogical strategy online, as suggested by green et al. (2010), since frameworks and models for technology-enhanced learning designs vary in terms of pedagogy (bower, 2018). honkimäki et al. (2021) recommend involving academic staff in the change process of a new university-wide reform. badia et al. (2019) state that it is important to include teachers’ experiences in the design of the degree. the change from traditional campusbased degree teaching to fully online degree teaching for the first time was significant for the entire he organisation presented in this study, and the same experience was reflected in the teachers’ answers. teachers seemed to be willing to participate in the design process and were willing to share their positive and negative suggestions as well as make new suggestions to facilitate the change process. the first odp teachers were also representing the change in the teacher’s role. the teachers did not have previous experience of teaching in an odp, although some of them had experience of online teaching. it is interesting to reflect how their teaching identity may have to be adjusted in odp teaching contexts, as they may not have previous teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 15 experience of teaching in a fully online experience, which may in turn become a source of technostress, as indicated by syvänen et al. (2016). teachers experienced institutional strategies negatively, referring to lack of time, infrastructure and support. this supports earlier findings of barriers experienced by online teachers, where faculty support is needed to manage the workload and policies in transferring to online teaching (kellen & kumar, 2020) and training is essential in supporting novice teachers (murtonen & vilppu, 2020). it was important to gain their views to understand their support needs better. this showed clearly in the results, since out of all suggestions the teachers made, the highest frequencies of suggestions were related to support and training. for example, they made several new suggestions regarding collaboration with internal partners, and this may point to the findings by murtonen and vilppu (2020) that teachers want collegial support but there may not be enough of it. tondeur (2018) highlights that integrating technology into teacher design teams can only work if both team and institutional level conditions are observed. this study supports their findings, as it can be concluded that teachers seem to experience organisational, managerial and collegial support important in implementing the odp education in the whole-of-institution design model. this may also reflect the specific need in the field of applied higher education to consider how to implement the practically oriented teaching and learning online. the teachers’ need for collaboration was highlighted in many aspects, but a surprising result was their desire for closer collaboration between online and onsite community for both teachers and students. according to damsa et al. (2021), teachers need support in the development of teacher’s agency in digital contexts. the surprising result of creating a closer bond between online and onsite teaching community may reflect the need to extend their established campus-based onsite teacher’s professional identity to that of the online role, as none of the participants had any prior experience of odp teaching. enabling collaboration between online and onsite community needs more research in future iterations of the design. professional development is identified important in previous research (naidu, 2019; murtonen & vilppu, 2020), and the results of this study confirm that participating in the development of a new type of education creates new needs but also possibilities for professional development. it is possible that teachers find participation in the design of an online degree programme as an interesting new opportunity where they can learn about and develop technology-based teaching solutions instead of focusing only on the content and subject expertise. this encourages organisations, managers and coordinators to involve their teachers in the design process of new online degree programmes. konst and scheinin (2018) state that in today’s world, work is not a constant or stable part of teacher’s life, and teachers must adapt and adjust quickly to changing demands of their work. this may be reflected in the interesting notion the teachers made about extending the working environment from campus and online to off-campus and home-based work. teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 16 the teachers expressed the need for support in changing work environments, which was also stated important by cober (2015) and chie et al. (2018). organisations should ensure that the teachers feel they are heard, so that they transfer their positive feelings to students, as reunanen and taatila (2021) suggest there may be a correlation between the two. in this study, the teachers’ experiences were examined to find out their negative and positive experiences of the odp design model to develop it further and to avoid possible negative feelings to be transmitted to the students in the implemented odp education. this is an important factor for the he organisation where standardised quality education should be offered through shared design and practices, as suggested by paniagua and istance (2018). moreover, the online degree students are likely to benefit from well-designed integration of the pedagogical approach in the implemented odp studies if the teachers’ feelings are heard already in the design stage. the teachers’ role as active participants in the design of odps as a new mode of degree education can add value to the design process. their experiences as practitioners of pedagogy can help develop organisation-wide implementation already in the design phase and ensure the consistency, collaboration and involvement at whole-of-institution level, as emphasised by kek and hujser (2017). in addition, internal support services may gain a clearer understanding about the intentions of the degree programme teaching and the type of support that is needed. it is important for the organisation to understand what kind of support the teachers and students need in the new type of education where there is no previous experience of constructing, implementing or providing odp education. limitations this study has some limitations. firstly, it represents the experiences of only those teachers that took part in the initial stages of the design and implementation of the first odps in the described he organisation. the data was collected through focus group interviews, and although the number of interviewees was relatively small, due to small total number staff in the odps at the time of data collection, it represents the target group well. however, it can be seen as strength that the interviews were held in multidisciplinary groups, which enabled a wide reflection of views which was not limited to a specific degree programme or study field. as the he organisation had no prior experience in the design and implementation of odps, the view presented is limited to previous literature and empirical data from the local context. the study could have been strengthened by investigating the views of those he organisations where odps have been offered for a long time and experiences are wide. however, this study may be useful for other organisations that are starting to construct opds for the first time. another limitation is that due to the early phase of implementation of the odps in teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 17 question, the view of the participants may have been limited in terms of their understanding about odp design and implementation process of online degree education that is offered fully online. it is possible that their views may therefore reflect experiences of online teaching in general, however, these views may still be applicable to the context of odps as well. finally, one limitation is that the researchers were actively involved in the odp design process and therefore it may be considered a risk that their subjective experiences influence the research. however, as one of the key ideas of a design-based research process is the close connection between researchers and the context of the research, this can be seen as a possibility for deeper interpretation of the results. further research in a dbr process, the researchers are active participants in the research process and find new ways how the design can be applied in new contexts (collins et al., 2004). one objective of dbr is to communicate research and its implications for a wider audience. this study offers possibilities for many new research topics that can expand our understanding about how to design and support online degree programme implementations in higher education, and some of them will be explored in the future cycles of this dbr study and tested in the local context of the he organisation. one interesting aspect that was raised in this study was to consider the international and intercultural aspects of online degree education. also, students’ viewpoint should be included in the design. the following cycle of this drb study will therefore focus on international and intercultural aspects of odps and presents the view of odp students. further research is needed in policy, administrative structures and pedagogical solutions. future visions for online degrees and shared practices across universities on a national level need to be addressed and more research is needed on common solutions, frameworks and models that can be used for ensuring quality of teaching and learning on a wider national and international scale. the fourth cycle of this dbr study will focus on online degree studies offered as national cross-studies. more research is needed to see how to better incorporate online and onsite teaching staff and students through collaboration activities. a valuable topic may also be to investigate how online degree teachers experience their work identity, and what are the possible changes in the teacher’s identity when working fully online. it may also be worth exploring how the design principles created for odp may be relevant in the design of blended degree programmes where online education forms a major part of the studies. the results could also be compared with those he organisations where odps have been offered for a long time to investigate how the needs of organisations and teachers may change as more experience in offering odps is gained. teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education 18 conclusion the results of this study contribute to the previous research of online degree programme (odp) design, especially in the field of applied higher education where it was important to consider how to implement the practically oriented teaching and learning through technology and pedagogy. in addition, the study adds to previous research on the use of design-based research in the holistic design of odps. the design principles were created based on the theoretical information and empirical data that were placed in the context of the initial holistic model for odp design. the design principles can be used when designing and developing odps as a new type of educational service in other he organisations. the results presented in this paper are especially relevant now, as the research was done prior to the covid-19 pandemic when online degree programmes were not offered widely, and experiences of online education were limited in places. following the pandemic, many higher education (he) organisations are planning to or have already implemented online and hybrid modes in degree education (oecd, 2021). those he organisations that do not have previous experience of constructing odps may find the design principles useful in the change process to the new type of education, especially if they are interested to create university-wide practices for the design of odps. the results may also give them a better understanding about the teachers’ needs and experiences in their new role as odp teachers. references alghamdi, a. & li, l. 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(2005). design-based research and technology-enhanced learning environments. educational technology research and development, 53(4), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02504682 xiao, junhong (2018). on the margins or at the center? distance education in higher education. distance education, 39(2), 259-274, https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2018.1429213 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2009.07.001 https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/updated-e-learning-definitions-2/ https://ojdla.com/archive/spring141/shelton141.pdf https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.2281 https://doi.org/10.7577/seminar.2981 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_170-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_170-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02504682 https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2018.1429213 teachers’ experiences and role in the design process of online degree programmes in higher education abstract introduction previous research research design results discussion limitations further research conclusion references microsoft word dale experiences with electronic test tools (revised).doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 survival of the ’net’est? experiences with electronic test tools – reduced teacher hours? kristin dale associate professor, dr.oecon. department of economics university of agder email: kristin.dale@uia.no abstract more feedback to students is demanded to improve educational quality. in large courses individual feedback is often very time-demanding for the teacher. if teacher hours are only marginally increased to cover increased student feedback, teachers should look for electronic tools for assistance with student feedback that will reduce teacher work hours, at least in the long run. this paper reports my experiences with electronic multiple – choice tests in mid-term feed-back to students in large courses in undergraduate studies. it reports a lot of the decisions that the teacher has to make when creating a multiple-choice test for a course such as the choice between a paper or electronic test, number and type of questions, number of answer options, scores for right and wrong answers and manual or electronic scoring. the paper also addresses the communication with students before and after the test, the need for administrative support and finally discusses the costs and benefits with respect to teacher hours. these experiences may be useful to teachers who consider using electronic test-tools. keywords: multiple-choice test, teacher feedback, teacher workload, test construction 1. introduction the purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the benefits and challenges of using assessment capabilities of internet-based learning systems to evaluate a student’s progress in a specific subject. particularly, the focus is on how the workload of the teacher changes when assessments shift from paper hand-ins to evaluations that use many of the automatic functions available through internet-based learning systems. this paper reports some experiences and reflections from the teacher’s perspective. the ‘quality reform’ (ot.prp. nr 40 2001-2002) for norwegian higher education demands that students get more feedback about their learning progress during a course, and that programmes are targeted and efficient. these objectives are discussed in ‘mjøs-utvalget’ (nou 2000:14 frihet under ansvar) and stortingsmelding 27 (2000-2001) ‘gjør din plikt – krev din rett’. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 2 such ideas stem from the european political process to harmonize higher education across countries by the lisbon recognition convention in 1997 and the bologna declaration in 1999 both emphasizing quality of higher education. for this and other reasons, institutions of higher education have typically introduced exam requirements in more courses than what was previously the case, and group or individual hand-ins have become more widespread and frequent. thereby, many additional courses have assignments that need to be assessed prior to the final exam. universities and other institutions of higher education have lately introduced commercial internet-based learning systems like blackboard, fronter, itslearning, moodle etc to present and organize course material and courseinteraction. these systems may also be used to evaluate students’ learning. these systems will vary with respect to the toolkit they offer, and which solutions they have chosen to implement tools so that the available functionalities vary across systems. to which extent such learning systems really supply useful tools relative to what is available through institutional internet pages and e-mail systems is debated (sveen, 2007). likewise, there is frustration with supplier’s lack of ability to supply the tools demanded by faculty and students. given that an institution has chosen one system, users are locked in with the functionalities of one particular internet-based learning system and the ability of the institution’s administrative support staff to press for desired changes, a frustration that is illustrated by ystenes (2007). in courses with few students the teacher has many options for midterm requirements that will not create a big workload. in courses with many students, evaluating individual hand-ins may create a large (additional) workload, so teachers try various alternatives to reduce this extra work load; group hand-ins instead of individual ones, or multiple-choice tests on paper to standardise the evaluation and cut evaluation hours. however, given the availability of internet-based electronic learning systems, the use of electronic means to test and assess the test may reduce the additional teacher work-load, particularly in the long run. below you find some experiences and reflections about the use of automatically scored multiple-choice tests to simultaneously give feedback to students and reduce teacher workload in big coursesi. 2. various multiple-choice tests three tests are reported in table 1: test 1 took place several years ago (2004), and was a multiple-choice test on paper with manual grading, and differentiated scores. test 2 was used in an introductory course in macroeconomics in 2007, and test 3 was used in a group of social worker students in 2007. tests 2-3 used the electronic resources that are available at university of agder. detailed information about each test is shown in table 1. test 1: test on paper (reply sheet), manually scored and graded turning good intensions into practice, test 1 was carried trough on paper in 2004. this was a course where exams were bilingual with parallel versions in norwegian and english. this course used an english textbook with a lot of internet-resources available. the previous year the text-book multiple-choice test had been used in the midterm-test by another colleague. this information made students work very hard to learn by heart the correct replies to the questions on internet, while they put less effort working with the textbook and exercises. furthermore, the differences among the alternative replies were often semantic in nature, not focusing on substantial misunderstandings of a typical student. these experiences of my colleague were the reason for making a new multiple-choice test. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 3 generally, if you are an expert, and you don’t know, should you guess or say that you won’t answer (yet) because you are not sure? based on such reflections i assigned 0 points to no answer, and negative points to a wrong answer. however, in such a test: offering 3 for the right alternative, 0 for no answer, and -2 for a wrong alternative, the experience showed that it took a lot of effort to score tests manually (including checking by another person). there were two ways of getting a low score: few correct answers or many answers including both many right and many wrong ones. especially this last group of students felt very disappointed with their grades (communicated through email and in my office) because they had not fully understood the strategic importance of avoiding wrong answers. negative scores for wrong answers demand more information to be communicated before the test starts, including an explicit decision about the exclusion of the hedging option (of 2 answers) . due to the workload of scoring a test manually when offering 3 for the right alternative, 0 for not answering, and -2 points for a wrong alternative, i shall only do this in electronically scored test in the future. due to the strategic aspects requiring detailed student information prior to the test, i shall hesitate to use this in the future. bar-hillel et al. (2005) discuss how the respondent’s attitude towards risk may create a bias in answering when there is a penalty to wrong answers. they argue that the socalled ‘number-right scoring’ is superior to formula scoring with a bonus of 1 for a right and a penalty of 1/(k-1) for a wrong answer. test 2: test in fronter, in a folder in the course-room, automatically scored to avoid hand-ins on paper (individual or by groups) in 2007 i decided to make a multiple choice test using the internet-based electronic learning system (fronter) of my institution. in a class of 160 students i made a folder in the course room in fronter, and made-up the test directly in this folder. given that students would not be monitored during the test (to check whether or not they were on their own as they were supposed to be), the individual tests should look as diverse as possible (to reduce benefits from undesired cooperation). to accomplish this, 15 questions were randomly drawn from a pool of 96 questions. my intension had been to create 100 questions from the first part of the course, but in the end i ran out of ideas. furthermore, the test should be open for response by the student only a short period needed for answering (for instance 1 hour) and not a long period sufficient to look up correct answers in the course material or to discuss with other students. in addition, the options ‘random ordering of questions’ and ‘random ordering of answers’ were chosen in the test to make two tests look even more different than they might be. bar-hillel et al. (2005) argue that key randomization is superior to key balancing, because it introduces no system in the correct answers that may be detected and used for strategic answering a test. furthermore, taylor (2005) recommends channelling effort towards the content of questions and answers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 4 test number 1 2 3 level bac 3rd year bac 2nd year bac 1st year topic macroecon intermed macroecon intro econ social work potential number of students 130? 160 80 medium paper fronter fronter place set auditorium internet anywhere internet anywhere period set time, 1 hour 9 days 9 days limited test time 1 hour 1 hour 1 hour early warning 20 minutes left 20 minutes left 20 minutes left location of questions course folder course folder data base question work load for students equal equal vary number of test questions 45 15 15 selection of questions all questions random from 96/97 random within group 1 mandatory answer no: no ans = 0 yes yes number of answers to each question 3 3 3 number of correct alternatives 1 1 1 values: correct 2 1 3 or 1 values: wrong -1 0 0 maximum score 90 15 15 minimum score -45 0 0 expected value of uninformed response 0 5 5 requirement to pass 30? 10 10 scoring manually electronically electronically student numerical feedback manual electronic ok electronic wrong number of trials ( tests) 1 2 (x2) 3 demand for pre-test information high little little student complaints fixed time/place none one about testperiod student strategic answering varying not relevant not relevant student feedback: correct answers yes yes yes student feedback: score no yes yes student feedback: grade yes (a-f) pass/fail pass/fail administrative resources great little some teacher information demands great small small teacher scoring workload great none none teacher grading workload medium small small problems: more teacher hours 2nd control score fronter: all not best fronter: all not best problems: student e-mails some a few lots about score previous system longer exam group paper individual paper teacher timesaving 1st test more demanding no some teacher timesaving 2nd test yes, might be yes, much yes, much table 1: experience with multiple-choice tests in various settings to formulate short and clear questions and correct answers is demanding. however, the formulation of wrong answers is even worse to accomplish in a good way. therefore, i decided to go for 3 answers only for every question: 1 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 5 right and 2 wrong, in line with conventional wisdom according to taylor (2005). amongst the 2 wrong, 1 is related to the topic, but something important should have been misunderstood (not only an issue of semantics). upon the creation of each question and its answers, the answers had to be assigned score values. every question had to be answered, and by one alternative answer only. the correct answer was categorized as correct straight away and assigned the value 1. wrong alternatives were assigned the value 0. students could go back and forth between the questions in the test, and the test was automatically submitted when they closed it. if the test was still open at the 1 hour limit, it was automatically submitted by the system. some students did not understand that when they opened the test just to take a glance at the set up and questions, that opening counted as one delivery even though they had not answered any question (and consequently the student got zero points). when closing the test, the student received the total score and further got to see which were the right and wrong answers. this is good for quality feedback to the students, but not ideal from the aspect of reuse of the questions in future tests. since the expected outcome of a complete random draw by an ignorant person is 5 points, and the maximum points are 15, i chose to make 10 points the pass limit for the test. furthermore, i chose the option that i as a teacher should only see the best test-score of each student, but by a mistake in the electronic learning system i received a test-score for each trial a student had made. therefore, if students had answered twice, i had to check trough all test-scores (both the best and the less good) to report to the exam office those who had passed. test 2 was made up in a second version similar to test 2 version one in all respects, except that it covered a different part of the syllabus of the same course. once again i ran out of ideas for questions prior to 100 questions. now i actively used the option to display additional material from a word-file below the question: for instance one equation. test 3 in fronter, data-base for different groups of questions, automatically scored test 3 is a mid-term test of economics in an introductory course of social work, so it is both an exam requirement and the final test in the economics part. as a substitute for an individual 2 weeks-for-work individual paper that had different assignments, the test would have to assess the students’ knowledge about various topics. a straight forward test with only short questions about concepts etc would be a poor substitute. therefore, i headed for a test consisting of three parts: short questions, questions demanding calculations (household budget, income tax, welfare payment), and questions asking about individual labour supply and microeconomics theory of consumer behaviour. the test was set up using a separate database. in the database questions with answer alternatives were entered in 3 categories: short questions, calculations, theory questions. this way the content of the topic could be tested in a more comprehensive way; to assure that everybody had to answer some questions from each of the three parts. when entering the questions in the database they had to be assigned to the proper subset straight away. for questions with calculations and theory the option to upload additional word-text and figures was used to supplement the question itself. the test itself is then set up to draw at random a certain number (9) of short question for the first part of the test, a number (2) of calculation tasks, and finally a number (1) of theory questions. as long as the test is open, the student can switch between parts and change answers. when they leave the test or the time runs out, the test is automatically submitted. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 6 it turned out that i had started the test without starting it; because i had put timing both in the test and the test folder that were not in accordance with each other. however, checking whether the test was open revealed this problem. second, upon finishing, the students received information about which questions they had answered correctly, but everybody received the information that they had zero points. so the time saved from automatic scoring was reduced by lots of e-mails from students asking what score had been registered on their tests. this programming mistake has been changed by fronter. these problems stemmed from using the database approach. 3. experiences and suggestions support staff i benefited from advice from two colleagues who had made up electronic tests in other courses. furthermore, i learnt a lot from talking to the person in charge of fronter at my faculty before i started, underway and when tests were opened. when i had entered the questions and responses, he also helped set up and preview all tests, test-run the two versions of test 2, and helped with the problems that occurred when the students got wrong information about their scores in test three. to my experience it is very important to be able to test-run an electronic multiple-choice test before it is opened to a large group of students. students were less sceptical towards individual electronic multiple-choice tests than i had expected them to be. however, it is very important to give students accurate and practical information about the test before it is opened to avoid misunderstandings that reduce their actual number of trials for each test. given that the functionality of showing me only the best test-score for each student was not available in fronter, i could see how some students in test 3 first did an attempt with low score, later did another with medium score, and finally (close to the closing of the test) passed the test. a test period of more than one week therefore increases the chance that the student will learn enough (from working on the material) to pass. furthermore, it is also convenient for the student to have flexibility in cases of illness, treatments, trips, hand-ins in other courses etc.. therefore, in the future i will stick to test periods of more than one week. how many attempts should a student get? the main idea with a mid-term test is to give students incentives to study properly (attend lectures, read, do exercises, discuss in groups etc) from the start of the semester. therefore, the student should get so few attempts that each one is considered scarce, and that the student will prepare properly in advance. millman (1989) indicates how an increasing number of trials increase the chance that the incompetent candidate passes the test, therefore, a large number of trials should be avoided in these mid-term tests. he argues that the passing limit should be raised over time to compensate for an increasing number of trials. for these two reasons a small number of attempts should be given. furthermore, there may be trouble with pcs, network, servers etc. and ict-competence varies among students. secondly, some students are very anxious about all kinds of exams. to reduce anxiety and demand for extra attempts due to technical trouble, more than one trial is recommended. in test 2 students got 2 trials in 2 different tests i.e. 4 attempts to pass altogether. however, most of the students passed the first test version on the first attempt, and since the second test was in a more demanding part of the course, the version 2 of test 2 was more demanding to pass, so the idea of millman about increasing requirements to pass with additional attempts was implicitly met. furthermore, for test 3 i told the students that they would get 2 trials when showing them an example test in advance during class. they asked for 3 attempts and got that, so there was an element of negotiation of number of attempts. given that it turned out that everybody passed within these 3 attempts, ex post, the mid-term evaluation was fully finished in one round of testing. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 7 in response to student demand test 2 version two was reopened as an exercise option prior to the exam, but then nobody kept track of the results. since it takes almost no time to reopen such a test, it is easy to give an extra test to someone needy, or to use it for extra training. becker (2000) states that since multiple-choice tests are crude instruments for assessing student learning in economics, they should not be the sole method of assessment in any course. in tests 1 and 2 there was as well the final examination an individual, written examination in school lasting 3 or 4 hours. however, my experience is that when a multiple-choice test can contain different types of questions with various types of additional figures, equations etc. as in test 3 above, they become less crude instruments of assessing student learning and understanding. timesaving to produce the questions for the multiple-choice test was more time consuming than producing questions for group hand-ins or individual hand-ins. automated scoring reduced hours for marking the electronic multiple-choice tests. however, producing electronic test for the first time meant spending time to learn about the system as such. therefore, compared to group hand-ins on paper in test 2, not much time was saved the first year. comparing test 3 to individual, large hand-ins, and taking into account the relevant experience from electronic multiple-choice test through test 2, i think there was a net reduction in teacher hours for test 3 the first year, despite all the student e-mails about scores that had to be answered. however, to really benefit from electronic testing with respect to reducing the teacher workload, the teacher should be able to use the same setup with only minor adjustments. this means that textbooks should not be changed, and the same teacher should be allocated to the same course the next year(s). in this way the teacher gets an incentive to make the time-investment in electronic testing. this is fully in line with the usual way of reducing time input in teaching and gaining economies of scale – letting a teacher teach the same course the year to come. however, uncertainty about the future tasks of teachers may hamper the diffusion of the innovation of electronic, automatically scored tests in internetbased learning systems. in my institution few teachers use electronic tests, so to have the opportunity to share such resources in the future, at present the first step seems to be introduction of more electronic tests. during an introductory phase the experiences reported in this paper may be of relevance and informative to potential users. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 8 references bar-hillel, m.; budescu, d.; attali, y. (2005). scoring and keying multiple choice tests: a case study in irrationality, mind and society, 4, 3-12 becker, w. (2000). teaching economics in the 21st century, journal of economic perspectives, vol.14, no.1, 109-119 blackboard: http://www.blackboard.com/products/academic_suite/learning_system/index itslearning: https://www.itslearning.com/ fronter: http://fronter.info/com/ gipps, c.v. (2005). what is the role for ict-based assessment in universities? studies in higher education, vol.30, no.2, april, 171-180. kunnskapsdepartementet. gjør din plikt – krev din rett, st.meld.27 (2000-2001) http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kd/dok/regpubl/stmeld/20002001/stmeld -nr-27-2000-2001-.html?id=194247 kunnskapsdepartementet. frihet under ansvar, nou 2000:14, 8.5.2000 http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kd/dok/nouer/2000/nou-200014.html?id=142780 millman, j. (1989). if at first you don’t succeed: setting passing scores when more than one attempt is permitted, educational researcher, vol.18, no.6, 5-9. moodle: http://moodle.org/ ot.prp.nr 40 (2001-2002) ‘kvalitetsreformen’ http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/kd/dok/regpubl/otprp/20012002/otprpnr-40-2001-2002-.html?id=167065 sveen, a.f. (2007). hva tilbyr itslearning av funksjonalitet? universitetsavisa, 12.1. 07: http://www.universitetsavisa.no/ua_lesmer.php?kategori=nyheter&dokid=45a 7e261297d68.93019505 taylor, a.k. (2005). violating conventional wisdom in multiple choice test construction, college student journal, vol.39, no.1 (march), 6p ystenes, m. (2007): kast ut its learning! universitetsavisa, 9.1.07 http://www.universitetsavisa.no/ua_lesmer.php?kategori=nyheter&dokid=45a 7fbb9cebc16.34079453 i according to gipps (2005) p.173-4, the efficiency issue (to save staff time in marking) and the pedagogic issue (to enable formative feedback to students) are two of the reasons why we might want to introduce ict-based assessments. title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 stories of technology-enhancement in higher education – a critical approach trine fossland centre for teaching, learning and technology / result uit the arctic university of norway email: trine.fossland@uit.no abstract there is a large body of research on technology-enhanced learning, but questions related to the educational effectiveness of technology use still needs to be questioned. in this paper, i argue that digital innovators’ stories about technology enhancement may constitute a rich source for understanding this complex educational phenomenon both in relation to teachers’ daily practices and the implementation of ict in higher education at large. based on biographical interviews with “digital innovators”, the aim of this paper is to investigate how [their] digital competence is used to enhance teaching and learning in higher education. this paper asks; how do digital innovators approach the use of ict to enhance students’ learning and what are the organisational conditions for this approach? the findings suggests that technology-enhancement is linked to nine key characteristics: different educational models, authenticity, pedagogical added values, meaningful student activities, changing approaches to feedback, assessment and connection with the outside world, as well as holistic planning, supportive leaders and strong micro-cultures. this paper proposes a more nuanced understanding of the term technology enhanced learning and suggests strategies for educational development and further investigations related to this phenomenon in higher education. keywords: technology enhanced learning (tel), digital competence, digital innovators, educational development, higher education introduction the educational potentials of using information and communication technology (ict) brings new possibilities and constraints when facilitating or in the facilitation of student learning. in higher education, the term technology-enhanced learning (tel) is often used to describe the interface between digital technology and higher education teaching and the application http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 80 and effectiveness of ict (kirkwood et al. 2014, bayne 2014). according to goodyear’s (2015 p. 30) definition teaching constitutes “any activity, which is undertaken with the intention of helping somebody to learn”, thus the educational potentials of ict may involve infrastructure, teaching related technology, and new forms of digital media. expectations related to how ict could enhance teaching and learning in higher education, have been clearly expressed in both international and national policy documents over the last 15 years (fossland 2015a, nou 2000:14, st. meld. no. 27 2000–2001, p. 8). however, findings from national surveys like the survey ict monitor for higher education in norway (2008, 2011 and 20141) demonstrate that educational development within this field is still driven by enthusiastic teachers – “lone riders” with digital competence and a special interest in using ict. the general use of ict in higher education is prevalent and it has been implemented with little variation to enhance student learning (op.cit). in their critical research review on how tel is interpreted in recent literature kirkwood and price (2014) argue that it is often taken for granted that technologies can ‘enhance learning’ (op.cit). in this paper i investigate how the ways experienced and dedicated teachers – digital innovators – use ict to enhance their students’ learning – and the organisational conditions for this. in closing, i discuss whether the digital innovators’ complex stories may contribute to new thinking as far as organisational requirements related to technology-enhancement within higher education are concerned. developing technology-enhancement in higher education when referring to change and development of pedagogical practice in higher education, frequent use is made of terms such as academic development, faculty development or educational development (taylor and colet 2010). according to gibbs (2013 p. 5) educational development can be defined within an institution by “the sub-set of change mechanisms in use that they are responsible for (and also, by default, the sub-set others are responsible for)”. educational development may include teachers, students, educational leaders and strategic plans – all of which are considered important points of departure when rethinking the use of digital technologies. change mechanisms such as tel may be defined as ‘enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology’, thereby identifying three levels of potential benefits that tel might bring (hefce 2009, 2): • efficiency – existing processes carried out in a more cost-effective, time effective, sustainable or scalable manner. • enhancement – improving existing processes and outcomes. • transformation – radical, positive change in existing processes or introducing new processes in their systematic approach to the various conceptions of enhancement kirkwood and price (2013 p. 11) identified the following desired enhancements in the research literature focusing [either] on: (1) ‘operational improvement’ in teaching and learning (for example, increased flexibility); (2) ‘quantitative change in learning’ (for example, increased engagement or time-on tasks), or (3) ‘qualitative change in learning’ (for example, improved reflection on learning and practice, deeper engagement or richer understanding). kirkwood and price (2014) also argue that many general characterisations of what technology-enhancement means are unclear and often limited to the use of ict in itself. technology-enhancement may be understood as “effective teaching”, as defined by fry (et.al. 2009 p. 3) as follows: effective teaching (and supervision, assessment, planning and so on) has to be predicated on an understanding of how students learn; the objective of the activities is to bring about learning, and there has to be insight and knowledge about learners’ needs for teaching to be successful. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 81 technology-enhancement in “quality guidelines 1” for online learning is often described as a one-dimensional phenomenon rather than a complex social, technological and pedagogical issue or educational driver for educational change (fossland and ramberg 2013). daniel and uvalić-trumbić (2013) have identified the following common quality aspects regarding online learning: institutional support (vision, planning, and infrastructure), course development, teaching and learning instruction, course structure, student support, faculty support, use of technology, evaluations and student assessment and examination security. the complex fact that the use of ict relies for instance on the teacher’s pedagogical beliefs and online teaching practices (owen 2015) as well as both students’ and teachers’ digital competences is often omitted. ferrari (2013, p. 4) argues that digital competence involves five key elements: information, communication, contentcreation, safety issues and problem-solving skills. whereas these general aspects are undeniably important enhancing students’ learning, the exact nature of technology-enhancement still requires specification and a more critical approach. guidelines needs addressing the complex aspects related to students’ learning processes and the way teachers facilitate their students’ learning through the use of technology. as suggested by bayne (2014) the need to investigate the term technology enhanced learning is pressing, as the instrumental assumptions embedded within the terminology of tel. he argues that the concept has been accepted as an “apparently useful, inoffensive and descriptive shorthand for what is in fact a complex and often problematic constellation of social, technological and educational change” (op. cit. p. 5). this paper argues that technology-enhancement is in itself a complex phenomenon, and this raises the question of whether it is possible to approach it by large-scale quantitative methods. price and kirkwood (2014b) argue that technology-enhancement has been a matter of debate ranging from positivist medical and natural-science perspectives to a tendency towards greater contextualisation and realist perspectives (clegg, 2005; hammersley, 2003, 2007; hargreaves, 1997; oakley, 2001). educational effectiveness is often the focus in meta-analyses and systematic reviews of quantitative studies (hattie & marsh, 1996; slavin, lake, tamim et al., 2011), or considered more in terms of changes in marks’ (elliott, 2001). research based on the notion that teachers’ practice cannot be approached through large-scale quantitative experimental studies, highlights the limitations associated with such approaches as they fail to provide insights into actual practice (clegg 2005). harvey & green’s (1993, p. 10) perspectives on quality as a complex, subjective and relative phenomenon may enhance our understanding of technology-enhancement. in the next section, we will consider the reasons why a biographical approach may be of benefit to the educational discussion as far as developing technology-enhanced learning environments is concerned. methods and modes of inquiry in recent years, “the biographical turn” has comes to refer to both a growing interest of stories in everyday life and a shift towards biographical methods within social sciences. this turn reflects a tendency to embrace a more humanistic research approach (chamberlayne et al, 2000, alheit 2005, fossland and thorsen, 2010). according to price and kirkwood (2014 b), a range of perspectives and methods is required to reveal evidence that may provide answers to difficult questions about human behaviour. this methodology challenges positivism and its objective and scientific approach where individuals are reduced to numbers and statistics (barababesch et.al. 1 like for instance european foundation for quality in e-learning1 (efquel), the european association for quality assurance in higher education (enqa). http://efquel.org/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 82 2014). oliver and conole (2003) discuss approaches to evidence in higher education and say: if teaching and learning are seen as being more complex than the application of technology, this approach (evidencebased methods) becomes problematic. (p. 392–393) while the term life history expresses and captures the subjectivity of a person’s whole life, the term biography encapsulates the written or told account of a life, or specific parts of it (fossland et.al 2010, fossland 2015). the biographical approach encompasses a range of methods and theoretical perspectives which shape the way biographical interviews are conducted, as well as the analysis and presentation of the stories 2. according to bertaux and kohli (1984) a biographical approach can: ...give the researcher access to the actor’s perspective: his or her values, definitions of situations, and knowledge of social processes and rules that he or she acquired through experience (op.cit. 1984, p. 216). general critical aspects in biographical methods are often connected to subjectivity or aspects of generalisation (fossland et.al. 2010). the advocates of this method would argue that it has the potential to give insight into educational practices as personalised generalisations, since they help the researcher to understand the complex experiences of participants and their culture. biographies provide unique data that unites societal, personal and relational aspects (op.cit). the approach to the interviews and the digital innovators “educational stories” was inspired by goodson (1992, 2000), involving a special focus on their use of technology, to really dig into the complexity of how ict was used in facilitating and supporting the student learning process. each interview lasted around 1 hour (some a little longer), and were all conducted in norwegian. to select the digital innovators i used “purposive sampling” (cohen et al., 2011) or “information-rich cases”, defined by patton (1990, p. 169) as ”those from which one can learn a great deal of central importance to the purpose of the research”. the twenty-five digital innovators from different universities also had the following characteristics: 1) they had long extensive experience with using ict for educational purposes, 2) they were all innovators (those who love to be the first with the latest and the greatest) or early adopters (those who see how new technology can revolutionize practice and want to be the leaders in this revolution) (roger’s 2003). as i strategically selected them through leaders in their respective institutions, i knew some of the teachers, but not personally. one additional selection criterion was that i searched for digitally competent teachers, with a reflective and critical approach towards the use of technology in their teaching to enhance their students’ learning. these interviews provided rich empirical material that was recorded and then transcribed. after familiarising myself with the data, a number of themes were identified by coding small pieces of data with brief descriptions. the analytical categories were found through a hermeneutic approach to the biographical interviews, with some similarities with grounded theory, as the themes were typically data-driven. the themes on the teachers’ practices were developed as new data were analysed. this process continued until a good fit was found between a substantive set of the coded data and the themes. in line with haavind (2000) i searched both “lengthwise” through all the stories and “in depth” in each story to find the traits and interwoven connections in order to understand their complex use of ict, searching for characteristics in their approach to enhance student learning. i was interested both in traits throughout the stories, but also in exceptions to see how teachers solved challenges individually. because of my selection strategy the study doesn’t cover problems “normal” or inexperienced teachers may encounter. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 83 findings to answer the particular research question: how do digital innovators approach the use ict to enhance students’ learning and what are the organisational conditions for this approach?” i present the main findings from the analyses of the digital innovators’ stories. as the chief purpose of this first article is to present the main categories, several sub-themes have been merged into larger main categories. authenticity and different educational modes the digital innovators’ experiences in the different blends of face-to-facelearning (so-called synchronous learning) and asynchronous learning (indicating a time lag between teacher and student interaction) emerged as an important organizational condition framing their approaches towards student learning. the overall finding in terms of ‘teachers’ approaches’ towards technology-enhancement was the importance of different educational models and authenticity when facilitating student learning. many of the digital innovators had experienced teaching within different educational models and they expressed the importance of different modes of context awareness and authenticity following the different educational models found in the digital innovators’ stories: 1) “the campus model”, when ict is used in campus based settings, happening at the same time and place; 2) “the blended model i”, characterised by the use of digital ict suitable when the students meet only online, at the same time from different places; 3) “the blended model ii”, where students combine online meetings and meetings in person (like much vocational education where students practise in schools or hospitals); and finally, 4) “the online model”, where students work mostly online, and “meet” asynchronously (e.g. different online educations like moocs). one of the digital innovators described the different dynamics and approaches to teaching and the facilitation of students learning in relation to the different educational models in which he was involved as follows: it all depends on what the purpose is and how the students’ teaching and learning processes are organized. sometimes i have exactly the same groups of students, but some of them follow face-to face teaching and others a blended approach. my experience is that these two groups have extremely different needs – both related to fellow students and my role as a teacher (di10-25) many of the digital innovators considered the importance of authenticity – especially in their online university teaching – with regard to the students’ personal engagement, and their academic development and studying in an academic fashion. this is in keeping with kreber (2014), whose book “authenticity in and through teaching in higher education” explores the particular engagement required by teachers in their teaching in order to foster the students’ own authenticity and autonomy, when they did not engage with the student in face-to-face settings. the digital innovators’ move towards greater authenticity involved for instance the promotion of personal and authentic elements into their use of ict, thereby involving and engaging the students personally in their approach to the learning process. another finding related to blended models was the perceived importance of creating a safe learning environment, namely an environment where students could speak up and participate as learning partners and gain reciprocal respect. although the active presence of teachers at all times was by no means essential, the facilitation of personal connections between the teacher, students and fellow students, proper instructions for collaboration, rules for communication, and contributions appeared to be important. one teacher describes the facilitation of a blended learning model in business as follows: students need clear instructions, support and examples on how to behave in an online learning environment. the collaboration does not happen automatically. they need to “break the ice” quickly to have a constructive seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 84 collaboration throughout the year. i facilitate a group-discussion on different “prototypes” concerning online students’ behaviour so the students reflect on the importance of their own contributions as students – as a starting point to create their own rules (di11-25) nearly all the teachers with students in blended models pointed out the impotence of social presence when it came to the teachers’ role (engagement, personal/ authentic attitude, engaged in sharing and caring). some reported different needs among different student groups in terms of age, experiences and sometimes gender. for instance, different needs related to groups with young students or older students following a blended educational model later in life. the latter group were more experienced as far as understanding working life and practical examples were concerned, but less confident when it came to studying in an online learning environment. they needed a more clearly defined presence and instructions from the teacher (especially at the beginning) to feel safe and efficient in their studies. the findings suggest that other students in blended models (with younger students) coped with the need for belonging and social presence with others through the teachers’ facilitation of social networks, like facebook; i create a closed facebook group for all my student groups. they even get the address for this group before they meet physically and i explain to them why i think the social dimension is important. the result is that before i talk to them the first time, they have already communicated and shared a lot about their expectations and personal information about themselves. i find this very useful (di7-25) some teachers indicated that publishing a filmed personal comment every week sufficed to make the students feel professionally motivated. this activity also allowed them to benefit from a sense of belonging through some personal comments from the teacher. in moocs, authenticity and social presence were approached in a completely different way. the teacher was important, but it was also essential that the flexibility needed by many students within this educational model was addressed/taken care of (fossland 2015a). one teacher sums up his role as a facilitator of the students’ learning in a mooc as follows: every week we videotape a session, specially made for students who want to follow some sort of progression. here we commented and summarised the weekly theme and activities as well as introducing the following week’s theme and steps in their learning process. this gave the students a feeling of the teachers’ social presence that was not at odds with their need for flexibility (di16-25) the quote illustrates that the sense of belonging and authenticity is also seen as important in relation to moocs – students in this educational model both needed to be included with others as well as being independent. the stories also narrated teachers with experiences from moocs with a very loose connection with the students, characterized only by delivering content and automatic tests to the students, without any contact between the teacher and the students. the dropout rates of these models were glaringly obvious. this illustrated how social presence was important in all four educational models – including the most independent and flexible ones – even though the facilitation varied in very different ways. whether flexibility was important and the constructive way the students’ learning outcomes were achieved depended largely to a real extent on different student groups. the findings demonstrate the importance of authenticity and social presence, as this must be seen in relation to the actual educational context, and the need for communication, belonging, and interactivity in the different educational models identified in the stories. the importance of pedagogical and academic added value seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 85 one of the primary findings in the digital innovators’ stories is that they do not use ict without a clear motive. there has to be a clear pedagogical or academic value or purpose added. the stories revealed diverse empirical examples of the use of ict to enhance teaching and learning when it promoted stimulating and challenging examples or tasks, variation, new possibilities for exam revision, student engagement and preparations. even though the use of ict facilitated involvement, taking control of the learning process and motivation – that also had the potential to “move” and challenge the students’ academic development and learning – this was only a part of the picture. even if pedagogical and academic added value was the goal solid planning was required and challenges had to be faced. one teacher expressed as follows: today, the new challenges within higher education with unmotivated students, large classes and students that are used to being entertained, the use of ict can give great assistance to stimulate and challenge the students in flexible ways (di19-25) another finding connected to pedagogical added value was related to effectiveness, in terms of ict enabling the teachers to devote more time to pedagogical approaches. examples of this are students taking automatic digital tests to identify their own weak spots before meeting with peers, and flipped classroom models, where working on the learning material in advance frees up classroom time to be spent on problem solving or engaging in discussions with fellow students. one of the teachers put it like this: when i use flipped classroom i feel that i “save time”. i know what the students find problematic and i always send out some filmed material before i meet the students in class. the ones who need special support to understand complicated content can read through my introduction several times or do their own preparation before we meet. i use this to support the students’ approach to difficult topics in their reading, or to give them an overview, or just to motivate or inspire them before they meet (di2-25) this quote illustrates that flipping the classroom is more time effective as well as having the potential to improve existing processes and outcomes and creating positive changes in existing processes (hefce 2009 2). several of the digital innovators said that when they used ict to flip their classroom (use ict to develop the students’ understanding before they arrive), they could use time in class to solve problems, discussing and enhancing their students’ knowledge. fulton (2012) reports that the flipped classroom has the potential to provide students with greater control over their learning processes, provide teachers with more information about students’ problems and approaches to learning – as well as increasing their engagement, interest and learning outcome. my data do not provide information about the students’ learning outcomes, but the digital innovators expressed the importance of facilitating it. fulton (op.cit) also mentions challenges related to for instance insecure students, those who do not prepare, or those for whom working alone is problematic. when the digital innovators use the principles of the flipped classroom to present for instance difficult concepts or topics before they meet the students for discussion, they argue that the pedagogical added value of using ict also encourages the students to start their own reflections and understanding. many of the digital innovators also underlined the importance of flexibility and the value of sharing. according to one of the teachers: the most important thing is that the use of ict increases accessibility and flexibility – they can approach the content and challenges whenever and wherever they want. when using online discussions you need to follow some clear instructions concerning requirements for the discussion, for instance how long and original the students’ contributions should be – you can get some really good, prepared discussions shared among the students (di10-25) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 86 as the quote illustrates, digital innovators use ict to facilitate a more active learning process. also in the case of asynchronous tasks, the intention is to facilitate the students’ growth and their capacity to study efficiently, but in order to succeed discussions must be well prepared and planned. another finding in relation to how ict could enhance student learning was the importance of challenging [their] students as creators rather than consumers. to promote more active forms of student learning, such as inquiry-based, problem-based, and more authentic approaches to learning, some of them used for example social media or filmed cases as a starting point for critical discussions. this could potentially facilitate a more authentic and active approach to the student’s academic journey. many of the digital innovators stated that social media is changing the way people interact, present ideas and information, and judge the quality of content and contributions. some of the digital innovators found for instance wikis to be a perfect way of facilitating the creation of the students’ content. as one of the digital innovators observed: it’s all about taking part, being involved and taking charge of your own learning process. i use wikis in nearly all my language courses – and find this as an excellent way for facilitating the students’ development of their own understanding. they use language through creating their own knowledge production together with others in different kinds of wiki communities (di7-25) the digital innovators state that blogs and social media provide new arenas in which students can express what they have learned, get feedback from others by using different digital tools to underline their message. many of the digital innovators argued that content creation strengthens the students’ sense of ownership of their own learning process. by using ict to enable the students’ learning through creating and editing their own content, many of the digital innovators underlined the potential to encourage students’ commitment to their own creative process in order to develop their own “academic voice” (fossland 2015b). ict was also used to solve didactical and motivational issues in large classrooms. one of the digital innovators used social media to engage 350 students in a marketing class. one task involved taking a picture of their view of one marketing challenge and to post it on instagram: as a teacher it was easy to show all the students’ images to the whole group, and make them proud of their contribution by asking and commenting on their own “products”. this is an excellent starting point for involvement and discussion – as well as easily providing me as a teacher with a lot of relevant examples from real life. it’s a win-win situation (di19-25) many of the digital innovators provide different examples of student activities and content creation to facilitate active learning processes. the aim is to allow students to participate through problem-solving, dialogue, actions and reflections, rather than acting as passive recipients of knowledge. the present findings demonstrate that technology-enhancement is concerned with a number of ways of challenging students’ practical-theoretical understanding, sharing knowledge, and working more effectively. changing approaches to feedback, assessment and connection to the outside world issues of assessment and effective feedback are significant in the digital innovators’ stories. whitelock (2010) cites different examples of using web 2.0 in assessment, ranging from multiple-choice polls to approaches involving the use of e-portfolios. the digital innovators’ stories demonstrate that the use of ict gives them not only an opportunity to follow their students’ learning processes more closely, but also to assess other parts of the students’ knowledge, skills, and general competences. the digital formats makes it easier for them to facilitate peer-assessment, written assignments, net-based discussions, essays, net-based quizzes, multiple choice questions, collaborative work assignments, debates, and digital e-portfolios for summative or formative purposes. some of the digital innovators used feedback before, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 87 during, or after their teaching sessions to test, raise the students’ consciousness about a topic or the especially difficult aspects of a topic – to give both themselves and the students a sense of what they need to prepare. one of the natural sciences teachers put it as follows: i use learning analytics before every session with my students. it gives me vital information on how i should organise my teaching so i can give the students the very best help. i need to know what they struggle with, and how they respond to the challenges i give them before we meet – to prepare myself (di3-25) following the students’ activities and progress more closely would also allow digital innovators to receive a lot of feedback during class. ict was used to get feedback, initiate discussions in class (peer, group, or plenary), challenge the students’ thinking, illustrate different opinions, or to give students opportunities to reflect on their own learning. using technology also facilitated a closer connection with the students in the case of some of the teachers, as it made it possible to reach out to every one of them quite easily. in line with hattie (2008), the digital innovators argued that feedback combined with effective instruction may be a powerful tool for enhancing learning. one teacher who used video feedback for written assignments explained it as follows: i give the students a five-minute filmed comment on their texts using the freeware program jing. the students like to get personal feedback at the same time as they can see their text and hear my comments as we go through them systematically. i save a lot of time as i do not have to write all my comments, and the students can listen to my comments several times. they get time to think things through and can contact me if anything is unclear (di24-25) this quote demonstrates how the use of ict can enhance learning and save time. many of the digital innovators consider their provision of timely and expert feedback to the students as significant for (a significant stage in) the student learning process. the stories of the digital innovators also demonstrate how the use of ict opens up new possibilities for rethinking the role of assessment, since technology provides an opportunity to test a whole raft of students’ competences. one of the digital innovators gave this example: in the first part the students were given randomized questions in a multiple choice test, where the students’ had 30 minutes before it closed – without any supporting material. in the next part they discussed theory, and were allowed to use any supporting material for 1½ hours. in the last section, they were supposed to watch and analyse a videocase. the point was to observe, analyse and apply theoretical and practical knowledge, skills and general competences (di14-25) digital innovators who used ict to assess broader aspects of the students’ learning outcomes reported that changes in both formative and summative assessment had also altered the way the students prepared and approached their studies throughout the term. this finding is in line with havnes (2002) and boud and falchnikov (2007), who argue that assessment is one of the main determinants of how students approach their studies. for this reason, they see assessment methods as being of prime pedagogical importance. the stories of the digital innovators demonstrate that itc had the potential to change assessment methods that enhanced the students’ learning as well as it making it more effective and efficient compared to the previous traditional assessments they used earlier. they had an opportunity to enhance the students’ learning through assessing broader aspects of what they had learned. another important finding concerning the way digital innovators use ict to enhance the students’ learning is how this opened up new possibilities to encompass relevant workplace elements or connect the students to the outside world. ict allowed them to a) connect students with researchers, staff or seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 88 employees from outside the institution, b) facilitate and use available digital learning resources and authentic digital material relevant from other universities or workplaces, c) use social or other forms of media to address and facilitate or illustrate current topics in ways that had the potential to stimulate the students’ development as society-oriented academics. as expressed in one of the digital innovator’s stories: there is a need to connect with others and the way things work in “real life”. the students are motivated by authentic problems, people or workplaces. for me the goal is that they should feel they can use what they have learnt at university once they leave. they also need to be prepared for the digitalized society (di17-25) as the quote illustrates, workplace relevance is also a matter of developing digital literacy and the requisite skills for the 21st century with the potential to enhance the students’ thinking, flexible problem solving, collaboration and communication skills (ferarri 2013). in line with barnett (2004), many of the digital innovators wanted to prompt students to think more broadly and they used ict to connect them to the outside world, since the students felt the need to belong and to build relationships relevant to their lives after graduation. the provision of new ways of collaborating stimulated the sharing of resources, new forms of national or international collaboration by means of, for instance, relevant networks, key academic personnel or other relevant staff having the potential to enhance the students’ learning were all considered to be important aspects. in line with fossland (2015b) this gave rise to new arenas where students could train their own academic voices. some teachers encouraged students to participate in networks such as twitter or facebook, where the teachers exercised no or only limited control, as they saw it as way of opening students’ minds. moreover, it was considered to be a potentially effective way of enhancing students’ communication skills and their ability to relate. holistic planning, leadership and the lack of strong micro cultures when answering the question: “how do digital innovators approach the use of ict to enhance students’ learning and what are the organisational conditions for this approach”, several findings were related to the importance of planning, leadership and the development of strong micro cultures. the planning aspects included the different aspects considered, such as the importance of authenticity/social presence, pedagogical added values, workplace relevance as well as feedback and assessment. however, these all need to be created within a balanced work. in line with biggs and tang (2011), many of the digital innovators were interested in the alignment between formulating student learning outcomes, learning activities, assessment methods. this can also be connected to what mishra and koehler (2006) calls holistic planning, that technology, content and pedagogical knowledge should be considered together when facilitating the student learning process. in other words, when facilitating the student learning process it is of paramount importance that content, technological and pedagogical knowledge are considered together: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 89 figure2: tpack by tpack.org common aspects of quality, such as institutional support (infrastructure/ictsupport), continuous course development, clear teaching and learning instructions, clear, motivating and intellectually challenging course structure, and sufficient use of technology were seen as important. other important aspects highlighted by several of the digital innovators included plans for continued evaluation, student assessment, and examination security. one teacher had the following comment: it’s important to think of the whole situation for a student – to understand what the students need from day one until they finish. this requires a holistic approach – and that teachers share their experiences so they can learn from their evaluations and challenges all the time (di9-25) even though the digital innovators were knowledgeable, motivated and autonomous ict-users, several of them mentioned the importance of faculty support. they also revealed that there was a lack of what roxå and mårtensson (2011) call strong micro cultures, namely a group of people working together on an academic project. this means that the digital innovators often operated as “lone riders” when it came to the planning of how to use ict rather than in a collaborative spirit with colleagues. some of them stated that the lack of concrete work on strategic plans for teaching and learning at their own institutions often represented a stark contrast to the stated aims of their institution related to teachers’ and students use of ict at large. as far as their everyday teaching was concerned this seemed mainly a matter of private reflection. roxå (2014) and mårtensson, (2014) demonstrate the importance of micro-cultures as a starting point for systematic academic development at the organisational meso-level, and suggest increasing the number of significant relations within and between micro-cultures as an effective strategy for academic development. http://www.matt-koehler.com/tpack/wp-content/uploads/tpack-new.png seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 90 technology-enhancement as a complex educational phenomenon in this paper i have questioned the large body of research on technologyenhanced learning, and demonstrated why this concept still requires further consideration. the findings have revealed how digital innovators’ stories about technology enhancement can provide a rich source for understanding this complex educational phenomenon – both in relation to teachers’ daily practices and challenges related to the implementation of ict in higher education at large. the findings suggest that technology-enhancement may be linked to the importance of nine key characteristics: authenticity, different educational models, and pedagogical added values, meaningful student activities, changing approaches to feedback and assessment, connection with the outside world, holistic planning, supportive leaders and strong microcultures. this explains why technology-enhancement should be understood as a relational and complex educational phenomenon. in line with the systematic approach to conceptions of tel which kirkwood and price (2013 p. 11) are exponents, the digital innovators’ stories also revealed how existing teaching and learning processes carried out had the potential to improve existing processes and outcomes a more time effective, sustainable manner when using ict. this might involve ‘operational improvement’ in teaching and learning (increased flexibility); ‘quantitative change in learning’ (increased time spent on collaborative tasks, assessment possibilities), or ‘qualitative change in learning’ (for example, improved reflection on learning and practice, deeper engagement or richer understanding). the interviews also demonstrate the possibility to move beyond learning and address students as individuals and people honing their intellectual skills and future members of the workforce. however, the main massage to emerge from the findings is that technology-enhancement is not to be taken for granted, as the assumptions in this concept suggest. it is all too easy to describe (tel) as the interface between digital technology and higher education teaching and the application and effectiveness of ict or just to define it as effective teaching. the use of technology cannot ‘enhance’ learning or ensure that learning is taking place just because technology is involved. if students’ learning is to be enhanced or if students are to move beyond learning hard work, planning, dedicated and digitally competent teachers and students are required. these findings support baynes’ (2014) argument that there is a need to revisit the term itself as well as the instrumental assumptions embedded inherent in the terminology of tel. further, the findings demonstrate the need for educational development, leadership involvement and educational strategies to increase teachers’ use of ict. in the introduction to this paper, i argued that in order to promote technology-enhancement through ict we need to radically rethink educational development. recent research has shown that unless individual effort is supported by an organization educational development is unlikely to occur (fanghanel 2012). leaders need to support and value not only digital innovators, but also the development of teaching and the implementation of change. leaders at all levels appear to be important –including both heads of departments and leaders of institutions and programmes. the findings indicate that several levels of leadership and educational development initiatives within higher education must be involved. these aspects require further investigation. the institutions’ approach to the involvement of leaders at all levels seems important as well as addressing strategies for teaching and learning within the organisation. these findings indicate that there are further avenues to explore. thus, in order to enhance student learning a more systematic approach to the use of ict seems essential. there is also a need for in-depth studies on educational leadership and knowledge regarding the way strong micro-cultures might strengthen a systematic approach to educational development and the use of digital technology. although not all teachers will wish or have the chance to become digital innovators, the findings in national seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 91 surveys and digital innovators’ stories, indicate the need for effective leadership, strong communities, and motivation to develop “normal” teachers approaches to itc to enhance their students’ learning. it is possible that the digital innovators’ stories and the above-discussed aspects related to technology-enhancement may contribute significantly to a more systematic approach to the use of ict. in order to reveal further organisational requirements additional research into the subject is required. references alheit, p. 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(2014). microcultures in the meso level of higher education organisations – the commons, the club, the market and the square. phd-thesis, lund university. tamim, r.m., bernard, r.m., borokhovski, e., abrami, p.c., & schmid, r.f. (2011). what forty years of research says about the impact of technology on learning: a second-order meta-analysis and validation study. review of educational research, 81(1), 4–28. taylor, l.k. & colet, n.r. (2010). making the shift from faculty development to educational development: a conceptual framework grounded in practice. i a. saroyan & m. frenay (ed). building teaching capacities in higher education: a comprehensive international mode (1139-167). sterling, virginia: stylus publishing. whitelock, d. (2010). activating assessment for learning: are we on the way with web 2.0? in m. j. w. lee & c. mcloughlin (eds.), web 2.0 based e-learning: applying social informatics for tertiary teaching (pp. 319–342).: igi global. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0260293930180102 http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_12/09_12.pdf seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 93 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 94 1 the ict monitor is a national survey carried out every three years third year (2008, 2011 2014) by the norwegian agency for digital learning in higher education. 2 for instance the chicago-school and symbolic interactionism (including “grounded theory”, strauss 1987, strauss and corbin 1990, 1998; german phenomenology (schütze), ffrench structuralism (bertaux 1981) and poststructuralism (foucault 1982), sociology (mannheim 1952), cultural studies” (wengraf, chamberlayne and bornat 2002) and the bbritish interpretative methods (roberts 2002, wengraf, chamberlayne and og bornat 2000), to mention a few sources of inspiration. stories of technology-enhancement in higher education – a critical approach abstract introduction references microsoft word stephendobsonnarrativecompetence.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 narrative competence and the enhancement of literacy. some theoretical reflections stephen dobson associate professor lillehammer university college email: stephen.dobson@hil.no abstract this essay argues for narrative competence as an underlying skill neglected in educational policy makers’ calls for enhanced literacy through improved reading, writing, numeracy and working with digital technology. this argument is presented in three parts. first, a genealogy of the narrative is presented by looking at understandings of narratives with respect to changes in technology and socio-cultural relations. three technological forms of the narrative are examined: the oral, written and image based narrative. second, revisiting bernstein, narrative competency is connected to pedagogic practice. the focus is upon code recognition and the rhythm of narrative in a classroom context. third, a proposal is made to develop narrative competence as a research programme capable of exploring literacy in an age of open learning. the core assertion of this essay is that when narrative is understood in a multi-directional, multi-voiced and multi-punctual sense, opportunities are created for a pedagogic practice that is in tune with the demands placed upon youth and their relationship to changing technologies. this makes the exploration of connections between narrative competence, pedagogic practice and technology the central focus of this essay. introduction it is not uncommon for educationalist policy makers to claim legitimacy for their work by connecting it with the desire to enhance literacy through learning and acquiring specific skills and competencies. take for example a recent norwegian government commission on proposed educational reform, where improved literacy is to include reading, writing, oral expression and numeracy, as well as the use of digital technology. these are regarded as fundamental skills based upon the ability ‘to identify, to understand, to interpret, to create and to communicate’ (st. melding. nr. 30, 2003-2004/ hov005-bn.html, 3 of 17). however, could it not be argued, as is the goal of this essay, that the competence based upon identifying, understanding, interpreting, creating and communicating rests upon a more essential and fundamental competence, that of narrative competence, such that it is an underlying factor in the above-mentioned forms of literacy? as ong (1982: 140) has phrased it in his book, orality and literacy, ‘in a sense narrative is paramount among all verbal art forms because it underlies so many other art forms, often even the most abstract. behind even the abstractions of science, there lies narrative of the observations on the basis of which the abstractions seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 2 have been formulated.’ if this is the case, it will mean that learning to identify, understand, interpret, create and communicate narratives with plots, that are, as i shall argue, potentially multi-accented, multi-directional and multipunctual will be essential to an enhancement of literacy. some initial points can be made about such an argument. firstly, when literacy is understood in such a wide sense (reading, writing, oral expression, numeracy and with reference to the digital), there is a danger that it might be used to explain all kinds of competence in not just a limited number of subjects, but all subjects. this is especially the case when all subjects might appear to rest upon some form of reading, writing, oral expression, numeracy and digital skills, as argued by johnson and kress in their view ‘that multimodal forms of representation exist in all curriculum subjects’ (2003: 11). if the concept of literacy is widened even more, to include the ability to draw on other competencies, then it will eventually become a concept lacking in analytical validity. it will become a descriptive container for the purposes of taxonomy. secondly, how should the concept of competence be defined and used? standard definitions talk of competence as knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes (lie, 1997: 33-35). some are more sceptical. take for example kress (2003:49-50) who is against the use of the term competence because in an age of instability we have no practices conventionalized into stability around which curricula and competencies can be developed. however, are competencies so fixed and unmoving as kress contends? there is a world of difference between the identification of competencies – in list form – and how they are enacted in a flexible manner in everyday lived life. moreover, if competency is defined in terms of identifying, understanding, interpreting, creating and communicating, as above, then competency becomes a mobile concept, permitting, rather than prohibiting new contents and forms. furthermore, it is important to note in defining narrative competency in terms of identifying, understanding, interpreting, creating and communicating plots, my position is closer to the one proposed by fisher (1987: 65, 75, 115-116). he argued not only that all humans acquire narrative competence in the course of socialization (becoming a ‘universal faculty and experience’), but that it entails forms of argumentative rationality. thus the identification, understanding, interpretation, creation and communication of narratives with plots that are multi-directional and multi-accented is based upon the use of rational argumentation. widening literacy or tightening its reach, fixing competencies or making them fluid? different positions are possible and in the spirit of a genealogy inspired by nietzsche, i will ask not what is the truth of a phenomenon, but how and under what socio-cultural and technological conditions does it exist and change. the diagram below summarises these concerns. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 3 diagram: narratives, technology and socio-cultural relations. to explore the concept of narrative competence and its relation to literacy, i will adopt a genealogical approach to the concept of narrative (part i) and explore how this might enhance our understanding of literacy and pedagogic practice (part ii). my final goal is to propose a research program capable of exploring and elaborating narrative competence (part iii). part i: the life and death of the narrative the attempt to find a universal, timeless definition of narrative, dates to aristotle (1965) in on the art of poetry, where he proposed that a narrative involved a beginning, middle and end organized in a causal direction so events are joined together to reveal a plot. riceour, has drawn upon aristotle’s perspective to provide a phenomenological understanding of narrative, connecting it with the experience of time and mimesis. as he put it: time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence. (riceour, 1984: 3) narratives, according to this perspective, are therefore regarded as essentially temporal and temporality can be described and recaptured in narratives of history and fiction. this kind of understanding is circular as life and narrative mirror each other in a creative mimesis. it also places an emphasis on the necessity of the narrative revealing the ordering of the events in ‘a causal sequence’ (riceour, 1984: 41). ricouer ignores post-modern and hypertext inspired conceptions of narratives (boje, 2001) that break with the temporal organization of the plot in a diachronic beginning-middle-end and disrupt the direction of causality. in my work with refugees i found instances of narratives where a single narrative beginning was unclear or authorship could not be traced to a single origin. instead the narratives were multi-punctual in origin and multi-accented because of the polyphonic presence of several voices (dobson, 2004: 131-4). it is important to note that in such cases, causality was not necessarily absent, but multi-accented and/or multi-directional. multi-directional can be defined narrative competence technology (oral, print, image) socio-cultural relations (social, privatized) narratives (emplotment, causality, connections that are potentially multi-directional, multi-causal and multi-accented) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 4 as a narrative that proceeds forwards, as well as backwards in search of an origin. an example of this is what jefferson (1978: 221) has called the embedded repetition, whereby a narrative repeats a phrase or a topic from a proceeding conversation or non-verbal event, and the repetition functions as a recall of the trigger that set the narrative in motion. this reversal of the causality means that it is not cause to effect, but an effect or several effects in search of a cause and this becomes the focus of the narrative. these conceptions of narratives, whether rooted in the tradition of aristotle or the post-modern share what czarniawska (2004) has called a desire to move from the mere description of events to their emplotment. secondly, since narratives express sense making in hermeneutic fashion, competing versions are possible. thirdly, these conceptions are based upon the desire to identify narrative rationality in the events examined (fisher, 1987: 47, 64, 109). by this it is meant narrative probability based upon a narrative’s coherence (‘whether a story “hangs together”’) and narrative fidelity (expressing a narrative’s credibility based upon ‘good reasons’). while these definitions provide an understanding of narratives that are multidirectional, multi-punctual and multi-accented, there is a danger that they are timeless in the sense that changing technologies and socio-cultural relations supporting different kinds of narrative are neglected. for this reason, a genealogical analysis is necessary in order to elaborate upon and provide a context for the multi-directional, multi-punctual and multi-accented conception developed above. genealogy, in the spirit of nietzsche (1969), seeks to understand the changing conditions, in this sense technological and socio-cultural, that support the life and death of a particular phenomenon, in this case narrative competence. in other words, to arrive at a closer understanding of narrative competence, understanding narratives as multidirectional, multi-punctual and multi-accented, is only one part of the answer. it is necessary to consider in addition the role of technology and the socioculture relations that accompany it as these narratives are created, communicated and interpreted. walter benjamin in his essay the storyteller (1992), provides some insight into these matters. he focused on the changes brought about in narratives as the socio-cultural relations of the oral were challenged by the arrival of print. the oral tradition of narratives praised by leskov, hebel, gotthelf and poe had relied upon the corporeal presence of the storyteller. to use the words of levinas (1969:67), ‘meaning is not produced as an ideal essence; it is said and taught by presence’. all this changes with the arrival of print technology. narrative and its socio-cultural relations gain a different form when expressed in novels or in newspapers. for benjamin (1992: 99), the novelist has isolated himself and the reader meets the novel on his/her own. benjamin argues that the novel does not provide advice on the living of life. instead the novel compensates for life and the reader hopes the novel can provide a way of ‘warming his shivering life’ (1992: 100). not all would agree with his view, but his main point is that the culture and technology of the novel involves a one-to-one communication, where the reader and writer are separated by distance and time. this precludes a spontaneous development of the meeting between the two. for ong (1982: 150, 153), this is also connected with the inward turn of narrative, as authors are concerned with the ‘interior consciousness of the typographic protagonist’ and engaging the reader’s ‘psyche in strenuous, interiorized, individualized thought inaccessible to oral folk’. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 5 the second competitor to the narrative communicated in oral fashion is the narrative found in newspapers. this kind of narrative has as its goal what benjamin calls information. it is characterized by ‘prompt verifiability’, unlike the oral narrative with its validity sometimes lying elsewhere in a different place and time (e.g. an experience from a long time in the past). secondly, it has to sound plausible, unlike the narratives of the storyteller, which can draw upon the miraculous. benjamin emphasizes a third characteristic of the informative narratives found in newspapers, ‘no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation’ (1992: 89). it is the expert communicating the narrative who proposes the interpretation and this is in stark contrast to the oral narratives of the storyteller: the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. it is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. (1992: 89) once again, not all would agree that the narratives of the oral storyteller contain no interpretation, especially when the storyteller leaves their own personal mark on the narratives communicated and the very presence of emplotment suggests the presence of interpretation. nevertheless, the main point is that information is more likely to interpret the narrative presented before it reaches the recipient. what we can learn from benjamin is that the opportunities for the recipient of the narrative actively giving a response to the teller of the narrative change with the move from the oral to printed narratives. the oral narrative relies upon a competence that is more social, open and spontaneous than the more privately directed, reflective printed narrative. this means that in the case of the oral narrative the listener is potentially able to exert an influence on the narrative as it is recounted, adding their voices, interpretations and understandings. the narrative can become multi-accented. it can also become multi-directional and multi-punctual as the listeners draw attention to new points and directions in the narrative not anticipated by the teller. the kind of narrative competence required with the oral narrative requires that listeners learn and have the opportunity to interrupt the narrative as it unfolds. it is this socio-cultural character that is lost with the printed narrative, even if newspapers are read in the presence of others, they cannot influence the narrative read in the same manner. we are still talking about the same competence to identify connections, emplotment and so on, what changes are the socio-cultural relations. with the arrival of image based narratives digital technology is important. it makes possible what kress has called the dominance of the screen: the dominant media are now the media of the ‘screen’ – whether the screen of the laptop, the mobile phone, the video, or the games of the console – rather than the media of the page – the book, the newspaper, the magazine, the pamphlet, the newsletter. we are in the age of the new media. (kress, 2005:7) the character of socio-cultural relations supporting narratives change once again. while the image based narratives of films are presented to the viewer in completed form, as was the case with novels and newspaper reports, the internet makes it possible for the receiver of the images to once again interrupt the person constructing and communicating the narrative. this is the case in constructive hypertext, where all are able to contribute to the narrative as it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 6 unfolds (svarstad, 2005: 84). hypertext can be multi-modal, making use of images, text and other modes of communication (kress, 2003). this makes it possible for the reader or viewer to examine the hyper-text in an order different to the left to right, top to bottom, that was dominant in western printed text. the narrative becomes multi-directional, multi-punctual and multi-accents and the narrative competence required still involves making connections, revealing and making lines of emplotment, identifying causal relations. but, now it is a more open process and the connections, emplotment, causality can be multi-modal in character, following the logic of time (dominant in print as the page is read) and space (dominant in the view of images) to summarise, with the oral, the narrative competence required to make connections, engendering emplotment and causality is supported by sociocultural relations that enhance the opportunity to create multi-directional, multi-punctual and multi-accented narratives. narrative competence dies somewhat, but not totally, with the arrival of print technology. the opportunities for interruption are restricted and socio-cultural relations are more privatised. with the rise of media of the screen, narrative competence is brought back to life once again and becomes potentially more open and involving. the kind of narrative competence required changes. now it is the use of different modes, such as written and image based, and their mixed usage that provides the foundation for the identification of connections, emplotment and causality that can once again become multi-accented, multipunctual and multi-directional. the diagram introduced in the introduction summarises the argument of part i: narratives and narrative competence are related to technology and the sociocultural relations supporting technology. understanding narrative competence as being able to identify multi-directional, multi-causal and multi-accented emplotment, causality and connections, is not therefore enough if technology and socio-cultural relations are ignored. part ii: literacy and pedagogic practice in this part of the essay, narrative competence and its relations to technology and socio-cultural relations are connected with pedagogic practice and literacy. let us start with an example: students are presented with the following page (http://www.trentu.ca/jjoyce/fw-308.htm) from james joyce’s novel finnegans wake. (1975: 308) they are asked it identify the narrative. it is to be expected that the teacher will be met with initial silence. perhaps one student is familiar with other works by joyce and hazards a guess that joyce was attempting to follow up an earlier book, ulysses, with a different kind of book. this student is searching for a way into the text, seeking to find connections between joyce the writer of other books and this book. put differently, the student is seeking to identify a possible emplotment for the events presented by joyce. to assist the teacher tells the class that joyce wanted the reader to have to struggle with the text and images. they represented events and the reader had to make connections between them in order to identify the plot. finnegans wake has a plot, but it is hard to pin it down and it changes as different connections are made or dissolved: at times it is about a family (publican, wife, two sons and daughter), at times it is about the river liffy flowing through the centre of dublin, sometimes it is about world history, on occasions it is about world religions. the plot changes, reverses and recurs. thus one plot, and not the only one, that can be found or created from the events of this page (and previous pages) is the following: three children have seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 7 been in the nursery doing their homework. they have been learning about war and procreation as two principles in world history and everyday family life. the ten monosyllables in the centre of the text represent the descent from god into the physical world the first three are the holy trinity (mirrored in the words of the left margin), the next three are human trinity, followed by the trinity of the physical world (in the left margin as: time, space and causality) in the right hand margin the kids are called for tea and cocoa. the two images: the uppermost is of a nose representing spirit exhaled into the world with creative force. the hand against the nose can denote the two brothers battling. the cross bones suggest death, but are also associated with love (in hinduism, the god of love is also the god of death) the x of the crossbones can also represent kisses and crucifixion (campbell and robinson, 1954: 162-163). these are only a few of the possible connections and joyce did not intend there to be one single set of a priori ‘true’ connections. the line of causality and emplotment is open to change and reversal. in the context of this essay, it is an example of a multi-directional, multi-punctual (i.e. multiple beginnings, ends) and multi-accented narrative that combines text with images and has a changing musical rhythm if read aloud. it pre-dates the arrival of hypertext, normally defined in the following manner and assumed to have its origin in the 1960s: …a special type of database system in which objects (text, pictures, music, programs, and so on) can be creatively linked to each other. when you select an object, you can see all the other objects that are linked to it. you can move from one object to another even though they might have different forms. (www.webopeadia.com/termh/hypertext.html) however, as argued above the narrative and the narrative competence required in its identification and creation is also dependent on the technology and socio-cultural relations in which it is communicated. in line with this view literacy is extended to include the role of technology and socio-cultural relations as student’s encounter printed texts and images and attempt to reveal or construct narrative connections, emplotment and causality. not all teaching resources provide joycean, narrative dilemmas for students, but parallel experiences and resources can easily be identified. for example, when students are asked to search on web-pages designed according to the principles of hypertext. with respect to technology, finnegans wake despite being in the form of a book and not on the internet, combines text with image and is multi-modal. as to the socio-cultural relations desired by joyce, his intention was that they should be open and no one person would be able to say they have understood the plot in a once and for all definitive manner. as to the embodiment of social relations, the teacher is thus no longer able to claim supreme knowledge and authority about the book and its narrative. having said this, joyce’s book does not make it immediately easy for the student who wishes to make narrative connections, identify plots and lines of causality. the teacher is still required, perhaps more as a guide and tutor than as a one-way communicator of a single narrative truth to be unquestionably accepted. the socio-cultural relation between the teacher and the student is maintained and with this in mind it is fruitful to look at bernstein’s reflections on these relations and also on what he calls the ‘rhythm of narrative’. to understand what is going on in the classroom, bernstein developed a theory of codes and connected it to the socio-cultural relations of the classroom: the essential logic of any pedagogic relation consists of the relationship essentially between three rules: hierarchal rules, sequencing rules and criteria rules. (bernstein, 2004: 197-198) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 8 hierarchal rules refer to the manner in which the acquirer and transmitter enter a relation, usually with the transmitter in the dominant position. sequencing rules: something must come before and something after the transmission. sequencing rules also entails a pacing. such as quick teaching, with fewer opportunities for examples, illustrations and narratives, which require a slower pacing. criteria rules ‘enable the acquirer to understand what counts as a legitimate or illegitimate communication, social relation, or position’ (2004: 198). the hierarchal are regulative rules, while the sequencing/criteria are discursive rules. when pacing is strong ‘we may find a lexical pedagogic code where one word answers, or short sentences, relaying individual facts/skills/operations may be typical of the school class of marginal/lower working-class pupils, whereas a syntactic pedagogic code relaying relationships, processes, connections may be more typical of the school class of middle-class children, although even here pupil participation may be reduced’ (bernstein, 2004: 207). in the latter, the code is more elaborated and explaining principles, in the former the emphasis is on specific operations that develop low-level skills. bernstein’s point is that when pedagogic practice utilizes a lexical as opposed to a syntactic pedagogic code, teachers and pupils will focus upon different things in the subjects taught. the latter syntactic coding is more suited to developing narrative competence because of its emphasis on identifying, understanding and interpreting ‘relationships, processes, connections’. in the context of my argument, narrative competence as a signifier of literacy, becomes connected with an awareness of the codes that can be used to understand specific subjects and what it means to become competent or skilled in them. thus, the syntactic code might enhance narrative competence to see connections and plots, or do the opposite, when it is a lexical code. thus, understanding the code or codes in finnegans wake makes it possible to understand its multi-directional, multi-punctual and multi-accented narratives. at the same time, bernstein complicates, or even confuses his argument, when he argues that, ‘the rhythm of narrative is different from the rhythm of analysis’ (bernstein, 2004: 206). by this he means that the latter’s strong pacing rests upon a principle of communication that is very different from the ‘communication principle children use in everyday life’. not only does it imply less time for the unfolding of narratives with images and digressions, it also privileges less ‘everyday narratives’ in the classroom. against bernstein, it might be argued that the rhythm of narrative is more suited to a syntactic pedagogic code, where relationships, processes and connections between events are in focus. if this is the case, then it becomes hard to sustain the distinction between a rhythm of narrative (considered dominant outside of the classroom) and a rhythm of analysis (considered dominant in the classroom). both become interlocked. thus, children in telling narratives or listening to narratives outside of the classroom are already making use of a rhythm of analysis as they contemplate or make connections between events. apart from these more critical reflections on bernstein’s essay, his emphasis on codes is important to the argument of the essay because it highlights how the codes adopted by the teacher in an educational situation can invite the making of narrative connections between events, or the opposite. put differently, the codes exert an influence upon both the opportunity to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 9 construct or interpret narratives and the kind of socio-cultural teacher-student relations used to communicate these relations. moreover, reading print or reading images can be regarded as different codes, where the logic of time is dominant in the former (i.e. words must be read in a specified, temporal order) and the logic of space is dominant in the latter (images or blocks of words embedded in an image can be read in different orders). in the example of the page from finnegans wake, code switching is required as the move is made between the images and the printed words. kress has highlighted the importance of this: the most important skills need to learn to negotiate regional, context; hybrid cultural discourses, the code switching often to be found within text among different languages, dialects, or registers; different visual and iconic meanings; variations in the gestural relationships among people, language material objects. (quoted in johnson and kress, 2003:9) transduction is the term kress (2003: 47) uses to denote the movement between codes, as contents are re-interpreted into the logic of the respective media. it may also be a case of not just code switching, but the development of ‘crossover and hybrid forms’ (kell, 2004: 440). for example the visual skills of ‘linking, decomposing, reorganising elements’ (jewitt, 2003:97-98) can be reintroduced into the writing and reading of a text with visual elements. what have these arguments to do with literacy? literacy is in my opinion to do with not only the competence to identify narrative connections, emplotment and lines of causality that are multi-directional, multi-accented and multipunctual. it is as much to do with the socio-cultural relations, in this case embodied in the practice of the teacher, as codes are selected to afford the student with a greater or lesser opportunity of enhancing their narrative activity. the practice of the teacher can be understood, in the spirit of bernstein, as founded on code selection, such as lexical and syntactic codes. the code selection can also refer to the different technologies, which have historically been dominant, respectively print and image and how they rely upon different logics (temporal and spatial). to be literate is to be able to use and recognize the different codes, and the enhancement of literacy is to increase this skill in code use and recognition. in part ii, narrative competence has been explored in terms of the sociocultural relations of the pedagogic relation between teacher and pupil and how these are connected with different forms of codes. the combined effect of the codes, relations and effect upon narrative competence provides a view of literacy that incorporates these dimensions. the diagram introduced in the introduction can be re-cast to illustrate this: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 10 diagram: literacy in terms of narratives, teacher-student relations and codes part iii: narrative competence as a research programme enhancing literacy the challenge, as defined by educational policy makers, exemplified in a norwegian white paper (st. melding. nr. 30, 2003-2004), is to enhance literacy through reading, writing, oral expression and numeracy, as well as the use of digital technology. fritze, haugsbakk and nordkvelle (2004) have highlighted how this might entail an instrumental view of not only technology, but also different teaching media (reading, writing and so on). what they ask for is a greater emphasis on how different media can support the bildung (formation) of the individual throughout life. to realise this greater awareness is required of the manner in which we learn about reality through these media. put differently, media mediate our relation to reality and a focus on this relation reveals the parameters and details of a pedagogic project for policy makers and teachers alike. my argument is also in line with their general view, in the sense that the concept of narrative competence seeks to account for the manner which reality is mediated in different media, such as the written, through images or orally. but, narrative competence represents only one research programme for understanding the mediation of reality. others might be possible, such as the one inspired by qvortup’s (2003) work on luhmann’s system’s theory and the hypercomplex society. a research program lakatos’s phrase (1970: 132-133) entails a hard core of assertions (his term was hypotheses), a protective belt of auxiliary, less strong assertions, a positive heuristic (suggesting paths of research to pursue) and negative heuristic (telling ‘us what paths of research to avoid’). lakatos restricts negative heuristic to the core assertion, which is not to be problematised, and positive heuristic to the questioning of the auxiliary assertions. i would contend instead that the core assertion can also be researched in a positive heuristic manner – with the goal of not necessarily questioning its validity, but of increasing our understanding of it. in addition, auxiliary assertions can be examined from the viewpoint of a negative heuristic narrative competence technology (temporal code of print, spatial code of image) socio-cultural relations (teacher-student) narratives derived from lexical and syntactic codes seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 11 in order to protect them asking what is necessary for assertions to hold, rather than be questioned and modified or abandoned. in this essay, the core assertion of the research program is that there is a connection between narratives, technology and socio-cultural relations. the last mentioned understood as a set of culturally defined relations between teachers and students/pupils. the protective belt auxiliary assertions are the assumptions connected with each of these core points. thus, for narratives and the competence entailed in creating and using them refers to narratives which can be more than simply beginning, middle and end with emplotment and a causal interpretation of the relation between events. narratives can be multidirectional, multi-accented, with different voices, and multi-punctual (with multiple beginnings or ends). the auxiliary assertions for technology can be more than the oral, the printed and the image with its emphasis on screens. it can be the manner in which technology has become, what kress has called multi-modal, combining the printed with the image, and potentially also including the oral. the auxiliary assertion for socio-cultural relations can be, with respect to pedagogic practice, more than the fixed roles of teacher and the student/pupil as passive recipient learning the codes of the narratives. it can be the flexible role positions, as the pupil/student adopts the role of teacher and the teacher as pupil. the diagram below portrays these core and auxiliary assertions. diagram: core and auxiliary assertion in a research program on narrative competence the ‘more than’ component of these auxiliary assertions enhances and defines the parameters of the openness of the learning that takes place, and mastering in turn these assertions in a practical and theoretical manner enhances the literacy and narrative competence of participants in the educational context. in part ii, the argument was made that this was to do with using and recognizing codes to create, identify, interpret and understand narratives such that code mastery becomes an expression of literacy. if these core and auxiliary assertion: the “more than” beginning, middle, end, emplotment of multi-direction, multi-accented and multi-punctual narratives core assertions: narrative competence technology socio-cultural relations auxiliary assertion: the ”more than” fixed role of teacher and pupil/students, as roles are exchanged and flexible auxiliary assertion: the ”more than” oral, printed, images of multi-modal technology combining text with image (& potentially oral) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 12 auxiliary assertions – in terms of a positive and negative heuristic – are further researched, then it will possible to further clarify narrative competence as a research programme. conclusion the goal of this essay has been to loosen up and widen our conception of the narrative and the competence that accompanies such an understanding. the argument made has been that if this understanding of narrative is combined with an awareness of changing technology and socio-cultural relations, it will be possible to re-conceptualise literacy. literacy, normally understood to include reading, writing, oral expression and numeracy, as well as the use of digital technology will then be re-positioned to rest upon a competence in narratives. this competence is in turn connected with the technology and socio-cultural relations mediating the narratives. put differently, reading without narrative competence and awareness of codes and technology will cease to be reading and the same applies to the other kinds of literacy. a second goal in this essay has been to demonstrate how narratives and the competence they generate cannot be divorced from the technology and sociocultural relations supporting their mediation. this is important to underline because it opposes the view that the narratives and narrative competence can be studied as timeless, universal phenomena; sufficient in themselves and independent of technology and socio-cultural relations. put simply, this essay has been predicated on the belief that a wider use for narratives can be found and justified in educational practice. it might be contended that teachers already possess and use narrative competence. against this it might be asserted that if this is the case, it is a largely taken for granted competence and reflection upon it is still necessary to bring it to consciousness, so it can be communicated and taught to pupils in an open manner. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 13 references aristotle (1965): on the art of poetry. translated by t.s. dorsch. london: penguin. benjamin, w (1974-89): gesammelte schriften. edited by schweppenhäuser and rolf tiedemann. frankfurt: frankfurt am main. benjamin, w (1983): charles baudelaire. a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism. london: verso books. benjamin, w (1992): the storyteller. in, illuminations. london: fontana. bernstein, b (2004): social class and pedagogic practice. in, ball, s. (editor) the routledge falmer reader in sociology of education. london: routledge falmer. boje, d (2001): narrative methods for organizational and communication research. london: sage. campbell, j. and robinson, h (1954): a skeleton key to finnegans wake. london: faber and faber. czarniawska, b ( 2004): narratives in social science research. london: sage. dobson, s (2004): cultures of exile and the experience of refugeeness. bern: peter lang. fisher, w (1987): human communication as narration: towards a philosophy of reason, value and action. columbia, sc: university of south carolina press. fritze, y., haugsbakk, g. and nordkvelle, y (2004): mediepedagogikk (media pedagogy). in norsk medietidsskrift, vol.11, no.3., s206-214. goodwin, c (1984): notes on story structure and the organization of participation. in, atkinson, m. and heritage, j. (editors) structures of social action. studies in conversation analysis. cambridge: cambridge university press. jefferson, g (1978): sequential aspects of storytelling in conversation. in, schenkein, j. (editor) studies in the organization of conversational interaction. new york: academic press. jewitt, c (2003): re-thinking assessment: multimodality, literacy and computermediated learning. in, assessment in education. vol. 10, no. 1. johnson, d. and kress, g (2003): globalisation, literacy and society: redesigning pedagogy and assessment. in, assessment in education. vol. 10, no. 1. joyce, j (1975) [1939]: finnegans wake. london: faber and faber. also: http://www.trentu.ca/jjoyce (4.11.04) kell, c (2004): review of literacy in the new media age. in, e-learning. vol. 1, no. 3. kress, g (2003): literacy in the new media age. london: routledge. kress, g (2005): english for an era of instability: aesthetics, ethics, creativity and ’design’. unpublished lecture, institute of education, london. january 18th. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 2 – 2005 14 lakatos, i (1970): falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. in, lakatos, i. and musgrave, a. (editors). criticism and the growth of knowledge. cambridge: cambridge university press. levinas, e (1969): totality and infinity. pittsburgh: duquesne university press. lie, l (1997): strategisk kompetensestyring (strategic management). bergen: fagbokforlaget. nietzsche, f (1969): on the genealogy of morals. new york: vintage books. ong, w (1982): orality and literacy. the technology of the word. florence ky: routledge. qvortrup, l (2003): the hypercomplex society. new york: peter lang. ricoeur, p (1984): time and narrative. chicago: university of chicago. svarstad, a (2005): pedagogikken og det digitale paradigme (education and the digtial paradigm). unpublished master in education, lillehammer university college, norway. st. melding nr. 30: kultur og læring (culture and learning), 2003-2004, http://odin.dep.no/ufd/norsk/publ/stmeld/045001-040013/hov005-bn.html. (4.11.04) about the author: stephen dobson has worked with refugees for 13 years and is currently senior lecturer in education at lillehammer university college, norway. his most recent book is cultures of exile and the experience of refugeeness (2004). other publications include: the urban pedagogy of walter benjamin. lessons for the 21st century (2002), the pedagogy of ressentiment (1995), baudriallard’s journey to america (1996). forthcoming essays (2006): assessing powerpoint presentations; courting risk – a framework for understanding youth cultures. he has published a collection of his own poetry in norwegian. title seminar.net 2015. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 examining value creation in a community of learning practice: methodological reflections on story-telling and story-reading filitsa dingyloudi department of psychology ludwig-maximilians-university munich email: filitsa.dingyloudi@psy.lmu.de jan-willem strijbos department of psychology ludwig-maximilians-university munich email: jan-willem.strijbos@psy.lmu.de abstract despite the abundant research on communities in various shapes and settings, examination of what community members gained from their participation remains a thorny issue. for this purpose, we adopted and refined the value creation framework developed by wenger, trayner and de laat (2011) to divulge experienced values by community members through “scaffolded narratives” and categorization of the values reported through their stories. however, in doing so two methodological issues emerged – in particular in relation to “values”. this paper reports on our methodological reflection on the challenging process of capturing community members’ value creation within a community of learning practice. more specifically, we reflect on the following questions: (1) to what extent can the values that the participants originally intended to report be identified as such by the researchers/analysts’ without bias due to the researchers/analysts’ own perspectives? and (2) to what extent does a theoretically-driven pre-defined typology of values confine or enrich the range of possible values that can be identified? what adds to this challenging research endeavour is the concept of value in theoretical terms and its associated typologies. hence, these methodological questions need to be discussed in order to comprehend both the phenomenon of value (creation) per se as well as how it is examined – as close to the participants’ reality as possible – since value creation is the driving force for the sustainability of a community. keywords: community of learning practice, value creation, situated multilevel typology of values http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:filitsa.dingyloudi@psy.lmu.de mailto:jan-willem.strijbos@psy.lmu.de seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 210 the “value” of value the concept of value is rich, complex and appealing, but often causes conceptual fuzziness among philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists due to its either narrow or broad treatment – which in turn resulted in the development of several typologies of theories of value over the last three centuries (kluckhohn, 1951; rescher, 1969; rokeach, 1973, 1979; schwartz, 1992; williams, 1968). the concept of value might be interpreted as (a) the value of an object (associated with objectivism in value theory) or (b) the process of a subject attributing value to an object based on a set of criteria or standards (associated with subjectivism in value theory; i.e. valuation). however, this axiological division seems contradictory since the criteria or standards lead to the assignment of value to an object and the value to an object requires the existence of standards or criteria set by the subject (pauls, 1990). fronzini (1971) adopts a critical view towards the objectivism-subjectivism division and claims that value is a relational construct with the existence of both the subject and the object being prerequisites. the relational nature of value is reflected in rokeach’s (1973, 1979) definition of value as “(…) an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence” (rokeach, 1973, p. 5). rokeach (1979) further emphasized that values imply the presence of criteria or standards of preference for any selective orientation and constitute both guiding factors of expected and goal-oriented behaviour and justification/explanatory factors of past behaviour. in the context of organizational management, but with a specific focus on communities of practice, wenger, mcdermott and snyder (2002), proposed a typology of values for community members and organizations, including (a) short-term and long term values, (b) tangible and intangible values, and (c) strategy-implementing and strategy-making values. their typology was further developed by integrating the idea of the value creation process, a notion which has been mostly associated with financial, organizational and strategic management (see seth, 1990). from a community and network perspective, wenger et al. (2011) conceptualize value creation as “(…) the value of learning enabled by community involvement and networking” (p. 7) with communities or networks to serve as social settings for social learning activities (e.g., sharing ideas, coconstructing knowledge, exchanging experiences). the spectrum of value creation consists of five cycles of value, which do not necessarily need to be all covered or follow a linear sequence: (a) immediate value, (indicated by meaningful activities), (b) potential value (indicated by robust resources), (c) applied value (indicated by implementation of practices), (d) realised value (indicated by return on investment), and (e) reframing value (indicated by reconsidering ideas and frameworks). within a community setting members might be involved in sharing of expertise, learning from each other’s experiences, and helping each other with challenges. these activities might be related to the values individuals attribute to a community or derive from it (wenger et al., 2011). the value of learning in a community derives from members’ ability to develop a shared intention to enhance learning in a common domain. the shared domain of interest, shared practice (developed through a joint history of learning) and the shared repertoire (consisting of shared perspectives, strategies, and stories), all constitute learning resources for the community members (wenger et al., 2011, p. 10). despite the abundant research on communities in various shapes and settings, examination of what community members gained from their participation remains a thorny issue. notwithstanding the conceptual advancement by wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation framework as “a means to appreciate seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 211 value created in communities and networks” (de laat, schreurs, & nijland, 2015, p. 254), methodological approaches to appropriately, precisely and authentically capture any reported value creation did not emerge concurrently. this gap between theory and method motivated our quest for an analytical discussion of methodological tensions when examining experienced values of participation as reported by members of community. the main questions that we discuss in this paper are: (1) to what extent can the values that the participants originally intended to report be identified as such by the researchers/analysts’ without bias due to the researchers/analysts’ own perspectives? and (2) to what extent does a theoretically-driven predefined typology of values confine or enrich the range of possible values that can be identified? by addressing these questions we aim to depict the complexity of the methodological endeavour of capturing members’ selfreported experienced values of community participation (i.e., story-telling) by researchers “from outside the box” and “labelling” participants’ experienced values with pre-defined typologies (i.e., story-reading). unravelling this methodological complexity can act as both “warning” and “support” for future researchers of communities and value creation therein. where we looked at: communities of learning practice our methodological reflection emerged from our aim to examine the phenomenon of value creation in a community of learning practice (colp). colp refers to a recombinant community model positioning itself in-between and beyond the existing community models of communities of practice (cop) and communities of learners (col) (dingyloudi & strijbos, 2014). colps are extra-curricular entities that derive from and operate in educational settings, in parallel with the curriculum – but not integrated into it – and with no predetermined pedagogical objectives. colps emerge from students’ common needs and are not used as an instructional approach by educators, researchers or stakeholders to enhance curricular learning objectives. participants of colps are fellow students who gather together as peers to address commonly identified needs that derive from the broader educational setting (e.g., academic challenges) through the sharing mechanism of peer feedback. peers voluntarily participate in the colp and are free to withdraw whenever they sense that their participation is no longer of value to them. any student can join the community as a plain peer willing to share, negotiate and co-construct learning experiences (dingyloudi & strijbos, 2014). while taking into consideration the sociocultural claim that the individual, the group and the surrounding context cannot be studied in isolation due to their interrelation (hatano & wertsch, 2000; sawyer, 2002), we identify the relevance and importance of examining personal, social, skill-related, studyrelated and contextual values within different cycles of value creation. thus we aim to provide a variegated picture of the values that are associated with this interrelation among the individual, the immediate social (group) setting and the surrounding educational context. participants the participants were eighteen international graduate students (mage = 25.90, sd = 2.37, agerange: 23-31) enrolled in a two-year research oriented learning sciences master’s program. the 18 students were part of the same cohort of students (31 students) and part of one colp (22 students) in parallel to the master’s program. participation in the community was voluntary and participants were free to join or withdraw from any community meeting. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 212 design the students voluntarily participated in seven community events (i.e., informal face-to-face community meetings), lasting approximately three hours each and taking place upon community members’ request (weekly or biweekly basis). the community events were co-organized and co-structured among the community members and a participatory non-peer facilitator (who was also the lead researcher of the present study. the facilitator was present at every community event in order to support the members’ interactions and community activities. face-to-face peer feedback on “work-in progress for future delivery within the study programme” was one of the main sharing mechanisms in the community events and coordinated by the facilitator. the lifespan of the community was one semester at the beginning of their study programme. all community events were video-recorded with consent by the participants. the values experienced by the participants were collected with the help of narratives, more specifically their “value creation stories”. what we looked for: a situated multilevel typology of values we employed a situated multilevel typology of values (smtv) to study value creation in the colp. the premises of a situated perspective to values are (a) fronzini’s (1971) value contextualism theory which implies that the existence and meaning of values is situation-defined and situation-dependent, and (b) lave and wenger’s (1991) situated approach to learning which implies that learning is a socially situated practice. although the employed typology relies heavily on the idea of cycles of value creation as developed by wenger et al. (2011), we extended their framework by including the pre-formation cycle of expected value (i.e., reasons for participation, needs and expectations) which corresponds to the values that prompt the participants to partake in community formation in the first place (see figure 1). this extension is based on the following premises (a) needs can act as prerequisites for the development of values (pauls, 1990, p. 26) and (b) values themselves constitute guiding factors of future behaviour (rokeach, 1979). along with this theoretical alignment, the integration of expected values as a pre-formation cycle is also in alignment with the first stage of community development as described by wenger et al. (2002), during which a network of people identify the potential for a community to emerge through the identification of common interests and needs. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 213 cycle 1: immediate value cycle 2: potential value cycle 3: applied value cycle 4: realized value cycle 5: reframing value pre-cycle: expected value skill-development reasons for participation and expectations productive activities robust resources promising practices return on investment new framework skills acquirednetworking implementation of insights personal performance community aspirations networking professional development value of connections collaboration change in perspectives new views of learning innovation in doing things use of social connections educational performances knowledge products as performance assessment new frameworks figure 1. cycles of value creation in networks and communities. adapted from wenger, trayner and de laat (2011, p. 34). the pre-formation cycle of expected values has been added. the smtv further extends the wenger et al. (2011) framework by differentiating five types of values within each cycle of value creation (see figure 2). personal values refer to any values that draw a direct link to one’s development as a person, self, or identity. social values refer to any values associated with one’s network, social relationships, and membership development. skill-related values refer to any values associated with one’s development of academic skills. study-related values refer to any values associated with one’s understanding of – or contribution to –her/his studies (in parallel to the study programme alongside which the community operated). context-related values refer to the usefulness and/or importance of community atmosphere and setting, the overall facilitation, and any general activities, tasks and/or tools therein. expected values context-related skill-related study-related personal social context-related skill-related study-related personal social context-related skill-related study-related personal social immediate values potential values applied values context-related skill-related study-related personal social realized values context-related skill-related study-related personal social reframing values context-related skill-related study-related personal social figure 2. situated multilevel typology of values (smtv). five types of values are distinguished within each cycle. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 214 these five types of value have been included in the smtv due to their relevance to the social setting of colps being examined (dingyloudi & strijbos, 2014), which in turn adds the situated nature of this typology. although we developed the smtv to study value creation from a situated perspective in the specific context of colps, it also contributes to the theoretical and analytical development of wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation framework for (online) communities in general – for example cops and cols often serve members’ needs to develop a certain skill in relation to a practice, organization or study programme. however, even if the smtv can be applied in structure (for the most part), the situatedness of participants’ expression of their experienced value will necessitate that the typology is recalibrated (in terms of the description of codes and examples) to the observed setting. how we looked for it: narratives and value creation stories people are storytellers who, individually and collectively, engage in experiencing, imagining, telling, retelling, re-experiencing, and re-imagining stories of their lived-in worlds (conelly & clandinin, 1990; denscombe, 2010; riessman, 2005). a story can be expressed through different media, such as written text and/or interviews (denscombe, 2010). stories can be treated as narratives when written or told with a particular purpose in mind (e.g., an account of personal experience), when drawing a link between the past and the present to reveal any developments or changes over time, or when including feelings and experiences emerging from social activities and interaction (denscombe, 2010). from a narrative point of view, stories can be analyzed in terms of how individuals construct their personal or surrounding world. narrative inquiry or narrative analysis is increasingly used in educational research with the claim that “(…) education is the construction and reconstruction of personal and social stories; learners, teachers and researchers are storytellers and characters in their own and other’s stories” (conelly & clandinin, 1990, p. 2). from a social research perspective, riessman (2005) argues that narratives are not self-evident non-analyzable data, but they require interpretation. in the present study, although influenced by narrative analysis, we employed a systematic thematic analysis following the principles of content analysis, in order to identify common thematic elements across participants’ experiences (riessman, 2005). according to riessman (2005, p. 6), “narratives do not mirror, they refract the past”, meaning that storytellers do not just reproduce a past experience but they rethink their experience based on their current interpretation, interests and strategies of sense-making to themselves and others, while drawing parallels among past, present and future. voice is a fundamental element of stories, since it is through voice that individuals are enabled to participate in a community and convey their meanings to others (britzman, 2003). voice aimed at the social process of understanding relationships between the individual, her/his experience and the other (britzman, 2003). while considering the importance and richness of participants’ stories and voices as devices of capturing in-depth, non-observable participants’ experiences of value creation in a colp, we invited the participants to write their own value creation stories after their participation in the community events. therefore, these stories have a retrospective orientation with a direct focus on linking expected, experienced and realized values of the past, with applied values of the present, and potential and reframing values for the future. the following sections describe in more detail how participants’ value creation stories were collected. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 215 value creation stories wenger et al. (2002) provide a framework for collecting community members’ value creation stories within organizations and their importance to the members, the community and the organization within which the communities arise. in line with denscombe (2010) and riessman (2005), wenger et al. (2002) state that the realization of values cannot derive from mere identifiable static measurements, but from stories that depict the complex relations between activities, resources and outcomes, while revealing the contextual aspects that frame those relations. the stories themselves – apart from providing evidence of community members’ co-construction, exchange and application of gained knowledge – also foster a sharing culture through the visibility of one’s practice within their context. according to wenger et al. (2002), three main components should be incorporated in one’s story to foster its systematicity in describing how community resources actually emerged and applied into practice creating value: (1) the initial activity, (2) the knowledge resource generated by this activity, and (3) the way the resource was applied to create value. scaffolding value creation stories we adopted wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation story scaffolding template as a systematic approach to collect value creation stories. the template by wenger et al. (2011) was adapted to the setting of a colp. it includes openended questions to scaffold participants in reporting and describing expected, emergent, applied, potential, realized and reframing values through overall and specific value creation stories. the template consists of two scaffolds that support participants in (a) depicting aspects of their overall experience of participation and (b) depicting how a specific story led to value creation. personal value narrative how participation is changing me how participation is affecting my social connections how participation is helping my practice how participation is changing my ability to influence my studies reasons for participation activities, outputs, events, networking value to me figure 3. scaffold for overall value creation narrative (adapted from wenger et al., 2011, p. 45). the first scaffold aims to capture the overall experience of participation and suggests various ways of talking about it (see figure 3). it includes several stages of the experienced participation (rows) and several aspects of the participant’s experienced values (columns). a variety of types and cycles of values can be identified from the overall personal value narrative, including the expected values. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 216 specific value creation story typical cycles your story: 1. activity: describe a meaningful activity you participated in and your experience of it. 2. output: describe a specific resource this activity produced for you and why you thought it might be useful. 3. application: say how you used this resource in your practice and what it enabled that would not have happened otherwise. 4. outcome: a. personal: explain how it affected your success. b. educational: has your participation contributed to the success of your seminars? 5. new definition of success: sometimes, such a story changes your understanding of what success is. if this is the case include it here. figure 4. scaffold for specific value creation story (adapted from wenger et al., 2011, p. 46). the second scaffold guides the telling of specific stories/examples of how participation created value to the participants (see figure 4). some storytelling aspects are included as guiding prompts: (a) describe a meaningful activity they participated in and how they experienced it (immediate values), (b) describe the resources the activity produced and their usefulness (potential values), (c) describe the application of the resources into practice (applied values), (d) describe the personal and educational outcomes of this experience (realized values), (e) describe the reconsideration, if applicable, of what success is (reframing values). although the scaffolds of the template implied a different level of specificity, both aimed at contributing to the depiction of each participant’s value creation story of their experiences within their colp. what we found: analysis and results out of 22 students that were members of the colp, 18 wrote a value creation story. we conducted content analysis of these eighteen stories to identify their experienced values of community participation. a coding scheme was developed on the basis of the smtv. the coding scheme thus included six cycles of values (expected, immediate, potential, applied, realized, and reframing), each with five types of values (personal, social, skill-related, studyrelated and context-related); in all 30 codes. we extracted 361 segments from the 18 stories, out of which 340 were codable and 21 were non-codable. based on the segmentation procedure, a segment was considered as meaningful by the coders when indicative of members’ attribution of positive, neutral, or negative oriented values to any aspect of his/her colp participation. any statement whose meaning was not clear to the coders, or was not explicitly related to the colp participation, was considered non-codable (e.g., when i was asked what motivates me in general, i answered improving something seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 217 with meaning for a system / society / community). the coding was performed by two independent coders (i.e., an external observer and the participatory researcher) who identified 21 out of 30 possible values with satisfactory reliability (cohen’s kappa = .72). identified values f % authentic example realized-skill 140 24.1 i have a clearer idea on an effective presentation realized-social 089 15.3 i felt far closer and open to all participants realizedcontext 082 14.1 i really liked that i had the chance to receive feedback realizedpersonal 042 07.2 i am much more confident expected-social 041 07.1 to get more in touch with students i did not have close contact with expected-skill 036 06.2 i wanted to improve my ability to give presentations especially in another language potential-skill 031 05.3 it helps me to evaluate the quality of a presentation applied-skill 023 04.0 i implemented the above suggestions in my subsequent presentations realized-study 021 03.6 …of course that influenced how i behave in class reframingsocial 014 02.4 my initial perceptions about certain people have altered in a positive manner reframingpersonal 012 02.1 it is not bad to be wrong reframing-skill 012 02.1 now i see each hurdle in the process of becoming a better presenter as a stepping stone expected-study 012 02.1 to get more information about the programme expectedpersonal 009 01.6 i hoped to develop myself as a person expectedcontext 005 00.9 to be more familiar with classmates in a smaller group (community) potentialpersonal 003 00.5 be more reflective in thinking about what questions i might get from the audience potential-study 002 00.3 i’m sure that will affect my education as a whole applied-study 002 00.3 i applied it during the seminars seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 218 reframingstudy 002 00.3 take into account your environment potential-social 001 00.2 i hope that i also can help other students some time appliedpersonal 001 00.2 in the first presentation…i was still struggling with confidence but i worked on it total 580 100 table 1. identified values in value creation stories (n = 18) the content analysis of the value creation stories (see table 3) shows that a wide range of values could be identified by the coders (21 out of 30 values) with the most prominent ones being realized skill-related values (24.1%), followed by realized social values (15.3%), realized context-related (14.1%), and realized personal values (7.2%). none of the coders identified nine of the theoretical value categories which were included in the coding scheme. four codes were not identified despite the fact that they could have been identified and the remaining five were nonidentifiable due to the nature of the data source which had a retrospective perspective (i.e., immediate values were not possible to be identified). however, the immediate values were retained in the coding scheme for the analysis of the video data, which enables capturing the actual participation of members in the community events. although the smtv enabled us to examine value creation in a colp – necessary for understanding of the phenomenon – it also fostered our reflection on the steps and approaches taken to unravel the value creation phenomenon. the following section addresses the main questions as part of methodological reflection and details our lessons learned. what we have learned: discussion in order to examine value creation in a community setting we developed a situated multilevel typology of values (smvt), with the concept of value and wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation framework as our theoretical basis. the smvt and its application to the analysis of self-reported value creation of members of a community of learning practice (colp) prompted our reflection on the following questions: (1) to what extent can the values that the participants originally intended to report actually be identified as such by the researchers/analysts’ without bias due to the researchers/analysts’ own perspectives? and (2) to what extent does a pre-defined typology of values, based on a theoretical framework, confine or enrich the range of possible values that could be identified? both questions are associated with the axiological issues of objectivism (e.g., hartmann, 1967), subjectivism (e.g., perry, 1954), and value contextualism (frondizi, 1971), along with the ethnographic issues of realism and relativism with a main focus on the extent to which an outsiders’ perspective can depict an insiders’ perspective when the former use their own conceptual tools for discovering the latter (descombe, 2010). by adopting the contextualism approach to values as described by frondizi (1971) – i.e. the uniqueness and high situatedness of participants’ stories and therefore values reported and described through the stories – a researchers’ re-production and interpretation of others’ stories is a challenging process. values are generated within specific situations and circumstances and do not necessarily need to be stable entities across situations (frondizi, 1971). they seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 219 can be intangible and therefore non-observable, need time to grow, are not always immediately realized by the participants within a specific situation, and even if they are realized it does not mean that these values can be automatically communicated to others because the personal value of an experience might be of relevance only to oneself. all these elements make the identification of values within the participants’ stories even more challenging. while reading the story as told by a participant, researchers might partially reproduce or mis-produce participants’ value creation stories due to the researchers’ own perspectives, theoretical frameworks applied for interpretation, the situatedness of their interpretation and the constraints of what can be told and what cannot be told (britzman, 2003, p. 35). while considering the situated nature of value creation, inviting researchers to observe the context and participants’ interactional patterns and value generation through video observation – prior to the analysis of value creation stories – might allow the researchers to understand better the participants’ perspectives towards values and the ways they would convey them to others. the closer to the phenomenon under study the less filters – that act as obstacles to the observation and analysis of participants’ experienced reality – are imposed by the researchers. eo v pr p figure 5. pandora’s box as a metaphor for the “filters” that might hinder or direct the identification of experienced values in communities (eo = external observer, pr = participatory researcher, p = participant, and v = value as experienced). the metaphor of pandora’s box (see figure 5) illustrates that the seemingly simple action of analyzing values experienced by participants in a community is instead a highly complex process that may lead to an endless complication of unravelling the “real”. analyzing or reporting experiences related to constructs seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 220 such as values, which are highly dependent on people’s own set of criteria (rokeach, 1979), includes multiple “filters” that may bias the participatory researcher’s and external observer’s interpretation of participants’ experienced reality. more specifically, such a bias of the values told or read in the stories is effected by story tellers’ (i.e., participants) and story readers’ (i.e., participatory researchers or external observers) own value systems, and in the case of story readers also their understanding of pre-defined typologies of value creation. in sum, the filters represent added layers of subjective interpretation. as such, any idea of an “absolute” or non-selective truth” reported by the storytellers or understood by the story readers should be discarded. a participant’s (p) own value system filters the reported values (v), which in turn are even further filtered by the participatory researcher’s (pr) value system and any biases deriving from the pr’s community participation. the pr’s lens is reflected in and shaped the development of the smtv, which further filters what can be observed by an external observer (eo). in turn, the eo’s understanding of the smtv may further filter the reported “reality”. our reflection with the help of the metaphor of pandora’s box emphasizes the complex interplay between what the story was, what the story tells, how the story is read and what any story reader further “story tells” that can lead to bias or misinterpretation of the experienced phenomenon. in our study, we involved two coders in the content analysis of the value creation stories. although these coders achieved satisfactory reliability, they simultaneously differed in their personal perspectives towards values and their interpretations of the stories as told by the participants, which in turn affects the identification and interpretation of values. in the present study the first coder was the participatory researcher (i.e., the non-peer facilitator) and the second coder was an external observer. although external, the observer was invited to watch the video data of the actual community experience before being involved in the analysis of the value creation stories in order to familiarize herself with the participants, their observed attitudes towards their participation, and their role in the community. doing so might have brought the observer closer to the phenomenon. regarding the theoretical framework by wenger et al. (2011) that informed the template and both storytelling scaffolds, we think that the template (and scaffolds) both confined and enriched the possible range of values reported by the participants. on the one hand the scaffolds facilitated the narrative storytelling process by serving as stepping stones, but on the other hand they might have directed the participants to attribute values to aspects that they normally would not have attributed value to. however, when invited to tell/ write their experienced stories retrospectively, participants might not be able to recall important aspects if scaffolds are not available. yet, with respect to the predefined smtv there is a danger of classifying values too broadly or too holistically and thus and thus losing the particularities of the experienced value. however, the typology provides researchers a framework to identify actual written elements that imply attributed value by the participants. nevertheless, it should be highlighted that it is still unknown whether the participants would have perceived the classification of their reported values in similar ways to the participatory researcher and the external observer. hence, further analysis could be done by involving the participants themselves, for example with the help of interviews around the analyzed stories and/or cued retrospective recall of video-fragments to foster participants’ reflection. our reflections on the examination of the under-researched phenomenon of value creation in communities signify that the analysis of value is highly situated and that any analysis also needs to consider the degree to which the outcome of such an analysis (story-reading) adequately represents participants’ experiences (story-telling) in relation to the filters that colour the researchers’ interpretation of the value creation stories. it also serves to inform researchers who study the value creation process in face-to-face or online seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 11 – issue 3 – 2015 221 communities (whether colp, cop or col) about the complexity of its analysis, but that the smtv is a first methodological stepping stone to address this thorny issue. acknowledgements we would like to thank fernando hernández-hernández and juana m. sancho for arousing our interest in reflecting and rethinking educational research. references britzman, d. 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(1968). values. in e. sills (ed.), international encyclopedia of the social sciences (pp. 283-287). new york: macmillan. examining value creation in a community of learning practice: methodological reflections on story-telling and story-reading filitsa dingyloudi jan-willem strijbos abstract the “value” of value where we looked at: communities of learning practice participants design what we looked for: a situated multilevel typology of values how we looked for it: narratives and value creation stories value creation stories scaffolding value creation stories what we found: analysis and results what we have learned: discussion acknowledgements references transcultural perspectives in teaching children’s horror films ©2018 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. transcultural perspectives in teaching children’s horror films marjo kovanen the faculty of communication science, school of communication, media and theatre university of tampere e-mail: marjo.kovanen@koulukino.fi (corresponding author) sirkku kotilainen the faculty of communication science, school of communication, media and theatre university of tampere e-mail: sirkku.kotilainen@uta.fi abstract in the light of the internationalisation of both higher education and global immigration transcultural perspectives have received considerable scholarly attention. thus, the objective of this paper is to open up a discussion on film education, with particular reference to the teaching of children’s horror films from transcultural perspectives through an empirical case study among university students in media education. this research concentrates on students’ attitudes and perceptions of the children’s horror genre from the perspective of film education. the question to be addressed is: how can university students’ understanding of children’s horror culture be increased through film education? this paper consists of research results based on students’ film life studies, interviews and learning diaries during a two-week workshop. the results show that perceptions and attitudes vary greatly depending on cultural background. students’ pre-existing understanding of film culture and film literacy as a pedagogical practice were largely professionally oriented and coloured by an aesthetic perception of film. the most notable impact of the course was characterised by a wider understanding of film as education and the uses of film in teaching. focusing on the aspects of children’s horror in the course was not on line with students´ expectations. dialogic pedagogies created open, safe spaces for reflection and changing students’ mindsets. based on the findings, a situated approach to horror film education is proposes to reinforce pedagogies on multiliteracies with safe spaces for supplementing emotional skills. key words: children, film education, horror, school, teacher training, transcultural seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 32 introduction film education has been part of film culture since the early 20th century. thereafter it has been regarded primarily even since then, film education has mainly been regarded either as art education or closely connected to questions of censorship and child protection. still later, it was connected to aims of wider media education. thus film literacy has become an increasingly prominent competence in the current image-saturated society and is an important part of wellbeing (e.g. a framework for film education, 2015). however transcultural perspectives and horror films have only received scant attention as far as film education is concerned. it seems that horror in children´s culture is little appreciated or understood. it continues to evoke moral panic, and initial reactions tend towards often eliciting a concern to protect children. the study based on this article tries to fill the gap from the perspective of teacher education. what kinds of pedagogic elements should be included in film education on the genre of children’s horror? this article aims to understand the position of horror culture from a transcultural perspective among students from different geopolitical contexts with a view to developing teacher education. legislation on age ratings is one defining factor when designing film education activities in the classroom in finland and europe. this provides the sociocultural environment of the study. age ratings are of course crucial elements for any discussions of sensitive or controversial issues like the consumption of horror culture or understanding horror as a genre, an understanding of which is crucial for developing film literacy in contemporary cultures. in teacher education and in schools, this theme can be addressed through the reading of the genre defined as children´s horror (e.g. lester, 2016). the genre as a starting point has been singled out as a safer way of developing film education on children’s horror, although little research has been done in this field. (e.g. kovanen, 2011, p. 120). in the study this article is based on, the assumption is that the focus on genre supports developing participatory film education at schools that is defined by curricula and legislation. the matter of multicultural classrooms in film education, with reference to children´s horror is equally deserving our attention. greater scholarly attention has recently been paid to the transcultural perspective due to the internationalisation of higher education and increased immigration worldwide, including finland (e.g. koponen & kotilainen, 2017). for example, international doctoral studies and master’s degree programmes in media education have been implemented at the universities of lapland and tampere. moreover, classrooms in schools have become more diverse throughout europe because of recent developments in immigration. moreover, finnish school culture and pedagogy is facing challenges whereby schools’ pedagogical framework, legislation and informal education outside of schools is incompatible with increasingly diverse students and their cultures. this accounts for why a transcultural perspective is especially appropriate in a consideration of film education. this article takes a closer look at the teaching of children’s horror films based on a case in which both authors were teachers at the international summer school of film education at tampere university in 2017. one of the main seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 33 objectives of this course was to strengthen participants’ film literacy regarding horror films as a genre from an educational perspective. as a case study, the approach adopted here is one of explorative action research approach because researchers were actively involved in its implementation (e.g. reason & bradbury, 2006). there were altogether 10 participants – from china (three), india (two), iran (two), italy (one) and finland (two) – including two males and eight female participants. their ages varied, and they came from different academic backgrounds with different kinds of basic knowledge regarding film. film education was an unfamiliar concept for nearly all of them. mostly, these participants were studying photography, film production and teacher training; they had backgrounds as master’s and doctoral students. what they had in common was a general interest in film education because of their educationbased studies, film-related research, work as film teachers or hobbies related to film. this paper, then, consists of the research results based on the course, including students’ interviews, their film life studies and learning diaries made during the intensive two-week workshop. the workshop necessitated three to six hours’ work every day, as well as assignments, such as short movies. the research was introduced to all students at the outset, including this study and a master’s dissertation (glotov, 2018, in progress). research consent forms were signed as voluntary-based participation for both studies. all students signed these consent forms. to protect respondents’ anonymity, country of origin and gender were not mentioned when reporting the results. the content of this article was presented in the media education conference in november 2017 at the university of lapland, rovaniemi, finland. film education and children’s horror as a genre i truly do not agree with horror movies for children and mostly ask myself why children should watch horror movies. (student 2, learning diary) in recent years horror content aimed at children has been under discussion with the emergence of various kinds of horror games, films and animated series. film studies scholar catherine lester situates horror aimed at children in a generic and industrial context. when speaking of the themes of films she uses the term ‘acceptance’ but she also refers to understanding horror films as a relevant part of children’s culture. lester discusses movies meant as entertaining horror films for children, such as paranorman (2012), frankenweenie (2012) and hotel transylvania (2012) (lester, 2016, p. 22). although horror content aimed at children has become an increasingly important field of popular culture in commercial terms, this does not necessarily mean it is a unprecedented phenomenon. horror elements in films aimed at children can be found also in early children´s cinema, for example, in disney’s animated feature film productions. the most classic example is snow white and the seven dwarfs from 1937 (davis, 2006, p. 22). since horror has seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 34 always been part of children’s own voluntary culture, it should be an integral part of an education as well (kovanen, 2011, p. 110). indeed, horror and scary stories have a long history in children´s culture. children´s horror culture is a way of dealing with fears, strengthening group identity and pushing boundaries (tucker, 2008, p. 113). audiovisual horror has its roots in oral folklore, in which horror stories have long been widespread. the oral horror tradition is thriving also in an urban context. children still tell ghost stories to each other, even with the arriving of social media as a new channel for children’s folklore. finnish folklorist laura hokkanen (2014) calls this new way of transmitting traditions digilore, which means ‘digitally created folklore’. regarding film culture, influences go are reciprocal: digilore is a source of inspiration and ideas to filmmakers of horror films, and horror film themes exist outside film screens in digilore. hence, it is possible to argue that horror culture of children themselves constitutes of a rich combination of oral, audio-visual and other media traditions (kovanen, 2016). with other children’s culture genres, it can also be perceived as a rebellious counterculture. american folklorist elizabeth tucker points out that, for example, halloween allows children to express themselves fully in an uninhibited fashion as they please, within the framework of tradition (tucker, 2008, p. 3). likewise, horror film culture can serve the same purpose (e.g. kovanen, 2011, p. 114–116). in the international summer school of film education, there was a short introductory lecture given on the subject of horror genre from a historical film perspective, including horror culture related to children´s films. this was necessary since horror as a genre − and especially related to children´s films – appeared to be a somewhat unfamiliar concept to most students. accordingly, horror was first introduced as a broad genre and part of film history and culture in general. the first lecture introduced the more specific topic of children´s horror. next, the children´s horror genre was introduced with examples following a discussion. as part of the course, there was an introduction and discussion of age rating systems in different countries and censorship in general. such an approach appeared to be the most natural and the only way to enable students to engage with the subject of horror for children. it was most difficult for those students who were least willing to accept horror as a part of children´s culture. their discussion on age ratings revealed a range of perspectives regarding suitable and good content for children, goals of education and cultural differences. for example, one student wrote in his text that: for me, the rating stays behind the need for security and growth for the children and is a good way to give them good content and not a dangerous environment. (student 3, assignment 1). a similar opinion on this subject was expressed frequently in discussion. horror as a genre has often been underrated from the viewpoint of education and the ideals of educational children’s films. horror and violence in children’s films has also given rise to a great deal of moral indignation, which has resulted in a paradigm that labels all horror and violent elements as summarily harmful for young audiences. this discussion has usually taken place in the context of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 35 the child protection and is related to age ratings. age ratings and child protectionist censorship is, of course, inextricably bound up with the content of children´s films. this is especially evident in the case of horror content. the entire history of censorship, age ratings and child protection are highly characterized by the moral indignation regarding the impact of films on young audiences (sihvonen, 2009, p. 218–219). thus it is both natural and instructive to ponder the questions of child protection and censorship in the context of children´s horror culture in film education. multiliteracies as a framework: towards transcultural perspectives film education summer school 2017 consisted of preand post-assignments, lectures, academic essays, presentations and videos made by students. during the course, there was a variation between an academic approach and exercises of a practical nature. children´s horror culture was introduced in the framework of pedagogies on multiliteracies (e.g. cope & kalantzis, 2000) including dialogic, participatory elements starting from the transcultural film cultures experienced by students through practice-based assignments carried out on their own or group work. the key pedagogic methods in the course were reflective film life studies, learning diaries, small group discussions and group work continued in class publicity as well. see table 1. table 1. pedagogical methods used in children´s horror as a genre. special film life studies were written by students as a preliminary assignment for pedagogical methods used outcomes film life studies (personal), preassignment students deepen their understanding of their own personal history regarding film culture and their film/media relationship to horror as well. presentations (in groups and class) during the course students familiarise themselves with each other’s cultural backgrounds and reflect on their own background. sense of belonging and understanding of children’s horror and film education. lectures (in class) students receive an introduction to children’s horror as a genre and film education. discussions (in groups and class) during the course students get to know each other’s thoughts, ideas and cultural backgrounds and to reflect on their own background. sense of belonging and understanding of children’s horror and film education. essays (personal) during the course students learn to read an academic paper with a reflection on their essay. they deepen their understanding of children’s horror and film education. learning diaries (personal) postassignment students deepen their learning and reflect on their learning process. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 36 the course. they were asked to reflect on how they felt about their relationship with horror content and scary film experiences and how those experiences had shaped their perception of cinema (on media life study, see kotilainen, 2001; koponen & kotilainen, 2017). in the first assignment after class, the students were asked to read filipa antunes´ article ‘children and horror after pg-13: the case of the gate’ and to reflect on their own feelings and antunes´ ideas regarding horror content for children and age ratings. students were asked, for example, to reflect on the themes of the article in the light of their own cinema experiences. after the course, students wrote learning diaries in which they analysed their learning process. discussions in class were intended to deepen the themes of the course and to shape students´ perceptions of each other’s cultures. the goal for creating a safe space for discussion would have been easier to achieve if there had been more time for group work and discussions without constraints of time. regarding intercultural and multicultural classrooms, this article presents them as mixed cultures and cultural understandings. a transcultural perspective looks at cultures as dialogue, for example, mixed user relationships with media between and over cultures (e.g. nohl, 2007; domenig, 2007). related to young people such as pupils and students, the user perspective is essential. researchers refer to, for example, the cultures of media practice (nohl, 2007). according to nohl (2007), this perspective implies to ‘habitualized patterns of media practice collectively shared by a specific social group’. frau-meigs (2013) has created the term ’transliteracy’, which mostly refers to the skills required in order to overcome the diversity of sense-making mechanisms online. it is important to understand the continuously changing media contexts together with changing identifications of the users through the negotiation of their own values. for example, young immigrants face several changes in their media contexts − the first when they enter western culture and mediated user practices in europe. koponen and kotilainen (2017) are challenging media education, especially in teacher training, in order that the transcultural mediated practices of the young for developing pedagogies as student-centred activities. might be taken seriously. this was considered when planning and implementing the international summer school as a workshop in film education with a special focus on children’s horror films. for the purpose of this article, the data were analysed according to the framework of multiliteracies (cope & kalantzis, 2000). multiliteracy was introduced by the researchers of the new london group (cope & kalantzis, 2000). this term, which combines the complexity of multimodal texts and cultural diversity, has been little discussed in media education thus far (e.g. koponen & kotilainen, 2017). the new london group provides ‘a theoretical overview of the current social context of learning and consequences of social changes for the content (the ´what´) as well as the form (the ´how´)’. the authors also state that their book is written as a programmatic manifesto and is meant to be ‘the basis for open-ended dialogue’. the new finnish core curriculum for basic education is one attempt to implement this. as defined in the core curriculum for basic education (finnish national board of education, 2014) multiliteracy is based on a broad definition of text. the aim of multiliteracy practices in education is to enhance seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 37 students’ skills in reading, interpreting and influencing the multicultural, diverse world around them (halinen, harmanen, & mattila, 2015). thus, new reading and writing skills include skills to understand the complexity of diversity of cultures and different genres, also in audio-visual form. as a theoretical framework, multiliteracy is a tool to analyse the content of controversial popular culture and meaning-making in a transcultural pedagogical context. the roots of the framework lie in the challenges educators have faced in cultural and linguistic diversity, mostly in the uk. the term was first used in the 1990s among literacy teachers working in multilingual and multicultural classrooms and was first intended to solve the problems of the complex reality in schools. multiliteracy emerged from the notion that it was no longer feasible to teach one single english language and cultural differences and rapidly changing media were creating new challenges for literacy pedagogy (cope & kalantzis, 2000, p. 3–5). from the perspective of understanding the genre, especially that of children´s horror, the meaning-making and respective skills become important. according to cope and kalantzis (2000), the meaning-making process comprises six elements: 1. linguistic meaning, 2. visual meaning, 3. audio meaning, 4. gestural meaning, 5. spatial meaning and 6. multimodal patterns of meaning that relate the first five modes of meaning to each other. pedagogical tools used in the workshop created a multimodal learning environment where students not only created linguistic meanings −for example, at the moodle platform − but processed audio-visual meaning by analysing audio-visual material in the classroom and creating gestural and spatial meanings in the context of classroom discussions and presentations. thus, our aim was that the multimodal patterns of meaning would become a crucial part of understanding and processing the workshop’s content. results: changing mindsets on horror film education the main findings concern students´ attitudes: it was common for many participants to have negative experiences with the horror genre. for example, they had seen scary adult content at an excessively young age, or horror elements in children´s film without parental supervision. this was reflected mainly in film life studies where, for example, strong emotional experiences were described. for example: as for my own experience, when i was a kid, i watched a horror film on television without parents, and it left me scared of horror films for a long time. to this day, i still hate horror films and will be easily frightened by the horror elements in films. (learning diary, student 5). to most students, using children’s horror films in education was something quite unfamiliar, and therefore their suspicion was aroused. this came across in interviews and written assignments. most students emphasised the role of age ratings, tighter control, the importance of suitable content (the ‘good always wins’ pattern in children´s films, comic relief etc.) and other guidelines. some students were brought up taking into account the individual capacities of children in educational settings. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 38 the multiliteracy approach emphasises not only ethnic cultural diversities but also sociocultural and family cultures. this study suggests that, for example, in transcultural settings, family cultures and individual childhood experiences have not received due scholarly attention. it was obvious that childhood experiences with films and horror content influenced students’ relationship with film and horror culture. differences particularly in family cultures were shown in consuming horror content and experiences related to it. family cultures were also sometimes in conflict with the official age rating system, as is evident in the following comment by a student: the first film memory that i have is about emmerich’s godzilla. it was a good film for sure, a new and advanced kind of sci-fi movie that followed the monster film tradition. i remember that i was 7 and i was not allowed to see this movie, but my parents let me see it and i was really scared. i still remember that i ran away from the living room at the stadium scene. this experience gave me a bad feeling about the supernatural and horror movies for a long time. i didn’t want to watch them until i became an adult and i understood that nothing is more scary than a university exam in private law. (student 3, film life study.) thus attitudes towards film education and horror content stem from were very versatile backgrounds. for example, one student wrote of the impact if her family having a religious culture: going to the cinema or watching movies was not a very easy task in my family, as it is in most families in india. coming from a very strong and orthodox christian family, watching films was considered to be a sin. (student 8, film life study.) in the case of many participants who had undergone negative experiences with the horror genre they had often seen adult content far too young or children´s film´s horror elements without parental supervision. they had to cope with that experience by themselves, without the support of an adult that would have enhanced emotional skills and coping mechanisms. seemingly bad experiences in one’s own childhood influenced one’s relationship with the genre and had a potentially negative effect on the pedagogical understanding of horror content. in the data, one factor that emerged in the context of horror content and child protection (for example, in the context of age ratings) was related to personal experience. for example, one participant wrote the following: for the scary films, it gave me an extremely negative impact during my childhood. (…) without correct guidance, these horror films may cause profound negative impact on a child’s character. (film life study, student 6.) in some cases, official age rating systems were seen as a corrective service: without age ratings, i would hardly know which age group the films were suitable for. (…) however, age ratings can provide a reference for parents seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 39 when choosing films for their children and prevent children from harmful content. (student 5, learning diary.) transcultural pedagogies matter from a transcultural point of view, it is important to address the question of different policies in countries regarding the age ratings. for example, chinese students indicated that political censorship in china was a problem because it is based on political ideology, rather than child protection purposes. this point of view is illustrated in the following comment: calling for age ratings, we are seeking the adults’ right of enjoying more diverse art and a child’s right to be protected. (student 5, assignment 1.) one student considered age ratings also from a transcultural perspective: in general, i’m in favour of age ratings, though i tend to view them as guidelines rather than commandments, due to individual children coping differently with the same material, the general differences between rating systems across nations and differences in what is considered appropriate content for children differing between cultures. (student 2, assignment 1.) since censorship appears to provide an answer (both governmental child protection censorship and self-censorship of the industry) for many participants, there is need for a pedagogical model to develop film literacy and the emotional skills tied to it. by reflecting on one´s own perhaps negative experiences with certain content, it is possible to consider content within a broader perspective as relevant. the way films used their horror elements was another important factor regarding attitudes towards horror: the most important point is to let children be aware of what illuminates the darkness and what drives away the demons. (student 5, assignment 1.) to me, in horror films which are for children, the content generally should show positive aspects of horror that shows how children can overcome the fear and scary things. (student 2, assignment 1.) while it was acknowledged that content intended for children might include difficult subject matter and some scary material, it was also common to demand the ‘right’ way to display such material. many participants also recognised horror to be a crucial part of popular culture consumed particularly during teenage years. because in junior high, as many teenagers, i found life annoying and had plenty of “dark and rebellious” thoughts. where is a better place to find similar thoughts than the internet? therefore, i started to watch a very specific type of film. those films which ground several people in one place with game rules or exit conditions, like cube, exam, misery and the mist. i was so obsessed with this kind of film that i practically watched as many as i could find during that year. somehow these films provided me seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 40 recognition. they embodied my “dark and rebellious” teenage thoughts and told me it’s ok to have those in my mind. (film life study, student 4.) during the course, students gave presentations about characteristics of the film cultures of their native lands. presentations resulted in open, far-reaching discussions. this is a practice that enhances the awareness of a student´s audiovisual roots and how these are related to other. this can also strengthen the understanding of potentially new and threatening audio-visual cultures and phenomena. as one student put it: this class included multicultural participants. students in the class had a different background in the field and experiences. it caused us to find many experiences from different groups. doing something as a group made us get more familiar with each other’s culture. (student 1, learning diary.) emotional meaning making and skills at the core the main result was a change in students’ understanding of film literacy and education in general. at the outset of the course, the participants considered film literacy a skill for reading pictures and understanding cinematic conventions, so their preconception was professional and aesthetic. at the end of the course, film literacy was understood as a critical literacy practice. it was clear that attitudes to horror content for children were mixed and characterised by emotion. for example, not everyone agreed that children´s interest in horror was endogenous. in the opinions of some students´ children´s horror culture was seen as a result of commercial entertainment of film industry. this is one case showing the importance of understanding your own relationship with certain media and dealing with emotions it raises. these discussions were also reflected in a learning diary as follows: i especially liked the ones on children and horror, which is a fascinating topic and merits more discussion (although considering the discussion that arose during the lecture, i can see why it isn’t brought up all that often.) (student 1, learning diary.) even when film literacy was understood as a critical literacy practice, the understanding of emotional skills as a part of film literacy was lacking. this was evident mainly in the learning diaries and interviews. with this in mind, we would like to add emotional meaning to the aforementioned list by cope and kalantzis (2000) on multimodal aspects on meaning making. this is because the emotional skills can be seen to be in the core of film literacy and crucial in the context of horror culture and thus it is important to create pedagogies based on that. children´s horror – developing pedagogical practices results show that horror content was considered to be connected primarily with the rebellious phase of teenage years but not something that could be useful from a pedagogical point of view earlier in childhood. negative experiences with horror films and lacking guidance were experienced in childhood, which turned seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 41 into a protective attitude toward film education in general, especially children´s horror films. horror as a theme for the course was new, together with a large part of film education as well. as expected, based on the novelty, the course resulted in a change of students’ pedagogic mindsets ending with critical, reflective understandings of horror film education as part of media education. this change shows that transcultural pedagogies matter in creating increased global understanding and the framework of multiliteracies is useful as a dialogic, participatory vehicle for augmenting the interest and reflection of students. emotional meaning-making and skills were at the core of creating understanding from horror as a genre: these were most visible in students’ discussions, interviews and personal assignments in many ways. more research is needed in this field, for example, in exploring the ways (horror) film education might support emotional education. developing film literacy for inclusive and participatory practice demands a focused pedagogical approach. the transcultural and multimodal nature of the real worlds of students ought to be approached from a standpoint in which different aspects of those worlds are recognised, horror culture being one specific example of those life worlds. this study has approached this question within the theoretical framework of multiliteracy which seems to convey a large part of this complex field. audiovisual horror culture can thus be seen as a learning environment of multiliteracies which support the development of emotional skills and wider multiliteracy skills. the results help to reinforce multiliteracy as a comprehensive pedagogical model. in doing so, it stresses the importance of notion of creating safe spaces for discussion, reflection and enhancing emotional skills. one solution to unlock and expand the attitudes and perceptions related to pedagogical uses of children´s horror culture could be film life studies related to experiences in horror and the concomitant emotions connected. this could also result in a more child-connected education (räsänen, 2015, p. 34). following kotilainen and pathak-shelat (2015), the study calls for situated approaches to media education in europe: more international film education through policy initiatives at the european level and locally. in a specific pedagogical, local setting in schools, an experimental attitude could take place for developing models for transcultural media and film education in which children collaborate, plan and design their own films as agents. in order for that to take place a change is needed in teacher training in favour of more active, agency-based media and film pedagogies. students from transcultural and versatile backgrounds undergo different experiences which potentially impact on teaching and learning. that is why the creation of a safe space for learning is crucial, including an educator or a teacher who is sufficiently familiar with the student group. both perspectives, transcultural and horror, call out for an inclusive understanding. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 42 references cope, b., & kalantzis, m.(2000). introduction – multiliteracies – the beginnings of an idea. in b. cope & m. kalantzis (eds.) multiliteracies. literacy learning and the design of social futures, (pp.3-9). london and new york: routledge. davis, a. m. (2006). good girls & wicked witches. women in disney´s feature animation. eastleigh: john libbey publishing. domenig, d. (2007). das konzept der transkulturellen kompetenz. in d. domenig (hg.) transkulturelle kompetenz. lehrbuch für pflege-, gesundheitsund sozialberufe (pp 165–189). 2., vollständig überarb. u. erw. aufl. bern: huber & lang-hogrefe ag. a framework for film education (2015). british film institute. frau-meigs, d. (2013). transliteracy. sense-making mechanisms for establishing epresence. in u.carlsson, & s.h.culver (eds.) media and information literacy and intercultural dialogue (pp. 175-189). milid yearbook 2013. göteborg: nordicom. halinen, i., harmanen, m., & mattila, p. (2015). making sense of complexity of the world today: why finland is introducing multiliteracy in teaching and learning. in v.bozsik, (ed.) improving literacy skills across learning. cidree yearbook 2015. budapest: hierd. hokkanen, l. (2014). sairaan hauskaa! nuorten kasvatuksellinen kapina folkloressa. kasvatus & aika 8(3), 7–22. kotilainen, s. & pathak-shelat, m. (2015). media and information literacies and wellbeing of young people: comparative perspectives. in kotilainen, s. & kupiainen, r. (eds.) reflections on media education futures. contributions to the conference media education futures in tampere, finland 2014 (pp. 147-159). nordicom yearbook 2015. göteborg: nordicom. koponen, m & kotilainen, s. (2017). kohti transkulttuurista mediaosaamista korkeakoulutuksessa. aikuiskasvatus 39(3), 205-221. kovanen, m. (2011). kauhuelokuva koulussa. in kotilainen, s., kovala, u. & vainikkala, e. (eds.) media, kasvatus ja kulttuurin kierto(109-130). nykykulttuurin tutkimuskeskuksen julkaisuja 106. jyväskylä: jyväskylän yliopisto, kovanen, m. (2016). horror in children´s culture and cinema. available: http://blog.thefinancingforum.com/horror-in-childrens-culture-and-cinema/. lester, c. 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(2008) children´s folklore. a handbook. greenwood folklore handbooks. westport, connecticut, london: greenwood press. http://blog.thefinancingforum.com/horror-in-childrens-culture-and-cinema/ transcultural perspectives in teaching children’s horror films abstract introduction film education and children’s horror as a genre multiliteracies as a framework: towards transcultural perspectives results: changing mindsets on horror film education transcultural pedagogies matter emotional meaning making and skills at the core children´s horror – developing pedagogical practices references title ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. editorial recent trends in the digitalization of the nordic k-12 schools j ola lindberg department of education umeå university sweden email: ola.j.lindberg@umu.se anders d. olofsson department of educational science umeå university sweden email: anders.d.olofsson@umu.se digitalization of k-12 schools the past decade has seen an increased interest in the possibilities and difficulties involved with the digitalization of society (selwyn & facer, 2014). this has affected all areas of society, particularly education (selwyn, 2011). the use of information technology (it), information and communication technology (ict), new technology, modern technology, and other ways of naming the trend is evident (willermark, 2018), as are the different ways of formulating the societal aspect of its use in the knowledge society (dede, 2010), the information society (kelly garett, 2006), the networked society (castells, 2000), the digital society (mossberger, tolbert, & mcneal, 2008), and others. these aspects come together in different conceptualizations of the skills, competences, and other kinds of preparation that are needed for people to take part in these societies (siddiq, gochyyev, & wilson, 2017) – such as 21st-century skills (van laar, van deursen, van dijk, & de haan, 2017), digital competence (ferrari, 2012), digital literacy (reedy & goodfellow, 2012), and more. at a policy level in norway, sweden, and finland, changes have been proposed during recent years (olofsson, lindberg, hauge, & fransson, 2015; niemi, multisilta, lipponen, & vivitsou, 2014). in norway, digital competence has been present in the educational discourse since the early 2000s; in sweden, denmark, and finland changes are currently taking place. the trends are there, but how do we make sense of them? is there a difference in the way these trends play out on a national and local level? are there transnational trends as well? in october 2017, lindberg and olofsson hosted a symposium at the university of umeå, sweden, in which the issues above were focused upon and discussed. scholars and researchers from the nordic countries were brought together to present their views on what they saw as the most recent trends in the digitalization of the nordic k-12 schools. from many theoretical perspectives, empirical contexts, and subject areas, the paper presentations highlighted both national differences and similarities. in order to have the nordic perspective put in comparison with non-nordic circumstances, two keynote presentations held seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 104 by colleagues from belgium and australia addressed the area of concern from both the continental part of europe and from the asia-pacific region. both of these provided important and critical insights into how the nordic situation can be understood. research in the nordic countries seems to be concerned with understanding the situation that schools are in when digitalization is ongoing. however, research is also concerned with how the different trends on a policy level are brought into schools as grounds for practice as well as with how policies are implemented in a more concrete way. as can be read from the papers included in this special issue, schools in the nordic countries are struggling to make sense of digitalization, as are researchers. digitalization is there, but what is it? in total, 15 paper presentations were given during the umeå seminar. this special issue consists of 10 papers that lindberg and olofsson selected. in total, 12 researchers from five countries contributed to the special issue. below, a short introduction of each paper is provided. the 10 papers in this special issue the first paper in this special issue is the conceptual paper “rethinking communication in virtual learning environments through the concept of bildung” written by charlotta hilli. in this paper, hilli departs from her previous writings about virtual learning environments (vles) in finnish secondary schools and relates these to the continental tradition of bildung. using vles as examples of a new digital technology, hilli discusses the transformative relationship between the self and culture, differently described in terms of bildung. the paper adopts a techno-cultural educational perspective – which, according to hilli, means that the digital world is an extension of the physical world and, as such, an extension of humanity. in the paper, communication is understood as a central theme in theories of bildung; communication is the space, or interface, in which bildung takes place. hilli points out a need to rethink what communication means in education when it is mediated through digital technologies such as vles. the second contribution to understand the nordic schools, is the outside perspective of tasmania and the asia-pacific context provided by jennifer masters. as an extension of her keynote speech at the symposium, her reflective position paper, “trends in the digitalization of k-12 schools: the australian perspective”, sheds light on the common perception in australia that children’s rich access to digital technologies in schools has not made a difference in the quality of education in the country. however, the paper reveals that the australian government have invested in a new curriculum regarding digital technologies and the provision of equipment and professional development for teachers to support this goal. masters’s paper is informed by a document analysis of relevant policy documents, websites, project reports, media releases, and research relating to the topic. in the paper, three examples of innovative educational-research projects in the use of digital technologies in schools are provided, but even so, masters argues that properly resourced and funded projects are unusual in australia, making it unlikely that new initiatives in this area will be implemented successfully. masters describes this as a missed opportunity, as research outcomes can contribute to justify why “new literacies” are essential in a contemporary school curriculum in australia. paper number three in this special issue, “digitally competent school organizations – developing supportive organizational infrastructures” was written by fanny pettersson from sweden. as signified in the title, this paper can be placed within the continuously growing field of research investigating the meaning and role of digital competence in k-12 schools. pettersson describes that such research has mainly focused so far on the level of single actors (that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 105 is, students, teachers, and school leaders) whereas research with a focus on school-level competencies when promoting digitalization and educational change is scarcer. with this backdrop, the aim of the paper is to explore how schools in sweden structure their organizations, institutional infrastructures, and activities as conditions for digitalization. data were collected through interviews with school leaders and educational technologists from five upper secondary schools with extensive experience in digitalization and remote teaching. the analytical framework used in the paper consists of three categories – setting the direction, developing people, and developing the organization – and two types of digitally competent school organizations, goal and structure-oriented schools and culture-oriented schools, are identified. pettersson concludes that the insights from the paper can serve as a point of departure for understanding the different ways in which schools can both organize themselves to become comprehensive, stable, and digitally competent organizations and understand important challenges related to this process. the fourth paper comes from norway. it was written by fazilat siddiq, and as the title “a comparison between digital competence in two nordic countries’ national curricula and an international framework: inspecting their readiness for 21st century education” suggests, it provides a comparison of how digital competence is present in different frameworks in norway and sweden. as its point of departure, the paper put forth that ict today not only plays a significant role in economic, social, and educational reforms but also creates changes in teaching and learning environments. moreover, digital competence has achieved increased attention and now is regarded as a crucial competence in 21st-century education. the study conducted by siddiq investigates the objectives and competence aims in the digital competence curricula of compulsory education in norway and sweden and in the international framework of developing and understanding digital competence in europe (digcomp). the aim was to analyse the visions and main features of the norwegian and swedish national curricula and inspect the extent to which they align with the digcomp framework. the paper shows that the underlying visions and objectives of the frameworks largely converge. however, large discrepancies between the national curricula and digcomp regarding the structure, the content covered (e.g., competence aims), and the instructional aspects can be identified. in light of the findings, the paper ends with a discussion about the implications the paper might have for researchers, policy makers, and curriculum developers. returning to the swedish context, paper five discusses the issues of power and control in the classrooms in which digital devices have been introduced. it is the first of two papers written in collaboration by peter bergström and eva mårellolsson and included in the special issue. in this paper, “power and control in the one-to-one computing classroom: students’ perspectives on teachers’ didactical design”, bergström and mårell-olsson report on a research study with the aim of investigating students’ perspectives on teachers’ different didactical designs from lessons in the one-to-one computing classroom. bergström and mårell-olsson focus on three clusters of didactical designs. each cluster represents different interactions between teachers and students in the one-to-one computing classroom. data were collected through interviews with student focus groups that included stimulated recall in which different photographs of teaching and learning situations were shown to the students. using bernstein’s theoretical concepts of power and control, the analysis shows how teachers regulate students and how students can make decisions in their learning processes. the one-to-one computing classroom can be one component of the facilitation of students’ learning processes concerning when and how to study. eva mårell-olsson and peter bergström’s second paper “digital transformation in swedish schools – principals’ strategic leadership and organization of tabletbased one-to-one computing initiatives” is paper number six in the special issue. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 106 this paper takes on a school leader’s perspective as digital devices are introduced in k-12 schools. in a swedish context, the authors report on a research study with the aim of producing additional knowledge about principals’ strategic leadership and organization of schools within established tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives. in more precise terms, the aim was to produce additional knowledge of how principals lead and guide one-toone computing initiatives in k–12 education. the paper used a qualitative approach and the empirical data were collected through semi-structured interviews with seven principals in five municipalities in sweden. the principals all worked at schools that had been using tablets for more than six months within a one-to-one computing initiative. the theoretical framework that informed the analysis is based on leontiev’s activity theory and the concepts of motives, goals, actions, and operationalizations. the findings show, for example, that the marketization of schools (e.g., the school-choice reform in sweden) in combination with the annual presentation of national rankings has had an impact on the financial situations of schools because they receive a voucher for every attending pupil. furthermore, the principals’ strategic leadership concerning their intentions and applied strategies regarding how to lead and organize the digitalized school can be understood as attempts to meet the demands of the marketization and digitalization of swedish schools. another paper from finland, paper number seven, was written by annika wiklund-engblom and was based on a study in which students were part of distance education. the paper, titled “digital relational competence: sensitivity and responsivity to needs of distance and co-located students”, is framed in an attempt to include distance learning in upper secondary schools in the swedishspeaking parts of finland; this paper makes the argument that being relationally competent is an essential skill for teachers. according to wiklund-englund, two key factors for relational competence are teachers’ sensitivity and responsivity to learners’ needs. data in this paper consist of nine semi-structured interviews intended to capture the experiences of teachers in finnish upper secondary schools as they practise distance teaching and learning. the focus is on how the teachers describe their digital didactical designs for distance courses and how they perceive whether the designs support students’ learning. wiklundengblom stresses the importance of teachers’ digital relational competencies with regard to their sensitivity and responsivity. that digital relational competence involves an empathic approach to learners’ needs in the context of digital didactical design – or, put differently, the teachers’ abilities to anticipate needs and be sensitive and responsive to learners’ needs in the distancelearning situation paper number eight, “digitally competent schools: teacher expectations when introducing digital competence in finnish basic education”, was written by linda manilla from finland. from a teacher’s perspective, this paper describes the situation and context in which programming is introduced in a school. the background for the paper can be found in the increased exposure to digital technology and the consequent need to understand how the digital world works. furthermore, it can be read in the light of the fact that countries all over the world are renewing their school curricula in order to include digital competence and computer science. the aim of the paper is to research and provide insight into what finnish swedish-speaking teachers see as crucial aspects when implementing a new curricula that introduces digital competence as a transversal element. the data consist of a course assignment which asked teachers to describe their understanding of the concepts of a digitally competent school and of digitally competent personnel. data were collected from teachers taking part in an online professional development course focusing on digital competence and programming, using the theoretical frameworks of schools as learning organizations and technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack). in total, 86 teachers’ descriptions were analysed in order to identify and present a list of 11 prerequisites that can be helpful to school leaders in the process of integrating digital competence in their schools. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 107 during his keynote speech at the symposium, jo tondeur presented and discussed a continental perspective on questions concerned with the digitalization of k-12 schools and the related educational practices. in “enhancing future teachers’ competencies for technology integration in education: turning theory into practice”, paper number nine in the special issue, tondeur focuses on one such practice – teacher education. in this conceptual paper, the aim is to provide an overview of what is described as effective strategies that support pre-service teachers in adequately integrating ict in teaching and learning activities. anchored in the idea of enhancing future teachers’ tpack, the focus is on strategies included in the synthesis of qualitative evidence (sqd) model, which involves the following: 1) using teacher educators as role models, 2) reflecting on the role of technology in education, 3) learning how to use technology by design, 4) collaborating with peers, 5) scaffolding authentic technology experiences, and 6) providing continuous feedback. the paper describes how one can use the sqd model in practice by adopting the approach of teacher design teams. tondeur describes a teacher design team as a group of two or more (pre-service) teachers who design (ictrich) curriculum materials. based on the sqd model (i.e., theory) and the implementation of the key themes emerging from this model via teacher design teams (i.e., practice), this conceptual paper provides recommendations for improving the potential of pre-service training to enhance future teachers’ use of ict in their educational practices. the last paper in the special issue is named “adequate digital competence – a close reading of the new national strategy for digitalization of the schools in sweden”. this paper written by göran fransson, j ola lindberg, and anders d. olofsson is based on a close reading of the new strategy for the digitalization of swedish schools. after providing a rich description of swedish policies and decisions in the area of ict between the years of 1983 and 2017, the paper specifically focuses the notion of “adequate digital competence” as it is used in the 2017 “swedish strategy for digitalization of the school system”. based on the reading of the strategy, the authors formulate three dimensions for discussion: time, context, and interpretation. in the paper, the authors argue that these dimensions open a more general discussion about the content of policies regarding digital competence. moreover, the notion of striving for an “adequate digital competence” for children, students, teachers, school leaders, and other school staff is loaded with a variety of possible meanings. the authors conclude that the strategy provides guidance in some aspects but leaves a lot to the local enactment of the strategy. references burton, j. k., & merrill, p. f. (1991). needs assessment: goals, needs, and priorities. in l. j. briggs, k. l. gustafson, & m. h. tillman (eds.), instructional design: principles and applications (2nd ed., pp. 17-43). englewood cliffs, nj: educational technology publications. castells, m. (2000). the rise of the network society. the information age: economy, society and culture (second edition). cambridge, ma: blackwell publishers. dede, c. (2010). comparing frameworks for the 21st century skills. in j. a. bellanca & r. s. brandt (eds.), 21st century skills: rethinking how students learn (pp. 51–76). bloomington: solution tree press. ferrari, a. (2012). digital competence in practice: an analysis of frameworks. seville: joint research centre. (jrc). european commission. kelly garrett, r. (2006). protest in an information society: a review of literature on social movements and new icts. information, communication & society, 9(2), 202-224. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 108 mossberger, k, tolbert, c.j., & mcneal, r.s (2008). digital citizenship. the internet, society, and participation. cambridge, ma: mit press. niemi, h., multisilta, j., lipponen, l., & vivitsou, m. (eds.) (2014). finnish innovations and technologies in schools. a guide towards new ecosystems of learning. rotterdam: sensepublishers. olofsson, a.d., lindberg, j.o., hauge, t-r., & fransson, g. (2015). uptake and use of digital technologies in primary and secondary schools – a thematic review of research. nordic journal of digital literacy, [special issue 2006– 2016/jubileumsnummer 2006-2016], 103-121. reedy, k., & goodfellow, r. (2012). digital and information literacy framework. milton keynes: the open university. selwyn, n. (2011). schools and schooling in the digital age. a critical analysis. london: routledge. selwyn, n., & facer, k. (2014). the sociology of education and digital technology: past, present and future. oxford review of education, 40(4), 482-496. siddiq, f., gochyyev, p., & wilson, m. (2017). learning in digital networks ict literacy: a novel assessment of students’ 21st century skills. computers & education, 109, 11-37. van laar, e., van deursen, a.j.a.m., van dijk, j.g.a.m., & de haan, j. (2017). the relation between 21st-century skills and digital skills: a systematic literature review. computers in human behavior, 72, 577588. willermark, s. (2018). digital didaktisk design. att utveckla undervisning i och för en digitaliserad skola. [digital didactical design. to develop teaching in and for the digitalised school]. (doctoral thesis, university west, trollhättan). retrieved from http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1174749/fulltext01.pdf http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1174749/fulltext01.pdf editorial recent trends in the digitalization of the nordic k-12 schools j ola lindberg anders d. olofsson digitalization of k-12 schools the 10 papers in this special issue references title seminar.net 2016. (author name) this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 unported (cc by 4.0) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 supporting learning through epistemic scaffolds embedded in a highlighter tool jan erik dahl department of education university of oslo email: j.e.dahl@iped.uio.no abstract this article explores the use of epistemic scaffolds embedded in a digital highlighter tool that was used to support students’ readings and discussions of research articles. the use of annotation technologies in education is increasing, and annotations can play a wide variety of epistemic roles; e.g., they can facilitate a deeper level of engagement, support critical thinking, develop cognitive and metacognitive skills and introduce practices that can support knowledge building and independent learning. however, research has shown that the actual tool use often deviates from the underlying knowledge model in the tools. hence, the situated and mediated nature of these tools is still poorly understood. research also tends to study the tools as a passed on resource rather than being co-constructed between students and teachers. the researcher argues that approaching these resources as coconstructed can be more productive and can create new spaces for teacher– student dialogues, students’ agency and self-scaffolding. keywords: social annotation technology, mediation, scaffolding, coconstruction/co-learning, design-based research. introduction this paper is based on a study of a master’s course in technology-enhanced learning. the central artefact explored in this study was an annotation highlighter tool. as novak, razzouk, and johnson (2012) pointed out, social annotation technology is an emerging educational technology, but it has not yet been extensively used and examined in education. they called for more studies on the effect of annotation tools, which is a legitimate request. however, insufficient understanding of the situated and mediated nature of these tools complicates this endeavour. particularly if we see these tools not as isolated artefacts (a tool in itself), but rather as an integrated part of continuously evolving practices that are co-constructed and result from the interaction between the tool, the task, the learner, the teacher and institutional factors that influence this practice. the article wishes to investigate the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 15 situated interaction and how it affects the annotation practices, and the analysis will be based on a sociocultural stance (vygotsky, 1978; wertsch, 1991). research question the paper first describes how the tool adapted to the evolving practices and some issues that prompted these changes. second, it will explore students’ annotation practices. finally, the paper investigates the annotation practices through the analytical lenses of scaffolding. this will further the discussion of what epistemic role annotations can play and some of the obstacles, challenges and opportunities to consider when moving ahead—which ultimately also impact the question regarding the ‘effect’ of annotation technologies. the research questions are as follows: 1. how did the annotation script evolve in response to the annotation practices? 2. how did the tool mediate the annotation practices broadly speaking, and with regard to a) cognitive scaffolding and b) metacognitive scaffolding in particular? a conjecture map has been created to elucidate the design ideas behind the experiment, and these conjectures will provide further guidance to the analysis of the research questions. tool and theoretical stance the research–teaching nexus and co-learning the studied master’s course had a strong focus on research as part of the teaching and learning processes, and the researcher thus tried to adapt the design interventions to this focus. such a focus constitutes a complex learning environment that potentially alters both the relation between students and teacher/researcher (students become co-researchers and researchers become co-learners), and changes the focus of the learning from content knowledge to engagement in research problems and the knowledge-building processes. to help explore these issues, the researcher drew in dahl (2016) on healey’s (2005) distinction between four different ways of perceiving the research– teaching nexus (cf. figure 1). figure 1. curriculum design and the research–teaching nexus (healey, 2005, p. 70). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 16 healey’s conceptualisation of the research–teaching nexus provides a relevant background for the design conjectures and how the tool is part of researcher/teacher–student co-learning and co-construction. annotation technologies in dahl (2016) the researcher reviewed related technologies and emphasised 1) standard annotation tools related to reading of documents (ovsiannikov, arbib, & mcneill, 1999; wolfe & neuwirth, 2001) and 2) knowledge-building environments that rely on annotation technologies more in the context of scaffolding students’ writing processes as part of collaborative inquiries modelled after researchers’ knowledge-building processes (muukkonen, hakkarainen, & lakkala, 1999; scardamalia & bereiter, 2006): 1) the conclusion drawn from the reviewed annotation studies in dahl (2016) was that annotation could serve a wide variety of purposes (novak et al., 2012; wolfe & neuwirth, 2001), also depending on the ingenuity of the users, but that more research was needed to contextualise the use conditions (benyehudah & eshet-alkalai, 2014; razon, turner, johnson, arsal, & tenenbaum, 2012; schugar, schugar, & penny, 2011). johnson, archibald, and tenenbaum (2010) have emphasised the need to shed more light on the intermediate processes (e.g. students’ annotation practices) and how this intermediate level affects outcome measures (e.g. reading comprehension, critical thinking or metacognition). they proposed design-based research (dbr) for further exploration of their findings. dbr has generally not been applied in traditional annotation studies. one exception is samuel, kim, and johnson (2011). design-based research can help detect the contingent relationship between annotation and learning, especially if combined with methods for microanalysis of students’ annotation practices. this study applies dbr, and hence takes advantage of the potential identified by johnson and colleagues (johnson et al., 2010; samuel et al., 2011). additionally, it incorporates microanalysis to study the situated and mediated nature of the students’ annotation practices. this sets the study apart from samuel et al. (2011) who based their dbr on a survey study. the review in dahl (2016) also found that the sociocultural history of the annotation resource was missing in the annotation studies. for instance, were the tool and the annotation practices passed on from teacher to students, or were they in some way a co-constructed resource, and if so, how were they coconstructed? the studies showed that annotations have a double role that can be quite problematic. they are strongly connected to the students’ personal habits and preferences (marshall, 1997, 1998). however, they are also subject to the teachers’ interventions due to the value annotation practices are perceived to have for learning processes (sung, hwang, liu, & chiu, 2014; yang, yu, & sun, 2013). this tension is likely to deeply affect the outcome of the reviewed annotation studies. the study will shed further light on this tension and the co-constructed nature of annotation resources, which is rarely discussed in the traditional annotation studies. 2) the conclusion in dahl (2016) regarding the use of annotations as category scaffolds in knowledge-building environments was that these studies have paid more attention to the sociocultural dimensions of these tools. this is particularly true for the critical follow-up studies which, for instance, have shown that the actual tool use often deviates from the underlying knowledge models in the tools and have explored these practices (arnseth & säljö, 2007; ludvigsen, 2012; ludvigsen & mørch, 2003). however, the students have been more the object of the focus rather than participating in this inquiry—the previous studies in this field have studied students’ tool use rather than students’ research on the tool they use. hence, dahl (2016) concluded that these studies also tend to perceive the tool more as a passed on resource, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 17 rather than seeing them from the perspective of being a co-constructed product of the interaction between the students and the teacher/researcher. the researcher argues that the distinction between a passed on and a coconstructed resource becomes particularly important when we want to scaffold self-regulated learning and therefore need to engage the students in their own scaffolding and in reflections on how the scaffolding they experience works (ben-yehudah & eshet-alkalai, 2014; chen & huang, 2014). sociocultural approach the sociocultural perspective grew out of a discontent with behavioural and cognitive research, particularly how these approaches failed to account for the situated and mediated character of learning (rasmussen & ludvigsen, 2010). hence, the unit of analysis in this perspective addresses learning as situated in particular social, historical, cultural and institutional settings, and as being mediated by language and material artefacts deriving from these settings (vygotsky, 1978; wertsch, 1991). rasmussen and ludvigsen (2010, p. 403) emphasise that ‘to understand learning, we need to capture how humans interact and make use of different kinds of cultural tools in different kinds of settings, or, to put it differently, how the social organisation of learning is played out’. the sociocultural perspective seeks to theorise the social interdependency of learning through relational concepts that can explore this interdependency. one of these key concepts is scaffolding (rasmussen & ludvigsen, 2010). however, the concept originated from the cognitive sciences, and the sociocultural expansion of the scaffolding metaphor has challenged the theoretical notion of scaffolding (stone, 1998). scaffolding the word scaffolding was coined by wood, bruner and ross (1976) and originally referred to a tutor-assisted ‘“scaffolding” process that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts’ (p. 90). the concept was inspired by vygotsky’s development theory, and in particular, his concept of the zone of proximal development (zpd) (holton & clarke, 2006). current discussion of the scaffolding metaphor often link scaffolding to zpd (stone, 1998). zpd refers to the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). both concepts focused on the interaction between a novice/learner and an expert providing assistance so that the learner can perform at a higher level, and on the relationship between instruction and psychological development. according to sharma and hannafin, scaffolding provides further operationalisation of this relationship: ‘the zpd thus supplies a conceptual framework for selecting individual learning tasks, while scaffolding provides a strategic framework for selecting and implementing strategies to support specific learning’ (2007, p. 28). the research on scaffolding has mostly focused on cognitive and metacognitive scaffolding (lajoie, 2005). a basic distinction between the two is that ‘while cognition can be considered as the way learners’ minds act on the “real world”, metacognition is the way that their minds act on their cognition’ (holton & clarke, 2006). there are two important aspects to keep in mind regarding metacognition. the first is that metacognition is key to self-scaffolding, i.e. to empower the learner to take control over their own learning processes, also referred to as ‘self-regulated learning’ (srl) (azevedo, cromley, winters, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 18 moos, & greene, 2005). the second is that metacognition plays a prevalent role when cognition becomes problematic (holton & clarke, 2006). hence in addition to structuring, scaffolding also plays an important role in problematizing in order to trigger metacognitive reflection (reiser, 2004). although cognitive and metacognitive scaffolding continue to be the primary focus of research, there has also been a trend towards giving the conative, affective and motivational scaffolds more attention (lajoie, 2005). while sharing the focus on expert support, scaffolding is distinguishable from other forms of instructional assistance due to the principle of fading, i.e. the gradual reduction and eventual elimination of scaffolds (sharma & hannafin, 2007). according to van de pol, volman and beishuizen (2010), no consensus regarding the definition of scaffolding exists, but some common characteristics in the various definitions can be found: 1) contingency: the principle that the support needs to adapt to the learner’s current level of performance; this also implies diagnostic strategies to identify students’ level of learning. 2) fading: the gradual withdrawal of the scaffolding. 3) transfer of responsibility: when the scaffolds are faded the students gradually take control of their own learning; this responsibility refers to all kinds of scaffolding, e.g. cognitive, metacognitive, affective or conative support. key questions in the research on scaffolding include what to scaffold, when to scaffold, how to scaffold, when to fade scaffolding, who or what should do the scaffolding, how to determine the effectiveness of scaffolds and identifying the mechanisms in scaffolding (lajoie, 2005). some of the important criticisms of the scaffolding metaphor include that it underestimated the complexity of the learner’s knowledge construction process, including how active the learner is in the learning process; the complexity of the participation structures and learning trajectories and the situated character of this learning (stone, 1998, p. 354). seeing the scaffolding as embedded in the broader social interaction, and in the activities and artefacts, concurs with the tenets of zpd and sociocultural theory, but has created a conundrum for the theoretical notion of scaffolding (palincsar, 1998; puntambekar & hubscher, 2005; stone, 1998). from its initial narrower focus on one-on-one interaction between a novice and an expert, the notion of scaffolding has expanded to include a higher variety of participation structures and interactional patterns, as well as scaffolding through other means (e.g. artefacts, learning resources, curriculum design) within the broader learning environment (puntambekar & hubscher, 2005; sherin, reiser, & edelson, 2004). case description the subjects in this study were ten female and six male students in their early to mid-20s participating in the master’s course in technology-enhanced learning. fourteen of the students came from the department of informatics and two came from the department of education. the experiment took as its starting point a natural occurring activity in many types of tertiary education—students applying some sort of reading tip/guidance from teachers regarding how to approach and analyse research literature, e.g. locating research questions, contributions, theoretical perspective, methodological concerns etc. (cf. appendix 1). the researcher designed an annotation/categorisation experiment around this activity, and integrated the reading guidelines as scaffolds in an annotation/highlighting script in a wiki. one of the assigned and graded tasks in the course was that students in groups of two should do a close reading of a course article and present this article for the rest of the class. as an additional task—which was designed to observe the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 19 collaborative use of the designed scaffolding tool—the same student groups was asked to jointly categorise/annotate the article they were going to present by using a highlighting script introduced by the researcher. the students were also able to suggest changes to this highlighting script. the experiment entailed that students in groups of two used a set of categories to analyse and categorise the content in a course article. the highlighting technology resembles the highlighting pens or the colour markers in microsoft word, but with the extra feature that each colour was linked to a specific category (cf. figure 2). each of the categories was also connected to a question or a reflection prompt (cf. appendixes 1, 2 and 3). figure 2. the highlighter/annotation script is to the left. a part of a curriculum article that students have categorised with the help of the highlighters is to the right. the design experiment was associated with several contexts: 1) the annotation experiment; 2) the students’ class presentation (the script was tailored for the deeper reading this presentation task required); 3) a semester project where students critically investigated the tool and argued for improvements and 4) the technology development this research aimed for. potential impacts of the different contextual settings on students’ inquiries were explored in dahl (2016). this paper conducts a more detailed inquiry into the first context, i.e. the annotation experiment. methodology analytical procedure the students’ interaction with the categories was observed and video filmed with a stationary camera and a screencast. the whole interaction was transcribed and the qualitative data analyses software nvivo was used for a more comprehensive analysis. interaction analysis will be employed to analyse the students’ inquiries (jordan & henderson, 1995). this is a methodological framework for studying sociocultural embedded moment-to-moment interaction, i.e. microanalysis of meaning production. the unit of analysis is the embedded interaction between humans, including interaction with the socio-material world, e.g. artefacts mediating the interaction. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 20 design experiment the study is based on the principles of design-based research (dbr). dbr uses theory-driven designs to generate complex interventions that are further improved through empirical studies, which also provide a more basic understanding and refinement of the theory (design-based research collective, 2003). an important area for dbr is to explore possibilities for novel learning and teaching environments (design-based research collective, 2003), and novel treatments of instructional resources, e.g. new topics, new technologies or novel forms of interaction (confrey, 2006). dbr’s novel and experimental approach can pose a problem for the assessment of these experiments, particularly when the issue of what to expect is ignored. kelly has criticised dbr for lacking an argumentative grammar, meaning ‘“the logic that guides the use of a method and that support reasoning about the data”’ (kelly quoted in; sandoval, 2014, p. 19). to address this criticism, sandoval proposes making a conjecture map to explicate the logic of the design, and exemplifies this in a generalised model (cf. figure 3). the model is used to articulate the ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ that guided this experiment. figure 3. generalised conjecture map for educational design research (sandoval, 2014, p. 21). according to sandoval (2014), the high-level conjecture articulates the theoretical principle of how to support some desired form of learning, but it is on a very general level and needs to be operationalised in order to inform design and interpretation of findings. embodiment refers to how the high-level conjecture has been reified in the learning design. tools and materials refer to the designed tangible learning resources. task structure characterises the task the learners are asked to do. participant structure refers to participants’ role and responsibility, and how they are expected to participate. discursive practices refer to the intended ways of talking. design conjectures refer to how the embodiment of the design is presumed to affect mediating processes, e.g. participants’ interaction (observable interactions), or artefacts participants construct through the activity (participant artefacts). theoretical conjectures postulate what desirable learning outcomes the mediating processes will help produce. the study’s high-level conjecture was that using annotation techniques to support students’ reading and discussion of research literature could enhance students’ learning in the following two respects. first theoretical conjecture: a greater focus on research processes and problems (mediating process) will seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 21 help develop knowledge-building strategies (e.g. to analyse, criticise and create knowledge) relevant for the twenty-first century (healey, 2005; scardamalia & bereiter, 2006). second theoretical conjecture: personal experience with the epistemic scaffolds embedded in the annotation tool can help students explore related themes in the course, such as scaffolding, zpd and appropriation. this can enhance students’ understanding of the cognitive, metacognitive and affective functions of scaffolds, and pave the way for self-scaffolding/selfregulated learning. tools and materials: the annotation tool and the research article were the key resources. the tool had constraints that could either impede the scaffolding effect or increase it by making the conditions for the success and failure of scaffolds more visible. one example is some students’ dissatisfaction with having to use a predefined script, which made them reflect on the personal nature of annotation strategies and the potential challenge this type of scaffolding constitutes (dahl, 2016). another constraint observable in this set of data is that each segment of text could only be attached to one category. this may create a false conflict between categories when they are, in fact, complementary and could both be used. how the students reason in the face of this dilemma shows whether these constraints trigger or impede their learning. task structure: the task was quite open. the students were expected to use appropriate categories to analyse the article. the other parts of the task was left more to students’ discretion, e.g. what to tag and how to tag. however, they were encouraged to approach the highlighting as a way of engaging with interesting aspects of the article rather than trying to categorise as much as possible. participant structure: the researcher introduced the experiment and asked the students to familiarise themselves with the different categories and propose any changes to the script. the students were asked to collaborate in the tagging, but apart from that, they decided themselves how they wanted to organise the task. the expectation was that the researcher mainly would take the role of an observer. however, successful use of annotations regularly depends on scaffolding from the teacher, so the researcher also had to intervene when necessary to facilitate more productive use of annotations. discursive practices: the goal was that students’ talk would oscillate between the annotation categories and instances/exemplars in a way that would lead to elaborations/exploration of both the categories and the exemplars. first design conjecture is concerned with cognitive scaffolding: the hope was that the embodied design could lead students to problematize the text in general and to explore the research process and problems covered by the article in particular (observable interaction), and that the discourse indicated improved conceptual understanding according to this focus (participant artefacts). second design conjecture is concerned with metacognitive scaffolding: the hope was that the epistemic annotation categories themselves would come into focus, not only as categories that they need to know in order to use them, but also as epistemic scaffolds (observable interaction). moreover, that indication of improved conceptual understanding of scaffolding could be traced in the students’ discourse (participant artefacts). analysis and results the evolvement of the tool (rq 1) three scripts were explored during the design experiment (cf. appendix 4). before doing an empirical analysis of two students that used the third script, a few potential problems with the two prior scripts will be addressed in order to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 22 provide some context for the script (cf. first research question). two issues in particular with the first script led to the creation of the second script. the first issue was that several of the categories simply became too general to trigger discussions and elaboration of category decisions. during an interview after the experiment, one student note that, ‘i felt at least in cases where one sits and marks absolutely everything, then there is no point anymore, it is more a case of being able to categorise this information a little. the annotation experiment came in conflict with the students’ own annotation practice, and in particular the use of annotation for the purpose of indexing important issues for easy retrieval. regular highlighting is often associated with making some key parts of the text stand out. when asking the students to categorise with a script that potentially can cover a major part of the text, one drawback is that it changes the ratio between highlighted and non-highlighted text, with the consequence that the highlighted text stands less out. a second concern with the first script was that it lacked a critical focus on the why and how aspects of the research, and thus resulted in an emphasis on research content rather than also trying to engage the students in the research process and the problems that the researchers tried to solve. a goal with the second and third script was to develop a greater focus on the research process and problems as emphasised in the right side of figure 1. some of the means used to try to achieve this goal included placing greater emphasis on research contributions, on how the study positioned itself in relation to previous research and on the interpretational process. the annotation practice evolving from script 2 indicated several problems, which led to the changes in script 3 (cf. appendixes 2 and 3). the space only permits a few examples. these examples indicate the considerations behind the third script. • general focus was removed. there was too much discussion about whether something was a general focus or the research focus. on the positive side, this discussion drew attention to the research contribution of the study. • research focus and research contribution were separated into two categories. since the students seemed to be concerned with finding instances of all the highlighter tags, this could give the research contribution more attention. when two categories shared a highlighter tag, the students tended to focus on the easiest category to decide on, which in this case was research focus. • learning type focus was added because there was little reflection regarding what sort of learning the technology-enhanced learning environment targeted. • theoretical perspective was used a lot in the tagging process, but it was not elaborated. for example, what does the theory explain? how does the theory explain the phenomenon? which inferences can be drawn from the theory? is it validated to the extent that we will call it a theory or is it more a framework for the systematisation of empirical findings? theoretical perspective was replaced by central concepts to force students to elaborate on whether the concept was part of a theoretical framework as well as what the concept denotes. • compare and contrast was separated into two categories to attract more attention to the study’s positioning with regard to previous research, either drawing an analogy (compare) or criticising and adding something missing in previous research (contrast). the hope was that this could lead to more exploration of research problems. • the category descriptions were on a separate wiki page. to ease the access to these prompts, they were integrated as popups appearing when the marker was placed above a category. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 23 empirical analysis of students’ use of categories the selected data focuses on students’ discussions of whether to tag with empirical findings or interpretation of findings (in the students’ discourse this was often shortened to findings and interpretation). the category descriptions/prompts (cf. appendix 3) are central resources in the students’ discussions, particularly with respect to the following two categories: • empirical findings: what are the empirical findings of the study? these are observation data—not to be confused with the interpretations drawn from the data, which can be erroneous. the empirical findings can also stem from reviews/other studies. • interpretation of findings: do the interpretations emerge naturally from the data, or can they be questioned? a generic script was used, and the researcher therefore wanted the empirical findings category to be broad. besides primary data, the desire was to include studies based on secondary data, so the script could also fit the more reviewbased articles in the course. in the following case, the students are working with a review-based article. the case will be illustrated through five excerpts. excerpt 1 shows the students’ interaction with the category descriptions to establish an understanding of the categories and their relevance prior to annotating. excerpt 2 illustrates how verbal cues pervaded the students’ category decisions. excerpt 3 shows how the interpretation work escapes students’ attention. excerpt 4 gives an example of scaffolding by the teacher. excerpt 5 analyses students’ engagement with the categories after the scaffolding intervention. prior to this excerpt, the researcher suggests that the students go through the categories and category descriptions in the highlighter script to find out what categories they missed: excerpt 1: transcript notations: 33 student b: ((puts the mouse above ‘empirical findings’ so the popup prompt appears and reads:)) ‘empirical findings’ (.) he has a lot of those. 34 student a: umm. 35 student b: ((switches to the description of ‘interpretation of findings’ and reads:)) interpretation= 36 student a: =wait a little ((returns to description of ‘empirical findings’ and reads quietly:)) ‘[…not to be confused with the] interpretations drawn from the data, which can be [erroneous]’ (.) okay (.) well, yeah, alright. 37 student b: ((reads from the latter part of the description:)) ‘can also stem from other studies’ (.) well that’s everything. 38 student a: um. 39 student b: ((switches to ‘interpretation of findings’ and reads selected words:)) ‘[do the interpretations] emerge naturally [from the] data, [or] can [they] be questioned?’ 40 student a: um. 41 student b: ummm. 42 student a: i’m thinking about the table with the development of research. 43 student b: yes (.) that’s quite= 44 student a: =very natural from the data. 45 student b: it is a very quantitative study, so there is (.) perhaps (.) not much to question. 46 student a: umm. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 24 a prevalent focus was whether the students could find instances of the categories (cf. line 33). they further emphasise different aspects of the category empirical findings, which may provide different directions for their further explorations. student a (line 36) highlights the contrast between empirical findings and interpretation of findings, while student b (line 37) addresses the category property that broadens it to include the secondary data. the comment that follows, ‘well that’s everything’, indicates that he perceives the category to be so general that it leaves nothing out. the students’ discussion of interpretation of findings (line 39–46) relates the category to some tables they later discuss in excerpts 3 and 5. here, they regard the tables as interpretations, but interpretations that emerge naturally from the data, and that it is a quantitative study, so it might be little to question about the study. the next excerpt illustrates the central role of verbal cues. excerpt 2: excerpt 2, shows how particular words (‘might be’) become associated with a category (interpretation of findings). the words become a verbal cue for category identification. the verbal cues are further used as heuristics for making swift category decisions. a second pattern that constituted a lot of the students’ talk concerns the question of how much of the text to tag. on one side, students were concerned with making sure that they managed to include all relevant instances. on the other side, the annotation was associated with highlighting a smaller part of the text so that this part could stand out. in the next excerpt, the students address the table discussed in excerpt 1. their category decisions involve few elaborations and are more associative. the transcript notations are based on the jefferson system, but follow a simplified and more accessible version: [ ] text in square brackets represents clarifying information regarding the discourse. (( )) a description inserted between double brackets denotes contextual information. = indicates that there is no discernible pause between two speakers' turns. ? rising intonation. : indicates prolongation of a sound. underlined: emphasis in speech. (.) short pause in the speech. […] utterances removed from the original dialog. single dash in the middle of a word denotes that the speaker interrupts herself. - double dash at the end of an utterance indicates that the speaker’s utterance is incomplete. 341 student b: and then it is some interpretation. 342 student a: yeah. 343 student b: ((reads:)) ‘might be’= 344 student a: ((reads the next words in the sentence:)) =‘due to the…trajectory’, well, yes. 345 student b: ((tags part of the sentence)) i don’t know if we should take more. 346 student a: it’s perhaps natural to include the whole sentence (.) i don’t know. 347 student b: ((tags the whole sentence)) let’s do it. 348 student a: yes. 349 student b: it’s perhaps the next as well; ((reads:)) ‘might be’, then it’s ‘interpretation’ ((tags)). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 25 excerpt 3: contrary to their discussion of the tables in excerpt 1, student b now asks if they should tag the table as findings (line 350). student a questions whether these findings are ‘empirical’ (line 355), but does not elaborate, and finally agrees that it is. the article uses the concept ‘findings’ sixteen times, but in a broader meaning that refers to both the empirical findings and their interpretations. this conflict between the script and how the article used the concept did not seem to be noticed, but may still have had an impact on their understanding. in line 362, student b draws on the category description, and implies that although the findings do not meet the first criterion (primary data), it meets the second criterion (secondary data). student a agrees (line 365) and argues that it must be empirical findings because there are no interpretations, and hence uses a logic that reaches a category decision by excluding the alternative categories. 350 student b: ((scrolls to a table displaying the yearly percentage of empirical studies)) shall we tag all of this as findings? ((both laugh)). 351 student a: but what exactly is (.) yes, no. 352 student b: hm? 353 student a: ((reads table heading:)) ‘percentage of empirical studies’. 354 student b: this must be the findings. 355 student a: but is it the empirical findings? 356 student b: isn’t it? 357 student a: i don't know (.) yeah? 358 student b: ((accesses the ‘empirical finding’ prompt so they can read it)). 359 student a: yes. 360 student b: it has to be. 361 student a: yes (.) okay. 362 student b: although he didn’t observe anything, but he retrieves the data from (.) 363 student a: umm. 364 student b: um, um, um. 365 student a: yes there’s nothing (.) he is not an interpreter, he is just= 366 student b: ((interrupts and reads selected words:))=‘[this finding was, by and large,] consistent with the claim that the exploration [of sl in education] started [from] 2005 [(foster, 2007; luo and kemp, 2008).]’ (.) this is a finding (.) or? 367 student a: yes, he studies the data here (.) all, all is= 368 student b: =yes all is= 369 student a: =empirical findings= 370 student b: =indeed= 371 student a: =and then he interprets it as ((reads selected words:)) ‘[consistent with the] claim [that the exploration of sl in education] started [from 2005]’. however, this is also a comparison. 372 student b: yes, it is that as well. 373 student a: he mentions another one who said that it started in 2005= 374 student b: =umm= 375 student a: =two others (.) three. 376 student b: it is both interpretation and compare. 377 student a: yes. 378 student b: but it isn’t possible to tag two things ((the tool functionality prevented the students from using overlapping tags, i.e. using several categories on the same text)). 379 student a: no. 380 student b: but if we say that this ((points)) is a little more interpretation, and the first one is a little more compare, perhaps. 381 student a: umm. 382 student b: ((tags second sentence as ‘interpretation’)) do you agree? 383 student a: umm. 384 student b: ((tags first sentence as ‘compare’)). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 26 in the interaction following line 366, the meaning of the table is explored through two sentences next to the table, and here the phrase ‘consistent with…’ becomes a verbal cue. student b associates ‘consistent with [other studies]’ as a cue for empirical findings, which follows his understanding in excerpt 1, line 37 that when secondary data is included in empirical findings, the category covers ‘everything’. student a concurs, but also refers to the sentences as interpretations that can fall under the category compare (line 371). student b’s response (line 376) is that the text is both interpretation and compare. since the tool did not support affiliation to more than one category, student b suggests dividing the text between the categories (line 378–384). shortly after this excerpt, the researcher/teacher intervenes to interrogate about the students’ understanding of the two categories and to provide some scaffolding if needed. excerpt 4: the researcher concluded from the students’ answer that they understand the distinction between the categories. however, he doubted that their practical skills of using the categories were on the same level, and he asks a couple of follow-up questions to scaffold their further tagging. the final excerpt looks at how this intervention may have influenced the tagging: 403 researcher: so how did you understand the difference between empirical understandings and interpretation of findings? 404 student b: findings are just very straightforward; here is the data i collected, without any further description. while interpretation is= 405 student a: =is what they extract from the data (.) what they understand from the data. […] 411 researcher: is it possible to problematize whether some of the empirical findings you have tagged are so straightforward, taken directly from the data, or if there is a lot of coding involved? […] 417 researcher: is it so that a study calls itself empirical and another conceptual ((reads:)) ‘pure conceptual discussions’ ((the students have tagged these categories as ‘empirical findings’, hence assuming that there is no interpretation involved)). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 27 excerpt 5: student b associates the table with empirical findings (line 471–475). student a claims the question is how the categories in the table are made (line 476). student b acknowledges that some interpretation can be involved. however, student a’s comment ‘here comes perhaps some central [concepts]’ changes the focus and represents a pattern that the students tried to find instances of in all the categories. aligning interpretation with concepts could help disclose the interpretation work and research contributions. however, student b instead suggests that the method category could be applied. in line 484–491, the discussion returns to whether the table should be regarded as interpretation or empirical findings; they conclude that it is both. this time it is student b making the point that the categories in the table are interpretations. in the final episode (line 499–505), student a emphasises the paradox that this text is presented as empirical findings when it is clear that interpretations are involved. the further discussion focuses on the design conjectures, and will first address the design’s mediating role with regard to cognitive scaffolding (rq 2a) before exploring the mediation of metacognitive scaffolding (rq 2b). mediation of cognitive scaffolding (rq 2a) the use of verbal cues to make swift category decisions (cf. excerpt 2) was a pervasive pattern across the study. when the verbal cues were first established, the categorisation process could become almost mechanical, and thus often displaced the more conceptually oriented discussions. however, also when this strategy was not used, the interpretational process often escaped students’ attention, cf. excerpt 3: although the students finally tagged 471 student b: ((scrolls to a section with a table that summarises the focus in the reviewed studies)) this one is very nice= 472 student a: =umm= 473 student b: =findings= 474 student a: =umm= 475 student b: =in a way. 476 student a: the question is how he made these. 477 student b: yes, it is probably some interpretation= 478 student a: =here comes perhaps some central (.) is there some central concept here?=where he describes the categories he has chosen (.) didn’t he? 479 student b: umm. he has analysed ‘research purposes’ (.) coded them (.) that can also fall under method- 480 student a: umm. 481 student b: how he has done it. 482 student a: umm. 483 student b: ((tags with ‘method’)). 484 student b: don’t know if we call this interpretation or [empirical] finding. 485 student a: yes=it is both. 486 student b: =it is both ((said simultaneously)) in a way= 487 student a: =because= 488 student b: =the categories [in the table] are an interpretation. 489 student a: umm. 490 student b: so it is maybe interpretation then (.) but it’s somewhat important. 491 student a: umm. […] 499 student a: but he presents it as a finding= but it is an interpretation. 500 student b: =but it is an interpretation ((said simultaneously)), yes (.) it is? so it might be an interpretation= 501 student a: =umm= 502 student b: =all of this= 503 student a: =umm. 504 student a: it is a little funny (.) here he presents everything as a finding (.) and here he presents how he interprets it. 505 student b: umm. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 28 a part of the text with interpretation of findings, this change of category was sudden and did not lead to elaborations or reflections on the table that was the focus of the discussion. the students’ category decisions in excerpt 5 also involved many sudden turns and few elaborations, but it also resulted in a major conceptual turn: that of seeing the presented findings as relying heavily on interpretations. the researcher’s scaffolding in excerpt 4 probably contributed to this turn. many factors in the embodied design and the evolving annotation practice affected the observed interaction. only a few examples can be addressed. the discussions in excerpts 3 and 5 seem to be seeded in two different routes for exploring empirical findings that student a and student b chose in excerpt 1. student a focuses on contrasting categories, and making category decisions based on exclusion (excluding the alternative categories). student b instead addressed the different types of data (primary and secondary) that empirical findings applies to and hence focused on this category’s inclusion criteria. although the third script improved some of the critical issues of the second script, several problems remained. for example, it was not possible to organise the categories in a folder structure, and the high number of categories complicated the script’s use. another constraint influencing the tool use is illustrated in line 378 where student b commented ‘but it isn’t possible to tag two things’. they ‘solved’ this by dividing the text in two, and categorising the first part with compare and the second part with interpretation of findings. it would have been more in line with the conjectures if the students instead would reflect on how the text can have multiple category affiliations and explore this relationship. the students seem to presume that the relationship between the categories necessarily involves competition and/or contradictions (as emphasised in the prompts of empirical findings and interpretation of findings). however, several of the categories were complementary; compare and interpretation of findings is just one example. in addition, the students’ focus seems to be on finding instances of all the categories (excerpt 1, line 33; excerpt 5, line 478), rather than seeing the categories as alternative ways to problematize the text and explore research processes and problems. hence, the assumption regarding the task structure that the students would approach the highlighting more as a way of engaging with interesting aspects of the article rather than thinking that they should categorise as much as possible proved incorrect. this was perhaps due to the fact that such a detailed script can widen the focus and counteract elaborations. in conclusion, the above discussion provides several indications of cognitive scaffolding (holton & clarke, 2006), but also many examples that this scaffolding did not fully reach the conjectures that the design aimed for. hence, the first design conjecture—presuming that the embodied design could lead students to problematize the text and to explore the article’s research processes and problems (observable interaction)—is only partly supported. mediation of metacognitive scaffolding (rq 2b) the presumed discursive practice was that ‘students’ talk would oscillate between the annotation categories and instances/exemplars’. this happened in the sense that students frequently used the category prompts in their category decisions, as well as compared different category descriptions in cases of doubt. the following part of the assumption (that this ‘would lead to elaboration/exploration of both the categories and the exemplars’) was partly true. the development of students’ understanding of the knowledge construction, in which they gradually became more attentive to the interpretational work involved in the article’s conceptualisation and coding procedures, illustrates the exploration of the exemplars. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 29 however, their exploration of the categories was more modest. there are several examples that the annotation categories affected students’ thinking and reflections on the article. however, this does not reflect back on students’ discussion of the categories. the category descriptions were treated merely as definitions. this approach risks turning the categories into static entities, which can be in conflict with the more dynamic, instrumental and interpretational nature of scaffolding, particularly the metacognitive scaffolds. the lack of metacognitive reflections was perhaps not that surprising as this was their first experience with the design. the annotation experiment became a rather isolated task, which thus made it more difficult for the students to find a relevant framing of the task. the tool had several constraints, e.g. predefined scripts that deprived students of epistemic agency (dahl, 2016). yet the conjecture was that the tool’s constraints not only weakened the tool support, but also could be an asset, insofar as the students used their experiences with the tool to problematize key concepts and principles in the course literature. however, this required meta-reflections, where the students not only explored the functionality of the tool (used a tool perspective), but also reflected on the fundamental design principles and how these related to their learning (used a tool inquiry perspective) (dahl, 2016). in spite of the researcher’s attempt to frame the technology within a tool inquiry perspective, dahl (2016) showed that it was difficult for the students to acquire meta-reflections based on the annotation experiment in isolation. there was a need for another context where the tool inquiry perspective could get more attention, and the students’ semester project provided this context. here, aspects of cognition, metacognition and scaffolding became key concerns (dahl, 2016). in conclusion, the metacognitive scaffolding was not sufficiently triggered, which impacts the opportunities of self-scaffolding and srl (azevedo et al., 2005; holton & clarke, 2006). we see no examples that the categories are approached or problematized as tools for thinking about learning; they are treated merely as means for categorising. the students seem to have little awareness of the presence of scaffolding and the scaffolding principles embedded in the design. hence, the second design conjecture—presuming that the epistemic annotation categories themselves would come into focus, not only as categories the students need to know in order to use them, but also as epistemic scaffolds (observable interaction)—is not supported. concluding remarks the principal issues the paper has attempted to emphasise are as follows: • when annotations are studied from the perspectives of mediation (vygotsky, 1978; wertsch, 1991) and scaffolding (vygotsky, 1978; wood et al., 1976), there is no simple cause–effect relationship between the explored social annotation technology and the outcome of using it. the tool is not an isolated variable, but instead is constructed through its use, often in unpredictable ways. we glimpsed fragments of this pattern, but not (yet) to the extent that we can claim that we know and control the relevant variables and can assess the tool’s general effect (novak et al., 2012). • there were several deviations from the design’s conjectures. an articulation of the conjectures (sandoval, 2014) can help accomplish the following: reveal the deviations and their implications; provide guidance for further design and theory improvements and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 30 expose the expectations of the tool so that these can become part of a researcher/teacher–student co-learning. • the deviations are themselves interesting areas for further investigations. • involving the students in this investigation can provide unique learning opportunities. hence, social annotation resources ought to be perceived as co-constructed rather than passed on resources (dahl, 2016). • the co-construction should include not only the use and understanding of categories, but also the epistemic scaffolding embedded in these categories. whereas there are many examples of the first type of co-construction, the students became less involved in the construction of the scripts. including the students in the creation and reflection on these scaffolds can enhance their metacognitive thinking (holton & clarke, 2006) and provide valuable resources for the further development and tuning of these scaffolds. • two areas for further research are as follows: settings where students themselves develop their own annotation scripts to a greater extent and settings where teachers and students collaboratively explore the potentials and challenges of these scaffolds. references arnseth, h. c., & säljö, r. 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(2013). the effect of collaborative annotation on chinese reading level in primary schools in china. british journal of educational technology, 44(1), 95-111. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 32 appendix appendix 1 the categories and prompts/category descriptions in the first script are as follows: figure 4. categories and prompts for the first script. how to present an article • focus – what is the theme of the article/study? – research questions (explicit or implicit) • theoretical perspective – what theory or conceptual framework is utilised? – can you compare it with the key concepts we use in the course (zpd, mediation, acquisition, participation etc.)? • locus – setting and participants  e.g. informal vs. formal learning, distributed vs. collocated – subject matter – technology  e.g. scaffolding • methods – qualitative/quantitative? – types of data – analysis methods • findings and conclusions • discussion points – strengths and shortcomings of the study – do you agree/disagree about the conclusions reported seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 33 appendix 2 the categories and prompts/category descriptions in the second script are the following. figure 5. categories and prompts for the second script. how to read an article? identify the basic elements and use these for questioning the research process. categories category descriptions/prompts general focus all there is vs. general focus: even the general focus is topical, disciplinary etc., i.e. narrowed down, e.g. ict and learning, technology-enhanced learning, computer-supported collaborative learning (cscl). notice that while cscl is a narrower focus than the first two, it is still very general. research focus general focus vs. research focus: for a topic to be researchable, it needs to be narrowed down. the move from a general to a focused topic often also provides interesting perspectives regarding research contribution and the framing and implications of the research. research questions research focus vs. research questions: the number of research questions that can address the research focus is usually very high, and thus the question we should ask is as follows: which of the research questions are the most promising for our research? a critique we might easily miss if we group the two together is how well the research focus and the research questions are aligned. setting what is the research setting? who and what is studied? where and in what context is it studied? for example, primary school pupils, university students or workers; informal vs. formal learning; synchronous vs. asynchronous communication; subject matter (english, science, communication etc.). data collection research questions vs. data collection: many different sorts of data can be used to explore the research questions, and there are also multiple methods for gathering these data. the chosen method for data collection can be critiqued based both on the research’s own assumptions (e.g. for being inadequate to address the research questions) and on more general methodological concerns (e.g. methodological conventions have not been followed). review & empirical findings review & empirical findings vs. interpretation of findings. for practical reasons one separates observations from the interpretations that can be drawn from the observations. there is also an important methodological reason for this distinction: research shall attempt to be verifiable and open to the scrutiny of others, and jumping directly to the interpretations and conclusions is in conflict with this objective. data analyses and interpretation data has the potential to inform (cf. empirical findings) and information has the potential to support knowledge claims (cf. interpretation of findings). but much of the knowledge we are interested in is not accessible through a simple ‘reading’ of the data. the data analysis is crucial to reveal the deeper patterns of possible interpretations that can be inferred from the data. due to the guesswork and conditional interpretation involved in data analyses, and hence the constructed nature of the knowledge resulting from the analyses, some prefer to call it ‘data production’ instead of ‘data analysis’. theoretical perspective data analyses will often rely on theories and conceptual frameworks. like hypotheses, theories make assumptions about the world. a distinction is that theories have undergone extensive testing, whereas hypotheses conventionally often refer to assumptions that have not yet been rigorously tested and validated. theories help explain or predict phenomena or correlations. when using a theory, we also add to the knowledge of the value of this theory, e.g. by adding or excluding phenomena or relations the theory can account for or pointing out limitations where other theories stand a better chance of explaining the phenomenon etc. overall conclusion/ broader implications suggestions for further research. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 34 figure 6. categories and prompts for the second script. appendix 3 the categories and prompts/category descriptions in the third script are as follows: figure 7. categories and prompts for the third script. a few other concepts that can be useful when analysing science articles as listed below: categories category descriptions/prompts compare and contrast (method for analyses) compare: what are the similarities? contrast: what are the differences? what units and variables have been compared/contrasted? are the units and variables the main focus, or are they indicators/used to represent something else? what is the purpose for the comparison/contrasting? central concepts, principles, definitions, ideas, objects central concepts, principles, definitions, ideas and objects that constitute the research discipline. beside the theoretical concepts, there might be many other concepts of relevance for understanding and contextualizing the research and domain knowledge. human models human models extract particular aspects of what constitute humans and the social world and use these aspects to make assumptions, explanations, predictions or normative judgements. the intended scientific contribution of these models can be to isolate a phenomenon and help us create empirical testable assumptions/hypotheses. our critique of these kinds of human models follow the same path; are the hypotheses validated empirically (through observation, experimentation etc.)? if not, the human models are not supported and should be corrected. categories category descriptions/prompts research focus what is the focus of the study? research contribution what do the authors consider to be their unique research contribution? research questions what is the research question(s) (explicit or implicit)? technology what type of technology (collaboration system, its, domain-specific app, game, virtual world etc.)? is it a prototype or a finished system? which affordances and constraints are built into the technology? what are the underlying design principles and theory? learning type focus what kind of learning or learning activity is supposedly enhanced through the support of the technology? how? interpretation of findings do the interpretations emerge naturally from the data, or can they be questioned? central concepts explain the meaning of the concept. can the concept be linked to controversies? if so, how? is the concept related to other concepts? which and how? is the concept a theoretical concept, or is it based on interpretations of empirical observations not yet validated to the extent of gaining a theoretical status? compare which similarities with other studies and perspectives are picked up and extended in this study? this implies an analogy—is the analogy the authors have made questionable? does the knowledge gained from the other quoted studies transfer indisputably to this study? contrast how do the authors contrast and position their study (cf. research contribution) to other studies, perspectives etc.? empirical findings what are the empirical findings of the study? these are observation data—not to be confused with the interpretations drawn from the data, which can be erroneous. the empirical findings can also stem from reviews/other studies. further research the authors’ or your own suggestions regarding the need of further research as an extension of this study. other/discussion points this is an open category for any other topic you want to highlight. method note: this category was added by the students. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 12 – issue 1 – 2016 35 appendix 4 here follows a comparison of the categories in the three scripts: figure 8. the three scripts. jan erik dahl abstract introduction research question tool and theoretical stance the research–teaching nexus and co-learning annotation technologies sociocultural approach scaffolding case description methodology analytical procedure design experiment analysis and results the evolvement of the tool (rq 1) empirical analysis of students’ use of categories mediation of cognitive scaffolding (rq 2a) mediation of metacognitive scaffolding (rq 2b) concluding remarks references appendix appendix 1 appendix 2 appendix 3 appendix 4 microsoft word tobias c werler on educational challenges.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 on the hidden curriculum of the mouse click: an anthropologically drama tobias werler associate professor of education university of agder, norway email: tobias.c.werler@uia.no abstract any process of education is media based. but the advent of computer based media in the classroom caused a qualitative change. this new type of media serves as a bodily and cognitive extension of man. the aim of the article is to demonstrate educational consequences of these new anthropologically premises. the article discusses the structure and concept of digital communication culture as it denies the existence of spatial distance. the click option of the mouse will be framed as digital communications hidden curriculum. in order to navigate in the digital world of education the texts concludes with that man has to develop sign-literacy to be able to master the iconic turn in education. keywords: anthropology, computer mouse, ict, man-machine-interaction, iconic turn, bildung 1 prologue who wouldn’t recognize it? the lights are our, the screen descends, the computer is turned on, the projector is running properly, and the presentation begins. but wait! is everything in place? yes. okay, we may continue then. a new american software application shows it muscle. letters, symbols, and icons scroll, fall, and vanish. everything works and murphy’s law has been suspended. even the audience is enthused. perhaps the scene resembles a theatrical performance, but the director and the teacher are absent. the person concerned isn’t even a part of the picture. but that’s not the only thing missing. the message is as well. it appears as though the visualization of communication has replaced the content. this example is a simplified account, but nevertheless conveys the sense of the modern classroom. it is similar to the struggle for media attention and causes social change in as far as web based information and communication technology (ict) “internationalize” the world society. the electronic interdependence creates the “global village” (mcluhan 1964). the perception of information or the educational content is thereby changed. a major reason for this seems to be that the formal qualities of most media are in the process of replacing message and content due to the effects of the media involved. one must wonder whether the expansion of the body by media serves to optimize or replace human actions by use of technology and media. these suggestions are based on a broad understanding of media. in principle, any objects may be seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 2 considered a medium, because anything can alter a person’s situation; books, the internet all have this effect. this article develops the anthropological foundations for and implications of ict based education. the first and second parts, analyzing the anthropological principles of the culture of digital communication, explore the consequences of a society based on nonlinear and asynchronous possibilities of communication and the consequences of the mouse click as one of the basal control options of man-machine interactions. section three establishes that man is in need of real (and not virtual) interaction to be human. the threat of fragmentation of society and the double-edged nature of technology are also shown. finally, this section concludes with some essential educational requirements when establishing ict based relationships between learners and teachers. the fourth section highlights the mouse click as a realization of man's will and intention in the interaction with machines. a second precondition for educational use of ict in education seems to be “something to click on”: the picture or icon. web based technology is not possible without it. thus, it is necessary to understand educational consequences of the “iconic turn” (flusser 1991, 1999, boehm 2007). it comprises the recognition of the structural nature of the picture which is based in a pictorial representation of reality. so, one might speak of the “return of pictures”. the last and final section illustrates some implications for the concepts of bildung when the educational sphere not only has to create meaning with language, but with pictures as well. before beginning the analysis, the importance of any kind of educational media should be underlined. our starting point is that man is able to create a relationship with himself, with the world, and with others via the use and support of media. however, man is not able to achieve this from the outset. the anthropological basis of man–media is best understood as the product of the processes of teaching and learning. both a person’s life history and cultural milieu shape that result as well. a necessary foundation for media use – from language to digital media – is the ability to make use of signs, icons, and symbols. man has to use them if he is to communicate with others in order to survive (in the long run). therefore, it is necessary to clarify some fundamental principles of education for media literacy. first, the acquisition of media literacy can take place in the efficacy in processes of teaching and learning. since the new media possess the power to change the structure of education, teaching, and learning, they require a new definition of the guiding concepts of cultivation of the self. two aspects are important. any kind of media “transports” meanings, implications as well as units of meanings. they all consist of a combination of simple signs. it is possible to call these units of meanings text, irrespective of whether they consist of a combination of signs or a combination of sign symbols (scripture, pictures, music, etc.). as we are confronted today much more frequently with audiovisual texts or hypertexts, students are challenged by these new texts. they have to develop a broad ability to adopt what here is referred to as media-reading competency. as media-based presentations grow more complex and the symbolic worlds we inhabit become more differentiated, we have greater need of a common understanding of media created meaning. to reach that goal sign-literacy, understood here as the ability to make decisions and envision their scope and relevance, seems to be necessary as a form of meta-communication. * * * the invention of the printing press and the ensuing proliferation of books led to a general growth in literacy. latin as the european lingua franca was gradually replaced by national languages. however, there was more to the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 3 printing press than this: aligning letters in a row in order to form words implies linear thinking. one letter follows another, line for line. similar delineation can also be seen in the assembly line. such linearity leads to classification and introduces order to the world. since knowledge and emotions can be expressed by means of lead pressed letters, mass communication becomes possible. this new form of communication involves the human capacity to perceive themselves as subjects. the object is thus the world; the world can be displayed and even performed through printed letters. media is thus the source for our creation of the world (wulf 2004: 183), the mimetic link between our perspective on the world and understanding ourselves. media represents therefore a form of historical grammar; it defines potential contact with that which is distant from us. media brings the distant within the grasp of our senses, literally the distant room. media are phenomenological; they serve to make things and ideas apprehensible. all media is framed esthetically (aristotle 1982). as recent studies have shown, that older media are not replaced by new media (ericsen 2005). old media become an integrated part of new media. this means that media, in addition to framing communication, also provide content, thereby shaping human experience. this means also that the new media change mankind. generally speaking, one might state that also new media will change our selves. 2 the culture of digital communication most of senior readers know the old life world, one grew up in it without computers and web based communication. humanity has always observed the world with the assistance of media. when considering language as a medium, the same rule also applies. through out history technical aids were developed which allowed us to view the world; books, microscopes, and even television may be included here. these media come in an incorporeal form. they exist (almost) entirely outside of the body and are not innately connected to man. however, this scenario changed with the onset of computers and internet. in an accelerated world, where it is simultaneously the source and tool, computer technology – seen from an educationalist perspective – must be considered an extension of the brain because of its calculative capacity and unlimited storage potential. technology and even so computer technology serves as the body’s externalization (extension), it extends not only the limbs but also the cognitive apparatus. it is primarily due to data technology that man is able to move about and orient oneself in the net-modern world. we have reached the point where technology defines human existence. let us imagine a blind man using his blind mans`stick. without the aid of his cane he would be unable to orient himself in his environment. his cane became inseparable from his existence (bateson 1972: 459). 2.1 tele society martin heidegger rightly noted that all of the elements of postmodern society which have the prefix tele (distant) deny distance. the original meaning of tele disappeared: “all forms for the acceleration which we more or less are forced into dealing with relate to the conquering of distance.” (heidegger 1979: 105) broadcasting creates distance by expanding our shared world. (ibid) television, telephone, and telecommunication produce the illusion of intimacy and closeness. the same applies to learning. since new media change everyday life, they also change learning. the media for learning are not only lectures and books; it is also the machine and the web. this dissolves gutenburg’s universe of print and engenders even faster changes than before. thought and cognition accelerate, leaving the one dimensional nature of the book behind. the construction concept is applied seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 4 instead of the reality concept in relation to new media. reality is considered a construction in today’s everyday life and this a result of the new media, thus replacing the criteria for truth. it is replaced by viability (to fit). knowledge either fits or it does not. indeed, causal explanations come to be replaced by looped concepts (hofstader 1992). instead of linearity configuration and constellation are used to explain the contemporary world. the linear word for word structure is replaced by the hypertext. it is now possible to use simultaneously several levels of meaning, several dimensions, and media! non-linearity is dissolved: video presentations, animations, photos, and text may be applied simultaneously (to the extent that human physical and cognitive abilities allow). this non-linearity does not destroy the concept of the narrative but it helps recreating and reinforcing the narrative in a new, multifaceted form. the hypertext enables the potential access to an unlimited quantity of data. the network structure allows us to sift through this data: one need not start at the beginning and finish there. it is possible to exit the two dimensional room and make use of other levels of understanding. if these developments code for e-learning’s foundation, then we at present become human through our interactions with our electronic environment. there are at least two distinctive traits of this new culture: the click options possible with the mouse (as alternatives) and visualized information containing compressed content. 2.2 the hidden curriculum: the mouse click the foundation for all e-learning is the click of the mouse. as a cognitive function of choice it translates intentions to actions. these actions are digital skills that link the click option to symbols (links). the combination of these abilities may be considered a language (click / no click) based on the classic symbolic triad: icon, index, and symbol (peirce 1990). it is only by means of these basic languages that interaction with the computer and with the worldwide web is possible. data technology’s global breakthrough into educational sector was possible because its foundation is found in a universal mental condition. the mind is capable of making conscious choices. the ability to produce change in a system can be considered a click option. the precondition for making a choice may vary greatly and be complex, but the result will always be the same. it entails affecting purposeful change on a technical (artificial) system through individual decision making (on/off; yes/no). in order to take part in the global digital world we need to acquire the ability to orient ourselves and navigate a network. people must be able to organize their behavior within culturally specific defined contexts. as with other human skills, click options are developed through interaction with other humans beings. the elementary skill of clicking the mouse key is the basic element for becoming a member of the digital culture. that’s not all. the click option (or an equivalent function) is a basic element for the digital skills it is a necessary condition for the skill. those who desire to participate in digital society must, of course, acquire typing skills. in contrast to the mouse click, these skills are already widely employed in our society. in school children learn to write letters by hand in order to understand their meaning. other institutions are responsible for acclimating people comfortable to the keyboard. irrespective of whether one presses a button, a key, or touches an icon on the screen every single person has the capacity to change their environment in some way. with a simple click people can send off an e-mail, print a drawing, listen to music, or watch a movie. herein is one of the great advantages in the application of computer technology to an educational setting. the digital revolution allows for new observations and actions. the new computer and web based technology enhances perception, motor skills, and cognitive skills. therefore modern education's central task seems to be to empower learners with the ability to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 5 handle contingent situations. the learner should be empowered to make choices. 2.3 click or not to click perhaps one of the most important inventions in the computer age is the mouse. the dual border line translates analogue signals (motion) into digital information. people can move the mouse arrow in order to point to something, to draw, or to follow links. when one releases the mouse key, the decision becomes digital. the intention of the mind was not only translated into a binary concept. it is possible to compute the decision made. it is here that the initial crossover of analogue action into the digital world occurs. within the click of the mouse lay the potential for corporeal (motor) mental control over the digital world. the computer world allows people to interact simultaneously at various levels. many links can be simultaneously pursued, which is also the case for texts, graphics, and symbols. fundamental to all of this is: the analogue and the digital, the corporeal and the technical become intertwined. every single click of the mouse opens up a new virtual room. this option is artier: two options are binary, three options are ternary, etc. in mathematics these n-functions are termed boolean. already when one has to choose between clicking on icon a or b, six possible options arise; three choices – clicking on a, b or c – generate 256 alternatives. in the computer world one begins with a single choice and, upon consideration of the whole, one discovers an incomprehensible number of possible choices. this means that one simple choice might engender a myriad of potential outcomes or paths and causes confusion. this realization may explain why the feeling of being “lost in cyberspace” occasionally arises. in any case, the elementary click operation opens a network of new options, challenging humans to develop abilities and skills through to integrate the digital and real worlds. the new language of the computerized world relates to icons, indexes, and symbols. these symbols and links only exist in digital environments and have remarkable consequences. digital links engender several alternative choices and these numbers grow exponentially in accordance with the boolean network of a click operation. when we point to a symbol, icon, or link (= index), we are translating our intentions into actions. at its very core the digital world is the click option and the necessity of choice. education’s hidden mandate lay here. education needs to promote mastery of both: clicking on the right place and understanding of such a click. 3 humans and electronic caves when students use software programming (powerpoint, ms word, open office, etc.) and computer technology (internet, e-mail, chat) in order to present something or write a paper, they are not only researching a given subject. students must also learn to organize their experiences. they learn what it means to know and understand. digital technology thus influences cognition and emotions, and plays an integral role in forming the practices and cultural traits of a new generation. the computer world not only entails instrumental skills (the power to get things done), it also entails powerful ideas that contribute to changing personal, social, and political realities. first, technology makes possible another form of personality modification (jörissen 2003: 129). people may represent themselves on the net as various persons; they may change age, gender, or political affiliation. a quiet and peaceful pupil can come across as magnificent and self aware because of the net’s ability to create distance (der spiegel 29/2006). however, what we are seeing here is only the dimmest outline of reality; the presence of the other or of virtual seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 6 objects is more than an illusion of spontaneity and presence. in order to see, in order to illuminate the anthropological consequences, we need to visit the bon fire; we must visit the caves. [cave 1] the human dilemma is the cave’s dilemma. a solitary individual could live very well in it because it offers protection and demarcation. still, life depends on the individual leaving the cave (werler 2005). thus the challenge becomes mastering the exchange of personae in the cyber world and developing an authentic personality in the real world. even though identity games play a decisive role in personality development (erikson 1963) these entail multiple choice narratives which can lead to loneliness and the fear of intimacy. this is especially apparent when pupils are expected to behave like critical customers while at the simultaneously seeking guidance in choosing their individual paths. it is easy to make demands in the anonymous situation in front of a screen, but sooner or later one is forced to come out of the electronic cave and come out into the open. [cave 2] the power of technology to foster individual development is not apparent, but it does play a role in fostering ideas. in addition to technology’s functionality, one also learns these ideas when using the search engines, social networking software, and productivity software as means of presentation, writing, or calculation. when we stress the utilization of these technologies we are also emphasizing a new epistemology: presentation and digital reproduction may be interpreted as new and powerful (therefore also disciplinary) concepts. the software entails an embodied manner of thinking (see postman 1985). because of its programmed structure it allows only predefined actions. it can cause us to think in fragments and therefore lead to cognitive overload. the problem with such software is that it primarily focuses on the speaker. it neither takes the content nor the audience into account (tufte 2003:4). presentation software such as powerpoint promotes exactly that the presentation in stead of the conversation. if one learns through a series of points one then learns isolated (and partially hierarchical) statements. in this respect one does not learn argumentation in the form of coherent connections since the presentation lacks a clear train of thought. the interaction and the debate shut down before they can get started. this aspect of the technology functions as an obstacle rather than a bridge. [cave 3] the third cave is perhaps the best hidden. the computer’s popularity increased as it became more and more user-friendly. this led to the demand for greater transparency. this resulted in “easy to understand” icons on the screen and in documents. this bears on the ability to get things done without necessarily understanding what is going on behind the scenes. thus we have an implied paradox. the demand for transparency resulted in the screen’s obscurity. this resulted then in a new understanding of transparency--one understands the way in which to get something accomplished, but not necessarily the way in which it actually happens. today transparency, shown on the screen, is epistemologically obscure. one is using open office, but a majority of users does not know how it (technically) works. computer technology has the potential of empowering its user by making it possible to command refined and advanced functionality. at the same time these tools teach us that our world is becoming more opaque and sketchy. the world seems more incomprehensible. and the message of technology is that our efforts to comprehend it do not pay off. and so we abandons the path we’ve been following the renaissance. we learn that it is not expedient to make political, social, and economic enquiries. thus we risk losing what we desire to establish: the informed and critical individual in a culture of imitation. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 7 interim consideration if, by development of media the basal anthropological conditions of man are changed, then society's educational concepts must be changed according to education of sign-literacy. by teaching and popularizing sign-literacy, media are capable of unfolding their efficacy in the framework of the humanity’s anthropological foundations. at the same time teaching and learning are not possible without the use of signs and are both changed by their use. as new media inevitably change the structure of education, they force a new definition of educational tasks and purposes. a central topic for any kind of media based education is to ascertain, before the implementation of any educational measures, how far media can alter the anthropological conditions of and for teaching and learning. because of man’s ability to employ signs, he is forced to develop, independently, competencies which allow him to make use of the new possibilities for media (and to see its limitations) in order to achieve a new humanity. it is education's task to foster awareness of the idea that all educational processes are media based. in conceiving new pedagogical and learning methods, we must grapple with the question: when media change the anthropological foundations of man, in what ways is the basis of educational action transformed? 4 icons & symbols in order to navigate in the digital world man needs more than just the mouse. since an understanding of the machine is not required for navigational purposes, we need boundaries which allow for this navigation. first, a visual representation of the machine-human boundary makes this possible. an equivalent representational system should be based on icons and symbols, or in more general terms, on pictures. their structural similarity to an object defines their relationship to it. if one clicks with the mouse on the icon, the entry into the digital world commences. a parallel development can be seen in everyday life. man meets everywhere symbols indicating various intensions. the world then, as defined by these images, becomes textual. in order to live in the real and in the virtual world, one is required to read and interpret the text. from an pedagogical perspective it is essential that we understand the function and form of the pictures which we encounter. which of these pictures meet? it is obvious to any viewer that the world is skewed, having consulted with the picture. 4.1 iconic turn no one can deny that pictures exercise power over body and soul. a picture opens our eyes and directs our attention. a picture is visible. pictures can only be seen. it is impossible to understand them by touching after or lecturing them. in contrast to every other visible real or virtual thing, they represent something they are not. irrespective of whether we see a a painted or a virtual bonfire, it does not warm us. the technical systems make pictures available to us simultaneously (almost) everywhere. pictures are eternal. even if one’s conversational partner is on another continent, he/she can view the same picture and the same text. still, there is no bodily experience of space; one is not required to move about in space in order to make contact with someone on the other side of the planet. the experience of space in the post-industrial world can be characterized by signs and symbols. my colleague is only a mouse click away. so these pictures function as codes which transcend the bounds of time and space in the struggle between the nearby and the far away. the pictures discussed here have an epistemic consequence: they are either mimetic (aristotle 1982; wulf 2004: 236) or scientific (wiebel 2004: 226). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 8 they indicate something or make recognition possible since they represent the world. the latter practice can be traced back to the renaissance. the first mentioned is present already in the antiquity and relates in contrast to this to internal and external images. the internal image forms through the apprehension of external images produced by the culture. media create the potential to transmit these images. this holds true for cave paintings as well as computer graphics. these pictures are inconceivable without corresponding media. media are constitutive for them. without media there would be no pictures which humans could apprehend and therefore no pictures which could be translated into internal images. it is for this reason that these media define the human experience of images (se mcluhan 1964). there still remains a qualitative difference between pictures experienced as paintings, photographs, or as digital (virtual) images. in contrast to photographs or television images, digital graphics do not have a matrix for the actual picture (mirzoeff 1998). still, that is not all. mathematical and electronic processes produce a virtually imagery. very few individuals understand these principles (and this provides the opportunity for manipulations). it might be more problematic that the traditional relationship between the picture, subject, and object is dissolved. even though this happens to be the case, synthetic images refer to whatever the screens displays. images require a screen in order to become a picture and this entails an illusion. these pictures suggest its availability within a manageable space. as the expansive use of synthetic imagery challenges faith in the image’s representative character, it in turn promotes change in its cultural utility and in attitudes towards pictures. 4.2 graphic texts virtual images are mimetic-technical imitations. they pretend to create reality. moreover, the computer age has perpetuated the tendency to define everything in terms of pictures. even abstract processes can be derived from pictures and symbols. the reason for this would the modern need for instant distribution and transmission. underlying this is the idea that these images must be recognizable (and can) be understood more readily than before. these images allow “reality” to vanish. if texts in earlier times relied more heavily on the imagination of pictures then this reliance is undergoing a profound transformation with the production of “graphic texts.” in particular presentational software applies here. in the same respect, there are fewer producers than consumers. the electronic characteristic of synthetic imagery potentiates acceleration; transmission from point a to point b can be accomplished at the speed of light. this instantaneous interaction contributes to the notion of a shrinking world and that the world can be experienced through imagery. moreover, these graphic texts create a new form of product that falls short in the battle of marketing principles. while it is possible to sell these graphic texts, it is impossible to purchase what they refer to. these graphic texts fascinate and scare us; they conceal and express aesthetically the political and social. but these images are much more: as a signal they make it possible to observe, as a sign they create cognitive relations, and as social form they create opportunities for contact. in short, synthetic imagery educates man. the educational challenge is this: can we manage to instill more than reading competence? as new media convey interpretations and meanings via a combination of graphic texts and from hypertexts, then we need receptor skills to make the utilization of them feasible. if the medially constructed and medially conveyed cultural elements receive a distinctive context dependent meaning, then education must foster a common set of values and interests in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 9 culture increasingly defined by one’s own individualized tastes. as a media person, or homo medialis, one should be informed of (new) media’s productive, functional, and application capacities. this is the only means by which humans realize new media’s potential. creation responds to the interplay with images. the image must be ”bent,” ”rotated,” and ”flipped.”. man must tolerate graphic text’s uncertainty, its plurality, and its complexity. finally, bildung demands work with the internal picture; it must be able to develop their gehalt. 5 epilogue with the social realization of computer technology, changes in communicative and interactive structures in society began. this realization changes organizational structures, teaching and knowledge practices, and teaching cultures. similarly, our self-awareness and all visions of the future have been altered. it is without a doubt and obvious that the data and net structure has taken on a greater role in educational and learning processes. the same holds true for lifelong learning as well. media, from the cave painting to synthetic imagery, influence mankind and its culture. not only do they place demands on the human senses; they demand economic, social, and political change. in paying attention to the outlined drama, educators and politicians must understand limitations of software. digital technology has always been valued for its economic potential rather than its pedagogical function. it is true that computer technology was brought into the educational realm because it promised to deliver content more efficiently than before. but this is only one side of the janus face: students receive a bonus to their purchase. computer technology changes their mode of thought. perhaps this is the story’s irony: learning institutions are controlled by computer products’ possibilities and limitations. in light of the iconic turn, viewing, recognizing, and seeing are to be understood as active, self-designed, and intentional actions. however, as these activities are dependent on something to look at, this object and its features will guide the beholder. this leads to acknowledgment of the structure and texture of any picture. consequentially one has to see a shift of meaning: from linguistic to visual information, from words to pictures, from arguments to videos. in contrast to manual technologies of visual representation by art such as technology-based techniques like photography or film, computers are able to create pictures without a reference to visible physical forms. thus, one might see in this a “return of pictures.” accordingly, ict’s heavy use of pictures seems to be a method to “store” knowledge in pictures to the extent that these pictures code for a spatial “where” and not for a content-related “what.” therein the topic of the picture was placed in a prominent social position. by the picture, the borderlines to symbolic systems like language, which are traditionally viewed as central to the creation of meaning in the processes of teaching and learning, was moved. any current didactic-process is challenged by the question of how these modern pictures generate meaning. education without means and mediator (teacher) – so as to say im-mediate – is not imaginable. if a modern concept of bildung does not want to appear fragmented, it must acknowledge that the relationship between the individual and society is based on media and its technology. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 10 literature aristotle (1982). poetik. stuttgart: philipp reclam bachmann-medick, doris (2006). cultural turns. neuorientierungen in den kulturwissenschaften. reinbek: rowohlt bateson, gregory (1972). steps to an ecology of mind: a revolutionary approach to man’s understanding of himself. new york: ballantine belting, hans (2001). bild-anthropologie. entwürfe für eine bildwissenschaft. münchen: fink boehm, gottfried (ed.) (2001). was ist ein bild? münchen: fink boehm, gottfried (2007). wie bilder sinn erzeugen die macht des zeigens. berlin: berlin university press carruthers, mary; ziolkowski, jan m. (ed.) (2002). the medieval craft of memory. an anthology of texts and pictures. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press du bist das netz! in: der spiegel, 29/2006, p. 6174 erikson, h. erik (1963). childhood and society. new york: norton eysenck, michael w. (2001). principles of cognitive psychology. east sussex: psychology press flusser, vilém (1999). ins universum der technischen bilder. göttingen: vice versa flusser, vilém (1991). digitaler schein. in: florian rötzer (ed.): digitaler schein. frankfurt/m.: suhrkamp heidegger, martin (1979). sein und zeit. tübingen: niemeyer hofstadter, douglas (1992). gödel, escher, bach. et evigt gyldent bånd. københavn: aschehoug eriksen, thomas hylland (ed.) (2005): internett i praksis. om teknologiens uregjerlighet. oslo: universitetsforlaget jörissen, benjamin (2003). who`s online. anthropological remarks on the construction of self and other in computer-mediated communication. in: christoph wulf & birgitta quarsell (eds.): culture and education, p. 122-134. münster: waxmann mcluhan, marshall (1964). understanding media. the extensions of man. london: routledge & kegan paul miller, george a. (1956). the magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. psychological review, 63, p. 81 97 mirzoeff, nicholas (ed.) (1998). the visual culture reader. london: routledge peirce, charles s. (1990). semantische schriften. frankfurt/main: suhrkamp postman, neil (1985). amusing ourselves to death. public discourse in the age of show business. london: heinemann tufte, edward r.: the cognitive style of powerpoint. conneticut: graphics press 2003 weibel, peter (2004). ortlosigkeit und bilderfuelle. auf dem weg zur telegesellschaft. in: christa maar & hubert burda (eds.): iconic turn. die neue macht der bilder. das neue buch zur vorlesungsreihe, p. 216 – 226, köln: dumont werler, tobias (2005). zwischen bildsamkeit und bestimmung. pädagogische dimensionen des zôon politikón. in: heinrich schmidinger & clemens sedmak (eds.): der mensch ein ‚zoon politicon´? autonomie – personalität – seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 3 – 2008 11 verantwortung (topologien des menschlichen band 3), p. 79-92. darmstadt: wissenschaftliche buchgesellschaft wulf, christoph (2004). anthropologie. geschichte, kultur, philosophie. reinbeck: rowohlt taschenbuch verlag wulf, christoph (2001). einführung in die anthropologie der erziehung. beltz: weinheim wulf, christoph (1979). globalisation: antinomies between commonalities and diviersities. in: chr. wulf (ed.): education for the 21 st century, commonalities and diversities, p. 15 – 30. muenster: waxman yates, frances a. (1974). the art of memory. chicago: university of chicago how are technology-related workplace resources associated with techno-work engagement among a group of finnish teachers? | seminar.net journal article skip to abstract how are technology-related workplace resources associated with techno-work engagement among a group of finnish teachers? jaana-piia mäkiniemi faculty of management and business, tampere university e-mail: jaana-piia.makiniemi@tuni.fi salla ahola faculty of management and business, tampere university johanna joensuu faculty of management and business, tampere university ©2018 (author name/s), cc-by-4.0 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by-4.0), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. abstract teachers perceive the digitalisation of teaching not only as demanding but also as an inspiring aspect of their work. prior studies have mainly focused on teachers’ negative experiences, such as technostress. therefore, the aim of the current study was to explore how technology-related workplace resources, such as technology-related self-efficacy and autonomy, predict teachers’ positive well-being and techno-work engagement. based on prior studies, it was hypothesised that three technology-related job resources are associated with higher techno-work engagement, and technology-related self-efficacy is associated with higher techno-work engagement. data were collected from finnish teachers and principals (n = 183) via a web-based questionnaire as part of a larger research project. most of the participants were female teachers. the hypotheses were tested with structural equation modelling. the key findings indicated that technology-related self-efficacy had the strongest impact on techno-work engagement. in addition, technology-related autonomy and technology-related competence support were statistically significant predictors of techno-work engagement. the findings suggest that similar workplace resources, which predict general work engagement, are also relevant in the context of techno-work engagement. some practical recommendations are made concerning the enhancement of teachers’ technology-related self-efficacy at schools. keywords: digitalisation educational technology teacher well-being techno-work engagement workplace resources introduction digitalisation is a global megatrend in the educational sector. some teachers perceive the digitalisation of schools and teaching as a demanding aspect of their job (syvänen, mäkiniemi, syrjä, heikkilä-tammi, & viteli, 2016), but in general, they have more positive perspectives. for example, according to a report, 70% of finnish teachers view the digitalisation of education in a positive light, and 75% would like to use more digital applications (tanhua-piiroinen et al., 2016). although the use of educational technology is often regarded positively, the focus of prior studies has often been on teachers’ negative experiences related to the use of educational technology, such as technostress experiences (e.g. al-fudail & mellar, 2008; joo, lim, & kim, 2016; syvänen et al., 2016). therefore, in the current study, we focus on teachers’ well-being experiences, particularly on their techno-work engagement, which can be defined as a positive state of well-being in which one feels fulfilled regarding the use of technology at work. techno-work engagement is a novel concept based on the notion of work engagement, which is a widely used construct for describing and measuring employees’ positive affective–motivational well-being work (mäkiniemi, ahola, & joensuu, 2019; mäkiniemi, ahola, syvänen, heikkilä-tammi, & viteli, 2017). work engagement is commonly divided to three main dimensions: vigour (e.g. high levels of energy at work), dedication (e.g. high inspiration to work) and absorption (e.g. full concentration on work), and it has been shown to be associated with positive outcomes, such as commitment to work and good work performance (albrecht, 2013; bakker, albrecht, & leiter, 2011). the main difference between the two above-mentioned two concerns the fact that although techno-work engagement and work engagement both capture the positive state of well-being at work, the former focuses on (digital) technology-intensive or (digital) technology-assisted work or work processes, whereas the latter focuses on work in general. since the focus of the current study is on teachers’ well-being experiences related to their use of educational technology at work – not their work in general – we suggest that the concept of techno-work engagement is well suited to our framework. moreover, since some teachers perceive the digitalisation of schools as stressful and demanding, it is important to identify so-called protective factors that can serve as a buffer to stress as well as divergent factors that can enhance well-being (e.g. work autonomy, social support). an understanding of those factors or resources will make it possible to influence teachers’ well-being by supporting and developing them. this is an important strategy that takes into account the fact that it is generally not possible to eliminate demanding factors (e.g. time pressures). in the current study, we aim to identify which workplace resources are associated with teachers’ techno-work engagement. according to nielsen et al. (2017), workplace resources are factors within a workplace that help an employee to achieve goals and complete work tasks. workplace resources can be divided into four main types: individual (also called personal resources, such as self-efficacy, competence and self-esteem), group-level (e.g. social support, good interpersonal relationships between employees), leader-level (e.g. leadership style) and organisational-level resources (e.g. autonomy, possibilities to develop capabilities, human resources practices). based on a large body of empirical findings, the authors found that these kinds of workplace resources (also called personal resources and job resources) enhance work motivation, well-being (e.g. work engagement) and performance (nielsen et al., 2017). since the concept of techno-work engagement is based on the concept of work engagement, we assume that workplace resources are also associated with techno-work engagement. techno-work engagement recently, a new concept and scale of techno-work engagement was developed to identify the positive well-being aspects of technology use at work (mäkiniemi et al., 2019). this was considered necessary since prior research has mostly focused on the negative or demanding aspects of technology use (e.g. ragu-nathan, tarafdar, ragu-nathan, & tu, 2008). further, the fact that an employee reports no or few negative well-being experiences, such as technostress, related to technology use does not necessarily indicate that he or she is having positive experiences. consequently, it is not possible to measure positive experiences with scales that focus on negative experiences. relatedly, tarafdar, cooper and stich (2017) recently suggested that there is a need to consider the positive aspect of technostress, which they refer to as techno-eustress (i.e. the perception of technology use as challenging, thrilling and motivating). they argued that mastering such challenges could lead to positive outcomes, such as greater work engagement. techno-work engagement refers to employees’ technology-related experiences of well-being, and it is defined as a fulfilling state of mind associated with the use of technology (mäkiniemi et at., 2017; mäkiniemi et al., 2019). similar to work engagement, it is a positive motivational state characterised by vigour, dedication and absorption. technology-related groupand organisational-level workplace resources so-called supportive workplace factors may enhance techno-work engagement as well as the willingness to use educational technology. in the current study, we call these kinds of factors ‘technology-related workplace resources’. in line with the definition presented above, we suggest that workplace resources are factors that help teachers to integrate and use educational technology at work and complete related work tasks. prior studies on work engagement suggest that individual-, groupand organisation-level workplace resources, such as social support, autonomy and self-efficacy (schaufeli & bakker, 2004; ventura, salanova, & llorens, 2015; xanthopoulou, bakker, demerouti, & schaufeli, 2007), are associated with higher work engagement. in line with these findings, we assume that high technology-related autonomy (i.e. teachers can freely make decisions regarding the use of educational technology), technology-related social support (i.e. colleagues give advice concerning educational technology) and technology-related competence support (i.e. individuals have enough time to use educational technology) are all associated with higher techno-work engagement. technology-related self-efficacy as an individual workplace resource self-efficacy is an important individual resource that is associated with employee well-being, such as higher work engagement (xanthopoulou et al., 2007; nielsen et al., 2017; skaalvik & skaalvik, 2014) and lower burnout in various occupations, including educational occupations (skaalvik & skaalvik, 2007; shoji et al., 2016). according to social cognitive theory, self-efficacy is defined as an individual’s beliefs regarding his or her capability to control situations and challenging demands. people with high levels of self-efficacy tend to set challenging goals, persist in achieving their goals, even under difficult and stressful circumstances, and recover quickly from failure, even in conditions that would appear to be overwhelming to the average person (bandura, 1997). self-efficacy can be measured at either a general or situationor domain-specific level. one domain-specific concept, teaching or teacher efficacy, is defined as a teacher’s future-oriented competency-based expectation, which is related to his or her ability to plan, organise and carry out the activities required to attain given educational goals. this expectation is a balanced judgement influenced by the teacher’s perceived capacity to carry out the acts as well as the perceived demands of the working situation (reeve & su, 2014). in the current paper, we focus on teachers’ (educational) technology-related self-efficacy as a personal workplace resource. we assume that a teacher has high technology-related self-efficacy, for example, when he or she understands the possibilities of educational technology well enough to maximise them in teaching and when he or she feels confident that he or she can help students when they have difficulties (c.f. wang, ertmer, & newby, 2004). in line with previous findings assuming the link between self-efficacy and work engagement among teachers (e.g. skaalvik & skaalvik, 2014), we suggest that technology-related self-efficacy is associated with higher techno-work engagement. two overlapping models. technology related subjects that are related to techno-work engagement. in model 1: technology-related collegial support, autonoy and compe\ tence support. model 2 is identical, but adds thechnology related self-efficacy. model 1 model 2 technology-related collegialsupport technology-related self-efficacy technology-related autonomy technology-related competencesupport techno-workengagement figure 1. hypothetical models. taken together, the main aims of the current study are to analyse how technology-related individual-, organisationand group-level resources are associated with techno-work engagement among a group of finnish teachers and determine which are the most influential predictors of techno-work engagement. we pose two hypotheses (figure 1): technology-related job resources, namely, collegial support (h1a), autonomy (h1b) and competence support (h1c), are associated with higher techno-work engagement, and technology-related self-efficacy is associated with higher techno-work engagement (h2). based on prior findings and theoretical formulations, it is not possible to hypothesise which predictors are the most influential. in practise, we tested two hypothetical models, as shown in figure 1. the first model (model 1) tested how three technology-related job resources – technology-related collegial support, technology-related autonomy and technology-related competence support – are associated with techno-work engagement. in the second model (model 2), technology-related self-efficacy as an individual resource was added to the model to test whether technology-related job resources and an individual resource together are associated with techno-work engagement and which of these are the best predictors of techno-work engagement (figure 1). methods data collection and participants quantitative data were collected from 15 schools in finland as a part of a larger research project. altogether, 183 teachers and principals answered a web-based questionnaire (in finnish). three principals had missing values on the techno-work engagement scale (technowes) and were therefore excluded from the analyses. of the remaining 180 respondents, 137 (76%) were females, and their mean age was 45 years. the respondents were class teachers (52.2%), subject teachers (43.3%) and principals (4.4%). measures techno-work engagement was measured with the technowes (mäkiniemi et al., 2019), which captures positive well-being aspects of technology use at work. the technowes consists of nine items that represent the three aspects of techno-work engagement (i.e. techno_vigor, techno_dedication, and techno_absorption; measured with three items each). the respondents were asked to evaluate how often they have certain kinds of feelings and thoughts using a 7-point scale (1 = never; 7 = daily). an example of an item describing techno_vigor is ‘when i utilise technology in my work, i feel that i am bursting with energy.’ an exemplary item measuring techno_dedication is ‘i am enthusiastic about utilising technology in my job.” finally, an example techno_absorption item is ‘i feel happy when i am immersed in using technology in my work.’ the respondents were asked to think about educational technology in particular when answering. technology-related self-efficacy, as an individual workplace resource, was measured by three items (e.g. ‘i feel confident that i have the necessary skills in educational technology’) on a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree; items adapted from wang et al., 2004). technology-related job resources were assessed with three subscales (adapted from lam, cheng, & choy, 2010). technology-related collegial support (e.g. ‘my colleagues support me if i encounter difficulties in using educational technology’), technology-related competence support (e.g. ‘our school provides sufficient training in using educational technology’) and technology-related autonomy (e.g. ‘i use educational technology voluntarily in my teaching’) were each measured with three items on a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree; for the finnish versions of the items, see mäkiniemi et al., 2017). data analysis first, the mean scores were calculated for each main variable, and differences between gender (calculated by an independent sample t-test) and teacher type (calculated by a one-way analysis of variance, anova) were analysed with ibm spss 22. subsequently, structural equation modelling (sem) was used to identify the antecedents of techno-work engagement. the hypotheses were tested with smartpls 3, which is based on the partial least squares (pls) sem theory. a pls-sem modelling approach was developed to maximise the explained variance of the dependent variable (hair, ringle, & sarstedt, 2011; hair, hult, & ringle, 2017). this approach was appropriate in this study due to the non-normality of the data and the small sample size (n = 180). additionally, pls-sem is considered appropriate for exploratory research and the early stages of theory development (hair, sarstedt, ringle, & mena, 2012). as we were interested in testing and comparing the antecedents of techno-work engagement, which is a recently developed concept, the explorative nature of pls modelling was advantageous for our study (henseler, ringle, sinkovics, 2009). results the level of techno-work engagement was quite high (m = 3.93, sd = 1.49). there was no statistically significant difference between females (m = 3.86, sd = 1.46) and males (m = 4.17, sd = 1.57; t(178) = 1.21, p = .229). however, there were differences between different types of teachers (f(2, 177) = 6.78, p = .001). post-hoc comparisons conducted with the scheffe test indicated that the mean score for principals (m = 5.71, sd = 1.26) was significantly higher than those for class teachers (m = 3.75, sd = 1.37) and subject teachers (m = 3.97, sd = 1.54) at p <. 01 (table 1). table 1. descriptive statistics for the study variables (n = 180). all female (n = 137) male (n = 43) class teacher (n = 94) subject teacher (n = 78) principal (n = 8) m sd m sd m sd m sd m sd m sd 1. techno-work engagement 3.93 1.49 3.86 1.46 4.17 1.57 3.75 1.37 3.97 1.54 5.71 1.26 2. technology-related self-efficacy (individual) 2.98 1.02 2.79 0.98 3.58 0.89 2.94 1.01 2.97 1.04 3.54 0.75 3. technology-related collegial support (job) 3.83 0.86 3.77 0.89 4.01 0.75 3.80 0.76 3.80 0.99 4.38 0.55 4. technology-related competence support (job) 3.26 0.77 3.21 0.77 3.45 0.76 3.23 0.75 3.23 0.78 4.04 0.58 5. technology-related autonomy (job) 4.09 0.63 4.01 0.60 4.35 0.65 4.05 0.56 4.11 0.70 4.42 0.77 outer model the assessment of pls models is twofold; an acceptable judgement of the outer model allows one to proceed with the inner model evaluation. the outer model is assessed by analysing the reliability and validity of the constructs. reliability and validity are determined for reflective indicators based on factor loadings, composition reliability (cr), average of variance extracted (ave) and discriminant validity (henseler et al., 2009). the estimated loadings of the reflective indicators were all high (0.58–0.92) and statistically significant (see appendix 1). statistical significance was achieved by the bootstrap procedure using 5,000 samples. the composite reliability (cr) of constructs can be regarded as more suitable than cronbach’s alpha when using the pls method (hair et al., 2012). cr values indicate the reliability and consistency of constructs (table 2) (hair et al., 2011). convergent validity of constructs is achieved when ave values are greater than 0.51. using the fornell–larcker criterion to assess the discriminant validity between the constructs, it was determined that the square roots of the aves of each construct were larger than the constructs’ correlations with each other (table 2) (fornell & larcker, 1981). table 2. construct validity, reliability, discriminant validity, correlations, means and standard deviations for constructs (pls models, n = 180). cr1 ave2 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) technology-related self-efficacy (1) 0.915 0.783 0.885 technology-related collegial support (2) 0.914 0.781 0.291 0.884 technology-related autonomy (3) 0.811 0.592 0.502 0.422 0.770 technology-related competence support (4) 0.760 0.518 0.387 0.397 0.375 0.720 techno-work engagement (5) 0.949 0.673 0.529 0.274 0.511 0.425 0.821 mean 2.98 3.82 4.08 3.28 3.94 sd 1.00 0.87 0.65 0.75 1.50 1 composite reliability, 2 average variance extracted. inner model to establish the role of technology-related self-efficacy in techno-work engagement, we tested the two models shown in figure 1. in model 1, three exogenous variables explain an endogenous variable (h1a,b,c). model 2 includes an additional exogenous variable, technology-related self-efficacy (h2). to establish the additional explained variance of techno-work engagement, we compared the predictive relevance of the models using the squared coefficient of determination (r2) and blindfolding procedure (stone-geisser’s q2). using r2 values as a criterion to assess endogenous variables, we employed chin’s (1998) boundaries (0.67, 0.33 and 0.15 as substantial, moderate and weak, respectively). according to these boundaries, the first model was interpreted as moderate (see table 3). the path coefficients of technology-related job resources to techno-work engagement met expectations, excluding the path from technology-related collegial support, which lacked statistical significance (t statistics < 1.96) and was therefore interpreted as zero. taken together, in model 1, two job resources, namely, technology-related autonomy and technology-related competence support, were statistically significantly and positively associated with the techno-work engagement; thus, hypotheses h1b and h1c were supported. however, unexpectedly, technology-related collegial support was not statistically significantly related to techno-work engagement, and therefore hypothesis h1a was not supported. to better understand this finding, we performed an additional analysis: estimation of a model with only one exogenous variable (technology-related collegial support) for techno-work engagement and comparison with model 1 indicated that correlation between job resources reduced the separate effect of collegial support in model 1. this may be due to multicollinearity problems, as technology-related job resources are highly correlated by nature. adding technology-related self-efficacy into model 2 resulted in higher r2 and q2 values (table 3). in addition to r2 and q2 values, inner model assessments should consider cohen’s f2 values and the magnitude and direction of the path coefficients (henseler et al., 2009). considering the magnitude of the estimated path coefficients and effect sizes, we found that technology-related self-efficacy had the strongest impact on techno-work engagement (β= 0.311, f2=0.112; table 3, figure 2). both technology-related autonomy and competence support were positive and statistically significant, with path coefficients of 0.286 and 0.205, respectively. using cohen’s (1998) limits to interpret f2 values, the effect sizes of self-efficacy, autonomy and competence support varied from weak to medium. the collegial support path was interpreted as zero (t < 1.96) in this model. taken together, model 2, which in addition to three job resources includes an individual resource (technology-related self-efficacy), had slightly better predictive power than model 1. further, in model 2, technology-related self-efficacy had the strongest unique contribution to techno-work engagement, followed by technology-related autonomy and technology-related competence support. therefore, hypotheses h2, h1b and h1c were supported, and again unexpectedly technology-related collegial support was not statistically significantly related to techno-work engagement (c.f. h1a). table 3. standardised path coefficients and t statistics of compared models and effect sizes for model 2. model 1 model 2 path coeff. t statistic path coeff. t statistic f2 technology-related self-efficacy 🡒 techno-work engagement 0.311** 4.189 0.112 technology-related collegial support 🡒 techno-work engagement -0.009 0.105 -0.019 0.237 0.000 technology-related autonomy 🡒 techno-work engagement 0.416** 6.656 0.286** 4.222 0.088 technology-related competence support 🡒 techno-work engagement 0.272** 3.937 0.205** 3.198 0.052 r2 0.33 0.39 q2 0.20 0.24 ** indicates statistical significance at a risk level of 0.01. figure 2. inner model path coefficients and their statistical significance. ** indicates statistical significance at a risk level of 0.01. discussion the aims of the study were to explore how technology-related workplace resources are related to techno-work engagement among a group of finnish teachers and determine which predictors of techno-work engagement are the most influential. we hypothesised that technology-related job resources are associated with higher techno-work engagement (h1a,b,c) and that technology-related self-efficacy is associated with higher techno-work engagement (h2). the current study is novel in its positive focus; prior studies have focused on negative experiences and a lack of well-being related to the use of educational technology in teaching (e.g. al-fudail et al., 2008). the findings of the statistical analysis show that teachers experience positive technology-related well-being quite often (i.e. at least nearly on a weekly basis), which supports the notion that techno-work engagement is an important phenomenon (c.f.mäkiniemi et al., 2017; mäkiniemi et al., 2019). consequently, when framing the digitalisation of schools as an emerging phenomenon in the media and when speaking about the use of educational technology at schools or in public, it is important to take into account and highlight its associations with teacher well-being (i.e. to focus on its positive aspects, not just the stressful aspects, which currently seems to be a more common frame of reference). as expected, techno-work engagement was positively correlated with all workplace resources. further, the key findings of the main analysis indicated that technology-related self-efficacy made the strongest unique contribution to techno-work engagement (model 2), which supports our hypothesis (h2; i.e. technology-related self-efficacy is associated with techno-work engagement). in addition, technology-related autonomy and competence support were relevant to the promotion of teachers’ technology-related well-being (based on models 1 and 2). hence, h1 b and c were also supported. the findings support the basic assumption of the job demands-resources theory: a combination of job resources (e.g. autonomy) and personal resources (e.g. self-efficacy) predict work engagement (e.g. nielsen et al., 2017; schaufeli & bakker, 2004; ventura et al., 2015). further, our findings are in line with prior studies indicating that self-efficacy is an important personal resource and is associated with higher work engagement (nielsen et al., 2017; skaalvik & skaalvik, 2014; xanthopoulou et al., 2007). unexpectedly, technology-related collegial (i.e. social) support was not associated with techno-work engagement. therefore, h1a was not supported. this may be due to the high correlation between technology-related autonomy, competency support and collegial support. this finding could also be explained by the fact that teachers still work very independently and autonomously or that those who are highly engaged in technology-related work do not feel the need for support. the role of technology-related collegial support in teacher well-being needs more attention in future studies, as the development of technology-related self-efficacy and technology-related competence support requires shared collaboration (i.e. collegial activities), as explained in more detail below. a key limitation of the study is that the sample was quite small and not nationally representative. further, in the current study, we focused on the main effects between workplace resources and techno-work engagement. since the study of techno-work engagement is in its early stages, we considered this to be a suitable approach. however, there seem to be complex relationships between work engagement, personal resources and job resources. for example, personal resources have been shown to mediate the relationship between job resources and engagement and influence the perception of job resources (xanthopoulou et al., 2007, xanthopoulou, bakker, demerouti, & schaufeli, 2009). therefore, as an additional analysis, we tested the mediating model that included paths from technology-related work resources to self-efficacy. although the paths from collegial support and autonomy to self-efficacy were positive and significant, the predictive relevance of the model did not improve. since the pls method emphasises prediction, the redundant paths were omitted. finally, we believe future studies should consider the broader context of the schools, as a community-oriented approach has been found to enhance the integration of educational technology (niemi, kynäslahti, & vahtivuori-hänninen, 2013), and in the current study we did not focus on all the workplace resources presented by nielsen et al. (2017). therefore, in the future, the effect of leader-level workplace resources on techno-work engagement should be analysed. in addition, the current study was quantitative by nature, which means that it could only answer certain types of research questions, such as how workplace resources are associated with techno-work engagement, how often teachers experience techno-work engagement and whether there are differences between respondent groups. evidently, there is also a need for qualitative research since there are still many unanswered questions, which are not possible to answer using a quantitative questionnaire. interesting questions for qualitative inspection could include why some teachers perceive the use of educational technology as inspiring while some experience it as more stressful, the role of workplace resources in educational technology and how teachers in practise tackle technostress and enhance their technology-related well-being. our main findings indicate the importance of three workplace resources – technology-related self-efficacy, technology-related autonomy and technology-related competence support – in the context of techno-work engagement. therefore, we propose some key practical recommendations for schools. first, in terms of technology-related autonomy, teachers should have considerable freedom regarding the selection and use of educational technology. their opinions and views should be heard, and they should be taking part in decision-making. this is also important because teachers usually have pedagogical expertise and knowledge about the motivation, learning preferences and abilities of their students and can thus evaluate the pedagogical value of the novel technological devices more critically than administrative personnel can. however, this kind of participatory approach requires high trust in teachers’ know-how on the part of school leaders and other managers. second, prior studies indicate that concrete ways to enhance teachers’ technology-related self-efficacy include successful (and vicarious) teaching experiences, concrete instruction in how to utilise educational technology in practice, intentional goal-setting and encouraging feedback on teachers’ performance (e.g. bandura, 1997; wang et al., 2004). it is worth noting that enhancing teachers’ technology-related self-efficacy cannot be done in isolation or alone. for example, vicarious teaching experiences and receiving constructive feedback require the potential to follow others work, shared discussions and collaboration. consequently, the development of technology-related self-efficacy is likely challenging in schools in which the individualistic school culture is strong and teacher collaboration is not supported (for a review of the benefits of teacher collaboration, see vangrieken, dochy, raes, & kyndt, 2015). third, technology-related competence development could be supported in practise by discussing and clarifying expectations regarding the use of educational technology in teaching (e.g. how and how often teachers should use educational technology at school and what is perceived as valuable and important when considering the use of educational technology). in addition, teachers must have continuing opportunities to develop their expertise (e.g. through relevant and suitable courses). finally, a lack of time should not limit the possibilities of teachers to learn and integrate novel educational solutions into their teaching practises. the current study provided new knowledge about the technology-related well-being experiences of teachers and supported the notion that, in general, resources that enhance work engagement are also important predictors of techno-work engagement. note: this research project was supported by finnish work environment fund (project number: 115412). the authors would like to thank antti syvänen, sannu syrjä, jarmo viteli, and kirsi heikkilä-tammi for collaboration in the project. references albrecht, s. l. 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(2009). reciprocal relationships between job resources, personal resources, and work engagement. journal of vocational behavior, 74(3), 235–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2008.11.003 appendix 1 measurement (outer) model of the constructs. standardised indicator loadings and respective t-statistics. standardised loading t-statistic techno-work engagement techno-work engagement_enthusiastic 0.800 24.316 techno-work engagement_inspired 0.860 42.206 techno-work engagement_proud 0.798 24.871 techno-work engagement_persevere 0.640 11.646 techno-work engagement_energy 0.829 32.957 techno-work engagement_vigorous 0.859 40.572 techno-work engagement_happy immersed 0.875 43.634 techno-work engagement_immersed 0.821 27.699 techno-work engagement_carried away 0.877 48.088 technology-related self-efficacy technology-related self-efficacy_know how to utilize 0.850 37.314 technology-related self-efficacy_able to help 0.896 42.257 technology-related self-efficacy_adequate skills 0.907 56.264 technology-related competence support technology-related competence support_training 0.743 11.102 technology-related competence support_time 0.812 15.417 technology-related competence support_what is expected 0.586 6.580 technology-related autonomy technology-related autonomy_opinions respected 0.803 15.491 technology-related autonomy_voluntariness 0.858 35.412 technology-related autonomy_freedom to decide 0.629 6.741 technology-related collegial support technology-related collegial support_colleagues support 0.842 17.073 technology-related collegial support_tips 0.885 18.008 technology-related collegial support_collaboration 0.922 22.368 microsoft word paulsen cooperative online education.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn cooperative online education morten flate paulsen professor, the norwegian school of information technology (nith) e-mail: mfp@nki.no abstract cooperative learning seeks to develop virtual learning environments that allow students to have optimal individual freedom within online learning communities. the pedagogical and administrative challenges with regard to accommodating both individual freedom and cooperation are explained in the theory of cooperative freedom. this article shows that cooperative learning can be implemented successfully through a set of instruments or means. to illustrate this with current examples, the article presents nki distance education’s surveys and experiences with cooperative learning. the article also discusses how issues such as web 2.0, transparency, learning partners and individual progression plans relate to cooperative online education. keywords: online education, e-learning, cooperative learning, individual freedom, virtual learning environment, learning community, collaboration, and flexibility. introduction this article builds on the theory of cooperative freedom. the first version of the theory was published in the monograph from bulletin boards to electronic universities (paulsen 1992). it was updated in the book online education and learning management systems (paulsen 2003), and further versions with more examples are available in english (paulsen 2006), portuguese (2007) and norwegian (paulsen 2007). the theory is also presented at several international conferences where feedback from participants has contributed to refinement of the theory. it is based on three theoretical perspectives on distance education described by keegan (1996, 56). the three perspectives are: autonomy and independence (e.g. moore 1988), industrialization (e.g. peters 1988), and interaction and communication (e.g. holmberg 1988). the article illustrates the theory of cooperative freedom including recent feedback from international colleagues, current system developments and participatory observations at nki distance education, as well as examples and surveys from nki. having about 14.000 students, nki is scandinavia’s largest provider of distance education and among the european megaproviders of online education (paulsen 2007). about two thirds of the students are enrolled in nki’s more than 450 online courses. to handle this, nki operates a selfdeveloped lms system named sesam (paulsen and rekkedal 2003). it is developed to support cooperative freedom and transparency in a large-scale online education environment. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 2 this article also presents results from four evaluations which included questions about nki’s cooperative tools and services. they are documented in three internal reports (paulsen 2005, 2006 and 2008). the first survey received about 910 responses, the second 360, the third 540 and the last 890 responses. cooperative learning learning theories can be individual, collaborative or cooperative, and online education technology can support the theories. in a white paper from epic group plc on personalization and e-learning, (clark 2004, p26) concludes that technology may support both individual learning and access to social networks. in the article collaborative versus cooperative learning, panitz (2003) starts to point out that there is a certain overlap and inter-concept usage between cooperative and collaborative learning and that it is an elusive goal to find a distinction between their definitions. in this theory, however, the three terms are clearly distinguished and defined as follows: individual learning provides superior individual flexibility, but very limited affinity to a learning community. it has a strong position in online education delivered by institutions with a tradition in distance education. collaborative learning requires participation in a learning community, but limits individual flexibility. one may say that collaborative learning requires that students sink or swim together. collaborative learning is common in online education offered by traditional face-to-face institutions. cooperative learning focuses on opportunities to encourage both individual flexibility and affinity to a learning community. cooperative learning seeks to foster some benefits from individual freedom and other benefits from cooperation in online learning communities. it thrives in virtual learning environments that emphasize individual freedom within online learning communities. after some personal communication, stephen downes (2007) inferred in a blog entry that another way to distinguish between the three terms is to claim that individual learning is conducted alone, collaborative learning depends on groups and cooperative learning takes place in networks. the differences between the three learning theories are illustrated in figure 1. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 3 . individu al learning alone cooperative learning in networks 6 individual learning environment cooperative learning environment collaborative learning environment individual flexibility a ff in ity to le ar ni ng c om m un ity collaborative learning in groups figure 1. individual, cooperative and collaborative learning environments well-designed virtual cooperative learning environments build on a number of means that support individual flexibility and other means that facilitate affinity to a learning community. the theory of cooperative freedom is based on the following three pillars: 1. voluntary, but attractive participation 2. means promoting individual flexibility 3. means promoting affinity to learning community cooperative learning is voluntary and attractive a cornerstone in cooperative online education is that cooperation should be voluntary, but attractive and appealing. it should be offered as an appealing opportunity to those who seek cooperation. the challenge is therefore primarily to help those who are interested in cooperation to engage in a network of learners and learning resources. in addition it is necessary to stimulate the rest to contribute to the learning community. this means that students should not be encouraged or tempted to completely withdraw from the learning community. total seclusion is not desirable. students should be stimulated to be visible as potential partners and resources for others. transparent information could be a huge cooperative resource. the dilemma is that students, who do not contribute to the community, cannot be perceived as learning resources for others. the potential of the learning community will then be diluted. so, one may argue that a successful cooperative learning community may depend on members who are committed to serve as resources for the learning community. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 4 nki’s cooperative philosophy for online learning nki has developed the following philosophy on cooperative online learning: nki distance education facilitates individual freedom within a learning community in which online students serve as mutual resources without being dependent on each other. version 6 of sesam, nki’s learning management system, was developed in 2007 when there was much focus on web 2.0 services. therefore, it was based on a systems development philosophy stating that the services should be personal, interactive, dynamic and transparent. they should further stimulate students and teachers to produce, share and refine content they all will benefit from. transparency supports cooperation transparency is important for cooperative online education. people can cooperate more easily if they know something about each other and have access to some common information and services. cooperation will benefit when general and personal information related to the learning and the learners is available directly or indirectly to the learning community. this transparent information may include personal information about the users and statistics related to the users’ application of the online tools. it may further include work students and teachers provide in online notebooks, blogs and discussion forums as well as results derived from quizzes, surveys, and assignments. transparency implies that users to a certain extent gain insight and are visible, but it is important to find a suitable transparency level. the theory hypothesizes that transparency is an important driver for improved quality, and that it has the following three positive effects on quality: • preventive quality improvement; because we are prone to provide better quality when we know that others have access to the information and contributions we provide • constructive quality improvement; because we may learn from others when we have access to their data and contributions • reactive quality improvement; because we may receive feedback from others when they have access to our data and contributions transparency may reduce the amount of low quality contributions and make high quality work more accessible as paragons for others. in transparent learning environments, poor contributions from teachers and course designers cannot easily be hidden behind closed doors. it is important to realize that transparency must be handled carefully with regard to privacy issues. the users must be confident that privacy is well taken care of. they should be able to choose their preferred privacy level and understand how this choice controls how much of their personal data and contributions that will be available to others. the challenge of finding the correct transparency level is illustrated in figure 2. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 5 figure 2. finding the right balance between transparency and privacy a few examples of information that may be more or less transparent in online education are presented in table 1. it is interesting to discuss the consequences of making the matrix items transparent to various user groups. who should be allowed to see: self teachers the class all classes the teachers’ response time? yes yes no no when the teachers’ latest was logged on? yes yes yes yes student grades? yes no no no the students’ progress plans? yes yes yes yes student submissions? how many assignments a student has completed? the students’ assessment of the teachers’ performance? the teachers’ feedback on student assignments? the teachers’ contributions in their online forums? the teachers’ personal presentations? the teachers’ private and mobile telephone numbers? which courses each teacher teaches? how many students each teacher serves? table 1. transparency matrix that could be used to discuss transparency levels information that is too personal to be transparent could still be very useful if it is presented as statistics or averages. individual grades are usually only presented for the student and the teacher. however, it might be useful to make average course grades available for everyone. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 6 social software and web 2.0 support cooperative learning the internet trends that are most interesting for online education today are related to social software and web 2.0. some well-known examples are blog, wiki, rss and social bookmarking. the most interesting characteristic of web 2.0 is the development of social networks and communities that are hugely successful since the users produce, share and refine information of mutual interest and benefit for all the community members. some relevant examples are wikipedia, youtube, flickr, slideshare, diigo and facebook. some online educators argue that social software and online communities will conquer learning management systems (lms) as the predominant online learning environment. they argue that personal learning environments (ple) in which students pick and utilize various social software services and online communities are more flexible and develop faster than existing lms systems. one may however argue that few students and teachers have enough competence and resources to set up ples themselves. at the same time, providers of online education need the structure and administrative tools available in lms systems to handle large-scale online education costeffectively. therefore the challenge is to improve the lms systems by adapting tools and services based on the philosophy and features in social software and online communities. cooperative evaluation and quality barometers evaluation and quality control is crucial but challenging in large-scale online education based on individual progress plans. some of the challenges are related to the following questions: • when should it be done – once a year – near the end of the course continuously? • what should be evaluated if the aim is to improve quality? • how should the results be presented, and how transparent should they be to have the best impact? • how could evaluation be automated and managed with a reasonable workload? in cooperative learning environments, the findings and results should be reasonably transparent, and relevant information should be available to the appropriate user groups so that they can learn from the results and understand that they are members of a larger learning community. nki developed an evaluation tool which was used for the first time in 2003. it has later been used in all nki surveys referred to in this article. the system allows nki to develop common forms of questionnaires and evaluation forms. each form can be assigned to one or more user categories, e.g. teachers, students in one course or all students. a user may only respond once and all replies are anonymous. when a user responds, the evaluation database is updated and the user is granted access to a personal evaluation report. the transparent reports that are generated from the database vary according to the user category: • students may see a report showing qualitative statistics of interest to students in their course • teachers may see the same report as the students with additional teacher information. the teacher information could come from certain parts of the questionnaire or from comparative data in other courses. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 7 • administrative staff may see comparative reports showing responses from all user groups and questionnaires. this means for example that one can compare responses in all courses. this could for example be used to identify teachers who receive excellent evaluations or courses that receive worrying evaluations. one weakness with the existing system is that it is not meant for continuous evaluation. therefore, nki has started integrating a new feature, termed quality barometer, which continuously records evaluation data and presents dynamic reports on important indicators of quality. means promoting individual flexibility in cooperative learning, individual flexibility and freedom is paramount. as illustrated in figure 3, the theory of cooperative freedom (paulsen 2003) suggests that important flexibility facets are: time, space, pace, medium, access, and content. in his article distance learning – social software’s killer ap? terry anderson suggests an additional facet: i have suggested to paulsen the need for a seventh freedom: that of freedom of relationship, where learners are allowed to engage in the type of learning relationship with other learners that best fits their individual social needs and capacities (anderson 2005, 3). the freedom of relationship is however so central to the theory that it is included in the middle of figure 3. it illustrates that there is a tension between the urge for individual independence and the necessity to contribute in a cooperative learning community. it is therefore necessary to find a reasonable balance between individual flexibility and participation in the learning community. figure 3. facets of flexibility discussed in the theory of cooperative freedom in personalisation and e-learning, clark (2004) discusses individual flexibility regarding: learning style, motivation, portfolios, where to learn, what to learn, when to learn and how to learn. he infers (clark 2004, p6) that: “many simply want a predictable system that works rather than a profusion of choices. theorists may want to complicate things but simplicity is often a virtue in practice”. it should also be emphasized that flexibility is not easy to provide. individual flexibility tends to add costs, administrative difficulties and pedagogical challenges. in the book flexible learning in a digital world, collis and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 8 moonen (2001, 16) present several factors that constrain learning flexibility. they state that flexibility could be unmanageable, not acceptable, not affordable, and not realistic. individual progress plans one of the most strategic decisions online education providers need to make is whether the students’ progress plans should be individual or collective. this is a decisive dilemma and challenge for cooperative learning, because its focus on individual flexibility favors individual progress plans while collective progress plans make cooperation easier. it is possible to use various schemes for progress planning as illustrated in the following three models with varying degrees of enrollment flexibility: • traditional universities enroll students once a year. • some institutions enroll distance education students once per month. • nki enrolls students every day. this article focuses on how cooperative learning is stimulated within nki’s model, the only one of the three models that supports individual progress planning. in learning environments with individual pacing, tools for individual progress planning could support planning and tracking of student progress. such tools could provide various progress reports and opportunities to initiate automatic and manual reminders to procrastinating students. the tools could: • help students develop individual progress plans in courses and study programs • provide various progress reports allowing students, teachers and staff to detect procrastination and initiate a set of services to help students proceed • reduce dropout rates by improving support to and communication with procrastinating students • suggest potential learning partners based on the database of progress plans as shown in figure 4, nki has integrated tools for individual progress planning in its lms system sesam. all students are encouraged to register their individual progress plans, and they may change their plans whenever they like. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 9 figure 4. nki’s planning tools allow individual students to register submission dates for all course assignments by clicking the chosen assignment number and date in the pop-up calendar. one challenge regarding individual progress planning is to decide how voluntary or obligatory it should be. the more students using the planning system, the more useful it is for the community. as illustrated in figure 5, the students’ contact list would be less useful if it only showed planning information for some of the students. contacts teacher: astrid m. administrative contact person: diane d. profile name postal code postal area last log in next planned submission learning partner wanted jeanette a. 7863 overhalla 06.01.08 2: 20.03.08 invite henning c. 3044 drammen 03.03.08 4: 15.03.08 invite nils petter h. abroad uk 16.05.07 course completed figure 5. nki’s contact list showing some progress plan information for fictitious students nki introduced the planning system as a voluntary option in may 2004. in february 2005, about 2200 students had registered their plans. from october 2006 the number has been quite stabile around 3900. this is a large number, but it still constitutes less than 50% of the student population. three surveys (paulsen 2005, 2006, 2008) answered by 154, 336 and 763 students, revealed that the respondents were very positive to the planning seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 10 system. in the three surveys, 88%, 80% and 87% of the responses were either very satisfied or satisfied with it and only 1%, 3% and 2% were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. the remaining responses were either neutral or expressed no opinion. in the qualitative responses, the system was referred to as simple and motivating. some stated that it made planning easier and resulted in improved progression. a typical comment was: it helps me keep up a steady study progression so that i finish the work before my exam. following-up individual progress plans in a cooperative virtual learning environment, following-up individual progress plans could be supported by the individual student, automated e-mail and sms messages, tutors, administrators and cooperative students. the most interesting strategy is to allow students to receive information about other students’ progress plans, but some oppose transparency that allows others to view their plans. one may however argue that these students may be the ones that will benefit most from having more focus on their progress plans. since the fall of 2004, nki has gradually introduced, tested and evaluated its system for following-up individual progress plans. when students log on, they see the number of days to each of their planned submissions. if one or more submissions are overdue, the student is reminded. the teachers receive similar information for all their students when they log on. the example in figure 6 illustrates the type of information the nki follow-up system provides for teachers. please remind delayed students the following students are more than 20 days behind their individual progress plans. send them an e-mail reminder by clicking their names. then they will disappear from your list. user id name course s12345 mary s. accounting 2, 4589e planned submissions according to the students’ progress plans, you can expect 16 submissions the next 7 days. figure 6. planning system services presented at a teacher’s web page nki is also testing, improving and contemplating good procedures to remind and encourage students who are delayed. the following means have been introduced: • standard e-mail reminders generated automatically and regularly by the lms • tools that make it easy for teachers to send personal e-mail reminders to procrastinating students • tools that help administrative personnel send seasonal bulk reminders to procrastinating students • student access to catalogues that provide information about other students’ progress plans. this provides additional incentives for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 11 maintaining up-to-date progress plans. some students may contact and encourage peers who have problems following their plans. the reminders must be activated in a proper sequence and with adequate intervals so that students perceive them as personal and informative, not as irksome spam. it is also necessary to purge overly overdue plans so that the users perceive the plans as real. plans that are more than 100 days delayed seem to be more annoying than useful. further, there is a danger that the system unintentionally exposes dropouts to public contempt. in his master thesis, fagerberg (2005) interviewed 15 psychology students about their evaluation of nki’s online tools. he (fagerberg 2005, 4) concluded that systems and tools for planning and following-up were perceived as more important than tools for collaboration and social interaction. two surveys (paulsen 2006, paulsen 2008) answered by 336 and 763 nki students revealed that the respondents were positive to the follow-up system. in the surveys, 66% and 71% of the responses were very satisfied or satisfied, 4% and 4% were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. the remaining responses were either neutral or expressed no opinion. asynchronous communication supports flexibility in time asynchronous communication offers much individual flexibility in time, while synchronous communication makes students dependent on each other. e-mail and discussion forums are examples of asynchronous communication. chat, videoconferences, telephone conferences, and face-to-face classes are examples of synchronous communication. because of its flexibility in time, asynchronous communication is the preferred form of communication in cooperative learning environments. synchronous communication could however contribute to students’ sense of belonging to a learning community. therefore synchronous communication could be a voluntary option, but obligatory synchronous communication should be avoided if possible. discussion forums are excellent means to promote cooperative learning communities. students and teachers should be encouraged to use the forums instead of sending e-mail whenever others could benefit from reading the messages. the forums are usually organized and structured in topics or threads. as the number of contributions grows, the structure often becomes unwieldy and disorganized. when students have individual progress plans, it is even harder to organize and maintain a suitable structure. so, the users should be able to easily find new contributions and to sort the contributions by topic, date, and contributor to make it easier to follow the appropriate contributions. when using individual progress plans, it is especially important to stick to a structure that clearly channels the contributions to the appropriate sections or study unit. if so, students can more easily find the contributions that are relevant for them. to support this, the administrators of nki’s about 350 forums usually structure them with one section per study unit. these are fixed sections that cannot be altered by students. submission system nki’s submission system was initially developed to track and supervise the time from students’ submissions to teachers’ grading. it automatically records the time of submission and the time of grading. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 12 by channeling both submissions and registration of grades through webinterfaces, the lms system can provide features and reports related to: • following-up the individual progression plans • response time between submissions and registration of grades since the submission system also files all student submissions and teacher responses, it provides ample opportunities to develop cooperative services that allow the owners to give other students or teachers access to them. this can for example be developed further to include functionality for cooperative portfolio evaluation and for submission of cooperative papers. quality barometer for teacher response time three nki surveys (paulsen 2005, 2006 and 2008) maintain that swift response time is essential for student satisfaction and perception of a tutor’s work. in cooperative learning environments with individual progress plans and many courses, it could be wise but difficult to continually supervise response times for all teachers. this is a controversial issue, since some teachers may resist the idea of being supervised this way. nki has handled this by integrating a response barometer in the lms system that records the time from a student submits a paper to the teacher registers the corresponding grade. the system allows nki to provide the information at the teachers’ web page shown in figure 7. nkis response aim: 2 days. my average last 90/180 days: 1/1 days. overall average last 90/180 days: 2/3 days. figure 7. response barometer that presents current response statistics at the teachers’ web-page the response barometer was introduced in may 2004 and it resulted in much discussion in the teachers’ online forum. a few teachers voiced strong criticism, doubts and reservations. others suggested improvements. initially, the system showed average response times with two decimal points. this was not a wise choice because we never intended such detailed supervision and because the system was not accurate enough to provide correct decimals. several teachers claimed that the statistics showed an average response time that was a fraction too high. however, it was interesting to observe that among the 150 teachers, the overall average response time accumulated over the last six months dropped month by month during the fall of 2004. in october it showed 3.97 days, in november 3.06 days and in december 2.76 days. since then, the overall average response time has been between two or three days, except from the summer holidays. a few teachers still have an unacceptable long response time, so in april 2008 nki introduced an automated e-mail message to teachers who had not registered a grade after seven days. means promoting affinity to learning communities there are a number of means that could be used to strengthen affinity to virtual learning communities. transparency and web 2.0 related services are central to these means. it is paramount that the participants are visible and accessible. in addition, the community members must be urged and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 13 stimulated to contribute to the community and to benefit from it. in the following some of these means are discussed. cooperative student catalogues comprising all courses student catalogues are important tools for showing students that they have access to a learning community. a comprehensive catalogue providing much relevant information about many students is crucial for the learning community. student catalogues usually provide information about all students enrolled in a course. however, if students also can access information about students enrolled in other courses, they may benefit from taking part in a larger learning community. a catalogue that even includes alumni students could be of interest for students who seek advice on courses they consider enrolling in or on future employment. to facilitate cooperation, the student catalogue should include information that makes it easy to initiate and maintain communication. this may be e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, chatting identities etc. that could facilitate electronic communication. it may also include postal codes that could make it easier to identify potential partners for face-to-face meetings. similarly, it may include progress plan information so that students may identify peers who are working with the same study unit as they are. finally, one may argue that student catalogues should include cv-type information to make it possible to search for peers with special competencies. student catalogues must handle privacy issues properly. some information may be regarded as sensitive and require student consent to be included. some students may also oppose inclusion in a student catalogue. the challenge is therefore to find the balance between providing as much relevant information as possible to stimulate cooperation without trespassing on students’ privacy thresholds. a viable solution is to ask students for permission to make the information available for the staff, the student enrolled in the actual course, or all students in all courses. cooperative learner profiles the acronym clip – cooperative learner information profile has evolved as a result of the author’s deliberations on effective cooperative student catalogues. using clips, lms systems may help students find learning partners (study-buddies) that are motivated and fitting for cooperation. clips could herald a new and innovative pedagogy for cooperative learning. clip could provide efficient tools for establishing smaller and larger networks with the right mix of students. it could be used to establish contact between junior students and more experienced students who are willing to function as mentors. it could also be used to establish small colloquial networks based on geographic proximity or compatible progress plans. these networks could result in reduced dropout rates and better learning. based on clip and algorithms for teaming students, the system should suggest partners that have clips that make cooperation interesting. elements from nki’s implementation of clips are illustrated in figure 8 and figure 9. the students should have access to enough information to establish contact and tools to maintain cooperation. however, to develop suitable algorithms for this is probably not a trivial task. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 14 learning partner and privacy level i would like to have a learning partner and i accept that my data is available to my learning partners global everyone on the internet may see my presentation open all nki students may see my presentation limited the students in my course may see my presentation closed only my teachers and the nki staff may see my presentation figure 8. an element from the students’ user interface. name: morten flate paulsen e-mail: mfp@nki.no telephone: mobile: homepage: http://home.nettskolen.com/~morten postal number and area: 1319 bekkestua enrolled: 18. feb 2001 i would like to have a learning partner: yes privacy level: open personal presentation professor of online education doctor of education, pennsylvania state university master of science in engineering, norwegian institute of technology director of development, the nki distance education i have worked with online education since 1986 and published many books, reports and articles about the topic. many of my publications and presentations are available via my personal homepage at http://home.nettskolen.com/~morten/. my book online education and learning management systems is available via www.studymentor.com. i’m on the executive committee for the european distance and e-learning network (eden) and on the european association for distance learning (eadl) r&d committee. figure 9. illustration of the author’s personal presentation in nki’s lms system clips may build on theories, ideas and features discussed in social capital and social software literature. resnick (2002, p1) argues that socio technical capital is a new construct that provides a framework for generating and evaluating technology-mediated social relations. in online education one may think of this as learning capital. in a blog entry, butterfield (2003) characterizes social software as tools that people use to interact with other seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 15 people, employing information about identity, presence, relationships, conversations and groups. even though facebook, one of the very most successful social software services, was developed as a network service for students, social software applied for organized educational purposes at an institutional level seems to be scarce. in norway, the university of tromsø has introduced a social software service (www.hvaskjer.no) to enroll more students from secondary schools, and the norwegian school of management has introduced an online alumni service. in its alumni magazine, the school (2005, 92) states that 9000 alumni students have made use of the service. all alumni students have online contact cards that they may update and supplement with information about their work and professional interest. all alumni students may search the complete database of information in order to find useful resources and contact people. an online survey (paulsen 2005) answered by 154 nki students showed that the majority wanted closer cooperation with one or more students. as many as 64 percent stated that they probably or definitively wanted closer cooperation. only 16 percent responded that they probably or definitively did not want closer cooperation. the verbal comments also showed that many respondents wanted cooperation. relatively many stated that they needed, wanted or missed cooperation and study-buddies. some pointed out that it was difficult to contact other students; others wanted better tools to find partners. on the other hand, there were some respondents who stated that they didn’t need cooperation. they thought cooperation should be voluntary and stated that they preferred to study without being dependant on others. the survey also showed that 71 percent of the respondents were positive or very positive to seeing each other’s progress plans. similarly 76 percent were positive or very positive to getting access to each other’s zip codes. online teachers could also benefit from finding partners for cooperation. therefore, nki provides teachers with a discussion forum and dynamic information that lists contact information for all 200 teachers and the courses they teach. learning partners based on the learning profile concept and a student survey (paulsen 2005), nki introduced a service for learning partners (slåtto and paulsen 2006) in march 2006. the students who want learning partners are asked to: 1. register their personal presentations 2. decide who may access it 3. search for potential learning partners 4. invite somebody to become their learning partner in november 2006, 3100 students had registered a personal presentation and an increasing number includes a personal picture. at the same time, 2500 had indicated their privacy level and preference regarding having learning partners. about 450 of the students had found one or more learning partners. in december 2007, 3900 students had registered a personal presentation. at the same time, 3689 had indicated their privacy level and preference regarding having learning partners as indicated in table 2. about 750 of the students had found one or more learning partners. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 16 privacy level want learning partners don’t want learning partners sum percent closed 79 657 736 20.0 % limited 1192 706 1898 51.5 % open 752 303 1055 28.6 % sum 2023 1666 3689 percent 54.8 % 45.2 % table 2. student preferences regarding learning partners and privacy the first major survey (paulsen 2008) including a question about the learning partner services was answered by 763 nki students. the results showed that 54 % of the responses were very satisfied or satisfied, 2 % were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. the remaining responses were either neutral or expressed no opinion. the report concludes that the service has a potential to be developed further, and that the students need more time to get familiar with the services. cooperative assignments assignments are crucial means to support learning theories. they should consist of tasks and directions. an assignment focusing on one task can easily support individual, cooperative or collaborative learning by varying the assignment directions. this is illustrated in the following example: assignment task: explain the differences between individual learning, cooperative learning and collaborative learning. alternative assignment directions: • individual learning direction: send your submission to your teacher. • cooperative learning direction: discuss the assignment with a colleague or a peer student in your network. write a short summary of the discussion and send it to your teacher. • collaborative learning direction: write a paper in a group with one or two other students and submit it to your teacher. cooperative assessment online assessment could be grouped in four categories (paulsen 2003, page 68): self-assessment, computer assessment, tutor assessment and peer assessment. all categories could have a cooperative flavor if they are designed with transparency and cooperation in mind: • computer based assessment could have a cooperative flavor if students have access to statistics, results or information derived from all or some other students taking the tests. • self-assessment could be cooperative if students are encouraged to exchange self-assessments or may access some statistics or information from other students who have completed selfassessments. • peer assessment is cooperative if students are encouraged to voluntarily assess each other’s work. • teacher assessment could be cooperative if the students have access to some information the tutor provides or derives from assessing other students. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 17 portfolio assessment could support cooperative learning if the system allows students to access and comment on each other’s portfolios. cooperative gating (cog) wells (1992) described gating as a pacing technique that denies students access to information before they have completed all prerequisite assignments. the acronym cog – cooperative gating – has evolved as an nki term. it signals that students must complete a task to get access to a cooperative resource. this could for example be used as a stimulus for motivating students to answer in-text questions. they are allowed to see what others have answered only if they provide an answer others may read. conclusion the evaluation tool developed by nki was used in all four surveys referred to in this article. all four were designed to improve the quality of nki’s online education. several of the questions were included to evaluate and refine the cooperative tools developed by nki. there were between 360 and 910 responses to the four surveys. so, the answers came from a substantial number of students. however, each survey represented less than 10 percent of nki’s online students. each survey was open to all students for approximately two months, but one may question whether the students who chose to answer were representative of the student population. the most recent survey was conducted at the end of 2007. there were 763 students who answered the questionnaire which included nine quantitative and ten qualitative questions. students who were enrolled in more than one course could respond one time per course, so there was altogether close to 900 responses. the results are available in an internal nki report (paulsen 2008) and the main conclusion states that nki can be very satisfied with the results. the responses provide much information about how the students perceive the tools nki has developed to support cooperative learning, and an overview of the responses to the relevant quantitative questions is provided in table 3. how satisfied are you with: v er y s a ti sf ie d s a ti sf ie d n eu tr a l d is sa ti sf ie d v er y d is sa ti sf ie d d o n ’t k n o w / n o o p in io n n u m b er o f re sp o n se s being an online nki student? 334 444 74 31 7 8 898 the teacher’s work? 324 327 114 42 11 73 891 the submission system? 493 302 55 7 2 26 885 the planning system? 426 346 90 21 2 9 894 the follow-up system? 231 400 169 24 7 59 890 the learning partner system? 148 326 271 10 7 130 892 table 3. summary of responses related to nki’s cooperative online education as shown in table 4, some of the questions have been repeated in several of the surveys. the satisfaction indexes show positive trends which indicate that nki’s incremental development of cooperative tools and services has been well received by the respondents. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 18 satisfaction index number of responses how satisfied are you with: f a ll 2 0 0 3 s p ri n g 2 0 0 4 f a ll 2 0 0 5 f a ll 2 0 0 7 f a ll 2 0 0 3 s p ri n g 2 0 0 4 f a ll 2 0 0 5 f a ll 2 0 0 7 being an online nki student? 1.08 1.06 1.12 1.20 911 364 542 898 the teacher’s work? 0.96 1.04 1.14 1.11 839 362 537 891 the submission system? 1.31 1.49 532 885 the planning system? 1.21 1.33 535 894 the follow-up system? 0.91 0.99 533 890 the learning partner system? 0.78 892 the satisfaction index ranges from -2=very dissatisfied to +2=very satisfied table 4. summary of responses in the four surveys the results from the surveys indicate that nki’s focus on a cooperative learning philosophy and incremental development of cooperative tools and services has been received positively by the respondents. author biography morten flate paulsen is professor of online education at nith and director of development at nki distance education (www.nki.no) in norway. he is on the executive committee for the european distance and e-learning network (eden) and on the european association for distance learning (eadl) r&d committee. he has worked with online education since he designed nki’s first learning management system in 1986 and published many books, reports and articles about the topic. many of his publications and presentations are available at his personal homepage at http://home.nettskolen.com/~morten/. his book online education and learning management systems is available via www.studymentor.com. references anderson, t. distance learning – social software’s killer ap? 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(1988). distance teaching and industrial production: a comparative interpretation in outline. in distance education: international perspectives, eds. d. sewart, d. keegan, and b. holmberg, 95-111. london/new york: croom helm/st. martin’s press. resnick, p. (2002). beyond bowling together: socio technical capital. in j. carroll (ed.), human computer interaction in the new millenium. (pp. 247-272). addison-wesley. retrieved july 18, 2005 from seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. n – issue n – 20nn 20 www.si.umich.edu/%7epresnick/papers/stk/resnickstk.pdf. slåtto, t. and m. f. paulsen, (2006). learning partner opportunities for cooperation in distance learning. retrieved november 14, 2006 from www.elearningeuropa.info/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=8294&doclng=6&me nuzone=2 wells, r. (1992). computer-mediated communication for distance education: an international review of design, teaching, and institutional issues. university park: the american center for the study of distance education. digitally competent school organizations – developing supportive organizational infrastructures ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. digitally competent school organizations – developing supportive organizational infrastructures fanny pettersson department of education umeå university email: fanny.pettersson@umu.se abstract while research on digital competences so far has focused on the level of single actors (teachers, pupils, and school leaders), a growing but occasionally overlooked field of research looks at school-level competences when promoting digitalization and educational change. the aim of this study is to explore how schools structure their organizations, institutional infrastructure, and activities as conditions for digitalization. the study relies on interviews with school leaders and educational technologists from five upper secondary schools with extensive experience in digitalization and remote teaching. by using three categories, namely setting the direction, developing people, and developing the organization, as an analytical framework, this study identifies two types of digitally competent school organizations: goaland structureoriented schools and culture-oriented schools. this study’s insights serve as a point of departure for understanding the different ways schools can organize themselves to become comprehensive, stable, and digitally competent organizations and for understanding important challenges related to this process. keywords: digital competence, pedagogical digital competence, digital literacy, digitalization, digital technologies, information and communication technologies (ict), organization, school leaders, teachers introduction in the last decade there has been a rapid growth in digital technologies meaning new possibilities to teach and learn in the context of k-12 (håkansson lindqvist, 2015). however, taking on challenges that comes with digitalization and educational change might not always be an easy process (blau & shamir-inbal, 2017). for digital technologies to become a natural part of schools as organizations, then schools are challenged to deal with both structural, educational and cultural transformation work in both classrooms and organizational structures (hansson, 2013). this often calls for transformation in the norms and visions as well as educational changes in teaching and learning activities (hauge, 2014; olofsson & lindberg, 2014; pettersson, 2015). important aspects for taking on these educational and organizational challenges have for example been the development of digital competences among teachers, pupils and school leaders (hansson, 2013). one example is teachers’ competences to integrate technology, pedagogy and content in the teaching design (mishra & koehler, 2008). school leaders need to understand and support the technical and educational needs in the organization (avidov-ungar & shamir-inbal, 2017). however, while research on the digital competences for taking on transformational challenges so far has focused on the level of single mailto:fanny.pettersson@umu.se seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 133 actors, such as teachers, pupils, and school leaders, a growing but occasionally overlooked field of research is the specific focus on school organizations and their abilities to become digitally competent in their way of structuring for, organizing for and supporting digitalization (from, 2017; pettersson, 2017; vanderlinde & van braak, 2010). ottestad (2008), vanderlinde and van braak (2010), and wastiau et al. (2013) argued for example that school organizations’ competences in building and structuring the organization as well as how they construct and mobilize supportive resources is crucial for supporting the work in these schools. however, research on how schools organize to facilitate digitalization seems to be rather limited (ottestad, 2008; pettersson, 2017; vanderlinde & van braak, 2010; wastiau et al., 2013). this paper deals with these challenges by exploring how schools can become digitally competent in their way of structuring their organizations, institutional infrastructure, and activities as conditions for digitalization. the specific aim is to explore components contributing to a supportive organization as perceived by the school leadership: school leaders and educational technologists. the following research questions are posted: how do schools structure their organizations, institutional infrastructure, and activities as conditions for digitalization? what differences in ways schools structure their organizations can be seen? review of research the concept of digital competence has been used in different educational contexts to describe the competences needed by teachers, pupils and school leaders working and learning in a digitalized knowledge society (from, 2017; hatlevik & christophersen, 2013; krumsvik, 2009). according to erstad (2010), hatlevik and christophersen (2013) digital competence or digital literacy has for example been a central concepts for describing pupils’ possibilities in making use of digital technologies to access and process, but also to produce and distribute knowledge and information. according to calvani et al. (2012) and ala-mutka (2011), this moves beyond basic ict skills as it includes personal and cognitive competences for practical and strategic use. for teachers, pedagogical digital competence has been referred to as the ability to plan, conduct and evaluate technology-supported teaching and learning based on research, theory and previous experience (from, 2017). pursuing a similar line of reasoning, krumsvik (2009) discussed digital competence in terms of teachers’ pedagogical use of digital technologies as a means to enhance students’ and pupils’ learning. with another theoretical framing mishra and koehler (2008, 2009) developed the technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack). the model represent a complex interplay between teachers’ knowledge of content (ck), pedagogy (pk) and technology (tk), needed when designing for technology-supported teaching and learning. mishra and koehler’s framework was also used to study the practice and competence of ict coordinators and ict leadership in school. in their study, avidov-ungar and shamir-inbal (2017) added two components of organizational knowledge (ok) and leadership knowledge (lk). accordingly, the study shows a complex role requiring broad competences needed when leading digitalization and systemic change in school. in another study, leithwood and riehl (2003, 2005; see also leithwood et al., 2004; leithwood et al., 2006) concluded that the components and processes of competent school leadership can be divided into three broad categories: setting the direction as identifying, formulating, and communicating goals and vision, developing people through supportive learning environments, and developing the organization by enabling supportive institutional infrastructure and a school culture based on shared goals and visions. leithwood and riehl’s (2003, 2005) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 134 three categories were later reconceptualized as a framework for analyzing the functions and practices of ict leadership (dexter, 2008; petersen, 2014) and ict policy planning in schools (vanderlinde, dexter & van braak, 2012). transforming categories into digitalized context further enabled the elaboration of complex developmental processes and practices related to digitalization in school. digitally competent school organizations as argued by from (2017), ottestad (2008) and pettersson (2017), a concern for research is not only how teachers’, school leaders’ and pupils’ digital competence can be developed and supported but also how schools can be digital competent in their way of structure and organize conditions and support in digitalized schools. from (2017) argued that digital competence is best understood in terms of the differing levels of the educational system, including the interaction, course, and organizational level. along the same lines, pettersson (2017) and ottestad (2008) posited that digital competence should be considered as an organizational characteristic or task that includes various actors and competences as a part of a digitally competent school organization. one such example is vanderlinde and van braak’s (2010) study on the ecapacity of a school defined as the ability or “collective competence… to implement ict in a way that is a lever for instructional change” (p. 542). taken together in the e-capacity model, there are a number of important aspects to achieve including leadership, goals, policy planning, decision-making, technological infrastructure, technology support, collegiality, professional development, staff’s digital competence, and pedagogical use of digital technologies. in another study, blau and shamir-inbal (2017) explored the complex and longitudinal process of developing a school ict culture by adapting schools to the digital age. these researchers combined factors that predict such development: frequency of teachers ict use, development of pedagogy by means of technology, teachers’ digital competence, design and use of digital content, teacher-parents and school staff e-communication and pedagogical updates of class websites. from another perspective, somekh (2008) argued that organizational and institutional infrastructure can either hinder or support educational and organizational change. on this matter, somekh postulated that “organisational structures of schooling often make it impossible for ict tools to be explored and appropriated pedagogically” and that educational systems “can be understood as outdated infrastructures resisting inevitable change” (p. 450). in summary, research points towards several components which are central for developing a supportive school organization. with this previous research literature as a base, this study will attempt to provide further insight into possibilities and challenges in developing a digitally competent school organization. in the next section, methods and context of the study will be presented. method and context of the study five swedish upper secondary schools with extensive experience in digitalization are included in this study. all of the schools are involved in remote teaching, meaning that digitalization is a prerequisite for the daily work in these schools. in sweden, remote teaching is regulated in the swedish school law, which implies that all schools need to consider certain quality standards (the swedish government, 2014). digitalization and remote teaching are seen as a means to increase the access and quality of education, in this case in sparsely populated areas (compare millet, 2012; pettersson, 2017; xiong, et al., 2016; yu & chen, 2016). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 135 the schools included in this study are located in two different municipalities in the northern sweden. they have some from 200 to 1000 pupils and about 30 to 120 employees. each school has a number of courses, subjects and activities conducted online, primarily synchronously through live-send lectures and seminars. online courses often include a blend of online pupils and pupils located in same school as the teacher. there is a mix of teachers sharing classrooms with their pupils and teachers conducting lectures in their offices facing all pupils primarily online. the latter is often developed as a solution facilitating one learning design (online) instead of two (online and face-to-face). to support remote teaching activities, all schools sending or receiving remote teaching have remote facilitators supporting pupils in their classrooms. teachers are often responsible for their specific subject while working in teacher teams in different programs. all schools have a learning management system (lms) for distributing handouts, instructions, schedules and such administrative aspects of teachers work. interviews as the study focus on organizational aspects, and has the perspective of school leadership, it was decided to conduct in-depth interviews with school leaders (n = 5) and educational technologists (n = 5). these actors are seen as representatives involved in digitalization and organizational change. before conducting interviews a two-day trip was conducted to meet respondents (all but two). this included a closer presentation of each school, participation in online remote teaching and meeting with teachers, pupils, school leaders and educational technologists. due to long distances, the interview study (cf. kvale, 2009) was thereafter conducted by phone. the interviews were conducted by means of a semi-structured interview guide (kvale, 2009). areas for the interviews were, in broad terms, how schools formulate their goals and visions, how they construct and mobilize resources and activities, and how they elaborate on supportive infrastructure to enable digitalization. the interviews lasted between 37–82 min, were recorded and transcribed in their entirety. data analysis content analysis was carried out using the method of coding and categorizing in the program nvivo. this included a systematic (yet open) process of analysis with the potential for developing categories in the data. as an analytical tool, the three categories of setting the direction, developing people and developing the organization (dexter, 2008; leithwood & riehl, 2003, 2005) were used to guide the analysis. the three predefined but broad categories allowed focus on central components for developing a digitally competent school organization, while still allowing unexpected subcategories emanating from data. in the first step of the analysis, sentences or text parts were coded by giving names describing their content (e.g., visions, professional development, pedagogical support, leadership). codes were then further analyzed and placed into the three categories: setting the direction, developing people, and developing the organization (dexter, 2008; leithwood & riehl, 2003, 2005). within each category, codes that seemed to bear a resemblance were placed into groups, forming subcategories of meaning; there were 12 subcategories, and these 12 are presented in table 1. table 1 categories and subcategories visions, content, and activities of digitally competent school organizations 1. setting the direction formulating and communicating goals and visions shared visions mean easy decisions seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 136 goals and vision at different levels 2. developing people technical and pedagogical support internal and external professional development collegial learning strict developmental requirements 3. developing the organization hardware and software technical and pedagogical support structures building digitally competent teams time budget and external collaboration the analysis was also performed on an aggregated level to display different types of digitally competent school organizations. for this step, different patterns in setting the direction, developing people and developing the organization were identified. the differences provided further insight into two types of digitally competent school organizations: goaland structure-oriented schools and culture-oriented schools (see table 2 in the results section). results the results indicate that several components and processes are important for developing a digitally competent school organization. in this section, the three categories and subthemes will be presented. setting the direction setting the direction was described by all respondents as essential for developing a digitally competent school organization. digitalization is, in different ways, seen as a prerequisite for schools’ survival in today’s digitalized knowledge society. accordingly, the respondents described a determination in leading the work towards an environment in which actors and practices are given room change and develop. however, becoming what they consider digitally competent is not about digitalization per se but rather about finding solutions and conditions to reduce workload, improve the work environment in psychosocial terms, develop new teaching and learning designs, and ensure schools’ quality and survival in rural areas. when setting a school’s direction, goals and visions are described to be formulated by different stakeholders. one school leader mentioned that there is a near-exclusive focus on bottom-up goals for setting the direction: “with us, [teachers] have a great opportunity to influence their everyday lives and formulate different types of strategies that we want to use to develop the organization. therefore, we do not need to set long-term goals.” other schools highlighted the importance of larger, holistic goals as a prerequisite for meeting the challenges of urbanization, digitalization, and educational change. some school leaders also described the importance of not letting single actors, such as technologists or external experts, formulate and decide on goals but rather letting developmental visions come from the practice and be supported by experts. another component relates to “shared visions mean easy decisions,” as shown in table 1. with this notion, several respondents stressed that having people seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 137 united around common goals and visions facilitated decision-making in their school organization: “we don’t have to spend time discussing whether to invest in digitalization; everyone knows that we have to.” hence, developing a digitally competent school organization is not dependent on single actors who might disappear from the organization; instead, visions are anchored in school management and preferably in the entire school organization. as it stands, schools have different strategies to convey goals in the organization. although some schools seem to discuss and remind employees of goals verbally on a regular basis, others do not mention goals: we do not mention goals and visions. there is too much talk about goals and how to transform them into concrete goals at specific schools. we are trying to instead show how to achieve these goals, namely by building a culture and forcing people into our mind-set. these school leaders describe how they take action by showing: “we show by doing. out in the halls, we show how we do things and where we want things done.” however, other schools have strategies to communicate goals and visions to staff on a regular basis (e.g., during meetings). another aspect is that instead of local ict policy plans, several schools seem to be driven by larger and sometimes political strategies related to, for example, flexible and available education in rural areas, meaning that digitalization becomes a natural process for reaching these goals. in these cases, digitalization does not become the goal per se but rather the tool and strategy for schools’ survival in rural areas. this is also pointed to as a benefit when having visions anchored in larger political goals and strategies at both municipality and national levels. developing people in meeting goals related to digitalization and the development of digitally competent school organizations, the development of people appears to be a central issue. in this category, the analysis signals three central components: technical and pedagogical support, internal and external professional development, and collegial learning and requirements of development. as it comes to technical and pedagogical support, there seems to be opinions on how such support should be organized. in some schools, support from ict coordinators, ict support, and educational technologists seems to be essential: “they do need a lot of support constructed by the management.” in contrast, for other schools, the focus has been on building a culture in which teachers assume the primary responsibility. professional development is here processed and supported in and by the teacher group: “individuals don’t need that much support; what they need is peace and quiet as well as time to develop through collegial learning.” teachers in such schools are required to learn both the technical and pedagogical issues needed for the development of and work in digitalized schools. another component concerns the importance of both internal and external professional development. some school leaders describe how they arrange “internal seminar series, learning cafés, inspiration blogs, web courses, and web-based materials for staff”. beyond this, school leaders and educational technologists also argued for external professional development in the form of formal courses, guest speakers, lecturers, or researchers as inspiration. a third component concerns building the conditions for collegial learning. on this point, some schools describe how they arrange for teachers’ collegial seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 138 learning: “sometimes, we arrange formal meetings and get together for teachers to provide with informal content.” other school leaders described how teachers are given time to arrange for collegial learning themselves: “much is made about creating conditions [i.e., time] for sharing knowledge and allowing problems to stem from practice. that is, waiting for problems to appear and then seeing what they might be and how they can be resolved.” at a general level and related to all components, there seems to be an attempt to establish strict requirements for technical and pedagogical development. some respondents also argued for having goals transformed into concrete requirements expressed as “all teachers should be able to do x.”. a problem raised by several respondents has for example been the initial challenges in having teachers moving from technical to pedagogical use and development of digital technologies in the classroom. developing the organization analysis indicate that to build a digitally competent school organization, it is important to develop an environment in which actors and practices are given room to change and evolve. in this category, central components are building digitally competent teams to drive change and development, implementing technical equipment, organizing technical and pedagogical support, managing time and budget, and addressing aspects of leadership. the first component relates to the technical equipment. this was expressed by all respondents with arguments similar to “nobody should be able to blame the technology.” this require firewalls, stable networks, servers, and such. other components are selection of hardware and software. in this regard, some schools discussed the importance of free choice of software, whereas other schools argued for the standardization of tools (e.g., all teachers using the same software chosen by the school organization). the latter approach is expected to facilitate collegial learning. all respondents called for a shared schoolmanagement system and as much alignment as possible between systems and applications. some respondents also described how they put significant effort into organizing for technical and pedagogical support structures in terms of ict support, educational technologists, ict coordinators, etc. other respondents seem to primarily delegate technical and pedagogical support to teachers and collegial learning. to give teachers time to develop is tantamount to teachers primarily serving as their own ict support. otherwise, as one school leader said, the question of digitalization and learning design is handed to ict support rather than driven by teachers and school leaders. a third important component for developing a digitally competent school organization seem to be building digitally competent teams at all levels of the organization, including digitally competent leadership, economists, ict support, administrators, educational technologists, and teachers who are willing and able to drive and direct the organization’s development. furthermore, recruiting competent people aligned with the developmental goals and visions of the school is crucial. additionally, time seems to be a central issue for all schools: “take, for example, professional development and collegial learning; why is it so hard to achieve? well, it’s either about the will or the time. the will is not an option; therefore, time needs to be freed up, used and evaluated.” to address this issue, school leaders have different strategies, including the recruitment of specialists to facilitate teachers’ learning, scheduled time for courses on teachers’ professional development (tpd), and investment and development of administrative support systems to reduce workload and leave time for teachers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 139 budget is another important component when developing school organization. schools often have a limited budget for digitalization and organizational change, so several schools described collaborating with externals, such as researchers and development projects. typologies an analysis was also performed on an aggregated level to display different types of digitally competent school organizations. this step revealed different patterns in setting the direction, developing people, and developing the organization, which were subsequently analyzed and described in terms of two types of digitally competent schools described (see table 2). table 2 visions, content, and activities of a digitally competent school organization types of digitally competent school organization categories goal and structure orientation cultural orientation setting the direction focus on goals and visions for focus on building culture of change and support learning and development communicate goals and visions communicate ways of doing shared visions mean easy shared visions mean easy decisions* decisions* developing people formal courses and formal focus on collegial and structures for collegial learning collegial support technical and pedagogical limited support, time for support collegial learning strict developmental strict developmental requirements* requirements* developing the leadership responsibility collegial responsibility organization institutional support structures focus on collegial support ict coordinators collegial support support for specific software free choice of software alignment between systems* alignment between systems* collaboration with externals* collaboration with externals* digitally competent teams* digitally competent teams* developing teaching and developing teaching and learning with support from with support from colleagues educational technologists note. * = components included in both school types the two types of digitally competent school organizations portrayed in table 2 unveil some interesting differences in approaching visions, content, and activities in school organizations. for example, the way an organization interprets and acts on different categories also seem to make a difference in the way the school is steered and organized. in the culture-oriented school, representing both small and large schools, focus seems to be primarily on building a culture: a mind-set, values, relationships, and, ways of doing rather than on formal structures and institutional support. teachers themselves are responsible for digitalization and educational change, with time allotted in their schedules. collegial learning and bottom-up visions and solutions are particularly rewarded and supported: “we find it hard to respond to strict structures that sometimes don’t lead us forward.” in these seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 140 schools, professional development consists mostly of collegial learning made possible by additional time in teachers’ schedules. in contrast, goaland structure-oriented schools, also including both small and larger schools, seem to focus on developing stable and comprehensive infrastructure to support change and development. school leaders are responsible for formulating and communicating goals and visions while building structures through which teachers feel safe and confident. moreover, there is emphasis on recruiting competent staff, standardization of digital tools, and development of formal courses and structures supporting tpd and collegial learning. despite differences, there seem to be similar components in both school types. one example is efforts on tpd and strict developmental requirements (i.e., not optional for or questionable by staff). another aspect is the focus on allotting time for tpd. the third similarity is that few schools seem to have an updated ict policy plan for setting the direction; instead, both types of school are focused on or driven by larger political goals and strategies formulated at municipality or national level. a fourth important aspect is having everyone united around common goals and visions as part of the overall school culture. as indicated in the results, this facilitates decision-making and strategic investments, for it means that visions of digitalization and educational change are anchored in the entire school organization. discussion and conclusion the aim of this study was to explore how schools structure their organizations, institutional infrastructure, and activities as conditions for digitalization. the specific aim is to explore components contributing to a supportive organization as perceived by the school leadership: school leaders and educational technologists. moreover, to provide insight into differences in schools ways of structuring their organizations. according to the analysis, a digitally competent school organization can be said to embrace the environment in which actors and practices are given room to change and evolve, where conditions for new forms of digitalized teaching and learning are provided and where goals on digitalization and educational change can be accomplished (cf. ottestad, 2008; pettersson, 2017; vanderlinde & van braak, 2010; wastiau et al., 2013). a wellorganized school also seems to serve as a prerequisite for sustainable learning and development insofar as it provides resources, supportive environments, and shared goals and visions in both long-term and short-term perspective (see also leithwood & riehl, 2003, 2005). moreover, it seems to be an organization that recognizes the importance of supporting its actors and what culture and structure are needed for sustainable technical and pedagogical development. a central component to developing a digitally competent school organization seems to be having goals and visions anchored in larger political goals and strategies (cf. dexter, 2008; petersen, 2014). most schools in this study do not seem to have an updated and active ict policy plan; instead they focus on strengthening their respective schools’ quality, position or survival in rural areas (cf. vanderlinde et al., 2012). this exemplifies how digitalization is not the primary goal or vision per se but rather a tool for achieving larger political goals and visions. having staff engaged in and united around the same goals and visions also seem to facilitate decision-making and the introduction of the developmental projects needed for schools to progress (leithwood & riehl, 2003, 2005). however, schools being digitalized must also know how to work with strategic organizational development. similar to avidov-ungar and shamir-inbal (2017), this requires, apart from tpack, to have staff who are familiar with organizational knowledge (ok) and leadership knowledge (lk). for example, to support strategic change, there needs to be an interplay between the knowledge in and development of teaching and learning practices seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 141 (technological and pedagogical) and the knowledge and development of the organizational structure. in addition, the ict leadership knowledge needed to drive and support the work. by using the three aforementioned categories as an analytical framework (leithwood & riehl, 2003, 2005), two types of digitally competent school organizations were identified: goaland structure-oriented schools and cultureoriented schools. among school types, differences were identified in the underlying processes in acting on challenges related to digitalization. for example, schools’ approaches to setting direction diverged in terms of communicating respectively doing and showing goals and visions. underlying goals and visions also seem to influence how responsibility for developmental processes is distributed across staff respectively school leaders. an important insight here is for example the differences in how professional development is supported and carried out. in the first type of school, the focus is on formal structures and courses for teachers, whereas in the second type of school, focus is on collegial learning. at the heart of this understanding is also that ways of organizing support influences how responsibility for the development of core practices (i.e., teaching and learning) is distributed. put differently, although both types of school aspire to develop teaching and learning in technology-rich environments, the differences in organizing the school influences whether such processes are top-down or bottom-up activities driven by for example teachers in the school. another interesting result of this study is that certain components remain the same regardless of how schools decide to organize for developing a digitally competent school. although visions, practices, and processes may differ in important aspects, there are common denominators: having people united around shared goals and visions, assigning time for professional development, and establishing strict requirements for expected development. another important component seems to be shifting responsibility from single actors to larger teams or, ideally, the overall school organization. this observation is important as it demonstrates aspects that go beyond individual and contextual preferences of the schools. moreover, it demonstrates aspects that preferably are considered for several schools striving for becoming a digitally competent organizations. to conclude, the insights provided in this study serve as a point of departure for understanding how schools, in different ways, can set the direction, develop people, and develop the organization to become a comprehensive, stable, and digitally competent school organization. in this study, typologies have served as a useful analytical tool for analyzing different approaches to digitalization and organizational change. the use of typologies has also supported development of a vocabulary used for describing the differences between school types and the processes and components needed when developing supportive school organizations (compare carlén & jobring, 2005). however, this study is based exclusively on qualitative data and a rather small number of schools. further research could preferably analyze a larger number of schools, including additional actors such as teachers and pupils. further research could also explore schools with different profiles or approaches to digitalization (remote teaching, one-to-one, blended learning and such). studies could then add to the understanding of how different school types and ways of organizing for digitalization play out in practice references ala-mutka, k. 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(2010). the e-capacity of primary schools: development of a conceptual model and scale construction from a school improvement perspective. computers & education, 55, 541–553. vanderlinde, r., dexter, s., & van braak. (2012). school-based ict policy plans in primary education: elements, typologies and underlying processes. british journal of educational technology, 43(3), 505–519. wastiau, p., blamire, r., kearney, c., quittre, v., van de gaer, e., & monseur, c. (2013). the use of ict in education: a survey of schools in europe. european journal of education, 48(1), 11–27. yu, l., & chen, s. (2016). synchronous remote classroom connecting k–12 schools in developed and undeveloped areas: a case study from china. in j. zhang, j. yang, m. chang, & t. chang (eds.), ict in education in global context (pp. 277–291). singapore: springer. xiong, c., ge, j., wang, q., & wang, x. (2016). design and evaluation of a realtime video conferencing environment for support teaching: an attempt to promote equality of k–12 education in china. interactive learning environments. doi: 10.1080/10494820. 2016.1171786 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0373-8 http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0373-8 http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.ub.umu.se/author/xiong%2c+caiping http://www.tandfonline.com.proxy.ub.umu.se/author/wang%2c+xuejun digitally competent school organizations – developing supportive organizational infrastructures abstract introduction review of research digitally competent school organizations method and context of the study interviews data analysis results setting the direction developing people developing the organization typologies discussion and conclusion references microsoft word øvern og kilvik ynkorr aller siste.docx ©2020 (karen marie øvern/astrid kilvik). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students karen marie øvern norwegian university of science and technology email: karen.overn@ntnu.no astrid kilvik norwegian university of science and technology email: astrid.kilvik@ntnu.no abstract after a merger of four higher education institutions in norway, the norwegian university of science and technology ended up with several nursing study programmes on campuses in three geographically dispersed cities three library managers decided to launch a product or service specifically designed for nursing students. e-learning has been a way to serve both off-campus and on-campus students alike, and a way of providing the same service across different campuses. getting students and staff to use new e-learning products, even when they are developed in collaboration with faculty, is not without problems, and librarians need to put in a significant communication effort. the many mergers in higher education mean that many libraries serve a larger, and more diverse, group of patrons, and finding common ground, good collaboration methods and joint services to patrons is important. keywords: information literacy, e-learning, faculty-library collaboration introduction as a result of a merger of four higher education institutions in norway, three different study programmes in nursing were gathered under one umbrella in 2016. the three campus libraries supporting these nursing programmes had not previously collaborated, and a project that could be a starting point for collaboration was suggested. the main goal making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 2 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 was to create a joint learning support service from the library to the nursing students, an equalising initiative of sorts. the mandate was very open, but the steering group wanted a uniform service from the university library to nursing students on three different campuses, in the form of a 24/7 accessible online support system. the bachelor’s students in nursing have explicit requirements for their bachelor’s thesis, and a detailed plan of progression that they must adhere to. the plan describes the elements of the thesis, the level of knowledge and skills required, etc. while many students can manage this process without more than the established help and services that all the libraries provide, many also need extensive guidance and repeated help from the teaching librarians. the project group decided to design a website that could assist nursing students with the literature search for their bachelor's thesis. the website was not designed to replace instruction and supervision from a librarian or a teacher, but as a supplement and a 24/7 help desk where students could access examples and review guidelines at their own convenience. this blended learning approach was seen as an important "harmoniser" between campuses as well as between campus and off-campus students. the goal of the project was thus to create a useful and accessible website where students could find examples closely resembling what they were expected to present in their own theses concerning e.g. patient, problem, intervention, outcome (pico) forms, search documentation forms, analysis and search processes. working together to create this website gave the librarians in the project group an opportunity to learn more about the various nursing study programmes at the university and about the libraries’ role in teaching the students enrolled in these programmes. while librarians at all campuses devote significant efforts to teaching, and nursing students and staff are among the groups that statistically use the libraries the most, a supplement in the form of a website was seen as a prospectively valuable asset by the librarians in the project group as well as within the steering group. research question steg: litteratursøk for bacheloroppgaven i sykepleie (steg) was officially launched in march 2018. the project group wanted to investigate if and how such a website could contribute to the students’ self-sufficiency and learning. the research question for this study is: in what way can steg support nursing students’ ability to meet the requirements for making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 3 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 literature search and the use of high-quality sources in their bachelor’s theses? background many academic librarians are involved with some form of teaching. some have traditional duties, such as library tours and introductions for new students, while others have a role embedded in the curricula, and enjoy more autonomy regarding form and content as well as in designing learning outcomes. the level of involvement differs greatly. while there is no single explanation for the wide variation in librarians’ roles, some key factors recur. generally speaking, information literacy is not “institutionalised” in the sense that colleges and universities share the same understanding about the meaning of this term (ekstrand, 2009; rimsten, 2009). information literacy is rarely addressed or emphasised by the leadership of higher education institutions. even though many faculty members include elements of information literacy in their course descriptions on their own initiative, they are not formally required to do so. the national qualification framework ("the norwegian qualifications framework for lifelong learning (nqf)," 2011) uses ideas from information literacy, but never uses the term, and the skills and general knowledge are not well described. these elements must be included in the structure of the course descriptions if information literacy is to be regarded as the foundation for learning the course content itself (rimsten, 2009). as long as information literacy is considered as an (unnecessary?) add-on instead of a valuable part of learning course content, it will probably get the customary shrug from teachers and students alike. another issue is that, while librarians’ typical skills, such as information organisation and retrieval, are still in demand and valued by students and teachers, collaboration between the libraries and teaching staff is not always uncomplicated (øvern, 2014). the power distribution between the two main parties, librarians and teachers, is unequal. there is some evidence suggesting that librarians know more about teachers than vice versa (caspers, 2013; christiansen, stombler, & thaxton, 2004; ekstrand, 2009; rimsten, 2009). this can be problematic because teachers generally only ask for the services that they know that librarians can provide. the stereotypical librarian is not doing a good enough job in outreach (dewey, 2005) or promoting his or her skills, and s/he is often frustrated at the lack of interest from faculty (ekstrand, 2009). some teachers have oldfashioned mindsets about libraries, and do not consider librarians as related to teaching activities (rimsten, 2009). because information literacy is often not described, or only mentioned in a general way, in course descriptions, the collaboration is often a bilateral agreement between teachers and librarians (asplund, hakala, sallama, & tapio, 2013; ekstrand, 2009), and whenever there is a change of staff or a restructuring of course content, the collaboration dies out or needs a complete reboot. this can be time consuming and frustrating, particularly for the librarians who need to start over to build the personal relationship with new teachers that they need to gain access. this in turn is connected to the lack of “institutionalisation” of information literacy. making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 4 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 the power distribution problem is most prominent in the context of access to students, which librarians need in order to help students with their information needs. many students come to the library on their own or with their peers, but librarians cannot reach out with their content, services and skills to all students that way. to make a real difference, librarians need access to students while they are with their teachers in classrooms, etc. teachers tend to have little class time, or they have too many students to deal with, and therefore time with the student group is precious and can ill be spared. teachers therefore need to be certain that librarians can deliver content in an efficient and effective manner. that is not an unreasonable requirement. librarians, while just as diverse in their teaching efforts as everyone else, generally have little formal education on the subject in norway (øvern, 2014). their training is mostly done on the job or as supplementary, single courses once they have entered their profession. many librarians are left to trying to figure it out on their own (houtman, 2010). the lack of class time leaves many librarians stuck with providing so-called “one-shots”, a practice that usually includes being invited into a class for a single or double session (45-90 minutes) on library research (buchanan & mcdonough, 2014; phelps & hyde, 2018). the one-shot is often a difficult affair, as the librarian most times has very limited knowledge on the students’ previous knowledge and skill levels, as well as very limited time to convey concepts and skills that would be better conveyed in a more distributed manner (phelps & hyde, 2018). there are some ways to address this, however, either by supplementary workshops, or, as in this case, a website to help the students with practical, concrete examples. yet another issue is the resource situation in libraries. many libraries are understaffed and overworked, due to a general increase in student numbers and activities. this has led to more pressure on all services, and librarians often have to juggle many tasks. unless the library has a strong emphasis on teaching and staff development, this lack of resources can be challenging for those who are trying to gain more experience and develop their teaching skills. however, as an answer to the increase in activities and the call for more student learning support, many libraries have started using social media and other communication platforms to support their teaching efforts. at the norwegian university of science and technology the librarians have spent time and effort in building a scaffold over a period of 10 years that can support learning for students that are either off-campus or cannot join some teaching sessions. videos ranging from lecture capture, screencasts and movie-like trailers (short videos) to podcasts, websites and self-paced courses have been published on a variety of platforms to give students the option to help themselves. this has been done in addition to making library services more accessible through communication on more platforms, e.g. chat, and installing library systems that make self-service opening times happen. still, even within the newly merged institution, these services and the librarians’ involvement vary greatly. the development of the product described in this article is the first of its kind at the norwegian university of science and technology. although the different libraries at the institution have produced their own videos, podcasts etc. before, making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 5 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 this is the first product that includes many different examples in one uniform product. e-learning exists in many forms; some e-learning sites are self-paced tutorials, some are workshop-like (with assignments and tests), some are more interactive, where the teacher or librarian is available for feedback, and some are not much more than a document archive with a few add-ons, like quizzes or a q&a section. the number of institutions and organisations that offer 100 percent e-learning programmes is on the increase (allan, 2013), but blended learning, mixing e-learning with traditional face-to-face interactions, seems to be a more popular option for many students (allan, 2013; blau et al., 2018). all these issues form the backdrop of why the libraries are trying new forms of outreach to students. developing a collection of examples with concrete tutorials meant that the librarians’ expertise was available to students 24/7, without spending all of the libraries’ resources on one group of students. it also meant that, while the librarians sought collaboration with the teachers during the development of the product, and the teachers’ help in promoting it, etc., they did not have to spend more class time than before to offer a better service to them and their students. last, but not least, it made the services from the libraries more equal, in the sense that it offered this product to all nursing students on all three campuses. method steg: litteratursøk for bacheloroppgaven i sykepleie (steg) was developed over some time, from october 2016 to january 2018. it was launched in march 2018. the initial assessment was done in may 2018. at one campus the librarian asked students to fill out a questionnaire. this was not possible at the two other campuses, but a librarian at one campus had a meeting with a “course reference group” consisting of some student representatives and teachers in charge of the course. in november 2018, a short questionnaire was sent to all teachers who had acted as supervisors for the students who handed in their theses in may 2018. in addition, usage data were collected from the learning management system (lms) for the period march may 2018. questionnaire to students during a lecture for the student group on one of the campuses, a questionnaire was handed out where questions about the use of steg were included. the following questions were asked: 1. have you seen steg in blackboard? (answer options: yes, no, do not know) 2. have you used the resource? (answer options: yes, no, do not know) making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 6 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 3. if yes, how satisfied were you with steg? (answer options: extremely satisfied, fairly satisfied, satisfied, not satisfied, extremely dissatisfied) 4. if you have not used steg, why not? (answer options: did not know it existed, did not need it, it was cumbersome to register, other (open comment field)) 5. if yes, do you have any suggestions for improvements? (answer options: open comment field) reference group at one of the other campuses, steg was evaluated in a course reference group with participation from student representatives and supervisors/teachers. the librarian was granted access to one of their meetings to discuss steg. the students were asked the same questions as in the questionnaire mentioned above. questionnaire to supervisors/teachers the student evaluation was supplemented with a questionnaire to supervisors/teachers. the following questions were asked: 1. did you and your students talk about steg? (answer options: yes, no, do not know) 2. if no, why not? (answer options: did not know about the resource, there was no time in the tutor sessions to discuss the resource, open comment field) 3. did you get the impression that your students used steg? (answer options: yes, no, do not know) 4. if yes on question 3: do you think steg was useful to the students? (answer options: yes, no, do not know) 5. if no on question 3: why do you think the students did not use steg? (answer options: did not know about the resource, the resource was not useful, it was cumbersome to register, open comment field) 6. do you have suggestions on how to improve the resource, regarding content, design, access, etc? (answer options: open comment field) making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 7 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 weaknesses of the methodology access to students was an issue in the assessment and feedback of this product. while the students were working on their theses, they had few or no joint lectures or other class time. when the students had handed in their theses, they were preparing for their oral exams, and were not accessible to the librarians. this made it hard to reach the students for formal feedback. at only one campus was it possible to get enough students together to have them answer the questionnaire. the questionnaire was linked in the lms, but no additional responses were registered from there. access to the supervisors/teachers also proved somewhat difficult. when the questionnaire reached the supervisors, they were busy marking the theses and other assignments, and this may be the reason why only 13 of the 64 supervisors responded. in retrospect, the authors see that they could have included broad or in-depth interviews to get more data. because steg is a new service, and it will continue in the same format until further development can be done, it is possible that this can be done later, when the product is better known. results while this article is about using the new product, a description of the product itself is included to provide a background for the usage results. the product the end result from the project became a product named steg: litteratursøk for bacheloroppgaven i sykepleie (steg) (translation: steg: literature searching for the bachelor’s thesis for nurses). the product consists of examples of how to find search terms and search for articles, how to use a search documentation form, and other relevant information, e.g. pico forms, flow charts, etc. there are plenty of academic writing sites online that offer support on a generic level. norwegian university of science and technology has its own platform for that. although these sites offer support on important aspects of academic writing, such as structuring the paper, reference management etc., they do not provide extensive examples relevant to all subject areas. the idea behind the product developed in this study was that students could access some practical examples directly related to their bachelor's thesis. therefore, all examples were developed on the basis of subjects in former bachelor’s theses, and these were developed to match current objectives for the bachelor’s thesis at the norwegian university of science and technology. the examples were also discussed with faculty, and faculty members participated in testing the product. steg’s content is placed in one main content box. in addition to this, there is a category for tools, methodology, suggested literature, etc. there are nine examples, and because the making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 8 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 structure is set, librarians can add on more examples on demand. the structure is set for all examples, but the search strategies, interface, etc. may differ a little between them. a typical structure for an example is: ● a presentation of the example topic ● research question making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 9 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 ● pico form ● possible search terms ● a generic video on how to locate search terms ● a presentation of some databases that could be useful for the subject ● a search documentation form ● video that shows searching for the particular subject in one or several of the databases the examples were developed by all three librarians involved in the project, and there are therefore slight differences in how they built the search, how they made the videos etc. still, they all followed the overall structure, and the project group decided that it was a strength in the product that there were slight differences in the examples so that students could see that there was more than one way to do this. the product was developed in the norwegian university of science and technology’s lms. this gave the project group some challenges. the graphical user interface (gui) of this lms was not very appealing and exciting for end-users, and the project group had to rely on the resources available in the lms itself. another concern was that the content would be locked into the lms, and that it would not be available to other users and that exporting content would be more difficult than if an open platform like wordpress had been chosen. still, the decision to place this content in the lms was made based on where the students look for information. norwegian university of science and technology has many platforms, and it was important for the project group to make sure that the content was located on a platform that the students would have to use. the product was released in early 2018, open to all students of norwegian university of science and technology, since there was no way to give automatic access to the nursing students alone. manual access management could not be undertaken, and automatic access to all students was therefore the only option. a direct link to the product was placed in all relevant rooms in the lms. however, students needed to register manually (similarly to signing up for a course) after clicking the link. the product would then show up on their course list. using the product results from the questionnaire from one campus the initial questionnaire showed that 17 of the 38 students who answered had seen steg in blackboard. 16 had not seen steg and four answered that they did not know whether they had seen it. of the 38 students that answered the initial questionnaire, 26 had not used steg. eight students had used it, and four students did not know whether they had used it. of the eight students that had used steg, four were fairly satisfied with it, two were satisfied, one was extremely satisfied, and one was not satisfied. of the 28 students that answered the making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 10 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 question: “why have you not used steg?”, 14 answered that they did not know that it existed, eight answered that they did not feel that they needed it, four said that it was cumbersome to have to register for it, one said s/he forgot it and one said that s/he did not want to spend time learning something new. in the open-ended question, “what could be done to improve steg?”, only one commented, and said that s/he wanted more videos and examples. results from the reference group meeting results from the reference group meeting showed that the students had little or no knowledge about steg. it turned out that only one of the three students participating in the meeting had heard of the resource. but although s/he knew about it, s/he had not used it. s/he reported that because none of the examples matched her/his research question completely, s/he had not seen the value of using steg. results from the questionnaire to supervisors thirteen of 64 supervisors answered the questionnaire. ten supervisors out of the 13 that answered said that they had talked to their students about steg. the three supervisors that had not talked to their students about it said that the reasons for this were that they had not heard about steg (n=2) or that they had forgotten (n=1). eight supervisors had the impression that their students used the resource, two did not think their students used it, and three supervisors said that they did not know whether their students had used it. the supervisors who thought their students had used it, thought that it had been useful (n=8), while two answered that they did not know. of the five supervisors who answered either that they did not know if their students had used the resource or that they did not think that the students had used it, three answered that they thought the students did not know about steg. in the open-ended questions about suggestions for improvements, supervisors commented that they would like more examples in the resource, that it should be easier to find, and that the examples should closely resemble the instructions that the students receive in their face-to-face interactions with teachers and librarians. user statistics from the lms usage data was collected from the lms from the official launch of the product in march 2018 until the students handed in their theses in may 2018. due to the new general data protection regulation (gdpr) that applied from 20 july in norway, statistics of use could no longer be collected from the lms, and consequently it is not possible to get updated usage data now. the data from march to may 2018 showed that there were in total 672 visits to steg, distributed thus: 363 visits in march, 151 in april and 158 in may. the nine examples had varying popularity, where the broadest topics, such as motivation, coping and dementia, making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 11 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 had the highest number of visits. “visit” is defined as the number of times the link to the example has been clicked. table 1 user statistics from the lms title of example # of visits in march # of visits in april # of visits in may 1. work life 2. behavioural and/or psychiatric disorders and psychosocial support 3. dementia treatments 4. mental health and client participation 5. diabetes 6. nutritional status for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy 7. coping strategies for family members 8. rheumatoid arthritis and physical activity 9. patient education and motivation 15 40 69 38 44 28 60 12 57 14 16 19 27 17 11 17 10 20 31 36 31 22 9 1 10 6 12 the title of each example has been directly translated from norwegian as it appears in the lms. some examples have a very broad topic title, like work life, while others have a detailed description of the topic covered, like nutritional status for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. the examples with the more general descriptions were the most visited. there is no data on why that was, but it is natural to assume a few possible reasons for this: either the descriptions, such as “work life”, were so broad and general that users had to click on them to find out more or more students had research questions that more closely resembled these broad, general topics. making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 12 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 discussion according to a study by the european university association (gaebel, kupriyanova, moranis, & colucci, 2014), ‘practically all higher education institutions […] have started to embrace e-learning. […] besides pedagogical and economic motives, the institutions refer to a growing need for flexibility of time and place, and better use of resources, benefiting both residential students and a wider range of professional and other lifelong learners.’ (p. 7). still, e-learning is not a convenient “one-size-fits-all” solution for all kinds of challenges concerning resources. for one, it is not the preferred method of learning for many students. it can also be costly and time consuming to produce high-quality multimedia content for such platforms and it is difficult for learners to prioritize the time for it (allan, 2013, p. 134). a cost-benefit analysis cannot be done for every decision on whether or not to make new material for students, but higher education institutions would be well-advised to have definitive strategies and guidelines in order to make it easier for the faculty and libraries to make good decisions regarding development of new learning materials. as the usage statistics and the other responses here showed, even when learning materials are developed for a particular user group according to course descriptions and in collaboration with faculty, it does not necessarily follow that the staff and their students will make use of it. steg has only been tested for one semester, and it is possible that usage will accelerate when it has been introduced from the start for new students, and that supervisors are more aware of the product. however, as the authors of this study found, one should not underestimate how much promotion a new service needs before it is rooted in students’ consciousness. the most prominent feedback that was received in the questionnaires was that the respondents were not aware of the product, even with mentions of it in meetings, lectures, info screens, flyers and a link in the lms. still, the total of 672 visits in three months, distributed over nine examples, indicates that the students and supervisors who did use the product used it more than once or clicked on more than one example. issues concerning the balance of power between faculty (including supervisors) and librarians can be a roadblock for librarians, particularly concerning access to students. a website was seen as a possible way to gain access to more students without having more class time. it was also seen as a potential win-win for librarians, students and staff alike, because the librarians could reach further with their specialist knowledge without spending more face-to-face time with students and they could manage more students with very limited resources, while faculty could also gain access to the information without having to ask librarians for help directly. students had better access to, at least some, information through steg. it remains to be seen whether the product had the intended effect on student learning and whether the use of the product could justify the time and energy spent on development and maintenance of the product. making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 13 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 steg was developed within the lms because it was important for the steering group to have a service included on a platform already in use by the students. while this was a good opportunity to integrate the service in the course descriptions for the bachelor’s theses, and a good opportunity for the project group to become more familiar with the lms, in retrospect, an open platform would have given the project group more scope for development. as the main reason for not using the product was reported to be a lack of knowledge of the existence of the product, placing it in the lms seems to have had little effect. a few of the students responded in the initial questionnaire that it was cumbersome to have to register to gain access to the content in the product. while this has been made easier now, it still requires an action to gain access. it may be assumed that placing the content on an open platform, such as wordpress/ blogger or an open website, could have given the project group more scope for interaction with the user group, either with using quizzes or other self-tester tools, through comments, etc. these features were also available in the lms, but were challenging to find and use. bringing the content to the open web could also have been a way of communicating with other librarians who teach, and they could have given useful feedback as to the further development of the contents as well as picking up useful tips for their own teaching practices. the steering group will consider moving the content out of the lms and on to an open platform at a later time. the nursing students perform a literature review for their bachelor’s thesis. the requirement specification is comprehensive and requires the students to write a literature review with a detailed methodology chapter on literature searching etc. many students are able to meet these demands with help from their supervisors and librarians with traditional lectures and face-to-face sessions. many students also find it helpful to have access to concrete examples on searching, documenting and evaluating research articles. an online service, like a website, may be a good bonus service for these students, as it is always open and accessible. still, the problem may be that the students see it as an extra burden on top of an already heavy workload, an add-on that they have to spend time learning, instead of a useful tool that can help them understand the principles for the literature review. the content in steg was the same for students on all three campuses, though it is possible that the principle of equality was more important for the libraries than for the students and faculty. in a longer term, however, a joint web-based tool may become more important also to the students. currently, the three bachelor's degree programmes in nursing have separate curricula and it can be assumed that the students have little interest in whether their library services are the same. however, from 2020 these curricula will be replaced by one joint curriculum. teaching methods, courses, assignments and so on will also be harmonized and coordinated. perhaps the students will, to a greater extent, feel that they belong to the same institution/university and that access to a joint online support product will mean more to them. making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 14 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 conclusion e-learning is on the rise worldwide, and more institutions now use 100 percent e-learning courses to ensure access and availability to content for more diverse student groups. steg is a collection of examples related to building search strings, database searching and documentation of searches for bachelor’s students in nursing. initial feedback from students and supervisors indicate that having access to an online support product can increase students’ ability to perform and document database searches. further data and assessment are needed. steg will be continued as a service in its current configuration for the next set of students during their bachelor’s theses. due to gdpr, statistics from usage can no longer be collected, but further assessment in other forms will be performed. some feedback from students and supervisors suggest that the product should be further developed with more examples. in march 2019, the steering group decided to take steg to a new phase. a new project group will work on updating and developing the content and decide whether or not the content should be moved to an open platform. the libraries at norwegian university of science and technology will have to promote the product more regularly and through different channels in order to reach the students and faculty. it takes time for new services to be firmly established within a user group, and support services that are not mandatory for the students will have to be developed and promoted over time to become rooted in the group. references allan, b. 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(2013). building strong relationships with faculty-librarian collaboration. in p. ragains (ed.), information literacy instruction that works: a guide to teaching by discipline and student population (2 ed., pp. 23-31). chicago: neal-schuman. making and using a new support site for undergraduate nursing students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning 15 vol. 16 – issue 1 – 2020 christiansen, l., stombler, m., & thaxton, l. (2004). a report on librarian-faculty relations from a sociological perspective. the journal of academic librarianship, 30(2), 116-121. doi:doi: 10.1016/j.acalib.2004.01.003 dewey, b. i. (2005). the embedded librarian: strategic campus collaborations. resource sharing & information networks, 17(1-2), 5-17. ekstrand, b., seebass, g. 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(2009). utbildning i samverkan: ett lärarperspektiv. in b. hansson & a. lyngfelt (eds.), pedagogiskt arbete i teori og praktik: om bibliotekens roll för studenters og doktoranders lärande (pp. 45-56). lund: btj förlag. øvern, k. m. (2014). faculty-library collaboration: two pedagogical approaches. journal of information literacy, 8(2), 36-55. doi:dx.doi.org/10.11645/8.2.1910 exploring healthcare simulation facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning | journal article skip to abstract exploring healthcare simulation facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning tuulikki keskitalo* lapland university of applied sciences e-mail: tuulikki.keskitalo@lapinamk.fi * corresponding author heli ruokamo university of lapland, faculty of education centre for media pedagogy (cmp), e-mail: heli.ruokamo@ulapland.fi *corresponding author ©2019 (author name/s), cc-by-4.0 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc-by-4.0), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. abstract this study aimed to investigate healthcare simulation facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning because they have an influence on the approaches and strategies used in teaching and learning, and ultimately they influence on learning outcomes. the study was conducted using a phenomenographic methodology to identify the variation in conceptions. this study included 37 healthcare simulation facilitators. the data were collected using both thematic and semi-structured individual and paired interviews. the iterative phenomenographic data analysis process revealed four categories of conceptions of learning: 1) learning as acquiring and reproducing knowledge and skills, 2) learning as applying and advancing knowledge and skills, 3) learning as transformation of individual thinking and behaviour and 4) learning as co-constructing knowledge and skills. three categories of conceptions of teaching were also identified: 1) teaching as transmission of knowledge and skills, 2) teaching as development of students’ professional skills and 3) teaching as facilitation of learning. based on the results of this study, we argue that, by changing teaching conditions, we may also affect the underlying conceptions of teaching and learning as well as approaches to teaching and ultimately learning outcomes. the results of this study can also be used to develop healthcare educators’ pedagogical training. however, facilitators’ conceptions and approaches to teaching and learning are not necessarily aligned; therefore, in future studies, our aim will be to continue the research by investigating how these self-perceived conceptions are related to approaches to teaching and learning within actual educational practices. keywords: healthcare simulation facilitators teaching learning conceptions phenomenography introduction since 1970, scholars have used phenomenography to study teachers’ and students’ conceptions of teaching and learning (säljö, 1979). the aim of the phenomenographic line of research has been to identify the variation in conceptions, or individuals’ different ways of experiencing and understanding the world (marton 1981). from a phenomenographic perspective, conceptions are understood as specific meanings which are attached to certain phenomena and which then mediate and form our relationship to the world (pratt, 1992; van rossum & hamer, 2010). in other words, the conceptions affect how we understand the world; therefore, from a phenomenographic perspective the world is different for every person. since 1970, studies on teaching and learning conceptions have mostly been conducted within university settings and with students (e.g., ellis, goodyear, calvo, & prosser, 2008; lonka, joram, & bryson, 1996; paakkari, tynjälä, & kannas, 2011). some studies have focused on teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning at different levels of education (e.g., boulton-lewis, smith, mccrindle, burnett, & campbell, 2001; kember, 1997; postareff & lindblom-ylänne, 2008), but only a few have focused on teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning within the field of healthcare education (keskitalo, ruokamo, väisänen, & gaba, 2013; jacobs, muijtjens, van luijk, van der vleuten, croiset, & scheele, 2015; laksov, nikkola, & lonka, 2008), and no one has used the phenomenographic method to study healthcare facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning. previous research aimed to study conceptions regarding teaching and learning due to the influence of these conceptions on the approaches to and strategies used in teaching and learning, and ultimately on learning outcomes (klatter, lodewijks, & aarnoutse, 2001; kember & kwan, 2000; pratt, sadownik, & selinger, 2012; trigwell & prosser, 1996; trigwell, prosser, & waterhouse, 1999). however, marton (1981) and trigwell (2000) have pointed out that it is important to study conceptions independently in order to fully understand and develop the conceptions and, furthermore, education itself. as barnard, mccosker and gerber (1999, p. 219) state: “to be aware of conceptions is to be aware of our social reality and ourselves.” the purpose of the study is to provide insight into the variations in healthcare simulation facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning by revealing the conceptions, assumptions and justifications behind their teaching activities, and possibly to broaden the facilitators’ perspective on effective teaching and learning in healthcare education (cf. pratt et al., 2012). this is especially important because simulation-based learning environments (sbles) have permanently changed the education process within the healthcare field (gaba, 2004; helle & säljö, 2012), and the traditional ways of thinking about and approaches to teaching and learning may not be the most successful. within the field of healthcare education some facilitators also hold their teaching positions without having had any formal training in education and pedagogy. put together, the purposes of this study are not simply to describe the phenomenon, but also to describe how healthcare simulation facilitators have responded to the challenges created by these novel learning environments. in this study, sbles refer to real-like contexts in which healthcare students and professionals learn new skills and knowledge or maintain their competence. according to rall and dieckmann (2005, p. 274), “simulation, in short, means to do something in the ‘as if’, to resemble ‘reality’ (always not perfectly, because then it would be reality again), e.g., to train or learn something without the risks or costs of doing it in reality.” pedagogically simulation-based training has similarities with problemor case-based learning, where the learner’s own activity is central for learning, and the teachers are more like a facilitator of learning (keskitalo, 2015; dieckmann, 2009). as noted, in this study, we also use the concept facilitator, instead of teacher, because during the simulation-based healthcare education, the facilitator’s role is to be more like a guide or a tutor, supporting participants’ learning. in this study, conceptions of teaching and learning are understood as the meanings that teaching and learning hold for healthcare simulation facilitators (åkerlind, 2003). conceptions are comparable to frames and beliefs through which people observe, interpret and create the meanings of phenomena (see, e.g., kember, 1997). the broader the frames are, the more awareness one has of the phenomena – —in this case the phenomena being teaching and learning. previous studies have shown that our conceptions are developed through experience (barnard et al., 1999; entwistle & peterson, 2004; entwistle & walker, 2000; tigchelaar, vermunt, & brouwer, 2014), which makes them personal, intuitive, relatively stable, and charged with emotions (entwistle & peterson, 2004; entwistle & walker, 2000). however, some researchers have argued that certain types of instruction and learning environments may change these enduring conceptions of teaching and learning held by teachers and students (e.g., postareff, lindblom-ylänne, & nevgi, 2007). marton (1981) has also argued that there are only a finite number of ways in which people can experience phenomena, which indicates that there are many commonalities in conceptions. however, due to our individual experiences in the world, there are also individual differences in conceptions (barnard et al., 1999). according to paakkari, tynjälä, and kannas (2010), some people are able to discern more aspects of phenomena than others, thus having greater awareness and a more complex understanding of the phenomena. however, from a phenomenographic point of view, this simply means that people are aware of different aspects of the phenomena. for example, pratt et al. (2012) describe five different sets of pedagogical biases: “b” stands for belief, “i” is intention, “a” is assumption, and “s” is strategy. according to pratt et al. (2012), biases are lenses we use when approaching clinical teaching. in addition to biases, there are conceptions, which is the term used and studied in our study. however, according to pratt et al. (2012, p. 9), no bias is more or less effective than any other one. they are simply different. in addition, some studies suggest that there is no critical difference in conceptions of teaching and learning across contexts (lam & kember, 2004); rather the context provides additional shades of meaning in those conceptions (dahlin & regmi, 1997). to summarize, in our study teaching and learning are understood in a finite number of common, qualitatively different ways, and the differences in conceptions depend very much on the facilitators’ different experiences of the world. previous research has proposed several categorizations of conceptions of teaching and learning. kember and kwan (2000) propose two broad categories of conceptions of teaching: teaching as transmission of knowledge and teaching as learning facilitation. the first category includes the subcategories teaching as transferring information and teaching as enhancing student understanding, and the latter category includes the subcategories teaching as meeting students’ learning needs and teaching as facilitating students in becoming independent learners. these main categories are also referred to as teacher-centered/content-oriented and student-centered/learning-oriented (kember 1997; see also samuelowicz & bain, 2001). in addition, kember (1997) proposes a so-called intermediate category which serves as a link between the two extreme categories. this intermediate category stresses the importance of student-teacher interaction in teaching and learning. earlier research on conceptions of teaching and learning has led to different categorizations of learning as well (bruce & gerber, 1995; marton, dall’alba, & beaty 1993; paakkari et al., 2011; säljö, 1979). for example, marton et al. (1993) have proposed qualitatively different conceptions of learning in their study of british open university students: 1) increasing one’s knowledge, 2) memorizing and reproducing, 3) applying, 4) understanding, 5) seeing something in a different way, and 6) changing as a person. boulton-lewis et al. (2001) conducted phenomenographic research on secondary teachers and found results that are similar to those of marton et al. (1993). there are also similarities in the categorization developed by bruce and gerber (1995); however, they established an additional category: learning as developing the competencies needed by entry-level professionals. within this category, the ability to implement successful practical applications is considered important. as bruce and gerber (1995, 451) state, “competence involves having a repertoire of skills, being able to apply knowledge, and generally being prepared for the workplace.” the necessary skills and knowledge are acquired through real-life cases and problems. this supports säljö’s (1979) work in the late 1970s. as the studies discussed above suggest, conceptions of teaching and learning seem to be somewhat universal regardless of differences in the experiences, context or target group (cf. paakkari et al., 2011), supporting the idea that there are commonalities and a finite number of ways of experiencing the phenomenon (barnard et al., 1999; marton, 1981). as dahlin and regmi (1997) argue, there can be underlying similarities in conceptions, but the time and the context affect the aspect on which we focus. for example, research on conceptions of teaching and learning within the medical domain has shown that so-called professional orientation, as described by bruce and gerber (1995), is often considered important in teaching and learning in the medical fields (keskitalo et al., 2013), which indicates that there may be a context-specific component in conceptions of teaching and learning (cf. bruce & gerber, 1995; lonka et al., 1996). however, the extent to which the categories are contextually-bound remains a subject of debate (paakkari et al., 2010) and, therefore, further study is needed. keeping in mind the earlier studies of teachers’ conceptions of teaching and learning discussed above, the aim of this study is to provide insight regarding the healthcare simulation facilitators’ different ways of understanding teaching and learning within the sble in order to help them better understand their educational practices, and to develop them. we set the following research question for our study: 1 how do healthcare simulation facilitators understand teaching and learning? methods participants the study was conducted using a phenomenographic methodology to identify the variation in participants’ conceptions. the participants in the study included 37 healthcare simulation facilitators from three different healthcare educational institutions (two universities of applied sciences in finland and one university in the united states). there were 19 male and 18 female participants. the specialties of the facilitators were nursing, paramedics, anesthesia and emergency medicine. twelve of the facilitators had also received pedagogical training. in this study, the participants often used a high-fidelity simulation technology, and consequently simulation sessions were typically structured into the following four phases: introduction, simulator and scenario briefing, scenario and debriefing (e.g., keskitalo, 2015). however, the implementation may vary depending on the learning objectives. data collection the data were collected from 37 healthcare simulation facilitators through paired and individual interviews during the years 2008–2016 (table 1). during the first study, thematic interviews were conducted with eight healthcare facilitators. during studies 2–5, the data were collected using various methods in order to develop the pedagogical model for sbles (see keskitalo, 2015); however, in the present study facilitators’ individual and paired interviews were analyzed. in this study, first author was responsible for collecting the interviews included in studies 1 and 2, while second author was responsible for collecting the interviews included in studies 3, 4 and 5. table 1. data collection, data sources, and data analysis methods studies data collection method data-analysis method study 1 (2008, finland) thematic individual interviews with simulation facilitators (n = 8) phenomenographic analysis study 2 (2009, finland) semi-structured individual interviews with simulation facilitators (n = 4) phenomenographic analysis study 3 (2010, usa) semi-structured interviews: paired interviews with simulation facilitators (n = 8, interviewed in pairs) individual interviews with facilitators (n = 1) phenomenographic analysis study 4 (2013–2014, usa) semi-structured individual interviews with simulation facilitators (n = 7) phenomenographic analysis study 5 (2016, usa) semi-structured individual interviews with simulation facilitators (n = 9) phenomenographic analysis each of the interviews ranged in length from 30 to 80 minutes. eight participants were interviewed in pairs, whereas the others were interviewed individually. however, we tried to ensure that this imbalance in the data collection methods would not affect our data collection and analysis. for example, in pair interviews, the interviewees naturally elicited discussion by commenting on and complementing each other’s answers, whereas in the individual interviews the interviewer was responsible for eliciting discussion. during the first study (2008), the interview themes were: 1) the possibilities and limitations of simulation-based learning environments for educational use, 2) the basis of the teachers’ pedagogical thinking, 3) the pedagogical principles, models and methods used in a simulation-based learning environment, 4) the role of the teacher, 5) the strength of the pedagogical community, 6) the need for continuing education, and 7) the teacher’s participation in developmental work. more specifically, the questions we asked included: how would you describe learning? how do you think learning occurs after these sessions? during the interviews, the aim was to have free and open-ended discussions, but the facilitators were also encouraged to provide examples or explanations through questions such as could you explain some more? or could you give me an example? the interviews conducted during the studies 2 to 5 were similar to those in the first study, but the interviews in these studies involved more questions related to the development of the pedagogical model. an example of an interview questions from these studies are: describe how you organise your courses. is there any phase that plays a more important role than the others? why? during the third study (2010), the interviews were similar to those in the study two, four and five, but paired interviews were used. the interviews in the us were conducted in english, and the ones in finland in finnish; the finnish responses were later translated into english. thereafter, the interviews were voice-recorded and transcribed verbatim prior to analysis. data analysis the data analysis was conducted using a phenomenographic approach (marton, 1981; marton et al., 1993; åkerlind, 2005). phenomenography aims to describe, analyze, and understand conceptions and different ways of experiencing the target phenomenon on a collective level (marton, 1981). as åkerlind (2005, 323) states, “phenomenographic research aims to explore the range of meanings within the sample group, as a group, not the range of meanings for each individual within the group.” the aim of phenomenographic analysis is to provide insight regarding the variations in understanding of the target phenomenon; therefore, each qualitatively different conception is important. another characteristic of the phenomenographic research tradition is the application of a second-order perspective (marton, 1981). according to marton (1981), the aim of a second-order perspective is to describe, analyze and understand people’s experiences of the world, whereas a first-order perspective aims to describe the world directly. thus, the focus of the phenomenographic research tradition is on the individual’s perceptions of reality rather than reality itself. in order to establish a general understanding of the phenomenon, the transcribed interviews were read several times. during the data analysis process, the data were treated as a whole (åkerlind, 2005) in order to identify the varying conceptions on a collective level. during the first reading, meaning units were underlined, and a mind map was developed to obtain an overall picture of the phenomenon and identify all possible conceptions and ideas that facilitators might have related to teaching and learning within an sble, and to see how the ideas and conceptions were related. the meaning units in the study consisted of sentences, groups of sentences, ideas or episodes that somehow reflected the conceptions of teaching and learning. in the phenomenographic research tradition, the first reading involves searching for meaning and is characterized by open-mindedness to all possible meanings that may be found in the data (åkerlind, 2005). during the reading, our initial focus was on the words themselves; however, in order to understand the interviewees more accurately, it was necessary to read larger portions of the transcripts (bowden, 2005). in addition, the entire transcript was also read thoroughly in order to analyze all the information provided by the interviewees; thus the focus was not only on questions related to teaching and learning. the data analysis process was iterative in nature in the sense that the data were re-read several times, and we moved back and forth between the data and the interpretations to verify the accuracy of our interpretations. this iterative data analysis process helped us remain open-minded and detect misinterpretations in our own thinking and reasoning until the final categories were formulated (åkerlind, 2005). during this study, first author made the initial analysis, while the final categories were negotiated and agreed together. the aim of the analysis process was to develop a hierarchical category system (see, e.g., åkerlind, 2005) where each category forms part of a larger whole and together they form the phenomenon (barnard et al., 1999). according to marton and booth (1997), each category of conceptions of teaching and learning has distinctive characteristics. during the analysis process, our focus was on the “how” (how subjects are taught or learned) and “what” (what the focus of teaching or learning is) aspects of teaching and learning, as well as on detecting similarities and differences within and between the categories (harris, 2011; åkerlind, 2005). in addition, samuelowicz and bain’s (2001) belief dimensions as well as paakkari et al.’s (2011) themes helped us focus our data analysis. the conceptions of learning are reported first, because it seems that those mediated the facilitators’ description of their conceptions of teaching. results conceptions of learning in this study, four distinct categories of conceptions about learning were identified among the facilitators we interviewed: 1) learning as acquiring and reproducing knowledge and skills, 2) learning as applying and advancing knowledge and skills, and 3) learning as transformation of individual t hinking and behavior and 4) learning as co-constructing knowledge and skills. detailed descriptions regarding the way learning is understood by healthcare simulation facilitators are provided below. learning as acquiring and reproducing knowledge and skills in the first category, which is learning as the acquisition and reproduction of knowledge and skills, the goal in learning is to acquire and reproduce knowledge and skills in a manner which is appropriate for the subject the students are studying. in this category, facts and skills are also constructed by the teachers for the students, thus making this category teacher-centered. knowledge and skills are considered rather unproblematic, which diminishes the value of reflection. according to facilitators who hold this conception, knowledge and skills are acquired using basic study skills such as discussing, reading, listening and observing; thus, the range of study strategies is rather restricted and traditional from their point of view. learning was also seen as something that cannot be seen, and which some of the facilitators’ thinks happens in a learner’s brain. in the following excerpt, facilitator describes how he thinks people learn: “i guess it’s being presented with new information and how your brain is able to process it to understand it and to build a little bit more knowledge about it.” (facilitator 34) in this category, learning can be considered to have occurred when students have memorized knowledge and can imitate the behavior correctly within the context of their field of study. learning as applying and advancing knowledge and skills in the second category, learning is viewed as the application and advancement of knowledge and skills in order to solve medical problems in new situations and become a better healthcare professional. compared to the previous category of learning conceptions, in which the purpose is to acquire knowledge and skills, knowledge and skills in this category must be applied in the care of real patients. thus, the focus of learning is on the competencies the students must attain, but also on the application of these competencies, using strategies such as problem solving, trial and error, gaining experience, practicing, and working through positive and negative feedback. the goal of learning in this category is to develop a more competent learner and healthcare worker. according to the facilitators, this type of learning makes students more independent, experienced and comfortable in various situations they will encounter in their future careers, as the following facilitator describes: “i think it [the sble] makes them more comfortable. the next time they’re in a situation like this, maybe they will remember to designate roles. maybe they’ll remember to sort of cut through the chaos and really look at what’s important right now and be able to process.” (facilitator 18) in this category, the acquisition of experience through experiential learning and the application of knowledge and skills are seen as crucial. however, the knowledge and skills are still constructed by the teacher for the students. this diminishes the importance of reflection in the debriefing phase. the critical reflection is more descriptive in nature, concentrating more on what and how question, e.g. describe what just happened? learning as transformation of individual thinking and behavior in the third category, learning was seen as a transformation of individual thinking and behavior. it was seen as doing and thinking about one’s own actions and reasoning process during the scenarios in the debriefing in order to change the way of thinking. to transform learners’ thinking and aid their future performance, the facilitator tried to detect their knowledge gaps, as this facilitator described: “so i think there’s a balance because it’s, like, if we say this isn’t just a change in a behavior, it’s based on their own change and knowledge and attitudes and perceptions. so it’s, like, you’ve got to understand where they’re coming from and where they’re at, what have they acquired, what haven’t they?” (facilitator 28) this category differs from the previous category because it stresses the individual thinking process, in addition to acquiring and applying knowledge. although in those previous categories there are elements of reflection, in this category it is more critical and concentrated on the why questions. that is, the reasons behind the certain actions. learning as co-constructing knowledge and skills in the fourth category, learning as the co-construction of knowledge and skills, students co-construct their own knowledge and skills in a collaborative setting with other participants. thus, the knowledge is viewed, at the same time, as personal and shared, something which guides the students’ personal and professional development in their lifelong learning process. the simulation-based learning environment offers a safe context for dialogue and the expansion of one’s own view of the world to take place, where everyone is treated as a genuinely equal participant. in this category, the focus of learning is on the competencies students will need to acquire in order to change their ways of thinking and behaving, but also to interpret reality in order to act properly in changing condition. consequently, the knowledge and skills used in patient care are seen as problematic, and critical reflection is necessary for professional development. compared to the previous category, in this conception of learning, facilitators also give the students an active role in defining the learning objectives, thus taking into account the students’ existing conceptions. in this conception of learning, students are viewed as active participants from the beginning, as described in the following excerpt: “so there has to be some interweaving of the teacher’s goals with the learner’s goals. when those can be aligned or explicitly explained as the teacher’s goals to become also the learner’s goals, that there’s a lot more buy-in and a lot more learning that happened.” (facilitator 23) in this category, learning requires study strategies such as verbalizing and sharing, reflecting, talking out loud, giving and receiving feedback, reasoning and gaining insight from others, and the facilitator is seen as guiding the learning process. as noted earlier, the salient feature of this conception of learning is the importance of reflection—not only the why question but also what if questions—to aid learners’ co-construction of knowledge for new situations. this category was viewed as student-centered since the students’ existing conceptions and previous knowledge, as well as their own activity, were considered to be central for learning. in the words of samuelowicz and bain (2001, p. 315), in this category facilitators used “student-centered language” to describe teaching and learning. conceptions of teaching based on the iterative data analysis process, respondents’ views of teaching were grouped into three distinct categories: 1) teaching as transmission of knowledge and skills, 2) teaching as development of students’ professional skills, and 3) teaching as facilitation of learning. a detailed description regarding how teaching is understood by the healthcare simulation facilitators is provided below. teaching as transmission of knowledge and skills in the first category, teaching as the transmission of knowledge and skills is based on the content and the facilitators’ expertise. in other words, the focus is on the content, or the skills and knowledge needed in the healthcare field. however, in comparison with the other categories, in this conception of teaching the teacher is seen as the one who defines what is to be learned and how it will be learned, as the following facilitator describes: “[t]eaching could also be showing those model performances…that you show how… you show how some things are done, then you give a model performance, and then others can imitate the behavior.” (facilitator 4) in the excerpt above, teaching is described as a process in which the teacher’s role is to introduce important learning concepts and skills, define goals, and assess student performance. the teacher’s role involves presenting information as well as giving an example of an ideal performance or operation for the students. consequently, the students’ role is viewed as being rather passive since the knowledge is externally constructed for them and their existing conceptions are not taken into account in this type of teaching. thus, the heart of the interaction involves the facilitator and his or her level of expertise, rather than teacher-student interaction on an equal basis, as the following excerpt illustrates: “and i don’t think we query them enough as to what it is that they want to learn. i think we have a tendency to teach them what we want them to learn. and sometimes there’s a disconnect where they may want to really focus on what [they] did right or wrong in terms of the medical management of a patient, and not really understand some of these other softer things, like communication and teamwork.” (facilitator 15) this category was viewed as teacher-centered since in this conception of teaching the facilitator is the main actor who tries to transmit externally constructed knowledge and skills to the students. applying samuelowicz and bains’ (2001) words, the facilitators use kind of teacher-centered language to describe their teaching. teaching as development of students’ professional skills in the second category, teaching as developing students’ professional skills, the teaching is planned based on the competencies the students will need later in real-life situations, and the goal of teaching is to educate future professionals, as the following facilitator states: “i try to take into account what the residents are exposed to here or the learners are exposed to here. and how relevant that is to their clinical practice. how likely are they to encounter some of these situations? or how much of an impact would these situations have upon them should they encounter them here? particularly, i think we’re aiming towards independent practice.” (facilitator 14) according to this conception of teaching, the aim of the learning process is to learn the specific competencies the students will need in the future in the healthcare field. in other words, the teacher’s task is to prepare the students for the workplace. compared to the previous category, in this category the teacher considers the students in such a way that he/she spends time and effort giving examples and explaining the things being learned to the students, but from his or her point of view, since he or she is the expert in the field. thus, in this type of teaching the aim is to produce applicable knowledge for the students to take in and use. teachers also use strategies such as providing models, telling, giving examples, illustrating and structuring. the teacher is also responsible for selecting useful and applicable information, as well as cases and problems that are similar to the ones the students will encounter in real life. consequently, the student’s role is to practice the competencies required of entry-level professionals (cf. bruce & gerber, 1995). the interaction takes place in an atmosphere in which the teacher-student relationship is closer to being based on equality than in the previous conception of learning. the students are treated like future healthcare workers and are provided with a safe environment in which to practice their knowledge and skills and share experiences. teaching as facilitation of learning in the third category, the conception of teaching as facilitating students’ learning, the planning of the teaching initially focuses on the individual student, including each student’s backgrounds, needs, expectations, motivation, and individual learning style, as the following excerpt illustrates: “[i]n a way, those learning needs arise from students and through students, so that if a teacher defines them alone, those learning needs and results and goals, obstacles could emerge.” (facilitator 6) in this category, the content and learning objectives are defined by the teacher, but they can be changed, depending on the learning needs of the students. the objectives can even be planned with the students’ participation, which makes it possible to take the students’ existing conceptions into account. therefore, the characteristics of this category include flexible course plans that can be easily changed. to teach competencies, teachers also use a variety of pedagogical methods, as the following facilitator describes: “i also use lots of discussion. i like the blackboard and the flip chart and drawing and asking questions, involvement.” (facilitator 9) in most descriptions, the facilitators’ main role is to create the safe learning environment for the learners. the teacher’s role within in the learning environment is often described as helping, guiding, instructing, motivating, supporting, encouraging and maintaining student learning. consequently, students are viewed as individuals and are considered to be equal to the facilitators, which makes learning as a two-way process. the students are active during the learning process, and they are viewed as responsible for and capable of acquiring knowledge and constructing their own understanding of the content. teachers’ and students’ roles are described in the following excerpt: “but in what we do, it’s more providing a learning environment that’s kind of exploratory. we set the scene for it; we have the residents carry out the various tasks and manage it. we don’t really interfere too much with that. and then we hope when we talk in the debriefing to kind of figure out what do they do, why do they do it, and where are the gaps. and i think that’s the bit. we kind of have the background from the simulation, and then we try to look for the gaps and either have the participant self-learn by exposing those gaps or try and fill those gaps in some way.” (facilitator 14) to summarize, in this category, facilitators acknowledge their role as facilitators of the students’ learning. this means creating a safe environment for students’ learning, taking into account the individual students, and using strategies they think will aid the students’ life-long learning. discussion and conclusion the aim of this study was to examine the different ways that healthcare facilitators understand the teaching and learning processes within an sble. in this study, four conceptions of learning and three conceptions of teaching were identified that are congruent to the conceptions found in previous research (e.g., keskitalo, 2011; keskitalo et al., 2013; boulton-lewis et al., 2001; kember & kwan, 2000; marton et al., 1993; paakkari et al., 2011; postareff & lindblom-ylänne, 2008). in this study, the conceptions of teaching as the development of students’ professional skills (cf. bruce & gerber, 1995; lindblom-ylänne & lonka, 1999), as well as teaching as the facilitation of student learning (keskitalo et al., 2013) were viewed as highly relevant. in this study, the facilitators often stressed the students’ roles as future professionals for whom learning how to apply knowledge, perform clinical procedures, and become competent professionals are the most crucial goals to accomplish. learning as the application and advancement of knowledge and skills was viewed as the most important category of learning conceptions. this is in line with the previous studies that have found this to be an important learning category within the context of healthcare education (cf. bruce & gerber, 1995; lindblom-ylänne & lonka, 1999). previous research has explained the similarities and differences between the conceptions of teaching and learning as being dependent on the individuals involved, the discipline being studied, and the context (boulton-lewis et al., 2001; dahlin & regmi, 1997; paakkari et al., 2010). the findings of our study contains also some differences from previous research results. first, in our study, the facilitators did not describe learning as personal growth, for example, in the sense described by paakkari et al (2011). paakkari et al. (2011) see learning not as simply changing how one sees the things around one and the world, but also fundamentally changing one as a person. rather the facilitators in this study focused on how to help the students develop into competent professionals through transformation of individual thinking and behaviour. our finding is supported by the study of boulton-lewis et al. (2001), who argue that personal development is more likely to be stressed in contexts that are more open to individual interpretation and meaning-making and that require personal understanding, whereas healthcare and medicine are a very content-driven fields in which a set of competencies must be mastered before one can work in the field (cf. laksov et al., 2008). in contrast to the results of previous studies (lindblom-ylänne, trigwell, nevgi, & ashwin, 2006; lueddeke, 2003), the facilitators we interviewed also emphasized teaching as the facilitation of student learning, which is unusual to the healthcare education. for example, lueddeke (2003), found that teachers who work within the disciplines of the hard sciences, such as medicine, are more likely to use a teacher-centered approach. interestingly, in our study, two of the facilitators also described learning as a sort of brain-based process where our brains are exposed to new things and critical reflection is a way to cement these neural pathways. this kind of description has been absent in previous studies, but may provide some new insights to discussion of teaching and learning conceptions. in the present study, none of the facilitators described just one conception of teaching and learning; rather they described teaching and learning from many angles, providing evidence of a hierarchy of inclusiveness. in our data, a hierarchy of inclusiveness can be seen, for example, in the sense that the conception of teaching as the transmission of knowledge and skills is rarely described isolated, since in the medical field the application of knowledge is more relevant than the mere production of inert knowledge. one reason for this multiplicity of conceptions might be that sbles allow and support several types of teaching and learning. the simulation-based learning process may involve initial learning tasks in which students actively acquire knowledge and familiarize themselves with the content to be learned. during the actual learning process, facilitators may be active in explaining difficult concepts and theories, but during the scenario phase (the phase when the learners take care of the simulated patient), students adopt an active role by caring for the patient simulator. the final phase of learning is usually the debriefing phase in which facilitators guide the students’ reflections and set new learning goals (see, e.g., keskitalo, 2015.) as noted above, sbles allow facilitators to experiment with different approaches to teaching and learning; however, if facilitators view teaching as simply the transmission of knowledge and skills, they may encounter difficulties because this traditional conception of teaching may not be the optimal or most functional method in the new setting of sbles. in addition, there are usually fewer participants in sbles, which allows facilitators to explore student-centered pedagogical methods (cf. lindblom-ylänne et al., 2006). in our study, facilitators seemed to reflect on their conceptions of teaching and learning based on their own backgrounds and experiences (cf. tigchelaar et al., 2014). for example, they described how they themselves have learned. this is why it also felt natural to present the conceptions of learning prior to conceptions of teaching. the conceptions were not easy to describe either, which has also been noted by postareff and lindblom-ylänne (2008), who state that facilitators differ in their level of pedagogical awareness; however, as entwistle and walker (2000) have noted, even highly educated teachers sometimes use imprecise language to describe teaching and learning. the research situation may have affected the participants’ descriptions of teaching and learning as well, because they may have responded in a way that they believed would be clearer to the interviewers, who themselves were educational scientists, not clinicians or nurses. the present study has a few limitations. first, due to time constraints, eight participants were interviewed in pairs, whereas the others were interviewed individually. however, we noticed that paired interviews were characterized by multiple perspective, because participants were constantly complementing each other. a second limitation of the study is that, based on the interviews, it could not be determined whether the participants were describing their conceptions of student learning or learning in general (cf. bruce & gerber 1995). it is likely that both types of conceptions were described because facilitators sometimes offered examples from their own learning experience and sometimes described how their students have learned or how they as facilitators have supported student learning. in future studies, it would be ideal to organize in-depth interviews with participants in order to gain a better understanding of healthcare simulation facilitators’ conceptions. a third limitation is that the facilitators we interviewed may have given ideal descriptions of teaching and learning rather than descriptions of actual practices. therefore, in future studies, comparing video data and field notes with statements in interviews would be beneficial. finally, the participants were all enthusiastic healthcare simulation facilitators and developers of simulation-based environments. therefore, they may have different views on teaching and learning than healthcare teachers working in more traditional learning environments such as lecture rooms. for example, previous research (keskitalo, 2011) has shown that sbles may be challenging for teachers who have more traditional views of teaching and learning, and this fact should be taken into account when interpreting the research results. this study provides an understanding of sble facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning. using the words of rudolph et al. (2008, p. 1011), our role has been “the cognitive detective”. during this study we have been exploring the facilitators’ conceptions that may lead to certain actions and behavior in educational practice. the results of this study can be used to develop healthcare educators’ pedagogical training, for example, by providing tools that enhance students’ personal growth and transforms facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning into a more complex direction. in such training, it is essential to take into account the prevailing conceptions of teaching and learning in order to develop them in a more desirable direction. previous researchers have also stated that in order to change conceptions and develop education, we must take many things into consideration: conceptions of teaching, learning and knowledge, conceptions concerning the learning process and the learning environment, and educational culture (jacobs et al., 2015; kember, 1997; laksov et al., 2008; lindblom-ylänne et al., 2006; postareff & lindblom-ylänne, 2008). based on the results of this study, we also suggest that such training should inquiry our previous experiences, since conceptions are developed through experience. (e.g., entwistle, & peterson, 2004). all of the above-mentioned factors affect conceptions of teaching and learning, approaches to teaching, and, finally, learning outcomes. in the near future, we aim to continue our research by studying how facilitators’ conceptions of teaching and learning have changed over time. it would also be interesting to study individual differences in conceptions of teaching and learning and how they are related to approaches to teaching in simulation-based healthcare education, because previous research on medical educators has shown that conceptions of teaching and learning and approaches to teaching and learning are not necessarily aligned (laksov et al., 2008). to conclude, it seems that previous experience, discipline and the learning environment play a significant role in forming our conceptions and approaches to teaching and learning. the effect of experience can be seen by the fact that the conceptions of teaching and learning discovered in our data are closely aligned with the results of previous studies, whereas the context and discipline seem to affect the aspects of teaching and learning on which the facilitators focus. for example, in the present study, the effects of context and discipline can be seen in the sense that within simulation-based healthcare education, stressing the professional competency of the learners is more common than the conception that education changes or transforms us as human beings. in our study, the conceptions of teaching and learning were also varied, implying that simulation-based education supports many types of teaching and learning. the facilitators who participated in our study were very much aware that teaching and learning comprise more than the traditional conceptions of teaching and learning. therefore, based on the results of this study, we argue that by changing the teaching conditions, we may also affect the underlying conceptions of teaching and learning, as well as approaches to teaching and, ultimately, learning outcomes. acknowledgements the financial support for this study was provided by tekes (the finnish funding agency for innovations) and the edrf (european regional development fund) as well as from a number of public and private financiers as part of the medipeda iii project (2008–2010) and the crics project (2016–2018). the authors would like to thank the facilitators who participated in this study. references åkerlind, g. s. 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(2010). the meaning of learning and knowing. rotterdam: sense publishers. microsoft word davidhamilton-messagepostingordialogue.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 message posting or dialogue? on the dialectics of online practice in adult education david hamilton, ethel dahlgren, agneta hult and tor söderström umeå university, sweden, email: david.hamilton@pedag.umu.se abstract this paper examines on-line communication in liberal adult education. it highlights the problematic space between message posting and the promotion of dialogue. conference software in swedish adult education is widely based on message posting. but can message posting also foster the democratic practices associated with reasoned discussion or dialogue? introduction space is not a background for events but possesses an autonomous structure (albert einstein, 1879-1955, quoted in clarke, 1973, p. 198) reading makes the full man, conference [discussion] a ready man, and writing an exact man. (francis bacon, 1561-1627, essays, 1625) in june 2001, the european distance education network (eden) held a conference in stockholm. its theme was 'learning without limits: developing the next generation of education'. twelve months later the eden conference was held in granada (spain). its title was similarly grandiose: 'open and distance learning in europe and beyond: rethinking international cooperation'. its keynote speeches extended this optimistic atmosphere, with titles like 'towards a global metacampus', 'the learner and (teacher) of the future', and 'building a collaborative eworld on a human scale'. the titles of these presentations, however, are problematic – at least from a scientific perspective. they are utopian since they seem to offer eternal salvation. unwittingly, too, the theological tone of these titles is reminiscent of a potent biblical image in european history the garden of eden. according to the book of genesis, adam and eve were given the opportunity to acquire the fruits of knowledge for all humanity and for all time. in return, they were barred from eating fruit from a particular site the tree of good and evil. encouraged by a serpent, however, they ignored this restriction, consumed the apple of wisdom, and were banished from the garden of eden. eden conferences can also be understood in these utopian, salvationist terms. ict is the garden of eden; and the conference publicists share the serpent’s outlook. they assume, uncritically, that everything in the garden is of equal seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 2 value. accordingly, they are reluctant to distinguish the good and evil of online learning. such a perspective, however, is understandable. it reflects the european reach and global ambitions of the sponsors, organisers and members of eden. nevertheless, the ideological baggage of the biblical ‘fall’ weighs heavily on distance education. modernist recovery and redemption are to be achieved – at almost any price. in the process, modernist arguments for e-learning are suffused with four problematic assumptions: 1. that the impact or uptake of technology is unmediated by social phenomena; 2. that e-learning is isomorphic with earlier forms of learning; 3. that e-learning can be used as a substitute for other forms of teaching and learning; and finally 4. that there is no difference between change, progress and revolution. (change is desirable; desirable change is progressive; and techniquefostered change is desirable, progressive and revolutionary). adult education and elearning this paper revisits these assumptions. it arises from an investigation of pedagogical practices associated with the use of forum (or conferencing) software in adult education. in 2001, the swedish national council of adult education sponsored a programme of research on the uses of ict to promote discussion and dialogue among citizens. this initiative embraced an educational form that, in the nordic countries, is known as folkbildning and, in english, as citizenship or liberal education. it is linked, therefore, to civil society rather than to the market place. typically, it comprises courses in foreign languages, leisure activities (e.g. music groups and choirs), crafts (mediterranean cooking, wood-carving); and topics of contemporary interest (e.g. globalisation, the rights of women, european union policies). adult education of this kind has a long history in scandinavia (see, for instance, korsgaard, 2002). originally, folkbildning was a self-help movement started at the end of the nineteenth century by workers organisations, temperance organisations and religious congregations outside the state church. it was based on a sense of common educational purpose, collectively negotiated. there is a widespread assumption that this educational form strengthens active citizenship and, as a result, safeguards democracy. folkbildning promoted social improvement for those who did not have access to higher levels of schooling. initially, it favoured men over women. subsequently (1920 onwards), folkbildning was also expected to promote social cohesion or active citizenship. most recently (in the 1990s), it acquired a third purpose social inclusion. target groups for social inclusion include single mothers, people with disabilities, people who live in remote areas, people raised and educated outside sweden and a diminishing category – people with limited experiences of formal schooling. within a wider educational context, folkbildning is deemed to be studentcentred, participatory and constructivist. it is student-centred to the extent that it takes account of students’ circumstances and prior knowledge. it is participatory insofar as it encourages students to share and exchange ideas. and it is constructivist because it hopes that students will shape themselves in accordance with the content and purposes of the course. nordic folkbildning, therefore, overlaps with the german enlightenment’s bildungsideal of self-governance and self-formation, and with 21st century seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 3 ideas about flexible learning – the conventional swedish characterisation of ict-based education. how or whether these aspirations are also evident in the inner life of adult education is, however, a separate question. recent software developments, however, provide opportunities to address this question and, in the process, throw further light on swedish adult education, distance education, and on-line practices. conferencing online the website ( www.thinkofit.com/webconf ) a self-claimed ‘ comprehensive guide to software that powers discussions on the internet’distinguishes 'forum software’ from 'web conferencing’. in december 2004, it listed 132 forms of forum software and 173 forms of conferencing software. suitably configured, forum software also retains a record of on-line linguistic behaviour. assuming ethical safeguards can be met, such behaviour can also be traced and analysed. problems remain, however, with the analysis of these data. the software preferred in swedish adult education firstclass is not, strictly, a conferencing medium but, rather, a forum or message-posting system. nevertheless, it is possible to conduct a frequency analysis of the postings: how many? when were they made? who made them? and so on. discontinuous messages have their own integrity and can be legitimately studied in this manner. yet, such analysis also has limitations. it overlaps with another form – or level of analysis. a message can be regarded as free-standing; but it can also be regarded as an utterance, a 'link in a very complex chain of other utterances' (bakhtin,1986, p.70). from this perspective, each posting serves as a signifier for one link in a chain of utterances that, collectively, link earlier and later messages. in short, message posting can also be analysed as a dialogic process. from this perspective, messages or utterances are part of an extended discussion. moreover, such exchanges may include more than two participants the conventional english denotation of ‘dialogue’. etymologically, dialogue does not denote two people speaking with each other. rather, the greek prefix di means 'through' (such that diaphanous means ‘see-through’). in this latter sense, dialogue means 'verbal interchange of thought between two or more persons’ (oxford english dictionary, emphasis added). this connotation applied when francis bacon wrote about 'conferencing'; and it still applies in the swedish word samtal. nevertheless, any discussion is a group process. it must be examined in terms of the intentions and expectations perhaps unspoken associated with utterances, which, in this case, are posted. thus, when separate postings form part of a dialogue, more sophisticated analysis is needed (see, for example, hamilton et al., 2004). ‘is silence an utterance?’ becomes, for instance, a telling question. in the remainder of this paper, we outline some of the issues that arose in our work. for the same of convenience, we build our commentary on some of the first-order, descriptive features of on-line communication; viz: message-posting is: i. an asynchronous, round-the-clock (24/7) activity. ii. a fusion of presence and distance seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 4 iii. written, not oral iv. permanent, not transitory v. conducted face-to-interface not face-to-face, vi. constrained by specific features of the interface, and vii. steered by norms that are defined by the course providers and course leaders that, in turn, are inherited from earlier discourses of adult education. asynchronous communication the 24/7 phenomenon in on-line distance education (the fact that messages can be posted at any time of the day and week) raises questions about conceptions of time in flexible learning. if a message is posted to provoke a response, how do the participants handle waiting time and turn-taking? can there be 'just-in-time' or ‘just for me’ practices in an asynchronous learning environment (cf. jochems et al., 2004, pp. 1-2)? do these practical or egocentric conceptions of time and space replace newtonian or cartesian conceptions? is real time, therefore, replaced by any time or my time? can flexible learning operate with hybrid conceptions of time? or do any time and my time practices mean that on-line teachers become a species of call-centre workers? convergence of distance and presence space can be analysed in a similar way, as a hybridisation of socialpsychological and physical phenomena. fontaine (2002), for instance, has written about 'presence' ('co-presence' or 'remote presence') in on-line learning, where participants feel close to each other despite their physical separation (see also shin, 2002). by contrast, moore (1993) relies heavily on the notion of 'transactional distance' in adult education. fontaine and moore treat space metaphorically rather than physically. like einstein, they accept that space is more than distance. it is also about social differences as well as geographical separation. personal or pedagogical configurations of space and time can be manipulated to create new ecologies of time and space (fontaine, 2002, p. 41). inherited assumptions about social space, social distance, social separation and social difference become, as it were, post-modern phenomena. they display the ‘liquid-modern’ transience of lifestyles where the ‘mass of accumulated knowledge’ is represented as sites of ‘disorder and chaos’ (bauman, 2003, pp. 41-42). the measurement and calibration of cultural separation and difference depends, instead, upon cultural scales that are embedded in specific value frameworks or paradigms. further, as pierre bourdieu repeatedly argued (e.g. 1970), social distance may also be an indicator of differences in social power. for this last reason, message posting can also be subjected to 'critical discourse analysis', where: power is conceptualized both in terms of asymmetries between participants in discourse events, and in terms of unequal capacities to control how texts are produced distributed and consumed. (fairclough, 1995, p. 1-2) what dimensions of separation and difference, for instance, can be discerned in the unspoken practices associated with message posting (and flexible learning)? when is a response too late (or too inflexible)? and, as suggested, can silence be an intentional response to an earlier utterance? not least, what seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 5 does this view of asynchronous communication mean for the promotion of democracy through adult education? do ‘political truths’ emerge from the ‘clash of pre-established interests and preferences’ and/or from ‘reasoned discussion about issues involving the common good' (london, 1995, p. 34)? oral and written voices the difference between written and oral forms of literacy is widely noted (for example, through the seminal work of walter ong, e.g. 1958). the general view is that written and oral forms have their own codes of practice. yet, a problem arises if dialogue is regarded as an oral form, a form of conversation. should postings mimic oral utterances, or should they follow written conventions? further, it is sometimes accepted that spoken (or face-to-face) communication is much more dependent upon tone and body language. the scale of tone/body variations is difficult to calibrate; but a recent handbook of online learning offers a model: the loss of face-to-face contact, both formal and casual, carries a great impact. studies show that in face-to-face discussions, a message is conveyed 55% by body language, 38% by tone of voice, and only 7% by actual words. in telephone conversations, a message is conveyed 87% by tone of voice and 13% by actual words'. (rudestam & schoenholtz-read, 2002, p. 367) thus, should online postings be regarded as oral or written forms of communication? how, paradoxically, should participants’ voices be read? for the reasons already given, on-line is a bi-modal medium. firstclass software displays, indeed supports, this bimodality. from a written perspective, it is forum or bulletin-board software, not a conferencing facility. yet, from an oral perspective, users may expect it to be responsive in a dialogic or conversational manner. and from a hybrid perspective, participants may resolve their uncertainties by switching between oral and written voices. at times they seem to be speaking while at other times they adopt a epistolary, letter-writing stance. a further indication of this bimodality is that signifiers of body language and tone are inserted using typographical devices (keyboard symbols (!), icons (smileys) and capital letters ( shouting )? permanent transience one of the enigmatic features of on-line conferencing is that, as suggested, it echoes both written and oral forms of communication. yet, when dialogue has an educational purpose, tensions can arise between the cultural ground-rules that regulate permanent and transient communication. for example, there may be an inherited assumption that course participation is oral while course assessment is written. forum software, however, removes this distinction because all public communication is shared, stored and open to subsequent review. in other words, all of it is potentially public. does this mean that on-line communication re-aligns the public and private dimensions of educational practice? and what does this mean for the integrity of the participants? does the realignment silence them? does it attenuate their communication? or do they seek other channels where they can communicate privately (e.g. email, phone)? face-to-interface for reasons given above, distance-based adult education (i.e. flexible learning) may not be the same as face-to-face adult education? if so, are these seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 6 differences a matter of degree or of kind? in other words, is flexible learning qualitatively different from previous forms of adult education? certainly, it is mediated in new ways that change the environment of communication and learning. yet the impact of these new mediations on the social-psychology of learning is neither widely-examined nor understood. in questioning this neglect, for instance, wertsch has commented that: we may need a more radical alignment of our analytic approach. rather than viewing the introduction of a new cultural tool as making an existing form of action easier or more efficient, it may be important to consider how it introduces fundamental change something to such a degree that we can question whether the same form of action is involved at all. (2002, p. 105) in part, this neglect arises for the reason given earlier a widespread quasitheological belief in technological determinism. but there is another possibility. mediation effects may be present but they may be mis-represented as undesirable side-effects. they are regarded as a kind of background noise, which will be eliminated in the next release of the delivery system. the message and the medium nevertheless, forum conferencing is always mediated by the architecture of the software that is utilised. firstclass, for instance, offers the possibility of more than one site for message posting. for instance, cafe sites may be included for off-task messages; while other sites are allocated to topic-related postings. data from the courses examined in this paper suggest there is wide variation in the targeting of these sites. there is extensive cross-posting or, what amounts to the same thing, evidence of participants’ failure to distinguish offand ontask messages. other forms of software, presumably, allow other forms of deviant or innocent cross-posting. one explanation of cross-posting is that assumptions built into the software may not be shared by course members. in short, the ecologies of time and space intended by software engineers and educational technologists may not correspond to the ecologies co-constructed by course participants and tutors who choose wilfully or innocently to ‘squat’ in the spaces created by the engineers. cultures of communication despite the constraints embedded in firstclass, tutors and participants have considerable scope to reconfigure its architecture. our data suggest that the same forum software can embrace widely different ecologies of time and space and, as a result, cultures of communication. if this is correct, there is no onesize-fits-all forum software. discussion back to eden this paper has focused on difficulties that can arise in the study of on-line teaching, learning and communication. it derives from a study of the inner-life of a small range of on-line courses in sweden. to highlight these difficulties, the paper contrasts two views of ict-based adult education. one of the viewpoints is close to technological determinism; while the other regards online adult education as a pedagogic practice that should be consciously saturated with the inherited values of liberal adult education (or folkbildning). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 7 the embedding and advancement of flexible learning in swedish adult education has been troubled by these different perspectives. while it pays homage to a transmission or delivery model of ict practice, it also wishes to affirm the inherited values of folkbildning and their assumed contribution to democratic forms of life in sweden. in short, a belief that the inner life of liberal adult has been, and can still be, a cradle for democracy is deeply implicated in public investment in on-line adult education. this paper was originally built on data from a small-scale project. more recent work, however, suggest that its cautionary comments are not merely relevant to nordic experience. they also emerge in a seven-page ‘policy paper’ prepared by the on-line distance learning (odl) liaison committee created by the member networks of the european distance education network (eden). the paper has the title distance learning and elearning in european policy and practice: the vision and the reality. it was issued on 17th november, 2004, and the full version is available at www.odl-liaison.org/pages.php?pn=policy-paper_2004 . as suggested by its title, the policy paper contrasts the vision and reality of elearning, echoing the experiences of the umeå project. it notes, for instance, that the prevalence of ‘very low quality and simplistic promotional messages’ in european policy allowed critics to ‘build their case’ against elearning. it suggests that use of the term ‘blended learning’ as a ‘panacea concept’ has become a recognition that ‘ict-supported learning’ can embrace ‘different learning strategies’ yet, at the same time, the use such labels also serves as a rhetorical device to ‘hide’ resistance to elearning innovation. the eden document attempts to evaluate the european elearning initiative, recognising ‘positive’ features as well as ‘weaknesses’. positive features include high levels of national mobilisation and cross-national networking, and the gradual ‘evolution of the rhetoric of elearning’ away from ‘just computers, connectivity, competitiveness and cost-effectiveness…towards content, context, collaboration and learning communities’. on the other hand, identified weaknesses include sustained ‘simplified visions and over-optimistic statements’ that ‘resulted in the interruption of a dialogue [between ict and odl] that, a few years ago, was starting’. the eden document concludes that in the knowledge society some level of use of ict in learning activities ‘cannot remain the exception’ and that, therefore, a ‘new vision’ is needed, one that distinguishes between ‘innovative and merely substitutive use of ict in different learning contexts’. such, then, is the new sense of change and progress offered by a section of the eden community. at the time of writing (december 2004), no response has been circulated, via the eden network, from the other sectors of the eden community – policymakers in the european community or representatives of the elearning industry. if the optimism shown in the various titles of the 2001/2 eden conference represented a thesis about ict and odl, the response of the eden liaison committee is its antithesis. meanwhile, like many others who find themselves between heaven and hell, we work towards a synthesis. note this paper was originally presented to the network ‘open and distance education’ at the annual conference of the european educational research association, lisbon, september 2002. it was produced as part of a three-year project folkbildning på distans – en samtalsmiljö för lärande (liberal adult education at a distance – a discussion milieu for learning), started in 2001and funded by the swedish council for adult education (folkbildningsrådet), with the support of the learnit initiative of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 8 knowledge and competence foundation (kk-stiftelsen). the project director is ethel.dahlgren@pedag.umu.se this email address is being protected from spam bots, you need javascript enabled to view it and the project website is http://alfa.ped.umu.se/projekt/folkbildning/ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 1 – issue 1 – 2005 9 references bahktin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays (ed. c. emerson & m.holquist; tr. v.w: mcgee). austin, texas: university of texas press. bourdieu, p., & passeron, j.-c. (1970). la reproduction : eléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement. paris: editions de minuit. clarke, r.w. (1973). einstein: the life and times . london: hodder & stoughton. fairclough, n. (1995). critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. london: longman. fontaine, g. (2002). presence in “teleland”. in k.e: rudestam & j. schoenholtz-read (eds.) handbook of online learning: innovations in higher education and corporate training (pp. 29-52). thousand oaks, ca: sage. hamilton, d., dahlgren, e., hult, a., roos, b., & söderström, t. (2004). when performance is the product: problems in the analysis of on-line distance education. british educational research journal, 30 (6), 841-854. jochems, w., merriënboer, j. v., & koper, r. (eds.). (2004). integrated e-learning: implications for pedagogy, technology and organisation. new york: routledge/falmer. korsgaard, o. (2002). a european demos? the nordic adult education tradition – folkeoplysning – faces a challenge. comparative education, 38(1), 7-16. london, s. (1995) teledemocracy vs. deliberative democracy. interpersonal computing and technology: an electronic journal for the 21st century, 3 (2), 33-55. retrieved 3rd june 2002 from www.helsinki.fi/science/optek/1995/n2/london.txt . moore, m. g. (1993). theory of transactional distance. in d. keegan (ed.), theoretical principles of distance education (pp. 22-38). london: routledge. ong, w. j. (1958). ramus, method and the decay of dialogue: from the art of discourse to the art of reason. london: harvard university press. on-line distance learning (odl) liaison committee of the european distance education network (eden). (2004). distance learning and elearning in european policy and practice: the vision and the reality: budapest: eden ( available at www.odl-liaison.org/pages.php?pn=policy-paper_2004 ) rudestam, k.e. & schoenholtz-read, j. (eds.) (2002). handbook of online learning: innovations in higher education and corporate training. thousand oaks, ca: sage. shin, n. (2002). beyond interaction: the relational construct of ‘transactional presence’. open learning, 17(2), 122-137. wertsch, j. (2002). computer mediation, pbl, and dialogicality. distance education, 23(1), 105-108. how to trigger students’ interest in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review ©2018 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. how to trigger students’ interest in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review liping sun faculty of education, university of lapland e-mail: lsun@ulapland.fi pirkko siklander faculty of education, university of oulu e-mail: pirkko.siklander@oulu.fi heli ruokamo faculty of education, university of lapland e-mail: heli.ruokamo@ulapland.fi abstract various digital devices not only provide students’ internet connections but also create more opportunities for them to get inspired, motivated, and engaged in learning activities. recent research has shown that triggering interest can enhance students’ self-regulation, collaboration, problem-solving, and joy of learning. pedagogical use of digital technologies can support student-centered and collaborative learning and develop thinking skills and creativity. however, little is known about the relevance of digital technologies for triggering interest. the aim of this study is to review existing literature in the field of the learning sciences and provide answers for the following research questions: 1) which factors trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments? 2) what kinds of learning environments have been used for exploring triggers? the systematic literature review (slr) methodology has been used in this study. the results indicate that three factors employed in computer environments, including scaffolding, collaboration, and perceived ease of use, can be the most efficient ways to trigger students’ interest in learning. the findings will be useful for researchers and teachers to discover appropriate methods and approaches in the successful integration of digital technologies in learning environments and the teaching process. keywords: trigger, interest, learning environments, digital technologies, systematic literature review (srl) mailto:lsun@ulapland.fi mailto:pirkko.siklander@oulu.fi seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 63 introduction the digital revolution and globalization have had a deep influence on education at all levels. various digital devices, such as computers, laptops, tablet technologies, and mobile phones not only provide students’ internet connections but also create more opportunities for them to get inspired, motivated, and engaged in learning activities (nygren & vikström, 2013; chen & wang, 2015; wang, 2010). previous studies have shown that the pedagogical use of digital technologies can support student-centered and collaborative learning and develop thinking skills and creativity (bingimlas, 2009; arancibia, oliva, & valdivia, 2013; danče, 2010; thang, nambiar, wong, jaafar, & amir, 2015). some educators and researchers also believe that digital technologies can be beneficial for students’ learning engagement and motivation; this is because the digital context can motivate students to apply positive emotion in attention, memory, and learning skills during academic engagement (chang et al., 2016; vandercruysse, vandewaetere, cornillie, & clarebout, 2013; chen, wong, & wang, 2014). for example, danče (2010) claimed that the use of digital technologies helped students to recognize connections and behaviors, improve quality of tasks, communicate with others and present ideas, increase efficiency, and be creative and self-confident. sun and looi (2013) pointed out that digital learning environments facilitated students’ cognitive development and metacognitive strategies and promoted their conceptual understanding, collaborative competence, and self-regulated learning and critical thinking skills. thang et al. (2015) found that the application of digital technologies brought about students’ improved performance, deeper strategies of learning, and a higher level of thinking skills. in addition, the studies indicated that the use of digital technologies to create a comfortable learning environment was able to assist students to practice and think for better learning engagement, while at the same time enabling them to experience, transfer, and demonstrate knowledge in different forms (silviyanti & yusuf, 2014; chen, lin, yeh, & lou, 2013; thang et al., 2015; nygren & vikström, 2013). recent research has shown that triggering interest can enhance students’ selfregulation, collaboration, problem-solving, and joy of learning (hidi & renninger, 2006; roberts & ousey, 2004; renninger & bachrach, 2015; siklander, kangas, ruhalahti, & korva, 2017). however, little is known about the relevance of digital technologies for triggering interest; most research has focused on applying digital technologies to create a learning environment to help students’ academic performance (furberg, kluge, & ludvigsen, 2013; chen & wang, 2015; pozzi, 2011; drijvers, doorman, kirschner, hoogveld, & boon, 2014). this study aims to contribute to the limited literature on triggering interest with digital technologies. theoretical framework interest, as one of the most significant motivational variables for learning, has been found to influence students’ attention, goals, and levels of learning (hidi & renninger, 2006; hidi, renninger, & krapp, 2004; schraw, flowerday, & lehman, 2001). researchers have proposed that triggering students’ interest can increase their motivation to organize learning tasks and use strategies in the classroom (schraw et al., 2001; krapp, 2007; hidi et al., 2004). meanwhile, it seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 64 also stimulates them to focus on the task itself and work positively and fully engaged with content (renninger, 2000). trigger the trigger is the original factor that motivates students to learn and engage (roberts & ousey, 2004; brauer, siklander, & ruhalahti, 2017). many researchers have pointed out that a trigger can change students’ learning motivations and result in good engagement in the classroom (roberts & ousey, 2004; annabi, 2007; lu & chan, 2015; määttä, järvenoja, & järvelä, 2012; siklander et al., 2017). as brauer et al. (2017) claimed in their study, triggers play a pivotal role when facilitating and maintaining students’ interest in learning and engagement. the main identified triggers were challenging tasks, progress in learning and gamification. similarly, korkealehto and siklander (in press) found that gamified solutions in language learning contexts are potential for enhancing students’ engagement. obviously, a deep understanding of triggers is beneficial for designing an appropriate environment that maintains students’ situational interest in learning as well as supports the development of individual interests (roberts & ousey, 2004; annabi, 2007; brauer et al, 2017; renninger & bachrach, 2015). in educational conditions, the trigger is used to stimulate the students’ motivation and support their learning (roberts & ousey, 2004; annabi, 2007; lu & chan, 2015; siklander et al., 2017). the trigger can be presented in different ways, such as video, slides, computer games, puzzles, written information, problems, and so on (siklander et al., 2017). the goal of triggers is to help students adapt to the courses and to confront their expectations and, thus, enjoy their learning. it should be noted that triggers process is sometimes transient, but it is also possible to have interest develop and generate maintained situational interest (renninger & hidi, 2011; siklander et al., 2017; roberts & ousey, 2004; annabi, 2007). development of the trigger triggers are able to develop problem-solving and increase enjoyment in learning (siklander et al., 2017; lu & chan, 2015). for triggers to be interesting and attractive, they must reflect situations in which students prefer to participate, and the students must focus their attention on the learning activity and practice every day (roberts & ousey, 2004; hidi et al., 2004; siklander et al., 2017). määttä et al. (2012) categorized and discussed three types of trigger: individual progress trigger, group progress trigger, and contextual trigger. they claimed that the group progress trigger had a significant influence on students’ on-task activity. the encouragement and support of peers was helpful for students to maintain efficacious interaction. meanwhile, task or topic discussion and working together facilitated students’ learning interest and engagement. triggers provide different types of learning experiences, and, consequently, students acquire various transferable skills, such as problem solving, selfconfidence, group work, self-regulation, etc. (määttä et al., 2012; roberts & ousey, 2004; lu & chan, 2015). but beyond that, triggers also help students develop their knowledge and understanding of learning materials (roberts & seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 65 ousey, 2004; renninger & bachrach, 2015; lu & chan, 2015). triggers can make students engage in the middle of the learning performance and stimulate an attitude of interest based on their stored knowledge. in this way, students’ stored knowledge is used and valued (roberts & ousey, 2004; renninger, 2000). in addition, triggers promote student-generated learning strategies and problem solving (hidi & renninger, 2006; lu & chan, 2015). however, siklander et al. (2017) emphasized that the same triggers do not always work well for various students or for the same students in various conditions and, further, that triggers can influence interest both positively and negatively. in summary, if the nature of triggers and the triggering process could be understood well, it would be possible to contribute to the design of a comfortable learning environment for students that effectively promoted their interest and engagement (renninger & bachrach, 2015). interest interest, “a cognitive and affective motivational variable” (renninger & bachrach, 2015, p. 59) that is a sustained characteristic resulting in increased engagement and learning of students, is regarded as a key that pushes students into a subject matter and inspires them to develop meaningful connections to a field of study (mazer, 2013; schraw & lehman, 2001; schiefele, 1999). in general, interest often refers to positive feelings and leads to “an attraction, a preference, and a passion” (hidi et al., 2004, p. 94). when students experience interest, they engage in intrinsic motivational behaviors, and they can be propelled by enjoyment but not by extrinsic motivations (siklander et al., 2017; ryan & deci, 2000). person-object approach to interest (poi) the person-object approach to interest (poi) is a theoretical framework to structure and clarify interest-related concepts (krapp, hidi, & renninger, 1992; krapp, 2002). according to krapp’s (2002) explanation, interest is defined as “a relational concept” (p. 410) that stands for “a relationship between a person and an object” (p. 410), and object of interest refers to a field of study, a special activity, series of question (renninger & bachrach, 2015), or “any other content of the cognitively represented life-space” (p. 410). on the basis of these objects, a person can develop a close relationship that could then become an individual interest under definite conditions (krapp, 2002; krapp et al. 1992). meanwhile, the importance of social context cannot be ignored because the environment provides chances for a person to experience object of interest and conducts a structure of conditions to affect interest development involved situational interest and individual interest (krapp, 2002; krapp et al., 1992; hidi & renninger, 2006; schraw & lehman, 2001). the interest relationship between person and object and interest development can be illustrated specifically with the following four-phase model of interest introduced by hidi and renninger (2016). interest development hidi and renninger (2006) presented a model of interest development comprising the four phases of triggered situational interest, maintained seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 66 situational interest, emerging individual interest, and well-developed individual interest, with profound educational significance in current in-school and outof-school learning. table 1 shows the features of each phase, and every phase includes certain forms of knowledge and cognitive procedure (hidi et al., 2004). table 1: four-phase model of interest development (hidi & renninger, 2006) according to table 1, the first two phases are types of situational interest. triggered situational interest is a forerunner for further development of interest (hidi & renninger, 2006; schraw & lehman, 2001; siklander et al., 2017). triggered situational interest can be aroused by environmental elements and contents of learning; meanwhile, maintained situational interest can be pursued by significant tasks or personal participation (hidi & renninger, 2006; schraw & lehman, 2001). both phases of situational interest can be triggered by instructional learning environments that supply meaningful activities, including collaborative group work, one-to-one tutoring, etc. (hidi & renninger, 2006; siklander et al., 2017). however, it should be noted that situational interest may not always facilitate further development of interest and sometimes has a negative influence (hidi & renninger, 2006; schraw & lehman, 2001; siklander et al., 2017). however, once situational interest is maintained, repeated engagement can be propelled by the environment and lead to the development of an emerging, and then a well-developed, individual interest (renninger & hidi, 2011; renninger & bachrach, 2015). the next two phases are types of individual interest. the characteristics of individual interest are positive feeling, stored knowledge, and task value (hidi & renninger, 2006; hidi et al., 2004; schraw et al., 2001). with emerging individual interest, the student would like to value the task, generate her/his questions, redefine task demands, anticipate succeeding steps, and bring effort. compared with emerging individual interest, well-developed individual interest involves more stored knowledge and task value for contents (hidi & renninger, 2006; hidi et al., 2004; renninger, 2000). with well-developed individual interest, the student values and engages in the task again so that she/he can relate and try to find answers to questions. she/he is likely to employ various strategies and provide effort if it is required (renninger, 2000; hidi & seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 67 renninger, 2006). both phases of individual interest need external support and encouragement from experts, teachers, and peers to increase task understanding and opportunity (hidi & renninger, 2006; hidi et al., 2004; renninger, 2000; siklander et al., 2017). additionally, instructional situations and comfortable learning environments are beneficial to develop and deepen those two phases of individual interest for knowledge building and achievement (hidi & renninger, 2006; renninger, 2000; siklander et al., 2017). it is clear that interest in the classroom may improve not only students’ intrinsic motivational levels but can also stimulate their learning performance and engagement (roberts & ousey, 2004; annabi, 2007; renninger & bachrach, 2015). meanwhile, triggers can profoundly change and influence students’ interest in either a positive or negative direction (siklander et al., 2017; määttä et al., 2012). research has shown that interest-triggered learning activities can develop deep learning and engagement and lead to better learning achievement as well (krapp, 2002; brauer et al, 2017). therefore, determining how to trigger students’ interest is regarded as one of the most significant elements in learning and development (hidi et al., 2004; renninger & bachrach, 2015). in this study, interest triggering will be applied within digital learning environments, which can support the enhancement of students’ academic learning and engagement. aim and research questions the aim of this study is to investigate how students’ interest is triggered and positively maintained by applying ict-based learning environments. the following research questions are examined in particular:  which factors trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments?  what kinds of learning environments have been used for exploring triggers? methodology the systematic literature review (slr) methodology was used in this study. compared with a narrative literature review, a systematic review that employs a strict methodology in a documented and structured process results in a more reliable and validated conclusion (sawyer, 2017). recognized as an appropriate way to search and analyze large literature databases, the slr can gather relevant research papers and make essential contributions that provide evidence on the relationship between interest triggering and digital learning (palsa & ruokamo, 2015; borrego, foster, & froyd, 2014; horvath & pewsner, 2004; boelens, de wever, & voet, 2017). search stages two search stages were used to obtain research articles relevant to the present study. the first stage used the following search terms: “ict” and/or “interest” and/or “trigger,” these terms being close to the current article’s keywords. for the second search stage, the following seven scientific databases were employed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 68 for information retrieval: 1) eric (proquest), 2) sciencedirect (elsevier), 3) springerlink, 4) sage journals, 5) academic search elite (ebsco), 6) abi/inform global (proquest), and 7) social science database (proquest). these databases were chosen because of their multidisciplinary ranges and their relevance to digital learning research. inclusion and exclusion criteria were used to select appropriate and focused studies (boelens et al., 2017). the inclusion criteria were:  peer-reviewed  journal articles  published between 2010 and 2016 (the last seven years)  written in english the exclusion criteria were:  short conference articles without clear descriptions  book or article reviews  book chapters  articles published in a language other than english based on the search terms, 240 articles were retrieved, and 47 of these were then selected according to the titles, abstracts, and keywords. through reading all the selected articles (n=47), a total of 20 articles (see appendix) were finally chosen according to the criteria for inclusion and exclusion. analysis the type of data analysis used in this study was content analysis. content analysis is a method that can typically be applied both to a qualitative and quantitative path (seuring & gold, 2012; borrego et al., 2017). seuring and gold (2012) described two levels of content analysis. the first level was to analyze the apparent content of texts and documents in a statistical way, while the second level was to find out the actual content of texts and documents on the basis of the items and parameters’ explanation. the combination of qualitative methods with quantitative analyses appeared helpful for the analyst (seuring & gold, 2012; borrego et al., 2017). in the educational research context, content analysis often appears as a kind of qualitative research and a method of synthesizing meaning from written documents, transcripts, and other media (borrego et al., 2017; seuring & gold, 2011; mayring, 2000). meanwhile, it is also a flexible method that allows researchers to make many decisions based on the research questions and the data (borrego et al., 2017; mayring, 2000). if content analysis is applied in the systematic review, the analyst should have a clear intention and basic principle in mind so that the content analysis is able to instruct all the decisions to accommodate the methodology (borrego et al., 2017; seuring & gold, 2011; mayring, 2000). in the light of this study’s research questions, the analysis focused on factors seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 69 that trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments and the learning environments used for exploring triggers. the retrieved articles were analyzed in two phases. in the first phase, a separate document was established based on the research questions and the related data extracted from the articles. the extracted information involved the articles’ details (authors, year published), contextual information (subject, course, program), and shortanswer items for each research question (factors, learning environments). in the second phase, similar short-answer items were grouped into categories, and closely related items were merged. this distinguished and classified the items into four categories (scaffolding, environment acceptance, learning approach, technology acceptance) for the first research question and three categories (technological tools, game-based learning environments, computer environments) for the second research question. results in this section, an overview of the selected articles (n=20) is provided. next, the results for each research question are described. analyses were conducted on fifteen articles (15/20) to answer the two research questions identified earlier in this study, while two articles (2/20) focused on the first research question, and three articles (3/20) focused on the second research question. the contextual information of articles included (a) subjects, for example, chemistry, science, mathematics (pre-algebra, algebra), english or chinese (as foreign languages), history, geography, etc.; (b) undergraduate courses, such as introduction to management, e-commerce, management information system, etc.; (c) master’s programs, for instance, information management, international management, international development, etc. which factors trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments? a detailed overview indicating which factors trigger students’ interest in each article is shown in table 2. table 2: factors that trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 70 in table 2, the four categories of factors are scaffolding, environment acceptance, learning approach, and technology acceptance. the related items that belonged to each factor are presented on the basis of study number. during the analysis of the included articles, various factors that influenced students’ interest in learning in digital environments were found, and these were divided into the four categories presented in figure 1. figure 1: various factors that triggered students’ interest in learning in digital environments (x-axis: factors that triggered students’ interest; y-axis: numbers of articles discussing related factors). several articles (n=6) considered support, collaboration, and perceived ease of use to be the main factors that could trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments. interaction (n=4) was also identified as an important seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 71 factor, and learning space (n=3), blended learning (n=3), perceived usefulness (n=2), self-efficacy (n=2), and enjoyment (n=2) were also found to influence students’ interest in the activities. only one article (n=1) identified learning style as having an impact on students’ interest in the learning process. scaffolding. support, as a type of scaffolding, may trigger students’ interest and engagement in learning (vandercruysse et al., 2013; pozzi, 2011). for example, in vandercruysse et al.’s (2013) study, three types of supportive feedback (correct answer feedback, explicit feedback, and implicit feedback) were provided to students when engaging in a game-based language learning environment, and the types of feedback would withdraw gradually when they engaged in various levels of tasks. their results showed that the content of instruction was relevant to students’ interest and enjoyment, perceived value and usefulness of the task, and level of motivation (vandercruysse et al., 2013; pozzi, 2011). lack of assistance would make students feel anxious and hinder knowledge exchange during the learning activities. however, teachers’ instruction and supervision could make tasks more interesting and acceptable, as well as activate students’ participation (sharma, pandit, & pandit, 2011; nygren & vikström, 2013; arancibia et al., 2013). for instance, in nygren and vikström’s (2013) study, upper secondary students pointed out that a teacher’s supervision would make a task interesting in history, and without a teacher’s instruction, their task would take longer. in addition, detailed guidance and explanation from teachers could give students direction and indicate how they should engage in the performance; it could help them to know how to continue in the activities and progress in them (furberg et al., 2013; pérez-sanagustín, santos, hernández-leo, & blat, 2012). environment acceptance involves collaboration, interaction, learning space, and learning style, closely related to students’ interest. regarding collaboration, various studies have shown that this positively stimulates students’ interest in learning activities. most students thought collaboration provided more chances to experiment or engage in other activities, further discourse, and instructionsafforded (sun & looi, 2013; pozzi, 2011). silviyanti and yusuf (2014) mentioned that collaboration directed students to become active participators and contributors, not just passive receivers of knowledge. in other words, students were prompted to share knowledge, discuss, negotiate, support, and appreciate one another in the collaborative setting (furberg et al., 2013; silviyanti & yusuf, 2014). regarding interaction, this may motivate students’ interest in applying active learning strategies for problem solving and help them to acquire and apply knowledge effectively in the digital environments (chen et al., 2014; pozzi, 2011). sharma et al. (2011) stated that interaction and dealings between learners could set up a social atmosphere that encourages knowledge construction and the conservation of learning. students felt they had a positive effect in the interaction with their peers, which motivated them to participate in the project (arancibia et al., 2013). further, various types of interaction, for example online interaction, increased students’ interest and motivated their self-learning (mompean, 2010). regarding learning space, wang (2010) found that a comfortable learning space could encourage students to learn actively without needing to wait for others. bere and rambe (2016) found that a flexible learning space provided students various choices and convenience in adapting to their learning needs, stimulated their intentions for learning, and allowed students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 72 to choose when, what, and where they study. chen et al. (2014) claimed that an explorative learning environment could trigger students’ motivation, support their active learning, enhance learning influence, and develop their cognitive skills. lastly, regarding learning style, research has shown that students with different learning styles had various interests in respect to technology (thang et al., 2015). for example, an analytical student would be interested in the usefulness and ease of use of the technology, differing from the interests of a communicative student (thang et al., 2015). it should be mentioned that although learning style was explored in the reviewed article, we are aware that there is not scientific evidence for this proposition (kirschner, 2017). learning approach. blended learning has been found to be a good way to increase students’ interest and willingness to learn through integrating traditional learning methods with interactive technologies (bader & köttstorfer, 2013; chen & wang, 2015; pérez-sanagustín et al. 2012). the study by pérezsanagustín et al. (2012) is an example of blended learning practices in which the script blended individual and collaborative activities supported by mobile and computer-based technologies in a geography course in a high school. the findings indicated that computer-supported collaborative learning scripts could promote students’ active learning, enhance technological skills, draw more attention to environment, enhance collaborative skills, and increase their enjoyment in geographic learning (pérez-sanagustín et al. 2012). in chen and wang’s (2015) study conducted in two junior high schools, face-to-face activities and hands-on online learning were blended in a regular science classroom. the results showed that most students considered the blended learning to be interesting and valuable and that they preferred to learn in a combination of learning styles. technology acceptance includes perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, self-efficacy, and enjoyment and is also an important factor in motivating students’ interest in learning. perceived ease of use has a positive influence on students’ attitudes toward using technology (bere & rambe, 2016; chen et al., 2013). it can trigger students’ learning interest, provide chances for selflearning, and supply feedback and solutions for problems immediately (wang, 2010). students who perceive technology use to be easy may put in more effort and obtain higher learning outcomes (vandercruysse et al., 2013). arancibia et al. (2013) reported that perceived ease of use was a motivational factor that had a profound effect on students’ expectations and preferences in learning. perceived usefulness is one of the most significant determinants of students’ use of technology because students could assess the results of their behavior on the basis of perceived usefulness (chen et al., 2013; bere & rambe, 2016). bere and rambe (2016) found that if students perceived technology to be useful, this would have an important and positive influence on their attitudes toward and purposes for using that technology in learning. perceived usefulness could stimulate students to complete learning faster, increase their learning achievement, enhance learning activities, and improve their efficacy of learning (chen et al., 2013). self-efficacy is the belief and confidence in using technology efficiently when performing learning tasks (chen et al., 2013). further, wang (2010) claimed that self-efficacy had an important consequential impact on students’ behavioral purposes and interests in learning and that it encouraged self-learning as well. regarding enjoyment, research has found that students’ seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 73 interest in learning activities could be affected by the extent of enjoyment perceived during the experience of using technology; in other words, enjoyment had a positive influence on students’ applications of technology (chen et al., 2013). if students had more enjoyable experiences during the learning process, they were more likely to use the technology as learning tools, and, as a result, their learning interest and productivity were promoted in the process (chen et al., 2013; bere & rambe, 2016). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 74 what kinds of learning environments have been used for exploring triggers? to answer the second research question, table 3 gives a detailed overview of the kinds of learning environments used in each study to explore triggers. table 3: various kinds of learning environments used to explore triggers. in table 3, the three categories of learning environments include technological tools, game-based learning environments, and computer environments. the related items that belong to each learning environment are presented on the basis of study number. figure 2: percentage of studies employing relevant categories of learning environments for exploring triggers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 75 technological tools refers to the usage of digital devices engaged in a web-based environment, e.g. blogs, facebook, email, skype, online discussion forums, etc. (mompean, 2010; silviyanti & yusuf, 2014; thang et al. 2015). these were used by 17% of the studies. game-based learning refers to employing a digital game for students in a learning context. this was used in 33% of the studies (vandercruysse et al. 2013; chen et al. 2014). computer environments refers to building digital learning contexts where multimedia technologies and internetmediated information resources are interacted. these were used in 50% of the studies (furberg et al. 2013; wang, 2010; chen et al. 2013). technological tools. six articles explicitly reported applying four technological tools, including blogs, web 2.0, mim (mobile instant message), and gs (group scribbles), to explore triggers in learning. blogs created harmonious atmospheres in learning and provided positive support for students to develop online interaction, exchange knowledge, increase self-confidence, and enhance language skills (mompean, 2010; silviyanti & yusuf, 2014). in silviyanti and yusuf’s (2014) study, students were seen to engage in situations where they posted their writings, commented, and gave feedback to each other. the information from students’ interviews showed that 87.5% of the students enjoyed writing in the blog and said it increased their interest in writing, and all the students agreed that the blog improved their writing ability (silviyanti & yusuf, 2014). in arancibia et al.’s (2013) study, web 2.0, a tool on the social web, offered more opportunities for students to participate in collaborative learning activities (e.g., information selection, interaction with peers) in a geography course. meanwhile, it also encouraged students’ self-regulation in learning processes related to the tasks they carried out with peers (e.g., increase their paces and regulate their learning) (arancibia et al., 2013). bere and rambe (2016) said mim had the potential to build a flexible learning environment to assist reformation from teacher-centered to student-centered learning in higher education, which could offer students more participation and engagement in tasks, deepening knowledge and prompting interest in learning. finally, wen, looi, and chen (2015) found that embedding gs, a representational tool, in a collaborative language (chinese) learning environment enabled junior students to participate equally, collect and share ideas based on individual effort and social sharing, guide collaborative interaction, and facilitate their language learning skills. game-based learning environments. games were considered a good way to catch students’ attention and awaken their motivation to learn (chen et al., 2014; chang et al., 2016; vandercruysse et al., 2013). three articles used gamebased learning environments to trigger exploration. first, in chen et al.’s (2014) study, the innovative and meaningful learning method of a 3d role-playing game (rpg) offered a student-centered immersive learning space to trigger secondary school students’ high motivation levels and self-satisfaction in learning chemical formulas. it assisted students in participating actively, better understanding scientific concepts, exploring learning strategies, and combining prior knowledge with new knowledge in an enjoyable environment (chen et al., 2014). chang, evans, kim, norton, deater-deckard, and samur (2016) found that the use of educational video games (named app) could profoundly foster fifth-grade students’ active learning and engagement (behavioral, emotional, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 76 and cognitive engagement) in pre-algebraic fractions concepts since it could stimulate both female and male students to employ their cognitive skills and strategies in the process. vandercruysse et al. (2013) claimed that in a gamebased learning (gbl) environment for learning business english conversation skills (age range between 16 and 33), the competition elements impacted the students’ motivation and learning outcomes, the supportive information facilitated the students’ problem solving, and the immediate feedback encouraged the students to invest more effort. most of the students reported that learning in a gaming environment could increase their interest and enjoyment and that they valued the accomplished tasks at a high level (vandercruysse et al., 2013). computer environments. various computer environments were selected by researchers to investigate how students’ interest was stimulated in the learning process. nine learning environments related to computer environments were identified: moodle, multimedia skill-learning platform, wbi (web-based instruction platform), scy-lab (a computer environment named by science created by you project) with internet-mediated information sources, ar (augmented reality) embedded instruction, wimvt (web-based inquirer with modeling and visualization technology) system, dme (digital mathematics environment), indiko (a digital database), and 4sppices(a conceptual model involving 4 factors: the space, the pedagogical method, the participants, and the history) based cscbl (computer-supported collaborative blended learning) scripts. pozzi (2011) claimed that moodle could easily be used for interaction that helped individuals or groups to exchange messages, construct knowledge, facilitate discussion, and provide instruction in an online teacher training course. wang (2010) found that multimedia skill-learning platforms applied in a vocational course benefited individual students in coping with information easily, accessing learning materials at their convenience, offering independent operation without emotional pressure, receiving immediate feedback and solutions, providing more opportunities for self-learning, and engaging their interest and satisfaction in architectural drawings and designs. chen et al. (2013) reported that the wbi system could deliver instruction and communication between teachers and students synchronously and asynchronously, which was helpful for students in vocational universities to gain knowledge, control the learning process, manage learning time and space flexibly, practice repeatedly, and experience enjoyment during learning courses supported by the wbi system. three articles applied computer environments in the subject of science. furberg et al. (2013) said that the scy-lab environment assisted upper secondary school students in employing multiple representations (science-learning diagrams) effectively, which was beneficial for them in understanding scientific principles and maintaining positive engagement. in chen and wang’s (2015) study, ar was a practical tool, and most eighth-grade students (from six classes in two secondary schools) felt that it would be profitable for their thinking skills and learning achievement, especially if it was integrated with instructional stages. in a study done by sun and looi (2013), modeling and interaction were integrated together in the wimvt system, which enabled secondary students to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 77 acquire a deep understanding of scientific concepts and develop critical thinking skills. at the same time, different scaffolds in the wimvt system helped students to explore unknown knowledge and maintain positive learning interest (sun & looi, 2013). dme is an online tasks environment for mathematics education whereby eighth-grade students were found to be able to acquire conceptual understanding and algebraic skills due to the supportive information, immediate procedural and corrective feedback, and valid practice it provided (drijvers et al. 2014). nygren and vikström (2013) found that many upper secondary school students thought it was interesting and instructive to use a digital database (indiko) in social history learning. meanwhile, feedback from previous practice, effective scaffolding, and suitable task planning were found to engage students positively in a digital learning environment (nygren & vikström, 2013). pérez-sanagustín et al. (2012) claimed that the combination of 4sppices and computer-supported collaborative blended learning (cscbl) scripts provided a dynamic and interesting experience for upper secondary school students and had a positive effect on their motivation and knowledge construction in geographic fieldwork. with the support of mobile and computer-based technologies, students could practice their technological and location skills, while the teachers could organize and structure the whole geography activity (pérez-sanagustín et al., 2012). discussion and conclusion this section emphasizes the three major findings of this study: (1) most articles mentioned the significance of triggering students’ interest in learning, (2) employing a computer environment was considered to be the most efficient way to trigger stimulation, and (3) there were many more articles focused on the development of a digital learning environment in a real learning background. the first research question inquired into which factors could trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments. the results uncovered three important aspects related to the key points of interest triggering in learning: (a) scaffolding, e.g., teacher–student interaction and teacher intervention and support, (b) collaboration, including face-to-face and online collaborative learning, and (c) perceived ease of use, relating to the attitude toward digital technology use in the learning activities. an obvious finding is that, in many of the articles, these three factors work simultaneously and mutually influence each other. a reasonable explanation for this is that one element alone is not enough to stimulate students’ interest and engagement in learning. collaboration provides more opportunities for students to participate actively, share knowledge, increase self-confidence, and develop interest (silviyanti & yusuf, 2014; furberg et al., 2013; renninger & hidi, 2011). meanwhile, a teacher’s detailed guidance and explanations during their individual and group learning can help stimulate students’ knowledge construction, facilitate their interest and enjoyment, and help them have a positive experience in the performance (vandercruysse et al., 2013; nygren & vikström, 2013; chen et al., 2014; furberg et al., 2013). with group work and teachers’ support, students’ individual interests can be developed, which will be beneficial for their task engagement. in addition, no matter what students learn individually or seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 78 collaboratively, digital technologies that are easy to operate trigger and maintain students’ situational interest in learning and engagement in the digital environment (bere & rambe, 2016; wang, 2010). in relation to the second research question, there were two findings. first, the results indicated that many studies in the articles employed popular and effective computer environments to explore triggers in learning. most of them were online learning environments, and one was an offline learning environment that integrates with internet-mediated information resources. many articles reported that computer environments can support students in acquiring academic knowledge and enhance situational interest within a flexible and comfortable learning environment (furberg et al., 2013). that is because digital learning environments can offer students opportunities for self-paced and collaborative learning, can provide support and feedback directly, and allow students to experience interesting and engaging learning activities (wang, 2010; pérez-sanagustín et al., 2012; sun & looi, 2013). however, it should be mentioned that the use of only digital learning environments does not develop students’ situational interest into individual interest in learning and engagement in activities, especially in primary and secondary education. the significance and effectiveness of teachers’ scaffolding should be considered and integrated into those digital learning environments. second, in some articles, the studies integrated social interaction into learning spaces developed with digital technologies (sun & looi, 2013; pozzi, 2011). the combination of digital technologies and collaboration is a potentially beneficial way for students to gain knowledge, develop critical thinking skills, and stimulate motivation and engagement. for further research, a blended learning environment in which face-to-face association is combined with online activities should be considered; this could offer students new opportunities to control their learning environments and could lead to the development of an emerging, and then welldeveloped, individual interest (renninger & hidi, 2011; renninger & bachrach, 2015). limitations the first limitation in the study concerns the analysis of the articles in the review. various elements were found on the basis of the research questions. although they were categorized as different items, there are also some elements that were not mentioned, for example, systematic characteristics and structuring resources. that is because the review focused on the general and effective elements that were discussed and applied in most of the articles. a second limitation is that the contextual background (subject, course, program) is not presented in the tables but only mentioned in the body of the paper. the contextual background information was not included because the review centered on the factors of and various learning environments for triggering students’ interest. a third limitation is that articles written in languages other than english were excluded. many articles relating to research about the use of digital technologies in education that would be meaningful and beneficial for the review are written and published in chinese, for instance. however, the role of english in international academic exchange must be considered in the study. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 79 implications this study presents a framework for how students’ interest in learning is triggered and stimulated in digital environments. the framework is helpful for educators and researchers in designing new technology-based learning environments and in discovering more appropriate approaches to the successful integration of digital technologies in the learning and teaching process. based on the previous research on digital technologies and interest triggering reviewed in this study, three focuses for future research are identified. first, when designing learning environments based on digital technologies, the teachers’ organization and structure of the learning activities should be considered. second, the students’ learning outcomes must be one of the criteria for evaluating the level of interest promotion in digital learning environments. finally, future research should pay more attention to students who may have low levels of technology acceptance and should seek out effective approaches to triggering their interest and engagement in the learning activities. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 80 references annabi, h. 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(2015). a clamour for more technology in universities: what does an investigation into the ict use and learning styles of malaysian ‘digital natives’ tell us? the asia-pacific education researcher, 24(2), 353–361. vandercruysse, s., vandewaetere, m., cornillie, f., & clarebout, g. (2013). competition and students’ perceptions in a game-based language learning environment. educational technology research and development, 61, 927–950. wang, t.-j. (2010). educational benefits of multimedia skills training. techtrends, 54(1), 47–57. wen, y., looi, c.-k., & chen, w.-l. (2015). appropriation of a representational tool in a second-language classroom. international journal of computer-supported collaborative learning, 10, 77–108. ©2018 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. appendix: list of articles chosen in the study study number author details year title subject/course/program publication title 1 pozzi 2011 the impact of scripted roles on online collaborative learning processes educational technology computersupported collaborative learning 2 chen, wong, & wang 2013 effects of type of exploratory strategy and prior knowledge on middle school students’ learning of chemical formulas from a 3d roleplaying game chemistry educational technology research and development 3 furberg, kluge, & ludvigsen 2013 student sensemaking with science diagrams in a computer-based setting science computersupported collaborative learning 4 chang, evans, kim, norton, deater-deckard, & samur 2015 the effects of an educational video game on mathematical engagement mathematics (pre-algebraic fractions) education and information technologies 5 drijvers, doorman, kirschner, hoogveld, & boon 2014 the effect of online tasks for algebra on student achievement in grade 8 mathematics (algebra) technology, knowledge and learning 6 wang 2010 educational benefits of multimedia skills training architectural design techtrends 7 sun & looi 2012 designing a web-based science learning environment for modelbased collaborative inquiry science journal of science education and technology 8 vandercruysse, vandewaetere, cornillie, & clarebout 2013 competition and students’ perceptions in a game-based language learning environment business english (second language) educational technology research and development 9 chen & wang 2015 employing augmentedreality-embedded instruction to disperse the imparities of individual differences in earth science learning science journal of science education and technology 10 mompean 2010 the development of meaningful interactions on a blog used for the learning of english as a foreign language english (foreign language) recall 11 arancibia, oliva, & valdivia 2013 meaning processes mediated through a protagonists’ collaborative learning platform geography media education research journal seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 84 study number author details year title subject/course/program publication title 12 chen, lin, yeh, & lou 2013 examining factors affecting college students’ intention to use web-based instruction systems: towards an integrated model introduction to management, chinese, e-ecommerce, management information system, english (foreign language) the turkish online journal of educational technology 13 nygren & vikström 2013 treading old paths in new ways: upper secondary students using a digital tool of the professional historian history education science 14 bere & rambe 2016 an empirical analysis of the determinants of mobile instant message appropriation in university learning internet programming and information system journal of computing in higher education 15 wen, looi, & chen 2015 appropriation of a representational tool in a second-language classroom chinese (second language) international journal of computersupported collaborative learning 16 silviyanti & yusuf 2014 a one-stop class blog to promote collaborative writing activities english writing (foreign language) malaysian journal of elt research 17 pérezsanagustín, santos, hernández-leo, & blat 2012 4sppices: a case study of factors in a scripted collaborative-learning blended course across spatial locations geography computersupported collaborative learning 18 thang, nambiar, wong, jaafar, & amir 2015 a clamour for more technology in universities: what does an investigation into the ict use and learning styles of malaysian ‘digital natives’ tell us? english (foreign language) the asia-pacific education researcher 19 sharma, pandit, & pandit 2010 critical success factors in crafting strategic architecture for e-learning at hp university personal contact programs (pcps, a distance education program) international journal of educational management 20 bader & köttstorfer 2013 e-learning from a student’s view with focus on global studies information management program, international management program, international development (master’s programs) multicultural education & technology journal how to trigger students’ interest in digital learning environments: a systematic literature review liping sun pirkko siklander heli ruokamo abstract introduction theoretical framework trigger development of the trigger interest person-object approach to interest (poi) interest development aim and research questions methodology search stages analysis results which factors trigger students’ interest in learning in digital environments? what kinds of learning environments have been used for exploring triggers? discussion and conclusion limitations implications references appendix: list of articles chosen in the study seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 interactive and face-to-face communication: a perspective from philosophy of mind and language halvor nordby professor lillehammer university college faculty of health and social research halvor.nordby@hil.no university of oslo faculty of medicine department of health management and health economy halvor.nordby@medisin.uio.no abstract the aim of this article is to derive fundamental communication conditions from central assumptions in recent philosophy of mind and language, and then use these conditions to clarify essential similarities and differences between face-to-face and interactive communication. the analyses are to a large extent made on the basis of participant observations and dialogues with students in a further education course for medical paramedics, but the conclusions should be of interest to anyone who has a pedagogical interest in understanding the nature of the two forms of communication. the arguments set out in the article have both a descriptive and a normative dimension. they are descriptive in the sense that they aim to give a philosophical analysis of successful communication; they are normative in the sense that they seek to understand how communication can be improved. the article concludes that the philosophical analysis presented constitutes a plausible conceptual framework for analyzing empirical phenomena related to face-toface and interactive communication. 1. introduction lecturers, supervisors and other persons with teaching responsibilities in modern education programs are often involved in two forms of communication: face-to-face communication, in which the participants in a communicative process can observe each other and the wider context of communication, and interactive communication, in which communication happens through some interactive communication channel. dialogues with students in traditional, physical classrooms are typical examples of the first kind of communication; supervision and discussions via internet-based programs like ‘classfronter’ are typical examples of the second. it is obvious that both face-to-face and interactive communication can involve fundamental challenges for communicators, but it is not so clear exactly how these challenges should be understood and related to each other. an important theoretical question is therefore this: to what extent are the communicative seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 2 challenges involved in the two forms of communication similar, and to what extent are they essentially different? a thorough analysis of all the potentially relevant aspects of this question would require a very comprehensive discussion. the obvious reason is that the question can be discussed from different perspectives, and that it is unreasonable, at least prima facie, to give one of these perspectives conceptual or epistemic priority (davies 1998, peacocke 1998). a better suggestion is that the similarities and differences between face-to-face communication and interactive communication can be elucidated in different ways, and that a variety of analyses can jointly contribute to a better, overall understanding of the nature of the two forms of communication. my primary motivation for exploring the nature of face-to-face and interactive communication has been the need to understand communicative challenges that confront students in a national further education program for medical paramedics. as the person responsible for one of the courses in this program i have, from a pedagogical and theoretical point of view, attempted to analyze the various forms of interaction paramedics are involved in. i have, in particular, sought to address two questions: what are some of the fundamental problems of understanding paramedics confront when they encounter patients and other health personnel in face-to-face situations? how are these problems similar to, but also different from, the challenges they confront when they communicate interactively via radio or telephone with other health personnel such as nurses in acute medical communication centers? the aim of this article is to address some important aspects of these questions on the basis of recent philosophical theories of speech acts and concept possession (guttenplan 1996; bechtel & graham 1998). within the theoretical framework i develop, i make a fundamental distinction between four communication conditions: firstly, speaker and audience (in a wide sense) need to share a common language that can be used to convey and understand a belief. secondly, the audience must realize that the speaker has the intention of communicating this belief. thirdly, speaker and audience must not associate beliefs and thoughts that are literally expressed in language with very different sets of other beliefs and thoughts. and finally, the experiences, motives and values that an audience ascribes to a speaker must not be radically different from the experiences, motives and values that a speaker intends to express. i will argue that this philosophical framework is completely general but also particularistic. that is, the four conditions can be used to show how face-toface and interactive communication involve some of the same fundamental communicative processes, but the conditions can also be used to illuminate crucial differences. this fact, i will argue, constitutes a plausible argument for using the conditions as a conceptual framework for analyzing empirical phenomena related to the two forms of communication. moreover, the fact that the framework is suitable for understanding and explaining the two forms of communication constitutes an independent justification for the framework itself, as a genuine theory of communication. in the last part of the article, i examine the question of how it is possible to avoid various forms of misunderstanding that occur when one or several of the four communication conditions are not met. this discussion is to a large extent based on ideas that have been central within modern philosophical hermeneutics (bleicher 1980; mueller-vollmer 1986; smith 1997). i focus particularly on gadamer’s (1975) idea of the aim of understanding as a ‘fusion of horizons’ and argue that in order to avoid poor communication, it is imperative that speakers are aware of various intrinsic aspects of the cognitive and emotional perspectives audiences have. i conclude that this and other seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 3 implications of the arguments i present should be of interest to anyone who wants to acquire a more philosophical understanding of the nature of face-toface and interactive communication. 2. background ’nasjonal paramedic utdanning’ (http://paramedic.hil.no/) is a national further education course for health personnel working as paramedics in the national health services in norway. the program consists of six courses, four of which focus mainly on issues directly related to medicine, one on legal issues and one on communication and ethics. the need for focusing on communication in the program is obvious. in their daily work as paramedics the students are to a large extent involved in interpersonal relations where empathy, understanding and dialogue are important factors for securing successful interaction. with respect to the especially important relation between paramedics and patients, it is crucial that paramedics are able to understand adequately how patients experience and think about their states of disease, illness or sickness. their choice of verbal and non-verbal behavior must be based on justified beliefs about the emotional and cognitive perspectives patients have on their condition of disease or illness (enelow, forde & brummel-smith 1996, nordby 2004a; nordby 2006). a detailed analysis of the diversity of communicative contexts paramedics face in interaction with patients and other health personnel falls outside the scope of this article. the important point i will focus on is that paramedics are involved in two forms of communication that are essentially different from each other. firstly, they are involved in many direct, face-to-face encounters with patients, relatives of patients and other health personnel situations in which they are able to observe not only the persons they communicate with but also the wider context of communication. when communicators are able to observe each other in this way, the obvious consequence is that it is possible to use more than uttered words as interpretative clues. interpretation can also be made on the basis of non-verbal behavior and other observable aspects of the communicative context (nordby 2004b). the significance of this consequence is obvious. normally, when we seek to understand other persons we rely on literal interpretation. as burge (1979, p.88) observes, “literal interpretation is ceteris paribus preferred” in ordinary discourse. for instance, if a speaker says ‘it is raining’, audiences normally assume that the speaker, as long as he means to be sincere, expresses the belief that it is raining involving the concepts it, is and raining that are literally expressed by the words he utters. the qualification ‘normally’ is important. sometimes certain aspects of a situation constitute good reason for being skeptical about literal interpretation, as in the case of incongruent communication involving a definite mismatch between verbal and non-verbal behavior. by being sensitive to the potential importance of non-verbal interpretative clues, communicators can avoid incongruent communication and other forms of poor communication that can occur when there is a mismatch between what is strictly speaking said and what is more generally displayed (eide & eide 2004). in such cases of experienced inconsistency, attentive audiences use the wider context to form special non-literal and complex interpretations that do not correspond directly to the words that a speaker utters (davidson 1984). furthermore, it is a widespread view that there are no observable aspects of face-to-face communicative contexts that are irrelevant in principle for determining the non-literal meaning of verbal speech acts (bezuidenhout 1997; cappelen & lepore 2005). face-to-face interpretation is essentially holistic; interpreters’ beliefs about the meaning of speakers’ utterances are based on assumptions about of all sorts of observations and all sorts of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 4 assumptions about speakers’ social and cultural contexts. face-to-face communication has received most attention in the health care literature focusing on interaction between health personnel and patients, but interactive communication here defined as communication that does not involve a face-to-face encounter is often equally important for paramedics (tjora 1997). when an ambulance is called out, it has received an interactive appeal from an acute medical communication center (amc center) where emergency nurses who cooperate with ambulance coordinators have answered an emergency call (‘113’ in norway). this interactive appeal has several elements, including a precise a description as possible of where the patient is, a categorization of the acuteness of the assignment according to a code, and an indication of the nature of the patient’s state of injury, illness or disease.1 furthermore, while patients are being transported there is often extensive interactive dialogue between paramedics and the amc-center. the paramedics often provide information about the patient’s state of illness or disease, they sometimes ask for medical supervision, and they sometimes require further back-up assistance from other medical units. there are, in fact, a wide range of aspects related to patients’ conditions that are of potential significance in this interactive communication. from the perspectives of all the parties involved, the experienced success of the paramedic-patient interaction will often depend heavily on adequate interactive communication. it should already now be emphasized that when i distinguish between face-toface communication and interactive communication in this way, i do not mean to argue that the two types of communication involve communicative processes that are different in principle. on the contrary, i believe that the assumptions i make are consistent with the plausible view that communication is a contextual, interpretative process, and that the difference between face-to-face and interactive communication fundamentally is a difference of degree. the reason this is an important point to make is that some might infer from the above that i rely on unjustified assumptions about some underlying principled distinction, but this is not the case. all i am presupposing is that we have a reasonable clear idea of what the differences between face-to-face and interactive communication are. more could be said about face-to-face and interactive communication and the particular ways in which paramedics are involved in these forms of communication, but this would fall outside the limits of this article. for my present argumentative purposes, it is sufficient to clarify the basic nature of two forms of communication. i assume, in particular, that i have made it clear that face-to-face communication and interactive communication must involve some different communicative challenges. in the following, i will first develop fundamental communication conditions that are relevant for understanding communication in general, and then use these conditions to shed light on relevant differences. 3. philosophical perspective in trying to understand some of the fundamental communicative challenges that paramedics confront in their daily work as health personnel, it has been important to make extensive observation studies in ambulances and amccenters. these studies have given me valuable knowledge of how the students in the further education course experience and try to solve problems of communication. at the same time it is important to remember that although observations of human behavior and interaction must necessarily provide the basis for deciding whether communication succeeds or fails in a given context, such observations alone cannot establish whether communication succeeds. conclusions about the status of a communicative process must always be made seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 5 on the basis of assumptions about the nature of communication. traditionally, these assumptions have focused on how the ‘external’ behavior and context – must match the ‘inner’ the subjective and private (davidson 1984, bezuidenhout 1997; cappelen & lepore 2005). the traditional idea has been that a speaker has successfully communicated an ‘inner’ mental state s to an audience if, and only if, the audience understands that the speaker intends to use verbal or non-verbal actions to convey state s to him. of course, making such communicative assumptions is something we do more or less unconsciously all the time in ordinary discourse, and even if the aim is nothing more than to explicate our common everyday assumptions, we have in effect started to clarify a theory of communication. indeed, the difference between common sense theories of communication and the philosophical perspective i will apply here is not meant to be one of principle. the aim is rather to locate assumptions that (a) appeal to our ordinary ideas and (b) can be used to understand the fundamental challenges that face-to-face and interactive communication involve. the theoretical framework i will use in seeking to achieve this twofold aim is grounded in a modern tradition within cognitive science and philosophy of mind and language (guttenplan 1996; bechtel & graham 1998). according to theories that fall within this tradition, verbal and non-verbal actions are conceived of as intentional language acts that express beliefs and thoughts. beliefs and thoughts are in turn thought of as psychological attitudes to propositions involving mental concepts (burge 1979; peacocke 1992). for instance, the sentence ‘water quenches thirst’ is normally used to express the belief that water quenches thirst involving the three concepts water, quenches and thirst. when a speaker associates these concepts with the sentence, communication of the concepts has succeeded if, and only if, the audience understands that the speaker intends to communicate a belief involving these concepts. it should be emphasized that this does not mean that an audience must necessarily think that is it correct to understand a language act in the same way as a speaker. for communicative purposes, all that is required is that the belief that an audience thinks that a speaker intends to communicate really is the belief the speaker intends to communicate. questions about the objective and normative status of the meaning of language acts are therefore not directly relevant for questions of communication; whether communication happens must be determined on the basis of considerations of how speaker and audience understand each other, not on the basis of considerations of how it is correct to understand a given language (nordby 2006).2 this point is of particular importance in discourse involving disputed concepts with unclear application conditions, like the basic health concepts disease, illness and sickness (mechanic 1968; nettleton 1995; worhall & worhall 2003). health professionals sometimes encounter patients who do not understand these concepts in ways that correspond to influential conceptions within the health services, but if a paramedic tries to adopt a patient’s understanding for communicative purposes, exchange of concepts can happen even if the patient’s understanding is regarded as controversial or even incorrect. a second and more philosophical point that should be made about the framework of communication that i will use, is that i do not mean to argue that it constitutes the only possible way of analyzing communication. basically, what i am relying on is that the framework represents a fundamental and influential way of understanding human interaction. i presuppose, in particular, that the assumption that successful communication involves successful exchange of subjective states has an intuitive, immediate appeal that is grounded in our ordinary communicative practices. of course, in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 6 everyday communication it is not common to think of exchange of thoughts and other subjective states as communicative processes, but the reason why the assumption is plausible is not that it aims to capture a process that we are consciously aware of in ordinary discourse. the reason is rather that as long as we conceive of communication as a rational activity, then we have to think of understanding and communication in cognitive terms: our understanding of the language we use, and the way we try to communicate our concepts to others, cannot be reduced to observable behaviour. as mcdowell notes, ...to learn the meaning of a word is to acquire an understanding that obliges us subsequently – if we have occasion to deploy the concept in question – to judge and speak in certain determinate ways, on pain of failure to obey the dictates of the meaning we have grasped” (mcdowell 1994, p. 160). mcdowell’s claim is illuminating, not only because it is reasonable in itself, but also because mcdowell ascribes it to the later wittgenstein. in contrast to the tradition that mcdowell’s interpretation of wittgenstein is framed within, wittgenstein is sometimes described as a modified behaviorist. according to this behaviorist interpretation, communication is essentially an observable activity within ‘language-games’, an activity that can be fully explained by referring to how we conform to language rules in different contexts (kripke 1982). whether or not it is (contrary to what mcdowell thinks) correct to ascribe some kind of behaviorist ‘third person’ perspective to wittgenstein, is an important question of exegesis, but it would fall outside the scope of this article to address it. for the purposes here it is more important to think of behaviorism as a genuine source of challenge to cognitive analyses of communication. independently of what wittgenstein writes, some might argue that all versions of behaviorism are not obviously false, and that i have not showed why the cognitive framework of communication i have adopted here is more plausible than all these versions. is important to say something briefly about this objection, first and foremost because the choice of framework has substantial different practical consequences. consider as an example a patient who utters the sentence ‘i am in pain’ and a paramedic who comes to assistance. a behaviorist will typically think of this as a complete communicative process and claim that further explanations that refer to ‘underlying’ subjective states and audiences’ mental interpretations of these states are irrelevant, superfluous or ‘quasi’ explanations that fall outside the realm of proper psychological explanations.3 there are in my opinion two main problems with this view. firstly, and as indicated above, if mcdowell is correct, then it is possible to think that the way we understand words and communicate meaning is derived from our use of language, and at the same time think that explanations of underlying mental phenomena are important. according to mcdowell, what wittgenstein is opposed to is not mental explanations per se, but a certain way of conceiving of the relation between ‘private’ subjective states and observable actions. it is only if one starts out with a classical cartesian first-person perspective that one is easily led to think that this dualism involves overwhelmingly difficult epistemic and metaphysical obstacles (burge 1979; nordby 2004c). the problem with behaviorism as a response to the cartesian tradition is that the position inherits the same dualistic way of thinking. the only difference is that behaviorism starts from the other end from the ‘outside’ and then claims that it is only this perspective that we have ‘real’ epistemic access to. behaviorism is a general doctrine that is grounded in a positivistic idea of what counts as elements in scientific explanations of communication. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 7 secondly, objections to the scientific status of cognitive analyses of communication often seem to rest on the idea that there is only one ‘proper’ level of psychological explanation. however, there is no good reason for holding that this is so. it is true that it is possible, on one level, to explain communication from a third-person perspective. and from this perspective it is correct to say that communication has succeeded if an audience manifests appropriate behavior as a response to actions performed by a speaker. but accepting that this is correct is compatible with holding that there is more to say about underlying mental processes from other perspectives. consider again the above example of a patient who utters ‘i am in pain’ and a paramedic who comes to assistance. how are we to understand this as a communicative process? we find it overwhelmingly natural to assume that the patient really is in pain (as long as he is sincere), that his utterance expresses his experience of being in pain, and that he intends the paramedic to understand that he is in pain (as long as his utterance is not merely an expression of pain) and so on. it is equally natural to assume that the reason the paramedic comes to assistance is that he thinks that the patient is in pain. this idea about the patient’s state of illness is derived from the fact that the patient used the sentence he used, and probably other interpretative clues like signs of pain. in short, the paramedic forms a belief about the patient’s state of mind on the basis of observable properties of the context. again, this does not depend on a special cartesian picture of the mental, or on the idea that interpretation is a conscious process. it is simply a natural way of widening a more narrow third-person explanation of what communication involves. hopefully, this defense of the plausibility of the cognitive framework has indicated why it has a strong appeal, and why proponents of other approaches therefore face formidable challenges. obviously, much more could be said about communication as a fundamental philosophical concept, but that would fall outside the aim here as long as my main focus is the application of the framework within health care. in the next section i will argue that theories of speech acts and concept possession can potentially shed theoretically interesting light on face-to-face and interactive communication, and that they can be used to analyze crucial differences within a completely general framework. i have explained how the framework focuses in a comprehensive way on verbal and non-verbal speech acts, but i have also indicated how it implies that an observable context can play a crucial role in interpretation. in the following i will first focus on the issue of general significance and then discuss the idea of an observable context in more detail. 4. communication conditions clarifying how communication can succeed or fail is equivalent to clarifying communication conditions – conditions that must be met in order for successful communication to happen. in order to understand communicative challenges within the framework i have outlined, i will make a fundamental distinction between four conditions. the first is that communication requires a common language: (i) in order for an audience to understand a speaker, it is necessary that they share a platform of shared concepts. here i use the expression ‘speaker’ in a wide sense to mean someone who has a belief, thought or other concept-involving psychological attitude that he wishes to communicate to an audience (one or several persons). since audiences are unable to grasp speakers’ thoughts and beliefs directly, these subjective states have to be expressed in language acts that can be seen, heard or observed and interpreted in other ways. as emphasized above, this can be all sorts of intentional behavior, but for the sake of clarity i will in the following primarily seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 8 focus on verbal speech acts. thus, in order for an audience to be able to understand that a speaker expresses a given belief, it is necessary that the speaker and the audience understand the sentence that the speaker uses in a sufficiently similar way, so that they associate the same concepts with the words that the speaker uses (cappelen & lepore 2005). the qualification ‘sufficiently similar’ is important. when i claim that speaker and audience must have a common language, i do not mean that they have to understand this language in the same way in the sense that they use it in exactly the same ‘language games’ (wittgenstein 1953). it is sufficient that their understanding is so similar that that they associate the words that are used with the same concepts (burge 1979; peacocke 1992; guttenplan 1996). this, in effect, presupposes that the conditions for the sharing of concepts are weaker than the conditions for sameness of understanding. it is obvious that communicators must have some similar understanding of a word in order to associate the same concept with it – the understanding that the audience has must to some extent approximate the speaker’s understanding.4 but this leaves open what a sufficiently similar understanding is, and exactly what the threshold condition for shared concepts is has been a disputed issue (for a discussion of this, see nordby 2004c). i will not presuppose any specific view on this issue here, but i will rely on the widespread idea that it is unnecessary that communicators use a word in exactly the same way in order to associate the same concept with it. the main reason why this idea is reasonable is this: we very seldom use language in exactly the same ways; there are normally differences due to our respective social and cultural contexts. so if we needed an identical understanding in order to share concepts, we would, in fact, seldom be able to exchange beliefs and thoughts involving the same concepts. furthermore, laypersons should not need complete expert competence regarding the application conditions of a term in order to express the same concept as persons who have expert competence (putnam 1981; pessin & goldberg 1996). if that were the case, laypersons within a given area of discourse would be unable to communicate with experts (consider again the area of health care and the relation between patients and medical doctors). this is a counterintuitive consequence, and it constitutes a good reason for being skeptical about the view that a platform of shared concepts requires an identical understanding. the second communication condition i wish to focus on is more straightforward: (ii) in order for a speaker to be able to communicate a belief, he needs to have the attention of the audience. the idea is as follows: a speaker might express a belief, used a language that the speaker and the audience have a sufficiently similar understanding of and think it has reached the consciousness of the audience. it can nevertheless happen that the audience fails to realize that the speaker intends to communicate this belief. the reason for this may be lack of attention, problems of interpretation due to a chaotic situation, or an impaired capacity for rational reasoning (a patient might be in a state of shock or under the influence of drugs). but the problem may also be of a more technological nature, e.g. computers that do not work so that audiences are unable to use them as interactive communication tools. it is important to bear in mind that in order for a misunderstanding of this kind to occur, the speaker must be unaware of the communicative problems. the speaker must genuinely believe that he has the attention of the audience, that there is no significant communicative ‘noise’ or disruption; otherwise he would not be sincerely attempting to communicate a belief. an example can be seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 9 used to illustrate the point: paramedics encounter a patient who has taken a large amount of paracetamol. relatives have called 113, and the patient himself, in a confused and agitated state, makes it clear that he does not want to be taken to hospital. in order to persuade the patient that treatment in hospital is necessary, the paramedics try to inform the patient about the physiological effects of paracetamol and they tell him that large doses of paracetamol can lead to serious irreversible damage to the liver. they hope that this information will lead the patient to change his mind, but this does not happen. consequently, the paramedics decide that there is little use in trying to persuade the patient, and they begin to consider more complicated strategies for securing necessary transport and treatment. in this situation it was evident that the paramedics assumed that the information about the negative health effects of large doses of paracetamol had reached the consciousness of the patient. however, it soon became evident that this had not happened. when the patient calmed down and his relatives told him what the paramedics had said, the patient realized the gravity of the situation and made it clear that he wanted to go to the hospital after all. in the first place, because of his confused state and the stressful encounter with the paramedics, the patient did not form the belief that the paramedics intended to communicate and thought that it was important to communicate. if we manage to avoid the two forms of misunderstands that occur when conditions (i) or (ii) are not met, does this mean that communication has succeeded? not necessarily. even if speaker and audience have a platform of shared concepts, and even if the speaker has the attention of the audience so that the message that he intends to communicate actually reaches the consciousness of the audience, it might still happen that the audience associates this message with beliefs and thoughts that are very different from the set of beliefs and thoughts that the speaker associates with the message. this third form of misunderstanding corresponds to a third communication condition: (iii) the wider set of beliefs and thoughts that an audience associates with a belief that is directly expressed in language must not be radically different from the wider set of beliefs and thoughts that the speaker associates with this belief. as davidson (1987, p.449) notes, interpretation always “rests on vague assumptions about what is and what is not shared” by speaker and audience, and problems typically arise when assumptions about what is shared beliefs turn out to be incorrect. of course, if communicators’ perspectives are so radically different that they influence the semantic interpretation of the language that a speaker uses, then the misunderstanding that arises is a misunderstanding of the first kind (i). in such cases speaker and audience do not even have a common language. a misunderstanding of the third kind requires that the message that is literally expressed by language is understood, that the communicators have a sufficiently similar understanding of the words that are used in the sense explained above. the problem that can still arise is that the beliefs that surround this message are radically different. an example can illustrate the point: an amc-nurse tells a patient who has called 113 that ‘the ambulance is on its way’. the patient forms the belief that the ambulance is on its way, but he then forms a further belief the belief that the ambulance will arrive very soon within the next few minutes. the patient expresses disappointment when the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 10 ambulance arrives after 30 minutes. in this case communication of the belief that the ambulance is on its way has succeeded. the amc-nurse has the attention of the patient, and they both associate the concepts the, ambulance, is, on, its and way with the sentence ‘the ambulance is on its way’. the problem is that communication has failed in the wider sense that the amc-nurse does not associate the belief that the ambulance is on its way with the belief that the ambulance will arrive within a few minutes.5 the patient, however, forms this association. he grasps the content of the message that the nurse expresses literally in words, but he then forms further associations that are radically different from the way the nurse intends this message to be understood. the qualification ‘radically different’ is important here. two persons never associate the beliefs and thoughts they form with other beliefs and thoughts in exactly the same way; there will always be some different associations as long as interpretation is shaped by social and cultural context (burge 1979; davidson 1984; smith 1997). the important point is that there are many cases in which the associations that are formed are so different that poor communication occurs. from the perspectives of speakers, it is the beliefs that it is most important to communicate that are ordinarily expressed literally in words; that is why communication of these beliefs is normally straightforward. it is when speaker and audience understand what is not strictly speaking said in significantly different ways, that a misunderstanding of the third kind (iii) occurs. is communication ensured if we manage to avoid the three forms of misunderstanding that correspond to communication conditions (i)-(iii)? we might think so, but this is because we sometimes tend to forget that communication is not always a rational activity. in addition to beliefs and thoughts that are true or false, there are many other subjective states that are important in human interaction. the fourth and final communication condition is meant to capture the fact that we sometimes communicate psychological states that are essentially different from beliefs and thought that are true or false: (iv) the values, emotions and other non-conceptual subjective states that an audience ascribes to a speaker must not be different from the values, emotions and other non-conceptual states that the speaker intends to communicate. by ‘values, emotions and other non-conceptual subjective states’ i mean states that cannot be ascribed as beliefs or thoughts that involve concepts. when we think about communication we often tend to focus on such states, on attitudes we ascribe by saying things like ‘s believes that p’ or ‘s thinks that p’ where ‘p’ is a concept-involving proposition. for instance, when i say ‘s believes that snow is white’, i ascribe to s the attitude of believing in a proposition involving the three concepts snow, is and white (which is true if snow is white and otherwise false). it is easy to forget that we sometimes intend to communicate psychological states that are not attitudes to propositions. personal values are not attitudes to propositions, it makes no grammatical sense to say ‘s values that p’ and replace for ‘p’ propositions that are true or false depending on how the world is. personal values are rather attitudes to ‘forms of living’ (wittgenstein 1953; johnston 1989); to the ways we wish to live our lives and the activities we like to participate in (dancy 1996). the same applies to emotions and other personal experiences. the way i feel a certain pain, or the way i have a visual impression of a computer in front of me, cannot be directly experienced by another person. i can attempt to report and communicate my experience by using a sentence that i think is true or false (‘i am in pain’, ‘i have the impression of seeing a computer in front of me’), but this sentence is not identical to the state i talk about and have privileged first-person access to. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 11 the state is a pure subjective experience, not a belief or thought about something (rosenthal 1991). understood in this way, the significance of (iv) becomes similar to that of (iii). we often try to communicate our personal values and experiences to other persons, but sometimes our audiences ascribe to us states that are different from those we intend to communicate. for instance, a patient who uses emotional vocabulary like ‘i am in pain’ will normally be interpreted as expressing a state with a certain qualitative ‘pain’ content. if this interpretation is wrong if the pain that the paramedic thinks that the patient feels is very different from the qualitative nature of the pain the patient feels – then a misunderstanding of the fourth kind has occurred. values that are attitudes to forms of life or activities are subject to the same problems of interpretation. in discourse between persons from different social or cultural contexts the values that are ascribed may be different from the values that the communicators have. it is reasonable to assume that this sometimes occurs in paramedic-patient interaction. a patient who is perceived as a person who appreciates that the paramedics are acting in a certain way might in fact be a patient who endorses an alternative course of action. typical cases include interaction between elderly people and younger paramedics who have a more ‘modern’ way of life. in one case observed by the author of this paper, a paramedic consequently addressed an elderly patient by his first name, even though it was fairly evident that the patient would have appreciated an alternative course of action (e.g. he introduced himself using his surname). this last communication condition (iv) might seem to inflate the philosophical framework of speech acts and concepts, but this is not the case. on the contrary, since the first three conditions focus entirely on concept-involving beliefs and thoughts, it is possible to formulate a fourth condition that captures the remaining ‘subjective’ and qualitative dimension of human communication. the philosophical framework i have outlined leaves room for this further condition precisely because it makes a sharp distinction between concept-involving and non-concept-involving subjective states. 5. implications: interactive and face-to-face communication i am not going to argue that the four conditions i have presented represent the only possible way of analyzing communication. holding that they are reasonable is consistent with holding that there are other conditions that are important as well. in fact, i do not even mean to provide a direct argument for the view that the conditions offer a plausible analysis of how poor communication can occur. what i primarily wish to focus on is their explanatory power, particularly the way they can be used to shed light on the similarities and differences between face-to-face and interactive communication. if we start with the first condition (i), i.e. having a common language, how is this condition relevant for understanding the nature of the two forms of communication? the basic distinction to be made in connection with (i) is that between what a word means and what a speaker means. an utterance heard on the phone or a sentence read on a computer screen means something – it has a semantic content. but when an audience is confronted with a speaker the immediate question for the audience is as follows: what is the mental state – belief, thought or value that the speaker has and intends to communicate? this difference of focus corresponds to two different ways of conceiving of a speech act. the activity that is performed interactively is a pure language act; seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 12 the social context of the act is not part of the meaning of the act. from the perspective of an audience, the aim is to understand the proposition expressed by the language shared by the speaker and the audience. the focus must be explicitly or implicitly on meaning, and the relevant interpretative activities correspond to the scope of philosophy of language – to philosophical questions about the meaning of language. face-to-face communication, on the other hand, is a social activity that essentially belongs within pragmatics and philosophy of mind. the question that confronts face-to-face communicators is this: what is the belief that the speaker in this context uses language to express? this is not a semantic question about the meaning of the words per se, but a question about the psychological nature of the relevant mental states of the speaker. even though the interpretative activities involved in the two forms of communication in this way correspond to different philosophical disciplines, it is important to recognize that the activities are similar in the sense that they both involve literal interpretation. that is, we normally assume that words that are used literally express the concepts communicated. we assume, for instance, that the word ‘dog’ in interactive communication means dog, just as we assume that a speaker who uses the word ‘dog’ expresses a belief involving the concept dog. in this sense there is an important similarity between face-toface and interactive communication, and the requirement that communicators need to have a common language can be used to understand challenges related to concept communication within both forms of communication. at the same time it is important to bear in mind that there are sometimes good reasons for not accepting literal interpretations, and in such cases the differences between face-to-face and interaction communication become more significant. in order to show why this is so it is important to distinguish three kinds of expressions. the first is what might be considered words with vague or unclear application conditions. many words that are used in everyday discourse do not have precise definitions, and the meaning explanations speakers give often differ even though they are members of the same linguistic community (burge 1979; 1986).6 three of the most disputed words in the area of health care are ‘disease’, ‘illness’ and ‘sickness’ (lupton 1994; radley 1994; worhall and worhall 2001), but the point is of course general. there are countless vague or abstract words that communicators tend to understand in significantly different ways. the fact that we commonly use vague words has an important consequence: different conceptions of what words mean are normally easier to detect faceto-face than interactively. there are at least three reasons why this is the case. firstly, face-to-face communication more often than interactive communication involves substantial dialogue over time in which communicators realize that they do not have a similar understanding. furthermore, when differences emerge and receive attention, audiences who are interested in communicating tend to adjust their conceptions of what speakers mean. secondly, it is sometimes evident from the body language or verbal behavior of a person that he does not share the understanding of another person. if a doctor tells a patient who is feeling ill that it has not been establish that he has a disease, and if the patient thinks that the doctor has a very narrow, rigid understanding of ‘disease’, the patient’s body language may manifest incongruent communication: even though the patient says that he accepts the doctor’s opinion, the patient’s body language or other aspects of the communicative context indicate that he disagree. thirdly, in face-to-face communication speakers have time, and it is often natural, to explicate in some detail how they understand words they conceive of as controversial. in particular, speakers often provide direct or indirect meaning explanations of words they think the audience has an incomplete understanding of. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 13 again, these points must be understood as prima facie principles that do not cover all cases. for instance, speakers regularly provide meaning explanations in interactive communication, consider an explanation of what an ‘essay’ is that a teacher distributes to his students via the internet. and face-to-face communication does not always involve extensive rational dialogue and proper explanations of theoretical or technical terms that are conceived to be important, as the above ‘paracetamol case’ clearly illustrates. however, it is surely the rule and not the exception that it is easier to detect and influence different conceptions of what a word means in face-to-face communication than in interactive communication. this also applies to a second kind of words that can be termed ‘qualitative words’. qualitative words are words that refer to private, individual experiences, or subjective states that have a significant personal element. typical examples are words that denote states like pain, nausea or dizziness, but the category, as i understand it here, also includes emotional vocabulary like ‘love’, ‘compassion’ and ‘empathy’ that are used to communicate states that do not so clearly refer to determinate conscious experiences. the important point is that these words also have a subjective, private dimension that it can be difficult to detect in communication. communicative challenges related to the use of qualitative words are to a large extent similar to the challenges related to unclear words, but qualitative words have an additional dimension: an audience has by definition only indirect access to a speaker’s first-person experiences, but it is these experiences that constitute the reference and thereby the individual meaning of qualitative words. qualitative words report these experiences, but they can only function as interpretative clues to the underlying nature of the experiences. this does not necessarily mean that the experiences are completely hidden from an audience; there are few modern traditions in philosophy of mind that hold that emotional states are fully independent from behavior (rosenthal 1991; davies 1995; guttenplan 1996). the important point is that there must be some independence; there are not many theorists today who accept the extreme and classical behaviorist doctrine that experiences are identical to behavior (ryle 1949). and if we accept the modern, more modest view that experiences are partly displayed in behavior, then it is reasonable to assume that communication of qualitative words more often succeeds in face-to face communication than in interactive communication. normally, facial expressions or other forms of observable body language constitute part of the content of the experiences that a speaker intends to communicate. the third category of words that deserve attention is technical or theoretical words. in face-to-face encounters it is sometimes sufficient to watch a person’s eyes in order to discern whether theoretical vocabulary represents meaningless sounds or not. furthermore, in face-to-face interaction it is possible to use various forms of body language as specialized communicative tools. a good example is the non-verbal dialogue in amc centers between nurses and ambulance coordinators. while talking to patients on the phone, they are able to observe each other and use body language – language that patients do not observe – as part of the basis for deciding what to do. an ambulance coordinator might for instance hold up two fingers to suggest to the nurse that the ambulance should be called out under ‘code 2’. if the nurse nods while the patient is on the line, the ambulance coordinator normally proceeds to call up an ambulance under ‘code 2’. there is also a further aspect of the communication of technical words that is essentially different from the communication of unclear words and experiences. the fact that technical words have a standard, normative meaning means that it is possible to make a principled distinction between experts who have a complete, correct understanding and laypeople who have an incomplete understanding. within recent philosophy of mind, it has been a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 14 widespread view that if a layperson is willing to defer to an expert’s correct understanding of a word, then he possesses the same concept as the expert even though he does not have a complete understanding. burge expresses this view in an illuminating way when he writes that …wherever the subject has attained a certain competence in large relevant parts of his language and has assumed a certain general commitment or responsibility to the communal conventions governing the language’s symbols, the expressions the subject uses take on a certain inertia in determining attributions of mental content to him. (burge 1979, p. 114) it is only when a person with an incomplete understanding is unwilling to defer to the normative meaning of a word that he should be understood as someone who has chosen to associate the word with his own individual concept that does not correspond to the correct, normative understanding. deference-willingness is in this sense a precommunicative attitude: laypeople need to have this attitude in the first place in order to be able to possess the same concepts as experts who possess and fully understand the correct, standard concept. the fact that this point is valid only when the expert-layperson distinction applies has an important implication: from the perspective of a speaker who has a competent understanding, it is often easier to secure a platform of shared concepts by using words with precise application conditions than by using unclear, everyday words that do not have standard, normative definitions. the reason is that audiences normally think they are entitled to understand the latter words in special, idiosyncratic ways if there is no profession that knows what the correct understanding is (helman 1984; lupton 1994). more generally, communicators tend to think that they are justified in understanding and using unclear or vague expressions in accordance with how they have learned them in their particular social and cultural contexts, even though they know that other speakers sometimes use them in other ways in other contexts. in such cases the idea of deference-willingness does not apply: communicators from different contexts will stand face to face and be unwilling to revise their understanding.7 but when one of the parties is perceived as being an expert on the application of a word within a given area – e.g. the way students often think of their teachers the non-expert will normally defer and thereby possess the same concept as the expert. if one seeks to apply this theory of deference-willingness, the strategy will obviously work only if it is possible to give the audience a sufficient understanding and if the audience is really willing to defer. the latter condition is particularly important. even if there are standard application conditions for a term, this does not help if the audience thinks of the speaker as a strict authority and consequently does not defer to his explanations. from the perspective of a speaker with a competent understanding who faces an audience who does not have a complete understanding, it is therefore necessary to create a situation where the audience feels comfortable deferring to the normative meaning in order to secure a platform of shared concepts. furthermore, it is reasonable to assume that this aim is easier to achieve faceto-face than interactively. often a simple smile, a friendly gesture or other form of body language is sufficient for creating an atmosphere in which audiences think of speakers not only as experts, but as sympathetic experts. in this deep philosophical sense, it is easier to secure communication of concepts in face-to-face relations than in interactive relations. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 15 6. further implications so far i have focused on implications of the first communication condition (i), but as emphasized above, meeting (i) can only be a necessary condition for meeting the three further conditions (ii)-(iv). when i claim that two persons must understand a language in the same way, what i mean is that they must understand it in the same way in general. obviously, when a speaker does not have the attention of an audience, speaker and audience do not understand the language act that is performed in the same way there and then. what the second communication condition (ii) was meant to capture is the idea that in order for the communication of a belief to succeed, the attention of the audience is needed in addition to a shared platform of concepts. is (ii) a condition that is relevant in both face-to-face and interactive communication in the way (i) is? it is since speakers always need the attention of their audience in order to be able to communicate beliefs and thoughts. the differences between the two forms of communication do not matter; (ii) represents a fundamental communicative aim both in face-to-face and in interactive communication. at the same time there is an obvious difference between face-to-face and interactive communication: it is much easier to secure the attention of an audience in the former than in the latter. after all, speakers are normally able to see whether they have the attention of their audience, and it is also easier for them to understand how to proceed in order to secure attention. again, this does not apply without exception. audiences might ostensibly understand and internalize what a speaker says but nevertheless make it clear later that they have not formed the beliefs that speakers intend to communicate. causes can be states of shock or stress but also, less dramatically, lack of genuine attention or problems of concentration. it is equally evident that the third communication condition that focused on associate misunderstandings applies in both face-to-face and interactive communication. both forms of communication can involve audiences who associate a message with beliefs and thoughts that are radically different from the beliefs and thoughts that a speaker has. whether or not the communicators observe each other is not crucial for this. an audience who hears a speaker over the phone might ascribe to the speaker beliefs that the speaker does not have, even though the audience understands what is literally expressed by the sentence in question, as the above ‘the ambulance is on its way’ case clearly illustrated. but this case could also be redescribed to show how a similar misunderstanding could occur face-to-face. imagine for instance a doctor who tells a patient who has been hospitalized for some time that ‘your condition has really improved’. the patient takes this to mean that the doctor thinks that he will be able to leave the hospital within a few days, he becomes frustrated when this turn out to not happen, and we might even imagine that he tells relatives that the doctor gave him false expectations. the problem, we may assume, is that doctor does not associate the belief that the patient’s condition has improved with the belief that the patient should be sent home within a few days. he does not mean to commit himself to this or any other specific interpretation of ‘improved condition’.8 even though these two cases clearly show that associate misunderstandings can occur both in face-to-face and interactive interaction, they also suggest an argument for the view that they more often occur in the former than the latter. when doctors in situations like the above utter sentences like ‘your condition has really improved’, it is not unusual for patients to ask ‘does this mean that i will be able to go home soon?’ if they are concerned about this. there is typically more of an atmosphere of dialogue and conversation in face-to-face communication, and this often causes audiences to clarify their own perspectives and make inquires about the speaker’s beliefs. in fact, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 16 communicators’ overall communicative aim is often to clarify their own perspectives and the perspectives of the persons they are talking to. associate misunderstandings typically occur when the situation is hectic, or when there is for some other reason poor dialogue about different aspects of the issue of discourse. in interactive communication, the problem is often that it takes a lot of time to clarify one’s own perspective extensively. the same point applies in connection with the last communication condition (iv), which focused on incorrect ascriptions of experiences and values, but now communicators face an additional challenge that makes observation even more significant. on the phone or via radio a person’s subjective states can only be presented as descriptions or single words that express these states. everything depends on the interpretation that the audience makes; the language that is heard on the phone or seen on the screen is the only interpretative clue. an observable communicative context, on the other hand, will often provide vital clues to the nature of an underlying experience. an adequate understanding of a pain state will normally be easier to achieve in face-to-face encounters because a person’s body language tends to reveal intrinsic aspects of the state. as long as a person’s immediate surroundings provide important clues to his social and cultural background a similar point applies when values are communicated. our personal values, the activities we like to participate in and the complex ways we wish to live our lives, are first and foremost accessible by observations of how we actually choose to live our lives in the contexts we are in. in this sense similarities and differences in values are often easier to detect face-to-face than interactively, and incorrect attributions of values do not occur so easily. there is a further even more fundamental difference between the fourth and the first three communication conditions. the first three focus on conditions for communication of concept-involving prepositional attitudes like beliefs and thoughts. this means that they are subject to the aim of understanding as a ‘fusion of horizon’, the idea that fundamental understanding is a matter of speaker and audience sharing subjective states involving the same concepts. (gadamer 1975, 1994; mueller-vollmer 1986; green 2000). a speaker and an audience who share many of the same beliefs have cognitive horizons that are much more similar than communicators who do not have many of the same beliefs. from the perspective of a speaker, the practical implications of this idea that a fusion of horizons should be regarded as an aim of understanding can be formulated as three action-guiding questions: corresponding to the first communication condition (i), does the audience have an understanding of the language i use that is sufficiently similar to my own understanding? corresponding to the second condition (ii), do i have the genuine attention of the audience? and corresponding to the third (iii), is it reasonable to think that the audience will associate the belief that i express literally in language with other beliefs that are radically different from the beliefs i have? it is important to recognize that since the fourth condition does not focus on conceptual states a similar question related to the idea of a shared horizon cannot be formulated. an experiential state like pain does not involve concepts that can be shared with another person. of course, if a person reports ‘i am in pain’, and if an interpreter takes this to mean that the person is in pain, then they share the concept pain. but as emphasized above, this is not the same as sharing the state of pain. similarly with values; a speaker might appreciate living his life in a certain way and attempt to communicate this value to an audience by using a particular sentence. the audience might associate this sentence with the same concepts as the speaker, but this does not mean that they share the same value. in order to understand what the underlying value is, the audience needs to take a further step and identify the value state that lies beneath the surface of language. a misunderstanding of the fourth kind seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 17 occurs when this attempt fails. the question a speaker needs to ask in order to prevent misunderstandings of this kind is therefore this: have i correctly understood the values of my audience, and is there a chance that i will be ascribed values that i do not have? this question about values should be sharply distinguished from the question of whether a person expresses a true or false subjective state. a belief is subject to rational discussion about truth and falsity; if someone thinks that a person has a false belief, he can rationally try to show the person that the proposition he believes in is false. since values are attitudes to activities and not propositions, they are not subject to similar questions about objectivity. if someone wants to influence or change another person’s values, the only rational way of doing so is to go beneath them, to locate possible beliefs and thoughts they are grounded in. for instance, i appreciate drinking a lot of coffee. this is an everyday personal value i have, but i would not have it if i formed the belief that drinking a lot of coffee is very unhealthy. so, if a person i consider to be a medical expert explained to me that me my activity is very unhealthy, then i would probably form this belief, and i would no longer have my value. it is therefore sometimes possible to change a person’s values by identifying unjustified beliefs that support them. the problem arises only if we think that a person’s values are equivalent to beliefs and thoughts and consequently attempts to show the person that his values are not ‘objectively correct’. a person who is subject to such a criticism will typically feel that we are encroaching on a private sphere that we are not entitled to enter; the person has already an implicit grasp of the nature of personal values as subjective states that we have an individual right to form. a further discussion of this issue would fall outside the scope of this article, but i think it has been important to make it clear exactly why successful communication presupposes that communicators, implicitly or explicitly, are able to distinguish beliefs and thoughts from personal values. a fundamental identification of a person’s values is often crucial for successful communication, regardless whether or not we want to change these values. 7. conclusion by using examples from paramedic-patient interaction within a theoretical framework from philosophy of mind and language, i have tried to explain how the idea of communication conditions can be used to analyze communication. in doing so i have made a distinction between four fundamental conditions. the first focuses on the idea of a shared language, the second on communicative attention, the third on the way we associate beliefs with other beliefs, and the fourth on subjective states like experiences and values that do not have a conceptual, propositional content. i have argued that these four conditions constitute fundamental communicative aims both face-to-face and in interactive communication. at the same time they suggest different strategies for how these aims should be achieved within the two realms of communication. the fact that the four conditions cover both forms of communication constitutes a fundamental justification for adopting these strategies in face-to-face and interactive interaction. this does not mean that the conditions imply that it is easier to secure successful face-to-face communication than it is to secure interactive communication. obviously, it is natural to assume that it is often easier to achieve the former than the latter (but there are some obvious exceptions), but the question of whether this really is so remains a further question. my aim has been to develop a plausible framework for addressing this and other normative questions related to face-to-face and interactive communication. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 18 in addition to this instrumental justification for applying the communication conditions, .i think it is important to recognize a further argument. it is sometimes held that an instrumental justification of a theory must be essentially incomplete, since it is possible for an instrumental theory to be false (dennett 1978). but in this context i do not think this is a genuine possibility. philosophical theories of communication are after all meant to capture ordinary discourse it is standardly assumed that whether they do or not is what makes them true or false so in this case the fact that the conditions match our communicative practices constitutes a good reason for holding that they are true. too often philosophical theories of communication are developed in isolation from areas of application, even though it is claimed that they are grounded in common sense. what i have tried to show is that the four communication conditions are really grounded in ordinary communicative practices. finally, i would like to make it clear that it has not been possible to discuss in detail the practical consequences of the analyses i have made within the limits of this article. the aim has been to develop and clarify some fundamental philosophical distinctions and to point out some reasonable implications of these distinctions. however, more empirical research is necessary to explore these implications further. what i have offered is a framework for doing such research, but this is a framework that in itself should be modified and developed further on the basis of such research. references bechtel w. & graham g. (eds) (1998). a companion to cognitive science. oxford: blackwell publishing. bezuidenhout a. (1997). ‘the communication of de re thoughts’. nous, 31, pp.197225. burge t. (1979). ‘individualism and the mental’. midwest studies in philosophy, 4, pp.73-120. burge t. (1989). ‘wherein is language social?’, in reflections on chomsky, a. george (ed). oxford: blackwell. cappelen h. & lepore e. (2005). insensitive semantics. oxford: blackwell publishing. dancy j. (1996) moral reasons. oxford: blackwell publishing. davies m. (1995). ‘philosophy of mind’, in philosophy: a guide through the subject, a.c grayling (ed). oxford: oxford university press. davies m. (1998). ‘externalism, architecturalism, and epistemic warrant’, in knowing our own minds, c. wright, b. smith and c. macdonald (eds). oxford: oxford university press. davidson d. (1984). inquires into truth and interpretation. oxford: clarendon press. davidson d. (1987). ’knowing one’s own mind’, proceedings of the american philosophical association, 61, pp.430-70. dennett d. (1978). consciousness explained. middlesex: penguin books. eide t. & eide h. (2004). kommunikasjon i praksis. oslo: gyldendal akademisk. enelow a., forde d. & brummel-smith k. (1996). interviewing and patient care. oxford: oxford university press. gadamer h. g. (1975). truth and method. new york: seabury press. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 19 gadamer h. g. (1994). literature and philosophy in dialogue. albany ny: state university of new york press. green g. (2000). theology, hermeneutics, and imagination: the crisis of interpretation at the end of modernity. cambridge uk: cambridge university press. guttenplan s. (ed.) (1996). a companion to philosophy of mind. oxford: blackwell publishing. johnston p. (1989). wittgenstein and moral philosophy. oxford: routledge. kripke s. (1982). wittgenstein on rules and private language. oxford: blackwell publishing. mechanic d. (1968). medical sociology. new york/london: the free press. mueller-vollmer k. (ed.) (1986). the hermeneutics reader: texts of the german tradition from the enlightenment to the present. oxford: blackwell publishing. nettleton s. (1995). the sociology of health and illness. cambridge uk: polity press. nordby h. (2004a). ‘the importance of knowing how to talk about illness without applying the concept of illness’, nursing philosophy, 5, pp.30-40. nordby h. (2004b). ‘communicative challenges for paramedics’. scand j trauma resusc emerg med,12, pp.178-182. nordby h. (2004c). ‘incorrect understanding and concept possession’, philosophical explorations, 7, pp.51-75. nordby h. (2006). ‘nurse-patient-interaction: language mastery and concept possession’. nursing inquiry, 13, pp.64-72. peacocke c. (1992). a study of concepts cambridge ma: mit press. peacocke c. (1998). being known. oxford: clarendon press. pessin a. & goldberg s. (eds) (1996). the twin earth chronicles. new york/london: m.e. sharpe. putnam h. (1981). reason, truth and history. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. radley a. (1994). making sense of illness. london: sage publications. rosenthal d. (1991). the nature of mind. oxford: oxford university press. ryle g. (1949). the concept of mind. london: huchinson. smith n. (1997). strong hermeneutics: contingency and moral identity london: routledge. tjora a. (1997). caring machines. dr. polit thesis in sociology. trondheim: ntnu. travelbee j. (1971). interpersonal aspects of nursing philadelphia: davis. warnke g. (1987). gadamer: hermeneutics, tradition, and reason. stanford ca: stanford university press. wittgenstein, l. (1953). philosophical investigations oxford: blackwell publishing. worhall j. & worhall j. (2003). ‘defining disease: much ado about nothing?’ analecta husserliana, 72, pp.33-55. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 20 1 an important motivation for providing information about the patient’s condition is that the paramedics can prepare themselves mentally and in practical terms for the situation that awaits them. 2 it is in general a sound methodological principle that issues of understanding and communication are not subject to questions about normativity in the way questions of truth and knowledge are. 3 i am grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal for pointing out that this objection needs to be addressed. 4 as emphasized above, this can be an understanding that the audience thinks is correct in general but also an understanding that is employed for communicative purposes. the important point is that the understanding that the audience employs must approximate the speaker’s understanding. 5 when the condition of a patient is perceived as not being acute the ambulance is not required to adopt ‘code one’ which is the code for acute situations, and it might take some time before it arrives (but outside central areas it might take some time even if the code is ‘code one’). 6 a meaning explanation is here understood as the explanation a speaker would give if he was asked to explain what a word applies to. meaning explanations are very seldom conceived of as complete descriptions of what a word means; we do not consider them as sentences that capture the whole meaning of the term we are asked to explain. they are rather statements that capture central aspects of a word’s meaning. compare, for instance, the explanation ‘the word ‘dog’ applies to a group of mammals with four legs’ with the explanation ‘ the word ‘dog’ applies to an animal my grandmother has’. only the first statement is normally conceived of as a meaning explanation. 7 consider again a doctor who tells a patient that he has not been able to locate any underlying disease. the patient, we might suppose, thinks that he must have a disease, and thinks that the doctor has a very narrow understanding of ‘disease’. an important part of the reason why such an attitude is widespread is that the patient thinks that he is entitled to use ‘disease’ in the way he has learned the word in his special social and cultural context. this point generalizes to countless words with non-standard application conditions. 8 this kind of misunderstanding is sometimes displayed in newspapers, under headlines like ‘the doctor gave me six months to live’. one should be skeptical about the idea that doctors very often state predictions in such a bold way. in fact, what has often been stated is something much weaker (‘there is a significant possibility that…’), but patients often associate these statements with stronger claims. this is a general phenomenon that most professionals involved in interaction with various forms of clients or patients should be aware of: we tend to forget qualifications like ‘significant possibility’ after a while, and we think of claims that have been made as much stronger than what they in reality were. microsoft word buhl new teacher functions in cyberspace.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 new teacher functions in cyberspace – on technology, mass media and education mie buhl, ph.d associate professor danish school of education university of aarhus email: mib@dpu.dk abstract information technology allows the education system to do its job in new ways. conceptions of what it means to be educated are changing both for teachers and for students. a teacher’s professional duties are not limited to acting as a disseminator of knowledge and facilitating learning processes for the student. teachers must also relate their position to new constructions of time and space. however, these new constructions of what it is to be an actor in time and space mean that some of the functions that have as a matter of course been assembled in the person of the teacher have been displaced into other positions. information technology exposes the teacher’s performative choice in how teachers act in certain situations, which intensifies reflexivity. this article is about how teachers must meet increasing expectations to perform on the premises of mass media and how this displaces the premises for educational practice. specific examples will be provided from a situation in the master’s program in media and ict. keywords: teacher functions, media, visual culture, educational anthropology, learning, technology late modern education and pedagogy in late modern society, the education system is facing a complexity that raises questions about aspects of education that we have heretofore viewed as selfevident. this self-evidence is based on the fact that the actors, for example, in an education/learning situation are in the same physical space. until now, this has been the premise for optimizing the conditions under which students acquire knowledge about a specific subject. didactics heretofore has been able to focus on how educational practice could be implemented, focussing on two things – the student and the subject matter – with a view towards promoting learning. these two things have been the objects for didactic considerations, and it has been part of a teacher’s job to do this. the teacher must be professional, which includes thinking about how to initiate and implement processes for achieving specific goals and disseminating specific information and how to evaluate these processes afterwards. erling lars dale describes this process in terms of three didactic skills that teachers must be able to master if their teaching is to achieve a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 2 professional level (dale 1989). the three skills are 1) the implementation of teaching, 2) preparation for teaching and 3) theoretical reflection on teaching. new information and communication technologies and mass media mean that the basis for making these three skills operative is changing. at the implementation level, the actors have changed with respect to time and space; at the preparation level, a rethinking of the educational setting is required; at the theoretical reflection level, a rethinking of the premises underlying teacher functions is required. with the title new teacher functions in cyberspace, this article focuses on how the teaching profession is gradually changing from an anchoring in physical space to also being able to take place in virtual space or in a mixture of both. with the increase of new technologies, teachers must rethink their own self-understanding as a profession. in particular, this applies to the implementation of teaching and learning processes as well as to preparation and reflection about them. teachers are no longer single actors in relation to didactic practice, and the functions of both teachers and students, as well as the idea of subject matter, are changing. the present article argues that information technology makes clear a reflexivity in the teaching profession, which appears in the way teachers carry out their profession and can be observed in educational contexts. the reflexivity is articulated aesthetically as performativity and assumes to an increasing degree forms that make reference to the paradigms of mass media. this plays a central role in the ways we read each other in educational communication and the functions connected to the teaching profession. refocussing on the teacher my focus in this article is on the teacher, because the increased focus on learning and learner is changing the functions of the teacher without much attention being paid to making these changes explicit. my starting point is the “generation” that follows project-oriented and problem-oriented education in which the teacher typically has the function of guide and critical friend. along with the increased use of information technology, the teacher’s function is being defined to an increasing degree as ‘facilitator’ and ‘moderator’. i am interested in thematicizing what significance this has for the teacher’s didactic professionalism, that the conditions for establishing education and teaching situations are not only changing from being able to take place in a physically defined framework to a virtual reality but also that the conceptions of the actors (student, subject matter and teacher) are generated in a context that draws on communication codes outside the education system. one of the technologies that have been brought into education is videostreaming. as a medium, video-streaming contains the potential, for example, to overcome geographic distance in educational practices and, by virtue of its asynchronicity, to make displacements in time possible. the actors in education no longer need to coordinate their physical and temporal presence with each other, which adds a new aspect to the teaching profession and, thus, the conditions for didactics. the implications of this are set out in the present article with examples from a case in 2003, in which i myself was an actor who, for the first time, was to teach a group of students while simultaneously being video-streamed. this process challenged more than simply how to relate to the cameras. it challenged professional aspects of my teaching that had to do with how to relate to students in my capacity as a teacher on dale’s three levels (dale 1989): it challenged those aspects that deal with preparation and implementation, since my own teaching performance received greater seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 3 attention than usual. furthermore, it challenged the conditions for didactic and pedagogical reflections and my self-understanding of the teaching profession.1 i decided to take up the challenges and to approach it from a perspective in which i positioned myself as both teacher and researcher during the process of giving the lecture. i found that my didactic decisions with regard to implementation required considerations and agreements that implicated technicians, just as i had to make dramaturgical decisions with those who were to run the camera during teaching. i could have chosen the classical view that the video recording could take place without my input with respect to, for example, camera placement, and simply consider the camera as a fly on the wall. but as a teacher, i was provoked by the fact that those who would be watching the stream were outside my reach in time and space. furthermore, i noticed that my consciousness of this had an influence on my performance, which challenged my self-understanding as a practitioner of my profession and my understanding of the practical and theoretical dimensions of didactics (cf. dale). the challenge in this complex of didactics and technology has to do with the possibilities of technology, the performance of the teacher, the access of students to teaching, the character of the content of the teaching, and thus new conditions for education. my methodological ambition is to explore these opportunities from the conceptual approach of visual culture as a strategy of reflection (buhl 2005) visual culture as analytical approach to the teacher in physical and virtual space i am interested in investigating this didactic complex from the ways the teaching profession is constructed in new ways. my focus is on how paradigms outside the education system are used and played out in the actual execution of those parts of education in which the teacher lectures, and what significance this has for how the teacher and the student act in an educational situation. it is here i believe that a performative aspect can be observed, since the teacher can either choose to ignore it or to relate to it reflexively. the performative aspect unfolds in the relationship between technology and mass media, which, making reference to niklas luhmann, i use respectively as dissemination media and a functionally undifferentiated system (luhmann 2002). i find luhmann’s distinction useful for identifying the relationship between technological opportunities and new modes of communication without making technology into the determinative factor. rather, i agree with luhmann’s assumption that technology clarifies features about late modern communication that are characterized by reflexivity. this goes for the researcher as well. luhmann’s understanding of reflexivity (luhmann 2000:507) forms the basis of my development of the analytical concept of visual culture as a strategy of reflection (buhl 2004a: 287, 2005:47ff), since this concept contains the possibility of pointing out, examining and raising questions about “self-evident” aspects of the education system that we automatically reproduce in physical space such as, for example, the classroom and transport to virtual space as metaphors and repeat in mixed forms of physical and virtual space. thus i introduce a reflexive position to the development of conditions for ‘professional amazement’ as an analytical strategy in the field of education. professional amazement is a concept i’ve taken from anthropologist kirsten hastrup’s account of being at one and the same time ethnographically present and anthropologically distanced from the field in which i am acting (hastrup 1992) and making it an object for reflection. her approach makes possible the use of visual culture as a privileged position for studying performative aspects of teacher functions. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 4 when visual culture is used as an analytical concept, it has to do with how the visual is a part of constructing the conditions for a concrete reality, which is in the present case an educational setting. visual culture indicates that, when something is observed, it also implies a thematicization of how this ‘moment of observation’ is established. this makes visual culture into a dynamic practice that is characterized by change and implicitly contains reflexivity. it might be said, somewhat trendily, that visual culture is about constructing a gaze upon the world, physical as well as virtual, and raising questions about the preconditions for seeing what one is seeing (buhl 2003:18). in this sense, i am using visual culture as a strategy of reflection for unpacking supposedly self-evident aspects of the teaching profession by pointing out those aspects of the teacher function that are articulated visually – for example, in the ways an education or teaching situation are established in a distant-learning context. in the present article, i use visual culture as a strategy of reflection to unpack the performativity that, on one hand, is always a part of certain aspects of a teacher’s functions and, on the other hand, assumes new forms in the interplay with the paradigms of new technologies and mass media. in my treatment of the relationship between technology and mass media, i introduce a distinction between the two concepts. technology refers to various forms of hardware and software that make possible different codes that can expand communication. i juxtapose this with luhmann’s concept of dissemination media. mass media, also with reference to luhmann, is used as a designation for a social system. that is, the mass media system maintains a particular function in society that is coded in a particular way (luhmann 2002:85). i base my reference to the mass media system in an interest in the paradigms for communication to which i believe the education system increasingly chooses to resort without necessarily articulating explicitly its relationship to the teacher function. technology, mass media and pedagogy are thus components that contribute a number of new teacher functions and construct the performative teacher position. physical and virtual space in education until now, pedagogical theory has been concerned with educational situations in which we are physically present in a physically-anchored world with physically-anchored teaching tools. even though technology has been available, it has not seriously disturbed the premises for this view. more recent forms of technology, however, make it possible for education to take new forms, and the way a teacher has to think about students in a concrete situation rests to a higher degree on the model conceptions the teacher has about the student than on what plays out in the specific situation in which there is physical presence. by model conceptions, i mean the general framework that society creates about what is supposed to take place in various educations and the implicit expectations of the student and the teacher (buhl 2002: 37 ff). however, it has always been the case that the teacher and the student have been positions that are primarily intended to facilitate educational communication. but the technological possibilities for establishing virtual space and virtual time have made this even clearer (fritze 2004). it is not only the student who must adapt to learning in new ways. didactics implies being able to imagine students as they could be. media and it scholar yvonne fritze has shown in her ph.d. dissertation mediet gør en forskel [media makes a difference] from 2004 that the way we as teachers relate to didactics is still carried by the metaphor that the teacher, the subject matter and the student relate to each other on the same premises as if they were in the same physical space and the teaching methods reflect this. even though the actors relate through video telephones or chat rooms, the traditional school metaphor lives on when it comes to conceptions for the rules as to how one acts in an educational situation. the teacher draws seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 5 unconsciously on experiences from education in which the teaching context was framed by physical parameters with everything that implies in terms of bodies in movement and expression, (smiles, wrinkled brow, yawn, looking out the window, etc.) as important parts of the communication. this also implies experiences with small talk about things other than the subject and empathy for the rules for being in the same space with everything that implies in terms of social conventions, regard of personal needs, mutual positioning and conflicts. changing teacher functions thus there is a discrepancy between the functions of a teacher and their conceptions about their functions. if i were to frame it polemically, i would say that virtual education and teaching has robbed the teacher of the opportunity for engaging in a transformative process with students and reduced students’ opportunities for engaging with a teacher. the teacher’s function in a traditional teaching situation is complex but gathered in the same person. here, the teacher and the student are able to support each other by insisting on pursuing a dialogue that one party, for one reason or another, is not interested in. the teacher is able to insist on ‘the student doing something in the situation.’ the teacher has established a space for the learning opportunities present in the situation along with others. with new technology, other possibilities appear, but the possibility to be the person who automatically has authority and the experience and professional expertise to insist on challenging another’s world view has been weakened. likewise, a number of teacher functions that have not been articulated as clearly before have appeared. i am referring to the teacher’s performative abilities (here, aesthetics plays a role), the options for dealing with the absence of physical presence, and – this is the most difficult – the teacher’s selfunderstanding of his/her profession. what criteria are actually at the basis for one’s self-perception as a teacher? what factors are more or less consciously ignored? what ‘metaphors’ for teaching are used? our encounter with technology has made it common to focus on learning as opposed to teaching, because teaching is the teacher’s project, and learning belongs to the student. the teacher has become a function permeated with demands for flexibility and a readiness to adapt, which follows in the wake of technology’s facilitation of displacements in time and space. the function of a teacher has at one and the same time increased in complexity and had its complexity reduced. the staging of the teaching plays a role, because what was once an implicit part of the teaching and learning situation is instrumentalized. fritze demonstrates this in her study of how different forms of lecture are staged in a distance learning context (2004:95ff). technology and mass media recent technology has made it clear that communication takes place in ways that cannot solely be reflected in the familiar school metaphor, because technology is capable of establishing an educational setting in many different ways. by educational setting, i mean the circumstance that communication alone determines the extent to which what takes place has an educational function. technology makes it possible to establish a space that is outside the control we are familiar with in school. it can construct a space that exists by virtue of digital coding but only makes sense when we attribute particular meanings to it from the experiences we each have. we can choose to interpret the shift from physical to virtual space with conceptions we have from our own school days when information technology did not exist, or we can choose to relate to it as if everything in reality is a fiction, or we can choose to try to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 6 relate to it in both ways. this is where the paradigm of mass media becomes interesting in an educational context. mass media as universe in the following, with reference to luhmann, i will focus on mass media as system (luhmann 2002). luhmann operates with a view of mass media as a reality in the sense that reality is not a physical reality but a component in communication in late modern society (op.cit:11ff.). sitting in front of the television, sitting at a computer, going to the movies are components that make up realities in our view of reality. in the following, i will refer to this as the universe of mass media. the universe of mass media has several aspects, because it disregards traditional rules for communication in which we are used to being able to see, for example, the person(s) to whom we are speaking. the mass media have no idea whom they are addressing. it can be said that a reality is constructed, which an unknown receiver may enter into well knowing that it is not a physical reality that directly involves the individual. a reality is created that is not reality (ibid.). the tricky thing is that, even though it is not reality in the sense that it gives us direct experience, it is nevertheless a reality that gives us a great deal of the information we use to understand the world. this puts us in a situation in which we have to live with the fact that we are provided with a reality that we know is not real but which still supplies us with information that becomes a sort of background reality that we use to construct our view of reality. modern man lives with this paradox to a large extent. it provides a form of presence, because mass media references itself directly to ‘me’ (and a lot of other ‘me’s), at the same time as each individual has the opportunity to believe what they will about what is going on, because it has no influence on further communication. the crucial thing is not the opinions that are the result but that mass media provides a thematic community (opcit.:89) – i.e., one is provided with a theme of an ethical, moral character, for example, about which the individual is not obliged to believe anything in particular without a communication partner to react to. mass media establishes a form of background reality that the individual can use in his or her own construction of different forms of reality (opcit:85). the individual is placed in a paradoxical situation: mass media is directed in a way that makes the individual a target for communicative efforts at the same time as the individual is de-individualized, because this effort is also directed at a billion other people. as a result, the individual cannot be seen as a true identity but rather as a series of roles that are one thing in one context and something else in another, which makes the concept of identity as a core difficult to maintain. even though different rules apply to online communication, there is no guarantee that identities are communicating rather a series of roles, or as i prefer to call them: avatars.2 in this way, mass media can be seen to operate with a standardization of the human being as a ‘social construct’. what was ordinarily obvious for parties to communication in a form of physical presence has established an expectation in communication that technology is helping to challenge in a new way. it appears that it promotes the development of self-regulation in the individual, which consists of being able to deal with the fact that the universe of mass media establishes a fictive reality that is accepted as reality, even though there is an implicit consciousness of the fact that it is not reality – i.e., it is accepted as a statement that can apply to how the world may be seen (opcit.73f. note 8). mass media images may be seen as a trivialization of artistic images: the news shows realistic images, entertainment dramatizes narrative sequences, advertisements always try to do something new and trail blazing to pique our interest and make us want to buy a certain product, even though we know that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 7 is the purpose of the ad. as users of mass media, late modern man has grown used to the different variances in the mass media and the universes and genres they make use of. late modern man has gradually become comfortable reading and understanding the rules and playing the game accordingly. when the computer is made available to the form of mass media, it plays out in different variations. luhmann divides background reality into three areas: news, advertisement, entertainment (op.cit:39ff.).3 these three areas make use of their own form: news: news makes use of an ‘informative form’ in its account of a reality. news presumes the individual is a cognitively interested viewer who, as one among millions, takes what is presented as a statement about the world. an example is television news or net-based news pages (or newspapers), which provide information on everything – terror, assassination, political conflicts, events in the royal house, scientific discoveries, etc. advertisements: advertisements make use of a form in which attention is attracted to a product through paradox. an advertisement plays openly on the fact that the observer knows the motive and the goal, but an attempt is made to establish a desire in the observer to deceive himself. ads are directed at the individual as a calculator who considers the utility of being flattered into purchasing or not. for example, many ads make use of the paradox that you can save money by paying money out (for example, 3 boxes of washing detergent instead of two), or concepts are used that gainsay the product by making fun of the product or the ad’s way of advertising. entertainment: entertainment presents a variety of mythologies that can be selected by the individual as a constant store for identification. the individual is presumed to be the recipient of narrative fictionalities within various categories. these are presentations of the typical as an experience of commonality – for example, films and talk shows – and the ideal as a striving to distinguish oneself – for example, in sport. self-regulation and performativity being able to regulate oneself with respect to various realities apparently goes further and develops performatively, understood in the sense that a consciousness of self-regulation has developed and may be that which the mass media has taught the late modern individual to exploit. this appears in the form of performative strategies that always point toward their own way of pointing. there is a reflexive play on the relationship between consciousness of the mass media’s distortions of real and fictive realities but in a way that challenges them. this makes self-regulation into a theme for various forms of development. in this way the aesthetic is actualized, because it provides possible forms for dealing with this performativity (buhl 2006). thus, selfregulation develops as a reflexive positioning that suggests consciousness of one’s own position and possible differentiation. the development takes place as a series of performative strategies. these strategies are especially prominent in the mass media at the moment, but they are also included in many of the ways we put things and social conventions. for example: • irony – i.e., distancing oneself by indicating the opposite, • sentimentality – i.e., exaggerating the means, • humour – i.e., constructing a logic and taking a surprise turn, • noise – i.e., disturbing expectation for order by adding or removing foreign elements (buhl 2004b:51; 2006:221). these strategies have made apparent special ways of communicating that call attention to the reflexive aspect in a form of performativity in the sense of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 8 action-processing positions, since they tacitly presume their own premises (buhl 2006: 221). thus various forms of reality are generated that enter into the space of experience for modern man and in the ways communication takes place. with respect to education and learning, a distance is built in that calls for performative strategies from the teacher and the student. this is clearly felt when there is a collision between physical and virtual space, when teachers and students have to act in the complex of the here and now and take into consideration displacements in time and space, when modes from the paradigms of mass media are activated in the form of assuming an observer role or commentary on the educational setting. technology, mass media and teacher functions – a case study as a teacher in a master’s program in which media and it are a central part of the program’s content and form, i have garnered experience with what is involved in teaching in physical space, virtual space and a mixture of the two. i will provide examples from a program in which i, in collaboration with two colleagues over a period from 2003 to 2006, taught a 2½-month course, which we introduce with a seminar at an educational institution, evaluate the quality of content and frequency of contributions at an electronic conference, and finish with another seminar. the course deals with graphics, images and sounds as components of didactic design and the students are evaluated on their ability to discuss the learning possibilities of a selected object of analysis on an analytical and theoretically-based foundation. the theoretical foundation consists of didactic theories, learning theories, and theories on images, sound and graphic design. my specific area of competence in this connection is in didactic theory and the aesthetic function of images. during this period, i experimented with pre-designed educational settings, investigating the functions of teaching in the virtual reality of video-streamed sessions. thus, the educational setting is constructed in such a way that the communicative space unfolds as physical, virtual and both. technology is included not only as a digital medium and as a way of communication, but the learning possibilities of technology are also the subject matter in the educational setting. the educational content thus consists of the complex of teaching in the physical and virtual space through communication in physical space, virtual space and a blended form thereof. the question is whether this virtual-reality-based master’s program (like every other educational program) rests on metaphors that relate to physical reality. if you entered into the program’s virtual portal in 2003, it has the visual appearance of a campus with buildings and, in the workspace, a desk has been drawn along with other things that traditionally belong to a physical workspace. the metaphor thus makes reference to a physical world. you could ask whether teachers – including in this case myself – use this selfdescription as a position for how we view our own profession, using it as a ‘filter’ for disregarding aspects that are made self-evident by a long tradition of teaching. even though you are prepared for the fact that it is a new situation to work with distance learning, there will be a paucity of seminars requiring physical presence, and technology will be used in a variety of ways in its development, the starting point as the teacher trying something new will still be anchored in the way the profession developed from its beginning: namely, the encounter between the person aiming at change for the purpose of gaining new insight (the teacher) and the person who receives the opportunity to gain new insight (the student). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 9 taking as my starting point a specific pre-designed sequence in 2003 and follow-up experiments in subsequent years, i will reflect on teacher functions below from three perspectives: 1) the physical communication space, 2) the virtual communication space and 3) mixed forms of physical and virtual communication space. the position for observing this is my reflexive and self regulating positioning as both teacher and researcher. 1st perspective: the teacher and physical communication space in the first perspective, i am in the teacher position, the situation with which the education system has the most experience, which has to do with the use of technology in physical space. here, my professional didactic skills are based on dale’s three levels (cf. dale 1989). technological skills, however, are required, because i have to deal with technology during the teaching process. the specific example has to do with the use of powerpoint presentations. as an organizational method, powerpoint has some technical advantages that make the program easy to use: it can organize a presentation;4 there is a broad range of possibilities for varying visual and audio presentation through pre-designed templates or, if you so desire, slides you can design yourself. there are opportunities for working with embedded links offline and online, so you have a connection to internet webpages and can use them in the presentation to document and demonstrate aspects that are topical in the communicative space. in my specific presentation, i used options in powerpoint (pp) for documenting how the universe of mass media generates particular forms of communication (cf. above). this meant that my preparation for the presentation consisted in part of organizing it in terms of how the universe of mass media reveals a form of self-regulation in the individual. as described above, mass media is not something that is outside reality but establishes a form of reality that takes part in our ways of constructing reality (cf. luhmann). these dimensions of technology and universes seem to generate a form of performativity in the teacher that, for example, results in the teacher assuming a complex of functions that imperceptibly take part in the construction of the role of teacher that arises. for example, this happens when the teacher fumbles around in her pp presentation while interweaving appropriate comments on what will appear on the screen very shortly. something similar takes place if the links in the pp presentation cannot be made to work on the specific computer, either because a program is missing or it takes time to make the connection. this has introduced a legitimate waiting period into the communication situation that is used to expand on the subject matter or to comment on the technology. however, this is interrupted the moment the connection is re-established and everyone concentrates on the projection on the screen. the technology is in charge of the room and demands attention like a television! in spite of the technologically-mediated interruptions, the teacher can in a combination of physical presence and technology easily preserve the conception of her profession as the person who maintains communication and acts in the ‘here and now’ in the situation. the teacher functions are assembled in one and the same person: • the teacher possesses, in the present example, the professional expertise to teach the subject matter. the teacher is the ‘critical friend,’ whose purpose is to alter the student’s insight in a particular subject. • the teacher possesses the technical expertise to deal with the use of pp in a way that can demonstrate relevant aspects of the subject. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 10 • the teacher creates the framework or rules of interaction. in the present example, this means establishing an educational setting for communication about the subject. this teaching situation is borne by the physical presence of the teacher and the student (body – eye contact – acting in the here and now), and as a teaching situation it does not distinguish itself markedly from the traditional teaching situation with blackboard or overhead projector. and yet – for the teacher, there is a difference. the pp presentation provides an opportunity to demonstrate sequences in time – for example, by embedding links to webpages that act as moving pictures. this means, for example, that the observer role takes over in the teacher, while the link is activated. this means that there is a form of timing implicit in the possibility of going online in the situation. this creates a situation in which teachers as well as students have experience with online connections from their own use of computers. that is, experiences with the use of technological skills are activated and experiences with the universe of mass media are activated. the field of attention shifts from a relationship between teacher-student eye contact to both parties being absorbed by what is happening on the big screen, since the teacher’s attention is aimed at the technology in order to comment and navigate through the pp presentation. the students’ attention shifts in order to follow along and they become an audience. in the moment technological refinements are intensified, physical presence is made more extensive. this is true for both the teacher, whose eye contact with students is reduced, and the students, who do not have sufficient eye contact with the teacher. the teacher’s voice may seem like a voiceover to what is going on visually. students can become the audience, who comment on what is going on visually from a position of mass media (cf. above). the subject matter in the communicative space begins to take on a life of its own and is assessed on the basis of its performativity. 2nd perspective: the teacher in the virtual communication space in the second perspective, i am in the teacher position, knowing that the traditional experience of the profession in the form of physical presence between the actors is not in play. this has to do with the use of technology in virtual space. in my specific example, it had to do with the use of streaming videos at an internet conference. what teacher functions are required here, and how is communicative space established? the teaching material, which is a recorded version of the aforementioned pp presentation, can be seen on the internet and is the only access to the presentation described above, which has already taken place in physical space. the student can see a ‘film’ about the session in which the camera lens is aimed at the teacher and the pp presentation – i.e., you can observe the teacher’s lecture and a demonstration of visual/audio tools in the pp presentation. the teacher’s presentation – now video-streamed – becomes an opportunity for meaning construction (fritze 2004:96) which the student can accept or reject exactly as in the universe of the mass media. even though the student, for example, may disconnect by pressing the pause button on the video player or simply walking out to get some coffee during the presentation, it has no influence on the way the teacher acts. it takes place as if in a classic teaching situation in which only those who have influence on the sequence of events are those present in the physical space (op cit.:99). it is the choice of the camera lens and the cameraman to determine what the distance learner has access to (ibid.). on the one hand, you do not choose for yourself which of your fellow student’s reactions you can see. nor can you interrupt and ask for an explanation or more detail. on the other hand, you can rewind, if you want to hear something again. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 11 this puts demands on both teacher and distance learner to imagine each other’s intention but without entering into a dialogue. the teacher is able to draw on experiences he or she may have from teaching in physical space. with technology, the teacher can vary visual and audio tools. because of the time frame and a general desire on the part of students to “get something out of it” the few times they meet their teachers in physical space (even though a weekend with a myriad of pp presentations can be too much of a good thing!), this type of presentation consists to an extensive degree of me, the teacher, speaking and doing demonstrations.5 this has the character of a lecture and it is this type of lecture that is suited for being video-streamed. as a further construction of what goes on in physical space, the distance learner can now observe how other students and teachers play out a scene in physical space called education. the ‘film’ on education can be seen and taken into consideration as news. the purpose is still that teaching is taking place with a view towards learning, but the premises have changed, because the distance learner is removed from what is going on. the distance provides the opportunity not only to relate to the content in the ‘film’ but also to assess the way the teacher performs – as interesting, entertaining or convincing (cf. above). whether what is going on within the framework is relevant, or how it is relevant. the teacher is cut off from reacting to a reaction from the distance learner, because what is seen took place a long time ago in chronological time and because the communication is principally taking place independent of the distance learner. no changes take place in the presentation if the distance learner yawns or displays boredom in some other way. the premises that have developed in the universe of mass media become premises for the distance learner. the teacher’s function is to provide a lesson that, in addition to a professional anchoring, either adapts to the form – or pretends the form isn’t there. with the development of information technology, another vocabulary has developed for communicative space, and the teacher’s function is described in ways in which the classic views of the profession are taken out of play. this has taken the consequences of the old saying that you cannot teach somebody something, they have to learn it themselves. when this is coupled with distance learning, the price is that the distance learner is in reality outside the teacher’s reach. the teacher loses the opportunity for being a critical friend that maintains communication with the distance learner in the process of change, which may lead to new insight. as a rule, processes of change are met with resistance, because becoming wiser in the world is always linked to insecurity and ‘crisis.’ it is possible to reject a downloaded ‘invitation’ from the teacher – for example, to reject the presentation as something ‘i can’t use’ or ‘i don’t have time for now.’ this is exclusively the student’s choice. you can very easily interrupt the ‘film.’ for to the extent that education is communication intended to create change, this form of interaction places responsibility on the distance learner for what is relevant for shaking up one’s worldview. the teacher is reduced to being a facilitator and a moderator. that is, the teacher can make learning possible and create the rules for how the communication takes place. certain aspects of the classic profession gradually seep out. the most noticeable one is the loss of direct obligatory interaction with the possibility of supporting each other in the difficult process of change. to adhere to or to reject is a form of regulation that has developed from increasing and long-term experience with mass media. late modern man is capable of dealing with this complex of different levels, because over a long period we have grown used to operating on several fictional planes (luhmann 2002:73). but it is necessary to build up a reflective relationship with respect to these possibilities in order to use them productively in a teaching situation. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 12 3rd perspective: the teacher in physical and virtual communication space the exposure of the significance of the mass media is articulated clearly when the third perspective on my teaching position is applied, in which communication occurs in a mixed form of physical and virtual space. here, the two other perspectives become a markedly changed term for pedagogical and didactic preparation in a teaching situation, since the teaching is carried out as a physical event and a potential virtual event. a consciousness of how the event takes place is brought into consideration. here, the teacher’s complex of functions becomes clear in another way in the preparation and performative strategies considered. in my concrete example, these considerations came into play on the basis of a technical-administrative inquiry: a few days before the seminar mentioned, i was asked to give permission for my lecture to be videotaped and streamed for students who were not present. my first thought was that i wouldn’t do it, because it would be useless for students who were not present as participants. they and i would not have an opportunity to meet in the communicative space about the subject. it would be me delivering something out into the air. on further reflection, i decided to use it as an opportunity to make it into the content and the form of presentation i wished. i wanted to make use of the fact that it was a master’s program focussed on learning potential and learning opportunities in the use of technology. i saw it, therefore, as an opportunity to challenge the students’ conceptions about media and it by demonstrating the consequences in both theory and practice. likewise, i would get an opportunity to test out and reflect on the complex of teacher functions that goes with it. building on that decision, my new knowledge about performing in front of a camera raised a series of questions of significance for didactic and pedagogical considerations i then had. these are questions such as: how does this new situation affect my preparations, how does it affect the teaching situation, how will it work as a finished educational document? can other forms of teaching be used or am i condemned to powerpoint? to whom won’t i speak? what won’t i say, when i know it’s going to be videotaped? is the point for me to ‘forget’ i’m being filmed or should i use the occasion to perform? even though i speak almost the whole time during the lesson, is there a difference between the student sitting there blinking and the distance learner watching the video on a computer while getting coffee or whatever? what about the person running the camera – does he have any influence on how i prepare for my presentation? should he have a design in mind about what will take place (which he actually ended up doing)? what about the distance learner – should he know that i know that i’m addressing more people in the space (both physical and virtual)? should i aestheticize my presentation? or should i, like fritze observed, simulate a traditional classroom and ‘compensate’ (fritze 2004:91)? should i indulge in some classic metaphors that the distance learner can feel secure with? the performative element in teaching has suddenly become central to the education and learning situation. the situation becomes complex from the fact that i have to integrate being a critical friend and participant moderator with technical expertise, professional expertise from the physical space with a learning facilitator, and an external technical expertise – both what i know about pp and the cameraman. when my talk is over, there will be a video of my presentation that will be accessible at virtual u-platform, so all students will be able to view it. i will not know who will see it, i will have no idea what they will be thinking, but i can try to take their reaction into account in the way i do my seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 13 presentation (ibid.). i can see to it that i create a communication of reality, that the video will be done in a documentary style – i.e., i will operate with a teaching concept in which what happens is reality, and this reality takes place in the here and now. of course, i will perform in a way to exude credibility but already i am taking into account how this performance will be broadcast into cyberspace. for example, i can look into the camera and speak to those who will be seeing me for the first time at virtual u. they have no opportunity for asking questions along the way. on the other hand, they can communicate about it afterwards. i am directed to relate to them as model students (buhl 2002:37), because i cannot see whether their eyes are attentive, rolled upwards, or closed. whether they walk out for a moment, while i grind on. i can see when the students who are sitting in the physical space need a break, while the distance learner is sitting there, reading an event that is taking place in present time for the distance learner but, for me, the teacher, has already taken place when the distance learner sees it! the displacement in time constitutes a fascination for teacher as well as distance learner, because in the here and now – actions cease to exist. you can at most react to the teacher’s ‘virtual eyes.’ the experiential space from the universe of mass media apparently makes up a part of regulating the communicative space known as education not only for students but to a high degree also for the teacher. some of the teacher’s ways of interacting with technology and some of the learner’s ways of interacting with technology are played out in the same ways as in the universe of mass media. thus it may be said that the actors in the communicative space called education regulates the modes of communication from criteria familiar from the mass media. as a consequence, it may be that the ways in which mass media communicates are used in the space of education: • could it be imagined, for example, that the world view of the news plays a part in communication in the sense that the teacher primarily communicates in a way in which what is communicated is taken into consideration, because the teacher is addressing himself or herself directly to one person but no one particular person (luhmann 2002:39 f.)? anyone can turn on the tv and see the news or go to a website and watch the news: i.e., video-streamed education. the news program is not made with the idea that you and no one else is going to react to it. it encourages an anonymity that has a built-in distance: “you may have an opinion about what you are seeing (for example, the case being made seems reasonable and credible) without having any responsibility.” • could it be imagined, for example, that experiences with advertising with its calculation of whether you want to buy the goods or not play a role (ibid)? that student and teacher communication is regulated by the fact that one tries to negotiate with the other on the probability of the teaching content? that there is a consumer relationship in which the criteria for communication are borne by the extent to which one party in the situation decides to be convinced by what the other presents: “i know what the goal is here, but will i choose to let myself be convinced by it?” • could it be imagined, for example, that the typification project of entertainment plays a role in which the parties to the communication regulate the communication from a set of rules that resemble entertainment’s performative presentation of situations that primarily have to do with attracting attention? where it primarily has to do with choosing between different types of options for identification. that the communication is carried by whether it immediately appeals to someone or whether “i see what you mean, but this is just not me seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 14 (ibid.)” can one see, for example, performative strategies play a role in the relationship between teacher functions and student functions? these aspects are not something we particularly think about in relation to the universe of mass media. we have grown used to a background reality (luhmann 2002: 85f, 123) being created in which communication is directed toward one person and a billion others. a consequence of this paradigm is that the teacher and the student, both present and distance learner, learn to regulate and take into account something outside of ‘reality’ and consider it as a reality that is not real but ‘a reality’ (cf. above). the student practises taking something into account outside of ‘reality,’ namely, that this is an event that has already taken place. therefore, the time aspect becomes random, because the setting, which is real in physical space, has already been dissolved. the teacher is directed to establish a sort of reality with the students who are present in the physical space and at the same time with a consciousness that she is addressing an audience on the premises of mass communication. the teaching is aestheticized, and this becomes a part of the learning possibilities that are made available! by this, i mean that the performative interplay, taking into account something outside the situation, is a part of the learning process. this promotes a distancing to the subject matter, and the development of the form of the subject matter comes to play just as significant a role as the content. it becomes easier to place a mass media paradigm over it, i.e., to take note of it (news), to calculate the subject matter’s ability to convince (advertising), to see it as an identification option (entertainment). but it becomes more difficult to hazard one’s own possibility for being changed and attaining new knowledge. the teacher must be able to handle this complex at the same time she, as a critical friend and facilitator and moderator, has to ensure that communication continues while implementing a slew of technical skills in the use of technology – for example, operating the different links that a powerpoint presentation makes it possible to demonstrate; for example, calling attention to what can be realized in cyberspace. the price may easily be that the teacher speaks with a form of introversion, perhaps because the performative setting was constructed more ambitiously than attention could permit. perhaps because it requires training to deal with the fact that communication that is supposed to change cannot immediately reach the person to be changed. this requires a reformulation of the profession. that the actors in the teaching situation must be able to perform in the experiential space they already have with the forms of communication that technology facilitates and where the physically-based interaction is disregarded? what teacher functions are required here? education as a ‘setting’ that develops the paradox: reduction in teacher functions and increased complexity in teacher functions the teacher’s entry into cyberspace changes the conditions for didactics as well as practice. the teacher must be able to handle and unfold this paradox: both a reduction and increased complexity in teacher functions (fritze 2004:335). this is a condition that has significance for the educational relationship between teacher, student and subject matter. this condition has to do, among other things, with a calculation of wanting to be involved or not. obligatory interaction has become a calculation of the choice to be involved. “crises of change” do not necessarily take place in physical space or not take place at all. this spurs consideration about when one can avoid taking a position, when comments are cost-free, and one can justifiably ask whether the education system is to an increasing degree cultivating the observer role by not taking a position on the new conditions for education? in the universe of mass media, it is the form that is cultivated. the education system acts on the basis of a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 15 metaphor about the classic profession, and to this belongs a series of virtues in which the teacher is a critical friend, facilitator, moderator, or at least a professional in control. the conditions for the use of technology flow freely, because the frameworks may not work. they don’t work, because they pretend that education is still the classic profession, while communication takes place in other ways – both in physical and virtual space. attention is directed toward how the student can acquire some sort of learning content. the complexity that this entails for the teacher function becomes practised but not reflected upon. one possible reflection and action is to unfold the paradox between the reduction in teacher functions and the increased complexity of teacher functions, which has been attempted in this article. i propose doing it reflexively, using the anthropologist’s ‘professional amazement’(hastrup 1992) and implementing it through the reflection strategy of visual culture. i have only touched on the extent to which teacher functions are gradually changing in relation to one specific situation. technology makes possible a countless number of variations that promote some aspects of education and weaken others. this requires a reformulation of teacher functions. the most difficult thing about it is that, as a didactician, you must begin to reflect on what you yourself will do in a specific teaching situation, and it is here all the filters come in. however – paradoxically enough – video-streaming may promote the beginning of such reflection. bibliography buhl, m. (2002). paradoksal billedpædagogik – variationer i læreruddannelsens billedkunstfag. ph.d. dissertation. københavn: danmarks pædagogiske universitet buhl, m. (2003). hvem skal jeg nu være…?unge pædagoger 7/8. buhl, m. (2004a). visual culture as a strategy of reflection in education. nordisk pedagogik 4 buhl, m. & hemmingsen k.(2004b): unges fritidsrelaterede æstetiske medieressourcer i en pædagogisk kontekst. københavn: danmarks pædagogiske universitets forlag buhl, m. (2005). pædagogisk antropologi forandrende forbløffelser. i: krejsler, j., et al., pædagogisk antropologi et fag i tilblivelse (1 ed., p. 31-50). danmarks pædagogiske universitet: institut for pædagogisk antropologi. buhl, m. (2006). the aesthetic actualization of learning potential with media and ict. i: buhl et al., media and ict learning potentials (1 ed., p. 207-225). københavn: danish university of education press http://www.dpu.dk/site.asp?p=8803 dale, e. l. (1989). pedagogisk professionalitet. oslo: gyldendal fritze, y. (2004). mediet gør en forskel – en komparativ undersøgelse i nærundervisning og fjernundervisning, ph.d. dissertation. odense: syddansk universitet hastrup, k. (1992) det antropologiske projekt. om forbløffelse. københavn: gyldendal luhmann, n. (2000). sociale systemer. københavn: hans reitzels forlag luhmann, n. (2002). massemediernes realitet, københavn: hans reitzels forlag seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 16 11 my former background as trained teacher and a teacher trainer probably has a role to play here. 2avatar derives from indian religion describing a god of transformation and is familiar in modern media research as a concept for temporary roles that participants assume in cyberspace. the avatar concept is used, in part, about a form of social manifestation and, in part, about a development phase in a religious system of reincarnation. for more information, see buhl 2002:106 ff). 3 for further development, see buhl (2006). the aesthetic actualization of learning potential with media and ict 4 there are even templates for different genres of presentation that have primarily been developed for commercial businesses (for example, ‘how do i explain that things aren’t going well in the firm at the moment and how can i motivate my employees!’). 5 it must be added here that education is constructed in a way in which project work and group communication (primarily virtual) are important ingredients. that is not what i am discussing here. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 do students profit from feedback? arild raaheim professor, dr.philos. university of bergen, norway email: arild.raaheim@iuh.uib.no abstract undergraduate students in psychology were given the opportunity to exchange the traditional exam with portfolio assessment. the students received written feedback, by way of a standard feedback form, on two of the three essays of the portfolio. to investigate whether students attend to and act on the feedback, a comparison was made between unofficial marks on the first draft of the first essay and the official marks on the full portfolio at the end of the semester. with approximately 20% of the first drafts being unacceptable in the end only 1.6% of the portfolios failed to reach the level of acceptance. the result is taken to indicate that the students did indeed attend to and profit from the written feedback. introduction “nonsense.” “rubbish.” “disastrous.” “this leads to nowhere.” “it is only your minimal material knowledge that prevents me from giving you an f.” the above statements are, contrary to what one perhaps might expect, exact citations from the kind of feedback students of law at the university of bergen were given on a written assignment. not surprisingly, this created quite a stir among the students. when asked why he presented feedback in this manner, the lecturer replied: “i admit that i was a bit too brutal in some cases. however, after the first assignment, the students complained that my comments were too scanty, so i decided that this time i would give them some well-founded information as to what they were doing wrong” (studvest, 2004). in this paper i will take a closer look at some aspects of the relationship between learning and feedback. the proposed question do students profit from feedback – will be discussed on the basis of data from a study among undergraduate students of psychology where the students were given the opportunity to exchange the traditional 4-hour written exam with portfolio assessment. the students were offered written feedback on 2 of the 3 essays included in the portfolio, and were given the opportunity of rewriting the essays on the basis of this feedback. the norwegian context following parliament proposition no 27-2000-2001, the ‘quality reform of higher education’ was implemented in norway in 2003. as a result, norwegian institutions of higher education have seen some massive changes in educational programs, teaching and assessment procedures, as well as leadership structures. the reform may be seen as part of a wider european seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 2 integration process following the bologna declaration of 1999, in which 29 ministers of education around europe agreed upon a common degree structure. as part of the quality reform, all institutions of higher education are expected to develop systems in which students are secured a closer followup and a proper feedback on their academic achievements. the same institutions are urged to introduce alternatives to the traditional exam, and to make use of more ‘student active’ teaching. the latter may be seen as a response to the rather severe criticism launched by the oecd, in which norwegian universities were described as “…research institutions conducting exams…” (oecd, 1997). according to the oecd report, too much emphasis has been on control of students and on grading, at the expense of teaching and co-operative learning. the quality reform, and the manner in which it was implemented, has created much debate. with the odd exception (e.g. bleikli, 2005), the local debates in our universities have focussed on how much the reform will cost in terms of money and extra teaching resources, nearly all of them concluding with fear that research will suffer and that universities will be reduced to suppliers of teaching and degrees, making them into schools rather than universities. as the reform has been followed by a new system of financing, in which the institution is refunded based on the number of students who pass an exam or finish a degree, there is also an expressed concern that this may affect grading and that it may result in a reluctance to fail students. such a concern was publicised in an editorial in the membership magazine of the norwegian research association in the autumn of 2004. with reference to experiences from the british educational system, the editorial more than suggested that the increased annual production of credits, and the reduction in failure rates seen across different institutions between 2003 and 2004, were the results of the new financial system (myking, 2004). the importance of proper feedback taking a closer look at the way in which our educational system traditionally has solved the task of giving feedback to students, we find that this primarily has been done in terms of marks or grades. in cases where additional feedback has been given, focus has typically been on what is wrong or not so good. this is true even in subjects like psychology and pedagogy, despite the long acknowledged fact that positive feedback carries more information and that it may serve to strengthen motivation and self-efficacy (bandura, 1998; wormnes & manger, 2005). bjørgen (1989), in a discussion of what he refers to as ‘ten myths about learning’, puts it this way: “we have available to us today an overwhelming amount of research concerning the learning process, with both animals and human beings as experimental subjects. one of the conclusions which stands out most clearly from this mass of material is that the most effective learning is inspired by the carrot rather than the stick: by rewarding what is right, the behaviour that is correct. drawing attention to what is wrong – incorrect answers and inappropriate reactions – seems in most cases to be unhelpful” (bjørgen, 1989, p. 23). the importance of positive and constructive feedback is also underlined by ramsden (2002). he is very critical of a practise in which students only receive a mark or a grade: “it is impossible to overstate the role of effective feedback on students’ progress in any discussion of effective teaching and assessment. students are understandably angry when they receive feedback on an assignment that consists only of a mark or grade. i believe that reporting results in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 3 this way, whatever the form of assessment, is cheating students. it is unprofessional teaching behaviour and ought not to be tolerated” (ramsden, 2002, p. 193). hattie (1987), in a review of 87 meta-analyses of studies related to what is known to affect students’ learning, shows that feedback is the one factor that bears the greatest importance. rogers (2001) draws much the same conclusion. here it is argued that the most effective learning happens when we really want and need to learn, when we know how we will apply our knowledge, when we are rewarded one way or another for having it, and when we are supported, stretched and challenged. topping (1998), in reviewing studies on peer assessment, concludes that feedback from peers may have as good, or even better, effect than the effects of teacher assessment. he also demonstrates that 18 out of 25 studies comparing teacher and peer marks or grades show ‘acceptably high reliability’ (p. 257). students find the process demanding but anxiety reducing, and learning gains in terms of test or skill performance are frequently reported. in an overall summary, topping concludes that peer assessment is adequately reliable and valid, students find it demanding but anxiety reducing, there is a marked learning gain, and it may improve confidence and result in better presentation and appraisal skills (p. 268). similar conclusions are drawn by althauser & darnall (2001), whose study also shows that there is a relationship between the type of feedback and outcome. the better the written peer review, the higher the quality of revised essays. willis (1993) makes the important point that there is a close association between curriculum, assessment and reporting, and that if one element is to be changed, it is necessary to change others to ensure consistency. assessment methods have been shown to shape students’ learning approach, and before any discussion of assessment reform is begun, consideration should be given to what kind of learning is desired, it is claimed (willis, 1993). a similar point is made by jackson (1995), who also makes the point that a deep approach to learning can be encouraged by peer teaching, in that it promotes self-consciousness among students about how they learn. falchikov (2001) argues along much the same line, showing that positive feedback ‘being pleasurable to presenters, seemed to boost confidence and prepare them for the criticism’ (p. 274). as is evident from the interview referred to in the introduction, the whole idea of giving feedback may be interpreted in various ways. one very common way of practicing feedback is correcting wrong responses, or plainly marking parts of a written text with words like ‘needs rewriting’ or the like, without supplying any information that may actually help in the process. there is some evidence that correcting wrong responses, or not giving feedback at all, do have a positive effect on learning (kulhany, 1977; meyer, 1986). this is, however, typical of situations in which the learning material is very simple, or limited to situations which allow the learner to see the feedback before responding (kulhany, 1977). as pointed out by weaver (2006), students consider feedback as unhelpful to improving learning when comments are too general or vague, when they lack guidance, focus on the negative, or when they are unrelated to assessment criteria. in a discussion of the benefits of feedback on written work, thompson (1994) cites students who say that knowing that they will have a ‘second chance’ makes them more relaxed and willing to be more exploratory. giving students feedback and the opportunity to rewrite their work is instrumental in providing them with experience of discovering their own standards. this may in turn result in a basic change in how students experience their writing, from regurgitating known information to writing as making meaning. thompson (1994) shows that students typically receive marks that are 5 to 10 points higher on the second draft than on the first draft. time, as well as quality of the feedback seem to be crucial elements. in this case students were supplied with typed comments in the range of 700 to 1,000 words shortly after handing seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 4 in the first draft, and given three weeks to hand in a second draft. in discussing this approach, thompson makes the point that the process is time-consuming for students and instructors alike, and that it may not be feasible when teaching large groups of students (100-150 students and more). the results reported in the thompson study are, as far as timing of feedback is concerned, supported by kulik & kulik (1988). in a meta-analysis of findings on feedback timing and verbal learning they show that immediate feedback is more effective than delayed feedback in classrooms and when dealing with real learning material. brown, gibbs & glover (2003) list a number of functions that the feedback teachers’ writing on students’ work may have, for instance identifying where errors have been made, demonstrating techniques or procedures the students may not have used appropriately or correctly, or engaging students in some thinking in relation to what they have written or presented. in order to decide which function is most important, one has to find out what types of feedback teachers actually give, and what students find most useful, they claim. the authors include and describe examples of assessment experience questionnaires and tutor feedback forms that may be useful in various settings. gibbs (2002), in discussing conditions under which formative assessment supports learning, underlines that feedback needs to be quite regular, and in relatively small portions of the course to be effective. feedback must be timely in that students receive it while it still matters to them, and it has to be appropriate to the purpose of the assignment and to its criteria for success. brinko (1993) looks at feedback from the perspective of the teacher, and asks how feedback may improve teaching. her conclusions are very similar to the ones described above. feedback is more effective when it focuses upon behaviour rather than on the person, when it is given as soon as possible after performance, and when it contains a moderate amount of positive feedback with a selected and limited amount of negative feedback. knowing what we now know about the importance of feedback on students’ learning, our main challenge is, probably, to develop structures to ensure that students attend to and act upon the feedback they actually get. this may, as thompson (1994) points out, constitute a particular challenge in cases where one is faced with large groups of students. the present work is an attempt to indicate how feedback may be presented to large groups of students, and to investigate what effect written feedback may have on students’ work. background of the study for a period of three years, starting in spring 2001, undergraduate students at a course in socialand community psychology (15 credits) were given the opportunity to exchange the traditional 4-hour written exam with portfolio assessment. the course ran once every semester for the three-year period, attracting large groups of students. each semester, approximately 50% of the students accepted the offer. an account of the number of students who took part each semester, and the results they produced, may be found in appendix table a. as can be seen from this table, a total of 1021 students participated. based on a general understanding of the importance of feedback on learning, much effort was spent on providing the participants with written feedback. when developing the course we did not, however, discuss questions related to effectiveness of such feedback. no plans were, at the start, made to evaluate whether the students actually paid any attention to the feedback. as we went along, we became increasingly aware of the costs associated with this kind of work, an awareness that in spring 2003 led to the following questions: does the feedback have any effect on the quality of the written work? do students use the feedback, and do they actually profit from it? we decided to investigate the issue of feedback effectiveness as we set up a new course in spring 2003. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 5 the study the spring 2003 portfolio the portfolio consisted of three written essays and a written self-evaluation. two of the essays were assigned to the students. the third had to be chosen from a list of 16 general topics made available to them at the beginning of the course. on this third essay the students had to specify both question and approach themselves. before proceeding with writing the essay, their choice of question had to be approved by the lecturer. students sent their suggestions via e-mail and received a reply within 24 hours. each essay was to contain a minimum of 1,000 words, but not exceed 1,500 words.1 a description was presented specifying important issues related to structure and content of the essays. the students were also given a detailed written description of the criteria on which the individual essays and the portfolio would be assessed, and told that they could work together with another student on one essay. four criteria were described; focus, structure, use of sources, and language. the students were told that the essays should have a clear and well-defined focus, to be kept throughout the discussion. it should be well-structured, balancing details with overview, not giving too much attention to particularities. the students were advised to go to the library and use other sources than the proposed textbook. it was emphasised that they should keep citation to a minimum, but try to use the literature as a basis for their own discussion. we also made clear that misspellings, misuse of literature, and a narrative rather than academic style had to be avoided. all students were invited to a two-hour work-shop at the beginning of the course. in this workshop we used pieces of texts to illustrate the criteria that had been spelled out. we also commented on some preliminary texts produced by some of the students. finally, the participants were asked to produce small pieces of texts and asked to discuss them with another participant. feedback a standard feedback form (a 4) giving detailed information related to the four mentioned criteria, was used. although no mark or grade was given on the individual essay, the person responsible for presenting the feedback indicated whether revision was necessary or not. this was done by ticking off one of three alternatives; ‘needs extensive revision’, ‘needs some revision’, ’ok as it is’ at the bottom of the feedback form. all students were invited to send (e-mail) any queries they might have to me (the lecturer), or to the person whose job it was to present the written feedback. many students took this opportunity, thus receiving additional feedback. the person responsible for providing the written feedback also acted as one of two examiners marking the portfolios at the end of the semester. the second examiner was external, appointed by the faculty of psychology. participants procedure in spring 2003, 483 students signed up for the course, 269 of them exchanging the exam with our alternative. the first essay was introduced one week into the course and the students had to hand in a first draft two weeks later. feedback was presented the following week. the second essay was presented five weeks into the course, and once again the students had to hand in a first draft two weeks later. feedback followed the week after. the full portfolio was handed in towards the end of the semester, and was marked as one. the students were advised that the portfolio was not complete unless they handed in a written self-evaluation (500 words), in which they reflected upon their own learning during the course. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 6 in order to investigate whether students did in fact act on the written feedback presented, the person presenting the feedback was asked to suggest a mark (not for the students to know) on the first essay, as it was handed in the first time. a copy of all feedback forms, marks included, was kept until the end of the course. a comparison was then made with the results of this informal marking with the final results on the portfolio as a whole. results figure 1 presents an illustration of the comparison between the informal marks and the final marks. the ects-marking scale was used. according to the qualitative description laid down by the norwegian council for higher education, an a is described as “excellent” and represents “an excellent performance, clearly outstanding. the candidate demonstrates excellent judgement and a high degree of independent thinking.” b is described as “very good”, c as “good”, d as “satisfactory”, and e is described as “sufficient”. according to the qualitative description, an f represents “a performance that does not meet the minimum academic criteria. the candidate demonstrates an absence of both judgement and independent thinking.” students who receive an f have, in other words, failed. figure1. comparing the (informal) marks on the first essay with final marks, spring 2003. (figures in percent). as may be seen from figure 1, approximately 20% of the students would have failed had the first draft been handed in as part of an exam – as the only essay and marked by this examiner only. this is, in fact, very close to the results traditionally found among students who sit for the exam at these courses (raaheim, 2003). at the end of the course, however, less than two per cent of the participants fail. we also observe that there has been an upward shift with the marks showing a pattern that is close to a normal distribution. this may be taken to indicate that there is a general learning effect across the three essays. based on what we know about the positive effects of proper feedback, it seems fair to attribute this development, at least partly, to the fact that the students received feedback on two of the essays. discussion did the students profit from the written feedback presented to them? the results presented in figure 1 indicate that this may in fact be the case. admittedly, there are some methodological weaknesses. the first draft was not subjected to an objective assessment using independent assessors. instead we seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 7 relied on the judgements made by the person responsible for giving the written feedback. this person also served as examiner together with an external examiner – in the final assessment of the portfolios. besides, we did not ask the students how they used the feedback. this must be taken into consideration when interpreting the results. at the same time it is worth noticing that the person presenting the feedback is among the longest-serving professors of psychology in norway, acknowledged as one of the nation’s top scholars. when asked to present his view on the question he writes: “after having read more than two thousand essays in social psychology over a period of three years, i was very pleased by being able to conclude that the vast majority of the students clearly demonstrated how the written feedback led to a clear improvement in the end result.” over the six semesters approximately 90% of the students in the portfolio groups completed the course (ranging between 87 and 98), whereas the same was true for only 40% of the students in the exam groups. it was also found that students in the portfolio groups produced better results than the exam groups (raaheim, 2003). the great difference in marks and failure rate between students in the portfolio groups and students who followed the regular programme may, of course, be explained in many different ways. one cannot rule out the possibility of a systematic difference, with the portfolio groups consisting of brighter students and/or more motivated students. it is also possible that time (to study) is an important element, as close to all students in the portfolio groups were full-time students, whereas this does not necessarily have to be true for the other groups. all of this can not, however, rule out the fact that nearly 20% of the first drafts in the portfolio group in spring 2003 would not have passed, and that this is very similar to the picture found over the course of many years at this level among students who do not receive any feedback as they sit for the traditional exam. the students in our group were allowed to co-operate with another student on one of the three papers. very few students did, however, grasp this opportunity. again, there may be many explanations. one may, for example interpret this as a general mistrust in the benefits of co-operation, based on real or imagined events. when asked at the end of the course why they did not choose to co-operate with another student, a very common reply was that they feared that the other person would not do his or her bit. social loafing is a well-known phenomenon, and it would not be the first time that the fear of ”free-riders” would prevent co-operative learning. if one wishes to introduce new ways of teaching and assessment within higher education, and if this implies that students have to work together in pairs or in groups, one does well to acknowledge that students, in general, have little experience in doing so. in order to achieve what brown (2000) has called ‘social labouring’, students need guidance and training in working together. one may also choose to devise a system in which the group takes control and involves all partners, and where stronger students teach weaker students as shown by bartlett (1995). as thompson (1994) argues, a system in which the lecturer presents extensive written feedback to the students may prove to be time-consuming, especially when faced with large groups. in our case we paid an external expert to do this, nearly tripling the costs as compared to the costs associated with the traditional exam. there is, however, much to be saved in time (and money) by refining the feedback procedure. in both our study and the one described by thompson, students received extensive written feedback. in our case the feedback was presented on a standard feedback form and related to some prespecified criteria. as one reads many essays belonging to a particular course, one will, inevitably, experience that some mistakes and misunderstandings are repeated. instead of supplying every student with an individual written feedback, one may use a feedback form with pre-specified categories and simply tick off for a particular category statement. in this way a lecturer may seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 8 be able to give feedback to very many students in the course of relatively short time. however, the best way to handle this challenge is, probably, to develop a system in which students give feedback to each other. in the norwegian context this certainly seems to be the correct way to go. a recent study shows that after the introduction of the quality reform in 2003, lecturers report that they spend much more time on giving students written feedback on individual papers than they did prior to the reform, and that they have less time to do research (michelsen & aamodt, 2006). such peer feedback would have to be in writing and both receiver and provider should keep a copy of this in their portfolio. the portfolio would not be considered acceptable unless it included both reports. one might elaborate on this, and ask the students to document how they have considered the feedback provided by one or more of their peers. such a system is well-founded on research, some of it referred to in this paper. there are some prerequisites; students would need to be trained in how to present feedback. this is especially important in introductory courses one might add, as research shows that students in advanced courses are more accurate assessors (falchikov & boud, 1989). it is also important that the criteria on which the essay is to be assessed are made explicit to all parties (dougen, 1996). as is discussed by orsmond, merry & spelling (2006), one ought to also be more careful in evaluating how effective the feedback really is. conclusions in this paper we have tried to shed some light on the relationship between feedback and learning. feedback is not always helpful to learning. if it is vague, general, focuses on the negative, arrives late, or is unrelated to assessment criteria, it does not do much good. the process of giving feedback to students is time-consuming and/or costs much money. in order to secure best value, assessment criteria have to be spelled out, and feedback must adhere to these criteria. as underlined by orsmond, merry & reiling (2006), tutors ought to also evaluate how effective their feedback has been. in our study students were supplied with feedback on a standard feedback form, and we argue that the feedback they received was helpful and increased the quality of the written work. we paid an external expert to provide the feedback. in the paper we discuss alternative ways of doing this. one alternative is to make use of the students themselves. in cases where a system of peer feedback is introduced, it is important that students are given training in how to present feedback. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 9 references althauser, r. & darnell, k. (2001). enhancing critical reading and writing through peer reviews: an exploration of assisted performance. teaching sociology, 1, 23-35. bandura, a. (1998). self-efficacy. the exercise of control. new york: w.h. freeman and company. bartlett, r.l. (1995). a flip of the coin. a roll of the die: an answer to the free-rider problem in economic instruction. the journal of economic education, 2, 131139. bjørgen, i.a. (1989). ten myths about learning. i: bjørgen, i.a. (ed.) basic issues in psychology. a scandinavian contribution (pp. 11-24). bergen: sigma forlag. bleiklie, i. (2005). organizing higher education in a knowledge society. higher education, 49, 31-59. brinko, k.t. (1993). the practice of giving feedback to improve teaching: what is effective? the journal of higher education, 5, 574-593. brown, r. (2000). group processes. dynamics within and between groups. oxford: blackwell publishers ltd. brown, e., gibbs, g. & glover, c. (2003). evaluation tools for investigating the impact of assessment regimes on student learning. bioscience education e-journal, 2: november 2003. dougan, a.m. (1996). student assessment by portfolio: one institution’s journey. the history teacher, 2, 171-178. falchikov, n. & boud, d. (1989). student self-assessment in higher education: a metaanalysis. review of educational research, 4, 395-430. falchikov, n. (2001). learning together. peer tutoring in higher education. london and new york: routledge/falmer. gibbs, g. (2002). evaluating the impact of formative assessment on student learning behaviour. invited address: earli-northumbria assessment conference, 28-30 august. hattie, j.a. (1987). identifying the salient facets of a model of student learning: a synthesis of meta-analyses. international journal of educational research, 11, 187-212. jackson, m.w. (1995). skimming the surface or going deep? ps: political science and politics, 3, 512-514. kulhavy, r.w. (1977). feedback in written instruction. review of educational research, 2, 211-232. kulik, j.a. & kulik, c-l.c. (1988). timing of feedback and verbal learning. review of educational research, 1, 79-97. meyer, l.a. (1986). strategies for correcting students’ wrong responses. the elementary school journal, 2, 227-241. michelsen, s. & aamodt, p.o. (2006). evaluering av kvalitetsreformen. delrapport 1. kvalitetsreformen møter virkeligheten. bergen/oslo: rokkan-senteret/nifustep. myking, i. (2004). vegen til kvalitet er olja med gode insitament. (the road towards quality is oiled by good incitements). forskerforum, 7/2004. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 10 oecd, (1997). oecd thematic review of the first years of tertiary education. country note norway. orsmond, p., merry, s. & reiling, k. (2006). biology students’ utilization of tutors’ formative feedback: a qualitative interview study. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 4, 369-386. raaheim, a. (2003). ferske erfaringer med mappevurdering. et eksempel fra psykologi grunnfag ved universitetet i bergen. (recent experiences with portfolio assessment at a first year course in psychology at the university of bergen). in: raaheim, k. & wankowski, j. man lærer så lenge man har elever (pp. 123-148). bergen: sigma forlag. ramsden, p. (2002). learning to teach in higher education. london and new york: routledge/falmer. rogers, j. (2001). adult learning. buckingham: open university press. stortingsmelding 27-2000-2001. gjør din plikt – krev din rett. (parliament proposition, no. 27-2000-2001. do your duty – demand your rights). studvest, (2004). skremt av eneveldig sensor. (terrified by sovereign examiner). no. 31, 08.12.04. thompson, j. (1994). “i think my mark is too high”. teaching sociology, 1, 65-74. topping, k. (1998). peer assessment between students in colleges and universities. review of educational research, 3, 249-276. weaver, m.r. (2006). do students value feedback? student perceptions of tutors’ written responses. assessment & evaluation in higher education, 3, 379-394. willis, d. (1993). learning and assessment: exposing the inconsistencies of theory and practice. oxford review of education, 3, 383-402. wormnes, b. & manger, t. (2005). motivasjon og mestring. (motivation and mastery). bergen: fagbokforlaget. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 11 appendix 1 a full portfolio of 5000 words would thus be equivalent to the average essay produced at a 4-hour exam. table a. portfolio assessment – distribution of marks and total number of students from spring 2001 through autumn 2003. a b c d e f withdraw al total s-2001 4 22 47 38 18 4 13 146 a-2001 4 10 36 24 4 5 6 89 s-2002 8 63 84 40 9 3 5 212 a-2002 10 41 40 18 4 5 13 131 s-2003 15 57 107 54 10 4 22 269 a-2003 17 47 50 25 6 10 19 174 total 58 240 364 199 51 31 78 1021 microsoft word dons dealing with pupils digital everyday.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 "… it is a major challenge to guide pupils in a field they believe they master." – student teachers on dealing with pupils' digital everyday carl f. dons. associate professor in pedagogy department for teacher and interpreter education sør-trøndelag university college email: calle.dons@hist.no abstract the main aim of this article is to answer the following research question: how can we prepare student teachers to deal with pupils who have a wide range of day-to-day experiences of the digital world? this question arises out of the understanding that today's student-teacher training is inadequately equipped to realize the potential for learning found in the way that digital technology is now an integral part of the social and cultural practices of children and young people. based on theory and practice from research and development activities in primary and lower secondary school, the article points out some perspectives connected to the technology culture of children and young people that may have importance for the professional training of student teachers. the article concludes by summarizing some findings from a research project in general teacher education, where it is argued that student teachers can be qualified to cope with the way children and young people use technology by teaching them to adopt solutions based on personal publishing. in many ways the article deals with classical issues in the education field; how the relations between cognition, learning, technology and fellowcitizenship raise practical issues connected to teaching and learning (dewey, 1915; 1938; 1958). keywords: digital literacy, pupil’s digital everyday, media convergence, multimodality, video games, personal publishing, student teachers, general teacher training background there are many indications that today's student teachers are not sufficiently qualified to deal with the digital challenges in school. several studies show that students in teacher education do not make much use of digital tools in their studies (rambøll 2004)1. moreover, experiences from such research as the pluto project2 show that the study processes at the teacher training institutions contribute to reproduction of traditional instruction models, thus lacking work forms dominated by pupil activity and the use of ict (hauge, 2003; ludvigsen and flo, 2002). this relates to the fact that the development of digital awareness in basic education has not gone as quickly as the intentions embedded in central policy documents would suggest. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 2 a number of studies from basic education in the nordic countries show that ict still has not been given a key position in pupil-learning processes in school (kløvstad and kristiansen, 2003; drotner 2003; sørensen, 2001). on the other hand, a number of studies show that the pupils’ use of ict at home is on the rise, both in scope and complexity (drotner, 2001; sørensen, 2001; hernwall, 2003; erstad, kløvstad, kristiansen and søby, 2005; ssb, 2005). one important dimension in this complexity is that technology is making inroads into culture and ict is increasingly converging with many other media. the convergence of audio, film, data and mobile technology is erasing the boundaries between consuming media expressions and producing cultural expressions. this opens new avenues for public participation and cultureproducing activities. these new avenues are also closely connected to the application of new forms of knowledge and skills. david buckingham (2003) uses the construct media literacy about such knowledge and skills. he points to the challenges found in developing forms of literacy that make young people active and critical participants in the media culture they are immersed in. increasingly closer links between globalization and a number of synchronous and asynchronous communication forms demand new broad communicative competence – multiliteracy (cope & kalantziz, 2000). a number of studies describe how children and young people include digital technologies in their interplay, developing multimodal expressions and new social practices (drotner, 2001; gee, 2005; kress, 2003; tapscott, 1999; lankshear & knobel, 2006; livingstone & bovil, 2001; steinkuehler 2006). they move among several technologies (mobile telephones, game consoles and internet applications) where areas and ways of use merge and influence each other. this gives new opportunities for communication and places new demands on such classical skills as reading and writing. active participation in computer games and internet-based arenas such as "my space", "facebook" and "youtube" represents additions to the socialization of children and young people where they participate in a number of collective practices in which personal voices and expressions are combined with problem resolution and knowledge sharing. these collective practices also help us study how children and young people use digital media as part of a techno-cultural education process (løvlie, 2003). putting the way in which children and young people use technology into an education perspective means we have to study how information technology can influence the relation between the individual and the culture he or she is part of (løvlie op. cit.). bearing such an education perspective in mind, we may also ask whether new conditions are created for legitimizing the role of school in the pupils' education process. in a society where technology increasingly contributes to complexity and information diversity, the role of school as a contributor in a democratic education process is challenged. media convergence and multimodality the democratic education process is, as has been previously mentioned, connected to the fact that children and young people become critical participants in the media culture that shapes them. this shaping process is also connected to the fact that being a fellow citizen means being able to produce utterances on a digital public stage. media convergence and multimodality are keywords for how the new technological formats may result in greater opportunities for variation in the utterances of children and young people. media convergence is roughly about how different media, telecommunications and ict are woven together. video, audio, film, data and mobile technology are linked into a plethora of texts and mediation forms. this is seen, for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 3 example, in how the tv medium is permeated by the aesthetics and functionality of the world wide web, that response can be given to radio and tv shows via sms or web-based services, that audio, video and film can be processed and integrated in digital formats, and that computer games can be played with familiar characters from films, tv shows or literature. computer technology can produce characters and allows the combination and manipulation of text, graphics, audio and video in ways that transcend the boundary of our traditional understanding of writing and reading skills. this enables new text forms and genres which in turn contribute to changing the requirements when it comes to text competence. some of this text competence is connected to the semiotic ambiguity of the text, or its multimodality (kress 1998; 2003). we are here talking about various text forms that can be combinations of video, audio and writing. a key question is then how to develop pupils' text competence to provide new opportunities for expressing themselves, participating and learning. children and young people are exercising text production in their spare time, and one way of strengthening their text competence may be to include the day-to-day recreational culture of the young in the school context. david buckingham maintains that the development of technology has meant that the distance between the culture of school and the recreational culture of the young has increased, and that school therefore must endeavour to build a bridge to span what he has called the digital gap (buckingham, 2006). much of what we see indicates that school has overlooked the informal forms of learning that pupils practise in their spare time. a case in point is playing computer games, an increasingly popular recreation activity among children and young people, and a field which is now being subject to more and more research (gee, 2003; 2005; 2005; stenkuehler, 2006). a vital question for this research is the extent to which computer games may represent such an informal learning arena. are video games good for learning? this headline is from an article by james paul gee in digital competence magazine (gee, 2006). he refers in particular to a research field focusing on the hypothesis that playing computer games contributes to learning (shaffer, squire, halverson & gee, 2005; gee 2003; 2005). researchers claim that good computer games use basic principles of learning and therefore may contribute to the development of learning systems for serious use in and outside school. gee identifies the following connections between learning principles and good computer games: 1. video games can create an embodied empathy for complex systems 2. they are simulations of embodied experience 3. they involve distributed intelligence via creation of smart tools 4. they create opportunities for cross-functional affiliation 5. they allow meanings to be situated 6. they can be open-ended, allowing for goals that meld the personal and the social. (gee, 2006 , p 179). needless to say, this does not apply to all forms of computer games and it is important to bear in mind that in the multitude of video games there are a few that are more or less adapted for learning purposes. a common way of dividing these games is to distinguish between problem games and world games. the former are games solving a given problem, while the latter category simulates a wider universe. both categories are about cooperation, where a participant must perfect specific skills and learn to integrate these skills as a member of a group or team. each group member must have specialized knowledge – intensive knowledge – and general knowledge – extensive knowledge – including knowledge about the functions of the other group members. this seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 4 requires a high degree of intersubjectivity, or a common understanding of the situation. there is much to suggest that this type of cooperation in commercial computer games (as for example word of warcraft) has transfer value when it comes to interdisciplinary cooperation in school and working life. an example is the implementation of distributed integrated operations connected to the extraction of oil in the north sea. 3 computer games may function as tools to construct learning rooms which in turn may provide a plethora of learning experiences. hence computer games may also mediate discussions, reflections, facts and analyses. computer games are thus not only interesting because of their content, but just as much for the way they contribute to new discoveries, initiate negotiations, constructions and knowledge journeys (egenfeldt, 2006, p 201). however, it is not always the case that potential learning qualities in computer games actually promote learning per se. this depends on how they are used and the extended learning contexts they are part of. and this is where we find the challenge for school; how can school contribute to reinforcing the learning potential in good computer games? we need to ask how we can create extended learning contexts and we need to discover which aspects of the teacher role are most appropriate in this context. this will include the content of learning, work forms and assignment cultures. … then we would just have carried on playing our own computer games andreas lund maintains that: "the practices we find outside school must find their (critical) resonance inside school" (lund, 2006, p 275). in a study under the project initiated by the norwegian directorate for education and training, "lærende nettverk 2006-2008" 4 (learning networks 2006-2008), we find one example of this (dons & hokstad, 2007). in the county of sør-trøndelag this project has attached importance to challenging the pupils to develop multimodal texts. in the 2007 school year a number of multimodal texts have been produced by pupils from year 1 to year 10. thematically, they have a broad range, from recreational tasks such as "my holiday" and digital christmas cards sent to family and friends, to more academically oriented texts dealing with social studies, mathematics and music. a common feature of these texts is that pupils spend very little time learning the technology itself. they are highly aware of multimodality and it is natural for them to produce texts where they combine monomodal text with video, audio props and music. work processes are collective, highly cooperative and involve knowledge sharing. the apocalypse dudes the apocalypse dudes is a film made by five boys in year 10. it has a number of sequences where the main characters (the two dudes) are sitting on a couch watching tv. what they watch on tv ranges from music on mtv to daily news reports. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 5 when they start to work on their film, one of the boys says: "... we were given a project assignment in music to prepare a presentation combining music and video. we saw that many pupils started making music videos and wanted to do something different. since we all are into computer games we realized we could do something like that and decided to make a film. we spent two hours at school brainstorming and planning, and then we set up a local area network, and the film was completed in a night." 5 each scene in the film is painstakingly produced, and great importance has been attached to the use of music and live footage. several scenes are put together from animation clips taking elements from computer games. these have then been combined with animation the boys have made and music they have selected. they use this to present a version of a daily news feature from the war in iraq. the scene from the war in iraq is introduced with very dramatic music, and we see soldiers preparing to attack a tank coming their way. suddenly the setting changes, the music switches to another mood, now sounding happy and fastpaced while the tank is pursuing soldiers in a game of tag. finally the tank inexplicably explodes. we see that the pupils have used different technologies, including word processing, audio clips, music, pictures, film and four different computer games. we also see that they are able to communicate their message through different semiotic layers. combining existing resources into a new product or expression is one of the characteristics of how the internet continues to be adapted for use in new contexts. as a technique this is a type of collage or mashup that is part of web 2.0. the activity features knowledge sharing (lan as a work form) and the application of technology must be called quite sophisticated. equally important as the use of technology is, of course, the way the pupils use such techniques as humour and irony. here also familiar elements from the media seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 6 are combined in fresh ways, whether the genre ideal is music performance on mtv or an updated news presentation on nrk (the norwegian broadcasting corporation) or cnn. the pupils pointed out that their intention in recontextualizing their media experiences was to produce more than mere entertainment. they also wanted to demonstrate their critical distance to modern media and the presentation of news, and demonstrate that they have media literacy. in the words of one of the pupils: "we primarily wish to entertain by using elements from tv, film and computer games that we like, but we also want to be critical and ironic about the various media, such as film, tv news and computer games." 6 this film bears all the appearances of being self-made, but also reflects the interaction in a social community, society and culture. the pupils are in dialogue with and the counterparts of the presentation forms that dominate in popular culture. an example of this is that the film was not put on youtube until their co-pupils had seen and discussed it. the film offers interesting perspectives on the knowledge and skills that are realized when school's assignment discourse meets the pupils’ after-school digital habits. in the words of one of the pupils: "... if we had not been given such an assignment ... then we would just have carried on playing our own computer games. school gave us a challenge that we rose to because we were able to do what we do after school in new and different ways ..." 7 this points out the importance of developing assignment cultures that involve the technology children and young persons actually use. the example shows how school can help create and extend the learning context and thus exploit the learning potential found in the pupils’ participation in computer games. furthermore, this example shows that the teacher must be able to interpret, accept and develop the pupils’ forms of behaviour and expression multiliteracy. the teacher must also help to increase the pupils’ academic development by providing them with established knowledge (literacy in the traditional sense). for this the teacher must have adequate insight into the field to increase the learning dividends of the pupils, regardless of their different literacies. through the way the pupils re-contextualize their media experiences we also see a fledgling development of critical distance representing an approach to elements of "classical education" or "literary education" (liestøl, 2006). the didactic challenges are found in the point of convergence between the pupil's emergent classical education and the teacher as the administrator of classical education ideals. elogg another example of dealing with the digital day-to-day experiences of pupils is the development and testing of the word processing tool elogg. this is a virtual learning environment for primary and lower secondary school based on web logs and wikis (hoem, 2005). the underpinning idea for this word processing tool is the benefits of blogs 8 , highlighting the personal voice, combined with the wiki idea 9 that anybody can share and edit texts. the core function of elogg is a blog-like learning environment that connects participants via the texts they produce. activities are connected to a specially designed website with pupil texts in focus. each participant can see the texts of the others and also see what they do with them. in the project "dramaturgi i distribuert læring" (dramaturgy in distributed learning) (hoem, 2005) e-logg seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 7 has been tested at all levels in primary and lower secondary school. in 2005, a total of 250 pupils participated in this pilot testing, and project findings showed that the pupils demonstrated greater text competence. many of the pupils who participated wrote hypertexts collectively and multimodally. in the spring of 2006 the use of elogg was studied among pupils in year 5 at a school in oslo and another school in bergen. four classes at these two schools joined a common learning arena. the pupils demonstrated multimodal playfulness and inventiveness in this arena. the door into the pupils' texts was a framework story prepared by the teacher, a multimodal text with a number of pointers to texts written by the pupils. østerud et al. (2006) summarize it as follows: "by taking the initiative to create a common hypertext within the framework of elogg the teacher invites the pupils to join a writing process where the pupils' own entries help make the community’s richly branching texts meaningful, informative and appellative to the other members. jointly they build a hypertext where the division of roles and responsibility is initiated by the teacher's framework story which then functions as scaffolding for the pupils' short factual texts. the fact that readers can navigate between the nodes means that they create their own reading progress. the pupils recognize this freedom from their digital recreational culture such as games and chatting." (østerud et al. 2006, p 220). experiences from the project "dramaturgy in distributed learning" showed that the open form of the elogg more easily invited "collective and processoriented activities such as writing a log, writing together, discussions and chatting." (schwebs, 2006). the pupils' active exploitation of the visual and semiotic resources found in the graphic interface of the elogg demonstrates that they have substantial multimodal competence (østerud et al. 2006). by referring to themselves, and in part to their surroundings, the pupils also use elogg to stage themselves in the world. in this project it appears that success was obtained in uniting informal non-institutional learning with school's formalized learning environment by lowering the threshold to recreational texts. a decisive factor for releasing pupil writing is also, in this connection, the manner in which the teacher facilitates the assignments. it also appears that the pupils' elogg activities developed good social interaction patterns precisely because they were writing for an audience, for each other and not merely handing in assignments using a traditional learning management system (lms) (schwebs, 2006). digital day-to-day experiences and general teacher training above i have pointed out how the digital day-to-day experiences of pupils in primary and lower secondary school may serve as the point of departure for learning in school. the question is whether we have a similar point of departure when it comes to learning for student teachers. what challenges does teacher training face when it comes to promoting learning in contexts dominated by media convergence and multimodality? for teacher training students, we are talking about a type of dual qualification, as the students must apply new technologies in their own studies process while also being able to use technology to support the learning of their pupils. in time, recruitment to teacher training will increasingly come to consist of "digitally native" students (prensky 2001). these are students who have as many technological experiences from their normal lives as today's pupils in primary and lower secondary school. the issue then is how these students seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 8 should strengthen their qualifications for their professions as teachers. do these students have the same need to stage themselves in the world (goffmann, 1959) as pupils in primary and lower secondary school? do they also have the need to participate in interaction patterns where they are writing for an audience, for each other? there is much evidence that suggests that we need to train teachers who are comfortable with activity structures with individual and collective orientation and which also play out in different contexts (lund, 2006, p 286). a consequence of this is that teacher training must prepare students to a greater extent to participate in a digitalized public sphere. this means that the student teacher must present impressions, play roles and appear as a "teacher to be", which also means to join "performances" on different "stages" (goffmann 1959.). one possible path might be to challenge students to present themselves through personal websites, allowing the creation of new stages for student self-presentation on the way to a teacher role. having a personal website means writing for oneself while also publishing in public. because the owner of a website has access to elements of the user interface that are closed off to others, this is a type of publication that lends itself to mediating a role in relation to others (hoem, 2004). rasmussen (2003) maintains that personal websites may appear as a medium from the individual to society, comparing it with the bourgeois saloon habermas describes in "strukturwandel der öffentlichkeit". personal websites are thus a way to practise identity, a practice occurring in a public space. challenging students to present themselves with their work identity (beck, 1992; giddens, 1996) in such a public space is also an important aspect of qualifying the student teachers for their profession. terje rasmussen (2003) describes selfpresentation on the web as a new type of resource used for presentation and impression management (goffmann, 1959) of a person's public image: websites are a way of writing, a way of conquering a field with texts about oneself, but more importantly, produced by oneself, published by oneself." (rasmussen, 2003, p 1). in self-presentation on the web one can select and consider the techniques and the style with which one wishes to appear – without disruptions. being an asynchronous medium there is more time for back-stage (goffmann, 1959) preparations, allowing self-criticism before facing one's audience. this means that a person stages himor herself through what is published, but we must also consider that this occurs in interaction with a collective (hoem, 2004). on track of the teacher role in the spring of 2005 10 , i explained in a case study connected to a pilot test of digital examination folders in pedagogy (they were formed as websites) how student teachers can develop new opportunities for knowledge and selfpresentation through personal publication on the web (dons, 2008). the point of departure for this study was to challenge the students to present their academic work from their studies, reflect upon their own study process and give grounds for their selection of works. such a dossier was also intended to allow a comprehensive assessment of processes and final products (dysthe, 2003). another point was that the students were to be given the opportunity to express themselves through multimodal texts. the students had produced a rich selection of digital texts in varying genres and formats they had produced in the course of their two first years of studying. called "on track of the teacher role!" the students were to present their "track" (personal and academic) that led them on their way to the teacher role, with emphasis on academic reflection. the examination dossier was to be designed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 9 along the lines of a website with requirements for hypertext and multimedia presentations. as a minimum, the website would need an entrance text ("meta text") describing the student's "track" on the way to the teacher role and a rationale for the selection. moreover, it would need to include an academic article based on issues connected to the theme of the teacher role. it would also have pointers to examples and reflections showing the student's development relating to didactic processes, internet-based communication and digital competence. the students started the work process early in the second year of studies and worked on their dossier throughout the period they had access to it. work seminars were also conducted where the students shared knowledge connected to design and content. the work was characterized by the exchange of experience and knowledge sharing, particularly during the final phase before handing in their work where the students intensified their activities through work seminars they initiated. method the intention of tracking the academic reflections of the students on a website required a methodological approach that enabled them to have an explosive design. the method chosen was therefore qualitative, and the study may best be described as a case study. a case study is exploration of a bound system through in-depth data collection comprising several sources (creswell, 1998). the informants, 50 students, left tracks through digital presentations as websites and as contributions to two different lmss11. the core material was, however, the 50 examination dossiers. all this material was studied using document analysis before a selection was made of a sample of eight students. criteria for this selection included variation in relation to gender, quality of content (grade) design and hyperstructure. the folders from these students were then subjected to a more thorough analysis. the eight students were then interviewed one year after they had submitted their examination dossier. each interview lasted around 45 minutes, and a high level of openness was sought so we could capture the students' personal reflections. postmodern critiques of interviews (scheurich, 1997) suggest that the interview situation often is controlled by the researcher's theory paradigm and previous understanding, and that there is thus a need for new ideas about interviews that expand the "knowledge universe" and open for varied types of interaction. bearing this in mind, the interview was arranged so that the student sat facing a screen studying his/her own personal website while the interviewer was seated by his/her side. the point of departure for the interview was thus that the student contributed reflections while looking at his/her website. the interviews were stored in mp3 format and later transcribed to provide a better basis for analysis (kvale, 1997; thagaard, 1998). findings analysis of the students' websites showed that they put their own stamp on the presentations. this applies to the choice of how to make statements and content. there is extensive variation when it comes to the use of illustrations, pictures, film, choice of colours, fonts and animations, and in the interviews the students underline how the freedom to choose graphic designs and publication styles is very important for the self-presentation or staging. in the words of one of the informants:"... the fact that i am pleased with my digital development is reflected in this website, which offers both an aesthetically pleasing design and user friendliness." there is, moreover, a trend that the students take their inspiration from website genres that are more closely connected to popular culture, such as web newspapers. the internet-based presentations thus appeared very much as personal creations, but also reflect seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 10 interaction with social communities, society and culture. they are in dialogue with and a counterpart to the presentation forms that prevail in popular culture. it is also clear that the informants have felt the challenges as something personal, and they make it clear that presenting themselves as professionals to other people than just their teachers is a special situation. in the words of one of the students during an interview: .... it was very good to be challenged in this way. it wasn't pedagogy as reeling off the curriculum but rather pedagogy as when you're a teacher. you were forced to think more deeply... a way to improve what you've done before. working on my website i found out how to make a better impression not only on my education teachers. the website allowed me to make a statement as to who i am and what i stand for as a teacher – like in selling yourself... (dons, 2008, p 87) the students put much work into both presenting themselves through the choice of multimodal utterances and in the selection of content. much of the work done backstage has also been dominated by knowledge sharing. one of the students says the following in the examination folder: ... we have helped each other with fancy tricks and better design, we have resolved technological problems and so on. thus we have applied lev vygotsky's socio-cultural learning theories in practice. we have acquired new knowledge in interaction with others. we have been "supporting scaffolding", helping each other in the "proximal zone of development." (dons, 2008, p 87) through the work on their own websites the students have been challenged to reflect upon the opportunities this type of technology has in relation to the learning of pupils in primary and lower secondary school. this is what one of the students said during an interview: it’s important to be able to design websites so that i’m able to help my pupils make their own websites where they can put their own work and reflect on it, just like i have done on my website. this enables the pupil to place himor herself in a better light, and, for example, allows recreational activities to liven up the schoolwork (dons, 2008. p 88) through their reflections the students show insight into much of what characterizes the technological day-to-day life of pupils outside school. they also think of the educational challenges these experiences bring. in the words of one of the students in an interview: ... the pupils are happy to work with a computer, but they are not quite able to use the computer in their learning activities. it’s difficult for them to find good sites for their subject on the internet, and they are not good at formulating what they actually find. therefore the teacher's selection of what they should learn and source materials are at least as important as before, but it’s really a major challenge to guide pupils in a field they believe they master ... the teacher needs to know about computers ... know what the pupils are talking about ... including what goes on outside school ... must know about computer games and be able to assess what might be suitable in school. (dons, 2008, p 89) the way our informants have presented themselves through personal publication shows that they have what we might call media literacy, i.e. they appear with clear work identities and demonstrate exuberant use of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 2 – 2008 11 multimodality and hyperstructure. there is much to suggest that they have conquered a new stage for academic self-presentation, a stage also used to reflect upon the digital day-to-day life of pupils in primary and lower secondary school. conclusion in this article i have drawn attention to the fact that there is a need for institutional learning in the digital day-to-day experiences of children and young people. using examples from primary and lower secondary school i have shown how school has changed its assignment culture, and graphic interfaces may promote learning through re-contextualizing the digital day-today experiences children and young people have. these experiences are highly characterized by media convergence and multimodality. i have also shown how collective and process activities such as writing logs, writing together, discussions and web chatting can help pupils learn. moreover, i have argued that the technological experiences from outside school that children and young people have should be placed in a techno-cultural education perspective (løvlie, 2003), and that this concerns active participation in the media culture children are immersed in. using a techno-cultural education perspective i have pointed out the importance of challenging student teachers to participate professionally in digitalized public spaces. based on goffman's (1959) construct of self-presentation and rasmussen's (2003) description of personal publication on the web as a new type of resource for presentation and impression management, i have attempted to show how student teachers present themselves in a digital public space. i have also pointed out that through publication on the web student teachers are both in dialogue with and a counterpart of presentation forms that characterize popular culture. the students thus participate in some of the same arenas as pupils in primary and lower secondary school and they use their own experiences as the point of departure for reflection upon the technological day-to-day culture of their pupils. presenting oneself front stage demands comprehensive work backstage. because the web is an asynchronous medium there is more time for backstage preparation. it is, however, vital to facilitate such activities which should also include experience exchange and knowledge sharing. based on the ability of computers to present multimodal texts (kress, 2003), i have also shown how student teachers' digital competence is connected to awareness of the use of multimodal texts in their own academic presentations on the web and in reflections connected to the learning of pupils in primary and lower secondary school. i have also drawn attention to the fact that digital competence as a meta perspective on technology and learning is closely connected to having control of the interfaces used for presentations. it also appears that the experiences made by student teachers when it comes to personal publication generate reflections relating to technology and learning for pupils in primary and lower secondary school. when working on the encounter with digitally native pupils and students it is important to use solutions based on personal publication because the basis for this is the personal activities of those who learn as producers of content and knowledge, which is a requirement for all learning. references beck, u (1992). risk society. towards a new modernity. london: sage buckingham, d (2003). media education. literacy, learning and contemporary culture. cambridge: polity press. buckingham, d. 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(2006). “they game (culture) studies now?” in gamers and culture, vol 1 nr 1 januar 2006, sage publications. sørensen, b. h. (2001). multimediadidaktikk og læring – børn og unges multimedieproduksjon. copenhagen: gads forlag thagaard, t. (1998). systematikk og innlevelse, en innføring i kvalitativ metode. bergen: fagbokforlaget tapscott, d. (1998). growing up digital. the rise of the net generation. new york et al.: mcgraw-hill. tyner, k. (1998). literacy in a digital world. teaching and learning in the age of information. mahwah, n.j.: lawrence erlbaum, inc. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society. the development of a higher psychological process. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. wertsch, j. v. (1991). voices of the mind: a sociocultural approach to mediated action. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. østerud, s.; schwebs, t.; nielsen, l.m.; sandvik, m. (2006). elogg – et læringsmiljø for sammensatte tekst. digital kompetanse, vol. 1, no. 3: 214-226. oslo. universitetsforlaget. 1 rambøl management: evaluation of ict efforts in teacher education. final report june 2004. 2 pluto (programme for teacher-education technology and restructuring) – the ministry of education and research's cutting edge drive to innovatively restructure teacher education 2000-2004, led by itu (the national competence network for it in education). 3 on 15 november 2007 vidar hepsø, chief researcher and project manager at statoilhydro's r&d unit, presented his paper "power to the edge. empowerment in the kristin asset." to employees at sør-trøndelag university college. here he suggested that young engineers are better equipped to deal with integrated operations due to their digital recreational experiences. such duties are based on interaction and common understanding between different actors. if such operations are to function, common perceptions of the goals and the conditions are required as well as a high level of available information in the form of real-time data. integrated operations also require trust, regardless geographical proximity, which appeared more natural to the younger engineers. 4 the learning networks project is part of "program for digital kompetanse 20042008" (programme for digital competence 2004-2008) and aims to increase learning dividends through the use of ict. in sør-trøndelag county the project is led by carl f. dons and svein-otto skjærvold, sør-trøndelag university college, department for teacher and interpreter education. see: http://lulne.hist.no/ 5 interview at hommelvik lower secondary school, 15 february 2007. all transcriptions from interviews are originally in the local dialect. 6 see footnote 5 7 see footnote 5 8 a blog is a frequently updated website consisting of short items arranged chronologically. they are open for comments and often have pointers to other websites. 9 a wiki is a web-based collection of texts produced by several authors, as, for example, the internet encyclopaedia wikipedia. 10 the project "fleksibel ikt støtta praksis" (flexible ict-supported practice) (dons & skjærvold, 2004; 2005) aimed to study how to exploit ict as a catalyst for learning processes that placed the reflections of students on their practice in focus. the project comprised students admitted to the study at hist "allmennlærerutdanning med vekt på realfag" (general teacher training with emphasis on natural science), autumn 2003. 11 mv forum and it's learning. digitally competent schools: teacher expectations when introducing digital competence in finnish basic education ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. digitally competent schools: teacher expectations when introducing digital competence in finnish basic education linda mannila department of media / school of arts, design and architechture aalto university, espoo, finland linda.mannila@aalto.fi abstract the increased exposure to technology raises a need for understanding how the digital world works, just as we learn about the physical world. as a result, countries all over the world are renewing their school curricula in order to include digital competence, computer science or other similar content. in this paper, we provide insight into what teachers see as crucial aspects when implementing a new curricula introducing digital competence as a transversal element. we have analysed 86 finnish teachers’ descriptions of digitally competent schools and digitally competent personnel, in order to identify a list of prerequisites that can be helpful to school leaders who are to drive the change at their local schools. keywords: digital competence, basic education, teacher expectations, schools as learning organisations, curriculum changes introduction the increased exposure to technology raises a need for understanding how the digital world works, just as we learn about the physical world. consequently, during recent years, we have witnessed an active discussion surrounding the role of programming and computer science (cs) for everyone (e.g. informatics europe and acm europe, 2015). as a result, an increasing number of countries have introduced or are in the process of introducing cs or elements thereof in their school curriculum. for instance in europe, the majority of countries (17 out of 21) taking part in a survey conducted by the european schoolnet in 2015 reported doing so (balanskat & engelhardt, 2015). the way in which this is accomplished varies. some countries focus on k-12 as a whole, whereas others primarily address either k-9 or grades 10-12. some countries have introduced cs as a subject of its own, such as the introduction of the subject computing in england (english department for education, 2013) while others have decided to integrate cs content with other subjects, by for instance making programming an interdisciplinary element throughout the curriculum. the latter is the case, for instance, in finland (opetushallitus, 2014) and sweden (skolverket, 2017). while some countries have a clear focus on programming or cs, finland and sweden introduce the term digital competence. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 202 in this paper, we provide insight into what prerequisites and needs teachers experience when implementing a new curricula introducing digital competence as a transversal element. we start with a brief presentation of the theoretical foundation for our study: schools as learning organisations (oecd, 2016) and the tpack framework (mishra & koehler, 2006). next, we discuss digital competence in the finnish curriculum and relate the term and the content areas to both cs and the general digital competence framework digcomp presented by the european commission (ferrari, 2013). after describing the study and its methodology, we present the results, which are then discussed in light of our theoretical framework. we end the paper with some recommendations. theoretical framework curricula changes and rapid technological progress affect schools and faculty in several ways. we frame our study of teachers’ view of a digitally competent school around two aspects in particular: implementing change in schools and teachers’ knowledge. schools as learning organisations the rapid pace of change in our society means new challenges for educational institutions, and thereby teachers, who are to prepare children and youth for an uncertain future (oecd, 2016). as a consequence researchers, educators and policy makers argue that schools should be reconceptualised as “learning organisations” (coppieters, 2005; fauske & raybould, 2005; oecd, 2016; stoll & kools, 2017). in the words of senge (1990) a learning organisation is “continually expanding its capacity to create its future”. coppieters (2005) argues that schools need to be seen as complex dynamic systems, which change constantly and move between stable and more chaotic situations. such a system and its evolution cannot be predicted, but viewing a school as a learning organisation makes it easier to cope with change. there are several lists characterising a learning organisation. one of these is the one presented by the oecd (2016) suggesting that such a school  develops and shares a vision centred on the learning of all students,  creates and supports continuous professional learning for all staff,  promotes team learning and collaboration among all staff,  establishes a culture of inquiry, innovation and exploration,  embeds systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning,  learns with and from the external environment and larger learning system, and  models and grows learning leadership. another concept, closely related to the notion of schools as learning organisations, is professional learning communities (thompson, gregg & niska, 2004). the aim of such communities is to develop a collaborative work culture among teachers. vescio et al (2008) discuss the model presented by newmann et al (1996) suggesting five essential criteria of a professional learning community:  having shared values and norms,  having a clear and consistent focus on student learning,  engaging in a reflective dialogue leading to continuous discussions among teachers on “curriculum, instruction and students development” (p. 182),  making teaching public, and  focusing on collaboration. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 203 the essence of these criteria shares many similarities with the oecd list above. in their review of research on the impact of this type of learning communities, vescio et al (2008) found that they have a positive impact on both teaching practices and student achievement. another review, conducted by stoll and kools (2017), indicated that there seems to be general agreement that seeing schools as learning organisations is necessary in order to deal with the current pace of development. stoll and kools also found that schools as learning organisations are closely connected to the external environment, use inquiry, problem solving and experimentation as change drivers, and emphasise individual, team and organisational learning. finally, stoll and kools’ review revealed that faculty’s beliefs, values and norms and the strategies and structures available for supporting this kind of learning are key in order for the school to function as a learning organisation. tpack shulman (1987) introduced the concept of pedagogical content knowledge (pck), as a means of conceptualising what knowledge is involved in good teaching. as information technology (it) became an increasingly integral part of teachers’ everyday practice, mishra and koehler (2006) built on shulman’s idea and introduced tpack (technological, pedagogical and content knowledge) as a corresponding framework for conceptualising the types of knowledge involved in successful teaching with technology. where pck integrates pedagogical and domain knowledge into an understanding for ways of teaching a given topic, tpack adds technological knowledge to the mix as a crucial component for integrating technology in teaching practices (voogt & mckenney, 2017). the framework hence acknowledges that in order to use technology efficiently in the classroom, a blend of knowledge is needed. depending on how these types of knowledge are combined, seven types of knowledge can be derived, as illustrated in figure 1. figure 1: the tpack framework researchers (e.g., harris and hofer, 2011; jimoviannis, 2010) have argued for the need to relate tpack to different subjects and domains. in their systematic literature review of tpack, voogt et al (2013), however, found that hardly any seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 204 of the 55 journal articles reviewed studied tpack from a domain specific perspective. they also found that tpack is closely related to teachers’ beliefs about pedagogy and technology. in a more recent review, willermark (2018) found that the tpack framework is utilized in a variety of ways in order to identify teachers’ knowledge. she also noted that there is a need for a clearer and joint operationalization of tpack. history of technology in finnish basic education the role of cs and it in the finnish national curriculum has varied over the years, placing focus on different areas, ranging from using technology as a tool to learning how the computer works and how to use it to create programs. cs, or what was then called automated data processing (adp), was mentioned in the national curriculum for upper secondary school (grades 10-12) for the first time already in 1972 (kavander & salakoski, 2004). it was, however, not until computers became a more common part of ordinary people’s lives in the 1980s that an active discussion on the need for teaching everyone about technology was initiated (toivonen & jarnila, 1981). in basic education (grades 1-9, starting at age 7) cs – or computer technology, “tietotekniikka” – was introduced as an elective subject in grades 8-9 in the curriculum from 1985. this meant that all municipalities had to offer the subject, although students did not have to select it as part of their studies. the curriculum specified four courses in this elective subject: basics of computer technology, computer applications, computer creativity (music and graphics) and programming (koppa, 2010). in the 1990s, cs lost its status as a subject of its own, as the curriculum from 1994 specified that computers and it should be integrated in the teaching of other subjects. this led to a larger focus on using computers and applications as tools, rather than understanding the technology, its benefits and challenges. schools still had the right to organise elective courses in cs, and they were given free hands to decide on the content themselves. this led to the course offerings at schools throughout the country varying to a high extent – some schools did not arrange any course in cs at all, while others offered they students specialised cs courses (koppa, 2010). in december 2014, a new national curriculum for comprehensive education (grades 1-9) was accepted after a two year long process, now again including a larger emphasis on cs and aspects of understanding technology in addition to merely using it. this is accomplished through the introduction of digital competence (opetushallitus, 2014). time wise, the development of the new policy documents, coincided with the global discussion on the need for cs at schools among parents, industries and society as a whole. the new curricula came into force in schools throughout the country starting in august 2016. we will return to the new curriculum below. digital competence the finnish curriculum introduces the concept digital competence, which is one of many terms used in the debate on how to integrate cs in basic education. in a review of digital competence in educational settings, pettersson (2017) found that digital competence should not be viewed in isolation, but instead be ”regarded as an organizational task, influenced and driven by several contextual factors embedded within and across a wider school organization” (p. 1). digital competence is also used in a more general discussion on skills and attitudes needed for everyone living in our current and future society. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 205 in 2013, the european union published the first framework named digcomp (ferrari, 2013), presenting the skills needed for all citizens to thrive in an increasingly digitalized society. the second version of this framework was presented in 2016 (riinakari et al, 2016), covering five main competence areas including all in all 21 specific competences (figure 2): figure 2: the eu digital competence framework (digcomp) in 2017, the framework was once again updated, this time to also include eight proficiency levels for each of the 21 competences, as well as examples of use of these competences in learning and employment (carretero et al., 2017). the competence level ranges from foundation to highly specialised, where the lowest levels involve basic knowledge and skills, which might involve guidance from others, and the highest levels involve being able to work independently, guide others and propose new solutions and alternative models within the given area. all in all, this framework provides a structure allowing individuals to understand what it means to be digitally competent and how to assess and develop the competences involved. the framework has been used for assessment and development purposes, for instance, in an effort to create a selfefficacy tool for teachers (nordén, mannila & pears, 2017) and libraries (andersdotter et al, 2017). educators do not only need these competencies at a personal level, but also for guiding the next generation in becoming digitally competent. it is hence crucial, that they are “equipped with the digital competence all citizens need to be able to actively participate in a digital society” (redecker & punie, 2017, p.15). in addition, teachers need educator-specific digital competences in order to use technology in their teaching. these competences are captured in another framework published by the european commission, digcompedu, which specifies the digital competence needed for educators. the proposal is framed around six areas focusing on different aspects of an educator’s activities (p. 16):  professional engagement: using digital technology for communication, collaboration and professional development.  digital resources: sourcing, creating and sharing digital resources.  teaching and learning: managing and orchestrating the use of digital technologies in teaching and learning.  assessment: using digital technologies and strategies to enhance assessment.  empowering learners: using digital technologies to enhance inclusion, personalisation and learners’ active engagement. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 206  facilitating learners’ digital competence: enabling learners to creatively and responsibly use digital technologies for information, communication, content creation, wellbeing and problem solving. finally, the eu commission (kampylis et al, 2015) has also published a framework describing digitally competent organizations, digcomporg, focusing on seven main themes: 1) leadership and governance practices, 2) teaching and learning practices, 3) professional development, 4) assessment practices, 5) content and curricula, 6) collaboration and networking, and 7) infrastructure. this is closely related to the concept of digitally competent schools, as used here and previously mentioned in the literature by for instance ottestad (2010). curriculum changes in finland in this section, we discuss the introduction of digital competence in the finnish curriculum (grades 1-9). in addition, we address teacher training and the need for professional development. digital competence and the finnish curriculum the finnish new curriculum includes many new aspects. one of the largest changes is the introduction of the so-called transversal competence as a trait throughout all age levels and subjects (opetushallitus, 2014). this competence is seen as a collection of seven competence areas, which all include knowledge and skills, values, attitudes and ambition: 1) thinking and learning to learn, 2) cultural competence, interaction and expression, 3) caring for oneself and everyday life skills, 4) multi-literacy, 5) digital competence, 6) workplace skills and entrepreneurship and 7) participation, influence and building a sustainable future. these competence areas are closely related to frameworks such as the key competences for life-long learning presented by the european union1 and the 21st century skills, presented by, for instance p212. each of the competence areas is described both in the general part of the curriculum as well as separately for each subject and grade level. when reviewing the seven competence areas in the finnish curriculum, most of the competences presented in the eu digcomp framework are covered – not only in the specific fifth area (digital competence), but throughout all seven areas. for instance, areas 1-4 and 6-7 include the following:  thinking and learning to learn: collaboration, finding information, problem solving  cultural competence, interaction and expression: communication  caring for oneself and everyday life skills: safety, responsible use of technology, ethical questions  multi-literacy: collecting, combining, editing, producing and evaluating information, critical thinking  workplace skills and entrepreneurship: work life changes due to technology and globalisation  participation, influence and building a sustainable future: societal engagement, collaboration, impact of media, environmental issues the fifth area “digital competence”, naturally, covers most aspects. in the general part, the curriculum specifies that students should develop their digital competence in the following four main areas (opetushallitus, 2014, p. 23, freely translated from finnish): they seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 207  learn to understand central concepts and principles for how digital tools are used and how they work. they are given the opportunity to develop their digital competence in practice while creating their own artifacts.  are guided in using digital tools in a responsible, ergonomic and safe manner.  learn to use digital tools for looking up information as well as in exploratory and creative work.  get experience and training in using digital tools for communicating and building networks. in addition, students “get familiar with how to apply and use different digital tools for various purposes and see their significance in everyday life, in communication between people and as a means to influence. […] students learn to evaluate the impact of it from a sustainability perspective and to become responsible consumers. students experience international communication using technology and become aware of the importance, opportunities and risks involved in a global world” (opetushallitus, 2014, p. 23, freely translated from finnish). one part of digital competence has received particular attention in the debate, both at national and international level, namely programming. in finland, programming is explicitly mentioned in two subjects: mathematics (grades 1-9) and crafts (grades 3-9). in mathematics, focus is on learning to use programming to solve problems and implement ideas. in crafts, programming is used together with technology such as robots, micro controllers and other components to add a new dimension to the types of artefacts that can be created. this is well in line with the ideas of the maker culture. in addition, programming can be included in all other subjects as part of the cross-curricular digital competence. it is, however, important to note that digital competence is much more than programming alone. teacher training and professional development curricula revisions naturally raise a need for teacher training efforts. when adding a completely new area, such as digital competence, the need is quite large. while most teachers are used to using technology to some extent, most of them lack previous background in programming, algorithms and data as well as questions related to privacy, ethics and safety arising from the increased digitalization. the introduction of digital competence in the curriculum hence calls for large training efforts in order for all teachers to have the skills and confidence needed to teach the new content (thompson et al, 2013). in england, the new subject computing was introduced in 2014 (english department for education, 2013), and despite large companies supporting the change, for instance by offering training and community efforts, over half of the teachers (60%) still felt that they were not ready to teach the new curriculum in fall 2014 (yougov, 2015). after teaching the new curriculum, teachers reported on five most common challenges: their own subject knowledge, students’ lack of understanding the new content, technical problems, meeting different ability levels, and students willingness/ability to solve problems (sentance & csizmadia, 2017). most finnish schools are publicly funded, and the teacher profession is regulated having the required qualifications defined by law (ministry of education and culture, 2016). to become a teacher in finland a master’s degree is needed, and teacher training programmes are offered by universities throughout the country. the ministry of education and culture finances professional development for in-service teachers through the finnish national agency for education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 208 (opetushallitus in finnish), as municipalities and organisations can apply for funding for arranging courses, workshops and other training initiatives both face-to-face and online. in addition, the finnish government has initiated the “new comprehensive education” programme (http://minedu.fi/en/newcomprehensive-education), focusing on new pedagogy, learning environments and digital learning. as part of this program each finnish school (grades 1-9) will get a tutor teacher to embrace new pedagogical approaches and promote digitalisation in teaching. if again reviewing digital competence from the digcomp perspective, some competence areas have received more attention in the professional development context than others. in recent years, there has been a clear focus on programming, digital creation and pedagogical use of digital tools. in the same way as programming has been the focus in the general school debate, it has also been subject to a quite active training scene. apart from government funded courses and support, other actors, such as the it industry, have also taken a role in providing teachers training in programming. study and methodology the purpose of this study was to bring light on teachers’ views on the prerequisites for implementing the curriculum changes. the research question is hence the following: rq: what prerequisites and needs do teachers in grades 1-9 consider important when introducing digital competence as a transversal trait in the curriculum? in order to address this question we have collected data during a professional development effort in 2016/2017. we have organised state funded professional development for swedish speaking teachers in finland in digital competence starting in 2013. some of the initiatives have been face-to-face, while others have taken place online. some have been half-day introductory workshops, while others have lasted several days. for this study, we have analysed data collected during an online course focusing on digital competence and programming. the course did not require any previous experience of the topics at hand. the data origin from a course assignment, which dealt with the notion of a digitally competent school and digitally competent personnel. teachers were asked to describe how they perceived these concepts using their own words. all data were collected online using an open survey tool during two instances of the online course (spring 2016: 59 participants and spring 2017: 27 participants). all in all, the data reported below are based on responses from 86 teachers, totalling 172 responses (two assignments per teacher). the analysis was done according to the principles of content analysis (cohen et al, 2007). the basic idea of content analysis is to take textual material and analyse, reduce and summarise it according to predefined or emergent themes. we analysed teachers’ responses to the two assignments one-by-one with the research question in mind, extracting all topics found together with excerpts that exemplified the topic. the topics and excerpts were collected into a spreadsheet. when all 172 responses had been analysed, we reviewed the spreadsheet and combined topics into larger themes. this phase resulted in 11 themes, which are presented below. each theme is exemplified by excerpts from teachers’ responses, freely translated from swedish. http://minedu.fi/en/new-comprehensive-education http://minedu.fi/en/new-comprehensive-education seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 209 results the content analysis of teachers’ views of a digitally competent school revealed seven themes. first, a digitally competent school has sufficient resources. some of the resources are related to technology (equipment and technical support), whereas others are related to teachers’ possibilities to learn and develop their digital competence (time and professional development). the school invests in the digital equipment needed. that there are enough computers, tablets… and that the network and other equipment work. easy and quick technical support when problems arise. time for planning and professional development. while buying technology and bringing it into the classroom is rather easy (provided that the economy allows for such purchases), it is not as straightforward to find good ways of using it. in order for a school to be digitally competent, the respondents hence noted that digital tools and new content need to be integrated in the school’s activities. technology is a natural part of teaching and is used for pedagogical purposes, not just for the sake of using it. digital competence is part of all activities at school. the use of digital tools should be seen as self-evident, both by students, teachers, headmasters and parents. as digital competence was added to the finnish curriculum as a cross curricular theme, it cannot be seen as the duty of only a selected few. the respondents noted that digital competence is everybody’s responsibility. for the school to be digitally competent, everyone needs to be involved, not only a couple of enthusiasts who are responsible for developing the competence level. teachers also noted that the school of today needs ways, processes and structures to keep up with the societal change. hence, in a fast changing world, a digitally competent school should be engaged in continuous development. the school’s aim is to constantly develop and take in new ideas, keep up-to-date and follow-up. there needs to be a mechanism for retaining what has been done before and ensuring that everything is compatible with the following step, so that nothing is lost. faculty naturally plays a crucial role in implementing the curriculum in practice, as they are the ones to meet the students in their classrooms. the respondents emphasised the importance of the school’s organisation serving as an enabler in this context, facilitating and supporting teachers’ work. the school structure, organisation and culture facilitate optimal usage of digital tools. flexibility, which allows for innovative and collaborative cross curricular work with different approaches and methods (both analogue and digital) across age levels. in order for the organisation to be able so serve as such an enabler, the respondents acknowledged the need for a strategy and plan. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 210 a clear strategy for the entire school, which is annually updated. this also includes a strategy for professional development. the school has a clear vision, a concrete action plan and priorities in the budget. the school needs to be aware that a strategy needs to be updatable and changeable if it turns out to not be optimal. there is a plan for when and how the students are supported in developing their digital competence. it is important that this is planned so that students are equally digitally competent. while the view of what the digitalisation means in educational contexts has varied over the years, the current definition of digital competence in the finnish curriculum is quite broad. consequently some teachers reacted on the current focus on programming in the general debate and emphasised the need for a digitally competent school to view digital competence as a versatile area. all focus should not be put on programming, but it is at least as important to use and understand digital tools, discuss social media and programs that students can benefit from in their working life. the school teaches social digital competence, for instance, being critical, reflecting on one’s behaviour and how we meet each other online, the meaning of publishing information and photos online, etc. when analysing teachers’ views on what they see as digitally competent personnel, we found three main themes. some respondents noted that a digitally competent personnel is the foundation for a digitally competent school: “how can a school be digitally competent, if the teachers are not?” hence, teacher knowledge and attitudes was one of the other main themes. teachers need basic knowledge in programming in order to teach it. the personnel, i.e. teachers, needs to know how to use computers, apps and programs. in addition, the personnel needs to be motivated to learn mode in this field and also be given the opportunity and resource s need for doing so. teachers feel secure in their role as a teacher with basic knowledge in the digital. teachers have an open mind to try new opportunities from the digital world in their teaching. teachers need to dare to try and make mistakes, as well as be open to what students’ already know. teachers are role model for students and show them how to use digital tools in a natural way. the respondents also discussed the need for teachers to know how to use computers, tools and applications. here pedagogical use and value were seen as crucial aspects. teachers can decide when to use different tools and what value they bring. teachers do not differentiate between analogue and digital but choose and suggest methods based on optimal teaching. finally, the respondents emphasised the need for teachers to work together and learn from each other. collaboration was thus mentioned by most teachers in one way or another. regular pedagogical discussions on why and how different methods can be used for optimally supporting students’ learning. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 211 teachers inspire each other and share tips and knowledge. continuous professional development together. collegial learning. teachers network and join facebook groups on the subject. teacher work interdisciplinary and use the broad experience of the collegium. the role of good digital leadership was a recurring theme mentioned by almost all teachers. this was said to be of crucial importance in the development of both a digitally competent school and digitally competent personnel. in the participants’ own words good digital leadership is characterized by a leader who …motivates the teachers to use it. …shows the way. has a positive attitude, shows interest and tries new tools and is a good role model. …has a vision, direction and priorities. …makes sure the resources needed are available, both softand hardware as well as knowledge in the form of professional development. …is an active leader who encourages teachers to take time to increase their knowledge in programming. …needs to encourage all colleagues, regardless of what they teach, to create a positive attitude towards programming at school. …trusts the teachers, gives support and prioritises the development of digital competence at the school. …involves the teachers and lets them participate in the digital development. …listens, supports, inspires and encourages, lets teachers and students experiment. …makes sure the digital curriculum is followed based on goals, equipment and implementation. discussion to summarize, the following eleven themes emerged during the analysis of teachers’ views of a digitally competent school and a digitally competent personnel. below, we have structured them based on our theoretical point of view, that is, seen through the lens of schools as learning organisations and teachers’ knowledge according to the tpack framework: schools as learning organisations  integrated digital competence  digital competence as everybody’s responsibility  continuous development  enabling organisation  strategy and plan  collaboration  supportive leadership teachers’ knowledge  teacher knowledge and attitudes  pedagogical use of digital tools  digital competence as a versatile area seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 212 other  sufficient resources (technology, time, support) all themes but one could be mapped to either theoretical framework. this theme, the need for sufficient equipment and technological support was, nevertheless an expected finding. although many areas of digital competence can be covered through unplugged activities (see e.g. computer science unplugged3), computing devices are seen as a natural requirement that has to be fulfilled in order to engage in a discussion on digital competence or digitally competent schools. the lack of computing devices can hence be seen as a problematic threshold when implementing the new curriculum. in addition, where there is sufficient equipment, teachers need to be able to get almost instantaneous support when faced with, for instance, crashing computers, lagging networks or cumbersome software interfaces. teachers clearly see a digitally competent school as a learning organisation: an organisation that makes change possible (enabling organisation), is constantly looking for ways to improve (continuous development), has a sense of direction (strategy and plan), supports team learning (collaboration) and grows a learning leadership (supportive leadership). it also supports all staff (everybody’s responsibility) and has a shared vision for what digital competence entails in general (integrated digital competence). when it comes to teachers’ knowledge, the respondents mentioned both factual knowledge and attitudes. they also emphasised the need for pedagogical use of digital tools, that is, technological and pedagogical content knowledge (tpack). in addition, the respondents discussed digital competence as a versatile area. as noted above, digital competence was not introduced as its own subject area in the finnish curriculum, but rather as a transversal trait. since the traditional way of thinking of digitalisation in a classroom setting has been from an it perspective (computers, applications, networks), it is quite natural to first and foremost think of digital competence as being part of technological (tk) or technological pedagogical (tpk) knowledge. while digital competence, as written in the finnish curriculum and as proposed in eu’s digcomp framework, also introduces new content to be learned, only focusing on digital competence from a technological point of view is no longer enough. digital competence should hence now also be considered part of content knowledge (ck). the results presented in this article point out the need for time, resources, training and support when implementing the curriculum in finnish schools. as the situation is the same in many other countries, which are going through similar processes of change, these results most likely also apply to those countries as well. for instance, the need for collaboration and team learning has been reported in england as well, where teachers reported that colleagues were the main source for support and guidance (yougov, 2015). the professional development courses discussed in this article were organised a couple of months before or after the new curriculum came into force in finland. the participants were self-selecting and most of the teachers participating reported being interested in digital competence. hence it seems reasonable to assume that we mainly reached teachers with a positive attitude towards digital competence as part of the curriculum, i.e. the early adopters or early majority. the bigger challenge is how to reach the teachers who for some reason still have not taken any step towards preparing for the new curriculum. based on the eleven themes that emerged from our study, we suggest the following checklist for school leaders who are in the process of integrating digital competence in their schools and practices.  make sure all faculty and learners have sufficient technological resources. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 213  provide all faculty with time, resources and professional development in order to develop their technical, pedagogical and content knowledge (as well as the combination of these).  support the integration of digital competence throughout the curriculum.  make sure all faculty is involved in teaching digital competence.  support team-learning, collaboration and the sharing of ideas.  avoid the temptation of seeing the introduction of digital competence as a one-shot activity, but rather as a continuous process.  make sure the organisation is flexible enough to facilitate change and crosscurricular work.  create a shared vision/strategy, which is aligned with an explicit plan for how to work towards that vision.  be a good role model. many questions related to teacher preparation and the integration of digital competence as a cross-curricular trait still remain open. as many countries are going through similar change, we believe that schools as learning organisations, or in this context, digitally competent schools, have much to learn from other schools, 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(2008). a review of research on the impact of professional learning communities on teaching practice and student learning. teaching and teacher education, 24(1), 80-91. voogt, j., fisser, p., pareja roblin, n., tondeur, j., & van braak, j. (2013). technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) – a review of the literature. journal of computer assisted learning, 29(2), 109–121. voogt, j. & mckenney, s. (2017). tpack in teacher education: are we preparing teachers to use technology for early literacy. technology, pedagogy and education, 26(1), 69-83. vuorikari, r., punie, y., carretero gomez, s. & van den brande, g. (2016). digcomp 2.0: the digital competence framework for citizens. european union. willermark, s. (2018). technological pedagogical and content knowledge: a review of empirical studies published from 2011 to 2016. journal of educational computing research, 56(3), 315-343 yougov (2015). yougov / tes & nesta computing curriculum. fieldwork 06/05/2014 – 16/05/2014. 1 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=legissum:c11090 2 http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework 3 http://csunplugged.org http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=legissum:c11090 http://www.p21.org/our-work/p21-framework http://csunplugged.org/ digitally competent schools: teacher expectations when introducing digital competence in finnish basic education linda mannila abstract introduction theoretical framework schools as learning organisations tpack history of technology in finnish basic education digital competence curriculum changes in finland digital competence and the finnish curriculum teacher training and professional development study and methodology results discussion references microsoft word habib and johannesen shaping or shaking.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 shaping or shaking the learning network? insights into teaching practices using virtual learning environments laurence habib centre for educational research and development oslo university college email: laurence.habib@hio.no monica johannesen faculty of education oslo university college email: monica.johannesen@lu.hio.no abstract this article carries out an analysis of a virtual learning environment (vle) in an institution of higher education using actor network theory (ant). the ant perspective is used to help explore the complex processes that come into play when a vle is introduced in an organisation, especially as pedagogical goals, administrative procedures and technological artefacts are interwoven in a heterogeneous web or “network”. the article identifies new actors that emerge in the traditional teacher-student, teacher-teacher and studentstudent relationships as a result of the presence and active usage of the vle. it also describes how already existing actors may change roles or status in connection with vle use. keywords: actor-network theory, virtual learning environments, teaching practice. introduction the main purpose of the study described in this paper is to shed light onto the complex issue of vle use and appropriation in an organisation of higher education, with a particular focus on the teachers’ perceptions of how such systems may have affected their teaching practice. oslo university college (ouc) implemented its first vle in 1999. however, this first system was used only sporadically throughout the institution. a shift to a new system, classfronter, later renamed fronter, together with a commitment from the top management at the college led to a much more widespread organisational use1. our study sets out to investigate how the implementation of the vle may have contributed to the shaping or reshaping of teaching practice. it also examines whether there may be grounds to claim that the introduction of the vle has “shaken” well-established didactical practices. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 2 throughout their practice as lecturers, the authors of this paper had noticed that the college management, when implementing a vle across the organisation, mostly relied on an assumption that such systems were indubitably advantageous both for the administrative and for the pedagogical parts of the educational work. another, apparently more moderate claim that such systems are merely “skeletons that can be filled in with whatever information is needed” was also a widespread argument throughout the implementation process. however, we could observe a significant gap between the management’s expectations and the actual patterns of use of such systems throughout the college. while many managers trusted that the chosen vle would be embraced wholeheartedly by lecturers and administrators alike, user data showed that many lecturers avoided some of the functions available in the vle, while others chose not to use the system at all. a lot of research involving vles focuses on issues such as speed of course delivery (goldberg & mckhann, 2000; langley, marriott, belcher, wilson, & lewis, 2004), learning efficiency (bird, 2001; broad, matthews, & mcdonald, 2004; piccoli, ahmad, & ives, 2001), or the perceived effectiveness of the technology (lee, hong, & ling, 2001). however, our research takes a slightly different perspective. it is part of a national project aiming at understanding how users relate to vles before, during and after their implementation. within this broad perspective, we chose to focus more particularly on questions related to the role played by vle in the teaching practice of academic staff at the college. more specifically, it aims to address questions about how vles become integrated within a particular teaching and learning context, which vle functions are more easily adopted and why and how vle technology enables or constrains the work of lecturers and student activity.2 theoretical background and research approach the focus of the research is on the teaching practice of lecturers at ouc. among the theoretical models available in the literature, that of løvlie (1974) provides a simple yet relatively comprehensive framework for understanding teaching practice, and this framework appears useful for the purpose of structuring data collection. however, the very complexity of the data collected via interviews and journals called for another methodological tool for analysis. considering that our research was centred on the use of a particular technology (vles) in a particular social context (higher education), we set out to try using actor network theory, which is a widely established theoretical and methodological approach within the fields of information systems and studies of technology in social settings. understanding teaching practice our study is concerned with what may happen to teaching practices in a changing technological environment. it aims to gather qualitative data both on the “operational”, day-to-day aspects of teaching practice and on what practitioners consider to be its underlying principles and raison d’être. the model presented by lauvås and handal (1983) on the basis of the work of løvlie (1974) portrays teaching practice as a triangle divided into three levels or zones: the “bottom” level (p1) refers to the concrete actions performed by practitioners within the realm of their professional activities. the “medium” level of the triangle (p2) consists of the reasons practitioners have to perform those particular actions. the “top” level (p3) encompasses the ethical and moral motives that inform the reasoning process that practitioners go through when planning, performing and evaluating their daily practice. we found the division into three levels of practice to be useful when designing our data collection process. in particular, our guideline for interviews featured seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 3 questions that addressed all three levels: 1) questions about what lecturers actually do within the realm of their teaching practice, 2) questions about why they carry out certain types of activities and not others (e.g., whether they are encouraged or pressured by students or colleagues, inspired to try out certain functions in the system, or hindered in performing a particular activity by the limitations of the system), and 3) questions about the respondents’ understanding of their own pedagogical approach. actor network theory as we aim to achieve an understanding of user perceptions, attitudes and routines, a number of research approaches are available. for the purpose of this study, we choose a broadly interpretative approach that is inspired from actor network theory (ant). ant is one of several schools of thought that aim to make sense of the role of technology in organisations and in society. this theory, or rather theoretical and methodological approach to research, was originally developed by bruno latour, madeleine akrich and michel callon for the purpose of studying the ways in which scientific practice, technology and society are interwoven and integrated (callon, 1986; latour, 1993). ant has been the basis of a number of studies of information systems (berg, 1999; brosveet, 2004; doolin & lowe, 2002; graham, 1998; hannemyr, 2003; hanseth & braa, 2001; wise, 1998) but, to our knowledge, has rarely been used to shed light on processes of vle use in organisations. one of the major originalities of ant is that it considers both humans and non-humans to be actors (or actants). actors bring in other actors as allies into an “actor network” and an analysis of those actors and of their interests can help understand how a “network of aligned interests” is initiated, developed, maintained, or sometimes dismantled. one of the key processes in ant is that of “enrolment” whereby an actor or set of actors goes through a process of negotiation with other actors, so as to translate their interests in such a way that they become “aligned” with those of the negotiating partners (akrich, 1992; latour, 1992). one of the main emphases in a study of actor networks is therefore to uncover in what ways the various components of a network interrelate, and in particular how they might influence or “mobilize” each other and how they negotiate with each other so as to create alliances. some actors become indispensable to the stability of the network, while others might become marginalised or even disappear completely from the network (callon, 1986; latour, 1987). one of the aims of this study is to identify the new actors that have appeared in connection with the introduction of a vle within the organisation, as well as recognize the changes that others actors may go through as a result of the vle implementation. this will also allow us to describe in more detail the actor networks that co-exist in the organisation, the elements that constitute them and the transformations they go through. this will in turn give us a richer understanding of the changes that teaching practice may undergo as a consequence of vle use. findings the findings reported here are drawn from a study involving ten members of staff from various departments at ouc. the empirical data is gathered primarily through in-depth interviews, diaries from teachers and evaluation reports from students. after each interview, every respondent was provided with a “daily log form” which they were asked to fill in during the working week seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 4 of their choice. additional data was obtained from reflection notes from students and from course evaluation reports. the interviews started as very open-ended conversations with the respondents. after having heard their own interpretations of the situation, we started to ask questions that would allow us to gather data related to the central notions in ant (actors, networks, enrolment, etc.). although the questions differed in formulation from one interview to another, they were broadly related to three main categories: what inspired the teachers to modify their practice, what hindered them in their practice, and what supported their existing practice. the respondents in this study cannot be considered representative of the college’s staff. first, not all the departments were represented in the study. second, and perhaps more importantly, many of the respondents had contacted us after having read a notice we had published on the school webpage requesting participants to interviews. it is reasonable to assume that those members of staff who volunteered to participate in the study did so because they considered that their experience with the vle could be of interest to researchers in the area of vle use. indeed, we did notice that all the respondents were active vle users and had an altogether positive impression of the vle. in order to counterbalance this possible bias, we will actively look for respondents among the “vle sceptics” during the next phase of the study. the analysis presented in this paper represents the first step in a complex process whereby we identify not only actors, but also the networks they create and are enrolled in. the focus here is on uncovering new actors that emerge when an organisation implements a vle and on depicting the changing nature of the already existing actors. information and communication as mentioned above, one of the most widespread understandings of why vles need to be used for communication between teaching staff and students is that they render communication more time effective and cost efficient. it seems, from the data we have gathered, that this belief is shared by at least some of the lecturers at ouc. our informants often describe the vle as an appropriate teaching tool because it reduces the amount of time used when communicating information to students. i think classfronter is very good when it comes to messages and news to the students. as for me, it’s about informing about the maintenance and what will happen with regards to machines and equipment, and general information. so i think it’s very practical in that sense. [interview with a lecturer, faculty for dental technician education] i need to write a collective e-mail to several people. i go into classfronter to send the mail from there because it is easy to access the e-mail addresses because of the “participant”-function. [diary entry from a lecturer, faculty for dental technician education] the vle has become an important actor in the actor network that encompasses the teaching staff, their colleagues, and the student body. in allowing information from one lecturer to reach all students and other lecturers simultaneously, a vle renders some teaching-related activities less cumbersome than they would have been with traditional teaching means. the vle is here used as a tool to achieve a particular pedagogical goal, i.e. to render the process of information sharing more effective. in this context, the term “information” here does not primarily encompass learning material upon seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 5 which students are to base their learning, but refers mostly to administrative information such as timetables, deadlines, room numbers, which supports the process of learning. the improved delivery of such practical information is meant to render the students’ quest for information less demanding and more easily structured. in analysing the situation from an ant perspective, we can suggest that the vle goes through a process of enrolment both from the teachers’ and from the students’ part. the teachers who experience the vle as an enabler to their teaching practice will enrol it as an ally in the network they establish with their students. in that sense, the vle will be inscribed with the teachers’ own interests. in addition, the vle appears to be a significant actor in the relationship between the students themselves. it is apparent from the data that students who make the effort to use the vle on a regular basis, for example to access course information, may put pressure on others to do the same. some are getting skilled at going into classfronter and if they have seen it [the material] they begin to mention it in class or in plenum: “yes, but it’s available online [on classfronter]”. that is to say, to those who are unhappy: “you could have know about it if only you had gone into [the system]” [interview with a lecturer, faculty of business, public administration and social work] it appears from the data collected that this type of “missionary work” by students is one of the main engines in the dissemination of vle usage in the organisation. by integrating the vle so tightly into their study routines, the students turn it into an “obligatory point of passage” for the gathering of necessary information for the course. they also start expecting all the teachers to put online the information that they feel they need. it is not always the case that all the teachers are equally good at putting the information out on the net. for example, sometimes the teachers have gone through an assignment that needs to be solved and those that do not have the opportunity to come to the lecture then don’t have access to this information except through their co-students. [excerpt from a course evaluation, faculty of education] this example illustrates how students use the vle as an ally in their quest towards a more flexible access to course information. in requesting that the teachers make all the information necessary for the course available online, they endow the vle with a new status as an indispensable element to the learning process and therefore an essential part of the teaching practice. the students, their study routines, and the vle can then be seen as constituting an actor network that also will work towards “converting” the teachers who are not yet using the vle. feedback to students’ written work vles can be seen as supportive of the social constructivist approach (bruner, 1986, 1990; vygotsky, 1962, 1978) that lies at the core of much of the values purported in many institutions of higher education. in particular, many pedagogical processes rely on response and feedback given to the students either by their formal mentor or by their co-students. from the interviews it is apparent that vle technology contributes to a more “effective” distribution of student production and feedback. thereby, the main focus throughout a course is no longer on delivering the final version of an assignment to the teacher, but rather on publishing drafts or unfinished versions of assignments for the purpose of getting feedback from both teachers and co-students. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 6 …assignments, that is to say the coursework they [the students] have in relation to the course, they put that out on classfronter. they [the students] give comments on classfronter both when they’re going to give feedback [to their co-students] and when they are getting feedback from the teacher, and then it lies open so everyone can see it. [interview with a lecturer, faculty of nursing] this “mass publishing” process may represent a new challenge for the lecturers, as they generally do not have the capacity to give feedback to all the students. one way of dealing with those increased expectations may be to relate only to a segment of the published material. for example, some lecturers have developed a strategy whereby they select a number of student assignment answers, provide written feedback to those answers and make this feedback available online to all the students. we don’t have the resources for them to get feedback and stuff right away. so then we took ten assignment answers from each of those [assignments]. so then we made use of the possibility we had to go in [the vle] and take out the document and read it, and give… and found some general features in those ten then, which we then gave… put out as a commentary. [interview with a lecturer, faculty of business, public administration and social work] availability of student answers online also seems to be a source of inspiration and insights for other students. the students can, by reading each other’s drafts, get new ideas about how to develop their own assignment, and also feel more secure about their own work when they see that other assignments have a similar structure or direction. by reading other students’ answers, i have got both ideas about how to make changes [to the paper] and a stronger belief that my own work was on the right track. [excerpt from a student reflection note] vles can also facilitate the procedure of re-using good answers from student assignments from one assignment to the next, or from one year to the next. this procedure can be an informal arrangement between students, but it can also be formalised and orchestrated by the lecturers themselves. when they [the students] have submitted their papers, i ask them [if it is all right that] the good answers get published. that i publish them in the [vle] room so that the others can see the good answers. [interview with a lecturer, faculty for dental technician education] in our observations of the new feedback processes enabled by the vle, we can identify at least two types of actors that gain momentum in the mentoring process. the first type of actor could be the draft answer that the students submit to the teachers and to their co-students ahead of the final delivery date. a second type of actor that seems to gain significance with the use of the vle is the feedback that students receive from both their teachers and their costudents. in many cases, publishing the feedback on the vle implies in practice that it will be available to others than the person it is originally intended for. this, in turn, gives a new “intentionality” to the feedback: not only is it meant to benefit the student who had composed the draft answer, but it is also expected to function as additional information for all the other students that have access to it on the vle. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 7 it can be noticed that neither the drafts nor the feedback are new actors in the process of mentoring. indeed, students have always had the opportunity to present their drafts to their lecturers and co-students, also before the introduction of the vle. however, the vle makes those drafts more readily available to a much wider audience. similarly, it was fully possible both for costudents and for lecturers to give feedback on drafts without using the vle. nevertheless, the increased accessibility of those drafts makes the process of providing feedback more straightforward for both co-students and teachers. in that sense, the changing nature of both drafts and feedback can turn them into “allies” in the new pedagogical processes embedded in the formalisation of formative assessment, as stipulated for example in the norwegian quality reform (kuf, 2001; nyborg, 2002). furthermore, writing feedback answers that are intelligible for others can be an opportunity for the students to reflect not only on the quality of the particular draft they give feedback on but also more generally on what is meant by quality. interpreting comments that have been provided on sample work can also contribute to developing the students’ conceptual understanding of the notion of quality. in particular, working with feedback may encourage students to reflect on what criteria should be used for assessment and how they relate to each other. this increased criteria awareness may also be a significant element in the process of acquisition of abstraction skills. other student activity in learning from our data, we observe that vles can be used as facilitators for new forms of student activity, in particular in relation to tests and examinations. for example, at the faculty of nursing, students are required to develop multiplechoice questions for each other on the basis of the curriculum in some subject areas. one of the most interesting aspects of this new activity is that, although the lecturers check that the tests developed by the students are actually used, they do not carry out any type of quality assessment of the questions or the answers. the lecturers are very much involved, however, in the development of criteria that are to be used by the students in their “test development” assignment. in that respect we can identify criteria as a significant actor in both the teacher-student relationship and the student-curriculum relationship. it is also interesting to note that one of the course teachers considered that such a process could only be carried out on the vle, because otherwise the students would not consider it “as much fun”. another new form of student activity that bears similarities to the above process has emerged in another part of the college, namely at the faculty of business, public administration and social work. for some of the courses, students are required to develop examination questions. as one of the respondents mentions, when referring to the students’ preparations for final exams: … this is supposed to be a voluntary effort in a sense, but there are a lot of good pedagogical reasons for you [the students] to make [the examination questions] yourself, and you learn a lot in doing so, and the whole curriculum becomes part of the agenda at the early stages of the academic year, instead of what used to happen before, that suddenly someone discovers some book or other at the beginning of june and unfortunately, it is sold out. [interview with a lecturer, faculty of business, public administration and social work] in the example where students create multiple-choice tests for each other, we can identify the multiple-choice function in the vle as an actor, which seems to present particular properties that purportedly make the process of getting to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 8 know the curriculum more exciting. creating multiple-choice questions can be done without the help of the vle, but this might require more work, and would no longer be considered a play activity. similarly, the participation of students in the creation of examination questions is not in itself dependent on the vle. in theory, the students could write examination questions and hand them in to the lecturers who would use them as a basis for the finals. however, the questions would then remain “private” in the sense that only their authors and the lecturers would have access to them before the finals. hence, they would only be part of a learning process for the students who write them and not for the others. in asking students to publish examination questions on the vle, the lecturers encourage them to share their insights into the curriculum with each other. the purpose of such a scheme is to help students develop a more “direct” relationship with the curriculum while the lecturers become less visible in the process of conveying content from the curriculum. in the example above, we see that the actor network constituting student learning may be changing shape. the online examination questions published by the students and the functions in vle that support the publication process can become central actors in the learning network, which originally encompassed primarily lecturers, students and the curriculum. in a traditional teaching practice, lecturers have a quasi-monopoly on the process of interpreting the curriculum for the purpose of student assessment. in the example described above, however, lecturers relinquish part of their control over the way students are going to relate to the curriculum. because they are taking an active part in deciding what parts of the curriculum will be taken up at the exam and in what way, the students may experience a more intimate connection with the curriculum, and this may contribute to a feeling of greater ownership of the learning process. such activities bring to the surface the importance of criteria development in the students’ learning process. through their participation in criteria development the students gain a new status as contributors to the academic discourse on professions. here we would suggest that one can catch a glimpse of a paradigm shift in the learning network, where the traditional hierarchical relation between lecturer and student becomes blurred. dynamic planning and control data from the interviews indicate that vles allow for a greater transparency and for increased dynamic with regards to both the lecturer’s work and student activity. one of the clearest examples found at ouc is the function allowing lecturers to publish and update online teaching schedules. previously, the teaching schedule was handed out to the students at the beginning of the semester and was considered to be binding for both teachers and students. the general feeling was that publishing a new schedule and making sure that the students discard the previous plan was such a complicated process that lecturers would try their best to avoid having to do it. only in situations requiring major modifications of the teaching schedule did the lecturers bother publishing a new plan. the vle has made the process of updating a teaching plan so straightforward that such modifications are made all through the semester and lecturers have integrated this way of planning as a standard procedure. for example, the lecturers at the faculty for dental technician education insist on regular updates of the teaching schedule, so as to increase the students’ confidence in the plan and teaching programme: […] it [the teaching schedule] lies on top of everything else when it has just been updated, so that the students can just go in there and see: “ok, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 9 it hasn’t been updated since the last time i was in, then it’s fine”. and if they then see that there is a change of date, they can go in and see what [has been modified]. [interview with a lecturer, faculty for dental technician education] another element that may contribute to vles increasing the feeling of control is that many such systems have a “statistics” function that allows users with teacher and administrator rights to get information about student online activity, including who has delivered which assignments, who has accessed what lecture notes, etc. this observation can give insight into the developers’ perception of the teacher-student relationship as hierarchical, based on power and control. this is in line with beck’s (2005) suggestion that vles give teachers a privileged status and cement a hierarchical understanding of the teaching and learning community. in ant terms, this is a manifest example of vles being inscribed according to the developers’ own understanding of the roles and functions of the “imagined” users. although this contradicts the ideals promoted by much of the higher education world, for example through the quality reform in norway (kuf, 2001; nyborg, 2002), most of the respondents did not seem to find such control to be problematic or bound to corroborate a controlling approach to teaching. so for the students the smiling face means that now someone has looked at it [the assignment]. […]. and if they see an angry face, then it means that it might not be so good. [interview with a lecturer, faculty for dental technician education] from the analysis above, we can identify a number of new actors, many of which are dependent on the vle. first, the online teaching schedule acquires a dynamic aspect that was almost completely absent when teaching schedules were distributed on paper before the introduction of the vle. the teaching schedule can therefore lose its former role as a “straight-jacket” to the teaching, and becomes more a support to a dynamic planning process, which is seen as more desirable by both the teachers and is more in line with the values promoted in higher education. in that sense, the teaching schedule is an actor that is constantly being translated by other actors, i.e. the teachers and administrators. another insight that can be gathered from the data is that publishing lecture notes online has a number of consequences for teaching and learning processes: it requires new preparation routines for the students as they are expected to access the online notes before the lecture. it also opens a window into the teacher’s preparation process. in that respect, online content is an actor that affects both teachers and students. vles also render possible the creation of a new actor, namely the “statistics” function that provides teachers and administrators with quantitative information regarding student online activity. the existence of this new actor raises new concerns regarding not only privacy but also teaching ethics – as statistics related to how many times a student has accessed a document can give a distorted picture of how well that student is doing. the lecture notes distributed by the teacher either on paper or online contribute to affecting learning. distributing lecture notes before the class may give the teacher an opportunity to focus on supporting the students’ understanding rather than spending time on conveying information (“dissemination”). the students who have made the effort to get acquainted with the material in advance may have acquired a better base for the formulation of relevant questions and the teacher may be able to discuss the material at a more advanced level. in other words, using vles to take care of the dissemination of information may liberate time to concentrate on other seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 10 learning activities. the change in essence that occurs when less lecture time is spent on dissemination can form the basis for a new understanding of the purpose of learning. by using lecture time to initiate discussions and debate, the teachers may be able to more easily convey the message that such activities are crucial in the learning process. discussion-based learning activities might stimulate the students’ questioning of the set of alternatives they are facing in the learning process. concluding remarks in this paper, we have used data gathered from a number of sources in order to shed light on the processes of vle use in an institution of higher education. using ant has helped us focus on the dynamic notion of the relation between the various human and non-human actors around the vle. in particular, ant has allowed us to uncover how the use of vles changes the roles of some of the existing actors in the networks formed in the teaching and learning processes, and how new actors might emerge as those networks are developed, cultivated and reconstructed. the most obvious new actor in the “teaching and learning” network at ouc is the vle itself and it is apparent from the data that both teachers and students try and enrol the vle so as to fit their interests. the data presented here indicates that teachers often use the vle as a tool to render communication with students more efficient. conversely, students might engage the vle as an ally when trying to get the information they require for their courses (often as a substitute for the teacher). a number of other actors also seem to have gone through a transformation process as a result of vle use. among those figure the assignment drafts that students publish on the vle and the feedback they get from teachers and costudents. we have also identified a series of rather heterogeneous elements that undergo some transformations, including the curriculum, the criteria that are used to evaluate the quality of the students’ work, the examination questions that the students create themselves and publish on the vle, the statistical data that teachers can gather on student online activity, as well as the students’ own study routines. multiple-choice tests also change form and are said to acquire a more “entertaining” character when students use the dedicated function on the vle. we have noticed how actors such as the teaching schedule change shape and become more dynamic as a result of vle use. moreover, the online lecture notes also become an actor which affects the teachers’ routines and students’ study techniques. we see thereby that the vle has contributed to shaping the lecturers’ teaching practices. however, there is little indication that the vle has had any revolutionary effect on the existing learning network. it seems that the teaching and learning described in the case study are based on established practices that are not easily shaken. this study reveals that the introduction of vles changes the actor network which brings about new teaching practices. this article is not a detailed account of how the different actors in the teaching and learning process interrelate, but a sketch of the situation at ouc that emerges from the datagathering process. further research might involve the collection of more extensive data from and about a larger array of actors so as to capture more closely the dynamics of the actor networks they constitute. this may help gain deeper insights into the processes of transformation, inscription and translation within the various actor networks that co-exist within an institution of higher education. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 11 references akrich, m. 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(2005b). domesticating learning technologies in a higher education institution: a tale of two virtual learning environments. in v. bjarnø (ed.), new teaching and learning practices: experiences with elearning projects at oslo university college 1998-2005 (pp. 79-87). oslo, norway: oslo university college. handal, g., & lauvås, p. (1983). på egne vilkår [on your own terms]. oslo: cappelen. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 12 hannemyr, g. (2003). the internet as hyperbole: a critical examination of adoption rates. information society, 19(2), 111-121. hanseth, o., & braa, k. (2001). hunting for the treasure at the end of the rainbow: standardizing corporate it infrastructure. computer supported cooperative work: the journal of collaborative computing, 10(3/4), 261-292. kuf. (2001). kuf (2001) stortingsmelding nr 27 (2000-2001) gjør din plikt krev din rett. kvalitetsreform av høyere utdanning. . retrieved 13.02.06. from http://odin.dep.no/kd/norsk/dok/regpubl/stmeld/014001-040004/dokbn.html accessed 13.02.06. langley, c. a., marriott, j. f., belcher, d., wilson, k. a., & lewis, p. (2004). the attitudes of students and academic staff towards electronic course support— are we convergent? pharmacy education, 4(2), 57-61. latour, b. (1992). where are the missing masses? the sociology of a few mundane artefacts. in w. e. bijker & j. law (eds.), shaping technology / building society: studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 225-258). cambridge ma: the mit press. latour, b. (1993). we have never been modern. hemell hempstead: harvester wheatsheaf. lee, j., hong, n. l., & ling, n. l. (2001). an analysis of students' preparation for the virtual learning environment. internet and higher education, 4(3.4), 231-242. løvlie, l. (1974). pedagogisk filosofi for praktiserende lærere. pedagogoen, 22(1), 1936. nyborg, p. (2002). the quality reform of higher education in norway. a national reflection of the bologna process. retrieved 05.02.2006, from http://www.uhr.no/internasjonaltsamarbeid/utskrifter/bol%20kvalitetsrefor men%20refleksjoner.htm piccoli, g., ahmad, r., & ives, b. (2001). web-based virtual learning environments: a research framework and a preliminary assessment of effectiveness in basic it skills training. mis quarterly, 0276-7783 december 1, 24(4). vygotsky, l. (1962). thought and language. cambridge, ma: mit press. vygotsky, l. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma,: harvard university press. wise, j. m. (1998). intelligent agency. cultural studies, 12(3), 410-428. 1 for an overview of the reasons for system change, see bjarnø & sandtrø, 2005 and habib, 2005a, 2005b. 2 it is to be noted that this research focuses on vle and not on teaching technology in a wider sense, i.e. we do not touch on the use of technological tools such as email or presentation programs if they are not specifically part of a vle. microsoft word rye dimensions of flexibility.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 dimensions of flexibility students, communication technology and distributed education ståle angen rye university of agder faculty of economics and social science department of political science and management email: stale.a.rye@uia.no abstract flexibility is a frequent topic in any discussion of higher education in general and ”alternative” forms of education, such as distributed education, in particular. the term is usually associated with change, but there has been little attempt to analyse the concept in further detail. this is surprising, since flexibility is often seen as the distinguishing attribute of this type of education. it is therefore the aim of this article to clarify the concept of flexibility by relating it to students in distributed education and their study situation. in doing so, i hope to create a platform for further research and development in the field of distributed education. keywords: flexibility, distributed education, communication technology, ict, students context, daily life. introduction flexibility is now a key concept in some areas of political, administrative and academic discourse. it is remarkable, however, how vague and little nuanced any discussion of the notion often seems to be. in terms of content, it would seem to suggest a form of change, while remaining unclear as to what this change implies. normatively, flexibility is often taken for granted, being a quality everyone must aspire to if they are to function in a social context. in the field of distributed education too, flexibility has long since gained currency and can be said to be a firmly established norm (collis & moonen, 2001; edwards, nicoll, & lea, 2002). the point of departure of this article is that there is very little research that seeks to analyse the concept of flexibility in relation to students in distributed education, despite the fact that alternative forms of education have a long history and are widely practised. in many ways this reflects the weak theoretical foundation found in research and development in relation to distributed education (garrison, 2000; perraton, 2000b; saba, 2000; støkken et.al., 2002; watkins & schlosser, 2003). there are, however, a number of interesting exceptions that attempt to address the problem. examples of this are støkken’s (1996) discussion of the student’s role, nylehn’s (1996) discussion of the role of technology in distance learning and edward’s (1997; 2002) discussion of the relationship between distributed education and social seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 2 change. the weakness of these contributions in relation to the aim of this article, however, is that beyond a limited extent they fail to address the concept of flexibility as such. if on the other hand we look outside the body of research dealing with distributed education, it is possible to find a number of other interesting contributions. sayer (2000) discusses flexibility from a scientific-theoretical point of view, nylehn (1997) discusses the concept on the basis of what it means for organisations, while hanseth et al (1996) discuss it in relation to technology and information systems. each of these approaches affords in its own way a good starting point for a better understanding of flexibility. however, it is necessary to follow up these contributions by clarifying the concept in relation to what flexibility means for students in distributed education. in this article, this is done by examining the aforementioned contributions in the light of existing research in the field of distributed education. to do so, we begin by looking at the relationship between students and the educational institution and between students and their everyday environment or setting. at the same time, the position of technology in students’ flexibility is allotted particular weight. the objective is to identify different aspects of student flexibility and to highlight factors that are influential in creating this flexibility. in this way i hope to make a contribution towards clarifying what we seek to achieve when flexibility is an objective, together with the factors that serve to increase/reduce flexibility, and to say something about the consequences of flexibility. my general aim is to help establish a useful platform for empirical research and development work in the field of distributed education. distributed education, development and characteristics although distributed education tends to be associated with the growth of the information society, this type of learning has long traditions going back to the correspondence school that flourished around the turn of the previous century (armstrong, 2002; støkken, 1998). from the 1980s, distributed education once more came to the fore as a number of countries set up open, flexible universities, with the uk’s open university being the best known (perraton, 2000a). in time, the traditional higher education institutions have also come to adapt to the notion of flexibility. new learning formats, whereby the requirement for personal attendance on campus has been reduced, have come about as a response to the new needs of students and society at large (albach, 1999; edwards, 1997; perraton, 2000a). in norway, for example, a move was made towards integrating this type of education in the established education system through the establishment of soff1 in 1990 (gunnar grepperud, 1996). today, there is a marked increase in the number of students following such types of education, both in norway and in other parts of the world (perraton, 2000a; unesco, 2001). one of the distinguishing features of distributed education is that the educational institution does not expect students to put in regular attendance at a campus. with the help of various types of communication technology, everything from letters to the internet, students can study at home, at work or in other locations variously suitable for study. in this way, new groups of students who for various reasons cannot follow conventional teaching programmes have found a place in higher education. (gunnar grepperud, 2005; støkken, 1996). this type of education is found in different forms and under different names, such as distance learning, flexible education, open learning and e-learning. in discourse it may be associated with lifelong learning, adult education, continuing education and not least the new knowledge requirements of the information society (edwards et al., 2002). variations in terminology are discussed by e.g. grepperud (2005) who shows how application of the concept in relation to different forms of alternative seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 3 education varies. within the different terms we find varying concepts of the same phenomenon and the same concept used of different phenomena. grepperud argues for the use of flexible education as the most appropriate collective term. simultaneously he urges the use of terms that best serve the particular purpose of the phenomenon being described and analysed. the main thrust of this text is the analysis of education offered mainly off-campus, distant or local. this being so, i find the term distributed education most comprehensive for the phenomenon i wish to examine. this is also reflected in what is my primary concern in discussing the concept of flexibility. my main focus, therefore, is on what it means for the students to follow a course of study in a location other than a campus. flexibility in relation to factors such as progression and choice of learning formats will be given only minor attention. student, educational institution and the student’s everyday context in order to better understand what flexibility means for students in distributed education, i shall start with some general considerations on the content of this notion. i shall attempt to go behind the concept’s normative aspects and instead give it an analytical basis by looking at what it involves and how it can be interpreted. flexibility as both stability and change a good starting point in trying to grasp the meaning of flexibility might be to go back to the original meaning of the word, which comes from the tree’s ability to return to its starting position, even when it sways in the wind. flexibility describes the tree’s capacity to bend and then recover equilibrium (sennett, 1998). sayer (2000:116) takes a similar view when he sees flexibility as phenomena’s: ”[…] ability to maintain their integrity and operate in a variety of different settings.” the structure’s ability to maintain its integrity is here the basic mark of flexibility. what distinguishes this interpretation of flexibility from how it is often presented in discourse is that the phenomenon’s ability to maintain its integrity is the key idea. flexibility thus indicates the stable components of a phenomenon that will guarantee its continuing existence. the phenomenon may be a system, such as distributed education, or an actor as in this article where the focal point is distributed students. at the same time it is worth noting that sennet also emphasizes change as an important element of flexibility, but as a means, a force for achieving stability. in other words, in order for something to maintain its integrity, change may be necessary. this corresponds to nylehn (1997:4) when he says that: ”flexibility is the ability to vary, both by functioning in different ways in given situations and in being able to tackle different situations in a variety of ways”. in order to understand the change component in flexibility, he divides the concept into structural flexibility and spontaneous flexibility. structural flexibility represents changes within given limitations, while the spontaneous element represents the transition to something new. it is worth noting here that ” transition to something new” does not necessarily have to stand in contradiction to sayer’s (2000) assertion that basic structures must be preserved as a condition for flexibility. it is rather, as nylehn (1997) also implies with reference to agryris and schön (1978), a matter of different degrees of change. in practice it is often a matter of making small adjustments in order to meet external pressures, and changes are often limited to rhetorical statements in planning documents. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 4 flexibility and contextual factors a setting, according to sayer (2000), can be understood in terms of contextual factors. the contextual element here is the concrete situation surrounding a phenomenon, without this being decisive for either the phenomenon’s essence or expression. although the setting is not a determinant, it will nevertheless exert an influence on the phenomenon and thereby on any phenomenon’s flexibility, including students’ flexibility and the theme of this article. with this as his starting point, sayer draws up a basic distinction between the structural qualities of phenomena and their setting. this definition of flexibility in turn requires insight into the phenomenon itself, while phenomena must also be interpreted contextually. this will also be the point of departure for our further study of the concept, when i shall tie in the foregoing comments to students in distributed education. based on the above, i shall take the following as a working definition of flexibility: qualities that help actors and systems to remain the same even though the setting changes and even if they move to a new setting. these qualities may be the ability to change but only as a means to maintaining integrity. together, these flexible properties comprise the structural aspects of phenomena in the sense that they contribute both to enabling and inhibiting action (bhaskar, 1989; sayer, 1992). the definition also implies that the flexible properties are first revealed on contact with the phenomenon’s setting. flexibility and how students relate to the educational institution a basic feature of being a student is formal association with an institute of education (edwards, 1997). according to gidden’s (1984) theory of social structure, this association is formed in the first instance by the formal and informal rules that set the framework for the actors’ room to act. grepperud et al. (2004a) describe this relationship through e.g. flexible students’ degree of self-determination in regard to their rate of progress and their influence on course form and content. with reference to their empirical studies, they further show how education based on predetermined curricula limits the student’s room to act. the educational institution, through provisions relating to form, content and progression, constrains students’ ability to vary in relation to when and where they choose to study. in the second place, according to giddens (1984), students’ relationship to the educational institution, and hence their room to act, is constituted by the resources to which the different parties have access. the forming of rules and norms therefore depends on the integral power balance of these relations, and will be manifested through the party with the opportunity to form them and through the possibility of renegotiation. the power relations between student and educational institution will thus determine, among other things, the student’s degree of freedom to make use of different settings and thereby also their flexible properties. the educational institution will generally tend to be the stronger party by virtue of the formal power it has to sanction students through the right of certification. if students fail to follow the given rules, they may lose their right to be a student. at the same time, each educational institution needs students in order to exist. from the student’s point of view, this can be a resource in itself. an educational institution must accordingly take into account at all times students’ needs and wishes. simultaneously, students will also enter into other structural relations, but in this case as employees, family providers, etc. although these relations in themselves do not make the student into a student, they will be highly significant for the shaping of student life. grepperud et al. (2004a) argue for instance that moral support and help with practical arrangements on the part of employer and family are decisive for the student’s study situation. the employer’s acceptance of the student’s right to use the work computers for the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 5 purpose of study, for example, will play an important part in determining how the student relates to the educational institution. in the light of the foregoing discussion, therefore, students’ flexibility will primarily be formed by their relations with the educational institution, but other important relations in which the student is involved will also carry significant weight. these other relations make up what i have previously called the student’s context or setting. analytically speaking, structures in the student’s everyday life will therefore provide the context in the relations between student and educational institution. in what follows, i shall look more closely at how these settings can be described in terms of students’ flexibility. flexibility and students’ settings i have earlier argued the case that students’ flexibility must be understood in light of the extent to which their ties to the educational institution give them room for action in relation to their everyday setting. taking a similar approach, støkken (1996) describes flexibility as students’ opportunity to study when and where they wish. flexibility then becomes the student’s degree of independence of the time-space dimension. this understanding of setting may be relevant as a basis for a broad description of flexibility, but in relation to concrete analytical work it may also be useful to clarify further what characterises students’ links with their setting. accordingly, it is important to note that time and space do not exist as independent dimensions but must be understood as consisting of objects, physical or social (sayer, 1992). the student’s freedom to study when and where he/she wishes must therefore also include freedom in relation to what constitutes time and space, whether it be other actors, physical surroundings or other objects. on this basis, flexibility becomes the phenomenon’s ability to sustain itself, in the face of changes in time, locality, material structure and/or social relations. a student’s flexibility can thus be determined on the basis of how far he/she is dependent on being in particular places at given times, for example in relation to lectures and group sessions. further, the student’s flexibility is determined by the necessity of having certain physical objects to hand, such as computers, software, books etc. finally, the student’s flexibility is determined on the basis of his/her dependence on relations to other important actors and institutions, such as family, job, friends and so on. on the basis of the foregoing discussion, there are two particular aspects of the setting that appear important in understanding students’ flexibility. firstly, flexibility does not necessarily mean that students are independent of setting but rather that they are independent of one particular setting. a number of studies reach the conclusion that the student’s individual environment, such as family and workplace, is absolutely critical to whether or not a student is successful in a flexible course programme (folkman, 2002; home, 1998; kember, 1999; støkken, 1998, 2000). grepperud et al (2004b) show for example in their own studies that students in flexible education choose this type of education because they have strong links to their home and/or family situation. one of the characteristics of distributed education that distinguishes this kind of education from the conventional kind is that the student does not have to meet at regular times on campus. the educational institution in turn does not lay down strict rules about where study is to take place. nevertheless, students may still be highly dependent on being in a particular place for their studies but then on account of their ties to job, home and family. grepperud et al (2004a) point out in this connection that flexible students’ setting is primarily expressed in terms of work, home and leisure time. they also show, on the basis of their empirical studies, how this setting influences the student’s opportunity to study. from the students’ perspective, therefore, the peculiar characteristic of flexible studies is not that they can seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 6 study anywhere they wish but that they can study in a different setting from that dictated by conventional education. students’ flexibility can therefore be seen as the opportunity for a re-connection to, rather than a disconnection from, their setting. secondly, it is usually a question of partial flexibility that varies in relation to the different dimensions of the flexibility. the phenomena of time, space and physical objects and social phenomena cannot be separated from each other but are always interrelated to a greater or lesser extent. a computer, for example, always has a special localisation and meaning depending on its relation to social phenomena (lægran, 2002). the distinctive character of a particular course can mean, for example, that the student has a high degree of freedom in relation to space and social phenomena but at the same time greater dependence on physical objects and time. in principle, therefore, a course of study can be followed anywhere in the world, at home, in a holiday cabin or on a beach in majorca. at the same time, the course requirements may demand that assignments be delivered by e-mail to the study location. this means that a course which basically imposes no conditions in relation to place but on the other hand requires the use of computers for the purpose of communicating with the educational institution, limits the student’s freedom in relation to where he/she can study. students following netbased courses must at least sometimes be present in locations where computers with internet connections are available. this can be illustrated by the fact that most flexible students, who from the educational institution’s point of view have relatively great freedom to choose where they prefer to study, in practice elect to study at home (gunnar grepperud et al., 2004b; kember, 1999). the explanation here may be that students depend on being able to combine their studies with other activities. most students in this type of education programme have both established employment relations and an established family situation. the course is thus flexible in regard to space but the student’s life situation means that the pursuit of study depends on his/her obligations in relation to job, family etc. the key features of the student’s everyday environment are therefore decisive for the student’s flexibility. the student’s ability to operate in different settings is therefore not uniquely a result of what characterises the student’s association with the educational institution, but also of the characteristics of his/her everyday context. students in the field of distributed education often depend for example on being able to renegotiate their roles in everyday life in order to uphold their role as student. (støkken, 1996). flexible students and a changing society i have so far identified some basic characteristics of flexibility by taking as my point of departure the relationship between students and educational institution on the one hand and students’ ties to their everyday setting on the other. at the same time, distributed education clearly does not exist in a social vacuum. a deeper understanding of the way students relate to the educational institution and their everyday setting must therefore be viewed in the light of general processes that go towards shaping this type of education and thereby student’s student life. in what follows, i shall therefore place distributed education in a societal context, with the aim of showing the driving forces behind this type of education and thereby also the background to students’ flexibility. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 7 interests outside the course programme in the first place, distributed education can be seen as a project initiated mainly by actors with interests outside the student him-/herself, often with underlying financial motives on the part of authorities and employers. a key element here is then the development of the economic basis for society, with consequent new requirements in relation to employees’ education. it may be argued that new, flexible forms of production call for flexible workers ready to adapt to changes in production (harvey, 1989). this can be seen as a response to changing production conditions in the form of global competition, the deregulation of production factors and the state of the labour market (edwards, 1997). it is further assumed that continuing education lays the foundation for an adaptable workforce. in order to bring about continuing education of the workforce, employers, with the support of the authorities, have adopted measures such as distributed education. lifelong learning has thus become an important factor in economic development (edwards, 1997). this kind of approach to the relationship between social change and distributed education focuses on the fact that changes in the workforce are essential to the continuing existence of the capitalistic system of production. the preceding analysis reflects power relations in which it is those who control production who have the resources and decide the rules. flexibility thus means freedom for the enterprise or public service, not for the worker. this can be illustrated by the suggestion put forward by moland and gautun (2002) to the effect that part-time employment in the health-and-care sector can be regarded as a “compulsory” working situation for employees in the interest of creating flexibility for the employer. in the same way, bakke (2001) raises the question as to how far it is a benefit or a burden for women when they resort to using a pc as a means of combining a job with care of children. this underlines nylehn’s (1997) point that stability on one level can contribute to flexibility in the form of change on another level. in this case, change will be expressed as the need for workers to be flexible. from the workers’ point of view, therefore, flexibility and change imply a situation characterised by coercion. in the same way, flexible course programmes can also be seen as something the student is forced to choose so as to be able to keep pace in a tight labour market: coercion rooted in the need of industry and public institutions to sustain their activities in the face of changing conditions and circumstances. the employees provide the organisation with its flexible qualities by adapting so that the organisation can continue its activities. the focus is therefore on economic development and not on the student’s personal needs. from this point of view, it may be legitimate to ask how far the freedom to study at home or at work is as much an obligation to add studying to all the other tasks to be done. this can be illustrated through støkken’s (1996) comment that the distance learning student often has to sit at home and complete assignments instead of visiting friends or taking part in other social activities. the survey made by grepperud et al (2004b) of the flexible student shows clearly how education is pursued at the cost of the student’s ”free” time. this perspective may be particularly relevant to many women’s life situations (handy, 1985). the coercive aspect becomes even clearer if we include technology. webster (1996:42) claims that technology’s link to economic development is used ”to re-establish social control and discipline, and to create a submissive and flexible worker”. there are many examples to show that technology contains powerful determining factors linked to the aim of controlling the workforce (rosen & barodi, 1992). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 8 the same may be said of educational technology in relation to students. new technology provides the educational institution with new ways of ”disciplining” distributed students by tying them “closer” to the institution. this can be done by expecting students to be ”online” at given times and assignments to be regularly submitted by e-mail. if the idea is that new technology should replace physical meetings, this may also reduce the student’s freedom to organise his/her daily life at will (støkken, 1996). at the same time, this is not, as edwards (1997) also claims, a necessary result of incorporating the use of technology. he also raises questions about how far this is a dominant function of technology. students’ interests in focus distributed education can also be seen as a project driven by students’ needs and wishes. the intention is to give the student the opportunity to follow education as part of his/her basic rights. education is thus a social benefit which the student needs and to which he/she is entitled, independent of the employer’s needs and wishes. distributed education can then be seen as a learning project aimed at giving the student an opportunity for personal development. at the same time, education can also be regarded as instrumental, as a contribution to the student’s economic and social mobility. taking this kind of approach to education, it is the educational institution, or the workplace, which is required to be flexible in the sense that it must adapt to the student’s needs. ideally, the student should be able to maintain approximately the same life situation while also following education. once more we see the applicability of nylehn’s (1997) argument, that flexibility on one level can contribute to flexibility on another. it is accordingly the student’s life situation that predominantly setss the basic premises for how education should be designed. the course programme must therefore either be tailored to certain groups of students or be flexible in the sense that it is possible to study in a variety of settings. a flexible course programme accordingly provides such freedom in relation to time, space and other contextual factors (støkken, 1996). it is exactly this that grepperud et al (2005:16) are calling for when on the basis of their empirical surveys of flexible students’ study situations they conclude that ”less standardisation, more contextualisation” is a primary challenge for higher education. as i have earlier touched on, this freedom often means in practice the possibility to uphold the student’s life situation. the idea that in principle one can study anywhere will therefore also imply the freedom not to make radical changes to one’s life situation (kember, 1999). in that case it may be asserted that students have flexibility in the sense of having freedom to form their own lives. the student’s ability to determine his/her own life situation, however, depends on having the necessary resources and power to obtain support for his/her needs and wishes. this presents a challenge in relation to marginalised groups of students (duran, 2001; perraton, 2000a). a final factor in relation to the student’s freedom to study wherever he/she wishes, as i have already touched on, is the use of different kinds of communication technology. students can, in theory at least, keep in touch with students living far from established educational institutions with the help of modern communication technology (bruce, 1996; nylehn, 1996). the problem here is that these groups are also often economically marginalised and thus have limited access to advanced technology. this applies especially to many students in developing countries. in this way, a type of education basically thought of as including will because of the internet be excluding because of the strong dictates of such technology (nylehn, 1996). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 9 dimensions of students’ flexibility rasmusen (2005:14) raises the question: ”when is part-time work a benefit that gives the employee the desired flexibility to be available for the family or other personal activities, and when is it an imposition that gives the enterprise flexibility?” in this article i have chosen a similar point of departure in looking at what it means to be a distributed student. the discussion so far shows that students’ flexibility can involve qualities that give an opportunity for both change and stability as well as freedom and coercion. in sum, these form different dimensions of students’ flexibility (see table 1). change stability freedom (have flexibility) students’ possibility to reorganise their daily routine as they wish, without overregulation from the educational institution. students’ possibility to sustain important relations in everyday life, for example relations to friends, family and work. coercion (must be flexible) requirements and expectations for the student to change his/her daily routine so that he/she can study. requirements from expectations that the course programme will be completed at the same time as other obligations continue to be respected, for example in relation to job and family. table 1: dimensions of students’ flexibility these are the dimensions showing different aspects of students’ flexibility, and not necessarily particular types of education programme or study situation. there is therefore no contradiction either between the different categories of flexibility revealed in the meeting/interface between the different dimensions of this flexibility. for example, there is no obvious contradiction between the requirements that the course of study should be completed at the same time as everyday obligations are met and re-organised as wished. the possibilities, requirements and expectations indicated in the table are in reference to the structural relations entered into by the student. as indicated in the previous section, these can be represented by the student’s links to the educational institution, family and workplace. at the same time, these structural relations can also, as shown in this section, be represented by more general societal structures such as changes in employment and welfare policy. the main point is that such structural principles are both enabling and inhibiting in relation to students’ options and hence also their flexibility. technology and flexibility in the preceding section it was pointed out that technology is important in determining how students are linked to educational institutions. in this section, i shall discuss this in greater detail and look more closely at how technology functions in relation to students’ flexibility. knowledge, technology and flexibility modern institutionalised education depends on the capacity to conserve and mediate bodies of learning. the art of printing has therefore been critical technology for the development of formal education. the capacity to conserve and store knowledge has made it possible for learning to be applied by others even though the individual person has neither had direct experience of it nor had it communicated face-to-face. in what giddens (1991) calls traditional seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 10 societies, cooperation through face-to-face interaction was the most common form of integration and is referred to as social integration. cooperation through mediated learning comes under what giddens refers to as expert integration. the use of technology for the mediation and communication of learning gives room for specialisation by means of the fact that individual persons can acquire abstract knowledge in a particular field without having had direct experience of it. knowledge is thereby isolated from its original setting and students have access to abstracted learning through books and other media. in many ways, this creates the basis for the existence of the educational institution. books have therefore become an essential form of technology in education. but other forms of technology too, such as radio, tv, calculators and later the computer, have periodically, and to a varying extent, had a profound influence on the education system (cuban, 1986; 2001). mediation is therefore a key factor in education (säljö, 2000). given the fact that, by and large, learning can be isolated from time and place through the use of various storage media, why then are most courses of study held on a campus? i shall not attempt to answer this question in depth, but would like to touch on a few factors that are central to our understanding of students’ flexibility. one basic feature of education is, as previously discussed, the student’s formal association with an educational institution. as part of this association, it is expected that the student will get help in converting the knowledge ”stored” in the book to personal learning. conventionally, this has taken place through face-to-face meetings between students and lecturers or course directors. technologies such as pen and paper, board and chalk, overhead projectors, slides and so on have been key aids in these meetings (cuban, 1986). even though stored knowledge in theory is relatively independent of time and place, access to it has been seen as dependent on a given social practice situated in time and space. the book’s original flexibility is thereby reduced through the learning process being tied to formal education and hence also to physical meetings between student and teacher in given locations, usually a campus. in distributed education, however, these face-to-face meetings have largely been eliminated and replaced with the help of communication technologies such as letters and telephone, radio, video and more recently the internet (armstrong, 2002). these technologies play a decisive role in determining students’ links to the educational institution and are hence a determinant for the phenomenon of distributed education itself. technology is therefore basic to the connection between educational institution and students by virtue of being both a communication technology and a storage medium. traditionally, these dimensions of technology have been separated into different technologies (for example between books and the postal system), but with the advent of the new information and communication technology (ict) the media have partly merged together in technologies such as the internet (castells, 1996). in order to obtain a better picture of how technology affects flexibility for students in distributed education, i shall now discuss this, taking ict, exemplified by the internet, as the starting point. however, the discussion will apply in essence to all types of technology. the aim is to identify structural properties of the technology that are critical to the student’s flexibility. i shall take as my basis the previous discussion of flexibility linked to the discussion by hanseth et al (1996) and by hanseth and monterio (1997) of the relationship between standardisation and flexibility in information infrastructures. i shall begin by looking at the notions of change flexibility and user flexibility2. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 11 change flexibility change flexibility indicates the ability of technologies and systems to adapt to changed conditions. this type of flexibility says something about the structural characteristics of the technology itself and how these characteristics are connected to, and interact with, the context of the technology. the flexibility of the internet is thus characterised by its constant adaptation to new user groups, new distribution and so on. in keeping with most types of technology used in distributed education, the internet for example was not originally envisaged in the role of educational technology (nylehn, 1996), but has now, in addition to the book, obtained a position as one of the most important technologies in distributed education. this flexibility is thus characterised by change, but at the same time in the form of adjustments that mean that the substantial aspects of the internet are maintained. the internet’s ability to survive and develop, including as part of educational technology, will therefore require continuous change (hanseth et al., 1996; smarr & catlett, 1992). in this argument there lies implicitly the idea that the ability to meet change depends on the existence of a stable component. hanseth et al (1996) link this stable component to standardisation, which may be interpreted to mean that technology’s internal connections are structural properties. standards are fixed norms for how information systems and information structures should be designed. they can thereby be seen as part of technology’s integral structural properties (hanseth & monterio, 1997; hanseth et al., 1996). the purpose of standards is to enable systems to operate in different conditions with different users, and they are thus a prerequisite for flexibility. from the perspective of change flexibility, flexible education technology implies technology and systems that can be adapted to the learning situations of individual students. for example, a ”learning management system” (lms), often used in distributed education for managing students’ learning situations, must be capable of change so as to meet students’ needs in particular situations. the change potential may be an integral aspect of the application itself, for example by allowing students and teachers to develop the interface as appropriate, or through system developers who adapt and develop the system in response to new needs as they arise. but even a system like lms requires a certain standardisation, for example in the form of applications which can be used no matter which browser students use. a relatively standardised interface recognizable to the student will also make the system more user-friendly. at the same time, a standardised interface may seem inhibiting in relation to the function a system is intended to serve in a particular course programme. a flexible learning technology will accordingly have to strike a balance between change potential and standardised solutions. it will therefore be interesting to see what web 2.0 and new user-directed functions will mean for alternative fora for education, since these web solutions are largely dynamic and open to change by the user. this leads us to the next form of flexibility. user flexibility the second form of flexibility, user flexibility, is based on users’ freedom to make use of the technology in different ways. it is thus an expression of structural links between technology and user. user flexibility can be understood through the notion of script, as it is developed in actor network theory (akrich, 1992). script refers to how artefacts have built-in patterns for use. although these patterns may contain wishes, visions, notions and physical limitations, they are in no way determinative for use. script is therefore the contact between those who have designed the technology and the users. this does not mean a linear process in which thoughts and ideas are passively communicated from developer to user (law, 1992). nor is it a process in which different actors have their programmes in which they try to realise their visions. programmes are the actors’ attempt to gain support so that they get seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 12 acceptance for their scripts (latour, 1987). the result of an inscription will be a result of how it is translated and given meaning by the different actors, and is described in actor network theory through the term translation (callon, 1991; latour, 1987). related terms in socio-constructionist approaches to technology are cultivation and domestication. they focus on how technology is adapted and given meaning in people’s everyday lives (lie & sørensen, 1996; silverstone & hirsch, 1992). here it is not the development of technology that is interesting but rather how different actors construe technology and hence give it its characteristics. the main point is that the properties of the technology in themselves do not determine its use. the consequence of the argument above is that even though inscriptions and structural properties contribute to deciding the technology’s flexibility, the ”translation process” must also be considered. how the users perceive, interpret and relate to technology is thus determinative for the technology’s flexible properties. educational technology used in distributed education will also have these integral scripts in which different actors have visions, objectives and purposes in relation to how the student applies the technologies in question. the actors may be system developers, teachers, administrators and technical service personnel in the educational institution. all of these have more or less concurrent programmes in which they seek acceptance for the design and use of the technology. once again, we can use lms as an example. a ”complete” lms has a long process behind it, in which all the actors mentioned have played a greater or lesser part. the result is various constraints built into the lms, for example in the form of access rights, links to the administrative system, functionality and directions for student use. stringent procedural rules give students limited possibilities and lay down strict directions for use. for example, students may have limited access to incorporating their own material, while at the same time the teacher may require them to submit a given number of contributions to the discussion forum. by means of electronic logs, the teacher can monitor the student’s use of the system and sanction accordingly. weaker constraints on the other hand will leave it very much up to the students and teachers to determine their use of lms. for example, students may be free to form their own group rooms and use the discussion forum when they want to and for their own purposes, without being subject to control by teachers. a final interesting element concerning the relationship between technology and flexibility is to assume that a particular type of technology used in an open and flexible study programme is itself a script. this applies to all types of technology, everything from books to the internet, but its relative strength will vary in relation to the type of technology in question and students’ access to this technology (rumble, 2001). in norway, where there is dense internet cover, the requirement to use the internet will normally be a relatively weak script. in a country like indonesia, with an almost total absence of home pcs with internet connection and where the most common point of connection is an internet café, inscription will be substantially stronger. the strength of a script is therefore not a given dimension but must be seen in context. the final result for how the educational technology will be used will therefore, together with the script, depend on how students interpret, evaluate and give the technology meaning, with a starting point in the resource-related situation. in other words, how the users translate, cultivate and domesticate the technology on the basis of given resources. the user flexibility of the educational technology must therefore be understood both through the technology’s inscriptions and how the user manages, perceives and interprets the inscriptions and the technology. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 13 the use of the internet as a standard and an inscription in a study programme will therefore not necessarily work in favour of flexibility. its use may equally prove inhibiting for that matter. the result of this standardisation and inscription will also depend on the context in which the study programme operates. the internet can thus be regarded as flexible technology in norway while it may be less flexible in given situations in a country like indonesia. from the foregoing argumentation, this means that the flexibility of the technology is not a given objective dimension but is dependent on contextual dimensions and how these interact. technology, actor and structure the view of technology that appears from the foregoing argumentation is in many ways a contrast to more structure-focused perspectives, represented for example by nylehn (1996). the basic premise can nevertheless be said to be identical, namely that technology is seen as value-bearing but without given results. the differences lie in the fact that both actor network theory and socioconstructionist approaches assign different actors, both as creators and users of technology, a more central position in relation to how technology arises and is applied. nylehn (1996:207) asserts on the other hand that, for example: “the students and their teachers! – are dominated and controlled by the technology they are using and they can only do what somebody else has built into it. the technology ‘belongs’ to others – it is not ‘theirs’”. a weakness of nylehn’s basic argument is that students become a “victim” of educational technology and are limited in how far they can adapt it to their personal life situation. with a view to flexibility, this will mean that it is ”always” the students who must adapt to the technology and its developers. in many situations, this will certainly be largely correct. however, there are also many good examples from ant (bijker & law, 1992) and socio-constructionist theories showing that users of technology are also active creators of technology by giving it meaning and content. summarising discussion: consequences for research and development work in this article, i have argued the case that students’ flexibility involves much more than their opportunity to study where and when they wish. students’ flexibility can on the one hand mean the opportunity to shape their own life situation, whether it means sustaining or changing relations in everyday life without too many constraints imposed on them by the educational institution. on the other hand, flexibility may also imply requirements and expectations in relation to organisation of employment and/or family situation and how other commitments in everyday life continue to be met. students’ possibilities, requirements and expectations in relation to the organisation of their everyday life, and thereby their flexibility, are determined by the students’ ties both to the educational institution and to principal actors in everyday life. a key feature of distributed education is therefore that students, with the help of communication technology used by the educational institution, no longer have to commit themselves to regular attendance on campus and can thereby follow the study programme in their normal everyday setting. nevertheless, this technology may carry built-in constraints that limit the student’s freedom to act in their everyday environment. technology can herefore both strengthen and weaken the possibilities, requirements and expectations that the student encounters. in addition to the properties of the technology itself, the consequences of using it will be decided by the student’s personal characteristics, the educational institution and the student’s everyday life. this view of students’ flexibility can be summarised as in figure 2. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 14 figure 1: analytical model for studies of students’ flexibility a key point of this approach is that any evaluations and analyses of students’ flexibility, in addition to students’ options must also take into consideration the factors that enable and inhibit these options. on a basic level, therefore, flexibility concerns how the meeting between actors and structure affects students’ change and is sustained in practice on an everyday level. if we take this approach to an understanding of students’ flexibility, what are the consequences for research and development in the field of distributed education? in the first place, intentions to design study programmes allowing students to choose where and when they wish to study are at best based on a simplified notion of flexibility. in the opposite case, it may lead to the overlooking of important factors that play a role in forming the student’s student life. even when the educational institution sets few rules and constraints, students following distributed education will always, to a greater or lesser extent, be dependent on their everyday environment for a successful outcome of their studies. this underlines the need to learn more about the student’s daily life and how this functions in conjunction with the rules and constraints imposed by the educational institution (gunnar grepperud et al., 2004b; g. grepperud et al., 2005). in this way, factors serving to strengthen or weaken students’ capacity to pursue this kind of course may be identified. the use of technology, from the foregoing perspective, must not be considered exclusively as a dimension in the relations between the student and the educational institution. acquiring better awareness of how technology works in distributed education means that the student’s everyday setting must be included in our analysis. the way in which the technology is integrated in these personal environments determines how the properties of the technology function in relation to the student’s study situation. we also need knowledge of how different aspects of students’ everyday contexts are interconnected. what is required is therefore empirical research into material factors, for example how computers affect students’ opportunities and limitations in choosing different locations for study purposes. similarly, we also need knowledge of how the student’s family and job situation affect the student’s scope to allocate time and space for study. in the practical development of distributed education account must also be taken of students’ everyday setting, whether family or job situation, in designing the study programme. it may be useful, for example, to adapt the teaching programme, including the use of technology, to students’ everyday life and context in practice. not all forms of technology are advantageous to students. in many situations, it may be helpful, for example, to avoid the use of new, advanced technology, in order to enable students to change their life situation while maintaining their basic relations. in this practical development work, we must be aware that the degree of flexibility does not necessarily increase even when the system lays down few rules about the student’s physical location, if simultaneously there are strict requirements regarding the technology students’ everyday setting students educational institution seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 15 use of technology. system standardisation must therefore be weighed against the need to adapt the technology to the individual course or the needs of the individual student. a form of technology such as the internet, for example, may work in a flexible way for certain students but give little flexibility for others, in the worst case prove an excluding factor. references agyris, c., & schôn, d. 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[tromsø]: institutt for sosiologi universitetet i tromsø. støkken, a.m. (2000). om fjernstudenten en kritisk analyse av studentrollen i fleksibel utdanning (no. 1/2000). tromsø: soff. støkken et.al., a.m.e.a. (2002). mange bekker små-: evaluering av arbeidet med soffstøttete fjernundervisningsprosjekter ; [forfattere: anne marie støkken m. fl.]. tromsø: soff sentralorganet for fleksibel læring i høgre utdanning. säljö, r. (2000). larande i praktiken. ett sociokulturelt perspektiv. stockholm: prisma. unesco. (2001). human development report 2001. making new technologies work for human development. new york: oxford university press. watkins, r., & schlosser, c. (2003). conceptualizing educational research in distance education. quarterly review of distance education, 4(3), 331-347. webster, f. (1996). the information society 10, 1-23. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 18 1 the abbreviation for sentralorganet for fjernundervisning which later changed its name to sentralorganet for fleksibel utdanning, but kept the same abbreviation. in 2003 soff merged with norway opening universities (norgesuniversitetet) and now goes under that name. the body was originally established as an advisory body for the ministry of church affairs and education. it has also awarded development funding for flexible education. 2 the terms change flexibility and user flexibility are based on the division of the flexibility concept by hanseth and monterio (1996) into flexibility in change and flexibility in use. digital transformation in swedish schools – principals’ strategic leadership and organisation of tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives ©2018(author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. digital transformation in swedish schools – principals’ strategic leadership and organisation of tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives eva mårell-olsson department of educational science umeå university email: eva.marell-olsson@umu.se peter bergström department of educational science umeå university email: peter.bergstrom@umu.se abstract this paper reports on a research study about principals’ strategic leadership and organisation of schools within established tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives. the aim was to investigate how principals lead and guide one-to-one computing initiatives in k–12 education. the research questions focused on principals’ expressed intentions and their strategic leadership and organisation when implementing tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives in swedish schools. the empirical material was collected through semi-structured interviews with seven principals in five municipalities where the schools had used tablets for more than six months within a one-to-one computing initiative. the findings are organised by themes concerning one-to-one computing as a strategy to change teaching and working methods, using technology for adapting teaching and learning to every pupil’s needs, and strategies for organisation. the findings show that marketisation of schools (e.g. the school-choice reform) in combination with the annual presentation of national rankings have had an impact on the financial situations of schools because they receive a voucher for every attending pupil. the participating principals’ strategic leadership concerning their intentions and applied strategies on how to lead and organise the digitalised school are an attempt to meet the demands that the marketisation and digitalisation of swedish schools requires. keywords: qualitative study, principals, strategic leadership, one-to-one computing, marketisation of schools seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 175 introduction the rapid digitalisation of schools worldwide has affected stakeholders of all levels; from policy makers to grassroots. at the policy level, curriculums in the nordic countries have started to use the concept of digital competence (skolverket, 2017), mirroring eu policy about digital competence for all citizens. in sweden, the recent national digitalisation strategy for schools (dnr u2017/04119/s) defines digital competence for principals, teachers, and pupils. for principals, emphasis can be found on the term strategic leadership. such leadership in relation to digital competence and the rich digitalisation through one-to-one computing initiatives is based on a terminology of principals’ own digital competence regarding being able to lead and support teachers’ digital development work and being able to identify and assess new solutions afforded through the digitalisation. the swedish school context demonstrates rich digitalisation by one-to-one computing initiatives. several studies, internationally and nationally, have focused on the role of one-to-one computing in schools, including studies about the innovative use of one-to-one computing and its potential for changing and modernising teaching and learning (bocconi, kampylis, & punie, 2013), teachers’ teaching (pegrum, oakley, & faulkner, 2013; håkansson lindqvist, 2015; player-koro & tallvid, 2015; saudelli & ciampa, 2014; bergström, mårellolsson & jahnke, 2017; bergström, mårell-olsson, häll, & kumar, 2017), and pupils’ use (håkansson lindqvist, 2013; tallvid, lundin, svensson & lindström, 2015; norqvist, 2016). few studies have focused on principals’ strategic leadership and organisation of schools’ processes of digital transformation through one-to-one computing initiatives. this paper makes an attempt to report on the principals’ perspective by addressing research questions about their strategic leadership for how to lead and guide the process of transforming the school through one-to-one computing initiatives. before presenting the aim and research question of this study, we set the scene by presenting previous reforms and research regarding principals’ work on organising and leading the schools. background principals’ strategic leadership does not take place in a vacuum. according to the national digitalisation strategy for swedish schools (dnr u2017/04119/s) a successful integration of information and communication technologies (abbr. ict) in schools demands a strategic leadership where the principals have the digital skills required to lead and support the staff in the digital development work. further, strategic leadership also includes having digital competencies concerning the ability to identify and assess the relevance of new solutions that are made possible by digitalisation and develop their use based on the different conditions and educational needs of children and pupils so that digitalisation opportunities can contribute to improved knowledge outcomes and increased educational goal achievement (dnr u2017/04119/s). the emphasis on strategic leadership is assumed to have grown from previous reforms. in recent decades, there have been two important reforms that have had significant impacts on working conditions for principals and the organisation of swedish schools. first, there was the introduction of an intensive reform that restructured the swedish school system as part of the so-called school choice reform or freedom of choice reform (sou 1991/92:95, prop. 1992/93:230), and second, there has been the on-going digitalisation of swedish schools. these two fundamental reforms have had a great impact on principals’ working conditions and leadership and on the organisation of their schools (lundström & parding, 2011; håkansson lindqvist, 2015; hult, lundström & edström, 2016; pettersson, 2018). the school choice reform means that parents are free to choose any school for their children, and the schools receive an educational seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 176 voucher for every pupil that is attending the school during the school year (alexiadou, dovemark, erixon-arreman, holm, lundahl & lundström, 2016). the deregulation of schools is not only happening in sweden, but is part of an international trend (lundström & parding, 2011). however, compared to many other countries sweden has gone further in its effort to create a kind of school market (chubbs, 2007). a consequence of this reform is that swedish schools are competing for pupils and trying to attract as many pupils as possible (e.g. parents’ choice, alexiadou et. al, 2016). further, attempts to measure the quality of swedish schools are presented every year by agencies and associations in the form of rankings of all swedish schools. for example, the swedish teachers' federation presents an annual ranking of the best school municipalities of the year to inspire municipalities to invest in those who create ‘good’ schools. reports on official school statistics are also presented by the swedish national agency for education. in addition, the swedish association of local authorities presents statistics for grades 6 and 9 and statistics related to individual subjects for grade 3 (see municipality and county database, 2015). consequently, these school statistics are presented and discussed in the national media every year, especially regarding which schools are ranked as ‘the best’ or ‘the worst’. schools can thus improve or worsen their positions in these rankings on a yearly basis. lundström & parding (2011) argue that this market logic affects principals’ working conditions in a way that has never been experienced before. hult, lundström, and edström’s (2016) findings show that principals are pressured by the marketisation of the swedish school system because school funding is directly linked to success in attracting and retaining pupils. the digitalisation of swedish schools has been going on in parallel with these school reforms, and söderlund (2000) suggests that this means that the increased use of technology in society has increased pressure on the schools to acquire and use information technology (it). sweden has quite a long tradition of having different it-projects in schools in recent decades. jedeskog’s (2002) study from 27 school-development projects in the mid-1990s had a focus on using it in teaching and learning. jedeskog found that the possibilities for teachers to construct good learning environments together with the pupils using it in teaching and learning were affected by other circumstances, for example, changes in organising the work in school and changes concerning teachers’ possibilities of having control over pupils’ different activities in school. söderlund's (2000) study showed that the experiences of the increased it use in swedish schools until the year 2000 was considered to bring many benefits to both pupils and teachers. the benefits were mainly linked to different forms of learning and the teachers were given greater opportunities for variation in teaching. since the mid 1990s, sweden has continued to increase access to digital tools in schools, and according to becker and taawo (2017) in today, almost all of the 290 municipalities in sweden have invested in one-to-one computing in some way. one-to-one computing initiatives are not only happening in sweden, but are increasing worldwide every year (zucker & light, 2009; bocconi et. al, 2013). even if great hopes are still expressed for what the digitalisation of schools will bring, recent studies (e.g. håkansson lindqvist, 2015, tallvid, 2015) show that the large-scale digitalisation of schools in sweden is not without problems. the discourse that surrounds one-to-one computing in schools is based on a terminology of modernisation and innovation of teaching and learning (bocconi et al, 2013) and where ict are considered as a catalyst for making such changes (brown, 2006). penuel’s (2006) definition of one-toone computing is based on pupils and teachers being equipped with a personal laptop or tablet, a wireless network in the school buildings, and software for school use. in addition, recent studies (bergström et al, 2017) suggest that the affordances of cloud computing for sharing, storing, and retrieving information represent an expanded dimension of the one-to-one computing environment (gonzales-martinez, bote-lorenzo, gomez-sanches & cano-parra, 2015). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 177 in the literature, principals’ strategic leadership and organisation role is central to lead and guide the digitalisation process (dexter, 2008; bocconi et. al, 2013). however, bocconi et al. (2013) showed that principals often engage in only limited competence development regarding their development of and understanding of what a technology-rich environment might provide and in turn how their strategic leadership and the organisation of their school might affect the digitalisation process. they argue that principals need support for making changes in modern schooling. toy (2008) describes how it is important that principals within one-to-one computing initiatives support early adopters and risk-takers so that they can share and spread their enthusiasm. according to toy, it is also important that principals provide appropriate professional development, time, and resources to support the effective implementation of these initiatives. further, mcgarr and kearney (2009) emphasise that principals must always have pupils’ learning in mind when making decisions about it, and the principal must be a learner alongside the staff at school and be a role model concerning experimenting with innovative strategies for the implementation process. hatlevik and arnseth (2012) found that teachers’ perceived usefulness of computers and frequency of computer use in school are correlated to experiences of ict-supportive principals. however, few studies have focused on principals’ intentions about their leadership and organisation of schools within established one-to-one computing initiatives. this paper aims to describe and understand swedish principals’ strategic leadership and how they embody the new demands that these reforms require in terms of their leadership and organisational changes. more specifically, it presents how principals lead and organise the tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives in k–12 education. this study focuses on the principals’ expressed intentions with regard to their strategic leadership and organisation when implementing tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives in swedish schools. research questions: 1. how do principals lead and organise the tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives in k–12 education? what do they want to achieve? 2. what strategies do principals use and how do they organise and implement their strategies in line with their intentions? study context and participants this paper presents a study on seven swedish school principals’ experiences and narratives about their strategic leadership and organisation of a tablet-based one-to-one computing initiative. applying a purposeful sampling (patton, 1990), seven k–12 schools in five municipalities were selected based on the precondition of having used tablets for more than 6 months within a tabletbased one-to-one computing initiative. these schools were among the earliest in sweden to start teaching with tablet-based one-to-one computing (rogers, 2003). the principals at these schools were contacted and agreed to participate in the study. in total, three female and four male principals were interviewed. four principals worked in k–9 schools, two principals in k–6 schools, and one principal in an upper secondary school. they had been working as principals for 3–14 years. all of the schools had been working with one-to-one computing in teaching and learning for 2–3 years except for one, which was a newly built school that had started operations 3 months before we visited it, although it is important to note that this principal had been previously working in another school for some years that had used one-to-one computing. the participating principals will be referred to as id01–id07. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 178 methodology and methods a qualitative approach was taken, and the empirical material was collected through semi-structured interviews with the participating principals. the principals agreed to a statement of research ethics based on beneficence, nonmalfeasance, informed consent, and confidentiality/anonymity (gustafsson, hermerén & pettersson, 2011). the semi-structured interviews focused on the principals’ own experiences and actions within the tablet-based one-to-one computing initiative at their school. the first section of questions focused on the principal’s background. the next section probed the process of making the school digital through the one-to-one computing initiative by asking open questions such as “tell us about your leadership as principal” and “can you tell us how you as the principal support teachers labelled as “early adopters” i.e. teachers that take the lead for the development work?” focus was also on the strategies the principals described for how to implement their vision of a digitalised education by asking, for example, “can you tell us what you think of the future for the school regarding the one-to-one computing initiative?” the interviews lasted for 40 minutes to 80 minutes, and a total of 6 hours and 50 minutes of interview material was obtained. the material was transcribed verbatim. theoretical framework the theoretical framework is based on leontiev’s (1986) activity theory and his concepts of motives, goals, actions, and operationalisation. these concepts of activity theory allow for an exploration of the context in relation to social relations and materials, tools, and intentions as well as the interplay among them and how they affect principals’ decisions and their actions. it is not only the individual’s perspective that is in focus within these processes, but also groups’ actions in relation to the actions of the individuals within the activity system. in a context where activity theory is used, it is important to study the role an artefact or tool plays in everyday life (nardi, 1996), for example, the investments and the uptake and use of tablets in one-to-one classrooms in sweden. further, activity theory embraces an exploration and an understanding of a context in relation to how social relations and materials, tools, and intentions affect actions in different situations. thematic analysis thematic analysis (ely, 1991) was used for constructing understanding and meaning of the empirical material and for identifying key themes and emerging patterns within the framework of activity theory (leontiev, 1986). boyatzis (1998) describe thematic analysis as a process for encoding qualitative information and to be used to assist the researcher in the search for insight. the process includes two perspectives – ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as’ (boyatzis, 1998). in line with creswell (2013), seeing can be described as the process of searching for repetitive patterns of meaning (i.e. significance) in qualitative data. thematic analysis includes several readings in iterative processes for identifying emerging patterns. the different steps include a) reduction of the data (coding), b) presentation of the data (thematisation), and c) summation of data in the form of conclusions and verification. first, the data in this study was coded into the emerging categories (e.g. motives, goals, actions, and operationalisation), and then into emerging themes within each category. for example, what the principals described they wanted to achieve (i.e., motives and goals) and what their strategies are and how they organise and implement their intentions (i.e., actions and operationalisation). ely (1991) describes a theme as a definition of either utterances that all informants in a study are expressing or as a single statement of an opinion that has a great emotional or actual significance. as a step of making sense of the coded material, the phase of constructing meaning or ‘seeing as’, was made by searching for signs and patterns at a more abstract seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 179 level of the principals’ utterances regarding what they explicitly or implicitly were saying in the interviews. these iterative processes formed the emerging themes in the material as presented in the next section of findings. the quotations presented in the next section should not to be seen as evidence, but more as illustrations of the presented themes that emerged in the analysis of the empirical material. findings the findings are presented in the following themes: one-to-one computing as a strategy to change teaching and working methods, using technology for adapting teaching and learning to every pupil’s needs, and strategies for organisation. the first theme concerns the principals’ visions of a digitalised education and their expressed intentions. the second theme illustrates how the marketisation of schools is affecting the principals’ efforts to ensure that all pupils receive passing grades in all subjects. the third theme concerns the principals expressed strategies and how they organise and apply their strategies. one-to-one computing as a strategy to change teaching and working methods all seven principals described the one-to-one computing initiative as fulfilling three visions. first, to be a school in a modern digitalised society, second, to modernise the teaching methods, and third, to prepare the pupils for the future. as one principal described it: “the school needs to keep up with changes and developments in society. we need to adapt to this context and change our working methods so that we can prepare the pupils for the future and the society they are living in” (id04). another principal (d01) highlighted the strategy for one school’s successful process: our strategy from the beginning was very clear. we build on the enthusiastic teachers who want to change. those who really want to lead the way and try new teaching methods. they can make the biggest mistakes in the beginning. they can act as inspirations and can teach others. the above quotation indicates what will be described further in the next theme. using technology for adapting teaching and learning to every pupil’s needs this theme is based on two subthemes. the first subtheme concerns principals’ efforts regarding the competition between schools. the second subtheme frames the principals’ beliefs in improving equality in relation to one-to-one computing. principals’ efforts and focus the principals described an effort to construct a school that parents perceive as a ‘good’ school (i.e. a reputation for providing high-quality education to all pupils). the one-to-one computing initiative was in line with this effort, and the principals described that the use of one-to-one computing makes it possible for teachers to adapt their teaching more easily and more efficiently to meet every pupil’s needs. as one principal said: “when it comes to teaching overall, the tablets make it possible to easily make adjustments that fit every pupil’s needs, and especially those pupils with special needs” (id01). a yearly endeavour among the principals was to improve their position in the school rankings that are released by various agencies and associations. the primary focus was therefore on how many of the pupils at their school had seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 180 mastered all parts of the knowledge requirements in every subject. being perceived as a ‘good school’ (i.e. having a high position in rankings) is therefore, linked to the success in attracting and retaining pupils in the school, which in turn affects the school’s economy. further, the principal described it as “a balanced economy”, where they have the freedom to deploy resources where they are most needed. this effort and focus was more strongly expressed by the principals working in schools situated in the bigger cities compared to schools in the rural area where competition for attracting pupils is not as big an issue as in the cities. however, the principals working in the schools situated in the rural areas described how they are affected by the yearly presentations of rankings to some extent for being perceived as a good school even if there is no competition for attracting new pupils to the schools. however, regarding attracting more pupils the next theme indicates how the one-to-one computing is providing better school results. equality the participating principals in this study have a strong belief that one-to-one computing will provide better possibilities for both boys and girls. one principal commented especially on how one-to-one computing as such had already had a great impact on the boys’ school results. this principal described how the increased use of tablets made the boys more motivated for doing schoolwork and in turn getting better grades: we can see it in the results. there has always been a difference between boys and girls regarding the results. the difference between boys’ and girls' merit value has been 50 points for quite some time. that means if the boys have 175, the girls have 225. that's a very big difference. but now we can see a difference in the boys' grades and results. if we look at the grades from the last semester, for example, the boys have risen and gotten better grades (id03). strategies for organisation the principals have a strong focus on the organisation. one principal (id06) described her focus by giving an example as a question posed to herself “how do i build an organisation and a structure to construct a ‘self-playing piano’?” (id06). she continues by describing that it is of great importance for a principal to be able to reflect on how to solve problems “i have an ambition to look at our organisation and our structure and reflect on things that didn’t go so well and on how to solve the problem” (id06). another principal (id05) described that it is important to learn from mistakes. “i have a developed a strategy when i'm wrong and get criticism. i sit down and think about it and reflect on how i can do next time. it's important to be able to analyze yourself constructively to do a better job and to avoid mistakes you may have made. sometimes i have apologized to the staff. it is a strength that has grown over the years. (id05) this theme is based on two subthemes related to the principals’ strategies for how they lead and guide the process of digitalisation and how they organise and apply these strategies. implementing one-to-one computing is seen as a catalyst for being able to change working methods, as mentioned in the first theme. the principals described that they are now able to start new types of discussions with their staff regarding how to change teaching and learning and what is required for such change. the one-to-one computing initiative also provides new possibilities for them to make practical changes in line with their personal understanding of how education and schools could be organised. this new situation, with new possibilities as well as new challenges for leadership and organisation, encourages them to organise their school differently. in this section two subthemes are presented regarding the principals’ applied strategies – building competent teams and organisation for technical and pedagogical support. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 181 building competent teams building “good teams”, as several of the principals called it, was presented as a key factor for being successful in the organisation phase. first, it is of great importance to be strategic in recruiting competent staff, including assistant principals, economists, administrators, ict pedagogues, and it technicians. these roles constitute the team needed to manage the organisation that digitalisation of schools entails, including both technical and pedagogical perspectives. further, the principals described how they are now also trying to be strategic in recruiting new and innovative teachers who can be part of the process and how it is important for a school to have an organisation with staff at all levels who are eager to learn and who want to change teaching and learning using technology. the principal (id07) at the newly built school described his strategy and how from the beginning he first picked two teachers who were known for being innovative teachers and later hired an economist that he trusted. “from the start, i picked lisa and edvin. it is necessary to have the right persons around you. especially those who have the same ideas about teaching and learning. thereafter i picked an economist that i knew from before and that i trust” (id07). recruiting staff that fit into the organisation requires that the principals have a clear vision of what they want to achieve and how to get there and knowledge about what is actually happening in the classrooms. organisation for technical and pedagogical support almost all of the principals described how they had put a lot of effort into th e organisation concerning both technical and pedagogical support. the latter is based on ict pedagogues and collegial learning. one principal (id01) described that she was trying to get an in-depth understanding of teachers’ different needs in order to take a strategic approach in the organisation; “…to have the ability to listen to the teachers and understand what they really need and to organise support for these needs”. this can, for example, be quick technical support when tablets or wi-fi are not working properly in classroom (i.e. the technician’s responsibility) or more continuous planned pedagogical support for those teachers who are not comfortable teaching with one-to-one computing (i.e. the ict pedagogue’s responsibility). the participating principals in the present study use a concept called collegial learning for competence development of their staff. this is a form of competence development that is arranged within the school itself. for example, the teachers who are frequently and continuously discussing their teaching with one-to-one computing (i.e. teachers who are perceived to be at the forefront and who are engaged in making changes in the school) have been given increased responsibility to inspire others and to show good teaching examples. two principals (id06 and id01) described this as investing resources and creating conditions for those teachers who were eager to learn and willing to invest their time in learning how to teach with technology. “i am lucky to have teachers that share a passion for this. my focus has been on to supporting them. i’m sending these teacher to different courses and then they can teach their colleagues” (id06). principal (id01) explained: we have chosen a clear strategy at our school. we have chosen to do this internally. that means that we have chosen to support those teachers who are curious and are at the forefront, and we give them the conditions to develop and investigate how to teach with tablets” (id01). many schools are arranging and coordinating competence development internally by having some teachers share and spread their ideas to others by showing good examples. the principals describe that this gives them control over the cost, and they perceive this as a very cost effective strategy. we have organised our workplace meetings so we have 20 minutes on every meeting where some teachers are presenting good examples to each other. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 182 sometimes, i’m also talking about and emphasize different aspect of teachers teaching that i think is important. for example, i can talk about how some of the teachers are using flipped classroom.” (id05). it is not only important that teachers show each other good examples, it is also of great importance for the principal to act as a role model within this process of change. to be a role model is extremely important as a principal. my leadership affects teachers’ teaching in the classroom. when i do classroom visits i can see that. my role as a principal, as a school leader, if i am not a driver of this development nothing will happen. if there really is going to be any change, a principal must lead the development. that’s just how it is.” (id02) one principal (id06) described the importance of being a role model and being able to engage in the process and to show the staff through her own actions: “i need to be a role model by being a digital principal. i need to think paperless and show the staff how to do it (id06). another principal described it as participating in discussions and listening to what is going on among the staff: “i need to listen to be aware of what is happening. i also need to read a lot of stuff to be able to participate in discussions and give examples and to give good arguments.” (id04). the structure of using collegial learning and role models as a concept for the development of teaching and learning with technology thus means that the schools have more continuous control over the planning for competence development. as one principle described: “the teachers that are inspiring others and giving good examples are here tomorrow, also. we can ask them things the day after” (id02). another principal (id03) describes the value with collegial learning as “the teachers are now starting to experiment more by themselves when they have seen how others have been solving problems or sharing an example for the whole teacher team”. discussion this paper was an attempt to describe and understand principals’ strategic leadership in schools with established tablet-based one-to-one computing programmes through leontiev’s (1986) theoretical framework of activity theory. by adopting this approach, the study aimed to increase the understanding of the participating principals’ expressed intentions and how this is affecting their applied strategies concerning organising their school within this context. based on leontiev's (1986) activity theory, the context for the principals’ strategic leadership concerns the implementation of their strategies and how they lead and organise this process. it is all about being aware of concrete motives and goals and how to achieve them by controlling the operations of the actions (leontiev, 1986). strategic leadership concerns competences as being able to identify and assess new solutions afforded through the digitalisation (dexter, 2008; bocconi et. al, 2013; dnr u2017/04119/s). mcgarr and kearney (2009) suggest that this requires principals who are learners alongside the staff and that they continuously are experimenting with innovative strategies. this is important since, as hatlevik and arnseth (2012) argue, teachers’ perceived usefulness and use of technology in teaching are correlated to their experiences of a ictsupportive principal and in turn their abilities to design a good learning environment for pupils (jedeskog, 2002). in this study, the principals’ digital competences (dnr u2017/04119/s) and their skills of strategic leadership (dexter, 2008; bocconi et. al, 2013) in relation to their vision of what a school in a contemporary digitalised society is, affect their leadership and their applied strategies for organisational changes. leontiev (1986) argues that humans seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 183 originally characterised the objects they acquired from the outside world as a means of satisfying their needs and giving them benefits. further, there is a difference between individuals and how well they adapt to a situation in terms of their ability to become aware of themselves within an activity system. the same also applies to becoming aware of one’s own self within such a system (leontiev, 1986). the principals’ applied strategies and organisational changes could be seen as the tools for reaching their satisfaction and for developing their own needs, which could be conveyed and transformed into the motives for the process. the first research question highlights what the principals want to achieve with the implementation of tablet-based one-to-one initiatives. based on the principals’ narratives they consider the implementation as a potential opportunity for organisational changes. even if the participating principals rhetorically describe their motivation as trying to provide a customised education for all pupils, indications can be considered as that the one-to-one computing initiative acts as a tool for the principals to implement practical changes and new teaching designs towards their own vision of applied teaching designs and teaching methods. the findings indicate an endeavour to be perceived as a good school by parents and achieve a high position in the school rankings. a strong focus is to ensure that all pupils should be able to reach all of their educational goals in every subject, every year. this could be interpreted as in line with mcgarr and kearney’s (2009) emphasis that principals must always have pupils’ learning in mind when making decisions about it. although this is rhetorically expressed, according to the analysis, the principals appear to have a strong focus on the goal (leontiev, 1986) only as a way for the school to be able to climb in rankings. this could be seen as an example of their strategic leadership and an adaptation to the marketisation of schools (e.g. the reform of school choice) in combination with the national policy of presenting the annual rankings of schools’ results. the latter has an impact on schools’ financial situations because they receive a voucher for every attending pupil (i.e. the school is a market, chubb, 2007). this indicates, as hult et. al (2016) describe it, that principals are to some extent experiencing themselves as ‘victims’ of external pressure and evaluation and that this affects the principals’ strategic leadership and professional role. the principals in this paper perceive the one-to-one computing initiative as an opportunity to reach the goal to be a ‘good school’ with a reputation of providing high-quality education. the second research question focused on principals’ strategies and how they organise and implement their strategies. this concerns their actions taken (leontiev, 1986) and the different operations (leontiev, 1986) in organising for the tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives. as an applied strategy, the principals described that they are supporting those teachers at school who are perceived as being at the forefront of using technology in teaching and learning. for example, these teachers sometimes are given special responsibilities for educating their colleagues (e.g. pedagogical and technical support). similarly, toy (2008) describes that it is important for a principal to support early adopters and risk takers so that they can share and spread their ideas. according to leontiev (1986), actions and operations are the tools for reaching the goals within an activity system. in this study, the principals’ strategic leadership and their strategies for building competent teams and organising technical and pedagogical support at their schools could be seen as tools to be successful and to reaching their goals. leontiev (1986) emphasises that the general principle of the relationship between different levels is that the current highest level always remains the leader, but this level can only realise itself by means of the underlying levels and is thus dependent on them. an interpretation of this in relation to the presented study might be that the principals’ expressed intentions and their efforts to reach their goals affect their seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 184 applied strategies for how they lead and organise their schools. the presented findings in this study illuminate an example of principals’ strategic leadership as described in the national digitalisation strategy for swedish schools (dnr u2017/04119/s), where a principal´s own digital competence in relation to how they are being able to lead and support teachers’ digital development work is central. limitations a methodological concern with this study is the selection of the principals. we assume that we would have obtained more extensive data and richer nuances if we had conducted more interviews with principals in more schools. it is hard to know if we would have come to different conclusions, but time limitations made further interviews impossible. much can take place when visiting a school and we had of course to adapt to the daily practice. for example, the interview with one of the principals we had to conduct over telephone since it was not possible to find an appointment for a face-to-face interview. however, it is also important to note that these schools were chosen and contacted because they were among the earliest in sweden to use tablet-based one-to-one computing (e.g. for at least 6 months) because we wanted to investigate specifically principals’ own experiences and narratives about their strategic leadership and their organisation of tablet-based one-to-one computing initiative. another methodological issue concerns the theory-driven approach in the analysis, and we most certainly could have obtained different results if we had applied a more data-driven analytical approach. however, the concept of activity theory (leontiev, 1986) was perceived as useful for the analysis according to the purpose of the study and the research questions. future research the first recommendation for future research is to expand the number of participants. this would give a broader understanding and perspective on principals’ strategic leadership and on how they lead and organise one-to-one computing initiatives in swedish schools. it would also be interesting to investigate more broadly the principals’ strategies and the effects these have on how they lead and guide one-to-one computing initiatives in k–12 education and in turn how their strategic leadership and organisation affect teachers’ working conditions in the school. further, it would be interesting to explore if, and if so how, the national digitalisation strategy for swedish schools (dnr u2017/04119/s) that took effect in 2018 overall affects principals’ strategic leadership and organisation of schools in a broader perspective. concluding remarks the participating principals’ strategic leadership regarding their intentions and their applied strategies on how to lead and organise the digitalised school are an attempt to meet the demands associated with the reforms of marketisation and digitalisation of swedish schools. references alexiadou, n., dovemark, m., erixon-arreman, i., holm, a. s., lundahl, l., & lundström, u. 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[eng. the government’s official investigations 1991/92:95. on freedom of choice and independent schools. stockholm: fritzes public publications] sverige. skolverket. (2017). läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet 201: reviderad 2017. [eng. sweden. swedish national agency for education. (2017). curriculum for elementary school, preschool class and leisure-time centre 2011: revised 2017.] tallvid, m. (2015). 1:1 i klassrummet – analyser av en pedagogisk praktik i förändring. [eng.: 1:1 in the classroom analysis of educational practice in change] doctoral dissertation. university of gothenburg, sweden. gothenburg: chalmers repro. tallvid, m., lundin, j., svensson, l. & lindström, b. (2015). exploring the relationship between sanctioned and unsanctioned laptop use in a 1:1 classroom. educational technology & society, 18(1), 237-249. tondeur, jo, van keer, hilde, van braak, johan, & valcke, martin. (2008). ict integration in the classroom: challenging the potential of a school policy. computers & education, 51(1), 212-223. https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/869852 http://www.kolada.se/ https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.64 https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/proposition/valfrihet-i-skolan_gg03230 https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/proposition/valfrihet-i-skolan_gg03230 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 2 – 2018 187 toy, c. (2008). ten lessons learned: considerations for school leaders when implementing one-to-one learning. meridian, 1(11), 1-6. zucker, a. a., & light, d. (2009). laptop programs for students. science, 323, 82-85. digital transformation in swedish schools – principals’ strategic leadership and organisation of tablet-based one-to-one computing initiatives eva mårell-olsson peter bergström abstract introduction background study context and participants methodology and methods theoretical framework thematic analysis findings one-to-one computing as a strategy to change teaching and working methods using technology for adapting teaching and learning to every pupil’s needs strategies for organisation discussion limitations future research concluding remarks references preschoolers learning with the internet of toys: from toy-based edutainment to transmedia literacy ©2018 (author name/s). this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license. preschoolers learning with the internet of toys: from toy-based edutainment to transmedia literacy katriina heljakka degree programme in cultural production . and landscape studies university of turku e-mail: katriina.heljakka@utu.fi pirita ihamäki prizztech ltd e-mail: pirita.ihamaki@prizz.fi figure 1. the set of iotoys that was used in our study. from left to right: fisher-price’s smart toy bear, cognitoys dino, hatchimals and wonder workshop’s dash. abstract the internet of toys (iotoys) as an emerging type of edutainment presents a new research area, especially in the context of learning. this study investigates four connected toys played with in the preschool context. by turning to preschool-aged children and their educators observed and interviewed during and after a play test and group interview session, we study how the educational value of iotoys is actualized in a play situation in an early learning environment. in order for iotoys to work as tools in toy-based learning in the preschool context, we suggest that educators acknowledge the engagement with these toys as a form of transmedia play which demands transmedia literacy skills. keywords: early education, edutainment, internet of toys (iotoys), toybased learning, toy literacy, preschool-children, transmedia literacy mailto:katriina.heljakka@utu.fi seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 86 introduction: new approaches to toy literacy toys, as an expressive medium, provide opportunities for both entertainment and learning. as hassinger-das et al. (2017) observe, any item that can be used for play may be considered a toy, including manufactured toys, as well as everyday items. today, many types of toys seem to strive to have status as playthings that cater for needs of edutainment, that is, to serve as both education and entertainment. in today’s world toys are increasingly connected to technologies and digitally mediated realms. some even consider mobile communication devices themselves as a new type of playthings, and various screens included in smartphones and tablets are functioning as toys for children (hassinger-das, et al., 2017, p. 2). one example of such toys are the playthings emerging in the category of the internet of toys (or iotoys). these connected toys are a subcategory of the global phenomenon of the internet of things (iot). the internet of things (iot) is a concept referring to the connectivity of any device with the internet. iot could be considered as a giant network of connected people or things like toys, the connections is between things-things, people things or people-people (morgan, 2014). in the current situation, smart toys have evolved into connected playthings, that according to holloway and green mean smart toys, which 1) are connected to online platforms through wifi and bluetooth, but can also connect to other toys, 2) are equipped with sensors, and 3) relate one-on-one to children (holloway & green, 2016). the internet of toys (iotoys) will allow the children of this generation to experience seamless interactive technologies geared for entertainment and education unlike any previous generations. through connectivity, these smart, hybrid toys, most often representing anthropomorphized characters, suggest that players connect to online environments in order to get involved in digitallyenhanced and socially mediated play. generally, toys encourage three subtypes of play: (1) pretend play, (2) object play, and (3) physical play (hassinger-das et al., 2017). in a digitalizing age and especially, when considering the iotoys, which can potentially be used in all three types of play, this list needs to be extended to include the notion of digital play. researchers marsh et al. (2016) discuss digital play as follows: “contemporary play draws on both the digital and non-digital properties of things and in doing so moves fluidly across boundaries of space and time in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital era” (marsh et. al., 2016, p. 9). plowman et al. (2010) describe guided interaction with information and communication technologies as interplay, which they see as children’s interactions with technology that can be actively supported in preschool settings. they present the concept of guided interaction as follows: it is 1) a tool for thinking about the different modes by learning in preschool settings, and 2) that helps practitioners to articulate, reflect and legitimise changes in pedagogy. in our case study guided digital play is one of the subtypes of play, where preschool teachers have the possibility to guide digital playing with a learning purpose, for example in teaching language skills, mathematical skills and so on. connected toys can contribute to blurring the boundaries between formal and informal learning (montgomery, 2015, p. 268). with these toys, children’s input (data) can be analysed and responded to in increasingly individual ways. the individualisation makes the potential to offer great educational benefits and is at the centre of significant changes in existing learning technologies (gordon, 2014, p. 3). the playful learning experience also contributes to the blurring of boundaries between formal and informal learning. this is where principles and elements of internet of toys’ design that entertains and engages children are utilised as pathways to their learning. nevertheless, due to the complex nature of the iotoys as entities that according to their marketers cater for learning opportunities for children and furthermore, offer fun and entertainment for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 87 young children, we believe that a critical inspection of these playthings’ actual capabilities to carry out this dual goal is needed. one way to start this investigation is to steer the focus into questions regarding media literacy, in other words, our ability to understand and evaluate media in our study the hybrid medium of the connected toy. media literacy arises from the interface and interaction between media and user (park, 2017). our digital technologies have changed rapidly over the last decade which is related to a developed view on literacy as proposed in the literature. for example, ict literacy, information technology literacy, media literacy, online literacy, multimedia literacy and new literacies (for reviews, see markauskaite, 2006). digital literacy means the functional skills required to operate and communicate with technology and media. it also refers to the knowledge of how technologies and media affect the world. lankshear and knobel (2003) describe new literacies as a new type of knowledge associated with a “digitally saturated social practices”. martin (2008) describes digital literacy in the following way: it is “the awareness, attitude to ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access and synthesis from digital resources”. again, toy literacy (sutton-smith, 1986) of the contemporary kind needs to be assessed from the viewpoints of both digital play and digital literacy. yet, with the iotoys in mind, the concept of digital literacy alone is not sufficient in explaining the wide spectrum of skills that are demanded in understanding and using the connected toys. as stated by mäyrä, ludic literacy includes understandings of (a) technology, (b) culture, and (c) social dimensions of games and play – capabilities to step within a game, interplay with others, and be creative within those frames (mäyrä, 2016). moreover, the use of toys and games calls out for ludic literacy skills. in fact, what is required, is to view the emerging connected playthings as a transmedia phenomenon. according to alper and herr-stephenson (2013), “transmedia experiences invite children to draw upon multiple literacies, including digital, textual, visual, and media literacies, as well as social skills and cultural competencies”. as educators look ever more to new media as a site for meaningful opportunities for children, transmedia can be a resource for learning in various contexts, they claim (alper & herr-stephenson, 2013). with these developed understandings of media literacies in mind, it becomes apparent that in order to be able to fully grasp the various dimensions of this new category of playthings, multiple literacies must enter the discussion. furthermore, in order to understand the capacity of the internet of toys from the perspective of early education, both parents and educators need to become familiarized with the notions of transmedia literacy. figure 1. 21st century toy literacy: the evolution of required literacies. positioning playful learning within the iotoys phenomenon one critical pathway to exploring the possibilities the internet of toys holds is to investigate them through the concept and activity of play. we know already that play is an essential activity to improve and develop children physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. playing is a natural way to solve problems and understand the environment. play also teaches a child to react and handle circumstances around enjoyable activities. play has its value as a mean in media literacy media literacy digital literacy digital literacy ludic literacy ludic literacy transmedia literacy transmedia literacy seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 88 children’s learning. as rapeepisarn argues, play prepares children for informal learning as they begin their school years and each step along the way (rapeepisarn et al., 2006). however, ‘play’ means different things to different people: “across early childhood education and home environments, play has shifted from its previous child-initiated basis of “free” or “unstructured play” to a structured, educational thrust for early academic preparation”, fisher et al. state (2008, p. 305). the reason is that play is viewed as having a value and a valuable place within the school curriculum (zoney, 2005). the teacher has an important role in helping children learn through play by selecting material they know, and guiding them when they need help. when children are free to follow their interest and organize their own experiences, learning happens naturally (dodge & bickart, 1998). as hirsh-pasek et al. (2009) describe, both free play and playful learning should command a central role in high-quality education for preschoolers (hirsh-pasek et al., 2009, p. 54). nicolopoulou (2010) has recognized three main reasons for this. first, one impetus for the growing academization of preschool is the recognition that young preschool children’s acquisition of literacy is critical of their long-term learning and school success. play-based practices that engage children’s interest and initiative (along with narrative practices like interactive book reading) fit children more effectively than top-down didactic transmission. secondly, forms of social competence are also crucial elements of school readiness, because they help promote children’s cognitive achievements as well. key dimensions include self-regulation of behavior, attention and emotion, the capacity and willingness for cooperation and social understanding. various forms of play have a critical role in promoting these socioemotional skills during children’s early years. thirdly, children need a certain amount of self-directed free play – including physical play. kangas (2010) sees playful learning as a key competence in teaching and learning. playfulness refers to the learning actions and their qualities (e.g. bodrova & leang, 2003). it is also seen as an attitude towards learning and a way of learning through play and games with playful learning environment (ple) settings. the literature related to playfulness assumes it to have positive effects on learning at various school levels and on learning in working life as well (e.g. sawyer, 2006). kangas (2010) has described creative and playful learning in playful learning environment settings as 1) learning that allows, stimulates and promotes learner creativity and knowledge co-creation, 2) learning through designing content for the ple by using new technology, and 3) learning through a variety of playful and physical activities, which take place in the ple. kangas defines the goal of playful learning as follows: it is curriculum-based learning that is enriched with play, games and technological affordances. once toys are used, and ludic behavior becomes object play, motivations, goals and outcomes of learning are easier for researchers to observe. play has value for education, and some toys are considered to have play value. play value is a term used to describe the overall enjoyment of a child with a certain toy (in this case, iotoys). toy design educator gielen (2009) explains: “a toy is a tool for play, and it must be useful tool.” various factors contributing to play values which give indications of qualities and weaknesses in the design of the toy. the term often used to label the worth of play is ‘fun’, which means that fun is rather an effect of the activity than an activity itself. play value is what motivates children to start playing, to continue and elaborate the play activity, and what makes them feel satisfied when they stop and what makes them return to the activity. many toys may be much more valuable if they are directed to children with a certain set of preferences, interests, knowledge, skills or character. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 89 unstructured play that requires imaginative or creative processes, often lacks clearly delineated rules or goals (fisher et al., 2008, p. 309). fisher et al. (2008) have noted in their research how a mother who believes that structured activities set the best foundation for future academic learning is more likely to create an environment that promotes learning through structured toys and activities (fisher et al., 2008, p. 313). in the context of the iotoys, as hybrid entities blurring the boundaries between the physical, digital and the connected play objects which we believe will become a normalized part of toy culture in the future, these structured toys and activities come to present issues related to literacy that are more complex and novel in comparison to for example traditional, physical and non-connected toys. the nature of contemporary toy play is not only present in play patterns regarding the material dimensions of play, but also in its increasingly hybrid and social in nature (heljakka, 2016). furthermore, it has an increasingly transmedia quality. the concept of transmedia describes the complex relationships between media audiences, producers, and content (alper & herrstephenson, 2013). again, transmedia literacy entails that learners derive meaning from the paths they make for consuming, creating, and sharing media elements. one way to understand the emerging field of iotoys and the play that happens with them, is to widen the aforementioned concepts of toy literacy, media literacy, digital literacy and finally, ludic literacy to the notions of transmedia literacy and understandings of play to the notion of transmedia play. transmedia play refers to a “new way to understand how children develop new media literacies through their interactions with contemporary media that links stories and structures across platforms” (alper & herr-stephenson, 2013). learners not only construct their own meanings from transmedia messages, but also derive meaning from the paths they make for consuming, creating, and sharing media elements. transmedia play is characterized by the following five facets, which makes it valuable for learning: resourcefulness, sociality, mobility, accessibility, and replayability (alper & herr-stephenson, 2013). according to the researchers, the concept applies to media that has no storyline; for example, crossword puzzles or open-ended videogames (ibid.). we suggest that the iotoys investigated in this paper demonstrate not only structured but also open-ended potentialities for play, and the play that happens with these connected objects may best be understood from the perspective of transmedia play. related work the first ‘smart toys’ were developed over a hundred years ago, as thomas edison adopted his wax-cylinder phonograph to create the first popular ”talking toys”. until 1998, these mechanical inventions were limited to only a handful of phrases. during the late 1990s the world was introduced to furby, a new kind of ‘smart toy’. suddenly, writes pesce, “the toy talking to a child has its own language (furbish), has the ability to compose simple sentences, and responds to a number of verbal and physical commands”. toys constant interactions with people make them more communicative, and one toy can share its learning with another (pesce, 2000, p. 5). in a research paper from the last decade it was claimed that top selling toys and electronic media of the contemporary kind are marketed as having educational benefits (fisher et al., 2008, p. 307). “such toys have highly visible value since they clearly promote academic learning (e.g., teach abc's and numbers) and engage children (e.g. through flashing lights and interactive buttons)”. in today’s world, contemporary ‘smart toys’ are not only enhanced with seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 90 technologies to facilitate learning through educational affordances and audiovisual features, but also through their connectivity to online platforms and access to content mediated through these realms. in this article, we use the concept of the io toys (wang et al., 2010) in reference to early education, to map the potentialities these smart and connected toys hold when considering toy-based learning opportunities. these kind of play resources can be characterized as objects in which the digital and physical are linked and which thus facilitate connected play (chaudron et al., 2017; wang et al., 2010). furthermore, the term is related to the concept of a network of physical devices that are digitally enabled and allow collection of data (kopetz, 2011). however, this category of physical play objects that are digitally connected open new possibilities for the toys to become connected via the internet with other toys and other players. the internet of toys’ development and related research has just begun. in our research, we have reviewed related work on children and technology and internet-connected toys. this category of toys represents quite a new phenomenon in the academic field and the studies of iotoys are still scarce especially regarding toy research and studies on toys as a cultural phenomenon. for the most part, previous studies are focused on technological matters, which present a relevant area of academic inquiry, but not the only one. studies have, for example, explored how young children perceive their computer use (mckenney and voogt, 2010), involving children in content control (hashish et al., 2014), and reactions to health monitoring technology (toscos et al., 2012). one example of a popular plaything representing the iotoys is toytalk and mattel’s hello barbie. the toy was quickly met with controversy upon its release, with twitter hashtags such as #hellnobarbie and an outline of the downsides to a connected toy, identifying issues with privacy, by the campaign for a commercial free childhood (campaign for a commercial free childhood, 2015). hello barbie has been complimented for its strong encryption practices, through its websites were sometime found vulnerable (somerset recon, 2016). in other words, iotoys toys should ensure children’s safety as well as provide appropriate content for them. in the study at hand, we are more interested in the iotoys’ possibilities to be used in the context of learning. consequently, we bring into discussion the topic of toy-based learning, which we see to have a similar purpose to support effective learning as playful learning has. educational value is frequently used as a marketing tool for smart toys with claims about accelerating progress in learning to read, write and use numbers. however, learning toys are often based on mundane educational tasks disguised as entertainment. the interactivity of smart toys may well provide educational and play value for the preschool context as school environments, but digital interactivity alone does not guarantee either an educational or a playful encounter. one of our goals is to turn the focus to the preschoolers themselves in order to find out about the toys qualities encouraging transmedia play. our study: preschoolers playing with the internet of toys the possibilities of using smart and connected toys in education seem to offer rich, interactive, innovative and mobile learning experiences in preschool children as well as in leisure time as suggested by the makers and marketers of the toys (pruet et al., 2015, joyce et al., 2014). in earlier stages on our research (ihamäki & heljakka, 2018) we have explored the educational potentiality of the iotoys. the goal of this study is to understand the iotoys in terms of their suitability to be used in toy-based learning and their relationship to transmedia play. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 91 by investigating the toys’ possibilities to be used as tools in toy-based learning, agency needs to be given to the main audience for the iotoys, i.e. the preschool aged children. in finland this means the context of primary education for children who are typically 6 years old, who we in this paper consider to represent digital natives. prensky (2001) described digital natives as people who lives their lives immersed in digital technologies and they learn differently from previous generations of people. they have grown up in a digital environment where immersion in digitally-related activities is part of their everyday lives. studies suggest that the used technologies in early childhood education could be addressed by developing new ideas about children’s digital play that helps educators to recognize children’s activity with technologies in a play-based way (edwards, 2013, yelland, 2011). this is because early childhood education is traditionally play-based, and educators are used to observing and assessing young children’s play. digital play has become part of everyday life. on the other hand, the enjoyment of digital experiences through shared social interaction is possible with the new iotoys. in their study, fisher et al. (2008) noted that when preschoolers are offered a toy to play with that has an ambiguous causal mechanism, the first thing they do, without being told, is figure out how the toy works through exploratory play (fisher et al., 2008, 305). our study is interested in the iotoys-related character playthings’ capacity to invite children to playful learning through the framework of exploratory play, which we understand as sensory-based play guided by curiosity. the four connected toys employed in our study represent hybrid playthings, which means that they are both physical artefacts and objects which function as portals to digital devices and socially shared content. in order to function in this new media environment, people of different ages need digital awareness, competence, and skills to participate in this digital world (park, 2017). they must know how to use different technologies by understanding their affordances. the article at hand investigates and discusses the pedagogical affordances of the iotoys and explores, how understanding of the toys’ affordances demands expanded understandings of both literacy and knowledge of the nature of transmedia play in both informal and formal settings for play – and from both educators and parents. method in our study, we focus on the educational value of iotoys by investigating their educational potential through three perspectives: first, an analysis of the toy makers’ ideas on the affordances and educational value of the toys; second, a survey concerning parental and kindergarten teachers’ views on the educational potential of digitally-enhanced toys in general, and finally; third: group interviews and play tests regarding preschool-aged children’s responses to a set of iotoys. the study employs toys that, according to their marketers, cater to enjoyment and opportunities for learning. in this way, the toys under scrutiny represent “edutainment,” although their educational promises are often accentuated over the play value of their traditional play patterns. moreover, the iotoys may be framed as—besides connected, digital toys—as transmedia playthings, which encourage their players to resourcefulness, sociality, mobility, accessibility, and replayability (alper & herr-stephenson, 2013). in the study, four iotoys were chosen based on their age-appropriateness, gender-neutrality as character types of toys and their availability on amazon us (in august 2017): 1) cognitoy dino, 2) wonder workshop’s dash robot, 3) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 92 fisher-price’s smart toy bear, and the 4) hatchimal (which has, e.g., the colleggtibles app). these toys fulfil the criteria of iotoys. they are “smart,” and their connectivity usually occurs through mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). in some cases, smart toys also contain their own computers (e.g., the cognitoy dino and fisher-price’s smart toy bear). further, the iotoys are sometimes used with remote control systems to interact with children. iotoys often use sophisticated sensor-based technologies to collect information from children and cloud-based platforms to process this information through realtime interactions. this means that the iotoys offer new opportunities for personalized content to be used in play and learning. we examine the following research questions: rq1 (targeting the kindergarten teachers and parents): what are their attitudes towards and observations of their children’s play with toys with digital dimensions in general? rq2 (targeting the children, asked about each of the investigated iotoys): what could this toy teach you and how would you play with it? we have used a semi-structured, thematic survey to explore parental and kindergarten teachers’ attitudes and parents’ experiences of connected toys. we have conducted two group interviews and interactive play tests with 20 preschool-aged children. the interviews and play tests were conducted in cooperation with two finnish kindergarten groups and the parents of these children in october 2017. our methods include participatory observation, play tests, and written and visual types of documentation through photographing and videotaping the test groups playing, learning, and interacting with the iotoys, including the children drawing their chosen iotoys after the play tests. survey for parents and kindergarten teachers “while parental beliefs appear to play a significant role in children's development, play-learning beliefs remain relatively unexplored in the developmental literature”, fisher et al. write (2008, p. 307). in other words, little is known about parents' beliefs about play. we have used a thematic survey to explore parental and kindergarten teachers’ attitudes and parents’ experiences of digitally enhanced toys in general. although the 14 parents of the altogether 20 preschoolers who participated in our play tests were interviewed about a wide range of topics in relation to digitally-enhanced toys to be presented in the following stages of our research, this article focuses on mainly on investigating the following questions:  does your child play with the (digitally-enhanced) toy alone or in the company of other children?  do you think that playing with this kind of a toy teaches the child new skills?  does the child simultaneously use (other) mobile devices when playing with the toy?  does your child play with the toy in any of the following ways: nurses the toy; uses the toy in narrative play (gives the toy a role and lines of speech in play); explores the toys’ mechanical features; tries to teach the toy new skills; uses the toy as a bedtime companion? group interviews and play tests skolnick weisberg et al. (2016) suggest that adults could ask open-ended questions while children are playing. we followed this idea in our study. we seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 93 conducted two group interviews and interactive play tests with 20 preschoolaged children (5–6 years of age) in a finnish group and a finnish/english speaking bilingual group in a west-coast finnish town in october 2017. finnish children are introduced early to mobile technologies and many even have their own mobile phones and tablets before starting primary school (typically at age 7). we were informed that the children in the finnish group each have their personal tablet at preschool, which they are allowed to use in supervision for a limited time per day. in order to understand the children’s exposure to mobile technologies, we also asked their kindergarten teachers how many of them have a mobile phone of their own. of the children that participated in our study, 10 reported owning a mobile phone. this question was relevant in developing an understanding of whether or not it is possible for the children to, for example, use the mobile phone to operate an app, photograph, or video-record their toys by themselves. analysis this study followed an abductive analysis, which meant that the researchers moved between an inductive reasoning and theoretical knowledge to theorize the phenomenon under investigation (dey, 2003). comparisons were made between theory and research materials, and within the collected, tripartite data. the toys included in our study, according to their marketing materials, suggested educational benefits could be gained through play, such as learning vocabulary, math, geography, science, and more to engage through learning and to play using interactive dialogue (cognitoys dino); hundreds of projects, such as coding challenges and puzzles (dash); social-emotional development, imagination, and creativity (fisher-price’s smart toy bear); teaching the toy things, such as how to talk (it will repeat phrases in its own voice) and how to walk (hatchimals). it is notable, how in the case of hatchimals —the only noneducational toy featured in our study—the role of the teacher is given to the playing child. the envisioned play patterns of the chosen iotoys, according to the toy marketers, are the following: the making of stories, games, jokes, and fun facts; play using interactive dialogue (cognitoys dino); and endless possibilities for freeform play. the player can, for example, create his/her own dance, record the choice, and have the toy play it back (dash); the toy invites the player to make up stories, playing a game, go on adventures, and more. the toy listens and adapts to understand conversations, the player’s voice, and the smart cards included in the packaging (fisher-price’s smart toy bear). the toy can dance and play music, and when kids pat its head, it will make the sound of a drum beat (hatchimals). results toy-based learning, contrary to the often structured, rule-bound, and competitive game-based learning, seems to build on an open-ended, imaginative but still educational realm, especially fit for young learners such as children of preschool age. as noted earlier, this form of play may also be understood as transmedia play. in our study the parents and educators were not asked to specify the new skills that children learn. however, plowman et al. (2010) found out that digital devices like smart toys, tablets, and smart phones are used to promote three seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 94 main areas of learning. the extension of knowledge about the world (cognitive objects), the acquisition of functional skills (such as the operation of a smart phone pen), as well as the development of the propensity for learning (by strengthening a range of emotional, social and cognitive functions of learning). based on our findings, iotoys capability to function as tools for toy-based learning requires planning and supervision from preschool teachers. while the toys offer plenty of entertainment and in this way resources for imaginative play (and thus, learning based on informal and creative play scenarios) learning with them might differ from educational goals set by preschool curricula. for example, the children often responded that a toy could teach them imaginative skills instead of cognitive ones. according to hassinger-das et al., the operative word for defining pretend play is imagining (2017, p. 2). the iotoys capacity to invite their players to imaginative and creative play and, in this way, their potential play value in terms of open-ended play (and intrinsically motivated play), when contrasted to their educational value (instrumentally motivated play) seems in balance as all toys afford both forms of play. potentially, children play with their iotoys and build an imagined world with them. in this theoretical frame, a socio-constructivist view is adopted, according to which learning is not an individual, but particularly social and societal activity that means that learning always takes place in a social context. under such a framework of toy-based learning the use of the educational features of the internet of toys contributes to the realization of: 1) meaningful learning, based on preschool age children's own group work with educational materials (in our case for drawing a picture of their chosen iotoys plaything); 2) authentic learning using learning resources of real-life or simulations of the everyday phenomena (in our case study the fisher-price smart toy bear has for example smart cards that remind the player to “brush his/her teeth”); 3) social learning: technology supports the process of joint knowledge development, connected with toys, iotoys can support collaboration between fellow preschool-aged children, who can be based at different schools or abroad; 4) active-reflective learning: preschool-age children's playing may result in problem-solving using available resources selectively according to their interest, search and learning strategies; 5) problem-based learning: a method that challenges preschool-aged children to “learning by doing”, preschools-aged children’s group are seeking solutions to real world problems, which are based on a toy-based learning framework used to engage children's curiosity and initiate motivation to learning. survey for parents and kindergarten teachers altogether 14 parents (n = 11 female, n = 3 male) from different sociodemographic backgrounds participated in our semi-structured survey. ten of the parents reported that their child owned some kind of toy with digital dimensions. we asked the parents to specifically describe the toys with digital dimensions in order to understand their preconception of iotoys. according to the answers, the toys could be grouped into three categories: toy robots or other toys featuring light, sound, and movements (i.e., “robotic toys that follow orders” (parent1fe); “a soft toy that mimics speech, singing dolls, and also has lights” (parent5ff);“trickster car, robot” (parent1ff); game consoles (“nintendo wii game console”) (parent4mf); but also mobile phones, tablets, and computers (“ipad apps, a recording microphone”) (parent7fe); “mobile phone, tablet = apps” (parent2ff). only two of the parents reported that their child played with the toy alone exclusively; all other respondents said that their child played with the toy both alone and with others. half of the parents considered their child to have learned seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 95 something while playing with digitally enhanced toys. the majority of the parents (8) said that their child did not use other mobile devices while playing. only two of them responded that their child does use other mobile devices while playing with a toy. the most popular play pattern the parents reported their children performing was to explore the toy’s mechanical features (9 children of 20), and the second most popular play pattern was to use the toy in narrative play (7 children out of 20). the third most popular play pattern was to nurse the toy and use it as a bedtime companion (6 children of 20). considering the educational features of the digitally enhanced toys, the parents who answered these questions reported the toy’s most important feature to be its ability to teach the child to how to count, to be self-expressive, to teach good manners, and to take other players into consideration. the toy’s ability to teach its player to read, make questions, and be self-expressive (e.g., to come up with stories) were considered somewhat important by the parents. the preschool educators’ (n=2) perspective in this study allowed us to consider the differences formal and informal learning environments may provide to the connected toys usage as play objects. a comment made by one of the preschool teachers accentuated the concern of educators concerning the uncertainties the digitally-enhanced toys hold for the preschool context for which these toys do not yet present typical tools used in pedagogy: “i see that digital toys are more suitable in the domestic environment than in the kindergarten” (preschool educator, 29 years in the profession). as long as these toys are not included in curricula, educators may not know how to relate to them as playthings that also could be used in teaching. however, we see the potential of iotoys to enter this realm in the near future and claim that educators should prepare for this development. children’s responses to the iotoys children’s input (data) can be analyses and responded to in increasingly individualized ways. this individualization, therefore, has the potential to offer significant educational benefits and is at the center of major changes in existing learning technologies. these technologies can give children “choice in the pace, place and mode of their learning” (gordon, 2014, p. 3). for example, acting on a toy to discover how it works thus leads to better learning compared to playing with a toy merely to confirm what has been shown (skolnick weisberg, et al., 2016). bergen (2004) describes a study, in which boys and girls ages between 3 to 5 years played with ‘talking’ (computer-chip enhanced smart toy) and ‘nontalking’ rescue heroes figures (firemen, police officers). after an initial exploratory period, most of the children used the smart toys in similar ways. the children with speech-enabled toys (smart toy) repeated some phrases and sounds that the smart toy made and initially activated the sound/talk mechanisms, but in their free play most of them used actions and language narratives similar to those of the children with the non-talking toys. our findings point to similar directions. in the two group interview sessions, the researchers introduced all four iotoys to the children one by one, first by showing the toy and then letting each child interact with it. our play tests took 15 to 20 minutes per smart toy. finally, we showed the children a short video of the toys’ functions based on noncommercial material (e.g. how-to-play videos) found on youtube. during the child-toy interaction, the group was asked what the toy could teach them and how they would play with it. the answers to these questions were collected to table 1. below: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/language seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 96 table 1. playful learning patterns associated with the iotoys as described by the children who joined our study. questions cognitoys dino wonder workshop’s dash smart toy bear hatchimals what the toy teaches the child (educational play patterns) * how to make different sounds * how to sing * music * how to make different sounds (e.g., farm animals) *english language * tells stories * how to play tag * how to sing * how to fly * how to read one significant result of our analysis interested in the toys’ affordances was to note the role of sound and movement, which sparked ideas in children about learning of languages, making of sounds, producing music and about learning how to read. again, the movement of an iotoy encouraged the children to envision playing a physically mobile game, such as playing tag. the preschoolers demonstrated the playing of tag by letting the iotoys that moved lead the way and simulated catching them. the children also demonstrated making of sounds and singing during the play tests. some children mentioned that the toy could teach them to fly, but due to the brief play test episodes this ‘skill’ like teaching of how to read were not discussed further on with the children. then again, the children who participated in our study were innovative in their ways to consider what constitutes a learning experience. according to our study they do not necessarily differentiate between teaching of ‘imaginative’ skills (fantasy play) and cognitive skills, but rather, have a more playful perspective on the toys and their capacity to teach them. discussion when considering the development of educational toys in today’s world, it becomes necessary to widen understandings of toy literacy into multiple directions. our research demonstrates, how contemporary toy literacy, especially with the emerging phenomenon of iotoys in mind, should be viewed from a multi-literacy perspective: from the perspectives of media literacy, digital literacy, ludic literacy and finally, transmedia literacy. moreover, in order to understand the iotoys capacity as tools for learning, the concept of transmedia play, as formulated by alper and herr-stephenson (2013), could be included in future research on play with these smart toys, in particular, when they are used in a formal educational setting, such as the early education context of preschools. iotoys need to be considered from the viewpoint of media literacy as toys are a medium among another media. iotoys need to be considered from the viewpoint of digital literacy because they both provide digital content, mediate social interaction and facilitate social practices through digital technology. moreover, iotoys need to be considered from the viewpoint of ludic literacy, because of their nature as interactive playable entities, i.e. their call for digital interplay with technology, other players and potentially, other cultures of play. finally, iotoys need to be considered from the viewpoint of transmedia literacy, because of the play that happens with them is transmedia play, i.e. play that promotes resourcefulness, sociality, mobility, accessibility and replayability. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 97 according to a developed understanding of iotoys, these playthings should be considered to afford play patterns in relation to interaction communicated through e.g. sound, lights, spoken language and movement, which invite the players to resourcefulness, sociality, mobility, accessibility and replayability. in the table below, we have identified different patterns of transmedia play informed by the educational values as communicated by the makers and marketers of the iotoys and our analysis of the play patterns communicated by the preschoolers in our study. table 2. playing with iotoys with preschoolers: our findings (examples) on transmedia-related play patterns as presented by alper & herr-stephenson (2013). when considering the iotoys, learning is awaited to happen in play – through physical and digital manipulation of the toys affordances. recognizing children’s actual play activities with the iotoys in play-based situations would provide educators with useful knowledge on the toys’ capacity to invite play patterns beyond digital play. with the use of iotoys, playful learning resourcefulness: thinking creatively 'players' abilities are tested by the iotoys’ demanding tasks, e.g. playing interactive mini-games (fisher-price's smart toy bear). • players' imaginative play with iotoys presents what the designer may not even have thought of, e.g. using the iotoy as a lamp (like the cognitoy dino). resourcefulness: thinking creatively 'players' abilities are tested by the iotoys’ demanding tasks, e.g. playing interactive mini-games (fisher-price's smart toy bear). • players' imaginative play with iotoys presents what the designer may not even have thought of, e.g. using the iotoy as a lamp (like the cognitoy dino). sociality: playing with others iotoys (like the dash robot) have their own community to share an experience of their own toy by sharing proximal space or connecting digitally with others. the toys also invite to analogue forms of social play. sociality: playing with others iotoys (like the dash robot) have their own community to share an experience of their own toy by sharing proximal space or connecting digitally with others. the toys also invite to analogue forms of social play. mobility: use of mobile technologies movement across media and platforms, for example, operating or the iotoys' functions through use of apps (like programming the dash robot) or enhancing the experience of the toy (like enjoying the narrative dimension and digital play patterns with the hatchimals). mobility: use of mobile technologies movement across media and platforms, for example, operating or the iotoys' functions through use of apps (like programming the dash robot) or enhancing the experience of the toy (like enjoying the narrative dimension and digital play patterns with the hatchimals). accessibility: player's own trajectory iotoys personalize the playing experience thanks to their interactive technologies: players are able to 'teach' the toy and personal data is stored (all featured iotoys). accessibility: player's own trajectory iotoys personalize the playing experience thanks to their interactive technologies: players are able to 'teach' the toy and personal data is stored (all featured iotoys). replayability: revisiting, exploring, investigating on multiple occasions players may contest their earlier experiences with iotoys as the toys provide seemingly 'endless' new content (all featured iotoys). replayability: revisiting, exploring, investigating on multiple occasions players may contest their earlier experiences with iotoys as the toys provide seemingly 'endless' new content (all featured iotoys). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 98 experiences also contribute to the blurring of boundaries between formal and informal learning. digital play may provide opportunities for edutainment entertainment, fun and learning – both at home as well as in learning environments, but the experiences of it are dependent on a child’s individual motives, adult or peer support. nevertheless, the connected toys under scrutiny in our study seem to present suggestions for play beyond their digital features and connectivity. finally, their pre-programmed, educational affordances seem to be embedded in their connectedness and digitally-enhanced features, although learning experiences may result from their hybrid nature, which combine the physical with the digital. conclusions the purpose of this article was to investigate iotoys from the perspective of toybased learning. one of the goals was to explore which educational needs the toys included in our study fulfil. we used four examples of iotoys with preschoolaged children in finland: the cognitoys dino, wonder workshop’s dash, fisher-price’s smart toy bear, and one non-educational toy, hatchimals. some of the features the toys explored in this paper, offer thanks to their connectedness limitless possibilities in terms of pre-programmed content when they work effortlessly. the results of our investigation in the educational promises of the iotoys offers some new insights in how to use connected objects as a part of educational environments, such as the kindergarten as a preschool environment. by summing up our discoveries on preschool-aged children’s use of the iotoys, it can be seen that young children are enthusiastic about digital affordances accessed through physical play objects, but they undertake a range of activities with these toys that foster play, creativity and learning – not only by turning to the digital affordances. surprisingly, the only non-educational toy featured in our study, the hatchimal, was also said by the children to be able to teach something as well. the digital natives who choose to draw this toy after the group interview situation mentioned various things the toy could teach them, ranging from educational (‘reading’), to imaginative skills (‘flying’). in their study, wooldridge and shapka found that during object play with electronic toys mothers talked less with children and were less responsive. instead, the mothers let the toy do the majority of the work to support the interaction (for reference, see hassinger-das, et al., 2017, p. 4). we believe that the current situation with iotoys used both in informal and formal learning contexts is the same: productive interaction—for example learning outcomes— are awaited to happen in the dialogues between the child and the toy. however, as our study shows, without guidance and structured educational goals given by parents or teachers, the iotoys are more considered as “normal” toys (i.e. without use of pre-programmed content) in a play situation with the exception of increased play affordances relying on sound, light, language, and movement. guided play can be used for teaching preschool children. it may enhance the discovery of undemonstrated functions, whereas direct instruction may inhibit this kind of exploration (skolnick weisberg et al., 2016). although the iotoys include educational value, in order for their educational promises to be fulfilled, educators need to guide young children’s digital play in preschool learning situations. marsh et al. (2005) suggested that educators were interested in using technologies with young children but lacked access to an appropriate pedagogical framework for understanding children’s education by the smart toys. this means that descriptions of children’s ideas on and play behavior with the iotoys are useful for educators because they can use these to inform the provision of technologies in early childhood settings in much in the same way seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 14 – issue 1 – 2018 99 that the provision of experiences such as role or construction play is informed by descriptions of children’s exploratory play. finally, it should be noted that several limitations pertain to this study. these include the scarcity of both earlier literature, limitations regarding the background information collected from parents in the survey and the setting of the study. in other words, the limitations that must be consider is a) the earlier literature on the iotoys used in education b) the parental and kindergarten teachers’ attitudes of digitally-enhanced toys surveyed, which did not particularly address the iotoys under scrutiny but digitally-enhanced toys in general and c) the study environment, which in our study was a finnish preschool environment (for n=20, 5-6 year old children) in combination with social group interview and play tests, not individual interviews. despite these limitations, our goal in this study was to consider the potential of the use iotoys in an early-education context to operate as a new tool for observing and assessing young children’s toy-based learning. furthermore, we found out how acknowledging the play with iotoys as a form of transmedia play may help parents and preschool educators to assess their potential. this work has implications for the field in terms of supporting early educators to better understand how children are learning through the use of iotoys through play, and as consequence to plan for more effective toy-based learning that takes into consideration contemporary toys’ capacity to ‘teach’ their players beyond their digital affordances and rather, through their multidimensionality. finally, based on our study, it is possible to argue, that play with digitallyenhanced, smart toys which we in this paper consider as iotoys, can also lead to imaginative and creative play. seen in this light, these hybrid objects of play call out for multi-literacy and in particular transmedia literacy. this playful approach to literacy, when considering use of iotoys in an educational context, also needs to be understood as transmedia play – the simultaneous knowledge of content and characters that travel across media and between physical and digital affordances, and the contexts of informal and formal learning. acknowledgements we wish to express our gratitude to the children, parents and preschool teachers for participating in our group interviews, play tests and survey. this study has been partially funded by the academy of finland and tekes: the finnish funding agency for innovation. it is part of the ludification and the emergence of playful culture (276012) and hybrid social play (2600360411) research projects. references alper, m., & herr-stephenson, r. 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(2005). the misunderstood learning activity: play. teacher magazine 17(5), 1-2. author bios toy researcher katriina heljakka holds a post-doctoral position at university of turku (digital culture studies) and continues her research on toys and the visual, material, digital and social cultures of play in the academy of finland project centre of excellence in game culture studies. her current research interests include the emerging toyification of contemporary culture, toy design and the hybrid and social dimensions of ludic practices. contact: katriina.heljakka@utu.fi pirita ihamäki received her ma in digital culture 2006, msc. in marketing 2011 and her phd. in digital culture 2015 from the university of turku at pori unit. she is currently working as project manager involved in game-related projects at prizztech ltd. she has also worked as a researcher at different universities. her current research interests are game design, gamification, service design, toyification, the internet of toys and toy tourism. contact: pirita.ihamaki@prizz.fi acknowledgements we wish to express our gratitude to the children, parents and preschool teachers for participating in our group interviews, play tests and survey. this study has been partially funded by the academy of finland. it is part of the ludification and the emergence of playful culture (decision #275421) and centre of excellence in game culture studies (decision #312396) research projects. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2753489 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0963721416645512 http://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2016/1/21/hello-barbie-security-part-%092-analysis http://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2016/1/21/hello-barbie-security-part-%092-analysis http://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2016/1/21/hello-barbie-security-part-%092-analysis http://www.somersetrecon.com/blog/2016/1/21/hello-barbie-security-part-%092-analysis http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5685507/?reload=true!60 mailto:katriina.heljakka@utu.fi preschoolers learning with the internet of toys: from toy-based edutainment to transmedia literacy katriina heljakka abstract introduction: new approaches to toy literacy related work method results conclusions references seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 digitalized story-making in the classroom a social semiotic perspective on gender, multimodality and learning håvard skaar research fellow oslo university college, norway email: havard.skaar@lu.hio.no abstract the article takes the case of pupils in a fifth-year primary school class (10-11 years old) who use text and pictures in their creative writing on the classroom computers. the study confirms what the research literature indicates, that girls show more interest than boys in writing and storytelling, while boys show greater interest than girls in using computer technology. social semiotics is used as a theoretical basis for analysing the connection between these differences and relating them to what girls and boys learn. in a social semiotic perspective, learning can be related to the experience of the difference between what we intend to express and what we actually manage to express or mean. in the article, it is argued that social semiotics provides a theoretical basis for asserting that the girls in this case learn more than the boys because they associate themselves with the signs they use through more choices than the boys. the girls, we could say, put their own mark on the signs by coding or creating them themselves while the boys tend more to choose ready-made signs. ready-made signs require fewer choices than the signs we make or code ourselves. fewer choices means less experience of the difference between what we wish to mean and what we actually mean, and hence less learning. a pedagogical consequence of this is that boys may be better served by having online work with multimodality of expression organised in such a way that it combines as far as possible the use of ready-made signs with signs they code or create themselves. background to the case study and problem addressed this study describes how boys and girls in a fifth-year school class used writing and pictures when creating narrative on the classroom computers. the research literature points to differences between girls and boys in relation to their interest in writing, story-telling and the use of digital technology. the task given to the pupils served to concretise these differences, which can all be linked to the relationship between signs and experience. social semiotics concerns how we use signs to give our experience meaning. it thus provides a theoretical basis for analysing how the boys and girls in this case study made use of digitally mediated signs in their story-telling. the interpretation of the results shows that computers assume a different function in the meaningmaking process for girls and boys respectively and the findings also contribute to the development of a social semiotic learning theory. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 2 both national and international research points to marked differences in girls’ and boys’ writing skills (purves, 1992; gambell & hunter, 2000). in the final examinations of the 10-year compulsory school in norway, girls obtain better results than boys in all subjects, except in mathematics and physical education. the greatest difference is seen in the written norwegian exams (vagle, 2005). the research literature also shows that there are differences in boys’ and girls’ interest in narrative. the same differences are shown in both oral and written discourse. eriksson (1997) has studied the difference in girls’ and boys’ oral narrative. he states that the girls in his material are simply more interested in story-telling than boys are. correspondingly, merisuo-storm (2006) demonstrates that girls in the fifth school year in finland are clearly more interested than boys in writing narrative. eriksson further shows that girls have a greater tendency to express their feelings and subjective evaluations in oral story-telling, while boys tend to report an external event without reflecting over their own feelings in relation to it. boys describe their own breach of norms uncritically while girls express shame in relation to this type of action. correspondingly, numerous studies of written narrative by girls and boys show that girls tend to put greater emphasis on feelings and personal relations while boys tend to emphasise autonomy, competition and aggression (gray-schlegel & grayschlegel, 1996; romantowski & trepanier-street, 1987; tuck, bayliss & bell, 1985).it is further shown that girls in the early school years show a greater tendency to relate their narrative to a primary territory, while boys relate it to a secondary territory. in other words, girls base their narrative on personal feelings and experience while boys tend to describe circumstances outside their own realm of experience (graves, 1973). berge (2005) has shown how girls in the older classes develop this subjective and emotive form of expression into the forms and conventions of the fictional literature genre. this contributes to their achieving better results than the boys in written norwegian examinations. in the present study, these findings are considered in the context of research on gender differences in relation to the use of, interest in and attitudes to computer technology (durndell, glissov & siann, 1995; vollman, 2005; endrestad et.al., 2004; erson, 1992). this research shows that computer technology generally has a greater appeal for boys than for girls. more specifically, boys tend to be interested in technology for technology’s sake, while girls are more concerned with the communicative possibilities the technology offers them (comber, colley, hargreaves & dorn, 1997; schofield & hubert, 1998; torgersen, 2004). when pupils compose digital narrative in the classroom, there is a convergence of the activities of writing, story-telling and the use of digital technology. in all these fields, research literature points to differences between girls and boys in attitudes, interests and performance. this study confirms that girls show greater interest than boys in writing and story-telling, while boys demonstrate a greater interest than girls in using computers. the present article will examine the interrelationship between these general trends and interpret them in the light of social semiotics theory. two questions will be posed: 1. what is the difference between girls’ and boys’ story-telling? 2. what do these differences imply for girls’ and boys’ actual learning? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 3 theoretical basis of the study social semiotics and multimodality ferdinand de saussure held that the sign is arbitrary and negatively defined. the sign is arbitrary because there is a coincidental connection between the sign’s content and expression, and between the sign and the sign’s referent outside the system of signs. the sign is negatively defined because it obtains its meaning from that which the other signs in the sign system are not. taking this as his point of departure, saussure drew up the basis for a structural interpretation of the language system (langue) which had significance far beyond linguistics. language in use (parole), on the other hand, was not susceptible to systematisation, according to saussure, and ended up in what hodge & kress (1988) calls ”saussure’s rubbish bin”. in a social semiotics perspective, however, it is the language in practical use, its function in human interaction, which is the basis for theoretical development and analysis. according to michael halliday, the function of language in use is to create meaning. the meaning-making process cannot be separated from its social and cultural context. this is the point of departure for his social semiotics and functional grammar (1985, 2004). both aspects have been applied as a theoretical basis for analysing gender differences in relation to children’s use of writing (kamler, 1994; kanaris, 1999). however, since halliday restricts his theory building to the spoken language, he does not develop concepts appropriate to the study of gender differences in children’s use of writing together with other types of sign (for example pictures). his student günther kress, on the other hand, in collaboration with theo van leeuwen (2001), developed the concept ”multimodal discourse” to incorporate this interplay of different types of sign. they assert that discourse, i.e. the expression of what we mean, will always be multimodal. this means that discourse can only be realised through the simultaneous use of different types of sign, or mode. writing, for example, is a sign system which must be given material form in order to be read (for example as handwriting or printed letters of one kind or another), and this material form always carries meaning in itself. kress & van leuween relate both digital technology and multimodality, often concretised in their work as the relationship between lay-out, writing and images, to a medial development from page to screen (snyder, 1997). the media’s digitalisation of different types of sign has consequences both for what we say and how we say it. in the study presented in this article, the children have been given the task of using the computer to create meaning structured as narrative. the concept ”multimodal discourse” brings together discourse (our “meaning” about something) with the way in which this discourse is expressed (as multimodality). this association is the basis for our analysis of the girls’ and boys’ discursive and multimodal choices when committing their narrative to the computer screen. in the following discussion, the differences that manifest themselves are related to the girls’ and boys’ learning output. multimodality and learning in a social semiotics perspective, it is our use of the sign that gives it meaning. how we express ourselves is not fortuitous. in practice (as parole), the sign in other words is not arbitrary but chosen on the basis of the user’s interests and semiotic possibilities. kress holds that all use of signs is based on a double metaphor. first we choose some aspect of an object we wish to say something about (it is impossible to say everything and our interests will dictate what it is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 4 about the object we want to focus on) and we also choose a sign that represents what we are interested in saying about the object (our semiotic resources determine our range of choices). kress uses a three-year-old boy’s drawing of a car in the form of circles on a sheet of paper as an example of such a double metaphor: the boy (on the basis of his interests) allows the wheels to represent the car (first metaphor) before (on the basis of his semiotic possibilities) he allows the circles to represent the wheels (second metaphor) (kress, 2003). these two metaphorical operations mean that there is no absolute concurrence between what the user of the sign wishes to signify and what he or she succeeds in signifying. the sign is never wholly apt. this gives rise to learning: “there is, however, a more profound way of seeing the process of semiosis (of making meaning) as a process of learning. in making a representation a person is making a new sign out of what they want to signify, with existing signifying materials. the sign-maker chooses the signifier that is most apt for being the vehicle to represent that which they wish to signify. however, there is never an exact fit, but it is the best possible fit of meaning and form. in the gap between what they meant to mean and what they have to use to mean it exists the possibility of the new; a sign that not only had not been made before, but a sign that wrenches their meanings in unpredictable directions. that lack of fit, and that wrenching, change not only the externally made sign, but also the inwardly made sign in its relation to other signs inwardly held. the new state of all signs now marks the effect of sign-making as meaning. (jewitt & kress, 2003 p.13) learning in a social semiotics perspective can thus be linked to the experience of what we mean to mean and what meaning we convey. this explains why we often observe that a text improves when we re-write it. at the same time, we also perceive that we express something different when we draw or paint than when we write or sing or dance. this gives a theoretical basis for discussing what the differences between the girls’ and boys’ use of writing, pictures and other signs mean for the learning process they embark on in creating their stories on the classroom computer. method classroom context this study was conducted as part of a research project in which i, as one of eight researchers, observed the use of technology in two school classes in oslo and bergen. the classroom described here is located in a large primary and lower secondary school (about 480 pupils) in a middle-class area in central oslo. there were 23 pupils in the class at the time of the study, but, in order for the group to reflect normal variation, pupils being given special follow-up because of reading and writing difficulties were not included. the total number of pupils in the survey was therefore 18, comprising 7 girls and 11 boys. of the girls, 3 were ethnic norwegians, 3 had a mixed background and 1 was not an ethnic norwegian. of the 11 selected boys, 9 were ethnic norwegians, 1 had a mixed background while 1 was not an ethnic norwegian. because of the pupils requiring special follow-up, the class has two teachers, roger and lisa, and a teaching assistant, sergio. the pupils’ parents have given written consent to the project group’s research results being published in anonymized form. the pupils have 28 class hours a week, of which 5 hours are given to norwegian lessons and 2 to natural science. i explained to the teachers that i was interested in studying a process in which the pupils used digital seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 5 technology in the narrative presentation of learning material and came to an agreement with them on the organisation of school hours. the actual storywriting concluded a learning sequence in which the pupils were first made familiar with human anatomy through the teacher’s presentation of the subject, through analogue and digital learning resources and in discussions with each other. after the class had learned in their science lessons how the human body functions, this material was integrated in the pupils’ work through the task of producing their own narrative in their norwegian lessons. the entire activity was distributed over a total of 14 class hours. data collection my first contact with the pupils and their teachers took place two weeks before the learning sequence began. the other researchers in the project group had earlier in the autumn filmed the pupils’ interaction at the computer over a longer period. on the basis of discussions with my fellow-researchers and my own preliminary observations in the classroom, i selected eight of the pupils: half of each gender and in the teacher’s opinion evenly distributed over three levels of norwegian language competence: high, medium and low. these pupils i filmed during the learning process in sequences of 2 to 20 minutes duration, a total of 2.5 hours. i gathered in the stories of all the pupils in the class and for eight of them these texts could therefore be matched against the video recordings and observational data. an addition source of data is the pupils’ handwritten diaries (logbooks). these diaries had been in use on monday mornings throughout the school year. the pupils wrote and drew in them freely about what they had experienced over the weekend. when the pupils were using these diaries, the screens would not be filled with digital signs but the jotting paper would be filled with carbon, colour and ink. contrasted with the pupils’ digitalised narratives, these jotters (in a4 format with stickers, writing and drawings) provide a basis for comparing how the girls and boys in the class express themselves by means of the technologies available to them. in her social semiotics analysis of how 6year-olds create meaning through drawings, hopperstad holm (2002) points to differences in the social and semiotic function of the drawings for the girls and boys she has studied. in the study presented in this article, the use made by girls and boys of analogue drawings in their jotters has also been included, as a contrast to their use of digital images when producing text on the computer screen. this contrast reveals clearly the differences between girls’ and boys’ interest in using writing and pictures when digital representation forms are applied in creating narrative. the task through their norwegian lessons, the pupils were already familiar with simple word processing and how to retrieve pictures from the google picture database. the immediately preceding work with tasks on the websites www.naturundring.no and www.norskverkstedet.no would help to create shortcuts to relevant learning resources. (how the body absorbs oxygen and how to write a story). after the teacher (roger) had taken them through the topic of how the body takes in oxygen from the air, the pupils were assigned the following task: ”you are going to write a story. imagine you are an oxygen molecule, called oggy oxygen, for example, who gets into someone’s body. what happens? you can illustrate your story with pictures if you want to.”1 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 6 the pupils’ assignment, then, was to tell a story. the narrative was to be a multimodal discourse in which the learning material could be combined with personal experience and in which the written text could be combined with pictures. in other words, the pupils had quite a free choice as to what the story could be about (discourse) and as to how this discourse should be given expression (multimodal use of signs). the result was that the pupils combined their own experience with the learned facts in various ways and that they combined writing and pictures (and other types of signs) in different ways. the small-scale qualitative study presented in this article supports qualitative and quantitative findings of differences between girls’ and boys’ interest in telling and writing about themselves and their relations to others (cf. eriksson, 1997; merisuo-storm, 2006; gray-schlegel & gray-schlegel, 1996). but individual pupils also made choices that clearly deviated from the typical patterns in these studies. in other words, sex and gender did not conform even in this little group. especially boys participating in girlish cultures have traditionally been subjected to heavy social sanctions. nevertheless, this choice appeared to be an accessible option for the boys in this study. this might indicate that traditional gendered behaviour is now under a pressure that gives both girls and boys wider scope than before in their reading, writing and use of multimodal resources. nevertheless, a comparison of all the stories in the class showed a systemic difference in the discursive and (multi)modal choices the girls and boys made when creating their stories. in the analysis, these general trends are further analysed through a more detailed description of the stories of two of the girls and two of the boys in the class. analysis discourse: what the girls and boys narrated all the pupils were faced with discursive choices, since both the subject material and their personal experience were relevant to the story they were to tell. these discursive choices reveal that the girls and boys in the study followed different patterns. generally speaking, the girls based their story on their own person and/or their own body. they were less concerned than the boys with the need to include concepts and facts from the learning discourse in their stories. instead, they filled their narrative with a discursive content closer to their own personal experience. the problem the molecule, as the hero of the story, meets in the girls’ accounts, concerns a threat to the body, which is not always specified but which the molecule does its best to deal with. the molecule has other oxygen molecules as friends and it has family members (mother, grandmother etc.) it cares about and is happy to meet. in other words, in the girls’ stories the molecule is personified in a way that gives it emotive associations with others. these associations load the story with meaning and are clearly more important to the girls’ narrative than to that of the boys in the study. cathrin, for example, uses selected elements of the learning material to give her story a development in which neither she herself (as a person in the story) or oggy oksygen come to any harm. the physiological fate of the oxygen molecule in fact is to be consumed by the body. this breaks with the emancipatory plot typical of the stories children are usually familiar with. but when cathrin creates a connection between the oxygen molecule, the lungs, heart and blood and her i-person’s intentions and fate in the story, she pays no heed to the oxygen molecule’s real function in the body. she both chooses her own body as the arena for the action and relates her own emotional life closely to the events experienced by the main character, oggy oksygen. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 7 the girls associate the events in the story closely with their own identity. by doing so, it is easier for them to choose which events to relate on the basis of their personal experience. in cathrin’s story, oggy oksygen is the i-person (female in this case), and the story angle is firmly maintained throughout the narrative. at the outset, the oxygen molecule is in the classroom where cathrin is sitting writing her story. the story begins by oggy oksygen introducing herself. this is immediately followed in the second line with the names of oggy’s two best friends, the oxygen molecules hippe hydro and britte blod. oggy oksygen ends up in cathrin’s ”boy-mad” body by chance, but once inside she manages to sneak past the ”heart’s bodyguard” into the heart chamber, looking for food. she finds ”only blood and meat from the food cathrin had eaten”, but is also fortunate enough to meet up again with her friends hippe and britte. at that point the ”heart guard” moves to throw her out, so she climbs out of cathrin’s body again. the story ends with her being eaten and spat out by a bird before she falls ”into infinity”. a discourse linked to personal feelings and experiences can be viewed as an expression of girls’ interest in using the story to explore their own identity. the girls in the study relate to the events in the story as problems or conflicts they must deal with on an emotive basis as these arise. this may help to explain why the girls demonstrate greater confidence than boys in the development of a narrative structure, although this interest alone is naturally not enough to guarantee the girls’ success as narrators. maria doesn’t quite succeed. both the presentation and the figures that populate her story are clearly inspired by the traditional fairy story. her story tells of an oxygen molecule (oggy oxygen and/or another oxygen molecule) the blood cells want to eject from the body because he smells so bad. the oxygen molecule then makes his way to the heart. there he meets the queen and marries her. as king, he helps other oxygen molecules who are in danger of being expelled. in the first sentence of the story, maria establishes oggy oxygen as a helper in her own body but already in the second sentence there is the beginning of an ungrammatical and inconsistent use of pronouns that makes it difficult to place oggy oxygen in the narrative development that follows. in fragmentary form, the text recounts a series of emotive events in the fairy-story genre: a love story, a story of mercy, one of ostracization and one of forgiveness. maria doesn’t succeed in integrating these emotionallycharged events into a coherent narrative but she links them together to make a single text. the girls’ emphasis on feelings and close relationships is a trait that stands in opposition to the boys’ depiction of external action, associated with speed and combat. applying günther kress’ concept we can say that the boys choose their discourse on the basis of other ”interests” than those of the girls (kress, 2003, p. 43). the boys’ molecules are thirdperson figures with implausible skills such as the ability to surf, drive racing cars and so on. the sequence of events in their stories primarily concerns the molecule’s passage through the body. the boys do not describe feelings and intimate interpersonal relations but rather the oxygen molecule’s attempt to fulfil a mission by fighting and beating its adversaries. the main characters generally assume the role of some kind of superhero, but the boys do not always succeed in integrating this superhero in a narrative structure. stephen adopts a consistent third-person narrator perspective. the twelveyear-old oxygen molecule ole ksygen who ”digs wind-surfing” and is ”sucked into the mouth” of a boy the ”heart’s bodyguards” tell him is dying. ole finds his way into the heart and learns from ”the leader” there that the boy is about to die and that they need an oxygen molecule able to fly so fast through the body that the oxygen will become ”clean”. ole performs the task successfully, thereby saving the boy’s life. ole’s family are happy that he will be breathed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 8 out again and inside the body they set up a statue of him in the brain and commemorate him with ”o.ksygen day”. like cathrin, stephen has written a story with a successful narrative structure. his main character assumes a traditional hero’s role inspired by tales of adventure. when his hero wins the day, this is given manifest recognition in the form of a statue. stephen thus immortalises his oxygen molecule. in contrast to the girls, the boys do not relate their stories directly to themselves personally or to their own experience. a hero figure acts out the story. in order to carry out the learning task, the boys have to rework the technical discourse into a story. stephen manages to do this successfully. he creates a narrative structure based on processing the learning material presented and reviewed in class. frank, on the other hand, fails to relate to the subject matter and so doesn’t succeed in his story-telling either. his text does not function as a story, even though he begins with a formula taken from a fairy story: ”there was once an oxygen called bloddy oksygen ” three sentences later there are two more narrative sentences: ” bloddy oksygen came from a bit of roast beef and into some person or other. the meat was going off. but they ate it all the same.” the rest of the text consists of sentences with informative content although this information serves no function in the story. the main character in the story alternates between being a determined individual and a general phenomenon, and the narrative structure therefore suffers. the product is not narrative but informative, while the factual information about the oxygen molecule is largely erroneous: ”bloddy oksygen can help doctors to give blood”, ”if bloddy oksygen gets into someone’s brain the person will die.”. bloddy oksygen is presented in both the informative and narrative discourse as a bloodthirsty, carnivorous monster with no linguistic foundation in a narrative universe. frank is distinguished from maria (who also has problems connecting the discursive elements in her story) by not being willing in the same way to draw on his own feelings as the basis for the structure such story-telling requires. this might suggest that story-telling is a more demanding task for him in this case than for maria and the other girls. the consequence of these gender-specific preferences is clearly seen when the pupils’ stories are compared with their handwritten diaries. the diaries give a chronological account of what happened at the weekend and are not subject to evaluation.(see polanyi, 1982; eriksson. 1997). here it is more difficult to distinguish between the boys’ and girls’ accounts. multimodality: how the girls and boys told their stories when pupils are working at the computer, they are using a type of technology that makes certain forms of semiotic resources available while others are excluded (kress, 2005). discursive choices are also reflected through the pupils’ use of these semiotic resources. these include pupils’ use of text, different font types and symbols and their choice of textual organisation, colour and pictures. our study looked at the differences between the girls’ and boys’ use of writing with different types of technology at their disposition. in composing stories on the computer, the boys made much greater use than the girls of a combination of writing and other semiotic resources. 9 out of 12 boys in the class found pictures or diagrams on the internet and pasted them into their stories. only 2 out of 7 girls did the same. among the girls, this was done in the two weakest answers but there is no correspondence between the use of pictures/symbols seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 9 and factual quality in relation to the boys’ answers. the girls in our survey make much less use than the boys of pictures and symbols in their stories. in relation to the pupils’ handwritten diaries, the opposite is true. there the girls combine written text with drawings and symbols to a far greater extent than the boys. it is also striking to note that, with one exception, all the girls drew pictures of themselves. only 2 of the 12 boys did this. when working on the computer, all the pupils, irrespective of gender, used ms word’s font series wordart to create an eye-catching title. for the remainder of the text, the girls made much less use than the boys of the possibilities the word-processing software offered them in choosing how to format their text. in their diaries, on the other hand, the boys opted much less frequently than the girls to “design” their writing creatively or enhance it with borders or other decorative features. the use of pictures and drawings cathrin chose to approach the assignment as a purely written exercise, paying no heed to the teacher’s suggestions about using pictures. both the teacher and cathrin herself explained that she also likes writing stories on her computer at home. she expresses clear tastes and preferences and has a selfaware attitude to her own creative ability, which she describes as ”my creativity”. she also likes drawing. at one point in her diary she recounts in relation to a home task that ”i finished a 30-page comic-book i made myself”. her diary reveals that she takes a keen interest in popular culture in the form of books, tv-series, films etc. she has drawn herself in various versions (figure 1.1). she draws using a type of line drawing from the comic-book ”witch”, and in general demonstrates an ability to make personal use of popular culture in a way the research literature often presents as ideal (buckingham,2003; willis,1990). for stephen the ratio of written text to technology and drawings/pictures is the converse. in common with most of the boys, stephen has used a picture in his story (figure 1.2). he has chosen a diagram that shows a schematic presentation of the body’s internal organs. this reinforces the impression that stephen is more concerned than cathrin to ensure his story is correct in terms of the factual material presented in class. in the handwritten diary stephen has kept throughout the school year, however, there are no pictures. he has made only a limited attempt to give his titles some kind of special typographic format. this consists of a faint wavy line above and below the text and highlighting the first letter of every word with a red felt-tip pen. as for other semiotic resources, he has pasted two small stickers into his book (and four on the cover). cathrin’s diary is decorated with two of the same types of sticker on the front page but the inside is full of drawings and symbols. the portrait of herself which in the digitally mediated narrative is given in writing is conveyed in the diary through a combination of written text, drawings and symbols. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 10 figure 1.1: drawing in cathrin’s diary. figure 1.2: picture in stephen’s story (there were no drawings in his diary). a comparison of their stories and diaries shows that the way in which cathrin and stephen use semiotic resources with different technologies at their disposal is typical for the girls and boys in the class respectively. in their diaries, all the girls, with one exception, have drawn themselves at least once (figures 2.1-2.4). figure 2.1: eva’s drawing of herself. figure 2.2: shabana’s drawing of herself.f figure 2.3: raya’s drawing of herself. figure 2.4: ida’s drawing of herself. the boys have generally not drawn as much in their diaries as the girls. two of the boys have drawn themselves. one boy is playing the violin (figure 3.1), the other football. the violinist has drawn himself as a violin. the other boy, who is very good at drawing, has drawn himself at the moment he throws himself forward and saves a goal. both emphasise an action when depicting seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 11 themselves. this presentation of a self that, as it were, becomes the action the person is performing, illustrates a consistent difference between girls’ and boys’ use of discursive and semiotic resources in the collected data material. the boys’ choice of semiotic resources means that their own “i” is not revealed. while frank chooses a star wars figure as the protagonist in his story (figure 3.2), ikmed chooses to illustrate his diary with figures inspired by the dual master cards he collects (figure 3.3). on the whole, he draws the figures without referring to them in his written text. the boys therefore do not blend the commercialised cultural representation with their own person in the open way cathrin and many of the other girls do. the figures often have qualities that are so unreal or scary that they quite overshadow the boys’ own identities. figure 3.1: the violinist who has drawn himself in his diary. figure 3.2: frank’s picture in his story. figure 3.3: ikmed’s dual master drawing in his diary. use of written text and font types in the design of the story’s main heading, the title, there is no clear difference between the girls’ and boys’ choices. roger has told me that the pupils ”like dressing up their work” and the material gives an unambiguous picture of what devices they choose to use to design or ”embellish” the titles of their digital narratives. without exception, they use the ms word font series wordart to design an eye-catching heading. in their diaries, however, there is a marked difference between the girls’ and the boys’ interest in working the design of their own writing. the girls put a lot more work into this than the boys do. in maria’s diary, this embellishment of the writing has a close association with the written description of her own person (figure 4). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 12 figure 4: maria: ”i was quite a little cutie with pigtails and make-up bag”. in the layout of text and pictures, the boys are generally less concerned to comply with textual conventions than the girls are. they make more use of the word processing software’s possibilities but in a way that weakens the structure of their presentation. the research literature points to the fact that boys are interested in technology for technology’s sake while girls are primarily interested in the technology’s communicative possibilities (cf. comber, colley, hargreaves & dorn, 1997; schofield & hubert, 1998; torgersen, 2004). in our study, the boys were generally observed to use the word processing system more than the girls in a way that makes it visible, makes it ”stand out” as digital technology (figure 5.) the way the girls use it, on the other hand, is primarily subordinate to the formal requirements they have learned at school in regard to writing and the use of text and pictures. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 13 figure 5: how one of the boys explored the possibilities of the word processing system the relationship between technology and the use of written text and other semiotic resources (pictures, drawings, fonts, symbols) in the girls’ and boys’ meaning-making process can be schematised as in table 1. technology: girls boys pc low high pen/paper high low table 1. girls’ and boys’ use of signs other than writing (pictures, symbols, embellishment) given the availability of different technologies discussion gender and representativeness our study shows that the interests expressed through the girls’ and boys’ discursive choices are also apparent when they use the pc’s digital resources. at the same time, the focus on the selected pupils shows that the relationship between gender and writing (and other types of signs) is a complex phenomenon (peterson & calovini, 2004; peterson & ladky, 2001). the significance of gender must always be nuanced at individual level. as thomas newkirk puts it “generalizations about gender, because of their scope, are full of holes. obviously not every child fits them, and most likely no one child fits them all the time. generalizations about gender at best can only describe tendencies and patterns – not deterministic limitations.” (newkirk, 2002, p.22). in the material, john is the clearest example of this. he broke completely with my gender stereotype expectations. in his social life, he mixes more with the girls than the boys, and he writes himself into the typical girls’ universe when in his story he uses his own body as the arena for the action, and also describes seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 14 himself as ”very sensitive” and ”little me”. to a greater extent than the other boys, he develops a relationship to the corporal, including the taboo-laden repulsiveness (“yuckiness”) associated with blood and bodily processes. john has used a little disney symbol in his story but no pictures. in his diary, however, he has drawn two girls. they are drawn with the same kind of line and style as the girls in the class use. one is in connection with a visit to the cinema with a girl cousin, the other with a school function (figure 6). figure 6: john’s drawing in his diary john thus falls into the typical ”girl’s pattern” in his choice of discursive and semiotic resources. at the same time, it is possible to hold that his very atypical-ness confirms the conventional boundaries between the boys’ and girls’ universe revealed in the rest of the material. these conventions are clearly seen in the classroom and are thereby valid in a description of what distinguishes girls’ and boys’ use of computer technology in this case. at the same time, it is clear that the sample is so small that this use is not representative of others than the pupils in the class studied. nevertheless, the gender-specific differences manifested in the study in relation to story-telling, writing and the use of digital technology are in line with research findings in other qualitative and quantitative studies. this reinforces the relevance of the study in relation to larger populations. kress and jewitt define learning as the experience of ”the lack of fit” between intended meaning and expressed meaning. this is the point of departure for investigating what the available signs, in the form of digitally mediated semiotic resources, mean for pupils’ learning process in this instance. the study is thereby also a contribution to the development of a social semiotic theory of learning. what is the difference between the girls’ and boys’ narratives? in the material as a whole, the contrast between the personal and impersonal creates a gender-based dividing line visible in both their discursive and multimodal choices. in these choices, the girls focus on themselves in a way shunned by the boys. the interest in appearing in their own identity, in revealing themselves in some way through written text and images, is therefore a key to understanding the different ways in which the girls and boys approached the given assignment. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 15 through their discursive choices, the girls related the narrative to their personal feelings and experience. this can be seen as an expression of the girls’ interest in using the story-telling to explore their own identity and thus also in allowing the story to take on aspects of their own lives. the girls’ multimodal choices show the same pattern. regardless of technology, the girls prefer to express themselves through the type of semiotic resources that afford them the best opportunity to make meaning based on their own person and body. on the pc, they prefer to use written text in answering their assignments, not choosing to find pictures and symbols on the internet to nearly the same extent as the boys. in their handwritten diaries, however, the ratio of text to image is the converse. there the girls combine writing with drawings and symbols much more than the boys do. in contrast to the boys, the girls (with one exception) all draw themselves in their diaries, while they use written text to describe themselves in their digital stories. in contrast to the girls, the boys do not relate their stories to their own feelings and experiences but to a discourse outside their own sphere of intimacy (cf. graves (1973), indicating that boys prefer to draw their narrative from “a secondary territory”. it is easier to talk about oneself than about something not known through one’s own feelings and experience (cf. also gee’s distinction between ”primary and secondary discourse”(gee, 1999)). from this point of view, it is more difficult for boys than girls to make their chosen discursive material function as a story. a comparison of the boys’ choice of semiotic resources when working on the computer with the resources they choose to use in their handwritten diaries confirms this pattern. as noted, the boys make much less use than the girls of the possibilities of personalising their entries through writing and drawings. the written text is not elaborated or embellished to any extent and most of the boys draw little or nothing. those of the boys who choose to draw themselves do not portray themselves as the girls do through emotive relations but through actions and skills. correspondingly, the boys’ use of digitally mediated pictures and symbols serves to create a distance between the related events and the boys’ own persons. when free to choose, the boys appear more than the girls to prefer semiotic resources which they do not need to relate to their own body, person and identity. at the computer, they show a stronger preference than the girls for using ready-coded semiotic resources (symbols and pictures), while the girls favour semiotic resources they can code themselves (writing). what is the significance of these differences for girls’ and boys’ learning outcomes? an account has been given above of how jewitt and kress relate multimodality to learning. they maintain that we learn from experiencing that there is not ”an exact fit” between our intended meaning and our expressed meaning. different modalities or forms of representation emphasise different aspects of our experience and therefore also represent different forms of learning. at the same time, learning is also often described as ”the acquisition of knowledge”. another way of putting it is that learning something means ”making knowledge one’s own”. we succeed in making knowledge our own when we manage to articulate it ”in your own words”, as school exercises put it. in this lies a general perception of learning as the assumption of some kind of ownership over the knowledge-based discourse. this ownership is expressed through the ability to choose how we wish to present it. different modes (writing, drawing, etc.) offer different options. our study shows that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 16 these choices must also be given a place in a theory of multimodality and learning. in the written mode, the pupils must make choices so that letters become words, words sentences and sentences text. these choices must at the same time be appropriate to the situational context (the classroom) and the cultural context (the story as genre). when the pupils draw, they do not need to conform to a set of conventional signs (words) but in principle can place each line as they wish. if the choice is e.g. a star wars figure, they relate their own person to the sign through a number of consecutive (analogue) choices as the pencil is guided over the paper. if the pupils choose instead to copy a star wars figure from the web into their digital text, they only relate to the figure through that one choice. both writing and drawing, on the other hand, which the girls tend to prefer more than the boys, require the pupils to make choices on more levels than when they copy digital images into their stories. the use of ready-made signs gives less room for experiencing that there is not ”an exact fit” between what the sign signifies and what the user means to mean. the interest in ready-coded signs may imply that boys learn less than girls through using signs because they relate less to the signs they choose to use. but in a multimodal text the ready-made codes the computer makes accessible can also stimulate greater use of signs the pupils code themselves, writing for example. stephen’s picture of the body’s inner organs (figure 1.2) shows that he has chosen to use an image that reinforces the factual content of his narrative. the image is related to the learning task through the written part of his multimodal discourse. frank’s choice of a star wars figure from the google database, on the other hand, is a breach of the learning intentions behind the teacher’s assignment of the task. so too is the irony that marks his written discourse. this makes the role of digital technology in relation to frank’s meaning-making process more ambiguous. on the one hand, frank uses ready-made signs to avoid personal commitment to the task. on the other hand, the star wars figure is part of a multimodal text which also includes the use of writing. the work of finding ”an exact fit” comprises a number of choices for which the computer helps to set the premises through the access it provides to semiotic resources. it is these choices that determine the extent to which the pupils commit themselves, through investing their emotions and experience, to the story they are recounting. in our study, the use of digital technology does not compensate for the boys’ failure to reveal their own person in their story-telling. the girls therefore retain their advantage as story-tellers, despite the fact that it is the boys who take the greatest interest in the expressive possibilities available to them through the computer. conclusion the pupils associate themselves with the signs they use through choice. when the signs are ready-made, the choices have already been made. the boys in the study choose, to a greater degree than the girls, to use ready-made signs (in the form of pictures and symbols) in their story-telling. the girls, on the other hand, tend more to code or make the signs themselves. social semiotics provides a theoretical basis for holding that the girls in the case study learn more than the boys because they associate themselves with the signs they use through making more choices than the boys do. the ready-made signs offered by computer technology require fewer choices. since the boys tend to prefer this type of sign more than the girls do, and these signs can only to a limited extent be related to their own person through their individual choices, a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 1 – 2007 17 consequence may be that the boys concerned gain less than the girls from the learning process. but when considering the differences in girls’ and boys’ use of semiotic resources, we should also take the task given to the pupils into account. the research reviewed indicates that boys generally show less interest in writing stories about themselves than do girls, who by and large are more interested. if this is correct, writing stories normally means to girls the cultivation of an already existing interest, while to boys it quite often means reconciling writing, which does not interest them, with something that in fact does interest them. this is a more difficult task. in the book “misreading masculinity” (2002) thomas newkirk argues that girls tend to outperform boys in literacy tasks in school because school-sanctioned narratives are too narrowly defined to engage boys’ interests. the boys in the study can express their feelings and factual knowledge through digitally provided, pre-coded signs and through writing. whether their semiotic choices would have been different given another topic or task is an open question. the study simply shows that in this particular case boys tend to prefer pre-coded signs to a greater extent than the girls. in a social semiotic perspective this can imply less learning. it must also be noted that in this particular case writing was the only semiotic resource the girls and boys were able to code. computers also offer possibilities for meaning-making through coding of e.g. pictures, figures and animations. it can be argued that this generally opens for learning through the coding of these resources in the same profound way as through coding of written language. instead of encouraging boys to tell more about themselves in same way as girls do, one should therefore use computers to give them the possibility to tell something else, and in a different way. however, if computers are used in creative writing, we should be aware that the use of ready-made signs can both stimulate and undermine boys’ willingness to express themselves. they may 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(1987). gender perceptions: an analysis of children's creative writing. contemporary education, 59(1), 17-19. schegloff, e. a. (2003). "narrative analysis" thirty years later. in c. b. paulston & g. r. tucker (eds.), sociolinguistics: the essential readings. oxford: blackwell. schofield, j. w., & hubert, b. r. (1998). i like computers, but many girls don't. gender and the sociocultural context of computing. in h. bromley & m. w. apple (eds.), education, technology, power : educational computing as a social practice. albany: state university of new york press. snyder, i. (ed.). (1997). page to screen. london: routledge. street, b. v. (1999). the meaning of literacy. in d. a. wagner, venezky, richard l.,street, brian v. (ed.), literacy: an international handbook (pp. 34-40). colorado, oxford: westview press. torgersen, l. (2004). ungdoms digitale hverdag. bruk av pc, internett, tv-spill og mobiltelefon blant elever på ungdomsskolen og videregående skole (no. 8/2004). oslo: nova. tuck, d., bayliss, v., & bell, m. (1985). analysis of sex stereotyping in characters created by younger authors. journal of educational reseach, 78(4), 248-252. vagle, w. (2005). jentene mot røkla. sammehengen mellom sensuren i norsk skriftlig og utvalgte bakgrunnsfaktorer, særlig kjønn. in k. l. berge, l. s. evensen, f. hertzberg & w. vagle (eds.), ungdommers skrivekompetanse. oslo: universitetsforlaget. vollman, m., van eck, edith, irma, heemskerk, kuiper, els. (2005). new technologies, new differences. gender and ethic differences in pupils' use of ict in primary and secondary education. computers and education, 45, 35-55. willis, p. (1990). common culture, milton keynes: open university press. 1 it could be said that the use of the word ”illustrated” indicates writing as a primary form of expression. an alternative could have been for the pupils to be asked to produce a story in pictures, which would have been closer to the forms of digital story-telling developed in recent years. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 tweens on the internet communication in virtual guest books annbritt enochsson the interactive institute, stockholm and karlstad university email: annbritt.enochsson@kau.se abstract today digital communication is a natural part of young people’s social life. it has increased drastically during the last few years, and there are still a lot of questions about what this means, and how this new media affects communication. this study focuses on young people of 11-13, i.e.the age between children and teenagers, also called tweens. in a large study, the overall aim is to see what communication in the internet community lunarstorm means to them in their social life. this particular paper reports on the content of the asynchronous communication in the participants’ digital guest books, which is one of the main channels for communication between the participants. a group of 15 tweens from a small village in sweden were studied when communicating in sweden’s largest internet community, lunarstorm. the research method used was what is usually described as cyber ethnography. the contributions in the participants’ digital guest books are not written by the guest book owners themselves, which means that the focus is on the collective aspects of this communication, and not from a specific children’s point of view. qualitative analyses were made of the content of 947 contributions in the participants’ guest books in order to make a statistical analysis. most of the participants’ communication was between friends in the same geographical neighbourhood concerning how things are going, what to do, when to meet and similar things. the contributions were divided into three categories: (1) social chat (2) chain letters, and (3) messages incomprehensible to outsiders. the information-category was divided into three sub-categories depending on the emotions expressed. 44% of the total messages were considered as emotionally neutral information, 39% as kind or encouraging, and also with an aim to sort things out, and 6% of the total messages contained insults and elements of anger. among the younger users of the internet community lunarstorm, the main reason to participate seems to be to keep in touch with already known friends. being part of an already existing group continues and develops online. the positive tone among the participants in the community and the possibility to express difficult feelings, which have been reported on earlier from lunarstorm, still seem to be present. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 2 introduction today digital communication is a natural part of young people’s social life. it has increased drastically during the last few years, and there are still a lot of questions about what this means, and how this new medium affects communication (e.g. livingstone & bober, 2005; rydin, 2003). the present study focuses on tweens, which is a concept for young people who are in between being children and teenagers. they do not want to be considered as children any more, and they are not yet part of the teenage culture. in this study the children are between 11 and 13 years old. this paper presents part of a larger study where the overall aim is to understand what communication in the internet community lunarstorm means to swedish tweens in their social life. this particular paper reports on the content of the asynchronous communication in the participants’ digital guest books, which is one of the main public channels for communication open to other participants, and according to themselves – the main channel. ‘public channel’ in the sense that all other participants can see it. another channel for communication within lunarstorm is the presentation page. however, since the tweens themselves in this study did not mention this at all, and most of the visible activity takes place in the guest books, i have chosen to separate these two channels and analyze the presentations in another paper (enochsson, submitted). lunarstorm lunarstorm is sweden’s largest online community. it is used by over 80% of swedish teenagers1. many of the users start at the age of 10 and some even younger. at the age of 12-13 the majority of the children in the age group are users. lunarstorm is the most visited website in sweden, and has been so for the last five years. the main activities are presenting oneself and communicating via guest books or lunar-mail (enochsson, 2005). when people want to chat, however, most of them use the application msn messenger, which is an instant messaging program used by about 80% of young teenagers in sweden2. lunarstorm was the first national net community to attract such a big part of the population. even though there are other both national and global communities competing with lunarstorm today (2007), lunarstorm has left important marks in the history of contemporary interaction media (dunkels, 2007). when becoming a member of lunarstorm you choose a lunar-name. this is the name by which you will be known by other users. most of the users choose a name without any apparent connection with themselves, others use their real-life nickname, and some their real name. every member has their own space with a profile page, space for pictures, a guest book, and a list of added friends. all these features are public and can be seen by any member, unless the owner of the space has blocked access, which is possible to do for undesired visitors. earlier there was a public diary which could be hidden from most of the visitors. today this is a blog. in addition to the private spaces there are public spaces like a graffiti wall, discussion clubs and a lot of other meeting places. lunarstorm have put a lot of effort into security and also good behavior on their site. there are blocking functions if you just do not want somebody to be able to look at your pages or write in your guest book. members are asked to report misbehavior, and lunar-crew can suspend people that do not behave well. any member can write a message in the guest books, and it is visible to everybody. when a more private conversation is required they use the mail function within lunarstorm, some other e-mail or im (instant messaging) applications. the communication in the guest books is asynchronous, which seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 3 means that the written messages are waiting for the user when he or she goes online the next time. the people communicating do not have to be online at the same time. it is difficult to describe a place where so many people do so many things and practically live their lives. rheingold (2005) points out the importance of the emotional support member give each other. he also describes the strategic work of lunarstorm’s management, and ends his description of their successful work with the words: for sweden's youth, lunarstorm became a portal for information, connection, emotional support, and relief work, a role that traditional media could not fill. i think that qualifies as a kind of ‘community’. online communication young people’s and children’s digital communication has been in focus from various angles. according to the media and also discussions i have been involved in at school meetings, the adult world (teachers and parents mainly) fears that the future population will develop into a group of anti-social people who will never leave their computers or mobile phones and who cannot spell. according to research, this will not be the case. it is true that internet communication is very important in young people’s lives (brignall, 2005), but it is not only negative. bargh and mckenna (2004) have made a review of articles concerning the social contacts of people who spend a lot of time on the internet. they summarize that people spending a lot of time on online communication also spend a lot of time on off-line activities. the time used on the internet is taken from tv watching and newspaper reading. compared to non-internet-users, these users are more likely to belong to off-line leisure, sports, religious and community organizations as well as voluntary and political organizations. the internet also helps to maintain close ties with family and friends, and in addition to this facilitates the formation of close and meaningful new relationships. in an american study, 40% of the internet users say that the use of the internet has increased contact with family and friends (annenberg digital future project, 2006). this is in contrast to the fear that the internet’s anonymity would lead to more superficial relationships. what is important is time spent together and what is shared (mersch, 2006). there is also reason to believe that personality plays a role with regard to which media you prefer (peter, 2006). language the language used in digital communication, also known as cyber-language, differs in some ways from other written communication. hård af segerstad (2002) claims there is no need to worry about deterioration of language because of this. young people know very well when to use different styles. some of this language is developed from the limited number of characters to be used when sending messages on a mobile phone, but even cyber-language has its different styles depending on the media. hård af segerstad calls this a creative adjustment to the special conditions given. there is a fear that the language may become rougher, and this has also been seen to some extent (bjørnstad & ellingsen, 2004). bjørnstad and ellingsen’s informants think that there is a need for rougher language since facial expressions are not present. behind the screen it is also easier to use rougher language, because you sometimes forget about others when sitting alone in front of the screen, and it is easier to accept responsibility for statements that would not have been said face to face. on the other hand it is also easier to apologize (enochsson, 2005). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 4 it is said that boys/men and girls/women have different ways of expressing themselves and use different words. herring and paolillo (2006) examined men’s and women’s web-logs from two different genres. in their rich statistical material they found that the difference between the genders was less than between the genres in ways of using language. it could also be seen that girls chose online interviews and boys face-to-face interviews when given the opportunity in a research project in school environment (enochsson, 2007b). the girls’ answers were longer and more informative online, and the boys’ answers were longer and more informative face-to-face. the use of emoticons is often mentioned as used to express feelings in digital communication (hård af segerstad, 2002; 2004). wolf (2000) found that women were more frequent users of emoticons, and in mixed environments, this influenced men to use more emoticons. in another study where the participants answered questions in a questionnaire, the young men claimed that they used emoticons when e-mailing to a greater extent than the young women (punyanunt-carter & hemby, 2006). since the second study was conducted six years later the use of emoticons could have changed, but these results can also be an example of what we think we do or choose to present not always being what we really do. social life the contacts online for young teenagers are mostly with already known friends (enochsson, 2005; livingstone & bober, 2005). bjørnstad and ellingsen (2004), who collected their data some years earlier, at a time when instant messaging programs were not that frequent, found that the young people in their study were more dependent on their mobile phones than on the internet. after chatting in public chat rooms for a period they got tired of it, and if there was the possibility, they continued with friends in im applications. bjørnstad and ellingsen also found that the teenagers in their study always gave priority to friends offline over online contacts. the feeling of being far away from the person addressed can make it easier for bullying. bullying takes other forms, which it is important to be aware of, and the anonymity can be worse compared to offline bullying, since there is no opponent (olin, 2003; slonje & smith, unpublished manuscript). however, it does not seem that bullying is more frequent online than offline (bris, 2001; slonje & smith, unpublished manuscript). instead there are reports of various marginalized and low-status groups finding an arena to participate in society on more equal terms (e.g. dahan & sheffer, 2001; hall, 2000; leonardi, 2000; tapscott, 1997; weinrich, 1997), and young lunarstorm users also claim that they address each other more nicely in this medium than what is usual off-line (enochsson, 2005) it has been seen in statistics that girls communicate more than boys (e.g. larsson, 2005). boys claim they do other things on the internet, like gaming for example. observation studies have shown that the difference is not that big, but that it rather has to do with different approaches to activities (e.g. bjørnstad & ellingsen, 2004; nordli, 2003). theoretical standpoint research within this area children on the internet – demands theories from both child research and media research, since there can be a risk of focusing too much on one of the fields and not being able to see the interaction between them (livingstone & bovill, 2001). the surrounding society and common cultural beliefs affect us all, and our actions are constructed within these beliefs. being part of a social group means seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 5 learning and identity building. to start with the participation is peripheral, you learn how to think and behave through feedback, and gradually you become a full member (lave & wenger, 1991/1998). the internet gives children access to an arena with new possibilities and affordances (hernwall, 2001; tapscott, 1997). as mentioned earlier, this has made it possible for new groups to find an arena for participating on more equal terms in social and political life. in this particular study this means that the young people in the study create their own social life influenced by the environment around them, individuals as well as structures. friends are friends, online as well as offline; what can differ might be the different possibilities different media offer. research questions the overall aim of this study is to see what communication in the internet community lunarstorm means to tweens in their social life. this particular paper reports on the content of the asynchronous communication in the participants’ digital guest books, which is the main channel for communication between the participants, according to themselves. • what is the content of the communication? • how do the tweens address each other in this particular medium? • is there a difference between boys and girls? the contributions in the participants’ digital guest books are not written by the guest book owners themselves, which means that the focus becomes on the collective aspects of this communication, and not from a specific children’s point of view. method in this study, 15 tweens from a small village in sweden with only one school were studied when communicating in sweden’s largest internet community, lunarstorm. the participants in the study were all familiar to each other, even if not all of them were friends. the research method used was what is usually described as cyber ethnography (markham, 1998), alternatively virtual ethnography (hine, 2000), where the participants’ own spaces within the community were studied. for seven weeks, divided into three periods during a period of seven months, all their activities in the community were documented. in addition, all participants were interviewed twice about their participation in lunarstorm and internet communities in general. all these data were collected in 2005. the participants’ e-mail messages within the community were not accessible to the researcher. the participants also had the possibility of erasing messages sent to their own guest books. there was an automatic counting of the contributions in the guest books, i.e. if a message was erased before the researcher noticed it, it would still be included in the number of contributions. in this way it was possible to see if there were contributions missing. the children in this group did not erase any guest book contributions before the researcher was able to read them during this period. following ethical guidelines for the protection of participants is not always easy when doing research with children. there is an imbalance in power relations between adults and children which can be difficult to handle. children do not always dare to say when they feel uncomfortable. the internet medium makes it easier for children. they can for example shut down the computer and blame the technology (dunkels & enochsson, 2007). in this study one of the participants pretended to be someone else when contact for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 6 deciding upon an interview was made online. this was interpreted as this child’s way of withdrawing, and the interview never took place. there were meetings irl with the participants and their parents, and they all agreed upon participating in writing. in order to be able to read all that is written in the community, the researcher has to have her own account. all the children knew this and were invited to take contact within the community. only one participant did so, and wrote ‘hello!’ in my guest book. apart from this, the only contact with the participants was within the framework of the study, such as telling them that it was the period of studying their personal spaces and deciding on appointments for interviews. knowing that somebody is watching you of course affects your actions. this has been known in research for a long time. this was also partly a reason for collecting a comparison material. it is also known that behind the screen it is easy to ‘forget’ that anybody can look at what you write, and i also got the impression from several participants that they had forgotten about my presence even though there were reminders. because of this my presence in the community is not discussed further. analysis in this paper, the analysis of the messages in the participants’ digital guest books is presented. these messages were not written by the guest book owners themselves, which means that the focus is on the collective aspects of this communication, and is not from a specific child’s point of view. since these data are part of a larger ethnographic study there are interviews and other material from the community, which work as a background and also a way of triangulating the written conversations. qualitative analyses were made of the contents of 947 messages in the participants’ guest books. in order to make a minor statistical analysis, three different categories were decided upon. the categories differed in content and the way of addressing the receiver. all the messages were quite short and are considered as one whole message. since all the participants were familiar to each other, a comparison material of 200 messages was collected from 20 other guest books, owned by tweens from different parts of the country. those guest book owners were not contacted, and the material was not saved afterwards. these messages were analyzed in the same way. most of the young people in the comparison group had erased a lot of old messages, but the messages chosen were all recent. the intent of a message is of course difficult to interpret. irony is a widely used genre among young people, and emoticons to clarify feelings were exceptions. bullying is known to be invisible to outsiders – or at least to parents and teachers. it can consist of seemingly nice messages, but in a context they can be cruel. bullying can also be the absence of a comment or just not being included (bliding, holm, & hägglund, 2002; olin, 2003). this is very hard for a researcher to trace. all the messages have been traced as far as possible, to analyze the context in which they were written. there has also been information about relations from teachers and children. this has been taken into consideration, but some things can have been misinterpreted anyway. on the other hand, some of the unkind messages are written as irony, and in a big material the tendency is clear anyway. the aim has not been to uncover certain relations or bullying, but to study the kind of communication in this community, and what it means socially to the young people participating. according to various kinds of statistics on the frequency of bullying (bris, 2001; skolverket, 2004), this medium does not seem to increase the frequency of bullying for this age group. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 7 result most of the participants’ communication was among friends in the same geographical neighborhood concerning how things are going, what to do, when to meet and similar things. only a handful of the messages could be considered as written by people unknown to the guest book owner. this is also what the participants claim in the interviews. to many users it seems that it is not very interesting to communicate with totally unknown people, perhaps because you need to be more careful in those contacts, which is mentioned. messages from outside the particular group were mainly from siblings and older friends from the same village, and it is assumed that most of the contributors are known by all the participants. the majority of the participants were girls, and the girls also wrote the main body of the messages in the boys’ guest books. two thirds of the messages were written by girls, and the girls also wrote longer messages. some children claim that they are shy and that this is a reason why they prefer to have contact with their friends by writing messages on the internet. the majority of the messages (89%) are messages that are just written to find out what the other person is doing or just to keep in touch. a lot of messages contain the questions ‘how are you doing?’ ‘what are you doing?’ or various answers to this. the participants write the main body of these messages when arriving home from school to friends they left half an hour earlier. socially these messages are not neutral, since it seems important to show that you are available and also that you belong to a group within this online community. in addition to this there are emotions of different kinds expressed. about half of these messages express emotions: kind, encouraging, insults or anger. the rest of the messages (11%) are either chain letters – which sometimes caused anger – or messages incomprehensible to outsiders. in the following presentation there are three categories of messages (1) social chat, (2) chain letters, and (3) messages incomprehensible to outsiders. the social chat category is divided into three sub-categories depending on the emotion expressed; (a) emotionally neutral messages, (b) kind and encouraging messages, and (c) insults and angry messages. the other two categories do not contain any personal emotions. even though emoticons are widely used in the digital text genre, they are exceptions here. if the participants paid for an extra service it was also possible to use pictures and colours in addition to the written message. this was also very rarely found even though about half of the participants in this group paid for this service. they used the extra tools available through this service for other purposes, which is described in another article (enochsson, submitted). the messages in the guest books are all written in swedish, and they are written in a kind of spoken language containing misspellings and with some words missing. this means that a translation would be very complicated, and has not been done. instead there is an explanation of the content. within brackets it is possible to see whether it is a boy (p) or a girl (f) who has written the message and the age of the writer. 1. social chat (a) emotionally neutral messages this sub-category includes all the contributions that are just written to find out what the other person is doing or just to keep in touch by saying hello or questions and answers. punctuation marks are widely used to strengthen expressions, even if no emotions are expressed here. here 44% of the total body of messages are found. msn?? gööres?? (p11) (“translation”: can we meet on msn messenger? what are you doing?) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 8 en killle! (p12) (a boy!) hej?? nja snart gå och läsa en bok?? hehe sj?? mm jag med som bara fassen??men du ska du tävla nått i vinter da?? snälla? (f12) (hi?? well, i will soon go and read a book?? hehe, and what about you?? yes, me too, like *?? but will you be doing any competing this winter?? please?) oki.…herrå (f12) (ok…bye) (b) kind and encouraging messages here are the messages which, in addition to just being social, also say something nice or encouraging to the receiver, like saying that the person is nice or just sending a hug or a kiss. in a way these messages seem to have the same function as the neutral ones– to keep in touch and to find out what the other person is doing. there is sometimes an aim to sort things out things that could have happened earlier that day in school. some are asking to be forgiven. a few are love messages between a boy and a girl. this category contains 39% of the messages, and the majority of them are written by girls. gör..??? kramiar (f12) (what are you doing..??? hugs) oki! vad bra!! saknar dejj kommer inte du till backen? kramizzz! (f11) (ok! fine!! i miss you. aren’t you coming to the slalom slope? hugs!) jag e sjuk, men annars e det bra. vad har du gjort i helgen då? älskar dej guman (f16) (i’m sick, but otherwise all is well. what did you do this weekend? i love you, sweetie) mmh.. hade bra.. puss (p13) (have a nice time…kiss) (c) insults and angry messages in contrast to the positive messages there are also negative ones. the texts contain insults or elements of anger. some of them are reactions to a person who has sent a chain letter. even if the messages in this category are few and so are the messages from unknown persons, it is obvious that some people do not want to be disturbed by a person they do not know. slightly angry messages can be directed to a newcomer to explain what is proper behaviour. six percent of the messages are considered to belong to this category. fan va arg du är har du mens? (f13) (* you are angry! have you got your period?) nähä skit i det då fjortis (p15) (don’t bother then, .,…[insulting expression about age]) ja eller hur...jätte kul... (f12) (yes, sure, very funny) hatar dei fatta (p11) (i hate you. get it?) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 9 2. chain letters a chain letter is a letter that is meant to be forwarded to more than one person, so that it will spread to a lot of people. sometimes chain letters can be serious with an aim to spread information and to make people engaged in some special matter. however, the types of chain letters found in these guest books were of the kind: “if you pass this on, you will get…” and “if you don’t, you will get….”. here we find 7% of the messages, and here is an example of a typical one: har precis blivit kysst av kyss guden skicka denna till minst 2 personer..annars får du inte ett bra hångel på ett år skojar inte., detta är en kedja som startade 2005.. om du skickar till 10 st kommer du att få en kyss inom 6 dar.. om du skickar till 15 st kommer du att få den du älskar...=) (tiden börjar nu)... man vill ju inte utmana ödet precis... (f12) (i have just been kissed by the kissing god. send this message to at least 2 people, or you will not get a good snog within a year. i’m not kidding. this is a chain that started in 2005. if you send it to 10 people you will have a kiss within 6 days, if you send it to 15 people you will get the one you love….=) counting starts now….you don’t want to tempt fate, do you?) 3. messages incomprehensible to outsiders some messages seemed at a first glance quite unintelligible, but in a context a message containing just “aaaa…” could correspond to a spoken alternative to the swedish word “yes”. the longer, the more emphasis. sometimes interpretations like this were obvious, other times they were not. when it was not obvious the messages were considered as incomprehensible. the interpretation is that some were written to be totally incomprehensible, and others as private jokes between the correspondents. this category comprises 4% of the messages. ihhihihi..!! det kommer en biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil (f12) (ihihihihi..!! there is a caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar) dklscskjlsjdsöldjsölad fjklkdsufjlksdfjnldsk bdskfldsnfkldsnf ldsfödsmflömflödsmföl mldsfmdslöfmöldsnf,.mdxflödsjflödsfd nfdskfjldösfjnlösdjfsjflödsjfösdljflödsf jlödsjflödjsflödjföldsjföldsjflösd jj jkfldsjflödsjföljdsflöjdsföjdlösfjdsöljf ldösjfldsjflöjflösdjflödsjflödsjfölsjdfö jdsföurhgjlögjlöjfdslöjföldsjflöhgrejfdo gurpongkföuogrpjgopr (p12) (translation not possible) in table 1 the percentages of messages of the total are presented. table 1 – the percentages of the various contributions to the guest books distributed over the five categories. category sub-category (% of cat.1) percentage of total 1. social chat (89%) a. emotionally neutral (49%) 44% b. encouraging or kind (44%) 39% c. insults or anger (7%) 6% 2. chain letters 7% 3. incomprehensible 4% seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 10 most of the messages are quite neutral and also kind. although the kind and encouraging messages are quite frequent overall, they are mostly girls-to-girls in this material. kind messages between girls are not only what the adult world regards as friendly, but also contain expressions previously almost only used by lovers. it seems to be a way to express close friendship, and is frequently used between sisters and female cousins, for example. the comparison material had a similar distribution of the various kinds of messages, apart from there being a few more kind messages and slightly fewer chain letters. this could be due to unwanted messages having been erased to some extent, but since the collected messages were quite recent, most of them written during the last few days, this did not seem to be too great an issue. there was a great resemblance between the participants’ guest books and the guest books in the comparison material. according to the contents of the comparison material, the main body of messages were written between friends known from school or leisure activities, or family members. discussion it can be seen in this study and in other studies as well that the main interest of communication for tweens and also younger children is to keep in touch with friends they already know from face-to-face contacts (enochsson, 2005; livingstone & bober, 2005). only a handful of the messages could be considered as written by people unknown to the guest book owner. this is also what the participants claim in the interviews. to many users it seems that it is not very interesting to communicate with totally unknown people, and you also have to be more careful in those contacts. but it is also known that the older the person gets, the more likely they are to find new friends online (enochsson, 2005; livingstone & bober, 2005). moinian (2006) interprets this from a perspective where young people have fewer opportunities than earlier to meet face-to-face. the adult world controls more of children’s and young people’s time and space. a reason for this, which moinian mentions, is that in a big city like stockholm, where her participants live, homes can be spatially dispersed and children have to wait for parents to come home to drive them to their friends. i would say that the same thing goes for the countryside, the setting for the present study. school and internet communities are the available meeting-places. these become very important places for building relations. being part of an already existing group offline continues and develops online. even if it is possible for anybody to read what is written in a guest book, the feeling of privacy makes it easier to express oneself. when the meeting-place cannot be in a sphere separated from the parents this privacy becomes more important. writing a message is silent and the rest of the family cannot hear you (dunkels & enochsson, 2007). most of the messages are quite neutral and also kind. in an earlier study (enochsson, 2005), tweens claimed that they were more kind and friendly when communicating on lunarstorm than face to face. in the study mentioned, which was not a quantitative one, both sexes claimed this, but it seems here that the girls write kindly more often. the feeling that it is easier to be kind seems important, at least for the girls, in their use of this medium. several examples are given of how they solve problems that are not easy to solve at school, where all their friends are present. being alone, at home in the evening, gives you time to think and to formulate exactly what you want to say. it is of course easier even to say things that are not very polite or nice, there are examples of this. but the nasty messages seemed to be quite evenly seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 11 distributed among the participants’ guest books. all of them were not friends, but according to the teachers at school, nobody seemed to be totally excluded from the group. angry messages were sometimes caused by a behaviour that was not considered as proper in this environment. sometimes these messages were reactions to chain letters or an unwanted visit. newcomers learnt quickly how to fit into the group. even if the kind and encouraging messages are quite frequent overall, they are mostly girls-to-girls in this material. kindness occurs among boys, but expressing love by using words like ‘i love you’ or ‘kisses’ seems to be limited to girls or a boy and a girl in a couple. boys are expected to have a rougher language, and a boy who crosses the gender boundary by saying ‘love’ to another boy takes the risk of being called sissy, which is very negative. being a sissy is also negative for a girl, but since girls are allowed to tell other girls they like and love them, this will not cause the same problem (thorne, 1993). boys are told to build their identities by separating themselves from each other while girls want fellowship in this process (tarullo, 1994). this means that expressing closeness becomes more important to girls, while boys need to keep a distance. in this material this does not mean that the boys are the only ones using a rougher language. in that respect the genders are equal. a question that arises is how these, at least for a swedish context, strong expressions showing love have developed. those expressions, which teenage girls today use among each other, were earlier reserved for lovers. one can speculate about the influence of american tv series, where the use of ‘i love you’ is more frequent also among friends. the division between girls communicating and boys gaming is not as clear as statistics often show (enochsson, 2007a), but in this group it seems that the girls at least wrote more and longer messages. it is known that in public spheres like classrooms, boys talk a lot more than girls and also use more space (thorne, 1993). boys are used to being listened to, but girls are not. this might be a reason for girls to choose this medium, to be able to say all those things that were never said because of the expectations of being quiet. this is also in line with enochsson’s (2007b) study about online interviews, where girls seemed to favour online interviews and boys face-to-face interviews. we are also sensitive to expectations from others. girls are not only expected to be nice to each other, and boys to keep a distance, as mentioned above. media reports on girls’ frequent e-mailing and chatting on the internet and boys’ gaming, can contribute to increasing the differences and preserving gender differences, since certain behaviour is legitimated and other behaviour is not. the participants belonged to a clearly defined group. in one way there are a lot of similarities between the participants’ way of expressing themselves, e.g lack of emoticons, short expression etc., and when newcomers are corrected it is possible to notice a change afterwards. according to herring and paolillo (2006) the genre differences are more obvious than gender differences, but it is not clear in these guest books. there are gender differences that are quite obvious, e.g. girls using more emotional expressions. maybe this is not only one genre. the fact that “everybody”3 is joining in might open up for several genres in parallel, and the gender differences are the most visible – reflecting society as a whole. the lack of emoticons is worth mentioning. this material was collected in 2005 and the participants came from a rural setting. several of them were also quite new users of this medium since they were quite young. when looking around randomly in lunarstorm’s guest books in 2007, it is easy to see that the use of emoticons has become more common. it can also be seen that the youngest users and newcomers use emoticons less, and an explanation may be that these users had not really discovered the use of emoticons yet, since they did not have a lot of contacts outside the group. this has to be studied further seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 12 concluding remarks within lunarstorm it is possible to meet ‘anybody’. in spite of this, young participants stay with each other in the local group. since it has been seen that talking online is less satisfying than meeting friends offline, this is not surprising (bjørnstad & ellingsen, 2004; livingstone & bober, 2005). this medium is seen as a complement to, rather than a substitute for, offline contacts (enochsson, 2005). it is an important complementary social arena where young people can build relations and form identities without leaving the, in one sense, safe environment of their homes. the medium also makes it possible to deepen these contacts, since being alone in front of the computer offers the possibility to formulate oneself in peace and quiet. the privacy offered by this medium is important from several aspects, not least the fact the conversation cannot be heard by parents, siblings or other friends. the positive tone among the participants in the community and the possibility to express complex feelings which have been reported on earlier from lunarstorm (enochsson, 2005) still seem to be present, and so do offline gender differences in the respect that girls tend to express more closeness to each other. it seems that this type of medium affords possibilities that are not easily accessible to everybody offline, for example shy people and groups that are given less attention in other media (e.g. girls talking in public spheres). the common depiction of teenagers, and also tweens, is that they know ‘everything’ about computers, and that they are ‘always’ connected to the internet. according to recent statistics, more than 90% of swedish pupils between 11 and 16 have internet access from their home computers, and two thirds of these have broadband connections (skolverket, skolutveckling, sveriges kommuner och landsting, kks, & microsoft, 2005). this does not mean that all those young people spend their lives in front of the computer. there can be different kinds of restrictions for using the family computer (enochsson, 2005). in a british study it was found that 16% of 9-19 year olds rarely used the internet or did not use it at all (livingstone & bober, 2005). this was not only due to lack of interest. almost half of them said they lacked access, and only one fourth said they were not interested. livingstone and bober claim that there is a digital divide even within western society. sjöberg (2002) found that it was more common for boys to have their own computers in their rooms than for girls. allowing boys this but not girls can be parents’ way of protecting their daughters from getting picked up by older men who seek sexual contacts on the internet, but it also means that there can be a digital divide even within families.. what can it mean to those who still do not have access to this medium but nevertheless live in western society and meet friends at school who are able to continue socializing online after school? does society have a responsibility towards those young people who have no access? my aim is not to answer this question, but just to point out the problem. what it can mean to be left outside this type of communication has to be further investigated. references annenberg digital future project, u. (2006). online world as important to internet users as real world? retrieved 4 jan, 2007, from http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2007-digital-future-report-press-release112906.pdf bargh, j. a., & mckenna, k. y. a. (2004). the internet and social life. annual review of psychology, 55(february), 573-590. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 13 bjørnstad, t. l., & ellingsen, t. (2004). onliners: a report about youth and the internet: norwegian board of film classification. bliding, m., holm, a.-s., & hägglund, s. (2002). kränkande handlingar och informella miljöer elevperspektiv på skolans miljöer och sociala klimat. stockholm: skolverket. brignall, t. w. (2005). the impact of internet co mmunications on social internaction. sociological spectrum, 25(3), 335-348. bris. (2001). bris webbrapport. stockholm: bris. dahan, m., & sheffer, g. (2001). ethnic groups and distance shrinking communication technologies. nationalism & ethnic politics, 7(1), 85-107. dunkels, e. (2007). bridging the distance–children’s strategies on the internet. doctoral dissertation, umeå university, umeå. dunkels, e., & enochsson, a. (2007). interviews with young people using online chat. in m. quigley (ed.), encyclopedia of information ethics and security. hersley: idea group reference. enochsson, a. (2005). ett annat sätt att umgås: yngre tonåringar i virtuella gemenskaper. tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning, 12(1), 81-99. enochsson, a. (2007a). communication vs gaming: differences and similarities in girls' and boys' internet use. in m. s. elm & j. sundén (eds.), cyberfeminism in northern lights: digital media and gender in a nordic context. newcastle: cambridge scholar press. enochsson, a. (2007b). gendered interviewing?: a comparison of online and face-toface interviews. paper presented at the ecer2007, ghent 19–21 sept. enochsson, a. (submitted). barns presentationer av sig själva på webben [children presenting themselves on the web]. hall, m. (2000). digital s. a. in s. nuttall & c.-a. michael (eds.), senses of culture: south african culture studies (pp. 460-475). cape town: oxford university press. hernwall, p. (2001). barns digitala rum. doctoral dissertation, stockholm university, stockholm. herring, s. c., & paolillo, j. c. (2006). gender and genre variation in weblogs. journal of sociolinguistics, 10(4), 439-459. hine, c. (2000). virtual ethnography. london: sage. hård af segerstad, y. (2002). use and adaptation of written language to the conditions of computer-mediated communication. doctoral dissertation, gothenburg university, gothenburg. hård af segerstad, y., & sofkova hashemi, s. (2004). exploring the writing of children and adolescents in the information society. paper presented at the earli. larsson, b. (2005). arenor för alla en studie om ungas kulturoch fritidsvanor (no. 2005:1). stockholm: ungdomsstyrelsen. lave, j., & wenger, e. (1991/1998). situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. leonardi, l. (2000). the other half of cyberspace. women and social participation in virtual and conventional networks. quaderni di sociologia, 44(23), 64-84. livingstone, s., & bober, m. (2005). uk children go online. london: e-society. livingstone, s., & bovill, m. (eds.). (2001). children and their changing media environment. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 14 markham, a. n. (1998). life online. researching real experience in virtual spaces. walnut creek: altamira. mersch, g. (2006). the quality of online and offline relationships: the role of multiplexity and duration of social relationships. information society, 22(3), 137-148. moinian, f. (2006). the construction of identity on the internet: oops! i've left my diary open to the whole world! childhood, 13(1), 49–68. nordli, h. (2003). the net is not enough: searching for the female hacker. doctoral dissertation, ntnu, trondheim. olin, f. (2003). digital mobbning: trakasserier via internet och sms. minor thesis [duppsats] in pedagogy, karlstad university, karlstad. peter, j. (2006). research note: individual differences in perceptions of internet communication. european journal of communication, 21(2), 213-226. punyanunt-carter, n. m., & hemby, c. o. (2006). college students' gender differences regarding e-mail. college student journal, 40(3), 651–653. rheingold, h. (2005). lunarstorm: sweden's youthful, increasingly mobile virtual community. retrieved 17 july, 2007, from http://www.thefeaturearchives.com/topic/culture/lunarstorm__sweden_s_y outhful__increasingly_mobile_virtual_community.html rydin, i. (ed.). (2003). media fascinations: perspectives on young people's meaning making. gohtenburg: nordicom. skolverket. (2004). yngre elevers attityder till skolan 2003 hur elever i årskurs 4-6 upplever skolan (no. 256). stockholm. skolverket, skolutveckling, m. f., sveriges kommuner och landsting, kks, & microsoft. (2005). it och skola 2005. stockholm. slonje, r., & smith, p. k. (unpublished manuscript). cyberbullying: another main type of bullying? tapscott, d. (1997). growing up digital: the rise of the net generation. new york: mcgraw-hill. tarullo, l. b. (1994). windows on social worlds: gender differences in children's play narratives. in a. slade & d. p. wolf (eds.), children at play (pp. 169-187). new york: oxford university press. thorne, b. (1993). gender play: girls and boys in school. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. weinrich, j. d. (1997). strange bedfellows: homosexuality, gay liberation, and the internet. journal of sex education & therapy, 22(1), 58-66. wolf, a. (2000). emotional expressions online: gender differences in emoticon use. cyberpsychology & behavior, 3(5), 827–833. 1 for statistics on visitors to different swedish websites: http://www.mediacom.itnorr.se/23/kia/final_web/con_web_month_mt.asp?. see also lunarstorm’s own visitor statistics at http://www.lunarworks.se 2 according to an online questionnaire within lunarstorm jan 6 th 2004 , in which 158,542 users answered the question about which im applications they used. 3 since 80% of teenagers participate, as mentioned earlier. microsoft word mso33c.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 the rhetoric of powerpoint jens e. kjeldsen associate professor the university of bergen email: jens.kjeldsen@infomedia.uib.no abstract the presentation program powerpoint is probably the most used tool in the schools, high schools and universities of today. the use of this program, however, comes at a cost, because it is not just a different and neutral way of teaching. like the use of any technology, powerpoint affects not only the way we present and teach, but also the way we think, learn and understand. the program carries an inherent tendency to crate fragmentation of thought and cognitive overload. in order to avoid this we should stop thinking in terms of technology and begin to think rhetorically. what we need is media rhetoracy: the ability to communicate persuasively and appropriately. “bullet me, bullet me, i take the full responsibility” (the september when, 1991) in the town of alexandria, in the state of virginia in the usa, there lived a woman we can call sarah wyndham. she was getting cross and tired of her two daughters ignoring her repeated requests to tidy their rooms and do their household duties. finally she’d had enough, sat down at the computer, opened the powerpoint program and wrote: “family matters. ideas/opportunities for positive change for the wyndham family team.” on the next slide she began to write down the relevant points: • lack of organization leads to confusion and frustration among all family members. • disorganization is detrimental to grades and to your social life. • disorganization leads to inefficiencies that impact the entire family. instead of simply pleading for harmony in the home she was pitching it – she was giving a talk. before long, she had 18 slides with powerpoint bullets, supplemented by colour photographs of happy families on cycle trips – and on the last page a key: the key to success. this family briefing was held only once. the experience proved so upsetting to the daughters that the mere threat of yet another powerpoint presentation was enough to make them burst into tears. how far this story is true i’m not sure. i’ve taken it from ian parker’s essay “absolute powerpoint. can a software package edit our thoughts?”. in may seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 2 2001, this article in the new yorker was one of the first texts to make critical comments on the microsoft program. whether this incident took place or not, the story of the wyndham family contains a few relevant truths. in the first place: powerpoint is everywhere. it’s probably just a matter of time before family members use bullet points to communicate with each other. in the second place: all these endless bullets and contrived clip-art images can bring even the hardest man to tears. the problem lies in powerpoint’s cognitive style, for the software forces us to speak and think in particular ways. like all tools – and media – it has contraints, certain possibilities and limitations. the solution therefore is not to do away with powerpoint but to develop rhetorical competence in the users. just as we need media literacy to be conscious receivers of communication, we need media rhetoracy to be conscious communicators. powerpoint is everywhere the 70's and the early 80's was the age of the overhead projector. a change began in 1984, the year that gave its name to george orwell’s frightening book. in that year, some of the employees in the silicon valley company forethought began work on an electronic presentation program they called presenter. the name was quickly changed to powerpoint, and in 1987 version 1.0 was available for macintosh. three years later, pc users with windows could also use the software. since then, it has spread throughout the world like something between a virus and a new religion. at an estimate, the average powerpoint user as early as 1995 was creating about 4-5 presentations a month. only three years later, this figure rose to 9 presentations a month – more than two a week. according to microsoft there are more than 300 million registered users of its software (keller 2003). every single day, at least 30 million presentations (parker 2001) are given, that is 1.25 million presentations an hour (cf. mahin 2004). in today’s business world, it is inconceivable for any sales pitch or company presentation to be given without powerpoint. universities and colleges gladly follow their lead. in 2006 a researcher can hardly listen to a lecture, take part in a conference or personally give a lecture without a series of slides. in the usa, and quite probably in europe and scandinavia too, more than 80% of all presentations at business colleges use powerpoint (keller 2003). such presentations do not automatically engender student activation. for, although powerpoint teaching is based on new technology, its use risks leading to an old-fashioned, didactic form of teaching. students expect this format, however, and they insist on being able to download the teacher’s slide presentation from the internet. and it doesn’t stop here. microsoft’s slides have begun to make their way into the teaching of children. in the usa, powerpoint is one of the most popular forms of software in schools (tufte 2003, guernsey 2001). in europe, or in scandinavia at least, the program hasn’t yet taken over in the classroom but it seems only a matter of time. even when the usa´s colin powell was attempting in late 2003 to convince un delegates that iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, powerpoint was the chosen tool. fine though the slides were, they failed to convince the delegates (cf. pece 2005). and they did nothing to change the fact that to date no one has found a trace of the dreaded weapons, the alleged cause of the war. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 3 so perhaps new york times journalist clive thompson has a point when he speculates on whether or not powerpoint in a unique way contributes to our contemporary confusion and obscuring of thought; a time in which manipulating the facts is as important as presenting them clearly (new york times 14/12-2003). “if you’ve got nothing to say”, starts a maxim from the advertising world, “then sing it”. perhaps we could say much the same about powerpoint: “if you’ve nothing to say, powerpoint can help you say it loudly and clearly”. like any other technology, the ubiquitous slide show isn’t without problems. in 1997 scott mcnealy, ceo of the company sun microsystems, found powerpoint so problematic that he forbade his employees to use it. why? because they were spending too much time on the software and the program took up too many bits on the servers. result: waste of time and band width. mcnealy himself described the problem and solution in these words: we had 12.9 gigabytes of powerpoint slides on our network. and i thought: what a huge waste of corporate productivity. so we banned it. and we've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned powerpoint. now, i would argue that every company in the world, if it would just ban powerpoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. employees would stand around going, "what do i do? guess i've got to go to work. in the american armed forces, people have had the same concerns. the military’s e-mail was cluttered with so many slides of rumbling tanks and whirling sector diagrams that here too it used up available band width and delayed the sending of classified messages from the defense department. and even worse: these slides prevented effective communication. in 2000, the pentagon began to clamp down on the widespread use of bullet points, fonts, dingbats, clip-art and animations. general henry h. shelton ordered american bases around the world to use simpler presentations (jaffe 2000, cf. also pece 2005). powerpoint’s cognitive style nine years after mcnealy’s prohibition, computers have a vastly improved storage capacity and this problem isn’t so critical. but there are still many employees, researchers and teachers around the world sitting out there spending a considerable part of their working hours developing powerpoint presentations. and the software has been subject to criticism from various quarters. the hardest and least compromising critic of powerpoint is undoubtedly the graphic and design guru edward r. tufte, professor emeritus at yale university. with original and attractively designed books such as the visual display of quantitative information, envisioning information and visual explanations, he has made his name as a key expert on graphic and visual presentations. in his pamphlet the cognitive style of powerpoint, tufte expresses merciless criticism of the microsoft program: presentations are like bad school drama performances: very loud, very slow and very simple. the problem with powerpoint, writes tufte, is that it is exclusively speakeroriented and neither content-oriented nor audience-oriented (tufte 2003: 4). the standard set-up and fixed formats that make the task of communication comfortable for the presenter are unfortunately at the expense of both content seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 4 and listeners. the price paid is presentations empty of information, lacking in content and endlessly tedious. anyone who has been exposed to powerpoint presentations can only nod in recognition. we’ve all experienced an instructor or speaker standing in half-shadow with his back to the audience, reading in a staccato voice: • each • word • on • every • single • slide. but the problem isn’t just boredom, accuses tufte. the software’s poor resolution and standard format depends on, and gives rise to, a cognitive style with abbreviated argument and fragmented thought. a strictly hierarchical single-track structure is the model for all organization of content. narration and information are therefore broken up into stand-alone slides and the barest fragments. the audience is served rapid, short sequences of thin information. at the same time, this cognitive style leads to conspicuous embellishment and content-less ”ppphfluff” – as he calls it. the microsoft program makes us focus on indifferent form and destroys content through a commercial approach that turns everything into a sales pitch. powerpoint is therefore not just an alternative method of teaching and giving presentations. for as culture critic neil postman (1985) states, any technology is also an ideology. and microsoft’s presentation software is a technology which fundamentally changes our way of communicating and thereby of thinking – even without our being aware of the change. • the software makes us think and speak in isolated blocks, instead of in coherent context, totalities, narratives or linear reasoning. • each block makes us think and speak in concise, discrete and hierarchizing sections and points. • the software encourages us to use particular forms of visual material and defined formats and to use ready-made visual material and animations, even if they have no clear relevance to what is being said. • the software invites ritual conformity of visual style. poor resolution and fixed formats all these problems relate to two connected main properties of the software: in the first place, the problems have to do with the interface’s poor resolution and limited band width. in the second place, they concern the way the program invites us to present all information in fixed formats and patterns. the problem with the interface’s poor resolution and limited band width is that, for example, very little textual or statistical information can be presented on the slides. this can lead to paucity of information and hinder certain forms of communication and teaching. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 5 when giving a lecture, we utter about 130 words a minute. the manuals for the presentation software show about 15 words per slide. if we think of an average lecture of about 45 minutes, the words would fill about 240 slides. no speaker, of course, puts all his words on slides, but the example illustrates how little information can be put across per slide. as tufte points out, most factual and informative statements are too long for powerpoint and, with so little information on each slide, speakers must use a long series of slides. information is heaped sequentially on even more information. when new information comes along, the previous information is gone and it is very difficult to understand the connection and to evaluate the relationship between the many statements. visual presentations normally work best when the informative elements are presented in juxtaposition and within normal visual range, claims tufte. but there is no room for this on a slide that follows microsoft’s templates; for less than half the slide area is available – and, because the resolution is so poor, large letters are needed. in serious lectures and talks, he emphasises, we should preferably replace powerpoint slides with hand-outs showing words, figures, data, graphics and pictures together. for handouts with high band width allow the audience to contextualize, compare, narrationalize and process the evidence. in contrast, he writes, the meagre, sketchy and forgettable slides tend to “make audiences ignorant and passive, and also to diminish the credibility of the presenter. thin visual content prompts suspicions: ”what are they leaving out? is that all they know? does the speaker think we’re stupid?” ”what are they hiding?” (tufte 2003: 12) for the same reason it isn’t wise to show longer text examples on powerpoint. if i intend to go through a page of aristotle’s rhetoric, i shouldn’t use a projector to show it, as it would be almost impossible to read. instead, i should quite simply hand out a photocopy of the page to each student. the other big problem is, as we have said, that the software encourages us to squeeze all information into fixed formats and templates and present it in relentless sequence. this leads to a problem in relation to good communication and teaching because the rhetorical and pedagogical choices the speaker ought to make in the concrete situation have already been made automatically by the software. these pre-determined choices are the result of e.g. the templates, which contain the typographics in a presentation, including the type and size of the set-up with bullet points and type fonts, textbox dimensions and placing, background design and colour, colour schemes etc. in the same way, the autocontent wizard contains text suggestions for each slide. the speaker can use these as a basis and replace the suggested text with text of his own choosing. when autocontent wizard was included in the software in the mid-’90’s, the name was actually an in-house joke, based on the rather absurd idea that you just have to press a button and abracadabra, there’s your content. or, as ian parker puts it (2001): “a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers” for example, if you want to present a teaching course, the program is designed to let you do this by means of nine slides. 1) first, a title page with the name of the speaker and lecture. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 6 2) then an introduction with three points: 1) define the topic, 2) specify what the participants are expected to learn, 3) find/produce all types of background material of relevance to the audience. 3) next comes a slide entitled agenda and a list with two points informing the audience what will be covered and the time to be spent on each topic. 4) the fourth slide is entitled overview, together with two points giving an overview of the topic and explaining the connection between the individual themes. 5) the title of the fifth picture is vocabulary. here the points comprise a vocabulary list and definition of terms. 6) in three points, the sixth picture will set out the first theme, by 1) describing the theme, 2) giving an example, 3) providing exercises designed to reinforce the learning process. 7) using exactly the same three points, the seventh picture presents the second theme. 8) in the eighth slide, the heading is summary, to be done through three points: 1) repeat what has been learned, 2) define learning methods, and 3) ask for feedback. 9) the ninth and final slide is entitled how to find out more and here are the three points: 1. other courses, 2. lists of information sources, 3. lists of consultancy services. this is the set microsoft template for learning – regardless of topic and situation. with such templates and automatizations, we can say that there is something already written before you write, something composed before you compose, created before you create. the norwegian media researcher anders fagerjord (2005) uses the term prescript of these ‘already written’ texts and almost-ready elements in every computer program used to create expression and content. a prescript is a set of precepts, that is, a format or template that determines the scope of what may be written or designed. it is those parts of a text, e.g. an internet page or a powerpoint presentation, formed by the template and software before the speaker produces a single message. when we set out to create a new presentation in powerpoint, we immediately encounter a template where certain choices have already been made for the speaker, certain guidelines drawn up. there are headings and texts that have to be written in specified places and using specified methods, dispositions that must be followed and points that must be filled out. with its templates and rules, the powerpoint interface makes it very simple to create slides with certain types of text and visual design. but it is much more difficult, even sometimes impossible, to create slides with other types of text and visual design. as it isn’t so easy to get away from the templates, we should be able to work both with them and against them, and to choose alternative templates and prescripts where possible and appropriate. for the average powerpoint user, however, this isn’t so easy, for the software invites the filling out of bullet points more than independent thinking. it is quite simply easier. shooting with imperatives, obscuring with hierarchies the most obvious rhetorical and pedagogical problem with the standardization in powerpoint is therefore the bullet points. the program’s basic structure, and thereby the lectures and talks which use it, is the listing of everything in bullet points. these bullet lists, writes edward tufte, may perhaps help extremely unorganized speakers to be a little more organized, and for the naïve they may seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 7 “create the appearance of hard-headed organized thought. but in the reality of day-to-day practice, the pp cognitive style is faux-analytical”. this is a harsh but not wholly groundless criticism. in the summer of 1998 three authors in the harvard business review made the same point (shaw, brown & bromiley 1998): the bullet point approach, so common in business life, leads to superficial and simplified ways of thinking. in the first place, bullet points are too general and say things that are applicable to any kind of business activity: cut costs! boost earnings! get a bigger share of the market! add to this the fact that lists state critical relations without specifying their connection in detail. for lists can only describe three kinds of relation: sequences, priorities and association. but they can neither explain relations between elements nor clarify narrative or causal relations. in the third place, bullet points omit and suppress important lines of reasoning as to how something works and is interconnected. when bullets in imperative form baldly command us to increase our share of the market by 25%, profits by 30% and introduce new products; the complex relationship between organization, market and customers remains understated and unexplained. relationships of this nature are much better described through complete sentences with both subjects and verbs. tufte not surprisingly concurs. instead of merely postulating briefly that we must introduce new products, he writes, we should rather say who might do it and how, when, and where they might do it. then several sentences together in a row, a narrative, could spell out the specific methods and processes by which the generic feel-good goals of mission statement might be achieved (tufte 2003: 6). the uncertainty about who does what, how, when and where becomes even more conspicuous when users of the software allow the division into bullet points to be followed by sub-points and confusing hierarchies – both in each slide and over a number of slides. that this use of powerpoint can even have fateful consequences is illustrated in a report from the space centre nasa. when in january 2003 the space shuttle columbia broke up during landing, the reason was that a piece of insulation material had already broken off and damaged the shuttle during the launch. the fact that the mission leaders in nasa were not given a clear understanding of the risks during re-entry, however, was due to an unclear powerpoint presentation. this was the verdict of the commission investigating the accident. nasa has become too dependent on presenting complex and intricate information in presentation software that simplifies and outlines, noted the commission, which also wrote in its report: it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this powerpoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation. (columbia accident investigation board: 191). in presenting their risk analysis, the engineers had gathered all information in a set of densely-packed slides. the result was incomprehensible, the consequences were fatal. and the commission regretted “the endemic use of powerpoint slides instead of technical papers”. the presentation had the usual powerpoint problems: detailed bullet points, separation of words and figures, seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 8 confusing typography, unclear hierarchies and data locked away in illegible tables. communication experts barbara l. shwom and karl p. keller acknowledge the criticism of the slides the boeing engineers used to explain what had happened when the space shuttle columbia sustained damage. but, they ask, who is really responsible here? tufte says that the poor communicative quality of the slides stems from the microsoft program. shwom and keller assert, however, that it was rather the engineers’ lack of rhetorical awareness and competence that created the problem. software isn’t the problem. unclear thinking, writing and organization is the problem: ”powerpoint is not the cause of a poorly planned, disorganized presentation”, in their view. the problem is instead: “a symptom of the writer’s failure to employ simple slide design principles, basic communication skills, and – most importantly – fundamental rhetorical techniques” (shwom & keller 2003: 2). shwom og keller (2003: 5) have made a new version of the infamous boeing slide, where instead of bullet points they apply tufte’s principle of gathering information “adjacent in space” in contrast to “stacked in time”, as happens for example with bullet points (tufte 1990: 81). in fact, it is not bullet points in themselves that are the problem, they write, but the excessive and unthinking use of them which destroys communication. the authors give the following advice to prevent the use of bullet points running amok: on each bullet point slide, authors should address only one main idea: a single discrete category with sub-items consistently related to that category. do not use bullet points to present a sequence of ideas. in other words, use bullets to present inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning (shwom & keller 2003: 8). shwom og keller are right in saying that communication is always the sender’s responsibility and that it is therefore in that direction accusation should be directed if communication is unclear, boring or inappropriate in some other way. at the same time, however, it is important not to neglect the importance of the medium. the engineers may have been responsible for the poor communication but it was primarily the presentation software that made them form their message in a problematic way. as greg meyers puts it: “the software can be used (but need not to be) to de-skill the presenter” (meyers 2000: 187). teaching with slides the problems described above also apply – perhaps particularly – to teaching and lecturing. if i am to enrich my students with a real understanding of how rhetoric can influence people, it will not suffice simply to give a list of points stating that we can appeal to our audience through rational argument, the speaker’s credibility and receivers’ emotions. valuable rhetorical insights are found in how these three work together, how they influence each other and how different constellations of appeals function. in some cases, the speaker forms attitudes by stirring emotions but in other cases he stirs emotions by creating an attitude. the important, and not least the interesting, aspect of teaching is not the sequential establishment of statements and facts but rather the act of conveying an understanding of connection, causality, chronology and relational complexity. edward tufte views the use of powerpoint in schools as particularly perturbing. for the basic ideas of learning stand in direct contrast to the software’s hierarchical and sales-pitch tendency to sloganizing (tufte 2003: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 9 13). learning means being able to explain, reason and find out about things, he says. instead of learning to ask questions and investigate content, powerpoint in the classroom teaches children and young people to speak and think in general, context-less maxims. the powerpoint exercises found in learning material and in student tasks on the internet, writes tufte, are marked by lack of content and a very empty style, ppphluff, as he calls it. there are normally 10 to 20 words and one clip-art image to each slide. with 3-6 slides altogether that makes about 80 words for one week’s work. reading 80 words will take about 15 seconds. that’s pretty thin teaching, thinks tufte, who would like to get powerpoint out of the school. he writes: rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in ppphluff and foreshortening of thought, students would better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the exploratorium. or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something (tufte 2003: 13). here too tufte expresses rather an extreme view. or perhaps not. for the templates, prescripts and bullets on the powerpoint slides do in fact encourage a form of teaching and lecturing leading to passive learning, rather than active learning. the technology invites an outmoded monological and didactic mode of teaching. because the software makes choices for us, we as teachers and lecturers do not need to concern ourselves with rhetorical considerations of what we want to achieve, what we have to do, why we should do it or how. we are invited not to think rhetorically but rather merely to fill the format with whatever content we happen to have. we are invited not to examine our subject in detail when lecturing but merely to present an outline of the lecture, which often means reading out points in the dark with our back half-turned to our audience. this kind of teaching is not likely to arouse students’s attention and teach them to think for themselves. a lively method of learning and thinking is reduced to a lacklustre reeling off of points. exposed to point after point, through long series of slides, students become stenographers without contact or deeper understanding of what they’re writing. it’s bad enough that pupils and students don’t understand the relations between the points they’re busy copying down. even worse is that they aren’t aware they don’t understand. we recognise this from our own experience. most of us have tried to take notes and believed thereby that we understood what we were writing while what really happened was that the mere act of note-taking prevented us from reflecting over the actual meaning of the words. in this way, technology risks posing a barrier between teacher and student instead of doing what it’s meant to do, that is, building a pedagogical bridge between them. teaching through bullet points teaches pupils and students to present statements but it doesn’t teach them to argue. it encourages presentation rather than interaction. it closes debate instead of opening it up. to all this we can object that bullets are after all only a form of checklist intended to hold the key points. and that is of course correct. it is therefore also a serious flaw in tufte’s criticism that he fails to acknowledge that slides do not function in a vacuum but on the contrary in connection with the spoken word and the speaker’s performance. the interplay between speaker and mode of presentation is something he jumps too lightly over. as yates and orlikowski point out (: 11): seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 10 tufte’s argument is less persuasive because it conflates the use of graphics in written documents such as articles and newspapers with the use of graphics as visual aids in oral presentations, failing to distinguish between fundamental different genres (the article and the oral presentation) and the recurrent situations in which they are enacted. moreover, as with all technologies, it is not the technology per se but how it is used that determines outcomes and consequences. nevertheless, tufte’s criticism is largely justified. for as both rhetoric (cf. yates 1974, carruthers & ziolkowski 2002) and cognitive psychology (cf. e.g. eysenck 2001, miller 1956) teach us, people don’t tend to remember freestanding points very clearly. particularly if there are lots of them. instead, we remember what is connected in emotive, logical or narrative context: vivid descriptions, arguments and stories. understanding and remembering occur more readily when we are presented with a rich context. and depth and context are precisely what is difficult to communicate with the help of powerpoint, and it is precisely those aspects the programme risks fragmenting. take for example the works of plato, e. h. gombrich’s legendary the story of art or chaim perelman’s and olbrecht-tyteca’s the new rhetoric. to present works like these as bullet points would be to violate them. it is not of course entirely impossible to draw some points from these books but it would hardly do justice to the style of the works or the thoughts they contain. for their value lies just as much in their style and development, their comprehensive examples and well-formulated descriptions. together, such texts give an insight corresponding to the anthropological view clifford geertz describes in his explanation of the term “thick description” (geertz 1973). in contrast to this, the use of powerpoint often reveals a thin form of traditional positivistic thinking. it is therefore no coincidence that the use of powerpoint in educational institutions has gained widest ground in business colleges. conversely, it is no coincidence that the software has gained least ground in the universities’ interpretative disciplines. for the literary researcher and the teacher of text analysis, the use of slides will often stand in direct contradiction to the textual analytical method and the detailed description of a work. listing illustrative examples and narratives in standard template form and bullet points would go against the intentions of these communicative devices. engineer peter norvig’s famous powerpoint parody shows this clearly. with the help of “autocontent wizard” he has reworked abraham lincoln’s masterly and poetic gettysburg address into a powerpoint presentation. the result is as expected: a miserable, derisible fragmentation of what was once a perfect work of oratory. it is primarily standardization through templates and prescripts that transforms and potentially destroys communication. standardization is dangerous because it is so seductively simple. the same applies to the use of fixed, ready-made elements such as clip-art, pictures, sound-clips, animations and autographics. because these ready-produced elements are so simple to use and include, they are often used to excess. instead of thinking rhetorically of what will best serve the pedagogical purpose, the speaker spends time searching for autographics, clip-art, pictures, sound effects and animations which often have only a tenuous association with the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 11 subject matter. in this way, technology blurs both the aim of the lecture and the relationship between sender and receiver. i shall shortly address the question of how we can adopt a constructive approach to powerpoint when treating the relationship between speech, text, image and sound – how we can begin to develop media rhetoracy for presentations and teaching. but let me first briefly outline what empirical research says about the use of powerpoint in teaching. powerpointing lectures powerpoint was originally designed for use in the business world. it is a rhetorical tool developed for the purpose of suasion. the question is whether the software is also a suitable didactic tool. what happens when we transfer the didactic content out of traditional didactic forms such as blackboard teaching and lecturing and into a modern rhetorical form such as the powerpoint presentation? although powerpoint presentations quite clearly have a number of inherent communicative and pedagogical problems, students still seem to prefer lecturers to use this technology. some empirical studies support this view (simpson et al. 2003, see also blokzijl & roos 2004), while others indicate that most students would prefer some other form of lecturing medium than powerpoint (loisel & galer 2004). however, in those cases where students were not obliged to sit passively watching a powerpoint show but could also interact with the lecturer and the presentation material, the majority did prefer powerpoint (louise & galer 2004). empirical research therefore provides no clear-cut answer as to whether students want the presentation software or not. the same applies to empirical studies of the program’s learning effect. while some studies claim that the use of powerpoint increases learning, others show that substituting powerpoint for the blackboard does not lead to better performance or grades. in one such study, the authors write that powerpoint may help students to remember certain elements (recall), but that the technology should not be used instead of the blackboard, merely as a supplementary aid” (szabo & hastings 2000). another study (bartsch & cobern 2003) shows that students who attended powerpoint presentations with sound and pictures performed less well than students who attended presentations without these elements. a number of studies showed that the less relevant the pictures, clip-art, animations and sound effects, the worse the students performed and the less they cared about presentations using powerpoint. microsoft’s presentation software undoubtedly tends to mould teaching and lectures into forms that prove limiting and problematic. but it also apparently has certain technological characteristics with the potential to create both satisfaction and learning. let me therefore, since the software is so ubiquitous – and since it has come to stay – conclude by drawing attention to a communication problem which can be resolved with a little rhetorical awareness and competence. media rhetoracy since powerpoint isn’t going to go away, we can only try to adopt an active approach to this communication tool. i am critical of the scope and influence powerpoint has gained over teaching and presentations. i do, however, use the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 12 software in some of my presentations and lectures – but i take care to do so on my own premises, not on microsoft’s. and i don’t use it every time i’m about to teach. we can certainly manage perfectly well without depending on the software every time we address an audience. the solution to the powerpoint problem is not for speakers to stop using the software – though it might help if many people did. the solution is for us to stop thinking in terms of technology and begin to think rhetorically. as speakers, we should not be thinking of how to fill in a template. we should be thinking of purpose, goals and means. what do we want to achieve? how can we best achieve it? what tools will help us best? and what are the technological limitations and possibilities? all this, of course, is the point of departure for speakers all over the world, regardless of the technology they use. as in any other form of communication, the speaker, before speaking, should emulate cicero. he/she should perform a rhetorical analysis of the situation, the audience and communicative tools in relation to intention. it has since become common to talk of media literacy (cf. potter 2005, erstad 2004), i.e. people’s ability to decode, understand and relate to media and media statements. the time has now come for us also to think about media rhetoracy, in other words rhetorical competence. if media literacy represents the ability to read and interpret media statements, media rhetoracy represents the ability to create and communicate such statements: to write instead of reading, code instead of decoding, influence instead of being influenced. among these skills is the appropriate and persuasive use of communicative tools such as powerpoint. multi-media learning practical skills require theoretical understanding. it is therefore important for us to understand the significance of multimedia learning. the supplementing of a teacher’s presentation with texts, pictures and sound involves at the same time the software’s pedagogical possibilities and limitations. it has to do with the way we humans perceive and decode information. cognition research has given us three hypotheses – or theories if you prefer – that describe how the human brain works (cf. meyer 2001 and mayer & moreno 2003). the first hypothesis is that we process information through two separate channels: an auditive and verbal channel which processes sound and verbal impressions, and a visual channel which processes images and visual impressions (paivio 1971, 1978, mayer & moreno 2003). in a powerpoint presentation the speaker’s words and any sounds or sound effects used will be picked up by the ears while words and pictures on the screen are picked up by the eye. our working memory will then connect, select and organize the auditive and visual impressions through the respective channels, before the verbal and visual modalities are finally united in the longterm memory. this sound relatively unproblematic, but it isn’t. for the second cognitive hypothesis teaches us that both these human information channels have limited processing capacity. this is particularly relevant in the processing of multi-media impressions such as powerpoint. true learning requires considerable cognitive activity in both channels. this is the third cognitive hypothesis. when in a learning situation we are exposed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 13 simultaneously to words, images and sound, we therefore run the risk of cognitive overload. in the progression from sensory impression to sensory memory and thence to working memory and finally to long-term memory, all teaching and learning entails the risk of cognitive overload (mayer & moreno 2003, cf. moreno & meyer 1999). if i’m too busy seeing, i’m not listening properly. if i’m too busy listening, i can’t manage to read or take notes. in powerpoint presentations cognitive overload is a constant risk. because we are continuously processing different representations such as written texts, design, pictures, graphics, ding-bats, animation effects, sound effects etc., our brain hasn’t enough capacity to process the speaker’s words. retention and processing of the many different representational forms absorbs our thinking capacity and leads to cognitive overload. because both verbal and visual information come so rapidly and fragmentally, listeners can neither process and retain the information in their working memory nor transfer it to their long-term memory. redundancy and rhetorical focus the solution is simple and rhetorical. in the first place, the teacher must remove everything not directly relevant to the main focus and desired aim of the teaching. away with everything just meant to be a little amusing and diverting. away with irrelevant pictures and ding-bats, disturbing animations and sounds without function. variety is positive but only if relevant and functional. secondly, we must create redundancy. we can do this in two ways: 1) we can repeat ideas over a period of time, or 2) repeat them simultaneously, that is communicate the same content in different ways, at the same time. by repetition over time we create diachronic redundancy, as when we repeat verbally or visually something presented earlier. we can say or show the same thing in different ways, for example by reformulating the same points, giving different examples or by first presenting something orally then in writing, or first with an illustration and then in words. we can also create synchronic redundancy, which is simultaneous repetition, by communicating something both verbally and visually at the same time. we can describe the relevant elements in a picture, emphasise what the audience should note on the screen, or simply read the text out loud. manuals on the use of powerpoint often advise us not to read out what’s on the slides. this is hammered home with exclamation marks: don’t read out what’s on your slides! but pedagogically it’s in fact quite a good idea. for in this way the message is communicated through both the recipients’ verbal and visual information channels. speakers who bore their audience by reading from their slides is naturally a problem, but this is because they tend to have too much text and too much extraneous text and are much too reliant on their slides as their real manuscript. as noted, we should be aware that powerpoint (and similar presentation software) is a multimedia tool. but we should also remember that presentations are primarily oral presentations. the use of text, sound and pictures should support the person speaking, not replace the speaker. we seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 14 would therefore do well to remind ourselves of the traditional rhetorical aims of suasion, teaching and entertaining. we should remember rhetoric’s doctrine of inventio, which teaches us how to find the best content and the most convincing arguments. and which teaches us to prefer exploring one central argument in depth rather than superficially reeling off a number of different arguments. in the same way, rhetorical doctrine tells us about the appropriate development of our theme, dispositio, that the different sections of our disposition have different functions: the introduction should arouse interest and win good-will and credibility. the presentation of the matter should be brief, clear and concise. our argumentation should provide proof of our theses and refute our opponents’ objections. and our conclusion should summarize and where relevant appeal to feelings and action. the waffling chat that often accompanies powerpoint presentations would also benefit from greater attention to the rhetorical requirement that the language we use should not only be clear, correct and appropriate but also vivid. it is the use of tropes and figurative language that sharpens our ears and structures our thinking: anecdotes and descriptions, alliterations and assonances, metaphors and metonyms. these verbal devices aren’t given free play when we use powerpoint lists to present our thematic content. to prevent these general rules about arguments, disposition and the use of language from petrifying into stiff genres – such as templates and prescripts in presentation software – they are always subordinate to rhetorical requirements for attention to functionality and regard to the concrete situation. the speaker must choose the right moment (kairos) to say what is pertinent and appropriate (aptum). functionality before form. bullet me, bullet me despite the many objections to presentation programs such as powerpoint, many people see no problems at all with the software. particularly in business life, people will shake their heads and say that no one can blame a hammer because someone uses it to destroy rather than to build. it isn’t microsoft but incompetent users who make poor presentations. using my terminology, we can say that they lack rhetorical awareness and competence: media rhetoracy. this argument is in keeping with aristotle’s view of rhetoric as an amoral techne, information technology of purely instrumental character. he says that apart from virtue itself, people can misuse everything, including rhetoric. like the knife: in the criminal’s hand it can be used to kill, while in the surgeon’s hand it is used to save life (rhetoric 1,1,12-14). aristotle may be nearly always right but we should remember neil postman’s assertion that any technology is an ideology. we should listen to medium theorists such as marshall mcluhan, daniel boorstin, walter ong and joshua meyrowitz, who teach us that communication’s forms and technology influence people’s way of thinking, speaking and acting. any kind of technology, any medium, has constraints, contains certain possibilities and limitations. there are some things they can do, some things they cannot. we don’t eat cake with a hammer and we don’t play volleyball with a knife. if edward tufte’s lament has its place, this is above all because powerpoint is now so prevalent that other forms of presentation are met with scepticism. if time after time we squeeze complex ideas into a series of disparate slides, with fixed templates and fragmented bullet points, we simplify not only speech seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 15 and content but also the way in which we perceive the content. indeed, we influence all our ways of thinking. that is why tufte talks about powerpoint’s cognitive style. aristotle is naturally right when he compares rhetoric to a knife and says that it isn’t the tool or the technology in itself that is the problem. people themselves choose whether to act well or badly, morally or immorally. it is the ancient version of “guns don’t kill people. people kill people”. quite correct, of course. and yet not. allow me to conclude with a simple reformulation of an assertion by peter norvig, creator of the powerpoint parody “the gettysburg address”: powerpoint doesn’t kill teaching and learning. teachers and lecturers kill teaching and learning. but using powerpoint is like having a loaded ak47 machine-gun on the desk: you can do very unpleasant things with it. that’s certainly something we should avoid. and the best way is to think rhetorically. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 16 bibliography aristotle. 1991. the art of rhetoric. penguin classics. penguin books. london. bartsch, robert a. and kristi m. cobern. 2003. “effectiveness of powerpoint presentations in lectures”. page 77-86 in computers & education, 41 (2003). blokzijl, wim & roos naeff. 2004. “the instructor as stagehand. dutch student responses to powerpoint”. page 70-77 in business communication quarterly, vol 67, no 1. marts. carruthers, mary & jan m. ziolkowski (ed.). 2002. the medieval craft of memory. an anthology of texts and pictures. university of pennsylvania press. philadelphia. columbia accident 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(posted at www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html moreno, roxana & richard mayer. 1999. “visual presentations in multimedia learning: conditions that overload visual working memory”. page 793-800 in (ed.) dionysius p. huijsmans & arnold w.m. smeulders: visual’99, lncs 1614. springer-verlag, berlin. heidelberg. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 17 norvig, peter (undated) http://www.norvig.com/gettysburg/ (accessed 27.04.06) paivio, allan. 1978 “a dual coding approach to perception and cognition”. page 39-52 in (ed.) herbert o. pick jr. & ellitot saltzman (ed.) modes of perceiving and processing information. lawrence erlbaum associates. hilsdale, newjersey. paivio, allan 1971 (1979) imagery and verbal processes.lawrence erlbaum. hilsdale, new york. parker, ian. 2001. “absolute powerpoint. can a software package edit our thoughts”. page 76ff in the new yorker, 28 may (annals of business section). pece, gregory s. 2005. the powerpoint society: the influence of powerpoint in the u.s. government and bureacracy. thesis submitted to the faculty of virginia polytechnic institute and state university in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in political science. blacksburg, virginia. postman, neil. 1985. amusing ourselves to death. public discourse in the age of show business. heinemann. london. potter, james w. 2005. media literacy. sage publications thousand oaks, california. shaw, gordon, robert brown, & philip bromilley. 1998. “strategic stories: how 3m is rewriting business planning”. page 3-8 in reprint no. 98310 of harvard business review. may-june 1998 shwom, barbara l. & karl p. keller. 2003. ““the great man has spoken. now what do i do?”. a response to edward r. tufte’s “the cognitive style of powerpoint”“. communication insight, vol 1. issue 1. october 2002. newsletter from the company communicationpartners. (last downloaded from www.communipartners.com 7/1-2005 simpson, claude l., lissa pollacia, jimmy speers, t. hilman willis & rick tarver. 2003. “an analysis of certain factors related to the use of powerpoint”. page 73-83 in communications of the international information management association, volume 3, issue 2. szabo, a. & n. hastings. 2000. “using it in the undergraduated classroom: should we replace the blackboard with powerpoint”. page 175-187 in computers & education, 35 (2000). thompson, clive. 2003. “powerpoint makes you dumb”. newyork times. 14/12-2003. tufte, edward r. 1990. envisioning information. graphics press. connecticut. tufte, edward r. 2003. the cognitive style of powerpoint. graphics press. conneticut. yates, jo anne & wanda orlikowski (under publication): the powerpoint presentation and its corollaries” in mark zachery and charlotte thralls (ed.) the cultural turn: perspectives on communicative practices in workplaces and professions.baywood. new york. yates, frances a. 1966 (1974). the art of memory. university of chicago. chicago. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 media pedagogy: media education, media socialisation and educational media lars qvortrup rektor danmarks biblioteksskole email: lq@db.dk abstract the aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between education and media. these two concepts can be combined in three ways: one can think of media education, i.e. education in the subject of mass media. one can think of media socialisation, i.e. education within the context of a media society in which pupils and students are experienced media users. finally, one can think of educational media, i.e. media used for educational purposes. after having specified these three subject areas, the paper focuses on the third subject: media used for educational purposes. according to the paper teaching can be defined as a specialised form of communication, and the basic point of the paper is that all communication is mediated. one cannot talk about such a thing as “non-mediated” communication. also talking or touching implies media: language or body language. consequently, the introduction of new, digital media for teaching does not imply to make teaching more artificial or non-authentic. the introduction of new, digital media for teaching implies that other and older educational media are re-mediated. pedagogy and didactics the present paper is about media pedagogy and media didactics. thus, before starting, i must specify the way in which i talk about pedagogy and didactics. pedagogy can be defined as the theory of education, i.e. the theory of the way in which external influence – teaching and upbringing – can change the object of this influence. in comparison, didactics can be defined as the methodology of education. for me, the difference between pedagogy and didactics is the following: didactics can be defined as reflection of practice, i.e. reflection concerning the way in which the teacher can realise his or her educational objective. thus, didactics is the theory of the teacher as reflective practitioner1 () specialised in education, while pedagogy is the theory of second order educational reflection, i.e. reflection concerning the unity of education and reflection of education. the subject of pedagogy is educational theory, while the subject of didactics is educational methodology. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 2 media pedagogy what happens, when the word “media” is combined with the word “pedagogy”, i.e. when one talks about “media pedagogy”? three things can happen. one possibility is that “media pedagogy” means that special kind of educational theory focusing on media teaching and media training. if this is the case, media pedagogy can be compared with literature pedagogy, language pedagogy, pedagogy of physics, chemistry, natural sciences, music, art, etc. another possibility is that “media pedagogy” means that special kind of educational theory, which focuses on teaching and upbringing in a media society. what happens to education, when pupils and students are experienced users of media? should the teacher teach differently in this social context, for instance by training the students not to be influenced by mass media, and does the socialisation in a media society condition teaching differently, for instance by making children better informed and/or more impatient? they read books – cf. the harry potter phenomenon – watch television, play computer games, surf the internet, listen to i-pod music, send and receive sms’s, talk in mobile telephones, etc. etc. the third possibility is that the word combination “media pedagogy” means that specialised part of pedagogy, which deals with the use and role of media in education. when a teacher teaches, he or she uses media. language for talking, blackboards for writing, body language for creating direct communicational contact – and computers, digital networks, learning management systems, etc. thus, “media pedagogy” can be interpreted in three ways: 1. the first possible meaning is the theory of media education. how does one teach the pupils and students to use media, and how does one teach them about media as a phenomenon in society? this may be called the theory of media education. 2. the second possible meaning is the theory of education under those special conditions that mass media represent a special aspect of socialisation in relation to the pupils. pupils know the world through the media, and they are experienced and competent media users. this may be called the theory of education of media socialised children, or – in brief – the theory of media socialisation. 3. the third possible meaning is the theory of education by means of media: how are media used in and for teaching, from school radio and school television to e-learning, e-portfolio and learning management systems. this may be called the theory of educational media. thus, “media pedagogy” is the theory of education about media, it is the theory of education within the context of media and media society, and it is the theory of education with media. in the following, i will outline all these possibilities. however, i will not hide the fact that i am particularly interested in the third point: how can dissemination media be used in and for teaching? i will however emphasize my first point of the present paper: that it is important to make a distinction between these three ways of interpreting the concept of “media pedagogy”. much too often these three definitions are being mixed together. media education what makes media education different from all other education? is teaching media basically different from teaching danish, norwegian, mathematics, physics etc.? seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 3 for me the basic difference is more than the difference concerning subject. for me the objective is different. if one teaches danish, norwegian or mathematics, the objective is that the students should learn these subjects. but the objective of media education is to teach the students to deal with communication and dissemination media as producers and as users, and to become citizens in a so-called media society. in this respect media education is much more directly related to the basic dilemma of modern education – some call it the paradox of education – that the basic aim of education is through teaching to influence the students in order not to be susceptible to influence.2 the dilemma of education is through communicative influences to make children free citizens. this is of course the teleological dilemma of all education. but in media education this is very present in the curriculum. here, teachers use media to influence students in order not to be susceptible to mediatised influence. here, teachers aim to make students interested in media, while simultaneously teaching them to distance themselves from the influence of media. sometimes, the administration of this dilemma has been called “housewife research”.3 on the one hand one tries to prevent children from what is seen as the harmful influence of media, on the other hand one introduces children to the fascinating world of mass media. what is the objective of teaching computer games? is it to prevent children from playing computer games, or is it to support their game abilities and aesthetic competencies in relation to computer games? as i have suggested, this dilemma is not unique for media education, but it represents a general pedagogical dilemma. however, the dilemma is particularly obvious in media education. sometimes the dilemma is managed by simply choosing a particular position. then, the objective of media education is – as it is often expressed – to turn children into “critical media consumers”. they should not be become “victims” of newspaper advertisements, television commercials or internet banners, but should be able to see through the tricks by learning their communicative effects. commercials should not be loved, but unmasked. in this respect media education is different from other school subjects. the objective of mathematics is not to create critical mathematicians; the aim of literature is not to educate children to establish a critical distance to fiction writers such as shakespeare or hans christian andersen. the literature teacher does not aim at critical readings of the ugly duckling, but aims at stimulating love and fascination. but the media teacher certainly wants to stimulate critical reading of the sun or disney commercials, and he leaves very little room for fascination. sometimes this dilemma leads into a division of the subject into two parts: a production part and a reception part. in the production part children are educated to be able to manage media production tools, not least computers. here, the curriculum includes teleological as well as aesthetic elements. one should be able to use the computer in a targeted way in order to produce the result aimed at. and one should know and admire media aesthetics in order to create beautiful and fascinating products. in the reception part children are educated in order to become sceptical media consumers. here they do not produce media effects; here they unmask these same effects. here they are not supposed to be fascinated, but critical. how does one manage such dilemmas or, as they are sometimes called, paradoxes? the rational approach would suggest that dilemmas or paradoxes seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 4 should be solved or “untied”. but what do you do, if the paradox is a real one, i.e. if it is inextricable? then one has to try a radically different strategy: to make the dilemma or paradox invisible. and this is exactly what the educational system does. niklas luhmann expresses this approach in the following way: das erziehungssystem hat eigene formen des umgangs mit paradoxen entwickelt. es nennt sich zu diesem zwecke “bildungssystem”. dabei geht es vor allem darum, die paradoxien zu entstören und sie so weit zu invisibilisieren, daß sie unbemerkt bleiben können. oder anders gesagt: die unergiebige kurzzeitoszillation im paradox muß ersetzt werden durch problemstellungen, die mit hoffnung auf lösung der probleme ausgestattet sind.4 in a free translation luhmann says: the educational system has developed its own ways to manage paradoxes. in this respect the educational system calls itself the system of “bildung”, i.e. of general cultivation or cultural education. the strategy is to avoid that paradoxes make too much noise, it is to make them invisible so no attention is paid to the paradox. or, otherwise expressed: the unpleasant short time oscillation of the paradox has to be replaced by articulations of the problem, which couch the problem in a hope for solution. thus, the general answer to the dilemmas or paradoxes of education is: bildung, i.e. general cultivation or cultural education, as a communicative trick. “general cultivation” is a contingency formula,5 which makes it possible to communicate about education as if it was not inherently paradoxical. what is the objective of education, is the question. is it: to form children in a certain way, or is it to make them impossible to form? the answer that covers this dilemma is: bildung. the inherent dilemma of media education has a similar solution: “media bildung” or general media cultivation. this specific contingency formula covers the doubleness of fascinated media production and sceptical media reception. media socialisation all teaching presupposes that the teacher makes a “picture” of the pupil. if the objective of teaching is to change pupils into certain directions, i.e. to meet the aims of the curriculum and to make the students learn certain things, then the teacher must act as if the student is a simple device. however, the teacher knows that this isn’t the case. students or pupils are not simple devices or trivial machines, but non-trivial devices. when students are influenced by the interaction of the teacher, they will react in non-foreseeable ways. “their reaction on impulses will always be mediated through selfreference. that is: they will ask themselves what they can do with – or should understand – a certain input, and they can react on the same input in different ways at different moments.”6 thus, often the teacher interacts with the students or pupils as if they were, what they are not: trivial devices. he asks them what two times two is, knowing that there is one correct answer, or he asks them when homer was born, knowing that the one and only correct answer is: “that is not known”.7 translated into categories of knowledge, the teacher interacts with students as if all knowledge is factual knowledge, although it is well-known that this is not the case.8 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 5 this, thus, represents another inherent dilemma of the educational system: that teachers interact with students as if they were trivial devices, knowing that in reality they are non-trivial devices. they communicate with students as if communication is transportation of knowledge, knowing that the basic condition of communication is double contingency: the teacher cannot observe the learning processes of the student, and the student cannot observe the intentional processes of the teacher’s selection of communicative utterances. again, there is no easy solution to this dilemma. one would not like to – and actually could not – transform students into trivial machines (although sometimes this seems to be the implicit effect of the intentional structure of the educational system). still, however, one wants them to learn what they have been taught. the answer to the dilemma, that the structural coupling between the communication system of the class-room and the psychic system of the student is both necessary and impossible, is to perform yet another communicative trick, i.e. to translate the contingent human being student into what luhmann calls a “person”, that is into a communicatively accessible instance. the mechanism is that we simplify the other in order to make communication possible, while we know that by doing so we reduce the other to something that he or she is not. this is of course even more acute, as teachers do not communicate with one student at a time, but with several students. the challenge of the teacher is not to interact with one non-trivial device, but with a non-trivial system of nontrivial devices. consequently, one of the activities often seen among teachers is to make general characteristics of pupils. they are characterised as “…the children of our time”. to interact educationally with children in a classroom the teacher has to typify them, for instance as “competent”, “narcissistic”, “early matured”, etc. similarly, teachers often talk about the characteristics of a whole class: “this class is good, that other class is lazy”. in order to perform this communicative trick, the individual children must be seen as a product of a common cause. they are supposed to be “socialised”. the idea of socialisation is, among other things, a trick used by teachers to categorise pupils and students under a common denominator. one can then talk about spoilt children, second-generation immigration children, working class children, academic family children etc. and one can generalise children into children belonging to certain generations: critical generations, happy-golucky generations etc. doing so, the teacher can so to speak communicate with what is believed to have conditioned the children. instead of looking into their souls – finding nothing – they can look into their social environment. in this respect so-called “media socialisation” is a communicative trick. it is a way of reducing children into a simple category, thus acting as if classroom teaching is possible. in order to construct the generalised communicative other, one can include him or her into the media socialised general other and act in correspondence with this generalisation. he or she can be said to having been socialised through media, and to having made his or her world experiences through media. students of our times are “products of the media”, “disney-fied”, they are “in lack of first order experience”, etc. but isn’t this true? no, if it is correct that society and humans – psychic systems – are mutually closed systems, human beings are not a simple product of society. norms, patterns, traditions etc. cannot be transmitted from one generation to the next. rather, the mechanism of socialisation should be analysed as a mechanism of expectations.9 the child or the young person can seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 6 observe the communication of the older generation, the teachers or the other young people, and he or she can react through adaptation or deviation. should i accept their communicative offer, or shouldn’t i? this is of course also the fact at the next level of observation. the young person observes the expectations of the other, or he observes the reactions from the other on his being this or that. in this respect socialisation is more “free” then education. socialisation is characterised as structures of expectations, but whether the other fulfils your expectations is not important. actually, it may be seen as positive if the other deviates from the expected outcome. but education is goal-oriented communication. children and students should learn something according to the curriculum, and they may react against these objectives. therefore, as luhmann notices, it is an old pedagogical trick to organise education as situations, which are supposed to actualise a certain socialisation potential. one might for instance identify pupils as media society children and provide them with computers, mobile telephones and treat them as experienced media practitioners – and this might then have a positive outcome in relation to the curriculum. educational media until now i have looked at the two first aspects of media pedagogy: media education and media socialisation. media education is about the way in which teaching students how to use media can be organised and practised. media socialisation is about the way in which teaching can be organised and practised, assuming that students have a common socialisation in media and in media society. the rest of the paper i will however devote to the third subject: how to use media in and for education. i will do so by discussing the question: what is a theory of educational media, that is a theory of teaching which has a special focus on the use and function of media in teaching? on the face of it one should think that this would be a theory about the special and atypical type of teaching that is performed by means of radio, television and new, digital media. thus, this would be a theory about school-radio, school-television, distance learning, computer-supported learning, etc. however, i would suggest that a theory about educational media should have a much broader definition. it is my hypothesis that all teaching is teaching using media, that is, all teaching is mediated. i would like to draw a sketch of the dimensions of that particular field of pedagogy, which can be called the theory of the function of media in upbringing and teaching. i would suggest that six dimensions could be identified: • first, i will argue that all teaching is mediated. this is the basic statement of media pedagogy. • second, i will describe the functionality of media in teaching as a specialised form of communication: why are media used? • third, i will look at the reflexivity of educational communication. i will demonstrate that educational communication includes first order as well as second order reflection, and that educational media should make reflections at both levels possible. • fourth, i will analyse the basic aspects of education, namely the mediation of the relations between student and subject, teacher and student and teacher and subject. each relationship calls forward a specific media type. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 7 • fifth, i will clarify the dimensions of educational communication, i.e. that one dimension of education is the one connecting rules and selforganization, while the other dimension is the one connecting virtuality and reality, and i will demonstrate the way in which educational media mediate these dimensions. • finally, i will look at the theory of educational media from a media specific approach. i will analyse a couple of specific examples of media genres such as playgrounds and computer games in order to demonstrate the analytical potentials of the above-mentioned concepts and categories. all teaching is mediated it is often heard that one can make a distinction between mediated and nonmediated communication, and thus between mediated and non-mediated teaching. the idea is that there is some kind of particularly “authentic” interaction and teaching, one in which the social distance between the communicators – e.g. between teacher and student – has been eliminated. they have established an “authentic” relationship.10 for me, this is an illusion. all teaching – and all communication – is mediated. also when sitting in front of the particular other in an educational relationship, this relationship is mediated. yes, the very fact that this relationship is not any relationship, but a relationship of upbringing or teaching, represents a mediation. also when talking to each other, verbal language, gesture etc. are media. thus, all education, and indeed all communication, is mediated. one could of course reply to this position that there is a marked difference between on the one hand language, gesture etc. and on the other hand technical media such as printed books, broadcasting programmes or elearning systems. for me, however, it is important to emphasize that language, gesture and technical dissemination media are related. first of all, they are evolutionary related. no communication media is “authentic”. language is a product of social evolution as well as the internet. secondly, they are functionally related. they are means for making communication less unlikely. this position can be substantiated as follows. education, i.e. upbringing and teaching, is a particular form of communication, namely that form of communication whose objective is to change individuals (pupils, students, adult students) into a certain direction. more precisely, teaching is a specialised form of communication whose objective is based on a pedagogical intention to provide a person or a group of persons with knowledge and/or abilities.11 this in itself represents a mediation. educational communication occurs in the medium of a code, through which one can decide, whether this communicative action actually is teaching, or something else. also, based on the code one can decide, whether the communication was successful. did education actually happen? thus, just by being “education” and not conversation, negotiation, decisionmaking etc. the communication is mediated, because one code and not others is applied. in addition, however, we know that the possibility for this communication to be successful is limited. when one educates a child, it is difficult to say, whether the upbringing is a result of the child’s self-socialisation, or the result of the specific educational communication. is the child taught to walk, or does it learn – does it teach itself – to walk? is it taught to talk, or does it learn to talk? here, it is relevant with luhmann to say that teaching is a specialised expression of the general improbability that “systems understand systems”,12 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 8 i.e. that one closed system should be able to observe another closed system in such a way, that the result is understanding. yes, it is a piece of disingenuousness to say that one psychic system observes the other. rather, one system, i.e. the pupil, observes another system, namely the system of educational communication, personalized in communicative decisions made by a generalised other: the teacher. in order to generalise this position, one can say – as does luhmann in das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft,13 – that the theory of education must make use of two basic concepts: operative closure and structural coupling.14 the concept of “operative closure” characterizes both the child and the educational communication. the child is a closed system, which based on its own operations, i.e. based on preconditions that it can only create itself, observe communicative operations in its environment. my one-year-old grandchild obviously observes what i am doing and saying, but what she actually sees and understands, and why she reacts in one particular way and not another, is not observable for me. i can see that she observes, but i certainly cannot see what she sees or why she reacts in one way or the other. suddenly she makes an utterance. but why did she do it now and not a month ago (actually i have said “book” hundreds of times, when she points to my shelves, without any other reply than what i interpret as “what’s that?”) is beyond the potentials of my understanding. certainly, however, it is the result of her own operations and not of my utterance: something in her makes her react. in a similar way one can think of the educational communication as an operatively closed process, the environment of which is – children. the teacher talks, demonstrates, makes gestures and drawings on the blackboard, but whether this affects the pupils, and in which way it does so, is in principle impossible to know. and seen from the position of the children communication occurs – just think of my grandchild – but how should it be understood? however, the result is not an absurd leibnitzian dance of isolated monads. the idea is that contact is made, but not in the sense of causal input-output processes, but in the sense of structural couplings. a “structural coupling” is a coupling made by one system and based on operations of this particular system. i observe my environment through the operations of my cognitive system, not as the environment exists “an sich”. and of course i observe myself observing my environment.15 structural couplings can have two different basic effects. one is that one system limits the operational potentials of the other system. although i – and not my brain – think, in order for my cognitive system to work it must make structural couplings to the neural processes of the brain. consequently, not everything can be seen and thought. for instance, what i can observe it limited by the visual potentials of my eye. similarly, in order to be systematically stimulated to learn, the child must go to school. but staying at school the child is not allowed to leave the classroom, and the learning stimulation couplings are limited to what the school offers. the other effect, which i have already indirectly mentioned, is that one system provides resources to the eigen-operations of the other system. in order to think, i must have a brain with a complex system of neural operations, but – as already said – it is not the complex system of neural operations that thinks, but “me” that do so thanks to the resources provided by my neural system. the social system communicates, but it does so thanks to the resources provided by the structurally coupled individuals – or psychic systems – in its environment. when observing the educational communication the child can observe phenomena that can be used as resources for its own operations. the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 9 small child can copy the sounds and gesture of the adult person and use this as resources for its own, continued eigen-operations. also in order to make structural couplings possible media must be applied. media are so to speak the evolutionary outcome of structural couplings, and it is the function of media to make the improbability of successful communication less improbable. in the educational context media are used in order to make it more probable that the educational communication has the premeditated effect. indeed, educational communication is mediated. we all know that we talk differently – more clear, more simple and with a more explicit orientation towards the intended effects – when we talk to a child within an educational context. however, mediation of educational communication is not an exception. on the contrary: all communication is mediated. such a thing as unmediated communication does not exist. educational media: dissemination, understanding and effect an analysis of communication, both in general terms and in relation to the special type of educational communication – implies that three types of improbability for successful communication can be identified. just think of the normal classroom experiences: first of all, it is not probable that the pupils should hear what is being said. secondly, it is not probable that they understand, what is being said. thirdly, it is not very likely that the children – if, against all odds, they have heard and understood what was said – react to what has been uttered in accordance with the intention of the communication. this can be illustrated by luhmann’s own example from the evening meal in his family. when he said to the children that they should wash their hands, they didn’t hear it. they were too busy doing their own things. when they, after all, heard what he said, they didn’t understand it. they looked at their hands and simply couldn’t understand what was meant. “dirty? what do you mean?” and when they finally understood it, they didn’t react accordingly, but continued doing what they thought was more important, silently backed up by their gentle mother, who let the family understand that it wasn’t after all that important. a similar example has been provided by søren kierkegaard. he presented one of his ethical essays to a person, he knew – but obviously didn’t admire. in the book he made the following dedication: it is not likely that you take the time to read the book. if you do so, you probably will not understand it. and even though this should be the case, you certainly will not change your lifestyle accordingly. however, he sarcastically added, i believe that you will be pleased to note that it is bound in chamois with gold-printing. again, there are three improbabilities: the improbabilities of being heard, understood, or accepted and followed. based on these three types of communicative improbability, which also characterises educational communication, three types of media can be identified:16 • it is improbable that the child hears, what the teacher says, i.e. that the message reaches the addressee. consequently, dissemination media (writing, printing, loudspeakers, broadcasting) must be used. • it is improbable that the child understands, what the teacher says. consequently, media of understanding must be used. the basic medium of understanding is language, but in the educational context it is concepts related to the children’s world of experience. • it is improbable that the child reacts in accordance with what the teacher says. consequently, effect media must be used. these are techniques of persuasion, rhetoric etc. at a societal level it is the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 10 development of symbolically generalized communication media, i.e. media that are functionally adequate to a particular set of problems. summing up, the theory of educational media can be defined as one part of the general theory of media pedagogy. the theory of educational media includes firstly that particular form of communication that has developed as a result of the functional differentiation of upbringing and teaching with its special code, intentionality and application of specialised roles. secondly it includes a specification and analysis of those media of dissemination, understanding and effect, which have emerged for educational communication, and the ways in which they are used. if the general theory of the emergence of media as an answer to the improbabilities of communication is specified in relation to educational media, one should start by looking at the classroom as a system of interaction. also in this interaction system three media types can be identified: first, the teacher must speak so loud that he can be heard by the students. also a particular asymmetry must be established allowing the teacher to talk, while the pupils must raise their hands in order to contribute. finally, the physical and organisational classroom can be analysed as a dissemination medium. the students are organised so that they can see the teacher, but cannot necessarily see each other. the teacher stands on a raised platform with his desk and chair. he speaks, as tradition says, “ex cathedra”. and he has monopolised the specialised teaching dissemination media: the blackboard, the overhead projector, the maps, etc. thus, the particular physical and social design and organisation of the classroom is part of the dissemination aspect of educational media. this can as well be found in e-learning systems. the most important point is that with e-learning the teacher can reach the students independently of time and place. also, in learning management systems the roles are not equally distributed, but the teacher has certain “rights”. however, one of the problems with e-learning is that the teacher cannot tell whether the students are connected or not. second, the teacher must do his best to make himself understood. he must use concepts that the pupils are expected to understand, and he must refer to examples from the children’s world of experience and relevance. we all know that abstract decimal fractions are “translated” into pieces of layer cake, and that technical terms are coupled with terms from everyday life. a basic characteristic of communication is that understanding must always be checked. “when one communicative action follows another, it tests whether the preceding communication was understood. (…) the test can turn out negative, and then it often provides an occasion for reflexive communication about communication. but to make this possible (or to make it unnecessary) a test of understanding must always accompany, so that some part of attention is always detached to control understanding.”17 we know this mechanism from the turn taking theory. communication is structured into turns, and it is important for the speaker through small signs of communicative acts to see that he is actually both heard and understood. in educational communication this is formalised into phases of question-answering, but also into systems of tests and examinations. thus, tests and examinations are not, as reform pedagogy might have it, means of rigid control and suppression, but are ways to test that educational communication is successful. also, the aspect concerning media for understanding can be found in elearning systems. the most obvious example is that educational concepts and themes are translated into concepts and themes closer to the experiential seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 11 world of the pupils. the best-known case is seymour papert’s classical “turtle talk”. here, mathematics is translated into movements on the screen, and it is asserted that children understand moving images better than mathematical formula. adding to that it is believed that they prefer anthropomorphised animals for abstract graphs, thus raising the level of relevance of the communication. other examples are simulation systems, which of course are nothing else than translations from one medium into another. however, one should bear in mind that nothing can be translated from one medium of understanding into another without side effects. meaning is bound to a particular context, and with e.g. “turtle talk” the risk is that children believe, it is about the life of turtles and not about universal mathematical principles. one of the inherent problems of e-learning systems is to support the test-ofunderstanding aspect. normally, understanding is tested by the application of secondary observation media. this can be done thanks to the physical presence of teachers and students in the classroom interaction. the teacher can observe the level of interest and/or absence of the students by observing their eye-contact, the nodding of their heads, and their small communicative expressions of being present. this is difficult to do in e-learning systems. the reason is that reflexive communication of communication often happens in supplementary observation media, which are often absent in digitally mediated interaction. one speaks to another person through the telephone, wondering whether he or she actively listens, or is busy doing sometimes else. in e-learning one misses the second, reflexive medium of eye-contact, of the pupils nodding their heads etc. this is sometimes compensated for by the development of formalised test systems. however, the cost of doing so is that a signal of miss-trust is sent. third, the teacher must try to overcome the third improbability of communication, the creation of effect. even when the students hear and understand what is being said, they do not necessarily follow the teacher. here, effect media must be applied. the teacher aims to be appealing and convincing, i.e. to create an effect. he talks appealingly to the children, he uses a wide repertoire of rhetoric means, and he would – at least in earlier days – use sanctions or rewards in order to be successful. according to luhmann, the most important means in society of motivating acceptance is the emergence of symbolically generalized communication media, i.e. media that are functionally adequate to the particular problem addressed in the act of communication. this mechanism can be found in the functional specialisation of teaching. one lesson is about mathematics, another concerns literature, and it is obvious that this increases the motivation for acceptance, particularly, of course, if participation is based on free choice. however, in an educational context the most important means to create effect is the physical presence in the classroom interaction. to make a promise – e.g. the promise of doing as one has been told – the physical proximity of the other is important. therefore, rituals of promise often imply physical contact, including ritualisation of potential sanctions. i touch your shoulder with my sword, when you promise to support me as head of the club. in mafia contexts, offers that cannot be refused are followed by highly ritualised hugs and kisses. looking at e-learning, it is difficult to compensate for the physical presence and thus to create effects and motivate acceptance. often, the reaction is to supplement e-learning with physical presence, that is to practice so-called blended learning. in this way one benefits from the strong potentials of elearning, that it is an excellent dissemination medium, because it combines the bridging of physical distance with the personal contact, at the same time as compensating for the disadvantages of the e-learning medium, that it is difficult to use as an effect medium. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 12 but of course e-learning systems aim at compensating for the weakness of the effect function, for instance by increasing its fascination potentials and by including mechanisms of reward and punishment. the most well-known mechanism is to use the genre of computer games for educational purposes. one can appeal to the engagement of the pupils, and one can include mechanisms of reward and punishment, which would otherwise not be accepted within a reform pedagogical context. reflexivity we have now identified the particularities of educational communication and of education as a medium for communication. we have also analysed the improbabilities of communication in general and of educational communication in particular, and we have specified the three basic mediumforms of educational communication: the dissemination-medium form, the understanding-medium form, and the effect-medium form. however, it should also be emphasized that teaching – as communication in general – is reflexive. all communication implies communication about communication, as watzlawick once said.18 in educational contexts it is obvious that both students and teachers know that this is the case, and that they act in accordance with this fact. concerning the classroom interaction, luhmann talks about ”wahrnehmen des wahrgenommenwerdens”,19 that is the fact that the child perceives being perceived, that the pupil or the student is aware of being observed. we know it right from the early upbringing. the child puts on its well-behaved manners, when it is being observed by adults – or it might on the contrary make faces of the expectations of the educational view. we know it from the classroom interaction, where pupils can avoid being observed by looking into their papers, or where they can try to catch the eye of the teacher in order to catch his or her attention. the trick is to be observed in the right and not in the wrong moment. we know it when the pupils get home from school making ironic remarks about the teacher. “what did the teacher say about today’s poem?” the interested parents might ask. when the child answers: “blah, blah, blah”, both parties know that the child – consciously or unconsciously – has practised the art of surviving tedious communication without letting others know that this is the case.20 but also the educator and the teacher know that this is the case. he or she knows that the pupil observes the observation of the teacher. they both know that teaching is a game, that is a performance in front of an audience, although the contract between actor and audience is different from the contract between teacher and pupil. the teacher acts. but in the classroom the audience should not be entertained, but educated. thus, teaching and education is characterised by double reflexivity, or by first and second order reflexivity. both parties mutually observe the other’s communication, and they observe that this observation is being observed. consequently, educational media must be able to make this double reflexivity possible. that kind of distance education medium that makes this reflexive look impossible is not an appropriate medium. it must support the signal from the pupils that they know that they are being observed, and it must support the signal from the teacher that he knows that the pupils know and signal this. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 13 communicative relations: student-subject, studentteacher, teacher-subject i have looked at education as medium, at media for education, and at the reflexive potentials of educational media. however, educational media are also influenced and formed by the fact that they media different communicative relations. in pedagogy one often talks about the educational triangle between student, teacher and subject. there are three different communicative relations, one relation between the student and the subject, a second relation between the student and the teacher, and a third relation between the teacher and the subject. for each of these relations specific types of media can be specified. the relationship between student and subject is mediated by that type of media, which according to tradition are called “educational material” or “learning” means. in system theoretical terms educational materials, for instance textbooks, can be defined as a medium that makes structural coupling between science and education and between subject and student possible. let me use the textbook in mathematics as an example. first, it functions as a “book of translation” or a “book of transformation”. it is based on scientific evidence, but it translates or transforms this evidence so that it can be understood and appreciated by the pupils. second, it is a “book of intentionalisation”. in principle it is only interested in scientific evidence in so far as this can be used for changing or developing the pupils into the intended direction, i.e. stimulate them to learn mathematics according to the curriculum plans. in the era of electronic media digital textbooks are supposed to support the same double structural coupling. first of all scientific evidence is popularised through visualisation etc., and it is made relevant by being integrated into a narrative context. second, it is intentionalised by being structured into bits and pieces that fit into the curriculum structure. computer game based teaching material is an obvious example of this. the student can enter and explore a visualised world, where he or she can solve problems, score points and reach the next game play level. the relationship between student and teacher is mediated by that type of media, which according to tradition are called “instruction” or “teaching” material.21 one might call these media “dramaturgic” media, because it is their function to support teaching as a specialised type of acting. in this sense the teacher’s podium, blackboard, chalk, overhead projector, pointer etc. – “instruction materials” – should be called instruction or teaching media. even the classroom in its physical layout is a medium – a stage – for teaching. only with new, digital media it has become possible to transform the classroom interaction – i.e. the mutual observation of persons being present – into a mediation of persons who are not physically present. with new, interactive dissemination media students at one place can observe a teacher at another place, or students at one time can observe a teacher teaching at another time of the day. of course, one of the challenges is to make interaction possible, that is to allow students and teachers to act in first and second order subject teacher student seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 14 reflection modes (cf. above). learning management systems are systems aimed to transform classroom interaction into mediated interaction between persons who are separated in time and space. actually, traditional textbooks can be defined as media for a teacher’s interaction with a pupil, from whom he is separated in place and time. however, most often textbooks are designed in order not to replace teaching, but in order to support teaching. finally, the relationship between teacher and subject is mediated by that type of media, which can support the teacher’s management of the subject. the most obvious example is the so-called “teacher’s book”. here, the student’s textbook is supplemented by a book for the teacher. this is a book with ideas and instructions for the teacher: how should he understand the scientifically based subject, how should he make the best use of the textbook, and how should he organise and stage his teaching? also, this type of medium can give solutions to the textbook assignments, provide additional material and perspectives to the subject, or support the teacher with examples, pictures, suggested work forms etc. in some extreme cases the teacher’s book is a teaching manual. of course, the “teacher’s book” concept can also be found within the realm of digital media, often with instruction tools, cd-rom or dvd materials or with links to network-based digital resources. also, however the relationship between teacher and subject can be mediated more directly by providing the teacher with production means for his or her own production of teaching material. summing up this section, three types of educational media can be identified: • learning or mediation media – textbooks etc. – for mediating the student-subject relationship. • teaching media – teaching equipment – for mediating the teacherstudent relationship. • subject production media for mediating the teacher-subject relationship. in addition to their individual qualities, all these three types of media are characterised by their intentionality, that they are aimed at changing individuals according to curricula. they are also characterised by being supposed to reduce the three improbabilities of educational communication: dissemination, understanding and effect. rules/self-organization, reality/virtuality in addition to the above, i will make the assertion, that education can be characterised in relation to two dimensions, which both are relevant for the understanding of educational media. one dimension is the one between rules and self-organization. the other is the one between reality and virtuality. i would claim that this distinction between rules and self-organization or between heteroand self-organization corresponds to the distinction between game and play. in the game, rules are pre-defined. one cannot change the rules for soccer or chess while the game is going on. in contrast, in the play the participants create – or at least negotiate and modify – the rules while the play is going on. one can play indians and cowboys while negotiating and changing the rules for being dead and alive. “you have to hit me harder, in order to kill me”. or: “i have already been dead for ten minutes. now i am allowed to join the play again.” all teaching can be placed on the scale between heteroand self-organization, i.e. between gaming and playing. teaching is a game in so far as the rules are seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 15 defined in advance, or in so far as the definition of rules are monopolised by the teacher. however, teaching can also look like play, for example because the pupils can appeal for the rules to be changed. “shouldn’t we just talk?” the pupils might ask, or: “shouldn’t we decide that the pupils are decision-makers today?” all teaching can also be placed on the scale between reality and virtuality. education in democracy is not necessarily democratic, and education concerning pollution does not pollute. education is a game or a play, it is not reality. the reason why education is separated from reality is that reality is irreversible, while things can be repeated in another way or even reversed in education. thus, education is necessarily “about” reality or “as if” reality, no matter how much reform pedagogy long for reality. soldiers have to read about war and simulate war before going to the war. what has this to do with media? i think it is illustrating to look at the computer game as educational medium. let us imagine a multi-user game that simulates organizational communication, for example a game for pupils who is supposed to try how democratic communication functions. or it might be a game for employees in an organization, who are supposed to go through a number of organizational scenarios. a multi-user computer game is a medium, which regulates the relationship between the actors and which stimulates the actors to reflect their mutual relations. in some cases the game rules are defined ex ante. then the game is like football or chess. in other cases it is possible to negotiate and modify the rules during the game. then it is rather like a role-play. often, both things are possible. then it can be called a “game-play”.22 no matter how the multi-user game has been constructed, it supports the reflection of the relationship between necessity and emergence, i.e. between hetero-organization and selforganization. by playing the game – or the play – one can observe oneself as a game-subject choosing between accepting the rules of the game or trying to change these rules. in addition, the computer game – not least that special kind of computer game called “pervasive gaming” – is placed on the dimension between virtuality and reality. pervasive gaming is a type of computer game, which does not happen in the virtual world, e.g. on the computer screen, but which happens in the real world. as an example one can play multi-user war-game by using a gpssystem and handhold computers. the basic effect of this is that the unbearable easiness of the game – that it is reversible, that is doesn’t have consequences, but can be re-done – is being confronted by the irreversibility of reality, no matter whether this irreversibility is based in space or time. one cannot revert time or be present at more than one place. one example is provided by a simple, early and successful example of pervasive gaming: tamagotchi. the simple rule of the game is that the player is supposed to keep a physical avatar alive by feeding and stimulating him/her. if one doesn’t manage to do so – for example because it has been forgotten or hasn’t been stimulated in time – the tamagotchi dies.23 in this way the computer game as educational medium illustrates the classical relationship between virtuality and reality in education. on the one hand it is, as already argued, necessary for education to be virtual. on the other hand this is the weakness of education: that it isn’t “real” or “serious”. with pervasive gaming the relationship between the aesthetics of education and the irreversible necessity of reality can be thematized. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 16 media genres until now i have tried to present the dimensions of a theory of media education, media socialisation and educational media. in this final section i would like to present the subject from the point of view of a number of specific media genres: children’s film, museums, playgrounds, and computer games. children’s film exemplifies the basic dilemma: is it – like children’s books – an educational media genre or is it an art media genre? on the one hand children’s films are often made with a pedagogical or didactical goal. like educational communication in general they are supposed to support the realisation of a specific educational objective. on the other hand children’s films and books have the same function as any other work of art: to make an aesthetic judgment – a judgment of taste, which by definition is highly subjective24 socially communicative.25 the function of art is to make “…perception (“wahrnehmung”) available for communication…”,26 as luhmann says. one thing is obvious. that children’s film as media genre is placed between two differentiated functional systems in society: education and art. this is not a question of an “ontological” dilemma. this is not an inherent tension in the children’s film as such, and it is also not the case that the film will be of less value if it has a pedagogical objective, or that it becomes of high value or “dangerous” for a child audience, if it has an artistic objective. rather, the point is that the same phenomenon appears differently depending on the observational position: is it observed from the point of view of the system of art or of the educational system? museums, playgrounds, computer games as well can be observed from different viewpoints. museums have a scientific function, and they have a lifeworld function, i.e. to make the past observable. however, they also have an educational function: museums are educational media. something similar can be said about playgrounds. on the one hand children are supposed to develop themselves freely and without any hidden concerns. on the other hand that are also supposed to learn something, e.g. to control their bodies. the same dilemma can be identified with computer games. like films and books they are aimed at aesthetic realisation, but at the same time they have a pedagogical function: they are supposed to educate. consequently, all these media can be observed through the optics of media pedagogy, i.e. as educational media. let me with a final example suggest, what could be said about the playground as educational medium based on this approach and with the above considerations in mind. first of all the playground incarnates a specific consideration of purpose. its clear colours, its potentials for free activities, its organic forms etc. – all this is designed from considerations concerning what is beneficial for the bodily activities of children. it incarnates a pedagogical ideal and an educational teleology. the function of the playground as a dissemination medium, a medium of understanding and en effect medium is subtle. there isn’t any explicit or specific message, which must be mediated. still however it is obvious that a certain teleology is supposed to be realised. the playground is supposed to attract children with its tempting visibility. it is supposed to “translate” a pedagogical message. and it is supposed to have an effect, namely to stimulate children to be cheerful, bodily strong, trustful and expressive. in addition, many modern playgrounds should stimulate collective activities. yes, playgrounds are strong effect media. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 17 should playgrounds stimulate reflection? i suppose not. playgrounds are supposed to stimulate spontaneity. the children are not supposed to be able to observe that they are being observed, for instance by being contextualised into a pedagogical framework. supposedly, this is due to an evolution theoretical consideration: reflection occurs later in the child’s individual evolution history. however, it is quite obvious that playgrounds are placed in the spectrum between freedom and necessity, and between virtuality and reality. that they are placed in the spectrum between freedom and necessity can be seen from the fact that playgrounds are designed in the interval between free activity – play – and rule-based activity, game. one can use a climbing frame or a swing for many things, but not for everything. basically, however, playgrounds as educational media are placed in the interval between virtuality and reality. they pay tribute to the principle of socalled experience based pedagogy. life – not even early child life – is uncommitted easiness. it is sounder to be at the playground than to sit in front of the television set, is the implicit message of the playground (and its pedagogical designers). of course, the playthings and climbing frames must be certificated according to safety regulations. however the basic point is that one hurts oneself, when one fall off the swing. conclusion the intention of the present paper has been to present the overall structure of media pedagogy. media pedagogy includes three basic elements: first, it includes a theory of media education, i.e. a theory of the way in which one can teach the pupils and students to use media, and how one can teach them about media as a phenomenon in society. second, it includes a theory of education within the context of “media-socialisation”, i.e. within the context that mass media represent a special aspect of socialisation in relation to the pupils. third, it includes a theory of educational media. this latter part includes the identification and analysis of the following aspects: first, it includes the fact that education represents a particular form of communication that has developed as a result of the functional differentiation of upbringing and teaching. thus, education is a symbolically generalised medium with its special code, intentionality and application of specialised roles. a theory of educational media must specify this particular form of symbolically generalised medium. second, it includes the fact that in order to make educational communication at least a bit less improbable, specialised media of dissemination, understanding and effect have emerged. a theory of educational media must specify the particularities of these media forms. third, it includes the importance of supporting both first order and second order observations in the classroom interaction. fourth, it includes a specification of three classroom interaction relations: student-teacher, student-subject and teacher-subject, and it includes a specification of the specific media forms developed for mediating these relations. fifth, it includes the basic distinctions of hetero-organization/self-organization and of virtuality/reality in educational communication, and it includes analyses of the ways in which educational media can make these distinctions observable. of course, a theory of media pedagogy and of educational media includes the forms, applications and usages of digital media for education, and the specific aim of the present paper is to present a framework for a theory of digital educational media. however, i have tried to demonstrate that theories of digital educational media, e.g. e-learning, must be based on a general media pedagogical theory, for instance the theory that has been outlined in this paper. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 18 literature baecker, d. (2005). kommunikation. reclam, leipzig. dreyfus, h.l. (2001).: on the internet. routledge, london. foerster, h. von (1984). observing systems. intersystem publications. seaside, california fritze, y., haugsbakk, g. and nordkvelle, y. (2004). ”tema: mediepedagogikk” [theme: media pedagogy], in norsk medietidsskrift, årg. 11 nr. 3. hjarvard, s. (2005). det selskabelige samfund. forlaget samfundslitteratur, copenhagen. laursen. p. f. (2004). den autentiske lærer [the authentic teacher]. gyldendal, copenhagen. luhmann. n. (1985). die kunst der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann. n. (2000). art as a social system. stanford university press, stanford. luhmann. n. (1995). social systems. stanford university press, stanford, california [first german version 1984]. luhmann. n. (2002). das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann. n. (2004).”erziehender unterricht als interaktionssystem” [1985]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann. n. (2004). ”systeme verstehen systeme” [1986]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann. n. (2004).”sozialisation und erziehung” [1987]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann. n. (2004).”das erziehungssystem und die systeme seiner umwelt” [1996]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. luhmann, n. and schorr, k. e. (1988). reflexionsprobleme in erziehungssystem. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. [1979]. oettingen, a. von (2002). undervisningens paradoks [the paradox of education]. klim, copenhagen qvortrup, l. (2004). det vidende samfund [the knowing society]. unge pædagoger, copenhagen. qvortrup, l. (in press) “e-learning – a knowledge theoretical approach”, in: peter ludes (ed.): convergence – fragmentation: media technology and the information society. changing media, changing europe. intellect, bristol and portland. rasmussen, j (2004). undervisning i det refleksivt moderne [teaching in the reflexive modern society]. hans reitzel, copenhagen schön, d. a. (1991). the reflective practitioner. ashgate, aldershot [1983]. watzlawick, p., beavin, j. h. and jackson, d. d. (1967). pragmatics of human communication. new york. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 19 1 cf. donald a. schön: the reflective practitioner. ashgate, aldershot 1991 [1983]. 2 cf. alexander von oettingen: undervisningens paradoks [the paradox of education]. klim, copenhagen 2002. 3 cf. yvonne fritze, geir haugsbakk and yngve nordkvelle: ”tema: mediepedagogikk” [theme: media pedagogy], in norsk medietidsskrift årg. 11 nr. 3, 2004, pp. 206-214. 4 niklas luhmann: ”das erziehungssystem und die systeme seiner umwelt” [1996]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 2004, p. 241. 5 this concept was introduced by niklas luhmann and karl eberhard schorr in 1979, cf. the definition of the concept in luhmann and schorr: reflexionsprobleme in erziehungssystem. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 1988 [1979], pp. 58-62. see also niklas luhmann: das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 2002, pp. 183-196. 6 niklas luhmann: ”erziehender unterricht als interaktionssystem” [1985]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 2004, p. 15. 7 ibid. 8 cf. : det vidende samfund [the knowing society]. unge pædagoger, copenhagen 2004. 9 niklas luhmann: ”sozialisation und erziehung” [1987]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 2004, pp. 111-122. 10 this position can be found in e.g. hubert l. dreyfus: on the internet. routledge, london 2001. see my critical discussion in lars qvortrup: “e-learning – a knowledge theoretical approach”, in: peter ludes (ed.): convergence – fragmentation: media technology and the information society. changing media, changing europe. intellect, bristol and portland, in press. in denmark the same position is articulated in per fibæk laursen: den autentiske lærer [the authentic teacher]. gyldendal, copenhagen 2004. within a general media scientific context this position is widespread. here it builds on a rather narrow definition of media as technical dissemination media. see for instance stig hjarvard: det selskabelige samfund. forlaget samfundslitteratur, copenhagen 2005, p. 36, where he analyses the ”replacement” of face-to-face communication by ”mediated” communication. 11 cf. jens rasmussen: undervisning i det refleksivt moderne [teaching in the reflexive modern society]. hans reitzel, copenhagen 2004. p. 11. 12 niklas luhmann: ”systeme verstehen systeme” [1986]. in: niklas luhmann: schriften zur pädagogik. edited by dieter lenzen. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 2004, pp. 48-90. 13 niklas luhmann: das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 2002. 14 ibid. p. 22. 15 the classical conceptualisation it that of heinz von foerster: observing systems. intersystem publications. seaside, california 1984. 16 the following is based on niklas luhmann: social systems. stanford university press, stanford, california 1995 [first german version 1984], pp. 157-163. 17 niklas luhmann: social systems, op. cit. p. 143. 18 cf. paul watzlawick, j. h. beavin and d. d. jackson: pragmatics of human communication. new york 1967. 19 cf. niklas luhmann: das erziehungssystem der gesellschaft, op. cit. p. 105. 20 thanks to yngve nordkvelle for mentioning this example. 21 if one compare the english terms ”education/teaching material” and ”instruction material” it is obvious that the distinction isn’t clear between the mediation of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 20 student-subject relationship and the student-teacher relationship. it is clearer in danish: ”læremiddel” versus ”undervisningsmiddel”. 22 thanks to my colleague bo kampmann walther for suggesting this play on words. 23 i have got the example from espen aarseth at the it university in copenhagen. 24 cf. niklas luhmann’s observation that ”...the notion of taste aims at the necessity of a (…) selection without being able to provide a criterion”. niklas luhmann: art as a social system. stanford university press, stanford 2000, p. 381 (footnote 86). in niklas luhmann: die kunst der gesellschaft. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt a. m. 1985, p. 387. 25 cf. dirk baecker: kommunikation. reclam, leipzig 2005 p. 17. 26 niklas luhmann: art as a social system, op. cit. p. 48. in niklas luhmann: die kunst der gesellschaft, op. cit. p. 82. microsoft word moini identifying needs.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 identifying needs: a missing part in teacher training programs hosein moeini, ph.d. faculty of commercial sciences baskent university email: hmoeini@baskent.edu.tr abstract diverse compositions of student populations, changing paradigms in teaching and learning, and changing expectations about the quality of education occur in every society at an unexpected rate. in the absence of well designed professional development programs, teachers have been expected to learn how to improve their teaching on their own, learn from trial and error, and individually seek the required professional development. in the new educational era, the trial and error teaching, and take it or leave it professional development programs cannot be accepted anymore. teacher training is more than the matter of only mastery of certain practical knowledge, pedagogical skills, and techniques. it has to concern teachers’ own perception about the fields in which they don’t feel knowledgeable. this article is a theoretical study intended to give an insight into teachers’ training, their professional development, importance of needs analysis, and integration of needs analysis and information and communication technology in teacher preparation programs. it emphasizes that information and communication technology can enhance teachers’ learning and their professional developments by giving opportunities to initiate new ideas through their training programs. keywords: teacher training, needs analysis, ict, professional development introduction a growing diversity of student population, a dynamic society and its needs, continuous changes in expectations about the quality and assessment of education plus rapid changes in information and technology, lead schools and instructors to face with tasks and greater expectations with respect to parents and society. in fact the issues for teachers and teachers’ education to fulfill these requirements are ongoing and complex. schultz (1981) stated that investment in population quality and in knowledge determines to a great degree the future of mankind. it is already known that inadequate education is associated with poverty, unemployment and deviant behavior. as long as the quality of education is not improved, students won’t be prepared for a contributing role in adult society. the key point to improve an educational system is to reform teacher education (hallinan and khmelkov, 2001). according to walter, wilkinson and yarrow (1996) “the quality of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 2 teaching depends on the quality of the teachers which, in turn, depends to some extent on the quality of their professional development”. without well trained, qualified and committed teaches it is impossible to deliver effectively functioning educational systems (unwin, 2005). in fact, to meet the challenges of globalization, teachers are required to gain the necessary skills and knowledge. as smaldino, lowther and russell (2008) state, the teacher in tomorrow’s classrooms needs to exemplify a willingness to explore and discover new technological capabilities that enhance and expand learning experiences. in this aspect, professional development programs for teachers have always been essentially important. those programs enable teachers to become highly qualified by improving, increasing and advancing their knowledge through a better understanding of effective instructional strategies. on the other hand, to improve teacher quality, teacher development needs should be identified first. based on teachers’ professional needs, information and communication technology (ict) can take on important roles in support of those professional development programs. according to moyle (2007), professional development of teachers is conducted on the assumption that improved teacher capabilities, e.g. in integrating educational technologies into their teaching, will in turn improve student learning outcomes. in this paper, a theoretical approach is used to define a framework for effective and successful implementation and integration of information and communication technologies and need analysis in teacher training programs. the aim is to highlight a set of parameters that are essential for a successful professional development program for teachers. teacher training and professional development teacher professional development is the tool by which policy makers convey broad visions, disseminate critical information, and provide guidance to teachers. it is the instruction provided to teachers to promote their development in a certain area (e.g., technology, reading instruction, subject mastery, etc.) (gaible, burns, 2005). hassel (1999) considered professional development as the process of improving staff skills and competencies needed to produce outstanding educational results for students. according to olivia and pawlas (1997), professional development is a program of activities planned and carried out to promote the personal and professional growth of teachers. shulman (1987) described an extensive knowledge base for teacher education. he identified seven categories of professional knowledge and four sources of such knowledge. the seven categories were content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, curriculum knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of learners and their characteristics, knowledge of educational context, and knowledge of educational ends and purposes. he mentioned the sources of the knowledge as scholarship in disciplines, educational materials and structure, formal educational scholarship, and the wisdom of practice. reynolds (1989), christensen (1996), and gore (2001) explained similar knowledge bases for teacher training. in general, there has been a strong tradition of teacher training that emphasizes obtaining the required pedagogical skills, instructional technology, and practical experience for teachers. hallinan and khmelkov (2001) mentioned that as the result of the new trends in the mid-1980s, educators and policy makers shifted their attention from improving schools to improving teaching. they relied on a growing body of educational research that highlighted the critical role of the teacher in the learning process. greene (1995) stated that teachers are expected to be the agents for educational reform, they need to be empowered to think about what they are doing and to perceive different alternatives; their perspectives on a broad range of educational issues need to be transformed and enlarged. cheung and cheng seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 3 (1997) also indicated that teachers should be aware of the importance of developing themselves strategically in order to achieve their personal goals and school mission and be able to formulate their own professional development plan. it is important to remind oneself that the majority of novice teachers begin their career in a teaching environment with little or no professional assistance while expected to carry a full educational load immediately. some new teachers may teach disciplines that differ from their area of specialization. they may be asked to teach in some fields for which they are ill prepared and receive little support, and are not evaluated based on proper criteria to improve their teaching. in fact, not only novice teachers require guidance in these areas but there are also veteran teachers whose knowledge of teaching methods should be updated. however, research shows that teachers tend to teach the way that they were taught (ball, 1990). in fact, school teachers need professional development opportunities in order to grow professionally. professional development of teachers plays an important role in the current global movement of educational reforms. a major study carried out by the national foundation for improvement of education of the us national education association concluded (after interviewing over 1,000 teachers) that professional development is no longer viewed as separate from the teaching job, but must be built into the daily, weekly and yearlong job of teaching (jegede and taplin, 2000). professional development is essential for teachers to develop the content knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their classroom. by improving their skills and knowledge, teachers become better prepared to create the most effective curriculum and instructional design (vrasidas and zembylas, 2004). it seems that attending high quality professional development programs is crucial to the future of teachers. what is apparent in most of the recent policy initiatives in education is an attempt to re-think the teaching profession by introducing significant changes in the way that teachers are trained. the existing teacher training programs are prepared in a wide range of activities including teachers’ orientation conferences, workshops and seminars, symposiums, courses, print publications, videotaping services, teacher consultations, teaching excellence centers, school teaching awards, research and training seminars. however, due to missing ingredients in the existing programs of efficient training, those programs try to be revitalized. in spite of the importance of professional development in teacher training, traditional methods of professional development of teachers and instructors have come under severe attacks as inadequate, inappropriate and out of tune with current research about how teachers learn and how expertise is developed (fullan, 1995; liberman, 1995; guskey and huberman, 1995). dass (1998) disagrees with the traditional form of professional development of teachers in which “everything is packaged into an afternoon, or a full day in-service session which seems to be designed as a quick-fix for teachers’ inadequacies and incompetence”. sykes (1996) also regards conventional professional development of teachers as sorely inadequate. the main point is that learning does not end at the conclusion of a workshop. teachers need continuous support to implement the skills and concepts learned in professional development programs. therefore, teacher training’s previous models may be inadequate to satisfy the expectations and challenges to teacher preparation which have emerged from new educational initiatives. furthermore from time to time those programs lack the necessary coordination with both the existing curriculum and the realities of the classroom in order to meet the new challenges. as liston and zeichner (1990) stated, in some programs trainees are exposed to weak courses focusing on pedagogy and student discipline rather than on subject matter and educational research. in other programs, the courseware focuses solely on a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 4 liberal arts curriculum, providing no knowledge about the mechanisms that underlie the processes of teaching and learning and no practical preparation for teaching. in fact, professional development programs for teachers should be more than a range of training workshops, meetings, and in-service days. it is a process of learning how to put knowledge into practice. according to ruohotie (2006) and also herrington & herrington (2006), the development of the required professional key qualifications can be supported and enhanced so that teacher training and staff development must utilize and enhance the development of authentic learning environments. few training programs have the resources to address all stages of career development for teachers. paying less attention to teachers’ development programs gives rise to those programs that are limited to occasional conferences or workshops, rather than a systematic on-going professional development. that’s why the traditional teacher training sessions cannot stand up to the expectations and challenges that emerge from new educational initiatives. as lieberman (1994) stated “today, ‘quick fixes’ or ‘single-shot workshops’, or even ‘weekend seminars’, are no longer acceptable. rather, professional development has come to be seen as a set of mutually reinforcing conditions that would need to be considered, understood and built over time.” for successful phases of implementation, teacher training activities that address the core areas of teaching are required to be extended. the aim is to provide continuing support for teachers as they develop new skills and understandings in their teaching career. needs analysis: the missing part in general, needs are defined as a gap between what is expected and the existing conditions. mitchell (1993) describes needs analysis as "an examination of the existing need for training within an organization". it identifies performance areas or programs within an organization where training should be applied. a needs analysis identifies the problem or need and then proceeds to identify the aims, content, implementation, target population and outcome of an intervention (cohen, manion and morrison, 2003). according to kaufman, herman & watters (1996), it is important to differentiate wants from needs. knowing the difference between where instructors are now and where they want to be plays an important role in determining the contents of a training program. applying need analysis before a teacher-training program defines fields in which teachers need to develop their skills. this also provides a baseline against which teacher training accomplishment can be measured. in fact, teachers need a wide variety of ongoing opportunities to improve their skills. effective professional development of teachers begins with an understanding of teachers’ needs and their work environments (gaible, burns, 2005). conrad (2000) stated that needs analysis begins with problem identification and definition. it is believed that a main step in any training program is to determine whether training is needed and, if so, to specify what that training should provide. although the majority of teachers consider themselves to be knowledgeable and confident, at the same time, due to the new expectations and challenges, they have a perception of a gap between their current knowledge and what they need to know to become an expert teacher. if in-service teacher training programs are established with the involvement of participants, butler (1989) considered that they will evolve to meet participants’ needs, level of awareness, mastery, and concerns. through the professional development activities, it is also important to take into account the teachers’ perceived self-proficiency about the topics in which they feel knowledgeable and those in which they do not. the training programs are most effective when they are based on an analysis of these needs of the teachers. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 5 unfortunately needs analysis is usually ignored as a critical first step in the development of most teacher training plans. this leads to a waste of time, human resources and money while damaging the motivation and enthusiasm of the majority of people involved in those programs. according to wanzare and ward (2000), staff development for the twenty first century should give teachers an opportunity to contribute to programs which address their own inservice training needs. as an initial step, in order to plan and conduct a needs analysis, different categories of needs should be considered. this helps us to determine the type of information to gather. burton and merrill (1991) defined six categories of needs that are used for planning and conducting a needs analysis. they are normative needs, comparative needs, felt needs, expressed needs, anticipated or future needs, and critical incident needs. based on the category of the need, an effective planning can be designed focusing on job classification or target audience. next, a strategy should be developed for collecting the needs’ data. for instance, well-designed questionnaires can be developed and conducted among the teachers to determine their needs and also goals of the training program. moreover, through conducting interviews data on teachers’ views are gathered. the opinions of teachers help us to understand their priorities. by analyzing those data through both descriptive statistics and inferential statistical models, some of the areas which instructors mention as a need in their teaching proficiency will be identified/classified. finally, the staff development team will develop some qualified programs based on the results. generally, the main aim will be to decrease gaps in teachers’ proficiencies in different educational needs. it should be remembered that teachers in different branches have a wide range of specific knowledge needs. they may show different characteristics based on their education, experiences, needs, the subjects they teach, and factors affecting their perceived proficiencies. these aspects lead us to develop professional development programs with different contents and methods based on their needs and priorities. courses which focus on the teachers’ interests and needs, and enable them to reflect on and improve their practice, are those most likely to improve the quality of the school and develop the individual (black, harvey, hayden and thompson, 1994). unfortunately, in the existing training programs, a distinction between different groups of teachers is rarely found. indiscriminate teacher training leads to inevitable ignorance of teachers’ educational requirements. in that case, teachers will not be likely to attend and follow further professional development programs with greater enthusiasm and interest. information and communication technology (ict) and needs analysis information and communication technologies are said to be reshaping the material basis of society (al-jaghoub and westrup, 2003). in fact, information and communication technology (ict) has the capacity to support a wide range of learning activities. those technologies have been integrated into teaching approaches of different training programs. ict can enhance the effectiveness of information presentation to teachers and stimulate their interest using various internet and multimedia technologies. according to duke (2002), ict capability should in principle represent a shift from content memorization to learning to search and learning to learn. in future, the role of teachers will still result in improved student learning, but will require the teacher to have broader capabilities than content knowledge and pedagogy skills. those teachers will need to be technologically competent and information-literate seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 6 (smaldino et al., 2008). teachers must be equipped well to respond and guide students in centered learning environments. in our times, ict has been considered a facilitator of the learning process. to create new types of learning environment and to open a wealth of new educational resources, the capabilities of ict can be utilized in facilitating teacher training programs. it can take on important roles in supporting teacher training programs by helping teachers enhance basic skills, develop curriculum and assessment resources, increasing access to information, and learn about new approaches to instruction. moreover, ict provides a variety of media to deliver up-to-date information to learners. the navigational properties of ict enable learners to search among various sources and documents in multiple locations. a convenient communication provided by ict allows learners in various locations to share and exchange ideas by engaging in conversation with subject experts in specific fields of their studies (smaldino et al., 2008). the impact of ict-enabled teacher training programs is often unknown. ict can be thoughtfully integrated into those activities, not as an add-on (technology for technology’s sake) but as a tool to promote higher order learning (learning with technology) (gaible and burns, 2005). similarly, with the development of new information and communication technologies, computer network technologies are used to organize, develop, manage, and administer in-service teacher training (jung, 2001). in fact, supporting innovative models of professional development that emphasize technology facilitated teaching and learning strategies are among proposed actions of different organizations like the society for information technology and teacher education (site, 2004). robertson, grady, fluck and webb (2006) also mentioned that in their study based on effective implementation of information communication technologies in schools, professional development of teachers in the use of ict was an important consideration. ict can provide a flexible learning environment in that teachers will be able to involve themselves in more meaningful interaction activities through their professional development. ict has also been expected to support individual learning processes through the preparation of a purposeful curriculum. furthermore, flexibility and powerfulness of ict helps teachers to improve their training experiences (cantoni, tardini, rega, fanni, 2007), develop materials, access resources, and enable communication with experts, master teachers, and help desks. multiple media and platforms of ict are able to enhance teachers’ development by using a combination of learning materials in various types (text, audio, video, and animations) presented in an interactive format. this will improve subject mastery and enable learner-centered and active-learning pedagogies for teachers. in an increasingly globalized world, ict can provide support for collaboration (individuals, pairs, and groups of teachers) through the training programs. as kozma (2003) indicated “ict is the vehicle that will assist schools in completing the transition from the industrial to the information era”. according to wanzara and ward (2000), those organizations involved in inservice teacher training programs will need to address teachers’ concerns related to their professional growth. wide range application of ict usage in schools has started public debate concerning the efficacy of using ict in teacher training programs. eisenberg and johnson (1996) stated that competent use of technology skills must relate to a content area, and the skills themselves must fit together in a systematic, instructional model. however, there is a common mistake in many teacher training approaches in that one tries to compensate a lack of needs analysis by extensive usage of ict. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 7 unfortunately, it is sometimes believed that technology is the solution to a whole range of educational problems and that there is no necessity to assess the instructors’ characteristics and educational needs. whenever ict is involved in a teacher training program, it should address teacher needs via approaches that are appropriate for conditions in their learning environments. as potter and mellar (2000) also stated, training based on information technologies should address the personal and professional needs of the learners. instructor training programs are most effective when they are based on an assessment of the priorities of instructors and context of instruction. as mentioned previously, teachers’ educational needs are vital for motivating them to gain new knowledge and acquire new skills. according to rollpettersson (2001), when developing a new program, failure to take in the perceived needs of the teachers might result in resistance to it. ignorance of their needs gives rise to construction of poor quality educational materials too. consequently, ict integrated programs must be arranged in such a way that the teacher should actively be involved in the learning process. continuing old practice with the use of new ict, without paying attention to instructors’ needs, will never affect their training positively and efficiently. similarly, gaible and burns (2005) stated that to be effective and successful, teacher professional development programs must be of high quality and relevant to teachers’ needs. no amount of ict can compensate for professional development programs that lack these characteristics. in fact, one of the main purposes of applying ict and needs analysis together is to shift teachers’ approach of knowledge transmission to knowledge building in their training programs. in this way, technology will be an integral part of teacher preparation programs. in other words, those programs should not simply offer a course in educational technology, but also demonstrate effective use of technology in teaching. they should be a matter of guiding, encouraging, and facilitating rather than a rigid application of a predetermined set of procedures and skills. as de sousa pires (2001) stated, ict can be a part of learning, but the starting point should be: ‘what can one do with a computer which one cannot do without a computer?’ introducing ict into professional development programs should include sufficient attention being paid to the involvement of teachers through their training process. application of needs analysis before using ict leads to an appropriate context within which instructor training can be offered properly. another advantage of this approach is to avoid the overloading of online technologies and to assist navigation through training resources. in this way, the assessment strategy will also reflect the aims and objectives of the training goals. it should always be remembered that training based on ict must offer much more than an easy text exchange between program mentors and teachers. here, it is important to consider that the focus should not be more on the technology than on the training methods. according to jung (2001), if designed and used properly, information and communication technology has the potential to make teacher training more effective, affordable and flexible. mason (2002) stated that while the basic mechanisms for getting online have improved, the need for students and tutors to adapt their learning and teaching styles to the online environment is, surprisingly, still a significant hurdle. therefore, in all stages of teacher training programs, needs analysis should be used in support of ictembedded teacher development programs to produce the desired educational outcome. otherwise, the teacher training programs will fail to utilize the benefits of an ict culture. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 8 conclusion teachers may not be professionals and they need to be professionalized. however, from time to time, resources and training are far from being responsive to their needs and their professional roles. sometimes, their training may even be neglected due to limited financial resources. for a satisfactory and effective teacher training program, it is absolutely essential that teachers, as the most valuable human resource in the educational systems, should be improved properly. they need a wide variety of ongoing educational opportunities to improve their teaching skills. meanwhile, in recent years there has been a community demand from students and their parents for highquality teaching. being concerned about the quality of teaching in schools, empowerment of teachers to strategically develop their own professional competence is also critical for quality of education. on the other hand, the role of ict in teacher training programs cannot be neglected. ict supports teachers’ learning in a variety of ways by offering interactive and effective learning environments. using ict in the training of teachers helps them to share information and other valuable materials through cooperation and collaboration with their colleagues and instructors while managing their self-directed learning process. it should always be remembered that the use of ict, careful instructional design, active teacher involvement, increasing teachers’ motivation, appropriate teacher support services and continuous evaluation all lead to high-quality training programs. consequently, teachers attending those programs will obtain higher levels of satisfaction and greater perceived learning. in this aspect, the major role of ict will be quality enhancement rather than just cost reduction or labor saving. it seems that many activities can be used to raise the status and quality of the teaching, and ensure a good supply of highly qualified and motivated teachers. however, from time to time this vision has been difficult to put into practice. teacher training programs are required to review and develop teachers’ educational knowledge and implement a program to provide a firm foundation in relevant new approaches and techniques for them. this process should be based on a well-designed needs analysis phase. a needs analysis may identify more than one training need. these needs should be prioritized, and either placed into a formal training plan, or prepare a database for future training. information and communication technology should be considered as an important tool to enhance the quality of these training programs. ict developments should be integrated productively in professional development programs of teachers. hence, it is quite important to take into account the teachers’ own perceptions about the areas in which they feel proficient, those in which they feel a need to be trained and those fields in which they have deficiencies but they are completely unaware of them. the main aim of integrating ict and needs analysis in the professional development programs of teachers is to improve their learning outcomes. teachers should be informed and confident in integrating ict to their educational needs. ict applications facilitate delivery of instruction and consequently the learning process. by integrating ict into the teaching and learning process, the required tools and environment for learning will be enhanced automatically. however, at this stage, the main attention should be paid not only to technical provision of those tools but also to satisfying the needs of different groups of teachers and understanding their perceptions of professional development activities. maybe the focus should be changed from a teaching technology to a learning technology in teacher training programs. in short, professional development strategies of the future should be sensitive to teachers’ needs as professionals and to related solutions supported by ict. it seems that the full potential for the integration of needs analysis and ict into the professional development programs of teachers has yet to be realized. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 9 on the other hand, change of teaching methods cannot be achieved in a short time. professional development of teachers must be a continuous, jobembedded, career-long process. the plans should be specifically focussed on improving teaching in all of the curriculum, instruction and assessment stages. through integration of ict and teachers’ needs assessment, the training should fill the gap in inefficiencies of teachers and also schools. to meet the educational needs of the new global organization, teachers need continuing professional development in order to maintain and upgrade their skills. through learning how to learn effectively, how to develop themselves professionally, and how to manage personal resources to achieve action plans they will become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. finally, an effective leader should be appointed who can manage the whole process of teacher training. she or he should have specific expertise and vision to create and head a professional development plan effectively. in addition, experts and participants should evaluate those programs regularly and necessary changes must be applied. with this approach, the use and impact of ict on teacher training can also be regularly monitored as part of evaluation activities that help to improve the whole process of professional development plans effectively. such evaluation process allows professional development staff to find and correct errors in implementation and identify factors that lead to success. formative and summative evaluation can be used to program improvements. as mentioned previously, in an effective training program teachers are prepared to work successfully in a rapidly changing social environment of schools while trying to meet the complex learning needs of students. consequently, the society will likely attach higher value to a qualified education system and the social status of the teaching profession will rise accordingly. such a success will lead to the revitalization of schools and related social institutions that interact with the educational systems. it is hoped that this approach will provide a starting point for further attempts to rethink and renew teacher training programs in the era of new expectations, innovations and challenges. such attempts should provide a clear vision of high quality professional development that recognizes local needs, ict integration, priorities and resources to improve the quality of such programs. the final aim will be to obtain a quality ict-based professional development program for teachers. references al-jaghoub, s. and westrup, c. 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(1987). knowledge and teaching: foundations of the new reform. harvard educational review. 57(1), 1-22. site (2004). statement of basic principles and suggested actions. available online at: www. aace.org/site/sitestatement.htm (accessed 12 december 2007). smaldino, sharon e., lowther, deborah l., russel, james d. (2008). instructional technology and media for learning. pearson merrill/ prentice hall. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 12 sykes, g. (1996). reform of and as professional development, phi delta kappan, vol 77, 464-8. unwin, t. (2005). towards a framework for the use of ict in teacher training in africa. open learning: the journal of open and distance learning, 20:2, 113-129. vrasidas, c. and zembylas, m. (2004). online professional development: lessons from the field. education + training, volume 46. number 7/7, 326-334. walter, j. m., wilkinson, m. and yarrow, a. (1996). facilitating professional development through the study of supervision and instructional change. british journal of in-service education, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 41-54. wanzare, z., ward, k. l. ( 2000). rethinking staff development in kenya: agenda for the twenty-first century. the international journal of educational management. 14/6. pp. 265-267. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 technocultural education lars løvlie professor university of oslo email: lars.lovlie@ped.uio.no abstract in this essay i try to describe the development of a traditional liberal education into a technological liberal one. i propose that we start by dropping the classical oppositions between man and animal, and man and machine; that we stop pitting morality against technology and rhetoric; and that we do away with the idea that ict in our schools will necessarily tear the fabric of education apart. we should rather try and re-describe the idea of an unencumbered and independent self in terms of relational concepts, like the cyborg or more radically: like the self as interface. john dewey led the way to this view a century ago, by coining the word intelligence as the name of educative interactions between man, animal and machine. the self as interface is a self of differences rather than identities. but that idea does not do away with our emplaced body, or our personal sense of self and identity. in the postmodern world, the cyborg is a migrant with the ability to interpret signs, understand symbols of power, see through rhetorical games, engage in argumentation, and in these activities partake in his or her own political education. the internet nomad does not bode anarchy. he or she is the radically decentred subject that may well participate in kant’s cosmopolitanism, jürgen habermas’ discourse ethics and jacques derrida’s deconstruction. – but this is to go slightly beyond the text submitted here … technocultural education is an attempt to describe education in a postmodern, technological society. if we include the internet in our description, this society is only ten years old. to talk about education in this ultra-brief perspective is risky – and exciting. risky, because teletechnology’s actual transformation of schools and society depends just as much on tradition as on technological innovation; exciting, because technology offers entirely new approaches to teaching. what can be said, then, about education in the longer historical perspective? a good deal! the concept of liberal education – bildung – was developed in the late seventeenth-hundreds. it influenced philosophy, literature and politics in germany, and featured in the literature of goethe and schiller as much as in the philosophy of humboldt and hegel. in its classical form, the concept contained two elements: the strength and expression of the self and the power and influence of culture. to this unity of the individual and the universal we can add a third element, namely transformation or the poetic 'refinement' of the relationship between the self and culture. for education drew its inspiration primarily from the idea of the expressive and creative individual. the concept of education has naturally changed in content over the last 200 years. any reconstruction of the concept must allow for the fact that not only seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 2 do we think differently about ourselves today but also that we live in a technological culture that the old educational theorists could not have dreamed of in their wildest fantasies. just as the postmodern has given rise to new ways of thinking about ourselves, so has teletechnology given us new means of communication. the postmodern self and teletechnological culture have a special interrelationship that is transforming not only the self and culture but also the concept of education. nevertheless, postand teleare after all only prefixes to the modern and thereby to the long history that links us to the old educational thinkers. i am not primarily interested here in what schools should be doing in the internet age but in how we might look at the idea of education in the internet age. the reconstruction i am attempting is philosophical. it seeks to say something about education before we raise purely practical questions about the kind of learning matter that educates, how it should be adapted for educational purposes, and what characterises an educated person. today education can be described in terms of the interface. the word implies a boundary, a border, an in-between. an interface is nothing in itself.1 it does not refer to a substantial self or culture but rather to the intersection where they meet. it conveys, too, the idea of exchange and transition and is analysed in terms of restlessness, movement, and transformation. the interface is a feature in the postmodern version of the traditional concept of liberal education as the transformation of the self and culture. but before we come to the postmodern, we must first outline the historical backdrop to educational theory. moreover, the local norwegian anti-technology debate over the last generation must be given its place because it may contribute to an understanding of the interface as a transformation of the traditional idea of education. the advent of technoculture it is common to associate education with humanism and the cultivated man, formed by classical literature, national traditions and the mother tongue. in the 19th century german neo-humanism of the middle class educational elite mounted a critique of realism, the natural sciences and technology. for them, science was without a soul and the machine without humanity. the study of science and technology might well educate but at best it was an education of mere utilitarian value. it certainly could not educate people to true humanity. but the conflict between realism and humanism, formulated by wilhelm dilthey (1833-1911) as the opposition between the sciences and the humanities, could nevertheless not ignore the need to see humanism as parallel to and not in opposition to technology. for technoculture is not only older than german educational culture or bildung, it is also a natural part of that culture. we should not forget that book printing in its time was a radical technocultural breakthrough. from the1450s onwards, printing governed our relationship to the word and transformed our relationship to language, for example by extending an oral tradition to a written one, a revolution in itself. for in the space of only 20 years – and that was incredibly fast in the age of the horse-drawn carriage – gutenberg’s technology spread to several of europe’s most important seats of learning. today people read books without even thinking about the technology literally imprinted in them, from the use of typeface to binding and dusk-jacket. or take the transition from book to image. from the 1830s onwards, photography taught us to see people and the world through the still picture, a multifarious and universal form of representation that retains its fascination today: just think of the family photo album, the photographic portrait and the art photo. 100 years later, broadcasting created a revolution in communication from the one to the many and helped transform the general public into an audience. this was before tv, the computer and the mobile phone made their breakthrough and created a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 3 communication network with a broadband capacity unheard of only 10 years ago. technology tends to be viewed as a threat before being incorporated into our culture. thereafter it is used without our ever thinking that we’ve been technocultural beings for a very long time. some people may still think that the new information and communication technology (ict) has left humanism in dire straits, sucked the life out of it indeed, leaving it a mere rhetorical shell for the pop world to fill with glitter. they ignore the fact that teletechnology is not the cause of tabloidization, madonna and nazi propaganda on the internet, and so let humanism’s potential in the postmodern technoculture pass them by. true, teletechnology has contributed to information chaos, advertising and internet pornography. that doesn’t prevent ict from bridging the gap between humanism and technology or from playing a role in education. we don’t talk about liberal education or bildung in the same way as in the period from 1770 to 1830, which was the time of liberal humanism’s flowering and growth in germany. we may, however, talk about a technocultural liberal education. let me describe briefly the transition to this concept. technocultural liberal education takes leave of the old nature/culture and man/machine antitheses. these oppositions grew out of the classical german concept of education and came to play a role over generations in the resistance to naturalism – that is, the idea that man was nature rather than spirit. today it makes no sense, and serves no useful purpose, to set humanism up against naturalism. to put it this way: anti-naturalism became untenable when the human genome project was completed in the winter of 2000. this project fixes the gene as the common denominator of man and beast and invites us to stop speaking of human nature as something categorically different from that of the animal. the mapping of the human genome shows that only local codes distinguish us from animals. though people and animals may differ in essential ways, they now belong to a world that is basically ecological and interactive. resistance to the machine lost its basis in equally dramatic fashion with the advent of the personal computer. it is the capacity for empathy, respect and care for others and not intelligence that separates us from the pc. the pc shares intelligence with man and because of that it is integrated in people’s lives in a wholly different way from the production machinery of the past. in short, biotechnology and teletechnology are serving to unite ideas which historically have been seen as disparate. the birth of the cyborg the 19th century was the century of the educated middle class and the elite university. those who sympathised with this world-view did not incorporate technology in the humanistic project the way the american pragmatists did in the 20th century. technology was, and remained for european culture, a threat to the truly human. but neo-humanists too readily confused technology with its effects on industrial society. the new technology at that time raised basic ethical and political problems, as it still does. teletechnology, for example, has revived debate on freedom of expression, surveillance and censorship. biotechnology has already introduced ethical problems which make for political discord and struggle, as evidenced by the debate on foster diagnosis and stem-cell cultivation. nevertheless, technology has continuously insinuated itself into the picture as a way of life and an educational horizon. the art of printing not only gave us the book but also led to coffee houses, reading circles and libraries. it created a reading public and a middle class citizenry with expectations in regard to information and education for all. the book played a role in that earlier technoculture as a persuasive cultural force. today the pc has a similar role. surveys show that the internet’s primary function is as a social meeting place. the grating of metal against metal has seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 4 been replaced by the tapping of the keyboard and the insistent hum of the cooler fan. while the book reinforces the subjective element in reading, the pc primarily invokes the intersubjective and interactive element. while the book created a literary public, the computer is creating an electronic one. the electronic public does not obey the rules of historical reason à la hegel, by which oppositions are resolved in unity and institutional harmony. historical reason no longer act as a unifying force nor is there any universal humanistic spirit or spirituality to turn to. john dewey (1859-1952) took a new course by introducing a new name for the german geist or spirit: intelligence. he described intelligence in different forms of interaction: he talked of intelligent people but could also talk of intelligent animals and tools. dewey’s change of terminology was an attempt to do away with metaphysical notions of the self as a fixed dimension, with an innate essence and autonomy. he resisted the self as self-identity and identity as something we can find or recover, as if it were lost property. for dewey the ”i” is not a spectator of the world but a participant in a relational and interactive world. to apply intelligence as a generic term for the activities of men, animals and machines does not mean ignoring the specific differences between them. although i share more than 98 per cent of my genes with a chimpanzee, i am not a chimpanzee; and although i write on a pc, i am not a computer. technocultural education is a different type of education because it uses different concepts and metaphors to describe the relationship between man and nature, man and machine. the cyborg is the metaphor for this – in the best sense – symbiotic relationship between man and machine. this metaphor suggests how the critique of instrumentalism in norwegian socialand educational philosophy as it has developed from about 1970 until now, should be re-written. the cyborg is the metaphor for postmodern technoculture. the name is derived from the initial syllables of cybernetics and organism, thus uniting technology and biology in the description of man. in 1985, donna haraway published an imaginative article which she called 'a manifesto for cyborgs'2, in which she proposed using the cyborg as social reality and fiction at the same time. not only was this a good idea for mixing genres of description but it also served to reconcile man and machine. because we are electronically linked to the world around us in different ways we are all cyborgs. scarcely a day passes without our opening a pc, calling from a landline or mobile phone or driving a car or bus in which the ignition, fuel injection and servo-steering are electronically controlled. and as users of pace makers and hearing aids we are already part of technoculture. but this is not where haraway’s most important point lies. the cyborg as metaphor is an invitation to think in contexts where the opposition of man and machine is replaced by the interface between them. the cyborg is not, as we may immediately be led to believe, primarily a being of flesh and blood and electronic prostheses but rather the interface between man and machine. the interface and hypertransformation what’s the interface? the screen is an interface, whether we’re talking about the tv, the pc or the display on a mobile phone. the interface is the dividing line between person and machine but at the same time marks the spot where the person stands face to face with the machine. that is why interface is such a graphic term. the cyborg originates in the interface, as electronically mediated communication between participants. take the owner of a mobile phone. for a young person, the mobile phone is naturally a thing to be bought, used – and lost. as a thing it is getting ever smaller and packed with ever more functions, so that it now works like a mini-pc. but the mobile is first and foremost part of a youth culture with sms and mms messages, interchangeable covers and personal ringing tones. it acts as a psychological and social interface. at the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 5 same time it is more than a thing, because it plays a part in the individual owner’s status and social recognition. the young owners do not necessarily identify with the mobile as a fetish, although it may offer an aura of freedom and power. rather, their identity is linked to the mobile as distributed intelligence in a network in which they realise themselves in ongoing dialogues with others. their identity is between rather than in the participants, identity is in the interaction. cyborgian identity is realised in the interface but where the interface is put in these networks is arbitrary. it may be located between the sender and the mobile but can also be minimised to the point of impact on the retina; it can be located between the sender and the software in the cellphone or also between sender and receiver. in these cases, the interface marks meeting places in the world. as “located” by its interfaces the cyborg belong to a topology of interactions, that is, it is caught in the contextual and situated descriptions that vary according to my activities online and off line. interface is a boundary but not in the sense of a barrier or obstacle. a boundary faces two ways, it both unites and separates, it is face-to-face and janus-face. the cyborg is on the one hand the locus where nature and culture, man and machine meet – a metaphor for ”pure” communication. but john dewey hinted at the practical version of the cyborg long before this word came into circulation after the second world war. he described consciousness – the mind – as the ‘name for a course of action in so far as that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims, ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the attainment of aims’. and he adds: ‘intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns; but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he plays a part have the qualities mentioned’.3 we are in the habit of talking about activities as if they belonged to the person lifting a stone, driving a car or speaking on the telephone. for dewey, activities were not primarily properties of the individual or the world but of the relationship between them. this way of looking at it turns actions into something more than the person’s intentions, decisions and motor movements. instead, action forms interfaces between the person and the world. the interface is not itself a thing in time and space but the difference between things.4 today’s technoculture reinforces this point of view in surprising ways: what lies between me and the world gains greater significance. the intermediate, the interesting has now become inter-esse, in the literal sense of “that which is between”, and is realised in communication. but this approach also raises a major question: how can we talk about educating the person if the relationship between me and the world shrinks to a play of differences? the answer can be formulated thus: if we keep to the key dynamic of traditional education, which is transition and transformation, then present-day technoculture has led us to what we might call hypertransformation. hypertransformation takes place online as experiences of play, change and difference. but this experience is the opposite of the old industrial society’s 'alienation'. alienation meant that the person lost his sense of individuality by being forced into an anaesthetic, monotonous and repetitive relationship to things. by contrast, the hypertransformative contributes to an enhancement of the self and to a heightened self-esteem in the vivid experience of the other. it allows confirmation of our qualitative 'spiritual' relationship with the world, in which the dialogue with the other can develop. the younger generation interact intensely on the internet and equally intensely in mixed situations in which the mobile phone participates in the ongoing dialogue between people in physical proximity. hypertransformation is revealed in the intensity of these dialogues, which are strongly 'poetic' or creative, precisely because they are unstable and fluid. there is no question, however, of losing oneself in this dialogue but rather of constantly rediscovering oneself in the relationship with others. the young are cyborgs, they live at the interface and create their world there. the internet offers new dimensions to a communicative existence. we discern the connection between educating the cyborg and the traditional insistence on education for humanity. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 6 the german philosopher wilhelm von humboldt (1767-1835) asserted that humanity is formed by connecting the self to the world in the most universal, vivid and freest interaction.5 in doing so, he was expressing the leading principle of german educational thinking. he was a firm proponent of the idea of the self as the driving force and focal point of education. this did not prevent him, however, from seeing education as a refinement of the relationship between the self and the world. he and the other neo-humanists were far removed from the notion of the literacy as mere factual knowledge to be learned by rote. knowledge and practice were a necessary but insufficient condition for education. the key aspect was the educational power of the subject matter and this could only be communicated in the engaged and free interaction between those studying and the subject matter. it was for that reason that the ideal of a community of scholars of professors and students was a key tenet of humboldt’s conception of the university. education was for humboldt basically aesthetic, a matter of feeling and the senses, that is, experiences that provided motivation for educational activity. for him, humanity’s goal stands open; it existed before education took didactic form. the transition from an expressive self to the cyborg radicalises humboldt’s view of education as reciprocal influence or interaction. dewey’s notion of education as problem-solving serves as pragmatism’s intermediate link to an idea of technocultural education, with the interface and the cyborg as key educational concepts. i have indicated some differences between the bookish approach to education prevalent around 1800 and a digital educational culture 200 years later. postmodern technoculture has abandoned the idea of man’s privileged position in relation to nature. it has put behind it the traditional divide between naturalism and humanism. by creating new interfaces, the interactive media contribute to promoting the primary aim of classical education, which was free interaction between the self and the world. in the cyborg’s perspective, education cannot be reduced to analysis of the self on the one hand and the subject matter on the other. the metaphor introduces a perspective which assumes a critical approach to such a dualist and 'objectivising' pedagogy. the cyborg sets the stage for notions of the subjective as relationship, prior to the subject as ego acting on the world. moreover, the electronic interface allows us to see the limitations of the current neo-liberal view of man. in a 'virtual' world described in terms of interfaces and communicative meetings, the notion of the isolated, atomic and purposefully rational individual can scarcely survive as anything more than ideological jetsam. of the three elements of traditional education: self, subject matter and transformation, the last of these concepts assumes lasting pedagogical importance, both theoretically and didactically. to be sure, the self and subject matter remain key elements in education. but education’s dynamic is now found in the interfaces, which in turn can be incorporated in expanded qualitative descriptions of friendship, caring relationships, collaborative relationships, to name but a few. the interface contributes to creating the existential unrest that forces us to find new arenas for communication. it sharpens focus on the meeting between teacher and pupil. we can therefore imagine a different educational topology, that is, of new 'locations' or themes which may ultimately describe technoculture’s dialogical content. anti-instrumentalism superseded it now seems both appropriate and important to examine the thematic constellation i have proposed in the local norwegian context – for two reasons: firstly, as a critique of philosophical anti-instrumentalism; and secondly, as a re-assessment of instrumentalism in education. in the late 1960s and early 70s a critique of “positivism” and instrumentalism took place in european philosophy and education. the critique was particularly directed seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 7 at a misplaced demand for scientific objectivity and strategic thinking in education, used by both social planners and educationalists in the implementation of the norwegian comprehensive school system. this technology was based on mechanical teaching machines using simple programmes, with the aim of meeting the new lower secondary level’s need for adapting to the individual pupil’s needs within the setting of the classroom. in this scheme of things, the teacher was expressly described as a teaching aid in a strict taxonomic scheme. general objectives should be realised in concrete terms of knowledge and behaviour capable of being the object of evaluation and control. the project foundered on the simplicity of its basic concept and on the norwegian childand culture-centred teaching tradition. the internet has surpassed and truly revolutionised this setting, and that is why instrumentalism itself is in need of a reformulation. the new technology is not based on mechanical devices but on electronic communication. it is not a mere factor in learning but has itself become a frame of reference for organising learning as hypertextual, experience-based and project-oriented. the internet is not structured in accordance with the logic of strategic planning or instrumental action. it is more or less chaotic, as any browser finds out for herself. the web is organised as hypertext, with no strategic centre of authority or power and with a logic that links information in search patterns the user himself must find his way in. the internet opens the door to undermining and protest, usurpers and hackers, surveillance and sabotage. at best it provides fora for civil society’s politico-cultural projects and organisations. these fora may use the mobile phone, e-mail and the web in seeking to promote deliberative democracy’s call for reasoned argumentation and negotiation. the new technology poses no inherent threat to political education. on the contrary, it is part of the postmodern education project, for it permits what traditional machine technology denied: public exchange of opinion and critical debate. anti-instrumentalism used the craftsman as a negative metaphor. for the teacher as craftsman, the child is an object to be formed in the image of the adult. the teacher owns the idea of what the object can become and knows the method for realising it. she sees upbringing as tekhne – technique or processing – and commits what the norwegian philosopher hans skjervheim called the instrumentalist’s mistake.6 the mistake is to regard pedagogy as a “rational objective” activity. the instrumentalist lives in the subject-object divide and ignores the aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis, between making or processing something and acting morally and politically. anti-instrumentalism took its inspiration, however, not so much from aristotle's polis as from kant’s theory of moral obligation, expressed as the moral imperative not to treat the other person as a means but as an end in itself. skjervheim was right in his critical rejection of the idea of making the pupil an object and upbringing the manipulation of behaviour. it has nothing to do with education for social integration and political reflection and action. but his theories tied instrumentalism to technology, and thereby succeeded in shielding the question of education from taking the technological perspective in general. this has left its mark on norwegian educational debate to this day. the argument seems still to be between a child-centred tradition on the one hand and a standard teacher-centred tradition on the other. across this axis there is, so to speak, a second-division match going on, between a protestant work ethic that swears by knowledge and diligence, and a rhetoric that promises to turn everyone into a happy consumer. both extol the individual and both shackle the pupil in the chains of achievement. norwegian anti-instrumentalism was both anti-pragmatic and anti-rhetorical. but it was unfortunate even 30 years ago that skjervheim rejected john dewey as instrumentalist and thereby underestimated the importance of american pragmatism as the theoretical basis for a liberal political education and critique. following the rehabilitation of pragmatism as a linguistic and action seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 8 theory in the 1970s, first by philosophers such as karl otto apel and jürgen habermas and later by hans joas, this became generally recognised. it was perhaps even more unfortunate that skjervheim rejected rhetoric and so lost sight of rhetoric’s potential for a critical education.7 the full significance of this rejection became clear in the course of the 1990s. a double prejudice clung to the theory: that technology is a threat to cultural and moral concerns, and that rhetoric is nothing but persuasion and manipulation. this scenario created a blind spot that obscured the possibilities of the internet. the antitechnology movement was not only off-centre in regard to postmodern technoculture. it also remained silent and passive in the face of the actual use of power and manipulation in the past decade and which manifested itself again in connection with the educational reforms of the 1990s. skjervheim ignored the fact that rhetoric itself can provide the tools for rhetorical criticism, not only because it knows about the misuse of rhetoric from the inside, so to speak, but also because rhetoric itself contains the rules for critical dialogue. it is not the case that reasoned argument belongs to a different category from rhetoric. on the contrary, as genus deliberativum or political deliberation, argumentation is part of rhetoric. to ignore this connection is so remarkable that it needs an explanation. part of the explanation lies in skjervheim’s intellectual roots. argumentation is a procedure – and so a tekhne. a reasoned discussion follows established rules for objective argumentation. rhetoric is also a tekhne, but with a varied repertoire. rhetoric is sensitive to the needs of the situation and the limits of argumentation, without rejecting argumentation as topos.8 topology can be configured in three senses of the original greek word topos: as geographical location, as discursive situation and as topic of discussion. topology does not favour argument but migrates between arenas of rational discussion. the coffee house, the seminar room and the reading circle unite the three meanings: they are geographical locations that provide different contexts for discussing common topics. technocultural education encompasses argumentation but also finds alternative ways of conducting rational discussions. education is a general topos for discussions which have abandoned the categorical distinction between true and false, between philosophical conviction and rhetorical persuasion. topology therefore defies the hegemony of argumentative reasoning. a nomadic culture survives, as we know, by moving from place to place to maintain its biological and cultural life. in the postmodern world, the nomad is a technocultural migrant, who can interpret signs, understand symbols of power, see through rhetorical games, engage in argumentation, and through all this is formed into a politically educated individual. that which in the 1970s was ideological awarenessraising in a dualist world is today rhetorical awareness-raising in many shades and in myriad locations for moral and political education. a critique of subjectivity opponents of instrumentalism defended the autonomous subject and the empowered individual. they were often learner-centred, dialogue-conscious and politically aware, and dissociated themselves sharply from french deconstruction. deconstruction belongs to the discourse on technocultural education and refers to critique in the traditional sense, as an inquiry into and analysis of theories of technology and rhetoric.9 the first step in this criticism was to introduce the interface as a topos and the cyborg as a metaphor for education’s subject. this subject is not kant’s autonomous or unencumbered ego but rather hegel’s subject of mutual recognition.10 the cyborg is, so to speak, implaced in hannah arendt’s description of action as 'the spontaneous beginning of something new' as the person appears in the public arena.11 in the next phase, the traditional educational subject will be deconstructed through various vignettes. these vignettes are examples of the decentred seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 9 subject and the topoi in which this subject finds itself. the examples are more than illustrations. they can be regarded as extended metaphors, as both situational description, interpretation and argument. kant’s statement in his critique of pure reason that 'i think must accompany all my representations'12 sets the scene for the centring of knowledge and morals in the subject's mental schematisation of the world. this “i” should not be mistaken for a psychological instance or a freudian ego. rather, it is the activity that structures experience and moral judgement in the first place. it is transcendental, that is, prior to the psychological subject that interact with the world through its ability to perceive, reason and judge, in other words the subject talked about in educational psychology.13 hegel broke with the perception of the ”i” as education’s point of departure and thereby opened the way to the notion of interactivity. of the 'idea' hegel says that it is neither a disposition nor a representation in my head. nor is it a theory, for the self does not apprehend the world but rather itself as thought. a theory cannot in itself be true of the world, for truth, according to hegel, is first found in the concrete unity of thought and object. the appreciation of art is not, then, in the beholder but in the relation to the art object. we may entertain an ideal of the constitutional state, but the idea is only true, in the sense of real, when actual, positive law matches the ideal of justice. we may dream of the perfect friendship but a true friendship is the one that unites dream and reality in a concrete relationship – and thereby step out of the dream. at one point, hegel sums up his views by saying that the concept of art, the state or friendship is the realisation and development of these institutions14. he had no time for intellectual abstractions about things. to him what is only in the mind is abstract, while the relationship between what we have in our heads and the world we live in he considered concrete. his concept of education is concrete much the same way von humboldt’s is. hegel thereby supplied a good argument for education as consisting of topoi, that is, the places where thought and object meet. he decentred the subject in a radical way by locating it in history – in customs and rituals, scientific and artistic forms, and in social institutions such as the family and the school. in hegel, the kantian 'i think' steps out of its egocentric existence and into the sphere of recognition, where “i is we and we is i', as hegel puts it in another context15. hegel rejected the autonomous ”i” and introduced a relational subject that is different from itself. to say this would seem an obvious self-contradiction. but the examples given above should make it more understandable. hegel introduced a version of the interface when he proposed that justice, friendship and love must be defined, not as atomic or isolated, but as relational in their concrete appearances. they are dialectical concepts or interfaces, in the sense that the universal, that is, implies the particular and is concretised in the singular or unique. they belong to a particular time and a particular place (abelard and heloise, romeo and juliet, faust and gretchen), and are thus more transition than identity. it concerns love that is not identical with itself and that cannot be consummated (or simply is that which cannot be consummated, to echo søren kierkegaard).16 whereas kant’s subject stands contraposed to the world, hegel’s subject was the relationship between the subject and the world. technocultural education follows hegel’s dialectic by regarding the interface as in permanent disequilibrium. the cyborg balances on a knife-edge in relationships that are impossible to reconcile – pace hegel’s history of philosophy. now if the subject is the relationship, the philosopher need not look for a tekhne to forge it. no instrumentalist pedagogy is required to connect a self and a world that are already connected in interaction. the content of technocultural education can then be traced in topoi that are driven by their own pathos rather than by tekhne and are therefore close to the historical and existential situations in which people always find themselves. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 10 while hegel ended up as a philosopher of reconciliation deconstruction rejects stories with happy endings, whether of the philosophical, political or psychological kind. it’s always making forays and operates elliptically rather than linearly, horizontally rather than vertically. it isn’t happy with metaphors like the column and the obelisk, as symbols of masculine thrust and power, but prefers the cultural landscape and the journeying. but let me return to the “i” and to contexts in which the subject fails to hold on to itself and matter is open to no definitive reading. examples of this are found in the reading of literary texts and in analyses of interaction on the internet. i will take the literary tack here, because the text is the conventional locus of the subject in its multiplicity and metamorphoses. implacing the subject in 1968, roland barthes published a little article called 'the death of the author'. in this he declared that the author is not the sovereign originator of his text, indeed that the text is in no authoritative meaning of the word his. in the written text, the author does not manage to be at one with herself but remains ambiguous. is it the author in the text, the voice in the text or even the text itself which is the author? barthes answers by saying that the text is composed of many scripts, taken from different contexts and different times. what unites the text, says barthes, is not the author but the reader. the meaning of the text does not originate in the author but in the text’s 'other', in the birth of the reader at the cost of the death of the author. all the same, the meaning of the text does not end with the personal reader. for the reader is in principle ‘… without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted’.17 i take this to mean that the reader is the locus of reading, she is the placeholder of the multiple traces and interfaces that the text invokes. if the meaning of the text lies in its traces and links to other texts, the hope of understanding our own life as a coherent story from beginning to end will necessarily end in disappointment – we are not capable of writing our own biography. barthes does not imply a constructivist subject as psychological instance and sovereign reader. by allowing the text to act as a location – locus – for the subject, the subject itself appears as difference. the subject is not a thing, indeed not even that which allows itself to be captured in a character description or in an autonomous role. this subject is free in a more radical understanding of the word than skjervheim’s subject, and offers therefore a deeper critique of reifying, objectivising pedagogy than he imagined. the system that attempts to discipline the postmodern subject meets the hacker; the absolute difference, the wild and untamed subject, the mutating virus circulating in the system as proof that the control of the internet and the absolute disciplining of the subject is impossible to fulfil. if the postmodern subject is anything at all, it is not identity but difference and communication – the difference that makes a difference, and thus turns out as significant learning. this is, i suggest, the reality that computer technology has brought into the classroom. hardly surprising that the school is being rocked in its very foundations, for this is a technology which in contrast to its predecessor introduces – and welcomes – the element of uncontrollability into teaching. how then can we ”grasp” the unstable subject? barthes implicitly posed the question if the narrative gives the best description of interpretation and meaning. he chose to invoke the still photo as historical artefact, as in camera lucida, and the anecdote as literary expression. walter benjamins introduced the autobiographical vignette in a berlin childhood around 1900, experiences described in brief paragraphs where the text appears in as condensed graphic form as the black and white photograph. they are descriptions of place rather than of time. natalie sarrautes does something similar in her autobiography childhood, from 1984, where the entire text is made up of short scenes. a number of tableaux are presented but not interlinked. the effect is striking, for seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 11 the scant, bare text has the effect of a palimpsest by which we get in touch with human existence, nothing specifically psychological in it. through the text, the reader’s own past is awakened like a biographical subtext and melds with the author’s voice – a meeting in the difference. the message steps out of the text, as it were, through the moments created in the confrontation between author and reader. the chapters, paragraphs, words, form interfaces that enable this meeting between author, text and reader. in benjamin’s childhood memoirs it is characteristically enough not the boy walter but the place, the locality, the event in which he is implaced that is described, and in these topoi the subject plays a part without surrendering his freedom. barthes described a subject without 'history, biography, psychology', only the 'someone' who holds the text together. at this point the educational theorist must apparently give up, for such a subject turns education into a shattered mirror in which no one can recognise themselves. it doesn’t seem possible to talk of education in a postmodern sense, when the subject becomes a khiasm – an x – in the web of communication. education predicates a person who can identify experiences and decisions as her own, and as an individual that project aims and has the skills and means to achieve them. barthes' article can be read as a protest against closing the educational process in such violent ways. it is a provocation to some to imagine freedom not as something the teacher and the pupil shall create, but rather as what already is there to be found and realised. in benjamin’s and sarraute’s texts the place or locus is seen as the central element in the education of the individual. their texts are images given permanence in the fixing bath of the biography. although we are talking here of childhood memories written down in adulthood, they are dominated neither by the child’s nor the author’s ”i”, but by the scenes unfolding in the reading. the texts do not invite us to any kind of discussion of identity and are hence free of any psychologising. strictly speaking, there is nothing to decide for oneself in these texts but there are many experiences to share. as the self is not identical with itself (hegel) and not identical with its work of creation either (barthes), we must turn to the other and to the topoi that describe communality, such as tolerance and caring, trust and hospitality. preparing the ground the interface exists here and now. it takes form when time gives in to the moment, just as when someone falling to their death sees history flashing past in a brief second. the moment realises a maximum of historical meaning in the significant experience of transitions at a standstill. it is thus here, in the movement of the still image, in what kierkegaard called 'the moment'18 and benjamin called ’the now’, that the topological first makes itself felt as the singular, unique and concrete. here too lies the potential and power of transformation. the moment can dissolve in immediate action but it is not only a matter of a carpe diem motive. the singular can manifest itself in the chance meeting with a person, a picture or a text; or in personal insight, resolution and action – quite normal things. i shall not overemphasise the connection between the topological, the interface and the moment. but the interface is dependent on the place where the boundary can be drawn, and the moment requires a place where the punctum is put. it is the place, the boundary and the moment which make the presence of the interface possible. i have described a mental and moral order that exists prior to the traditional subject-object-dichotomy that divides the world in two: the subject and its object. the topological view of education does not begin with the subject but with the topoi in which the subject is already implaced. among the familiar clichés in the criticism of deconstruction is the dissolution or death of the subject. but deconstruction does not do away with the subject: because it does not begin with the subject, there is no subject to dissolve. deconstruction is, of course, a critique of – and thereby an attempt to break down – the philosophy of subjectivism, but that does not mean killing off the subject. deconstruction seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 12 has only abandoned the subject-object dichotomy which has given the subject such an elevated position in our traditional mental world. it seeks alternative descriptions of the subject and proposes therefore a different philosophical frame of reference from that in which skjervheim used to argue. when the cyborg replaces the “i” as metaphor, the question of who i am lives on but in a less pretentious and absolute way. deconstruction radically decenters the autonomous ”i” of universal reason and action. the subject lose its hegemonic position, and here is the clue to a different pedagogy from the traditional; a pedagogy that places the responsible moral and political person subject into a different constellation of experience and learning. the cyborg is a radically decentred subject. in a world of interfaces the cyborg is not identical with itself, at least not in the sense of idem or sameness. from this point of view, much of the current talk of identity is a sidetrack and not only to the private and internal. talk of the individual in search of itself lingers in the myth of an original core self in search of its lost identity. but once more, if there is no centred “i” and no lost identity, there is no point in searching for it or creating it in education. the cyborg is interface in the sense of turned away from itself to the things in the world: it is a de-privatised subject open to the other. we have given up the postmodern scare of the fluid, hybrid subject for the more realistic vocabulary of distributed identities who live and strive with an identity that does not implode in the private individual of consumer society. the cyborg is present in the world. it is an unstable presence but nevertheless presence to itself and others. from the point of view of a topology, the postmodern person is always already implaced in the real or imaginary loci that grounds experience and action. the realisation of presence is found in the sense of where we are, who we are and what we ought to do as responsible persons. the concept of a centred “i” and its construction belongs to the historical form of authority that we call the modern. it provides a horizontal model for upbringing and education. if we replace this philosophy with the horizontal, heterogeneous and singular perspective, we find ourselves in a topology with a different configuration of reality than that governed by the ideal of possible consensus between the parties in a discussion, or the prospect of possible reconciliation between conflicting perspectives. this new configuration does not replace consensus with disagreement or dissent but refers the question of truth and agreement to the interface as the permanent indefiniteness applying to the true, the right and the beautiful. in this indefiniteness there is no rejection of truth and morality and their discourse, but humility and openness towards that which is different. modern life is straightforward in following intentions and objectives. but there is also a quiver of doubt and ambiguity of action. technocultural education tries to translate old educational responsibilities into a language appropriate to the problems of the time of the internet. it is grouped round common values but does not permit independence and freedom to be contingent on a perceived humanity, because the question of humanity vibrates constantly in the interface between the universal and the particular. technocultural education as i now attempt to summarise what technocultural education may be, i shall do so in the form of statements requiring a further critical, concrete evaluation. technocultural education gets by without the dualities that still plague pedagogy 100 years after dewey tried to kill them off. it does not perceive the self as force, as humboldt and kant did, and does not view identity as individual character but as the promise or advent of the relationship between the self and the world. humboldt wrote somewhere that the individual can be described as character; but individuality itself will always remain hidden, inexplicable and inconceivable.19 while character can be seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 13 described and recorded in the report book, individuality is the element that is insusceptible to diagnosis or evaluation. what then is the connection between humboldt’s statement on indefinable individuality and the promise of technoculture, and hence between traditional and postmodern education? the connection is intact, broken, and transformed. intact in the sense that he described individuality as expressiveness and freedom from the intervention of an authoritarian state; broken in the sense that humboldt was theorising in a frame of reference both mentally and politically different from our own; and transformed in the sense that we have to propose the vocabulary for a new and different pedagogy. humboldtian individuality is non-conceivable. at the same time we cannot but perceive the individual as a person with a character, qualities and abilities. it all seems destructively paradoxical, for in humboldt’s perspective we are doomed to believe in an individuality that is not susceptible to description, and to doubt the character that is appears in our description and evaluation of others. but this paradox – individuality as the interface between description and non-description – is precisely where postmodern education has its opening and future. hegel’s dialectic as the restlessness of position and destruction of closure amounts to the same. in his introduction to the phenomenology of spirit he refers to experience as the despair that self-awareness goes through. before søren kierkegaard, he described the existential status of the interface as perpetual movement and transition. this observation rejects pedagogy’s idea of the self and the world as stable elements in education. the relationship between them exists as interface, located in incomplete topoi which must therefore be constantly re-addressed: from the more general what is true? and what is just? to how can we cope with existence? how can we save freedom? how can we conceive of a different pedagogy? the state of permanent transition discussed here is the freedom of the self from the self and others, that which prevents the self from being reduced to an object to either itself or others. if that is so, then freedom cannot be something the subject constructs but rather the restlessness that drives us to attain freedom. it is then possible to conceive of freedom as its own origin, and of despair and suffering in the original meaning of the word as pathos or movement. the debate on education is the place or topos where education seeks to arrive at an understanding of its own activity. in his philosophical essays, skjervheim urged this debate forward in inimitable fashion. he proposed that the idea and potential of education be reconciled with its actual conditions and possibilities, he had the sense of the place and presence of liberal education. he perceived the signs of the times but also wished to convince educators of the intention behind talking of freedom, recognition and respect for the other in terms of his philosophical principles. this intention is, i propose,reaffirmed in the idea of the hypertransitional. the cyborg is the metaphor for the agents in the electronic world. the metaphor offers no pat answers to the current problems of education; its job is to usher in new perspectives and another vocabulary for pedagogy. humboldt wouldn’t have felt at ease with the cyborg; he lived with the classical metaphors. but in its own way, the internet can contribute to humboldt’s concept of the spiritual self-realisation of the individual, if in versions that would naturally surprise him. the web hasn’t given us a new world but has quite clearly expanded the old one. the book and reading still give us the most complex and intense interface we know of. but the internet has partly created new forms of community by rapid world-wide communication. the “life on the screen” has made an inspired contribution to the depiction of human beings as distributed and multifaceted identities in a communicative world which encompass differences of nationality, colour or ethnicity. in contrast to such a 'bright' utopian picture, there is, of course, the dystopia of the internet as the arena for power, surveillance and suppression. in the gaps between these extremes, the internet has transformed the library into a hypertext, that is, into a virtually instant reservoir of information configured by the web and made accessible by search engines. this has contributed to communicative seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 14 noise, to a world of information garbage with no sorting mechanism for determining what should be dumped and what recycled. the internet has exacerbated the problem of what is worth knowing and what worth doing in education. when there is no curricular canon that everyone can agree on and hardly any didactic method capable of systemising and communicating that which is worth knowing, there is as far as i can see only one practicable way to follow, and that is a combination of interpretive and problemand projectoriented efforts. the postmodern cyborg is a “cybernaut” or helmsman and must himself help to navigate through these new pedagogical waters. the educational tradition remains with us but how it is to be steered is something we must find out as we go along. for the future of projected ideals no longer shine bright in the pedagogical skies. teletechnology challenges in the first instance an over-managed school system because both information and authority are more distributed than before; that is, knowledge from outside and below now competes even more fiercely with authority from above. in the second place, the internet plays a part in the loss of the teacher’s natural authority as the source of information, because the internet always knows more than both teachers and pupils. this is not a new problem, of course. the teacher’s power of definition began to be eroded when the bible began to give way to books, newspapers and the tv. in the third place, hypertext means that the school curriculum is losing its authority as an accepted canon or guidelines for teaching. the new literacy is bound to live with the paradox that there is no canon, therefore we need one! hypertext is a system of nodes or junctions, links and networks, with the web as the best example. hypertext, unlike the tree of knowledge, does not grow upwards but is instead rhizomatic20, spreading by sending out new shoots without drawing energy from a main source. it has no centre, establishes no hierarchy and has no authentic story to tell except that created by the participants themselves. in other words, it radicalises barthes’ assertions in 'the death of the author': anyone who nowadays enters the net contributes to forming his or her own study scheme. it is well nigh impossible to teach in accordance with the canon of the 'great books' tradition when teachers and pupils work with a wide variety of media, sources, and textual collages. a curriculum with its hierarchical structure and teacher’s authority is not appropriate to culture of the hypertext and the search engine. last but not least, distributed learning means that the class gradually ceases to exist as the natural social community. pupils become knowledge nomads working together in groups formed in relation to the specific assignments, the library and the net, at times appropriate to the requirements of their project work. in short, the school becomes more interactive and pupils more inter-individualised in the school landscape exemplified by the modern media station. it is not enough to take sides for or against the future of computer technology. we are bound to take a stand in relation to its promise and possibilities. our technocultural education project takes postmodern ambiguity as an inspiration to look afresh at the modern educational paradigm. the neohumanistic classicalists may be consulted for their opinion but they cannot answer our questions. it wasn’t the internet that humboldt had in mind when he wrote his ’school plans’ of 1809. but his concept of the university is readily reconcilable with dewey’s ideas of an experimenting community of teachers and students in which the 'investigative method' was to be used to transform doubt into belief. however, the technocultural approach to education does not relate, as dewey did, to one single method. technocultural education finds it sources in the interfaces of a topology of knowledge. education does not, as j. g. fichte would have it, put the ”i” first and then add the world. education helps to locate and grasp the interface that has replaced dewey’s “problem”. interfaces are configured in a topology that encompasses intention and execution, theory and experiment, map and terrain. topology locates – as the name clearly indicates – the common human topoi that appear in literature, in the cafés and at the dinner table. topoi or topics are systemised in museum seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 15 collections, school curricula and university research programmes. technocultural education, like traditional education, should formulate a basic concept of education for humanity, exemplified in the idea of the cultivated human being. the task is to transform education’s classical triad – the self, the world its transformation – into interfaces for subject as distributed and situated. technocultural education retains the ideals of humanity, justice and freedom, not as 'objective' values but as questions, interpretations, and conjoint action. technoculture is the culture of the meeting place. education is realised in the meeting places where people live mind to mind in relation to the world and face to face with each other. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 16 references arendt, hannah (1958): the human condition. chicago, chicago university press. barthes, roland (1968/1977): the death of the author. in roland barthes: image, music, text. london, fontana press. bateson, gregory (1980): mind and nature. a necessary unity. glasgow, fontana. biesta, gert j. j. (2001): preparing for the incalculable. deconstruction, justice and the question of education. in biesta, gert j. j. and egéa-kuehne, denise (eds): derrida & education. london, routledge. dale, erling lars (1992): pedagogikk og samfunnsforandring 2. oslo, ad notam gyldendal. deleuze, gilles and guattari, félix (1983): on the line. new york, semiotext(e). derrida, jacques (1982): margins of philosophy. brighton, harvester press. dewey, john (1916): democracy and education. n.y, the free press. glasersfeld, ernst von (1995): a constructivist approach to teaching. in leslie p. steffe and jerry gale (eds): constructivism in education. new jersey, lawrence erlbaum. haraway, donna (1985): a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s. in social review 80. hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich (1817/1970): encyclopädie der philosophischen wissenschaften iii:81. in werke bd 8. ff.a.m, suhrkamp. hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich (1807/1999): åndens fenomenologi. oslo, pax forlag. hellesnes, jon (1975): sosialisering og teknokrati. oslo, gyldendal. hellesnes, jon (1992): ein utdana mann og eit dana menneske. in dale, erling lars (ed): pedagogisk filosofi. oslo, ad notam gyldendal. hellesnes, jon (1999): på veg mot ein tilstand utan education. in andersen, øyvind (ed): education – humanitas – paideia. oslo, sypress forlag. honneth, axel (1992): kampf um anerkennung. zur moralischen grammatikk sozialer konflikte. ff.a.m., suhrkamp. honneth, axel (2001): leiden an unbestimmtheit. stuttgart, reclam. humboldt, wilhelm von (1980): theorie der bildung des menshen. in wilhelm von humboldt werke in fünf bänden. stuttgart, cotta bd in:235. humboldt, wilhelm von (2000): theory of bildung. in westbury, in hopmann, p. and riquarts, k. (eds): teaching as reflective practice. london, lawrence erlbaum. humboldt, wilhelm von: latium und hellas oder betrachtungen über das classische alterthum. in humboldt werke in fünf bänden. cotta, stuttgart, bd ii:27. kant, immanuel (1781/1968): kritik der reinen vernunft. in theorie-werkausgabe immanuel kant in 12 bänden, bd iii. ff.a.m, suhrkamp. kierkegaard, søren (1962): sygdommen til døden. in samlede værker bd 15. københavn, gyldendal. kierkegaard, søren (1962): gentagelsen. in samlede værker bd 5. københavn, gyldendal. løvlie, lars (1989): john dewey – erfaring som handling. in thuen harald and vaage, sveinung: oppdragelse til det moderne. oslo, universitetsforlaget. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 17 løvlie, lars (2002): the promise of bildung. in løvlie, l./ mortensen, k. p./nordenbo, p. e. (eds): educating humanity: bildung in postmodernity. journal of philosophy of education, vol 36, special issue 3, autumn 2002. nyrnes, aslaug (1977): retorikk som didaktikk. didaktikkens allmenne topologi i moralske tanker av ludvig holberg. in rhetorica scandinavica 2/1977. skjervheim, hans (1992): det instrumentalistiske mistaket. in filosofi og dømmekraft. oslo, universitetsforlaget. skjervheim, hans (1992): filosofi og dømmekraft. oslo, universitetsforlaget. trippestad, tom are (2003): mistillitens sosiologi. in slagstad, rune/korsgaard, ove/løvlie, lars (eds): dannelsens forvandlinger. oslo, pax forlag. wimmer, michael (2001): the gift of bildung. reflections on the relationship between singularity and justice in the concept of bildung. in biesta, gert j. j. and egéakuehne, denise (eds): derrida & education. routledge, london. 1 derrida describes this as différance in his article of the same title in derrida, jacques (1982): margins of philosophy. brighton, harvester press, p 25f: 'there is no essence of différance; it (is) that which not only could never be appropriated in the as such of its name or its appearing, but also that which threatens the authority of the as such in general, of the presence of the thing itself in its presence. that there is not a proper essence of différance at this point, implies that there is neither a being nor truth of the play of writing such as it engages différance.' 2 haraway, donna: a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s. in social review 80, 1985. following haraway the publication of manifestos has gained in popularity. jaron lanier presented one-'half of a manifesto' in wired, december 2000, and david gelernter presented 'the second coming – a manifesto' on www.edge.org , downloaded in february 2001, both contributing to an interesting discussion on the future of cyberspace. 3 dewey, john (1916): democracy and education. n.y, the free press, p. 132 see also løvlie, lars: 'john dewey – erfaring som handling'. in thuen harald/vaage, sveinung (1989): oppdragelse til det moderne. oslo, universitetsforlaget. 4 see bateson, gregory (1980): mind and nature. a necessary unity. glasgow, fontana, p. 110ff. there gregory bateson says that difference is not content. difference has no dimensions. take for example his illustration of the chalk mark. the white mark is put on the blackboard and they can both be localised. but the difference between them cannot be localised either to the mark or the board. the difference 'is qualitative and not quantitative'. the notion of the dimensionless difference radicalises dewey’s idea of action to the point where communication, according to bateson, consists 'of differences that make a difference'. 5 wilhelm von humboldt (1980): theorie der bildung des menshen. in wilhelm von humboldt werke in fünf bänden. stuttgart, cotta bd in:235. see also wilhelm von humboldt (2000): theory of bildung. in westbury, in/hopmann, p./riquarts, k. (eds): teaching as reflective practice. lawrence erlbaum, london, p. 58. in the same anthology there is a good introduction to humboldt by lüth, christoph: on wilhelm von humboldt'p theory of bildung. 6 skjervheim hans (1992):det instrumentalistiske mistaket. in filosofi og dømmekraft. oslo, universitetsforlaget. se også hellesnes, jon (1975): sosialisering og teknokrati. oslo, gyldendal. also by hellesnes: ein utdana mann og eit dana menneske. in dale, erling lars red. (1992): pedagogisk filosofi. oslo, ad notam gyldendal, also: på veg mot ein tilstand utan education. in andersen, øyvind, red. (1999): education – humanitas – paideia. oslo, sypress forlag. see also erling lars dale (1992): pedagogikk og samfunnsforandring 2. ad notam gyldendal, oslo. 7 skjervheim is the best counterexample to his own point of view. he fought an explicit battle against rhetoric at the same time as he implicitly practised the new norwegian essay as rhetorical genre. he renewed the philosophical essay in the interface between argumentation and rhetoric. he always wrote in the form of central topoi, in which he was the topologist par excellence. the essays entitled 'deltakar og tilskodar', 'det instrumentalistiske mistaket' and 'det liberale dilemma' are examples of this. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 18 8 nyrnes, aslaug: retorikk som didaktikk. didaktikkens allmenne topologi i moralske tanker av ludvig holberg. in rhetorica scandinavica 2/1977. conversations with nyrnes have considerably reinforced my understanding of topology as pedagogical form. 9 that plato’s dialogues in themselves are examples of rhetorical writing is something that skjervheim took account of in a late essay, by distinguishing between 'differentiated' and 'dedifferentiated' rhetoric. the former takes into account the difference between to persuade and to convince and makes a commitment to the better argument in a truth-seeking discourse. the latter is simply suasive rhetoric, i.e. without making any pretension to truth and reason. the essay is entitled 'invitasjon til (kulturrelt (?)) sjølvmord?', is as always blessedly fresh in style and attacks french deconstruction, particularly jacques derrida. derrida’s conceptual universe opens dedifferentiated and dangerous waters. like odysseus we must tie ourselves firmly to the mast to avoid the perils ahead: '[e]in kan bli førd av garde inn in ei privat forvilling, in verste fall av psykopatologisk slag'. see skjervheim, hans (1992): filosofi og dømmekraft. oslo, universitetsforlaget, p 52. for an entirely different and welcome application of deconstruction to education, see gert j. j. biesta: 'preparing for the incalculable'. deconstruction, justice and the question of education; and michael wimmer: the gift of bildung. reflections on the relationship between singularity and justice in the concept of bildung. both in biesta, gert j. j./egéa-kuehne, denise, eds (2001): derrida & education. routledge, london. wimmer's essay was originally published in german in masschelein, j./wimmer, m. (1996): alterität, pluralität, gerechtigkeit. randgänge der pädagogik. augustin, academia. see also lars løvlie: ‘the promise of bildung’. in løvlie, l./ mortensen, k. p./nordenbo, p. e. (ed): educating humanity: bildung in postmodernity. journal of philosophy of education, vol 36, special issue 3, autumn 2002. 10 the hegelian recognition topos is addressed in honneth, axel (1992): kampf um anerkennung. zur moralischen grammatikk sozialer konflikte. ff.a.m., suhrkamp (also in english); the topic is pursued further in honneth, axel (2001): leiden an unbestimmtheit. stuttgart. reclam. 11 see arendt, hannah (1958): the human condition. chicago. chicago university press, p 234. 12 kant, immanuel (1781/1968): kritik der reinen vernunft, p. 136. in theoriewerkausgabe immanuel kant in 12 bänden, bd iii. ff.a.m, suhrkamp. 13 the constuctionist von glasersfeld is indebted to kant when he asserts that knowledge does not represent an independent world but 'what we can do in our experiential world, the fortunate way of treating objects we call physical and the fortunate way of thinking in abstract concepts'. but he confidently skips the important distinction between the constitution of recognition on the one side and construction on the other. he thus contributes to the widespread misunderstanding that the world is a construction and that we create the world in man’s image. this not only gives god a run for his money but is also to misunderstand how experience lives historically through us as much as we live through it. see glasersfeld, ernst von: a constructivist approach to teaching. in leslie p. steffe/jerry gale, ed (1995): constructivism in education. lawrence erlbaum, new jersey, p. 7. 14 hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich (1817/1970): encyclopädie der philosophischen wissenschaften iii:81. in werke bd 8. ff.a.m, suhrkamp, §213 zusatz 15 hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich (1807/1999): åndens fenomenologi. oslo, pax forlag. 16 søren kierkegaard (1812 –1855) offers us another approach to the interface through existential philosophy. he opens sygdommen til døden by saying that the self is a relationship that relates to itself, or that it is in the relationship that it relates to itself. here he anticipates deconstruction by describing the self not as a centre or body/instance in itself but as the divide in the relationship to itself and therefore as 'despair'. kierkegaard, søren (1962): sygdommen til døden. in samlede værker bd 15. københavn. gyldendal, p 73. 17 roland barthes: the death of the author, p 148. in roland barthes (1968/1977): image, music, text. london, fontana press. 18 kierkegaard took up this theme in repetition. repetition has the sacred truth of the moment, '[ø]yeblikkets salige sikkerhed', he says. but repetition is not to remember or seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 1 – 2006 19 repeat the past, for it is what is remembered. repetition instead engages the past: 'gjentagelse og erindring er den samme bevægelse, kun in modsat retning; thi hvad der erindres, har været, gjentages baglænds; hvorimod den egentlige gjentagelse erindres forlænds'.18 (kierkegaard 5:115). repetition is kierkegaard’s term for 'here and now' as a place in time, that which appears to us as event/action. repetition is not realised in the subject but in the topology 'forlænds – baglænds', i.e. forwards and backwards in topos. it is both return and arrival, that which manifests itself or is born her and now. it is before or ahead of the answer to the question 'what shall i do at this moment?' it isn’t a matter of anyone’s subjective freedom of will. we are now closer to the idea of freedom as the coming of the new. 'gjentagelsens dialektik er let; thi det, der gjentages, har været, ellers kunne det ikke gjentages, men netop det, at det har været, gjør gjentagelsen til det nye.' in kierkegaard, søren (1962): gentagelsen. in samlede værker bd 5. københavn. gyldendal, p 131. 19 wilhelm von humboldt: latium und hellas oder betrachtungen über das classische alterthum. in humboldt werke in fünf bänden. cotta, stuttgart, bd ii:27. 20 with gilles deleuze and félix guattari the rhizome can be used as a metaphor for what i have called topology. the word suggests a free-growing root system with no stem, the wood anemone’s roots for example, and replaces the tree and flowering – the traditional educational metaphors. the rhizome emphasises nonlinear connection and evades weeding: 'the rhizome is anti-genealogy', write the two authors, in deleuze, gilles/guattari, félix (1983): on the line. new york, semiotext(e), p 21. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 when means become ends: technology producing values bjørn hofmann adjunct professor section for medical ethics, faculty of medicine university of oslo institute for health technology university college of gjøvik, norway email: bjoern.hofmann@hig.no abstract technology has become the symbol of our culture. the claim that we are subject to a technological imperative is therefore a fundamental cultural critique: we do not control technology, rather technology controls us. an alternative way to formulate this is to claim that technology cannot be “made down” when it is made up; we just have to make the best of it. accordingly, it has been argued that technology has evolved from being merely a means to becoming an end in itself. this article investigates this claim by analyzing the relationship between technology and values. the examples stem from the technologies of medicine and weapons because they clarify this relationship. it is argued that technology relates to values in two ways. technology both raises general questions about values and it is value-laden due to its very function. however, although technology is value-laden, it does not necessarily give an imperative mandate. one reason for this lies in our responsibility. we are inevitably responsible for all aspects of technology, i.e. development, construction, production, commercialization, implementation, and use. referring to a technological imperative to explain and defend our decisions with respect to technology constitutes an unjustified renunciation of our own responsibility. hence, the article tries to underscore our responsibility by developing a technological axiology. introduction a core claim about technology is that it has changed the relationship between means and end. while technology traditionally is thought of as a means to human ends, it has actually has become an end in itself. one could even argue that it has become an end to which we adapt our lives – a gauge for human life (ars mensura). we can recognize this in ordinary language where we can encounter claims such as “technology generates demands,” “technology seeks problems to its solutions,” and more specifically “drugs looking for diseases” (vos 1991). within communication technology, “integrated services digital network” (isdn) was established to integrate speech and digital information, e.g. from personal computers. this service received little interest for many years, and it was only the explosive use of the internet and net browsers that fuelled the demand for isdn. similarly, “electronic information highways” were launched seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 2 and developed without any particular use in mind, i.e. no external end. the task afterwards lay in finding uses for the technology. there are also several examples of technologies in the field of medicine that had no clear application: nuclear magnetic resonance, impedance analysis, optical spectral analysis. within all these technologies, millions of dollars have been invested to find medical applications, such as mri, impedance imaging, and optical tissue characterization. although only the first of these is an example of a successful medical technology, all are examples of technologies looking for applications.1 in a now classic book, langdon winner has described this swap between means and end as a reverse adaptation: human ends are adapted to the characteristics of the available means (winner 1977: 229). the goals, purposes, needs, and decisions that are supposed to determine what technologies are in important instances no longer the true source of their direction. technical systems become severed from the ends originally set for them and, in effect, reprogram themselves and their environments to suit the special conditions of their own operation. the artificial slave gradually subverts the rule of its master (winner 1977: 227). hence, although technology was meant to free the human being from being a slave of nature, one can argue that we are subject to a new technological enslavement. while technology was supposed to increase our selfdetermination and choice, instead it seems to have reduced our autonomy. technology appears to promote a subtle but extensive change in our thinking and motivation. efficiency, expedience, measurability, rationality, quantification, productivity, and technical improvement have traditionally been guided by quite different considerations, namely qualitative and value related aims (winner 1977: 229).2 according to winner, this reverse adaptation and the corresponding reduction of human autonomy creates the impression that we are subject to a technological autonomy. winner is supported by others claiming that there are technological values external to human values that enforce our actions: there is a technological imperative (wolf & berle 1981; tymstra 1989), technology is rampant, perpetuating, self-augmenting (cassell 1993), autonomous (ellull 1964; winner 1977), and there is a belief that technology can overcome all human challenges, i.e. a “technological fix” (callahan 1996; shackleford 2006).3 the term “technological determinism” has been used as an umbrella term for theories conceiving of technology as influential on human modes of action (sejersted 1998; smith and marx 1994). although strong versions of “technological determinism” having a view of technology as something incomprehensible, independent and autonomous that reduces human selfdetermination, may be prevalent in the general population, they appear to be rather unattractive to scholars. it can be argued that if we really are governed by technology, it would be better for us to be ignorant of its dominance. moreover, strong versions of technology determinism are obliged to explain how technology which is developed, produced, commercialized, bought, implemented, used, and disposed of by human beings can control those same humans. the difficulties in explaining this have resulted in various interpretations and nuanced versions of technological determinism.4 this is not the place to elaborate on the peculiarities of technological determinisms, but only to claim that there are some challenges related to many of them. if we really are determined by technology in one way or another, it must mean that we have less responsibility for technology. we can only be held responsible for acts and situations we can actually do something seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 3 about, i.e. “ought” implies “can” (tranøy, 1972; 1975). if we are controlled or coerced, the responsibility for our actions is diminished. moreover, it appears to be difficult to find the technological determinant that can diminish our responsibility for it. it seems to be hard to free ourselves from the responsibility for its development, production, commercialization, implementation, and use. the point is that the disclaimer of responsibility for technology may challenge profound structures and values in modern democracies. one reason for this is that the reversed adaptation and notion of technological imperative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. if we believe that technology determines our choices and that we are therefore not responsible but only act in accordance with a technological imperative, we let technology decide for us in the sense that we renounce responsibility for our actions. this means that the belief in technology, i.e. making means become ends, results in a situation with a self-enhancing use of technology which can be interpreted as a technological determinism. technology appears to be imperative. this is, however, a dangerous illusion, as it legitimizes the production and implementation of technology without assessment.5 indeed, it appears to be difficult to argue that we who develop, produce, implement, and use technology should not be responsible for it. the point is that our seduction by technology is one of its most dangerous aspects. how then is it possible that we feel controlled by technology when this is seemingly impossible? how can the common conception of technological determinism be reconciled with the scholarly rejection of determinism? i will try to address these questions by investigating the relationship between technology and values.6 technology appears to relate to values in at least two profoundly different ways. firstly, technology can raise general value issues. secondly, technology is constituted by its end. its teleological nature makes it value-laden. hence, technology both makes values into a current issue and is value-laden by raising ethical questions and promoting values.7 technology raises ethical issues technology confronts us with a series of ethical issues: is it right to clone8 human beings? should prenatal screening be allowed on demand? these are general value issues not related to technology as such. modern gene technology can be applied to many purposes other than reproductive cloning of human beings. similarly, diagnostic ultrasound technology can be used for purposes other than detecting deficiencies or diseases in fetuses before the gestational limit for legal abortion. whether it is right to “produce genetically identical human beings” or to select fetuses with respect to their characteristics (other than severe disease) are ethical issues existing independent of gene technology and diagnostic ultrasound technology. technologies only raise these value issues and make them more apparent. just because we allow gene technology that can isolate, characterize, and modify dna, does not mean that we have to allow reproductive cloning. the use of a diagnostic ultrasound does not necessarily entail prenatal selection for all possible conditions or characteristics.9 however, before technology made it possible to “produce genetically identical human beings” and perform selective termination of pregnancies we were not forced to decide on these kinds of ethical issues. technology highlights questions concerning values and makes them topical. this means that technology’s general potential renders certain ethical issues current even though they are not specifically related to a particular technology. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 4 technology is value-laden what about bacterial weapons and respirators? can they be used for many purposes and do they therefore raise general ethical issues as well? it is hard to find purposes for bacterial weapons other than hurting people by making them sick. by the same token, respirators maintain artificial respiration and can only be used for this purpose (as respirators). hence, bacterial weapons and respirators do not raise more general questions of values, but they promote particular values, i.e. that it is good to hurt people (defined as enemies) by making them sick, and that it is good to artificially maintain respiration. these value issues are related to technology in a basic way and are not only raised by it. if we accept and are prepared to use respirators, then we cannot renounce artificial respiration. conversely, it is difficult to use bacterial weapons (as bacterial weapons) without making people sick. it would contradict our values.10 what then is the difference between genetics and bacterial weapons, between diagnostic ultrasound and respirators? both appear to be technologies that can be applied for good and for bad. the point is that genetics and diagnostic ultrasound are examples of general technologies that can be applied for many purposes, and not only for cloning human beings and for selective abortion. hence, more general ethical issues are involved with these technologies: is it good or bad to isolate, characterize or modify dna and is it good or bad to produce an image of intracorporeal anatomical structure by means of ultrasound reflections? bacterial weapons and respirators, however, do not involve more general questions of values. they can only be used for hurting people and for artificially maintaining respiration. the point is that bacterial weapons and respirators have been described by their inherent function. by contrast, cloning and ultrasound screening of fetuses before the gestational limit for legal abortion are only one of many applications of genetics and the diagnostic ultrasound, respectively.11 hence, my objective is not to generate a certain typology of technology or to differentiate good technology from bad. instead, it is to point to something general about all kinds of technology: technology raises questions of values which are general because they are not specifically related to any particular technology. other technologies may raise such questions as well. there may be other technologies for cloning humans or other methods of facilitating selective abortion of which we are not aware. however, there are some ethical issues that are specific to a given technology and that cannot be separated from that technology. such ethical issues related are to function. technology thus raises general questions of values, and is generally value-laden through its inherent function. every technology has a function, and every function is related to a purpose and a value. as described above, there appears to be a difference between the many functions of an ultrasound machine and the function of a respirator. a (diagnostic) ultrasound machine can be used for many purposes: it can be used for diagnosing cancer, for examining joints, for screening of pregnant women, and for guidance and orientation during surgery. accordingly, one might group such purposes in even more general categories, such as diagnosis of diseases, screening, and assistance during treatment. furthermore, one might continue such a generalization, resulting in an overarching purpose of an ultrasound machine without which it would not be an ultrasound machine, such as for example to produce images of intracorporeal structures by means of variation in ultrasound reflection in tissue. this makes the function of a technology its most general defining characteristic. hence, the ethical issues related to the many particular seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 5 purposes have to be addressed in relation to those purposes. whether it is good or bad to carry out cancer diagnostics is not an ethical issue that is specifically linked to ultrasound technology. again, many other technologies might do the same. in the same vein, the accumulation of diagnostic knowledge through the screening of pregnant women involves ethical issues which are not specifically related to ultrasound technology. however, the ethical issues related to the ultimate and most general purpose of the ultrasound machine cannot be separated from the technology in question. different characteristics of various goals of technology are outlined in the table below. the point is that only the most basic level concerns values which are actually related to technology as such, whereas the subsequent ends are ascribed to technology due to external values. teleological level overall level particular level: e.g. ultrasound function to look into the body to produce an image of intracorporeal anatomical structure by means ultrasound reflections purpose to gain knowledge to recognize conditions, to diagnose intention to obtain choice of action to make prognosis, treat, prepare for emergencies, (sex) selection intention’ to make progress ultrasound device as a symbol of progress: the new the paradox of value-ladenness this leads to an apparent paradox. on the one hand, technology is fundamentally value-laden because of its function. on the other hand, the ethical issues that are often thought of as associated with particular technologies, such as cloning and diagnostic ultrasound are actually only made topical by the technologies. this means that of all ethical issues that are raised by technology, only some of them are “genuinely technological.” let us now return to the original question concerning why people feel that they are steered by technology, even though the justification for this impression is so difficult to give. also, how can technological means have become ends in and of themselves? the point is that technology is a complex phenomenon. we cannot relate to it in only one particular way. technology can be conceived of as both free of values and value-laden. many ethical issues are not related to technology, except for being raised by technology. however, some ethical issues are clearly related to a particular technology due to its characteristics, most especially its function. therefore, it becomes important to differentiate between when technology is promotes values12 and when it raises general value issues. this is important because if means become ends in what winner characterized as “reverse adaptation” to an “autonomous technology,” it is particularly important to be explicit what kind of technological end that becomes valuable. if we do not differentiate between values raised by technology and values inherent in technology, we fall subject to several fallacies. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 6 the fallacy of the value neutral stance the fact that technology raises questions of values which are independent of or at least external to the technology in question has caused many to argue that technology is value neutral, i.e. technology is strictly instrumental. although the value neutral stance appears to be popular, few scholars have found it defensible. one exception is the swedish physician and philosopher per sundström (sundström 1998). according to the value neutral stance, technology is value neutral because a) we can choose whether we will develop, produce, or use technology or not, b) because we can use it for different purposes, and c) because technology is based on science, which is value neutral. the problem is that there are situations (related to a technology’s function) when we cannot choose whether to use a certain technology or not, e.g. if a dying child could be saved by using an available respirator. moreover, even if science were value neutral, it is its application that relates technology to values, and this can hardly be annulled by its scientific basis (hofmann 2002a). the point is that the value neutrality stance appears to ignore that technology inherently has an end, because of its function. disregarding the function of technology is to ignore one of its inherent characteristics. one cannot create respirators independent of the goal of artificially maintaining respiration (without them not being respirators). when we create technology, we simultaneously make choices about values. if we produce respirators and bacteriological weapons, then this implies that being able to sustain artificial respiration and to subdue people by making them sick are worthwhile goals. ignoring such an implication can lead to technology establishing values in a covert manner. the introduction of technology can be a promotion of underlying values. in this manner, technology can produce values and the value neutrality stance can result in a “technological imperative.” to believe that there is a value-free zone in dealing with technology can be dangerous. the fallacy of technological imperative a second fallacy is to believe that all issues raised by technology are related to technology as such. to believe that the question of whether it is right or wrong to clone human beings is a question of whether gene technology is good or bad is to make technology more value-laden than is justifiable. similarly, it appears fallacious to boil down all questions about whether we should allow fetus selection to the issue of ultrasound technology, or to equate issues of involuntary infertility with questions of artificial reproduction technology (art). this would be to reduce ethical issues to questions of technology, and to make technology “value-imperative.” as argued before, cloning and selective abortion are general value issues that are simply raised by particular kinds of technology. the danger with assigning an ethical dimension to technology is that we may be tempted to reduce all ethical issues to technological matters, nourishing the belief that ethical issues can be solved by technology, the so-called technological fix. to implement art involves an ethical question, but the intrinsic ethical issue concerns whether infertility is a bad thing which should be remedied, rather than any particular method of in vitro fertilization (ivf). equating technology with ethical issues is problematic because it makes it a normative agent. in literature written about technology, it has been described as a frankenstein’s monster (winner 1977) and as the sorcerers broom (cassell 1993). although it may be difficult to identify such a technological actor or subject, the ascription of values to technology makes it a normative seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 7 actor, which revives the monster metaphor. it also can explain people’s notion of being powerless and steered by technology. the danger with the fallacy of technological imperative is that the ascribing of values and characteristics to technology above and beyond its function makes us subject ourselves to an unjustified imperative. the belief in a technological imperative represents a renunciation of responsibility which may lead to irresponsible actions, which may in turn reinforce the belief (hofmann 2002b). the technological imperative leads to reduced self-determination. reduced autonomy also entails less responsibility. despite the general feeling of reduced control, less responsibility for technology is difficult to defend. we are responsible for our actions when we develop, commercialize, buy, implement, and use technology. hence, it is hard to see how our autonomy and our responsibility with respect to technology could be reduced.13 a challenging case: on technology pragmatics let us now apply the results from this analysis to a particular case. so far i have used examples from medicine and weapon technologies. this choice is not accidental, of course. both areas exemplify the relationship between technology and values in an illustrative manner and both have been central in debates about values. the debate on prenatal diagnosis, and particular ultrasound screening, within the gestational limit for legal abortion is a good example of technology’s impact on values, as described above. a key claim in the debate was that one should not allow the application of ultrasound technology to screening, because it would result in sex selection or selective abortion for minor defects (fosterdiagnostikk 2000). it has been argued that if the technology was implemented, one would not be able to restrict or abolish its use. in short, once a technology is implemented, we have to accept it.14 if this is correct, it means that although we can develop, produce, and commercialize technology as independent human beings, we loose our autonomy once that technology is implemented. as previously indicated, the challenge with such a claim is to explain exactly how technology reduces our autonomy at its moment of introduction. indeed, experience from many countries indicates that when this (ultrasound) technology is first implemented,, it tends to be applied to different purposes than those originally conceived of (as well as discussed and decided for). once technology has been applied in research for instance, it will be also used clinically, almost independently of the results with respect to efficiency (eiring and vollebæk 2001). should we ignore this? would it not be wise to apply such empirical knowledge in a pragmatic fashion? should we not proceed cautiously and avoid sliding down “the slippery slope”? technology is a practical matter, and it would be wise to relate to it pragmatically. the problem is to justify taking measures against technology because we do not control it. how can we be autonomous when we restrict the development and implementation of technology (by being cautious), but not its use? following from the above analysis, it would be a fallacy both to believe that technology is either value-laden or neutral with respect to values. even after having been implemented, there is nothing about technology that makes it impossible to decide not to use it, if we really want to. part of the problem in our relationship with technology appears to be our ambivalence: we want seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 8 technology because it promotes our interests (through its function), while we do not like its side effects: nobody wants pollution, but everybody wants the car. at the same time, the ultrasound example illustrates how important it is to differentiate the aspects in which technology is related to ethics. if we would not only ask whether it is right to use ultrasound technology to diagnose fetuses within the first trimester, but also whether it is right to make images of intracorporeal structures by using ultrasound reflection, it would not only raise general ethical issues, but also raise questions about the technology as such. in the latter case it is not possible to differentiate between technology and values. if we conceive of (diagnostic) ultrasound as good, we cannot simultaneously maintain that it is bad to produce images of intracorporeal structures by means of ultrasound reflections in tissue. here we are dealing with the description of the function of technology, and, hence with the extent to which technology is linked to values. it therefore becomes essential to differentiate those cases where technology may be equated with ethical issues from those situations where technology merely raises ethical issues. in both cases, it is important to focus on the questions of values (and not only on the technology itself). at the same time, the example shows that technology gives us choices we were not previously aware of and that we were perhaps not prepared for. imagine that a routine prenatal check-up reveals that that there is a certain probability of a child having down syndrome (or another condition). another test must be undergone to learn more, but that test involves a risk of miscarriage, whether or not the fetus actually has the condition in question. what does one choose to do? this shows how important it is to clarify the ethical issues raised by technology, so that we are not forced to make impetuous decisions that appear to be compelled by technology. it seems that we tend to take advantage of technological possibilities because we are afraid that we will otherwise regret not doing so (tymstra 1989). this indicates that we are not mature enough to make the ethical decisions that the advent of technology makes possible, and also shows the importance of perpetuating a debate about ethics in our modern society where technology is so prevalent. another pragmatic approach would be to argue that, since we are not prepared to tackle the ethical issues raised by technology, we should proceed cautiously by restricting the development and implementation of technology. however, it is important to notice that the precautionary principle only argues that ignorance is not an argument for technology.15 not knowing the consequences of a given technology cannot be used as an argument for implementing it. similarly, we could argue that the lack of control is not an argument for implementing technology. technology’s ends and our values if it is true that our means become our ends either because we do not address important issues raised by technology (value-neutrality fallacy) or because we make all ethical issues into technological issues (“value-ladenness fallacy), we should be concerned with how technological means become human ends (reverse adaptation). although this is not the proper place to debate the different kinds of values and their internal relationship, something should be said in order to clarify what is meant when means become ends. first, making means become ends can signify that technology’s (functional) value becomes something which is seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 9 valued. here technology is of instrumental value. we come to use and value technology because it gives us pleasure or other (intrinsic) values. a much stronger version of technology having become an end is if it its ends actually become our intrinsic values. how can technology’s instrumental values (towards intrinsic values) become intrinsic? cell phones and audio technology appear to be examples of this: cell phones appear not merely to be used in order to communicate, but to obtain some other value. audio enthusiasts tend not to buy extremely expensive music machines in order to listen to wagner or wolfsmother, but rather for the technology itself. however, most versions of “reverse adaptation,” making means into ends, are less extreme than these. our values are more influenced by technology than a simple appreciation of technology’s instrumental values, but less important than having made the instrumental value of technology (i.e. its function) into a value in and of itself (intrinsic value). the inbetween situations, where technology appears to represent both instrumental and extrinsic values, may be difficult to handle.16 nevertheless, it appears to be clear that technology has more than only instrumental value when we a) ignore side effects, b) when we use technology because of its symbolical value (e.g. power and freedom), and c) when we adapt to technology in order to obtain its (instrumental) values.17 hence, means may become ends in a variety of ways, and technology’s values may be diverse. the values making technology an end may be values related to its function (instrumental values). nevertheless, there may also be other values attributed to technology. only in a few cases will technology’s end become an intrinsic value. if technology does not have an intrinsic value, it will become hard to renounce responsibility for its implementation and use due to its extrinsic (e.g. its instrumental) values. technology changes us – but not our responsibility it is clear that technology changes us. it does not only change our environment and our actions and activities, but also our thoughts and ideas. ultrasound technology changed our ideas about the status of the fetus. similarly, a series of machines and tools, for instance the personal computer, has changed our conception of work. heidegger’s theory of technology tries to make sense of the complex and profound role of technology in being human (heidegger 1953; dreyfus 1997). technology is part of forming us as human beings. man develops through the technology he creates. in this way technology is liberating. at the same time, technology sets up a framework for our idea of self, it is our perspective on the world which we cannot escape. according to the latter perspective, man is enframed (gestell). hence, technology is also restrictive. however, this technology’s enframing is something different than a technological imperative. it is a restriction which we ourselves have created, and which we can change (e.g. by changed use of technology or by creating new and different technologies). technology tends to change us, either in a liberating or confining manner. nevertheless, it does not free us from our actions with or without technology. technology: value productive, but not imperative technology is value active in two different ways: it raises issues of values and it promotes them (i.e. is value-laden). this explains why technology appears to many as controlling and governing, even though we ourselves develop, produce, commercialize, buy, implement, and use it. we tend to think that seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 10 technology is value-laden as such, and that it promotes its own values, contrary to ours. therefore, it appears to be important to acknowledge that technology’s value-ladenness is limited to its function. all other values are human values attributed to it. on the other hand, we tend to believe that technology is a value-neutral means for an external end. correspondingly, it appears to be important to recognize that technology raises a series of general ethical issues, but that only a few ethical issues are related to the technology qua technology. therefore it becomes important to differentiate between technology’s most basic instrumental value (its function) and other values. correspondingly, because technology raises so many general ethical issues, it appears to be important to debate such issues in an open manner. if not, many important choices about values might be made through our choice of technology, and the technological imperative will appear to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. the danger is that the means justifies the end. therefore, an open debate about values will promote a healthy society. the myth of the technological imperative is by no means sufficient to escape our responsibility with respect to technology. on the contrary, our responsibility for technology is what makes us able to reject a technological imperative. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 11 references cassell, e. j. (1993). the sourcer’s broom. medicine’s rampant technology. hastings center report, 23; (6): 32-39. borge, o. j. (2004). fosterdiagnostikk og verdier. oslo: bioteknologinemnda. rapport, 32-4. isbn 82-91683-24-7. callahan, d. (2006). the goals of medicine: setting new priorities. hastings center report, november–december. dreyfus, h. l. (1997). heidegger on gaining a free relation to technology. in k. schrader-frechette and l. westra, technology and values. new york: rowman & littlefield publishers, 107-14. eiring, ø, vollebæk l.-e. (2001). behandling på sviktende grunnlag. dagens medisin. 10.05.2001. hofmann, b. (2001). on the value-ladenness of technology in medicine. in european journal of medicine, health care and philosophy 4(3): 335-345. hofmann, b. (2002a). technological medicine and the autonomy of man. in european journal of medicine, health care and philosophy, 5: 157-67. hofmann, b. (2002b). is there a technological imperative in health care? in international journal of technology assessment in health care, 18(3): 675-89. hofmann, b. (2006) vi vil jo ha ultralyd! om teknologi og verdier. in p. nortvedt & å. slettebø etikk for helsefagene. oslo: gyldendal akademisk, 104-123. fosterdiagnostikk: trygghet eller trussel (2000). debatthefte fra seminar om fosterdiagnostikk, politisk notat 2 sejersted, f. (1998). teknologipolitikk. oslo: universitetsforlaget. smith, m. r., marx, l. (1994). does technology drive history?: the dilemma of technological determinism. cambridge, ma: mit press. sundström, p. (1998). interpreting the notion that technology is value-neutral. in medicine, health care and philosophy, 1: 41-45. tranøy, k. e. (1972). ‘ought’ implies ‘can’: a bridge from fact to norm? part i. ratio 1975, 14: 116-30. tranøy, k. e. (1975). ‘ought’ implies ‘can’: a bridge from fact to norm? part ii. ratio 1975, 17: 147-75. tymstra, t. (1989). the imperative character of medical technology and the meaning of “anticipated decision regret”. in j of technology assessment in health care, 5: 207-13. vos, r. (1991). drugs looking for diseases: innovative drug research and the development of the beta blockers and calcium antagonists. dortrecht: kluwer academic publishers. winner, l. (1977). autonomous technology. cambridge ma: mit press. shackleford, b. (2006). the technological fix: how people use technology to create and solve problems (review). in technology and culture volume 47, number 1, january 2006, pp. 246-248. 1 it is important to notice that i do not refer to the explorative development of technology, but the large scale commercialization and marketing of technology before any applications are identified. in the explorative phase, where somebody pursues their seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 2 – issue 2 – 2006 12 interests or intuition to investigate certain physical phenomena or mechanisms, there is no clear end for the technology. the phenomenon investigated in this paper belongs to the phases following this initial, and often arbitrary, phase where there is an implementation of a certain technology on a broad basis without any well defined end. 2 with habermas one could say that the instrumental rationality dominates (together with the strategic rationality) over the communicative rationality, which results in cultural impoverishment and colonizes our life world. as the teleological rationality of the means has set the standard, it reduces the possibility of discussing human ends. we cannot discuss the ends of our means with the language of the means. 3 for further details on the technological imperative in health care see (hofmann 2002b). 4 nomological determinism, normative determinism, and determinism due to unintended consequences, are but some examples of this (smith & marx 1994) 5 no other assessment than that it is a technology, and therefore good. 6 with respect to the relationship between technology and values, see (shraderfrechette 1994) 7 i have elsewhere argued that the relationship between technology and values is much more fine grained: technology challenges existing values, it promotes values, it displays values, technology hides values (hofmann 2006). 8 reproductive cloning is appears to be more morally challenging than therapeutic cloning, although the distinction may itself be seen as a rhetorical device in order to promote particular technologies (and values). 9 although blue eyes and intelligence have been used rhetorically as examples, sex selection and the negative selection of milder diseases or impairments appears to be much more relevant. 10 it could be argued that one could use bacterial weapons to kill an alien or to spread vaccines. i owe this counter argument to one of the anonymous referees. however, if a particular technology would be use to spread vaccines, it would not be a bacterial weapon; it would be a vaccine spreading device. 11 note that the term “function” is used differently here than in biology and social sciences. the technological function is intentional, whereas “function” in biology and social science tend to be non-intentional. 12 i.e. in what aspects technology is value-laden. 13 it is of course important to differentiate between different kinds of responsibility, e.g. on the personal level, on the group level (role responsibility), and on the societal level. it is beyond the scope of this paper to perform the analysis on all these levels respectively. allow me only to indicate that i believe that it is possible to do so. 14 some would make an even stronger claim, that once it has been invented, we cannot do anything but accept the technology. 15 or more specifically: its safe implementation. 16 instrumental values are extrinsic values, which together with other kinds of extrinsic value is opposed to intrinsic value. 17 one could argue that technology has inherent value because experiencing technology has intrinsic value. for some people appreciating technology may be intrinsically good. this does not make technology an instrumental good (because the good experience is directly related to technology and not an instrumental result of it). microsoft word anderson et al and twelve months later.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 “and twelve months later, we are still waiting…”: insights into teaching and use of ict in rural and remote australian schools neil anderson carolyn timms lyn courtney james cook university email: neil.anderson@jcu.edu.au abstract this paper presents an analysis of the combined data sets from a large arc (australian research council) funded study on the declining enrolments of female students in high school information technology subjects, and a simerr (science, ict and mathematics education for rural and regional australia) study of 9 rural or remote schools in the state of queensland. the aim of examining the combined data set was to investigate any apparent differences between girls’ perceptions of studying higher level ict subjects in rural areas compared to metropolitan areas. the findings of the study highlighted some problems experienced by female students studying outside of metropolitan areas. they perceived the subject offerings to be ‘more boring’ than their city counterparts and reported a lower level of home ownership. the paper offers possible explanations for the findings and strongly recommends that strategies need to be implemented to overcome these problems. key words: ict, information communication technology, girls, female students, rural education, high school, secondary education. introduction from word processing to the purchase of goods, services and communication between people, information communication technology (ict) has become an integral part of modern industrialised society. the sheer scale of ict use within society has mandated the need to provide appropriate and representative approaches to more user-oriented technology. currently the ict field is both male dominated and oriented (adya & kaiser, 2005; margolis & fisher, 2003); therefore, it is important for technology creators to ascertain information about users, and to design to the needs of users, in order to ensure that the technology matches the stated purpose (for example, oudshoorn, rommes & stienstra, 2004). furthermore, while ict promises to minimise geographical and time barriers to communication, it can also serve to exacerbate frustration and alienation by its lack of accommodation of cultural sensitivities, especially in areas with high indigenous populations (anderson, 2005). it is with this in mind that one of the aims of the current paper is to seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 2 investigate the perceptions about ict held by high school girls who live in rural and remote areas of queensland (australia). the current focus on rural and remote queensland this paper presents an amalgamation of findings derived from two project sources: the australian research council (arc) linkage project “girls and ict” survey (anderson, klein & lankshear, 2005) and the focus group research of the centre of science information and communication technology and mathematics education in rural and regional australia (simerr) (2006). the rationale for the first research project was to develop understanding and specific information on a local level in order to determine appropriate ways, through policy and action, of redressing what is a worldwide problem; that of declining numbers of women choosing to take up careers in ict (millar & jagger, 2001). other papers derived from the girls and ict survey examined differences between high school girls who participated in advanced computing subjects, such as information processing technology (ipt) and information technology systems (its) within the education queensland (eq) system, and those who chose not to take these subjects (anderson, lankshear, courtney & timms, 2006; courtney, timms, lankshear & anderson, 2005; timms, courtney & anderson, 2006). the simerr project was not gender specific and targeted issues that pertained to rural and regional schools in regard to science and mathematics as well as ict use. some of the simerr focus group material has been reported in lake, faragher, sellwood, lenoy and anderson (2006) and lake (2007). it is noted that the girls and ict project was targeted specifically at girls, whereas the simerr project was directed towards the needs of schools in rural and regional communities. the current paper has, however, used findings from the girls and ict project to tease out some differences between students attending high schools in rural and remote areas and those attending high schools in more metropolitan centres. it is noted that the simerr research included regional centres; however, in the present study larger regional centres were treated as metropolitan as they typically are well serviced in regard to technological support and backup. therefore the current focus is on rural and remote areas of the state of queensland as defined by education queensland’s ‘zone system’. queensland is a state characterized by the vast distances between its major towns and by its tropical climate. the bulk of its total population of 3,980,778 estimated population reported by the queensland government office of economic and statistical research, ([oesr], 2005) is concentrated in the southeast corner within several large metropolitan centres. consequently, substantial areas of the state are far from major urban centres and sparsely populated. a ministerial committee of education, employment, training and youth affairs (mceetya) (2003) report noted that rural and remote australia has similar educational issues to those encountered in comparable regions in the united kingdom (uk), new zealand (nz), united states of america (usa) and canada. intuitively, it would appear that those students who attend rural and remote schools would have increased incentive to develop skills in communication technology as these are particularly suited to the needs of people experiencing isolation. however, it is evident that providing the means of the technology without provision for support or training of teachers is short-sighted, piecemeal and exacerbates the problem by ignoring the social context (victoria state government, 2001). focus groups were conducted by members of the present research team under the auspices of simerr (2006). the simerr national survey was conducted with the aim of identifying key issues affecting seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 3 educational outcomes in science, ict and mathematics education in different parts of australia, with particular focus on regional and rural australia, including very remote schools. members of the present team met students, ict coordinators, teachers and parents/caregivers in queensland and their findings have informed the current investigation. one recurrent positive theme in the simerr research was the confirmation that many rural and remote schools have ict resources that are equal to or better than city schools. schools generally reported a good computer to student ratio and highly satisfactory levels of peripheral and associated ict devices. on the negative side, the most commonly reported challenge in the simerr research was the distance from technical assistance and repair agents. breakdown of critical servers and associated networks was reported as a major issue compounded by the long wait for repairs to be completed and machines returned by post or courier. these findings are supported by lennie (2002), who found that, in spite of the enthusiastic support of rural women when they were provided with the opportunity to learn from, and participate in, ict projects, the cost of installation and maintenance of computers and peripherals constituted a significant barrier to its uptake in western queensland. anderson (2005), in a discussion of internet access within developing countries, referred to “mere access” (p. 33) as only one part of the complicated social configuration of the digital divide. it is one thing to provide access; another thing to provide skills to use technology; and yet another thing again to provide adequate and costeffective ways to maintain the technology. therefore, when people within rural and remote communities consider the potential benefits of ict, they must consider all of these factors which may be exacerbated by severe financial constraints. lloyd, harding and hellwig (2000) found that incomes of people living in rural and remote areas of queensland are considerably lower than those of people living in metropolitan areas, suggesting a potential for inequality of opportunity. moreover “the data suggests that the income gap between those living in cities and those living in regional and rural towns is increasing” (p. 7). in 2001, the office of cultural enhancement and diversity (oced, 2001) pointed to the central role played by schools within the community in providing it with a source of expertise, information and provision for networking. consequently, schools can contribute to the social cohesion (social and human capital), the viability of the community and the lifelong learning of its citizens. it is this extension of economic realities to implications for schools within the whole community which is important for governments to address through policy and initiatives. a key aspect of these economic realities is the disinclination of qualified teachers to be situated in rural and remote areas where they might well be required to teach outside their main area of expertise (mceetya, 2003). another important factor is that the teaching profession is 68% female, an increase of 9.6% from 1985 to 2005 (australian bureau of statistics [abs], 2005) and, based on current teacher training estimates, it would appear that the profession is likely to become even more feminised (mceetya). teacher interests and training unfortunately, in the high school arena, women teachers tend to specialise in subject areas such as english, humanities, business, arts and languages other than english (lote) leaving areas such as mathematics, science, technical studies and computer studies difficult to staff (mceetya, 2003). this leaves school administrations with the difficult decision to staff such subjects with personnel who are lacking expertise and familiarity with the subject and who may well be disengaged from it. in 2001, the victoria state government found seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 4 that there was “almost universal concern among all stakeholders that it teachers were not adequately trained or resourced” (p. 43). granger, morbey, lotherington, owston and widman (2002) suggested that successful ict implementation within schools requires individual characteristics of teacher comfort (familiarity) and confidence with the subjects. a previous paper from the current arc project (timms et al., 2006) observed, in the light of comments from students on their experience of ict subjects in schools, that “supportive teaching, therefore, requires social as well as computer fluency, and awareness on the part of educators of how important it is to attract diversity to the ict industry” (p. 8). this problem would be compounded in rural schools which are generally hard to staff and regarded as less desirable locations by some teachers (preston, 2000), as “those teachers judged by school authorities to be most competent and having the highest professional standards will also most readily find positions in desirable schools” (p. 12). other issues in order to provide a more relevant picture of this complex problem, batchelor (2002) suggested that it is simplistic and unrealistic to assume that once access to ict is provided, it will be readily taken up by people. “there is a need for content that is grounded in the reality of the local context and the best way to generate this content is to get members of the same community to create it” (p. 4). it is only by involvement of the community that the potential of ict to empower people within that community can possibly be realised. this was supported by anderson (2005) who suggested that ict must be provided to communities “in response to community needs and consultation rather than being large projects imposed from afar” (p. 40). kent and facer (2004) suggested that an important factor in the development of skills in ict involved the ability to use computers at home for recreational use and that this then enabled students to generate confidence and familiarity with technology. aim the focus of the current paper is on differences drawn between “takers” and “non takers” of advanced ict subjects in high school who fell into two groups derived from the education queensland’s zone system. the system uses four zones (metropolitan, provincial city, rural and remote) to describe schools within its jurisdiction. these categories have been adapted from the ‘accessibility/remoteness index of australia (aria) plus scores’ which are widely used in australia to determine economic advantage (mceetya, 2001). the aim of this paper is to explore specific issues, in regard to teaching and learning using ict, faced by students and teachers in schools in rural and remote areas of queensland. methodology the mixed method design of the current paper includes quantitative findings from a survey conducted by the arc research project and qualitative focus group findings from the source material of lake, et al.’s (2006) simerr queensland focus group report. it was used in the current paper to corroborate the quantitative findings of the arc research and will be referred to as the simerr research or focus group data. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 5 quantitative data two populations of female students, approximating to ‘typicality’ by socioeconomic status, location, and school type, government schools (gs) and nongovernment schools (ngs) were identified for survey purposes. the first, comprised of students taking board level ict subjects (ipt and/or its), was the takers and the second group was non takers of the board ict subjects. the survey did not ask respondents for their ages; however students in the target grades (11 and 12) are typically between 14 and 17 years of age. questions for the survey were determined from the findings of a pilot survey conducted in 2004 (anderson et al., 2005). a particularly striking finding of the pilot study was a polarity in attitude towards advanced ict subjects between takers and non takers; hence the quantitative questions were designed to achieve awareness of where the incongruence sprang from, rather than to establish that it existed. takers responded to a bank of 14 questions and non takers responded to 15 questions designed to identify reasons students decided whether or not to take advanced level ict subjects in high school (e.g., influences of family, friends, teachers, timetable conflicts, interest in subject, future career plans). for purposes of parsimony the eq zone system was collapsed from four groups into two groups. the first group included participants from metropolitan or provincial cities and the second group integrated the rural and remote groupings; these are described in table 1. metropolitan or provincial city rural or remote total takers 95 36 131 non takers 1074 248 1322 total 1169 284 1453 table 1. participant distribution by geographical area. participants the participants were 764 year 11 and 674 year 12 female students attending 26 schools in queensland. sixteen respondents did not indicate their year level resulting in a total of 1453 respondents. a total of 131 respondents (9%) were takers and 1322 respondents (91%) were non takers. the survey was voluntary and responses were only accepted from participants who completed consent forms in accordance with ethical clearance requirements. in some schools response rates approached 70%, while in others the response rate was below 10%. materials the pen and paper survey consisted of a mixture of yes/no questions; 14 takers questions and 15 non takers questions regarding reasons for choosing or not choosing advanced level ict subjects on questions on a five-point likert scale (“strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”); and open questions. procedure the survey was conducted between august and november 2005 with year 11 and 12 female students throughout queensland. twenty-six of the 31 invited schools elected to participate. school selection was based on an attempt to obtain a study population as typical as possible of the state as a whole, but seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 6 without any claims to producing a representative sample. emphasis was on pursuing scale of responses and ensuring that participants ranged over key variables like socio-economic status, ethnicity, rural/urban location and school system (e.g., gs and ngs). schools were supplied with sufficient questionnaires and instructions. most surveys were completed at school; however, in some instances surveys were sent home. completed surveys were returned by the schools and entered into spss by means of scanning software. qualitative data a series of focus groups was conducted in nine schools throughout rural and remote areas of queensland in 2005. participants in these focus groups included parents/caregivers, ict coordinators, teachers and students from rural and remote primary and secondary state (government) schools. three of the nine schools were situated in communities where over three quarters of the population were indigenous australians. primary schools were selected on the basis of their status as ‘feeder’ schools for the secondary schools in the study. the purpose of the clustered school selection was to provide for optimal comparison of science, mathematics and ict resources within the school systems (lake, et al., 2006; lake 2007). quantitative results when metropolitan /provincial city takers’ responses were compared with those of rural/remote takers the only statement to demonstrate significant difference between the two groups was “the subjects are interesting” (χ2 (1) = 4.73, p < .05). rural/remote takers of ipt/its were more likely to disagree with this statement than were metropolitan/ provincial city takers. the difference in responses between the two groups is demonstrated in table 2. metropolitan / provincial city rural/ remote n % n % total strongly disagree 3 3.1 6 1 2.7 8 4 disagree 7 7.3 7 4 11.11 11 neither agree nor disagree 7 7.3 7 7 19.40 14 agree 50 52.63 17 47.22 67 strongly agree 28 29.47 6 16.67 34 no response 0 0 1 2.7 8 1 total 95 36 table 2. takers’ responses to “the subjects are interesting” by geographical distribution. on the other hand, when metropolitan/provincial city non takers’ responses were compared with those of their rural/remote counterparts, the only significant difference between the two groups noted was on the statement “i don’t have a computer at home, or have limited access to a home computer” (χ2 (1) = 12.52, p < .001). rural and remote non takers tended to agree with this statement more than did non takers in more urban environments; participant responses are summarized in table 3. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 7 metropolitan/ provincial city rural/remote n % n % total strongly disagree 676 62.60 131 52.82 8 07 disagree 231 21.39 61 24.60 2 92 neither agree or disagree 94 8.7 0 2 7 10.89 1 21 agree 46 4.2 6 17 6.85 6 3 strongly agree 21 1.9 4 12 4.83 3 3 no response 6 0.5 6 0 0 6 total 1074 248 table 3. non takers’ responses to “i don’t have a computer at home, or have limited access to a home computer” by geographical distribution. qualitative results and discussion the aim of the larger arc research project was to identify any significant differences between high school girls in queensland which may shed light on issues pertaining to reduced female participation in ict professional careers. the research team has sought to organize data by assigning respondents into two groups: takers and non takers of ipt/its (anderson et al., 2005). the present paper has further divided the two groups into metropolitan/ provincial city and rural/remote. statistical comparisons between the two geographical groups found a significant difference between rural/remote takers and metropolitan/provincial city takers on only one statement “the subjects are interesting”, with rural/remote takers more likely than their city counterparts to indicate that they disagree with that statement. on the other hand, rural and remote non takers tended to agree with “i don’t have a computer at home, or have limited access to a home computer” more than did non takers in more urban environments. it has to be noted at this juncture that in the case of the takers only one comparison out of 14 found significance, and in the case of non takers, the figure was one significant comparison out of 15. therefore, on their own, these findings represent only an indication as to differences between the experiences of students in rural/remote areas and those in metropolitan/provincial cities; however, the quantitative findings are further contextualized by the findings of the simerr focus groups research. the focus group research highlighted a perception within rural communities that specialist teachers capable of taking higher level ict subjects were not as readily available in regional and remote areas and that this meant that higher level ict subjects were not offered. one parent from a small sugar cane farming community explained: i think most of the it subjects they have here are very basic and when they think that’s what they want to study and they come from the primary school and they’ve done a lot there, and what they’ve done there is at a higher level than what they do when they come to high school. and yeah, even grade 9 and 10 computer studies aren’t adequate. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 8 parents also expressed the view that teachers did not have access to adequate professional development “you know the teachers aren’t getting the training and like many teachers at the school, you know, like they’re not getting the updated training”. this is indeed an accurate reflection of reality in light of findings from a national report (mceetya, 2003) that, like comparable areas in other countries, rural schools are hard to staff and that, out of necessity, many rural teachers teach outside their own particular subject areas. adya and kaiser (2005) highlighted the importance of technological training for both veteran teachers and those at the undergraduate level, over 93 percent of teachers report that their main source of technological training is independent learning or support from colleagues. k-12 systems need to provide an environment where teachers can become comfortable with their technology preparedness and convey enthusiasm about it to students (p. 252). this was supported by the victoria state government (2001) which found an “almost universal concern among all stakeholders that it teachers were not adequately trained and resourced” (p. 43). the issue of training and providing teachers with necessary confidence with, and access to, technology is, however, only one part of a much bigger picture. moreover, it would appear from the focus groups that rural and remote schools actually fare quite well in acquiring the technology by which students and teachers can develop technological fluency. one recurrent positive theme in the focus groups was the confirmation that many rural and remote schools have ict resources that are equal to or better than their city peers. schools generally reported a good computer to student ratio and highly satisfactory levels of peripheral and associated ict devices in quantities which surpassed previous teacher experience in metropolitan schools. on the negative side, the focus group research found that the most commonly reported challenge was the distance from technical assistance and maintenance. breakdown of critical servers and associated networks was reported as a major issue compounded by the long wait for repairs to be completed and machines returned. one example cited spanned a 12 month period: investigator: how do you deal with the dramas when they arise? participant teacher: going away from the computer and wait for a technician to come out and fix it up and after 12 months of waiting, we’re still waiting. in a western queensland centre a teacher commented: we weren’t getting the support that we needed to get it [the network] up and running. when it worked…it was great but then we’ve got other issues where different computers within the school would break down and you could get the part replaced easily enough but we can’t get the person to reconfigure it so it created a problem. another commonly cited problem was the slowness of internet connections resulting in frustration and wastage of time. one parent expressed the problems caused by many students logging on to share a fairly slim, older style isdn broadband connection: “but once you get onto the internet, it is really slow because of the server, and while everyone is on you have got to wait to log on because a lot of kids are on it.” seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 9 it is, therefore, hardly surprising that teachers in rural areas, faced with such predictable unreliability of the technology they are supplied with, and driven by the daily imperative to provide subject material in a manner that will keep students actively learning, choose not to embed ict within their teaching practice. it would be difficult to convey enthusiasm to students, as suggested by adya and kaiser (2005), about equipment that is not dependable, no matter how much training one has in its use or how ‘well resourced’ one is. furthermore, many rural teachers teach outside their subject area (mceetya, 2003) and reliability issues may well provide messages to students that ict is not relevant. this can only exacerbate the digital divide (anderson, 2005) owing to the central position that schools occupy (oced, 2001) within rural and remote communities which may well be suffering financial disadvantage compared with local communities in a more urban milieu (lloyd, et al., 2000). when the spotlight was turned to a comparison between metropolitan/ provincial city and rural/remote non takers on survey statements, the only statement in which a significant difference was found was “i don’t have a computer at home or have limited access to a home computer”, with the rural/remote respondents agreeing with the statement more than their city counterparts. hence schools may well provide students’ only access to computers in rural areas. kent and facer (2004) noted that those students who had developed computer fluency at home were “more likely to experience particular computer activities at school and to use school computers more frequently” (p. 447). therefore, a link is suggested between home and school use of computers and confidence in using technology. lennie (2002) found that the cost of technology was a concern in rural areas. lloyd and colleagues (2000) reported that rural households in australia were more likely to suffer financial hardship and the focus group research indicated that rural schools were more likely to experience technological unreliability and difficulty in repairing broken-down machinery and connections. another factor involves lack of access to fast, affordable internet connections in rural and remote households in australia. ono and zavondy (2007) studied computer use and access in five countries including the united states, sweden, south korea and singapore and found internet access to be less available and more expensive away from the major centres. it is therefore hardly surprising that some rural households choose not to provide computers for their children’s use. conclusion this paper has highlighted some important difficulties facing schools in rural queensland. takers of advanced ict classes tend to perceive that the subjects are not interesting. the problem could be explained by the fact that that specialist teachers are reluctant to situate themselves in rural areas (mceetya, 2003) combined with indifferent reliability of the technology itself. on the other hand, non takers of advanced computing subjects in rural communities are less likely to have a computer at home than non takers in city environments. this would necessarily mean that rural students are less likely than city students to develop fluency in using computers and are therefore excluded from the benefits of the many opportunities offered by communication technologies (kent & facer, 2004). it is therefore recommended that issues in regard to the access to and maintenance of technology systems, along with the training and attraction of specialist ict teachers for rural areas, be addressed within a policy framework for equity within education. furthermore, in the light of an increasing gap between incomes of rural and city people (lloyd, et al., 2000), it is imperative that those school authorities and educational systems address the issue of the reliability of ict in rural communities. it is when technology is reliable and costeffective and people have the opportunity to use it, that ict can play its role in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 10 reducing social isolation within australia by the promotion of networking and providing people with the opportunity to pursue lifelong learning agendas. references adya, m., & kaiser, k.m. (2005). early determinants of women in the it workforce: a model of girls’ career choices. information technology & people 18 (3), 230259. anderson, n. (2005). building digital capacities in remote communities within developing countries. in d. kamalavijayan, et al. (eds.) international conference on information management in a knowledge society, volume 1, february 21-25, 2005, conference papers (pp. 33-41). new delhi: allied publishers. anderson, n., klein, m., & lankshear, c. (2005). redressing the gender imbalance in ict professions: towards state-level strategic approaches. australian educational computing, 20(2), 3-10. anderson, n., lankshear, c., courtney, l., & timms, c. (april, 2006). girls and ict survey: initial findings. curriculum leadership. curriculum corporation, australia and new zealand [online journal]. retrieved july 22, 2006, from http://www.cmslive.curriculum.edu.au/leader/default.asp?id=12704&issueid= 10270 australian bureau of statistics (abs) (2005). schools, australia, 2005. abs cat. no. 4442.0. canberra, act, australia. batchelor, s. (2002). using icts to generate development content. research report, 10. retrieved 24 april 2006, from http://www.ftpiicd.org/files/research/reports/ report10.pdf centre of science, information and communication technology and mathematics education in rural and regional australia (simerr) (2006). retrieved 28 april 2006, from http://simerr.une.edu.au/projects/projects.html courtney, l., timms, c., lankshear, c., & anderson, n. (2005). establishing pathways for girls in ict: the search for strategies to achieve balance in queensland. redress: journal of the association of women educators, 14 (3), 14-19. granger, c.a., morbey, m.l., lotherington, h., owston, r.d., & wideman, h.h. (2002). factors contributing to teachers’ successful implementation of it. journal of computer assisted learning, 18, 480-488. kent, n., & facer, k. (2004). different worlds? a comparison of young people’s home and school ict use. journal of computer assisted learning, 20, 440-455. lake, d. (2007). science education: innovation in rural and remote queensland schools. educational research for policy and practice, doi 10.1007/s10671007-9038-6. retrieved 30 november, 2007 from http://www.springerlink.com/content/85275k332112842q/fulltext.pdf lake, d., faragher, r., sellwood, j., lenoy, m., & anderson, n. (2006). ‘what makes a good teacher? they have respect for our culture.’ in t. lyons (ed.) science, ict and mathematics education in rural and regional australia – state and territory case studies, (pp. 123-148). armidale: university of new england. lennie, j. (2002). care and connection in online groups linking rural and urban women in australia: some contradictory effects. feminist media studies, 2(3), 289-306. lloyd, r., harding, a., & hellwig, o. (2000). regional divide? a study of incomes in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 11 regional australia. paper present at the 29th conference of economists, 3-6 july, 2000, gold coast, qld, australia. retrieved april 2, 2006 from http://www.natsem.canberra.edu.au/publications/papers/cps/cp00/2000_2/c p2000_002.pdf margolis, j., & fisher, a. (2003). unlocking the clubhouse: women in computing. cambridge, ma: massachusetts institute of technology press. miller, j., & jagger, n. (2001). women in itec courses and careers. london: uk department of education and skills, department for employment. the women’s unit: 156. ministerial council of education, employment, training and youth affairs (mceetya) (2001). national framework for rural and remote education. developed by the mceetya task force on rural and remote education, training, employment and children’s services. australian government: canberra, act, australia. ministerial committee of education, employment, training and youth affairs (mceetya) (2003). demand and supply of primary and secondary school teachers in australia. canberra: curriculum corporation. retrieved 21 april 2006 from http://www.mceetya.edu.au/mceetya/default.asp?id=11940 ono, h., & zavondy, m. (2007). digital inequality: a five country comparison using microdata. social science research. 36, (3), 1135-1158. organisation for economic co-operation and development (oced). (2001). the wellbeing of nations: the role of human and social capital. executive summary. paris: oced. oudshoorn, n., rommes, e., & stienstra, m. (2004). configuring the user as everybody: gender and design cultures in information and communication technologies. science, technology & human values, 29(1), 30-63. preston, b. (2000). teacher supply and demand to 2005: projections and context: a report commissioned by the australia council of deans of education. canberra: australian council of deans of education. abn: 58 003 862 359. queensland government office of economic and statistical research (2005). information brief: australian demographic statistics, september quarter 2005. retrieved april 19, 2006 from http://www.oesr.qld.gov.au/data/briefs/demography/australian_demographic _statistics/australian_demographic_statistics_200509.pdf timms, c., courtney, l., & anderson, n. (2006). secondary girls' perceptions of advanced ict subjects: are they boring and irrelevant? australian educational computing, 21(2), 3-8. victoria state government (2001). reality bites: an in-depth analysis of attitudes about technology and career skills. melbourne, vic, australia: multi media. microsoft word selwyn constructing the challenge.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 constructing the challenge of digital didactics: the rhetoric, remediation and realities of the uk digital curriculum neil selwyn london knowledge lab e-mail: n.selwyn@ioe.ac.uk abstract this paper uses bolter and grusin’s remediation approach in investigating the manner in which new forms of digital media are re-casting the communicative and epistemological import of knowledge, teaching and learning. given the considerable disparity between the rhetoric and realities of the educational implementation of information technologies to date the paper argues that particular attention should be paid to the refashioning of existing forms of pre-digital didactics in current forms of digital didactics. these themes are pursued through an examination of the uk government’s ongoing ‘digital curriculum’ project as a case study of remediation of didactics in the digital age. keywords: remediation, didactics, policy, discourse, advertising introduction the principles and practices of didactics are subject to continual contestation and change. the close relationship between the ever-evolving interests of nation state, politics and polity and a country’s dominant ideas about knowledge, learning and teaching has been well documented (green 1990). indeed, the notion of didactics emerged in seventeenth century western europe as a result not only of the epistemological debates of the time but also prevailing social and cultural expectations, political pressures and economic demands (see nordkvelle 2003). thereafter the didactics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries become necessarily institutionalised, commodified, ritualised and factory-like as befitted the needs of burgeoning industrial economies (thomas 1986). now, a few years into the increasingly ‘postindustrial’ twenty-first century, it is therefore appropriate for us to once again reassess the notion of didactics – this time in light of the so-called ‘information age’ and ‘digital revolution’. indeed, the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society based around the commodification of information and growth of telecommunications technology has, in the eyes of many commentators, already led to significant transformations of education and didactics. contemporary forms of didactics are now presented under the guise of flexible and fluid forms of lifelong learning which are informal, noninstitutionalised and ready the meet the needs of a ‘knowledge society’. thus there is a distinct sense in some quarters of the educational community that these times require nothing less than completely new forms of teaching and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 2 learning – and that a ready solution lies in the new media that are seen to be driving the knowledge society. within the general spectre of the knowledge society, the emergence of digital technology and increased digitization of everyday life is seen by many commentators as constituting a key challenge and opportunity for didactics in contemporary society. thus the process of breaking down and codifying the processes of teaching and learning into a series of digital bits and bytes has taken on a heightened significance for many educationalists who see digitised technologies as offering education a chance to rid itself of its physical, cultural and other ‘offline’ limitations. technologies such as the internet, for example, are seen as allowing education and educators to break free of the synchronous norms of classroom-based learning, and to allow access to learning on an anytime, anyplace, anypace basis (dobson 2002). it is argued that teachers can shift from the often antagonistic role of omnipotent learning provider to one of mentor and advisor a ‘guide on the side’ rather than ‘sage on the stage’ as king (1993) put it. students can learn through ‘hard fun’ rather than being subjected to the ‘teaching disabled’ pedagogies they have hitherto encountered in the classroom (negroponte 1995). computerised technologies have therefore been argued to ‘blow-up’ the notion of the conventional school (papert 1984) and transform knowledge into a boundless ‘curriculum without walls’ (furlong et al. 2000). for many commentators new digital technologies constitute nothing less than a ‘ground zero’ for education – promising a substantial if not total re-engineering of the industrial age systems of teaching, learning and schooling. of course, a wealth of critical social science research and scholarship on new media and society highlights the obvious flaws in such a determinist reading of technology and educational change. although there is an understandable optimism in educationalists’ hope that information technologies prove to be unproblematic and autonomous forces for improvement and change, such totalising techno-utopianism is confounded by the fundamentally unchanged classroom and school settings to be found the world over nearly thirty years since the introduction of the classroom computer and ten years since the widespread introduction of the internet. thus, as has been reasoned from the outset of this book, instead of naively anticipating the total renewal and replacement of education through technology we are best perhaps advised to consider how ‘new’ digital technologies are contributing – if at all to the recasting, recoding or in jay bolter and richard grusin’s (1999) words, remediation of didactics. the notion of remediation has gained considerable currency in the social study of new media over the past decade. building upon the work of marshall mcluhan, bolter and grusin’s thesis focused on the relationship between visual digital expressions such as computer games and webpages and earlier media forms such as film and television. here it was noted that the ‘new’ visual media of the 1980s and 1990s achieved cultural significance not by usurping all media that had gone before but by paying homage to, drawing upon and refashioning preceding media as well as challenging and rivalling them. bolter and grusin (1999) therefore explored how ‘new’ digital forms both borrow from and seek to surpass earlier forms. as such the notion of remediation provides a insightful corrective to the prevailing emphasis on novel aspects of new media and can be a powerful concept to employ when examining what is happening when new media forms meet the content of older media forms. as bolter and grusin (1999, p.45) contend: “the representation of one medium in another … is a defining characteristic of the new digital media … [there is] a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 3 spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old”. although bolter and grusin’s original analysis was primarily concerned with the remediation of aesthetic and cultural aspects of visual media, the notion can be a useful prism through which to examine the bearing of digital technologies on contemporary forms of education and didactics. thus we now go on to use the notion of remediation to investigate the manner in which new forms of digital media are re-casting the communicative and epistemological import of knowledge, teaching and learning. given the considerable disparity between the rhetoric and realities of the educational implementation of information technologies to date we should pay particular attention to the refashioning of existing forms of pre-digital didactics in current forms of digital didactics. thus we need to take time to ask if and how new media forms are indeed leading any significant recoding of teaching and learning. in particular we shall pursue these themes through an examination of the uk government’s ongoing ‘digital curriculum’ project as a case study of remediation of didactics in the digital age. construction the challenge of the digital didactics: the case of the uk digital curriculum and curriculum online the digitalisation of teaching and learning through the production of education software and latterly ‘online content’ has a long history in the uk. unlike many other countries there is also a long history of state-support for the production of educational software from the thatcher administration’s 1987 software for schools initiative to the current labour government’s national grid for learning programme of the late 1990s. at present uk schools are subject to the ‘ict in schools’ (ictins) policy programme and its stated aim to stimulate the ‘e-confident’ use of what are now termed ‘digital learning resources’ throughout the educational sector (dfes 2002). under the aegis of the ictins drive a parallel curriculum online programme was launched to “improve[e] access to ict and multimedia resources for all pupils” (dfes 2005a). throughout the first years of the twenty-first century, curriculum online’s primary legacy was the provision of £330 million of ‘electronic learning credit’ (elc) funding distributed from central government to individual schools, which were then able to spend their credits on a range of approved digital learning resources. alongside this support for existing educational software, concurrent attempts were also made to stimulate the production of new digital learning content. most notably the british broadcasting corporation (bbc) was commissioned to provide a range of free online learning resources meeting the requirements of the uk’s statutory national curriculum. this so-called digital curriculum was seen to complement the elc funding by offering digital learning resources for curriculum areas and learners likely to be less well-served by the existing educational software market. part of the digital curriculum remit entailed a commitment to producing learning resources which were explicitly learnercentred (rather than school-centred) and therefore accessible at home or in the classroom. between 2001 and the end of 2005 around £150 million was dedicated to the production of digital curriculum resources, with the bbc externally commissioning more than half this content from commercial software producers. from 2006 these projects have been made available to teachers, learners and parents via the ‘bbc jam’ service1. in theory these initiatives mark significant state and commercial commitment to the digitalisation of didactics. the mass of digital learning resources now available to teachers, learners and parents in the uk has certainly been presented as a digital ‘upgrade’ if not a transformation of teaching, learning and knowledge. yet scrutinising the digital curriculum project for the nature seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 4 and extent of its remediation of didactics is a difficult task at present as actual use of these resources ‘on the ground’ is only in its early stages. thus whilst the main contestations and challenges of digital didactics will eventually take place throughout the production, configuration and use of individual digital learning resources in the classroom and home, an important but often overlooked element of this remediation process is the ‘selling’ of the notion of ‘digital learning’ by political and commercial actors to often unsuspecting and sometimes sceptical audience of school managers, teachers, learners and parents. indeed, during the lifetime of the ictins programme there has been a voluminous production of government policy documents, official statements, commercial advertising and industry rhetoric designed at persuading ‘stakeholders’ of the value of this new digitally-driven phase of uk education. it is this discursive arena that therefore provides the main focus of attention for our analysis in this chapter. in particular, we can explore the rhetorical ‘shaping’ of technology-based didactics by political, commercial and educational actors involved in the digital curriculum project. through an indepth examination of the discursive construction of the ‘digital curriculum’ over the past six years the chapter highlights the numbers of ways in which didactics are seen to be remediated in the socio-technological context of digital learning resources and, in the overall spirit of the book, we address the main question of how the notion of a digital curriculum has re-mediated, and hence re-contextualized political, commercial and educational concerns with didactics. in particular we can use the example of the uk digital curriculum to explore two specific aspects of remediation and rhetoric, i.e. what kind of didactic and epistemological challenges are seen to emerge from the digital curriculum and its influence upon the practice of teachers, learners and what counts as ‘official’ (and unofficial) knowledge? examining the social construction of digital learning our examination of the discourses and rhetoric surrounding digital learning starts from the foucauldian notion of discourse as the historical and cultural production of systems of knowledge and beliefs which are shaped, and shape, our behaviour (foucault 1981). from this perspective, any analysis should aim to extend individual texts into their wider discursive fields – seeking to understand the effects of bodies of discourse rather than focusing on the internal organisation of individual examples (barker 1998). examination of discourse production in an area of education such as digital learning can thereby lead to a powerful understanding of “the multifaceted public process through which meanings are progressively and dynamically achieved” (davies 1989, p.45). with this in mind we now go on to construct a detailed account of how the notion of digital learning and digital learning resources are being constructed in the political, industrial and commercial discursive arenas of uk education technology. through a content analyses of key texts the chapter asks how the notion of digital didactics has been constructed over the past six years by policy actors and political agendas as well as commercial and journalistic discourses. in all these instances we seek to identify the wider philosophies, priorities and intentions which are driving the ongoing digital content agenda in the uk. given the many different forms that this discursive construction has taken, we have systematically examined two distinct sets of sources. firstly, an analysis of policy discourse covered all publicly available and officially commissioned reports, positioning papers, policy documents, published speeches, press releases and statements pertaining to ‘digital learning’, ‘curriculum online’, the ‘digital curriculum’ and ‘bbc jam’ from government departments and other stakeholders. searches were conducted of the hansard, government news network, lexis-nexis, the stationery office, department for education and skills and department of culture, media and sport databases using the search terms ‘digital curriculum’, ‘digital learning’, ‘curriculum online’ and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 5 ‘bbc jam’ and a date range of january 2000 to september 2006. similar searches were conducted of the times, guardian, telegraph and tes newspaper online databases. secondly, all instances of commercial print advertising for digital learning resources and services were included in a systematic discourse analysis (see jensen 1993). all advertising featured between january 2001 and september 2006 in the education technology supplements of the guardian, independent and times educational supplement national newspapers were included in this analysis (representing 68 volumes, 1820 pages of text). we now go on to offer an analysis of the recurring discourses, debates and depictions of the didactics of the digital curriculum and digital didactics in general apparent within these two set of texts. i) the nature of digital learning and knowledge whilst displaying an understandable concern with societal and market-level concerns, much of the political discourse surrounding the digital curriculum has focused on the nature and outcomes of digital learning itself. here, an interesting tension between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ traditions of technologybased education is apparent. for example, digital learning is often positioned as a transformatory educational experience. throughout the examined texts, digital learning is sometimes portrayed by political sources as leading to a range of new outcomes from increased internationalism to unshackling students from restrictive educational structures; “help[ing] us see a new and different way of looking at things” (clarke 2004) and giving learning a contemporary "xbox feel" (shaw 2006a, p.14).. as the initial digital curriculum proposals from the bbc put it: “[we do] not seek simply to transfer the structure of traditional teaching to an online environment, but instead to create an online space, in which students discover and explore concepts in innovative ways” (bbc 2002). yet digital learning has more often been portrayed in more prosaic and mechanical terms within the political discourse, with digital learning associated with many established educational discourses – such as the ability to “raise standards still further” (charles clarke in dcms 2003b), “boost performance and standards across education” (stephen twigg in dfes 2005a), foster ‘world-class’ learning (estelle morris, in dcms 2003a) and so on. in this way, digital learning is portrayed as offering a reinvigoration of traditional means and modes of teaching. thus educators are promised “digital educational aids tailored specifically to the national curriculum” (cassy 2002), providing “more efficient ways of keeping in touch and giving feedback on students' progress. (derek twigg in dfes 2005a) and even transforming less popular elements of the traditional offline curriculum such as latin into “must do” subjects (cole 2002). as the then secretary of state for education promised, "digital resources will not replace but will enhance traditional and tried teaching methods” (david blunkett in dfee 2001). only in a few instances throughout our analysis was digital learning presented as offering a distinct form of learning and teaching – more often than not by commercial actors. abstract allusions were occasionally made to the ‘new’ forms and outcomes of learning offered by digital learning – such as cambridge university press (2003) slogan of “e-learning … e-xcite, e-nrich, e-xplore … @cambridge”. a less subtle portrayal of the futuristic possibilities of digital learning was provided by the virtual education partnership. beneath a somewhat dated impression of a ‘virtual reality’ space containing a circle of five flat screen monitors, the advertisement text describes the digital learning resource in question as: seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 6 “produc[ing] creative applications for organising and mapping knowledge, accelerating the learning process…creativevr™ is an interactive, fully networkable ‘knowledge space’ that allows users to create multimedia galleries of their pictures, videos, sounds, documents and internet links … the software is also coded for virtual reality”. these examples aside, advertising more commonly reflected distinctly traditional notions of education and learning. indeed, visual portrayals of ‘old’ learning in this way were nearly five times more prevalent than ‘new’ learning. in contrast to cup’s allusions to exciting and enriching students, plato learning (2001) summarised its “comprehensive collection of interactive learning materials” in terms familiar to the contemporary educational era of modernisation and new managerialism – “achieve, attain, succeed, triumph, thrive, enhance, accomplish”. figure one. learnpremium (2003) this over-riding notion of ‘old learning’ apparent in the commercial portrayals of digital learning is perhaps best illustrated in the marketing for the learnpremium (2003) online service (figure one). in this advertisement the educational heritage of the online content is encapsulated in a computer screen embedded into a tapering line of old, leather-bound books with spines inscribed with “national curriculum keystage 1”. the accompanying text also locates the firm and the product within familiar educational contexts such as the dfes, testing and their national curriculum. in a similar manner, the marketing of the heinemann explore (2004) product was even more overt in its portrayal of traditional and established learning – presenting images of test-tubes, castles and river valleys to stress the curricular connotations of the software. this advertisement was notable for also drawing on the provenance of non-digital learning resources, promising “free books when you spend your elcs on heinemann explore”. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 7 ii) the nature of digital learners in contrast to this ‘traditional’ portrayal of digital learning and knowledge, the prevailing political discourse when it comes to digital learners is very much one of change – in particular emphasising changes involving the individualisation, personalisation and empowerment of the student experience. in this way digital learning resources are seen as providing an education system tailored to each individual learner’s requirements: “ict transforms education and the way that children learn. every child matters, and i want a system of personalised learning that allows each of them to learn at their own pace, in ways that suit them best” (charles clarke in dfes 2004). “in the past it was about getting it right for the teacher. turn that on its head, and say, this is what's going to be right for kids” (liz cleaver bbc controller of learning, in gray 2006, p.15). "the whole feel of it is going to be learner-centred rather than teachercentred. the concept is that it will be an immersive world, a rich environment which will be different for different age groups, and which children will want to come to by choice." (derek butler, senior commissioner of bbc jam, in shaw 2006b, p.17). thus digital learning is repeatedly positioned as a significant re-engineering of the uk school system “for the first time, it is becoming possible for each pupil to learn in a way and at a pace that suits them” (house of commons 2002b). the bbc have spoken of “putting creativity and control in [children’s] hands” (blake 2006, p.28) and creating “something innovative and distinctive which really works for [children]” (mark thompson, in blake 2006, p.28). crucially, this learner-centred approach is seen as “empowering learners” (charles clarke in dfes 2003b), acting to “motivate the learner and make a real difference, both to their personal development and to their understanding of a topic” (bbc 2002), as well as “engag[ing] minds, capturing the imagination of both learner and teacher” (andrew adonis in dfes 2005b). individually-centred digital learning is also seen as having collective benefits – most notably the democratisation of learning and the overcoming of barriers to participation and achievement. thus the flexibility of digital learning is seen as “dissolving barriers of distance, time or attitude” to learning (tessa jowell in dcms 2002a). this allows learning benefits to “ultimately reach every child in every classroom in the uk” (thompson 2005); especially “people and groups sometimes excluded from conventional channels” (estelle morris in dcms 2004) and “young people who are disaffected, or disengaged” (dfes 2005a, p.27). this confidence in the democratic ability of ict is often rationalised through the notion that digital technologies are an integral part of youth culture and children’s lives, and are therefore an ideal vehicle through which to engage all children: "these children are of a screen generation. they go home to a playstation and expect the same dynamism from a pc in school. our products will help them experience that." (cassy 2002). "children can totally immerse themselves in computer games. we want to make their objective learning, rather than just finishing grand theft auto” (mark thompson, cited in lee and mansell 2004). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 8 with a few notable exceptions (see below), learners were consistently portrayed throughout the examined commercial texts as passive recipients of digital learning – usually turned out neatly in pristine school uniforms, working in classroom environments and often sat behind desktop computers. cartoon pictures of students in non-school clothing were occasionally used, but generally children were depicted in the traditional sense of the school student focused on learning the school curriculum. visually, students were pictured as being always ‘on-task’, either intently concentrating or obviously enjoying their work. in the accompanying texts students were rarely, if ever, implied to be individualised learners. in contrast to some of the earlier political rhetoric these were not a noticeably ‘new’ generation of learners. figure two. pip online (2004) a rare example of advertising not centred around curricular or teacher matters was found in the advertisement for the pip online (2004) website authoring service (see figure two). this advert was distinctive in its presentation of learner-driven use of a digital learning resource. underneath an off-kilter photograph of three grinning pupils is the headline “meet the webmasters of class 4”. the text of the advertisement goes on to describe the product in terms of allowing children to assume responsibility for designing and producing class websites and subsequently learning through their creative endeavours: “if you thought you needed to be a boffin or techie to design and manage your primary school website … think again. … within 24 hours, your pupils will be adding and editing content so easily that even the best designers will be amazed … a large part of the site is dedicated to kids, so they will be able to publish their work … a pip website could be the most exciting thing to happen to your school all year. but don’t just take our word for it. ask the experts. ask class 4” (pip online 2004). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 9 iii) the nature of digital teaching and teachers of course, the discursive construction has not concentrated on learners alone, with the role of digital learning in assisting teachers also prominent in political and commercial rhetoric. here care has been taken to position digital learning as a tool for teachers, or at least one with considerable benefits for teachers. thus digital learning represents ‘a step change’ in the quality of the educational tools available to the teacher (miliband in dfes 2003a) by bringing “exciting new learning tools into schools [and] giving teachers more options” (douglas alexander in dti 2001). again, a distinct tension between the new and the old is apparent within these teacher-centred discourses. in some instances digital learning is presented as leading to enhanced and often new forms and modes of teaching. as charles clarke outlined, digital learning should … “transform classroom practice … enhanc[ing] both the process and the product of education … helping teachers and lecturers innovate in the classroom. today’s measures will help teachers be creative and embed best practice for all." (dfes 2003b). this altered state of teaching sometimes involves distinct changes in the roles of teachers and their students. teachers are positioned in a providing and guiding role – expected for example “to forage” for online learning resources (frank flynn in cole 2002). on the other hand learners assume more control and participation in shaping their learning, with digital resources “enable[ing] users to participate in new and exciting ways, perhaps by creating their own content or getting involved in real as well as virtual activities." (tessa jowell in dcms 2002b). this said, another set of discourses – often from the same political actors presents a more conservative portrayal of teaching in the digital age. here digital learning provides teachers with closer control over their students’ learning, “allow[ing] teachers to monitor progress more precisely and push pupils on to more challenging topics as soon as they are ready” (david blunkett in dfee 2001), as well as “improve[ing] assessment, testing and examination” (miliband in dfes 2003b). alongside “raising standards in the classroom” (house of commons 2002b) and “accelerat[ing] reform and transformation” (dfes 2005b), digital learning resources are depicted “removing the frustrations” of existing constraints in the classroom (cabinet office 2002). put simply, digital learning allows teachers to return to the craft of teaching: “curriculum online will provide teachers with the best resources available and will free them up to do what they do best – teaching” (estelle morris in dfes 2001). although learners were more than twice as likely as teachers to feature in the pictures used in the commercial advertising of digital learning resources, the text of these advertisements were predominantly concerned with teachers. the majority of this discourse drew upon traditional notions of teaching and teachers and sought to reassure potential purchasers and users of the seamless fit of digital learning with existing practice. according to one advertisement, digital learning resources were was therefore “a teacher’s dream come true!” (test nation 2005). in some cases digital learning was portrayed as a means of putting right what was wrong with traditional practice – be it matters of poor resourcing, examination attainment or student engagement. in this way digital learning was presented as offering a better, but not completely transformed, version of the classroom. for example, anglia campus (2001) positioned their online subscription service in terms of assisting teachers in delivering quality education: “hard-pressed secondary teachers will be thankful to know that the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 10 information revolution can offer solutions to the perennial problem of obtaining effective classroom resources”. underneath a picture of an older female teacher and four students at computers are a series of reassuring and familiar slogans such as “online learning”, “supporting the national curriculum”, “written by teachers”, “raising standards”. indeed, many of these texts took great care to reassure teachers of their enhanced rather than usurped position in the digital learning scenario – with the traditional role of the teacher protected by digital learning rather than threatened. this is illustrated in marketing for the rm product ‘ict alive’. with a headline stating “puts you at the heart of the lesson”, a photograph shows six primary school pupils and their classroom teacher staring into the white glow of a computer screen. “with innovative software, lesson plans and assessment tools, it puts you the teacher at the heart of the ict lesson. used individually or for the whole class, it’s a great way to engage everyone” (research machines 2003). other advertisements also presented digital learning as a means of correcting the perennial frustrations of using ict in classroom practice. for example, one advertisement reasoned that “its all about finding and learning, not just searching” (heinemann explore 2002), with the firm portrayed as removing the time frustrations from online learning by providing teachers with ‘curriculum matched’ resources allowing them to maintain ultimate control of the learning process. one wider issue pervading the commercial discourse produced during later years of the curriculum online programme was the bureaucratic process of procuring digital learning resources. thus the notion of firms helping teachers to deal with the burden of having to ‘spend’ their elcs emerged – one company asking: “who can help you through the maze of digital learning resources?” (heinemann 2003). thus we can see the digital learning marketplace begin to emerge through advertising slogans such as: “use your elearning credits with us and receive a 5% discount – it’s easy” (inclusive technology 2003); “primary and secondary schools – your elc clock is ticking. don’t waste your elcs. buy our award winning resources today” (actis 2004); or the commercially direct command of “spend your e-learning credits” (proquest 2004). discussion from even this brief examination it is clear that a variety of strategies are being employed to shape and sell the concept of digital learning and the wider ‘challenge’ of digital didactics – culminating in a somewhat ambiguous account of what digital learning is and what it may have to offer to learners, teachers and knowledge (see table one). for example, digital learning is portrayed in some texts as a complete reassessment of educational practice but, on the other hand, as a set of benign tools which fit seamlessly into the daily drudgery of the classroom. digital content is a familiar re-packaging of the traditional curriculum yet provides access to knowledge which is futuristic, exotic and endless. these tools allow teachers to exercise control over what students are learning yet emancipate the individual learner to do whatever they wish. young learners are active and adept consumers of commercial technoculture yet reliant on the guidance and protection of adults. throughout all the texts it would seem that digital learning is presented as both an active challenge to and benign continuation of existing forms of ‘non-digital’ didactics. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 11  the impact of digital learning on knowledge knowledge as bounded within the traditional confines of the official national curriculum, provision of ‘safe’ knowledge vs. knowledge as boundless and justin-time, creation of ‘risky’ knowledge  the nature of digital learning traditional, safe, enhanced quality, collective process vs. innovation, risky, increased quantity, individualised process  the impact of digital learning on learners regulated, controlled, passive vs. emancipated, empowered, active  the impact of digital learning on teachers increased control of learning opportunities and outcomes, freedom to teach, chance to be effective in testing, meeting targets and raising standards vs. guide and forager on behalf of the learner, facilitator of learning opportunities table one. the discursive construction of digital didactics as continuation and challenge in many ways this deliberately ambiguous presentation stems from a shared set of wider pressures that digital learning is subject to within the context of the uk government’s ictins policy and the surrounding education technology ‘marketplace’. for example, many of the conflicting portrayals of digital learning and learners reflect wider commercial conflicts as competing public and private actors jostle for position and gain a sense of what advertising ‘pitch’ will best sell to educational consumers. from the perspectives of policy makers, the rhetoric of remediation serves mainly to ‘sell’ the idea of continued investment in national technology policies to practitioners, politicians and the public rather than necessarily reflecting the emergence of a new didactical form. our analysis also highlights how digital learning has become party to a convergence of educational, economic, cultural and social policy concerns relating to issues such as social inclusion, modernisation of public institutions, and globalisation. all these influences coalesce into a portrayal of digital learning which appears understandably as “an uneasy, sometimes quite contradictory, combination of […] imperatives” (scanlon & buckingham 2003, p.192). although inevitably coloured by the pragmatic and often contrary nature of commercial advertising, business manoeuvring and public policymaking, all of these official discourses surrounding digital learning exhibit a restrained and surprisingly conventional portrayal of technology – far more restrained than some of the academic commentary in the area. for example, most of the discourses surrounding digital learning examined in our analysis are mundanely positive in outlook, approaching what bryson and de castell’s (1994) term a ‘modernist/romantic’ account of educational technology. much of the shaping of digital learning also replicates the familiar determinist seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 12 manner in which society tends to understand technology, positioning digital learning within a limited ‘cause and effect’ perspective where education is faced with having to adapt in the face of technological change (see bromley 1997). in this sense much of the prevailing discursive construction of digital learning in the uk can be seen as a straightforward continuation of the ways in which earlier generations of education technology (such as the microcomputer and internet) were shaped. from this points of view the ‘new’ digital learning drive would appear to be a prolongation, rather than radical transformation, of previous education technology thinking. as such the digital curriculum could be seen as a case of ‘business as usual’ for education. in the initial stages of the discursive promotion of digital curriculum there is little sign of competition or rivalry between the technology of the classroom and the technology of the computer and internet with, if anything, the digital curriculum representing the normalising of digital technologies into pre-existing educational forms and practices. alongside the preservation of the traditional classroom setting and teacher/pupil dynamic, the spectre of the statutory, formal national curriculum looms large over the digital curriculum project. despite some protestations to the contrary, the bbc jam service, for example, is specifically predicated upon the uk’s official national curriculum for 5–16 year olds, with spending restricted to compulsory curriculum subjects (such as maths, english or geography) or else the specific curriculum needs of minority groups. in very few circumstances is there mention of an experience of knowledge beyond or outside the concerns of the national curriculum. as bolter and grusin remind us, remediation is the formal analogue of the marketing strategy commonly known as repurposing, whereby a disney film (for example) will spawn a vast array of product tie-ins, from amusement park rides to action figures to fast-food packages and clothing accessories. in some ways the digital curriculum can be seen as nothing more that the re-purposing of the uk government’s national curriculum – a ‘spin-off’ or extension of the existing national curriculum ‘brand’ and its epistemological boundaries. these continuities notwithstanding, the discursive constructions of digital learning examined in the chapter do present some new and significant challenges which, it could be argued, reflect a noticeable recasting of uk educational technology. in many ways these challenges stem from the increased political, economic and commercial significance of digital content as compared to previous incarnations of educational technology. yet there is little sense that these changes are due to the technology of the time, but rather the wider educational and political climate of the time. indeed, as a digital (re)presentation of what should be learnt in schools and how it should be learnt, digital learning content has also become embedded in a range of wider (and well-rehearsed) educational conflicts. for instance, long-running ideological conflicts such as the nature and form of the curriculum, the disciplining role the teacher, or the introduction of other experts into the classroom was apparent within some of the discursive constructions of digital learning. in many ways the refashioning of education within the discourse of the digital curriculum was being driven by current wider didactic debates and demands being enrolled into the discursive domain of digital learning, rather than being promoting the ‘new’ challenges or affordances of digital technologies. conclusion this analysis can only serve as an initial exploration of the remediation of digital didactics and we will need to keep a close eye on the ways which the rhetorical concerns and conceits of uk policymakers, industrialists and educationalists shape the actual consumption of the digital curriculum in the classroom and the home. of course the transition of these political and seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 13 commercial messages through other contexts of construction (such as retailers, local authorities, schools and classrooms) is not straightforward and there will be need for further research which continues to address the often ‘messy translation’ of ideology and policy discourse into practice (moss and o'loughlin 2005). yet, as it currently stands, we would argue that there is little to suggest that digital learning will become anything more than another underachieving and ultimately disappointing phase of education technology. in this sense, our concern with the currently limited and conservative discursive construction of digital didactics should lie not in the short-term political or commercial conflicts that it reflects but in the likely long-term impacts on educational practices and outcomes. as moran-ellis and cooper (2002, para.8) assert, texts such as those examined in this paper are not simply descriptions or portrayals but have the far more significant purpose of being “designed to be persuasive to [their] audience … rhetorically and discursively constructed so as to bring about the enrolment and positioning of players”. thus the limited discursive constructions of digital didactics highlighted in this paper act to preserve education along their own confined lines – seeking to control and limit rather than represent the user (wajcman 2004). we are therefore faced with the distinct possibility that policies such as the digital curriculum will serve only to curtail and stymieing the undoubted educational potential of digital technology in uk teaching and learning. we have seen how the current socio-technical configuration of digital learning is limited, in many ways, to one of replicating the producer interests of ‘traditional’ education with the predominant positioning of digital learning by political and commercial actors is centred firmly around the maintenance of the educational status quo, and with digital learning being portrayed as a conservative continuation of teaching, learning and knowledge. as our analysis has shown, digital learning resources are being constructed in ways which (re)present the politics and practices of ‘learning’ as they were before – merely in a slightly enhanced digital guise. thus many of the examined texts act primarily to frame demand for decidedly non-active, non-personalised and non-empowering forms of digital content – suggesting that digital learning resources will do nothing to change the educational status quo they are so loudly purported to technologically transform. thus, if digital didactics remain rooted in the structures and power dynamics of education then there is every likelihood that policies such as curriculum online and digital curriculum will serve to reproduce (or even reinforce) existing inequalities. as we have seen within this chapter, throughout the discursive construction of digital learning it is the limits – rather than the limitlessness – of the digital learning landscape which are being moved into place. thus a valuable role for critical scholars of education and technology is to now begin to explore ways in which this political and commercial conservatism can be challenged from the ‘bottom-up’, and seek to influence the remediation of digital didactics in ways which benefit the individual teacher and learner as well as the wider producer interests of state, industry and economy. footnote [1] the bbc has stated that the rather informal and playful name ‘bbc jam’ was chosen for their digital learning service “after lengthy consultation with children because it could be pronounced by five-year-olds and carried connotations of musicians ‘jamming’ rather than sounding educational” (derek butler, senior commissioner of bbc jam, in shaw 2006b, p.17) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 14 references barker, p. (1998) ‘michel foucault’ edinburgh, edinburgh university press bbc (2002) ‘digital curriculum service’ london, british broadcasting corporation blake, a. (2006) ’it's jam today, jam tomorrow and now lessons 'jam' online’ western mail february 23th, p.28 bolter, j. and grusin, r. (1999) ‘remediation: understanding new media’ cambridge ma, mit press bromley, h. (1997) ‘the social chicken and the technological egg: educational computing and the technology/society divide’ educational theory, 47, 1, pp.5165 bryson, m. and de castell, s. (1994) ‘telling tales out of school: modernist, critical, and post-modern ‘true stories’ about educational computing’ journal of educational computing research, 10, 3, pp.199-221. cabinet office (2002) ‘prime minister pledges broadband for all schools’ press release cab 100/02 cassy, j. (2002) ‘auntie, the school bully’ the guardian 25 september clarke, c. (2004) ‘speech to the ict industry club’ 17 november, london dfes cole, g. (2002) ‘digital dilemma’ the guardian 8 january davies, b. (1989) ‘the discursive production of the male/ female dualism in school settings’ oxford review of education, 15, pp.229-241 department for culture, media & sport [dcms] (2002a) ‘tessa jowell announces £12 million funding to develop project’ press release 118/2002 department for culture, media & sport [dcms] (2002b) ‘the race is on to put culture online’ press release 163/02 department for culture, media & sport [dcms] (2003a) ‘arts minister estelle morris unveils first seven projects for culture online’ press release 20 october department for culture, media & sport [dcms] (2003b) ‘tessa jowell gives approval to bbc digital curriculum’ press release 9 january department for culture, media & sport [dcms] (2004) ‘culture online: estelle morris unveils four more projects, using new technologies to help open up the arts to the people’ press release 3 march department for education and employment [dfee] (2001) ‘digital tv and the internet to help pupils’ press release 2001/0190, 2 april department for education and skills [dfes] (2002) ‘fulfilling the potential: transforming teaching and learning through ict in schools’ london, stationery office department for education and skills [dfes] (2003a) ‘digital teaching in the 21st century david miliband speech to the centenary north of england education conference’ press release 2003/0002 department for education and skills [dfes] (2003b) ‘digital learning revolution for schools’ press release 2003/0003 department for education and skills [dfes] (2004) ‘latest technology must help personalise learning around each child’ press release 7th january department for education and skills [dfes] (2005a) ‘e-learning strategy the key to personalised learning’ london, stationery office seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 4 – issue 1 – 2008 15 department for education and skills [dfes] (2005b) ‘andrew adonis announces extra money for elearning credits’ press release 3rd november department of trade and industry [dti] (2001) ‘curriculum on-line is important new opportunity’ dti press release p/2001/705 dobson, s. (2002) ‘the urban pedagogy of walter benjamin. lessons for the 21st century’ london, goldsmiths’ university [http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cucr/pdf/benjamin1.pdf] foucault, m. (1981) ‘the history of sexuality: vol i’ harmondsworth, penguin furlong, j., furlong, r., sutherland, r., facer, k. (2000) 'the national grid for learning: a curriculum without walls?' cambridge journal of education, 30, 1 pp. 91-110 gray, s. (2006) ’bbc jam spreads the word’ times educational supplement, september 15, 2006, p.15 green, a. (1990) ‘education and state formation: the rise of education systems in england, france and the usa’ london, palgrave house of commons (2002b) ‘science and technology sixth special report house of commons commission’ 16 october jensen, k. (1993) ‘one person, one computer’ in bøgh andersen, p., holmqvist, b. and jensen, j. (eds.) ‘the computer as medium’ cambridge, cambridge university press king, a. (1993) ‘from sage on the stage to guide on the side’ college teaching, 41, 1, p.30 lee, j. and mansell, w. (2004) ‘designer's needle pricks delegates' utopian ideal’ the times educational supplement 3 december, p.14 moran-ellis j. and cooper g. (2000) ‘making connections: children, technology, and the national grid for learning’ sociological research online 5, 3 [www.socresonline.org.uk] moss, g. and o'loughlin, b. (2005) ‘new labour's information age policy programme: an ideology analysis’ journal of political ideologies 10, 2, pp.165183 negroponte, n. (1995) ‘being digital’ london, coronet nordkvelle, y. (2003) ‘didactics: from classical rhetoric to kitchen latin’ pedagogy, culture and society, 11, 3, papert, s. (1984) ‘trying to predict the future’ popular computing, october 1984 scanlon, m. and buckingham, d. (2003) debating the digital curriculum’ london review of education, 1, 3, pp.191-205 shaw, m. (2006a) ’teachers tick the xbox’ times educational supplement, january 13, p.14 shaw, m. (2006b) ’jam's recipe for tomorrow’ times educational supplement, january 6, p.17 thomas, g. (1986) ‘education and technology in the third wave’ oxford review of education, 12, 3, pp. 223-231. thompson, m. (2005) ’the ns media lecture’ new statesman 1 january wajcman, j. (2002) ‘addressing technological change: the challenge to social theory’ current sociology, 50, 3, pp.347-363 microsoft word larsen et al–developing a virtual book.doc seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 developing a virtual book – material for virtual learning environments anne karin larsen (1) assistant professor, project leader bergen university college email: anne.larsen@hib.no grete oline hole (2) associate professor, bergen university college email: goh@hib.no morten fahlvik (3) project leader, the media centre, bergen university college email: mfa@hib.no abstract this article describes the process of, and considerations taken when virtual learning materials were developed for an international study in comparative social work arranged by the virclass project. the steps taken and the elements included in the virtual book – a guide to social work in europe are presented in details to inform others who are planning to make virtual learning materials. students from 11 countries in europe participated, and their reception of this material and learning outcomes from using it are analysed and presented. furthermore; the article discuss how the learning material contributes to students’ learning, how a common understanding of practice enhances knowledge-building and in what way audio-visual learning material can contribute to good learning in e-learning courses. the results are discussed in relation to theories about composite texts and community of inquiry, and outlines some challenges for e-teachers’ competences. keywords: virtual learning environment, digital learning material, internationalisation, social work education, screen-lectures, triggers, audiovisual learning material, learning community, composite text environment, community of inquiry. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 2 introduction this article will present some experiences drawn when developing and using a virtual book and discuss what consequences virtual elements like this may have for e-learning and for students in social work. what are the students’ experiences in relation to learning and learning outcomes? what works or does not work? the idea of developing a virtual book with learning materials came as a result of running an international e-learning course with students and teachers from all over europe. the course: social work in europe – commonalities and differences, is a result of the virclass project – the virtual classroom for social work in europe1 (www.virclass.net). development and learning outcomes from this project have been analysed and described elsewhere (hole & larsen, 2007; larsen & hole, 2007a; larsen & hole, 2007b). after analysing the experiences of the students and teachers from the first pilot-course, we noticed that students had appreciated the use of a short video case (video of a single mother with low economy) presented in one of the modules. the positive reaction to this amateur video made us reflect over how to increase the audio-visual elements in this international course. inspired by other projects (glad & lekven, 2007) and knowing that bergen university college (hib) had a media centre that was competent to do the job, an application for grants was sent to norway opening universities (nuv); and the production started in 2006 after the grant was approved. pedagogy and learning objectives virclass is funded on a socio-cultural learning perspective intending to develop a community of learning among students from different parts of europe (wenger, 1998; larsen & hole, 2007b). study of social work in their own country and participation in the virclass courses will give students an opportunity to look at commonalities and differences and compare their knowledge and practice to that of students in other countries by participating in theme discussions, chats and by sharing documents. the courses intend to stimulate creativity in problem-solving processes as an important part of the daily work of a social worker. through interaction between students from different countries working with the same assignments in a transparent classroom, we hope to stimulate new methods of problem-solving strategies in social work. more details about learning objectives can be found in the curriculum plan (www.virclass.net). high commitment and engagement from an international group of teachers and partner institutions involved in the project has been of significant importance both for the development of a common curriculum plan and the virtual learning material, the collaboration among teachers running the courses together as well as the development of an administrative model for the partner institutions constituting a consortium. production of short screen lectures and other audiovisual learning material have made the teachers aware of the important differences in the e-teacher role compared with the campus teacher (larsen et al. submitted). one of the main challenges in open distance learning (odl) is to get the students to communicate and collaborate (salmon, 2004; paulsen, 2007). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 3 a major idea in our courses is to stimulate international cooperation in the learning process and virclass has high ambitions towards making this possible. this ambition meets some barriers because of students’ different time schedule, different holidays and times for exam as well as time spent on courses at their home university (larsen & hole, 2007b). the idea of bringing more audio-visual elements into the course is supported by cognitive psychology and theories about perception. the human processing of the different visual elements (pictures or film) can trigger learning in different ways (helstrup & kaufmann, 2000), as well as supporting the students’ various learning styles (gardner, 1993). visual information can be two-dimensional (pictures) or three-dimensional (movies, videos, flashproductions). learning as development of competencies is closely related to the interrelationship between content, motive power and interplay or cooperation between the individual and the society (illeris, 2006). as e-learning courses become more common, it is important to know more about what causes good learning in computer-supported settings (ludvigsen et al, 2003; kuomi 2006). careful considerations were taken in the production of this material, as shown in the following paragraphs. production strategies and methods four basic considerations were taken before starting the production of the virtual book. firstly, it should be possible to use the product independently of any standard virtual learning environments (vle) or within different vle systems. secondly, we wanted to be able to use the display without being tied to the frames of any specific vle interface. thirdly, we wanted to exploit the multimedia possibilities in e-learning and promote student activity and interaction. finally we wanted to produce a material that could be reused in the course year after year; thus leaving more time for supervision, communication and responding to students’ assignments. cooperation among the partners involved has been an important part of this production. the decisions regarding elements and content of the virtual book have been taken together with the international e-teacher group and the media centre, starting with what elements should be included, the graphic design or wrapping, construction of lectures, audiovisual triggers and a manuscript for a video case. the project leader for virclass was responsible for the professional content and served as editor (larsen, 2006), while the production leader at the media centre coordinated the staff involved in the production. there was one producer of the video elements and one graphic designer for the whole production. this division of responsibility for different tasks has been very important and facilitated good and effective cooperation. the virtual book has been in development for more than one year. the combination of pedagogical and technical competence, experience with e-learning pedagogy and production of digital learning materials contributed by the media centre at hib was highly appreciated by the social work teachers and european partners. the process includes the translation of different professional concepts and language into visual and technical meaningful expressions. the quality control, including the permission to use others’ material, was taken care of by the editor and the producers. design is not only an ornament, but also serves to underline the content. design can have a significant effect on how we make meta-cognitive decisions and the layout can affect work-flow (kirsh, 2005). the chosen interface gives associations to peoples’ everyday life, where their ordinary human problems very often are invisible to their surroundings. with the virtual book the designer2 wanted to bring students into a different atmosphere than that of the seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 4 standard vle and to give them an opportunity to capture a special modus and other “view” when looking at a problem. the virtual book is published in a custom-made web publishing solution made by the media centre and contains learning objects like texts, animations (triggers), video-lectures, video-clips with scenes from a role play of an immigrant family. each learning object in the virtual book has a unique address which gives the teachers the possibility to make a direct reference from an assignment to a specific learning object. it is easy to update and add more content to the virtual book. when students are logged in to the virtual book they will have access to most of the material. an exception is made for the video-case where the e-teachers can decide when and which scenes students are allowed to view depending on the progress in the programme. the main idea behind this choice was to let the virtual book appear as a printed book where all the pages are always present and accessible. this will hopefully motivate the students to explore the content and make them curious about the whole study program. the unique addresses to the learning objects allow the e-teacher to utilize the learning objects in a wide variety of activities. the book contains material the teachers can include in tasks, but the tasks themselves are presented outside the virtual book, which makes it possible to use the material in different ways, according to one’s didactical approaches. few students starting at virclass have had any prior experience with elearning, and it was important not to exclude any applicants due to technical equipment and software demands. starting the production of the virtual book in 2006, we kept this in mind and chose to use the flash plug-in for visual elements, which is easy to download. however, we were aware that the sound and video elements would function best with a broadband connection. it was decided that the vle should take care of the course-administrative part of the programme while the virtual book should include learning material such as screen lectures, triggers and a video case. the vle included the bulletins, discussions, chat, messages, personal presentations, information about the curriculum, literature, weekly programmes, assignments, open feedback, surveys, e-portfolio and exam delivery. we wanted the students to be met by their e-teachers immediately upon entering the bulletin board in the platform; and as such the personal video presentation and welcome from each of the e-teachers was included in the vle and not in the virtual book (illustration 2). a shared log-in page for the virtual book and its learning was made (illustration 1). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 5 illustration 1: a shared log-in page the virtual book is password protected and only available for students and teachers participating in the courses. we did not want students to have access to the material before they started the course. we wanted to take care of their first impression of the triggers and the case. illustration 2: the it’s learning course page, module 1 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 6 production of the specific content in the virtual book the virtual book is constructed in two parts (illustrations 3 and 4). one part is for the content in the module 1 course, the other for the content in module 2 with separate “chapters” for the three themes in that module3. each part and “chapter” is subdivided into resources (including the screen lectures), triggers, and the case (only in module 2). there is a preface, information about copyright and an overview of contributors. each module and theme has a short text introducing the content. illustration 3: the different interfaces in the two parts of the “book”. module 1 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 7 illustration 4: the different interfaces in the two parts of the “book”. module 2 the virtual book includes 25 screen lectures, 12 audio-visual triggers and a video case containing 12 scenes. all elements have a text file, produced as a .html or .pdf file, which can be downloaded separately. a list of content can be seen in appendix 1. a promotional video is available at www.virclass.net/virtualbook/promo.html (illustration 5) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 8 illustration 5: the promotional video (click on the picture to see the video) the lectures were produced as screen lectures of 15-20 minutes. we considered well-tailored short lectures to be better than more traditional ¾ hour lectures with a powerpoint presentation (kjeldsen, 2005; mcgrann, 2006). applying a student perspective to the receiver's end, we decided to use the television format where the picture of the person on the screen and other elements are shifting; what kuomi (2006:95) calls screenwriting, with words and pictures being carefully interwoven (illustration 6). the lectures were recorded in hib’s studio in bergen, with the international group of professors presenting their lectures in english. understanding the implications of making lectures in this genre was a great challenge due both to time limitation, video recording and language for the teachers. illustration 6: example of the interface of a screen lecture seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 9 triggers are visual or audio-visual elements like pictures or flash productions, which aimed at stimulating curiosity, perception and fantasy (illustration 7). the triggers were related to a task or some questions, and students were asked to share their interpretations or thoughts in a theme discussion after looking at the triggers. they were challenged to discuss their different interpretations, and to see whether they could relate the visual elements to their professional work. the content of the triggers came from the professors after brainstorming sessions in meetings, and were related to the content of the particular modules and themes. the triggers were produced according to a standard format including: situation/issues to address, objectives, content, participants, medium, and which module or theme it should be related to. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 10 illustration 7: example of a trigger4 a trigger many students found interesting. (click on the picture to open the link and follow the instructions in the text) the video case illustrates a single-parent immigrant family from belarus living somewhere in europe (wherever the student comes from). the twelve scenes (illustration 8 and 9) give short glimpses into the family’s life in different situations and locations, and their meetings with social workers in various settings. the case was intended to give students a chance to relate theory to practice, and represent a shared starting point for discussions, professional description, analysis, intervention, and comparative work with a task-centred approach (skaar, 2005). snapshots from the case can be seen in the promotional video (illustration 5). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 11 illustration 8 and 9: overview of the scenes from the case, and one of the scenes illustration 8. the teachers decide which of the case situations students are able to see. scenes faded out are not available to the students, but they can see that there is more to come. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 12 illustration 9 one of the scenes the manuscript and the characters were made in a brainstorming session where all project partners participated and finalised by a few of them. one professional actor and several amateurs and colleagues from hib were hired to participate in the role play. for economical reasons a blue-screen studio5 was used for production. pictures of different locations and surroundings were taken, and purposefully presented in black and white in order to make a more “anonymous” background and not take the focus away from the actors (illustration 10). props were rented from the salvation army second-hand shop. three cameras were used to record and the scenes were edited in studio while recording, the process of which took 14 hours. the final editing job was done later, whereupon sound effects were added to the video. in addition to the actors, four people were involved in directing this production. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 13 illustration 10: the blue-screen method. (click the picture to see how it works) evaluation of the learning outcomes from using the virtual book after producing this learning material we wanted to know what consequences did virtual elements – like the introduction of a virtual book – have on elearning for students in social work. what did students experience as productive for their learning and what did not work in relation to learning? research method this research and the data analysis are inspired by pragmatism (creswell 2007:22; cherryholmes, 1999); no specific philosophy or any particular theory structures the data collection and the analysis. the purpose of the data collection is evaluation research (patton, 1990), and the collection is based on a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data. to explore whether the learning objectives were met we extracted the students’ learning experiences from using the “book”. two surveys have been done after the end of the two modules including questions with multiple choices, openand closed response alternatives collecting information about students’ experiences with the material. qualitative telephone interviews with six students from different countries who participated in different themes in module 2 were done before the end of module 2. in addition to this there is data from students’ opinions about the triggers presented in theme discussion in module 1. together with the data collected from the students, a survey and a group interview of the teachers was done after module 2/2007 as well as a group interview with the producers in spring 2007. in the following session data from the student surveys and the interview with 6 (out of 24) students from different countries who participated in module 2 (2 students participating in each of the three themes in this module) will be presented. the interview was carried out in english for 4 of them, and in seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 14 “nordic” for 2 of them. after the analysis of the interviews six categories emerged: contact : seeing the teachers, working with other students, the feeling of participating in a class. content: includes comments to different parts of the book such as screen lectures, the triggers, the case, or the .pdf files that have been important for learning. the book as a concept: comments on lay-out, structure, availability, usability and access. technology: how the technology worked; whether technology provided learning or not. study level: students’ experience with the content and learning material – whether it was too advanced, too elementary or it suited their level. learning outcomes: students’ summary of their learning experience and how they felt the learning material had contributed to new practice. both the surveys were delivered in it’s learning (the vle used for the courses) and the survey after module 1 focused on triggers and lectures; while the survey after module 2 focused on all the elements, including the case. the interview focused on whether the virtual book had contributed to learning or not. the analysis of the surveys has been done in the same way as that of the case, focusing on what “works”, “does not work” or “contributes to learning”? the open-ended questions have been cross-case analysed (patton, 1990:376) by analysing all the responses to specific questions. what may affect this research is the writers’ very close relation to and knowledge of the course. the first writer is the project leader for and editor of this virtual book and is using the learning resources as a teacher in both modules. to avoid possible bias, the validation of the research process has been handled by data triangulation and by inviting a fellow researcher (the second author) to join the data analysis. the surveys have been developed and refined in cooperation with virclass research, some of the partners in the project. the way the students used the material in the survey after the end of module 1, most of the students (n=36, n=33) reported that they had both seen and read all the screen lectures. 1/3 of the students seem to have preferred reading the lectures. very few (6%) reported technical problems. two lectures were not seen or read by 12%. most students found the lectures informative, relevant, clear and interesting, and stimulating to their work. students found the triggers interesting and the different triggers in module 1 had been viewed by about 80-95% of the students. in the survey after the end of module 2 students participating in the different themes (n=20)6 were asked what they had viewed in the virtual book, relating both to their own theme and the other material in the “book”. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 15 themes module 2a module 2b module 2c material seen all material in my theme part of the material in other themes all material in my theme part of the material in other themes all material in my theme part of the material in other themes lectures 75% 75% 55,6% 77,8% 71,4% 71,4% triggers 50% 100% 77,8% 66,7% 71,4% 71,4% case 100% 88,9% 100,0% table 1 material seen by students table 1 shows the percentage of students looking at the different material in their theme, and how many had been looking into material in the other themes. the case is similar for all three themes in module 2 but only open to students for the theme they are studying. nobody had viewed all the material in the virtual book. some few students in module 2b and 2c reported that they had technical problems with viewing the video material and had only read the text files. what students find helpful or not in terms of learning by using the virtual book about the content students found the content, including the different parts of the book: the screen lectures, the triggers, the case and the .pdf files, important for their learning. the screen lectures were important when writing and responding to the assignments. “the virtual, clear and precise lessons allow to understand in a better way the meanings of the work. they gave me useful advice from a theoretical point of view but they were also fundamental for the realization of the tasks. thanks to the fact that they have always been available on-line without limits of times i could organize my work more easily in relation with my study or work schedules” (survey m1/2006). students found the lectures introducing the themes, lectures about working methods and lectures directly related to specific assignments most helpful. “it was really nice the introduction – important for the students first time they become an e-learner, and it was really useful – and also the theories regarding subjects. at this time in module 2 we had to compare the themes in the case and it is more concrete, not so theoretical. but it was useful – i have the basis from module 1” (s37 interview 2007). students with technical problems did not manage to view the videos and for these students especially, the text files with the lectures were important. the text files were used in different ways, some printed the text and followed the text while viewing and listening to the lectures, others printed the text files later and found it easier to look at the paper version when they were searching for information they needed. some did not print the text at all, but just viewed it on their monitor. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 16 the triggers have been important for students’ reflection and learning. in the surveys and the interviews, students confirm that the triggers stimulated their learning in many ways. they were inspiring, and led to thinking about social work from another perspective; and they liked to see how other students had interpreted the material. the triggers were also a great reminder of aspects they already knew but had forgotten: “it stimulates me to think about how i look at things. sometimes your first impression is not correct”. “they made me stop for a little while and think over a few facts of social work. it was useful for my attitude to the profession and my further professionalisation” (survey m1/2006). some of the students did not see the triggers because of other priorities: “i have not seen them as priorities since i have had a lack of time. therefore i have not been able to read many of the other students’ reflections. i also think there are a bit too many triggers (survey m1/2006). the video case raised problems that students found very realistic; some experienced that the family situation in the case illustrated a situation they might encounter, or even that it resembled one they had been working with in their practice. “i think it is a case that we can be confronted with at any time in real life. it’s a very realistic case to work with” (s4 interview 2007). by not giving students the possibility to see all the scenes at once, the teachers kept the students alert, and stimulated their curiosity for what was going to happen next: “…it made me want to see more every time” (survey m2/2007). at the end of the course, students could see the whole case. the fact that there is a video with real people makes a difference to students’ way of learning. “i really like seeing people. because we are used to working with cases in our study, but it is different to actually see the people you are talking about. then you also can see their non verbal communication and you hear what they are saying. because when we get the printed cases there are no words spoken in it, just information. so this is different. and i like this way of working, because this is more like real life. so if you are a social worker coming to mrs k’s family you would see them interacting, behaving like in a movie and you wouldn’t just read mrs k is 42 years old..” (s5 interview 2007). the case gave students situations they could compare to situations in other countries, which is the main objective in the curriculum plan for the courses. “what i really liked about this case is that we have to compare and imagine that she is someone in our country. and then we have to find our own sources and that is really something interesting because in that way you can compare the situation for immigrants in different european countries. i did not realize the difference it caused being an immigrant in holland or in sweden” (s5 interview 2007). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 17 about contact the work related to the triggers was often reflections upon or interpretations of the triggers, presented by the students in the theme discussion area in the platform (it’s learning). both the triggers and the video case contributed to contact, and a feeling of being part of a real classroom: “i was hoping that we had more triggers in module 2 as well… it is not so much work connected to it, but it helps to stay in contact with the other students as well, and in this module, i was missing this contact with the other students a little bit” (s4 interview 2007). “the case is an important instrument for working and learning the working group discussions about the theme – this is the real meaning of cooperation, it did not matter that we were far away” (survey m2/2007). students experienced that the material gave a sense of being in contact with other students and teachers, and of participating in a real class. they knew that they were looking at the same material, getting to know the same immigrant family and looking at the same triggers; and this gave them a feeling of being in the same community of learning. additionally, the teachers’ personal presentations in the beginning of the course were important for this feeling of being in contact. “what i really liked in the beginning of the course in 2006 was seeing the teachers, actually seeing them, much nicer than just reading a text they had written. it gave me a feeling of going to a real class. the difference is that you cannot ask any questions and there is no direct interaction. but i like the idea of presenting the teachers by showing them” (s5 interview 2007). about learning outcomes all the students found the case important to their learning, and thought module 2, which included the case, to be more interesting than module 1. the opportunities to relate theory to practice and to actually see people, hear them talk, notice their feelings and emotions; all this made a great difference to their learning process. some students experienced working with a “real” case, and being able to think in a concrete way about different ways of interventions, for the first time. the case made some students aware of different roles or working arenas for social workers, which they had not been familiar with in their own country (like the street social worker). “it has contributed much to my learning, because the best way to learn the things is by doing practice and examples, and also i really like the transparency8 to see the different solutions” (survey m2/2007). the case stimulated their knowledge and their search for information about problems in the case: “the case makes me curious and starts me thinking and connects theory and practice in a way that i probably would not have done without it. and i search for information and collect knowledge that i might not have done otherwise. i notice that it makes me develop personally” (s2 interview 2007). the case also challenged the methods of interventions and the skills needed for working with the family: “to look at all the problems in one family. you did not know how to start, which person to start with, how to approach the family” (s4 interview 2007). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 18 about the “book” concept students felt the concept to be good, and were impressed that so much work had been put into making the course interesting. students interviewed were asked how the material if not existing would have affected their participation in the virtual classroom. this expression from one of the students is an example of what others responded: “without the book? oh, the course had been less interesting. i participated earlier in a course on the internet and it was dull. this one gives me a lot more. the virtual material makes the course fun. it would have been good anyway, but this material adds an extra dimension” (s1 interview 2007). how did the material meet the students’ educational level? both second year ba students, ma and phd students, and professional social workers participated in the courses and it is interesting to see how their educational level was met by the content of the book and the course. when interviewing the 6 students about how the lectures in the virtual book had met their educational level, they all responded that the lectures suited their level. this does not mean that they were simple; students found them stimulating, interesting and it gave them new perspectives: “the lectures suit me well. they fit very well together with the literature. if they were more advanced, then it will not be so interesting to read. it’s a good level. the lectures make me want to read. i can be rather tired but when i look at lectures it inspires me to read more” (s1, interview 2007). what did not contribute to students’ learning? students did not have many negative comments to the virtual book, but some had technical troubles that caused problems using the audio-visual material, either due to slow internet connection or because of other computer problems. these students found the material useful by looking at the pictures and then reading the text files, but they could not see or hear the video properly. the text files seem to have been useful to all the students. “..when watching the lectures with linux there was delay between the sound and the picture which is very annoying at times, especially if the teacher has an accent i am not used to. makes it more difficult to follow when i can’t read the lips too.. “(student survey m1/2006). most of the students expressed that the length of the screen lectures was fine; a few thought some of them could be shorter. a few mentioned there could be more lectures. some students would have liked more triggers available, because they triggered discussions among the students and formed a common ground for discussions. e-teachers’ reflections about the learning materials’ effect on learning and teaching all the professors except one had participated twice (2005 and 2006/07) as eteachers in virclass courses. this time all of them found the course a very good and satisfying experience due to the new learning material, and better knowledge of the platform. they felt more confident with both the content of the courses they taught, and the technical challenges of being an e-teacher. “the best experience for me was the improvement the virtual book turned out to be”. ”this works for students as well as for teachers!!” (teacher survey 2007). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 19 use of the virtual book changed the job as e-teacher; having all the learning material already available reduced stress, and they could spend more time supervising students’ work and communicating with them in chats or theme discussions. “virtual book has been central to the new way teachers have worked this year. it permits teachers to centre their efforts in the tutorial tasks. also to the students it helps to increase their motivation and it contributes to reinforce the perception of the quality and seriousness of the courses offered” (teacher survey 2007). the virtual book did not only make the job “easier” for the e-teachers, but it also motivated students and was a vital component in the educational programme: “the virtual book was very good to motivate students, to give them guidelines, to structure the learning and to inspire students and teachers to keep a high motivation on the course process” (teacher survey 2007). teachers also experienced that the video elements in the course made it easier for students to relate theory to practice. especially the case was important: “the virtual book has made the job easier in a way and also more fun. it has been interesting to see how the case has made it possible for students to relate theory to practice”… (teacher survey 2007). teachers found it useful to have the lectures related to a central part of the topics in the module, even though there were some doubts about how the student used the material. the collaboration between teachers was seen as inspiring and supportive. the contact that students had felt with their teachers was seen when some of the teachers met their virclass students at a conference: “meeting two of the students face to face for the first time was like we had known each other for a long time. we really had good understanding and contact” (group interview with teachers 2007). discussion e-learning a challenge for developing new learning material the virtual book consists of composite texts (liestøl, 2006) not only formed by written text, but also multimedia elements. multimedia seen as text elements “talks” to people in a new way and opens for interpretations other than does literature. we have seen students become interested in how pictures and audio-visual elements are interpreted by other students from different cultures. meeting the same people through a video case gives an experience of handling the same “reality”, while still being located in different countries. in social work, the cultural context is important for how social problems occur and get dealt with. the ambiguity presented by pictures and video brings forward the commonalities and differences between the interpretations of the students; meaning-rich pictures open for interpretations in another way than written text. all this is important when diversity and tolerance for different opinions and complex solutions are learning objectives. using the video case gave interesting possibilities for online role-playing. we noticed that knowing the same family (mrs.k) caused students to learn about different interventions taken to solve the problem. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 20 giving students access to composite texts opened for different learning strategies (malberg, 2003). some preferred to read the texts when looking and listening to the screen lectures, others printed the text after seeing the video and found the text useful when doing the assignments. some preferred to simply read the text files. the triggers stimulated reflection, writing and sharing their thoughts. some busy students did not take the time to look at the triggers, and did not think they were important for their learning outcome. other students found the triggers to be some of the most important elements in the course because of the reflection and thinking they made them do, and also because they found them a good tool for communication with other students. the challenges of digital dialogues (fritze & nordkvelle, 2004) might be mastered by the use of composite texts. giving student access to the same scenes gives a common frame for discussions (goffman, 1974). others have found that, usually, poor performers benefit from introducing virtual elements in educational programmes (virvou et al, 2005). in virclass we don’t have the data that makes it possible to compare students’ marks with their earlier performance. we know that all the students had a positive experience by using the virtual elements and one of the students with less academic background stated very clearly that because of this she found the use of the audiovisual elements most important for her learning process. this corresponds to other findings related to deep learning. “non-academic students are likely to adopt a deep approach only under the most favourable teaching conditions” (biggs 1999:58). the introduction of a virtual book may prove fruitful when students of different ages, academic levels, and cultural contexts meet in the same virtual classroom. critical inquiry in a composite text environment virclass is based on the ideas of situated learning and community of practice (wenger, 1998). when analysing the experience of using the virtual book as a medium for learning, we find that the educational experience when students and teachers use this material contributed to a community of inquiry (ci) (garrison et al, 2000). learning occurs according to ci when three core elements: cognitive presence, social presence and teaching presence are interacting. originally these concepts were used to analyse a text-based environment in computer conferences. however, we also find these concepts useful for analysing students’ learning by using a composite text like the virtual book. cognitive presence is defined as “the extent to which the participants in any particular configuration of a ci are able to construct meaning through sustained communication” (ibid:89). social presence is defined “as the ability of participants in the ci to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to the other participants as “real people” (ibid:89). while the third component, teaching presence, consists of two functions: design of the educational experience and facilitation thereof, which can be performed by any of the participants but most likely is the primary responsibility of the teacher. the main component for teaching presence is “to support and enhance social and cognitive presence for the purpose of realising the educational outcomes” (ibid:90). teaching presence includes here also the contributions of the virtual designers, and the considerations taken to promote learning. the well planned constructions, the design of the interface as well as the deliberations taken when recording the case, have contributed to elements that have triggered learning. we found that the design of the learning material, the teaching seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 21 presence, has contributed to cognitive presence and critical thinking. students report that the learning elements have inspired them to read more, and to reflect and to make their thinking consciously through writing. the triggers have challenged their ideas about what they can see, or what is “invisible”, in relation to their professional role. the learning elements have activated their fantasy and their ability to combine theory with practice. the selection of content in the virtual book has been experienced as relevant, and also contributed to setting the climate in the virtual classroom. the experience of dealing with a “real case” and working together with the other students, gave them a feeling of social presence. the virtual book has been a communication medium that has contributed to the establishment of a community of inquiry. however without a community of practice established through the vle or the virtual classroom, the virtual book by itself would not have given the students the experience of being in the same environment despite living in different countries. what are the implications of our findings? multimedia elements or composite texts manage to trigger students’ learning and reflection, and provide an important common ground of reference and experience of “reality” when participating in a virtual classroom. composite texts may also be used in blended learning and in campus studies, which is in accordance with other findings (keefe, 2003). the experience of short screen lectures in combination with triggers and video case offers an opportunity to teachers to spend more time supervising students. keeping the attention of students who are sitting in front of a monitor requires other teaching skills than just recording ordinary lectures. using composite texts for creating teaching presence is challenging. virclass has succeeded so far, thanks to the careful considerations taken in the planning process, where different competences successfully collaborated in the creative process. e-teaching in itself demands new skills and other ways of acting than in campus studies (wake et al, 2007), and other teaching skills are necessary to learn when performing screen lectures. in the future, the skills of e-teachers delivering both good screen lectures and long-distance written supervision will be important areas for further development. further didactical research in this field is important (larsen et al. submitted). conclusion this article has outlined the learning experiences of developing and using a virtual book in e-learning courses with an international group of students and teachers. both students’ and teachers’ experiences have been mainly positive and the material has contributed to reflective learning and a feeling of acting within the same reality. for the teachers, the workload has been transferred from producing learning material to being able to focus on supervision during the courses. the virclass project as a whole has contributed to an increased consciousness about how e-learning can become an integrated part of internationalisation in social work education, and through collaboration over years contributed to raise the knowledge and skills in creative use of ict among teachers in this professional education. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 22 references biggs, j. 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(2003). ikt i læring, undervisning og utdanning. norsk forskningsråd nfr. rapport fra en arbeidsgruppe. oslo: kunnskap og samfunn malberg, a. (2003): e-læring og læringsstile – teori og praksis. frederikshavn: dafolo forlag. mcgrann, r.t.r. (2006). enhancing engineering computer-aided design education using lectures recorded on the pc. journal educational technology systems, vol 34(2) 165175, 20052006. baywood publishing co. inc. patton, m.q. (1990). qualitative evaluation and research methods. second edition.newbury park, london, new delhi: sage publication, inc. paulsen. f.l. (2007). e-bok for læringspartnere: kooperativ frihet som ledestjerne i nettbasert utdanning. bekkestua: nki forlaget salmon,g. (2004). e-moderating: the key to teaching and learning online. london: routledge falmer skaar, b. (1005). nettcase. multimediale case i profesjonsutdanningen av lærere. dr.polit. avhandling. oslo: det utdanningsvitenskapelige fakultet. universitetet i oslo. virvou,m., katsionis,g., manos,k. (2005). combining software games with education: evaluation of its educational effectiveness. educational technology & society, 8 (2), 54-65 wake,j.d., dysthe,o., mjelstad,s. (2007). new and changing roles in higher education in a digital age. educational technology & society, 10 (1), 40-51 wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice. learning, meaning and identity. learning in doing: social, cognitive and computational perspectives. usa, cambridge university press. websites: curriculum plan: social work in europe 2006/07. http://virclass.net/ep_tmp/files/770342958462f32e970cad.doc (accessed 25 august 2007) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 24 norway open universities (norgesuniversitetet) (nuv): www.nuv.no (accessed 8 august 2007) virtual classroom for social work in europe (virclass): www.virclass.net (accessed 8 august 2007) eusw – world wide platform for social work in europe: www.eusw.unipr.it (accessed 8 august 2007) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 appendix 1: list of content in the virtual book resources module 2a lessons -introduction to theme 2a -some notes on theory -anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice -what is ethnicity? why does it matter? triggers module 2a -contextualizing individual rights in the multicultural and multiethnic europe -the meaning of the words -voices with volume resources module 2b lessons -positive discrimination & positive action -introduction to theme 2b -poverty -professionalism as individual development -the principle of subsidiarity (pdf) triggers module 2b -ethical dilemmas resources module 2c lessons -introduction to theme 2c -tools for social work practice -ecological approach to social work. presentation of the life model -ethics in social work -critical theory and critical reflection part 1 -critical theory and critical reflection part 2 -professionalisation in social work triggers module 2c maps as metaphor of theories empowering students resources module 1 lessons introducing the pedagogy in the course -introduction to m1 social work in europe; commonalities and differences -to be an e-learning student -problems based/task centred study methods -reflection on learning -evidence-based writing lessons about how to do comparative work -introduction to methodology of comparative studies -questions and responses – how to cooperate with fellow students lessons about issues in social work -ethics in social work -different models of welfare systems -european constructivism triggers module 1 -students’ living conditions -welfare systems and elderly people -the “welfair” show -perception and understanding -reality or fiction? case mrs. k and her family 12 scenes professors representing screen lectures andres a. astray, anne karin larsen, answin weissenborn, eduardo marques, bob sanders, carsten otte, ewa kantowicz, kjell henriksbø, klas-göran olsson, remmelt veenkamp, målfrid henriksbø the promotional video is available at http://www.virclass.net/virtualbook/promo.html 1.edition 2006 © bergen university college, bergen, norway � virclass production editor: anne karin larsen � production: media centre, bergen university college seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 the authors’ biographical notes and correspondence details (1) anne karin larsen, assistant professor at bergen university college, department of health and social sciences, at the social work education programme. she is a social worker by profession and holds a master degree in health promotion and health psychology and has further education in use of ict in teaching and learning. she is the project leader of the virclass project since 2004. her research interests are related to social work education, the use of ict in higher education and communities of learning. (2) grete oline hole, associate professor at the centre for evidence-based practice at the department of health and social sciences at bergen university college. she is a nurse by profession and holds a master degree in sociology and has further education in use of ict in teaching and learning. her research interest lies within the development of professional knowledge, use of ict in higher education and communities of learning. (3) morten fahlvik, project supervisor at the media centre at bergen university college. he has been an online teacher and developer of online courses since 2000. his professional interests are related to development of virtual learning environments and online learning material. he has a background as teacher in elementary school and work with both human and social relations as technical issues regarding online teaching and learning. fahlvik has been connected to the virclass project as an online teaching consultant and multimedia producer since february 2005. address for correspondence: anne karin larsen, bergen university college, faculty for social educators and social work, haugeveien 28, 5005 bergen, norway. tel: +47 55 58 78 21; fax: +47 55 90 00 11; e-mail: anne.larsen@hib.no acknowledgement: we want to thank norway opening universities (nuv) and bergen university college for grants as well as professional support, which have made it possible to develop the virtual book and the international educational project. our thanks go also to european social work thematic network, a world wide platform for social work in europe, a project that triggered the development of the virclass project and has supported the virtual book production economically. we also want to thank our international colleagues participating with their professional knowledge in this production and the staff at the media centre at bergen university college for excellent work. thanks also to professor dr. psychol arild raaheim, university of bergen for supervision during the writing process. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 3 – 2007 27 1 the virclass project is one of the outcomes of another international erasmus project: european social work thematic network (eusw), now the european platform for world wide social work (www.eusw.unipr.it) 2 the designer of the virtual book has been lisbeth thomassen, the media centre, hib 3 the content of the different modules can be found in the curriculum plan at www.virclass.net 4 photo © ingvar grastveit tekst & foto 5 in a blue-screen studio or virtual studio the background is of one colour, of the blue or green and by using a colour key function on a video mixer, the background colour may be replaced by another source like pictures. 6 module 2 theme 2a: 4 of 6 students responded to the survey module 2 theme 2b: 9 of 10 students responded to the survey module 3 theme 2c: 7 of 8 students responded to the survey 7 s3 refers to the code in the interview for student 3 8 transparency refers to the fact that students’ e-portfolio were open. all participants in the courses could read the other students’ material and response to assignments and also see the feedback from the teachers to their own and the other students’ tasks. this matter is treated in another article (larsen & hole,2007b) weblinks to the illustrations: illustration 5: promotional video http://www.virclass.net/virtualbook/promo.html illustration 7; example of a trigger http://virclass.net/index.php?action=static&id=50 illustration 10: the blue screen method http://www.virclass.net/filer/production/mrsk/ larsen et al–developing a virtual book.pdf larsen et al–developing a virtual book.2 larsen et al–developing a virtual book.3 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 how students interact when working with mathematics in an ict context joakim samuelsson lecturer linköping university email: joasa@ibv.liu.se abstract there is a common assumption that computers will change the conditions for teaching mathematics. this paper discusses expectations regarding changes in working methods and, specifically, adolescents’ interaction in the computer-aided teaching of mathematics in middle school. the empirical material was collected through interviews with eighteen teachers in grades 79. the author also participated in all of the computer-aided lessons given by two teachers during one year, which means access to 700 lessons where teachers and students could use computers. during this year they used computers in only 18 lessons. this particular study reports from a closer analysis of seven observed lessons and 18 teacher interviews. in sum, using the computer when solving mathematical problems with peers is not always a successful learning method. the empirical data indicate that the linguistic interaction consists mostly of one student posing a question and another giving an answer. there was a lot of communication in the classroom but very little could be signified as dialogic. the different forms of interaction observed also tell us that students are not involved in communication about scientific concepts. their communicative ability is therefore not developing to any large extent. when students collaborate in order to solve math problems they oscillate between disjunctive and complementary tasks. it means that different students practice different skills, some that are important for their mathematical ability and some that are not. keywords: interaction, computers, adolescents, middle school, mathematics. introduction changes in society are reflected in school, albeit with some delay. few specific contemporary events have had such a powerful influence on society as the introduction and development of information technology (it). a review of literature in the field shows the importance of the communicative function of it; therefore the term ict, information communication technology, is frequently used (edström, 2002). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 2 in several swedish governmental documents (e.g. utbildningsdepartementet, 1994; utbildningsdepartementet, 1997) it is argued that the computer is an agent of change which can contribute to finding new teaching methods and giving the students possibilities for developing new knowledge. the new technology can reshape pre-requisites or conditions for learning. within the research community, there are those who argue that computer programs can make fundamental changes in the conditions for students’ learning in mathematics (blomhøj, 2001; niss, 2001). other researchers argue that students’ mathematical skills will be affected negatively (cf. young, 1968; galbraith & haines, 1998). a common teaching method in the swedish classroom is characterized by teachers instructing or imparting knowledge and students then practicing their skills (lindqvist, emanuelsson, lindström & rönnberg, 2003, nu, 2003). this teaching method encourages a dependence on a teacher’s confirmation, a book that drills, and a key that gives the right answers. wyndhamn (2002) draws attention to another teaching method where students are organized in smaller groups in order to discuss and investigate mathematical phenomena. with this new method, one aim is that the computers will challenge common teaching practices and help teachers to organize their teaching in a more interactive way, as stressed by wyndhamn (2002). this paper discusses expectations regarding changes in working methods and specifically the possibilities of interaction in the computer-aided teaching of mathematics in middle school. the everyday teaching of mathematics it appears that very few articles about the use of computers in the everyday teaching of mathematics have been published. this could be because computers are not used very much in teaching (rosen & weil, 1995; becker, ravitz, & wong, 1999; nissen, 2002; samuelsson, 2003). many studies can be regarded as field experiments using different types of computer programs as conditions that influence the ways in which the work is carried out as well as the results the teachers are focusing on (ruthven & hennessy, 2001). usually the researcher first decides what classroom arrangement he or she will investigate. then he or she discusses results that come out of the work. some articles discuss how computers can be used in an experimental activity (marrades & gutiérrez, 2000; holahan, jurkat & friedman, 2000; hammond & mumtaz; 2001). when students use tool programs for experimental activities, the learning changes from mastering of procedures to conceptual understanding, and the ability to interpret, analyze and assess data in diagrams and other statistical materials is emphasized (marrades & gutiérrez, 2000; ruthven & hennessy, 2002). there are studies that highlight a change in the way computers are used, from drill programs focusing on procedural knowledge to activities with more simulation and problem solving (dahland, 1998; pemberton, 1995; forster, 1997; galbraith & haines, 1998). samuelsson (2003) argues that drill programs are the most common programs used in math teaching in elementary and middle school. other studies tell us that computer-aided teaching can influence students’ feelings towards mathematics (galbraith & haines, 1998). one conclusion from the research done in the area is that few researchers have been interested in what happens in everyday teaching. studies of everyday use of computers in teaching math were already in demand at the end of the 1980’s (fey, 1989). studies of how the computer can be used and what contributions it can make do exist, but there are no descriptions or analyses of seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 3 how computer-aided instruction is carried out in everyday teaching. ruthven & hennessy (2002) point out that: there is a pressing need for naturalistic studies more directly grounded in the actuality and contingency of teaching, (p. 51). in order to help teachers to take advantage of computers in the teaching process it is important to describe and analyze the use of computers in everyday teaching (samuelsson, 2003). theoretical concepts important to the study interaction in this study is defined as when two or more actors are involved in what happens on the computer screen (svensson, 2001). the review of literature related to fields of interaction focuses on technology’s importance in forms of collaborative learning (koschman, 1996; lee, 1993; silverman, 1995). computers support collaborative work, reduce distances and create a shared focus (edström, 2002). crook (1996) stresses that computers will help a teacher to organize a collaborative learning environment. there are several studies showing that computers get people together to interact and communicate (svensson, 2001; klerfelt, 2002). some studies (alexandersson et. al, 2000; alexandersson, 2002) describe students who interact as more focused on the goals of the activity than students working individually. svensson (2001) argues that it is an effective and constructive working method where children help each other (clements, 1993; liang, 1998). there are several factors affecting the outcome of collaborative work. there are many studies indicating that the way the task is presented and the combination of how children work together strongly affect the outcome (helleve, 2003). one researcher who tried to understand interaction in small groups is steiner. steiner (1972) constructed a typology where he described different types of collaborative work. he stresses that a group’s performance is decided by three factors: a) the demands of the task, b) the resources in the group, and c) the processes in the group. a starting point for the typology is the task. steiner (1966, 1974, 1976) suggests five different types of tasks: a task may be additive, disjunctive, conjunctive, compensative or complementary. when students work with an additive task, their contribution is valued as equal. one person’s contribution is just as important as another’s. the result is the product of all group members’ contributions. in a disjunctive task only the answer is important. one answer represents a group’s performance. also, one answer must be accepted in the group and any other rejected. in a collaborative work situation, this type of task helps capable students to learn while less capable students stand back (samuelsson, 2003). significant for a conjunctive task is that all students have to manage the task. a complementary task is performed when all group members’ understandings are collected and the average understanding is the group’s result. lastly, steiner discusses the complementary task. when students are told to solve a complementary task, they split the task up and different students then solve different parts of the task. the result is the sum of all students’ contributions. the key element of effective collaborative work is the active exchange of ideas through verbal communication (e.g. king, 1999; samaha & lisi, 2000; webb & favier, 1999). when students communicate they interact with each other. one aspect of communication is the dialog (dysthe, 2001) where students discuss and try to understand a problem together. another aspect of communication is a question-answer practice (sahlström, 1999). one big difference between these types of communication is the possibility to learn scientific concepts (säljö, 2000) which is important in mathematics education. in a community signified by dialog, students have a greater opportunity to develop their concepts (säljö, 2000) seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 4 looking at math specifically, there are few studies that draw attention to students’ interaction when working with computers. considering mathematics as a language where students are supposed to develop their adaptive reasoning, it is interesting to notice two studies by ivarsson, 2002 and wyndhamn, 2002. they indicate that students cannot on their own, without the teacher’s support, create a meeting between their everyday concepts and the scientific discourse (vygotsky, 1986) when they work together in front of a computer screen. another aspect of importance for the interaction is the program. drill programs seem to recall students’ past competitive experiences (liang, 1998; samuelsson, 2003). the competition can affect students in a negative way (samuelsson, 2005), and they can form a basic assumption group, a term introduced by bion (1961). a group in working position is mature and taskoriented. a basic assumption group is marked by immature and less taskoriented work. the basic assumption phenomenon is a group’s reaction to anxiety which competition can cause. these states are ways of dealing with impulses to satisfy the defensive needs of members. a basic assumption group may be supportive, or it may be an obstacle. if the group needs a break in order to continue with the task, the basic assumption group helps students to achieve their goals. bion identifies three basic assumption groups: a) pairing, b) fight/ flight, and c) dependency. the aim of the study the purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between adolescents working with mathematics problems in an ict context. the purpose is specified in two questions: 1. what type of tasks do students work with when they interact in order to solve math problems in an ict context? 2. how do students communicate when they interact in order to solve math problems in an ict context? method design as my intention is to capture students’ everyday activities and processes in the classroom, i prefer to use the ethnographic approach. according to hammersley and atkinson (1995), ethnography is a method, or a set of methods, suitable for exploring this kind of phenomenon: in its most characteristic form, it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions in fact, collecting whatever data are available to shed light on issues that are the focus of the research. (hammersley & atkinson, 1995, p. 1) the approach is based on the assumption that the understanding of an action is reached by gaining insight into those ideas or understandings that make the action meaningful. the researcher can observe the behavior of the actors and interview them about their thoughts concerning the activities (nardi, 1996; larsson, 2000). i was inspired by ethnography in my effort to understand the interaction in front of a computer screen. seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 5 selection of participants the criterion for selecting classrooms for the study was that the responsible teachers had demonstrated some interest in using computers in their teaching. during one year, i followed two teachers in their computer-aided teaching of math. this means i had access to 700 math lessons where computers could be used. during this year the teachers chose to use computers in 18 lessons. every computer-aided lesson was documented in field notes. eighteen teachers in six municipalities were interviewed. the interviews were tape-recorded. analysis interviews and observations notes have been analyzed and interpreted in several steps. first, the notes were read from the first to the last letter. during the reading of interviews and field notes, i took notes about my observations in the margins. these notes helped me to construct categories related to learning math using computers. then i tried to write detailed descriptions (geertz, 1991) about what was seen in the material. from these descriptions, it is possible to classify several different types of computer-aided lessons. one type of lesson is therefore constructed from several observed lessons. a detailed description, rather than a fragmental description, gives the reader better insight into the everyday interaction between adolescent solving math problems in front of a computer screen. to strengthen an observed phenomenon, quotations from the teacher interviews are used. i also use transcription of dialogs in order to exemplify different phenomena in the classroom. these transcriptions were made during the lesson. they are very short and were easily transcribed. the following type of lesson is a result of seven observed lessons and 18 teacher interviews. in these 7 lessons most students worked in pairs. they worked together with different math tasks and therefore had to interact and communicate with at least their peer. the description of the lesson type focuses on students’ interaction and communication while solving math problems in the classroom. results tasks and communication this mini-story describes my observations of students’ interaction while solving math problems in an ict context. the lesson started in an ordinary classroom with one computer. the teacher described the program they would be working with and why students should practice using this program. the program contained different tasks and it was important for students working together to agree on procedure and results. after the information, the students ran down to the computer lab. when i asked a student why she was running, she said that she wanted a computer of her own. there were 25 students competing for 15 computers. when the students arrived in the classroom, they tried to find a computer of their own. students who came too late sat down next to a friend who heaved a deep sigh because he or she had to collaborate with a classmate. after a while, the students were all sitting either alone in front of the screen or with one friend. they logged in and opened the program they were going to work in. i was surprised how calmly the lesson began. the students who were collaborating whispered to each other and tried to solve the math problems that popped up on the screen. students who were working alone focused on their own screen. interaction with their classmates on other computers did not exist. after approximately ten minutes something happened: the students started to talk to each other in a noisy way. it wasn’t just the pairs who were seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 6 chatting with each other; the communication took place all over the room. the figures illustrate some of the observed interactions. the letters symbolise both students and computers. figure 1. student a trying to interact with classmates b and c across the room student a tried to communicate with classmates in order to get help with the math task he or she couldn’t solve. the most common interaction was the one between a and b. if b didn’t have the answer to the task, a looked for help from a friend further away in the room (in this case c). sometimes students shouted out their questions in the room hoping that someone would help them. in most cases, the question remained unanswered. frequently, the teacher went down to the shouting student and tried to answer his or her question in a less noisy way. the teacher did not correct the student’s behavior. to shout out a question in a computer-aided lesson seemed to be acceptable. the ordinary behavior of raising a hand if you need help was not emphasized. if a student was understood to be a good mathematician by classmates, he or she would get many questions during a computer-aided math lesson. b c a seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 7 figure 2. student b, c and d trying to interact with student a when the screen and the tasks were visible to people around, it was acceptable to read someone else’s screen and help a classmate having difficulty with a task. the tasks in this type of program varied, but in most cases they involved simple arithmetic and were clearly defined. when students looked for help, it was only specific answers they were looking for. i did not notice any deeper discussion about concepts or mathematical relationships in the interactions. after fifteen minutes, the communication in the classroom increased to a level where the teacher needed to calm the students down. sometimes a student who asked a classmate for help didn’t get any help. all students worked with timed tasks, so to help another student means that you would lose time on your own task. some of the interviewed teachers described similar experiences. there’s always a lot of communication in the room. they always try to help each other. the problem is when someone is very focused on his or her task, the person doesn’t have time to help a classmate (teacher). even though students sometimes chose not to help each other, i still see collaborative activities as a common process in computer-aided math learning. looking at the collaborative work where pairs tried to solve tasks presented on the screen, i observed the following interactions: b c a d seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 8 figure 3. four students collaborating in front of two computer screens one student at each computer acted as a navigator (students 1 and 4). student 2 and 3 controlled both screens and tried to solve problems on both computers (a and b). the four students communicated about what answers they would enter during the whole lesson. answers were accepted or not accepted by the navigator, whose responsibility it was to enter the response into the computer. once again, i notice that it was just a short answer that was communicated in the interaction. one teacher described the communication in the following way: when they work in pairs, they communicate a lot all over the room. if they have questions, they ask everyone they think can help them, regardless of their location (teacher). this emphasizes my observations in figures 1-3 about the communication in the computer-aided math classroom. in order to see how the collaborative work was processed, i walked around in the classroom and observed three different ways in which students collaborated: • one student navigated the computer and calculated. the other student sat beside him/her and helped to calculate with paper and pencil or a calculator. • one student navigated the computer and the other delivered answers. the student who delivered answers didn’t use any aids to solve the math tasks. • one student worked and one watched. one teacher expressed his anxiety about the collaborations described above: weak students will not grow when they work in pairs. they just follow the one who is a stronger mathematician. i don’t think the collaborative work functions when two students try to solve math problems with a computer (teacher 4). when i walked around in the classroom, it was obvious that some students weren’t working on the tasks. they just sat and talked to someone or just watched what was happening on the screens. two students who were working alone turned off the computer when 20 minutes of the lesson had passed: a b 1 2 3 4 seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 9 why did you turn off the computer?, asked the teacher. i am too tired to work anymore, replied one of the students. ok, said the teacher, sit down with a friend and try to help him. the students who started to work alone with a computer then sat down with a classmate. i doubt that such behavior would be accepted in any regular math lesson. in other words, a student who is tired of working in the textbook would probably not be allowed to sit down with a classmate and help him or her with the math tasks in his book. further, a student who couldn’t manage a task would never be allowed to change books with one of his or her friends in order to get help solving the problems. several times i observed students using each other in such a way: students who weren’t able to move on in the program changed computers with a friend who could manage the problem. when the friend solved the problem, they exchanged computer again. at the end of the lesson none of the students were working alone. the ones who got tired sat together with one or more classmates. something very interesting seemed to be on going by one computer. four students eagerly discussed how to solve a problem presented on the computer screen. when the teacher tried to finish the lesson, these students continued their work, and three more students joined the group. the teacher didn’t interfere. we have to solve this before we go, said the students. i can wait, said the teacher. but help us then! no, there are so many of you that you can help each other. after the students had been working for five minutes, they decided to give up. what a pity, said the teacher, you were so close to solving it. i have never seen so many students stay and try to help a classmate who was trying to solve a math problem after a regular math lesson. analysis and discussion the purpose of this study was to investigate how students interact when solving math problems in an ict context. when 25 students run from their regular classroom to a classroom with computers, they all have the intention of working alone with a computer. almost every middle school, in sweden, has one or two classrooms with 15 computers each. teachers and students who go to the classrooms with computers are aware that some of the students will have to collaborate and therefore be obliged to interact. therefore, collaborative work is an integral part of everyday computer-aided math learning. tasks and interaction collaboration has been the basis for the development of communities that foster children’s learning. the idea is that children and adults are responsible for helping each other to learn (rogoff, turkans & bartlett, 2001). in this study, it is obvious that students sometimes work together, but if they are able to choose, they will work alone on the math problems. students’ motivation to interact could have implications for how they communicate with each other. if a student doesn’t want to work together with someone, and he or she has control over the computer, it is possible that this student won’t let the classmate participate. if a student does not participate in solving the task, he seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 10 or she will not practice any math or computer skills that lesson. the active student practices both his math skills as well as his computer skills. there is a risk of losing weak students when students collaborate with drill programs in everyday computer-aided math lessons (e.g. samuelsson, 2003). there are several times in the described lesson where students are not taskoriented. alexandersson, et. al, 2000 and alexandersson, 2002 observed that a necessary component of collaborative work is that it is focused on goals. i stress that when students collaborate in order to solve math problems, they do not always focus on the goals of the activity. groups of students or individuals find excuses for what bion (1961) would call flight: they run away from the task. sometimes they try to help a classmate and sometimes they just sit down beside a classmate and talk about something unrelated. for those students, collaborative work (gabriele & meegan, 2001) and computers (dahland, 1993; galbraith & haines, 1998; thomas & thomas, 1999) do not function as motivational tools. when students interact, they just focus on getting the right answer. steiner (1966, 1974, 1976) describes these tasks as disjunctive. one answer must be accepted in the group, and any alternative must be rejected. when students try to solve problems together, the task could be described as a complementary task (steiner, 1966, 1974, 1976). to solve such a task, students do different activities. some students navigate the computer; others calculate with calculators, pen and paper. different activities affect what students can learn. students who only navigate computers learn to navigate the computer. if they don’t participate in the math activity, they will not practice their math skills. a student who calculates with a calculator or an algorithm is practicing his or her math skills. when students interact in order to solve math problems in an ict context they oscillate between disjunctive and complementary tasks. communication according to my classroom observations, there was a lot of communication in the classroom. the students communicated all over the room and this was accepted by the teacher. but was it an effective form of communication that will help students to develop higher-order cognitive skills? the teachers in the study have a tendency to focus on language. by providing elaborate explanations, asking appropriate questions, providing sufficient time for a partner to think, and using supporting communication skills with one another, the students can construct a specific world of representations whereby they can detect and conquer the concepts, words and expressions of mathematics. vygotsky (1986) makes a distinction between scientific concepts and everyday concepts. scientific concepts are cultivated, whereas everyday concepts are unsystematic and concretely derived. the teachers’ intentions to make the students communicate could (theoretically) mean that the students develop their arsenal of scientific mathematical concepts. my empirical data indicate, however, that the linguistic interaction, above all, consisted of one student posing a question and another giving an answer. the different forms of communicative interaction observed also tell us that it is not communication about scientific concepts that the students are involved in. their communicative ability is therefore not developing to any large extent. wyndham (2002) suggests that students cannot create a meeting between their everyday concepts and the scientific discourse on their own. this connection may require the teacher’s support, which i think is often lacking in computer-aided instruction. several studies of students’ conversations while working at the computer have pointed out this problem (e.g., ivarsson, 2002; wyndhamn, 2002). seminar.net international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning vol. 3 – issue 2 – 2007 11 concluding remarks in my introduction i wrote about the computer as part of information technology (it). today the term ict is often used, where the letter c stands for communication. my results indicate that the computer enhances communication between the learner and him/herself (intra-subjectivity). there are also examples of communication between learners (inter-subjectivity). however, the results do not demonstrate how students, by means of the computer, create virtual classrooms where they communicate with other classes, exchange mathematical problems, or discuss different solutions. ict, for the most part, remains it only. the traditional methods of teaching mathematics seem to have such a strong hold that the computer’s position as an agent of change is relatively weak. instead, it seems that the computer is assimilated into existing math teaching traditions as regards both content and form. visions in curriculum and governmental documents still remain visions. idealistic experiments about the computer’s possibilities in the teaching process have not reached the classrooms. there are possibilities for change, but very little happens in everyday teaching. references alexandersson, m., linderoth, j., & lindö, r. 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